Honeymoon in Rome

Phillip and Jessica. Phillip drives a scooter. Jessie wraps her arms around his waist. They are zipping around the cobbled streets of Rome. Romantic? It should have been, but they're fighting. He's driving like a mad man to scare her. She keeps telling him where to turn, until he's flustered, emasculated. She hides her fear of dying a two-wheeled death on foreign stones by getting angrier, by telling him to stop being such an ass, but the tightening of her grip on his waist tells him that she's giving in to him a little, he's starting to chip away into that bullheaded reserve of hers. But he hates giving into his own anger, he wants to be calm, wants to relax, wants to take in the brilliance of Rome at a leisurely pace. So why is Phillip zipping around like a Kamikaze, aiming for a ship that he can't discern out of the dust and crowds and cars blaring their horns at this mad American couple? He just needs to let go, to give in, to back down; he releases the throttle, and they coast to a stop in a deserted square. They're still rolling when Jessica ejects from the seat by stomping down her feet, jogging to a stop, taking death breaths, stooped over with her hands on her knees. "What the fuck, Phillip? Is that your way of punishing me or something?"

"I just wanted to get through that mess back there," he lied. "Romans don't know how to drive. They should've stuck with their horse drawn chariots".

She turned from him, walked over to a fountain in the middle of the square and sat on its rim. She pulled a strand of hair out of her eyes that had come loose in the rushing wind on Phillip’s mad flight on the scooter. She started to laugh, looking at him. It wasn't a kind laugh, where he looked cute to her, and they would suddenly both begin laughing, then kiss or make love there in the shallows of the fountain. No, this was a contemptuous laugh at the fool she'd just married, this disappointment of a man who needed to ask for directions, who still couldn't say thank you in Italian (he kept pronouncing it as "Garcia",). She kept telling herself she could have done better, she was young, attractive, intelligent. She was tall, around 5'7", with auburn hair with highlights. Her brown skin was flushed an even deeper shade of red in the cheeks from their scooter ride, from the sun, from the wind. Her Capri pants had a dirty handprint on her ass from when Phillip had playfully groped her earlier in the morning. He thought it was cute. She wondered if she could get the stain out that evening. "I need you to start acting reasonable, Phillip. Take some responsibility. Take the bloody tour map and study it a little. Why do I have to do all the work and figure out where we're going?"

Phillip sat down beside her, snatching the map out of her bag. His blurry eyes quickly took in the expanse of Rome, but all he cold see were the highlighted points of interest that Jessica had already mapped out, the notes in red felt-tipped pen of where Caesar was buried, the Spanish Steps (need to find some accurate sights). He pointed at a place on the map clear of markings, free of Jessica's excessive outlining and planning, this rigidity he was beginning to see would create a real problem for them.

"Here. I want to go here."

"What is that? An aqueduct, a park, what?"

"It's the Foro Romano. I don't know what it is. But I can see it's heading out of the center of Rome, that it'll be easy to get to."

"I don't want to decide where we're going just because it's easy"

The path of least resistance, Phillip thought. What's so bad about that? Why can't some things be easy? "You asked me to pick a place to go, so I did"

"Ok, let's go to the Foro Romano," she said, standing up and marching to the scooter, sitting down and waiting for her gallant knight to mount his steed, she scoffed to herself. Or was he the village idiot? Mounting his steed wasn't one of his natural abilities, as she'd witnessed during their wedding night. Is a good lover born or raised, she wondered? Nature versus nurture; she remembered arguing these two schools of thought back in Psychology 101. She couldn't remember which side she fought for at the time. Let's hope 'nurture'.

Phillip reluctantly got back on the scooter. He was tired, and didn't want to fight anymore. It would be easier to just back down and follow Jessica's lead. He wasn’t going to say a word the rest of the afternoon. Let her discern his anger in his silence. Oh she knows what she did wrong. I don't have to tell her.

But she didn't know. She didn't have a clue. She was just being herself, and that was always right; isn’t' that what her father had always said?