The last time I lost my voice, I was itching to say something to Ted that I just couldn’t spit out. This year, not only did I have a major throat infection, I became literally itchy – all over. Coincidence? You know I doubt it.

**

You’d think that with all this time on my hands I’d be plowing through the Matador program at hyperspeed. Not so. I’ve found myself blocked and stymied so often, I’ve only just completed the assignments of the first week — in one month. Granted, Week One is a multi-part assignment that includes setting up a blog and posting three different posts, one of which requires more than cursory research. Who completes these fool things in a damn week? Already I’m feeling inferior to my fellow students, mainly energetic and tech-savvy young things who have Twitter feeds and Tumblr accounts and who have backpacked through the Andes with naught but a burro and a tent.

All of my insecurities, all of my violent envy and feelings of rivalry toward other writers have come surging back, and the World Wide Web seems to me like a river choked with excess content, like floating garbage, that no one will ever read. Who needs more word pollution? Why do this? My voice is going to be drowned out by the deafening cacophony of more aggressive (if not more talented) voices. What makes me think I have what it takes to succeed in this clogged, competitive, relentlessly fast wired world?

As a quieter counterpoint, I hear Jonathan Goldman’s voice again, his raspy, ebullient baritone, good-naturedly attempting to calm my agitated mind. Long before the dawn of the Internet, I voiced these tortured thoughts to Jon, who was a highly talented writer in his own right. He, however, didn’t see the ever-increasing output of innumerable wannabe writers as a noxious glut any more than he envisioned the market as a single, crowded stage where competition was fierce for scarce attention and acclaim. “There’s room for everybody,” he insisted. He didn’t seem to view his own success as necessarily someone else’s failure, or vice versa. He believed abundant opportunities existed for a multiplicity of unique voices.

Jon’s perspective stopped me in my tracks. I’d never heard anyone frame things in such an expansive, non-competitive way before. (I was a senior in high school.) For me, fighting for scarce resources had always been a way of life.

**

But even assuming, like Jon, that there’s “room” for me, there’s still the practical problem of travel. Beyond the most obvious question – how does one make money doing travel writing when one has no money to travel in the first place? – there’s the lead boot of my weak immune system, of which I’ve been so thoroughly reminded. I was on a long weekend, visiting my best friend from college on the East Coast for a long overdue vacation, when I came down with the fever of 102 that began this nasty business. I did drink a lot of alcohol, and combined the drinking with some extreme temperature changes (getting in and out of an outdoor hot tub in winter weather)…but alcohol and extreme temperature changes are par for the course in a lot of travel situations.

At home, I can carefully control my diet and my environment, taking a daily regimen of supplements and other preventative foodstuffs and staying out of extreme temperatures. On the road, that amount of control can go out the window — even in-country, and among people who know me. (Almost every time I go back East to visit family I get sick…although that may be another story.)

In my house, growing up, it was as rare for my mother to be completely well as it was for my father to miss a day of school. Unfortunately, I inherited more of her immune system than his. Since early childhood, I’ve been plagued with skin problems and urinary tract disorders and sinusitis and multiple pneumonias and snail-slow recoveries from the most ridiculously common ailments. Once I was even tentatively diagnosed with fibromyalgia by a clinic specializing in autoimmune diseases. I like to ignore these facts, and pretend that I’m completely normal, even if I have to slather myself with cortisone cream every morning or find a restroom once an hour. (Maybe I can turn that into a selling point: travel for people with overactive bladders.) But I fear my less-than-robust health may be a liability when it comes to my dreams.

**

These are the some of the things one thinks about when one is home sick and has nothing to do but think.

One may also think about how one is alone, and how there is nobody, really, whose job it is to look after one.

Well, if you’re me, that is. I’ve leaned pretty heavily, too heavily, perhaps, on Greg, who has driven me to the hospital, the enrollment clinic, the Japanese noodle house, and the grocery store (just to name a few), bailed me out and bought me lunch, and who is neither my brother nor my boyfriend. It’s gotten to the point where I don’t dare ask him for one more thing for fear of becoming a bona fide pain in the ass. I asked a girl friend to take me to the enrollment clinic one morning, but she isn’t the sort of friend I’d ask a favor more than once.

So then I venture out on foot or by bus or bike, in an effort not to ask for any more favors, and wind up making myself sicker again.

When well, you see, I can be independent and get around on my own, without bothering anyone; made dependent, I’m afraid I’ll spend the last of my friends’ goodwill. In these sorts of situations of weakness and vulnerability, it’s usually one’s “flesh and blood,” or one’s significant other, that steps in to help. Obviously, I have neither. My mum may fuss about my ailments from two thousand miles away, but there’s a very good reason I vowed never to depend upon my kin again. So I don’t. And despite my best intentions and efforts of the past couple of years, I’m still as partner-less as ever.

Being ill can really underscore one’s existing loneliness.

**

In those wretched moments when you feel as if you’ll never be well again, when you start to imagine that the authorities will find your lifeless body in your bed three days from now, you also begin to think of everything you haven’t done. When you’re healthy, you act as if you have all the time in the world, as if you’ll live forever, which is an illusion. Illness strips away illusions and makes you revisit your priorities.

Which brings me back to the recurrent location of my dis-ease. Is it wholly unreasonable to relate persistent throat and voice issues with the inability to speak one’s truth?

**

One day, a few weeks ago, I lost the “battle.” The battle my kinfolk would no doubt characterize as being against Satan. One Sunday morning at the beginning of January, I stopped waging my moral struggle entirely.

I was in the sunny front room at work with Dan and our friend Eric, who can get some hilarious banter going with Dan when you put them together. They had been making me laugh helplessly to the point of tears, but when Eric took a call, the talk turned more serious, and I started telling Dan about Matador.

I don’t know what it was…the way he listened to me so attentively, or the look in his eyes, those shining eyes so absolutely full of Dan, but all at once something just gave way inside of me. If the feeling had been a thought, it might have been something like: Fuck it. I surrender. You win. Even if there’s absolutely nothing in it for me, I love you, Dan, because you deserve it. Because I can’t help it.

There wasn’t any pain, not at that moment, anyway, only a sort of inarticulate joy, and the relief that comes at the end of a long, strenuous, futile effort. I relaxed and enjoyed the Dan and Eric morning show until Dan left at noon.

Another day soon after, he was sitting next to me in a sun-drenched cubicle during a client briefing. It was warm, and close beside me my lovely friend stretched out his big body drowsily in his chair, his head by my shoulder. The light, even in that relatively dull environment, was exultant, beaming off every surface (cup, keyboard, cubicle wall) as if in praise or celebration…and suddenly I felt as if I were in sunny, magical Italy again, not some godforsaken call center. Not a thing was missing; I was where I belonged, right now, nowhere but here, in this light, beside this dear, beloved man, my friend. All questions of should or shouldn’t were meaningless. Life was beautiful, rich, and whole. I could scarcely draw a breath, fearing I’d disturb that moment of perfectly crystallized happiness. I hoped the briefing would go on indefinitely.

**

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,

there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,

the world is too full to talk about.

Ideas, language, even the phrase each other

doesn’t make any sense.

- Rumi

Rumi loved another man in a time when loving another man that much was punishable by death. It’s still that way under fundamentalist Islam. Whatever else anyone wants to say about me – however they want to judge me – I’m unlikely to get executed for my propensities. They don’t stone adulterers anymore, either; otherwise most of Congress would be in trouble.

**

I am wondering what I’ll find when I return. Perhaps my absence has made the effects of my presence fade. Perhaps my friend will have made new friends; the company has a constantly revolving door, with new trainees arriving every week. Will he even still be there? The only constant is change, after all, and I’ve certainly made the mistake of overestimating my significance to other people, particularly men.

All of these ponderings may be moot. If, after my month-long absence, Dan keeps more of a distance from here on out, it may mean that our moment has passed. Such moments pass in all kinds of relationships, not infrequently those at work. Every one has a greater or lesser lifespan. Today’s confidante can become tomorrow’s water cooler acquaintance. More rarely, that person can become your friend for life.

For the umpteenth time, I never wanted to bark up the wrong tree. I don’t want to complicate Dan’s life or make him unhappy, or make his wife unhappy. At the same time, in some strange way, I believe that the words stuck in my throat are less ambiguous and less harmful now than they may have been before. Without the moral judgment, without the teeth-clenching self-control (that pushes Dan out of my conscious mind and so vividly into my dreams), they don’t get so mixed up with ancient resentments and injuries having to do with my deserving and/or unworthiness. So fucking what if I love Dan? Who’s gonna tell me I can’t?

**

Greg told me about a friend who divorced his wife amicably simply because she wanted to move somewhere else and pursue a life he couldn’t envision as being his. “Who was I to hold her back?” he explained to Greg. I’ve encountered this generous attitude elsewhere, but it’s more European than American, more like the unapologetically secular French with their more flexible (to put it diplomatically) approach to commitment than our Judeo-Christian tradition, which tends to view spouses as personal property.

It’s a stance I’ve had to embrace more of necessity than by choice, relinquishing loved ones who had other ideas. Of course I hadn’t gotten a promise to stay from any of them. But what if we were all that generous with each other? Can you imagine? Not only could I accept (if not be thrilled about) Dan saying I like you a lot, but I love my wife, she’s the one for me…but Mai could also accept (if not be thrilled about) Dan saying I’ve fallen in love with someone else, and I want to be with her.

I can just hear my mother having paroxysms as I write. O the selfishness! O the worldly permissiveness! In my comments section last time, I posted a link to a fundie article on “Biblical marriage” asserting that “there is no right person,” which was shared on Facebook by (of all people) my sister-in-law. Interestingly enough, right above that in my feed was the “testimony” (ironically named) from exchristian.net by a woman who had tried to be a Good Christian Wife by rejecting the agnostic she loved, and marrying a Good Christian Man. Twenty-five years later, she would leave the Bible-believing abuser and be reunited with her godless first love – with whom she has been happy ever since. So much for “Biblical marriage” and “no right person.” I don’t know how people continue to live within the born-again bubble, you have to filter so much conflicting information out.

Strictly speaking, by the way, “Biblical marriage” would mean that Dan would be perfectly justified in taking me as a second wife or a concubine, in the tradition of Abraham. Or Solomon. Or countless other wealthy patriarchs. But that’s beside the point.

**

My aforementioned friend on the East Coast, who is in the middle of a divorce, and has found her soul mate at last in a much older man who was just getting separated when they met, had this to say: “Can you continue to just be, like that, with him, in the moment?”

Maybe that’s all there is to be done. I’m not convinced, however, that my voice will come back if I don’t speak the words that have been sticking in my throat. I’ve swallowed an awful lot of them in the course of a lifetime. If this godawful antibiotic-resistant bacteria were going to kill me either way, I wouldn’t want anything important to be left unsaid. I’ve done more damage with silence than with words anyhow.

Matador offers a 12-week online course for aspiring travel writers and photographers. Their faculty and alumni write for paying travel blogs and magazines like National Geographic Traveler. I had been trying to figure out how I could pay for “tuition’ ever since finding out about their program. My initial plan had been to get a better job and save up, but that obviously wasn’t happening, and I could see myself putting off the course indefinitely in the meantime. I seriously considered charging it on my high-balance, consolidated-debt credit card, but I have enough trouble meeting the monthly minimums as is.

Instead, the crazy-making job I do have, after my many attempts to leave, provided me with the unexpected means. Go figure.

So I have taken the first step toward at least one dream.

**

The day before Christmas, I had a massive shock: I found Sam.

Online, that is. On Facebook. Through a mutual friend. He had been loath to join Zuckerberg’s internet playground back in the day, but his girlfriend must have convinced him otherwise.

Yes, I said girlfriend.

Given that Sam has never tried to contact me again, I didn’t attempt to ‘friend’ or even message him, but as the contents of his page weren’t hidden from me by privacy settings, I simply looked at his info page, wall, and photos. I guess you could call that Facebook stalking. Since I’ve known nothing about his life after he left, however, I don’t think anyone will blame me.

There was a relationship status and anniversary. Sam had apparently gotten involved with a young woman his own age eight months after leaving me. They are still together after a year and a half; living together, in fact. I like the look of the girl: she has that sweet, slightly bug-eyed vulnerability of a Jane Adams character, sweatshirt-clad, sans makeup, with a pierced lip that defies midwestern conservatism. She’s not the type to inspire violent jealousy in other females. Sam still looks ineffably Sam, of course: a sly smile flickering in only his eyes in one photo, breaking into an unabashedly happy grin beside the girl, who looks delighted to be with him, in the next. She should be delighted to be with him. In one photo he is kissing her, and I remember his knee-weakening kiss. I helped him perfect that knee-weakening kiss. I helped him perfect a few things. Blessed art thou among women, I think. It’s all hers, now. But Sam…he looks so terribly adorable, and so terribly Sam, I miss him all over again, and burst into a torrent of hot tears. Sam!

**

It is a bittersweet Christmas. I am both gratified and newly heartbroken. Finally I know where and how Sam is; finally I know Sam is never coming back.

By way of consolation, I find myself contemplating Dan Savage’s “campsite rule,” which has been summarized thus:

If you’re in a sexual relationship with somebody significantly younger or less experienced than you, the rule that applies at campsites shall be applicable to you: you must leave them in at least as good a state (physically and emotionally) as you found them in. That means no STDs, no unwanted pregnancy, not overburdening them with your emotional or sexual baggage, and so on. Younger partners and particularly virgins will often take everything given to them by an older, more experienced partner as being “written in stone,” and will carry around everything they learn from them for the rest of their life: so treat them right!

My young friend had, at the time I met him, only recently lost nearly half his body weight. He had had considerable social difficulties all of his life because of his extraordinary but differently-abled brain. I was, all things considered, writing on a fairly blank slate, one belonging to a boy of twenty-one who was far more vulnerable with me than any “grown man” had ever been.

I thought of all the positive reinforcement I gave him almost continuously, all the many ways in which I told him he was wonderful and beautiful and amazing, how sincerely I enthused about his marvelous natural abilities as a lover. I showered him with well-deserved praise. The feeling comes overwhelmingly back – that enormous, grateful love I could scarcely contain at the time, which overflowed in words as well as in kisses and caresses. I wanted to offer him anything and everything for everything he offered me. Our lovemaking was more deeply satisfying than anything else I’d ever experienced, nourishing both my body and soul. I loved it, and I loved him, and I told him so at every opportunity.

In the end, what Sam gave me even he couldn’t take away. And perhaps my loving words overwrote some of the noxious messages, some of the neglect and cruelty of his own past.

After all, here he is, two years on, in a longer and more serious relationship than I’ve ever had in my life, with a young woman who posts adoring messages on his Facebook wall even though she’ll see him at home later. Sam looks happy. She looks happy. They look happy together.

I’d like to say it’s a campsite rule epic win.

**

The kicker comes when I go back and read the emails I wrote to Sam in those months after he left, when his silence drove me to speculate wildly and to drink. I had expected them to be more oppressive and scolding than they were; I was startled to find some beautiful, heartfelt words that expressed sentiments even I’d forgotten expressing. I’ll leave most of it between Sam and me, but here’s the passage that contained the words (italicized for your benefit) that caused me to burst into tears one more time.

I thought: Whatever (Sam) has to do to reclaim, or save, his life, I’m all for it. I don’t even know if that’s what you’re doing. You once told me you didn’t care to get well. But so help me God, I would give anything, I would give you my blood, baby, I would give you up entirely, I would give you to another woman…if it meant you could be well and whole and healed and happy.

I guess I said it first, didn’t I.

I had no idea I was predicting the future.

**

One door closes. And then another. This week I learn that a girlfriend of mine is engaged to a widower who had caught my eye more than once. I hadn’t even known they were an item. Well, bully for her. One more possibility bites the dust.

Matador is, I suppose, my way of prying open a window – not quite far enough to escape, yet, but at least to let the air in.

Escape does not seem to be in the cards.

**

Escape from what, you ask?

Look here, people: I have tried to be good (even though Mary Oliver tells me in “Wild Geese” that I don’t have to be). I have not indulged thoughts that could easily have taken over my idle hours. For well over a week, I did a decent (at times excellent) job at work while Dan was absent, and I took the aforementioned steps toward my future as a writer. I didn’t wallow. I didn’t obsess. My sexual fantasies consisted of syndicated reruns of The Best of Sam — at least until Christmas Eve. I flirted with the Asian Adonis, who returned to the call center a few months ago. I tried fantasizing about him instead.

None of this seemed to matter when Dan came back. Nor did it matter that he’d cut off his beautiful thick hair, or that he told a lame poop joke, or that he has a paunch in lieu of Adonis’s veiny arms and tight little body. My struggle doesn’t stem from lust for his physical attributes; it’s not made more difficult by intellectual accord; it’s not even quite such a matter of emotional attachment, at this point, because I prevent myself from confiding too much in him. Seriously, I’m clutching the reins so tight, I’m drawing blood.

No, it’s as if there were a magnet inside of each of us, some kind of subtle gravitational force that keeps drawing us back together. If I stay away from him, he finds me (and so help me God, I’m happy to see him). Break time the other day found us standing together in the hallway by the credenza, munching on our respective apples, through absolutely no effort of my own. I had actually deliberately gone somewhere he was not. But when he came toward me, grinning affably in his way, something in me rejoiced in spite of myself.

Don’t think it’s Dan being “bad,” either. He’s not seductive or a flirt like Ted. He’s not seductive at all. That’s not his modus operandi. He just apparently really likes being around me, probably without even knowing why. I really like being around him, too. At the time, it just seems to flow so easily. It’s no big deal. He treats me like a good friend, a buddy, telling me about what he and Mai did over the holidays…but I know we can both feel the magnet. Don’t ask me how I know that. It sounds insane, even to me. But I understand now what people mean when they say “It was bigger than both of us.”

**

I could always write off married men before, no matter how charismatic or handsome. A ring on a man’s finger was tantamount to an electrified fence as far as my crushes were concerned. (My fondness for my friend Ben paled in comparison to my grand Greg Schulz obsession, anyhow.) How harshly I judged people who couldn’t restrain themselves! I thought they were being willfully stupid. All of that drama, it seemed so avoidable.

“The heart wants what it wants,” said a disgraced Woody Allen by way of explanation, after breaking an even stronger taboo. “What you resist persists,” cautioned Dr. Jung, who failed to resist his troubled patient Sabina Spielrein. In the Whole Foods restroom, I happen to hear my old buddy Melissa Etheridge, who wrote the soundtrack to my agonized twenties, growling and howling over the sound system

Now we make our choices

Doing what we think is good

We deny our own dreams

‘Cause we think we’ve been told we should…

She looks up to heaven

And wonders why love is so cruel…

Can’t stop the wanting of you

Even Sonny weighs in, quoting Kierkegaard in his Facebook status: “To cheat oneself out of love is the most terrible deception; it is an eternal loss for which there is no reparation, either in time or in eternity.” I can’t help but wonder what it was like for Sonny to meet Elyse, his on-again off-again girlfriend of almost seven years, the willowy, stunning kids’ yoga teacher who precipitated the end of his fourteen-year marriage.

Personally, I think I summed things up best in a comment on my last post: “All of my malaise of the past several months can be attributed to the bitter realization that someone else has married my husband.”

**

Soon after writing that comment, I dream that I am wearing a gorgeous white wedding dress. There is a wedding happening, and it’s Dan’s, in a facility that looks less like a church or government building than Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory (of the 1971 musical). A setting I’ve associated since early childhood with wishes and dreams, with finding that mythical golden ticket. (The song “Pure Imagination” puts a tear in my eye to this day.)

Even though I’m in a wedding dress, I am nevertheless aware that my job is to walk Dan down the aisle and give him away. The bride-to-be is nowhere to be seen at this point, and I’m passing time with Dan outside before the ceremony. The one person who is around is a woman from work who I’m certain (given some barbed offhand comments) has grasped what’s going on between Dan and me. She can be a bit catty, and seems jealous of him at times, in that competitive alpha-female way former homecoming queens can have about them (despite being married, with a baby), but (unlike me) she’s not one to be shy to speak her mind.

For my part, I am suffering tremendously and at length over the concept of “speak now or forever hold your peace.” Oblivious, Dan is talking to me like I’m his best friend. Maybe I’m the Best Woman? Liz, the coworker who can tell how I feel, gives me a tight hug of support in passing. In contrast to waking life, I feel like she’s the one person on my side. But still I wait, and say nothing.

At what seems like the last minute, I blurt out to Dan that this joyous occasion will, in fact, go down in history as the worst fucking day of my life. Dan looks stunned. I flee.

I run right into Liz, and tell her that I’ll be drinking a bottle of wine by myself tonight and crying my eyes out. She shocks me then by telling me, very sharply, how disappointed she is in me – she had thought I had more ‘fight’ in me than that – and stalks off in disgust. Dan has still not walked down the aisle. I start to meander tentatively back toward the wedding, but at that point I wake up.

**

Don’t ask me to interpret that in detail. I will point out that it’s the first dream I can remember having in which I’m wearing a full white wedding dress. It was strapless, as I recall. An elegantly simple, satiny, form-fitting thing. Quite lovely, really. I felt like Audrey Hepburn.

I do think it all points back to my lack of a sense of entitlement, and the fact that I’ve always felt forced to “give away” the men that I love…whether the man was León in my teens or Sam in my forties. Liz probably represents the part of me that’s disgusted by the way I just lie down and roll over. There’s no ‘fight’ in me at all. I don’t believe I’m deserving…and even if I could believe that, I still wouldn’t believe I could do anything but lose in the most humiliating manner imaginable. I’m not the kind who would ever stand up in church and stop a wedding. Easier for me to buy a bottle of wine and go home, get drunk alone, and cry.

**

Not that I don’t believe I did right by Sam. At least I have one thing I can be proud of. If nothing else, I seem to have left his “campsite” in such primo condition the next visitor decided to stay permanently. In general, I try to leave people better off than I found them, although the Jeannies and the Elis of the world, who are probably off somewhere right now feeling aggrieved, sometimes can’t be helped.

León used to claim that I saved his life, even as my experience with him left me licking the stab wounds for years. I let Jeannie tear me down mercilessly without even putting up a hand, despite the cruel words I could have thrown in her face like acid. Somehow it’s always me who winds up in the worst sort of pain, regardless of whether I did the “right” thing. I wonder if I shouldn’t do the crime, once in a while, if I’m going to do the time.

Bold words from a coward. No matter how much Dan may like me, he has a nice, comfortable life he probably likes a whole lot better. I’m not the woman men want to run away with, anyway; I’m the one who gets left behind without a backward look. I’m Jen, not Angelina. Or is that just what I believe?

**

But here’s an interesting exercise: read my dream again, just as it happened, and ask – what if the bride is actually me?

I’ll share a favorite scene from Chapter One, set during the Becker family’s first summer vacation dinner at the pensione (inexpensive rooming house) in Paraggi, Italy. Mom is in the middle of saying a typical (i.e. very long) grace.

**

In my heart I said, “Please, oh please, don’t let Lucrezia come to our table to ask if we want wine with dinner while Mom is praying!”

Lucrezia was the owner’s daughter. When she cleaned the rooms with her mother they both wore blue housecoats over their day clothes. At night she was the pensione’s waitress. She wore a white apron over her black pleated skirt. Her starched apron strings hung down to the hemline behind. Lucrezia wore her silver crucifix outside of her white blouse when she served us our dinner. It made her look very Roman Catholic.

Lucrezia was standing at our table. “Vino? Rosso–? Bianco–?” she said.

“Please, Lord!” I prayed.

Mom kept right on praying.

“Vino?”

Couldn’t she see we were praying? Would Mom interrupt the prayer and look up?

“We thank Thee for this food and we pray for those who live and work in this pensione that they might come to know Thee as their personal Savior…”

“Vino?”

Mom opened her eyes, looked up sorrowfully, blinked as her eyes adjusted to the light, then smiled ruefully at Lucrezia. Poor girl, she didn’t know the Lord. In fact, here we were praying, and she didn’t even wait until we were done. Probably she didn’t even notice. I guess she thought we were staring at our food while Mom talked to herself with her eyes shut. We had pity for Lucrezia and all the unsaved Italians. Roman Catholics thought they knew the Lord, but they worshipped Mary, not Jesus; they did not trust Him as their personal Savior but tried to merit salvation by works. I knew they were lost, but, just the same, I wished we didn’t have to pray in front of them.

“Vino?” Lucrezia was starting to really wonder what was going on. She tried English. “Wine? Red…White…Yes?” She smiled. Mom smiled too. Mom’s smile was full of compassion.

“No, Lucrezia, no, we won’t be having any alcohol to drink.”

“No wine.”

“No, thank you, we’re Christians, just some water please.”

“Acqua minerale?”

“No, just natural water…acqua naturale.”

It was Lucrezia’s turn to look sorrowful and to smile wistfully. Mom took her smile to be an expression of longing to know the Truth. I knew Lucrezia just felt sorry for people who drank tepid tap water at dinner when a hundred and fifty lira would buy a bottle of Chianti or Orvieto.

When Lucrezia walked away, we bowed our heads to finish our interrupted prayer. “And, Lord, we pray for dear little Lucrezia. We pray that You will give one of us an opportunity to share Your love with her and an opportunity to witness to her. In Jesus’ precious name we pray. Amen.”

I love how Calvin’s mother says “we’re Christians,” in characteristic evangelical insider way, like they and only they own the word — as if “you unsaved pagan Catholics obviously don’t know anything about it.” Schaeffer nails it.

**

I may never accept Jesus as my personal Savior, but I’ve found a Salvador.

Well, Salvador is his name, anyway…a sweet, round, 37-year-old Mexicano divorced father of two who works for a Spanish language network and broadcasts our baseball games on the radio en Español. We met via a free online dating site. I’m not at all sure he’s The One — I’m kind of disinclined to think so — but he possesses just the sort of crazy creative and risk-taking mindset that’s generally been missing among my circle of close friends and associates. Only Meg Ferris, that globetrotting writing coach who showed up at my yard sale last year, hatches anything like the sort of “harebrained” schemes Salvador comes up with — and makes work. This is a man who got himself an interview with George Lucas’s creative team in Los Angeles simply by setting up an attention-grabbing Web site.

He claims to have no expectations about us, and I believe he’s sincere. “Perhaps I am here to help you now,” he said at our lunch meeting, “and then, someday, you will have an answer I need.” Salvador was raised Catholic but has become enamored of Buddhism and Eastern spirituality. He teaches martial arts to kids in his spare time. (I can almost imagine him punctuating his sage observations with “young grasshopper.”)

I’m glad, at any rate, to have found a new friend with his breed of unrepentant cojones. Wasn’t I just saying I had no idea how to break out of the box?

**

A separate foray into the online dating world, this time for a Match.com free trial, has yielded equally interesting results. A gentleman my age, whose photo and profile I had skipped right over while perusing my daily matches, sent me a message. It was so warm, witty, and complimentary, I felt compelled to respond. But first I clicked on his profile to get a better look.

What I read there got me a little scared.

Not creepy scared, but scared in a way that Jason’s and Salvador’s and some of the other guys’ profiles hadn’t, because they essentially gave me a list of interests and what-I’m-looking-fors that more or less fit me or didn’t. (Online dating thus far has been like looking through a catalog and picking out the style and color that suits me best. The list approach, again.)

William’s profile struck a different chord. And not because of his vocabulary or his writing skills, which were excellent. Not because he was a law student focusing on international human rights law. Not because he was nice-looking in a supporting-actor kind of way, or because he’d rather watch a foreign film than climb a fourteener. What came through his carefully chosen words was a good-humored generosity, authenticity, and lack of ego. Here was an educated man who didn’t take himself so deadly seriously, who admitted to not having all the answers or all the confidence in the world, and who felt a strong sense of responsibility toward (and interconnectedness with) other human beings. His sense of humor was not unlike my own. (My best friend of twenty-three years, listening to me read his “In My Own Words” section, exclaimed, “But that’s you!”) I wish I could paraphrase a sentence or two for you here, but he took down his profile when his paid month expired.

After several rounds of increasingly personal email exchanges, William and I chatted amiably on the phone for over an hour. We have yet to meet. He’s leaving for Nigeria on a school-related mission next week and will be gone for three weeks.

I’m almost too freaked out to meet him, to tell you the truth.

Like me, he has deeply conservative parents, who hail from the same state as my mom. And Sam. His trip has become somewhat controversial: the faculty advisor who backed him for this Nigeria project just got fired. (Apparently the University doesn’t want its law students inserting themselves into the affairs of third world countries.) I’m inspired and humbled by his humanitarian passion and commitment, which goes way beyond the often ineffectual rallying and canvassing that wonky political progressives like Eli and I do on weekends, however well-intentioned. Talk about walking the talk.

I think: could he be…? Do I deserve…? I don’t dare finish the sentence.

Suddenly I’m not so sure I’m ready for prime time.

**

On the same day that I read William’s first, flirty message, a yoga friend posts a call on Facebook for interested parties who might like to get coached for free in the “Calling In The One” process. Rebecca has just finished Katherine Woodward Thomas’s relationship-coach training, and some of her friends in the program need “practicum” guinea pigs with whom to complete their certification.

Within 24 hours of responding to Rebecca, I am talking with Beth, a fledgling “Calling In The One” coach in California. Just like that. And for free.

You tell me that’s not one hell of a coincidence, amigos.

After our introductory phone session, however, I find myself awash in ambivalence.

**

At work, a tall, slim young trainee with jet-black hair and tattoo “sleeves” is looking at me. I noticed him his very first day: he resembles a young “Camelot”-era Robert Goulet, at his peak of tastiness, when they were saying he might be the next Elvis, before the cheeseball ’70s moustache and the Greatest Hits 8-tracks. I meet his gaze; he holds it for a provocative moment with his deep-set brown eyes, then looks away. I flush. We exchange furtive glances throughout the shift. One of us seems always to be sneaking a peek at the other through the cheerful, hefty matron sitting between us.

Suddenly the call center seems full of delectable young men again. A lean but muscular half-Asian with creme-caramel skin and huge hazel eyes whose name is really Sam (honestly!) makes me forget to breathe when he goes out of his way to introduce himself in the parking lot. He’s no taller than I am, but he has the torso of Apollo and the face of a Filipino matinee idol. Mama Maria.

I suppose there have been a few lovelies around in the past few months, but these latest afternoon delights are actually giving an eye to this tired old broad. Why, I have no idea. I think I look kind of fat and mousy at the moment. Go figure.

But it all comes surging back, all the forgotten intoxication and hunger. In between calls, somewhere in my graphic imagination, I’m nuzzling the tender brown nape of Apollo’s neck and running my fingers all over his taut, smooth, inconspicuously magnificent body. I’m pulling Young Robert down the stairwell to G3, the parking level where no one ever goes on foot, and pushing him up against the wall, thrusting my tongue between his lips, pressing into him. I get lightheaded with lust; my knees weaken. Not enough blood is getting to my brain or my feet, and…hello, may I please speak with Jane Smith?

**

I talk things out with Jeannie, my closest girlfriend in town. I’m beating myself up and working myself into a state of despair for being “superficial” and apparently losing my newly acquired, less visually-oriented perspective. I don’t have any impulse whatsoever to drag sweet, eager, decidedly stout Salvador, reeking of cologne (I hate cologne), down a stairwell, as swell as he is and as much as he seems to dig me.

I tell Jeannie that I don’t expect the guys who inspire lust in me to be the same ones who are good for me. Probably quite the opposite. But now I’m not sure I’m ready or willing to give up the hunger.

Jeannie, a counselor by trade, gently suggests that it doesn’t have to be an either/or proposition. If I’m not turned on by someone, I shouldn’t force myself just on principle. Sam #1 didn’t elicit from me the same Greek-god comparisons as Sam #2, but we still had an intense, undeniable, potently pheremonal chemistry that made me want to eat him alive. With a spoon. Every day, if possible.

Who says you can’t love the right guy AND feel “the hunger?” she muses.

I start to feel a little more hopeful.

I think it’s great that you’re so sexual, adds Jeannie. I love that about you. Maybe what you need right now is to have a fling. Maybe you want to have a little sumpin’-sumpin’ with one of these youngsters before you get serious and look for something real. Have you talked to Beth about these feelings?

Of course I haven’t. Not yet. It may have been our decision to work together, after all, and the renewed prospect of successfully “Calling In The One,” that triggered this little midlife crisis.

**.

I struggle to complete my “homework” — not for Beth, but for Salvador. His questions for me are: what, exactly, do I want to write? And where do I want to be?

Finally I email him an answer. I don’t know! Frank Schaeffer makes me want to write a novel. But I’m not even sure I can do it; I’ve never managed to write a sustained work of fiction. (Of course, at the time, neither had Schaeffer.) I know I can do something like a personal travelogue competently and love it, and I can meet deadlines when I’m doing expository-type writing, so there’s that…but do I want to live abroad, or just travel? Where on earth do I belong?

“Don’t worry, just be patient, even a tree can’t speed up to grow,” he writes back. “Step by step. You need to relax, be quiet so you can start listening.”

Probably excellent advice all around.

**

My assignment from Beth has me stymied as well. I’m supposed to set an “anchoring” intention for love, in my own words. And answer the question: who would I need to be, to call in the love I desire?

All that comes to mind now, for the latter question, is: Someone else!

Jeannie, who dearly loves me and always sees the absolute best in me (you’re brilliant, you’re beautiful, you’re hilarious, et cetera), genuinely believes that these mouth-watering boys are a viable, if temporary, option, but you and I know that I’m only a legend in my own mind. When it comes to initiating anything with anyone who inspires that kind of unbridled lust, I’ve historically managed to project all of the allure of a skunk at a picnic. Out of dozens of fantasy partners, I’ve managed to snag only two or three (Lord only knows how) and pull them over into the reality of my bedroom.

The clincher of course is that the fantasies — to be brutally honest now — have nearly always proven to be better than the reality. Not to diss anybody, but just because something looks like a Porsche doesn’t mean it drives like one. When your nose is pushed up against the glass like the Little Match Girl, however, whatever’s going on inside is an imagined paradise. In the mating dance I’ve generally been a wallflower with two left feet, so I’m prone to thinking I’m going to miss something somewhere (the greener-grass syndrome) no matter what.

But the fevered imaginations of those who, like me, live too much in their heads can really short-circuit actual experience. (Case in point: the strange phenomenon of fans wanting to literally check out of life on Earth and go live in James Cameron’s Avatar universe.) Not everything is what it appears to be. Jeannie, a fellow vegetarian who makes a lot more money than I do, likes to take us out to the kind of candlelit restaurants that have white tablecloths and $20 entrees, where we’re routinely disappointed by the risotto al funghi. Conversely, we’ll sometimes wind up at a tiny storefront with plastic flowers on the table in a dingy strip mall on one of the ugliest thoroughfares in town, and slurp the best coconut curry soup anyone has ever concocted for a mere $4.95.

If there have been any pleasant surprises along the road of amore, it’s how the physical intimacy with Sam just kept improving. I went from not being sure I wanted to get him naked to wanting to keep him that way all the time.

So maybe what I need to do first and foremost is to let go of the stubborn and thoroughly unfounded belief that I understand anything at all about how this mating business works, and embrace my own unknowing.

Maybe “who I need to be” is just someone with a beginner’s mind.

I did express trepidation to my friends, over and over again, that the longer I stayed here, not following my intention to live abroad, the more momentum I would lose, and the more likely it would be that I would become embroiled in some new drama on the local level that would suck up all of my energy and motivation. I wasn’t wrong. Candy-loving AlienBaby got a job working alongside some tasty boys, and wound up, once again, in a metaphorical Shanghai.

**

But there’s more to it than that. I realized something earlier this week when my cannabis-clouded friend was unusually clear-headed: there is something entirely palpable between us. I know that he has strong feelings toward me. I can see it; I can feel it. For my part, I simply soaked up that life-giving energy while it was present, adoring him right back (which wasn’t hard, as he really is fricking adorable). I’m glad I made the most of our time then, however, because he disappeared into a bleary-eyed fog the next day, before literally disappearing.

Within this certainty, I’m much more comfortable extrapolating that, as he never planned on having these feelings toward me, he’s not okay with them…or at least a significant part of him isn’t. At the risk of seeming like I’ve gone from one extreme (of severe self-deprecation) to the other (of insufferable conceit), I think the problem isn’t that Rick doesn’t want or care about me. The problem is that he wants and cares about me a lot more than he wants to want or care about me. And that is a problem. Just ask Psyche. It’s the age-old story…déjà vu all over again.

I was a little afraid, myself, at the outset; I felt vulnerable, overwhelmed by his radical differences in habits and lifestyle, and ambivalent about his appearance. But one of the most poignant things about this young man is that he has — throughout so many of the experiences that make men hard (and not in a good way) — retained a certain childlike wonder about the world, and an open, curious, friendly attitude toward other people. I feel as if I’ve had the rare privilege to have touched a heart that’s known far less love than it deserves, and is far less armored than one might expect. How could I not love this person, regardless of the package he came in? Sure, I may think he’s the most gorgeous thing alive now — but my faithful readers know he was not what I had in mind. And there were so many reasons for it not to work on any level. In spite of all that, when the moment came for me, I surrendered.

For a man, however, that kind of surrender may mean intolerable weakness, or public humiliation in the ignoble tradition of the hand-wringing Mark Sanfords of the world. The seductress Delilah cut Samson’s hair and robbed him of his strength; every worldly warrior since has been wary of her. She tied you to a kitchen chair/and she broke your throne/and she cut your hair/and from your lips she drew the Hallelujah, wrote legendary songwriter Leonard Cohen, a man who could easily be described by detractors as “whipped” and who actively savors that kind of surrender.

I mean Rick no harm — I mean him anything but harm (and I love those long black waves of his) — but the argument could be made that he’s better off not getting mixed up with me, a substantially older woman intending to move overseas. (I do have the occasional thought that he could always come along, as he wants to see the world.) Maybe it was better for James not to get mixed up with me, either. I don’t know. It’s just too bad if what was better for them didn’t involve me getting a little sumpin-sumpin.

Anyhow, without further ado, here are my reflections on that not completely dissimilar episode.

______________

PART FIVE: LEAVING OZ

I have stolen something from Centro d’Ompio.

A virtually useless item, cheesy-looking, and broken to boot, it has no value to anyone but me. It’s a Christmas mug with a broken handle. Most people drink their tea and coffee from glasses up at Centro; only Bisetti has mugs. But there was a certain working guest who absolutely had to take his tea in a mug, and this particular mug somehow found its way up the mountain, where it dwelt in a secret hiding place near the dishroom. And now I have taken it. HA.

Maybe it’s extremely third grade of me, but nevertheless. It’s all I have. No shirts no shoes no jackets no blues, to borrow from the old Mel Etheridge song “No Souvenirs.” I never even got a picture of the bloke.

*

Here’s one for the May You Live In Interesting Times file: I got an email from my mother, who has no idea what’s really been going on. As you may recall, she and my father are ultraconservative born-again Christians. She told me that they have been praying I’ll have “a very memorable experience” here. You can imagine the laugh that one gave me. Be careful what you wish for, Ma.

There were some definite bright spots my last week. Last Saturday night we had a barbecue at Bisetti. Marjorie and I were drinking a potent dark rum with coke; she got “leathered” and fell out of the hammock, to everyone’s amusement. Eddie, the newest working guest, a student in international relations from Long Island who resembles the young Daniel Johnston (not that that may mean much to most of you), is now Finn’s roommate. He’s a funny kid, and he and Finn get along extraordinarily well. That night Cosmo (in typical Cosmo fashion) had called Eddie “Herman” by mistake, and Finn was especially tickled because “Her Mann” in German means “mister man.” Finn and Eddie started bantering back and forth drunkenly…Finn harassed his roommate about his tendency to snore, and Eddie countered by accusing Finn of yodeling in his sleep. Somehow or other, the two of them eventually decided that they should be in a band together called “Herman and the Yordeling Snodelers.” Maybe you had to be there, but the two of them made me laugh harder than I have since…well, you know. I was definitely inebriated, myself, but it was the first time I’d had such knee-slapping fun since before my escape to Orta.

Eddie’s got the New Yorker sarcasm that never fails to crack me up, but I’ve been most grateful for the arrival of Finn. The man is a blessing, like sunlight — his mere presence can make the difference in the tone of your day. He fixes you with these serene green eyes as clear and pure as glacier water, and grins widely before erupting into uninhibited laughter that jumps two octaves. Such unabashed, high-pitched giggling from a man betrays a striking cultural difference; Centro’s Swiss groundskeeper Gerhard has a similar unselfconscious titter. American (and English) men wouldn’t dare sound so “girly,” but truth be told, it’s completely infectious, and a joy to be around.

Finn’s girlfriend will be arriving at Centro on the day I leave Italy, and I regret not being able to meet her. She is undoubtedly an amazing person. Sitting beside Finn at lunch and watching him talk, I considered what an incredibly lucky woman she is. Socrates would have pronounced Finn kalos, a word meaning both beautiful and good (of the highest kind).

One day at the bar I told him, “We should clone you, and repopulate the world.”

His response was to giggle happily and to respond in his incomparable Viennese accent, “But who then would there be, to love Finn?”

*

We were talking about attachment at one point. He’s definitely on the side of the yogis and Buddhists, and believes that we cause ourselves unwanted suffering by clinging to our experiences. He never takes photographs for this reason. This is one way in which we differ, although I couldn’t precisely articulate my disagreement at the time. But while sweeping bamboo leaves from the gravel path outside Centro, I thought of the famous Auschwitz survivor Viktor Frankl, who founded the school of logotherapy. In Frankl’s view of the world, there is no doing away with suffering — what is important is the meaning we derive from it.

I realized then that I don’t believe it’s necessary, or even desirable, to try to banish suffering from our lives – it seems, to me anyway, to be an attempt to escape our inescapable humanness, much like what those Western White Males were trying to do in subjugating or denigrating the Feminine. What I find that I need to do instead, more than anything, is to make some sort of sense of what happens.

I suppose that’s why I started writing in the first place, and telling these stories. Every culture on Earth has its stories and its storytellers.

This is one thing that appears to be universally human.

*

Hanna and Alessandro, perhaps intuiting that I would want to hear them (there have been no open discussions of what happened), shared some James stories with me. Alessandro told me about their trip to Florence together early on, where they enjoyed bloody, juicy steaks (very welcome after Centro’s strict vegetarian fare) and spent the evening talking with a couple from one of the Dakotas. The man was a fan of British television, and he and James apparently had a fantastic time together. Alessandro said he’d never seen James laugh so much. “He seemed really happy that night.”

Hanna told me about going to the nearby Ameno blues festival with James and Robert. Robert told the ticket booth that James was a journalist from Rolling Stone magazine, and that he was the photographer. Hanna, of course, was a groupie. Unbelievably, the gullible staffperson bought this shameless bullshit story and let them all in, free of charge.

*

Cosmo left on Monday, and I forgot to say goodbye.

Cosmo was frequently unintentionally, side-splittingly funny with his misunderstandings and mangled versions of English expressions.  He was an offbeat character to begin with, having gone through younger incarnations as a hippie and a Rastafarian; earlier this month he even visited an Aquarian community. James thought he was a total flake, naturally — when Cosmo and Mila were having problems in the kitchen, he said “Mila doesn’t seem like one who suffers fools gladly” — but I got a big kick out of him. And he coined my favorite catchphrase of all. One night when I broke a beer glass in the dishroom (much to Robert’s dismay), Cosmo came in, surveyed the mess, and pronounced sagely, “Shits happen.”

He didn’t understand my ensuing hilarity, but at appropriate moments thereafter, I would turn to Eddie (who had been my dishwashing partner) and repeat Cosmo’s wise words.

Christian and Marjorie left Monday as well. On their last night, I found out from Marjorie her actual age, which is thirty-seven. I couldn’t believe it. She’s almost twice Christian’s age. She could be his mom, for crying out loud. But that didn’t stop them from embarking on their little foreign affair.

Now I’m truly envious. Some people I know have trouble with a decade.

Alessandro stayed another day, and left at five in the morning by taxi. I didn’t get to say goodbye to him, either (though I imagine we’ll be in future contact). The night before, Gina was in Bisetti again, and I just had to get out of there and away from her. The last time I saw Alessandro, he was sitting beside her on the stairs. Her shiny black curtain of hair fell over one shoulder as she smiled up at him, almost leaning in to him. I wondered if she meant to give him a similar sendoff, the incorrigible little puttana. In Alessandro’s case, I actually hope she did. He could seriously use the boost.

As long as it didn’t come with a rash.

Me-ow.

*

On my last night at Centro, the group on retreat known as “The Libido Group,” who had been doing primal dances in the pavillion all week, had their going-away party. It became my going-away party, too. Robert played his best dance music, and I got decidedly drunk on a bottle of wine. Elke, Bettina, Finn, Eddie and I all danced to Marvin Gaye and Tom Jones. I even let a soused Hanna cuddle me and tell me I was “so cute.” She confessed drunkenly that she and Robert have been carrying on all this time (which everyone knew anyway), but my fifty bucks says she’ll be living with another woman before she’s thirty.

After most of the staff and working guests had gone, things got kind of wild. Juanita, one of the retreat-goers, a sprite-like African-American woman from Santa Barbara, got up on the bar with a slim blond German man, a German woman named Marta (who can’t be a day under forty-seven, but has a firmer body than I ever will) and a cute Indian guy named Ajit, and started dancing. Marta was the first one to take off her pants, and the others followed suit (or un-suit, as the case may be). Soon they were all topless, and by the end of Tom Jones’s cover of “You Can Leave Your Hat On,” they were all as naked as the day they were born. Robert had offered me a toke of some quality weed earlier, which I had, for once, smoked, so the entire thing felt completely surreal. And yet it wasn’t that sensational once you got used to it. Yeah, naked people. Dancing. Hey, this is Europe — big deal.

*

Finn was up early the next morning, and made me a cup of Earl Grey tea. I sat on the smokers’ porch with him eating cornflakes as some of the others roused themselves and started moving about. Eddie, Hanna, Mila, and Elke all came to hug me goodbye. Finn carried my luggage to the car and gave me a long, tight squeeze and his card. It was like he was kinda attached to me, or something.

Bettina drove me down to Pettenasco station. The train was twenty minutes late, and the waiting and waiting was a déjà vu. I felt nostalgic, there on another bright Italian morning, at that abandoned stazione. I knew I would never step in that river again. It was bittersweet as I hugged Bettina goodbye.

I had to change trains at Novara, on the way to Milan. There was so little time between trains, I wasn’t able to buy as much as a postcard. I wish I had gotten at least one, to commemorate the place where I was so beside myself with joy, if only for a day. Novara. Mia Novara. I don’t have any photos, and I disagree with Finn about them. I want to remember the place – how it was, and what it looked like, that one summer when I was thirty-eight and met that beautiful young Englishman in Pettenasco, the one who accidentally stole my heart. “It all goes by so fast,” I tried to explain to him, that long night in Bisetti’s kitchen. Ten years are nothing. When I come back here — if I ever do — I may have blue hair and dentures, and romance of any kind may be a distant memory.

Bettina and Finn both expressed the opinion that Mezza Coda chose her “time” because she was incredibly happy. Several of us were picking her up and cuddling her on a regular basis, Finn had taken to feeding her and keeping the other cats away until she’d finished, and Padma had gently cleaned her dirty fur on the day that she disappeared. According to them, the little kitty more or less said to herself, “It doesn’t get any better than this,” and gave up the ghost. It seems like a feasible theory. I wonder: is it possible for us two-legged mammals?

I mean, think about it. I don’t know about you, but if I could choose, I’d prefer to throw in the towel after a day like Novara.

The problem is, how do we know when we’re done?

*

Before I left the U.S., life seemed better than ever. I was (finally) focused, hopeful, living with intention, cultivating new and thoroughly healthy habits, feeling like I was getting somewhere. I started to experience a sense of trepidation (and some outright anxiety) about my Italy trip at some point, as if it were a tangent, or worse, something that might derail my fine progress, change everything that was good.

In a way, I turned out to be absolutely right. I mean, here I am, slacking off on my yoga and meditation practices, drinking more than I have in the last six months together, depressed, a bit lost, a tad hateful even.

Would I take it all back?  That’s the million dollar question.

Probably not.

Sometimes you live with intention, and sometimes life just grabs you by the collar and shoves you in the boat and takes you to Shanghai.

I actively resisted going. I did. I remember trying hard to keep my pulse down, that one day early on, when the cute English guy flipped up his shirt to show me what was apparently a newly flat and muscular stomach (he was so proud of the recent loss of his “loov handles”). That trash-talking rascal could look so inexplicably hot in a dishwashing apron, showing me how to turn the glasses over to let them evaporate, and giving me hysterics all the while. Jesus, there was just no way I could have ever helped myself. I was doomed, totally doomed, from day one. And secretly so thrilled, later, when he took to calling me “loov,” an endearment English women usually take as insufferably patronizing, like being called “honey” by your male boss. No matter. It made me unbelievably happy, James calling me this, with a tone of affection behind it. Almost as if he meant it.

Riding from Novara to Milano on the train, I had time to contemplate how often I’ve found that the old stereotypes are a lot of bollocks, and that it’s straight men who are frequently constrained by some kind of internal chastity belt. Put simply, you can’t get into both their hearts and their pants. At least not in that order.

My roommate Elke, as it turned out, understood a lot more that one might have thought about what happened, despite the language barrier. She had seen everything. She knew without my having to tell her, and I have to say I was gratified that she had only distaste – grimacing and shaking her head – for Gina. “Sometimes the men, they just want the sex,” she offered tentatively.

I had to laugh at this. That’s exactly where I got myself into trouble. It was me who wanted the sex, Elke dear.

It was my fault, in a way. I went and got greedy. Coming back from Novara, I experienced a kind of bliss, simply being there with James while he dozed. We were in the process of developing a quite wonderful bond, but I was the one who started to want more. I relished that growing ache of lust, that hunger that makes you weak with anticipation and need. It’s a bit addictive, no?  I thought I could have his warm body as well as his warm regard. But with men like James, you just can’t have both. I’ll never forget his nervous laugh when I told him outright that I wanted him — how young he looked all of a sudden, and how uncertain. It was as if I had betrayed him by changing the rules in the middle of the game. How dare I, indeed. First I make him start to give a fook about me, and then I want to touch his willy. Dirty play, that.

But by the end I didn’t even need it. I just wanted him to know how much I cared for him, which was the most unforgivable sin of all.

It amazes me, in retrospect, how little time it took to fall so hard and to have it end so abruptly. At the risk of exposing my abject geekiness — I feel like Jean-Luc Picard in that episode of “Star Trek” where he lives out an entire accelerated lifetime in another dimension, while unconscious for only fifteen minutes on his ship. Centro d’Ompio has been like that other dimension, and returning home will be like waking up. This has all been an episode in a parallel universe.  Or maybe a technicolor dream I had, after getting smacked on the head during a tornado.

*

But now I’m in Rome, and I’ve been walking all over town looking at all manner of buildings and eating all manner of food. I’ll try hard to make number six about my final aventuras in the citti d’Italia, since I know you’re probably getting weary of hearing me go on and on about my beautiful lost limey bastard. You know how I am, though. Such ruminations are part of the package. And besides, I never planned on any of it.

You know how it goes. Shits happen.

Could it be a feeling of control over the situation? I wonder, because of how negatively many men have reacted to my desire made explicit, and because the ones I’ve had most success with sexually were either former or current habitual drug users who repeatedly sought out a certain kind of surrender. (Now there’s a sentence my mother would love.)

This is just one more reason why I’m grateful for my weed-redolent young friend Rick, actually. He’s an outsider in many ways already, and he responds unconventionally to my unconventional talk. Our wildly divergent habits make spending time together a challenge, but we’re still in the midst of a very honest conversation, with a great deal of genuine regard on both sides.

“Do you love him?” asked my coach friend last week. “Yeah, a little,” I answered with a sheepish grin. I’m surprised how much this unlikely character has come to mean to me in so short a time. He scares me a little, but I think I scare him too. Who knows what will happen next? He has resolved to at least refrain from drinking around me; I’ve disclosed how intense my sexual feelings for him have become. It may not be long before we act on them…I feel vaguely like Thelma in Thelma and Louise, hooking up with this funny, sexy young outlaw (and while Rick is a far cry from Brad Pitt, as far as I’m concerned he is rapidly becoming the Sexiest Man Alive). Then sometimes I feel like I’m in the middle of Say Anything with the hilarious and sincere underachiever Lloyd Dobler, while at still other times I think I’ve wound up in Buffalo ‘66 with a volatile but heartbreaking Billy Brown.

Yes, Rick is definitely lovable. And yet I don’t get the impression that he’s received a great deal of love thus far in life. I don’t mind giving him mine. I may have to stay mindful of my boundaries and keep my expectations at a minimum, but so far I’ve had almost unprecedented success with speaking my mind (and heart), a need of mine that seems to typically cost me relationship. Rick actually seems to appreciate that level of candor. For this alone, the endeavor has been worth the trouble.

But now I’ll give you what will likely be the last installment of my Italy diary, due to low hits and nearly nonexistent comments. I’m afraid I’ve killed my blog!!! What happened over in Italy with James seems entirely relevant, however, because it’s a perfect example of how my habits have worked so perfectly against me, at least with the majority of men I’ve known (Sonny excepted). I really was crazy about James. I sensed that he felt something similar. But I was left, as usual, swinging in the wind ass-out for confronting the situation the way I did.

__________

PART THREE: MORE THAN THIS

So. I’m finally over the raging cold I had for over a week, thanks to the hot days, cool nights, and the drinking of wine on those cool nights that makes one unaware that one is getting overly cool oneself. Fortunately Elke, my gracious German roommate, who speaks only slightly more English than I do German, brought along some homeopathic remedies, which she generously shared. Günter prescribed fresh ginger, which I took in hot water with lemon and honey. What would I do without the Germans? Ah, mein annen. (My ancestors.) I love to listen to them talking to each other in that singularly expectorating way, with all those patched-together words comprised of shorter words. Elke is delighted that my catchphrase has become Alles ist gut. It’s all good.

This cold kept me from going on a field trip with the others last Saturday. All the paying guests were gone, and the working guests went with some of the staff to Lago Maggiore, the big lake nearby that’s much better known than our little Lago D’Orta. Everyone raved about how lovely it was and what great gelato they had, but, as Bettina is fond of saying in English — what to do? I slept most of the day away. James came to find me in the morning, wondering loudly outside my door where that lazy American might be. When he poked his head in, I croaked from under my quilt that I wasn’t going to make it. He seemed genuinely disappointed.

Did I mention that I managed to fall madly, utterly in love with James?

I really didn’t come to Italy for that. No, really, I didn’t. I know people do, but I didn’t. The whole thing was completely unintentional.

You may have noticed that I was well on my way by the last episode. Alessandro, dear to me as he is, may as well be my actual nephew in his childlike and almost scandalous innocence. I’ve never met a young man in his twenties who was so utterly guileless and so oblivous to his own best attributes. You’d think his family had kept him in a shed in back of the house all these years. With Alessandro, what you see is what you get. Which should actually recommend him…there’s a lot to be said for someone whose thoughts flow unhampered to his mouth. If he thinks I’m a worthless piece of shit, he says “I’m a worthless piece of shit.” He doesn’t have to act it out so that you’ll believe it too.

But back to the matter at hand. I’ve read that an atom has recently been photographed as being in two places at once, so I imagine it’s not a theoretical impossibility for the human heart, either.

Life at Centro and Bisetti is definitely exceptional and intense, like summer camp in the land of Oz. You spend a great deal of time talking with your working guest comrades in this circumscribed but technicolor environment, amid green mountains and peacocks. Being a stranger in a strange land is a vulnerable position, and can make you more open more quickly than you might have been at home. My joke with James was that he and Alessandro were my Scarecrow and Tin Man. (I’ll leave it up to you to determine which is which. I suppose it’s not the nicest joke.) I recognize that this is all in fact like a dream, that I will probably never see any of these people again, and that my time here is precious. Ever since my little meltdown on the kitchen steps, I’ve held nothing back. What’s the point? I’m either fully here or I may as well not be here. Which means that I’ll also fully grieve leaving, along with all the departures and necessary losses that happen before.

James happens to be the first loss.

In “Lost in Translation,” a film James and I both loved, there is a poignant scene where Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson are out singing karaoke with some Japanese acquaintances. Murray’s character gazes at Johansson as he sings the words to Roxy Music’s haunting “More Than This.” More than this/there is nothing/more than this. These two English-speaking characters, afloat in a foreign land, separated by age and circumstance, act out a unique and unconsummated love story, and in that particular scene their unspoken yearning is palpable. At the time, it gave me goosebumps.

**

Obviously, it wasn’t difficult to be charmed by someone who has Denis Leary’s wicked sense of humor (as well as his potty mouth) and resembles Ewan MacGregor, even if I never considered Ewan my type (I’m more of a Johnny Depp girl). James and I spent so much time together, much of it involving me laughing uncontrollably, that I’m certain all of the other working guests thought I was getting colonized by the Empire. Eventually I had to put forth that possibility myself, seeing as I was technically bound by nothing at home other than the one-sided loyalty of my own heart. I had nothing more serious in mind than some good old-fashioned fooling around, because the cheeky limey was just so fookin irresistible, and the chemistry was so potent…

But as soon as I made the suggestion, I hit a wall.

Apparently James files women into two categories: viable relationship material, and shit. Actually, he called them one-night stand types, but really, they’re worthless. They must be reasonably hot, fairly stupid, and fail to amount to more to him than a stain on his shirt. I told him that I don’t really have categories anymore, I have priorities, and that beauty and joy have become more important to me than self-protection or sure things.

Thus began a two or three hour conversation in Bisetti’s kitchen, with James drinking more and more (he’s a real Englishman all right, I can’t believe how much he can hold). I’m sure he divulged more that night than he had intended. Essentially, without going into too much detail, I heard this young man’s court case against himself. He seemed to want very much to convince me that he was a sick, miserable, cold-hearted bastard, but all he did was convince me of the depth of his despair and the reality of his suffering. (Fathers and teachers, wrote Dostoevsky’s character Father Zossima, I ponder: what is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.)

As Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh observes, the more we understand such things about someone, the more deeply we begin to love him. So James’s tactic backfired quite spectacularly. What he said didn’t scare me; it didn’t suck me in; it didn’t shake my faith in the beauty of life, or even in the beauty of James. It was too familiar. I had been here before. Dostoevsky had distilled all of this anguish into the character of the Underground Man, and I had known this man. I had loved this man. I had even, in a sense, been this man. I’ll call his malady the Straight White Western Male Sickness Unto Death: a classic and distinctly macho nihilism communicated by the likes of Friedrich Nietszche, Blaise Pascal, Albert Camus, Ernest Hemingway, and more contemporary writers like Chuck Palahniuk and Norman Mailer. It’s what happens when you prescribe for yourself the most impossible and inhuman precepts for attaining manhood, and utterly reject everything that smacks of what Jung characterized as the Eternal Feminine. For the more spiritually oriented, what you might call the Source, the Great Mother, the God who is Love. In other words, everything in life that makes tenderness and connection possible.

If you cut yourself off like this, banishing half of your humanity, it will not only make your soul sick, you may wind up putting a gun in your mouth. James seems to see Hemingway as an ideal role model. Certainly, the man could write, but he’s an awfully shitty role model. (A man would be much better off looking up to someone like Nelson Mandela. Dignity, strength, courage, compassion…now that guy’s got class.)

To put it another way, if James were drowning (and I dare say he is, in several litres of alcohol every night) and the Feminine were a life preserver, he’d go under the waves yelling “Fook off, ya pussy shit, and let me die like a mahn!”

The next morning as I hiked up the mountainside to Centro, I felt full to overflowing with a love and a joy I wished I could bottle and pour directly into James’s beer. When did I cease to be an Underground Woman myself, and surface into the light of day? How did it happen, and how could I explain it? I thought of Esther, a wonderful yoga teacher I know who is fond of saying “It’s all grace,” and I felt as if I’d been bodily lifted from misery by unseen hands. I began to sing the chorus of “Amazing Grace” as I walked, emotion making my voice crack.

When I saw him at lunchtime, I was amazed that he was still talking to me. I fully expected him to despise me out of shame, but over the course of the day he warmed up even more. After dinner, at Bisetti, a group of us watched “What the Bleep Do We Know,” which, one has to admit (whatever one’s orientation toward that goofy Ramtha woman) has some compelling things to say about the way we talk to ourselves. James, having smoked some weed with his alcohol, seemed affected (surprisingly, calling the film “brilliant”), and I wondered if any of these things would stick.

(Editorial note: in retrospect, I wonder what would have happened if I had slid onto the couch next to James after the movie, and taken a hit myself, and lain my arm across the back of the couch behind his neck…but hindsight is 20/20! I probably missed my only chance.)

It was the next afternoon, when he was acting strange and distant again, that I divulged that I no longer felt I needed anything from him, and that I loved him, that it was fierce and unconditional. His response was an icy “How dare you say such a thing to me,” and, of course, “fook you!”

“I thought you’d say something like that,” I replied with a resigned sigh. He smiled a little then, almost in spite of himself, musing on my choice of words and liking the use of the term “fierce.” At least the guy appreciates my diction. In a moment we were talking about something else as if we had only just been discussing the weather. (In a little while, we would go with the others to a bar in Pettenasco, and he would demonstrate the extent of his panic by immediately beginning to seduce a friend of Raffe’s.)

Ah, the dreaded L-word. Tell me, friends, what is the big fookin deal??? It should be the most natural thing in the world for human beings to say to one another, but thanks to this macho bullshit crap, it’s this outrageous declaration, laden with all manner of weighty prerequisites (in order to even utter it), and bales of shame. What happened between James and me, the sparkling rapport, the give-and-take of mirroring and response, that deeply satisfying pleasure of relatedness, it was all real, it was all true. Everyone around us felt it, the chemistry of our connection. There are witnesses, although I no longer need them in order to believe in its veracity.

**

My own father is not unlike Pascal — he filled the hole in his soul with religion, but he has little respect for anything other than the intellect. I don’t believe, like some psychoanalysts, that everyone we fall in love with is strictly some projection of our original caregivers, but there is a degree of truth to this theory. Anyone could reasonably say I have tried to win his approval in the persons of these unhappiest of men…but in that case I have also attempted to redeem him, to save him somehow. Call it pathological, but I don’t believe the attempt is without merit. James Baldwin, the passionate, gay black antithesis of the spiritually ailing Straight White Western Male, believed that only a human being can save another human being, and that we create one another’s consciousness.

Still, what struck me the other day, sitting in a ristorante in Pettenasco eating an insalata with fresh mozzarella (and keeping away from Bisetti), is that I have lately stopped courting my father by proxy — this episode has been something of a retread of old, painful ground — and that I am the one who has been redeemed. My equanimity in the face of James’s rejecting cruelty would never have been possible if an old pattern had not already been decisively broken. They say that to do the same thing over and over again, and expect a different result, is insanity…but what if you meet that one rare gentleman who can hear everything you’re saying, and not panic? It’s difficult in Western culture to encounter intelligent heterosexual men not somehow hobbled by the legacy of Hemingway. Speaking from the heart is seen as foolish (if not outrageous), and even we women are regularly shamed out of it.

But I have been redeemed: by the warm and affirmative response of a decidedly straight man who is not afraid of me, or for that matter of feeling, or connection, or the Feminine. Even if we were never together again, even if he chooses to be with someone else, or things just don’t work out, what has been done cannot be undone. I finally believe that It’s Not About Me. I am not crazy, repugnant, or fundamentally flawed. If you’re reading this, my dearest hipster daddy, let me just say this from the bottom of my heart: thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. My deja-vu experience has deepened my appreciation for you, and for what a miracle of a man you are. You think I exaggerate…but a sincere seeker, who has already been to hell and back, and who flings himself at life with an open heart and without the distortions of pride, is a much rarer thing in my experience than fanatically self-censoring, contemptuous misanthropes who won’t allow themselves the pleasure of a natural emotion. And I have known them already, known them all…

**

In the sunlit and car-free square of Orta, breathing in the aroma of what smelled like a local cousin of the linden flower and facing the magnificent medieval monastery on the island of San Giulio, I ate a cup of freshly made, creamy gelato, but after the first bite I could taste nothing but grief. It’s like what I told Alessandro that day in the square: you buy now, you pay later…but at least it works the other way around as well.

I felt that James was already gone; everything was over, it was in the past, even with him still physically present, shagging the Italian girl he had charmed the other night at the local watering hole. His room was located diagonally above mine, and late at night I could hear her giggling like a schoolgirl on dope.

With “Lost in Translation,” the audience, at least, knows how much Bill Murray’s character cares for Scarlett Johansson’s, even when he picks up the blowsy lounge singer from the hotel bar for a tawdry one-night stand. There was slightly vicious comfort in knowing that James would only “stuff” a woman he finds stupid and doesn’t respect…but listening to the whole business wasn’t something I’d wish on my worst enemy. I lay there feeling absolutely sick to my stomach, taking deep yoga breaths and trying to empty my mind. If I could have vomited, it might have brought some relief. I pretended that it was only a window on London, where he had flown already, picking up giggly blondes in dimly lit pubs. James was gone. It was time to let go, and to feel the loss of something that had been beautiful, if ephemeral as a mayfly.

Nietzsche, the proudest all-star in the Straight White Western Male Sickness Unto Death gallery, was in Orta once, with the highly educated and independent woman of letters Lou Salome. She ultimately rejected him, whereupon he promptly became despondent (and allegedly suicidal) and went off to write “Thus Spake Zarathustra.” This explains a lot to me, as far as the man’s nihilism and raging misogyny are concerned. Later Lou would become the lover and confidante of Rainer Maria Rilke, a luminous man so unlike poor Friedrich that one waggish writer called him “the world’s greatest lesbian poet.”

I ate my dinner at Leon d’Oro, the hotel where Friedrich and Lou stayed: pasta with aubergine and pomodoro in a cream sauce, accompanied by a half bottle of Valpolicella. The waiter, to my astonishment, resembled Rilke. I kid you not.

Gazing at the beautiful island of San Guilio, I paraphrased James in my head, copping his attitude. That evil harpy of a woman! How dare she have the unapologetic gall to love me, and the unmitigated temerity to say it out loud? She must be put to DEATH!!!! Wine-warm laughter bubbled up from within me as I realized the ridiculous, Pythonesque absurdity of his position. What the fook, James?

And then I thought, Good God, but I like myself. It’s taken thirty-eight years, but I honestly do. I have nothing to be ashamed of, and nothing to apologize for. I have been honorable and true with an open and loving heart.

On the long walk back to Pettenasco at sunset, I bought myself a chocolate gelato in the shop by the rotary.

It tasted delicious.

**

I made myself as scarce as possible at Bisetti until the morning of his last day. Leaving for Centro early in the morning (I had breakfast dishwashing duty) I slipped a note under his door. It explained my absence, briefly, as the unwillingness to subject myself to watching what he was doing. I loved myself too. I wished him luck and goodbye. Expecting that to be the end of it, I went about my workday in a vague funk of bereavement.

He came up to Centro at lunchtime to say goodbye to everyone. When I first saw him walking up the drive, my heart leapt into my throat. While I was back in the work area behind the kitchen, squeezing fresh orange juice, he came to shake Bruno’s hand. I didn’t expect to speak to him myself, and after he left the kitchen I let myself cry all over the oranges. I was washing the juicer parts when I heard him say my name.

I turned to see him coming at me with a politely outstetched hand, as if to bid farewell with an impersonal handshake. Seeing my wet face and eyes must have been what made him open his arms. I flung my arms around his neck and clung to him, most impolitely, and for a long time, as he said something about Robert having his email address. I said that I’d send him my travel diary (boy will he love this one). Finally he let go of me with an abrupt English “right,” and I released him, turning my head to kiss his cheek at the jawline where his beard grew soft and thick. After he had walked away (never looking at me directly) I finished cleaning up, and then locked myself in the handicapped restroom and sobbed violently and inconsolably for about ten minutes.

When I emerged, I felt as fresh and clean as Colorado air after a hailstorm.

**

You may ask me: what the fook, C? He told you to fuck off and then went about poking someone else right under (or above) your nose, and you still feel this way about him?

That night in Bisetti’s kitchen, I told James that no matter how shittily the men in my life have behaved, in the end what stays with me are the wonderful things, and how much I loved them, whether it was for five years or five minutes.

I won’t keep the sick-to-my-stomach feeling. What I’ll keep are things like this: the raffishly saucy look in his eye as he bit a cluster of shrimp off of my proffered fork in Novara (my pizza had come with shrimp through a misunderstanding); the way he would say simply “quality,” with a grin, when something pleased or amused him; the night we watched Günter’s DVD of “Shaft” on my iBook in his room, and I wanted so badly to kiss him; the private universe we could be at a table full of people; and the soft-focus, almost melancholy look he had at Centro’s bar one of those last nights, when Robert played a torchy Tom Waits song for us from his laptop. So close he was, so close and yet so far away, my beautiful English so-called bastard. There is nothing/more than this…but to quote another Tom Waits tune, I’m gonna take it with me when I go.

**

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.

(I do want to observe, based on my unfolding friendship with the increasingly complex and sometimes volatile character known as “Rick,” that sometimes our passing attractions to people turn out to be unlikely opportunities to develop underdeveloped aspects of ourselves, and to exchange strengths. I don’t think it’s sentimental to say that nearly everyone — even the ex-felons and the chemically challenged — has something to teach us, if we’re open to listen and learn and not make everything about us.)

At any rate, upon my faithful German reader’s encouragement, I thought I would perform an exercise in self-reminder. That is, I thought I would remind myself of what I recently acknowledged as my Big Dream by sharing with you fine readers some, if not all, of my Italy diaries. Because I feel a little as if I’ve lost my way…

As I mentioned, I felt then as if I had finally found my place in the world, living these experiences and writing about them. I hope they don’t disappoint…some of my friends at home, Sonny included, were hooked, as if on a TV series. They do start off on the factual side, as I get acclimated, and become more introspective over time.

Most of the names have been changed, as is my custom on this blog.

**

PART ONE: CULTURE SHOCK

So: I’ve realized that I’m no Elizabeth Gilbert.

The delightful and funny woman who wrote “The Last American Man” and “Eat Pray Love” has a genius for travel. She can land anywhere without a plan or a knowledge of the language, and by the weekend she’’ll be staying in someone’s house being toasted by a table full of locals. She makes it sound so easy.

Maybe it is…for her.

Sometimes you’re just a beginner. And I haven’t felt like such a rank beginner in quite some time.

1. Mi Dispiace, Non Parlo L’Inglese

The flights were uneventful, although I wasn’t able to get much sleep on either leg, not even the eight-hour transatlantic flight. (Both flights somehow managed to show “Big Momma’s House.” One viewing may be more than it deserves.) When I reached the tiny airport in Milan I exchanged my dollars for Euros, incurring more than $15 in service charges. Outright theft (!), but I suppose you could consider it the fee one pays for being a greenhorn. The bus was easy enough to locate — I spoke a few words in Italian to the driver and felt so very proud of myself — and the ride to Novara gave me a chance to check out the landscape. I was struck by how much the quality of the light is like the American West’s — bright and direct, shining down out of an expansive blue sky. But it’s much greener here. On the highway, you think you could be anywhere (it resembled the American Northeast) but the inhabited areas are full of palms and other more exotic Mediterranean flora, even this far north.

We drove through a few small towns, after which some American resort towns seem to model themselves, with familiar red tile roofs and beige facades — some of them crumbling picturesquely. Everywhere I saw old women riding bicycles. The motor traffic seemed to regard the many bicyclists as legitimate vehicles, even on these narrow streets. In Novara, traffic slowed to a halt near the stazione, but it seemed to have been the natural order of things. No one so much as honked a horn.

Inside the station I managed to buy a train ticket to Pettenasco (in Italiano), but once outside I had no idea which track I needed. The direction I had been told was Domodossola, but there was no ‘Domodossola’ on the signs. This is when I first found out that, generally speaking, no one in the smaller towns speaks English. The people at Centro confirmed this later. (Thank God I know how to ask where the restrooms are in Italian, it was the first thing I taught myself! I could go off on an ugly American’s tangent here about my experiences with Italian public restrooms, and how the station’s was barely a Port-o, but I’m sure you don’t want to hear it.)

My anxiety mounting, I approached a fiftyish gentleman who had come to look at the schedule of destinations and track numbers. In the United States, fifysomething gentlemen are nearly always favorably disposed toward me, even when no one else is, and I hoped that the rule might apply internationally. Mi scusi, I said, Me scusi, non capisco. Sono Americana. Dov’e…? and I pointed at my ticket. He peered at my ticket and at the schedule and seemed to be as flummoxed as I was. He told me (as best as I could understand) to follow him, taking my suitcase, and I trotted after him up the underground walkway steps to a uniformed man by one of the tracks. They conversed rapidly in Italian and the uniformed man consulted a map, pointing out (quite serendipitously) the train behind us that was about to leave. Mille grazie! I cried to them both, and ran with my bags to the train. My Samaritan followed, sitting across the aisle with another middle-aged man in a baseball cap and sunglasses. He only rode three stops, but I heard him tell the other man that I was an Americana.

At the next major train station the train stopped, and everyone, including the conductors, began to deboard. I looked in confusion at the man in the baseball cap. Che stazione? I asked, and he said “Borgomanero.” I must have looked crestfallen. He reached out for my ticket. “Pettenasco,” he murmured, and then said something that sounded like Ven conmigo, which means “come with me” in Spanish, along with a string of words I didn’t understand. I followed him out of the station, and around what appeared to be a major construction project. Maybe that’s why the train stopped there? At any rate I was becoming nervous. Perhaps I should find a phone and call Centro. Where was this guy taking me? “But the train was supposed to go all the way there,” I said, and he turned around. Mi dispiace, signora, non capisco…non parlo l’inglese. Sorry, ma’am, I don’t understand, I don’t speak English. For all I knew, he was leading me to his den of iniquity, or into some international slavery ring…

But instead he led me to a bus that said “Trenitalia” across the front of its window, whereupon he spoke more rapid Italian with the driver, apparently asking if he went to Pettenasco. The driver nodded. Si, si, Pettenasco, he said, motioning to me to board. I didn’t have to pay — apparently this was some sort of extension of the train service. We both got on the bus, and I sat up front behind my second graying savior, who proceeded to engage in a long, animated conversation with the driver and a sweet-looking puckered old woman who was sitting behind the driver.

The bus wound its way up into the mountains, on impossibly narrow streets, through Orta (which shares its name with the lake) and into Pettenasco. Signore Baseball-cap helped me with my luggage and I told him and the driver Mille grazie, siete molti gentili. Thanks a million, you guys are very kind.

There was a phone kiosk just across the street, and I went over to it only to find that it took neither coins nor my credit card. Well, I’d made it that far…maybe I could use someone else’s phone? I pulled my luggage up the street and noticed a sign on a building that said something about an ufficio and turismo so I went behind the building as directed and found a small office full of pamphlets — but no people. I had just gone behind the desk there to inspect an old, non-working telephone when a woman with a name tag hurried in looking purposeful. I came toward her gratefully, full of explanations, but she shook her head and raised a hand to halt me.

Non parlo l’inglese, she said.

It seems they don’t speak English in the tourism office here either. I managed to communicate my needs with telefono and Centro d’Ompio. She led me into a small, much more modern back office where I was able to call Centro, and they were able to send Günter (who is from Germany) down with a car.

2. Centro d’Ompio, Bisetti, e la ‘Meltdown’

Günter is a full-time employee at Centro, a cheerful but serious taskmaster whose chosen mode of leisure dress could be described as heavy-metal-musician-meets-bondage-master. He likes to go shirtless, and is so hirsute as to qualify as furry. Günter oversees the center’s groundskeeping, and manages the working guests’ residence, Bisetti, a half mile down the mountain from Centro.

Günter drove me at breakneck speed up a slender road full of hairpin turns, honking his horn to alert pedestrians or other cars. There was hardly room for one car to pass, so I’m not sure what happens when there are two going in opposite directions. We arrived in the gravel parking lot at Centro and went up to the office on the second floor of the main building, where I was introduced to Paola, the pleasant young Italian woman who helps run the office. Paola took me downstairs, whereupon I met several of the other working guests immediately — Christian, from Norway, Stefan, from Switzerland, Hanna, from Finland, and Alessandro, from Canada. I also met Cosmo and Mila, full-time kitchen workers who are native Italians. Stefan was leaving in a day, but the rest will be my companions for the majority of my stay here.

Christian is bearded, lanky, and ponytailed, and smokes expensive cigarettes. He works in a clothing shop back home in a small Norwegian town, and speaks English fairly well. He makes me a little nervous, however, with his lingering, sultry looks…such unabashed boldness strikes me as a marked cultural difference, something tres European, along the lines of nude beaches and legalized weed. I meet his gaze and smile…but not for too long.

Hanna is a sweet, shy young slip of a thing still in university, with scholarly glasses and delicately pale skin. Her English is decent, if limited, but it’s all we have to work with as I don’t know a word of Finnish. She looks at me with an almost awestruck expression, which I doubt I deserve, and speaks to me with the utmost fondness. What did I do, sweetheart?? Please tell me so that I can repeat it everywhere I go.

Alessandro is (in my humble opinion) the resident beauty, dark and stunning, the child of Italian parents who reside in Canada. The poor fellow has dual citizenship in Canada and Italy — can you imagine a worse fate?! — and ultimately wants to move here. He would rather be a waiter in Italy than an accountant (as is his training) in Canada. Six months ago I would have surely and rapidly alienated him with a clumsy and singleminded pursuit, but at this point I’m content with just talking and looking. To be honest, we don’t have a whole lot in common, but he’s good-hearted and sincere, with an almost childlike quality. Our conversations actually remind me of the sort I have with my nine-year-old nephew.

Cosmo recalls to mind some character actor from the 1970s I just can’t place. He has frizzy graying hair and sly dark eyes that suggest to me that if I understood what he was saying half the time, I’d find him hysterically funny. Mila is slim, fortysomething, no-nonsense, but good-natured.

Centro d’Ompio stands on the side of a mountain overlooking Lake Orta, with the little island of San Giulio, on which sits a medieval monastery, visible from the pool terrace. The lake itself is surrounded by steep green mountains. It’s a dramatic view. At the moment I’m unable to download pictures from my bargain-basement digital camera onto my computer and I’m not sure why. Otherwise, I would show you. Centro has several peacocks — one of them completely white – wandering the grounds and emitting haunting, catlike cries. They have no fear of people, and weave amid the outside tables at mealtimes. Seeing them after so many hours of not sleeping was a completely surreal experience.

What’s odd to me is how much less infatuated I am with it all than I expected to be, how unreal the scenery feels, almost like a photographed backdrop. I can’t explain why this is. I half anticipated feeling Frances Mayes’ instant sense of belonging.

But belonging is the opposite of what I felt my first evening…

After lunch, Günter drove me and my luggage down the hill to Bisetti, the guest worker house. He showed me my room, which was private (at least I didn’t have to share), located up two flights of outside stairs and then up a sort of ladder. (All of the rooms, toilets and kitchen included, let only onto the outside, like motel rooms.)

The sky had by this point clouded over and it had grown quite cold. I noticed that there was only one thin quilt in the chilly and unheated little room, and I wondered whether, with my tendency to get cold under the best of circumstances, I might in fact freeze to death.

The closet-sized toilets, shared by all, were on the ground level, and both contained a small cold-water sink. Then Günter showed me the showers. Two coed, communal showers, off of a room with a hot water trough-style sink for washing up and brushing teeth. One of the stalls wasn’t even in use, due to a leaky pipe that had flooded the adjacent laundry room. I looked at it all in a sort of despair. Was I a completely square American prude that the thought of showering within sight of the Norwegian, or for that matter anywhere where absolutely anyone could come and have a lookyloo, completely creeped me out? Was this how they did it in Europe?!! And what of the infernal swamp in the next room? Would laundering my dirty clothes be out of the question? I thought, I’m sure all my little anarchist friends with their communal housing and free love and unflushed toilets could cope with all of this just fine, but I’m an old broad who craves a few basic creature comforts, like a little bathing privacy and a warm bed. I said something to Günter about whether there was a protocol for the showers. He looked at me as if I were a completely square American prude, and said that there was not.

Of course all I wanted to do at that point was take a hot shower and go to sleep.

I opted to try for a nap. Layering up, I curled into a little ball under the white (yes, white) scrap of quilt and shivered. Eventually, after some yogic breathing and a Buddhist exercise in surrendering to “absolute cold,” I dozed off. I woke just in time to hike up the hill to dinner. At least the hike warmed me up. I ate with some of the Italian kitchen staff and Bettina, one of the people who worked in the office. I told Bettina about being cold, and she told me she could give me another blanket. I asked her about the showers, and her response was, more or less: you’ll deal with it.

She left the table, and I tried to have a halting conversation with the others, but both sides lacked crucial vocabulary and I wound up feeling even more like a stranger in a strange land. Mila did understand somewhat about the showers, and she said that maybe I could come up to Centro and use theirs. Her tiny bit of sympathy made me feel dangerously close to tears.

But she left the table, too, and I left Centro for Bisetti, feeling more profoundly lonely than I have in years. Sometimes being surrounded by a hundred people is lonelier than being alone, when language and culture prevent some sorely needed understanding.

But I was also trying to suck up and buck up and not appear needy, square, or uncool. I wasn’t going to be the whiny, high-maintenance American. No, no one was gonna see me sweat. I wouldn’t give them any more chances to judge me. I was afraid Günter and Bettina already had.

These efforts, however, were about to go straight to hell.

Bisetti is home to a number of small stray cats, about which I had been repeatedly cautioned. Don’t let them in any of the rooms, they’ll shit everywhere! They seemed to be regarded like pests, including the small, rather dirty 19-year-old deaf and blind cat that spends most of its day on the kitchen steps. One of the residents had kicked the poor thing out of the way before. This cat was on the steps when I arrived back. I bent to pet it, and it began to purr like a tiny motor.

Suddenly I saw myself in this helpless, despised, affection-starved little creature, and I sat down on the step beside it and started to weep quietly, stroking its bowed head. A small black cat (drawn, no doubt, by the purring) came running and jumped up in my lap. This second cat couldn’t get enough love either, and that’s when I really lost it, wetting its silky back with hot tears.

Just then Bettina came through the gate, and stopped.

She came over to me and sat down beside me and pulled me into a fierce embrace. It was no use hiding it anymore; I sobbed. She clucked sympathetically and said — You’re tired, and overwhelmed, and it’s your first day, and I know it’s all a bit much. We’ll get you a blanket, and if you like you can take a shower up the road at Leibich, our house. (The full-time year-round employees live in another, more traditional house a few doors down.) I can even give you a hot water bottle, if you wish.

And that’s exactly what she did. She gave me a wool blanket and a hot water bottle and showed me the perfectly lovely accommodations (complete with bathtub) at Leibich. We went into Bisetti’s rustic kitchen to heat water, and there I met Raffe, short for Raffaella, Centro’s cleaning woman. She is of indeterminate age, my height, pleasantly round, with large, kind green eyes and dark burgundy-tinted hair. I love the name Raffaella — it’s the name of the angel, played by Natassja Kinski, who watches over Karl (the angel who falls to earth) in Wim Wenders’ “Faraway, So Close,” one of my favorite films.

And yea verily, Raffe immediately sensed the state of my soul and began to minister unto me, that very evening, and from thence. Her English is not great (still much better than my Italian) but we manage to communicate in other ways. She felt the shower situation was undesirable too, and encouraged me to lock the door (as she does) when I went in. She heated the water for my water bottle and stroked my hair and kissed me and called me “Bella,” something she has done ever since. She always greets me with an Italian-style kiss on both cheeks, and it gives me a greater sense of belonging than just about any other thing or person here.

That night I locked the door and took a hot shower, right there in Bisetti. Afterwards I sat in the kitchen and drank tea with Cosmo, Mila, and the soon-departing Swiss. And later, I crawled under a warm blanket with a hot water bottle, lovingly prepared by my angel Raffaella.

For the past few days I’ve been sporadically weeping with elation, relief, and another sensation that doesn’t have as ready a name. Think of it as the sweet agony of relaxing the heart muscle into receiving kindness and respect after countless humiliations and cruelties have left it armored and tight. Or as the raw, painful reawakening of joy after thousands upon thousands of deadening disappointments. You receive kisses where you were braced for blows; bread where you expected a stone. I’ve experienced this exquisitely poignant sensation before on a personal level, and my country has heaped humiliations, cruelties, and disappointments upon its black citizens on a collective level for centuries — so when I saw the tears in Jesse Jackson’s eyes Tuesday night, forty years after he watched Martin fall, I crumbled with empathic overwhelmment. Could it really be? Could we, as a nation, have so resoundingly exalted a member of his perpetually embattled and subjugated race? Can we, dare we let ourselves believe it’s real?

Yes. Yes. Yes we have. Yes we can. The impossible dream of Dr. King has come true. Barack Obama, a brown-skinned man with an unabashedly African name, has just been elected as our forty-fourth president.

And he is clearly the best man for the job.

How can we not weep?

**

Over the weekend preceding the election, I committed an act of radical personal catharsis. My idea was to finally release my own obsolete, failure-ridden, profoundly unhappy past, and clear the way for transformation, at least on a microcosmic level. In other words, to do what I would have my dysfunctional country do. After all, as goes AlienBaby, so goes America! But seriously: over the space of two days and almost fourteen hours, I destroyed bales upon bales of old journals and writings, some of which dated back twenty-five years. I surrendered my history, my so-called “life story.”

I had wanted to burn them all for more than a year, ever since reading The Power of Now had led me to discard, recycle, or give away most of my belongings and reams of old files in an act I called “the purge.” I knew that those yellowing notebooks were packed full of miserable ruminations and regurgitations that had served only to aggravate and cultivate the chronic depression and self-loathing I had suffered throughout my adolescence and young adulthood. I saw them as relics of a dead past I had no desire to keep alive any longer. (Besides which, I knew that if anything were to happen to me, they were the last thing I’d want my family to read.)

As I still hadn’t found a convenient and legal place to incinerate them, they had been sitting in two heavy boxes gathering dust in a corner of my apartment. Charged up with optimism after voting on Friday, I decided that there was no better time to dispense with them. On Saturday afternoon, armed with nothing more than a pair of kitchen scissors, I began pulling off the cardboard covers and shredding the pages into vertical strips. By the time I was finally finished Sunday night, I had filled six large shopping bags with recyclable materials.

Along the way, I read passages here and there, revisiting the memory of my younger self. At times I felt shame at her naïveté and utter self-absorption; at others I was embarrassed by her ill-informed grandstanding. What surprised me most about the writing, however, was how much of the content was redundant, and how little of the style was as good as I had thought at the time. This was no great loss to the literary canon, believe me!

Its greatest value, I would have to say, lay in its ability to demonstrate the extreme acrobatics of a deeply insecure and thoroughly hyperactive ego. “The tongue caresses these exacerbations,” wrote Wallace Stevens, “…like a hunger that feeds on its own hungriness.” That more or less sums up my collected works.
**

There were only a few things I found worth salvaging. Some of what I pulled out I’ll reproduce here, starting with a Walt Whitman quote I’d all but forgotten, but which is still entirely relevant:

Why are there men and women that while they are
        nigh me the sunlight expands my blood?
Why when they leave me do my pennants of joy
        sink flat and lank?

What was I just saying last time?

Speaking of such men and women, I got to rediscover my first impression of my college boyfriend (and first love) León Arenas at our freshman orientation assembly.

A young man stands up. His stance is slightly slumped, head and pelvis thrust slightly forward, hands in pockets, with what could be called a cocky air. Adding to this is his distinctive clothing — a black T-shirt and light yellow pants with white suspenders. His brown hair falls above his ears by reason of its wave, but he has a sort of forelock tumbling rakishly over his right brow. His jaw is lean and wolfish. He has a lanky attractiveness about him.

“Yes…I was wondering…for those of us who plan to go to graduate school, and are worried about grades…”

Here, an appreciative chuckle from those in the audience worried about grades; confident of his audience, he continues, smacking of wiseguy/class clown: “I know math isn’t my best subject, and I’m sure there are people here wondering whether it’s their efforts that are going to be recognized…or just what they produce.” He strokes his chin for dramatic effect. Students are tittering at the weaselly question, and the asker’s awareness of its weaselliness.

Across the aisle, I’m thinking: Oh, Lord, and I thought I’d gotten away from this kind when I left high school. Stay away from this hotshot, he’s annoying, and probably full of himself.

Yellow suspender pants perpetuates this image at convocation: students traverse the stage to shake the president’s hand and sign a registry. He not only shakes the president’s hand but at the same time gives a little bow and clicks his heels together, eliciting titters yet again.

He was an attention whore, sure, but I loved him. And after spending fourteen hours reading over my own obsessive self-dissections, I know I’ve got no business calling anyone else narcissistic. (I used up a couple of volumes suffering excruciatingly and verbosely when my Argentinian smartass broke up with me and affixed himself to one of my best friends.)

**
Also among those thousands of pages were some of my sophomoric attempts at erotica. Much of it bodice-ripper-grade, and fueled largely by my vast frustration. Back in the days of the first Clinton term, when Kurt Cobain was still alive and everyone was wearing flannel, I scribbled this R-rated paragraph. It isn’t as graphic as some of my other passages, but it’s better written.

I confess: I respond to beauty in men. Beauty of a particular — perhaps peculiar — sort, but beauty nonetheless. I want them. All of them. I want a smorgasbord of slackers. I want a grunge buffet. Pure pleasure, to run my hands through and smell their tousled locks, caress their stubbled faces, and breathe in the strong healthy scent that the skin and even the breath of such men have…to feel the definition in their hard, lean muscles and rub my cheek against the silken sworls of hair on their bellies, and lower, lower still…Ah, the smell of a man’s sex in warm denim. The animal in the cotton. It sleeps there in a mound, hibernating. I like to see it there, to know that it is there, whether or not he is going to let me touch it, wake it up. When I know that he is not, and I can see that it is there, it makes me crazy.

I hope that at least puts François’ doubts about me to rest.
**

There were a few surprises in the mix, and odd moments of edgy levity. I was particularly delighted to find this little ditty, written as it must have been while I was sick in my noisy tenement apartment. I had forgotten all about it; it made me laugh.

FLU AT THE BOARDING-HOUSE

The bass from the alley neighbor
drills its beat into my bed;

the taxicab driver in number six
is walking on my head;

burrowed beneath my pillows, there’s
no rest for my aching brain;

no wonder no more why it’s always the poor
who kill, or go insane.

I do remember writing the following not-quite-nursery-rhyme in my thirties to a twenty-four-year-old who flirted outrageously with me but never made good on his threats or even returned my nervous calls. He was full of clever jokes and bravado, but in retrospect I think he may have been more nervous than I was.

AGE-APPROPRIATE VERSES

You pocket your posy,
my little boy blue.

‘It’s mine, you can’t have it,
so go suck on poo.’

It’s all games and nonsense
and nyah-nyah to you.

Nothing is serious
when you’re brand-new.

Crow’s-feet and varicose veins,
boo-hoo-hoo.

Worms will have eaten me
before you do.

That’s not really much worse than Ring-Around-the-Rosy, which is ostensibly about the Black Death. Ashes, ashes, we all fall down?

But it’s this piece of relative doggerel that sums up the entire bitter AlienBaby oeuvre in four short stanzas:

EVERYTHING GOES ALL TO HELL

Those lips that first kissed me, for hours on end,
soon made excuses, excusing themselves,
soon told me how he loved her well.
Everything goes all to hell.

Once, I was happy when she would call,
until grievance and blame and demand coerced me
to give her far more than I had to sell.
Everything goes all to hell.

He begged for love or scorn. The first
felt right. And Christ, but his eyes were blue.
Now he makes me watch him court young belles.
Everything goes all to hell.

When they dredge me up from the reedy depths
Blue and bloated like a manatee,
those who knew me best won’t say “She fell.”
Everything goes all to hell.

Nothing like a little suicide fantasy with your fatalism.

**

The biggest surprise of the weekend, however, was a long-forgotten passage written after one of the most heartbreaking “misses” of my twenties. Luke Taylor and I might really have been something, if either one of us had had the courage to put ourselves out there and not just bluff and duck (I’m a master at the hit-and-run). Luke was a gentle giant of a guy, lovely in his ragged hippie way, with whom I could discuss Virginia Woolf and Nabokov. He had a broad vocabulary when it came to his emotions, and when I looked in his clear, kind eyes I felt somehow at home. Reading that part of my story again, I could see how we circled each other for months like uncertain animals, each waiting for the other to do or say something definitive. The openings Luke gave me, I blew, paralyzed by the prospect that my actions might actually have an effect. I was frankly terrified about what might happen. Maybe he was, too. Eventually he moved away to New York to be with a woman who wasn’t afraid to ask for him. I wonder where he wound up, and whether he’s happy. I hope he is.

I remember being crushed at the time, however, and crying a lot, grieving the loss of a good connection that I knew intuitively could have been amazing. What I don’t remember is writing this after he was gone:

Tonight, I felt strength. More than that, I felt something like greatness. By that I mean, I felt bigger than anything that was happening to me. Without even considering the future — how I hate those well-intentioned advisings of ‘it will get better’ and ‘you’ll meet someone!’ — I found myself in a present where both nothing and everything were, at once, possible. Walking the tightrope of paradox, I was powerless and all-powerful. I had nothing, but because I had nothing I had everything. Kierkegaard’s ‘knight of faith’ makes sense to me! Finally I understand…the deathbed revelations of Prince Andrei, the postwar epiphany of Pierre Bezukhov (in War and Peace). To love everyone is to love no one in particular, is to be supremely free…I feel again the strength and fearlessness of having nothing to lose, and I can at last speak my mind. How many people, do you suppose, have felt that liberated fearlessness?

This is not the sort of revelation I used to have back then. I was never one for living in the present, or for feeling fearless. It goes without saying that this was long before I ever picked up Eckhart Tolle! But I had definitely had some kind of firsthand experience of presence, nonduality, and even transcendence here; I was describing something in language used by spiritual teachers I had not yet read, something I hadn’t understood when I encountered versions of it in classic literature. In contrast to all the incessant why-me left brain activity characterizing the majority of my twenty-five-year diary, the above paragraph stood out like a neon sign. It was like an intimation of awarenesses to come, awarenesses that would eventually lead to my active destruction of these same diaries.

Ironically, losing Luke seems to have led to the loss of the fear that in all likelihood contributed directly to his loss in the first place. If only I could have found that expansive space of equanimity before! I can rarely find it now, still invested as I am in outcomes, in doing or saying the right thing, and still taking everything personally — in other words, still living mentally in the past or future. Today I might be a little more aware of the necessity of separating Luke from my anxious need for something from Luke. The higher you make the stakes, the more fear can enter, and fear is the greatest obstacle to love.

At any rate, I will no longer be hoarding the painful stories of my past. They sit, ready to be hauled away, lacerated beyond recognition in six jumbo shopping bags. Good riddance to my mopey opus! I am bigger than anything that has happened to me.

Something African-Americans have known since this nation’s inception, and which the election of President Obama confirms.

President Obama. I love saying that.