Part Two

1

Because Greece was the first «Europe» I had ever known, I loved it like you love your first child: you demand everything of it and what you receive swells your heart like a balloon.

When we returned to Italy after those first two weeks, I had the secret fear that nothing could he as good as those first days overseas. Afternoon light couldn't possibly fall on broken walls the same way as it did in Greece. Where else on earth would someone think of using giant rubber bands to hold the tablecloth down at an outdoor restaurant? On beaches of black sard, men walked alongside ancient mules that carried melons for sale. The men cut the melons in half with one swat of a big knife and the red fruit tasted so sweet and cool in the hot afternoon sun.

And I was right – those things belonged in Greece's house and I gradually learned not to look for them elsewhere. But that was the most wondrous surprise of this new world: you didn't have to look for them, because «elsewhere» you looked out of the window of your _auberge_ in Brittany and saw sheep grazing in salt marshes by the gray ocean. Elsewhere you saw fresh blood on men's faces in Dublin and it made you realize that what you'd once read about the scrappy Irish was true. Elsewhere you felt the cogwheel train carry you up the craggy side of the _Schneeberg_ in Austria; halfway there, the train stopped at a tiny station so they could pour water into the boiler of the turn-of-the-century steam locomotive.

Milan was a bunch of bustle and beautiful hidden courtyards. I got a job at Berlitz teaching young Italian go-getters how to speak American. The hours were odd and the majority of my students were snazzy young guys who couldn't decide whether to pay attention to the lesson or try making a little pass at the teacher. We got used to each other and I began learning not to be nervous when life wasn't going exactly as planned.

But getting used to European life was hard. Getting used to European life _and_ living with someone for the first time was often a landslide of frustration, responsibility – and days when all I wanted was to quietly go off and ram my head against a wall.

A sample? Danny was a slob, while I was Miss Neat. The first time he shed his clothes as he walked across the room to bed, leaving them in colorful little piles where they fell, I gawked but said nothing. The next time he did it I picked up the things in the morning and put them in his closet. The third time, I screamed. He smiled like he didn't know what I was talking about; said I sounded like Oscar in _The Odd Couple_.

Another thing that drove me crazy about him was that he had no facility for language, but that didn't stop him for a second. He would walk into the corner store and ask in his nice American English for two yams, tabasco sauce, a bit of fresh basil and two Cokes. Then he would come home with the two Cokes and shrug sweetly: «I guess they were out of yams, Cul.» I'd be in the middle of making fresh pesto sauce, and more than once found myself throwing the stirring spoon at his retreating head. «Get back in here and stir this stuff!» I'd grab my Italian dictionary and head for the door, knowing it was partly my fault for sending him in the first place.

When I got mad at Danny, I yelled. When he got mad at me, he either said four concise words or else wrote a note and taped it to the bathroom mirror or my dressing table.

But the chemistry was right and I learned you can survive without basil so long as you like the person sitting across the table from you at dinner.

He became less of a slob and studied his vocabulary. I grew less hysterical and learned to stop worrying about everything twice.

Other problems? Two o'clock in the afternoon in Italy is fourteen hundred hours. _Quattordici_. Figure that word out when you're in a hurry. Everything was measured in meters and _ettos_. Old friends – words like butter and hot water – had had radical plastic surgery and were suddenly unrecognizable strangers named _burro_ and _aqua calda_. Doesn't _calda_ sound like _cold_? It did to me. I made that mistake for two weeks running.

You get the gist. I ran around like a squeaky mouse in a cartoon, trying to learn this new language and culture in five minutes, and getting things straight with the man I was falling more and more in love with by the moment.

In the meantime, Dan was tearing up the turf for his basketball team. As with so much else in Italy, the Italian basketball games were raucous, funny and loud as hell. I went to as many as I could. Fans jumped up and down in the stands, slapping their heads in mock dismay and yelling things like «_Mascalzone senze Calzone_!» («Filth without pants!») at the referee. They brought picnic baskets full of food to the games and shared their things with whoever sat near them. I think I gained four pounds that season, because I always sat in the same section at home games and got to know my neighbors, who always had some new sausage or sweet to eat along with the action. I think they secretly felt that if they fed me, it would give Danny more energy.

Danny said he did so much better that year because of me, and I loved that, but I think he scored so many points and played so wonderfully because he was young and good and living his first adult days in Europe with someone he loved. There isn't much more you can ask for in life, and we often said – in our different ways – how very lucky we were to be there together.

In between games and language classes, we traveled whenever we could: to Florence, Siena, Assisi and Rome. We spent Christmas in a villa on Lake Maggiore with a wonderfully Catholic team member of Danny's who took us (along with his huge family) to mass every morning and told us we had to have at least eleven children.

One night during our stay there, I suddenly started crying like a fool. Very calmly, Danny put down his book and asked what was up.

«I don't know. It's so stupid. I'm just feeling very sad.»

«Anything I can do for you?»

«No, you go to sleep. I'll be all right.»

«Cul, was it something I did?»

«No, of course not! I'm just being a baby. I just want everything to stop right now and never _never_ move again: like a picture you carry in your wallet. You know those? The kind people carry in their wallet to show you? Whoever it is, is always smiling and so happy. But you _know_ they were always sad after that. Maybe five minutes or a day after the picture was taken, someone they loved died, or they lost their job . . . and everything got screwed up. I just want to freeze everything right now, so nothing will ever change or go wrong with us.»

After basketball season was over, we spent a month driving through Europe in Danny's schizophrenic car. In between breakdowns and new mufflers, we went everywhere. We returned to Milan broke with thirty rolls of undeveloped film and memories galore.

We were married that autumn and promised our parents to fly home the next summer to visit.

The second year started out as gloriously as the first. There was nothing reluctant about life with Danny. He woke up most mornings smiling and ready to go, no matter what day it was. He taught me by his constant example how to charge forward and hope for the best. After much late-night discussion and some tearful scenes, I stopped taking the pill in January. A month later I found out I was pregnant. When I told Danny, he put his hands to his face and said through his ringers that it was the happiest news he had ever had. Inevitably, the pregnancy made me think about my abortion. I wondered if in some cosmic scheme of things, there was any way that I might be giving birth to the child I had purposely lost. The idea was loony and I wasn't about to tell it to Danny, but why wasn't it possible? Who said things like that couldn't happen in life?