Free The Best American Short Stories® 2011 by Geraldine Brooks Page A

firemen dropped to their knees and started praying while my friend just stood there. He made the point that you'd have to be astonishingly simple to believe in a God who'd let someone's apartment burn down but magically intervene to save a three-dollar version of his own likeness. He also told me that Italians are basically the most complicated uninteresting people in the world."
    "You're being really interesting yourself right now."
    "I'm not trying to be interesting." His voice had a real snarl in it. "I'm trying to objectively describe my impressions and tell you about my friend." Then he calmed down, or at least hid his anger more cunningly. "I'm sorry I made fun of your book last night."
    Before their argument, while at a restaurant and while she was in the ladies', he had fished out of her purse the travel book she was reading about Italy. Its author was an American woman. When she returned to the table he began to read aloud certain parts in a dopey voice. "Listen to what she has to say about Rome: 'It's like someone invented a city just to suit my specifications.' Considerate of the preceding twenty-seven hundred years of civilization, wasn't it? This is priceless: 'It's like the whole society is conspiring to teach me Italian. They'll even print their newspapers in Italian while I'm here; they don't mind!'" He tossed the book onto the table and stared at it as though it were an excised tumor. Finally he said, "That is, without question, the stupidest fucking book I've ever seen you read."
    The book in question was currently a bestseller, and the only reason she was reading it was that her mother had given it to her, just as she had given her (them) the gift of an Italian honeymoon. He too was a travel writer, though one who had never made it off what he sometimes called the "worstseller list." He had published three books (all before she had met him) and preferred writing about places, he had once said in an interview she was embarrassed for him to have given, with "adrenaline payoffs": Nigeria, Laos, Mongolia. (His honeymoon suggestion? Azerbaijan.) She admired his determination to love the unloved parts of the world, but, like all good qualities, it remained admirable only insofar as it was unacknowledged.
    She decided to speak carefully. "I
like
that everything is closed from noon to four. It creates a little oasis in the middle of the day. I
like
that life in this city isn't based around my own convenience. I also like that people talk about dumb, pointless things like shoes with passion here. And I like Italians. They seem like totally lovely people."
    "I guess what irks me," he said, speaking just as carefully, "is this fantasy that Italy exists only as a sensory paradise when it's got all these completely obvious
problems.
"
    "Okay. How about this: I hated your creepy bone church."
    "Creepy bone
crypt.
"
    "In fact, I've hated every stupid church we've walked into." She knew she was asking for it here, and waited. He said nothing. Onward, then, into the dark. "You know I'm not comfortable in churches and yet you keep dragging me into them."
    Five pounds of emotion seemed to encumber his face. "Please, let's at least lie down before we start talking about this again."
    The hotel was many blocks away.
    "Why," she asked, "do you want to take me into places you know I'm not comfortable in?"
    His mouth set into an ugly little frown. "Because I think this discomfort of yours is ridiculous. I'm no more a Christian than you are. The ideology you suddenly feel so offended by is an ideology that would have had someone like me burning at the stake right next to you. That you can't separate the objectively aesthetic pleasure of churches from your own—" He stopped himself. Standing there, he began to rub his eyes. "Christ. Just forget it."
    "My own what?" Now she had stopped too. They were outside the gate-lowered entrance of a cheese store, whose owner was probably off banging his noontime mistress about now, and good for