INTERESTING WOMEN
ANDREA LEE

Dedication

To Alexandra,who merits her middle name,and to Ruggero and Charles,i miei uomini interessanti.

Epigraph

Pinkerton (con franchezza):

Dovunque al mondo lo Yankee vagabondo si gode e trafficasprezzando i rischi. Affonda l’ancora alla ventura.

—Luigi Illica, Giuseppe Giacosa,

Madama Butterfly

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

The Birthday Present

Full Moon over Milan

Brothers and Sisters Around the World

Anthropology

Un Petit d’un Petit

Dancing with Josefina

The Golden Chariot

Interesting Women

The Visit

About Fog and Cappuccino

The Pulpit

Sicily

Winter Barley

The Prior’s Room

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Other Works

Copyright

About the Publisher

The Birthday Present

A cellular phone is ringing, somewhere in Milan. Ariel knows that much. Or does she? The phone could be trilling its electronic morsel of Mozart or Bacharach in a big vulgar villa with guard dogs and closed-circuit cameras on the bosky shores of Lake Como. Or in an overpriced hotel suite in Portofino. Or why not in the Aeolian Islands, or on Ischia, or Sardinia? It’s late September, and all over the Mediterranean the yachts of politicians and arms manufacturers and pan-Slavic gangsters are still snuggled side by side in the indulgent golden light of harbors where the calendars of the toiling masses mean nothing. The truth is that the phone could be ringing anywhere in the world where there are rich men.

But Ariel prefers to envision Milan, which is the city nearest the Brianza countryside, where she lives with her family in a restored farmhouse. And she tries hard to imagine the tiny phone lying on a table in an apartment not unlike the one she shared fifteen years ago in Washington with a couple of other girls who were seniors at Georgetown. The next step up from a dorm, that is—like a set for a sitcom about young professionals whose sex lives, though kinky, have an endearing adolescent gaucheness. It would be too disturbing to think that she is telephoning a bastion of contemporary Milanese luxury, like the apartments of some of her nouveau-riche friends: gleaming marble, bespoke mosaics, boiserie stripped from defunct châteaux, a dispiriting sense of fresh money spread around like butter on toast.

Hmmm—and if it were a place like that? There would be, she supposes, professional modifications. Mirrors: that went without saying, as did a bed the size of a handball court, with a nutria cover and conveniently installed handcuffs. Perhaps a small dungeon off the dressing room? At any rate, a bathroom with Moroccan hammam fixtures and a bidet made from an antique baptismal font. Acres of closets, with garter belts and crotchless panties folded and stacked with fetishistic perfection. And boxes of specialty condoms, divided, perhaps, by design and flavor. Are they ordered by the gross? From a catalog? But now Ariel retrieves her thoughts, because someone picks up the phone.

“Pronto?” The voice is young and friendly and hasty.

“Is this Beba?” Ariel asks in her correct but heavy Italian, from which she has never attempted to erase the American accent.

“Yes,” says the voice, with a merry air of haste.

“I’m a friend of Flavio Costaldo’s and he told me that you and your friend—your colleague—might be interested in spending an evening with my husband. It’s a birthday present.”

When a marriage lingers at a certain stage—the not uncommon plateau where the two people involved have nothing to say to each other—it is sometimes still possible for them to live well together. To perform generous acts that do not, exactly, signal desperation. Flavio hadn’t meant to inspire action when he suggested that Ariel give her husband, Roberto, “una fanciulla”—a young girl—for his fifty-fifth birthday. He’d meant only to irritate, as usual. Flavio is Roberto’s best friend, a sixty-year-old Calabrian film producer who five or six years ago gave up trying to seduce Ariel, and settled for the alternative intimacy of tormenting her subtly whenever they meet. Ariel is a tall, fresh-faced woman of thirty-seven, an officer’s child who grew up on army bases around the world, and whose classic American beauty has an air of crisp serviceability that—she is well aware—is a major flaw: in airports, she is sometimes accosted by travelers who are convinced that she is there in a professional capacity. She is always patient at parties when the inevitable pedant expounds on how unsuitable it is for a tall, rather slow-moving beauty to bear the name of the most volatile of sprites. Her own opinion—resolutely unvoiced, like so many of her thoughts—is that, besides being ethereal, Shakespeare’s Ariel was mainly competent and faithful. As she herself is by nature: a rarity anywhere in the world, but particularly in Italy. She is the ideal wife—second wife—for Roberto, who is an old-fashioned domestic tyrant. And she is the perfect victim for Flavio. When he made the suggestion, they were sitting in the garden of his fourth wife’s sprawling modern villa in a gated community near Como, and both of their spouses were off at the other end of the terrace, looking at samples of glass brick. But Ariel threw him handily off balance by laughing and taking up the idea. As she did so, she thought of how much affection she’d come to feel for good old Flavio since her early days in Italy, when she’d reserved for him the ritual loathing of a new wife for her husband’s best friend. Nowadays she was a compassionate observer of his dawning old age and its accoutrements, the karmic doom of any superannuated playboy: tinted aviator bifocals and reptilian complexion; a rich, tyrannical wife who imposed a strict diet of fidelity and bland foods; a little brown address book full of famous pals who no longer phoned. That afternoon, Ariel for the first time had the satisfaction of watching his composure crumble when she asked him sweetly to get her the number of the best call girl in Milan.

“You’re not serious,” he sputtered. “Ariel, cara, you’ve known me long enough to know I was joking. You aren’t—”

“Don’t go into that nice-girl, bad-girl Latin thing, Flavio. It’s a little dated, even for you.”

“I was going to say only that you aren’t an Italian wife, and there are nuances you’ll never understand, even if you live here for a hundred years.”

“Oh, please, spare me the anthropology,” said Ariel. It was pleasant to have rattled Flavio to this extent. The idea of the fanciulla, to which she had agreed on a mischievous impulse unusual for her, suddenly grew more concrete. “Just get me the number.”

Flavio was silent for a few minutes, his fat, sun-speckled hands wreathing his glass of limoncello. “You’re still sleeping together?” he asked suddenly. “Is it all right?”

“Yes. And yes.”

“Allora, che diavolo stai facendo? What the hell are you doing? He’s faithful to you, you know. It’s an incredible thing for such a womanizer; you know about his first marriage. With you there have been a few little lapses, but nothing important.”

Ariel nodded, not even the slightest bit offended. She knew about those lapses, had long before factored them into her expectations about the perpetual foreign life she had chosen. Nothing he said, however, could distract her from her purpose.

Flavio sighed and cast his eyes heavenward. “Va bene; Okay. But you have to be very careful,” he said, shooting a glance down the terrace at his ever-vigilant wife, with her gold sandals and anorexic body. After a minute, he added cryptically, “Well, at least you’re Catholic. That’s something.”

So, thanks to Flavio’s little brown book, Ariel is now talking to Beba. Beba—a toddler’s nickname. Ex-model in her twenties. Brazilian, but not a transsexual. Tall. Dark. Works in tandem with a Russian blonde. “The two of them are so gorgeous that when you see them it’s as if you have entered another sphere, a paradise where everything is simple and divine,” said Flavio, waxing lyrical during the series of planning phone calls he and Ariel shared, cozy conversations that made his wife suspicious and gave him the renewed pleasure of annoying Ariel. “The real danger is that Roberto might fall in love with one of them,” he remarked airily, during one of their chats. “No, probably not—he’s too stingy.”

In contrast, it is easy talking to Beba. “How many men?” Beba asks, as matter-of-factly as a caterer. There is a secret happiness in her voice that tempts Ariel to investigate, to talk more than she normally would. It is an impulse she struggles to control. She knows from magazine articles that, like everyone else, prostitutes simply want to get their work done without a fuss.

“Just my husband,” Ariel says, feeling a calm boldness settle over her.

“And you?”

Flavio has said that Beba is a favorite among rich Milanese ladies who are fond of extracurricular romps. Like the unlisted addresses where they buy their cashmere and have their abortions, she is top-of-the-line and highly private. Flavio urged Ariel to participate and gave a knowing chuckle when she refused. The chuckle meant that, like everyone else, he thinks Ariel is a prude. She isn’t—though the fact is obscured by her fatal air of efficiency, by her skill at writing out place cards, making homemade tagliatelle better than her Italian mother-in-law, and raising bilingual daughters. But no one realizes that over the years she has also invested that efficiency in a great many amorous games with the experienced and demanding Roberto. On their honeymoon, in Bangkok, they’d spent one night with two polite teenagers selected from a numbered lineup behind a large glass window. But that was twelve years ago, and although Ariel is not clear about her motives for giving this birthday present, she sees with perfect feminine good sense that she is not meant to be onstage with a pair of young whores who look like angels.

The plan is that Ariel will make a date with Roberto for a dinner in town, and that instead of Ariel, Beba and her colleague will meet him. After dinner the three of them will go to the minuscule apartment near Corso Venezia that Flavio keeps as his sole gesture of independence from his wife. Ariel has insisted on dinner, though Flavio was against it, and Beba has told her, with a tinge of amusement, that it will cost a lot more. Most clients, she says, don’t request dinner. Why Ariel should insist that her husband sit around chummily with two hookers, ordering antipasto, first and second courses, and dessert is a mystery, even to Ariel. Yet she feels that it is the proper thing to do. That’s the way she wants it, and she can please herself, can’t she?

As they finish making the arrangements, Ariel is embarrassed to hear herself say, “I do hope you two girls will make things very nice. My husband is a wonderful man.”

And Beba, who is clearly used to talking to wives, assures her, with phenomenal patience, that she understands.

As Ariel puts down the phone, it rings again, and of course it is her mother, calling from the States. “Well, you’re finally free,” says her mother, who seems to be chewing something, probably a lowcalorie bagel, since it is 8:00 A.M. in Bethesda. “Who on earth were you talking to for so long?”

“I was planning Roberto’s birthday party,” Ariel says glibly. “We’re inviting some people to dinner at the golf club.”

“Golf! I’ve never understood how you can live in Italy and be so suburban. Golf in the hills of Giotto!”

“The hills of Giotto are in Umbria, Mom. This is Lombardy, so we’re allowed to play golf.”

Ariel can envision her mother, unlike Beba, with perfect clarity: tiny; wiry, as if the muscles under her porcelain skin were steel guitar strings. Sitting bolt upright in her condominium kitchen, dressed in the chic, funky uniform of black jeans and cashmere T-shirt she wears to run the business she dreamed up: an improbably successful fleet of suburban messengers on Vespas, which she claims was inspired by her favorite film, Roman Holiday. Coffee and soy milk in front of her, quartz-and-silver earrings quivering, one glazed fingernail tapping the counter as her eyes probe the distance over land and ocean toward her only daughter.

What would she say if she knew of the previous call? Almost certainly, Ariel thinks, she would be pleased with an act indicative of the gumption she finds constitutionally lacking in her child, whose lamentable conventionality has been a byword since Ariel was small. She herself is living out a green widowhood with notable style, and dating a much younger lobbyist, whose sexual tastes she would be glad to discuss, girl to girl, with her daughter. But she is loath to shock Ariel.

With her Italian son-in-law, Ariel’s mother flirts shamelessly, the established joke being that she should have got there first. It’s a joke that never fails to pull a grudging smile from Roberto, and it goes over well with his mother, too: another glamorous widow, an intellectual from Padua who regards her daughter-in-law with the condescending solicitude one might reserve for a prize broodmare. For years, Ariel has lived in the dust stirred up by these two dynamos, and it looks as if her daughters, as they grow older—they are eight and ten—are beginning to side with their grandmothers. Not one of these females, it seems, can forgive Ariel for being herself. So Ariel keeps quiet about her new acquaintance with Beba, not from any prudishness but as a powerful amulet. The way, at fourteen, she hugged close the knowledge that she was no longer a virgin.

“Is anything the matter?” asks her mother. “Your voice sounds strange. You and Roberto aren’t fighting, are you?” She sighs. “I have told you a hundred times that these spoiled Italian men are naturally promiscuous, so they need a woman who commands interest. You need to be effervescent, on your toes, a little bit slutty, too, if you’ll pardon me, darling. Otherwise, they just go elsewhere.”

Inspired by her own lie, Ariel actually gives a dinner at the golf club, two days before Roberto’s birthday. The clubhouse is a refurbished nineteenth-century castle built by an industrialist, and the terrace where the party is held overlooks the pool and an artificial lake. Three dozen of their friends gather in the late September chill to eat a faux-rustic seasonal feast, consisting of polenta and Fassone beefsteaks, and the pungent yellow mushrooms called funghi reali, all covered with layers of shaved Alba truffles. Ariel is proud of the meal, planned with the club chef in less time than she spent talking to Beba on the phone.

Roberto is a lawyer, chief counsel for a centrist political party that is moderately honest as Italian political parties go, and his friends all have the same gloss of material success and moderate honesty. Though the group is an international one—many of the men have indulged in American wives as they have in German cars—the humor is typically bourgeois Italian. That is: gossipy, casually cruel, and—in honor of Roberto—all about sex and potency. Somebody passes around an article from L’Espresso which celebrates men over fifty with third and fourth wives in their twenties, and everyone glances slyly at Ariel. And Roberto’s two oldest friends, Flavio and Michele, appear, bearing a large gift-wrapped box. It turns out to hold not a midget stripper, as someone guesses, but a smaller box, and a third, and a fourth and fifth, until, to cheers, Roberto unwraps a tiny package of Viagra.

Standing over fifty-five smoking candles in a huge pear-and-chocolate torte, he thanks his friends with truculent grace. Everyone laughs and claps—Roberto Furioso, as his nickname goes, is famous for his ornery disposition. He doesn’t look at Ariel, who is leading the applause in her role as popular second wife and good sport. She doesn’t have to look at him to feel his presence, as always, burned into her consciousness. He is a small, charismatic man with a large Greek head, thick, brush-cut black hair turning a uniform steel gray, thin lips hooking downward in an ingrained frown like those of his grandfather, a Sicilian baron. When Ariel met him, a dozen years ago, at the wedding of a distant cousin of hers outside Florence, she immediately recognized the overriding will she had always dreamed of, a force capable of conferring a shape on her own personality. He, prisoner of his desire as surely as she was, looked at this preposterously tall, absurdly placid American beauty as they danced for the third time. And blurted out—a magical phrase that fixed forever the parameters of Ariel’s private mythology—“Tu sai che ti sposerò. You know I’m going to marry you.”

Nowadays Roberto is still furioso, but it is at himself for getting old, and at her for witnessing it. So he bullies her, and feels quite justified in doing so. Like all second wives, Ariel was supposed to be a solution, and now she has simply enlarged the problem.

Roberto’s birthday begins with blinding sunlight, announcing the brilliant fall weather that arrives when transalpine winds bundle the smog out to sea. The view from Ariel’s house on the hill is suddenly endless, as if a curtain had been yanked aside. The steel blue Alps are the first thing she sees through the window at seven-thirty, when her daughters, according to family custom, burst into their parents’ bedroom pushing a battered baby carriage with balloons tied to it, and presents inside. Elisa and Cristina, giggling, singing “Happy Birthday,” tossing their pretty blunt-cut hair, serene in the knowledge that their irascible father, who loathes sudden awakenings, is putty in their hands. Squeals, kisses, tumbling in the bed, so that Ariel can feel how their cherished small limbs are growing polished, sleeker, more muscular with weekly horseback riding and gymnastics. Bilingual, thanks to their summers in Maryland, they are still more Italian than American; at odd detached moments in her genuinely blissful hours of maternal bustling, Ariel has noticed how, like all other young Italian girls, they exude a precocious maturity. And though they are at times suffocatingly attached to her, there has never been a question about which parent takes precedence. For their father’s presents, they have clubbed together to buy from the Body Shop some soap and eye gel and face cream that are made with royal jelly. “To make you look younger, Papa,” says Elisa, arriving, as usual, at the painful crux of the matter.

“Are we really going to spend the night at Nonna Silvana’s?” Cristina asks Ariel.

“Yes,” Ariel replies, feeling a blush rising from under her nightgown. “Yes, because Papa and I are going to dinner in the city.”

The girls cheer. They love staying with their Italian grandmother, who stuffs them with marrons glacés and Kit Kat bars and lets them try on all her Pucci outfits from the sixties.

When breakfast—a birthday breakfast, with chocolate brioche—is finished, and the girls are waiting in the car for her to take them to school, Ariel hands Roberto a small gift-wrapped package. He is on the way out the door, his jovial paternal mask back in its secret compartment. “A surprise,” she says. “Don’t open it before this evening.” He looks it over and shakes it suspiciously. “I hope you didn’t go and spend money on something else I don’t need,” he says. “That party—”

“Oh, you’ll find a use for this,” says Ariel in the seamlessly cheerful voice she has perfected over the years. Inside the package is a million lire in large bills, and the key to Flavio’s apartment, as well as a gorgeous pair of silk-and-lace underpants that Ariel has purchased in a size smaller than she usually wears. There is also a note suggesting that Roberto, like a prince in a fairy tale, should search for the best fit in the company in which he finds himself. The note is witty and slightly obscene, the kind of thing Roberto likes. An elegant, wifely touch for a husband who, like all Italian men, is fussy about small things.

Dropping off the girls at the International School, Ariel runs through the usual catechism about when and where they will be picked up, reminders about gym clothes, a note to a geography teacher. She restrains herself from kissing them with febrile intensity, as if she were about to depart on a long journey. Instead she watches as they disappear into a thicket of coltish legs, quilted navy blue jackets, giggles and secrets. She waves to other mothers, Italian, American, Swiss: well-groomed women with tragic morning expressions, looking small inside huge Land Cruisers that could carry them, if necessary, through Lapland or across the Zambezi.

Ariel doesn’t want to talk to anyone this morning, but her rambunctious English friend Carinth nabs her and insists on coffee. The two women sit in the small pasticceria where all the mothers buy their pastries and chocolates, and Ariel sips barley cappuccino and listens to Carinth go on about her cystitis. Although Ariel is deeply distracted, she is damned if she is going to let anything slip, not even to her loyal friend with the milkmaid’s complexion and the lascivious eyes. Damned if she will turn Roberto’s birthday into just another easily retailed feminine secret. Avoiding temptation, she looks defiantly around the shop at shelves of meringues, marzipan, candied violets, chocolate chests filled with gilded chocolate cigars, glazed almonds for weddings and first communions, birthday cakes like Palm Beach mansions. The smell of sugar is overpowering. And, for just a second, for the only time all day, her eyes sting with tears.

At home, there are hours to get through. First, she e-mails an article on a Milanese packaging designer to one of the American magazines for which she does freelance translations. Then she telephones to cancel her lesson in the neighboring village with an old artisan who is teaching her to restore antique papiers peints, a craft she loves and at which her large hands are surprisingly skillful. Then she goes outside to talk to the garden contractors—three illegal Romanian immigrants who are rebuilding an eroded slope on the east side of the property. She has to haggle with them, and as she does, the leader, an outrageously handsome boy of twenty, looks her over with insolent admiration. Pretty boys don’t go unnoticed by Ariel, who sometimes imagines complicated sex with strangers in uncomfortable public places. But they don’t really exist for her, just as the men who flirt with her at parties don’t count. Only Roberto exists, which is how it has been since that long-ago third dance, when she drew a circle between the two of them and the rest of the world. This is knowledge that she keeps even from Roberto, because she thinks that it would bore him, along with everyone else. Yet is it really so dull to want only one man, the man one already has?

After the gardeners leave, there is nothing to do—no children to pick up at school and ferry to activities; no homework to help with, no dinner to fix. The dogs are at the vet for a wash and a checkup. Unthinkable to invite Carinth or another friend for lunch; unthinkable, too, to return to work, to go shopping, to watch a video or read a book. No, there is nothing but to accept the fact that for an afternoon she has to be the loneliest woman in the world.

Around three o’clock, she gets in the car and heads along the state highway toward Lake Como, where over the years she has taken so many visiting relatives. She has a sudden desire to see the lovely decaying villas sleeping in the trees, the ten-kilometer expanse of lake stretching to the mountains like a predictable future. But as she drives from Greggio to San Giovanni Canavese, past yellowing cornfields, provincial factories, rural discotheques, and ancient village churches, she understands why she is out here. At roadside clearings strewn with refuse, she sees the usual highway prostitutes waiting for afternoon customers.

Ariel has driven past them for years, on her way to her mother-in-law’s house or chauffeuring her daughters to riding lessons. Like everyone else, she has first deplored and then come to terms with the fact that the roadside girls are part of a criminal world so successful and accepted that their slavery has routines like those of factory workers: they are transported to and from their ten-hour shifts by a neat fleet of minivans. They are as much a part of the landscape as toll booths.

First, she sees a brown-haired Albanian girl who doesn’t look much older than Elisa, wearing black hot pants and a loose white shirt that she lifts like an ungainly wing and flaps slowly at passing drivers. A Fiat Uno cruising in front of Ariel slows down, makes a sudden U-turn, and heads back toward the girl. A kilometer further on are two Nigerians, one dressed in an electric pink playsuit, sitting waggling her knees on an upended crate, while the other, in a pair of stiltlike platform shoes, stands chatting into a cellular phone. Both are tall, with masses of fake braids, and disconcertingly beautiful. Dark seraphim whose presence at the filthy roadside is a kind of miracle.

Ariel slows down to take a better look at the girl in pink, who offers her a noncommittal stare, with eyes opaque as coffee beans. The two-lane road is deserted, and Ariel actually stops the car for a minute, because she feels attracted by those eyes, suddenly mesmerized by something that recalls the secret she heard in Beba’s voice. The secret that seemed to be happiness, but, she realizes now, was something different: a mysterious certitude that draws her like a magnet. She feels absurdly moved—out of control, in fact. As her heart pounds, she realizes that if she let herself go, she would open the car door and crawl toward that flat dark gaze. The girl in pink says something to her companion with the phone, who swivels on the three-inch soles of her shoes to look at Ariel. And Ariel puts her foot on the gas pedal. Ten kilometers down the road, she stops again and yanks out a Kleenex to wipe the film of sweat from her face. The only observation she allows herself as she drives home, recovering her composure, is the thought of how curious it is that all of them are foreigners—herself, Beba, and the girls on the road.

Six o’clock. As she walks into the house, the phone rings, and it is Flavio, who asks how the plot is progressing. Ariel can’t conceal her impatience.

“Listen, do you think those girls are going to be on time?”

“As far as I know, they are always punctual,” he says. “But I have to go. I’m calling from the car here in the garage, and it’s starting to look suspicious.”

He hangs up, but Ariel stands with the receiver in her hand, struck by the fact that besides worrying about whether dinner guests, upholsterers, baby-sitters, restorers of wrought iron, and electricians will arrive on schedule, she now has to concern herself with whether Beba will keep her husband waiting.

Seven-thirty. The thing now is not to answer the phone. If he thinks of her, which is unlikely, Roberto must assume that she is in the car, dressed in one of the discreetly sexy short black suits or dresses she wears for special occasions, her feet in spike heels pressing the accelerator as she speeds diligently to their eight o’clock appointment. He is still in the office, firing off the last frantic fax to Rome, pausing for a bit of ritual abuse aimed at his harassed assistant, Amedeo. Next, he will dash for a pee in his grim brown-marble bathroom: how well she can envision the last, impatient shake of his cock, which is up for an unexpected adventure tonight. He will grab a handful of the chocolates that the doctor has forbidden, and gulp down a paper cup of sugary espresso from the office machine. Then into the shiny late-model Mercedes—a monument, he calls it, with an unusual flash of self-mockery, to the male climacteric. After which, becalmed in the Milan evening traffic, he may call her. Just to make sure she is going to be on time.

Eight-fifteen. She sits at the kitchen table and eats a frugal meal: a plate of rice with cheese and olive oil, a sliced tomato, a glass of water.

The phone rings again. She hesitates, then picks it up.

It is Roberto. “Allora, sei rimasta a casa,” he says softly. “So you stayed home.”

“Yes, of course,” she replies, keeping her tone light. “It’s your birthday, not mine. How do you like your present? Are they gorgeous?”

He laughs, and she feels weak with relief. “They’re impressive. They’re not exactly dressed for a restaurant, though. Why on earth did you think I needed to eat dinner with them? I keep hoping I won’t run into anybody I know.”

In the background, she hears the muted roar of an eating house, the uniform evening hubbub of voices, glasses, silver, plates.

“Where are you calling from?” Ariel asks.

“Beside the cashier’s desk. I have to go. I can’t be rude. I’ll call you later.”

“Good luck,” she says. She is shocked to find a streak of malice in her tone, and still more shocked at the sense of power she feels as she puts down the phone. Leaving him trapped in a restaurant, forced to make conversation with two whores, while the other diners stare and the waiters shoot him roguish grins. Was that panic she heard in Roberto’s voice? And what could that naughty Beba and her friend be wearing? Not cheap hot pants like the roadside girls, she hopes. For the price, one would expect at least Versace.

After that, there is nothing for Ariel to do but kick off her shoes and wander through her house, her bare feet unexpectedly warm on the waxed surface of the old terra-cotta tiles she spent months collecting from junkyards and wrecked villas. She locks the doors and puts on the alarm, but turns on only the hall and stairway lights. And then walks like a night watchman from room to darkened room, feeling flashes of uxorious pride at the sight of furnishings she knows as well as her own body. Uxorious—the incongruous word actually floats through her head as her glance passes over the flourishes of a Piedmontese Baroque cabinet in the dining room, a watchful congregation of Barbies in the girls’ playroom, a chubby Athena in a Mantuan painting in the upstairs hall. When has Ariel ever moved through the house in such freedom? It is exhilarating, and slightly appalling. And she receives the strange impression that this is the real reason she has staged this birthday stunt: to be alone and in conscious possession of the solitude she has accumulated over the years. To contemplate, for as long as she likes, the darkness in her own house. At the top of the stairs she stops for a minute and then slowly begins to take off her clothes, letting them fall softly at her feet. Then, naked, she sits down on the top step, the cold stone numbing her bare backside. Her earlier loneliness has evaporated: the shadows she is studying seem to be friendly presences jostling to keep her company. She relaxes back on her elbows, and playfully bobs her knees, like the roadside girl on the crate.

Ten o’clock. Bedtime. What she has wanted it to be since this afternoon. A couple of melatonin, a glass of dark Danish stout whose bitter concentrated taste of hops makes her sleepy. A careful shower, cleaning of teeth, application of face and body creams, a gray cotton nightdress. She could, she thinks, compose a specialized etiquette guide for women in her situation. One’s goal is to exude an air of extreme cleanliness and artless beauty. One washes and dries one’s hair, but does not apply perfume or put on any garment that could be construed as seductive. The subtle enchantment to be cast is that of a homespun Elysium, the appeal of Penelope after Calypso.

By ten-thirty, she is sitting up in bed with the Herald Tribune, reading a history of the FBI’s Most Wanted list. Every few seconds, she attempts quite coolly to think of what Roberto is inevitably doing by now, but she determines that it is actually impossible to do so. Those two pages in her imagination are stuck together.

She does, however, recall the evening in Bangkok that she and Roberto spent with the pair of massage girls. How the four of them walked in silence to a fluorescent-lit room with a huge plastic bathtub, and how the two terrifyingly polite, terrifyingly young girls, slick with soapsuds, massaging her with their small plump breasts and shaven pubes, reminded her of nothing so much as chickens washed and trussed for the oven. And how the whole event threatened to become a theater of disaster, until Ariel saw that she would have to manage things. How she indicated to the girls by a number of discreet signs that the three of them were together in acting out a private performance for the man in the room. How the girls understood and even seemed relieved, and how much pleasure her husband took in what, under her covert direction, they all contrived. How she felt less like an erotic performer than a social director setting out to save an awkward party. And how silent she was afterward—not the silence of shocked schoolgirl sensibilities, as Roberto, no doubt, assumed, but the silence of amazement at a world where she always had to be a hostess.

She turns out the light and dreams that she is flying with other people in a plane precariously tacked together from wooden crates and old car parts. They land in the Andes, and she sees that all the others are women and that they are naked, as she is. They are all sizes and colors, and she is far from being the prettiest, but is not the ugliest, either. They are there to film an educational television special, BBC or PBS, and the script says to improvise a dance, which they all do earnestly and clumsily: Scottish reels, belly dancing, and then Ariel suggests ring-around-the-rosy, which turns out to be more fun than anyone had bargained for, as they all flop down, giggling at the end. The odd thing about this dream is how completely happy it is.

She wakes to noise in the room, and Roberto climbing into bed and embracing her. “Dutiful,” she thinks, as he kisses her and reaches for her breasts, but then she lets the thought go. He smells alarmingly clean, but it is a soap she knows. As they make love, he offers her a series of verbal sketches from the evening he has just passed, a bit like a child listing his new toys. What he says is not exciting, but it is exciting to hear him trying, for her benefit, to sound scornful and detached. And the familiar geography of his body has acquired a passing air of mystery, simply because she knows that other women—no matter how resolutely transient and hasty—have been examining it. For the first time in as long as she can remember, she is curious about Roberto.

“Were they really so beautiful?” she asks, when, lying in the dark, they resume coherent conversation. “Flavio said that seeing them was like entering paradise.”

Roberto gives an arrogant, joyful laugh that sounds as young as a teenage boy’s.

“Only for an old idiot like Flavio. They were flashy, let’s put it that way. The dark one, Beba, had an amazing body, but her friend had a better face. The worst thing was having to eat with them—and in that horrendous restaurant. Whose idea was that, yours or Flavio’s?” His voice grows comically aggrieved. “It was the kind of tourist place where they wheel a cart of mints and chewing gum to your table after the coffee. And those girls asked for doggie bags, can you imagine? They filled them with Chiclets!”

The two of them are lying in each other’s arms, shaking with laughter as they haven’t done for months, even years. And Ariel is swept for an instant by a heady sense of accomplishment. “Which of them won the underpants?” she asks.

“What? Oh, I didn’t give them away. They were handmade, silk. Expensive stuff—too nice for a hooker. I kept them for you.”

“But they’re too small for me,” protests Ariel.

“Well, exchange them. You did save the receipt, I hope.” Roberto’s voice, which has been affectionate, indulgent, as in their best times together, takes on a shade of its normal domineering impatience. But it is clear that he is still abundantly pleased, both with himself and with her. Yawning, he announces that he has to get some sleep, that he’s out of training for this kind of marathon. That he didn’t even fortify himself with his birthday Viagra. He alludes to an old private joke of theirs by remarking that Ariel’s present proves conclusively that his mother was right in warning him against immoral American women; and he gives her a final kiss. Adding a possessive, an uxorious, squeeze of her bottom. Then he settles down and lies so still that she thinks he is already asleep. Until, out of a long silence, he whispers, “Thank you.”

In a few minutes he is snoring. But Ariel lies still and relaxed, with her arms at her sides and her eyes wide open. She has always rationed her illusions, and has been married too long to be shocked by the swiftness with which her carefully perverse entertainment has dissolved into the fathomless triviality of domestic life. In a certain way that swiftness is Ariel’s triumph—a measure of the strength of the quite ordinary bondage that, years ago, she chose for herself. So it doesn’t displease her to know that she will wake up tomorrow, make plans to retrieve her daughters, and find that nothing has changed.

But no, she thinks, turning on her side, something is different. A sense of loss is creeping over her, and she realizes it is because she misses Beba. Beba who for two weeks has lent a penumbral glamour to Ariel’s days. Beba, who, in the best of fantasies, might have sent a comradely message home to her through Roberto. But, of course, there is no message, and it is clear that the party is over. The angels have flown, leaving Ariel—good wife and faithful spirit—awake in the dark with considerable consolations: a sleeping man, a silent house, and the knowledge that, with her usual practicality, she has kept Beba’s number.

Full Moon over Milan

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.

Brothers and Sisters Around the World

“I took them around the point toward Dzamandzar,” Michel tells me. “Those two little whores. Just ten minutes. They asked me for a ride when I was down on the beach bailing out the Zodiac. It was rough and I went too fast on purpose. You should have seen their titties bounce!”

He tells me this in French, but with a carefree lewdness that could be Roman. He is, in fact, half Italian, product of the officially French no man’s land where the Ligurian Alps touch the Massif Central. In love, like so many of his Mediterranean compatriots, with boats, with hot blue seas, with dusky women, with the steamy belt of tropics that girdles the earth. We live above Cannes, in Mougins, where it is always sunny, but on vacation we travel the world to get hotter and wilder. Islands are what Michel prefers: in Asia, Oceania, Africa, the Caribbean, it doesn’t matter. Any place where the people are the color of different grades of coffee, and mangoes plop in mushy heaps on the ground, and the reef fish are brilliant as a box of new crayons. On vacation Michel sheds his manicured adman image and with innocent glee sets about turning himself into a Eurotrash version of Tarzan. Bronzed muscles well in evidence, shark’s tooth on a leather thong, fishing knife stuck into the waist of a threadbare pareu, and a wispy sunstreaked ponytail that he tends painstakingly along with a chin crop of Hollywood stubble.

He loves me for a number of wrong reasons connected with his dreams of hot islands. It makes no difference to him that I grew up in Massachusetts, wearing L. L. Bean boots more often than sandals; after eight years of marriage, he doesn’t seem to see that what gives strength to the spine of an American black woman, however exotic she appears, is a steely Protestant core. A core that in its absolutism is curiously cold and Nordic. The fact is that I’m not crazy about the tropics, but Michel doesn’t want to acknowledge that. Mysteriously, we continue to get along. In fact, our marriage is surprisingly robust, though at the time of our wedding, my mother, my sister, and my girlfriends all gave it a year. I sometimes think the secret is that we don’t know each other and never will. Both of us are lazy by nature, and that makes it convenient to hang on to the fantasies we conjured up back when we met in Milan: mine of the French gentleman-adventurer, and his of a pliant black goddess whose feelings accord with his. It’s no surprise to me when Michel tries to share the ribald thoughts that run through the labyrinth of his Roman Catholic mind. He doubtless thought that I would get a kick out of hearing about his boat ride with a pair of African sluts.

Those girls have been sitting around watching us from under the mango tree since the day we rolled up from the airport to spend August in the house we borrowed from our friend Jean-Claude. Michel was driving Jean-Claude’s car, a Citroën so rump-sprung from the unpaved roads that it moves like a tractor. Our four-year-old son, Lele, can drag his sneakers in red dust through the holes in the floor. The car smells of failure, like the house, which is built on an island off the northern coast of Madagascar, on a beach where a wide scalloped bay spreads like two blue wings, melting into the sky and the wild archipelago of lemur islands beyond. Behind the garden stretch fields of sugarcane and groves of silvery, arthritic-looking ylang-ylang trees, whose flowers lend a tang of Africa to French perfume.

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