Class

by Francesco Pacifico

He walks through the yellow arches of the covered bridge between the last stop and the airport.

  The producer—Ludovica’s connection—summoned him to New York to shoot a video. “Totally,” he replied. “I’m in New York. I’ll catch you next week.”

  In line for the security checkpoint, he keeps getting long, appraising stares from a kid in shorts and a Lacoste polo. He can feel the kid admiring his fumé shades and his red scarf. Lorenzo slips off his belt, lets the clerk feel him up, retrieves his phone and bag after they’ve been scanned, and leaves the area, flooded by endorphins, an undertow of pleasure beating down on his temples.

  The duty-free aisles are warm and sweaty, barely air conditioned. The sun outside the windows dries his mouth and moistens his forehead, the natural light making the glass seem thicker and dustier than it really is.

  He sweats against the window on the Rome-London flight.

  This morning’s journey, the awakening—that’s the story he should try to tell in the video, with Gassa playing Lorenzo. Up from the couch at dawn to chase his dreams. He wants his wife back, but he knows he has to take the long route, so he hops on the train in multiracial Rome: the dirt, the old women, the graffiti, the liminal spaces. Gassa playing Lorenzo: he’d feel so triumphant showing her the video, getting her back.

  At Heathrow Terminal 5, he waits for the second leg of the trip, takes off his shoes at security, then goes up the escalators to the corporate landscape of international brands on the second floor, where he opts for a BLT at Pret, its big flavors and precise smells carefully engineered, either naturally or artificially. He pictures Gassa as himself, asleep and hungover: it’s the story of a rapper—a filmmaker—who’s sleeping on the couch because his woman won’t let him in the bedroom, and he has to go all the way to America to win her over.

  New Russian money looks like bouncers and hookers, speaks English to its kids, and sleeps all the way to its destinations. He’s taking notes on his phone.

  The plane touches down early on a windy afternoon after displaying Manhattan off to the left—lovely to see her again. What a blast this is, queuing up among the families on vacation; what a blast lying to the guard and telling him he’s also here on vacation; what a blast taking the train and being able to see the city in the distance, the buildings so weirdly thin that their height seems irresponsible.

  —

  HIS HOST IS Elly Parenzo, a twenty-five-year-old Jewish Milanese woman who works for Pixar. She was the only acquaintance who could put him up. (Even Berengo said he couldn’t.) The lobby of her high-rise near Ground Zero, where they’re building the Freedom Tower, is retrodecadent: brown, black, blood red, charcoal gray flecked with orange. Lorenzo gives his name to the doorman, whose outfit is elegant and intimidating.

  The man checks his passport and hands him the keys. He’s only been here once before, when he was out with three girlfriends after a movie on Canal Street and a cold stroll in Battery Park. He was looking for refuge; it was snowing that night, and Ludovica had been gone for three days by then, God knows where. You could see nothing in the whiteout, the soft snow had leveled off every surface. The ramps coming off West Street looked like private driveways or front porches. The white exaggerated the magic trick of Wall Street, of Lower Manhattan, where the streets’ straight lines are forced into increasing contortions and strange angles, piercing one another to form a delirious spiderweb.

  Elly comes home before dinner. She pours him some peach juice and offers him a plate of cookies. They’re watching Jon Stewart on Hulu, and he’s impressed by the scale and grandeur of the streaming service—and the way that Elly seems perfectly in sync with it. She quotes old episodes, speaks the fast, hybrid English-Italian that defines this future breed of hyper-accomplished Italian émigrés. She still gets a high from actually living in New York. Her parents bought her the apartment when she started her first job as an assistant copywriter after an internship at Pixar she got right out of NYU. Her parents had allowed her to apply to American universities and skip the cursus honorum of Italian academic life. Her half-English/half-Italian doesn’t even sound affected. Lorenzo doesn’t like to feel envious of others, and he likes her a lot; she’s smart and has her shit together. He’s trying not to compensate by saying that he’s here to shoot a video, but he can’t help but feel that this time around, they’re almost on the same level.

  He drags her up to the twenty-third floor to stare down through a window in the shared lounge at the construction site where the Freedom Tower is taking shape. If she were his wife, he could be a director. But she’s a child, and he doesn’t find her attractive anyway. She wears a high-waisted skirt and a white shirt, but she looks modest. There’s a more attractive young woman sitting on the couch in front of the TV, carefully arranging her curls behind her ears, her legs askew. She makes the couch look so comfortable that it seems to exude an almost spiritual quality. On the balcony they look out onto the illuminated scaffolding against the red light of the city, dark matter in the humid air. “So tell me about this video,” she says, flattering him. “It’s so cool, sono troppo excited. I like Gassa a lot!”

  Lorenzo grabs her wrist. “Quite a compliment, coming from you, Elly!”

  “What does that mean?”

  “You are the Italian-American dream!”

  “You’re sweet, Lorenzo. I wish you luck, davvero.”

  It’s drizzling, so they go back inside and then downstairs. The apartment itself is spare. She isn’t adult enough to see the swanky communal spaces as a challenge, to match them with her own decorative choices. She’s a wholesome girl who has everything, and she doesn’t brag, isn’t lofty. She was the only one among his friends who didn’t pretend to be impicciata, incasinata, strippatissima—all those hateful, slangy words they used instead of just saying they were too busy—and she let him crash. She makes him a cup of coffee to counter the jet lag.

  Later, they take a fifteen-minute walk on the wet sidewalk. It starts pouring, so they give up looking out at the river and retreat into the lounge downstairs, play pool on the tangerine-colored table, warm and wet from the thick raindrops.

  Two yuppies sit quietly on two plush chairs, watching a late-night show whose host is the same age as them.

  —

  AT NIGHT THE exhilarating haze of success turns dark. He thinks about his host, about the fact that she gets to lead this life every single day. The thought becomes unbearable. Elly is in her room, preparing for another perfect day in the life her parents dreamt up for her. She’s from a renowned family of Milanese intellectuals, distant relatives of the Berengos. They’re not much wealthier than his own family: real estate, long trips in the summers. He’s awake on the bare sofa, which sits between the front door and the kitchenette. He travels back to his parents’ American-style kitchen. It was there, sitting on their stools, that he asked them for the money for the airfare.

  His parents have always supplemented the grants he’s gotten from school. This year he was supposed to get €1,200 a month from his alma mater for the borsa di perfezionamento all’estero, but he lost his right to the money in February, when he flew back to Rome. (The entire sum was supposed to be paid out in three installments, but he got the first one in advance and had never really counted on the other two to cover his life in New York.) His parents were sad about their daughter-in-law’s change of heart and felt for their kid, so they transferred an extra €10,000 into his account to help him through the rest of the year. And they still contributed to his private pension, €5,000 a year. This is why it’s hard for him to ask for more. Ludovica isn’t getting a salary for her work in the bookstore, and she asked him to pay for her part of the mortgage installments through the end of the year. He couldn’t help but agree, even though he’s been sleeping on the couch on the ground floor. And since he’s also been networking—going out to dinner, buying drinks—he knows he won’t be able to pay for the plane tickets. So he goes to his parents and asks for an extra €2,000: he describes the extraordinary ci
rcumstances and promises to pay back the €2,000 when the video money comes in. To which they respond: “Don’t be silly! There’s so little money going around these days. You earn it, you keep it.” Sitting there in their kitchen, his parents promised him as much support as he needed.

  Lorenzo has now seen the results of Elly’s parents’ self-abnegation. They decided to part with their daughter and send her to America instead of spending tens of thousands of Euros on monthly allowances to supplement many underemployed years in Italy, and they were wise to buy her an apartment in New York (which is a great investment, isn’t it? Right now it’s cheaper than Italy, and they’ll be able to rent it out forever). And so Lorenzo has to wonder how two sane and free people like his own folks—a manager in a dog food corporation and a housewife, a reader and a lover of the outdoors—never suggested that Lorenzo and his brother study abroad. His mind wanders and he moans with greed until he stumbles onto a detail from his last visit to his parents. His mother—the eternal dyed ponytail, the olive complexion, the fine and compact lines of her face—can no longer sit on the stools in the kitchen. These stools were the centerpiece of the renovation they undertook in 1986, but now she’s tired, and the stools are uncomfortable. The kitchen is at the center of an amazing fifth-floor apartment in Parioli, a maze of rivulets and a fugue of rooms, inlets of intimate angles, islands, hiding spots, storage units hidden under stairwells. Everything pivots around the kitchen: from there you turn in for the night, or head out to the salon and its covered balcony, or leave through the main entrance or the servants’ entrance. Before the cancer three years ago, this was his mother’s throne. She dominated the apartment from her perch on the stool. Her cordless phone wedged between her jaw and shoulder, she’d sort out deliveries and doctors’ appointments for the whole family. In his tired daze, it has now hit him abruptly: his mother isn’t using the stool anymore. The stool was a piece of furniture imbued with her personality, but now she sits on the bench at the low wooden table that faces the kitchen counter. During his American winter, Lorenzo’s memory had repositioned his mother: she was back on the stool, back on the phone near the buzzer. But that image has disappeared, and all he has is what he’s just seen: she’s drained, physically and morally, by the removal of her left breast and the death of her younger sister, zia Gianna. She sits at the low Italian table. These thoughts flood his lymphatic system with black rain. Maybe, he thinks, maybe his mother had been waiting for the cancer to appear ever since that day, sixteen years ago, when her sister had found a lump in her breast. Maybe this is why she never brought up the idea of the brothers studying abroad. Maybe she wanted them near her, or worse, near their dad, so that he wouldn’t be left alone. In the middle of the night, he feels horror at his own ingratitude.

  —

  EIGHTEEN HOURS LATER he’s out on the street in a linen shirt and linen pants. He takes the train under the river to East Williamsburg. Grand Street—Laundromats, 99-cent stores, fried food, pizza places—the low center of gravity of wide American roads under an open sky. It’s nearly dusk, though not quite yet: everything is brilliantly visible.

  Grand Billiards is a big, rickety place half a flight of stairs up from an empty gym. He can sense the three people staring in his direction: Sergio, myself, and Anna—a model/gallerist/producer. (Anna: one of the two girls who were talking in Berengo’s room that first night when La Sposina fell asleep. Also the one who announced the following evening that she couldn’t decide whether or not to undress for the Jacques photo shoot.) The pool bar is a Puerto Rican hangout. Here, tacky is the new exotic: glass and metal and couches and a digital jukebox. Italian, Hispanic, and American hipsters have begun to colonize this place and use it to throw cheap parties. There’s an Italian DJ-ing tonight, so Lorenzo’s professional meeting is underscored by Mina, Rettore, and Robert Miles’s Children, and then at the end, a turn toward hard core. The three of us are a reality effect for Lorenzo. Sergino’s pants are huge and outrageous, the legs rolled up over thin, gnarled ankles that poke out from his bulky legs. He wears his Church’s loafers without laces. Anna stands by his side, a black jacket over a checkered shirt, long hair relatively untangled. Lorenzo—whose point of view I keep evoking here—thinks she’s one of the most attractive women he’s ever talked to, including during his TV days. Her strong features are almost disquieting. They’re kept in check by perfect makeup and bright red lipstick over a full mouth. Her gaze is dark, euphoric, fake fun, tense, frantic. (Later, Sergio tells Lorenzo that she collects star fucks: “indie singer-songwriters you’ve listened to, artists your wife knows, rappers you know, journalists your wife knows, photographers your wife knows.” He also tells you that she’s talented: she isn’t too well versed in basic Italian grammar, but she manages to hang out with Massimiliano Gioni and Cattelan. You learn that she’s prone to anxiety attacks that deform her face, make her cry in fear for her life. She comes from somewhere outside Bergamo, and she wants the world.) As they shake hands, she kisses Lorenzo near his mouth.

  Then there’s me. The role I’m playing here is that of the middle-aged, redheaded, wrinkled bisexual—Daria, the veteran of counterculture. Sergio dressed me up in bright red stockings and a miniskirt, and now he’s leading us to a pool table. There are games going on on either side of us: a group of Puerto Ricans from the neighborhood at one table, some black writer friends of Anna’s at the other. The music is loud. Anna leans over to get all the balls into the triangle, then comes over to me and hugs me for no reason.

  “What’s your name again?” Lorenzo asks midhug.

  “Daria.”

  “I heard D’Aria,” he laughs. “I was thinking that that’s such an exotic name.”

  I grab the cue and break.

  Lorenzo and Sergio step outside for a smoke, leaving just us women to keep playing. Lorenzo’s hands are clammy. Sergio is bleary eyed.

  “She’s cool, Anna is.”

  “Anna, yeah, interesting, totally. I’m worthless, by the way. She’s the producer; it all goes through her.”

  “Really? I thought she was the actress.”

  “Maybe, yeah, maybe. But you know, she’s…she’s like a feminist from the future, I mean, she does everything. She wants to produce, mostly, you know, and she also works at a gallery, she wants to curate—she’s the total curator, very modern. She’s the curator of bellezza: produce, create, produce, curate. Self-curate or die, right?”

  “She’s a piece of ass.”

  “Oh, she fucks everybody. If you don’t fuck her you’re crazy.”

  Back inside, Lorenzo watches Anna with new eyes: her power, her mouth, the lipstick she slowly sucks on and chews. She and her jacket are both perfectly rumpled, worn out, and she’s always touching everybody, jumping around the pool table, shit talking, kissing every black guy who comes over. Then she comes over to Lorenzo, gets close to him, and whispers conspiratorially: “That guy’s a douche, a world-class douche. You stay with me, okay?”

  The city softens up. Elly’s job seems like just a minor brick in this monumental building that he, too, can be a part of. Anna’s all over him, and she offers a running commentary on the game, and life is simple and perfect. It’s Anna and Lorenzo against Lamar, this big, dapper black guy. “Don’t let this bel negraccio fool us with his cue,” she whispers to Lorenzo. “We’re better.” And as soon as Lamar gets his first ball in the hole, Anna grabs Lorenzo by his elbow, pretends to slap Lamar’s face, and says, “No more, Lamar, we win.” She puts her cue down in the middle of the table, and the game is over. Lamar seems to expect as much from her. He gathers the balls and goes in search of a new opponent. Now Anna and Lorenzo are walking side by side, almost hugging, and he can feel her braless breasts bouncing against his linen shirt, fresh and warm.

  Then, on a couch: “So I understand you’re producing my video.”

  They’re sitting very close to each other, staring straight ahead. “Yes.”

  “And you’ve seen my shorts.”

  “Yeah, zio, ye
ah.”

  “And you like them?”

  “Of course, don’t be such a loser!”

  “You’re so young.”

  “If you don’t quit being such a loser, I’ll have to kick your ass!”

  “You’re a weird kid. You’re awesome.”

  “Thank you.”

  Suddenly she’s quiet, all mouth, just front teeth and cheekbones, a little pagan statue.

  “You’re welcome. It’s true, though. And what would the schedule be? Should I send you the script?”

  “You’re such a Roman.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re not talking money.”

  “Money is not the priority for me.”

  “Don’t say stupid shit. You don’t understand anything.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. Well then how much is it?”

  “I’m not sure I want to be in the video. Do you want me in it? Do you have ideas already?”

  “Well, you could play Gassa’s girlfriend, the one he’s fighting with?”

  “No way. He’s already after me.”

  “You mean…”

  “You really don’t understand anything.”

  “It’s the slang from Milan.”

  “He’s on me.”

  “Is he hitting on you?”

  “I was dumb enough to schlong him and now I can’t get rid of him.”

  “Schlong him?”

  “Bang him.”

  “Well, you’re the producer, you get to choose.”

  “Thank you. You dress like shit, though.”

  “Don’t make fun of me! Maybe I want to dress this way.”

  “Zio, I feel bad for you, you know? Wait here, don’t move…”

  —

  SHE COMES BACK with a pretty girl, not model-pretty, normal-pretty. Her name is Chiara, and she’s from Milan: petite, red haired, with the confident-unconfident face of a woman who comes from wealth. Chiara and Anna look him up and down, and Chiara jokes to Anna that they should strip everything off of him and start from scratch: a pair of Dockers, a white tee, or a pale blue cotton button-down. “Man, those Campers are incredible,” Anna says. “He should be in Madame Tussaud’s. This should go up on a fashion blog!”