How to Love an American Man (18 page)

“Of course, darling, who else.” Then he set down his silver tray, and the two of us did cheers with grape juice. Even though I've known since junior high that he was never attracted to girls, he always had a way of making me feel as priceless as a crown jewel. Over a decade after our graduation, I'm reminded of something that's both strange and familiar: every woman needs a man like Kenneth in her life. Here was this person whose family essentially abandoned him thanks to their own unhappiness, and yet Kenneth's sole concern is everybody else's good time—so selfless and noble. To think of my loved ones always so solidly intact with one another—and
I
feel alone and confused?

Kenneth walks around his New Year's party handing out what he claims is Richard Nixon's champagne. He then dings a fork on a glass. “Everyone, I want to welcome you to New Year's Eve two thousand and nine. At this time I invite you to join me in the salon where I've orchestrated an unforgettable round of Dirty Santa.” The naughty gift exchange sends us two dozen adults whooping like fifth-graders who just learned how to translate perverted jokes. At midnight we throw confetti and streamers around Kenneth's kitchen, and as the TV airs shots of New Year's celebrations in Sydney, Paris, and Hong Kong, I catch myself feeling a foreign sensation: I'm present
in this moment
. As Ryan Seacrest announces to the world that it's now 2009 in New York City, there's truly no one who I wish were at this party who's not already here. The billboards light up Times Square behind Seacrest's ear-muffed head, and around me there are blasts of laughter and huddles of hugs. There's no reason I shouldn't find total contentedness in the life around me. My friends, my work, my family, my interests are more than enough to keep a girl satisfied: why would I ever be okay with
striving
for someone's attention? I make a silent New Year's resolution to
have fun
this year and to stop fretting that I'm somehow incomplete. I say a prayer for Grandma, who planned dinner with her friends and an early bedtime to ring in 2009. I hope her resolution was similar.

Around me, men and women—and men and men—hug and sway and blow plastic horns to “Auld Lang Syne,” and it's as though someone has bestowed on all of us a momentary state of perfect bliss. It's time I start finding joy again in the
people who are in my life
. I am complete, I tell myself. I am alive. And even though I don't have romance, I have love. I am loved . . . and most rewarding of all, I am in fact capable of loving others.

J
ANUARY RUSHES PAST
in a bright white gust as I make trips to Cleveland to catch up with old college roommates, and to up-state New York to see my best friend since kindergarten, Emma. This may be the last time I see her in an ordinary state: she has designated this year as the one in which she and her husband will make a baby. But even with all the visits with old friends, I have found that during an emotional period in life, there's often a single companion who fills a particular yearning . . . right now, that's Celeste. Her presence makes me feel more understood than anyone else's.

Celeste finished out her nanny contract in Italy and has been back in Ohio living with her parents since October. With our shared states of transition, we agree that we're both desperate for some together time. She makes the three-hour trip to visit me for Valentine's weekend, and on Saturday we pop into Grandma's for a hug. Energy bounces constantly between Celeste and me like a Ping-Pong ball, and our eye-rolling jokes about living as two exasperated Americans among the old-school Italians make Grandma double over. I sense that this visit with my closest friend from college may have answered a silent plea Grandma had for some company. She flips on lights as we walk from the living room into the kitchen, and it dawns on me that she'd been sitting in the dark before we arrived.

“Dig into those peanut butter melt-aways,” she says, gesturing at the box of candy that Celeste and I have brought from the local chocolatier. We lean over Grandma's island counter as she sits down at the kitchen table to slice open the oversized gold envelope that we've handed her. She spreads the card open and reads about St. Valentine, who, according to legend, was a healer who was thrown in jail and tortured for his faith in God. Valentine also disagreed with the Roman law that kept citizens from marrying, as it stated that married men made poor soldiers, so secretly Valentine performed wedding ceremonies for couples who wanted to spend their lives together. The jailer who was guarding Valentine's cell was desperate for him to restore his blind daughter's sight. According to legend, Valentine agreed to try.

He and the daughter, Asterius, became close friends throughout her therapy (
very
close friends, it sounds like, although the religious section of Hallmark isn't exactly known for its juicy romances), and because she was bright but not educated, Valentine began teaching her about nature and history and God. One day Asterius asked him if God really hears the prayers of little old her, and Valentine explained that if we simply believe in God, He will always do what is best for us—there's nothing we have to do to earn his love. Then right before Valentine's execution, he gave Asterius a love letter with a flower tucked inside and a message to continue seeking God. Immediately after Valentine died, Asterius gained her sight. When she looked in the mirror, she saw how beautiful she was, and she read Valentine's letter saying that she'd been the beautiful red rose of his gray, wretched life. In that moment Asterius learned that her insecurities about being loved and taken care of had always been unwarranted.

In the card I've given Grandma is the prayer to St. Valentine:

Maybe the secret to fulfillment is to stop wondering what we're lacking; to stop seeking love and instead to start accepting ourselves and loving the people we encounter. Two weeks ago in late January the one-year anniversary of Grandpa's death passed, and this humanistic prayer to St. Valentine today with Grandma reminds me of the kindness that overflowed from my heart and my actions in the weeks immediately following Grandpa's passing. Suddenly I understood everyone I encountered as a person who had suffered significantly at some point; who knew struggle and chose to smile anyway. When I returned to Italy after Grandpa's funeral, I couldn't help but hold open doors for the old ladies in the village, to kiss up the kids I was nannying, and to pick up Celeste's tab at bars when her boss forgot to pay her. Losing my grandpa made me want to be more caring, and I noticed that when I was giving love, I wasn't so starved to receive it.

Celeste heads back to Ohio the Sunday after Valentine's Day, and Mom packs up a heart-shaped meat loaf for me to take to Grandma. I know how she hates eating alone, so while I'm working on quieting the emotional hunger inside of me, I do bring my appetite to Grandma's. Across the kitchen table she sets down her fork and says to me, “You know, you seem different.”

“Yeah?”

“You've lost weight, haven't you?”

I nod and swallow my mashed potatoes. “A little, five pounds maybe. After the holidays, it sort of just came off.”

“That's not all, though.” She's squinting, studying me carefully. “You seem happier.”

I scrunch up my nose.
“Really?”

“Mm-hm.”

“Well, so do you, you know. Maybe it's because you've survived your first year without Grandpa.”

“I imagine that has something to do with it. But you,” she muses. “Something's definitely different.”

Could it be that contentment makes us more attractive? I remember the first time I ever saw a Bon Jovi video, in 1986. Jon Bon Jovi had this tough-guy look on his face through the first verse of the song, and watching, you're going, “Oh sure, y'know, he's a cute enough guy.” But then at the chorus he flashes a huge movie-marquee smile at the camera and every girl in the room—well, my babysitter, her friend, and me—swooned to our knees going,
“Oh . . . my . . . God!”
Everyone's better looking when they're expressing happiness and radiating warmth and self-assuredness from inside. It's why we use the word “attractive”: a person's positive affect magnetizes us to them.

But I wonder if that actually works from the other side of the world. I explain to Grandma that Chris has been back in Asia since late January, and, after a little of my own internal resolution, we've returned to cordial terms. She sets her plate aside to hear that he first made contact with me when he needed help locating a document I'd worked on. While I kept my end of the initial exchange short but sweet, he told me how indebted to me he was for my willingness to always lend a hand . . . though I can never tell, does he say such kind things because he's genuine, or because he loves to hear himself say perfect words?

I brushed my hands of the question until a few days later when he called me at seven in the morning. I answered the phone groggy and confused, and he apologized with a hush. “No, no, what is it?” I said.

“Don't worry,” he whispered. “Check your e-mail later.”

After I woke up and poured my coffee, I sat down at the computer to read his note that—oh, wow—he'd passed his board exams, which was one of the projects that kept him so secluded from other people for the past few months. He said he knew I would appreciate what it meant and that I was the first person he'd called to tell.

There is a bottle of Cakebread behind my bar with your name on it,
I wrote back. I'd remembered him once mentioning his favorite wine, and months ago I bought the bottle, hoping we might share it some evening.
I shall gladly find a way to get it to you when you're back in PA.

“His loss,” Grandma shrugs.

I tilt my head and push my plate aside to meet hers in the middle.
His loss.
She's turning the tables on me, feeding back the advice I gave to her. “His loss that he never got to share wine with me?”

She nods.

“You really think so?”

“I'm proud of you,” she says. “You've done everything right.”

“With him, you mean?”

“With him.”

Isn't she being a little generous with the flying colors she's just pinned on me? I wouldn't say I've done everything right—far from it. First of all, my parents had me thinking I was cold-hearted for not wanting to speak with him on Christmas. And now, almost three months after the Thanksgiving disaster, I can't help but maintain the impression that Chris's ducking out of dinner was based on a series of rotten excuses.
I need to study. I'm traveling tomorrow.
I had surgery.
I never did come upon proof that in fact he'd performed a trauma surgery the night before Thanksgiving. I still feel embarrassed that I'd put so much energy into preparing for the whole thing, that my entire family looked at me with both hunger and excitement in their eyes as they waited for him to arrive at the top of my aunt's stairs with a dessert in his grip. On top of it all, why can't I just let the whole thing
go
? Yes, I've forgiven him . . . but every time I think of him, I catch a disappointed jab to my stomach—that confirmation:
he's not coming.
He's not here.

Celeste's mother once gave me one of the most useful pieces of advice I've ever received. One summer weekend in college when I was visiting Celeste in Ohio, her mom said, “Remember, on your way home, if you don't know which lane you're supposed to be in on the Interstate, always stick to the middle lane.” That rule has come in handy dozens of times since then, even in desperate moments on the Italian highway when I could barely read road signs or operate a stick shift with the crazy drivers around me sucking all my attention.
Stick to the middle lane
, I'd remind myself, and instantly I would feel my blood pressure slow down to a normal rate. This weekend I brought Celeste up to speed on the Chris situation from summer to winter, and this afternoon before I left for Grandma's, Celeste e-mailed me to tell me she'd gotten back home okay. (Our friendship, the quintessential two-way street.) She writes:

I think it helps—but I want to run it past my coach. “What do you make of that advice, Grandma?”

Grandma says she agrees completely, that even in the age of e-mails and “those little messages you kids send each other on your phones,” a woman has to operate with grace in any relationship. She explains that when she was young, women “didn't ever want to be chasing a man.
Back off
. That was the custom, and if you ask me, it's still that way. Men don't want to be approached just any time.”

“Hm. What if the guy's thinking the girl's going to call him?”

“Listen, you're asking my opinion. I'm telling you that Cecilia's mother is right—”

“Celeste.”

“Celeste. Her mother is right. You're the prize. It's up to him to
get you
. If he wants to call, he'll call. If he wants to see you, he'll see you. Men still think they're the ones in charge. It's their biological nature.”
Biological nature?
When did Grandma go all pop psychology?

I like it.

But what if, just what if you can't help but reach out to a guy? Grandma says the savvy way a girl would see if a guy liked her when she was young was to somehow drop a hint about where she was going to be later. “We'd make it known where we were going without being bold,” she says. Ah, like a Facebook status update. “And when I first started dating your grandpa, I really thought he was seeing other girls. So I'd make plans to go out with my girlfriends. I wasn't going to sit at home doing nothing.” Years later she found out that Grandpa really had just been cruising around with his buddies. “That was another thing I learned—when I wanted an answer out of your grandpa, I never pounded it out of him. Give him some time to explain himself,” she says. “You'll find out a whole lot that way.”