by Mark Lukach
Dedication
For Giulia and Jonas, true believers all the way.
Epigraph
I can see a lot of life in you
I can see a lot of bright in you
And I think the dress looks nice on you
I can see a lot of life in you
—Sufjan Stevens, “The Dress Looks Nice on You”
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
one: August 2000
two: July 2009
three: September 2009
four: October 2009
five: April 2010
six: August 2010
seven: September 2011
eight: October 2012
nine: November 2012
ten: April 2013
eleven: October 2014
twelve: November 2014
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
one
August 2000
The first time I saw my wife, she was walking around the Georgetown campus and I shouted out, “Buongiorno, Principessa!” like a buffoon. She was Italian, radiant, way out of my league, but I was fearless and almost immediately in love. She had a smile bello come il sole—I learned some Italian to impress her—and when I saw her at a party, we spent the whole night immersed in flirtatious conversation. I walked her to her room, and I snuck in a quick good-night kiss, and she kissed me back. We both already knew what was happening. She lived on the floor below me in the same freshman dorm. I knocked at her door the next morning to take her out to breakfast. She answered with a tone that was almost like “Where have you been, it’s about time you got here.”
Within a month we were a couple. She’d stop by my room to wake me up if I was oversleeping class; I taped roses to her door. Giulia had a perfect GPA; I had a Mohawk and a Sector 9 longboard. We were both blown away by how amazing it feels to love someone and be loved back.
The night before winter break freshman year, the first time we’d be apart since we met, we sat up together late into the morning, perched at my dorm window, watching snow blanket the quad below. We cried our guts out at the prospect of being separated for two weeks. It felt as though we were anticipating a death. I hoped that the snow would postpone or cancel her flight and we’d steal a few more hours together, but the snow backed off, she flew off to her family in Italy, I to my family in Delaware. Our fragile hearts somehow survived. By the time we got back to school, we were already talking about the Future, as if it were a certainty. Our love was inevitable, like graduation or gravity, a foregone conclusion that neither of us wanted to escape. It didn’t matter that we were only eighteen years old.
The more we got to know each other, the more we delighted in our commonalities. We were both left-handed, and our moms shared a birthday. My family moved abroad from the U.S. to Japan in 1989; Giulia’s family moved abroad from Italy to the U.S. in the same year. We told ourselves that these mere coincidences were something much more, and they became part of our mythology that we were destined to be together.
The most important thing we shared was an emphasis on family. I had three siblings and Giulia only one, but for each of us, family was at the core of our identities.
Our two families first met on Christmas Eve, a few blocks from the Spanish Steps in Rome, the winter break of our sophomore year. My family was there on vacation; Giulia was visiting her extended family, all of whom were still in Italy. Another coincidence to be spending the holidays in the same country.
Giulia’s mom, Mariarita, gave me her cell phone number in a time when few people had cell phones, so I could call to arrange for us all to meet. Giulia arrived a few days before we did. On my family’s first night in Rome, we ate dinner and then walked through the cobblestone streets back to our hotel. My mom, Mary, led the way—she had studied in Rome in college and was giddy to be showing the city to me and my three siblings. Every few blocks I ducked into a bar or a restaurant to try to call Mariarita from a pay phone, but she never picked up.
I had just about given up, and then we turned a corner and I saw Giulia coming our way, the collar of her winter coat drawn tight against the lightly falling snow, arm in arm with her mom, her dad and brother laughing about some joke. They stopped short when they saw us walking their way. Mariarita’s cell phone was in hand, waiting for the call. The phone lines didn’t find each other, but we did anyway.
No one knew what to say, we were so shocked. This was one coincidence too many.
My dad, C.J., was the first to snap out of it, and he eagerly introduced himself to Giulia’s dad, Romeo. The moms met, and all the siblings exchanged hugs, and then we parted ways, with a plan for a proper meeting scheduled the next day.
No one said it, but I think everyone left knowing that these two families would gather again someday down the road, in a church, for a wedding, a formal blessing of the union, and maybe that was what we had just done anyway.
Back at our lives in college, our plans expanded, from what we were doing that weekend—like crashing a wedding reception, which we did one Saturday night—to what we were going to do beyond college. Ever since high school I had been planning to go to law school, but now in my critical college years, I wasn’t doing a very good job of convincing myself of that. I haphazardly signed up for whatever humanities courses sounded interesting to me and cobbled together a history major with an English minor. During summer break, I escaped to a small beach town in Delaware and wandered from surf session to beach volleyball and then worked for tips in restaurants.
Giulia could not have been more opposite and certain of her path. She wanted to be a marketing director and have three kids by the time she was thirty-five, and she was ready for whatever work was necessary to get there. Which meant internships, and meeting with professors during office hours, and even spending Friday evenings at the library. She used to dress herself up for Friday night by four p.m. in order to go to the library for a few hours before meeting me—straight from the books to her boyfriend. She always covered her tracks, pretending that she was doing something with friends rather than studying, afraid that I might think she was too nerdy.
Summer for Giulia meant an internship in New York City—the first summer it was with a fashion house, then a boutique ad agency the following summer, and then a major ad agency the summer after that. In the summer after our junior year, that major ad agency celebrated the end of the season by taking the interns out to a concert. I came up to New York for the weekend to be Giulia’s plus-one.
“Now remember, my boss is going to be there, so make sure you say hi to him, and, you know, be good,” Giulia said to me. We were cramped in the bathroom of her rented apartment. Giulia was in a skirt and a bra, applying eyeliner. I was ready to go and didn’t need to still be in the bathroom, but I liked to be there as she got herself ready. I got to see Giulia before she presented herself to the world and felt like I was getting to become a part of her secrets. I closed my eyes and imagined us getting ready for concerts and parties together like this for the rest of our lives.
“I’ll be good,” I insisted, hands up, innocent of the implied charges.
“I mean don’t say anything about the band,” she said.
“Oh, you mean Evanescence? You don’t want me to say anything about the fact that we’re actually at an Evanescence concert?” I had been mocking Evanescence to her over the phone since she’d first told me about the concert.
“Yes,” she said. “That’s exactly what I don’t want you to say.”
She was impatient with me, but I leaned in and kissed her on
her bare shoulder. I couldn’t help it. Makeup, no makeup, in the act of putting on makeup, it didn’t matter. She was stunning in all contexts.
“What’s the name of that song of theirs that you love so much again?” I asked, teasing, knowing she didn’t know.
“You know, that one song,” she said, now applying lipstick.
“Oh yeah, right, that song,” I said back, smirking.
“Don’t be a jerk,” she said.
“I’m not, it’s just . . . Evanescence.”
“Mark . . .” She turned, trying to be mad. This was a big night for her, and she was taking it seriously, which she should, but I knew that even she couldn’t take Evanescence seriously. Finally, she couldn’t contain it. The laughter spilled out of her, a bellowing laugh that outshone even her smile with joy. Giulia laughed longer and harder than anyone I’d ever met. It took control of her whole body. She often had to hold herself up when she started laughing, to keep herself from falling down. No matter what mood you were in when she started, you were always laughing along with her before she finished. I loved to make her laugh, because it was like creating a little private memory that was ours and ours only, to add to the growing pile of trivialities that no one else could possibly care about but were becoming the foundation of our intimacy. Little things like this—knowing that we would wordlessly laugh about the band all night long together, through smiles and glances—pulled me deeper into my infatuation. As she laughed in her bra and half-applied makeup, I knew that I would never be able to be away from her.
At the concert it was the boss who tried to be good around me, rather than vice versa. He wobbled on drunken legs and leaned into my ear to shout over the loud music about just how great Giulia had done this summer, the best intern they had ever had, so hardworking and team oriented, the ideal combination of creative thinking and attention to detail, and they were going to miss her and hoped she’d apply for a full-time job when she graduated.
I beamed. I had my understanding of Giulia—her passion, her fire, her smile, her ambition—but I knew the professional Giulia only through hearsay. She studied business, and I was in the humanities, so we were never in the same classes, and I certainly never saw her at work in an office. But any time I met a boss, or a professor, or even another student who was in a group project with her, it was always the same refrain: Giulia was exceptional, the kind of worker who made everyone around her want to do better.
Of course, not everything was 100 percent perfect, even though it felt that way at the time.
One Saturday night Giulia stayed in to work on a paper for a religion class, and she called me in a panic. Her computer had frozen, and a cryptic window had popped up that asked whether to proceed: yes or no. I left the friends I was with and marched across campus with a purpose. I found her in her room, in tears, frantic, her pillow clutched to her chest.
“I don’t know what to do, Mark,” she said through her sobs. Her eyes were fixed on the ominous computer screen. “If I click the wrong option, I’ll lose the whole paper.”
“Okay, let’s settle down, we’ll figure this out,” I said, taking a place next to her on the bed, my arms immediately on her shoulders for gentle massaging. “We’ll figure out what to do.”
“But what if we don’t figure this out?” She shook me away, agitated by my touch.
“Then it’s okay, it’s not a big deal, it’s just an essay.”
She exploded. “How can you say that?” she shrieked. “Do you know what will happen to my GPA if I don’t do well on this paper?” She squeezed the pillow tighter, her body hunched and shaking as the tears fell harder and her sobs grew louder.
It took almost an hour to calm her down before we clicked together and salvaged the essay. But by then, to me, whether or not we saved the essay was beside the point.
After we graduated, I moved to Baltimore to teach high school, and Giulia moved to Manhattan to work in fashion.
We tried every possible angle to end up in the same city and all along had a certainty that we would. But that didn’t happen.
Giulia moved with a college girlfriend into an apartment on the Upper East Side, laundry and gym in the basement, frozen yogurt spot just around the corner. She loved it: living in the big city, walking briskly down Lexington Avenue in her stylish sunglasses and designer jackets to her office in the morning, coffee in hand, each step in the direction of that director job and those three kids.
My life in Baltimore was bleak in comparison. I knew no one and rented a depressing one-bedroom apartment in a run-down condo unit named Cherrybrook Meadows, an insulting homage to the disappeared scenery that the condos replaced. My bedroom windows looked out over a parking lot. I barely decorated. The room held a bed, a table with a few chairs, and stacks of books towering along the floor. I was a first-year history teacher at an all-boys school, and also coached soccer and swimming. I enrolled in a grad school program at Johns Hopkins that offered night classes so I could pursue another degree in history. Giulia was my future, and she was in New York, so I flooded my life with as much work as possible to fill the emptiness. I often stayed up lesson planning and grading papers until two a.m., with the alarm set the next morning for five a.m. If I was falling asleep, I did a bunch of push-ups to wake me back up. Fifty push-ups could usually get me another fifteen minutes of concentrated focus, no matter what time it was.
One day at school, another history teacher named Cas came up to me and put his hand on my shoulder. Cas was short, stocky, and the only person I ever met with a louder voice than I have. A direct, warmhearted, but sometimes cranky Australian, Cas looked me in the face, saw my loneliness, and said, “I can see that you need to spend time with a family. Come have dinner with my family tonight.”
With that, I made my only close friend in Baltimore, a man twenty years my senior. For dinner, he cooked up an assortment of Indian and Chinese vegan dishes, and he and his wife, Leslie, along with their two young boys, Bronimir and Blaize, marveled in awe at how much food I ate. After dinner, they cranked David Bowie followed by Bruce Cockburn, and we all danced together wildly in their living room, their dog, Brutus, barking at me as I spun and swung the boys.
Giulia and I committed to seeing each other every other weekend and alternating who traveled, but those rules lasted only a month. There was so much to do in New York City and so little to offer Giulia in Baltimore, so I headed to Manhattan for five or six weeks straight, just as excited to see her as I was to get out of Baltimore.
Amtrak was far too expensive to sustain on a teacher’s salary. I eventually discovered the Chinatown bus, a network of buses that drive from Chinatown to Chinatown along the eastern seaboard for only $20 one way, no matter your destination, $35 round-trip.
I always brought grading and reading to do, but I almost never did it. Instead I purchased a Discman to give the long rides a soundtrack, and the songs I listened to became my protective cocoon as I shuttled back and forth from my loneliness in Baltimore to the blur of New York. I burned matching CDs for the two of us—Belle and Sebastian, Sufjan Stevens, Nada Surf, Death Cab for Cutie—so she could listen to the same music at work.
After a few months of traveling to New York, I noticed that my Discman was still on full battery power. Pretty impressive, I thought. Before long, I was obsessing over the batteries. They were magic. We were magic. The fall became winter, and we ice-skated in Central Park. Winter became spring, and we made picnics and watched weekend softball leagues. Through it all, the batteries remained full.
Summer came. I ramped up my grad school classes for the summer term and worked at my school’s summer camp. Giulia was in her first summer of a full-time job, no extended vacation. We shifted our visits away from New York to Bethany Beach, the small coastal beach town in Delaware where I had spent every summer of my life. My parents had a house there, so Giulia and I could meet in Wilmington and we’d drive south from there for a weekend of sun, volleyball, and surf. We soon fell into the habit of going for long-dist
ance paddles together, Giulia on a kayak, me on a paddleboard I borrowed from my friends who lifeguarded at the beach. We spent a few hours out on the water together each weekend, escaping from the trappings of life on land, exercising our bodies, talking, or simply enjoying the silence.
When the summer dwindled to an end, I knew it was time for us to get married. I needed more of Giulia. I didn’t want the best part of my life to be confined to the weekends. I consulted one of her girlfriends about ring size and style. Labor Day weekend, our last weekend in Bethany Beach, I stuffed the ring inside a Ziploc bag and put it in the pocket of my bathing suit before we went out for our ritualistic paddle. After our paddle, as we floated out at sea a few hundred yards away from the shore, the waves rocked us as I pulled out the ring. She said yes.
It was ninety-six degrees on our wedding day, with 98 percent humidity. We married where we’d met, at Georgetown, in the iconic chapel on campus, and then had our reception at a nearby country club. We all cried and laughed through the toasts, and the dancing, and then after we cut the cake, I walked up to the microphone at the front of the room.
“Excuse me, everyone,” I said, more nervous than I’d ever been. “I picked up the guitar a few months ago for two reasons. The first is that I want to sing my kids to sleep someday; the second is that I wanted my wife to hear her favorite song on her wedding night. I’m not very good, so bear with me, but Giulia, this is for you.”
And then I clumsily began the off-tempo strumming that was meant to mimic the ukulele version of “Somewhere over the Rainbow,” and I started to sing. I had practiced the song hundreds of times. I thought Giulia might cry when I sang it, but instead she walked out from the crowd and stood in front of me and rocked and swayed and sang along.
At the end of the night, and as the lights came up and the venue tried to shoo us away, the band put on a recording of me singing. All of our guests joined hands in a large circle around Giulia and me. We danced together in the center. It all felt like a dream.