To which I can only reply--especially when looking across the table at handsome
Giovanni--"Excellent question."
Giovanni is my Tandem Exchange Partner. That sounds like an innuendo, but
unfortunately it's not. All it really means is that we meet a few evenings a week here in
Rome to practice each other's languages. We speak first in Italian, and he is patient withme; then we speak in English, and I am patient with him. I discovered Giovanni a few
weeks after I'd arrived in Rome, thanks to that big Internet cafe at the Piazza Barbarini,
across the street from that fountain with the sculpture of that sexy merman blowing into
his conch shell. He (Giovanni, that is--not the merman) had posted a flier on the bulletin
board explaining that a native Italian speaker was seeking a native English speaker for
conversational language practice. Right beside his appeal was another flier with the same
request, word-for-word identical in every way, right down to the typeface. The only
difference was the contact information. One flier listed an e-mail address for somebody
named Giovanni; the other introduced somebody named Dario. But even the home phone
number was the same.
Using my keen intuitive powers, I e-mailed both men at the same time, asking in Italian,
"Are you perhaps brothers?"
It was Giovanni who wrote back this very provocativo message: "Even better. Twins!"
Yes--much better. Tall, dark and handsome identical twenty-five-year-old twins, as it
turned out, with those giant brown liquid-center Italian eyes that just unstitch me. After
meeting the boys in person, I began to wonder if perhaps I should adjust my rule
somewhat about remaining celibate this year. For instance, perhaps I could remain totally
celibate except for keeping a pair of handsome twenty-five-year-old Italian twin brothers
as lovers. Which was slightly reminiscent of a friend of mine who is vegetarian except for
bacon, but nonetheless . . . I was already composing my letter to Penthouse:
In the flickering, candlelit shadows of the Roman cafe, it was impossible to tell whose
hands were caress--
But, no.
No and no.
I chopped the fantasy off in mid-word. This was not my moment to be seeking romance
and (as day follows night) to further complicate my already knotty life. This was my
moment to look for the kind of healing and peace that can only come from solitude.
Anyway, by now, by the middle of November, the shy, studious Giovanni and I have
become dear buddies. As for Dario--the more razzle-dazzle swinger brother of the two--I
have introduced him to my adorable little Swedish friend Sofie, and how they've been
sharing their evenings in Rome is another kind of Tandem Exchange altogether. But
Giovanni and I, we only talk. Well, we eat and we talk. We have been eating and talking
for many pleasant weeks now, sharing pizzas and gentle grammatical corrections, and
tonight has been no exception. A lovely evening of new idioms and fresh mozzarella.
Now it is midnight and foggy, and Giovanni is walking me home to my apartment
through these back streets of Rome, which meander organically around the ancient
buildings like bayou streams snaking around shadowy clumps of cypress groves. Now we
are at my door. We face each other. He gives me a warm hug. This is an improvement;
for the first few weeks, he would only shake my hand. I think if I were to stay in Italy for
another three years, he might actually get up the juice to kiss me. On the other hand, he
might just kiss me right now, tonight, right here by my door . . . there's still a chance . . . I
mean we're pressed up against each other's bodies beneath this moonlight . . . and of
course it would be a terrible mistake . . . but it's still such a wonderful possibility that he
might actually do it right now . . . that he might just bend down . . . and . . . and . . .
Nope.
He separates himself from the embrace."Good night, my dear Liz," he says.
"Buona notte, caro mio," I reply.
I walk up the stairs to my fourth-floor apartment, all alone. I let myself into my tiny little
studio, all alone. I shut the door behind me. Another solitary bedtime in Rome. Another
long night's sleep ahead of me, with nobody and nothing in my bed except a pile of
Italian phrasebooks and dictionaries.
I am alone, I am all alone, I am completely alone.
Grasping this reality, I let go of my bag, drop to my knees and press my forehead against
the floor. There, I offer up to the universe a fervent prayer of thanks.
First in English.
Then in Italian.
And then--just to get the point across--in Sanskrit.
2 2 2 2
And since I am already down there in supplication on the floor, let me hold that position
as I reach back in time three years earlier to the moment when this entire story began--a
moment which also found me in this exact same posture: on my knees, on a floor,
praying.
Everything else about the three-years-ago scene was different, though. That time, I was
not in Rome but in the upstairs bathroom of the big house in the suburbs of New York
which I'd recently purchased with my husband. It was a cold November, around three
o'clock in the morning. My husband was sleeping in our bed. I was hiding in the
bathroom for something like the forty-seventh consecutive night, and--just as during all
those nights before--I was sobbing. Sobbing so hard, in fact, that a great lake of tears and
snot was spreading before me on the bathroom tiles, a veritable Lake Inferior (if you will)
of all my shame and fear and confusion and grief.
I don't want to be married anymore.
I was trying so hard not to know this, but the truth kept insisting itself to me.
I don't want to be married anymore. I don't want to live in this big house. I don't want to
have a baby.
But I was supposed to want to have a baby. I was thirty-one years old. My husband and
I--who had been together for eight years, married for six--had built our entire life around
the common expectation that, after passing the doddering old age of thirty, I would want
to settle down and have children. By then, we mutually anticipated, I would have grown
weary of traveling and would be happy to live in a big, busy household full of children
and homemade quilts, with a garden in the backyard and a cozy stew bubbling on the
stovetop. (The fact that this was a fairly accurate portrait of my own mother is a quickindicator of how difficult it once was for me to tell the difference between myself and the
powerful woman who had raised me.) But I didn't--as I was appalled to be finding
out--want any of these things. Instead, as my twenties had come to a close, that deadline
of THIRTY had loomed over me like a death sentence, and I discovered that I did not
want to be pregnant. I kept waiting to want to have a baby, but it didn't happen. And I
know what it feels like to want something, believe me. I well know what desire feels like.
But it wasn't there. Moreover, I couldn't stop thinking about what my sister had said to
me once, as she was breastfeeding her firstborn: "Having a baby is like getting a tattoo on
your face. You really need to be certain it's what you want before you commit."
How could I turn back now, though? Everything was in place. This was supposed to be
the year. In fact, we'd been trying to get pregnant for a few months already. But nothing
had happened (aside from the fact that--in an almost sarcastic mockery of pregnancy--I
was experiencing psychosomatic morning sickness, nervously throwing up my breakfast
every day). And every month when I got my period I would find myself whispering
furtively in the bathroom: Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you for giving me one
more month to live . . .
I'd been attempting to convince myself that this was normal. All women must feel this
way when they're trying to get pregnant, I'd decided. ("Ambivalent" was the word I used,
avoiding the much more accurate description: "utterly consumed with dread.") I was
trying to convince myself that my feelings were customary, despite all evidence to the
contrary--such as the acquaintance I'd run into last week who'd just discovered that she
was pregnant for the first time, after spending two years and a king's ransom in fertility
treatments. She was ecstatic. She had wanted to be a mother forever, she told me. She
admitted she'd been secretly buying baby clothes for years and hiding them under the bed,
where her husband wouldn't find them. I saw the joy in her face and I recognized it. This
was the exact joy my own face had radiated last spring, the day I discovered that the
magazine I worked for was going to send me on assignment to New Zealand, to write an
article about the search for giant squid. And I thought, "Until I can feel as ecstatic about
having a baby as I felt about going to New Zealand to search for a giant squid, I cannot
have a baby."
I don't want to be married anymore.
In daylight hours, I refused that thought, but at night it would consume me. What a
catastrophe. How could I be such a criminal jerk as to proceed this deep into a marriage,
only to leave it? We'd only just bought this house a year ago. Hadn't I wanted this nice
house? Hadn't I loved it? So why was I haunting its halls every night now, howling like
Medea? Wasn't I proud of all we'd accumulated--the prestigious home in the Hudson
Valley, the apartment in Manhattan, the eight phone lines, the friends and the picnics and
the parties, the weekends spent roaming the aisles of some box-shaped superstore of our
choice, buying ever more appliances on credit? I had actively participated in every
moment of the creation of this life--so why did I feel like none of it resembled me? Why
did I feel so overwhelmed with duty, tired of being the primary breadwinner and the
housekeeper and the social coordinator and the dog-walker and the wife and the
soon-to-be mother, and--somewhere in my stolen moments--a writer . . .?
I don't want to be married anymore.
My husband was sleeping in the other room, in our bed. I equal parts loved him and could
not stand him. I couldn't wake him to share in my distress--what would be the point? He'dalready been watching me fall apart for months now, watching me behave like a
madwoman (we both agreed on that word), and I only exhausted him. We both knew
there was something wrong with me, and he'd been losing patience with it. We'd been
fighting and crying, and we were weary in that way that only a couple whose marriage is
collapsing can be weary. We had the eyes of refugees.
The many reasons I didn't want to be this man's wife anymore are too personal and too
sad to share here. Much of it had to do with my problems, but a good portion of our
troubles were related to his issues, as well. That's only natural; there are always two
figures in a marriage, after all--two votes, two opinions, two conflicting sets of decisions,
desires and limitations. But I don't think it's appropriate for me to discuss his issues in my
book. Nor would I ask anyone to believe that I am capable of reporting an unbiased
version of our story, and therefore the chronicle of our marriage's failure will remain
untold here. I also will not discuss here all the reasons why I did still want to be his wife,
or all his wonderfulness, or why I loved him and why I had married him and why I was
unable to imagine life without him. I won't open any of that. Let it be sufficient to say
that, on this night, he was still my lighthouse and my albatross in equal measure. The
only thing more unthinkable than leaving was staying; the only thing more impossible
than staying was leaving. I didn't want to destroy anything or anybody. I just wanted to
slip quietly out the back door, without causing any fuss or consequences, and then not
stop running until I reached Greenland.
This part of my story is not a happy one, I know. But I share it here because something
was about to occur on that bathroom floor that would change forever the progression of
my life--almost like one of those crazy astronomical super-events when a planet flips
over in outer space for no reason whatsoever, and its molten core shifts, relocating its
poles and altering its shape radically, such that the whole mass of the planet suddenly
becomes oblong instead of spherical. Something like that.
What happened was that I started to pray.
You know--like, to God.
3 3 3 3
Now, this was a first for me. And since this is the first time I have introduced that loaded
word--GOD--into my book, and since this is a word which will appear many times again
throughout these pages, it seems only fair that I pause here for a moment to explain
exactly what I mean when I say that word, just so people can decide right away how
offended they need to get.
Saving for later the argument about whether God exists at all (no--here's a better idea:
let's skip that argument completely), let me first explain why I use the word God, when Icould just as easily use the words Jehovah, Allah, Shiva, Brahma, Vishnu or Zeus.
Alternatively, I could call God "That," which is how the ancient Sanskrit scriptures say it,
and which I think comes close to the all-inclusive and unspeakable entity I have
sometimes experienced. But that "That" feels impersonal to me--a thing, not a being--and
I myself cannot pray to a That. I need a proper name, in order to fully sense a personal
attendance. For this same reason, when I pray, I do not address my prayers to The
Universe, The Great Void, The Force, The Supreme Self, The Whole, The Creator, The
Light, The Higher Power, or even the most poetic manifestation of God's name, taken, I
believe, from the Gnostic gospels: "The Shadow of the Turning."
I have nothing against any of these terms. I feel they are all equal because they are all
equally adequate and inadequate descriptions of the indescribable. But we each do need a
functional name for this indescribability, and "God" is the name that feels the most warm
to me, so that's what I use. I should also confess that I generally refer to God as "Him,"
