When we bought the new moka pot, there was no going back. We were officially living together.
Truth be told, we had already been living together for a little more than a year. But it was the new moka pot that sealed the deal. I bought it online on a dull Saturday morning, early in October, along with a pair of tacky red horns and a devil’s tail for a Halloween party. When I unwrapped it a few days later, the epiphany of our living together came out of the box with it. Suddenly we had a one-bedroom apartment, with framed pictures on the walls, polished hardwood floors, and both our names on the lease. Suddenly, we were not sharing a bedroom over a smelly deli in Bushwick anymore. We were not subletting from a friend of a friend. No more roommates, no more muffled sex noises on the other side of a thin wall, or shared fridge shelves. We were a young couple, living together. We went to Ikea to buy furniture, we put a nice carpet on the bedroom floor. The new moka pot said it all.
It is hard to say why a moka pot held more meaning for me than a signature on a lease. It was the gesture of buying it more than anything else — of saying, it is time now to buy the coffee machine. And not just any coffee machine, but the solid moka pot that Italian families keep for generations. The metal darkens with years of coffee stains, plastic handles burn down and get replaced, the taste emboldens with every use.
My parents’ moka has been on their stove for years. I learned how to make coffee with that pot when I was six or seven years old. It is still there, faithfully gurgling out coffee every morning. I used to think of it as my moka not so long ago. But now that I had a new one, I was puzzled. Which one was my pot? My parents’ one, or the new one, our new one? Did it mean we were a family now? Who got to keep it if we split up? How did all of this happen?
It didn’t feel too long ago that I had bought a one-way plane ticket for New York City. It didn’t feel long, because it wasn’t. I had no idea of what I was doing, and I was moving to the other side of the ocean for a man. If a friend had told me she was ready to fly herself to another continent for a man, I would have started an emergency rescue operation. And yet here I was, sharing an apartment, a bed, and most importantly a coffee machine.
**
It all started in the summer of 2015, on the sun-bathed island of Corsica. I was on holiday and nursing the scars of a disastrous relationship, and of a couple of even worse romantic decisions that I took to recover from said relationship.
I was with friends, and we met friends of friends on a long white beach somewhere on the west coast. He was among them. I could say that he came out of the sea after a swim, like a newborn Venus, and just like that I was in love. But it would a be a cheesy lie. I was introduced to six different boys that afternoon, and I spent the next ten hours struggling to associate names with faces. Soon enough, though, I noticed him.
He had pretty green eyes and a skin dark with summer. He read a thick book — I remember peeking, it was Ovid’s Metamorphoses — in between long lonely swims. He lived in New York, he wanted to make movies. But that’s not it. There was something about him — an independence, a stillness at the core. The world could have disaggregated, and he would have stayed whole. He didn’t need people, validation, social rules. He didn’t need me. I was hooked.
We spent three days together. I batted my eyelashes a lot, and made sure to press my knee against his every time we sat next to each other at a restaurant. I talked to him about my favorite books, and asked him many questions. My whole arsenal of seduction was swiftly brought out. I could feel his attention slowly stirring, but then he had to leave.
I came back from the holiday telling everyone who would listen that I was in love. My therapist, who had spent many a session trying to convince me that embracing feelings is not such a bad thing, was delighted. I stored the certainty in a corner of my brain and cheerfully went on living my life. He was in New York anyway; I was in Milan. There was nothing I could do.
**
One year passed. During that year, we met casually at a Christmas party while he was back for the holidays and ended up sleeping together. We met in a bar and ended up sleeping together. Then the holidays ended and he left for New York again.
A few months later, when it was April and spring had that aphrodisiac taste of naked legs, and arms and flowers and expectations, I met his best friend at a party. He was drinking from a bottle of red wine and was tipsy. I was wearing sunglasses even if it was well past midnight. I asked him how his New York friend was doing. “Why don’t you find out yourself and text him,” he replied. I said, “I wouldn’t want to bother him.” He smirked, and assured me he wouldn’t be bothered at all. Then, after a moment during which he obviously pondered how he could be of best service to his friend, he went on to tell me that he was actually doing very well and was in Los Angeles making a movie. It was as impressive a statement as it was false. As I found out later, he was still in New York, being bored at an IT company, and there were no movies in sight. The pitch, however, worked and that same night I sent him a text. He replied with a very long message and it became a four-month-long Facebook correspondence.
**
Then it was summer again, a Milanese summer of shuttered blinds in the afternoon, melting pavements and unforgiving swarms of mosquitoes. He came back from New York, and we started dating, to use the English word much resisted by the Italian taste for ambiguity in every romantic or non-romantic situation. By dating I mean we met around midnight at a bar and drank too many gin and tonics. From then on he was sleeping in my bed, as if it had always been that way.
I remember the first time I woke up and he was there. It was the hour in the morning when it’s not too hot yet. The bedroom was dim-lit, the house blissfully empty — my parents had left for the country, where the summer is somehow milder. I liked that I was awake and he was not — there was intimacy in it.
I was surprised at how easily I was accepting his presence, but I was glad. I went to the tobacco shop around the corner to buy a pack of cigarettes, and I came back, and made coffee and smoked quietly outside the window. The street was yellow with summer, without a single soul in sight. Would he be bothered by the smoke when he woke up? How would he take his coffee? With sugar, or milk? I had no milk, or sugar, almost no food whatsoever to be honest. Only red squares of watermelon that I placed neatly on a plate, and a semi withered sunflower in a vase on the kitchen table.
**
Between that summer in Milan and the purchase of the moka pot there were five apartments, and as many coffee machines. Two of them were in Bristol, where I went to study literature and learned to dislike academia with a passion.
Bristol was a one-year-long stagnation on my way west. I’d say my stay there can be divided squarely in three parts: for a third of the time I was getting drunk in pubs, for another third I was on the phone with a man on the other side of the ocean, and for the last third I was being very cold in a room on the top floor of a shared house.
During those months, I got to know him through a computer screen. We spent hours on Skype, smiling stupidly and looking at each other naked. He listened to me babble about books and tv shows, and learned that I cry easily when tired. I listened to him describe his roommates and his job, and learned he doesn’t like coffee as much as I thought any Italian person would.
When I went to visited him in April, he didn’t even have a coffee machine. He scrambled around the city, looking desperately for a moka pot before my arrival. He couldn’t find one. How that happened, when they’re sold in all New York hardware shops I have visited since then, eludes me. But it was sweet how he made sure to wake up before me every morning to go buy me coffee at the shop around the corner.
**
Since he doesn’t drink coffee much, it was a given that the moka pot buying decision came mostly from me. My parents’ perseverance in making it every morning, no matter what, eventually led me to believe the moka pot is what keeps the sky from falling down. So when his brother, who had been living on our couch for a few months, moved out and took the battered moka pot we had been using with him, I was lost for a few days. Then I went on Amazon to buy a new one.
I dragged him into the decision, and pointed to a few options on the screen. There were the cheap ones and the solid expensive ones, which would have probably not melted after three uses. I was torn as I always am when I have to spend money on things that are actually useful — for mysterious reasons, I have no issue in spending it on glitter socks and walrus-shaped Christmas ornaments.
After some debate, he saved me from a suspiciously cheap purchase online, and opted for the expensive one. “It’s an investment,” he said, even if he would only use it to bring me coffee in bed when in a loving mood.
“It’s our investment.”