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“drank too much.”
    She had invited me to the party in the hope that she might be able to fix me up with her friend. I wasn’t interested in her friend, but I sure liked Bruna. She was dating another man, though, so we struck up a friendship, meeting occasionally at the pizzeria around the corner from our building. One evening, as we talked while eating our pizza, Bruna looked at me with searching eyes. I could tell that she was pondering something, but she didn’t reveal her thoughts.
    Our first real date was to Lake Como on a cool, rainy day. I was happy it was raining, because we had only one umbrella, so we had to stay close as we walked. Shortly after that, Bruna told me that she had ended the relationship with the man she’d been dating. “We really hadn’t been dating very long,” she explained to me. “And he was kind of possessive. More important, if I can feel something for someone else, I must not really care about him,” she said demurely.
    â€œYou feel something for someone else?” I asked.
    Bruna flashed her gorgeous smile and hugged me. I was hooked.
    Our courtship was like a dream come true. Living in Milan was romantic in itself, and we did everything together. We attended some of the social events associated with the fashion business in Italy, and some of Bruna’s school events, but mostly we enjoyed the simple things. Bruna loved movies, so we often went out to dinner and then rented a movie. We took day trips to Venice and Switzerland, which were fabulous, but we didn’t have to do anything extravagant like that to have fun; we simply enjoyed being together.
    During Bruna’s spring break before her last semester at Domus Academy, she and I traveled to New Jersey for a brief visit. When I described her to my friend Bobby Chang, I told him, “I think I met the girl I’m going to marry.” Bobby teased me, because I was constantly singing or whistling the old mid-sixties Jobim bossa nova hit “Girl from Ipanema,” a song first recorded by Pery Ribeiro (no relation to Bruna), and later made popular by Astrud Gilberto and Stan Getz. For months the song reverberated in my mind. Bruna was, after all, a Brazilian beauty, and we were in love.
    While Bruna and I were in New Jersey later that summer, I invited her parents, Raimundo and Silvana, and her brother, Luca, to join us. They readily accepted. It wasn’t the first time Bruna or her family members had been to the United States. Before Bruna and I met, the family had visited New York, Florida, and other locations.
    They had never been to our peaceful little oasis in Monmouth County, however, so when Bruna’s family saw it, they fell in love with the area. They stayed with me in my town house for most of the summer. During that time, they saw everything about me—good or bad—including the way I lived, the car I drove, my family and friends. I had nothing to hide, so I readily shared everything with them and their daughter. My attitude was, “This is who I am. If you are looking for someone who loves you, here I am. If you’re looking for someone who owns a mansion and a yacht, that’s not me.”
    Bruna and her family responded positively. They loved me—or at least they said they did—and they loved New Jersey, especially the clean, quiet, safe suburban area in which I lived. It was the best of both worlds: we were less than an hour away from the hustle and bustle of the Big Apple, we were within minutes of the expansive Atlantic coast beaches, and we lived in a small-town environment where people actually called one another by their first names. For better or worse, Bruna knew what she was getting into when she fell in love with me. And so did her parents and brother.
    Bruna’s mother and brother especially enjoyed New Jersey’s proximity to New York. Ray liked the relatively quick jaunt to Atlantic City to visit the casinos. I became his