It is a long, gray San Francisco summer. Whenever you leave town,
you’re always surprised to find that beyond the thick curtain of fog
that circles your immediate world the sun is blazing hot. You wonder why
you live here in the middle of February when it is August everywhere
else, why you pay the price you pay to say you’re a San Franciscan.
Sometimes you feel like your love affair with this city is turning into
a bad marriage. It was so wonderful at first, so promising. You chose
San Francisco 15 years ago on a whim, because it is a city full of
people with whims. You had been traveling for a year after college, and
when your money ran out you knew you had to land someplace where there
was a real city with real nature nearby. You were lured by San
Francisco’s improbable terrain, its old-worldish charm and its history
of bemused tolerance for all kinds of misfits. You figured it was a
place where you could settle and still have the sense of traveling, of
wandering well-known streets and always being surprised. So you drove
someone’s else’s big Buick Riviera all the way west, and when you
finally saw the Golden Gate Bridge you had a giddy sense of
amazement that you had found what you were looking for. That you were
finally home.
The first phase of romance ended with a series of little
disappointments — bad public transportation, crazed roommates, high
rents, low pay, impossible parking. Your affection for the city became
more complicated, but your struggles made you that much more loyal.
Every so often — walking in the arboretum in Golden Gate Park where the
irises and poppies spread like common grass, watching a parade of ornery
bicyclists — you’d be amazed all over again at the city. You remember the
day after the big earthquake in 1989, a warm blue day, when everything
in the city was shut down but its beauty. Everybody was walking around
outside, happy to be alive in such a splendid, sometimes terrible city.
A city worth all the risks.
But in the past few years, you’ve watched the character of the city
changing, with baby-faced Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and Lexus-driving lawyers
pushing the artists, dreamers and immigrants into tighter and tighter
corners. You married a delightful man who loved exploring the city as
much as you do, and you saw him change, too, from a scruffy public
defender who followed the Grateful Dead into a highly paid attorney who
wore Italian suits, drank single-malt scotch and cheated on his wife.
The city you knew so well together stopped sparkling. After you got divorced, everything became dull. The romance left San Francisco the way the youth
and attractiveness drained out of your face. You became invisible on the
streets and only saw the cracked and dirty sidewalks. Walking
outside your Haight-Ashbury flat, you saw more and more homeless people
every day, sleeping under cardboard, using their dirty bags of
possessions as pillows. You tried to avoid them, but they were too
familiar, every year a little more raw. Now you sometimes wonder if it
would just be better to leave.
Then one day a postcard of a silver propeller plane lands on your
doorstep from the French professor you last saw in Milan for a weekend
in spring. He had casually mentioned that he’d like to visit you in San
Francisco sometime, and you said sure, knowing it would never happen.
Now he writes in his poor English that he is “very exciting to come,”
and he has already bought his ticket to San Francisco, departing 12
days after he arrives. During this time, he says, he will be entirely
under your responsibility. He is leaving you to decide everything for
your amorous trip since you know his tastes: big, comfy beds.
You drop the postcard because it is impossible. How can you spend
almost two weeks on your own turf with a man you have known for only a
few days in a fantasy world of islands and antique hotels? You won’t be
able to sustain the romance. He will become bored with you and your
mundane little world. He will sneer at your shabby flat and think the
art is bad and that you have way too many shoes hidden under the bed.
He’ll be appalled at how often you check your messages and e-mail. He’ll
realize that you aren’t sexy and voluptuous, you’re fat. After believing
for a few short days in Italy that you are a lively, amusing, well-read
woman of the world, he will leave understanding that you are just
another ugly American. And you will never see him again.
Not knowing what else to do, you find a postcard of a couple driving a
1950s convertible on the beach and write that you can’t wait to see him,
but you leave the card in your bag for days, finally remembering to drop
it, dog-eared, into the mailbox. He sends back a photo of the Golden
Gate Bridge disappearing into the fog and says he’s very excited, more
and more. You realize he really has his sights set on San Francisco. He
has spent only three days in the United States in his life, in New York 15 years ago, and now you are responsible for his
once-in-a-lifetime trip to California.
Well, you say to yourself, he’s a lucky guy. And then you get out the
maps. You come up with a plan for 10 perfect days in California, your
California, and you send him a postcard promising him an island, too.
The day finally comes when the professor is supposed to arrive. You
spend the whole morning taking down all the art in the house,
rearranging it and then putting it back where it was in the first place. You
change your clothes several times, too, and eventually just put on your
worn jeans and cowboy boots because you figure he might as well know
right off the bat that you are not even trying to impersonate a European
intellectual or a delicate French beauty. You are a big American blond.
You wait in the international terminal as homebound passengers roll
their carts toward open-armed relatives and weary honeymooners catch
their first glimpse of this notoriously romantic city. Finally you see
the familiar denim jacket, silver bracelet and chestnut curls. M.
embraces you and you can’t believe you’re actually here at the airport,
picking up a man you met over breakfast on an Italian island a year ago,
a man you’ve known for a total of six days. At first you can’t remember
a word of Italian, and you lead him out of the maze to the parking lot
in silence, hoping you will even be able to communicate with each other
for 12 days. “Eleven hours,” he says. “Can I smoke yet?” You tell
him that California is a non-smoking state and he has a flicker of panic
before he lights up.
You load his compact bag into the car, afraid to glance at him, and
drive home on the industrial freeway next to big billboards and bald
brown hills. He is puzzled by the ugliness and you remind him, your
Italian coming back now, that the highway to the airport is ugly in
Paris, too. You exit onto hilly Dolores Street, with its stately rows of
palm trees and Victorian houses, and he begins to become excited. You
wind up a steep back hill toward the Haight-Ashbury and as he hangs on
to the corners of his seat the entire city comes into view, from the
hills of houses to the toy blocks and triangles downtown. The view
almost surprises you and he is entranced. Over and over he says he can’t
believe he’s here.
You warn him that your house is bohemian as you open the gate to the
1907 apartment building where you live. He surveys the high ceilings,
hardwood floors, molded wainscotting, cheerful kitchen, yard sale
furniture and books everywhere and pronounces the whole place charming.
He walks right into your room and hops onto your bed. “Monumentale,” he
says, and looks you in the eye. While you explain how you thought it was
kind of important and symbolic to get a really good bed after your
divorce, he starts to kiss you and it is so good to touch someone, him,
again.
He is much too wide awake to lie around napping, so you take him for a
quick tour. You walk down grimy Haight Street, with its tattoo parlors,
head shops, used clothing stores, burrito restaurants and bondage
boutiques, and M. stops in front of almost every window, fascinated. You
hate the Haight after all these years, but today it seems like a
friendly street carnival. You recount stories about the ’60s rock stars
who used to live here, how there used to be old sofas in the revival
movie house, and how much you like it that after all these years you
know the people in the produce market, the independent bookstore, the
post office and the hardware store. It’s a real neighborhood. Someone
near the park offers you buds and doses, sotto voce, and M. is delighted
that he’s on the famous hippie Haight Street and someone is actually
trying to sell him drugs.
You cross over into Golden Gate Park, half as long as the city itself,
a variegated jewel that never would have been built if it were up to
anyone today. You wander through the tunnel, where someone ingeniously
molded stalactites on the ceiling years ago, and then emerge into the
grassy sun. On a nearby hill, drummers are drumming African drums,
barefoot women in Indian skirts are dancing, guys in long baggy shorts
are throwing frisbees and people are lying out bare-chested, catching
the last rays before the chill. “This is just how I imagined San
Francisco,” says M., and it is how you imagined it, too, before you
moved here. You walk over to the Hall of Flowers, closed since it was
battered by a big storm a few years ago, and M. gasps at the beauty of
the fragile Victorian glass palace surrounded by towering palm trees and
tidy beds of flowers. You show him the huge square of dahlias nearby,
bursting in color, and point out the rocks that someone has arranged
into a miniature model of the Grand Canyon. He can’t believe the park is
so vast and uncrowded. You can’t believe how long it’s been since you’ve
actually looked around here instead of bicycling through, unseeing,
just getting exercise.
The sun sets and you walk back toward home, veering off to Cole
Valley, which is near the Haight but in another, tidier, more gentrified
world. M. admires how European the neighborhood is, with its cheese
shop, its sleek blond-wood restaurants, its compact bars and cafes. You
duck down a side street into your favorite sushi restaurant, a plain
place with plastic chairs and Japanese calendars. You pick your sushi
adventurously, happy to be taking a Parisian to a meal he could never
get in Paris without paying a fortune. He savors every bite of fish and
marvels at its freshness. The sushi chef comes over to tell you that you
have such good taste that next time you’re in he promises he’ll feed you
a really exquisite fish liver. You love that of all the many times
you’ve been in this little restaurant the chef waits until you’re with a
snobbish Parisian to compliment you on your palate. You walk a few
short blocks home, where M. says he already feels comfortable. He lights
a cigar even though no one ever smokes in your house and watches the
church lights glow in the distance.
In the morning you are confused by having someone in your bed. You
bring him coffee as he wakes up, and he sips tentatively, his first
American coffee, and is surprised it is so good. Of course it’s good,
you tell him. This is San Francisco, not America.
That day you take him along for the ride, showing him the collective
writers office where you work. He climbs the stairs to the loft and
takes in the punching bag, the Christmas lights, the plastic shower
curtains dividing the cubicles, and says you would never find anything
like this in Europe. You’re anxious about introducing him to the people
you work with.
It’s odd to have your fantasy world meet your reality. You still worry
about what people will think about this dalliance with a married
Frenchman. You know it’s good for you. But other friends have been
surprised and disapproving. One asked you how you’re any different from
the woman your husband escaped your marriage with, the woman you found
late one evening snuggled up with your ex on the deck in sleeping bags,
drinking wine and looking at the moon. You know there is a world of
difference, that you are no threat to M. and his wife, that they are
complicated French people who have a clear understanding, that M. isn’t
going to leave her and move in with you the next week, as your ex did
with his girlfriend. You aren’t going to move to Paris; you won’t even
visit there. You don’t speak French, and M. doesn’t speak English.
There’s no risk. You keep telling yourself that.
You have lunch at a Thai restaurant with two of the women you work
with, and even though they don’t speak much of the same languages, M.
begins to believe that all the women in San Francisco are smart and
well-traveled, and like to laugh. Your friends know that M. has given
you a little sparkle back. They know that it’s exactly because there’s
no risk that you’ve been able, for a few days here and there, to peel
away your depression, to peek outside again at all that is alive around
you. They pronounce him charming and sexy, which he loves hearing
repeated.
You take him over the Bay Bridge to Berkeley, where you teach a class.
He scrutinizes your clothes when you get out of the car and says you
look too sexy to be a professor, all the male students must want to
sleep with you. You say that here in America it isn’t taken for granted
that teachers sleep with their students, and he shrugs: your loss. It
crosses your mind that you’re glad you’re not married to a guy like
this, and you put your hair into a tight bun before going in. He wanders
around taking in the sights of the great American university he heard so
much about in the ’60s.
Afterwards, you drive all the way around the bay and get lost looking
for the Richmond Bridge. Suddenly there are strip malls and housing
developments everywhere. “We’re outside the oasis,” says M. You find the
bridge and pass by San Quentin prison, where M. asks whether it’s really
true that they still execute people there. This, he says, is completely
barbaric; no one in Europe understands it. You say, uneasily, that you
went to the demonstrations against the first new execution in years, but
now there are so many it’s hard to keep track. You tell him that one in
250 Americans is in prison — that one in five black male Californians
will spend time there — and he just shakes his head. This is the America
he has heard about.
You wind your way up Mount Tamalpais, the big sleeping woman that looms
over Marin County. You park at the trailhead to the secret entrance to
Muir Woods, where you can descend into the tall trees without ever
seeing a tourist. You walk in silence on the dark trail, taking in the
prehistoric ferns and soft needles under your feet. Finally you tell M.
that you’re worried that after 12 days he’ll get tired of you.
Maybe, he says, but after 12 days you might get tired of me, too. He
takes your hand and tells you you’re a sweet woman, you’re so easy to be
with. You tell him he is welcome to his space whenever he needs it,
trying to say that in Italian. He nods soberly, agreeing, and then tries
to suppress a laugh. You don’t understand what’s so funny and he
explains that he can’t help it, it’s just too much, a Californian
talking about having space like that. You tell him to visualize himself
abandoned on a California trail and he grabs on tightly to your arm, and
then your waist.
You keep descending until you reach the redwoods and then a creek far
below. Light bursts in between great soft branches and dapples the
forest floor. You take the path that winds around huge tree stumps and
cathedral circles of redwoods. “Incredible,” M. says, staring up. There
is nothing like this in Europe. It is amazing that such a magical place
is so close to your home, and you rarely visit. You hike back to the top
of the trail, check into the cozy Mountain Home Inn there and have a
drink on the terrace, watching San Francisco peek between the distant
hills like the Emerald City. “Wonderful,” says M. “Gorgeous.” You
remember another terrace overlooking the Mediterranean with him and feel
the same sense of luxuriating in a perfect moment.
The next morning you drive down the curving road to Stinson Beach. This
is the first time M. has seen the Pacific Ocean. It may be called
pacific, he says, but it doesn’t seem peaceful at all compared with the
Mediterranean. And so cold! You walk barefoot in the sand until you find
a cluster of rocks that you can climb on and stretch out in the morning
sun, watching the waves crash. He searches around to see if there is
anyone watching, if you could get away with making love on the beach.
The idea tickles you and then you flash on a time your ex wanted to make
love on the beach, so full of desire, so dead now, and you wonder
whether you can ever feel free and sexy at home without feeling haunted.
The place is too full of memories, all spoiled.
Eventually you make your way back to San Francisco along the rugged
coast. M. says it looks like Spain. “How can it be so wild so near the
city?” he asks, and you wonder the same thing, silently
toasting whoever had the foresight years ago to leave the headlands near
San Francisco undeveloped. You drive over the Golden Gate Bridge, its
orange girders bright against the blue sky, and on this miraculously
clear morning you can see from Mount Diablo in the east to the sailboats
in the bay to the tidy stripes of streets climbing the sides of San
Francisco to the Farallon islands out in the ocean. You make your way
across and into the Marina District, where you point out the Palace of
Fine Arts, a building you love because it is encircled by huge statues
of terra-cotta women who are facing butt-out to the world, making fun of
the whole business of imposing city monuments. You head across the city
and do what you’ve never done, drive down Lombard Street, the crookedest
street in the world, and when M. is surprised at the zig-zag, you shrug
your shoulders like it’s just another normal street in San Francisco.
You arrive in North Beach, and from the top of the parking garage M.
surveys the city and its Victorian houses. “It’s a doll’s city!” he
says. “It isn’t real.” You walk to your favorite Italian cafe and have
an espresso, watching the passersby. You love speaking Italian in North
Beach, which is full of Italians, without seeming like you’re trying too
hard. Spending time in your city speaking another language makes it all
new.
M. announces, with his new vocabulary, that he wants to “take his
space” and is going to explore the city by himself for a while. It makes
you nervous to abandon him, but you realize he has traveled the world by
himself and will be able to figure out how to get to the Museum of
Modern Art by 4 p.m.
When you see him again, he has the city all figured out. He has
discovered Chinatown and says the Financial District has no charm and the
shop windows are boring to look at. He strides through the art museum,
making his snap art professor judgments: The early Calder works are
interesting, that Matisse is beautiful, Clyfford Still is no big deal,
he isn’t so sure about the California hyper-realism. He pauses at a
glass cube and explains that he can lecture for three hours about this
glass cube. You ask what he can possibly say and he becomes animated.
This chair! he exclaims, pointing to a clean, simple metal-and-leather
seat in the middle of the room. This chair would not have been possible
without this cube. He goes on and on about an object just being what it
is, what you see, positive and negative spaces, and you, amused at his
performance, pull him along to the Rothko, where you have common ground
standing there in front of the deep, vibrating, infinite red.
You take him home for dinner, and do the thing you have missed most
since you were divorced, which is to cook for a man as a prelude to
sleeping with him. You tantalize all his senses with a meal: fresh
mozzarella and summer tomatoes with basil; orecchiete pasta with
cauliflower, toasted pine nuts, currants soaked in white wine and
reggiano cheese; good crusty California bread; salad greens with olive
oil, shallots and lemon. He abandons himself to the meal and the wine
and can’t help himself, he has another serving. You bring him espresso
and an alambic brandy made in Ukiah that you think is better than most
cognac, and he agrees. He smokes a cigar and you smoke one of the
Gitanes cigarettes he sent you last year for Christmas and then,
completely satisfied, you make yourselves dessert.
For the next two days, you say you are out of town and play San
Francisco tourist. You take M. to Fisherman’s Wharf to catch a ferry,
and are amused to see the professor of the philosophy of aesthetics
pawing through a bin in a cheesy souvenir shop looking for T-shirts to
bring home to his kids. You promise him you’ll come up with something
better than a baseball cap that says Alcatraz. You wait for the ferry
and watch the crowd of sea lions sunning themselves on the pier. On the
ferry, you feel like it’s the boat to Ischia, a romantic voyage, even if
you’re only going to Tiburon to eat lunch. You have a big Mexican lunch
with all of San Francisco and Angel Island before you, and you take the
ferry back to the city again, a little tipsy, stretched out on the deck
kissing, and then you head toward North Beach.
You climb up to a friend’s apartment on the Filbert Steps, a steep
garden staircase with quirky wooden houses perched on the sides, where
you watch the sky turn pink with the Bay Bridge in the background.
Suddenly a flock of bright green parrots flies into view and it is just
another little daily San Francisco miracle. Then you drag him to the top
of Coit Tower, and you realize you never go to Coit Tower to see the
sunset. You tell him the story of Lily Coit, who built the big phallic
firehose as a monument to firemen, whom she liked very much. It’s a
glorious, rare day, and you take in all the territory from the hills of
North Beach to Mount Tam and Tiburon. You can’t believe this is your
backyard. “This,” says M., “is too pretty.”
You take him to a swanky bar in North Beach to watch people, checking
out whether the couples fit together, deciding if you like their
clothes and commenting on them all in Italian. Then you cross the
street to eat at one of your favorite restaurants, a tiny, unpretentious
trattoria where the food tastes like Tuscany and there are no tourists.
You take him to City Lights bookstore, talk about the beatniks and have
a late drink at Vesuvio’s bar. You are visiting all the places you used
to love to wander with your ex on a Sunday afternoon, reclaiming
territory you have avoided, happy the romance of North Beach outlived
your relationship.
The next morning, you take M. to the Castro, the city’s gay district,
rainbow flag fluttering at the portal. He is fascinated by the men
casually walking around in couples. The Castro, you tell him, isn’t as
lively as it was in the early ’80s, before AIDS made it a kind of living
ghost town. But it is becoming brighter again. You show him the
magnificent gilded Castro Theatre, where the organist rises to play
music before the film, always ending with “San Francisco, Open Your
Golden Gate” as it descends, the entire audience singing and clapping
and whooping it up. Walking around outside, he says that one of the
biggest tragedies of his life would be if one of his sons turned out to
be gay. How can this sophisticated man say something like that? You ask
if he has gay friends, and he says sure. Wouldn’t you just want your son
to be happy? you ask. Sure, he says, but how can you be happy if you
don’t love women? What we have here, you say, is a cultural difference.
After that, you take him to the dungeon of the gay leather shop, with
its displays of whips, chains and foot-long dildoes. He asks if you
take all your tourists here, and you tell him only the ones who have
been bad. He promises to make no more anti-gay remarks if you just take
him out of the dungeon. So you climb the stairs and he nonchalantly
fingers a couple of leather jackets and flirts a little with the
shopkeeper. Then you take him to a wonderful little seafood restaurant
on Castro with a diner atmosphere and he comments about how nice it is
that people mix so well in San Francisco before he tucks into his crab.
That afternoon, you have a few of your friends over to meet M. Drinking
wine in your garden, he is impressed by how Americans are not all like
what he has expected. M. compliments one of your friends, a journalist
in his 60s, for speaking French perfectly, with no trace of an accent.
He says that your Italian-speaking graphic designer friend, a fine-boned
50-year-old with a strong sense of style, is the type of woman who would
be at home in any great city in the world. He’s only a little confused
by an artist friend who wears vintage housedresses; you have to explain
that she isn’t really like a Midwestern woman from the 1940s, that she
wears those clothes a little ironically.
You are surprised, there in your garden, to find yourself happy. If M.
lived in San Francisco, if there were any possibility that he could
break your heart, you never would have allowed yourself the pleasure of
him for fear of the pain. You know he’ll be leaving in a week, but that
still seems far enough away not to anticipate the sadness. For this
moment, you’re completely content. M. has not only allowed you to open
your heart a crack, he has made you open your eyes and fall back in love
with your city.
When the light dims, your friend Elena leaves, tossing you a set of
keys. M. asks what those are for, and you tell him, the convertible. You
can’t go to Southern California without a convertible, can you?
You keep seeing his face during rainy days in San Francisco. It pops up in your dreams and hovers between you and your computer screen while you’re working: There are his thick dark curls and Egyptian nose, his skin warmly brown from the Mediterranean sun. The Ischia sun. You pause to savor the memory of his rough cheek pressed against your smooth one, his quick kiss goodbye, his face fading into a crowd in the train station in Naples.
He is gone, but he sustains you with a sense of possibility, of pleasure. You may be freshly divorced, you may live in a city where the women are strong and the men are pretty and you may think your chance of finding a wonderful straight single man to date are about the same as San Francisco’s chance of having another big earthquake (it could happen, but you don’t really believe it). But somewhere in the back of your mind is that face, that desire and that island. It lifts you back to buoyancy, even if you don’t expect to see or hear from the French professor you met on Ischia ever again.
Then one day a postcard from Paris arrives, a colorful Matisse print of a woman dancing. “It was great!” he writes. “I can’t forget … Love, M.”
It is a little treasure you look at too often in the next few days. You wonder about writing him back and hope that his wife doesn’t open his mail. You think maybe it’s better not to write, though, better to leave that perfect fantasy, those four splendid days together, alone. And so you don’t.
But then a month later you are packing a bag for a business trip and find a roll of film. You develop it, and there’s the postcard sunset, there’s the view from your terrace of whitewashed houses with pots of geraniums trailing down to the beach, and there’s the French aesthetics professor himself, leaning back in sunglasses against the white railing of the ship, flawless blue sky and sea behind him, collar open, cigarette clasped in his smirking mouth. You can’t resist.
So you enclose the photos in a plain brown envelope with no return address and mail it off. You write in Italian that before you went to Ischia, you had a fantasy about encountering a lovely man for a little fling. The reality was so much better than the fantasy, you say, that now you have a much richer imagination. You remember his astrological sign and tell him happy birthday, too.
Not long after, you are feeling depressed and exhausted. You’ve spent most of the day in divorce mediation, using all your wits against an adversary who knows your vulnerabilities better than anyone else. You go home alone while the ex goes back to his new girlfriend. But there is a little package waiting for you from France: a tin of Gitanes cigarettes, the type you used to steal from M. after dinner. You go outside to smoke, which you never do, and the terrible day dissipates in the pleasurable haze of memory.
You realize that it is dangerous to rely on the French professor to cheer you up. So you hold on to the image of M. only to remind yourself that there are lovely, intellectual men out there who are relaxed and romantic, who have a delicious sensibility about life. There are men who make you feel like a woman. You wonder if there are any American men like that.
You’re thinking about this one evening and have another one of his cigarettes and a tiny folded paper flutters out of the tin. Your letter arrived exactly on my birthday, M. writes. Better that these photos exist, because otherwise I couldn’t believe it was all real. Today under cold, gray Parisian skies, “Penso con piacere al piacere,” I’m thinking with pleasure about pleasure.
By spring he is suggesting a little rendezvous somewhere between Paris and San Francisco. You tell him that the aesthetic choice would be to never see him again, to keep the memory of your romantic chance meeting intact. He says that as an art professor, he likes your argument very much, but as a man he wants to know: What are you doing in September? You say that the only place between Paris and San Francisco is Newfoundland, and that would be a bit brisk for sunbathing, no?
In May, a friend announces at a dinner party that she’s rented a place in Florence for a month and everyone is invited. You think it would be nice to go to Italy for a few days just to flirt. Italian men, unlike American men, like to flirt even when there’s no chance of any tangible outcome. They just like to let you know, in restaurants and on the street, that they appreciate women, all kinds of women, that in fact they like women better than anything else in the world, and thank God he made creatures like you.
American men, you think, have more of a museum gift shop mentality about women: What’s the point of spending time in the actual museum appreciating the art if you can’t take it home with you?
So you hope the dinner-party friend was serious, and you book a ticket to Italy for a few days. It seems rash, but traveling where people flirt will help you stop feeling so invisible. As an afterthought you scrawl a postcard to M. telling him when you’ll be in Italy. You know he teaches and has a family and won’t be able to get away.
Your phone rings one evening and someone sounding like Gerard Depardieu in “Green Card” asks, “Is Laura?” It is so surprising you can barely speak. He asks if he’s disturbing you, and you say of course not, you’re quite content to hear his voice. He is abrupt: When does your plane arrive in Milano? You tell him the details. “I’ll meet you on the steps of the Duomo at 10,” he says. “Ti aspettero.” I’ll wait for you.
On the endless flight to Milano you read a fat book, “The Decameron,” to calm your nerves. Written in the shadow of the 1348 plague, Giovanni Boccaccio’s comic masterpiece is about a group of 10 noble young women and men who gather in villas outside Florence to wait out the Black Death by dancing, eating, playing music and telling tales. For 10 days they each tell a story on such themes as love, deception, adultery and getting out of tricky situations with a witty remark. In the midst of death, fear and sorrow, they live in the moment with as much pleasure as possible. The stories celebrate luscious sensuality above all else. There is the tale of a judge’s wife, for instance, who quickly tires of her husband’s feeble sexual appetites (pre-Viagra, he downs vernaccia wine for its uplifting properties, to little effect). Kidnapped by a handsome young rogue, she pretends not to recognize her husband when he comes to rescue her. “I would never go back to you,” she says when she finally lets on that she knows him, “because if you were to be squeezed from head to toe, there wouldn’t be a thimbleful of sauce to show for it.”
The tales describe the endless varieties of love — adulterous passion, courtly love, enduring marriages, homosexual love, forbidden love, infatuation. The moral — if you can call it that, and why not — is that fulfilling sexual desire is more important than any of the constraints society might put on people’s inclinations to “forgather” together. As one storyteller comments after a tale of adultery, “And by proceeding with the greatest of discretion, they enjoyed their love together on many a later occasion. May God grant that we enjoy ours likewise.” This, you think, is what Italians read in school instead of “The Scarlet Letter.” No wonder they’re better at flirting.
You wonder about the varieties of love, you who have been so hurt by adultery and divorce, you who are about to spend a weekend with a married man. Is it possible, you wonder, for couples to have affections on the side that don’t erode their marriage? Is it possible to have a second fling with a French professor (who is full of sauce) without ruining the first brief romance? Without some part of you falling in love?
When you can’t read anymore, you chat with the Milanese in the seat next to you, who, once you land, offers to take you to the center of town with his friend. You reach a bar a block from the Duomo and it is 10:15 and they ask you to have a coffee. It is impossible to refuse, so you drink your cappuccino and watch the clock move closer to 11. Finally, they show you to the Duomo and wave ciao-ciao.
You roll your suitcase along the cobblestones and scan the faces of the
young people sitting on the steps of the enormous cathedral. You don’t
see him. You panic: You’re late, and you have no back-up plan. There is
no way to reach him. You sit on the steps and wait, bleary from the
sleepless flight, anxiously glancing in all directions. You have no idea
what you’ll do. Here you are in Milano, the ugliest city in Italy, under
thick threatening skies, and you are worried that even if he shows up,
it will rain and you’re tired and there’s nothing romantic about Milano
and no nice place to stay. You consider leaving.
You get up and wander toward the doors of the cathedral, then turn
around and spot his denim jacket and the curls at the nape of his neck.
There is an empty space beside him on the steps. You quietly sit down
next to him and he doesn’t see you. You press your skin ever so slightly
against him and there is a little frisson before he turns. “Ciao,” you
say, and he smiles in an excited way the French rarely allow themselves
to smile, and then he takes you in his arms.
“I never dreamed I’d see you again so soon,” he says. He tells you,
appreciatively, that you look the same, and you tell him he does, too,
but in truth he looks much more skinny and haggard than you remember. He
asks if he looks thinner, and you say maybe a little, and he says he
hasn’t been eating, it has been a long story these past few months. But
he likes himself this way. I don’t know, you tease him. You used to have
a rule that you never sleep with anyone who weighs less than you. He
looks at you doubtfully and then draws himself up to seem bigger and
taller. “Va bene?” he asks. You say well, probably, and he says the only
rule you should have is never to sleep with a man who likes his body
better than yours. He takes your hand. “Andiamo.”
You walk across the wide piazza, glancing at each other with shy
surprise and frank expectation. He says he has found a charming little
hotel nearby. In Milano, filled with big, anonymous modern business
hotels, this is a miracle. You climb the stone stairs in an ancient
building to land at a cheerful, airy hotel, with hand-painted furniture,
fresh flowers and views of the historic center. Inside the room,
everything suddenly seems so small, so intimate. He puts down your
suitcase and you don’t know what to do.
“A shower?” he asks, and you nod, good idea, and disappear into the
bathroom. You return, refreshed, with some courage, and flop down on the
bed next to him, tossing away your towel. Ah, he says, and he runs his
finger down your spine. He caresses you and your weariness from a long
flight turns into dreaminess as you make love. After, he strokes your
hair and whispers that he’s going out for a couple of hours, that you
should nap after that long flight, but not too much.
In what seems like a moment he is back again, and he draws the curtains
so you can watch the fading light outside. He climbs back under the
fluffy comforter and you think, we have only two days and nights
together, maybe we will never get out of bed.
But eventually you dress and wander outside to the nearby castle
grounds. He asks you about your divorce and you say you feel better,
it’s been a year, and now you just want to cut the ties completely, get
on with your life. Also, you say San Francisco is a desert for dates.
Don’t worry, he says. It’s early. Maybe, you say, but the shock of being
suddenly single after many years is the feeling that women over 35 are
no longer considered attractive, not even by men over 35.
It’s a pity, he says. The problem with American men is that they are so
superficial. They want youth and beauty right up front in their faces.
That isn’t interesting. European men like to discover what’s beautiful
about a woman. Your beauty, he tells you, sneaks up on you. He didn’t
see it right at first, meeting you over breakfast in a pensione on an
island, reading your guidebook, asking practical questions, so serious.
He had to figure out how to make you smile that soft smile. That’s the
pleasure.
He squeezes your hand and you ask about his long winter. It was
terrible, he says. His wife fell in love with another man and almost
left him. He couldn’t imagine his life away from her, from their house,
from their children, their routine. They’d both had little stories with
other lovers before, but this threatened everything. He was scared and
lonely, but exceptional circumstances, he says, make you become more
exceptional. That, of course, made it a more difficult choice for her,
he says, with empathy and no bitterness. His wife stayed, but it’s
different now. It does give him more freedom to travel, though.
Your wife, you tell him, would have to be completely crazy to leave
you, and you mean it. He’s grateful for that remark, and you realize
that the tables are oddly turned from Ischia. He is heartbroken and you
are stronger, comforting someone who seemed so invulnerable. He feels
sad, he says, but something positive came from it. For the first time he
had to really talk to his friends about his personal life. Before, he
says, there was no one I could even tell about meeting you on Ischia.
Nobody.
You walk quietly for a while, crossing a busy street back to the center
of town. Did you tell anyone about meeting me on Ischia? he asks. Well,
yes, you say, a few people. Actually, quite a few people — you wrote a
tiny little story about it and published it online. He seems amused.
When can I read it? he asks. You spread your hands in an Italian gesture
of helplessness. Sorry, you say, it’s in English. “I learn fast,
sweetheart,” he says. In English.
In the evening, outdoors over pizza, you talk about his new book idea,
your work, his students’ art, your families, and you realize that the
conversation is much deeper than it was on Ischia, that something else
is happening.
You have a grappa in the Piazza del Duomo when it starts to pour. You
abandon your drinks, splash through the streets and take refuge in the
covered open-air market square, which is empty. You watch him leaning
against a stone pillar and you tell him he looks good from a distance.
He tells you that you have to drink grappa more often, and he walks
toward you and wipes your face dry with his foulard. Alone in the market
square, with lettuce leaves scattered at your feet, you make out like
teenagers, rain splattering all around.
The next morning you wonder what you’ll do in gray Milano. You have
pots of cafi au lait in bed and then he says that since we’re island
specialists, we’ll have to go to an island. You have no idea where the
train you board will take you, but an hour later you arrive in Stresa, a
lovely little town on the edge of Lago Maggiore. You descend to the
boardwalk and follow a path lined with Liberty-style villas and flowers
everywhere — azaleas, rhododendrons, roses. You go to the edge of the
enormous lake, surrounded by high granite mountains and green valleys,
and take a water taxi to Isola Bella — “beautiful island.”
The island at first appears covered with bad restaurants and tourist
kiosks selling the same Boticelli ashtrays they sell everywhere in
Italy. But then you enter the Palazzo Borromeo, Conte Vitaliano
Borromeo’s 1670 hideaway, and you’re in another world. The huge palace
rests on the edge of the island cliffs, and you walk through room after
room of overdone gilded splendor. Here is a grand ballroom, here is the
canopied bed where Napoleon slept (twice, behind Josephine’s back: once
with an Italian princess, another with an opera star), here is a little
stage with fierce marionettes that must have terrorized the children. M.
explains that the way you can tell this is a baroque, not
Renaissance, room is that you have the feeling that you can’t escape;
you don’t see the other rooms or have a sense of the building. It’s
handy, you think, to have an affair with an art professor.
You pass by rooms filled with armor and go downstairs into the
grottoes. “Incredible,” says M., and you have never seen anything like
it, either. The cool cellars are lined, floor to ceiling, in mosaics
made of pebbles, in sea themes, with swirling shells, starfish and
mermaids, room after room of fantastic designs. There is a smooth white
marble sculpture of a woman sleeping on her stomach, with a pretty curve
in her back. “That,” says M., “is obscenely beautiful.”
The grottoes open out into classic Italian gardens, with infinite
varieties of exotic trees, plants and flowers. Huge terra cotta pots of
lemon trees and geraniums perch atop the cliffs against the blue water.
White peacocks traipse around the lawns, displaying their spectacular
tails whenever a drab little peahen shows the slightest interest.
Delicate, pastel-colored water lilies float on a reflecting pool. Statues
of gods and mythical beasts face the lake, standing on ever-higher
terraces of roses. You explore together, taking paths, and are
comfortable not saying anything at all.
The sun breaks out and M. sits down in an ornate iron chair on a lawn.
“Imagine it in the evening, at a party, lit everywhere with candles,
with a banquet there and a string orchestra over there,” he says,
gesturing. “You and I were born three centuries too late.” You picture
him telling tales in “The Decameron,” sneaking off between times into the
grottoes or a secluded corner of the gardens — with you.
Reluctantly, you leave the palace grounds and stand in line for a boat
to another island and you hear someone call your name. You turn and see
a woman who seems familiar but whom you don’t recognize. She introduces
herself and you realize it’s a foreign student who lived with you six
years ago; you’ve bumped into the only person you know in Switzerland
here near the border. You are so surprised you introduce her to M. but
completely forget his name. You chat for a while but then it comes back
to you that you didn’t like her so well and even if it is a phenomenal
coincidence to see her, you hope she sits somewhere else on the boat,
which she does. M. watches all of this and you tell him it was
remarkable to run into her, but in fact you weren’t really friends. “I
noticed that right away,” he says. “Now I know something new about you:
You can be cold.” You say you hope you weren’t rude, and he says no,
it’s just nice to know you’re so warm to him when you can be so chilly
to others.
You stroll around another island — Isola Madre — taking trails that snake
through lush woods to wide flowery meadows that are thick with exotic
birds. “We’ve seen so many beautiful things today,” he says, content,
smoking a cigar on a bench overlooking the lake. Amazing, you say. This
was every bit as enchanting as Ischia.
Snuggling on the train ride home, he touches your arm tenderly, easily.
You think about the habit of American men who jump right into sexual
intimacy, but then are afraid that if they touch you affectionately
outside of sex you’ll want to marry them or something. They confuse a
woman’s desire for ambient affection with demands on their freedom.
It’s late and you’re hungry when you return to the hotel, but you’re
hungrier for each other. You play and play and he keeps offering you
more until you tell him, loosely translating a French phrase he’s used,
that he has killed you so many times you’re dead. Famished, you walk out
and wander in the old Jewish section of town until you find a trattoria
tucked in a side street. You both order risotto milanese, with its rich
aroma and saffron-gold flavor, and you suspect that the reason it tastes
so good has to do with veal broth, and even though you’re a vegetarian,
you don’t care. You order porcini mushrooms and place one in your mouth
and while it melts you realize you have never tasted anything so good in
your life. You will never have another porcini mushroom like that
porcini mushroom. And looking across the table you wonder whether you’ll
ever have a chance to have another meal with him again.
It makes you a little sad, you have to leave so soon. This visit will
become another snapshot of paradise that you tuck away in your desk. He
seems to sense what you’re thinking and he asks you: What are you doing
in September? You forgot about September and a nervous thrill shoots
through you, but you calmly say you have no real plans.
I’ve never been to California, he says. I think I would like San
Francisco.
You try to digest this while you walk back to the hotel, and you’re
excited and scared. He says he is making plane reservations for
mid-September, and he will leave everything about this romantic trip up
to you. He says nothing more about it.
In the morning, you have early trains. This time when he kisses you
goodbye in the station, it isn’t so hard. You’ll see him again. But you
wonder if the next time you say goodbye to each other, it will be much
more bittersweet.
Most business travelers don’t know that in Tokyo it’s possible to find a free tour guide, book a reasonably priced hotel room and get paid to eat a meal. By following a few tips, you can find travel to the capital — whether for business or pleasure — unexpectedly affordable.
If you’re coming to town for an extended stay, you should know about a week-long air-and-hotel package that offers a tremendous value, a deal that was unthinkable two years ago, when the dollar was trading at only 80 yen. Both Airport Travel (800-310-5549) and Travis Pacific (800-227-4352) are offering one-week stays in Tokyo with round-trip flights from the U.S. on Singapore Airlines and accommodations at the Tokyo Hilton for $999. A half-day tour of Tokyo is included as well.
If you’re not traveling on a package deal, of course, you’re on your own getting from the airport to downtown. What are the options? Well, you can always take a taxi — but even if you’re getting reimbursed, $200 for 40 miles of traffic seems excessive. The NEX (Narita Express) train is faster and a ticket costs only about $25. (All figures in this article are calculated using an exchange rate of 125 yen to $1.) The slower Keisei line costs even less. Another option that is slightly cheaper than NEX is the Limousine Bus. While it might take a little longer than the train, the big advantage of the bus is door-to-door service from Narita Airport to most major hotels.
One of those hotels, the Keio Plaza Inter-Continental, offers business travelers an especially good deal. Members of the hotel’s “Executive International Club” can take advantage of guaranteed U.S. dollar rates starting at $190 for a single room. Membership offers a variety of other perks, including full American breakfast, health club passes and extended check-out time. And if you want to take a client out for drinks, the Keio’s second-floor “Let’s Bar” offers a budget-friendly happy hour special: Between 5 and 7 p.m. weekdays, all drinks are 600 yen (about $5).
Other Tokyo hotels such as the Okura, Tokyu and Four Seasons also have membership clubs and offer special rates and package deals. In addition, prices at the Prince chain are always good. Rates start at 13,000 yen (about $104) per night at the Sunshine City Prince and 14,500 ($116) for a room at the Shinjuku Prince.
In your travels around Tokyo, taxis should be avoided, except for short jaunts. The subway is faster and much cheaper, and the new automatic fare cards make it even easier to navigate the extensive train system. If you’re in need of help, most ticket-takers can offer rudimentary guidance, or look for stations marked “Information” in the main subway stops. Of course, many passersby can also speak English and will be happy to help a lost traveler.
Finally he sits with you in the sauna and tells you that you have the
most beautiful skin he has ever seen, the color of gold, so soft. And
your body. What a beautiful body, so nice from so much swimming, so
strong, so curvy. Bella, bella. He is, of course, saying all the
things a Blond American Divorcée is dying to hear, and in soft
Italian. But he doesn’t seem to have much of anything else to say.
Here he is, the Italian lover you fantasized about. He’s wild about
you, he’ll make passionate love to you, and he leaves you absolutely
cold. Maybe, you think, you just have no desire for men at all anymore.
So you leave, explaining you have to meet a friend in Forio, and you
become just another fish that got away.
The next day you meet an American woman who has lived on Ischia for
30 years, and she and her friend, a 40ish photographer, take you in a
’62 Ford to a hidden canyon on the island where mineral water comes
pouring down through the rocks like a shower. Afterwards, you lie on
the beach and drink a couple of beers and have a cheerful conversation
and the photographer starts telling you how much he’s attracted to
you. You swim out to get away and he swims out after you and suggests
that you two should spend the night together. He has some really great
music you could listen to. Some Carpenters and some Fleetwood Mac. And
he has studied yoga and he knows that your energy will be good
together. You have the perfect body, he says, you are the perfect
woman for me. For a moment you consider going back to the waiter in the
sauna the day before. You bide your time until you can politely say
you have a phone call to make to the States and return to Forio alone.
Italian lovers, you realize, are as easy to pick up on Ischia as
ceramic ashtrays painted with lemons. You go back to the pensione and
read a novel and watch the ocean and realize it’s just fine to be by
yourself. You fall asleep making plans to move on the next day. A
mosquito wakes you in the dead of night and you write a 12-page letter
to your ex that you will never send, but putting it all down in a
notebook in a pensione on Ischia seems to make it feel better. In the
morning, you’re ready to explore someplace new, alone.
At breakfast you say buon giorno to the signora and nod to the
gentleman at the table next to you. You notice he is not German and
you wonder about him. He looks remarkably like Bob Dylan did 10 years
ago, only less craggy, with shiny brown curls, a beak-like nose and
watery blue eyes. He’s wearing a long soft denim jacket and a tapestry
vest and thick silver bracelets.
You’re studying your hippie guidebook when he starts asking the
signora some questions about the island. You join the conversation by
asking her a question yourself without making eye contact with the
man. When she leaves you offer him a look at your guidebook. You speak
to him in the third person formal, Lei. You tell him what you know
about the island and when he asks, you say you’re probably leaving
that morning but you’re not sure, you still might want to climb the
mountain first. He slips into the second person familiar, tu. You find
out he is from Paris, half-Italian. He teaches art at a university,
the philosophy of aesthetics. He first guessed you are German, but
your accent is good and he can’t tell, and you say you are from San
Francisco, which you always say instead of America.
Your brain parts company with your mouth for a moment and you tell
him he has a face like Bob Dylan. He seems surprised at what a direct
and personal thing that is to say, you American you, and you quickly
add “10 years ago,” though it’s probably closer to five, and he
doesn’t really look displeased. Amused. Wasn’t it strange, he says,
that Bob Dylan just played for the pope in Bologna? Has he become a
Catholic or what? And what’s with the hat?
It’s always hard to know what religious phase Bob Dylan is in, you
say. But the hat was troppo cowboy. The day the Stones play “Sympathy
for the Devil” for the pope, he says, I’ll become a papist. You like
his sensibility and he says that if in fact you do climb the mountain,
instead of leaving that morning, he’d like to come along. You shrug:
Why not. Pompeii can wait.
In a few minutes you climb aboard a bus and notice that he, like you,
has brought along a beach bag. He leans toward you away from the
Germans and asks you your name. “Laura,” you say, with the pretty
rolling Italian pronunciation. He tells you his lovely French name and
you say, in your best formal schoolbook Italian, that it is a pleasure
to meet him. He laughs.
The bus takes you to the highest road on the island and from there
you walk another couple miles until the road turns into a small
brushy footpath and reaches the summit. From here, you really know you
are on the island: water on all sides, Capri just obscured by the
clouds. You sit on volcanic rocks overlooking everything and he smokes
and says there’s no sight he loves more than grapevines with the ocean
in the distance. You talk about all the islands you’ve been to,
Stromboli and Sardinia, Crete and Santorini, and find you’ve both
climbed to the top of Formentera, too, the tiny island off Ibiza. You
go farther afield and talk about Iraq and Egypt, French politics, then
Bill Clinton and Paula Jones. American politics are ridiculous,
he says. Who cares whether the president propositioned her? At least
Kennedy had better taste in women.
We are far too puritanical, you agree.
At Mitterand’s funeral, he says, his mistress was right there with
his wife. Much more civilized. The problem with Americans, he says, is
they think a little affair will destroy a marriage. How can you be so
claustrophobic? It puts far too much pressure on the marriage.
On the way down the mountain, wandering through terraced farms with
lemon trees, tomatoes and figs, he asks about your marriage. We’re
just traveling, he says, you can tell me anything. You tell him the
story in brief, so in love, only married a year and a half when he
left, a complicated psychological scenario. Did you have time for
affairs? he asks. No, you say. But my husband did. Well, he says, that
is all history. That is all behind you now, yes?
And are you married? you ask. “I’m not talking,” he answers in
English. That answers the question, you say. OK, he says, he has
been married for 10 years and has two children. I know better than to
ask whether you had time for any affairs, you say, and he smiles,
you’re learning fast. You wonder to yourself whether you would have an
affair with a married man with two children, and decide that in the
United States, you would not. Then you figure that’s why God made
French men.
You find lunch, and then decide to go to a beach you’ve heard about,
the Sorgeto, where hot water bubbles up from the rocks. After a swim,
lying on the pebbles, you realize the rocks on the beach are not
warmed from the sun but from inside the earth. The farther you dig
down into the rocks, the warmer they are. You lie on your stomach to
snooze and just when you’re drifting off you feel a warm rock placed
lightly on the small of your back and all the desire you thought was
dead radiates from that rock through your entire body.
In the evening you find the only restaurant in Forio where Italians
are eating, and you talk over pesto like old friends. You discreetly
go back to the pensione at different times to your separate rooms.
Later, when you tiptoe around the open stairway to his room, the
eagle-eyed signora catches you walking where you have no business
walking and you realize you’d better leave in the morning.
So you have the bright idea of escaping these German tourists and
going to Procida, a nearby tranquil fishing village, says the hippie
guidebook, and the French aesthetics professor is game. After a
crowded bus ride and a boat trip you land on Procida, which is
charming in its 1950s Italian movie style, but the beaches are dirty
and the pensione are deserted and the whole place is simply glum.
After lunch you return to Ischia, and you suggest St. Angelo, and by
evening you’re back to the whitewashed village with the bright
geraniums and fragrant jasmine and oleander. You’re hot and tired but
still in fairly good traveling spirits and when the hotel with the
great view says it’s full you ask if there might not be a private room
to let somewhere nearby, and there is, with a terrace, and meals are
included. You drop your things and rush to the beach to jump in. “Lava
tutto,” he says. The feel of the water washes away the whole day.
Afterward, in the room, you mention that it’s strange to share a
room, it’s somehow much more intimate than making love. He nods.
“We’ve made a grand progression in a short time,” he says, and then he
picks up a big white towel and offers to dry your hair. A little later
he thinks you are asleep and he traces his fingers down the curve of
your back and then he stops and you are desperately trying to come up
with the right verb tenses. Imperfect subjunctive: “If you were to
stop touching me,” and then present conditional, “I would die.”
Dinner is on another terrace, and the sun sinks red into the ocean.
There are grilled eggplants and arugula salad and roasted potatoes
with rosemary and tomato salad and bruschetta and that’s just to
start. Over a lovely piece of sole he looks out over the view and
starts laughing. We have found the perfect place, he says, delighted.
“Gorgeous,” you say in English, and he likes that word, tasting it
like wine.
The next day you stretch out on lava rocks away from all the people
as the sun washes over you. “La vita é bellisima,” he says, and you
know that one of the things you have in common is a willingness to
believe that life is truly beautiful at times and you should enjoy the
pleasure of it completely. You talk about authors and films, Marcel
Proust and David Lodge and Marguerite Duras and Martin Scorcese. The
names and titles are a shorthand for what you can’t express in your
incomplete Italian, but it’s enough. You are drugged with pleasure,
lying on the rocks, going through cycle after cycle of swimming,
drying off, eating, making love, swimming and drying off again. The
next morning you ask what we should do today and he says, “The same
thing we did yesterday. In reverse.”
At some point it occurs to you that these four days are unique, that
their particular beauty can never be repeated, and that probably you
will never see him again. And you realize you may never have another
lover like him, either. His lovemaking is like a long, languorous
Italian meal, full of delightful appetizers and side dishes, a variety
of simple, exquisite tastes, finished off by an unfiltered cigarette.
“After 36 years you decide to take up smoking now?” he asks.
You smile and tell him it is all his fault.
When I get back, you say, I’m going to have to find a lover like you.
“Inutile,” he says, and laughs. Your only hope is to teach someone.
Then he becomes more serious, avuncular. You’ll find someone, he says.
All you need is a man who is older than you and younger than me. A
professor of literature who speaks Italian. There must be some of them
in San Francisco.
They’re everywhere, you say, like German tourists.
Over dinner, when he’s quiet, you ask him if he’s thinking about
school on Tuesday and he says no, he’s thinking about you. Cara
signorina, he says, his only compliment. You dear woman. In such a
short time you know him better than most people do, he says. Then he
laughs: You even know about his secret life.
Maybe, he says, we will find each other again some time.
I hope so, you say. You really shouldn’t die before you see San
Francisco.
The next morning is all business, a bus ride to the port and a ship
to Naples where you practice putting distance between each other. In
Naples, he helps you find the train station and your ticket and takes
you to a very quick, noisy, wonderful Napolitano lunch. He crosses the
street to the train station and says send a postcard at Christmas.
Then he abruptly says, “I’m abandoning you here,” and kisses you on
both cheeks, ciao, ciao. Piacere, you murmur, a pleasure, and he is
gone.
He is gone, but on the train ride back to Florence, the sad feeling
of loss that followed you to Italy doesn’t return. You are lighter and
happier and even, somehow, feel more beautiful. The physical miles of
travel, you realize, can’t make the pain in your life go away. But you
have traveled inside, too, and it has expanded you, let you discover
that la bella vita always exists alongside what is ugly, and you can
at least find it for a time, if you look.
