Excerpted from The Reluctant Metrosexual
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Here, honey, put this in your billfold,” my mother said as she walked out of the shirt store, handing me a ticket to a Vivaldi concert we were to attend that evening at a well-known Roman garden and museum. “In case we get separated and have to meet you at the Villa Borghese. And please, dear, don't lose it.”

By “billfold” she meant, of course, wallet. My mother still uses many words considered old-fashioned, like “icebox” instead of “refrigerator,” or “picture show” instead of “movie theater.” But she is not trying to be ironic or clever. It is a Southern thing.

“You know, there's a funny story about my wallet,” I said, putting my arm around her shoulder as we walked toward the Piazza del Popolo. “Let's go for a coffee and I'll tell you about it.”

What my mother would soon learn was that I was, in fact, traveling without a wallet, so I had no place to put the ticket for safekeeping. My wallet had been lost. Well, technically it had been misplaced, but that distinction would do me little good in the conversation that would surely ensue.

What had been my last known wallet was conveniently left in the backseat of a cab the day before I was to depart from New York. I blame this on the fact that I was burdened by an armful of shopping bags packed with the sorts of items one always seems to acquire before going abroad (or, I imagine, to war)—travel-sized toiletries, electrical converters, guidebooks, chewing gum, batteries. In my haste I had left it on the faux-leather seat, a sacrifice to the travel gods or, if nothing else, a windfall for the two guys who jumped in as I was exiting.

Leaving a wallet in the back of a New York City taxicab is like throwing it into the Grand Canyon, except for the fact that under the Grand Canyon scenario, there is still the off chance that an honest, donkey-riding tour guide may find, recover, and return the lost item. Thankfully, apart from the five hundred euros (about $600) I had recently exchanged, my flight itinerary, and two Ambien tablets tucked safely away in an inner fold (jet-lag-reducing velvet hammers in handy ten-milligram doses), nothing of any real value was lost. It was also fortunate that I would be leaving for a foreign country in less than twelve hours, where conveniences such as credit/bank cards and various forms of legal identification rarely prove necessary.

The immediacy of my travel plans left me no choice but to withdraw an obscene amount of cash (using the temporary, nameless ATM card the bank provides until the replacement arrives, which always makes me feel like a kid who transferred to a new school in the middle of the year and has to use a shelf to store his belongings, all of the regular lockers having long since been distributed) and to bundle it, together with my passport and several scraps of information-bearing Post-it notes, into a large wad, held together with a medium-sized binder clip (I have an obsessive stockpile of office supplies, as they are the closest I have come to an actual office in some time). As I finished telling my mother the story I pulled the bulky contraption from my front pocket, adding the concert ticket to the fist-sized bundle.

“Oh, Peter, you can't travel around Italy like that. You look like some kind of Las Vegas hoodlum,” she said.

“Yeah, well do you know who I am?” I mock-shouted back, shaking my first. “I'm Moe Green! You can't come into my casino and talk to me that way. I was making my bones while you were banging cheerleaders!”

“I don't know what on earth you're talking about, dear,” she answered, missing my clever Godfather movie reference by a mile. “But walking around like that is not safe. They're liable to rob you.”

I am not sure who “they” are (or what sort of sinister methods “they” employ), but this is how, in addition to two ungarish handmade dress shirts from Marcello, the shopping excursion on my first full day in Rome also yielded a brown single-fold calfskin wallet (on my mother's watch, black leather is generally forbidden, reminding her, as it does, of Vegas hoodlums and the like).

The concert went off without the loss of ticket or any other sort of hitch (if attending a pitch-perfect open-air concert in Rome on a triple date with your parents can be considered hitchless) and it gave me an occasion to wear one of the new shirts.

“This is a wonderful weight, son,” my father had said, caressing the sleeve of my shirt as we waited for my mother, before the concert. My father has spent a good portion of his married life waiting for my mother, and I was happy to provide him the company. It is possible that I will travel through Italy with him again, passing the time talking about world affairs and European fashions in a hotel lobby, but it is not guaranteed. Such moments are best not taken for granted.

His opinion of the shirt's weight was a significant affirmation of my purchase. Clothing weight, to my father, is serious business. A suit's measure of greatness, for him, lies not only in its cut or tailoring but also in the heft of the fabric. The Holy Grail is a suit that earns the privilege of becoming a “year-rounder”—that is, light enough to breathe comfortably in the summer months but with ample girth to get its wearer through a winter in the Great Lakes region. Some men bond while foraging through the woods in search of large animals to shoot. We buy suits. It may lack the quest for blood of an old-fashioned father-son deer hunting excursion, but as Jews, we don't tend toward activities that involve camouflage and high-powered munitions. On the plus side, our hobby requires no permits, and there are far fewer accidental casualties.

So, dressed in a properly weighted Italian dress shirt, I bade farewell to my parents after the concert and prepared to lay siege upon the Eternal City. I knew that, mathematically speaking, in a city with a population of several million, my chances of bumping into the shopgirl were almost nil, and that even if, by some random quirk, I did see her, I had lost so much face in the store that, apart from providing material for her potential stand-up career, any encounter would have little impact.

Yet out into that great, dark night I ventured. For as we all know, there are certain ideas that exceed rational thought. Destiny, love, the hope that Joan Rivers will move to an island without any access to television cameras—none of these make sense intellectually, yet they are often the seeds of our most important dreams.

The potential of an encounter is what drove me out in search of the shopgirl (okay, it is possible that pure physical attraction was involved as well). For what if we were fated to be together? What if, upon seeing each other under the moonlit sky at the Trevi Fountain, we were drawn together, compelled by the sobering beauty of Neptune and his mythical counterparts toward a romantic union? What if we were to fall in love and have beautiful, golden-brown children who had dual citizenships and a passion for soccer? And finally, what if, instead of bumping into the shopgirl, I found myself in a drunken stupor at 2 a.m. , lost and alone, having wandered into a dark neighborhood where nobody spoke my mother tongue?

Of these four questions, I can only answer the last one: I would eventually find a ride back to my hotel with a police officer, having recently been involved in a minor scuffle at a jazz bar. And upon my entering the hotel, the desk clerk would be kind enough to point out the large, rose-colored stain that adorned the middle third of my shirt. And while he would not be able to identify the exact vintage of the wine that I now wore (a 1997 Solaia), he would know without any further inspection that the shirt was beyond repair. His eyes and his nodding head would say it all: Wearing an Italian dress shirt is an honor, my son, and you have desecrated that sacred trust. Luckily, I was too drunk to care or do much more than stumble up to my room.

The next day, when I went back to Marcello to replace the shirt, the shopgirl was not there. In her stead was a young man. He was well dressed and eager to help, and I'm sure that he will go far in the haberdashery business, if he chooses this path. But I did not require any assistance. I had come back to the store with two very specific goals in mind, only one of which I was able to achieve.

Most times, we don't find the girl again. But we do keep our eyes open, watching for her to turn up at a cocktail party or exit a crowded subway stop in the early evening. And because we carry the faint tremor of possibility in our hearts, we try always to wear a clean, properly weighted dress shirt, on the off chance that she does reappear.

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