perfunctorily and, worst of all, politely. We shared the beer on the rocks with icy routine, while harnessing the two squirming high-strung kids.
Beer on ice, before nine p.m., is something for us. It’s almost a conversation for us. Beer on ice, for example, does not happen, like, at three o’clock on a Tuesday between lunch and dinner service at the restaurant with only an hour to get the kiddy dinner rolling and the tubby ready, before heading back to work. When Michele shows up with two beers and two glasses of ice it says, suggestively, that We Have Time. Time to sit for a minute. Time to sleep off the alcohol, should we feel it. Time to lie down with each other. And we drank the beer on ice, in Terminal C, as usual, as we had every year before our flight. But it was not with a grinning, quiet excitement shimmering with sexual promise, freedom, youth, all the things that a couple of beers makes us remember.
“Beer?” he asks, proferring one as usual because he has not yet caught on that I have dropped out.
“Yes, please. Thank you.”
When I am polite with Michele is when we are at our deadliest. When he is nothing more to me than a one-off customer at my restaurant where my professional courtesy is required. When I don’t even have the warmth and friendliness I can easily conjure for a beloved regular at the restaurant. When I am “Yes, please,” and “No, thank you” is when we are dead in the water.
I’ve grown ambivalent about this annual trip to Italy as it is. Perhaps this is in direct proportion to questions I have about my continued stamina for the marriage itself. As early summer arrives and everyone’s casual conversation turns to vacation—the hairdresser, the meat man, the exterminator—all ask: “Are you going to get away this summer? Any plans?”
And I answer matter-of-factly now, without animation, “Yup. I am going to Italy for the month of July. We go every year. My husband is Italian and we go every year to his home and his family in Italy.”
And the meat man, the hairdresser, the exterminator light up as if plugged in. Eyes widen with delight and envy. Huge smiles. They burst as I did the very first time I went.
Italy! Oh my God! That’s fantastic! Three weeks in Italy!
While I still share much of this delight, after the first few years it’s no longer an unmitigated joy. I want to have seen much of the world before I bite the dust. I want to know more of Italy than the apartment in Rome and the crumbling old house in Puglia. I want to be with friends or people I can really talk to on my twenty-one days of vacation. To take the same one vacation every year, with someone I don’t get along that well with, while much of the rest of the world remains unexplored and unknown by us, makes me a little less joyful than the exterminator. That we also only go from the house to the same beach or to the same swimming pool every day while we’re in Puglia, makes me less electrified than the meat man. I like to be anchored by routine, not shackled by it. What I love about Italians is exactly what I also don’t love: the incredible fastening down of routine, tradition, the nearly pathological preservation of habit. I love that they haven’t torn down the ruins to make a highway, that the pasta is still made the same way, that certain foods are eaten only in certain places in certain preparations—Trippa Milanese is always Milanese and Trippa alla Romana is always alla Romana—this is so reliable and rich and fascinating. This is how countries older than ours become so rich in tradition. Repetition. Centuries of repetition. But it’s that very repetition that makes my heart sing a little wanly when I think of my one vacation a year. Shouldn’t we be on a houseboat on the Mekong River delta this year? Eating raw octopus head in Tokyo? Strolling the boulevards of Buenos Aires? Bicycling the coast of Portugal?
It’s exactly the same when I tell people that I am married to an Italian.
“An Italian! Oh, from Italy? An Italian Italian!” and they are agog.
“Does he cook with you at the restaurant?”
And I laugh. “No, he’s a doctor.”
Well then they are just about levitating.
Even I am seduced by the idea of it. An Italian doctor! Three weeks