All Over the Map - Laura Fraser [21]
We kiss in the cab on the way back to the Village, where I am staying. There’s nothing better than being tipsy and kissing a hunky Brazilian man in the back of a New York City cab. When I get out, he holds the door for me, and I tell him how much fun I had and that if it weren’t three o’clock in the morning, I’d invite him up for a drink.
“What’s so special about three o’clock in the morning?” he asks, in that soft accent, with a sly smile, and it is impossible to argue; I can’t come up with any smart response whatsoever.
For the next few days, we barely leave the apartment, surfacing only for beer and cupcakes before diving back under the covers. I don’t usually prefer a certain physical type in men; I’m democratic, and if you lined up all the guys I’ve dated, you wouldn’t find much in common beyond XY genes and an edgy sense of humor. But in Gustavo I recognize my animal ideal. He might not turn heads at a bar, but he’s medium-tall and strong, soft around the edges from loving good food, with thick, straight black hair, dark eyes, and a little beard stubble. He’s the very image of Brenda Starr’s Basil St. John—her mysterious disappearing boyfriend—without the eye patch. More than that, there’s something about him that’s so quietly sure of himself, so manly, in bed and out; he’s one of those few men who makes me feel 100 percent female. He stops using my name and just calls me “Sexy.” He slays me, over and over.
“You’re a sweetheart,” I tell him, kissing his chest.
He shakes his head. “You’re the sweetheart,” he says. “I’m just a sweetheart-in-training.”
We finally venture out of the apartment and walk to a theatre to see a tragic Vittorio De Sica film, and at the end, peeking behind the sleeve covering my face, he wipes a tear off my cheek with his thumb. On the way home, he holds my hand, fingers interlaced, and walks curbside, as if protecting me from the splashes of passing cabs. I’m leaving, and he has a new gig; I sense that our own little film is coming to an end. But it’s early summer, it’s New York, and for those few blocks I have the world’s sweetest, sexiest Brazilian boyfriend.
Home from the East Coast, I take a walk one day with my friend Cecilia. As we climb up one of San Francisco’s Twin Peaks, to a sweeping view of the city from bridge to bridge, I mention that I need to come up with something worthwhile to do, something that will get me out of my head and out into the world. My brain keeps flitting back to Gustavo—who, after a flurry of e-mails, seems to be out of sight, out of mind—and to the general problem of being single in my forties; I’m having trouble creating positive, forward momentum in the rest of my life. But seeing all those accomplished classmates at the reunion who had made real contributions and being in a liberal arts atmosphere reminded me of the responsibilities that go along with the privilege of a good education—with being alive, really—and lit a fire under me.
I tell Cecilia I am tired of writing peppy articles that fill the space between ads in women’s magazines, boosting women’s self-confidence on one page so it can be torn down on the next. I want to do something useful, worthwhile.
Cecilia walks along quietly for a while, and then something pops into her mind. She says her friend Carmen, a social worker in Rome, has a new job, working with a program that rescues immigrant women who have been sex-trafficked in Italy, promised a job in a pizzeria and ending up a prostitute, enslaved. Italy, alone in Europe, offers these women