A Woman's Survival Guide to Difficult Men: Going, Going Gondola

Chapter 5: Going, Going Gondola

Photo by Darwin Vegher on Unsplash

With so much to take care of before our trip, Alex and I didn’t see much of each before taking off. By the time departure day arrived, Alex felt like a stranger. To top it off, that morning I ran into his ex-girlfriend Laura while picking up toothpaste at the supermarket.

Alex had confided in me that after their break up, Laura continued to leave desperate phone messages and notes for him until he finally told her to stop, that he was in love with someone else. “Well it must be someone you know,” she’d said to him, “because that was pretty damn fast.”

While I felt sad for her, it made me feel safe and special that he told me. It would turn out differently for us, otherwise why would he mention it?

Laura was in front of me at the checkout line. I hoped she wouldn’t notice me, but I was right behind her, so of course she did.

“Hey! Pam,” she said in a friendly voice. “How are you?”

“Fine, fine,” I said, a little too self-consciously. “Things are fine. How are you?”

She finished her transaction and left with a funny look on her face. Our brief, awkward exchange felt like a bad omen. Why did I have to run into her mere hours before taking off with her ex-boyfriend on the most romantic vacation ever?

I arrived at Alex’s house, dragging my heavy suitcase behind me. The minute I walked through the door, Alex barked at me, “What did you say to her? What did you say to Laura?”

Apparently, she had left a message for him right after our encounter.

“Nothing,” I replied. “That’s probably what seemed strange to her.” I was caught by surprise and hadn’t asked her about him or about their break-up. “Women have a way of reading between the lines.”

He remained distant with me as we left for the airport, explaining that he needed “the length of the plane ride to settle down” from his intense work schedule. “OK,” I said, “that’s fine.”

We got to the airport and discovered we did not have assigned seats. The airline could not find us two seats together. Alex got grumpier.

“Someone will move for us,” I reassured him. “People are usually pretty accommodating if you ask nicely.”

I asked everybody in the cabin. Not a single person would budge from their seats to accommodate a young couple in love. Ironic, considering we were flying to the romance capital of the world. Another omen. I quickly canceled out the thought with an “it’s all meant to be” affirmation. Perhaps this would help give Alex the space he needed to relax into the vacation.

During the flight I visited him at his seat where he was reading a Mario Puzo novel about Mafiosos. “Look, the main character has the same birthday as me,” he exclaimed, “what a coincidence!”

I don’t believe in coincidence. I’m a rational, science-based producer, skilled at managing schedules, budgets and crews, but I also believe in forces of the unseen. I’ve been known to consult intuitives and tarot cards for guidance, mostly to confirm my own intuition, and I do believe in signs from the Universe. Right now, they were flying at me like meteors.

Later, when our eyes met across the cabin, he had a determined, hateful look on his face like he was plotting my hit. What the fuck was going on?

Upon landing in Venice, Alex lit up a cigarette and announced, “I’ll be taking up smoking for the rest of the trip.”

A mark of European whimsy? Or straight up contempt? I wasn’t sure.

It was beginning to dawn on me that my brief stint at Cinderella’s castle might be coming to a close. He hadn’t cracked a smile at me in the past fourteen hours and began a steady stream of condescending remarks to which I did not know how to respond.

If I said black, he said white. If I said the sky was blue and my mother’s name was Elizabeth, he told me I was mistaken.

Once we settled into our Venice hotel room, his first endearing words to me were, “Hey, pass me the remote.”

I gave him the remote and locked myself in the bathroom. Curled into the fetal position in the contoured, marble bathtub, I cried and prayed to the white walls.

Finally, the angels answered. OK, it may have been my inner voice. My “Picasso voice,” the one who tells me to seize life with open arms, embrace the ups and downs like a carnival ride. This voice is more brazen than I am in real life and leads me to places I might not otherwise visit.

“Enjoy this trip, Pam, no matter what this asshole says to you,” said the voice. “The joke is on him – he’s paying the bill!”

When I emerged from my safe haven of the bathroom, he reached out for me.

“Finally,” I thought to myself. “He’s back to normal. Maybe he did just need some space to decompress.”

We made love, after which he promptly returned to his aloof demeanor. We strolled silently through the city that evening. My heart broke with every step on the cobblestone streets that he didn’t reach for my hand. I held back the tears, which formed a tiny puddle around my heart.

By morning, sadness and bewilderment completely enveloped me. Alex found this irritating.

“If you’re going to be like this,” he said two days into the trip, “I’ll end this vacation right now.”

We sat at breakfast overlooking the plaza, a spread of the most delectable Italian meats and cheeses on the banquet beside us. I considered the options. If only I’d known what I had in store, I would have taken him up on the offer. My decision to continue on with him may have been influenced by the unlimited buffalo mozzarella cheese. It’s my kryptonite.

Sex continued to be a daily event on the trip.

For me, it was an attempt to reconnect. I believed it would be the magic elixir that would heal our divide. Each time, I was wrong. He returned to his distant self afterward, not cuddling up to me in the mornings like he used to or holding my hand when we went out. This was the same man who used to laugh in his sleep at home, reaching out for me declaring, “I am the luckiest man in the world.”

Desperate to repair our connection, I accommodated his every whim, shrinking myself to the size of a toenail clipping. It only made him meaner.

I now understand why deer freeze in headlights. It’s not part of their reality. They don’t understand what’s heading toward them. It was the same for me.

As we explored the city the next day, Alex mused, “Women always go for men with money. Even if they’re fat and bald. Is that why you like me?”

“No,” I answered. “I like you because you are fat and bald.”

He presented as a sexy Buddha to me. Doughy, bald and extremely mellow. It became evident, however, that he was not as Zen as I thought.

I gradually lost my appetite. I may be the only person to visit Italy and lose weight.

Strolling through the Piazza San Marco with a boulder of grief in my gut, I felt drawn to a small watercolor painting on display by a local artist. A field of sunflowers with a tiny house in the distance. It brought me comfort to look at, like I wasn’t alone and everything would be OK. I bought it for fifteen lira.

Three days later we rented a dark green Fiat and departed for Florence. Alex puffed away on his cigarettes while I quietly grew nauseous from the stench. I said nothing. In fact, I tried to say as little as possible. During a rare reprieve from the smoke, I was able to make out the glorious scent of the Tuscan countryside.

“Yes,” Alex agreed for once, “it does smell nice.” Then he quickly lit a cigarette and added, “Let me fuck that up for you.”

We drove into Florence and got lost. I tried to help decipher the map while still reeling from his blatant contempt. He pulled out another cigarette.

“Would you mind waiting just a few minutes until we’re out of the car?” I asked.

“I would mind, actually,” he said and proceeded to light up.

By the time we reached the hotel, I’d reached my limit and declared that I wanted to go home.

“You clearly don’t want to be here with me,” I said. “Just let me go.”

Momentarily stunned, probably from the fact that he wasn’t calling the shots anymore, Alex left the room to think about it. He returned with a bottle of Spumante and two glasses.

“Don’t go,” he said. “I love you and I do want to be here with you. I don’t have many words but let me show you with my actions. Please stay.”

“What’s going on between us, Alex?” I asked. “Why are you acting like you hate me all of a sudden? What did I do?”

He couldn’t answer any of my questions and reacted like I was bludgeoning him to death by pointing out his hostile behavior. It made him feel like an asshole and that was terribly mean of me. Laying back on the bed and closing his eyes, he withdrew from the conversation by falling asleep.

Still traumatized by the past few days, I did not feel chatty at dinner that evening. This pissed Alex off. We returned to our hotel room. He watched a soccer match in the living room while I sat on the bed working out my feelings on the page. Desperate to repair whatever had broken between us, I decided to write a love letter to him, which I slipped into his watchband on the nightstand.

Alex came to bed with a splitting headache. I fed him an aspirin and rubbed his back to make him feel better. Wandering hands began a sexual encounter that I was not really up for but, as an act of goodwill, let continue. Orgasm for me requires large doses of relaxation and trust. When it became obvious that my heart wasn’t in it, Alex threw my legs aside and rolled over with his back to me.

“Fuck it, you’re never going to come. Just go to sleep.”

I stared at the ceiling in the dark. “That wasn’t nice,” I said softly.

“Pam, just let it go, would you?” he growled. “Can’t you just let something go?”

A rumble of indignity began its way up my belly and into my throat. I tried to remain calm. “That was mean,” I said softly again.

He yelled further about his splitting headache and that I should just roll over and forget it. I threw myself on my stomach, pulled the pillow over my head and murmured angrily into the mattress, “Oh, fuck off!”

Slowly, ominously, he rose from the bed and turned to me. Removing the pillow from my head, he growled, “What did you just say to me? Did you just tell me to fuck off?” Silence.

“I was upset,” I replied. “That wasn’t nice what you just did.”

A look washed over his face like a scene out of “The Godfather” (his favorite movie, wouldn’t you know). Pinning me to the mattress, he barked into my face, “I don’t know who the hell you think you are. You don’t ever tell me to fuck off!”

I was (again) a deer in the headlights, unsure whether he was about to hit me or throw me naked into the hallway. He stormed over to the mini bar to get a drink, grumbling to himself like a mad little troll, “Ha! She tells me to fuck off.”

I suddenly recalled a story he’d told me of his ex-wife, who left him for a British man. Alex’s uncle, a connected Italian in New York, orchestrated the revocation of the man’s visa and got him kicked out of the country. What would he do to me? I popped a Xanax and went to sleep.

In the morning, Alex wouldn’t speak to me. He slipped on a bright yellow T-shirt with a smiley face on the front, an ironic effort to feign cheerfulness. He hummed a jaunty tune as he moved through the room. His face spelled utter hatred. Was he crazy? Or was I?

I had done the unthinkable, he reminded me. I had told an Italian New Yorker to fuck off. “I will never forget that,” he said, as if I’d killed his dog.

“They’re just words, Alex. You tell me to fuck off all day long with your actions. Don’t you always say actions speak louder than words?” It didn’t matter. Later that night he broke up with me.

“We have two choices,” he said over dinner. “I can call the travel agent right now or we can stay and try to be friends on vacation together.”

One would think the choice was obvious. As we wandered silently around the plaza, I mused, “What is the difference between friends and lovers, anyway? Expectation,” I thought. If we stripped away the romantic demands placed on our relationship over the last few months, perhaps we really could return to a friendship.

Neither of us was prepared to admit defeat just yet – we were in Italy, for chrissake. We decided to give it a go and stay as friends. I was giddy with relief on the way back to the hotel.

The next morning, he was still not smiling at me. Things had not changed too remarkably, and we continued to have sex.

Just when I thought he could not get any bossier, he ordered me into an orgasm. “You haven’t had one orgasm since we started dating,” he snapped, “so don’t move my hand, don’t tell me what to do. Just shut up, lay back and enjoy it.” Strangely, it worked.

We packed our bags to move from Florence to a small town called Spello. Alex was feeling anxious about going to the country. He was a city guy. I couldn’t wait to be surrounded by trees and chirping birds. Another difference between us.

Alex struggled to squeeze all his new purchases into his suitcase. He huffed and puffed, working the zipper while sitting atop a heap of clothes.

“Try rolling your clothes,” I suggested. “It takes up less space in your suitcase plus they won’t wrinkle as much.” It was a trick I’d learned years ago.

“Isn’t that cute,” snorted the world-traveled editor. “You are going to tell me how to pack.”

The next five days were a blur of incompatibility. He was angry when I had a suggestion about what to do. When I stopped having an opinion, he found me irritatingly indecisive. He struggled with every TV remote control we encountered along the trip.

“Can I help?” I asked.

“Right,” he replied sarcastically. “I am a video technician for a living and you are going to figure out the remote.”

I stuck my nose back in my book and listened to him curse the television for another twenty minutes before giving up.

Dinner conversation was a compelling orchestra of all the reasons I was an incompetent producer because I had not seen certain obscure films, mixed with the fact that my chosen profession was a sham since all producers were useless and stupid.

One afternoon, ten days into our vacation at the heartbreak hotel, he entered the bucolic, flower-filled garden where I’d briefly escaped reality with a book.

Alex wasn’t into books. He wrote like an illiterate third-grader, a fact to which I turned a blind eye during our relationship (another side effect of oxytocin).

“What do you want to do about dinner?” he asked.

I blinked up at him.

“I don’t think I can sit through one more meal with you,” I blurted. “I want to go home.”

Back in the room, I watched out of the corner of my eye as he sullenly rolled his clothes before placing them in his suitcase. I heard him crying in the bathroom before we left, which confused me.

“I didn’t ask you out for four years because I didn’t think I was smart enough for you,” Alex finally admitted when he emerged from the bathroom.

I couldn’t believe it. I looked up to this guy! In fact, I was a little intimidated by him.

I then learned that Alex’s NASA scientist father had put down his brilliant artist son every day of his life. His childhood programming told him: If his own father thought he was a loser, what was wrong with me that I’d want to be with him?

At the airport gate the next day, Alex and I were antagonistic cellmates awaiting release. Conversation was tense.

Alex accused me of not being assertive enough. By not standing up for myself he’d lost respect for me, which made him even meaner. I froze. Having no experience with emotional abuse, I had no frame of reference for this. Was he saying it was my fault that he was being so mean? He thinks he’s the cool one, and I’m some poodle that rolls over at the first growl?

Well, he was right.

“I hope you meet lots of people just like me in New York,” he snarled.

Rude and condescending? I thought.

I had a million incendiary witticisms dying to get out, but I didn’t want to fan the flames. We had a twelve-hour flight ahead of us. This time, the airline found us two seats together. I spent most of the flight crying under a blanket while he read his Guide to Becoming an Italian Thug (Mario Puzo book).

We arrived at LAX, took separate cabs home and never spoke again. No explanation, no tidy good-bye. A friend suggested our demise was as arbitrary as a car wreck. I could not accept this and reached out to him by email months later for a post-game review.

Alex, Thank you for planning this wonderful trip. I’m sad that it didn’t

go as planned. I don’t understand what happened. Why don’t we

grab a coffee and find a way to complete this chapter that makes

sense to both of us.

To which I received the following reply:

To be honest I don’t know exactly what to say. I apoligised to you

in the past and I’t still holds true. I am sorrie. I don’t have a explination,

I dont really wan’t to get in to druging up the past. I have no bad feelings to you .

I hope your well.

Not only did he not say he was sorry, he couldn’t even spell it. Ever heard the phrase “rejection is God’s rescue”? The hollow, completely illiterate nature of his email sobered me to the reality that, from the start, he was a pair of ill-fitting stilettos that were a size too small for me. Besides, I rarely wear heels.

It occurred to me then that I really did not know much about Alex or his background. I’d been too hypnotized by the idea of finding “true” love to dig around for some true facts. In retrospect, I wondered if Alex needed to be the big shot. Maybe it was the catch 22 Lady Gaga talks about in her Netflix documentary, Five Foot Two. Every time she has a career win, her relationship falls apart. Men say they’re attracted to independent women, but when I had the opportunity to advance my career, Alex seemed threatened and inconvenienced.

Once we broke up, Alex told me he didn’t think he was good enough for me. When a guy says that, believe him. Classic Groucho Marx Syndrome: “I don’t want to belong to any club that would accept me as a member.” Had Alex been trying to get me to kick him out of the “club” (our relationship) all this time? The one he didn’t feel he deserved to be in? The one he felt I might outgrow? And lastly, I knew for sure that the next time this happened (hopefully there wouldn’t be a next time, but who ever knows) I needed to stand up for myself, refuse to become roadkill and recognize that if a guy didn’t support my career, he was not the right one. I would not stay ten more desperate days hoping this frog will turn back into my prince. He never would.

*This is a work of fiction loosely based on true events. Names and details have been changed.