Page 27 of Saltwater

“Will you show me Naples?”

We were in bed in Prati, the sound of a woman calling her dogechoing through the open windows. I always loved that about Rome, the echoes.

“I don’t know if you will like Naples,” he said slowly, and I knew he was trying to telegraph one thing to me:Let’s not.

“I want to meet your friends,” I said.

He sat up. “It’s not like this.” He pulled back the sheet and made his way to the bathroom, ran the water in the shower. “It’s not Prati.”

“That’s okay,” I said. Because it was. “I still want to see it.”

“Maybe,” he said.

I got out of bed and walked to the door of the bathroom. I leaned against the jamb and watched him duck under the running water.

“No,” I said. “I want to go. Let’s go. Why don’t you want me togo?”

“Okay,” he said, “I’ll get us a hotel.”

“I don’t want a hotel. I want to stay in your apartment with your friends.”

It struck me then that it was possible none of them knew he was here, in Rome. With me. That I would be a surprise.That I was the secret.

“You think that,” he said, pulling the hair back from his face, “but I promise you a hotel will be better. I’ll find something.”

“I don’t want to see that Naples,” I said, taking two steps into the bathroom. “I want to seeyourNaples.”

He laughed. But there was no humor in it.

“Girls like you always think that.”

“What do you mean, girls like me?”

I knew what he meant. And I wanted him to say it. I was going tomakehim say it.

“You know,” he said, waving a hand through the water, soaping his chest, his balls.

When I didn’t say anything, he spit it out.

“Richgirls,” he said. “Rich girls.”

I left him there in the shower and went out for a coffee. And then, later that week, I convinced my father I needed to go to Naples.

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Naples was all noiseand exhaust and bodies. Flows of people and cars and coffee, the sound of neighbors yelling from their windows above the street. And Ciro’s house, a two-room apartment he shared with four others, was not in a charming historic center, was not in Prati, but on the outskirts. In a concrete high-rise where laundry flapped constantly in the wind.

“You can see,” he said as he led me up the stairs, the elevator perennially out of service, “why I like to spend summers with my mother on Capri.”

I laughed as a group of children rushed past, hurtling down the stairs.

The interior of Ciro’s apartment was utilitarian and spare. Every object—the couch, the table, a leaning bookcase—tired. There were no rugs or curtains or elements of warmth, just an air of cigarette smoke and the sound of shirts snapping in the window. Ciro led me to the door of his bedroom, where two twin mattresses lay on the floor, their sheets a tangled mess.

I wanted to lean into him, to look at him and tell him I didn’t care. That I could do it. We could live here together. But I couldn’t.

We didn’t stay long—just long enough for an introduction to his one roommate who was there—and then Ciro led me back into the fray of the city. There was something about being here, with the shadow of Capri looming in the distance, that made me feel closer to my mother. She had spent two years in Venice, writing, working, living, before she met my father. Maybe that was why I could feel her here. In the heat and the bodies and the gestures. As if I could believe that she might turn a corner, come barreling toward us. And even when she didn’t, it was still okay, because I could imagine it.

Ciro took me to a pizzeria at the top of the funicular, to the flea markets, and, finally, to a simple hotel near the Piazza del Plebiscito. Despite my insistence, he had known me better than I knew myself.

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