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
