Tara Marshall

Ciao, Bella

North Carolina, 2002

We’d been dating a matter of weeks when Ben took me and two sacks of laundry home with him. We were both second semester freshman, dancing on the edge of adulthood. We were both Christians, which was important to me. I was 12 years old the night I asked God to come into my heart, still reluctant to let go of Barbies, still happy with a stuffed animal or two inside my bed, still unaware the world was anything but what had been presented to me. God is what made my dreams seem possible. By the time I met Ben, my dreams were still there, although the bounds of time and money had already muted them just a bit. But Ben wasn’t a muted dream. He was exactly what I’d prayed for.

The next morning, Ben and I attended his home church with the other forty-some Methodists in the small town. It was small but stately, brick with stained glass windows depicting Bible scenes, grand white columns in the front, a rounded stark-white entry door.

The piano started playing and the music director stood in the pulpit and gestured for the congregation to stand. Ben grabbed a hymnal for us to share and I began singing quietly. I watched the music director while she motioned as a formal conductor would do with a baton; cueing a sea of off-key voices bringing their best to God. Quieter and quieter my voice became as Ben’s smooth and confident tenor rose above all the others in flawless harmony with the ivories.

I knew I loved Ben before the visit to his tiny hometown. As I stood there listening, Ben’s sport coat brushed my arm and I felt peace. Satisfaction. When the song ended, Ben grabbed my hand and the preacher gave his sermon. I wasn’t listening. At the same time my heart was still and thankful, it was also excited, so elated to have this feeling – this love feeling – overwhelm me. During a reading of Psalms, Ben squeezed my hand and looked over at me. He gave a slight smile; one I hadn’t yet seen. That’s how I knew he felt the same thing.

France, 2004

Before I left, I had written Ben 29 letters; one for every day I would be gone. I desperately missed him for the duration of the journey to Dijon. I cried with homesickness in the airport bathroom and wondered why I had chosen to study abroad anyway. Although it was my first time traveling to a foreign country, it didn’t feel like the precipice of a big adventure. It felt like I missed my best friend. I remained moored by prayer, and would often ask God to watch over Ben, to make him know how much I loved him.

The dorm at Université de Bourgogne gave me a private room, sink, and desk. The next day, I assembled with my new classmates in the common area café before classes began. I ordered a coffee, and was presented with a tiny cup.

“Sucre?” the girl behind the counter asked.

“Oui!” I said, after a brief hesitation. I was proud of myself for recognizing the French word for “sugar.” She plopped two sugar cubes. I sipped on the black elixir, listening to the different languages echo in the open space, wondering what was next.

“Ciao, bella” is what he greeted me with. I wasn’t expecting to be addressed directly by the olive-skinned, long-haired Italian. His eyes were blue, they were perceptive, they were engaging, and they were on me.

Alessandro held out his hand towards me, his way of introducing himself. I discovered he was fluent in Italian, Spanish, and English and was in the same program as me, working on his French. The lust I felt for Alessandro was instant and flirting followed. Mostly the flirting was with our eyes, each saying to the other “I like you and am desperate to know more,” or the back of his hand brushing the back of mine.

“Where are you from?” he asked, taking one corded ear bud out of his ear. It was attached to a portable CD player, and he held it in his hand while balancing his own tiny cup in the other.

“The U.S. I go to school in North Carolina.”

“I’ve never been,” he said. “I, eh, New York … but never there.”

“I’ve never been to New York.”

“Really?” he said, as if he assumed everyone in the U.S. had been to New York.

“I hope I’ll see you tonight,” he said—eyes staring straight into mine.

“Don’t people use iPods now?” I asked, pointing at the CD player.

“Cradle of Filth,” said Alessandro, either ignoring or not understanding my question.

I must’ve given him a comically horrified look because he thew back his head and laughed.

“Cradle of Filth?” What band calls themselves that?” I asked.

“You’ve never heard of them? Here. Listen.”

Alessandro took the ear bud in his hand and put it in my ear, and we were forced into closeness. A hot, electrical feeling erupted inside of me. The music sounded … terrible but all I wanted was to be closer to him.

“Sounds pretty awful.”

Alessandro laughed hard at my admission, clearly amused by my befuddlement over the band.

North Carolina, 2011

I woke to an empty bed. I reached to Ben’s side and my hand met the coolness of sheets that hadn’t been slept in. I remembered Ben had been sleeping in the guest room. I could hear the neighbor’s wind chimes and the crash of a storm door. Another Saturday. It was two weeks and six days since I’d found out about her.

I tiptoed down the hallway to the guest bedroom, anticipating a miracle. I imagined thrusting open the door and Ben, my beloved of nine years, would be there, sitting up in bed, asking for forgiveness. He would be explaining what had happened in a matter-of-fact tone, a story I’d understand. Something logical.

I stood in the hallway contemplating his affair and the uncertainty it now brought. Through the confusion and the terrible wondering of why over the last weeks and days, I realized I’d forgotten completely about prayer, as if I wasn’t sure God had anything to do with us anymore. Or as if I didn’t believe God could help fix it.

I opened the door a crack and saw Ben still sleeping. I studied him intently, a new habit since discovering the affair, which wasn’t a one-time illicit tryst. It had been going on for a year. If it wasn’t for the carelessly left behind movie ticket stub in the back pocket of his jeans, I may have never known. My husband, the life of every party. I wondered where he’d met her and how; if he’d charmed her with the same jokes and laugh that had thrilled me. Was she drawn to his fair complexion, signature scruffy five o’clock shadow, and impeccable sense of style?

I’d spent the last weeks and days assuring Ben I’d forgiven him and we could move through this together. My Christian upbringing had instilled in me the sanctity of marriage and working it out. I was determined we’d end up with a testimony we could eventually regale other Christians with about how we overcame infidelity.

I quickly shut the door and went downstairs. I put the coffee in the coffee maker slowly, counting the scoops as I went. One. Two. Three. I went back upstairs with a steaming mug in hand and opened the guest bedroom door a couple of inches. The square shape of the sun on the carpet filtered through sheer curtains in the room. Ben, lying on his side with his phone, jumped, as if I’d caught him doing something nefarious. I couldn’t deny he was likely texting her, and he wasn’t jumping up to wrap me in his arms.

“What do you want to do today?” I acted as if I didn’t know what Ben was doing; desperately hopeful he’d suggest a bike ride, a picnic, anything.

“I think I need to visit my family. Stay with my sister.”

Ben was still staring at his phone, thumbs furiously typing.

“I’ll go with you.”

“I’m going alone, to figure some things out.”

I recoiled as if I’d stepped on a sharp tack but no comfort came. The rejection hung there, unresolved. My body stiffened as if it was made of wood, and the hope I hung on to that we’d stay together began to melt as my hands trembled and hardened, clutching the coffee mug and door handle.

 As Ben got up to go to the bathroom, I saw it, the lines of a familiar suitcase. The beat up black American Tourister had made its way from Ben’s dorm to our house at the beach where we spent our first year. It traveled to Baltimore where our cat napped, cozy in our clothes, those first few days while we unpacked. After that, I’d seen it in the Mooresville apartment and finally the house we were standing in, only six years into what I had always assumed would be a long marriage. The suitcase looked packed, no doubt bursting at the seams with a bunch of expertly folded polo shirts.

“You don’t have to do this,” I said.

In an impulsive fervor, I yanked the wooden attic stairs down from the ceiling. My hands trembled and my legs shook as I sobbed and ascended the stairs. I knew right where all of the letters were, and I hauled the box down the ladder.

“Don’t do it, Tara. Don’t do it.”

I ignored him and carried the box to our bed. Ben sat down with me on the edge of the mattress and, one by one, I pulled the cards out and opened them.

“Happy Valentine’s Day, beautiful,” I read aloud. “Let’s make this last.”

“Remember that day?” I asked, pleading. “How we went to Outback and waited two hours for a table? How we didn’t care because we were just holding each other? Do you remember the walk back from the car to the dorm, and how you told me to put my hand in my coat pocket?”

Ben didn’t look at me. His head bowed; his legs hung limp off the edge of our bed. I looked at the watch I was wearing, the silver Movado I pulled out of my coat pocket that night.

“Please, stop.”

Ben took the suitcase and walked out the door, coffee mug untouched.

France, 2004

I saw Alessandro again at dinner, as our little friend group formed: a mishmash of Americans, Brits, Italians, Mexicans, and Japanese. It turned out Alessandro was an atheist who smoked and was bitter about losing his mother to an illness a year earlier. He told me he was eighteen years old, although he acted and looked mid-twenties. He was passionate about whatever he chose to give his opinion on; so strong-willed. Whatever way Alessandro thought things were, that’s the way things were.

Although being an atheist and smoking were two things that were wildly unpopular with the crowd I hung out with at home, these things are part of what made Alessandro so appealing to me. I’d met my inverse, and his very existence lured me to him. He thought about the way the world worked; I’d never asked questions. His draw could’ve also been the delicate gold chains around his neck, the messy midnight black hair and the thick beard, but it wasn’t just that. Alessandro’s eyes looked straight into mine and invited me to have opinions as strong has his own.

Alessandro didn’t just buy a pack of cigarettes. He went to the tobacco shop and was choosy about which pouch of tobacco he got. Each time he wanted a cigarette he’d have to stop what he was doing, open his messenger bag, pull out the pouch of tobacco, select a single cigarette paper from another package, and proceed with the rolling process. Only the precise dollop of tobacco would do, and he would meticulously roll the cigarette, careful not to spill any of the precious tobacco out of the sides. Then he’d lick one edge of the paper; too little saliva and it wouldn’t hold, too much and it would fall apart. After that, the cigarette would be complete. He always lit it and sucked in the first drag for a good long time, blowing the smoke upwards toward the sky. Somehow, I was sucked in, too, in him, in how different he was than any man I had ever met.

The first time Alessandro’s fingers grazed mine, I had to remember to breathe. In a quest to feel him again, I brushed his hair out of his eyes and saw a genuine smile on his face, betraying that brooding, tortured-soul persona. Another time we stood in line at the café, waiting on our tiny cups of what I had come to discover was espresso. Alessandro was behind me and he put his hands on my shoulders and pulled me towards him, an all-too-brief moment that had me wanting more.

He knew I was engaged and scoffed at the ring on my finger, as if it didn’t matter in the world we now inhabited. We talked about everything in our lives and debated Christianity. I wanted him to love God the way I did. He didn’t find it necessary. If there was a God, reasoned Alessandro, then why would He let his mother die? My answers to this question came out paltry.

North Carolina, 2011

In the weeks following Ben’s exit from our home, the question of “Why?” consumed me. It became an obsession, figuring out the why, so I wrote about it. My journal was full of scrupulous questions which all led back to why—why Ben had an affair, why he didn’t care about working it out, and why I didn’t see it coming. The writing turned into marvelous, loopy, blathering text. My prayers halted as if I didn’t feel God could really help or I wasn’t worth helping.

I knew the truth. I didn’t need a journal to understand what I already knew: the why was going to be too hard, if not impossible, to find. I wanted so badly to understand what Ben did. I refused to admit I already understood him. How mad could I really be about the affair if it had so easily happened to me?

When I used to think of Alessandro, a speck of guilt would come first. If I didn’t push it away, a shroud of guilt would come but eventually, I’d move on. I always kept Alessandro in the past, back in France, only existing in my mind or in my dreams, whether they were the dreams of daytime or the unconscious musings of the night. In the days and weeks after Ben left and discarded our marriage, all I needed was to feel the way Alessandro made me feel, like I was wanted. And so, in the bleak loneliness and all the asking of why, I went to find what I knew would make me feel those feelings again: the journal, and those pictures.

I scrambled towards my closet to look for it—the five by eight-inch journal with the Eiffel Tower on the front. “What happens in France, stays in France,” I wrote. How juvenile, to think things will stay where you hope they will. I flipped through the pages, scanning my entries for anything that would bring me back to the moments when, in his deep gravelly voice, Alessandro would say, “Ciao, bella.”

Oh, and it did.

France, 2004

A few days after we met, Alessandro and I were studying together in my dorm room side by side at the small desk. We were conjugating verbs when he turned to me and said he had something he had to tell me. I wasn’t sure what to expect because our relationship, although dangerously close, had been platonic. I secretly fed off his scant touches, looks, and the “Ciao, bella” he always greeted me with.

I thought he was going to say “I love you.” Instead, he began to write on a piece of paper, his long hair draped over the side of his face. He tore the small piece of paper from the page and pushed it over to me on the desk. It read “Ti voglio bene anche io.”

I could hear my own heart beating as his face moved in closer to mine. Alessandro breathed the Italian words he had written, pronouncing one after the other.

“What does it mean?”

“I love you in the easy way,” said Alessandro.

I stared, unsure. I thought maybe I loved him.

“Like a friend,” he said. “I love you like a friend.”

Alessandro leaned in closer as he pushed the scrap of paper towards me. He loved me as a friend. I nodded, giving him the indication I understood even though I didn’t.

Alessandro’s shoulder length black hair surrounded his face, the strands looked like soft, frothy waves with split ends. The heat and humidity caused the hair framing his face to stick to it, and there was the smell of cigarette smoke on his breath. Under normal circumstances, that would have turned me off, but it enthralled me, and invited me into his space. His hand came toward my face, slowly. I could see the pores of his skin, and in my peripheral vision, the sparkle of the little diamond on my left hand. It glinted for a moment, then shifted, like a kaleidoscope.

Guilt mixed with excitement clouded my judgement, and I did not have a choice when his lips grazed my cheek. My body revved, and the curtain of guilt fell away. Alessandro’s kiss tasted forbiddingly like sweet nicotine. My body reacted with familiar sensations that had been reserved for one person, who seemed dreadfully far away.

Alessandro’s hands moved from my face down my body and stopped slowly over the arc of my breasts, then headed lower. I stiffened. I inhaled deeply; my thoughts, for the first time, weren’t floating in my head. I was weightless.

Snap! The typically brooding Alessandro was smiling as he unfastened the metal snap on his pants and began to lower them. The sound gave me a jolt and reminded me of the critical consequences that would befall me if I went any further. Alessandro took my hand and placed it on him, and I recoiled.

“Why did you stop?” he asked, looking up at me, breathing heavily.

“I can’t,” I mumbled. “It’s God,” I finally said. “Want to know the truth? It’s God. I know you don’t believe in it. I know you won’t understand me. God loves me so much, my fiancé loves me so much, and it’s not ok, not ok at all, but I want you so much.”

“If you want me, you can have me,” Alessandro said. “Can’t you do what makes you happy? How can God stop you from doing something you want?”

“I don’t want this.”

“You don’t? You seem like you want it. This is about him, isn’t it? It’s not about God.”

Of course it was about him. Ben was everything to me.

“I’ve got to go,” Alessandro said, hastily dressing and leaving the room.

I couldn’t stand it. My heart was burning, and I felt like vomiting. I knew I shouldn’t but I wanted more. Again, our conversation had turned to God, and every time I brought God up with Alessandro it ended with me wondering what right I had to tell Alessandro, the atheist, about God, when I was such a hypocrite? My commitment to God and Ben had stopped me from doing something I wanted, but I couldn’t stop the desire to hear “Ciao, bella” from Alessandro’s deep voice.

I spent the next few days trying not to kiss Alessandro. It didn’t work. We kissed behind bushes, under willow trees, and in souvenir shops. I prayed every day for forgiveness. Immediately after those prayers I would seek out Alessandro, often finding him in the dorm’s shared kitchen laughing his throaty laugh. Eventually, his hand would graze the back of mine, and we’d find a reason to leave the kitchen and be alone again, always careful to go no further than the kiss.

North Carolina, 2011

I buried myself in the Eiffel Tower journal and became stuck in mental quicksand, chiding myself for not knowing Ben had someone else, not noticing any ominous signs of a marriage suffering. My mind languished in self-deprecation as I thought back over the last year with Ben. I scanned every interaction I could recall and tried to find what I’d missed.

We went to Tulum, Mexico just the summer before. I’d found out about Tulum in a magazine. Ancient Mayan ruins! Stay where the celebs come to escape! It was July, hotter than most people tend to be comfortable, especially at night. Ben and I stayed in a hotel and the rooms were thatched huts painted in bright blues, reds, and oranges, with mosquito netting around the beds. We ate fish caught from the Caribbean in the morning, cleaned and gutted and then presented on our plates later that evening. We lounged on beach chairs, drank Cokes and Coronas, and took photos of every colossal lizard and hermit crab that traipsed by our beach chairs.

We passed time by reading books and walking and talking to each other. We’d brought our Bibles and I had never felt more thankful or closer to God than I did when I was on the beach where the sand met the water, looking out at His creation. I’d ask Ben questions like “What makes you belly laugh?” or “Do you want to try and read the whole Bible together this year?” and wait for answers I thought would allow me to feel closer to him. At night, we’d cuddle up next to each other in our mosquito-tented beds, both still in bathing suits, and stare at the ceiling fans until we started kissing each other like we did in the days and weeks after we first met.

Sometimes when I’d ask Ben a question, his eyes would dart to the side, as if his answer to what kind of job he wished he had was a lie.

“What big trip do you want to go on next?” I asked one afternoon as we were lounging in hammocks. “Morocco? I think that would be cool!”

“I don’t know, Tara,” he said. “I don’t want to play this game.”

I felt stung, but left the question there, open-ended, hopeful he’d answer another time. There was nothing I wanted more than to be inside Ben’s head, to feel his arms around me and have him breathe into my neck and tell me all of his dreams for the future, things he wanted, things he was going to do. Being in the Mexican paradise was just about as close as we were going to get, adventuring together over rocky and sandy terrain, me immune to the fact there wasn’t truly-steady or solid ground underneath.

How was I to know Ben’s faraway looks and noncommittal ideas about vacation activities weren’t just him relaxing and taking in the scenery? There is nothing that would’ve indicated someone else was already in our marriage, with us on a beautiful Mexican beach, living in Ben’s head. I’m just the idiot that didn’t know.

France, 2004

About a week after Alessandro and I began secretly making out in the city of Dijon, I traveled to Paris with some of my classmates. As I stood in line to climb the bus bound for the city, Alessandro appeared next to me and slipped a chain off his wrist.

“For the weekend, only,” he said. “My mother gave it to me.”

I clutched it the entire bus ride there. I walked to the Basilique du Sacré-Cœur, located at the highest point in the city of Paris. The desire in my heart was fighting a to-the-death duel with my values and my guilt over what I’d been doing with Alessandro.

I thought of Ben back home and imagined the welcome home reunion we’d have, a hug and a kiss amidst a bouquet of flowers. I searched for a pay phone, half thinking I’d call Ben right then and there, and the drawl of his voice with a hint of twang would jolt me back to reality, would make me think Alessandro never existed. I didn’t bother to wonder what meeting Alessandro meant for my relationship with Ben, and spent only a scant amount of time consumed with worry over my lust for Alessandro and how wrong it was. I made the choice not to think about it at all and give up my half-hearted search for a pay phone. I paid a street artist to sketch a portrait of me instead, a testament to the state of my mind. I was only thinking of myself.

After I returned from the weekend trip to Paris, I let Alessandro drown my common sense with his affection, with his words, with his hand on the back of my neck. We did not have sex, but the memories of what we did do are far more intimate than what I imagine a hasty attempt at making love would have been. I let him sleep in my dorm room and smile at me in the morning. I watched him brush his teeth and put on his strange stretchy European boxers, and later I let him hold me on the bus and I didn’t care who saw it. I did all of that, out in the open, an ocean away from Ben. I intentionally decided, the day I put the engagement ring in its box, back in my suitcase, that I would think about it later, “it” being how much I was hurting Ben, my best friend. My guilt, along with that ring, were buried far enough for me to pretend it wasn’t there.

Three days before I was scheduled to leave France, Alessandro and I went to the lake to sprawl in the grass. I could only think of all the things I’d never get to do again—see his smile, hear him talk, experience his laugh, watch him roll a cigarette. As we both settled lazily in the sun, I wanted to ask him, “What if we just stay?” Would Alessandro have said yes?  Would he have taken me in his arms, told me we’d figure it out, and would that have been the beginning of my great big adventure? I didn’t even try to pray about this; I had buried my guilt and God would only bring it up again. I didn’t ask Alessandro anything, I only wrote in my journal lamentations that no doubt I would cry in the months and years to come every time I thought of him.

The next three days passed at the same rate time always passes. It wasn’t enough. The morning of my group’s departure, a bus awaited us outside the dorm room. When I last saw Alessandro, we embraced outside of the dorm, steps away from the bus. He smelled faintly like stale cigarettes; his eyes were shining with tears he refused to let fall. Alessandro slipped the bracelet off his wrist and motioned to my wrist, mumbling something in Italian. I didn’t ask him to translate. I refused the offer, and pushed his trembling hands back toward him. We both knew it was the last time we’d ever see each other. There were no other words exchanged. Just a brief hug, and the turn of his head, a sad, agonizing expression permanently affixed to his face. I climbed the bus and peered out the window. I saw Alessandro saunter away, and the image of his gait and wavy hair blowing around burned into my brain like a brand.

I had three hours on a bus alone with the image of Alessandro in my head, and the smell of him still on my skin. God was with me but I was no longer with God. I was left to wonder what Alessandro was doing, what he was thinking, left to wonder if he ever looked back. By the time the bus reached the Charles de Gaulle airport, I dug my engagement ring out of the bottom of my suitcase.

North Carolina, 2011

It took me only an hour to read the journal, all the childish words I had written about love. It took me back to Alessandro and back to Ben again. Ben’s affair left me feeling punished, in emotional chains. My trip back in time left my face covered in tears of salty shame. I came as close as I could to feeling Alessandro’s breath on my neck, his hand in my hand, and his voice in my ear. I realized perhaps I didn’t deserve to ask myself why Ben left. Even if I did know the why, would it answer anything at all?

What did it mean, as the weeks went on, that I yearned to hear “Ciao, bella” again? I needed to hear those raspy, gruff, I-want-you words because the extraordinary high I got from Alessandro’s pursuit of my affection was enough to remedy the loneliness left in Ben’s wake. I sought the memories of being pursued by Alessandro most often in nights of fitful, dream interrupted sleep. Those dreams would be some version of a reunion, or a what-if-I-had-stayed-in-France scenario. I decided I could not dive into my heart to ask why because I would also have to ask what if … and thinking of one’s life in whys and what ifs would no doubt become too much to bear.

Ben never came home. I did not wade and wonder though the why any more. I forged ahead, in a rocky pursuit towards God which led to forgiveness for myself, and for Ben. Several more relationships and many only acquaintance-worthy relationships with men ensued. Some of these men were bearing flowers, some just overbearing, one was the type to get in bar fights, one was too afraid to open up, several were just walking through life with no purpose, and one knew exactly who he was.

I never saw, spoke to, or heard from Alessandro again, with one exception. There are nights we meet up in the French countryside, on a bus. I wake, though, while we’re still bantering back and forth, before I fall completely in love with him again.

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Tara Marshall graduated with her B.A. from Winthrop University. She started writing community news stories over a decade ago for the greater Charlotte, NC, area as a side gig while spending the bulk of her professional career in property management. She now concentrates on writing her creative non-fiction memoir about the aftermath of divorce—faith, forgiveness, and serial dating. Tara wrote this piece because she believes there aren’t enough Christians willing to be open about their own experiences in a fallen world. Tara lives in Davidson, NC, and is often seen around town strolling with her young daughter, husband, and one really peculiar pug.