andiamo

It's been dark for more than an hour. I got a lot of reading and writing done today and I was out, walking around in Westminster and to Regent's Park, which I love, although it's (surprise!) very gloomy outside. I'm still alone. Robert's been at work since this morning and I could steal a pair of his socks and walk to the gym but I want to wait for him and then go together. Last night, he came home and I said I wanted to go out and have a glass of wine and some cheese, which is not what he would have chosen to do -- he's very into "dining" and dinners with courses. We ended up at a little Italian place called Caffe Caldesi, eating cheese and meat and sharing seared tuna and vegetables, drinking Chianti and talking about his work and my writing and his phone rang a few times and he took the calls, stepped outside. He's having a hard week. I sat there by myself for twenty minutes at one point, pretending to read a pamphlet on cooking classes, thinking that I should have brought a book. When three French men at a nearby table started talking to me and invited me to join them, Robert looked inside and saw and then came back.
We went home and got into bed and while we were making love for the second time in as many hours, he said, "I think we could really work."
"Don't we already?" I said.
"No," he said, "I mean together, sharing a life -- a dog, a home, children."
It was weird, I thought, his timing, considering that we've been together for two-and-a-half years and he said it as if it had just occurred to him for the first time.

Later, I was telling him about the John Galliano show in Paris this week, how he hadn't used only supermodels but a whole array of people, including elderly red-headed identical twins. In her review of it in the Times, Cathy Horyn wrote that a man next to her had asked afterwards what she thought of the "monsters" and that she thought nothing ill of it. What she did see as unforgivable, however, was the fact that in all of the Milan shows, she barely saw a single Asian or black model on the runways.
Robert said, "We're so white, we should go to Milan and be models."
"What?" I said and motioned around his partially furnished apartment. "And give up all this?"

I can't understand working eighty hours a week and not feeling like you have a home. I can't understand his not being sure about wanting us to live together and create one. If he's unsure, I think, then what am I doing here? What, exactly, am I waiting for?