All Over the Map (14 page)

When dessert came, a berry feuilleté, perfect little fresh spring berries in the lightest and flakiest of pastry, Larry uttered a French expression of delight. He said the meal made up for the time, years before, when we’d gone bicycling on Thanksgiving when everything was closed and all we could find for dinner was mango juice and pretzels. At that moment, the Chez Panisse meal was making up for so much more. The server snapped our photo as we finished our wine.

I would go back to my tears the next day, and it would be months before such a look of contentment would cross my face again. But at that moment, sharing a wonderful meal with a friend, the last pastry flake melting on my tongue like snow, I was happy. And every time I looked at that photo during the dark times that followed, I knew I would be happy again.

“I guess it’s silly to talk about a French meal in the States when we’re here eating the real thing,” I say. Charlotte smiles. She gestures to the waiter, brings out her camera, puts her arm around me, and asks him to take our photo.

W
HEN THE CYCLING
trip finishes, we take a train to Paris, finishing off chocolates we found in Saint-Rémy on the way, each infused with a hint of Provence—lavender, thyme, basil. When we arrive in Paris, Charlotte is prepared, having already researched the restaurants and found us a charming and inexpensive hotel. I’ve been to Paris only a couple times before, the last time for a few days with my mother, who wanted to travel in Europe with me to help take my mind off my divorce, on the way to Italy.
Paris is the perfect place for cheering you up, almost by example; its sublime beauty lights up all that gray.

I call the Professor to let him know I’m in town; I’ve never spent any time with him on his home turf, so I’m excited and nervous to see him. I also don’t know how he is going to feel, hearing from me out of the blue. When he answers the phone, he is surprised and then delighted that I’m in Paris, and wants to see me right away.

Charlotte and I meet him in a perfect French café, and since I’m with my cousin, he is formal, kissing us both on both cheeks, but then hugging me tight. When we pull away, I notice that for the first time since I’ve known him he’s wearing a tie, an old-fashioned red plaid thing, instead of his usual scarf. I wonder if he dresses more conventionally at home in Paris than when he’s traveling, being his Mediterranean self, and then I notice something else about the tie.

“The Fraser tartan,” I say, and laugh; it’s the dress plaid from my family’s Scottish clan. The Professor is pleased that I’ve noticed, and I’m happy he thought of me in Scotland, even though we’re no longer lovers, and wanted to surprise me the next time he saw me. It’s funny that while in Scotland, he went looking for my ancestral home, made a point of it, though I’ve never stepped foot in that country.

“There are Frasers everywhere in Inverness,” he reports. “But none of them at all like you.” He smiles at me with his crooked French teeth and watery blue eyes. “They’re very serious, very hard people. I think you must have an Italian bastard somewhere in your past.” He gives me a little squeeze.

W
E HAVE ONLY
part of a day together; he has a girlfriend and responsibilities with his children. But for a few fine hours he shows me his Paris, a relaxed stroll through the Tuileries, then secret courtyards, and along the Seine. He takes me to lunch in a restaurant he’s frequented since his student days, a grand old place with huge antique mirrors that retains the marvelous atmosphere, amid its splendor, of being a dive. The Professor points out slots in the walls where the regulars used to keep their cloth napkins. “This has been here since the time of Balzac,” he says.

He shows me his apartment, a tiny place in the Sixteenth Arrondissement, a more bourgeois neighborhood, he explains, than he’s used to, but he’s here because his kids and their mother live nearby. It’s a small studio dominated by a big desk, with books floor to ceiling, and a little nook with Indian pillows where he sleeps; there is little room for anything here but his mind. There are a couple of beautiful drawings and a photo of a woman, his girlfriend presumably, crossing her slender ankles and wearing white pumps. I do not imagine the Professor with someone who wears white pumps.

We have little time, because he has to go pick up his son. It’s so different from all our other visits together, where the days stretched out long, with no plans except to decide when and where to eat, to swim now or later. We have so much to say to each other, but, conscious of our short time, we sit there on his couch, saying nothing. Finally I ask him about the book he’s writing, and he gives me an enthusiastic description, verging on academic; it’ll be
his best book yet, he thinks, and will even be translated into English. “Now you can read
my
book,” he says.

He asks where I have traveled, and I tell him Italy, Samoa, Tahiti, Nicaragua. “Ah,” he says, “
la bella vita
continues. You are always on the road.”

“I’m not settled down like you,” I say, half teasing, glancing at the photograph of the woman in white shoes.

“It’s not what I expected,” he says. “But I’m happier with a woman, someone to share dinner with.” He sighs. “My secret now is that I have no secret life. My students look at me like I’m an old man. I’m completely boring.”

“Never,” I say.

“Grazie, signorina,”
he says, and strokes the back of my hand.

He asks about my next trip, and I say I’m not sure, I may take a little break from traveling.

“Because you have a boyfriend?”

I shake my head no. “I’m not interested in men right now.”

“Impossible,” he says. “No men, no travel? What’s happened to you?”

I get up and pretend to inspect the art books in his library. Then I sit back down. We are so used to touching each other, and now we can’t touch at all. Tears start to roll down my eyes.

“Che c’è?”
he asks. What is it?

“I miss you,” I tell him in Italian. “I miss knowing that I’ll see you.”

He picks up my hand, squeezes it, then gives me a hug. I use his Egyptian scarf to wipe my eyes and pull away.

“Do you know what I liked best about your book?” he asks.

I shake my head no. We have never spoken much about the fact that I wrote a book about our romance.

“It was the first time I understood that you loved me.”

I nod yes, unable to speak.

“We’ve had a beautiful story,” he says. “Life is full of stories, and we’ll have more, each of us. Though maybe fewer.” He smiles.

“Sì,”
I say. He embraces me again and then kisses me and then caresses me, and I pull away, alarmed.

“I can’t,” I say and start crying afresh.

“It’s nothing. Just a little caress,” he says, opening his hands wide. “We are old friends.”

“It’s not that,” I say, and somehow I tell him that I don’t feel comfortable touching anyone at all, I can’t travel, I’m too afraid, something bad happened to me in Samoa. He listens to me and frowns. He brings out one of his little cigars, in a tin box, and lights it, inhaling. “Do you want one?” he asks.

I shake my head. “I only smoked that one time, in Ischia.”

He blows a perfect smoke ring, and in spite of myself I smile.

He considers my story.
“Mi dispiace molto,”
he says, giving me a hug and then still holding on to my hand. “I’m so sorry. I’m sorry that happened to you, my dear.” He takes another puff. “But don’t make things too complicated. That experience happened, and of course you always want to be careful. But you can’t let one experience with a cretin change you. You’re a stronger woman than that.” He strokes my hair. “You love to travel, you have a great big appetite for life, and that’s who you are. You just have to continue to be yourself. It’s simple.”

“Simple,” I repeat. “Okay, Professor.”

He holds up his glass.
“La bella vita,”
he says. I pick up my glass, a little shaky, and clink. He gathers his coat and bag, and then he walks with me to the Métro.

I
SPEND ANOTHER
couple days in Paris with Charlotte, wandering the streets, visiting museums, eating long lunches, and finding little shopping areas. With all the beautiful clothes and jewelry, we are still mainly interested in food; the only things we buy are mustards and salts from a gourmet shop on Île-St.-Louis. On our last day, we’re on a busy street near a bookstore, and I see a familiar figure emerge, with his curls and scarf. Out of everyone in Paris, I randomly run into the Professor on the street. I walk up to him and shake my head wordlessly.

He kisses me on both cheeks.
“Incroyable,”
he says. “You see? We keep meeting each other.” He glances at his watch.

“Ciao,”
I say. Hello and good-bye.
Ciao, ciao
.

“Ciao, Laura,”
he says, pulling away.
“Ciao, bella. Ci vediamo.”
We’ll see each other.

I
WISH IT
were as simple as the Professor made it sound, to just be my strong self and start traveling again. But I’ve had one good trip with my cousin, so I feel I can venture out again as long as I’m not alone.

On the way home, I stop off in New York to break up the trip and call Gustavo. He is busy but glad to hear from me, and
one evening he takes me to a Brazilian restaurant, where we eat big chunks of meat, drink hearty red wine, and talk about movies. The restaurant is cozy and warm, and he speaks to the owner in Portuguese. He touches me affectionately, the way Brazilians do. We go back to where I’m staying, and I’m glad to feel that same chemistry, drawn to his irresistible sexiness. We kiss, but he can’t understand why I keep pulling away, repeatedly getting up to get a glass of water or use the bathroom. I don’t want to tell him, it seems like too much information, too intimate—strangely, for all that we’ve been intimate—but then I finally stammer out that I haven’t felt comfortable with men since I was sexually assaulted several months ago. I say “sexually assaulted” as a euphemism but hate that it takes so many more syllables to say.

“I’m sorry about that,” says Gustavo and touches my cheek. I’m glad he isn’t reacting as though it’s a huge horrible deal, the way a couple of my women friends did. “But I think—what’s the expression you use in English?” he asks, his big brown eyes searching mine. Then he has it. “I think you better get back up on the horse.” And then he pulls me toward him, puts his familiar arms around me, safe, holds me tight for a moment, and starts kissing me again. I let myself go; I do want to get back to being myself, to feeling sexy, to being able to make love, to trust. Even though I know I’m not going to be with Gustavo in the long run—and maybe because of that, because there is no great emotional risk—I feel comfortable with him, with his animal self, who finds the animal within me again, who wakens her and plays with her and strokes her softly until morning.

I
N
M
AY, ANOTHER
opportunity to go to Italy falls into my lap;
Gourmet
wants me to write a story about the cuisine of my favorite islands in the world, the Aeolians, the archipelago north of Sicily. This is a dream assignment, but I’m hesitant. A year after my trip to Samoa, I still do not want to travel by myself, even in a country I know well, where I speak the language. I’m uncomfortable, too, with the idea of eating at all those restaurants by myself. You can’t enjoy meals in Italy so much if you eat alone, the food doesn’t taste as good. And I’m conflicted about returning to a place where I had a romantic love affair.

There are some places to which you should probably never return. The Professor mentioned that to me several years ago, when we were on a boat to the Aeolian Islands, watching the volcano on Stromboli blowing smoke into the dawn like an Italian lighting his first cigarette of the morning. The Professor had climbed the volcano years before and never wanted to go back, for fear that the lines of tourists with their headlamps and walking sticks would forever mar the memory of his astonishing overnight trip to the edge of the erupting crater. “But you must go,” he told me, blowing a few smoke rings himself. “Absolutely.”