The Only Two Choices I’ve Ever Made
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The first time I ever traveled without my children, in the year of my divorce, I went to Italy for a week with a friend. I was half in love with him, but when we got there, he made it clear that we shouldn’t anymore, it wouldn’t work, and anyway, he didn’t want to.
We were just a couple of pals, hanging out in Tuscany. We were basically the middle-aged guys from . In Siena, on top of the duomo, we got into a fight. How could we not be in love on top of a duomo, with all that potent golden light frothing over the tiles of the crumbling city and the green fields beyond studded with cypresses that looked as if they had been placed there expressly to pin all that beauty to the earth? I mean, seriously: ? I said I was probably going to throw myself off the roof of the cathedral. He’d have to arrange a funeral for me in the Piazza del Campo. Unfortunately, he knew I was joking. We walked back down the narrow steps; we looked at the statues that had once guarded the walls, and the eroded face of every prophet and philosopher was my dumb face, trying not to cry. “This place is aggressively romantic,” he said that night at our Airbnb. I was upset that he had said that, like it was a mistake to have come. We were screwing up the whole country’s vibe. I went outside and patted the owner’s big white dogs until they knocked me over into the pea gravel and battered me about with their big white paws. They were the next best thing to my children, whom I missed every minute and Small children don’t consume just a little bit of a person; they don’t say, “I want this much of you and no further.” One of the joys of parenthood is the discovery that there is always more to give, that love is a deep, deep well, and that any concept of balance is bogus. This dynamic, I was learning, is not great preparation for dating. I had left my marriage six months earlier. The man I went to Italy with was the first new person I’d kissed in 15 years. I had felt—and this is embarrassing to admit—incapacitated by desire.
