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
