Honeymoon for One

a tale of modern romance in which the author's better half turns out to be himself

Is this where Hemingway used to sit?" I asked the bartender, who threw me the hairy eyeball and replied, "Yeah, that's where Hemingway used to sit. He'd come in here and make a point of sitting on all the barstools, so years later, Americans could rub their butts on the same sacred spot where he used to park."

"How do you like that?" I said to the young couple standing near me in the bar at Harry's in Venice. I threw back another Bellini, a stupid drink made with peach nectar and champagne. It was maybe my third or fourth; I wasn't counting. "How do you like that? I'm sitting where Hemingway used to sit. Hey, I bet you're on your honeymoon. Am I right?"

They told me I was right and edged away from me a little.

"No reason to get worried," I said. "I'm on my honeymoon, too."

That's nice, they said. And where's your wife?

"She couldn't make it." I told them. "So I came by myself." I laughed the laugh of a man who's on a brief leave from a halfway house, and they edged farther away, giving me a look of mild horror as they climbed to the second-floor dining room. I lifted my Bellini and toasted their happiness and my own joy at being on my honeymoon. It was a good honeymoon, even if it was a honeymoon for one.

I hadn't planned to go on my honeymoon by myself. Actually, I had planned to go on my honeymoon with a wife--my wife, to be exact, a perfectly wonderful woman I had lived with for some five years. We were perceived as being the ideal couple. People invited us to dinner parties because, they told us, we made the evening so much fun. And fun was something we had a lot of--I've got boxes and boxes of slides to (continued on page 155)Honeymoon for One(continued from page 90) prove it. The slides show us in Spain and Portugal, in Mexico and Hawaii, in Japan and Hong Kong, in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles, having one heck of a good time.

After five years of living together, I developed the foolish idea that marriage would be a good thing. It would cement our already perfect relationship. It would allow us to grow together even more. It would give us a reason to start a family. And so, for her 35th birthday, I gave her an engagement ring, which she tearfully accepted. We went out for dinner, where we ate caviar and drank champagne. Life was good and all was right as far as the eye could see. This perennial bachelor was getting hitched.

Unfortunately, this perennial bachelor had also set up a fine bit of infernal machinery, which would become my undoing. I had helped support the wife-to-be as she had gone through a major career change, which had resulted in her becoming a marriage-and-family counselor. Suddenly, a cigar was no longer just a cigar and a relationship was no longer just a relationship. Things had to be probed, poked, investigated, looked into, hashed over. Soon after we became engaged, she revealed to me the fact that there were a number of aspects of my personality with which she was unhappy.

"You've never been unhappy with any aspects of my personality before," I told her. "But I'm only too glad to make myself perfect for you. What changes would you like made?" Product of the Sixties and Seventies that I am, I felt that change was no problem. After all, Alan Alda was my role model, and I knew that in this situation, he'd do all he could to be tender and understanding. Little did I know that in just a few weeks, my new role model would be Rambo, mixed with not a little Norman Bates.

She told me that there were just a few personality defects that made her uncomfortable. I was impatient, she said. "No problem," I told her. "I'll be more patient." I didn't spend enough time talking with her about my problems, she told me. I had too strong a personality, she told me. I overwhelmed her, she said. "No problem," I told her. "Meek-and-Mild is now my hyphenated middle name." She looked at me sadly and said that that just might not be enough. A chill began to spread up my spine.

She insisted that we go to a marriage counselor. "No problem," I told her. The marriage counselor suggested that I be more patient, spend more time talking about my problems and get a weaker personality. "Great," I said. "I'll do whatever I have to do to make this relationship work. We're the perfect couple, after all--everybody says so. I'm deliriously happy--I'm getting married."

"Just work on it," he told me, and the chill grew worse.

Still, when you're focused on what you want, you tend to be blind to the simple realities of the world. I didn't think anything was strange when my fiancée found reasons not to meet with the caterer, not to go shopping for a new house, not to buy a wedding dress (even though she helped me choose a very nice seersucker wedding suit). Blinded by love, I stumbled forward, ignoring every danger sign along the path to mythical bliss. I even made all the necessary plans for our honeymoon, including first-class plane tickets and a full set of reservations at honeymoon suites all over Italy. It was going to be one hell of a trip.

Six weeks before the wedding date, after many delays, we went out to eat Chinese food. We talked about what sort of dog to buy after we got back from our honeymoon. We ate chocolate ice cream. Then we went home to address the wedding invitations. She addressed two, then stood up and announced that she couldn't do it. I tried to be understanding and spoke to her of the naturalness of being nervous. She told me that it had nothing to do with being nervous; she just couldn't do it. Her reason was simple--she didn't feel like it. It's considered rude to cancel a dinner invitation for any reason less than the death of a close family member. But in the case of a marriage, "I don't feel like it" is perfectly acceptable. Miss Manners says so. I know; I checked.

In the next few weeks, my life fell to pieces and then continued to crumble into particles. Thanks to a careful regimen of throwing up five times a day, I lost a quick 20 pounds (proof that every cloud has a silver lining). My former fiancée moved out the day after she called off the wedding, neatly ending a five-year relationship because she didn't feel like it. Like a flagellant carrying a cross, I staggered from friend to friend, relative to relative, grocer to garbage man, telling anyone who'd pause for a moment about the grief that had befallen me. Total strangers were accosted on the street and regaled with my tale of gloom. And then, when things seemed their very worst, two things my daddy had told me came back, like klieg lights in a very dark night. One was "Never get involved with a woman who has more problems than you have." The other was "Living well is the best revenge." It was too late for the first; but the second--now, there was a High Concept for the Eighties.

At first, living well meant trying to fornicate myself into a coma. But that got boring--after all, I had just been chucked out of a deeply meaningful relationship. Sex was not what I was looking for. In time, and not a very long time, at that, living well came to mean eating and drinking. And drinking some more. I began to drown my sorrows at the bottom of a bottle. And I came to realize that in only a few days, that bottle was going to be filled with Italian wine, for the departure date for my honeymoon was drawing nigh.

When I told people that I was planning to go on my honeymoon by myself, they sympathetically informed me that I was a lunatic. And they were probably right--but, then, I had good cause to be crazy. My life had gone to hell in a U-Haul. And anyway, the more I thought about it, the more it became obvious that I had no alternative but to go on my honeymoon in the style of one hand clapping. I'm a practical sort of a guy--I had already booked one heck of a trip, and I hated the idea of letting all that effort go to waste. The idea of staying home, spending two weeks refinishing an end table, really didn't appeal to me, either. Neither did the concept of going someplace else. "Go to Hawaii instead of Italy," people told me. I told them I didn't like Hawaiian food, that I had an aesthetic problem with Don Ho and that, anyway, no people on earth deal with heartbreak better than the Italians.

And so I found myself, one bright and sunny July day, seated in first class on Alitalia, with an empty seat next to me. I was wearing a very smart white suit with Reeboks, which seemed a reasonable alternative to the sort of white shoes worn by used-Bible salesmen from Des Moines. I had decided I'd wear white suits on the trip (I had another one in my suit carrier), because they'd give me an air of rakish abandon. They'd make me seem like a man with a secret. They'd attract women to me in sidewalk cafés. And, of course, they'd let me pretend that I was a gigolo, which is no small trick when you look like a cross between Wally Cox and Toulouse-Lautrec.

On the table in front of me in first class was a glass of asti spumante and some bread sticks. In the seats in front of me were another couple on their honeymoon. (I was doomed, on this particular voyage of discovery and introspection, to run into dozens of couples on their honeymoon, not one of which deserved to be married as much as I did.) As soon as the door of the plane closed, the couple in front of me started necking frantically, rooting about like gerbils in heat. I sublimated by eating my bread stick. I began to get an undeniable creeping sense that maybe I should have stayed home to work on that end table, after all.

As the plane taxied down the runway, I also began a diary of sorts to my former fiancée, which I thought I'd give to her as a snippy present upon my return. On one level, I was letting her know about the fabulous trip (and, by extension, the fabulous person) she had missed; on another level, though, I was also trying to work out with her--in absentia--just what had happened. This being the beginning of the trip, I felt that I should be feeling awfully sorry for myself. I opened the diary by writing, "The people around me are all very happy. They chatter constantly, saying 'Bene, bene, bene' and 'Prego, prego, prego.' They sing. They tell jokes in Italian. I don't understand the punch lines, which must be why there are these hot, sad tears coursing down my cheeks. Can you imagine any other reason?" When it comes to milking a situation, I'm one of the Guilt Masters of the Universe.

My sense of gloom grew throughout the flight. The happier the people around me became, the more miserable I grew. I truly came to understand the meaning of the old saw "Misery loves company." I longed to be surrounded by miserable people. Perhaps I should have gone to someplace like Funeral Peak, California, out in the middle of the stinking Mojave Desert, where people have no reason to be happy. Maybe I should have gone to Chernobyl. Or perhaps, it occurred to me, this would be a good excuse to go to the town of Assisi and become a helpful brother to the oppressed and gloomy. An act of selflessness would be sure to make my former wife-to-be miserable because she had left me.

By only the merest strand of good fortune, that whole concept was wiped away by my very first bottle of Pinot Grigio in my very first genuine Italian trattoria. The wine cost a couple of bucks, the meal just a little more. But the meal, and the joie de vivre with which I ripped into it, let me in on one of Italy's most hedonistic secrets. In Italia, the good eater is a creature beloved, a man or a woman whom small children seek to emulate, a blessed soul. As the restaurant-reviewing duo of Gault and Millau once observed, "Italians would sell their beds just to eat. Not at home, but at the trattoria. ... The trattorias play the role of Italians' second homes."

And so it was that, within hours of dropping my bags at the Hotel Excelsior on the Via Veneto (where I stared disconsolately at the waiting basket of fruit, the flowers and the bottle of asti spumante with two glasses), I found myself howling at my waiter for more vino, more acqua minerale, more pasta and more oblivion. I was in a great trattoria in the heart of Rome, not far from the Piazza Navona, called Trattoria da Luigi. The place was a mishmash of mismatched tables and chairs, sprawling across the cluttered, homely Piazza Sforza Cesarini--a lovable dump of a restaurant. It was the last place where you might expect to find even the vaguest edge of trendiness. Yet seated there was an assortment of Americans working at the nearby Cinecitta film studios. They had all learned the fine art of trattoria etiquette, which I was quick to pick up on. The first rule is that it's essential to yell and wave your arms a lot--that sort of thing is expected of you. The second rule is that wine is the first thing you order; if you have a good bottle on your table, all else will follow with ease and simplicity.

So it was that I found myself seated at a table about three o'clock in the morning, utterly besotted and surrounded by the remains of a stewed baby goat, assorted pastas and meats and cheeses. I have some vague recollection of having a conversation with my former fiancée (who wasn't there, of course) about how good the parmesan was. I recall being poured into a cab by a kindly streetwalker and sent packing back to my hotel. The next morning, with my brains turned to rigatoni, I discovered why Italians regularly drink a foul herbal concoction called Fernet Branca. For better or worse, it returns hangovers to the hell whence they came.

And so went my honeymoon for one. I would spend my mornings recovering from what I had done the night before, wobbling on rubbery legs through an endless string of museums and cathedrals, where I would often pause to beg forgiveness for whatever sin I had committed that had led to such an abominable pounding in my skull. I'd spend the afternoon eating and drinking enough to get me through my afternoon nap. And I'd spend the evening eating and drinking enough to get me through the night.

Even the most pained and wretched of souls can spend only so much time avoiding the inevitable. And so it was that what I was going through finally caught up with me in Venice. I was doing a fairly decent job of drowning my heartache until I wandered into a stuffy, rather nasty restaurant, where the singularity of my situation led to my being given the full Lonely Guy Treatment. In other words, the restaurant's personnel behaved as if what they had seated at one of their tables was nothing more or less than human garbage wrapped in skin. While other tables laughed and sang, I was seated at a little table in the shadows near the kitchen door. No bread arrived. My wine, appetizer, soup, pasta and entree all came at once. I was made to feel as if I were a leper, dressed in sackcloth and ashes, ringing a bell and crying, "Unclean, unclean!" as I made my quasi-tragic exit from the restaurant. I didn't look like Camille, but I sure as heck felt like her.

After that, I collapsed into a canal of despair, filled with self-loathing and unremittent mortification of the flesh. I left Venice in a torrent of tears and was stopped just out of town by a member of the local constabulary. He pointed out to me that, while blubbering like a fool, I had gone through what passes in Italy for a red light. I think the light was sort of a bluish-amber, an amusing joke played on tourists by the locals. Actually, it took a while for me to discover that I had been stopped for going through a light and not for being a weepy terrorist, simply because the policeman went through his entire song and dance in Italian. Since my Italian consists mostly of spaghetti and vino, it took a while for me to get a word in edgewise and let him know that Italian was a 37th language for me, and I was only up to language number one in my studies.

When I told him that I didn't speak Italian, he started speaking pretty good English--good enough for him to read me the riot act. After he finished bawling me out, he stopped himself and asked, "Wait a minute! Why are we speaking English?" I told him it was because I didn't speak Italian. He told me, "But you must speak Italian." I asked him why. He told me it was because I was driving an Italian car. And people ask me why I love Italy.

I explained to the officer that I hadn't seen the light because I was swimming upstream through a river of tears. I told him of my love for my past-tense fiancée and of my tragic jilting. I explained to him that I was on my honeymoon by myself, that I was a soul roasting over a barbecue in the lower depths of perdition. By the end of my oration, he was on the verge of tears. He told me he had a cousin in San Francisco who ran a restaurant and that I had to look him up when I got home. Then he took me to his home to meet the wife and kids and have some wine. He wanted me to know that a family could be happy, that marriage was an honorable estate, that life had meaning. He never did give me a ticket.

Probably the worst part of going on my honeymoon in the singular was that all the experiences I wanted to share with a wife in the course of the honeymoon, I had to share with no one. Sometimes, I'd pretend I had imaginary beings with me, and I'd share the experiences with them. Not with six-foot-tall rabbits, which is someone else's fantasy, but with imaginary creatures such as Pia Zadora, Bo Derek and Traci Lords. Traci was especially good company, though I swear on every bottle of chianti I consumed that I never knew she was underage. I may go on my honeymoon by myself, I may fantasize about porn stars such as Traci, but my own weirdness stops when it comes into close contact with the age of consent. Honest.

Of course, I found that even my imaginary companions didn't give me quite the solace I sought. I mean, what kind of a conversation can you have with Pia Zadora--an imaginary Pia Zadora, at that--when you want to muse upon the strange horns growing out of the top of the head of Michelangelo's Moses? Or why Michelangelo's David isn't circumcised? He was the king of Israel, which implies that he was a nice Jewish boy. So why was his foreskin still intact? This was not the sort of question either the real or an imaginary Bo Derek was going to have any luck dealing with.

In the end, my honeymoon for one was what might best be described as a deeply bittersweet journey through me. I was glad I had gone on my honeymoon; I needed some time to myself. I needed to be away from the matchmakers and meddlers who looked upon me as a prime steak, ready for the marital griddle. It was also a unique way to come face to face with some of the shortcomings my ex-wife-to-be found so alarming. I realized that I'm a real pain in the butt, that you can't bully people into living lives they don't want to, that patience may, indeed, be the greatest virtue of them all. I learned that being a highly obsessive type-A personality can exact a rather high price on relationships and that sometimes the price of being self-absorbed is having no one to be absorbed with but yourself.

But there was good news mixed with the bad. I reaffirmed the simple fact that I'm an OK guy. I can entertain myself pretty well, I can change my socks with reasonable regularity and I can strike up decent conversations with people with whom I share no common language. I liked being one of Bruce Jay Friedman's Lonely Guys--at least for a while--and I liked being one of P. J. O'Rourke's Bachelor Disaster Areas. Women inspire men to be neat, clean and upstanding. Every once in a while, especially when the occasion calls for it, it's fun to be a mess.

My favorite bit of honeymoon madness came late one night after a two-bottles-of-wine meal in the fine old city of Verona, home of Romeo and Juliet. It was after one in the morning; I was nattily attired in my white-linen suit, with matching white shoes. Heading back to my hotel, I stumbled through a dimly lighted medieval square, packed with locals eating and drinking in a clutter of outdoor cafés. I stood there, listing ever so slightly to starboard. And all of a sudden--mirabile dictu! --right out of nowhere, the voice of Gene Kelly popped into my head. He was crooning the title song from Singin' in the Rain, which had been our favorite movie musical. I wanted the music to go away, but the wine had ensured that it wouldn't.

And so, to appease whatever demon had gotten into my noggin, I started to dance. I danced my way around the piazza, once, twice, three times, maybe even four times. Diners and drinkers, late-night carousers every one of them, would look up at me and smile as I did a workaday soft shoe, interspersed with the occasional buck and wing. Looking into their eyes, I could read their thoughts as they blessed me for the divine madness that had afflicted me and for the divine comedy that had become my life. I danced for close to an hour, dancing away the pain and hurt, the misery and self-doubt, the devastation to my soul and havoc wreaked upon my psyche. I danced like a man possessed. And I know it was during that dance in Verona that I began to heal. I could hear Scarlett O'Hara going on about how tomorrow was another day, as the closing music from Gone with the Wind replaced the voice of Gene Kelly within my well-addled mind. I knew I was going to be all right. I had also made myself powerfully hungry. And that reminded me of one of the best things about going on your honeymoon in Italy. When you make yourself hungry, you can always get a pizza, at any time of the day or night. And in my case, I didn't even have to share it.