by Laura Fraser
I smile. “I do have a great job and a great apartment.”
“Then if the right man comes along, you’d better be careful about your lease.”
I laugh and give her a hug. Maybe the right guy will come along, although I realize that two decades after college, you have to expect that everyone you meet will have difficult traits, awkward histories, and annoying habits (I know I do). In any case, looking around at my classmates seated so smartly at the white linen tables set up on the lawn, I still have twinges of regret that I didn’t eventually marry one of these amazing college men, these funny, high-SAT-scoring guys who were always asking thoughtful questions and called themselves feminists not just so they could get laid but because they honestly respected women.
But you can’t second-guess history. During dinner, an accomplished and engaging guy comes up to me while I’m in line for a drink and confesses, tipsy, that he once had a huge crush on me. I’m flattered and floored. “That,” I finally muster, “is a painful thing to hear from such an attractive, married man.” I find myself fantasizing about the men at the reunion—How did I overlook this wonderful guy? Why can’t we run off together now and try again?—but most are married; and not only are there rules about married men, there are delusions, on both sides, about still-single women they may have gazed at in government class or smooched and never slept with decades ago.
After dinner, I walk back to my dorm room, which is in the same complex of buildings where I lived as a sophomore, the year I had the most trouble with men, food, sex, pot, paranoia, personal style, and everything but my classes, whose challenges I could at least work through if I tried hard enough.
I brush my hair and freshen up for the party that starts later on, then stop at my reflection in the mirror. Here I am, with my prospects for finding a mate heading steadily downhill on the graph of time, and I suddenly look older and fatter, with wiggly arms and creases on my face like I’ve slept wrong. I have never been full-on beautiful, so losing my looks isn’t going to be as hard for me as for someone who always relied more heavily on her physical charms. But still.
As I stare in the mirror, I remember another party and another black dress, slinky with spaghetti straps. It was sophomore year and I was unhappy with how I looked. “You’re beautiful,” a woman next to me said to my reflection. “Just forget about it.” That moment, with my protruding collarbones, tiny waist, smooth skin, and long blond hair, was probably when I looked my most conventionally attractive. But I got there by extreme dieting and purging (I thought I’d invented bulimia) and felt anything but beautiful inside. There were so many pressures on me—thrown into a situation where I thought I had to be thin, witty, East Coast–smart, sexually experienced, invulnerable—that something had to give, and it ended up being my self-esteem, along with my lunch. The campus therapist asked why I couldn’t just control myself—this being the Dark Ages in the history of eating disorders—and I told him that that was exactly the fucking problem. So many of us young women could have earned PhDs in eating issues, or in anything else, for all the time we wasted on our unhappy relationships with food and our bodies. Not to mention how much joyful eating and delicious sex we missed out on.
Thank God those days and issues are out of the way. I look in the mirror, apply some bright lipstick, pat my belly, and decide there’s no way I’m going to waste any more of my evening with my sophomore self, who barely had a sense of humor (one of the things that definitely improves with age). I’m taking my forty-one-year-old ass back out to a party.
The alumni fete is at one of the old fraternity houses, which smells faintly like twenty-year-old beer. A band is playing New Wave cover songs from the late seventies and early eighties, the Talking Heads and the Clash, which we all simultaneously enjoy and dimly, uncomfortably realize that the band is playing as oldies.
No matter. In the living room, on worn wooden floors, a group of us dance, warming up slowly, then moving and shaking through the strata of our bodies to an energetic, euphoric 1982. I am back in the body of the young woman who, no matter how confused she was about what it meant to be a feminist woman making her way in the world, could dance her way down to a truth, holding and expressing rhythm in every part of her being in a way that was completely, unabashedly female. Dancing kept me grounded in college and transformed me from a brain with a ponytail, supported by undifferentiated mass, into someone who inhabited her body with flexible, energetic assurance.
Just a few hours a week of dance class with a warm, exuberant, and challenging professor changed my body image: when we watched a videotape of ourselves leaping across the room, I wondered who that graceful woman was wearing the same color leotard I always wore. The subtler lessons of dance class were harder to learn, such as the idea that in order to improvise with someone else you have to really listen to them, to respond rather than react, a notion that has tickled my brain ever since but which I’ve rarely managed to embody.
I dance with these people I danced with so long ago, with no judgments, just joy. It reminds me of sunny days in spring when we’d dance in a circle to African drums, feeling ecstatic and tribal there in Connecticut, unleashing our bodies, passion, and energy. “That was better than sex,” I recall one guy remarking when the dancing stopped, and we all lay back on the grass, sweaty and spent.
AFTER THE REUNION, my head buzzing, I head to New York City for a few days, a city I love and lived in briefly during college, doing a magazine internship (I was Xeroxing for cokeheads at Rolling Stone; the only time an editor spoke to me except to give me shitwork was to ask, “Why is it all the women who work here are pears?” I was still too young and cowed by New York magazine editors to come back with a proper reply, which I’m still practicing in my head). I returned the summer after graduation, because it seemed like the place a real writer ought to live, even if it meant working three part-time gigs that were only distantly related to journalism and moving from one illegal sublet to another. New York was a feast, though—for art, cheap ethnic food, used bookstores, dance classes, and wonderfully complicated friends.
I left the city around the time I was offered my first full-time job in publishing, as an assistant on the advertising side of Omni magazine, owned by Penthouse, where you had to look at soft-core porn covers every time you stepped out of the elevator. I considered the offer, because it was a job, and you have to start somewhere, especially if you have no contacts in New York, nor a trust fund, but it seemed to define soullessness. I’d have to put on an outfit every day, would come home too tired to write, never see the outdoors à la Colorado, and would face the distinct danger of turning into a bitch.
Just then my late Grandma intervened, leaving me that small inheritance, and I went for breakfast at the Greek diner near my apartment to mull things over. Before the waiter even poured the weak coffee, I decided New York City could live without me and I was leaving for Greece. (Who knows what would’ve happened if I’d been in a Chinese restaurant.) I spent the rest of the summer temping for an ad agency, which tried to hire me after I took advantage of a break from word processing to test their client’s new coconut liqueur, creating several new cocktails and marketing ideas just so I didn’t have to go back to typing. But I couldn’t see working somewhere you could get fired for drinking a Diet Coke if they shilled for Pepsi.
Nine months in the Mediterranean put to rights everything that had troubled me at Wesleyan or in New York. It awakened all my slumbering senses: I had my first fig from a tree in Greece, my first fat black olive in Spain, and my first simultaneous orgasm in Israel. I learned to dance flamenco and ride a camel, I saw the art I’d seen only on slides at Wesleyan, and I kept a journal along the way. When I returned to New York, I sensed right away that it was too confining a space; I needed some cross between the city’s culture and Colorado’s outdoors, and set out, on a hunch, to San Francisco. I cried as I crossed the Golden Gate Bridge and have felt at home ever since.
But I still get a thrill every time I visit New Y
ork. Part of it is peeking in on a parallel life that I passed on; part of it is feeding on its energy and unexpected scenes. This time, it happens that Doug, a childhood friend who is a film director, has a movie opening. In line for the movie, before heading in, Doug introduces me to Gustavo, a friend of his who is standing next to me. Also in the film business, Gustavo has shaggy black hair and is wearing a mountain parka and hiking boots in New York City, oblivious to fashion. He has a soft accent I can place only in the vicinity of Latin America. I have a soft spot for Latin men; they are less confused than American men about how sensitive they should be and whether to open doors, and are just men, which makes it easier to just be a woman around them. He gallantly asks if he can take the empty seat next to mine at the movie, and we whisper a few remarks about films we’ve seen lately before the lights go down. He helps me off with my jacket, and his sure, gentlemanly touch makes popcorn explode under my skin. In the dark, I can barely watch the movie because two hundred pounds of male pheromones are sitting right next to me, transmitting wildly, uniquely attuned to mine. I want to lean in to smell him better, rub my face right into his soft sweater. Every time he shifts his hand on the armrest I jump; I feel like I’m fifteen and on my first date at the movies, practically trembling at his proximity.
Doug invites us to an after-party at the corner bar. Gustavo and I sit in a red leather booth and drink too much champagne and then beer when the champagne runs out. We talk about Japanese novels and Italian films until long after Doug leaves and they start putting chairs up on the tables. Born in Brazil, Gustavo has been speaking English for only ten years but has read all the literature I hold dear; he likes the same books and films and is absolutely certain about his tastes. He treats me like a woman, but a smart woman, which is one of those feats foreign men are good at without ever feeling threatened or, God forbid, emasculated. I’ve known Gustavo for a few hours and I feel like I’ve always known him, or maybe always wanted to know him.
We kiss in the cab on the way back to the Village, where I am staying. There’s nothing better than being tipsy and kissing a hunky Brazilian man in the back of a New York City cab. When I get out, he holds the door for me, and I tell him how much fun I had and that if it weren’t three o’clock in the morning, I’d invite him up for a drink.
“What’s so special about three o’clock in the morning?” he asks, in that soft accent, with a sly smile, and it is impossible to argue; I can’t come up with any smart response whatsoever.
For the next few days, we barely leave the apartment, surfacing only for beer and cupcakes before diving back under the covers. I don’t usually prefer a certain physical type in men; I’m democratic, and if you lined up all the guys I’ve dated, you wouldn’t find much in common beyond XY genes and an edgy sense of humor. But in Gustavo I recognize my animal ideal. He might not turn heads at a bar, but he’s medium-tall and strong, soft around the edges from loving good food, with thick, straight black hair, dark eyes, and a little beard stubble. He’s the very image of Brenda Starr’s Basil St. John—her mysterious disappearing boyfriend—without the eye patch. More than that, there’s something about him that’s so quietly sure of himself, so manly, in bed and out; he’s one of those few men who makes me feel 100 percent female. He stops using my name and just calls me “Sexy.” He slays me, over and over.
“You’re a sweetheart,” I tell him, kissing his chest.
He shakes his head. “You’re the sweetheart,” he says. “I’m just a sweetheart-in-training.”
We finally venture out of the apartment and walk to a theatre to see a tragic Vittorio De Sica film, and at the end, peeking behind the sleeve covering my face, he wipes a tear off my cheek with his thumb. On the way home, he holds my hand, fingers interlaced, and walks curbside, as if protecting me from the splashes of passing cabs. I’m leaving, and he has a new gig; I sense that our own little film is coming to an end. But it’s early summer, it’s New York, and for those few blocks I have the world’s sweetest, sexiest Brazilian boyfriend.
Home from the East Coast, I take a walk one day with my friend Cecilia. As we climb up one of San Francisco’s Twin Peaks, to a sweeping view of the city from bridge to bridge, I mention that I need to come up with something worthwhile to do, something that will get me out of my head and out into the world. My brain keeps flitting back to Gustavo—who, after a flurry of e-mails, seems to be out of sight, out of mind—and to the general problem of being single in my forties; I’m having trouble creating positive, forward momentum in the rest of my life. But seeing all those accomplished classmates at the reunion who had made real contributions and being in a liberal arts atmosphere reminded me of the responsibilities that go along with the privilege of a good education—with being alive, really—and lit a fire under me.
I tell Cecilia I am tired of writing peppy articles that fill the space between ads in women’s magazines, boosting women’s self-confidence on one page so it can be torn down on the next. I want to do something useful, worthwhile.
Cecilia walks along quietly for a while, and then something pops into her mind. She says her friend Carmen, a social worker in Rome, has a new job, working with a program that rescues immigrant women who have been sex-trafficked in Italy, promised a job in a pizzeria and ending up a prostitute, enslaved. Italy, alone in Europe, offers these women not only a chance to escape but help to stay in the country.
“It’s a good story, no?” Cecilia asks.
Sì. The prospect of a real story, in Italy, no less—which I am able to sell to an international women’s magazine—makes me forget entirely about the urgent problem of needing a new life. It also stops my obsessive wondering about whether Gustavo will ever call or whether I’ll see him again. We exchanged a few e-mails, his addressed to Sexy, mine using up all the Brazilian endearments I knew, and then the correspondence fizzled out. For all my fantasies, maybe it had just been a fling—a wildly fun fling, and not everything has to last forever, but still. A friend remarked that maybe the problem was that I was the one who needed to be the hot Brazilian in a relationship, so to speak. “You’re the exotic and creative one; your guy needs to be a little more stable,” she said. “Otherwise, it’s just one zany adventure after the next.” In any case, once again, I decide to fly away.
I arrive in Rome and visit Carmen, the social worker, who is in her fifties and divorced. Every evening, Carmen takes me along to a different dinner party, because her circle of friends can’t stand the thought of her trying to microwave something to eat at home alone (she’s the only Italian I know, male or female, whose cooking is truly atrocious). Italian women are never really alone, because Italians, bless them, tend to crowd around their unattached friends until they safely find someone. Carmen has a houseful of people—an African daughter she adopted, a boarder, and now a guest from the United States—but that doesn’t prevent her friends from considering her in mandatory need of company. There is no direct translation of “loneliness” in Italian—or, for that matter, “privacy.” The concepts don’t quite exist in Italy.
Not that Italian women don’t have their own problems with men and relationships. Even more than Americans, they’re caught between expectations of being good, traditional Italian girls and wives, looking after men who have never washed a dish or made a bed, and being sophisticated professionals; the dilemma leaves a lot of them unmarried, without children, and the Italian birthrate is the lowest in the world. Somehow, though, they don’t seem to have the hardness that a lot of American women have, and even 1970s feminists like Carmen have no Puritan-inspired problems reconciling their ideology with dressing glamorously and provocatively. Italian women in their fifties and sixties just seem to be all that much sexier for how well they know themselves and how assured they are about their charms.
During the day, when Carmen is working, these friends invite me to lunch, one by one, as if they’d worked out a schedule. I’m never alone for a meal. Somehow, in Italy, you always feel held—if not by a man, then by a family o
f friends.
WHEN I ARRIVE at the Naples train station, I remember that this is where I said good-bye to the Professor after we first met on the island of Ischia and spent four sun-drenched days there, a sweet reward for getting up out of my postdivorce depression and traveling by myself. At the time, I was sure I would never see him again but felt delighted to have been able to run into him, to have spent those wonderful days in his company—eating fresh pasta, making love, swimming in the sea, and starting all over again. Now it’s been four years, and I know this time that if I do see him again, it won’t be as a lover. But that’s fine, too. I’m moving ahead and haven’t lost those years I spent with him. All those beautiful moments—sipping wine and staring at the volcanoes in the distance, making love with open eyes, wandering around Moroccan alleys holding hands—don’t go away. The love in your life adds up.
I step out of the train station into soft light that shows off Naples’ faded Renaissance beauty at her best. Naples is sometimes called the northernmost city in Africa for its sultry air, chaotic humanity, and medinalike mazes of ancient streets. To be in Naples again is an unexpected pleasure, because the city is irresistible in its charms: perfect pizzas, splendid decay, crumbling treasures, and evening parades of tanned and meticulously turned out couples. The volcanic islands in the distance are silhouetted against the darkly shimmering sea. I have an appointment in front of the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in a couple hours—enough time to wander the waterfront, explore the little streets and stores in Spaccanapoli, and marvel at the treasures of Pompeii in the museum.
I’ve never spent time in Naples by myself. This is the first time since my divorce that I’ve been to Italy without the Professor. Only a couple hours by train from Rome, where there are single women everywhere, like in any major industrialized city in the world, southern Italy looks upon single women suspiciously, with pity sometimes, and a whiff of disrepute. A woman dining alone in a southern Italian restaurant, relishing her food and wine, might be completely content with herself and her spaghetti alle scoglie but treated like prey by the waiter and as contagious by the Sunday-dinner guests. In southern Italy, women don’t often go out by themselves, at least not in the evening or to partake of a meal; their husbands, family members, or female friends almost always accompany them in public. This is true, to a lesser extent, of the men, too; Italians don’t like to do anything alone.