Читать книгу Interesting Women - Andrea Lee - Страница 7

It began with rubber bands. The silly sentence bobs up in Merope’s mind as she sits over a plate of stewed octopus that along with everyone else’s dinner will be paid for by one of the rich men at the table. Rogue phrases have been invading her brain ever since she arrived in Milan and started living in another language: she’ll be in a meeting with her boss and a client, chatting away in Italian about headlines and body copy for a Sicilian wine or the latest miracle panty liner, when a few words in English will flit across the periphery of her thoughts like a film subtitle gone wild.

Her friend Clay with typical extravagance says that the phrases are distress signals from the American in her who refuses to die, but Merope has never intended to stop being American. Her grandparents came from the British Caribbean island of Montserrat, and her earliest continuous memories are of her mother and father, both teachers, wearing themselves out in New Rochelle to bestow a seamless Yankee childhood on their two ungrateful daughters. Such immigrants’ gifts always come with strings attached that appear after decades, that span continents and oceans: at twenty-eight Merope can no more permanently abandon America than she could turn away from the exasperating love engraved on her parents’ faces. So she is writing copy in Italy on a sort of indefinite sabbatical, an extension of her role as family grasshopper, the daughter who at college dabbled in every arcane do-it-yourself feminist Third World folklorish arts-and-crafts kind of course as her sister Maia plowed dutifully along toward Wharton; who no sooner graduated than went off to Manhattan to live for a mercifully brief spell with a crazed sculptor from whom she was lucky enough to catch nothing worse than lice.

With family and lovers Merope learned early to defend her own behavior by adopting the role of ironic spectator, an overperceptive little girl observing unsurprised the foibles of her elders. The role suits her: she is small with large unsettling eyes and nowadays a stylish little Eton crop of slicked-back straightened hair. Milan suits her, too: after two years she is still intrigued by its tenacious eighties-style vulgarity and by the immemorial Gothic sense of doom that lies like a medieval stone wall beneath the flimsy revelry of the fashion business. The sun and communal warmth of the Mezzogiorno have never attracted her as they do her English girlfriends; she likes the northern Italian fog—it feels like Europe. She respects as well the profound indifference of the city to its visitors from other countries. From the beginning she’s been smart enough to understand that the more energetically one sets oneself to master all kinds of idioms in a foreign country, the sooner one uncovers the bare, incontrovertible fact that one is foreign. The linked words that appear and flit about her brain seemingly by sheerest accident, like bats in a summer cottage, seem to Merope to be a logical response to her life in a place where most really interesting things are hidden. The phrases are playful, but like other ephemera—dreams, advertisements, slips of the tongue—if you catch and examine them, they offer oblique comment on events at hand.

This dinner, for example—three Italian men and three foreign women gathered without affection but with a lot of noisy laughter on a May evening in the outdoor half of a restaurant in the Brera district. It did in a certain way come about through rubber bands—the oversized pink ones that provide fruitful resistance to the limbs of the women in the exercise class where Merope met Clay at noon. If Merope hadn’t been dripping with sweat and demoralized by the pain she would have said no, as she has privately resolved to do whenever Clay gets that glint in her eye and starts talking about extremely interesting, extremely successful men.

The exercise class they attend is a notorious one in Milan: it is dedicated entirely to buttocks, and is even called simply “Buttocks”—“Glutei.” Rich Milanese housewives, foreign businesswomen, and models without any hips to speak of flock to the Conture Gym to be put through their paces by a Serbian exgymnast named Nadia, in an atmosphere of groaning and mass agony that suggests a labor ward in a charity clinic. Merope is annoyed at herself for being insecure enough to attend—her small, lofty Caribbean backside, after all, ranks on the list of charms she sometimes allows her boyfriends to enumerate. Yet, Tuesdays and Thursdays at midday, she finds herself there, resentfully squatted on a springy green mat. Sometimes, looking around her, she draws a professional bead on those quivering international ranks of fannies: she sees them in a freeze-frame, an ad for universal feminine folly.

Her friend Clay, on the other hand, adores Ass Class, or the Butt Club, as she alternately calls it. She says that she likes her perversions to work for her. Clay is the class star, the class clown. In a glistening white Avengers-style unitard, she hoists and gyrates her legs with gusto, lets out elemental whoops of pain, swaps wisecracks in Italian with Nadia, flops about exuberantly in her bonds, tossing her sweat-soaked red hair like a captive mermaid, occasionally sending a snapped rubber band zinging across the dance floor. Merope sometimes thinks that if Clay didn’t exist it would be necessary to invent her—at least for her, Merope’s, own survival on the frequent days when Milan appears through the mist as a dull provincial town.

A case in point: last Sunday, when Merope and Clay and a friend of Clay’s, a Colorado blonde who works at Christie’s, were taking the train over the Swiss border to Lugano to see the American Impressionist show at the Thyssen-Bornemisza, Clay got up to go to the toilet, found the toilet in their train compartment not up to her exacting standards, went down to the next car, and there suddenly found herself left behind in Italy as the train divided in two at the border. Merope and the other woman sat staring dumbly at Clay’s beautiful ostrich-skin bag on the seat as their half of the train tootled merrily on into Switzerland.

However, after a few minutes, the train drew to a halt in a small suburban station not on the schedule of express stops, and as the few other people in the car began peering curiously out of the window, a clanking, clanging sound announced the arrival of another train behind them. Merope and the other girl jumped up, ran to the end platform of the car, and saw arriving a sort of yellow toy engine, the kind used for track repair, and inside, flanked by two Italian conductors wearing besotted grins, was Clay, red hair flying, waving like the Queen Mother.

Clay is busy these days ironing out the last wrinkles of a complicated divorce from a rich Milanese who manufactures something rarely thought of but essential, like tongue depressors. Then she is immediately getting married again, to a Texan, with dazzling blue eyes and a glibber tongue than an Irishman’s, who won Clay by falling on his knees and proposing in front of an intensely interested crowd of well-dressed drinkers at Baretto, in Via Sant’ Andrea. Maybe Texas will be big enough for her. Italy, thinks Merope, has always seemed a bit confining for her friend, like one of those tight couture jackets Clay puts on to go to the office, where for the past few years she has run a gift-buying service for Italian companies who want to shower Bulgari trinkets on crucial Japanese. Nowadays she’s shutting down the business, talks about Texas real estate, about marketing Italian cellulite creams in America, about having babies.

Merope feels a predictable resentment toward the Texas Lochinvar who rode out of the West and broke up the eleven months of high times she and Clay had been enjoying as bachelorettes in Milan. Now she would have to start a real life in Milan—unlikely, this—or return home. Her weather instincts tell her that her friend’s engagement means that she herself will fall in love again soon: another partner will come along in a few beats to become essential as salt, to put her through changes, perhaps definitive ones. Clay says that what she wants most in the world to see before she leaves for Houston is Merope settled with a nice man; every time they go out together, she parades an international array of prospects, as if Merope were a particularly picky executive client.

Merope isn’t in the mood yet to settle down with a nice man; in fact last October, when she met Clay, she had just made a nice man move out of the apartment they’d shared for a year and a half in the Navigli district. She’d explained this to Clay in the first five minutes they’d started talking, at a party in the so-called Chinese district, near Corso Bramante. “He was awfully dear. He was Dutch: sweet in the way those northern men can be sweet. Crazy about me the way a man from one of those colonizing countries can be about a brown-skinned woman. A photographer. Never fell in love with models, and he cooked fantastic Indonesian food. But he was making me wicked.”

Clay, shoehorned into a Chanel suit of an otherworldly pink, stuck her chin into her empty wineglass and puffed out her cheeks. Across the room she’d looked like a schoolgirl, wandering through the crowd with downcast eyes, smiling at some naughty thought of her own; up close her beautiful face was a magnet for light, might have been Jewish or not, might have been thirtyish or not, might or might not have undergone a few surgical nips and tucks. Merope had at first glance classified her, erroneously, as “Fashion”—as belonging to the flamboyant tribe of ageless nomads who follow the collections between Europe and New York as migrant workers follow the harvests.

Clay, however, was beyond Fashion. “Because he was too good,” she said in a thoughtful voice, of Merope’s Dutch ex-boyfriend. Her accent in English, like her face, was hard to define: a few European aspirates that slid unexpectedly into an unabashed American flattening of vowels. “No respectable woman,” she added, “should have to put up with that.”

The party was given by a friend of Merope’s—a model married to an Italian journalist, who occasionally got together with some of the other black American and Caribbean models to cook barbecue. The models got raunchy and loud on these occasions, and that night hung intertwined over the beer and ribs, hooting with laughter, forming a sort of gazebo of long, beautiful brown limbs, while a bit of Fashion and a few artistic Milanese buzzed around the edges. Merope had arrived with a painter who dressed only in red and kept goats in his city garden—the type of character who through some minor law of the universe inevitably appears in the social life of a young woman who has just broken off a stable relationship. When the painter left her side and went off to flirt vampirishly with everyone else in the room, Merope started talking with Clay and instantly realized, with the sense of pure recognition one has in falling in love, or in the much rarer and more subtle process of identifying a new friend, that this was the person she had been looking for to get in trouble with in Milan.

Clay’s too hastily proffered description was of a family vaguely highborn, vaguely European, vaguely American (her passport, like her pithy syntax, demonstrated the latter) and of a childhood passed in a sort of whistle-stop tour of the oddest combination of places—Madrid; Bristol, England; Gainesville, Florida. By comparison, Merope’s own family seemed as stable as Plymouth Rock. She was tickled: Clay gave her a school’s-out feeling after her model friends, who, for all their wild looks and the noise they made, were really just sweet, hardworking, secretly studious girls.

Over that fall and winter she and Clay, without finding out much more about each other, spent a lot of time together, chivying a string of Italian and foreign suitors and behaving like overage sorority sisters. They hardly ever went to bed with anybody, not from fear of AIDS but from sheer contrariness, and they called each other late at night after dates and giggled. They cockteased. Merope wondered occasionally how it was possible for fully employed grown women to act this way: did adolescence, like malaria, return in feverish flashbacks?

The same thought occurs to her again tonight in the restaurant garden, because she can feel the spring getting to her. After a cold wet April, warm weather has finally arrived, bringing wan flourishes of magnolia and sultry brown evenings heavy with industrial exhaust. The hordes of Fashion in town for the prêt-à-porter collections have been and gone like passenger pigeons, leaving in their wake not desolation but a faint genuine scent of pleasure. Tonight there is even a full moon: coming in the taxi from work, she caught a glimpse of it, big and shockingly red as a setting sun. Moons and other heavenly personages are rare in Milan: this one vanished under the smog by the time she reached the restaurant. Now between the potted hedge and the edges of the big white umbrellas overhead she sees only the cobblestones of Piazza del Carmine, a twilit church facade, and part of a big modern sculpture that looks like a Greek torso opened for autopsy.

Across the table, Clay is looking good in black. The man to Clay’s right is obviously impressed. His name is Claudio, he is a Roman who lives half the time in Milan, and he owns shoe factories out in the mists beyond Linate: a labyrinthine artisanal conglomerate whose products, baptized with the holy names of the great designers, decorate shop windows up and down Via Spiga and Via Montenapoleone. He’s been making not awfully discreet pawing motions at Clay since they all met up at Baretto at eight-thirty. He is touching the huge gilt buttons of her jacket with feigned professional interest, and her hands and the tip of her nose with no excuse at all, and Clay is laughing and talking about her fiancé in Texas and brushing him off like a mosquito or maybe not even brushing him off but playing absentmindedly with him, the way a child uses a few light taps to keep a balloon dancing in the air.

The other men at the table are designed along the same lines as this Claudio, though one is Venetian and the other a true Milanese. All three are fortyish men-about-town whom Merope has been seeing at parties for the last two years: graying, tanned, with the beauty that profligate Nature bestows on Italian males northern or southern, of all levels of intelligence and social class. They are dressed in magnificent hybrid fabrics of silk and wool, and their faces hold the faintly wary expression of rich divorced men.

Like all the dinner companions Clay has provided recently, they are all impossible, for more reasons than Merope could list on a manuscript the length of the Magna Carta. Without having been out with them before, she knows from experience that soon they will begin vying with each other to pay for this dinner, will get up and pretend to visit the toilet but really go off to settle things with the headwaiter or to discover with irritation that one of the others pretending to visit the toilet has gotten there beforehand. When it has been revealed that someone has succeeded in paying, the other men will groan and laughingly take to task the beaming victor, who has managed to buy the contents of their stomachs.

The other woman at the table is Robin, the Colorado Christie’s blonde from the train incident. She is pretty but borderline anorexic, with a disconcerting habit of jerking her head sharply to one side as she laughs. Clay uses her shamelessly to round out gatherings where another woman is wanted who won’t be competition. Merope likes her but pities her because after five years in Italy she hasn’t yet understood the mixture of playfulness and deep conservatism in Italian men and goes from one disastrous love affair to another. Just a few weeks ago, she spent a night shivering in a car in front of a house where her latest lover was dallying. Now she’s looking hopefully around, as if she’s eager to get burned again.

On the right side of Merope, the Venetian, Francesco, is recounting something that happened to him last month: a girl of about sixteen, a Polish immigrant who had been in the country only a few months, had bluffed her way in to see him in the offices of his knitwear business and without preamble pulled off her shirt. “She told me that she’d done a bit of lingerie modeling—you can imagine the body—but that she wasn’t making enough money, and she proposed for me to keep her. Viewed with the greatest possible objectivity, era una fica pazzesca—she was an amazing piece of ass. She said that she didn’t care about luxury, that she’d accept one room in any neighborhood, that she didn’t dress couture, only Gaultier Junior, and that she rode a motorbike, so that her overhead costs would be very low. She used that expression: ‘overhead costs.’”

“Well, what did you do?” demands Clay.

Francesco pauses to scrape a mussel from its shell, and then glances around the table with his shrewd, pale Venetian eyes. He seems pleased with the story and with himself. “I don’t like complications, so I kept my head with extreme difficulty, made her put her shirt on, and sent her away. And lucky for her, not morally but practically, because a week ago I ran into her at the gala the Socialists gave at La Scala—covered with jewels, on the arm of old Petralzo the rug man, who must be seventy-five.”

“Lucky girl,” says Clay. “So she has minimum work for maximum compensation.”

“It’s an inspiring story,” Merope says. “Even ideologically. When you think of her, born under Polish socialism, progressing to the Italian brand—”

A waiter dashes up and shows them an enormous boiled sea bass, lead-colored in the candlelight, and then runs off to bone it. Though they are all laughing, the story about the Polish girl has changed the atmosphere of the group, momentarily causing each one of them to envision the candlelit outdoor restaurant with its stylish diners as a temporary and unstable oasis of safety, an illuminated bubble poised at the murky edges of the chaos going on not far enough away to the East: the Wall toppled and strewn; teenage Germans nonchalantly resuscitating the Third Reich; international mafiosi and ex-apparatchiks making pacts in the shadow of the Kremlin; Croats slicing heads off Montenegrins; Czech whores servicing the flights between Vienna and Prague; dissolution spilling over into the once safe and prosperous fields of Western Europe in the form of refugee hordes from every tattered state on earth. Each of the men at the table thinks of certain investments and says an inward prayer. The three American women experience a brief, simultaneous thrill of empathy with that coldhearted young girl, as foreign as they are.

Subdued, they finish off two bottles of Piedmontese red wine and eat the fish with thin flat salad greens called barba di frate—“friar’s beard.” Merope chats with the man on her left, who has a posh Milanese accent with a glottal r that sounds as if he’s constantly clearing his throat. His name is Nicolò, and he agreeably surprises her by accepting without comment the fact that she is American of African-Caribbean ancestry—most Italians feel obliged to observe that she doesn’t look American, as if one could—and that she actually works in advertising rather than at one of the jobs that many otherwise intelligent people in Milan consider the only possibility for a pretty young woman with skin the color of cedarwood: runway work, or shaking her behind in television ads for tropical juice.

She tells him that at work she has set herself the private task of trying to change attitudes and images, a generally futile ambition in a small Italian agency grateful for any accounts it can attract. Italians aren’t natural racists, she explains, not like Americans, but they tend to view foreigners in a series of absurd roles as set as those of the commedia dell’arte. “It’s funny, really. The last campaign we did for an air conditioner, what the kids in the creative department held out for was two black models dressed as cannibals carrying the air conditioner slung on a stick. Cannibals, can you imagine? Bare breasts, strings of teeth around their necks, little grass umbrellas around the hips. The company directors loved it. I screamed and yelled.”

Nicolò smiles. “They must love you.”

“Well, I’m somewhat of a crown of thorns for them. But I provide comic relief.”

She knows this Nicolò by sight; she has seen him at parties, always with a different oversized, underage beauty glued to his flank. He has even gone out with one of her friends, a lanky nineteen-year-old from Santo Domingo who is doing a lot of work for Armani this year. “Nicolò” she thinks of as a young name, impetuous, boyish, ardent, like the medieval revolutionary Cola di Rienzo, but this Nicolò is no boy. He has a head of bushy graying curls and weary, protuberant blue Lombard eyes with—surprising for a viveur—an expression of gentle, lugubrious sentimentality.

He is well dressed like the others, but his clothes seem slightly too big, giving him a curious orphaned air that must, thinks Merope unkindly, be the secret of his success with women. That and his money. He is the only one of the three who is not newly rich: his family has professors in it, and a famous collection of Futurist art, and people say he keeps up the textile business his great-grandfather started only to satisfy his taste for very young models. (In fact his eyes glistened mournfully at the description of the Polish girl.) It is said that he falls in love constantly, with untidy results.

He sits and talks about a big house in the Engadin Valley where his seventy-eight-year-old mother passes the winters making nutcake, skiing, hiking, fighting with the family board of directors via phone or fax.

“She sounds fantastic,” Merope says. She tells him about her father’s mother, Jazelle, a school principal with a taste for Plutarch as well as for a certain type of hot yellow-pepper sauce—a tall, rigid, iron-colored woman who commanded obedience from family and pupils in a whispering deadly Montserratian voice that both awed and embarrassed her Americanized grandchildren. It’s just an impulse: her family is her own private thing that she doesn’t usually talk about with the people Clay trots out.

“I don’t understand what you’re doing in Milan,” he says.

“Well, I have to see the world. This is as good a place as any, maybe better.”

Nicolò taps the base of his wineglass with his fingernail. “St. Augustine was converted in a garden here. I think that that was probably the last time this city has done anyone any good.”

“I wonder where the garden was,” says Merope.

Nicolò laughs and says it was a child’s voice that spoke to Augustine in the garden, and that he is thinking at the moment that Merope has the face of a child who knows too much. She reminds him, he says, of Velázquez’s Infanta Margarita. This is a nice compliment, but spoiled by being said in a self-satisfied, overly proficient manner that makes it clear that he habitually comes up with artistic comparisons to impress his very young models. It annoys Merope. She sees that he is quite interested, and this is puzzling, since she is not at all his type.

They are interrupted from across the table by Claudio, the Roman shoemaker, who has heard them talking about the mountains. In between bouts of flirting outrageously with Clay, he starts reminiscing about a party given at Champfer in the sixties by a spendthrift cousin of Nicolò’s. The cousin had wanted to tent a forest for his guests to dance in like gnomes, but this was against Swiss law, so he filled a tent with tall potted larches specially imported from Austria. At dawn the men, a black phalanx in evening dress, had descended from Corviglia on skis.

The two other men at the table chime in to exclaim nostalgically over how much time they spent in dinner jackets, their crowd of young blades, in the sixties. They were so stylish they never wore ski clothes even on ordinary days, but skied in three-piece suits, the wasp-waisted, flare-trousered sixties kind, with a highcollared shirt and a wide tie up under your chin. “We were dandies,” sighs Francesco.

Clay says that they are still dandies, that it is a basic instinct of the Latin male to decorate himself. But are they still up to snuff physically, she asks in a rhetorical tone that makes Robin and Merope giggle. Tossing back her red fringe, she says she doubts it, and she commands without further ado that they show her their legs. Clay has an effect on men like a pistol held to the back of the neck: all three of them at the table—fathers of adult children and heads of companies—rise promptly from their places, considerably surprising the waiters and the other diners in the restaurant, and line up like naughty schoolboys in front of Clay, who, with a Circean smile, has swiveled in her chair to survey them. They pull up their trousers to reveal a variety of knobby, sock-covered ankles and calves. Clay keeps them standing there a second longer than necessary before pronouncing them acceptable and allowing them to file back to their dinners. “But you’ll have to work on that musculature, gentlemen!” she says.

“Of course they behave this way because we’re foreigners,” Clay tells Merope a bit later in the ladies’ room. Clay has a frequently voiced conviction that Italian men view foreign women as escape hatches, vacations from the immemorial stress of life with Italian women, who are all descendants of exigent Mediterranean earth goddesses.

“Italians are just intensified versions of men from anywhere,” says Merope. “The real mystery, the riddle of the ages, is why we go to buttock class and put ourselves through severe pain for their benefit. Look at them—those bony legs!”

Merope is redoing her lips with a tint from a little pottery dish her ex-boyfriend brought her from Marrakech. Clay has left the toilet door open to talk to her and sits with her black skirt hiked up and her tights down, her chin propped on her hands and her elbows on her knees.

When Clay is washing her hands, they start talking about Claudio the shoemaker, who, as Merope accurately observes, has been making passes at Clay like a Roman café waiter with a schoolgirl on a junior year abroad. Clay, always merciful when one least expects it, declares that there is no real harm in poor Claudio, who is upset about having less money than his friends and about having had his business partner hauled off to prison last month as a result of the government bribery scandal.

“Well, if you’re so sympathetic, you should cure him of that behavior,” says Merope, dropping the Moroccan dish into her bag. “Why don’t you act like his charm has caused you to lose your head, and grab him in front of everybody and kiss him. Stick your tongue in his mouth. That would scare the shit out of him. It might change his life. At the very least it would teach him some manners.”

Clay says it isn’t at all a bad idea, and when they are back at the table she actually does grab Claudio the shoemaker and give him a whammy of a kiss—a real bodice ripper, as she describes it later. She doesn’t do it right away but waits until they’ve had dessert and small cups of black coffee, which intrude on the languid meal like jolts of pure adrenaline.

Merope sees Claudio reach out for the twentieth time and trail his fingers down Clay’s cheek while he formulates yet another outrageous compliment, and she watches Clay laugh, turn to him, grab his shoulders, and give him a long, extremely kinetic kiss. They all stare, and Robin from Christie’s claps her thin hands spontaneously like a child at the circus when the elephants come in. Clay lets Claudio go, and his face has blushed dark as a bruise. He is groping for an expression. The rest of them follow Robin and burst into applause, because there is nothing else to do, and people at other tables turn around to look.

“Brava, Clay! That’s showing him,” calls Francesco.

Clay herself is pale, but she has lost no equilibrium at all. She takes a sip of mineral water. “That was possible,” she says evenly, without a smile, “only because with Claudio there could never be the possibility of anything more.”

Shrieks of laughter, invocations of the Texas fiancù, loud protests from the men, especially from Claudio himself, who has enough of the Roman genius for saving face to cover his tracks—to court Clay still more flamboyantly, to laugh artlessly at himself. But the atmosphere, observes Merope, is momentarily murderous; at least, under the voices, through the candlelight diffused beneath the white umbrella, travels a dire reverberation like that which follows the first bite of an ax into a tree trunk. She herself feels half angry at Clay for taking her at her word, half full of unwilling admiration.

“So what do you think, precocious child?” Nicolò asks her a few minutes later, when Francesco reveals that he has paid the bill, and they all get up to leave.

“That precocious children come to bad ends,” replies Merope.

The six of them take two cars to Piazza Sant’Ambrogio to visit Angela and Lucia, a pair of forty-year-old twins who design a sportswear line for Francesco. These sisters with first names like chambermaids are in fact members of an aboriginal Milanese noble family whose dark history of mailed fists and bloody political intrigues dominates medieval Lombard chronicles. The twins themselves, leftover scraps of a dynasty, are small, with masses of streaked hair and frail chirping voices like a pair of crickets; at parties they dress alike to annoy their friends. Tonight they are darting around in red and yellow bloomer suits in Lucia’s apartment, which adjoins her sister’s in a damp sixteenth-century palazzo with a view onto the church of Sant’Ambrogio. The two sisters boast that even during their marriages and love affairs they have rarely spent a night apart.

In the room where the guests are gathered, there are Man Ray photographs leaning against the baseboards, couches and poufs covered in sea green damask, and a carved Malaysian four-poster bed; the windows look down into a leafy wilderness starred with white blossom—the kind of courtyard Merope had at first been surprised to find behind the pitted, smog-blackened facades of Milanese palazzi.

Merope detaches herself from Nicolò, who has been hovering since they got out of the car, and goes and sits down on a wobbly pouf beside a handsome Indian designer who works with one of the twins. The designer’s name is Nathaniel, and he is talking emotionally about Cole Porter to a large, round Englishman whom Merope remembers chiefly for the fact that in the summer he bounces around the city in the most beautiful white linen suits, like a colonial governor on holiday.

“My mother,” continues Nathaniel, “used to sit down at the piano at sunrise with a pitcher of cold tea beside her and start in with ‘Night and Day.’ It’s a very peculiar sensation, Cole Porter in Delhi at dawn.” He passes one hand over his forehead as if to dispel an unbearable memory and then props his elbow on Merope’s shoulder. “Hello, chum,” he says. “You look appetizing tonight.”

Merope pushes his elbow off and smiles. She likes Nathaniel, who is a friend of her boss, Maria Teresa. He asks her about work, and she tells him about the most interesting thing she is doing these days, which is a freelance project writing scripts for a video series on the fantasies of top models.

“Oho,” interjects the round Englishman.

“Well, it’s not as hot as it sounds. These are the kind of fantasies most women have at the age of eleven. The sex is all submerged. One of the girls, Russian, really gorgeous, dreams of being Catherine the Great—”

“I don’t call that submerged,” protests Nathaniel. “Think of her and the horse.”

Merope tells him that the horse is a myth and that anyway the video limits itself to onion domes and fur-edged décolletage. Then she describes another video, in which the model fantasizes about being a Mafia princess, climbs out of a black Mercedes with an Uzi in her hand while the voice-over observes that she has looks to kill for.

The two men giggle, and then the Englishman asks Merope about Ivo, her Dutch ex-boyfriend. When she says that she left him almost a year ago, he leans toward her looking simultaneously lascivious and avuncular and says, “I hope you haven’t gone over to the wops. My child,” he goes on, “I have a definite paternal concern for your romantic future. Too many nice girls come over here and get flummoxed by the Eyetalians. Bad situation—very, as Mr. Jingle would say. Because, all indications of myth and popular tradition to the contrary, the Italian—”

“Is the most difficult male on the planet,” interjects Nathaniel, with the happy air of one climbing onto an old and beloved hobbyhorse.

“That stands, though I was about to say conservative,” says the Englishman. “Difficult, because with the Asian, the African male—”

“Don’t forget the Indian,” adds Nathaniel.

“You know where you are,” says the Englishman. “And one expects behavior along primitive authoritarian lines. But the Italian has a veneer of modernity that makes him infinitely more dangerous. Underneath the flashy design is a veritable root system of archaic beliefs and primitive loyalties. In Milan it’s better hidden—that’s all.”

Getting excited, he waves across the room at, of all people, Nicolò, possibly because he’s seen him come in with Merope. “Just pick an example! One look at him and the discerning eye sees not just an overdressed example of the Riace bronzes but an apartment! Yes, behind every Milanese playboy lurks an immense, dark, rambling bourgeois apartment in the Magenta district, with garlands on the ceiling and the smell of generations of pasta in brodo—oh, that brodo!—borne to the table by generations of maidservants with mustaches.

“And the tribal life in these apartments—all-powerful mothers, linen closets, respectful tradesmen presenting yearly bills, respectful priests subtly skimming the household wealth, ceremonial annual removals to the mountains and the sea, young men and young wives slowly suffocating, gold clinking in coffers to a rhythm that says, family, family, family.”

He fixes Merope with a sparkling periwinkle eye. “One grows up in one of these miniature purgatories with a sense of sin ingrained in one’s cells—a sense that human compromise and human corruption are inevitable. It’s the belief at the root of all the wickedness in this city—and this is a very wicked city. Wicked in a silly and not even very interesting way. An exotic American like you can’t comprehend the weight of it.”

Presumptuous old donkey, thinks Merope, who has been looking around and only half listening. It would be nice to get through an evening out without hearing the word exotic. “I have a family, too,” she says, distinctly.

“It’s eminently clear that you are a sheltered and highly educated flower of the New World, and that makes you more vulnerable.” He points to Clay. “That’s the kind of girl who gets on in Italy: hit and run.”

Clay is standing across the room talking to one of the twins. Unlike anyone else, she looks better as the night wears on: her eyes and earrings gleam and she seems more voluptuous, whiter, redder, more emphatic. By her side hovers Claudio the shoemaker, who has not left her since she gave him that kiss. If he was annoyingly forward in his behavior before the event, now he is desperate.

“Yes, that intelligent young woman has had the good sense to hook up with a cattle baron and get the hell out.”

“You sound jealous,” says Merope.

“Oh, extremely,” says the Englishman. “But it’s too late for me.”

“At this point we’re fixtures,” sighs Nathaniel.

One of the twins darts over and compliments Merope on the wonderful new shoes she has on, which are black with straps, and this somehow gets everyone talking about the British Royal Family, since Nathaniel claims to have heard on reliable authority that what the Prince of Wales really desires in his troubled marriage is straps, plenty of them, but that the Princess declines to oblige.

Clay waltzes up and plops down on the Englishman’s lap, nearly knocking him over; meanwhile they start discussing a new conspiracy theory that links the Queen with the latest Mafia executions in Palermo. They go on to the fiasco of the AIDS benefit gala held the previous week at the Sforza Castle, where a freak storm fried the outdoor lights and nearly electrocuted an international crowd of celebrities. After that they argue over the significance of the appearance of a noted art critic on a late-night television sex show hosted by a beautiful hermaphrodite. Then they thoroughly dissect the latest addendum to the sensational divorce case of a publishing magnate: his wife’s claim that he violated her with a zucchini and then served his friends the offending vegetable as part of a risotto.

Nicolò has come over and sat down on the arm of a couch next to Merope, and through all the laughter she feels him watching her. Under cover of everyone else’s chatter, he leans over and says, “I have to fly to New York the day after tomorrow. Do you want to come with me?”

She rises and moves away from the rest of the group toward the window, and he follows her. Then she stands still and looks directly at him. “I don’t think you are really interested in me,” she says. “I’m not your type at all—not extraordinarily young, not tall, not beautiful at the professional level you like. And I have a personality. An attitude, though you can’t possibly know what that means. So the question is why you are behaving this way: To keep your hand in? To practice for the Third World models?”

He reddens, but not as much as he should, and apologizes. He admits he’s been horribly clumsy but says she’s being too hard on him. The fact is that she’s different from the women he usually meets, and that has thrown him off base. He should have guessed—

“I go to New York quite often for work,” Merope interrupts pitilessly. “You offered me a trip like someone offers stockings to a little refugee. Offer it to that Polish girl who came into Francesco’s office, the one who took off her shirt. I could see that got you excited.”

He reddens some more, rubs his right eye with a nervous forefinger, but he is not, she sees, displeased; on the contrary, he is liking this intensely. What’s going on, she thinks, that all the men want us to tread on them? Even the poor old Prince of Wales likes a spanking. From across the room Clay winks at her as if she knows what she’s thinking, and Merope feels suddenly tired.

Francesco has helped one of the twins put together a batch of sgropin, the vodka-and-lemon-sherbet mixture Venetians drink after heavy meals; when Merope sits down again the others are sipping it from spumante glasses and continuing to chatter away at the top of their lungs, now about telepathy and magic.

Clay talks about a friend of hers in Rome who can call you up on the phone and tell you the colors of the clothes you are wearing at that moment. One of the twins describes the master wizard from Turin, Gustavo Rol, who in his heyday in the nineteen fifties would tell you to select any book from your library, turn to a page you chose, and there would be his name, written in an unearthly handwriting. Francesco tells of his uncle who, while living in a huge old villa on the Brenta, had a dream one night that an unknown woman instructed him to lock a slab of limestone into a small storage room and throw away the key. The uncle obeyed the dream, and when he and his family broke down the door a day later, they found the slab engraved with the words “Siete tutti maledetti”—“You are all cursed.”

These dismal words don’t directly end the party, yet no one manages to stay around much after they are spoken. People go off for a drink at Momus, or to watch the latest crop of models dance at the eternal model showcase, Nepentha. Some go home, since there is no shame in this in the last, frugal years of the millennium. Clay does one of her fast bunks, adroit as usual at collapsing with exhaustion when she feels bored; hissing to Merope that she’ll call her later to rehash, she slips into a taxi that no one knew she had called. She leaves Claudio the shoemaker on the sidewalk with a peck on the cheek. From the corner of her eye Merope observes him standing, just standing as the taxi whisks off. He looks suddenly two-dimensional, as if his stuffing has all fallen out. “Marsyas flayed, eh?” says the Englishman, from over Merope’s shoulder. “I told you she was an expert.”

Nicolò offers to drive Merope home, and she says yes. Which leaves her walking toward the car at 1:00 A.M. through the ancient center of Milan with a man who doesn’t attract her, whom she doesn’t want to try to understand. What strange glue has them still stuck together?

Under their feet the worn paving stones are slippery with damp, and from gardens hidden behind the smog-blackened portals of the old palaces comes a breath of earth and leaves and cat pee. Occasionally they pass a doorway littered with disposable syringes, but they see no one—no addicts and no lovers. Approaching is the quietest hour of the night, the hour when the unchanging character of the city emerges from the overlay of traffic and history.

Their footsteps echo on the walls of the narrow streets with a late-night sound that Merope thinks must be peculiar to Milan, as each city in the world has its own response to night voices and footfalls. As if her scolding had pushed a button that vaporized inhibitions, Nicolò has been talking steadily since they said good-bye to the others and he continues after they have gotten into his big leather-lined car, where the doors make a heavy prosperous sound when they slam, like a vault closing.

He talks about his estranged wife, whom he has never quite been able to divorce, about the excellence of her family, a pharmaceutical dynasty from Como, about her religion, about her well-bred pipe-stem legs below the Scottish tartan skirts she favored in the nineteen seventies, about how her problem with alcohol began. He talks about how until a certain age a man goes on searching for a woman to heal who-knows-what wound, until some afternoon one looks up from scanning a document and realizes that one has stopped searching and how that realization is the chief disaster one faces. He talks about his son, who is with Salomon Brothers in London, and his daughter, in her last year at Bocconi; he asks Merope how old she is.

“Twenty-eight.” She says it with careless emphasis, knowing that it is too old for his tastes, that probably one of the most intense pleasures he allows himself is the moment he learns definitively how young, how dangerously young, is the girl at his side. It heightens her sense of power, not to be to his taste, and yet there is something companionable in it. Any tiredness she felt has passed: she feels beautiful and in control, sustained by her little black dress with its boned bodice as if by a sheath of magic armor.

On impulse she asks him not to take her immediately home but to drive out of town and follow the canal road toward Pavia first so they can have a look at the rice fields, which are flooded now for the spring planting. To get to the Pavese canal they cut through the neighborhood near Parco Sempione where the transvestite and transsexual whores do business. It’s late for the whores, whose peak hour for exhibiting themselves on the street is midnight, but those who are not already with clients or off the job go into their routine when they see the lights of Nicolò’s car. Variously they shimmy and stick out their tongues, bend over cupping their naked silicone breasts, turn their backs and wag their bare bottoms.

They are said to be the best-dressed streetwalkers in Italy, and certainly in fast glimpses they all look gorgeous, fantastically costumed in string bikinis and garter belts, stockings and high heels, with their original sex revealed only by the width of their jaws and the narrowness of their hips. All together they resemble a marooned group of Fellini extras. One of them is wrapped in a Mephistophelian red cloak that swirls over nipples daubed with phosphorescent makeup; another is wearing a tight silver Lycra jumpsuit with a cutout exposing bare buttocks that remind Merope, inevitably, of the Glutei class.

Nicolò slows down the car to allow the two of them a good look, and makes a weak joke about urban nocturnal transportation services. He tells Merope that the transvestites are nearly all Albanians or Brazilians, something she already knows. With Clay and other friends she has driven around to see them a number of times after dinner; only now, however, does she consider what life must be like for these flamboyant night birds, foreigners to a country, foreigners to a gender, skilled but underappreciated workers in a profession that makes them foreigners to most of the rest of the world.

She can see that Nicolò is eyeing them with the veiled expression that men adopt when with a woman companion they look at whores, and this fills her with friendly amusement. She’s starting to feel slightly fond of him, in fact, old Nicolò. His overlong curls, the superb quality of the fabric of his jacket, his anguish, even his timid taste for adolescents are all, as the Englishman said, parts of a certain type of equation. It has to do not only with vast gloomy apartments with plaster garlands but also with escapes from that world—endless futile escapes with the returns built right in. Nicolò, she knows, would like her to be one of his escapes. He’s not brave enough for the transvestites.

They reach the Naviglio Pavese and drive along the canal toward the periphery of the city, past the darkened restaurant zone and the moored barges full of café tables, the iron footbridges and the few clubs with lights still lit. Nicolò continues to talk: spurred by her silence, he starts improvising, gets a bit declarative. He is confessing to her that he is tired of young models and wild evenings. Even tonight, with that kiss—He has nothing against her friend Clay, who is a fascinating woman, but there is something about her—In any case, at a certain time one wants a woman one can introduce to one’s children, one’s mother. He personally could never involve himself seriously with a woman who—The minute he saw Merope he sensed that, though they were so different, there was a possibility—

They pass through the periphery of Milan: factories, government housing, and hapless remnants of village life swallowed by the city. Then suddenly they are among the rice fields that stretch outside of Pavia. Beside them the sober gleam of the still canal stretches into the distance, and to the right and the left of the empty two-lane road is a magical landscape of water, divided by geometric lines. It could be anywhere: South Carolina, China, Bali. And there is light on the water, because once they are beyond the city limits the moon appears. Not dramatically—as full moons sometimes bound like comic actors onto the scene—but as a woman who has paused unseen at the edge of a group of friends at a party calmly enters the conversation.

The sight of the moon dissolves the flippant self-confidence Merope caught from Clay, which carried her through dinner and the party. She looks down at her bare knees emerging like polished wood from black silk, shifts her body in the enveloping softness of the leather seat, and feels not small, as such encounters with celestial bodies are supposed to make one feel, but simply in error. Out of step.

Once, four or five years ago, on vacation in Senegal, she and her sister sneaked out of Club Med and went to a New Year’s Eve dance in the town gymnasium and a local boy led her onto the floor, where a sweating, ecstatic crowd was surging in an oddly decorous rhythm of small, synchronized stops and starts; and in those beautiful African arms she’d taken one step and realized that it was wrong. And not just that the step was wrong in itself but that it led to a whole chain of wrong steps and that she—who had assumed she was the heiress of the entire continent of Africa—couldn’t for the life of her catch that beat. Sitting now in this car, where she has no real desire or need to be, she experiences a similar dismay. She feels that a far-reaching mistake has been made, not now but long ago, as if she and Nicolò and Clay and the other people she knows are condemned to endless repetitions of a tiresome antique blunder to which the impassive moon continues to bear witness.

“I think it’s time to go back now,” she says, breaking into whatever Nicolò is confessing; then she feels unreasonably annoyed by the polite promptness with which he falls silent, makes a U-turn, and heads toward the city. For a second she wishes intensely that something would happen to surprise her. She sees it in a complete, swift sequence, the way she dreams up those freelance scripts: Nicolò stops the car, turns to her, and bites her bare shoulder to the bone. Or an angel suddenly steps out on the road, wings and arm outstretched, and explains each of them to the other in a kindly, efficient, bilingual manner, rather like a senior UN interpreter. From the radio, which has been on since they reached the canal road, comes a fuzz of static and a few faint phrases of Sam Cooke’s “Cupid.” Merope looks down at her hands in her lap and when she looks up again they are passing an old farmhouse set close to the road: one of the rambling brick peasant cascine, big enough for half a dozen families, that dot the Bassa Padana lowlands like fortresses. Even at night it is clear that this place is half in ruins, but as they pass by she sees a figure standing in front and gives an involuntary cry.

Nicolò has good reflexes and simply slows the car without bringing it to a halt. “What is it?”

“There was someone standing in front of that cascina—it looked like a woman holding a child.”

“That’s not impossible. Some of these big abandoned houses close to the city have been taken over by squatters. Foreigners, again: Albanians, Filipinos, Moroccans, Somalians, Yugoslav gypsies. What I’m afraid we’re facing is a new barbarian invasion.”

She hardly notices what he says, because she is busy trying to understand what she saw back in front of the old farmhouse, whose walls, she realizes with delayed comprehension, seemed to have been festooned with spray-paint graffiti like a Bronx subway stop, like an East London squat. The figure she saw in the moonlight could have been a wild-haired woman holding a baby but could just as easily have been a man with dreadlocks cradling something else: a bundle, a small dog. The clothing of the figure was indeterminate, the skin definitely dark, the face an oval of shadow. Thinking of it and remembering her thoughts beforehand, she feels an absurd flash of terror, from which she quickly pulls back.

You aren’t drunk, she tells herself in her mother’s most commonsense tone, and you have taken no dicey pharmaceuticals, so stop worrying yourself at once. Just stop. When Nicolò notices that she is shaken up and asks if she is feeling all right, Merope says she is overtired and leaves it at that. She is sorry she cried out: it makes it seem that the two of them have shared some dangerous intimate experience.

Back in Milan they go speeding along the deserted tram tracks, and the moon disappears behind masses of architecture. Merope wants above all things to be back in her apartment, in her own bed, under the ikat quilt her ex-boyfriend made for her. She has to drive to Bologna for a meeting tomorrow afternoon and in the morning has a series of appointments for which, she thinks, she will be about as alert as a hibernating frog. By the time they are standing outside the thick oak carriage doors of her apartment house, in Via Francesco Sforza, her fit of nerves has passed.

Nicolò, looking a bit sheepish after the amount he has said, invites her to have dinner next week.

“I can’t see how that would help either one of us,” replies Merope, but she says it without the malicious energy of earlier that evening. In fact she says it as a joke, because she doesn’t really mind him anymore. She doesn’t give him her number, but she knows he’ll get it from Clay or from someone else, and this knowledge leaves her so unmoved that for a minute she is filled with pity, for him and probably for herself as well. Without adding anything she kisses him on both cheeks and then lets the small, heavy pedestrians’ door close between them.

Then she takes off her shoes and in her stocking feet runs across the cold, slippery paving stones of the courtyard into her wing of the building. She steps into the old glass-and-wooden elevator, careful not to bang the double doors and awaken Massimo the porter, who sleeps nearby. As she goes up she feels the buzzing mental clarity that comes from exhaustion. In the back of her mind have risen the words from the ghost story at the party, the baleful pronouncement engraved on a stone slab: “Siete tutti maledetti.” And for a few seconds she finds herself laboring over that phrase, attempting with a feverish automatic kind of energy to fix it—to substitute a milder word for cursed—as she might correct a bad line of copy.

The phone is ringing as she lets herself into the apartment, and she grins as she picks it up: Clay is worse than a dorm mother.

“What if I decide to go to bed with somebody?” she says into the phone.

“You won’t—not with him, anyway. You’re not the charitable type,” says Clay. She gives a loud yawn: she’s probably been lying there talking to the Texan, who calls every night. “I just wanted to make sure you made curfew.”

“What time is curfew at this school?”

“Oh, around noon the next day.”

“Clay, shame on you. You kissed that man.”

“There was no man there. It was a trick of lighting.”

They start giggling, egg each other on. For the first time that night Merope is having fun; courage warms her and the dreadlocked apparition by the farmhouse steps back into whatever waiting room in the imagination is reserved for catchpenny roadside omens. A few months later, she will discover that this was the night she decided to stop living in Italy; that here, in a small burst of instinct, began her transition to somewhere else. But at this moment on the bare edge of a new day in Milan, only one image comes to mind: herself and Clay in evening dresses out of a thirties film, foxtrotting together like two Ginger Rogerses around and around an empty piazza. Full of bravado, they laugh loud American bad-girl laughter as they dance; they whirl faster until they outrun gravity and start to rise over the worn gray face of the city, their satin skirts spinning out in a white disk that tosses casual light down on factories and streetcar lines, on gardens, palaces, and the bristling spires of the Duomo.

Merope sits down on the bed and wedges the phone between her shoulder and ear. “Did you see the moon?” she asks.