work a little, play a little,” someone was saying in accented English, followed by cute, hollow female laughter. A recently arrived American girl, a yoga teacher to the stars, was being reduced to tears by a much older local woman, who kept stabbing her in the heart with one long, painted fingernail and accusing her, personally, of the U.S. invasion of Venezuela. A domestic came carrying a large plate of marinated anchovies. The bald man known as “Cancer Boy” followed dejectedly on the heels of the Afghani princess to whom he had given his heart. A slightly famous Rai actor started telling me about how he had impregnated a girl of good standing in Chile and then fled back to Rome before Chilean law could hold him accountable. When a fellow Neapolitan showed up, he said to me: “Excuse us, Lenny, we have to speak in dialect.”
I continued to wait for my Fabrizia while nibbling on an anchovy, feeling like the horniest thirty-nine-year-old man in Rome-a very serious distinction. Perhaps my occasional lover had fallen into another’s arms during our brief separation. I did not have a girl waiting for me in New York, I wasn’t sure I even had a
I caught sight of a Roman fixture, an old American sculptor of small stature and dying teeth who wore his hair in a Beatlesque mop and liked to mention his friendship with the iconic Tribeca actor “Bobby D.” Several times I have pushed his drunken rotundity into a taxi, telling the cabbies his prestigious address on the Gianicolo Hill, and handing them twenty of my own precious euros.
I had almost failed to notice the young woman in front of him, a small Korean (I’ve dated two previously, both delightfully insane), with her hair up in a provocative bun so that she resembled vaguely a very young Asian Audrey Hepburn. She had full shiny lips and a lovely if incongruous splash of freckles across her nose, and could not have weighed more than eighty pounds, a compactness which made me tremble with bad thoughts. I wondered, for example, if her mother, probably a tiny, immaculate woman humming with immigrant anxiety and bad religion, knew that her little girl was no longer a virgin.
“Oh, it’s Lenny,” the American sculptor said when I came around to shake his hand. He was a High Net Worth Individual, if barely, and I had tried to court him on several occasions. The young Korean woman glanced at me with what I took to be serious lack of interest (her default position seemed to be a scowl), her hands clenched tightly before her. I thought I had blundered onto a new couple and was about to make my apologies, but the American was already starting to introduce us. “The lovely Eunice Kim from Fort Lee, New Jersey, via Elderbird College, Mass.,” he said in the brawling Brooklyn accent he thought was charmingly authentic. “Euny’s an art-history student.”
“Eunice
I was pleased by her humility, acquiring a steady, throbbing erection.
“This is Lenny Abraham. He helps old stockbrokers live a little longer.”
“It’s Abramov,” I said, with a subservient bow to the young lady. I noticed the glass of inky Sicilian red in my hand and drank it in one go. All of a sudden I was sweating all over my freshly laundered shirt and ugly loafers. I took out my apparat, flicked it open in a gesture that was
“Like a scientist?” Eunice Park asked.
“More like a salesman,” the American sculptor rumbled. He was notoriously competitive over women. At the last party, he had championed over a young Milanese animator to get a blow job from Fabrizia’s nineteen-year-old cousin. In Rome this passed for breaking news.
The sculptor made a half-turn toward Eunice, partly obscuring me with one thick shoulder. I took that as my sign to leave, but whenever I began to do so, she would glance my way, casually tossing me a lifeline. Maybe she was scared of the sculptor herself, worried she would end up on her knees in a dimly lit room.
I drank heavily, eyeing the sculptor’s broad attempts to impress the thoroughly unimpressible Eunice Park. “So I says to her, ‘
I felt sad for the sculptor, and not just because I doubted his chances with Eunice Park, but because I realized he would soon be dead. From an ex-lover of his I had learned that his advanced diabetes had almost cost him two toes, and the heavy cocaine use was maxing out his aging circulatory system. In the business we called him an ITP, Impossible to Preserve, the vital signs too far gone for current interventions, the psychological indicators showing an “extreme willingness/desire to perish.” Even more despairing was his financial status. I’m quoting directly from my report to boss man Joshie: “Income yearly $2.24 million, pegged to the yuan; obligations, including alimony and child support, $3.12 million; investible assets (excluding real estate)-northern euro 22,000,000; real estate $5.4 million, pegged to the yuan; total debts outstanding $12.9 million, unpegged.” A mess, in other words.
Why was he doing this to himself? Why not keep off the drugs and the demanding young women, spend a decade in Corfu or Chiang Mai, douse his body with alkalines and smart technology, clamp down on the free radicals, keep the mind focused on the work, beef up the stock portfolio, take the tire off the belly, let us fix that aging bulldog’s mug? What kept the sculptor here, in a city useful only as a reference to the past, preying on the young, gorging on thick-haired pussy and platefuls of carbs, swimming with the prevailing current toward his own nullification? Beyond that ugly body, those rotting teeth, that curdled breath, was a visionary and a creator, whose heavy-handed work I sometimes admired.
As I buried the sculptor, marching behind the pallbearers, comforting his beautiful ex-wife and cherubic twin sons, my eyes watched Eunice Park, young, stoic, and flat, nodding along to the sculptor’s self-serving remarks. I wanted to reach over and touch her empty chest, feel the tough little nipples that I imagined proclaimed her love. I noticed that her sharp nose and little arms were lightly coated with moisture and that she was matching me in the drinking department, plucking off wineglasses from passing trays, her tightly wound mouth turning purple. She wore fancy jeans, a gray cashmere sweater, and a string of pearls which lent her at least ten years of age. The only youthful part of her was a sleek white pendant-a pebble almost-which looked like some kind of miniaturized new apparat. In certain wealthy precincts of trans-Atlantic society, the differences between young and old were steadily eroding, and in other precincts the young were mostly going naked, but what was Eunice Park’s story? Was she trying to be older or richer or whiter? Why do attractive people have to be anything but themselves?
When I next looked up, the sculptor had placed his heavy paw on her negligible shoulder and was squeezing hard. “Chinese women are so delicate,” he said.
“I’m not that delicate.”
“Yes, you are!”
“I’m not Chinese.”
“Anyway, Bobby D. and Dick Gere were fighting at a party. Dick came to me and said, ‘Why does Bobby hate me so much?’ Wait. What was I saying? Do you need another drink? Oh! You made the right choice coming to Rome, kitten. New York is finished these days. America is history. And with those fuckers in charge now, I’m never going back. Fucking Rubenstein. Fucking Bipartisan Party. It’s
“No,” Eunice Park said. “No, thank you.”
“Why not?” the sculptor shouted. And then, because he had long lost the ability to gauge short-term consequences, he shook her by the shoulder, a drunken shake, but one that her tiny body looked ill-equipped to handle. Eunice looked up, and in her eyes I saw the familiar anger of an adult suddenly dragged back into childhood. She pressed one hand to her stomach, as if she had been punched, and looked down. Red wine had spilled on her expensive sweater. She turned to me, and I saw embarrassment, not for the sculptor, but for herself.
“Let’s take it easy,” I said, putting my hand on the sculptor’s taut, moist neck. “Let’s maybe sit down on the
