Chiara works as an image consultant. “We’re only teasing you, okay?” she reassures him. “Just some professional advice.”
Anna: “Okay, zia, give me your keys.”
Chiara obeys. “Don’t use his room, though, just his clothes!” she says.
—
SHE TAKES HIM to an apartment just a couple of blocks away from the billiard place. Chiara lives there with a gay German. The place is much more real than Elly’s: you can feel it in the warm wind brushing the street, in the two bodegas at the intersection, in the absence of all but a small handful of people on the sidewalk, in the carpeted staircase, in the stale smell that ascends behind an ass that’s three quarters smaller than Ludo’s, in the flimsy wooden door with three locks, in the shrill clack sound, in the three-room apartment itself, with its sloping floor and the grim metal bars on the windows.
—
“CHIARA’S HOMO ROOMMATE has a real-ass closet. Let’s see if any of this fits you. Maybe the nonskinny shit will.”
Lorenzo’s answers are unavailable to me. He’s all eyes and smells: wood, dust, a woman’s scent, mint tea. They take a break and eat American cookies. Suddenly I see a girl’s fingers dirty with chocolate chips, and she’s sticking them in her mouth while he goes in and out of the German’s messy room and tries on four button-down shirts, two polos, three pairs of long pants, two pairs of shorts, four bomber jackets, all of which Anna has laid out on top of the mattress.
Lorenzo is overwhelmed by the intimacy, and he keeps changing outfits. In his shorts he looks like a queer, in his skinny jeans he’s moody, in the buttoned-up polo he’s clownish and ridiculous.
Anna finishes up her snacking and wipes her dirty, chocolate-covered fingers on her neck as she scolds, “Chill out, zio! You gotta relax.” Then she starts dressing herself in Chiara’s clothes. She disappears into her friend’s room, and when she reappears to him (he’s wearing weird elastic black pants and a black polo: he doesn’t look like himself; he’s tapered and streamlined), she’s dressed like a woman, a pale dress that looks like Cape Cod curtains, with a zipper in front that runs from her sternum to her vagina and a flat Tudor neck. She’s put on black thigh-highs, and he can imagine how the fabric recedes softly whenever she undresses, how it falls down the leg, mortally sweet.
“Okay, maybe something less skinny?” She’s still giving advice. “The buttoned-up polo sort of suits you, yeah?”
They change and reconvene in the living room, on top of the cracked wooden floors. The wind blows against the windows. Anna is wearing a long skirt and a very light white shirt, again with no bra.
I can’t hear Lorenzo’s words, but I can hear Anna’s. “Do you like me?”
I hear nothing and then, “I’ve met your wife. I brought some of my clothes to her shop. Don’t talk to me about your wife, zio.”
From Lorenzo, I only detect the feeling of his ass pressing down on the surface of a wooden chair, his thighs filling up some guy’s pants, his moist breath traveling through the smallest passage in his breast, the oxygen not reaching his legs.
Anna is drinking some lukewarm herbal tea. “I know all that, yeah, and I won’t tell you shit, it’s your fucking business. You might wanna ask Berengo, though, whether he necked her. What I mean is that you are allowed to tell me you like me, considering what your wife is doing behind your back.”
Lorenzo is speaking without listening to himself.
She talks in an unintelligible, slangy Italian, which literally translates: “If I tell you, will you shoot me a lemon? ’Cause dressed like that you’re half-behaving,” which means “will you make out with me? You’re sort of sexy with those clothes on,” though of course he doesn’t understand a word.
Before she climbs on top of him, Anna shoots a video of his erect cock. He’s lying on the naked mattress, perched on two elbows. Then she hands him her iPhone, gets on top, and lets him shoot a few minutes of intercourse. She’s clean-shaven, except for a brown strip of hair. Two waxed, lean thighs. Her knees look pummeled. She’s small in the frame, an actress, a star, suddenly unreachable while he’s still inside her with no condom (“you’re a bad boy,” she scolds him, “no condom”), her tattooed bust stretched to the sky, her young breasts, both soft and full, her slightly crooked spine, the shoulders of a former swimmer, her capillaries…
She climaxes. The redness of those capillaries smudges her face, her neck stretches, the muscles on her shoulders flex, her face is deformed, grimacing, a look of disgust. (Lorenzo has stopped filming. He puts the phone down next to him.) The grimace leaves vertical shadows on her jaws, her cheeks, her temples. Her lips are curled up, and her skin looks like it’s covered with red spots. It’s a terrible, ominous spectacle, and it’s still there as Lorenzo begins to come onto her neck, his dick in her hands, which she lubed up with drool.
You’re sitting on the edge of the bed, and Anna is still kneeling over, frantic and naked, gasping for air but not yet ready to let go of you.
—
AFTERWARD, THE TWO of you are in the bathroom. She’s pissing, talking to you, scratching her head, still breathing heavily, smelling her sweaty armpit. Then you’re in the kitchen splitting a piece of toast. You’re famished, and you hope you’ll get to do it all over again this very evening, but it’s not going to happen. “Zio, you better leave; if Sergio finds out I schlonged you, he’ll fucking lose it. You can get a cab on Grand.” You ask if you can maybe take a shower before you go, and she points to the bathroom. The water is boiling hot, and you sigh and squirm the whole time. You dry yourself off, put on the linen shirt and the rest of the clothes you had on before the masquerade, and slowly return to your old self. Before you leave, you go back to the kitchen and say, “Then we won’t say anything to anyone. It’s ours.”
You wake up feeling blessed by the sun. You have breakfast with Elly, who’s late for work and speaking full-on English: gotta run, gotta run, take your time, enjoy the city! You’re sleepy, but the smell of the toaster and the taste of the mango juice wake you up, enliven you. “You want any bacon?” she asks. You tell her that the meeting yesterday was very promising, and she graces you with her cosmopolitan Jewish gaze. You get the sense that she’s treating you like a peer.
You check Facebook on your Mac, and Sergio’s profile seems to have vanished. Did he block you?
You want to call him, but you realize he didn’t give you his number. As you get dressed, you think about taking a cab to Williamsburg to talk to Anna. You can’t stand the idea of an entire train ride, not right now. You slip on the same clothes you were wearing yesterday, only today they suddenly look bad. It’s been half an hour since you sent Anna a Facebook message, no reply. Heartburn tightens a fist in your stomach.
You go downstairs, hail a cab, and twenty dollars later you’re in front of the building where you had sex last night. A long ride through the morning sun and the warm wind and the smell of garbage. The street is tough and austere, and it feels less like New York than an unfriendly village, invisible eyes staring down at you from every angle. You press a buzzer next to a label with two names—Italian and German—but no one responds. You’re nervous, confused. Long minutes go by, and you spit on the sidewalk. Two handsome men walk out of a bodega eating big chocolate chip cookies. Two other men ride by on their bikes, slower than slow.
Another cab. Anna’s Facebook profile includes the name of the gallery where she works. In her profile picture she stares into a mirror with her big, hungry eyes. She’s taking off her makeup with a white cotton swab, at once adrift and focused.
In the cab your hand vibrates with your phone. A text from Ludovica: “Don’t come back.” As you call her, you think mostly about your arrhythmia and the bile bubbling in your throat. You don’t get through. Her phone is off, and now you’re gasping for air. You try forty more times.
There are very few details to go on, almost none. First stop: a Madison Avenue gallery. She’s not there. A new cab: the sister gallery in Chelsea, way out on the fr
inge of the island, near the West Side Highway. What you see: casual visitors, idle collectors, curators, interns, huge works of art hanging clumsily off the walls. Anna talks to everyone in the room for a few seconds at a time, making her way between groups with utter effortlessness. Her black-clad legs look Gothic and unreal.
She spots him, excuses herself from her conversations, and hugs him hard as soon as she reaches him. She presses her face into his collarbone affectionately but avoids eye contact. Her body is warm. I can’t make out what you are saying, Lorenzo. She steps back and stares down at the floor. “I don’t think Sergio’s on Facebook, no…Just call him on his mobile.”
Again, I can’t hear you.
Anna: “Oh, I’m all right, I guess. I have a ton of work, can’t really talk right now, well…”
I can’t hear you.
Anna: “No, lunch is impossible for me.”
And then: “No, no, I’m not gonna talk to him. You do it.”
And then: “I told you I’m not talking to him. If you want to talk to Sergio, call him and ask him why he blocked you. Don’t let him treat you like a child, okay?”
And then: “So go ahead and think that I know some shit and won’t tell you. Go ahead, think that, what difference does it make?”
She turns her head and moves away without ever having made eye contact, tightening her fists as she walks. She walks toward a white wall and through a white door you hadn’t noticed until now. She closes herself in, and the wall reverts to pure white.
You stay in the gallery. You reach the wall, push open the knobless door, and see her sitting on the ground, her face red like it was yesterday, during climax, but here, in the light of a midcentury modern lamp, the effect is starker and more ominous. She looks scared: her face seems dilated; her cheekbones look like the rearview mirror of a sports car; her eyes are closed. The room has three couches and a desk, all white. It’s a formal space set up for meetings. She’s sitting with her legs crossed, her back against the wall, her strange long fingers laid out carefully on her thighs. “Call Laura,” she whispers in English. “I’m scared, call Laura.” You leave the room and ask the busy-looking people if they know a Laura. She rushes over quickly; she must be the gallerist. She’s dressed in a gorgeous white tunic and asks you: “The usual? Panic attack? Man, every other fucking day!”
You walk toward Eleventh Avenue to hail a cab.
Now you’re inside Cosmic Diner, in Berengo’s neighborhood. And here’s Berengo, buying you breakfast. He’s wearing his short jogging pants, and he’s slimmer than he was in winter. He places a blister pack of Xanax on the table.
“Absolutely. Ask me anything.”
I can’t hear your words, but I can taste the pancake and the syrup and the butter on your tongue.
Berengo’s answers:
“Because I put her up when she left your apartment.”
“Because Ludo didn’t want to see you and asked me not to tell you. I even untagged myself from all the Facebook pics everyone took at my parties.”
“I promise: nothing at all. No way was I going to have sex with her.”
Chewing, butter, amber colors, hunger.
All Berengo:
“Lore, I don’t like what you’re saying. I think I can help you. But you have to be honest. If you’re honest, I’ll be honest.”
“Nothing much. Just that, and I’m sorry to say this, but your short film isn’t going to make you a director. You have to let it go. You have to do me a personal favor and let it go.”
“No, it’s not an obsession. It’s a fixation.”
“Sergio and Anna are difficult people. They’re complicated, and you may not want to trust them.”
“Well then you should have asked me before you bought the ticket.”
“You’re right. I didn’t tell you because I try not to talk about work I don’t like. I don’t want to be that kind of person.”
“That’s the way it is. The short isn’t good. You know that the only way is for us to talk this honestly; otherwise I can’t help you.”
“Of course. All the time in the world.”
“Shouldn’t be a problem changing it. British Airways?”
“I don’t know the details, Lore, but yeah, ‘prank’ seems like the right word to me.”
“Come on. Think. How can this be Ludovica’s prank? With Sergio? Maybe she’s pissed about something else entirely. Go home, and by the time you land, she’ll have already forgotten.”
—
I CAN’T FEEL you, but I feel the Xanax. The Xanax and the drizzle as the two of you walk to Berengo’s house. The Xanax and Berengo’s sofa, where you lie down in your underwear, pull the soft sheets over your face, feel the air conditioning blasting from the old unit.
—
THEN I FEEL the moment when you wake up: those thick, round moments of pure pleasure, when you’re still high and still big on Xanax. Then the thoughts that try to break through: no news from Ludovica, a few texts from her girlfriends, who say she knows you’ve been with someone else.
—
AND THEN I’M lucky enough to not hear your mind anymore. I can’t hear your thoughts, your words, your wishes, your desires. It’s as if someone has given me Xanax. But here, now, I do see you:
A red-eye flight. You sit in the window seat, and there’s no one next to you in the aisle. You’re in the last row, right by the bathrooms. The crew have dimmed the cabin lights but you can see the shape of the plane, this cylinder that keeps you oxygenated and warm in the inhospitable hollow in the sky. At JFK you bought €200 noise-canceling headphones. You had two hours to kill at the airport. There was a Milanese family sitting across from you by the gate, youthful parents and their two sons, both in their early twenties, wearing Superga shoes. They all went on and on about Madison Square Garden, how cool it looked from outside, and how cool it’d be to see a Knicks game next time they were in New York: “Well, that’s just an excuse to come back!” In their conversation you hear the entire epic romance Italian middle-class families have with this city, and from now on, until the day you die, you’ll feel hurt whenever someone mentions it, whenever you overhear a happy couple planning a trip to stroll along the High Line, and take pictures with a hot dog vendor at a traffic light under a classic green street sign, and sprawl out on the grass in Central Park. You bought two AAA batteries for the headphones, and you’ve kept them on ever since, though you haven’t played any music. They cancel the annoying frequencies from every kind of noise. You still hear the noise, but it’s flattened, like a wildflower pressed in a book. When the plane took off it was unreal, the pure sound of matter making an effort to unglue itself from earth unaccompanied by the roar of the engine. So now, without all that acoustic trauma, you feel flying as more of an abstraction. And the benzodiazepine in your thighs, your knuckles, the soles of your feet, your cheeks, in the softest spot of your forearms, in the nerves of your scalp collaborates with the loss in frequency to make you feel like little more than a tiny marble being flicked into the jelly of time. So you let yourself go. You feel loved by the force pushing the marble through the jelly, enough to tell that force a secret that has just been revealed to you:
I’m technically not a movie director. There are some lucky men out there who get woken up at dawn by a text message from their producer and hop on a bike and ride to Cinecittà, or to the fields of Formello, where they find trailers with makeup artists and actors already inside, and strong young men carrying rolls of wire. I don’t, because that’s not my life. I wake up and go to the philosophy department, where I talk to students who are committing their lecture notes to memory, who ask what their current credit count is. All the beauty in those wake-up texts, those bonafide directors, their eyes rimmed with dark circles, the way they’ll be in a bar one moment and then have to break off in the middle of a conversation to go solve some kind of problem. Never again will I save money by selling my mother’s car; never again will I go out of my way to raise €3,000–€5,000 for a sh
ort film; never again will I go to those evenings at Kino, where producers talk shop and field questions and I spend the whole time thinking that tonight, finally, this producer will be struck by my smile and feel the need to talk to me, pick my brains. Should I lose my hair trying to learn the trade on some TV series, some Endemol reality TV show? Work my way up to directing a TV movie? No, no. We should always be like this, every organ smoothed out by the benzodiazepine, listening to the sound of the world without its roar. Here, I am stronger, I can take my phone, open the video directory, delete G., which I’ve kept all this time so I can show it when networking. “You know, we won a prize from the Comune di Roma.” Deleted. And maybe delete the idea people have of me. Maybe they should never ask me again if I love cinema, if I’ve ever had the bright idea to turn this love of cinema into a creative act. I’ve never wanted that, and you don’t want to ask me, which, by the way, wouldn’t serve any purpose anyway—asking me. What if I wanted it…Mom, come on, you sit right there, comfortably, pick the seat you’re most comfortable in, and don’t ever ask me, and I will pay you as many visits as I can, and we won’t talk money. We’ll talk about something else, about Ludovica, about carnal love, about how beautiful it is to stroll around my childhood neighborhood, run errands for you, how happy I am when you need me to go to the hardware store, to the drugstore. Just ask me, Mom, ask me, all right?
Then I feel your footsteps on the sidewalk near your house in Via del Mandrione, four meters away from the Roman aqueduct. It’s midmorning, 26°C. You’re rested and sad, your phone is dead, and the last thing I feel is the metal of the key making contact with the metal of the keyhole in the small gate. You expect to hear the slow clack, but your key doesn’t work; you can’t get in. You lean in to take a closer look: no sign of tampering, it’s a perfect new keyhole without a single scratch. I can still feel the Xanax: I feel something obstructing your chest and your tears, keeping your temples muffled in wool. You try, by force of will, to change the fate of that key against the new keyhole, but you don’t succeed. Then I feel you sitting on the steps, and then, at last, the membrane detaches, and I stop feeling you.
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