Tuesday, Jul 8, 2008
The first time, her passionate affair with the Frenchman in Italy had helped heal her heartbreak. But now she was returning to Italy to see him again. Could the second time be as good as the first?
Aug 30, 1998 | You keep seeing his face during rainy days in San Francisco. It pops up in your dreams and hovers between you and your computer screen while you're working: There are his thick dark curls and Egyptian nose, his skin warmly brown from the Mediterranean sun. The Ischia sun. You pause to savor the memory of his rough cheek pressed against your smooth one, his quick kiss goodbye, his face fading into a crowd in the train station in Naples.
He is gone, but he sustains you with a sense of possibility, of pleasure. You may be freshly divorced, you may live in a city where the women are strong and the men are pretty and you may think your chance of finding a wonderful straight single man to date are about the same as San Francisco's chance of having another big earthquake (it could happen, but you don't really believe it). But somewhere in the back of your mind is that face, that desire and that island. It lifts you back to buoyancy, even if you don't expect to see or hear from the French professor you met on Ischia ever again.
Then one day a postcard from Paris arrives, a colorful Matisse print of a woman dancing. "It was great!" he writes. "I can't forget ... Love, M."
It is a little treasure you look at too often in the next few days. You wonder about writing him back and hope that his wife doesn't open his mail. You think maybe it's better not to write, though, better to leave that perfect fantasy, those four splendid days together, alone. And so you don't.
But then a month later you are packing a bag for a business trip and find a roll of film. You develop it, and there's the postcard sunset, there's the view from your terrace of whitewashed houses with pots of geraniums trailing down to the beach, and there's the French aesthetics professor himself, leaning back in sunglasses against the white railing of the ship, flawless blue sky and sea behind him, collar open, cigarette clasped in his smirking mouth. You can't resist.
So you enclose the photos in a plain brown envelope with no return address and mail it off. You write in Italian that before you went to Ischia, you had a fantasy about encountering a lovely man for a little fling. The reality was so much better than the fantasy, you say, that now you have a much richer imagination. You remember his astrological sign and tell him happy birthday, too.
Not long after, you are feeling depressed and exhausted. You've spent most of the day in divorce mediation, using all your wits against an adversary who knows your vulnerabilities better than anyone else. You go home alone while the ex goes back to his new girlfriend. But there is a little package waiting for you from France: a tin of Gitanes cigarettes, the type you used to steal from M. after dinner. You go outside to smoke, which you never do, and the terrible day dissipates in the pleasurable haze of memory.
You realize that it is dangerous to rely on the French professor to cheer you up. So you hold on to the image of M. only to remind yourself that there are lovely, intellectual men out there who are relaxed and romantic, who have a delicious sensibility about life. There are men who make you feel like a woman. You wonder if there are any American men like that.
You're thinking about this one evening and have another one of his cigarettes and a tiny folded paper flutters out of the tin. Your letter arrived exactly on my birthday, M. writes. Better that these photos exist, because otherwise I couldn't believe it was all real. Today under cold, gray Parisian skies, "Penso con piacere al piacere," I'm thinking with pleasure about pleasure.
By spring he is suggesting a little rendezvous somewhere between Paris and San Francisco. You tell him that the aesthetic choice would be to never see him again, to keep the memory of your romantic chance meeting intact. He says that as an art professor, he likes your argument very much, but as a man he wants to know: What are you doing in September? You say that the only place between Paris and San Francisco is Newfoundland, and that would be a bit brisk for sunbathing, no?
In May, a friend announces at a dinner party that she's rented a place in Florence for a month and everyone is invited. You think it would be nice to go to Italy for a few days just to flirt. Italian men, unlike American men, like to flirt even when there's no chance of any tangible outcome. They just like to let you know, in restaurants and on the street, that they appreciate women, all kinds of women, that in fact they like women better than anything else in the world, and thank God he made creatures like you.
American men, you think, have more of a museum gift shop mentality about women: What's the point of spending time in the actual museum appreciating the art if you can't take it home with you?
So you hope the dinner-party friend was serious, and you book a ticket to Italy for a few days. It seems rash, but traveling where people flirt will help you stop feeling so invisible. As an afterthought you scrawl a postcard to M. telling him when you'll be in Italy. You know he teaches and has a family and won't be able to get away.
Your phone rings one evening and someone sounding like Gerard Depardieu in "Green Card" asks, "Is Laura?" It is so surprising you can barely speak. He asks if he's disturbing you, and you say of course not, you're quite content to hear his voice. He is abrupt: When does your plane arrive in Milano? You tell him the details. "I'll meet you on the steps of the Duomo at 10," he says. "Ti aspettero." I'll wait for you.
On the endless flight to Milano you read a fat book, "The Decameron," to calm your nerves. Written in the shadow of the 1348 plague, Giovanni Boccaccio's comic masterpiece is about a group of 10 noble young women and men who gather in villas outside Florence to wait out the Black Death by dancing, eating, playing music and telling tales. For 10 days they each tell a story on such themes as love, deception, adultery and getting out of tricky situations with a witty remark. In the midst of death, fear and sorrow, they live in the moment with as much pleasure as possible. The stories celebrate luscious sensuality above all else. There is the tale of a judge's wife, for instance, who quickly tires of her husband's feeble sexual appetites (pre-Viagra, he downs vernaccia wine for its uplifting properties, to little effect). Kidnapped by a handsome young rogue, she pretends not to recognize her husband when he comes to rescue her. "I would never go back to you," she says when she finally lets on that she knows him, "because if you were to be squeezed from head to toe, there wouldn't be a thimbleful of sauce to show for it."
The tales describe the endless varieties of love -- adulterous passion, courtly love, enduring marriages, homosexual love, forbidden love, infatuation. The moral -- if you can call it that, and why not -- is that fulfilling sexual desire is more important than any of the constraints society might put on people's inclinations to "forgather" together. As one storyteller comments after a tale of adultery, "And by proceeding with the greatest of discretion, they enjoyed their love together on many a later occasion. May God grant that we enjoy ours likewise." This, you think, is what Italians read in school instead of "The Scarlet Letter." No wonder they're better at flirting.
You wonder about the varieties of love, you who have been so hurt by adultery and divorce, you who are about to spend a weekend with a married man. Is it possible, you wonder, for couples to have affections on the side that don't erode their marriage? Is it possible to have a second fling with a French professor (who is full of sauce) without ruining the first brief romance? Without some part of you falling in love?
When you can't read anymore, you chat with the Milanese in the seat next to you, who, once you land, offers to take you to the center of town with his friend. You reach a bar a block from the Duomo and it is 10:15 and they ask you to have a coffee. It is impossible to refuse, so you drink your cappuccino and watch the clock move closer to 11. Finally, they show you to the Duomo and wave ciao-ciao.
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