The Greatest Lie Part 18

When we both returned to Italy, he became my most loyal regular. He hired me for a short session after a bitter loss and overnight after a crucial win. His team won their league championship, and he took me to the post-game party. I met a lot of hot soccer players, and made a bunch of lucrative connections. Later on, as my homage to his victory, I comp-ed him a weekend, a treat which, at my rates, was worth five thousand Euros.

He took me to the Grand Hotel Villa Serbelloni on Lake Como. The crystalline sapphire sky, snow-capped Alps, aqua waters of the lago and the earthy but celestial Barolo made me forget my professionalism. I felt like I was falling in love. I knew, of course, that in reality, I was only a weekend away from his wife and kid. When the dreaded Rafaela called him at the hotel, he shushed me and ordered me to sit alone in the bedroom. I listened in miserable solitude and silence as he baby-talked to his darling son and lied expansively to Rafaela about how much he missed her.

I swaddled miserably in the damp sheets and clutched the pillows, hiding my sorrow and pain as I remembered how my father had goo-goo talked to me over crackling long distance connections from adulterous bedrooms around the globe. I cringed as I imagined my own abandoned, and half-forgotten child, Alyssa, crying in a dirty diaper, drinking sugary juice alone on tortilla chip-littered carpet, her grandparents too stoned or drunk to care, or oblivious to her. Wasn't I lingering too long in profitable and pleasurable exile, becoming, in the process, an even worse parent than my own had been to me?

Memories of frigid streetwalking in Minneapolis, and of the months in poverty or on the run in the dangerous squalor of Thailand and Burma, made me cautious. I had become accustomed to comfort, money and privilege. I was habituated to the thin mountain air, the deep tissue massages, the mountain herbal facials and body wraps, and the state of the art elliptical machines, the thick towels and soft, warm robes at the fitness center. Our weekend turned into a fortnight, and culminated in a Cristal-soaked celebration the night that AC Milan sold Ronaldo's contract to the Los Angeles Galaxy.