low-grade oblivious neglect. This is how it looked to me, anyway, taking into account
that nobody (and especially not the children) ever knows the secrets of a marriage. What I
believed I grew up seeing was a mother who asked nothing of anybody. This was my
mom, after all--a woman who had taught herself how to swim as an adolescent, alone in a
cold Minnesota lake, with a book she'd borrowed from the local library entitled How to
Swim. To my eye, there was nothing this woman could not do on her own.
But then I'd had a revelatory conversation with my mother, not long before I'd left for
Rome. She'd come into New York to have one last lunch with me, and she'd asked me
frankly--breaking all the rules of communication in our family's history--what had
happened between me and David. Further disregarding the Gilbert Family Standard
Communications Rule-book, I actually told her. I told her everything. I told her how
much I loved David, but how lonely and heartsick it made me to be with this person who
was always disappearing from the room, from the bed, from the planet.
"He sounds kind of like your father," she said. A brave and generous admission.
"The problem is," I said, "I'm not like my mother. I'm not as tough as you, Mom. There's
a constant level of closeness that I really need from the person I love. I wish I could be
more like you, then I could have this love story with David. But it just destroys me to not
be able to count on that affection when I need it."
Then my mother shocked me. She said, "All those things that you want from your
relationship, Liz? I have always wanted those things, too."
In that moment, it was as if my strong mother reached across the table, opened her fist
and finally showed me the handful of bullets she'd had to bite over the decades in order to
stay happily married (and she is happily married, all considerations weighed) to my father.
I had never seen this side of her before, not ever. I had never imagined what she might
have wanted, what she might have been missing, what she might have decided not to
fight for in the larger scheme of things. Seeing all this, I could feel my worldview start to
make a radical shift.
If even she wants what I want, then . . .?
Continuing with this unprecedented string of intimacies, my mother said, "You have to
understand how little I was raised to expect that I deserved in life, honey. Remember--I
come from a different time and place than you do."
I closed my eyes and saw my mother, ten years old on the family farm in Minnesota,
working like a hired hand, raising her younger brothers, wearing the clothes of her older
sister, saving dimes to get herself out of there . . .
"And you have to understand how much I love your father," she concluded.
My mother has made choices in her life, as we all must, and she is at peace with them. I
can see her peace. She did not cop out on herself. The benefits of her choices aremassive--a long, stable marriage to a man she still calls her best friend; a family that has
extended now into grandchildren who adore her; a certainty in her own strength. Maybe
some things were sacrificed, and my dad made his sacrifices, too--but who amongst us
lives without sacrifice?
And the question now for me is, What are my choices to be? What do I believe that I
deserve in this life? Where can I accept sacrifice, and where can I not? It has been so hard
for me to imagine living a life without David in it. Even just to imagine that there will
never be another road trip with my favorite traveling companion, that I will never again
pull up at his curb with the windows down and Springsteen playing on the radio, a
lifetime supply of banter and snacks between us, and an ocean destination looming down
the highway. But how can I accept that bliss when it comes with this dark
underside--bone-crushing isolation, corrosive insecurity, insidious resentment and, of
course, the complete dismantling of self that inevitably occurs when David ceases to
giveth, and commences to taketh away. I can't do it anymore. Something about my recent
joy in Naples has made me certain that I not only can find happiness without David, but
must. No matter how much I love him (and I do love him, in stupid excess), I have to say
goodbye to this person now. And I have to make it stick.
So I write him an e-mail.
It's November. We haven't had any communication since July. I'd asked him not to get in
touch with me while I was traveling, knowing that my attachment to him was so strong it
would be impossible for me to focus on my journey if I were also tracking his. But now
I'm entering his life again with this e-mail.
I tell him that I hope he's well, and I report that I am well. I make a few jokes. We always
were good with the jokes. Then I explain that I think we need to put an end to this
relationship for good. That maybe it's time to admit that it will never happen, that it
should never happen. The note isn't overly dramatic. Lord knows we've had enough
drama together already. I keep it short and simple. But there's one more thing I need to
add. Holding my breath, I type, "If you want to look for another partner in your life, of
course you have nothing but my blessings." My hands are shaking. I sign off with love,
trying to keep as cheerful a tone as possible.
I feel like I just got hit in the chest with a stick.
I don't sleep much that night, imagining him reading my words. I run back to the Internet
cafe a few times throughout the next day, looking for a response. I'm trying to ignore the
part of me that is dying to find that he has replied: "COME BACK! DON'T GO! I'LL
CHANGE!" I'm trying to disregard the girl in me who would happily drop this whole
grand idea of traveling around the world in simple exchange for the keys to David's
apartment. But around ten o'clock that night, I finally get my answer. A wonderfully
written e-mail, of course. David always wrote wonderfully. He agrees that, yes, it's time
we really said good-bye forever. He's been thinking along the same lines himself, he says.
He couldn't be more gracious in his response, and he shares his own feelings of loss and
regret with that high tenderness he was sometimes so achingly capable of reaching. He
hopes that I know how much he adores me, beyond even his ability to find words to
express it. "But we are not what the other one needs," he says. Still, he is certain that I
will find great love in my life someday. He's sure of it. After all, he says, "beauty attracts
beauty."
Which is a lovely thing to say, truly. Which is just about the loveliest thing that the loveof your life could ever possibly say, when he's not saying, "COME BACK! DON'T GO!
I'LL CHANGE!"
I sit there staring at the computer screen in silence for a long, sad time. It's all for the best,
I know it is. I'm choosing happiness over suffering, I know I am. I'm making space for
the unknown future to fill up my life with yet-to-come surprises. I know all this. But
still . . .
It's David. Lost to me now.
I drop my face in my hands for a longer and even sadder time. Finally I look up, only to
see that one of the Albanian women who work at the Internet cafe has paused from her
night-shift mopping of the floor to lean against the wall and watch me. We hold our tired
gazes on each other for a moment. Then I give her a grim shake of my head and say aloud,
"This blows ass." She nods sympathetically. She doesn't understand, but of course, in her
way, she understands completely.
My cell phone rings.
It's Giovanni. He sounds confused. He says he's been waiting for me for over an hour in
the Piazza Fiume, which is where we always meet on Thursday nights for language
exchange. He's bewildered, because normally he's the one who's late or who forgets to
show up for our appointments, but he got there right on time tonight for once and he was
pretty sure--didn't we have a date?
I'd forgotten. I tell him where I am. He says he'll come pick me up in his car. I'm not in
the mood for seeing anybody, but it's too hard to explain this over the telefonino, given
our limited language skills. I go wait outside in the cold for him. A few minutes later, his
little red car pulls up and I climb in. He asks me in slangy Italian what's up. I open my
mouth to answer and collapse into tears. I mean--wailing. I mean--that terrible, ragged
breed of bawling my friend Sally calls "double-pumpin' it," when you have to inhale two
desperate gasps of oxygen with every sob. I never even saw this griefquake coming, got
totally blindsided by it.
Poor Giovanni! He asks in halting English if he did something wrong. Am I mad at him,
maybe? Did he hurt my feelings? I can't answer, but only shake my head and keep
howling. I'm so mortified with myself and so sorry for dear Giovanni, trapped here in this
car with this sobbing, incoherent old woman who is totally a pezzi-- in pieces.
I finally manage to rasp out an assurance that my distress has nothing to do with him. I
choke forth an apology for being such a mess. Giovanni takes charge of the situation in a
manner far beyond his years. He says, "Do not apologize for crying. Without this emotion,
we are only robots." He gives me some tissues from a box in the back of the car. He says,
"Let's drive."
He's right--the front of this Internet cafe is far too public and brightly lit a place to fall
apart. He drives for a bit, then pulls the car over in the center of the Piazza della
Repubblica, one of Rome's more noble open spaces. He parks in front of that gorgeous
fountain with the bodacious naked nymphs cavorting so pornographically with their
phallic flock of stiff-necked giant swans. This fountain was built fairly recently, by
Roman standards. According to my guidebook, the women who modeled for the nymphs
were a pair of sisters, two popular burlesque dancers of their day. They gained a fair bit
of notoriety when the fountain was completed; the church tried for months to prevent the
thing from being unveiled because it was too sexy. The sisters lived well into old age, and
even as late as the 1920s these two dignified old ladies could be seen walking togetherevery day into the piazza to have a look at "their" fountain. And every year, once a year,
for as long as he lived, the French sculptor who had captured them in marble during their
prime would come to Rome and take the sisters out to lunch, where they would reminisce
together about the days when they were all so young and beautiful and wild.
So Giovanni parks there, and waits for me to get a hold of myself. All I can do is press
the heels of my palms against my eyes, trying to push the tears back in. We have never
once had a personal conversation, me and Giovanni. All these months, all these dinners
together, all we have ever talked about is philosophy and art and culture and politics and
food. We know nothing of each other's private lives. He does not even know that I am
divorced or that I have left love behind in America. I do not know a thing about him
except that he wants to be a writer and that he was born in Naples. My crying, though, is
about to force a whole new level of conversation between these two people. I wish it
wouldn't. Not under these dreadful circumstances.
He says, "I'm sorry, but I don't understand. Did you lose something today?"
But I'm still having trouble figuring out how to talk. Giovanni smiles and says
encouragingly, "Parla come magni." He knows this is one of my favorite expressions in
Roman dialect. It means, "Speak the way you eat," or, in my personal translation: "Say it
like you eat it." It's a reminder--when you're making a big deal out of explaining
something, when you're searching for the right words--to keep your language as simple
and direct as Roman food. Don't make a big production out of it. Just lay it on the table.
I take a deep breath and offer a heavily abridged (yet somehow totally complete)
Italian-language version of my situation: "It's about a love story, Giovanni. I had to say
good-bye to someone today."
Then my hands are slapped over my eyes again, tears spraying through my clamped
fingers. Bless his heart, Giovanni doesn't try to put a reassuring arm around me, nor does
he express the slightest discomfort about my explosion of sadness. Instead, he just sits
through my tears in silence, until I've calmed down. At which point he speaks with
perfect empathy, choosing each word with care (as his English teacher, I was so proud of
him that night!), saying slowly and clearly and kindly: "I understand, Liz. I have been
there."
29292929
My sister's arrival in Rome a few days later helped nudge my attention away from
lingering sadness over David and bring me back up to speed. My sister does everything
fast, and energy twists up around her in miniature cyclones. She's three years older than
me and three inches taller than me. She's an athlete and a scholar and a mother and a
writer. The whole time she was in Rome, she was training for a marathon, which meansshe would wake up at dawn and run eighteen miles in the time it generally takes me to
read one article in the newspaper and drink two cappuccinos. She actually looks like a
deer when she runs. When she was pregnant with her first child, she swam across an
entire lake one night in the dark. I wouldn't join her, and I wasn't even pregnant. I was too
scared. But my sister doesn't really get scared. When she was pregnant with her second
child, a midwife asked if Catherine had any unspoken fears about anything that could go
wrong with the baby--such as genetic defects or complications during the birth. My sister
said, "My only fear is that he might grow up to become a Republican."
That's my sister's name--Catherine. She's my one and only sibling. When we were
