Lost in Carmel Page 6

  But now as Natalie zeroed in on the young lovers, the body language broke through all cultural and linguistic barriers. No doubt about it, they were arguing, but doing their best to keep it under wraps. The girl looked straight ahead, ignoring her young Romeo who was leaning into her ear and pleading his case. Juliet’s arms were folded tightly against her chest; she was hearing none of it.

  Both Natalie and Shakespeare knew young love was the same the world over, full of drama and immediacy. The pair weren't standing in an open piazza but on a private balcony in Verona. When Romeo tucked a lock of hair behind Juliet's ear, Natalie cold almost feel her resolve soften. How lucky they were to have their whole lives ahead of them.

  A soccer ball came rolling under Natalie's feet, followed by a little dark-haired boy, drawing Natalie's attention away from the lover's spat. Natalie nudged the ball with her toes and a mini soccer player reached for it with a smile and a 'grazie.' A couple of older women seemed to be scolding the boy, who ran off to join his team unscathed. She watched the boys jostling and laughing, all elbows and knees and found herself scribbling Tess’s name across the page as a pang of guilt wrapped around her heart. Los Angeles was a world away and phone calls only left her wanting more.

  Taking a sip of her drink, she looked over the rim of her glass and noticed a handsome man sitting alone at a table and reading the newspaper.

  When did he get there?

  No, more than handsome. She needed another word. Like when you saw the Grand Canyon for the first time, and the word, beautiful, suddenly had meaning.

  Chin in hand, she studied him and was struck by the notion that she’d never seen a man so comfortable in his skin. A skin hand sewn by the gods, fit to perfection. Like all Italian men, he was impeccably dressed. Yet, it seemed unstudied on him, as if he might have tumbled out of bed that way.

  What was this Italian James Bond doing sitting in a quiet little café in the middle of the afternoon in her piazza? The tables turned and now she was the spy watching for clues to his story. Behind the beauty—which could blind you at first—she sensed something else. Sadness. He wasn’t cloaked in it, but it was standing just off his left shoulder. She could almost see it. James Bond tucked the newspaper under his arm, as he pushed back from the table and unfolded to his full height. Natalie looked down at her journal to avoid being caught staring but managed to watch over the rim of her sunglasses as he walked away. Heading off to some secret mission to save the world.

  “Nice meeting you, James,” she whispered. She penciled his name at the bottom of her page, before closing her journal and heading back to the convent.

  11 Black and White

  “Okay, so you were right about the piazza.”

  Anne bit down on her 'I told you so' grin.

  “I felt like quite the explorer,” Natalie continued. “And I'm going out again today. I think I'll head in the opposite direction and see what's at the other end of the block.”

  Her first step might have been a baby step, but it was one giant leap for Natalie. As she walked home yesterday afternoon, she turned back to look at the flag she’d planted in Piazza Farnese.

  “Well, look at you.”

  “Yeah, look at me,” Natalie answered swallowing her self-satisfaction. “Oh, and by the way, the men. It's unbelievable. Look, I'm from a town where there's no shortage of good-looking men, but not every single guy, on every single corner. The men are better looking than the women, for God's sake.” Natalie collapsed on the sofa.

  “One of the perks of living in Rome.” Anne nodded.

  “How on earth does anyone get anything done around here with all this fabulousness on display?”

  With a martyr's sigh, Anne said, “We've learned to persevere. The entire city is a museum. After a while it just blends into the background.”

  “Good God, I hope I never get to that point,” Natalie moaned. “By the way, do you mind if I ask how you ended up here?”

  “Me?” Anne smiled at the memory. “I was the keynote speaker at a conference. I fell in love with the city, first. Then to seal the deal I married an Italian and never went home.”

  “Keynote speaker, huh? I remember Monty saying you were something of a big deal.”

  Anne’s smile was bashful. “You know Monty, he’s completely biased.”

  “Yes, that’s one of the things I love about him.”

  The thought of never going home curled up next to Natalie on the sofa.

  “You seem to be in an exceptionally good mood this morning,” Anne said. “Could that have anything to do with Monty coming over in a couple of days?”

  “Maybe.”

  Weeks since she’d landed in Rome left her hungry for a familiar face from home. Daily therapy sessions with Anne, had her sleeping better and she was beginning to feel her feet beneath her again, but she knew Monty would help her find her smile.

  “I’m practically in love with him, you know. I’d marry him if he wasn’t gay. In fact, I might do it anyway. That would really piss Stanley off.” Though she laughed, there was wistfulness to her words. “We have that rare friendship where even if you’ve been disconnected for some time, whenever you find one another again, you just pick right up as if the person had only been in the other room. I love that about us.”

  Anne smiled along with her. “You’re lucky.”

  “Luckier than I deserve.”

  Anne drew her lips in. “Why do you say, ‘luckier than you deserve?’”

  “Because it’s true. I took a beautiful friendship for granted. Threw it away to soothe the wounded ego of my husband, which couldn’t be soothed. Even after all these years, I’ll never forget the look on Monty’s face that day I fired him. I hurt him. Badly.”

  “He doesn’t seem to have held it against you.”

  “He wouldn’t.” Natalie’s eye fell to her lap. “But that's not the point. It’s not about him, it’s about me. I should have been stronger.”

  “I think you’re a little too hard on yourself sometimes. You were a newlywed and pregnant with Tess, trying to navigate uncharted waters and keep everyone happy. It’s impossible to keep everyone happy.”

  “Don’t I know it.”

  “How do you feel about yesterday’s session?” Anne shifted gears.

  “Now that I'm standing on the other side, I can see how everything converged. My father’s death… the sleeplessness, not eating well, losing fifteen pounds and the amount of stress in my personal and professional life led to a breaking point. Even for weeks beforehand I felt like there was an anvil on my chest. I could never get a good breath.”

  Anne was nodding. “Stress can exhibit many physical characteristics. A perfect storm was brewing. Or I guess keeping in line with our simile I should say…earthquake. But I think there’s more here.”

  “Like what?

  “There's something else I wanted to look at. Give me a minute…” Anne's voice trailed off as she flipped back through her notebook searching through highlighted text. “Remember when we were talking about your father leaving?”

  “Yes.”

  “Something struck me about the way you said Alex looked back at you over his shoulder, then turned and walked out the door. The words we choose are very important. You used the word abandoned.”

  Natalie sat up straight, as Anne opened a door to her past.

  “When you talked about Cliff, you mentioned that he walked away, and you were left abandoned at the Kraft Service table…”

  Natalie sensed that her therapist was tugging at a thread and leaned in to offer a hand. She was tuned in to Anne and picked up on the thought. Her chest tightened as the image crystalized.

  “Like Stan?” Natalie's eyes widened at the revelation.

  Anne nodded slowly.

  The slow-motion image of Stan looking back over his shoulder, that had been haunting her for days, flickered on the screen. She watched him turn his back and the black and white likeness morphed into Alex Hampton. Both men walked away.


  “You've heard of the straw that broke the camel's back? Somehow you painted this picture. Whether or not it’s entirely accurate is beside the point, it’s how you perceived it. It’s how you’ve processed it.”

  Natalie nodded, busy connecting the dots that had been hiding in plain sight.

  “It was more than just walking in on Stan. He turned his back on you. It triggered something.”

  Both her father and her father figure betrayed her.

  12 Spring Rain

  “It all seems a little too perfect,” Natalie said the next day as she sat on the sofa opposite of Anne. “Exactly like something a shrink would come up with. Tying everything up in a neat little bow.”

  “There's nothing neat and tidy about it. It's life, in all its complicated messiness.”

  “I get it.”

  “Complicated,” Anne reiterated. “The fact that you felt relieved that Stan pulled the trigger, as you put it, doesn't change the fact that you were devastated by how he chose to do it. Both reactions can be valid. It doesn't have to be either or.”

  Anne was right. The messy pieces snugged up next to the pretty ones creating the puzzle picture of her life. Each piece touching the other, moments folding in on one another, squished together in one glorious mess.

  “The big question is, why do you feel as if you deserved it?”

  Natalie looked over at Anne, her mouth open in surprise. “What do you mean?”

  “Did you?” she pressed gently. “Feel as if somehow you deserved to be abandoned?”

  The question stared at Natalie, begging for a response. A ten-year-old Natalie stared back. Arguments, decades old, flooded into the room. Her parent's voices raised in anger as they fought over money and the cost of feeding the Hollywood machine. Acting classes, followed by dance classes, followed by speech classes ate up the meager paycheck Alex brought home on a Friday night. It would never be enough for Nora. Alex would crumble under the pressure and walk out the kitchen door before Natalie ever got her first big part. And Natalie knew as he closed the door behind him, that it was her fault.

  “I guess there's still some bit of childhood dialogue playing in a loop in the back of my brain, that has me believing that if it weren't for my pursuit of a movie career, Alex would have stayed.”

  “Maybe not,” Anne offered. “He made his own decisions. And Stan made his.”

  “But Stan was just a solid investment banker when we met. When he married me, he married Hollywood, and everything changed.”

  She was already on her knees after the breakdown, now the realization that she’d settled for so much less than she deserved had her scrambling for the elusive, why?

  “I think—” Natalie struggled to find the words that had been buried deep under a lifetime of dismissal. “I think, I’ve always struggled with the amount of adulation I’ve received for pretending to be someone I’m not.”

  She sat quietly for a moment allowing the realization to take a seat on the sofa next to her. “I’ve always felt unworthy of it, it’s such an odd life. And therefore it makes perfect sense for people to leave when they finally get to know the real me.”

  “I can see how those thoughts might have found a place to throw down roots,” Anne said. “But Stan is a grown man, eight years older than you. He made his own choices, and his own mistakes. Did you deserve what happened that night on set?”

  Natalie shook her head slowly. “No.”

  “Good. And I don’t want to hear, ‘no—but’. The right answer is just, no. Period.”

  “Got it.” Natalie managed a small smile.

  “Now that we’ve dug up this old bone, we’ll gnaw on it in the next few sessions. What else is going on with you? How are you feeling overall?”

  “Hopeful,” Natalie said. “I feel like I’ve thrown off a lot of weight. I literally feel lighter. But I miss Tess so much.”

  Natalie smoothed the silk threads on the pillow in her lap, counting to three before she spoke. “I’m thinking of having her and Nora come over for a visit.”

  “I think that’s a great idea.”

  “Really?”

  Anne’s optimism washed over Natalie like a spring rain. Clearing away the last of the doubts she hid under her pillow at night. She wasn’t crazy. Though Anne kept insisting her recent breakdown was a temporary situation, part of her refused to believe it. Remembering the terror of reality slipping through her fingers only weeks ago. Now she closed her grasp around the fact that Anne wouldn’t tell her it was a good idea if she didn’t think it was true.

  “I’ve been meaning to ask you, why do you call your mother Nora?” Anne tilted her head at Natalie.

  “Oh... poor Nora.” Natalie grinned. “When I went to my first real audition, she decided it would look better if she called herself my manager, Nora. It stuck.

  “Nora always loved Hollywood more than I did,” Natalie continued. “I’ve never really been sure if I was living her dream or mine. She came from a little mining town near the Nevada border. Grass Valley. Like thousands of other girls before her, she landed in Hollywood with a pocket full of dreams. And she chased that dream every day, until she had me. Attached to my birth certificate was a big red debit.”

  “I see.”

  “I got the message, early on. I owed it to her, to pick up the baton and make it across the finish line. Because of me Nora lived a life unrealized,” Natalie finished with a half-smile.

  “That’s quite a heavy load for kid.” Anne was shaking her head. “Not only to be the breadwinner, but the keeper of dreams.”

  Natalie lifted her shoulders and let them fall in a sigh. “I didn’t know any better.”

  Anne was scribbling something in her notebook and Natalie knew she hadn’t heard the last of this subject.

  “I think we’ll work on this later.” Anne looked up, leaving Nora to another day. “So Monty will be here tomorrow, right?”

  “Yes.” Natalie could feel the change in her breath at the sound of his name. “And not a moment too soon.”

  13 Mata Hari

  “Natty honey, what have you done?” After spinning her around in a giant bear hug, Monty held Natalie back at arms’ length. Getting his first good look at her.

  His eyes were a mirror and unable to turn away from the image, her hand flew up to finger the wisps of dark hair framing her face.

  “I got a haircut.”

  A crooked grin lifted the left corner of his mouth. “I hate to say this, but you might want to ask for your money back.”

  Natalie lifted her shoulders in a half-hearted shrug. “It seemed like the thing to do at the time.”

  Monty pulled her close, tucking her head beneath his chin. “What’s this all about? I sent you over here to get better. This doesn’t look like better.”

  Natalie stepped back and took Monty’s hand in hers, opening her eyes wide and letting her old friend deep inside. Pulling him in past the rough edges and all the debris. No curtain, nor a hair between them.

  “Trust me. It’s better.”

  “Well, only you could manage to look gorgeous with a haircut like that.”

  He hugged her again, long and hard, a transfusion of strength passing from his body into hers. Filling up the empty corners, she swore she could feel herself expanding in his presence.

  She led him by the hand, to her little piazza, where they ordered a couple of beers and settled in a quiet spot to roll back the years.

  “God I've missed having you in my life.” Natalie sighed.

  Monty reached across the table, across the decade between them and Natalie pressed her hand onto his open palm. Fingers curling around one another. And just like that she was back where she belonged.

  “Me too, honey.” He didn’t try to contain his smug grin. “Was I right about sending you to Rome, or was I right? Look at this place. It's gorgeous.”

  “Yes, you were right. You're always right.”

  “Thank you.” Monty gave her a mock bow. After taking a sip of beer, he lea
ned back in his chair, feet crossed at the ankles, and studied Natalie as if he were drinking her in. “You.” Monty nodded at her get up. “You look out of place. Like you're in the witness protection program.”

  “I don't want to be recognized.” Her hand smoothed the silk scarf around her face.

  “Sometimes looking like Mata Hari on the hunt for Nazi's actually brings more attention. Why don't you get a trench coat while you're at it?”

  “Fine.” Natalie peeled her sunglasses off slowly and laid them on the table.

  “That's better.” Monty grinned. “I can't tell if you're lying to me, if I can't see your eyes.”

  “I wouldn't lie to you.”

  “Maybe not, but sometimes you lie to yourself, and I need to see that, too.”

  She could have used a little of that honesty in the last few years. Someone who cared enough to call her on her bullshit. The words, sometimes you lie to yourself, danced off like a temptress crooking her finger. Natalie was inclined to follow her as she slipped into the shadows but sensed now wasn't the time. She made a mental note to explore it later, with Anne.

  Natalie leaned in, looking directly into Monty's eyes. “I don't think any of...this... would have happened, if I’d had you to talk to.”

  “Well I'm here now.”

  “Yes, you're here now.”

  Now. Such a small word to hold so much possibility.

  Ten years was a long time. She didn't quite know where to start. There was so much to tell him, and so much she wanted to hear. But first things first.

  “I'm so sorry, Monty.”

  “For what?” He looked genuinely confused.

  “For all of it. Sorry doesn't seem to be a big enough word. I'm sorry all the way back to letting you go and all the way up to having you see me in the state I was in when I called you. I know I scared the crap out of you.”

  “Honey, I'm so glad it was me you called. Yeah, you scared the shit out of me. But you're going to be fine. And we're going to be fine.”