Love and Travel

‘Umm, no, not really until you pointed it out. Doesn’t everyone live like this?’

Speaking of Slovakia, the long cold winter was beguiled by my flirtation with Zoli, the bemused bartender who couldn’t quite work me out, but seemed to want to try. In our one private conversation told me that he thought I was someone who wanted to taste everything, to try all the flavors of life. Let’s not mention the gruff Irish factory owner who spent as much time as I did in the Green Pub, had a nice sardonic wit but didn’t live up to the hype. Then again, maybe they never do. Maybe the best romance is always a dream, then the bubble bursts.

A few years previously, there was the non-affair with a grizzly-bear organic farmer and blacksmith in upstate New York, who I met through a media art project. We had an instant connection, found a sense of ease and joy in each other’s company, and he grew to depend on my presence at his farm stand and in the quiet country evenings … but again, no hot potato. At one point his neighbors staged an intervention—he was a dry, charming professor of Italian literature, she was a very lovely woman and Air Hostess, and after cocktails, chocolates, and cognac he enquired as we sat rocking on the porch, ‘You’re not involved with X. are you?’ ‘No. But … ’

That one ended in a screaming match on Avenue B on the Lower East Side, we’re not friends.

There was a momentary flash of mutual interest with a Finnish friend on my first trip to Helsinki, but he was sick and I was tired, and we’ve never followed it up. The first time I was in Berlin, that same year, the disheveled doctor who wanted to be an actor drew me into staying longer than I had planned. We kept arranging to meet and then not quite making it for various reasons, until the last night of my trip, three months later, when he amused me with tales of the four women he was dating, but I wasn’t going to be the fifth. Although he was gorgeous, like an unmade bed you just wanted to fall into, the German George Clooney.