“So you don’t miss the pleasure of someone taking them off.”
I laughed again. Then I shrugged my shoulders. “I hope I can make it. I read English even more slowly than Shimoto.”
“You can’t read more slowly than Shimoto,” said Juncal. “He reads like a turtle races.”
After a quick lunch, I went right back to the library. I had to study hard if I wanted to find a job; there was no way around it. We had been assigned a hundred pages of reading on corporate governance, and I decided to study with Shimoto. I felt I had something in common with him, beyond the fact that we both read English slowly.
Shimoto was from Seoul and, like me, had undergone great trials to get into the University of Chicago. His mother had sold the family’s land to pay for his tuition. Beneath Shimoto’s woolen cap, one could see he had a gentle smile. He wore that cap all the time, as if he wanted to shield his thoughts from the rest of the world.
“Let’s grab some A’s,” I said as I entered the library, handing Shimoto a cup of coffee from the cafeteria. Then I dropped my backpack on an empty table by the window and pulled out some plastic bags. Due to my various allergies, I always carried a pharmacopeia with me. “Chloé’s Turkish coffee.” I smiled as I melted small pieces of dark Colombian chocolate into his cup, two spoons of sugar, and one of cayenne pepper. “Trust me, it’s like gasoline.”
“Will that make me a Mazda?” the Korean student smiled back, bringing the drink to his lips.
I looked around with pleasure at the noon sun beating down on the stacks. Studying in the D’Angelo Library, with its broad tables and the windows facing the fountains—it made you feel extraordinarily smart.
Little by little the white sunlight turned to gold and chased down the stacks farther away. For an hour or so it lingered on the Wisconsin Penal Code. Soon enough the fluorescent lamps switched on and drew dark circles beneath the round tables. We had been sitting and reading for close to twelve hours.
Around midnight Harold, the guard, anxious to close the library, shouted, “It’s time to go find your parties! Don’t you guys have a life?”
His key ring banged against his big belly as he walked away.
I snapped my book shut and called it a day. I pinched my friend on the back of his neck. “Are you coming?”
Shimoto was still leaning on his book. He didn’t even get up to pee. He pressed his fingers against his cheeks, so firmly his phalanxes trembled. Damn, what had I given him? Weird sounds came out of his mouth.
hen I headed back to the International House, my dorm, it was late. There were parties going on all around me. Pity I wasn’t invited to any. I could feel the resounding beat of the music even on the sidewalk outside. What a drag I was. And now I had also lost my way.
A silhouette on the other side of the road caught my eye. “Excuse me, do you know which way I-House is?” I asked.
The silhouette looked like a man’s, and it was pushing a bicycle toward the crosswalk. He must have been at one of the parties because he was wearing a mask. The temperature had dropped. I felt the cold air suddenly increase; rolling fog banks were enveloping the gutters.
“You don’t remember where you live?” The cyclist lifted his mask.
I winced. “If I don’t know what corporate governance is, do you expect me to know where I live?” I asked.
“Yes, the two things do usually go together,” said Franz, laughing while pushing his bicycle. “Come on, I’ll take you to I-House.”
We walked past Victor’s Pub and the cloying smell of microwave pizza that came from the back door; we passed the damp lawns and the university’s black crystal cube, lit now from inside, where, if one listened closely, you could hear the quiet singing of a solitary Korean student. We walked in silence in the cold, our breath preceding us. Franz’s breath was calm and steady; mine was short and irregular and embarrassed. He’d outwitted me on our first day of class, and now he was even showing me the way back to my own dorm. I would have liked to kick him right back to Rapallo.
A little flame of pride flared up in me just as we were passing by the medical school. Two figures were turned toward the ferns beside the brick building.
“Hey guys,” I called, trying to catch their attention. “Is either of you headed toward I-House?”
“But I’m taking you,” said Franz.
“No, you’re not,” one of the two figures said.
Just then the other one suddenly spun around, displaying a six-inch blade. “Cough up your watch and wallet, man,” he said. “And you, sweetheart, what have you got for us?”
Franz made a move to reach for his wallet when all at once, for no reason, the blade went in and out of him, long, cold, and fast.
ne evening near the end of January, a group of handpicked students flew out of Chicago and landed at New York’s La Guardia Airport. A light rain slicked the pavement as we boarded the bus and gazed out at the approaching city. If for some, like me, getting into Chicago was a lifetime goal, the purpose for attending was right there, beyond the bus windows: the New York Job Fair. I had no idea why I was invited to participate. I had studied hard, but my grades were barely average. Was it because I was female? We stared at the dark and silent East River, at the columns of smoke rising from the Triborough Bridge, and suddenly the patchwork of lights of the Manhattan skyscrapers, inaccessible, splendid, but with a hole in the middle, like a smile without front teeth, and we all were asking ourselves the same thing: will I find a job or will I go home up to my ears in debt?
Some students, like Shimoto, hadn’t even gotten an interview, hadn’t even gotten this far. I had helped him draft application letters to six potential law firms, but his first-quarter grades were too low. The day when we went together to mail the letters, he knelt in front of the post office sign. “Are you praying to the god of jobs?” I asked smiling. I remember that in response he looked at me and pressed his fingers against his face so hard that a trickle of blood dripped down his cheeks.
That evening in New York, Juncal and I checked in at the Edison, a cheap Broadway hotel between the two last surviving peep shows in all of Manhattan, and went out to look for a restaurant. The rain magnified the lights on Sixth Avenue. It was nice to cross Broadway on the way to the East Side, and smell kebabs, grilled peppers, and caramel almonds, and to brush against businessmen getting out of work, super fat women with pink bags of see-through lingerie, and to feel the whir of the cabs, of the rickshaws, of the bicycles driving on the wrong side of the road. I already felt a part of all of it.
After a forty-five-minute wait, we were seated in the back room at JG Melon’s, a burger joint on Seventy-fourth and Third where the customer is always wrong. Since Juncal was leaving in June for Tajikistan, she had come to New York just to eat Melon’s mozzarella in carrozza—i.e., grilled cheese sandwiches.
“Let’s see…,” I said, looking at the menu intensely, as if it were a curriculum vitae. We had been advised to practice for our interviews, asking one another the standard questions that might come up the day after. “Ms. Juncal, where do you see yourself in five years’ time?”
Juncal stretched her arms, smiling. “In the Bahamas.” She wasn’t participating in the job fair and was not taking the exercise seriously.
“You’re not helpful,” I said.
“I know. How many interviews do you have?” asked Juncal, laughing, although she knew the answer.
“Two.”
“Well, the second one is with SL&B. Why don’t you let Franz help you? Don’t you know him from back in Italy?”
I lowered my eyes. Slowly, I split the mozzarella sandwich in two. The curtain of warm cheese parted. “This joke is even less funny than the one about the Bahamas.”
I remembered that night in late September. Why was I such a poor loser, so petty only because he outsmarted me in class? Had I not spoken to those guys…
“Rig
ht,” said Juncal, reading my mind. “If it had been me, instead of sending Franz to the hospital I would have shagged him.”
he following morning I spent at least an hour staring at the blueberry muffins on the elegant buffet of the Palm Tree Hotel’s reception room, where the job fair was taking place.
Oddly, my two interviews were with firms that were ranked on opposite ends of the Lawyer 500 ranking. The first was a small, unknown Wisconsin practice and the second was the Wall Street giant Sinclair, La Touche & Buvlovski.
I had chosen my attire carefully: a knee-length skirt and a green blouse that matched my eyes.
When I proceeded to the twenty-third floor of the Palm Tree Hotel, the candidate interviewed before me was still inside. The rain had stopped and out the window the Morgan Stanley building was clothed in mist. Unlike the other firms’ suites, SL&B’s reception room boasted no flowers or promotional videos. There was only a somber Copperplate Gothic sign that read Sinclair, La Touche & Buvlovski.
As I waited for my turn, I looked out at that ghostlike edifice.
“Break a leg…,” said a voice behind me.
“I think I’ve done enough damage already!” I laughed, surprised, recognizing a familiar voice. “How did your interview go?”
Franz smiled. “I don’t know. Buvlovski isn’t easy.”
If Franz said the lawyer wasn’t easy, it meant he was a bulldog.
“How are you doing?” I asked.
I hadn’t spoken to him since the night I’d accompanied him, bloodied, to the emergency room. I had my friends check up on him a couple of times and bring him food and books and even a feel-better sunflower, but I never mustered the courage to visit him myself. When he returned to class, I tried to be invisible.
“Does it still hurt?” I asked.
“No, it’s healed.” Cavalierly, Franz pushed his jacket flaps aside and lifted his shirt to show me the stitches on his hip. He looked thinner and a bit pale but otherwise unscathed. As ever, he wore the knot in his tie disrespectfully loose.
The suite was large and almost empty. There were only two chairs in the room, placed side by side before a window that looked out on Sixth Avenue. I was not invited to sit, but decided to anyway, and was soon joined by my interviewer. Bumping into Franz had completely broken my concentration.
“Interesting attire, Ms. Chloé Ombra Allegra Verdi…,” said Dimitri Buvlovski, looking down from my bright-green blouse to my résumé. “You completed high school in one year and university in thirty-six months, and you graduated cum laude. Surprising, Ms. Verdi. Was it dedication or impatience?”
The lawyer raised his round, bulging eyes from the résumé, waiting for an answer.
“There’s nothing wrong with impatience if the grades are cum laude, Ms. Verdi. Unfortunately…” Dimitri Buvlovski got up from his chair and walked across the room. SL&B was the only firm on Wall Street whose managing partner had attended the job fair. Between his raw wool suit, his black sneakers, and the way he dragged his left leg—it was five inches longer than his right one—you wouldn’t have guessed he was the highest-paid lawyer on Wall Street. He pulled out a contract from his briefcase and handed it to me.
“Unfortunately?” I asked.
“Unfortunately, in Chicago your grades have not been cum laude,” said Buvlovski. “Actually, they are below average. Any comments?”
“Well, usually, the first quarter is the most difficult one,” I said. “And Chicago’s grade average is B minus.”
“No. I meant any comments regarding the contract I just handed you, Ms. Verdi.”
After opening the document, which was as thick as an Argentine steak, I began to read it without knowing where to start. SL&B was the only firm on Wall Street that would put applicants through a strenuous test during an interview. Several minutes passed.
“Any comments on the purchase price adjustment clause, Ms. Verdi?” Buvlovski asked.
I bent over the reps and warranties, the covenants, and then the purchase price adjustment formula. The provisions seemed to spin in a circle that I couldn’t stop. Instead my head was elsewhere, far away, at the sea of Rapallo, and the day the response from Chicago arrived, and my mother’s cry of joy, “You made it!” And now all was at stake. Why couldn’t I say anything?
“Thanks, Ms. Verdi,” Buvlovski said, retrieving the contract. “Our interview is over.”
t the beginning of April, forecasts still predicted that a cold spell was about to arrive and that the wind off Lake Michigan would bend the skyscrapers. Spring came instead. In front of I-House the geraniums bloomed and some students were training outdoors for the university’s soccer tournament. The graduating students who had found jobs on Wall Street could relax, enjoy jazz music in the bars, and see the Renoirs at the Art Institute or plan a weekend away in New York to look for an apartment. The others, like me, who hadn’t received an offer, sat hungrily and slightly panicked at the library’s tables consuming civil procedure manuals, Red Bulls, and my Turkish coffee.
When final grades came out, it was an evening in early May. The lawns were being watered by the sprinklers and smelled of wet grass. I walked back to the library where, in the heat of my finals, I had left my backpack. Since I hadn’t received a job offer, I felt the aimlessness of someone who didn’t know what she’d do tomorrow. K&J sent me a rejection letter and Sinclair, La Touche & Buvloski did not even bother to answer, though my final grades were above average, between B plus and A minus.
Since there was nothing more I could do, I was going to take a holiday for the night. In fact, I was going out with Franz for the first time. I wondered if he’d make a move and thought, climbing the library’s steps, well, if he doesn’t, I will.
Harold, the guard, was standing inside the library, right behind the door. He opened the door a crack.
“I left my mascara upstairs,” I said, smiling at him proudly. “Harold, I have a date tonight.”
But something in the guard’s somber eyes told me that this time my smile wasn’t going to work. Harold was holding the key ring tight against his large belly without smiling. On the street, the wail of a siren interrupted the hum of the library’s air conditioner.
“You don’t need mascara, Chloé,” said Harold kindly.
The siren stopped. Two paramedics jumped out of the ambulance and ran through the door, which Harold held open for them. The ambulance’s lights were making silent yellow circles in the night.
“What happened?” I asked.
In clockwork intervals the flashing lights lit shards of broken glass on the sidewalk.
“He threw his laptop from the fourth floor,” Harold said. “It took three of us to prevent him from jumping.”
I felt something lodge inside my throat.
The library door opened once more. On a wheeled stretcher lay a small body. When the stretcher passed in front of me, I noticed that the cuts on his face were deep and his cheeks were all bloodied. He was strapped down to the gurney in full restraints. His brown eyes were staring at me, as if he wanted to tell me something. I came closer.
“Failed!” Shimoto said, smiling.
CHLOÉ VERDI
May 4, 2009, New York City
ho was actually in charge of the finances at the company?” asked the prosecutor. “Yes, Ms. Verdi, let’s take a step back. Can we hear more about Sachin, the future accountant of the company, and his ‘creative’ past?”
ROSSO FIORENTINO
September 5–6, 2007, Portofino, Italy
hile I continued struggling with a hundred pages of an incomplete novel, a small publishing house from Genoa, Cesar Publishing, had decided to publish the book Sachin had written in one month.
The launch of The Venus with the Singing Nipples took place on July 17 at Canepa, a pastry shop in Rapallo, and gained a number of local reviews (on the Web sites Seagullnews.com and NotOnlyTigulio.com, and
in the magazine the Maritime Voice). Every time an article on his book came out, Sachin would climb up the hills to a hidden restaurant called Ca’ Del Frate and order the best Fiorentina steak and a bottle of Vermentino. As he felt the night breeze on his cheeks, warmed by the wine, he would read the review again and again. He couldn’t believe that he had written a book, and that the critics said that it was crisp and beautiful (and a bit deranged), and he was beginning to discover his own vanity. Not even in his wildest dreams, however, much less my own, would Sachin have imagined himself at the Italian Book Awards a few months later.
When Federico and I arrived at the Benedictine Abbey of the Cervara for the event, it was the end of a summer evening. The clouds formed a nice row of signs in the sky, like the instructions for a wire transfer. As always, the Book Awards ceremony was held at this famous abbey, trodden upon for thousands of years by monks and now by writers. Sachin was already sitting right on the stage between a critic and Cesar, the publisher himself, with his bushy eyebrows and crystalline eyes. My miniature friend was downing oyster martinis and flipping through a copy of his novel in front of the crowd. Why am I not up there? I thought. When I saw the master of parties sitting in the third row, with his legs crossed in a pair of beige corduroys, my ego took another hit. He must be a Chicago grad by now, and dating Chloé.
From the stage Cesar was smoking a Gitane and chatting about the deranged plot of the novel (which was described as a cross between Lolita and The Lord of the Rings): As a young man, the Maestro finds in a dusty library in Genoa an old manuscript telling the most amazing story of a woman whose nipples sing when she makes love. After this life-changing discovery, the young Maestro decides to leave everything behind—mom, dad, and his job as an editor—and begins the quest to find the Venus with the Singing Nipples.
After the book presentation, we all lined up, waiting for a signed copy. Even the seagulls, who flew by brushing the fat tower of the abbey, seemed to want signed copies. As I joined the line, a cherry-red, knee-length skirt brightened my thoughts. So she’s here too? I felt a tightening in my throat. Sure enough, there she was a few steps ahead, walking in line toward the podium, her hair tied back in a ponytail like a schoolgirl. The last time I’d seen her was the night at Don Otto’s bakery, which now seemed a distant memory. What do I say to her? I anxiously ran through my options. And how do I greet her, a kiss on the cheek and pretend we’re friends? I was not prepared to meet her. Or kiss her on the mouth? When I was insecure, I sometimes considered stupid bold moves. She was the one to kiss me first…With each step forward, the cherry-red skirt grew closer. Okay, but that was a year ago. Luckily she reached the podium a second before I did. She handed her copy of the book to Sachin.
Something Great and Beautiful Page 7