Sweet and sour days in Perugia – romance, pique and revenge
As a student, Elinor Goodman was bowled over by a charming American, who did the dirty on her. Fifty years later, he got in touch…
Revenge is a dish famously best served cold. In this case, 50 years cold. When I was 18, I was sent to the University for Foreigners in Perugia to learn Italian. It wasn’t really a university – the only person I know who claims to have graduated from it was the former Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith – more a depository for kids not clever enough to get into a proper university at home and Americans trying to dodge military service in Vietnam.
Frank was the latter. He was tall with dark, curly hair, black eyes and a hirsute body spoilt only by rather bowed legs. Without a single pimple, he was unlike any of the boys I had had ungainly wrestling matches with at parties in England. Compared with him, they seemed childish.
He oozed confidence and experience. The trouble was his experience had included getting a girl pregnant in the States two months before while he was working at a ladies’ college. For him, Perugia was a way of dodging not just the draft but also the irate father of his pregnant girlfriend.
I met him in a bar beneath my pensione – where the landlady, who was supposed to talk to me in Italian, took out her teeth before every meal and fell silent. I felt very alone, so although I had been warned by friends at school not to trust Italian men, I was bowled over when Frank asked me to share a pizza
– and later his very narrow bed in a room he shared with another American.
We were all loose cannons, away from the constraint of school and parents, smoking quantities of pot and partying for days on end in a room we rented within the city wall.
One night, we hired a car and spent the night in it in Assisi. The windows got so fugged up with smoke that the police couldn’t see us through them when they tried to move the car out of the piazza.
I didn’t end up dead like Meredith Kercher, the poor English student at Perugia 45 years later, but I took risks of other kinds. I had come unprepared for sex, and bought contraceptive pills one at a time from an enterprising New Yorker who had brought a supply with her and sold them singly under Perugia’s Etruscan Arch every night.
To be fair, Frank told me early on about how he had got a girl knocked up in the States. But she seemed very much in the past. So it came as a bolt from the blue when six months into our relationship – and eight months into her pregnancy – he announced he was going back to Indianapolis to marry her. Instead of staying on and finding an Italian boyfriend who could have at least taught me Italian, I demanded to go home to lick my wounds.
Six months later, I got a phone call from Frank in the States. He was coming to England. Could I find him and his wife a flat? Unbelievably, I did – and he charmed his way into my extended family, though curiously I don’t think I ever met his wife or the baby.
The very fact that he was in London kept my hopes alive and I would fantasise about some time in the future when he would get in touch and I would be married to someone incredibly glamorous and would reject him after he had spent a great deal of money taking me to an expensive hotel.
But then I found a career and met other men. So when I went to Washington on a trip for the Daily Telegraph, it felt safe to get in touch with him. One of the wonders of the American telephone system, even before the
internet, was that if someone had an unusual surname, as he did, you could always find them through directory enquiries.
He invited me to his apartment, which was furnished with only a mattress. It turned out that his marriage hadn’t lasted. His income was divided roughly in equal parts between child maintenance, alimony, psychoanalysis and a draft-dodge lawyer – which didn’t leave much for creature comforts beyond women.
Over the next ten years or so, I would phone him when I was in the States. He got various university jobs and married again before becoming a radio DJ for a local station. Then, in the middle of the 1983 election, he turned up in London at Channel 4 News, where I was working. He wore a cowboy hat, and told a story about how he had been employed as a cameraman in Borneo for an American TV company and had dropped the camera in a swamp. He asked to meet my husband, but it was embarrassing enough introducing him to Jon Snow without risking a complete cultural meltdown.
I didn’t think of him for another 30 years – and then I met a woman who had been at the same rather obscure American university as him. She remembered his exotic good looks and offered to put him in touch with me through the alumni association.
I was curious – so I agreed – but no more so than I would have been about meeting up with an old schoolfriend. A few months later, he rang up. I immediately recognised his voice because of the way he pronounced my name, without the ‘i’ in the middle.
It turned out that he was a freelance travel journalist. I said I too dabbled in travel journalism and was about to go to a jazz festival in Rajasthan. Initially, he assumed it was a luxury freebie. But when I told him I would be roughing it, and that if he came along he would have to pay, he became less keen.
And when I pointed out there would be no question of our sharing rooms, he was positively affronted. ‘El’nor, you used to be so sweet and kind,’ he said.
It wasn’t quite the revenge I’d imagined in my 20s, but it gave me a certain satisfaction. Then, this year, I got an email out of the blue describing a terrible trip to Ireland when he had got lost and written off a hire car because he was so deaf he couldn’t hear the satnav.
I didn’t reply. At which point, I got another email which began, ‘I am 73, walking with a cane, have hearing aids and false teeth and serious money issues.’
He then quoted Bette Davis about ageing not being for sissies and also included a paragraph that appeared to have been copied and pasted from one of his articles about how, in his 20s, he had gone round Italy in an alcoholic trance ‘with a luscious English girl’. He ended by saying he had just been sacked by his last website, the Daily Meal (which he originally wrote for thinking it was the Daily Mail), because of complaints from a holiday operator.
As I was just preparing to go walking up mountains in Albania, I felt rather smug to be so relatively fit and affluent.
It was, I felt, fair reward for the pain he had caused me. But then I discovered it made me feel rather melancholy to think of that beautiful, sexy Lothario reduced to this – particularly as I suspect he has a degenerative condition. Revenge doesn’t have a statute of limitations, but after 50 years it doesn’t taste as sweet.
‘He invited me to his apartment, which was furnished with only a mattress’