“Could you cut that stuff for a while and talk to me?” I demanded.

“Isn’t this too much?” Lalah said, waving the book.

“Listen kiddies, we’ve got the real thing on our hands so you can just put your porno paperbacks aside and lend me your dirty ears…” Lalah looked at Chloe and Chloe looked at Lalah and they both began to laugh as if they knew something I didn’t know.

“Well-what is it?” They kept laughing conspiratorially.

“Come on you idiots-tell me!”

“You’re going to say Pierre tried to seduce you…” Lalah said, still giggling.

“How the fuck did you know?”

“Because he tried it with me,” she said.

“And me,” said Chloe.

“You’re kidding.”

“We are not kidding,” Lalah said. “Would that we were…”

“So what happened?”

“Well I laughed him out of bed, and Chloe says she did, too… but I’m not entirely sure I believe her…”

“You bitch!” Chloe yelled.

“OK… OK… I believe you.”

“And you mean you just stuck around here after that happened?”

“Well, why not?” Lalah said nonchalantly. “He’s pretty harmless… He’s just a bit horny because Randy spends her entire life in an advanced state of pregnancy.”

“A bit horny? You call that a bit horny? I call that incest.”

“Oh God, Isadora, you really are too much. That’s just your fucking brother-in-law… It isn’t really incest.”

“It isn’t?” I think I was disappointed.

“It scarcely counts at all,” Lalah said contemptuously, “but I’m sure you’ll find a way to make it seem more lurid on paper.” (Lalah hated my writing even then.)

“I’ll work on it,” I said.

On the way back from Karkabi with the new maid, Pierre was utterly cool and unruffled. He pointed out landmarks.

Arabs, I thought, goddamned Arabs. What a disproportionate sense of guilt I had over all my petty sexual transgressions! Yet there were people in the world, plenty of them, who did what they felt like and never had a moment’s guilt over it-as long as they didn’t get caught. Why had I been cursed with such a hypertrophied superego? Was it just being Jewish? What did Moses do for the Jews anyway by leading them out of Egypt and giving them the concept of one God, matzoh-ball soup, and everlasting guilt? Couldn’t he just have left them alone worshipping cats and bulls and falcons or living like the other primates (to whom-as my sister Randy always reminds me-they are so closely related)? Is it any wonder that everyone hates the Jews for giving the world guilt? Couldn’t we have gotten along nicely without it? Just sloshing around in the primeval slush and worshipping dung beetles and fucking when the mood struck us? Think of those Egyptians who built the pyramids, for example. Did they sit around worrying about whether they were Equal Opportunity Employers? Did it ever dawn on them to ask whether their mortal remains were worth the lives of the thousands upon thousands who died building their pyramids? Repression, ambivalence, guilt. “What-me worry?” asks the Arab. No wonder they want to exterminate the Jews. Wouldn’t anybody?

Back in Beirut, we made plans to go home. Lalah and Chloe had a charter flight to New York, so they had to leave together, and I had my old Alitalia roundtrip from Beirut to Rome to JFK.

I stopped in Rome as I’d planned and took one more week in Florence before going home to face the music with Charlie. Even in hot, crowded August, Florence remained one of my favorite cities in the world. There I took up with Alessandro again and this time we had an almost perfect, if loveless, six-day affair. At my request, he forsook his mania for dirty words, and we found a charming room at an inn in Fiesole where we could make love from one to four every afternoon (a very civilized lunch-hour custom). Maybe it was because of my fury at Charlie, or perhaps Pierre had really turned me on, but my lovemaking with Alessandro was inspired. It was the only time in my life when I was able to have exuberant, affectionate sex with someone without convincing myself that I was in love. A kind of six-day truce between my id and superego.

When Alessandro went home to his wife in the evenings, I was on my own. I attended concerts at the Pitti, saw a few of the other characters from my previous visit and was hotly pursued once more by Professor “Michelangelo” (Karlinsky) of the flaming beard. Despite the heat and the motley assortment of boyfriends, I loved Florence and there were moments when I hardly wanted to leave at all. But a depressing teaching job and a Ph.D. program I hated were waiting for me in New York, and I was still too much of a superego-ridden schoolgirl not to choose something I hated over something I loved. Or maybe it was really Charlie: I was outraged by his betrayal, but I couldn’t wait to see him again.

Charlie and I broke up soon after our reunion. It seems I could never forgive his ambivalence, though, in fact, I now see it was very like my own, and perhaps I should have been more understanding. Alessandro kept writing from Florence with talk of “divorzio,” but I had seen too many Italian movies to believe him. “Michelangelo” turned up once and looked so much worse in the polluted sunlight of New York that I hadn’t the heart to continue. The brown and amber shades of Florence had done wonders for him-as any E. M. Forster fan can readily understand. September and October were grim and dreary. I went out with a depressing assortment of divorces, mama’s boys, neurotics, psychotics, and shrinks. I was only able to keep my spirits up by describing them all in bitchy detail in my letters to Pia. Then, in November, Bennett Wing waltzed into my life looking like the solution to all my problems. Silent as the Sphinx and very gentle. Savior and psychiatrist all in one. I fell into marriage the way (in Europe) I had fallen into bed. It looked like a soft bed; the nails were underneath.

15 Travels with My Anti-Hero

I told Adrian everything. My whole hysterical history of searching for the impossible man and finding myself always right back where I started: inside my own head. I impersonated my sisters for him, my mother, my father, my grandparents, my husband, my friends… We drove and talked and drove and talked. “What’s your prognosis?” I asked, ever the patient in search of the perfect doctor.

“You’re due for a bit of a reshuffle, ducks,” Adrian kept saying, “you have to go down into yourself and salvage your own life.”

Wasn’t I already doing that? What was this crazy itinerary anyway if not a trip back into my past?

“You haven’t gone deep enough yet,” he said. “You have to hit rock bottom and then climb back up.”

“Jesus! I feel like I already have!”

Adrian smirked his beautiful smirk with the pipe tucked between his curling pink lips. “You haven’t hit rock bottom yet,” he said, as if he knew some of the surprises in store.

“Are you going to take me there?” I asked.

“If you insist, love.”

It was his magnificent indifference which infuriated me, turned me on, made me wild with frustration. Despite his cuddling and ass-grabbing, Adrian was so cool. I used to stare and stare at that beautiful profile wondering what in the world was happening in his head and why I couldn’t seem to fathom it.

“I want to get inside your head,” I said, “and I can’t. It’s driving me crazy.”

“But why do you want to get inside my head? What do you think that will solve?”

“It’s just that I want to really feel close to someone, united with someone, whole for once. I want to really love someone.”

“What makes you think love solves anything?”

“Maybe it doesn’t solve anything,” I said, “but I want it. I want to feel whole.”

“But you felt you were part of Brian and that didn’t work either.”