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
