**

What a strange week it’s been. I felt a bit knocked off-kilter by my coach friend’s sudden fixation on logistics and finances, things I tend to worry about to the point of losing faith entirely and giving up. I also had my first experience with Bikram yoga — thanks to the free yoga package I scored after writing an article on a Bikram studio — which I found to be an acquired taste. I’m not sure I like holding poses while dripping on the floor in sopping clothes and trying to breathe stifling air.

And then there’s my new friend. I can’t help but think of a funny, jaunty Jazz Age throwback remix track by The Real Tuesday Weld that goes When Psyche meets Cupid/don’t mind me, I’m feeling stupid/and terminally ambivalent over you. (Imagine my amusement when I found that the animated video featured a character in old-school prison stripes. See above link.) In terms of lifestyle, we’re almost comically incompatible, and yet he’s something of a natural philosopher, wholly unpretentious, and frank to a fault. Plus something about our chemistry you just can’t manufacture, even under ideal circumstances. I’ve met a number of men closer to my “type” and probably less “questionable,” but they’re not the ones I’m getting distracted at work fantasizing about. Still, I swing wildly between “This is such a bad idea” and “When the hell is he going to come upstairs and drop those baggy pants?”

Above all, I have to keep reminding myself not to take it all so seriously, and treat him as one treats a friend — allowing him to do his thing, without the over-identification that comes with certain forms of attachment. I’m not responsible for his choices. I can only try to continue to seek common ground where we can meet and enjoy each other.

**

But now on to Part Two of my Italy diary, where you’ll be introduced to James, the Englishman with whom I became so fatally enamored. This is quite possibly my favorite installment, because it includes what I consider one of the loveliest, happiest days of my life — a balmy summer afternoon walking around a small Piemonte city with Alessandro and James. I was drunk on all the beauty, of Italy, of the architecture and the gardens and of my two young male companions.

Somebody should have just shot me right then and there, because it doesn’t get any better than that!

**

PART TWO: I MUST HAVE DONE SOMETHING GOOD

I think they mean to work me to death here. My knees and my joints are killing me — the other working guests are all under 30 and still have all their cartilage — and I have a rash on the underside of my arm from the wrist up past the elbow. It might be from dishwashing several hours a day, but who knows. (I’ve had trigger-happy skin since I was in diapers.) The dishwashing is usually followed by several more hours of housecleaning, raking endless leaves, or working in the kitchen. I enjoy kitchen duty more than the other tasks, having been a prep cook in college. At least there I feel halfway competent, and I get to work with Cosmo, Mila, and Bruno.

Bruno is the chef in Centro’s vegetarian kitchen. He’s somewhere in his forties, decidedly short in stature, and thoroughly Italian in appearance. Shaggy-haired and craggy-nosed, he’s a bite-sized treat. I follow him around like a cocker spaniel, getting in the way and listening to his directions puppy-eyed. He regards me somewhat dubiously, but lets me handle the big knife to cut the watermelon. Above all I try not to do anything which elicits the dreaded “Che fai?!!” – What are you doing?!! — from the grande formaggio.

Socially, things got much better after that first day. Having found some emotional support from Raffe, and comparative facility of communication with Alessandro, the sinfully beautiful Canadian-Italian, I soon had another English speaker to play with.

James, a right smart bloke from a working-class town in England, had been off campus Thursday, but I met him at lunch the following day. He’s a witty and literate political science grad who actually dated someone from my obscure private college in Maryland. Golden-haired and fair, with piercingly blue eyes, he’d be almost too pretty if not for his beard, which butches up his appearance considerably. His eyelashes are a mile long. (I suppose, being in Europe, I should say they’re a kilometer long.) It was a delight to sit with him and Alessandro after lunch, complaining about Bush and explaining to them why many Americans believe he stole the election. (Oh wait, I mean elections.) For his part, James is articulate, well informed, and chock full of Brit colloquialisms that make me snicker. Exactly how mad is a bag of hammers? Who can say. He has more euphemisms for getting drunk than could fill a phrasebook, and more colorful obscenities than a room full of American truck drivers.

So far, these three seem to be becoming my chosen clan away from home. Raffe supplies unconditional, undaunted love and acceptance, regardless of language; Alessandro (about whom I had a dream the other night, in which I kissed him on the forehead repeatedly, which about sums up the nature of my affections) is like a terribly sensitive but perennially depressed adolescent boy; and James is a kindred spirit in intellect and humor. Communicating with him requires no effort whatsoever, which I appreciate after hours and hours of choosing the simplest words possible to inaccurately get my point across. We have a lark, we do, Yank and limey. He curses constantly, and I always laugh when he says “fookin,” as in “I’ve got the fookin dishwashing duties again!”

In the midst of a grinding week of physically demanding work, Monika — a cute young German so free-spirited and effervescent that the boys are all leery of her (I would have thought they would all be lining up to “tap that,” as James would say) — insisted that I lead a yoga class before her departure later that week. I protested that I wasn’t a teacher, I was a student, that I had never taught before, that I wasn’t certified, etc. Almost immediately Bettina, Paola, and Raffe all joined in the chorus: oh, please, please! So at six o’clock Tuesday evening, an hour and a half before dinner (meals are served late here) we congregated in the lovely meditation room on the upper floor of the main building called the “sky room,” and I began to lead four eager students in a series of the easiest stretches and salutations, demonstrating as best I could, and using the simplest words possible. At the end we lay in savasana, and I led them in a brief breath meditation before finishing with three rounds of om and my favorite teacher’s traditional blessing before the namaste. Afterwards they all told me how much they loved it, and Raffe wanted me to do it again tomorrow. Bettina, who is partially responsible for our work schedules, came up to me and suggested that she make leading an hour of yoga part of my work trade here. She also enthused about my teaching abilities (I had mentioned to her that I might take a teacher training when I got back home) and urged me to continue. She is a student of Qi Gong, which she practices every afternoon just before lunch, and has had several teachers. She said I was a natural. Well, well…

By midweek the guests had all gone, including the tantra workshop that had concluded with a ritual dance and the drinking of the “fire drink” (spiced wine, actually). The permanent bartender Robert, an aging American Lothario from California with a mane of heavy-metal hair and a laptop full of eclectic pirated music, delighted in telling us about the predatory atmosphere at the bar that last night. He’s one to talk, having latched onto 22-year-old Hanna early on. The more seasoned working guests here tell me he likes them young and vulnerable, and all appearances would seem to support this hypothesis. Alessandro dislikes Robert intensely because he sees Robert as a popular guy who enjoys success with women — the sort of guy Alessandro has never been, the sort of guy who picked on Alessandro in school. I tell Alex he has a totally distorted view of reality, and that Robert would trade places with him in a nanosecond. This ridiculously pretty baby, more than six feet tall with gorgeous eyes and a perfect bow of a mouth, could make millions modeling for Hugo Boss or Armani, and he doesn’t even think he’s attractive! I hope he gets discovered waiting tables in Roma. Or something. Some kind of external validation greater than my best encouragements can give him. He reminds me of myself in my twenties (although he often lacks the vocabulary for his despair), tending to be depressed, self-obsessed, and merciless in his judgments of himself.

On Wednesday another working guest, Elke, a fiftysomething German friend of Bettina’s, arrived, and the room situation had to be rearranged. I moved into the room that had been Alessandro and Stefan’s to share with Elke, Alessandro moved in with Christian, and James (who was not getting along with Christian) moved into the single room that had been mine. I did some obligatory bitching about it, but Elke has been perfectly lovely, and James is a lot happier in the single.

Thursday I was given the extraordinary gift of a shared day off with my boys, James and Alessandro. We talked about going to Milano, but there were no tickets available to see Da Vinci’s Last Supper (probably thanks to Dan Brown and the new Tom Hanks movie), so James suggested we go to Torino instead. Apparently there’s an incredible Egyptian museum there, the second largest in the world. Frankly, I didn’t care. A day trip anywhere in Italy with mi cari would already be heaven.

That morning they were waiting for me by the kitchen before I had even finished getting ready or gotten something to eat. I didn’t understand their hurry until I saw the 8:55 train leaving Pettenasco station from our vantage point on the hill. I apologized profusely; as a city dweller I’m used to public transporation that’s readily available and frequent, and I hadn’t thought to ask about the train schedule. We checked on the board, and the next departure was at 10:30. James settled on the station’s bench with a Tom Robbins novel, and I accompanied Alessandro down the road into Pettenasco to buy cigarettes.

After visiting the newsstand/tobacco shop (staffed by none other than Pettenasco’s female mayor) we sat down for a little while in the cobblestone square by the tourism office. Alessandro started in with his pet miseries, asking me what I thought of Robert. It was here that (for God’s sake, Alex) I had to tell him that I’d told everyone at home that he was ravishingly beautiful, and that he should give himself a break. I divulged that if I had met him at a different point in my life I would surely have been trying to get him into bed. He started to blush and smiled shyly, showing perfect white teeth. It was as if he’d never heard this sort of thing before. Apparently one of the full-time Centro employees had recently rebuffed him, and he was taking it very hard. I said that the souls who experience the deepest despondencies are also capable of the greatest joys, and suggested some authors he might read, starting with Rilke. When we walked up the hill he was positively hot to find an English language bookstore in the city.

James was where we had left him on the bench, although he had just walked down to the town himself to “take a Nixon” — the meaning of which I’ll spare you all. We all waited together for the train.

And waited. And waited.

We had a look around inside the unstaffed and generally abandoned building. The office had several boxes full of childrens’ textbooks in Italian, dating back to 1993, which engrossed the fellows for a short time. I visited the station restroom, and here I just have to interject – what is up with these Italian holes in the floor?! Do they think women don’t pee? (Thank God I do yoga!) And are they allergic to toilet paper, or what? If I were in a third world country I wouldn’t be surprised, but this is Europe for crying out loud. Even in fairly nice restaurants, where you’d expect something a bit more genteel…Bisetti’s rustic water closets are like the Ritz in comparison. Heaven help you if you’re an old woman, or disabled. I think I’d just as soon use the woods. It would feel so much cleaner.

It was eleven-thirty and the boys were getting cranky. James was ready to say, fook it all, let’s go down to a poob and have a beah. Alessandro was dead set on getting to a bookstore in Torino. I didn’t care what we did, but I hoped I wouldn’t have to choose between going with one or the other. Turning cartwheels by the tracks, I observed that it was a beautiful day in the Italian countryside, and that my companions were the two handsomest gentlemen at Centro d’Ompio. I really had nothing to complain about. James, cheered somewhat, called me a liar, while Alessandro (with uncharacteristic good humor and bravado) countered that it was half true, that half being himself.

Finally we walked down to town. Alessandro had a word in Italian with the mayor, who told him that at certain times of day (as I found, en route to Centro) it’s a bus that runs to the Borgomanero station, from which point one can take a train to Novara and then change over to the Torino line. The next bus came in ten minutes. James, already dreaming of a cold lager, reluctantly agreed to take it — we’d already paid for and validated the tickets, after all. So more than three hours after we set out, we were finally on our way.

The lakeside bus ride was a panorama of gorgeous views. I sat contentedly by the window next to James, brimming with pleasure as he took a catnap and Alessandro spoke Italian with the driver. From Borgomanero we caught the Novara train. I sat facing them and we had a remarkably personal conversation, the three of us, on the hour-long ride. James, who is rarely serious for three minutes, wound up advising Alessandro, like an older brother, about life and women. Alessandro is twenty-five and James barely twenty-seven, but the emotional difference is akin to that between a sixteen-year-old and a thirty-year-old. It warmed the cockles of my heart to see the cagey intellectual Brit sincerely offering his experience and wisdom to the entirely ingenuous blue-collar Italian boy from Toronto. With my typical bluntness I had let them know that I was completely infatuated with both of them, but not prepared to do anything about it (James says “Don’t shit where you eat,” at any rate), so sans that ambiguity, I had the enviable position of hearing some frank guy talk.

When we got to Novara after two o’clock, James convinced us that the trip to Torino would be useless (we’d have to leave after only two hours to catch the last train to Pettenasco) so we decided to stay in Novara. It’s a small city, but one of the largest in the region, with all of the ATMs and gelato shops and other amenities missing from our tiny little mountain town. I insisted on buying the boys lunch, including real Italian thin-crusted pizza (deliziosa!) and a pitcher of beer, because I’d made them miss the train, and because they’re just “so bloody lovely.” James eyed our waitress — randy as all get-out — and proceeded to check out the considerable local talent all afternoon. “It’s only fair,” I sighed — I had them to look at, after all, and none of the local men were anywhere near as attractive as my traveling companions.

We walked around the narrow, cobblestoned streets of Novara, which turned out to be a far prettier town than it had appeared to be from the road or the stazione. The old buildings were embellished with Corinthean leaf and scrollwork cut from stone, and many of the upper windows had wrought iron balconies bursting with cascading plants or flowers. We found several bookstores for Alessandro (although only one of them had a limited selection of English language books), and a graphic novel store for James.

In the center of town sat a magnificent basilica dating back to the 16th century. We went inside, and I was overwhelmed by the Baroque grandeur of it all. Intricate frescoes depicting Biblical scenes lined either wall, surrounded by large, fierce-looking stone statues of saints and apostles. The vaulted dome rose from above the altar, and here I find my descriptive powers fail me. Suffice it to say that its detail and its sublime geometry, with the sunlight illuminating the ceiling of that otherwise dark sanctuary, was suggestive of heaven. The whole structure was imbued with the gravitas of centuries of tradition and history, with its ferocious-looking saints and its painted skeletons dancing on either side of the Crucifixion. Unfortunately I had left my camera in my room at Bisetti, but James got some good pictures, opting for details like the expression on the prophet Joel’s face.

All day I kept pinching myself. Was I really here? In this place? With these guys? Somewhere in my youth or childhood, as the song goes, I must have done something good. I look at how my life was when I was roughly Alessandro and James’s age, how for so many years (verily, almost forty) it seemed like I wandered like Moses in the desert, and now, in my thirty-eighth year, it’s as if life has suddenly blossomed — exploded! — into unimaginable beauty. Even before coming to Italy. Things I no longer dared to dream became not only possible, but manifest.

Walking down the exquisite streets of Novara, peering through gates at hidden urban gardens, flanked by two positively glorious young men, I thought I would perish of delight. It’s really not true, after all, the cynical estimation that said I’d never be satisfied, no matter what. I have simply been lacking in the things that bring me joy.

Better late than never.

The train back to Pettenasco was hot, and the boys lay back against the seats in exhaustion and dozed. With their peaceful expressions and interminable eyelashes they looked like sweet, beautiful children, and I couldn’t help but perform a visualization on their behalf. I took it from Aleta St. James. (Say what you will about New Age hocus-pocus, I can’t tell you why, but this shit works for me.) I imagined them surrounded by hot pink light, like a blanket — color language for unconditional love — and I wished them everything that might bring them the kind of joy they’d brought me. To Alessandro, I said: Love yourself, baby boy! To James, I said: Be happy, darling. Otherwise, there were no words to the meditation, only emotions. James shifted in his seat and lay his knee against mine, and even in the train’s heat I was gratified by that warmth.

That said, I’ll proceed. Join me at your peril.

So I was cleaning my bathroom the other day, wiping accumulated dust and fuzz from the base of the toilet, when I suddenly remembered another such throne I’d cleaned many years ago in the Maryland town where I went to college. What was memorable about said pot was not the object itself, but the particular circumstances under which I cleaned it. I’m sure that more than a few people would have deemed my reasons quietly pathological. To an outside observer, they probably were.

It was summertime, and a number of us had sublet apartments in town during the break. Among those hanging around were two guys I’ll call Dave and Jacob, who were sharing a two-bedroom with another young man I’ll call Alexey. I didn’t know the latter very well, but Dave was like a younger brother to me. We had very similar religious backgrounds, and could talk about almost anything with the comfortable ease you might feel with a childhood pal.

And then there was Jacob.

My memory of Jacob looks like a shot in a Merchant-Ivory production, where our hero is backlit by sunshine in a meadow, his shiny hair making a sort of lambent halo. And this is really how he appeared to me then. He was a lovely, lonely, tragic sort of boy, a bereft orphan (his parents had died within months of each other), shy around women, whose first and only love had abruptly dumped him and moved on to other things and other men. During the course of my junior year he managed to capture both my imagination and my impressionable heart, even though he didn’t ask for either. Red-faced and stammering (how I embarrassed his excruciating modesty!), he had already made that much clear. He was a one-woman man, regardless of where the woman was.

But Dave and I were still the best of buddies, and talked on the phone regularly. As I recall, on one of my days off from work, we spoke and he told me he was at home sick. Jacob and Alexey were at work, so I decided on the spur of the moment to come over and attend to Dave. I brought food, intending to cook up something restorative for him, but when I saw the decimated condition of the bathroom (remember, there were three college-age guys sharing an apartment!) I announced “I’m cleaning your bathroom,” and attacked it like a Clorox-wielding kamikaze despite his protests. I scoured the toilet until it gleamed, and scrubbed the shower free of the grime that had built up from the residue of Alexey’s boat-detailing job. When I was finished, it looked like a different room.

I realize that to another progressively-minded woman (not to mention a “Rules Girl” — see “Fascinating Womanhood”), this may seem thoroughly objectionable, but I really didn’t feel like some domestic drudge. I remember feeling incredibly energized, even excited. Under different circumstances I might have felt differently. Make no mistake, I’m no June Cleaver. I hate cleaning my own apartment. I don’t put on an apron and run around serving men all the time. But I saw this as an opportunity to give something to Jacob as well as to Dave. I couldn’t do it any other way, or at least in any more direct way (after he turned me down, I respected his feelings and left him alone). Besides, to me, Jacob’s dirt wasn’t nasty dirt; to clean it up felt oddly intimate. And now he would come home not only to leftovers of the hearty stew I made Dave, but to a bathroom that could no longer incubate bubonic plague.

There is still a part of me, though, to which this seemed excessive when I thought of it after so many years. Jacob, after all, never returned my affections. What the hell did you do that for? this part will demand, after I perform some beau geste for which I know I won’t receive thanks or reciprocity. It will vociferously remind me of my maternal grandmother, who moaned and groaned over the daily chores she elected to do to assist my mother, and then complained to my brother and me that we didn’t appreciate her selflessness. Martyrdom runs in my family, so I’m aware that I’m a high risk.

Moreover, I recently admitted to a friend, “Somehow I arrived at the conviction that it’s pointless for me to expect recognition, because I know I’ll ultimately be disappointed.” I’m pretty sure I picked this attitude up during high school, when so many of my peers started to surpass me academically, athletically, romantically, and even in terms of their supposed “walk with Christ.” Jesus, Christ wouldn’t even walk with me across the street! It didn’t matter how “good” I was. It didn’t matter how smart I was. It didn’t matter how much effort I put into trying to be attractive. In this world of weights and measures, someone else always got the A. I told myself it really didn’t matter to me, even when it did.

But I also know that at some point life stopped being about getting A’s. I remember the bracing wave of relief and gratitude I felt reading James Baldwin’s words: “If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.” The same could be said of any concept, including our notions of “success” or “justice.” (I always thought one of the the coolest things about Jesus was that he declared an-eye-for-an-eye obsolete.)

Cleaning Jacob’s toilet really wasn’t a ploy to score points or to buy his undying love through indentured servitude. I chose to do it, and it actually gave me tremendous joy while I was performing the task. The most essential part of me felt I was contributing to the well-being of those I cared about. Few things in life feel that good.

Of course I’m not Mother Teresa. Like most people I have this wounded inner adolescent that clamors for attention and hates feeling overlooked or undervalued. She’s the strategizer, the one who (as Ben Zander put it) got me out of childhood alive. Sometimes she resents doing something from the gut for no glory, remembering how she ceased to be a player in high school, warning me not to be anyone’s bitch. (She can also be obstinate, petty, vain, insecure, full of blinding, bitter jealousy and envy, impossible to please…did I mention jealous?) Hers is the realm of doing and having, of winning and losing, rather than that of simply being. She measures my actions against the yardstick of accepted external standards and frets that I’m doing it all wrong, that I’m not getting mine, that I’m being left behind.

So let me recognize me, for her, right now. Let me give myself a shout out on behalf of anyone who wouldn’t or couldn’t do so. I know we’re not encouraged to blow our own horns except on our resumes; well, then, let this be my resume, the resume of a toilet scrubber, because it’s more real and more meaningful than some lame chronology of my various bullshit jobs.

Strengths and skills: if I care for you, if I love you, if you matter to me, I will do windows. I will give you more than you didn’t ask for. I will leave you be if that’s what you need. I will look for subversive and original ways to help you. I will sneak over while you’re at work and clean your toilet.

Education and experience: lots.

References: who needs em?