Negotiations were tense from the start. I would suggest Tuscany or the Cinque Terre, and Jeremy would shrug his shoulders and sigh heavily.
“We could do Greece, the birthplace of philosophy.”
More shrugging.
“Can’t we discuss this?”
“You get to control this because you have the money.”
“So you pick.” I threw up my hands. Honestly, I didn’t care where we went so long as it was together.
After a long pause, he said, “Italy’s fine.”
Both of my groups and Dr. Rosen advised me to focus on myself and plan the trip I wanted to take. “He’ll either come with you or he won’t,” Dr. Rosen said. So comforting. I pushed aside my brewing dread. I barreled ahead in the face of Jeremy’s resistance because being a young woman alone in Italy was not a story I was willing to inhabit. Solo travel was not one of my heart’s deep callings.
The temperature in Florence soared into the nineties, and BBC Radio reported seven heat-related deaths. Jeremy and I ate a breakfast of soft scrambled eggs, fresh strawberries, and toast with homemade orange marmalade on the sun-flooded second-floor terrace of the Hotel Silla. We moved our chairs to take cover under the shade of a fig tree. I could have stayed there all day, looking over the Arno River and listening to the pigeons coo, but I’d scheduled a bike tour that started at ten. The day before I’d taken a bus to Siena. By myself. Jeremy hadn’t wanted to face the heat.
“Are you up for the bike tour?” I asked in my upbeat vacation voice, the voice of my heart holding on to hope.
“You go ahead. I’m going to study.” He pulled out an LSAT workbook and his special black pen. He’d recently decided to apply to law school, which was an undeniably positive development given how much he hated his job. But his ironclad study schedule was not to be interrupted by the Florentine countryside, even though the LSAT was months away.
“Is there something else you would rather do? I can cancel the bike thing—”
“No, you go. I need to do a practice test.”
Leading up to the trip, Dr. Rosen had encouraged me to accept Jeremy’s introversion. Stop trying to change him. I understood the importance of acceptance, but when Jeremy said he wouldn’t be joining me for the second day in a row, I wanted to flip the table and send his precious LSAT book flying into the cobblestone street. How small could I fold my desire so that Jeremy’s rebuffs no longer stung? How could I make myself want less from this man who said he loved me, but who seemed to have so little desire to spend time with me?
He flicked his pen and started sketching out his answer to one of the questions.
I kissed him on the top of his head and set out for the bike tour, fuming. Who pays for her boyfriend to come to Italy and ignore her? My heart thrummed its familiar rhythm: alone, alone, alone.
A lanky expat named Sherry with a yoga teacher’s posture showed me my bike. “Where’s your partner?”
“Oh, he’s—” Like the wife covering for an alcoholic husband who couldn’t get out of bed, I lied. “Sick.” I blamed the heat and jet lag.
The twelve other people in our group arrived in pairs. Honeymooners, fathers and daughters, college roommates, a couple celebrating thirty years of marriage. Our first stop was an old stone farmhouse, where a sunburned groundskeeper served us a morning snack. I sat on an ancient stone bench eating the salty cheese and buttery quail egg surrounded by strangers who were snapping pictures of each other.
“Want a picture?” a father from San Diego asked me. I wiped the sweat from my brow and stood by a fig tree, trying to look natural, even though I didn’t know what to do with my hands. Clasp them in front of me? Put them on my hips? Steady myself on the stone wall?
The father whispered to his daughter, “It’s so brave to travel alone in a foreign country.” Believe me, buddy, I’m a lot of things, but brave comes well after desperate, foolish, lonely, depressed, sad, lost, humiliated, and starving.
When the other bicyclists headed back to Florence at the end of the tour, I broke away, pedaling so fast my quads burned. After I returned my bike, I followed the narrow streets back to the hotel but then stopped halfway there. Why rush? Jeremy wasn’t pining for me. Would he even be happy to see me? I veered away from the hotel and toward the tourist strip by the Ponte Vecchio instead, where leather belts hung from stalls like slabs of meat. On a side street, I spotted a pay phone. I chucked coin after coin into the slot until I reached Chicago.
Dr. Rosen’s voice mail picked up after three rings. At the beep, I let it out. “I just went on a bike tour, alone. Yesterday, I went to Siena, alone. I thought you said you could fix this—that you could fix me.” I sobbed into the grimy Italian pay phone until a computerized voice cut me off.
After all the therapy sessions I’d sat through. The prescriptions I’d willingly done. The feeling of my feelings. Here I was, still so terribly alone. The loneliness was supposed to recede. I thought my progress in therapy would be a graph line that trended up and only up, but sitting alone in Florence, I felt that same desperate stirring I’d felt in Chicago before starting group. If I hadn’t changed yet, when would I? Maybe it wasn’t possible for me. I loved my group mates—and even Dr. Rosen—but they couldn’t come to Italy with me. Dr. Rosen was right: I’d tasted the company and fellowship of sitting in group week after week, and now the loneliness was darker
