Read Online Keeping the Feast by Paula Butturini - Free Book Online
Authors: Paula Butturini
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psychological sense at all to me. And then, with pitch-perfect bad timing, I realized that our wedding was less than two weeks away. For the first time since we had met four years earlier, I felt a sudden twinge of fear about our future. My anger, his guilt: neither emotion was exactly an ideal thing to bring to our wedding, nor was the idea that our dynamic as a couple seemed subtly changed.
I stayed in Prague another two days, long enough to tell a colleague on the Tribune ’s foreign desk all that had happened, a rambling conversation that the paper published as a story, and then I flew home to Warsaw. John, who was never good around blood, met me at the airport, looking increasingly green as he took in my bandaged head and my ankle-length parka, both still covered in dried blood. He put his arms around me and held on tight, then took my hand and drove me home. We turned in very early that night, for now it was John’s turn to leave for Prague. After he left early the next morning, the headaches began: deep, pounding pains that did not go away for weeks. My face swelled in the coming days, until it was no longer recognizable even to me. My entire face, especially around the eyes, was grotesquely bloated, black and blue. As the days passed, the swelling seemed to shift south, from forehead to under the eyes, to nose, to cheeks. The bruises faded first to purple, then to green, and finally to yellow.
My bruises had already turned to green about a week later, when John and I flew to Rome to clear the final bureaucratic hurdles before our wedding. I told myself that the dynamic between John and me had not essentially changed but only that I understood it better. By the time the flight landed in Rome, both of us had managed to put the beating aside for the time being and we were once again excited at the thought that the wedding we had long been planning was finally about to happen. By the time we took our vows in Rome’s ornate wedding hall atop the Capitoline Hill, my bruises had faded to yellow.
Our wedding, perhaps like many second marriages, ended up feeling like a somewhat thrown-together affair, squeezed into a lull in the revolutions spreading throughout Eastern Europe. For the ceremony, I had packed an old dress I loved, but a longtime UPI friend, Cathy Booth, then working for Time magazine, insisted I buy something new. Two nights before the ceremony she dragged me through an endless series of shops not far from the Spanish Steps until I found a suit she deemed festive enough for the occasion. She also insisted I carry a bouquet, and silenced my objections by saying she would arrange it all. When the florist failed to appear at her apartment before she left for the ceremony, she threw together a bridal bouquet from flowers she happened to have in a vase in her living room. All the initial photos of the wedding show me carrying Cathy’s simple, homemade bouquet. The florist, in typical Roman style, arrived at city hall just as we were called in for the ceremony. His bouquet, stiff and formal, had none of the charm of Cathy’s posies, but for a bride who hadn’t wanted to carry a bouquet at all, I ended up with two.
John and I had booked a big table at the same restaurant where we had celebrated our departure from Rome two years earlier. Just ordering off the menu, we had a long, delicious meal, full of chatter, good wishes, congratulatory telegrams, and endless happy photos, none of them posed. Only after we finished the main course did I realize that we had completely forgotten to arrange for a wedding cake. I could handle my last-minute purchase of a suit, the mix-up with the flowers, even the chaos of twenty friends trying to order a wedding feast off a menu. But completely forgetting to arrange a wedding cake sent a shiver of misgiving through me. Forgetting the cake seemed unforgivable.
Normally I dismissed Roman scaramanzia —all the touching of wood and other gestures that Romans routinely practice to
I stayed in Prague another two days, long enough to tell a colleague on the Tribune ’s foreign desk all that had happened, a rambling conversation that the paper published as a story, and then I flew home to Warsaw. John, who was never good around blood, met me at the airport, looking increasingly green as he took in my bandaged head and my ankle-length parka, both still covered in dried blood. He put his arms around me and held on tight, then took my hand and drove me home. We turned in very early that night, for now it was John’s turn to leave for Prague. After he left early the next morning, the headaches began: deep, pounding pains that did not go away for weeks. My face swelled in the coming days, until it was no longer recognizable even to me. My entire face, especially around the eyes, was grotesquely bloated, black and blue. As the days passed, the swelling seemed to shift south, from forehead to under the eyes, to nose, to cheeks. The bruises faded first to purple, then to green, and finally to yellow.
My bruises had already turned to green about a week later, when John and I flew to Rome to clear the final bureaucratic hurdles before our wedding. I told myself that the dynamic between John and me had not essentially changed but only that I understood it better. By the time the flight landed in Rome, both of us had managed to put the beating aside for the time being and we were once again excited at the thought that the wedding we had long been planning was finally about to happen. By the time we took our vows in Rome’s ornate wedding hall atop the Capitoline Hill, my bruises had faded to yellow.
Our wedding, perhaps like many second marriages, ended up feeling like a somewhat thrown-together affair, squeezed into a lull in the revolutions spreading throughout Eastern Europe. For the ceremony, I had packed an old dress I loved, but a longtime UPI friend, Cathy Booth, then working for Time magazine, insisted I buy something new. Two nights before the ceremony she dragged me through an endless series of shops not far from the Spanish Steps until I found a suit she deemed festive enough for the occasion. She also insisted I carry a bouquet, and silenced my objections by saying she would arrange it all. When the florist failed to appear at her apartment before she left for the ceremony, she threw together a bridal bouquet from flowers she happened to have in a vase in her living room. All the initial photos of the wedding show me carrying Cathy’s simple, homemade bouquet. The florist, in typical Roman style, arrived at city hall just as we were called in for the ceremony. His bouquet, stiff and formal, had none of the charm of Cathy’s posies, but for a bride who hadn’t wanted to carry a bouquet at all, I ended up with two.
John and I had booked a big table at the same restaurant where we had celebrated our departure from Rome two years earlier. Just ordering off the menu, we had a long, delicious meal, full of chatter, good wishes, congratulatory telegrams, and endless happy photos, none of them posed. Only after we finished the main course did I realize that we had completely forgotten to arrange for a wedding cake. I could handle my last-minute purchase of a suit, the mix-up with the flowers, even the chaos of twenty friends trying to order a wedding feast off a menu. But completely forgetting to arrange a wedding cake sent a shiver of misgiving through me. Forgetting the cake seemed unforgivable.
Normally I dismissed Roman scaramanzia —all the touching of wood and other gestures that Romans routinely practice to
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