“It’s lovely here,” said Frank. “I didn’t always have the best associations with Italy because of my father. But now that you live here, I’ll think of it differently.”
Cleo bit into one of the salty circles of salami that had been set before them without ceremony upon seating. Her face was glowing in the peach evening light.
“I’m glad,” she said. “He shouldn’t get to take Italy from you.”
A teenage waiter came to offer them an aperitif, clearly delighted to have the opportunity to practice his English. Frank gave Cleo a panicked look, but she ordered them two sparkling lemonades in Italian with impressive smoothness.
“I never thought I’d be able to visit Rome and not drink,” he said, as the beaded glasses were placed before them.
“Wine is the least interesting part of Rome,” Cleo said. “And of you.”
Frank gave her a defenseless smile. “Thanks, Cleopatra.”
“You’re welcome, Frankenstein.”
And there, suddenly, it was, the memory of their first Halloween together elbowing to the front of Cleo’s mind. They’d dressed up as their nicknames, Cleopatra and Frankenstein’s monster. Cleo had spent the whole afternoon getting ready, painting a golden headpiece and pinning a dress out of loose linen. She’d worn a long black wig with thick coats of coal eyeliner, transforming into her own dark twin.
“Do you remember Halloween?” she asked suddenly.
They had gone with friends to a party at Anders’s, everyone crammed into a cab, fighting over which radio station to play, the first baggie being passed around the back seat like a lover’s note.
“Of course,” said Frank. “What made you think of that?”
Cleo shrugged. Her mind still had a habit of tossing up painful memories, a reminder, she supposed, to keep moving forward. Unlike Frank, she was not prone to nostalgia.
“When I think about drinking, I have a habit of remembering the best part of every night,” said Frank, as if reading her mind. “My sponsor says this thing to me, ‘Play the tape forward.’ I have to keep remembering until I reach the point where it stopped being fun.”
“Okay,” said Cleo. “So, play it forward. You know how that night ended.”
Frank fast-forwarded to being at the Halloween party, where he had been uncomfortable in his costume, which consisted of a monster mask that smelled like chlorine. Anders was dressed, to devastating effect, as some kind of sexy murderer. Fast-forward to feeling ugly and forgotten, like an actual monster, to drinking too much, to fighting with Cleo on the way home, to the sound of her crying into the pillow as he lay beside her, watching the ceiling turn. Yes, there were the pillowcases in the morning, all tarred with black makeup that wouldn’t wash out; he’d stuffed them into the bottom of the trash, just as he used to as a child with his piss-soaked sheets, so his mother wouldn’t find them. That was why he hated to remember. Fast-forward and he always got to the dark current running beneath each seemingly happy night, to the secret sadness at the heart of Cleo that he couldn’t heal, to the black scars on the white sheets he couldn’t get out.
“I’m ashamed to remember it,” he said. “How I hurt you.”
Cleo nodded. “You did,” she said. “But there was one upside to that night.” She gave him one of her mysterious, knowing looks. “You were so hungover the next day, I finally won Pinch Punch.”
Frank began to laugh. Cleo had once mentioned offhandedly that it was a tradition in England on the first day of the month to say “Pinch, punch, first of the month!” As long as the victor declared “And no returns!” afterward, they were free to enact these pinches and punches without retaliation. The loser then had to wait a whole month before having the chance to say it first again. Frank, who had a taste for the nonsensical, had sprung upon this game with a fanatical competitiveness, waking up early on the first of every month and hovering over Cleo’s sleeping figure until, at the slightest sign of awakening, he would launch his attack, screaming the singsong rhyme with the kind of zeal that, Cleo was sure, caused middle-aged men to have heart attacks.
“I forgot about that.” He chuckled. “You sucked at Pinch Punch.”
“Because I didn’t want to set my alarm for the crack of dawn on the first of every month like a maniac!”
Frank looked at her seriously. “That’s what it takes to be a Pinch Punch champion, Cleo.”
He tried to maintain a straight face, but they were both quickly reduced to laughter.