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 somethingpops 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 theirunattached 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
“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 somethingpops 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 theirunattached 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
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