The Intimates: A Novel

by Ralph Sassone

  Yet sometimes Robbie had to admit—at least to himself—that he’d gotten something out of the J. affair anyway. Not just being relieved of his virginity, not just the cheap thrill of sneaking around and carrying on a secret life that nobody else knew about so nobody could question, but something bigger. In J.’s thirty-one-year-old presence, Robbie had never felt younger and more vital and full of possibility, precisely because he was lying next to someone whose own novice possibilities had already started to fade. Robbie brimmed with the cruel potency of being twenty-one, with his whole life ahead of him. He’d noticed that was something people didn’t talk about or write about when older people took younger lovers. They battened on the predatory power of the elders and the innocence of the dewy subordinates. Well-educated people were familiar with Zeus and Leda, and David and Jonathan, and Socrates and Alcibiades, and Oscar and Bozy, and Humbert and Lo. But nobody dwelled on the ravishments of elders after their conquests—the bereft left to memories and sagging flesh while their young lovers skipped away toward the endless open vista of their own futures, where anything might still happen and anything could be built.

  That had always been Robbie’s advantage: his ability to move on. Robbie imagined his particular smell might have lingered on J.’s musty sheets for a few hours each time he left J.’s apartment, but if J. made an effort to inhale that scent it would disappear.

  “Gotta go now, breakfast is here,” he said to Maize after two knocks came at his hotel door.

  “Take off that button-down, you stud!” Maize said with a laugh.

  Robbie stopped at the mirror to smooth out his clothes, straighten his hair for Carlo, and practice a smile that would look welcoming rather than maniacal. But when he opened the door there was an old man carrying a tray on his bony right shoulder. In Italian Robbie inquired where Carlo had gone and in Italian he was told, he thought, that today was Carlo’s day off. The plunging disappointment took him aback, but instead of giving in to it he gulped his black coffee and decided to avoid the hotel until evening, though he hadn’t the foggiest notion of what he’d do with himself next.

  * * *

  The exchange rate was terrible. He didn’t have money to buy things but he could at least window-shop on Via Condotti, gawking at the sumptuous clothes and wondering whether his personality would improve if he dressed better, like a prince who felt entitled to cashmere socks and shirts priced like suits instead of a drudge who waited for clearance sales. All the supple tweeds and silky cottons and feathery wools inevitably reminded him of his father, whose mills had probably supplied some of these textiles and whose apartment was perilously close to this opulence. It wasn’t impossible that his father’s reflection might bob behind Robbie’s image on the storefront glass, like a memory ember flashing through dark recesses of consciousness. But it was unlikely. His father worked in another district—Robbie knew that much—and at midday he’d be grinding away at his office the same way he had done in the States.

  Maybe Robbie should do a dry run to his father’s apartment—which his mother described as luxurious though she’d never seen it—so that he wouldn’t get lost trying to find it in a few days. He’d always had a lousy sense of direction and he was dying to see what his father’s block looked like, and his father’s building, and even his father’s sidewalk, though he didn’t want to admit it. If he didn’t resist he’d be viscerally drawn to it like one of those displaced pets he sometimes heard about, who managed to find their way back to the master’s house against all odds.

  He wandered from store to store, telling himself he was merely moseying but also aware he was getting closer to his father’s apartment, until he was on his father’s block, which had no stores and no other excuses for being there. It was a purely residential, rather elegant street with imposing façades and balconies spilling with potted flowers and Lamborghinis at the curbside. There was almost no through traffic, as if this stretch had been cordoned off to all but rich people, so when Robbie found himself standing in front of his father’s building, gazing up at the top-floor windows, he felt as conspicuous as a bull’s-eye. With a shudder he dashed off to the nearest small square, which he’d never heard of and wasn’t in his guidebooks, but which was lined with cafés and a newsstand.

  It was lunchtime, so he bought a copy of the Corriere della Sera and took a table near a window behind tall planters, where he could observe everything safely without being looked at. As in much of Rome, there were legions of native men enjoying each other’s company on this square—sitting at coffee bars together, walking arm in arm, laughing and conversing and using their hands to communicate—but strikingly few women, as if a female neutron bomb had been dropped. Where were all the Roman women? Home with bambini or chained to a sink? The few Robbie noticed had been working behind store counters or hotel desks or bustling somewhere, as if they had to make up for all the male leisure. Maybe the absence of native women was the reason the men here were famous for pouncing like wolf packs on any half-appealing girl who entered their territory. They seemed more ravenous for pretty women than they were for food, which was saying a lot in a country where the day was divided not into morning, noon, and night but breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

  Robbie had read somewhere that a lot of these horny men were called mammoni—perpetual mama’s boys who wooed women and bedded them but lived with their mothers way into middle age, letting them launder their clothes and make their beds and cook their favorite dishes with nary a flicker of worry about arrested development. Even if Robbie’s own mother hadn’t been a bad laundress who disliked cooking, he still would have considered these guys crazy. He couldn’t wait to permanently get out of his mother’s house, where the window shades were always at half-mast even in daytime and the pewtery air of depression was inescapable.

  A petite brunette crossed the square in front of the café. Then a fleshy redhead. Then a bombshell in huge sunglasses. Although Robbie was concentrating on the Corriere, he sensed when each of these women appeared from the near silence that fell over the restaurant, plus the none-too-tactful shift of male gazes and craned necks in their direction before conversation resumed. It was like a soccer match where the men took shots and the women deflected their attentions like expert goalies. No one won but no one seemed to lose, either. He was reading the paper and lingering over his check and a double espresso when another silence fell and the heads around him turned even more dramatically—this time for a leggy blonde carrying a large shopping bag as she navigated the cobblestones on high heels. For a moment there was nothing except the clatter of plates and flatware as busboys cleared the tables.

  It took Robbie half a minute before he grasped what he was noticing this time around; the awe made it register eerily late, like a delayed echo. What he saw emerged instantly yet slowly, as in a time-lapse photo of a plant rooting and budding and rotting with unnatural speed. The entire event passed before him in a matter of seconds that felt elasticized. Still, he didn’t quite believe what he was looking at until he suddenly did believe it, and then his mouth dropped open as the chatter around him resumed.

  The leggy blonde with the shopping bag looked exactly like his father’s girlfriend, Clarissa—the woman his mother referred to as that harlot. It couldn’t be her, yet it was: Clarissa from the misguided pictures his father had air-mailed to Robbie at college. Clarissa the plush and photogenic babe his father clutched to his side again and again like a severely overgrown child with his favorite stuffed animal. Clarissa in the flesh.

  In person she was tall and lithe and athletic-looking, broad-shouldered as a champion swimmer, with bronzed skin and shoulder-length hair that curled into ringlets. Her silk dress had a bold green jungle-vine print that clung to her toned legs and shot up toward her prominent breasts. She looked Amazonian except for her delicate face and girlishly wide brown eyes. No wonder the whole restaurant had paused and a geezer near Robbie had sighed “Dio mio” as if his heart might give out on the spot.

  Envy mingled wit
h Robbie’s horror as he watched Clarissa continue to stride across the square. Then he realized he wasn’t feeling envy at all; it was stabbing disappointment that she was even better-looking than he’d imagined. Better-looking than his middle-aged mother and better-looking than himself and better-looking than just about everyone else on the planet. What a bummer. For years he’d hoped Clarissa would wear badly to make his father’s decision look unwise. Now he crouched at his table behind a little potted cypress and merely hoped she wouldn’t glance to her left.

  Not that Clarissa seemed to notice anything in her orbit. As she gamboled over the cobblestones with a tan pocketbook banging against her hip, none of the men’s leers reached her. She looked oblivious in the manner of gorgeous people who from childhood take in very little because they’re used to being the focal point. How could you not dislike a person like that?

  Robbie could only be grateful for Clarissa’s obliviousness. It meant there was little chance of her spotting him as he stared in fascinated revulsion, or of her noticing as he threw euros on the table and rose tentatively to leave the restaurant. He was gripped by panic—the same galvanized enthrallment as when he’d run into J. after their affair, yet not the same because the person who spooked him now was a stranger. It was unlikely she’d recognize him. Even if his father had shown her old pictures of adolescent Robbie, they would have been outdated shots from when his hair was longer and lighter and his skin blemished. He wasn’t that boy anymore.

  He clutched his newspaper in one hand and his camera in the other as he prepared to leave the restaurant. He intended to flee in the opposite direction from Clarissa whether or not it would take him anywhere useful. But instead he found himself pausing at the threshold a few extra seconds, gazing at Clarissa’s elegant retreating back and wishing he could get a better look. She got smaller and smaller and smaller as she receded into the distance, and he fell into a sort of trance where his next movements were his own yet someone else’s. It wasn’t Robbie who found himself walking in Clarissa’s direction but some bolder, more foolish version of himself. It wasn’t Robbie walking farther and farther away from the safety of his hotel but some phantom who resembled him. Nor was it quite Robbie who raised his camera and zoomed in on Clarissa’s back before snapping a picture. It was a sleepwalker Robbie, a ghost Robbie, a ghoul.

  Although Clarissa was nearly a block ahead now, the loudness of her green dress made it easy to keep an eye on her. At first Robbie picked up his pace but then he slowed to maintain a secure distance. Whenever Clarissa paused at a busy street corner clogged with Fiats and Volkswagens, he too stopped dead in his tracks until she moved again. He didn’t concern himself with the other pedestrians bumping into him from behind, one of whom muttered what was probably an Italian curse.

  She walked straight down the bustling Via del Corso for several blocks, before making a right turn and then a left onto smaller streets. By the time Robbie could detect where they were now, from a sign on a corner building, she’d made a few more turns and he lost his bearings again. He snapped pictures as they went along as if leaving a bread-crumb trail—shots of stores and cafés and farmacie and of Clarissa herself, an activity that had the advantage of making him look like a tourist instead of a spy.

  Several minutes passed. Clarissa made another left, another right, another left again. Clearly they had moved into a whole new district now (vaguely near the train station, Robbie guessed), with wider streets and clots of young people ambling around holding cigarettes and notebooks. Somewhere in the distance a peal of bells announced it was two o’clock. Yet it didn’t occur to Robbie that he was in an academic setting—practically his home turf—until he saw signs saying UNIVERSITÀ on a number of crumbling limestone structures and a few bespectacled, scholarly-looking men so distracted and ill-groomed they could only be professors. Again and again he also saw the word sapienza on buildings, but he had no idea how that translated.

  If Clarissa had indeed led him to a university, how different this shabby quarter was from his own campus. His college looked like a country club, with a lushly landscaped quad and rolling lawns and playing fields, not to mention buildings so stately they seemed designed to make him wonder whether he deserved to enter them. For three years it had been Edenic until J. started pursuing Robbie down its bluestone paths and lush bowers, ready to alight at any moment like a pigeon bearing the message I will not be ignored by you, I will not be dismissed. And even when J. wasn’t physically present he accosted Robbie with phone calls and e-mails and notes through the campus mail, now waxing sentimental about their bond, now calling Robbie a callous little prick, now apologizing for the bitterness of his last note, now telling Robbie he couldn’t dump him as easily as he assumed.

  After weeks and then months of this agitation, Tonia Cantor had gotten as worn out as Robbie, since J. was confiding his every move to her. She pleaded with Robbie to reach out to J. and give him satisfaction and show him a little compassion because J. was really suffering like a wounded animal bleeding on the roadside. But with each new salvo and plea Robbie got increasingly frightened. He became convinced that any response would give J. encouragement to think there was hope for them when there wasn’t. Plus he was angry that Tonia had suddenly become J.’s pity pimp. Of the three of them, it seemed, he was the only one capable of being mature about the situation (the phrase being professional also came to mind, even though he knew it was wrong) and soldiering on in the aftermath of a huge mistake, although J. and Tonia both had a decade on him.

  He came to wish he’d never met either of them. He came to wish they’d both return to their usual extracurricular activities (writing articles for obscure Teutonic journals in J.’s case, and reading Cosmo for advice on underwire garments and aphrodisiacs in Tonia’s) and leave him alone. When they refused, he didn’t know what else to do, so he severed contact with both of them, which shocked shocked shocked Tonia in particular and only made them closer allies.

  Finally, Clarissa seemed to arrive at her destination. She stopped in front of a four-story apartment building with a massive wrought-iron front door, pressed a button on the intercom, and waited. Twenty or so paces away, Robbie pretended to read the newspaper he’d smudged with his sweaty hands and tried not to stare excessively. After a moment she leaned toward the intercom and said something while brushing away a strand of hair from her face. Then the iron door opened and she disappeared as it thudded behind her.

  Robbie assumed she’d reappear shortly but she didn’t. After several minutes he worked up the courage to inch closer and snap pictures of the unprepossessing façade, making sure to include the house number to the side of the entrance. He was standing directly across from the building now, a bit faint from his jumpy pulse. Only now in the idle moment did the recklessness of his actions hit him. At any moment Clarissa could reemerge to look straight at him—and then what would he do? In the meantime he loitered like a thief. He considered texting Maize to tell her what he was up to but decided against it. Strangers had to detour around him on the narrow sidewalk and a few shot him suspicious looks. Who could blame them? He was suspicious of himself.

  While he waited there he imagined what his mother might say about the situation: Turnabout is fair play. It was one of her favorite expressions when it came to actions against his father. But in this case it didn’t apply. This wasn’t turnabout. If anything this was a pathetic imitation of J. in his obsessive phase, though to Robbie’s knowledge even J. hadn’t used a camera when pursuing him.

  Another half hour passed outside the apartment building, and then an hour, and then an hour and a half. He paced up and down the street to prevent his legs from falling asleep. After two hours the tedium set in fully—he was thirsty and tired and faintly grimy from the diesel exhaust of passing cars—and he longed for a hot shower as if he’d been running several miles instead of loitering on the same block. He hadn’t consciously decided enough already any more than he’d first decided to follow that woman, but when the next taxi
rolled around he raised his arm and jumped in the backseat with a profound sense of relief. It was only as he gave the driver his hotel address that he remembered he wouldn’t have been able to find his way back alone if his life depended on it.

  * * *

  Carlo was back serving breakfast the next morning. Although Robbie hadn’t shaved and his shirt was wrinkled, he felt better prepared this time. He’d rehearsed a few Italian sentences beforehand, making Carlo guffaw when he mentioned his impending visit with his father and the fact that they weren’t close anymore. (Guffawing was an odd reaction, Robbie thought, but better than nothing.) Carlo reported that his own father was dead, having had what appeared to be heart sickness. (He pointed to the center of his muscular chest.) Then he asked Robbie, would he like a personal tour of—How did you say it in English?—happy places before he left Rome? Some night after Carlo finished work? Before Carlo had to return to his mother’s flat in the suburbs? Yes? Would Robbie like the names of these places in the meantime?

  Yes, Robbie said. In thanks he touched Carlo on his square shoulder gingerly and he tipped him double the cost of his breakfast.

  “Wow. That’s totally random,” Maize wrote him later, after Robbie texted her about having spotted Clarissa. “I’m not sure I believe you.”

  “I think it’s a sign,” Robbie wrote.

  “A sign of what?” she wrote back.

  “I don’t know,” Robbie replied. “I’ll have to get back to you.”