All Over the Map (7 page)

But I still get a thrill every time I visit New York. Part of it is peeking in on a parallel life that I passed on; part of it is feeding on its energy and unexpected scenes. This time, it happens that Doug, a childhood friend who is a film director, has a movie opening. In line for the movie, before heading in, Doug introduces me to Gustavo, a friend of his who is standing next to me. Also in the film business, Gustavo has shaggy black hair and is wearing a mountain parka and hiking boots in New York City, oblivious to fashion. He has a soft accent I can place only in the vicinity of Latin America. I have a soft spot for Latin men; they are less confused than American men about how sensitive they should be and whether to open doors, and are just men, which makes it easier to just be a woman around them. He gallantly asks if he can take the empty seat next to mine at the movie, and we whisper a few remarks about films we’ve seen lately before the lights go down. He helps me off with my jacket, and his sure, gentlemanly touch makes popcorn explode under my skin. In the dark, I can barely watch the movie because two hundred pounds of male pheromones are sitting right next to me, transmitting wildly, uniquely attuned to mine. I want to lean in to smell him better, rub my face right into his soft sweater. Every time he shifts his hand on the armrest I jump; I feel like I’m fifteen and on my first date at the movies, practically trembling at his proximity.

Doug invites us to an after-party at the corner bar. Gustavo and I sit in a red leather booth and drink too much champagne and then beer when the champagne runs out. We talk about Japanese novels and Italian films until long after Doug leaves and they start putting chairs up on the tables. Born in Brazil, Gustavo has
been speaking English for only ten years but has read all the literature I hold dear; he likes the same books and films and is absolutely certain about his tastes. He treats me like a woman, but a smart woman, which is one of those feats foreign men are good at without ever feeling threatened or, God forbid, emasculated. I’ve known Gustavo for a few hours and I feel like I’ve always known him, or maybe always wanted to know him.

We kiss in the cab on the way back to the Village, where I am staying. There’s nothing better than being tipsy and kissing a hunky Brazilian man in the back of a New York City cab. When I get out, he holds the door for me, and I tell him how much fun I had and that if it weren’t three o’clock in the morning, I’d invite him up for a drink.

“What’s so special about three o’clock in the morning?” he asks, in that soft accent, with a sly smile, and it is impossible to argue; I can’t come up with any smart response whatsoever.

For the next few days, we barely leave the apartment, surfacing only for beer and cupcakes before diving back under the covers. I don’t usually prefer a certain physical type in men; I’m democratic, and if you lined up all the guys I’ve dated, you wouldn’t find much in common beyond XY genes and an edgy sense of humor. But in Gustavo I recognize my animal ideal. He might not turn heads at a bar, but he’s medium-tall and strong, soft around the edges from loving good food, with thick, straight black hair, dark eyes, and a little beard stubble. He’s the very image of Brenda Starr’s Basil St. John—her mysterious disappearing boyfriend—without the eye patch. More than that, there’s something about him that’s so quietly sure of himself, so
manly, in bed and out; he’s one of those few men who makes me feel 100 percent female. He stops using my name and just calls me “Sexy.” He slays me, over and over.

“You’re a sweetheart,” I tell him, kissing his chest.

He shakes his head. “You’re the sweetheart,” he says. “I’m just a sweetheart-in-training.”

We finally venture out of the apartment and walk to a theatre to see a tragic Vittorio De Sica film, and at the end, peeking behind the sleeve covering my face, he wipes a tear off my cheek with his thumb. On the way home, he holds my hand, fingers interlaced, and walks curbside, as if protecting me from the splashes of passing cabs. I’m leaving, and he has a new gig; I sense that our own little film is coming to an end. But it’s early summer, it’s New York, and for those few blocks I have the world’s sweetest, sexiest Brazilian boyfriend.

H
ome from the East Coast, I take a walk one day with my friend Cecilia. As we climb up one of San Francisco’s Twin Peaks, to a sweeping view of the city from bridge to bridge, I mention that I need to come up with something worthwhile to do, something that will get me out of my head and out into the world. My brain keeps flitting back to Gustavo—who, after a flurry of e-mails, seems to be out of sight, out of mind—and to the general problem of being single in my forties; I’m having trouble creating positive, forward momentum in the rest of my life. But seeing all those accomplished classmates at the reunion who had made real contributions and being in a liberal arts atmosphere reminded me of the responsibilities that go along with the privilege of a good education—with being alive, really—and lit a fire under me.

I tell Cecilia I am tired of writing peppy articles that fill the space between ads in women’s magazines, boosting women’s self-confidence on one page so it can be torn down on the next. I want to do something useful, worthwhile.

Cecilia walks along quietly for a while, and then something
pops into her mind. She says her friend Carmen, a social worker in Rome, has a new job, working with a program that rescues immigrant women who have been sex-trafficked in Italy, promised a job in a pizzeria and ending up a prostitute, enslaved. Italy, alone in Europe, offers these women not only a chance to escape but help to stay in the country.

“It’s a good story, no?” Cecilia asks.

Sì
. The prospect of a real story, in Italy, no less—which I am able to sell to an international women’s magazine—makes me forget entirely about the urgent problem of needing a new life. It also stops my obsessive wondering about whether Gustavo will ever call or whether I’ll see him again. We exchanged a few e-mails, his addressed to Sexy, mine using up all the Brazilian endearments I knew, and then the correspondence fizzled out. For all my fantasies, maybe it had just been a fling—a wildly fun fling, and not everything has to last forever, but still. A friend remarked that maybe the problem was that
I
was the one who needed to be the hot Brazilian in a relationship, so to speak. “You’re the exotic and creative one; your guy needs to be a little more stable,” she said. “Otherwise, it’s just one zany adventure after the next.” In any case, once again, I decide to fly away.

I arrive in Rome and visit Carmen, the social worker, who is in her fifties and divorced. Every evening, Carmen takes me along to a different dinner party, because her circle of friends can’t stand the thought of her trying to microwave something to eat at home alone (she’s the only Italian I know, male or female, whose cooking is truly atrocious). Italian women are never really alone, because Italians, bless them, tend to crowd around their
unattached friends until they safely find someone. Carmen has a houseful of people—an African daughter she adopted, a boarder, and now a guest from the United States—but that doesn’t prevent her friends from considering her in mandatory need of company. There is no direct translation of “loneliness” in Italian—or, for that matter, “privacy.” The concepts don’t quite exist in Italy.

Not that Italian women don’t have their own problems with men and relationships. Even more than Americans, they’re caught between expectations of being good, traditional Italian girls and wives, looking after men who have never washed a dish or made a bed, and being sophisticated professionals; the dilemma leaves a lot of them unmarried, without children, and the Italian birthrate is the lowest in the world. Somehow, though, they don’t seem to have the hardness that a lot of American women have, and even 1970s feminists like Carmen have no Puritan-inspired problems reconciling their ideology with dressing glamorously and provocatively. Italian women in their fifties and sixties just seem to be all that much sexier for how well they know themselves and how assured they are about their charms.

During the day, when Carmen is working, these friends invite me to lunch, one by one, as if they’d worked out a schedule. I’m never alone for a meal. Somehow, in Italy, you always feel held—if not by a man, then by a family of friends.

W
HEN
I
ARRIVE
at the Naples train station, I remember that this is where I said good-bye to the Professor after we first met on the island of Ischia and spent four sun-drenched days there, a
sweet reward for getting up out of my postdivorce depression and traveling by myself. At the time, I was sure I would never see him again but felt delighted to have been able to run into him, to have spent those wonderful days in his company—eating fresh pasta, making love, swimming in the sea, and starting all over again. Now it’s been four years, and I know this time that if I do see him again, it won’t be as a lover. But that’s fine, too. I’m moving ahead and haven’t lost those years I spent with him. All those beautiful moments—sipping wine and staring at the volcanoes in the distance, making love with open eyes, wandering around Moroccan alleys holding hands—don’t go away. The love in your life adds up.

I step out of the train station into soft light that shows off Naples’ faded Renaissance beauty at her best. Naples is sometimes called the northernmost city in Africa for its sultry air, chaotic humanity, and medinalike mazes of ancient streets. To be in Naples again is an unexpected pleasure, because the city is irresistible in its charms: perfect pizzas, splendid decay, crumbling treasures, and evening parades of tanned and meticulously turned out couples. The volcanic islands in the distance are silhouetted against the darkly shimmering sea. I have an appointment in front of the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in a couple hours—enough time to wander the waterfront, explore the little streets and stores in Spaccanapoli, and marvel at the treasures of Pompeii in the museum.

I’ve never spent time in Naples by myself. This is the first time since my divorce that I’ve been to Italy without the Professor. Only a couple hours by train from Rome, where there are
single women everywhere, like in any major industrialized city in the world, southern Italy looks upon single women suspiciously, with pity sometimes, and a whiff of disrepute. A woman dining alone in a southern Italian restaurant, relishing her food and wine, might be completely content with herself and her spaghetti alle scoglie but treated like prey by the waiter and as contagious by the Sunday-dinner guests. In southern Italy, women don’t often go out by themselves, at least not in the evening or to partake of a meal; their husbands, family members, or female friends almost always accompany them in public. This is true, to a lesser extent, of the men, too; Italians don’t like to do anything alone.

S
TANDING BY MYSELF
in the wide stone piazza in front of the Museo Archeologico Nazionale, waiting for Giusi, a social worker who is going to help me do research, I feel nervous—a target. Naples, of course, has a dangerous reputation, with its mafioso underbelly, its petty and not-so-petty thievery, anarchic traffic, and casual attitude toward history and human life. But it’s no more dangerous, really, than New York or any other big American city; you just have to act smart, tuck away your jewelry, and look as if you know where you’re going.

A tough-looking boy, a hoodlum, maybe ten years old, approaches me, and I hold my passport and money tighter to my body. I glare at him, and he crosses his arms and opens his legs in a wider stance, like an annoyed Italian grown-up man, then calls my name. He’s here to meet me instead of his mother. Carlino takes my arm, a perfect little gentleman, steps off the sidewalk,
and brazenly stops traffic with an authoritative hand signal, only the drivers’ hands moving in a vast repertoire of gestures of impatience. It’s sweet to be back in Italy, where even little boys look out for you if you’re a woman—not belittlingly, but protectively, in a courteous way.

Carlino leads me to a tall, narrow stone building, laundry hanging on the balcony above. Inside, I meet Giusi, a single mom who works to rescue sex-trafficked women. She seems frazzled but kisses me enthusiastically and makes me an espresso. We’ll need the coffee, because we’ll be up most of the night, scouting for immigrant women who are enslaved and forced to work as prostitutes. A neighbor drops by to stay with Carlino, who is watching soccer on TV, screaming and punching the air every few minutes when someone makes a play. He jumps to his feet, unprompted, when we leave, and shakes my hand.

Giusi and I meet up with two coworkers. Though their task for the evening is serious, they are Italians and hospitable, and so they first take me to a famous pizzeria, L’Antica Pizzeria Da Michele, before we set out at night. There is a huge crowd outside the pizzeria, and it seems like it will take all night to get a table. But somehow, with the right word to someone, the long line melts like mozzarella and we are sitting down. This is the oldest and best pizzeria in Naples and so the world. It’s a small place for all its glory, and its offerings are few, but the wood-fired pizza—with spicy extra-virgin olive oil and fior di latte cheese puddling among the fresh herbs and tomatoes—is enough reason itself to go to Naples.