The apartment is plain and white, well lit and clean. The bookshelves—Ikea Expedits in beech and black—are full of toys: stuffed Angry Birds, tin robots, lunch boxes. There are three posters in the living room: Megadeth, Hannah Montana, and Stranger Than Paradise—the latter a positive Jarmuschian omen. The counter that separates the room from the kitchenette is covered in containers half-filled with Mexican food and a tall vase: two withered irises and a sad bunch of baby’s breath.
Without Berengo to distract her, she remembers the first time she saw the apartment: during the party where she met him. There were more than a dozen people angled over the furniture and hanging out the window: photographers from the Contrasto agency, a music journalist from Milan. Without the crowd to take up every corner of the place, the apartment looks smaller.
She lies down and angles her head on two pillows for an unobstructed view of the skyline. The winter sun shines on her face.
—
THE SUN IS a rich yellow when she wakes up from her nap. Her shoulders and cheeks are heavy, and she lifts herself up on her elbows slowly, as if a sharp gesture might pull her back into full consciousness. The walls are covered in splotchy shadows and diamonds of light. The window feels cold to the touch. She kneels to look out, sees limestone stains on the glass.
—
SHE GOES OUT to buy a toothbrush, underwear, some new clothes. Everyone in the Rite Aid is fat or ugly: eccentric ugly or Asian ugly or post-Soviet ugly. They’re buying twelve-packs of toilet paper, shampoo in large, white containers, two-liter bottles of raspberry-flavored ginger ale.
There’s a small beauty salon in a quiet corner of the lobby. It’s closed for the day, so there’s no one around. She finds a stray chair and sits down to call her husband.
“Now I’m the one who wants to be alone,” she tells him calmly. “Don’t freak out. I’m just going out tonight.”
“Great. Thanks for telling me,” he says, his voice icy but wounded. “You’re a piece of work, you know. I’m going out dancing.”
“Think about what I told you, Lo.”
“Come back, will you? You have to trust me; I have a plan.”
“Come on, Lo.”
“If you don’t come back, I’ll fuck anything I see.”
“Come on.”
“You’re only doing all this because your dad won’t let you stay here.”
“Lo.”
“You do everything for your father, you know? You two have a really fucked-up relationship.”
You let him go through the rituals, because he doesn’t know where you are so he’s entitled to some freaking out; still, you don’t feel like telling him. He likes that you indulge his abuse, and he says:
“I’ll give some thought to what you’re saying. But if you sleep with someone I’ll hang myself.”
“No, my love, my legs are shut. Be good tonight, and tomorrow I’ll make love to you.”
“Okay, love, make love to me tomorrow.”
You hang up the phone and think of Gabriele Muccino, the middling Italian director who became a middling American hack. Lorenzo went to Muccino’s high school, and you see now that he shares the director’s penchant for bourgeois melodrama. “WellmakelovetomorrowMuccinoboy,” she texts him.
“I’m in pain. I miss you.”
“I miss you, too.”
She needs to use the bathroom. She gets up from the chair in the lobby and runs to the elevator. But when she gets to the apartment there are two strangers in the living room, and they’ve turned her bed back into a couch and completely ruined the beautiful peace that the apartment had before she’d run out. They’re both balding, though one of them is young, twenty-five or so, an Italian hipster who introduces himself as Cugino Hitler. The other one is closer to fifty. His name is James. They sit back down on the couch and return to their video game. “Make yourself at Berengo’s,” says the affected Italian. In the game, a basketball player is doing dunking drills on a floodlit outdoor court.
She doesn’t want to rush to the bathroom, so she stays a minute and looks out at the sunset crouching behind the skyscrapers that stand between her and the sun, seven dark shapes in this light, the spaces between them occupied by black clouds. Somewhere between the distant sunset and the clear, lobster-colored sky is a cluster of chunky clouds that resemble nothing so much as pieces of brain. Above Manhattan everything is still white and blue, the outlines of a day that hasn’t quite receded, but the clouds closest to her are prone and hollow and heavy, seconds away from discoloration. La Sposina takes in the view with that part of the soul that emerges in men as they fall from cliffs or realize that they’re lost at sea.
Cugino Hitler begs her to play. She detests him completely: the Adidas kicks sloppily thrown off to the side, the tight red pants rolled up above the ankles, the black shirt buttoned up and too tight. He looks a lot like her flatmate’s Portuguese boyfriend, the guy from the boutique who didn’t like G. Ludovica nods and smiles and strains every muscle in her face as she does so, her smile a Jasmine Trinca frown. James, the older man, apologizes for his dumb friend and tells her not to pay attention to either of them, to just do whatever she wants. His vibe is serene.
The windowless bathroom is tiny and has no ventilation of any kind, but there’s an iPod dock for music. She sits on the toilet in a complicated bundle of pain and stimuli that send mail via pneumatic tubes from organ to organ, her armpits and her tongue receiving the most messages somehow. She glances at the white panties between her legs.
Later, she showers with a rich coconut soap and spreads it all over body, on her legs and on her stomach. The powerful gush of the showerhead is a pleasure. She ends up touching herself in a corner of the shower, an abandoned body leaning on the wall, cheeks against the cold tiles.
Her blood pressure low, she wraps a towel around her hair and thinks of her brother. He abandoned his engineering management master’s almost as soon as he began and instead enrolled at a Catholic university where he’s working on a bachelor’s degree in theology. He’d met some Opus Dei people, and that was that. She thinks of her mother’s cancer, and the pretentious restaurant they opened in the Sabine Hills, and her dad’s brief departure from the family, and his heart attack, and his decision to open the bookstore/bistro in a shitty neighborhood with no nightlife to speak of. But none of it pointed to her family’s imminent doom quite as much as her brother’s decision to study theology. Her father, now a double bypass, didn’t want Ludovica to go to New York because it meant neglecting the bookstore. Still, in light of the global recession, a bachelor’s degree in theology seems much worse, and her father, she knows, would have to agree—and yield.
She finds two kinds of moisturizer—grape-scented for the face, almond-scented for the body—and applies both as she sits on the toilet lid. These delicate creams, she thinks, must belong to Berengo.
She retreats to Berengo’s room and shuts the door. The city is transformed: the twilight is an artificial orange glow, a rebuke to the intensity of the blue darkness. The skyscrapers’ lights have been turned on, and Manhattan looks like an intricate scale model of itself: miniature human models in miniature offices posed under miniature fluorescent lights. She abandons herself on the bed, her face buried in the duvet sheet.
—
SHE WAKES UP suddenly in a bed in a dark room, party noise seeping in through the walls. Her husband might be out there among the guests, and if he sees her he’ll make a scene.
—
I KNOW THE mattress she’s lying on—it’s thin but comfortable and rests on a large metal frame, and when I’m visiting Berengo, there’s always a moment when I stick my hands and arms underneath to take out The Box. By then I’m usually shirtless, wearing only a pink-and-whipped-cream bra with little ribbons. I sit on the bed, open the Box, and take out the edible ink sharpie. Berengo pulls down one of the cups and draws a swirl around my areola and then proceeds to lick it from the outside in until he reaches the nipple. Then we take somethi
ng else from The Box: the black tape or the dildos or the beads. When I’m there he doesn’t go around throwing parties. No bitter throats from MDMA, no Vitamin Water, no Spanish bubblegum dance music.)
Minutes later two very attractive, very young girls enter the room. They switch on the lights and apologize in two languages, though they don’t leave. Maybe they imagine La Sposina as one of those background characters in party scenes, the crumpled lover who prefers to stay in bed. They slide the window open, and La Sposina calmly slips her head under the duvet.
“You all right, zia, you need anything?”
They don’t like the mumbled mmm she gives them in response. “Minchia, zia, ce la fai?” one of them says. Literally “can you make it?” but in Milan, it’s more like “you’re so lame.” But La Sposina only catches the literal meaning.
“I’ll make it, thanks. I’m all right.”
The two beauties laugh at her. Their hair is endless, their cheekbones sharp and ruthless; wide mouths, immaculate necks, knuckle and wrist tattoos that emerge from under rolled-up sleeves. They begin a discussion they’ve clearly had before, about an acquaintance who only talks about work and wants everybody else to be tranquillo “when she’s so not tranquilla, la zia.”
“If she keeps it up, I’ll kill the bitch.”
Coughing as she gets out of bed, less out of need than for momentum, Ludovica walks out into the living room to face her husband. To her surprise, he isn’t there. There are a dozen people in the room, and none of them is Lorenzo. She recognizes her own foolishness: La Sposina had convinced herself that Berengo was trying to help the two of them work things out.
There are so many people on the sofa, the sofa that, only hours ago, was briefly hers. They’re watching a Ryan Trecartin video on someone’s iPhone and babbling indistinctly, mimicking the performances. Someone throws a stuffed Angry Bird halfway across the room. It’s Cugino Hitler, of course. He and two friends are playing Angry Birds IRL: one holds a pig head with an outstretched arm, like a conqueror, while the other throws the red bird at the pig, hoping for contact. They laugh, smoke pot, switch places. Berengo is projecting a Kanye West video on the wall, two girls are playing Mario Kart.
(I have never seen the living room that crowded when I’ve flown over. Perhaps because I always tell Berengo ahead of time that I’m coming, and he’s happy to see only me. It’s always the same: I get five days off at the travel agency and persuade Il manifesto, the pinko newspaper, to let me publish a couple of interviews with American writers or a piece or two about the New York Film Festival or the New Yorker Festival—the cultural coverage left-leaning Italians hunger for.)
A friend of Cugino Hitler has spread peanut butter on his nose, and another boy licks it off. La Sposina wants to fit in, and her best shot is her sleepy air: she looks wasted, maybe. Her Jasmine Trinca grimaces won’t work with these people—they’re younger and more cynical—so she has to keep her eyelids droopy, her mouth shut. As soon as there’s an opening on the couch, she moves in, hoping she doesn’t look too clumsy as she does so or perhaps just clumsy enough. She’s sitting in the corner under the windows, where the draft is iciest. The bald, mangy fifty-year-old she met earlier sits down next to her and begins to ask her how she’s doing, along with other polite questions. She manages, against her nature, to look jaded while staring out at the view outside. She spots The New York Times Building, a Renzo Piano joint, and finds herself telling her mom about it in her mind. She tells James she’s from Rome and has many weird jobs that she can’t be bothered to list.
She’s managed to get him to leave, which allows her to stretch her legs. Perhaps it’s time to pretend that she’s asleep. But as she drifts off she realizes she doesn’t have to pretend. She’s telling her friends in Rome about how everything here is so obscure: someone is wearing a black t-shirt that reads HATERS GONNA MAKE SOME GOOD POINTS IN HELVETICA, a sentence that riffs on some other sentence, neither of which she understands or maybe half-understands; someone else has an I AM CARLES shirt, barely more understandable, also in Helvetica. No one seems to be talking about New York, about boroughs or neighborhoods or even restaurants. What she hears instead are only brands: Comme des Garçons, Issey Miyake, Miu Miu. There are two guys talking in Brescian dialect, perfectly dressed, rocking grandiose fur sneakers, their slanted mouths almost identical in mutual disgust.
Cugino Hitler wakes her up and suggests a walk. Everyone’s leaving, including the two beauties: one of them is putting on a Barbour jacket, the other (whom La Sposina feels she’s met before) a coat that’s almost certainly Marni.
“No, no, I’m staying.”
Cugino Hitler, unpersuasive in his puffy red jacket, grabs her hand to try to force her up, but she resists.
Alone on the couch, she checks Foursquare to see if her husband has checked in somewhere. He hasn’t, and neither has she. There are two new texts from him: “You’re not in bed with some man please promise me on your mother’s life,” and “Don’t you see what you’re doing to me??”
“I want you to think about us and about your choices,” she replies. “How would being in bed with somebody help me think? Lol. Trust me, baby.”
Berengo still has company. He’s with a woman in the kitchenette and is switching off all the living room lights except a dim orb on the shelf. He has arranged the bamboo screen wordlessly, pretending to believe she is asleep. She can’t see anything beyond her little corner of the room, not the kitchenette, not even the table.
So this is how the long Monday ends: behind a bamboo screen, low on the couch to avoid the draft from the two windows as the woman in the kitchenette discusses Margiela sneakers and summers in Japan and begins to bake a cake with Nico, right now, at this hour. What she hears: egg yolks and flour being mixed up in a big plastic bowl. Twok twok twok. The oven being turned on, the pans pulled out of their drawers. She smells butter. La Sposina follows the sounds and the smells from her perch on the bow of the cold sofa, exposed to the deadly breath of the city and the hot siren breath coming in from the kitchenette.
After a long period of indecision, she gets up and slips out into the other room, unavoidably exposed to the gaze of the two bakers. Nicola’s date is so round and tall, her hair so rich and chestnut that she seems to have emerged from the oven herself; her apron is the napkin Berengo will use to eat her. Ludovica crawls inside Nico’s room and locks the door: she’ll relax on the bed and in time, as they end up unable to reclaim their room, she’ll fall asleep. She’ll stay put.
She’s lying askew in Berengo’s bed, tangled up in the duvet with her pants unbuttoned, the slotted light from the venetian blinds giving her a film noir aura. Ritual can save her. She recalls an underlined passage from Mrs. Dalloway that helps her muster the strength to leave the bed:…Ma lei veniva dal diciottesimo secolo. Lei era a posto. She pulls open the blinds, revealing a tall white sky that’s also gray and pink and blue in the corners, almost beyond the window’s reach.
Around eight, she looks for the two lovers, but they’re nowhere to be seen, so she does the dishes. She scrubs the colanders and strainers they deployed for late-night baking, the cutlery for the Mexican food. She scrapes away the hard and wet strips of nachos, fills the sink with hot water, takes a sponge and tries to ignore the splashes from the faulty faucet, which drips inconsistently.
She walks to Central Park to see the snow, a meandering stroll inspired by a book of architectural walks she found on a shelf at Nico’s. It’s daylight now, indisputably, the pink filtered out of the sky. The park is pale and readable, its spectrum condensed, its extremes mitigated by crisp, shimmering snowbanks. She’s not ambitious enough to follow the walk the book suggests, which would take her all around the park: down the deserted paths, past the bare trees, north into the wilder corners. A paper she picked up in a coffee shop is panicked: snowfalls, subway-service changes, road closings. She finds a bench and leafs through the book with fingerless gloves. Well-equipped joggers run up and down the asphalt and through big
white hills, their prework rituals unaffected by the extraordinary landscape. They’re wearing every kind of expensive sneaker in every possible color combination, they’re wearing Beats and Skullcandy headphones. Lorenzo’s texts persist.
Now she’s in a crowded, sunlit Starbucks on Broadway just south of the Ed Sullivan Theater, which Italians imagine as some kind of temple, an entertainment mecca. So she tells her friends about it, in English, but instead of opening Skype on either her phone or her laptop, she contents herself with addressing them in her mind. In her mind her accent is perfect, her vowels just lethargic enough. She buys two bananas and a bottle of water in a colorless cylinder tapered like a perfect bullet.
For two hours a day and €300 a month, she works as an administrator on a forum run by a prominent viral marketing website. The forum is purely transactional: customers willing to test products are rewarded with discount offers and corporate junkets. Her first task of the day is to spark debate about a viral video of a man jumping into a hay baler and turning himself into a human bale of hay. “È un fake? And what is it advertising??” Conversation started, she has to post a pitch—“You can be paid to blog about herpes. How cool is that??”—and track the feedback for a recent Colgate campaign promoting gum health. Next, she launches a forum dedicated to the Opel Young. This means convincing Italians between the ages of twenty-six and forty-two to buy an Opel instead of a VW Golf, an eighties icon whose impact still lingers. She’s typing and posting and emptying her mind.
A text from your mother sweeps away all your serenity: “Are you alive? Call.” The ceiling of the Starbucks descends, the pedestrians pick up their pace, the line for Frappuccinos gets longer. The sun is out, it’s a kind sun, almost loving, but as more and more city dwellers walk in in a state of snowbound relaxation, you lose yourself wondering if your mother knows (maybe from your in-laws?) that you didn’t sleep at home last night. Your throat shrinks. You think: this may not be panic; this is suffering. Yes, you are dying of suffocation. You ate the bananas for potassium, because of your bowel problems, but maybe you’ve become allergic? It’s panic, or it’s colitis, or it’s suffocation, but in any case you’re dying: your fingers feel numb, your sweat is cold; it’s definitely an allergic reaction, and it’d be crazy if you minimized this by calling it a panic attack.
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