Carole Lombard

"It has taken me about 12 years to realize that love happens and cannot be invented."

From the moment I met him I knew we were going to fall in love. This is markedly different to love at first sight because love at first sight is non negotiable. But I was not ready to be in love so instead I reserved a place for him inside my heart and waited. It was 2010 and I was 23 years old. Looking back I’m not sure if I can truly label what transpired as love. At the time however, it was what I thought to be love. Perhaps you can already see cracks in the authenticity of the relationship through these opening sentences. I was a great orchestrator of my own sentimental disasters, a meticulous planner. It has taken me about 12 years to realize that love happens and cannot be invented. Nevertheless a few months down the line that reserved space in my heart became available and I, as promised, let him in. 

Vittorio. How I love to see his name written on my pages, even now. One of the privileges of being 35 is that you can say things like “12 years ago” and have the words lose the massive weight of that time with very little effort.

I believe the first introduction took place in an apartment he shared in London. I was at university studying film, he was studying economics and my friend Chiara lived with him. That night they were both writing essays and I had to stay with Chiara because we were driving somewhere early the next day to work on a short film. I remember the evening well; the dark wooden floors, Vittorio’s thick knitted jumper, the moment he offered his bedroom to me so I could watch a movie and then sitting in the living room reading a long boring magazine article so I could stay in the same room as him. An album by Leonard Cohen was playing as I silently decided that Vittorio and I would someday fall in love.

The second time we met was a few months later at a fancy dress party in Rome. I was dressed as Brigitte Bardot in “Le Mépris”, he was dressed as Barry Lyndon. We spent the night sitting outside the party, the entrance flagged with 2 large golden statues. Inside there was a banquet table and huge metal bowls of cherries hung from the ceiling. In the growing darkness we talked. I remember looking down at my Grandmother's shoes on my feet, the loose blue pencil skirt I wore and pulling my cardigan tightly around my striped t.shirt. He invited me to come with him that summer to his family's house in the countryside. I did not go.

He came to visit me at my apartment some months later in Greenwich London. I made pea and ham soup. Afterwards he texted me saying “Even while having this delicious cappuccino and triple chocolate muffin, all I wish is to be back in Westcombe Park having pea and ham soup with you.”

After that, our communication moved to Skype. He was living in New York working as a personal assistant to a famous Italian actress and I was working as a waitress in a bakery. I was still not prepared to be in love with him. But I continued to cultivate our relationship from afar. Skype was fun and easy to manipulate but the time difference was a challenge. I was always in bed dabbing lipstick onto my lips to look natural and trying to fix my hair.  Then he told me he loved me.

6 months later, I felt ready. He came to stay with me in Greenwich. I bought him a box of 12 cupcakes from the bakery I worked at, iced with “All I want for Christmas is you Vito”. The cakes were decorated with fawns and silver baubles. 

It was around this time that he told me I looked like Carole Lombard and I believed him. I used to dress like a 1940’s starlet. I was all into high waisted trousers and long camel coats, I used to wear bullet bras too.

We were sitting in the Dove at Broadway market. Vittorio pulled a card from a battered box of Trivial Pursuit and read it to me “Which Hollywood actress died in a plane crash in 1942?”

The correct answer was Carole Lombard and the area that I had kept for him inside my heart became full with wonder. 

In February, he sent me some plane tickets and I went to visit him in New York. The trip was a disaster. The overbearing memory is going to Coney Island when everything was shut down, cold, off season and out of time since it was February and I was leaving in a few days. This summed it all up. We were perpetually off season, at the wrong time.

He realized it before me. As soon as I arrived in New York. He kept telling me he had work to do and sent me out onto the streets alone in my long camel coat where I walked around, bought Lucky Charms, Hershey Bars and took photos on a pink disposable camera. On one of these outings, I was coming home and heard someone calling my name. I looked up to see Vittorio leaning out from the window of his apartment. He had pushed the window grate so hard it almost fell onto the street.

We had nothing substantial when it came down to it. I remember lying next to him beneath his “Bobby and Helen fell in love in Needle Park” poster, falling asleep unsatisfied, our noses pressed together in frustration. 

The funniest thing about it all is that afterwards I remember him telling me that when I arrived in New York, I was not the person he had fallen in love with. At the time I had blamed this on him but now I realize that although at times it was romantic, what he said was true. Love cannot be arranged or contrived. The whole thing was a set up, of my own hand. I was not Brigitte Bardot, nor did I resemble Carole Lombard. I was a waitress who did yet know what I really wanted and for all my high waisted trousers and white apron ribbons I should not have decided he was going to fall in love with me. 

There is a scene in ‘The Umbrellas of Cherbourg’ where two ex lovers are reunited accidentally at a gas station, decades later. You realize that the heroine has called her child her past lover's name. I used to watch that scene and think of Vittorio. I imagined us meeting once again at an airport and having a final moment in which we would say something prolific. There would be a parting word, a meaningful look, some reason for it all; a clear symbol of finality. But this will never come to be, no matter how hard I push my fantasies into being as big as cinema. All that will remain is the simple fact that I thought I loved him once. 

(Illustrated by Glenn Whiting)