I announced to Bartok that I was leaving the dinner party to return to town. She pointed out that I had absolutely no idea how to get back to the main piazza since we’d been guided up to the villa by Capri natives and it was now pitch black. Even in my crisis-like condition, I understood that no one was leaving this party anytime soon. We’d finished dinner over an hour ago and people were lazily lounging, smoking, playing with the stereo system, making out. The host’s five-year-old daughter kept sneaking downstairs only to be repeatedly dragged away by her Sri Lankan nanny. She wanted to show us her stuffed cat. Every time I saw her, my eyes moistened just a little more.

I realized that even if there had been someone willing to walk back to town with me, they’d be drunk and useless since it was almost one a.m. I flung open the villa door and hurried outside in my completely irrational, melodramatic state, Bartok at my heels.

“Why don’t you just get one of those long, white dresses and walk off one the cliffs around here while I play a slow, tragic tune on a violin,” Bartok suggested. This absurd image actually made me smile a little, or perhaps I just smiled to assure Bartok that I had retained some mental competence and was capable to getting myself to the piazza in one piece. She let me go, and I ran like a crazed she-devil through the empty, dark, cobblestone paths.

Life Coach and I had texted back and forth throughout the evening. He instructed me to meet him at the Quissina for a drink. I, not liking his obnoxious comment about he was staying at “the best hotel in Capri,” pretended not to know where the Quissina was and insisted he meet me at the piazza steps where we met. I arrived wide-eyed, teary and breathless to see that he was by the newsstand patiently waiting for me, hands in his pockets, that same smile sitting pleasantly on his face.

“You’re still crying!” He grinned as if I were a child who’d just impressed him. Life Coach had last seen me at around eight p.m. – five hours ago now – and I was still just as red, puffy and distraught as before. We began walking side by side:

“Babies cry.”

Me: “Excuse me?”

“It’s an attention getting mechanism. There’s really no need for it.”

I was hysterically crying, and this guy’s response was to cheerfully smile at me? Most people furrow their brow, reach out to comfort you, try to give you a hug (my least favorite). With LC - nothing.

“Paying attention to the fact that you’re crying would only reinforce it as an effective attention getting mechanism. Crying’s a negative behavioral pattern for you. You need to work on breaking it.”

My tears sobered up for a moment when I realized that perhaps for the first time in my life, I was crying in front of someone and receiving no sympathy whatsoever. It was kind of revolutionary. I still wanted to hit him, but now refrained since I thought he might be some spiffed-up Buddha reincarnation roaming Italy with a briefcase, teaching the secret of eternal happiness.

We entered the Quissina lobby and he bee-lined for the elevator.

Me: “I thought we were going to the bar?”

“Bar’s closed,” he announced. “I’ll order some champagne up to my room.”

UH-OH. Back up. Wait, I couldn’t back up. I had just followed him into the Quissina’s golden elevator and we were now rapidly ascending to the fifth floor. It’s in these swift elevator moments that one contemplates the rationality of what they are doing. I mean, this guy could be a rapist. A murderer. He could tie me up and tickle torture me or force me to inhale crack. I looked sideways at him. He still wore the contented smile of a five-year-old boy. He stood quietly clasping his hands behind his back.

When I had first met Life Coach, I’d thought him older. For some reason, the Capri sunset gave the allusion that his hair was thinning. It wasn’t. He actually looked great for lack of a better word. Fit, clean-shaven, a tad athletic. See, I like dark hair, dark eyes. In my experience men with blue eyes tend to be especially cruel. I’ve never liked light eyes on my men, and hadn’t seriously checked out a blue-eyed blonde-haired guy for so long that I was imagining things. Then again, it could have also been the pounds of mucus and salty tears obstructing my vision. I had thought this guy a B and he was really an A minus. Don’t you just love it when that happens?


The hotel room was lovely while being quite standard. The good news was that it had a balcony so I could sit “outside” without feeling like the freak I was for being in some man’s hotel room I’d known for less than five minutes. I’d never been such a physical and mental wreck. I had nothing to lose. Anything was possible.

Life Coach put a Buddha Bar CD in his laptop for some musical ambiance. I stayed very FAR out on the balcony, away from him, his suitcase, his computer and that heavenly looking bed. Someone delivered a bottle of champagne and we both settled on the balcony, me still crying, him calmly analyzing me as if I’d already become his favorite pet project.

We started talking and I started healing. LC remains to this day the most amazing communicator and motivational speaker I’ve ever met (don’t worry, he’s really a train wreck of an individual, and those stories are to come.) I’d do anything to time travel back to that night and hand my sobbing self a tape recorder. Having our conversation on file would be priceless. All I can remember now is that we talked about me controlling my emotions, taking charge, becoming empowered, eliminating the weeds from the garden of my life, setting goals, staying on the freeway while enjoying the view…have I lost any of you yet? In order to become enlightened like I did that night all you have to do is read the book “The 7 Habits of Highly Successful People” by Stephen Covey which is hands down, my favorite non-fiction book of all time. Those Mormons know their stuff. It’s a must read.

“Do you love yourself?” LC asked me. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. I could never figure out if I wanted to spastically hit him or tie him up, shrink him and keep him in my pocket for the rest of my life.

Me: “Uuuuh. Do you?”

“Yes. Everyday. In front of the mirror.”

FYI: Life Coach actually was the text book definition of an egomaniac – but I wouldn’t learn that till later.

LC: “See. The love we have for another can never come from a genuine place unless we’re first truly in love with ourselves. What would you do for someone you loved?”

I recited a laundry list of nice deeds:

“So surprise yourself with nice things, take yourself places you know you’ll like, celebrate with yourself, get yourself a massage, tell yourself you love yourself.”

This idea was slowly beginning to grow on me.

“Everyone else in the world is outside your circle of influence. Attempting to change them is ineffective, like running into a brick wall. Spend all that energy on yourself. You are the only person that you can control.”

I’d stopped crying. It was just too exhausting to continue. I opened up to LC. Told him a lot. And he really listened.

The next afternoon on the beach with Bartok, revived and happily back in our pathetic partying existence, I received a formal-sounding text from LC. He informed me that he’d left Capri and was on to meet a client in Positano. I thought I’d never see him again.

I was wrong.


On next: The Capri grand finale. Stay tuned!