Eat, Pray, Love

I can speak this language! The kid thinks I like him, but it’s the words I’m flirting with. My
God—I have decanted myself! I have uncorked my tongue, and Italian is pouring forth! He
wants me to meet him later in Venice, but I don’t have the first interest in him. I’m just lovesick
over the language, so I let him slide away. Anyhow, I’ve already got a date in Venice. I’m
meeting my friend Linda there.
Crazy Linda, as I like to call her, even though she isn’t, is coming to Venice from Seattle,
another damp and gray town. She wanted to come see me in Italy, so I invited her along on
this leg of my trip because I refuse—I absolutely decline—to go to the most romantic city on
earth by myself, no, not now, not this year. I could just picture myself all alone, in the butt end
of a gondola, getting dragged through the mist by a crooning gondolier as I... read a
magazine? It’s a sad image, rather like the idea of humping up a hill all by yourself on a bi-
cycle-built-for-two. So Linda will provide me with company, and good company, at that.
I met Linda (and her dreadlocks, and her piercings) in Bali almost two years ago, when I
went for that Yoga retreat. Since then, we’ve done a trip to Costa Rica together, too. She’s
one of my favorite traveling companions, an unflappable and entertaining and surprisingly or-
ganized little pixie in tight red crushed-velvet pants. Linda is the owner of one of the world’s
more intact psyches, with an incomprehension for depression and a self-esteem that has nev-
er even considered being anything but high. She said to me once, while regarding herself in a
mirror, “Admittedly, I am not the one who looks fantastic in everything, but still I cannot help
loving myself.” She’s got this ability to shut me up when I start fretting over metaphysical
questions, such as, “What is the nature of the universe?” (Linda’s reply: “My only question is:
Why ask?”) Linda would like to someday grow her dreadlocks so long she could weave them
into a wire-supported structure on the top of her head “like a topiary” and maybe store a bird
there. The Balinese loved Linda. So did the Costa Ricans. When she’s not taking care of her
pet lizards and ferrets, she is managing a software development team in Seattle and making
more money than any of us.
So we find each other there in Venice, and Linda frowns at our map of the city, turns it up-
side down, locates our hotel, orients herself and announces with characteristic humility: “We
are the mayors of this town’s ass.”
Her cheer, her optimism—they in no way match this stinky, slow, sinking, mysterious, si-
lent, weird city. Venice seems like a wonderful city in which to die a slow and alcoholic death,
or to lose a loved one, or to lose the murder weapon with which the loved one was lost in the
first place. Seeing Venice, I’m grateful that I chose to live in Rome instead. I don’t think I
would have gotten off the antidepressants quite so quick here. Venice is beautiful, but like a
Bergman movie is beautiful; you can admire it, but you don’t really want to live in it.