CHAPTER 1

Vincent

I

He had nearly convinced himself that this latest break up wouldn't hurtas much, not like Jeremy or Mike or his first love, Logan. With Orlando,he had time to prepare for the blow, a year at least to trace the sad eclipseof happy possibilities.

What Vincent hadn't expected was how quickly it was all settledonce the decision had been made. Within a week, Orlando was gone,leaving Vincent a bit disoriented if not thoroughly in despair. There weremornings when he woke with the comforting sense of having his boyfriendnext to him—but that Orlando could be a comfort at all after so manymonths of stiffness was a tribute to the overall loss. The evenings were byfar the worst; he would fall into inexhaustible loneliness, reaching out totheir four years of togetherness for some kind of purpose, some substantialground that he could build some meaning on. In the end, the only thingconcrete was the familiar humiliation of another failed relationship. Thiswas his fifth and he was only twenty-seven years old—

And if this time Vincent could burrow deep with the pain, it wassimply because the sting of rejection was so palpable. Not only hadOrlando thoroughly given him up, he hadn't even bothered to show himwhat he had been given him up for. All Vincent had, with any certainty,was that his boyfriend had come back from a "time alone" vacation toPoland even more aloof. And when he wasn't, he was even more irritable.The months that followed consisted of bitter, erratic argument that leftVincent spiritually wasted ... until he was done—everything breached,exposed, and exhumed.

Now he was left to search out where he had failed, where Orlandohad failed, where the world had failed. Round and round, the only endwas that there were no answers, only that he hated Poland, would alwayshate Poland. But he couldn't so irrationally hate without often smilingafterwards at the insanity of simply being human.

Orlando moved out in November and then moved away in January. That,at least, was a blessing. If his ex had stayed in New York City, Vincent wassure he would have run into him by chance, or worse, by convenience.That it all shifted during the holidays was another blessing; the holidaysDemanded attention and therefore could prove a much needed distractionfrom the dangers of his renewed state of aloneness. This is not to say thatVincent was by any means in the Christmas spirit. He was an actor byprofession and passion and could thus just play the spirited Christmas.

The worst of the three holidays, New Year's Eve, might've posed achallenge, but that too he performed expertly: he went out with uncoupledfriends and then went home with the first man who made a convincingmove. He woke up the next day with an exhausted relief that the holidayswere over. It certainly gave him courage to face the new year ... until hecouldn't find his underwear—or a yellow cab out of the Bronx.

When winter established itself, he could truly find no desire in hislife, only the routine of singleness to fiddle with and adjust to—again.January and February were cold, harsh, servile months of self-reprisalsand subtle despondency. That it only showed outwardly in the slack of hisoften generous smile, the thoughtlessness in his words, and the unkemptlength of his dark hair, was proof that Vincent wasn't the type to hold uphis feelings for the world to see. He showed enough, but that quality wasnow measured by the collapse of repetition and a suppression of feeling,patterns of behavior that nevertheless promised nothing overwrought orhysterical, which then added, for the intimate observer, poignancy to hisoverall spiritual derailment.

Fortunately there were several unexpectedly warm days in Marchand you could say that kept him superficially steady until the early springpulled him out from the frozen finality and placed him firmly on newground: new hope and better days. And yes, Vincent came into happinessagain. Well, not so much happiness as a lessening of unhappiness—butthat was a start. Here, he had been before and from here he knew the way.He knew too that he wasn't alone on this road, the result of which wasto find himself on a brilliantly warm afternoon in Central Park, alongwith hundreds of other New Yorkers who were bidding farewell to theexhausted winter. And it was under this sun, on a soft grassy incline of hisyoung life, that Vincent took up again an appreciation of all that could beright and good around him.

It was here too that Vincent, with no need to struggle with questionsof expense or prudence, decided to take a two-week vacation, in the latesummer, to somewhere in Europe, specifically somewhere he had neverseen before. Why not? He had the means, the accumulated time, and thepersonal freedom. And if it seemed as if he was taking a characteristic cuefrom Orlando, then he had recovered enough to cite him as inspiration.Vincent had never been on a trip alone, not even cross-state. There wasnow a curiosity in the thing that his ex had seemed to flourish in. Perhapshe had been missing something; perhaps it lay mostly in introspectionthan the generic sense of change; perhaps the thing he was missing-outon was the thing that ultimately broke them up—

Looking into the fractured light of the sun from behind his dark sunglasses,Vincent could now see how Orlando had perched himself high aboveeverything. Even him. And now he wanted to be perched, to see what allthe fuss was about—to know what he had been given up for. Surely it wasbetter than the nothing Orlando had left him, nothing in the form of analmost offensive platitude: "I don't think we were meant to be."

II

"Scusi, is this where you get the ferry to Dubrovnik?"

Vincent certainly could've pieced together the question in Italian, buthe was tired and just didn't have the patience for translation. The fleshymiddle-aged native hardly moved from his low canvass chair; he might'veeven resented having to turn away from the shifting afternoon on theAdriatic: "Yes, that come from Dubrovnik," he lazily pointed to nothingparticular, "another to Dubrovnik in eight tonight, eight tomorrow, noproblem."

Vincent turned to the harbor, to the direction the weary Italian hadreturned to. "Grazie," he brushed him off with ease, "just wanted to besure." He then walked to the edge of the harbor for a moment's absorption.It was still insistently humid but the clear green-hued water refreshed hisconsciousness so that you could say there was a hint of satisfaction in hisexpression—

Indeed everything was going well. He had flown into Rome andstayed a night, just enough time to retrieve a past connection: a birthdaysurprise, his two best friends, Dave Matthews Band at the then newlyerected Gran Teatro Roma. That had been a good trip, but he couldn'tcount on nostalgia to keep him in Rome for more than a day. Vincentwanted novelty; he wanted an experience all his own. The old port cityof Bari was all his.

And he had had a good day in Bari, a day encased in summer andshade, not dust and ruins. So to linger at the harbor, in the dwindlingafternoon, showed that Vincent was going to do as he pleased and whatpleased him was to absorb what was in front of him—

But he couldn't take it all in without an irritating sense of Orlandoestablishing a fine mise en scène for him. In fact, his ex-boyfriend hadforced his way in, here and there: in the taxi on his way to the airport, alittle...