I spent a few decades looking for my real partner, and put a lot of energy that might have been better spent, on my friends, my work, my own inner life, in the interest of this quest. Here comes the story of one particularly misguided attempt. In truth, I think I knew, when I embarked on this particular relationship—if I can even call it that—well aware that it had no future. I thought I was someone who could have a romantic fling in a very romantic place. I learned otherwise.
This story was originally published in Vogue Magazine in 2014.
The balcony in the beautiful little town on the Amalfi coast where I did not fall in love
Twenty-three years after my divorce from the only husband I have ever had, with more failed relationships behind me than the number of cars on the Golden Gate Bridge at rush hour, I decided to change my approach to romance. I had been looking all these years for my true love, and he still hadn’t shown up.
So I decided to try something less ambitious: a plain old good time, though I was not an expert in those. I had somehow bypassed those kinds of relationships in which the boyfriend sweeps one away to Paris, or the Caribbean, in favor of the kind where, when the bill came for dinner, I took out my charge card. More than once, the time I’d spent in therapy with a partner surpassed the time in bed with him.
This decision to try taking things less seriously—and just have fun for once-- came to me two summers back, when I received a last-minute invitation to teach writing at a music festival on the Amalfi Coast. Though most of the participants would be opera fans, the idea was that some of them might like to work on their writing in between concerts and meals.
The prospect of an all-expenses-paid trip with a hotel room overlooking the Mediterranean in a romantic Italian town led me to mourn—not for the first time—the absence of a partner with whom to share it. At just this moment, I had a date with a man I’d met on Match.com, who seemed enthusiastic about getting to know me better. When I told him I was leaving for Italy in ten days, he said, “Why don’t you take me along?”
To nobody’s amazement more than mine, I said OK. I had just formulated my plan to give up looking for Big Love, take things less seriously, and have more fun. And for that one brief moment, bringing Doug along seemed like the place to start.
I got more ambitious. After the festival we’d pay a visit to old friends who lived nearby. I’d never been to Venice, so I booked a cheap hotel room in a fourth-floor walkup two blocks from San Marco Square. Picturing dinners with Doug in wonderful little restaurants (his face a little hazy in the picture), I assembled a wardrobe that included seven glamorous dresses and five pairs of shoes.
I arrived in Naples a day before Doug. At the airport I met a woman—elegant, well dressed, intelligent–looking—who was also on her own and also headed to the festival. Different from a romance, it was friendship at first sight, and, on the hour-long cab ride to our hotel, we moved with surprising swiftness beyond casual conversation to the things that mattered in our lives.
Though she was spry, and sharp witted, Eleanor turned out to be eighty-three. In the past, she’d travelled with her husband, Joe, but he had died three years ago that very day—obviously a hard one for her. Now she travelled alone, and because she was a music lover, this festival had seemed like a good way to mark this emotional anniversary.
Over the course of that ride, Eleanor told me about her marriage. The two of them had met when they were in their thirties—both unhappily married to other people and raising young children. The attraction had been immediate and powerful, but they’d tried hard to remain simply friends and had done so for many years, though in Eleanor’s case, she left her marriage a few years later. And never stopped thinking about Joe.
The woman I met in that little Italian town, the same week my very unpleasant rendezvous occurred with the man I call Doug, who taught me some important lessons about love.
They were almost sixty when, with Joe’s children grown and his divorce finalized, they’d married. They had twenty good years before Joe’s Huntington’s Disease took hold, and another six or seven in which she’d cared for him. “I never minded that,” she said. “I was just grateful to be with him at last.”
Eleanor and I parted at the hotel, planning to meet up again during the week. I’d told her about Doug’s impending arrival, and she was excited that a great love affair of my own might soon be under way.
Within five minutes of Doug’s arrival the next day, I realized I’d made a mistake. In our first twenty minutes together, he’d managed to convey his distaste for any kind of classical music, his need to get online to check out the Giants’ scores, his desire to find the bar, and to have sex. Hard to say which of these seemed more pressing, but it was probably the baseball scores.
Because Doug slept late, I met Eleanor for breakfast. She asked at once about the arrival of my lover. (“Oh God,” I said. “He’s not.”) To bring the conversation to a happier place, I asked her more about Joe, whose photograph she’d taped into the notebook we’d all been issued, with the program of musical events for the week ahead. She told me about their travels around the globe together, his love of golf and her total lack of interest in the sport, and how little that mattered to either of them. Neither one of them ever stopped being interested in what the other had to say.
“Every time I’d catch sight of him across the room,” she told me, “I felt happy.”
“It’s not that he was perfect,” she said. “But he was perfect for me.”
This conversation took place on a bus, riding to one of the festival’s many live performances. The musical offerings that night were to be performed in a fifteenth-century church an hour’s drive from our hotel. I was not disappointed that Doug opted to stay back at the hotel and catch a ball game online. I realized I was enjoying those bus rides as much as the music. Always, on the bus, I sat next to Eleanor. The length of these trips allowed us to go deeper into our stories, to the point where it felt as though I had known Eleanor far longer than a handful of days.
In addition to having maintained, for many years, a serious career as an editor, it turned out that Eleanor possessed a vast knowledge of the lyrics from the American Songbook—Cole Porter, Gershwin, Rogers and Hart, even the obscure ones. As the van twisted its way up the mountain roads, she recited some to me; they were nothing less than poetry, and every line applied to my life. Stormy Weather. Down with Love. Don’t Get Around Much Any More.
On the second day, Doug slept in again. After my class I found a note in our room: Went to the bar. That night over dinner—as I filled Doug in on the friends we were to visit shortly, a gay couple--Doug shared his imitation of a gay man while I shared mine of a stone face. Leaving him behind again (the stock market was needing his attention) Eleanor and I heard selections from Mozart operas, and more of the American Songbook, and the wisdom contained in those lyrics from long ago that seemed to speak so perfectly to what I was feeling.
On the third day, Doug and I toured Pompeii. We made a stop at the ancient city’s house of prostitution--a place evidently frequented by the most prominent male citizens of the time. Over the door of each room in this whorehouse were ancient drawings of lovers in various sexual positions.
“Hey, babe,” Doug said loudly, pointing to the ancient carvings. “Take notes.”
That afternoon, I suggested that we leave our group and have a meal alone in the town. “Dinner on me,” I said, more grim than celebratory. Over dinner, I told Doug no hard feelings, but our relationship -–if that’s what it had been—was not working.
He checked out the next morning before I was awake. His bar tab, along with the bill for all his meals, remained unpaid.
I was unhappy about that bill, but not the departure of he who’d run it up, who’d left without a note. So often, over the years, I’d mourned the absence of a partner in my life, but now I celebrated my release to what I now saw as my under-appreciated solitary space.
When not teaching, I spent much of the rest of that week with Eleanor. I listened closely to her stories of her many years alone after her divorce, and the eventual, joyous day of her marriage to Joe, when she’d been roughly the age that I was now, and deeply in love--the thing I’d always hoped to find, myself, that had come to seem impossible.
After the festival ended, and I said goodbye to Eleanor, I took a boat to Positano to visit my friends, and from there a bus to Naples, and a train to Venice. Dragging my two enormous bags of unworn outfits—the trappings for the love affair that never took place-- up a long run of stone steps to the bus, I heard an old man call out to me, in Italian: Where’s your husband? No doubt he was baffled that no man at my side to assist me. Truthfully, so was I.
Alone in my fourth-floor walkup (recovering from the exertion of getting my suitcases up the stairs unassisted once again), I told myself I wouldn’t let being alone destroy my time in this beautiful city. I would have a wonderful adventure. My first foray into San Marco Square revealed what this should be: Sting was to perform there three nights later—outdoors, accompanied by the entire Venice orchestra under a full moon. Tickets cost $400 apiece, and had sold out long before. Still, I resolved to hear this concert.
For three days, as I explored cathedrals and bridges, glass blowing studios and the vast galleries of the Biennale, I considered strategies. I studied the second-floor rooms of every building overlooking the square in search of a place—a storefront maybe, or the apartment of some elderly person who might take a liking to me, as Eleanor had, and invite me to observe Sting’s performance from some prime location. I wandered into building after building in search of openings. I found none.
The night of the show I shifted my approach. At 9 pm
—the concert was due begin at 9:30 --I put up my hair and unpacked the fanciest of my seven dresses, applied lipstick, perfume, earrings, and, slipped into my tallest heels.
When I got back to San Marco Square—totally closed off to all but those with tickets to the concert--I took my place in the ticketholders’ line. No ticket in my hand, just the air of a woman in possession of one. When the gate opened, I drifted in as effortlessly as a cloud.
Given the price of tickets, and the unlikelihood that anyone who’d bought one would miss this show, I opted to stand on the sidelines, leaning against a pole. But partway through the first song—“Every Little Thing”—an usher approached me, not unkindly, requesting in Italian that I take my seat. Something prompted me to respond not in English but in French.
“Je cherche mon mari,” I told her, scanning the crowd. “I’m looking for my husband.” In some ways this was true, but for the first time in many years, I also felt surprisingly content without him.
Here came the strangest part. In all the ocean of fans, a single seat right near the front remained unclaimed. I took it. And though the concert lasted nearly three hours—as Sting, and the orchestra, played “Englishman in New York”, “Roxanne”, “Every Breath You Take”—nobody ever showed up for that seat. It was after midnight when I left the square and made my way up those four flights of stairs to my little rented cubicle. Transported.
The next morning, I dragged my heavy bags down the stairs, through the streets to the boat that would bring me to the airport, and home.
A person might suppose I would have given up on romance after this—or at the very least, given up online dating. But even after Italy, the same incorrigibly optimistic spirit that had me believing I’d get to hear Sting remained intact.
I got up on the horse again. Reposted my profile. (This prompted my final missive from Doug: “I saw that you were back online, trolling for your next victim. Too bad I can’t rate you like eBay or Airbnd, to warn guys what to expect.”)
Four weeks later, on a Match.com date once more, I met Jim—divorced, like me, for a quarter century. An attorney—handsome, in possession of all his hair--with surprising interests in astronomy, environmental politics, good fiction, playing the electric bass, camping in the California desert, jazz as well as opera, and motorcycles. He was a political liberal, and an Eagle Scout. He revealed himself to be one of those rare individuals more inclined to allow for silence than to fill every space in a conversation with small talk-- though when he did speak, what he said was invariably thought provoking, and frequently funny. Our first encounter lasted five hours.
After the second and third and fourth dates that followed in quick succession, it became clear: with Jim’s own romantic dreams intact and unyielding, no casual relationship would be possible. I would either love this man and allow myself to be loved back, deeply and well, or I would never see him again.
One of the first people in whom I’d confided my feelings about Jim was Eleanor, with whom I’d stayed in touch since our happy discovery of friendship in Italy. I thanked her for reminding me, that week we spent riding buses up and down the Amalfi coast to opera performances, that love is not a casual matter, and a good husband is worth waiting for.
Jim and I were married last summer. Though she is 85 now—and without a travelling companion—Eleanor made the trip to our wedding in New Hampshire, from Washington D.C. When I expressed momentary surprise about her travelling solo, she laughed. Did she suppose, just because her husband was gone, that “don’t get around much anymore” was her refrain?
I found my husband. She lost hers. And though we would both agree, it is a wonderful and precious thing to find true love—and a rare one--there are a number of excellent ways for a person to make her way through the world. “You must hold out for the right one,” Eleanor told me. “And make sure that the life you’re living in the meantime is a full one.”
Me, the following summer, with Jim, the man I met the month after I got home from Italy, and married two years later. A very good man. A year after we were married he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and died 19 months later. From my time with Jim, I learned what it was to have a true partner.
a wonder full story
A beautiful story. Thanks once again.