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CHAPTER 1
Casual Sex
À la Italia Laura Krafft
A while ago, I was living in New York and about to celebrate a big birthday. An enormous birthday. The most colossal birthday I'd celebrated up to that point. I'm not going to say which it was but suffice it to say it was the first one where the number started becoming much smaller on the coasts than it was back home in the Midwest.
I decided to celebrate by taking myself to Italy. I'd always wanted to go and had never been. What better time than a birthday to become a citizen of the world? What better way to start than by being a tourist in Rome? In the summertime? At the height of tourist season? I tried to find a friend to travel with, but for some reason my plan didn't appeal to anyone. Most of my friends had traveled after college. A few said they would come but only if we went to small coastal, village-y, nontourist places. But I didn't want that. I wanted to see the sights. I decided to go it alone. I could do artisanal back in Brooklyn.
So I bought all the Rough Guides and pored over them. I planned every minute down to the second. I booked tours and lovely hotels, I made reservations at the best restaurants. And I got to Italy and I started touring around Rome and it was awful. Terrible in every way. I was so lonely. I hadn't thought about the fact that I had come from New York, where I sat alone at a desk all day before going back to an empty apartment, to Rome, where I would tour the sights alone all day before going back to an empty hotel room. Rome was basically New York with better footwear.
Also, nobody else in Italy was alone. Nobody. Everyone traveled around in clumps. I discovered that Italy is about friends and families and romance. Italy is not about being newly middle-aged and single. People had warned me that blondes in Italy have to put up with a lot of grabbing and whistling. This blonde, um, did not. Instead, there was a lot of solicitous moving out of my way and seating me at a table for one, away from the noise of joyful couples and families, in the back of the restaurant, next to the bathroom. I smelled so much human waste in Italy while trying to eat delicious food that, to this day, I have a hard time eating spaghetti. I remember covering my nose with a napkin while I ate and feeling like some kind of stately old widow in a Merchant Ivory film. The fact that I insisted on wearing European-y draped scarves around my neck and an expensive black fedora I'd bought on my first day made the humiliation complete.
But throughout it all, I tried to stay upbeat. I kept saying to myself, "I'm having a blast!" And I would pull out the beautiful leather journal I had bought specifically for the trip and write, "I am so lonely! I am so lonely!" over and over again. And I would carry the big, fancy camera I had bought specifically for the trip everywhere I went. And because I don't like to read camera manuals, I only took one picture. And the picture was blurry. And because the lens cap wasn't all the way off, the picture was also half dark. But I was in Italy and I kept reminding myself that even if it felt like I was fulfilling some weird karmic punishment, I was on the trip of a lifetime.
One day, in this spirit, I went on a tour of the Vatican Museum. I had booked a personal tour guide before I'd left New York, and, I will admit, I fantasized about how cool it would be if we fell in love. We did not. But I enjoyed the art. So much so that when the tour finished I thought, "Again!" And I went out to the enormous line and found another tour guide to give me a second tour because you can do that when you're traveling alone on the trip of a lifetime. Then I went to Trastevere, which the guidebooks had told me was the East Village of Rome, for the reservations I'd booked weeks earlier at a restaurant that was supposed to serve the best meatballs in Italy. And the meatball restaurant was closed. No explanation, just a locked door. But that was fine. I remember thinking it would make a great memory of the time I walked all the way to Trastevere because I was scared of cabs even though my legs were killing me because I'd been standing for ten hours. And how much fun it had been.
I went to the café across the street to have some wine and recalibrate. I wrote a couple "I'm so lonely" paragraphs in my journal and got a little buzzed. Then I looked around. There was a ridiculously beautiful guy sitting across from me, smoking a cigarette and reading Kierkegaard. He looked like he'd been sent over from central casting for the role of handsome intellectual type who doesn't realize that no one actually reads Kierkegaard and therefore doesn't know that you can lie and say you've read him and never be called on it — that Kierkegaard is in the same foolproof lie category as playing the harp or arc welding. I smirked at him and he looked at me and asked in Italian if I was laughing at him. I understood the gist of it and answered in English, "You're reading Kierkegaard in a café. It's a bit much, no?" Instead of being annoyed, he got all excited and said, "Ah, you speak English! If I buy you a drink, will you speak with me?" After a week of communicating by pointing and saying "Please" or "Thank you," I said "Yes" so fast I almost shrieked.
He came over to my table. His name was Allesandro and we talked for a while, the conversation drifting like so many conversations between New Yorkers and foreigners do onto the topic of whether or not the real New York City is anything like the New York City on the TV show Friends. Then he asked me cautiously, "Lah-oo-rah [that's me], would it be too much? This man, he is having a party. Would you come with me? He is the Warhol of Trastevere!" I obviously would. And I remember thinking it was funny that sometimes when God closes a meatball restaurant, he opens a Warhol party.
So we went to the party and the host did sort of look like Andy Warhol — if you caught him at the right angle. But better than that was the fact that it was a real Italian party in a real Roman apartment. Everyone was smoking. Everyone was laughing. The party passed in flashes of black-turtlenecked people explaining things to me with big hand gestures. I didn't understand a thing except that my new friend Allesandro kept filling my glass with wine.
When it ended, Allesandro and I went outside and he suddenly grabbed my hand and turned to me with a pained look in his eyes. "Lah-oo-rah," he said. "Can I ask you something? My heart, it is aching." I nodded and he asked, "Can I kiss you?" He looked at me beseechingly and I remember thinking, "Really? Who says that?" I mean, I was visiting from New York where guys never kissed me. The guys I went on dates with spent most of the night trying to clarify what would happen to our relationship if we took various next steps. I'd written the whole thing off as a worldwide phenomenon I called "Magic Dick Syndrome" — a syndrome wherein men think their penis is magic and that if you get even one whiff of it, you will become enchanted and want to marry them on the spot. Nobody I went on dates with in New York said, "My heart is aching." I don't know much but I know enough that when a handsome someone says that, you say, "Hell yes, I'll make out with you!" So we did. We made out all over Trastevere. We banged into old ladies carrying bread, stumble-walk kissed over bridges. We made out in the way only people in coffee commercials or catalogues do. It was fantastic.
After a while, Allesandro stepped back and asked very formally, "Lah-oo-rah, would you ever consider coming back to my apartment?" Before he could get the words out, I was like, "Hell yes, I'll go back to your apartment!" The next thing I knew, I was wearing a helmet and we were on his Vespa. His Vespa! We drove and drove, around fountains, on highways. The air rushing by smelled foreign and exotic. We ended up in a far-off suburb of Rome, at a weird postwar apartment building with huge front doors that had sixties-style doorknobs in the middle. It felt very Antonioni.
We went inside his apartment and made out all over the place. We had crazy, great sex. And I remember thinking to myself, "I'm alive! And I'm with this beautiful man! And this is really happening! Happy birthday to me! Happy birthday to me!" Afterward he cuddled with me in a way that only speakers of Romance languages can and I thought to myself, "I'm going to be okay with this part of my life." And we fell asleep.
The next morning, Allesandro and I woke up at the same time. And I looked at Allesandro and he looked at me and we both quickly drew back from each other and grunted the universal exclamatory, "Huh."
Then Allesandro said, "Lah-oo-rah, can I ask you something?" And I said, Of course. And he asked, "How old are you?" I looked at him and said haltingly, "Um ... thirty ..." And then I took a big pause while I tried to think of an age that wouldn't freak him out, and finished, "... -three?" I remember thinking, "I'm in Italy, I can dip low." And then I asked Allesandro how old he was and he answered haltingly, "Twenty ..." and then there was an equally big pause while he thought of an age that wouldn't freak me out and finished, "... -five?" And I realized that Allesandro was actually probably, like, twenty-one. And not just twenty-one but, like, secondary-sexual-characteristics-just-coming-into-play twenty-one. A new-hint-of-peach-fuzz twenty-one. And I realized, looking at his body, that what I had seen as reminiscent of a character from a Rossellini film was actually someone who was slender because he was still a boy. On the verge of manhood, getting close, but still, a boy.
Then I looked around his room and realized that what I had seen as great cuddling was actually clinging because we were on his tiny, single bed. And I saw stacks of books and realized he was reading Kierkegaard not because he was a philosopher-poet type, but because he was still in school and probably had a paper due on existential philosophers. And just as all this was clicking in, Allesandro asked if I would like him to make me an espresso and I said sure. He got up and started getting dressed. Then he stopped for a moment and solemnly asked me to promise that if I ran across his roommate, I would say that the coffee was mine because she always got mad when he used hers even though she used his toilet paper and he never said anything.
It was at that point that I remembered I had a reserved appointment at the Borghese Gallery. You have to get your entrance time months in advance, they're unavailable at the door, so I told Allesandro I had to leave. He answered, "Of course, of course." And then asked, "Before you go, maybe we should ..." He searched for the right way to phrase what was coming next and he was so sweet and polite because he was just a kid, and he asked, "Do you know what email is?" And it dawned on me that Allesandro was about to suggest we exchange email addresses but then had the thought I might be too old to know what that meant. I realized he thought of me the way I thought of my mother who, every time she goes to the ATM, needs to pull a little notebook out of her purse and look up her personal identification number — otherwise known as her PIN. Allesandro thought that as my mother was to the PIN, I was to email. To reiterate: he did not think I knew what email was.
I took a pen out of the little plastic pen cup on his desk and started writing all my information down. I told him that not only did I have an email address but I also had a Facebook page and had thoughts about starting a Tumblr. And then he showed me pictures from the soccer game he'd won the day before. And then I told him I had to leave.
It took several buses to get back to downtown Rome. They were all packed with the morning rush hour. Each time I got on, I would hold people up while I figured out the different fares. I didn't know where to stand because after touring the Vatican twice and then partying and having sex all night, I smelled foul. I didn't want to give my armpit too much access to fellow passengers' civil liberties. Nice old ladies kept giving me the stinkeye and then I would fall on them when the bus jostled.
When I finally got back to Rome, I took my stupid black hat out of my purse and put it on. I halfheartedly tied a scarf around my neck. It was at least 100 degrees. I wanted to take a cold bath back at my hotel but realized that I wouldn't have time to go there and make my entrance time at the Borghese Gallery. So I decided, "Screw it, I'm in Italy. Who will know?" And I trudged through the Villa Borghese gardens to the gallery.
Once there, I got in line behind a large touring group of ten-year-old soccer players from St. Louis and their mothers. Apparently, there had been a big international tournament that week. Everyone was freckle-faced. Everyone was adorable. I was older than all the mothers. As I was standing there, one of the kids turned to me and asked if I was an American. I'm not sure why he asked; the hat probably. "Yes," I told him. "I'm American." He told me he was from St. Louis and I told him I was from Illinois. He announced, "We just won our game." So I announced, "I just got laid."
CHAPTER 2
My Sex Playlist Alison Agosti
My longest relationship was my very first. We 'dated from when I was sixteen until I was twenty-one and he was my first love, my first kiss, my first person I ever slept with, and eventually my first heartbreak. Knowing myself better now than I did then, I understand why this fairly doomed relationship was able to survive that long. And even though it was a mostly mutual and inevitable breakup that we'd both been aware was coming for years, I was completely crushed, emotionally devastated in a way that only twenty-one-year-olds can be emotionally devastated. Now, at twenty-seven, I just can't muster up the kind of energy required to be able to stay up all night and get really upset about things. Who can be bothered? In fact, when I try to remember the last thing I was notably upset about, all I can come up with is an image of me walking past a display of leashes for cats and shaking my head.
I think part of the can't-get-out-of-bed sadness was due to the fact that I suddenly realized that romantic love was not unconditional and that I might have just experienced the last time I would be able to wholly give myself to another person without fear of getting hurt — hurt in a way where you ache with no cure.
A turning point in my devastation was about six months after we'd broken up, when I was finally able to go to the bathroom without crying. The reason this seemed significant was that the bathroom was the one place where I found it damn near impossible to fight off my thoughts, because it was the one place where I was always guaranteed to be alone. So I just remember it being a major landmark when I could finally sit there without tears.
The amazing thing is that I got over it. People would hug me and tell me that I was going to be okay and that time would heal my pain and whatever but when I was in the thick of it, there was no comfort and no consolation. My sadness had such a hold on me that I sobbed uncontrollably in the grocery store, in class, and while masturbating. And then it went away, and I was just left there with myself as I tried to learn how to be a person again.
And with depression's abrupt exit came the realization that I would eventually date someone else, which would eventually lead to me sleeping with someone else — someone else who I hadn't passed notes to in AP English and whose high school swim meets I had never attended and who I didn't know so completely that I couldn't fall asleep without them. The idea of this was so completely crazy to me that I realized that part of the reason my ex and I had stayed together so long was to avoid this very thing.
During college I worked at a hardware store, and I remember talking to a coworker down aisle Q, which was the farthest place from our boss and customers but also the most likely place to see a rat, and telling her about my dilemma. "I just can't imagine sleeping with someone I'm not in love with," I said.
Thinking back on that, there's part of me that wants to tell that girl she'd eventually sleep with people she didn't even like, over and over again. Dating, even now, feels very much like a competition between two people — like a race to figure the other one out without revealing too much before the other person does. It should go without saying that I am terrible at dating.
The way I decided to trick myself into excitement was to make an extensive and painfully planned-out sex playlist, even though I understood that sex in college was sort of like a tiny bird trapped in a house just frantically trying to get back outside, unsure of where an open window was. The optimism of young women can be heartbreaking. Please keep in mind that, at this point in the story, dating was completely hypothetical; there wasn't a long line to take out the girl who had been spontaneously sobbing for most of junior year. But I knew at some point in my life I was going to be in the position to have sex again, even if it wasn't for another ten years, so let's just say that it was a sort of very optimistic sex playlist. When it was finished, it was about three hours long and broke down into roughly four parts:
PART ONE: A few innocuous pop songs so I could bail if it turned out I was misreading the situation;
PART TWO: Make-out slow jams, with Feist's album Let It Die prominently featured;
PART THREE: Songs with a harder bass for the actual fucking part (thank God for the Black Keys);
PART FOUR: The denouement. Where, in my mind, we would talk about our feelings while Sigur Rós serenaded us.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "True Tales of Lust and Love"
by .
Copyright © 2014 Anna David.
Excerpted by permission of Counterpoint.
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