The Art of Men (I Prefer Mine Al Dente) (32 page)

This area, this place, was extraordinary. I was surrounded with all my best friends and I was in heaven. Italy is my favorite place in the world thus far, and Firenze is my second-most-beloved location in Italy, Positano being the first. It was so much fun, all my friends going to town to get dance costumes, Sergey choreographing away. I ordered the lighting and stage men around to have the show look just so. And with my limited Italian and their limited English, it was mostly a symphony of hand gestures.

Italians never go places without their children. Children were running around wildly in typical Italian fashion. I’d adopted a stray kitten who’d just come to the villa. The food was beyond articulation, the weather was perfection, and show night was an enormous success! We raised 1.7 million euros!

After the competition, after my Italian best friend, Elena, and her husband, Marco, had suspiciously won the competition, we all danced the night away under the luscious Tuscan moon.

There was no crush on Sergey at this time, or “Puppy” as I fondly call him. His dark past had been dragged into my life and my only agenda was to get him out of it. No, there was no romance with Puppy under the Tuscan anything.

I was crushing out on this musician, Pierro. A bit of a musical genius, he was. Handsome, blue eyes, big smile, endlessly talented. Hmmm, he looked even better. Elena said he was perfect for me, and he was split from his wife. He had this gorgeous voice and could play any instrument on the stage. And he was genuinely nice and extremely charismatic. The next time I saw Pierro was in Padova for another fundraiser charity event. You know how girls look around to see if “he” has shown up yet? How they nonchalantly inquire to people they don’t really know, “So, is that Pierro guy gonna do the show tonight?” Ho hum, you could care less but just checking for a friend. I heard laughter behind me. It was Pierro and some of my friends. Sergey was off training and choreographing the new talent for the show the next night.

“Bellissima, bellissima!!”
he ran to me and hugged me madly. “You look so beautiful, I missed you,” he went on in his hopelessly sexy accent. “Oh, hi Pierro,” my aloof Kansas girl stated. The musicians walked by and said, “Pierro, sound check” or “Pierro, leave her the fuck alone”—whatever they said, it was directed at Pierro. He kissed my cheek and was off to rehearse.

On a scale of 1 to 10, I was riding at a level 5 in crush world. Maks had been an 8, Sergey was a 0, and Patrick Swayze had been a 10, just to give you an idea how my crushometer works. Oh, and Travolta had been off the charts.

I don’t count the men I lived with or married as crushes. They were realities.

But crush world is fun and dangerous and terribly giddy. I just love a genuine crush and a budding 5 for Pierro was a good start.

There had been three weeks between the first big show and this next one in Padova—enough time to get a little excited about seeing Pierro. Also, there was crush number two, helping with the show. He was younger than Pierro, equally talented, but a completely different cat. He worked with Roberto Cavalli. He’s actually an artist, quite a good one, in his own right but he was in his late thirties, the “too-young zone.” I had him pegged as a level 3 crush, with little hope for a future.

It’s astonishing how much flirting you can do with a below-5 crush. When you feel you can take them or leave them, the game is so easy. It’s when you crush out at levels 7 to 10 that the thought of not having them in your life turns painful. But this one, crush number two was a breeze to flirt with.

I
did
look amazing in Italy. I need to add that. I was at my all-time thinnest in five years and in the zone of sorta hot. My long blond fake hair was rockin’ it. I felt confident in my looks and I’m always at my best mentally and spiritually when I’m in Italy. I guess my ideal scene would be to fall in love with a handsome, smart, funny Italian man and spend the rest of my life in some bad-ass villa high above the Amalfi coast overlooking Positano.

Everyone was crazy for Sergey. He’s so good at teaching people to dance and at validating all their right moves. Again the fundraiser was a flaming success. My friend Elena danced like an idiot, and she and Marco were reduced to third place but no one cared. We raised another two million euros and everyone was in a delirium with the success and having the time of their lives—even Pierro’s wife, who had gotten back together with him over those three short weeks between fundraisers. I recovered quickly; after all Pierro had only been a level 5 crush.

  •  •  •  

When Sergey and I did our exhibition performance that night it was nothing short of a comedy routine. Sergey had choreographed the most divine, sexy waltz for us. We called it the “dirty waltz” because it was no
DWTS
waltz. The story behind it was lovers who just couldn’t get enough of each other but sadly couldn’t seem to stay together.

A huge lawn lies in the midst of extraordinary gardens just in front of the massive villa outside Padova, nearer Venezia. Because Sergey had the job of training all the dance couples, he had little time for us. He created the dance early in the morning, and we had just one go at it in rehearsal. The other dance couples danced on the stage at the end of the endless lawn. Sergey and I had the lawn lit up with periwinkle-colored lights, the same color that was bleeding across the 16th-century villa. Our dance was a barefoot dance in the grass, covering the entire span of the massive lawn.

Wow, it was a sexy dance. It was dynamic and dramatic and riddled with sexual tension. We’d come together and push apart, as lovers do. We would cling to each other and twirl and Sergey had incorporated ballet into the dirty dance—not for me but for him, thank god, with leaps and bended knee and pirouettes. I’d never danced a dance so intense and emotional. At the end of our rehearsal that morning we were sure we would blow everyone’s Italian minds. At the previous event we had danced the same cha-cha that Maks and I had danced on
DWTS
. It became our private joke: “Should we do the road show?” That’s what we called the cha-cha to Cee Lo Green’s “Forget You (Fuck You).” But this night we were doing our own original rendition of the dirty waltz in front of hundreds of appreciative Venetians.

My dress was a glorious, long, lime-green silk with a train six feet long trailing behind when I walked. It was sexy. I was tan and barefoot. Sergey was tan and buff and wore black jeans and a violet cotton shirt that matched the periwinkle lights projected on the villa. The only difference in that morning rehearsal and that evening’s performance was all the dew sparkling underneath the violet lights and the moon.

We began our dance. We first walked along the edges, each on opposing sides of the dew-laden lawn. A very dramatic entrance. Then we ran into each other’s arms in a frenzy and met in the middle, 50 feet away from the edges, and fell into a lovers’ clutch. I pushed him away, and as I was choreographed to do, ran to the edge of the lawn again, sort of; by this time my dress was drenched with dew. It was soaking wet. The breezy silk felt like water-soaked wool. But I made it to the edge. This was the part where I look over my shoulder at my man doing pirouettes and gallant leaps toward me, to win me back. His pirouettes were sort of goofy-looking, awkward, and his leaps were about six inches off the ground when he burst into my arms and said, “This ground is so fucking wet, I can’t get any height.” I quickly whispered back, “My dress is so fucking soaked, it feels like a wet blanket.” And yet we tried to spin and twirl in an emotional burst that symbolized our lover’s frenzy.

Sergey, it seems, was standing on my green silk dress that had now grown at least 24 inches longer all around the hem.

“You’re on my dress.”

“Pull it the fuck out.”

“I can’t, you’re fucking standing on it.”

Sergey being the pro dancer he is, in a flourish of hand and arm, swept down, grabbed my soaking wet dress, and threw it into the air! I swooped my arm under it so that the massive weight of the train was over my left arm. We continued. All this stuff only took about three seconds but seemed an eternity.

Twirling, whirling, running, sliding doors, opening out, dips, twinkling, shadowing, until my dress dropped off of my arm. Again, “Dip, fucking dip,” he demanded.

“I can’t because you’re standing on my fucking dress.”

Angrily he whispered, “Dip the fuck anyway. This is the finale. Do a back bend, do something. Fuck!”

So I did a back-bend-sorta thing and threw my inside leg up for the extended toe point, the opposite leg that is supposed to be lifted. But fuck, I at least dipped to the soggy ground with my fake blond hair sopping up the dew and my other leg over his shoulder. As we then walked off, arms around each other in the choreographed “walk off the dance lawn,” Sergey was walking all over my dress—again! My straps were hanging to my elbows and we both looked at each other with big, professional, toothy dance grins.

“Fuck you.”

“No, fuck you!”

By the next morning Sergey’s crush status had risen to a level 2.

Sergey and I took our
DWTS
fundraising format all around Europe and England. We never performed the dirty waltz again. It seemed it was too dangerous to our budding flirtations. We stuck with the road show cha-cha as our exhibition dance.

We were together 24 hours a day, and we got to know each other very well—extremely well. We became each other’s confidants and would talk for hours about life, dreams, and goals. We were inseparable.

By the time we hit Paris, Sergey was a stone cold level 6. The danger zone. We had flirted from shore to shore, joking or not, that it would happen “tomorrow.”

I can’t think of a more free time in my life. There were no rules, no limits. I didn’t have to do an ABC pilot until December and the book I was writing wasn’t due for seven months. I would have to go to NYC sometime in November to shoot a TV commercial, but that was all in the distance.

Sergey and I were always in separate hotel rooms. In Positano I was in a two-bedroom bungalow, far away from the hotel, whereas he had a room on the ocean side of the hotel itself.

Friends would come and go, Italian friends, American friends, Jonathan Knight, assistants. They would stay in my suite in the second bedroom or in a different room in the hotel. Then before we went to Paris, the night before we left Italy, friends just disappeared and it was Sergey and me alone, together.

Nothing much changed. I wrote, he talked to his ex and future girlfriends on the phone and flirted. I flirted with occasional men but mostly we just hung out together and flirted and laughed about “tomorrow.”

We flew away to Paris for our final fundraising dance exhibition. I’d booked us in the Hotel Coste, a trendy, high-class boutique hotel close to Place Vendôme. The last time I’d been there was my last holiday with Black. It’s a provocative hotel, sexy and chic. Everyone who works there looks as if they’ve stepped out of an Armani ad.

The hotel is too cool for anyone, actually, and there is always groovy music, oo-chinka-oo music, club music, Buddha Bar stuff. The hotel has its own soundtrack, for Christ’s sake.

Sergey and I had adjoining rooms for the first time on our journey. The rooms are lush with burgundy red walls which would usually repel me, but in the Hotel Coste it works. The rooms feel like a high-class bordello from the 1930s. Romantic, provocative, oozing sexuality.

Sergey and I went to see Jim Morrison’s gravesite in the famed Père-Lachaise cemetery. We were dicking around with me walking on a short wall while he was beside me in the street. We were holding hands for the sake of my balance. Snap, snap, snap, we spotted French paparazzi scurrying in and out of the historical tombs and little beautiful houselike things where dead people have rested for centuries. Snap, snap, snap.

We joined friends for lunch and looked at artwork. Snap, snap, snap.

We had dinner hours later with the same friends and I decided to have wine. You know, one of my good ideas. We all drank Merlot and Mouton Rothschild, then visited the most extraordinary Parisian home I’ve ever laid eyes on. They were treating Sergey and me like we were a couple. Like we were together as lovers. But don’t the French always have a lover or two tucked in their back pocket? We played word games, drank wine, and laughed and flirted, said
au revoir
and then walked to our hotel.

I was thinking,
Is this “tomorrow”? Are we really going to do this?
Of course it would ruin our relationship. He’s a friend, he’s my dance teacher. He’s my children’s friend.
Shoo, shoo, off you go, sane realities,
I thought. The entire world thinks I’m a cougar, the most overused word of 2008 to 2012. Was it wrong to take a boy lover? And he isn’t a boy; wasn’t he simply a 23-year-old man!? I’d been married three years by the time I was 23. I’ve gone on dates with men much older than me, years ago, when much older than me existed. And what about all my guy friends who’ve married or dated women 20, 30, 40 years younger? Sure they were all rich and that had to have something to do with the women who fall for older men. Let’s face it, it’s hard to find a woman who fell for a 30-year-old trash collector. And why the hell can’t I be like other people? Why can’t I just have affairs or brief encounters and go on about my life? Do I have to fall in love or be in love with a man to shag him? But I do love Sergey in many ways. I’ll convince myself—yes! The love is there, well, a certain kind of love. And I should do something daring. I should not remain the born-again virgin I’ve become over recent times. And he certainly seems willing and able. He’d propositioned me a hundred times . . . or was he kidding? Oh lord, stop this noise!!

Back at the den of iniquity I could feel my conviction waning. Doesn’t sleeping with a friend always end badly? And especially a dancer friend who hops on and off his partners like a round of leapfrog? Oh my, oh my, I’ve got it! I’ll order some wine.

“What are you doing over there?” Sergey hollered from his adjoining room.

“I’m ordering wine, you want some?” asked the spider of the fly.