—
AT FOUR I decide that I want to shower and change my underwear, but what I see when I open my suitcase makes my head spin. I slump backward. Sergino finds me lying on the shiny wooden floor a few minutes later, and he helps me to the bedroom, where I spend the next two hours with a sweet, mysterious flavor in my mouth. Its name is a whisper from Sergino’s lips to my ears. “EN, it’s EN, E-N. I only have Xanax pills, and I don’t want you to choke on them, take these drops.” I wake up around seven p.m. and feel a presence at my bedside. Sergino is on his knees, his hand on the bedspread with which he’s covered me. He’s asking if I want him to order us any food. “Make the suitcase go away,” I reply. “I don’t ever want to see it again.”
—
SERGINO STILL HASN’T said a single word against Berengo, but he has been kind to me. After taking a look at the clothes, which Berengo cut into little pieces and packed up and sent via UPS, Sergino reacted like a volunteer at the site of a natural disaster: he was tactful and calm and never once pointed out the obvious, never said a word about the house that had just burned down. He didn’t try to argue that it wasn’t bad, that I was overreacting, but the next morning he woke me up and ordered me to go outside with him. I complied, and when we got back the suitcase was gone. We haven’t discussed the horrific salad of panties, with its shreds of light yellow and white and pink fabric and the thicker strips and the long filaments that used to be the stockings I’d bought for him to pull off of me. His ugly decision to include the black vibrator hasn’t been brought up, nor has the fact that he ripped off its battery cover and pulled out one of its springs. Sergio hasn’t said anything about my sneakers with the cut off tongues, about familiar things and their new shapes. I don’t have enough money saved up to buy new clothes.
After a pancake breakfast at a flashy new diner whose attractive Scandinavian waiters we discuss while licking our fingers, Sergino takes me to a thrift store and to American Apparel to buy one or two items for the rest of my stay, on the pretext that I’ll need to look the part in the prank. “Something modern but not distracting,” he says. I’ll be the producer, or the fixer. I’ve accepted reluctantly, but if it hadn’t been for Sergio, I would have had to max out my credit card and wait for my next paycheck. Sergio didn’t rub my face in the situation, didn’t ask for anything in return. He just kept throwing pairs of stockings or pants into the shopping cart, while continuing to talk about the prank. It’s good that it’s warm out, or else he would have had to spend a fortune.
—
THERE’S NO WAY I’m skipping the Oneida Show at Secret Project Robot on Saturday night, especially because it’s always Berengo who goes into hiding whenever we have our arguments. The warehouse is overshadowed by one of the new buildings near Sergio’s. The river is across the street, beyond a tangle of wires, nets, metal cylinders, and danger signs. The members of Oneida are all forty. They wear jeans and t-shirts adorned with Beavis and Butthead’s grimaces. Some of the band members have beer bellies; the others are wiry and slim. They’ve been playing psychedelic jams since lunch. At dawn, they’ll play the new record, entirely electronic.
They’ve also cooked dinner for everyone using two pressure cookers with timers, some kind of Asian-style rice meal. There’s a purple strobe light positioned near a column. There are a few hipsters; many fat, long-haired dudes; lesbians; a man and a woman asleep on chairs. James Murphy is there, too, a plate of rice in one hand, under a different strobe light.
I recognize James Murphy’s face from the Internet, and I know he came to see me. He has the air of one of those priests too cool to wear the garb. He’s not aware of the band, but he fits in, chewing with his mouth closed and staring into space.
He has recognized me from pictures, I guess, and maybe from Berengo’s sex videos—I enjoy thinking he showed them to him. He leaves his plate on a shelf and walks over to me through the sparse crowd.
“Did Berengo send you?” I shout, kissing him on the cheeks.
“I wanted to meet you. He and I aren’t on speaking terms. Didn’t he tell you?”
“No?”
We spend the evening discussing Berengo in the dark, screaming to be heard. He doesn’t know about my suitcase, so I can pretend it never happened, and here I am talking about Nico the way I like best—as if he were just a harmless kid who happened to snap. Luminous paint bleeds through the darkness in nondescript stoner paintings. We’re Stalin and Roosevelt in Yalta.
He says Nico isn’t doing well because one of his lovers passed away recently.
“Why are you telling me about his lovers?”
He’s talking about this woman photographer who was shot and killed in a mortar attack while she was photographing a rebel group somewhere. I think I’ve read about her in the paper…so she was banging Nicolino. I make eye contact; he looks down but keeps talking: Berengo wants to break up with me. He tried to start a relationship with another woman, but they stopped seeing each other, and she’s already in another relationship, so he sort of had a breakdown.
“You think,” I say, “that if you tell me all of this I’ll feel less guilty when I end up sucking your dick?”
Our strong opinions are swallowed up by the sound of the band. He keeps interjecting phrases like “So, we finally meet,” and “Wow, Daria in the flesh.” He says this even though he’s seen pictures of me. (“Have you watched our videos?” “No, not those.” “You can tell me, no problem.” He sneezes in amazement.) In his mind I’ve always been an IRL version of Daria—the MTV cartoon—the snobby, literate girl who functions as a kind of nineties compendium: sloppy, simple, well-read, partial to mix tapes. A fan of drab colors in unfortunate combinations—purple, green, fuschia, yellow. In 1997, he was thirty-five, if not older, whereas I was twenty-two. He says he likes my red hair and my round face.
At night, when the jam is over, we get Hanoi Jane, the guitar player, to fix us rum-and-tonics with lime. A DJ spins some dry, early reggae. We talk to him, too, then go down to the basement to smoke Sergino’s pot. I want to take him beyond a screen at the end of the dark room downstairs. He stops me, and he says he’d rather not. We go back upstairs and fall asleep on two giant chairs some couple just deserted. We feel dizzy from climbing the stairs, and as I drift off I see cylindrical shapes pulsing red and orange pulled out of the darkness.
—
I OPEN MY eyes, take a look around. Now the hall is jammed with people. Many arrived just before dawn to hear the electronic set. The keyboard drones and somehow echoes the ventilation fan toward the back of the room. We have a hard time getting up, and as soon as we’re awake enough to make a move, we leave.
—
I HAVE FOUR days left in New York, and James texts me to hang out. We spend Monday afternoon in Union Square staring at crackheads, a small society that occupies a semicircle of benches under the watchful eyes of the Parks & Recreation employees. I keep putting my sweater on and taking it off. Murphy says there’s going to be a heat wave.
Squirrels and pigeons; a white crackhead with a spangled, purple cap; a black pusher in shorts, a fat guy in Timberlands trying hard to find a solution to some problem encountered by the group. Maybe he’s just speaking slowly.
We talk about books. I argue that his is a fake, hollow empathy, tell him that I wrote about this very thing for the Communist paper. He laughs, says he knows about the review, and quips that he cares deeply about his Italian Communist fanbase, so would I please try to avoid alienating his readership? The crackheads are busy, affectionate. A guy in baggy nü-metal clothes comes over to ask for a cigarette. “I didn’t want to bother you before, when I was eating my sandwich,” he says.
Two afternoons later, the heat has receded. My armpits are still sweaty, and my period has started, but it’s still light. We take a walk around the Financial District, then he takes me to the mall on the pier by the East River. We lie limply on the wooden beach chairs on the upper balcony. We watch barges and water taxis float by, and a boat with a mi
dday dance party. Beyond Red Hook, a cruise ship, and right in front of us, the tips of the masts of the old sailing ships sway in the air, beacons for tourists.
“So if you’re actually an empathic person, how come no one ever feels real pleasure in any of your books? No one. You force readers to follow some predetermined path to redemption, but you never actually portray their quest for pleasure, for well-being, for a happy, moderate, Pagan well-being.”
“Berengo says nobody ever enjoys sex in my books.”
“It’s because you’ve only had disappointing sex in your life, and very little of it.”
“That’s right.”
“And you want to have better sex.”
“That’s also right.”
“See? I’m empathetic; I feel you. I’ve got you, I know what you want.”
I’m holding onto the back of my neck with my hands, and my legs are stretched out and crossed at the ankles. I’m wearing a sleeveless shirt and sandals.
James stares at my neck, then pulls To the Lighthouse out of his backpack. He has brought it for me, and he offers it with trembling hands. I open it, but he takes it back and begins to read it aloud himself. On second thought, I’m not really sure he’s trembling at the touch of my fingers.
Ma come funzionano le cose? In che modo giudichiamo la gente, o ce ne formiamo un’impressione? Su che base, sommando una cosa all’altra, concludiamo che proviamo simpatia o antipatia? E, in ogni caso, qual è il significato di queste parole?
“Well, you know, it is sexy to hear you read aloud like this, because I know you’re trying to make up your mind about whether you want to take me home or not. The truth is I like you because you’re a big-time author, and I want you to take me like you take your female students.”
“I don’t sleep with my students. Is this something Berengo told you?”
“Virginia Woolf always comes in handy when you need to get laid.”
It stops there, and we move on to Jonathan Franzen and his awkward relationship with Murphy. And the whole time James Murphy is thinking, well, it’s happened again. As soon as I knew this woman wanted me, it killed my appetite. I won’t take her back to NYU, to the Soviet high rise. I will never know what Berengo gets to experience with Daria.
—
AFTER I LEFT, we stayed in touch via email to discuss books we were reading and reviewing. He told me about “Marcello” and the problem of ambition. Something he’d seen in Times Square late June had reminded Murphy of him: at Seventh and Broadway, there was a man perched at the top of a streetlamp and a crowd had gathered around him, everyone filming the scene with their phones. “He was up high, sitting on the lamp, crouching like Spider-Man. You couldn’t tell if he was going to jump. He wasn’t high enough to really get himself hurt, but the police were still trying to get him to climb down. The next day, I pick up a tabloid and read a short piece about him—there’s even a little picture of him. Turns out he’s a Jersey guy in his early thirties who wanted to be a rapper and wanted to attract the public’s attention by climbing that streetlamp.”
—
“MARCELLO” DIED IN a car crash in Rome’s Prati Fiscali while driving his father’s Saab. James heard about it from Cugino Hitler, bought a plane ticket for a flight the following day, and flew there with Sergio. (He never mentioned Berengo, and I didn’t ask.) He arrived the day of the funeral, just in time for afternoon mass. Berengo didn’t attend, even though he’s been back living in Rome for a while. (Again, when Berengo and I don’t speak, he vanishes.)
There isn’t a single octopus carpaccio my American lover fails to describe in his notebook. No island view can pass without his note taking—no trapezoidal moon reflected on the black, cobbled surface of the quiet nighttime sea; no vines creeping along ancient stucco; no choreography of children playing football in a courtyard. My lover is shabby and gray haired, thin and weak and pale. We have come to Ventotene to commit adultery after the funeral, and he never takes off his baseball cap, never varies his outfit: a short-sleeved shirt and and blue shorts. There are a few black hairs on his arms and legs. He wishes he had a hundred eyes with which to take notes, but he keeps dozing off—at the bar in the piazza, under the pergola, on the rocks by the sea, back in our room. He’s upset by his first extramarital affair and by the death of the Italian young man whose voice remains an eternal presence on his phone and on his laptop. “Marcello” used to scare him, he says, and now he’s dead. He’s American, so in a way he has to be a boor: he’s polite and professional, but he treats beauty like a parasite. He’s a speculative moralist, and his notetaking gets on my nerves. He refrains from mentioning his wife, yet his discretion is a symbol of some kind of masculine vanity. He sits on the rocks and stares out at the sea, sighing and holding my little finger, dozes off sitting, wakes up and asks me if he was asleep. He’s going to take notes on everything, and he’ll process it all rapidly. He draws major moral conclusions from the posture of a modest seagull that observes a group of children playing in the water. The seagull’s rock is two meters away from the one we’re sitting on. Between our two rocks is a small canal where the kids show off their diving skills.
The chubby kids with their love handles get in line and take turns jumping. We keep our distance and look down at them from our perch.
Everything has to mean something for James Murphy, who holds his pen with tremendous concentration. Is the sea green like jade, or is it turquoise blue? Two girls dive in and splash his notebook. I stand behind him, whispering in his ear, spying on his work. He wants to describe these eternal kids as ineffably Southern, somehow—he loves the South, for him the image of the Magical Negro is too deep seated to fully quell. He writes: black fish and striped fish. He ignores their names because he never liked going fishing with his father. The small fish swimming through the canal, indifferent to the divers lined up on the rocks.
Beyond the seagull we see the island of Santo Stefano, the hollow ruin of the prison towering over it. He tries to find a metaphor in order to commit the prison to memory, but he fails. The seagull, with its satisfied, feathery belly, looks lost in thought. When the bird speaks it speaks with a man’s voice: “Aaaah.” In James Murphy’s notes, the seagull becomes a prison’s guardian, depressed and worn down by his unrewarding job. Damned metaphors.
I translate the kids’ tussle for him. The girl who dove in first declares, “The women are more brave.”
A thin, savvy-looking boy is afraid to jump. “So are there jellyfish in there or not?”
Now another girl who dove in teases him. She’s fat and confident: “Cinderella, the carriage is waiting for you.” She crushes the s in aspetta! (wait!) in an adorable way that I’m not able to translate into English.
I try to help James with dialogue, but I can’t translate it all.
The cowardly kid has a new problem. “There’s a chunk of poop in there!”
“It’s a pebble!”
The girls float in the water and make fun of him.
The first girl: “I’ve been playing with them in the water! They’re just pebbles!”
The fat one: “Hurry up! The carriage is on its way!”
“Is there really a piece of crap in there, though?” And also, “Is it crap or is it a pebble?”
James jots down the conversation in English, annotating my explanations.
“Hey!” the kid asks the girls who swim away. “Is the carriage already gone?”
“Of course it is! It’s not for babies!”
The seagull takes it all in, safe on his comically straight legs.
James knows nothing, and he’d love to know everything. At dinner I insult him. You’re just an MFA student, I say, like all American authors. He sweats and argues. He’s fifty years old and his face is decomposing. He can’t eat or drink because of acid reflux that wakes him up at night with coughing fits that are Bruegelian in scale, a sequence of grimaces and anguished pauses. He avoids the lentils, the paccheri, and the prawns because he’s afraid of death.
I KNOW FROM his notes that James loves the way I smile in bed. Should I feel lonely? I don’t know the meaning of her smile; it might just be that she’s able to godere. He himself is incapable of godere (he’s mesmerized by the Italian verb): he may find himself content, but nothing more, he cannot experience true enjoyment, godere. When he’s actually pleased by something he feels too schmaltzy. Still, he is the Author, and people rely on him to provide descriptions of emotion for them to inhabit.
—
I CALL HIM provinciale all the time. He’s from the Midwest, and I’m from Rome. He speaks at a Roman auditorium designed by Renzo Piano and he’s invited to the summer festival in Capri, whereas I’m a secretary who works for the owner of a travel agency and I write literary criticism for free. James has always dreamt of making a sex video, and I’ve told him he can ask me to do whatever he wants. It feels reckless—he has the vague feeling that I might ruin him by sharing it. His fear puts some fear in me too, which makes things interesting—ordinarily I wouldn’t care too much. I tease him until he finds the courage to shoot his penis and my vagina.
—
A GANG OF kids runs right by us and dives into the water, then jumps onto the rock in front of us and claims it, forcing the seagull into a corner. They try to imitate the seagull’s voice, but they do it all wrong. I translate what follows for James:
Class Page 23