Merope pushes his elbow off and smiles. She likes Nathaniel, who is a friend of her boss, Maria Teresa. He asks her about work, and she tells him about the most interesting thing she is doing these days, which is a freelance project writing scripts for a video series on the fantasies of top models.
“Oho,” interjects the round Englishman.
“Well, it’s not as hot as it sounds. These are the kind of fantasies most women have at the age of eleven. The sex is all submerged. One of the girls, Russian, really gorgeous, dreams of being Catherine the Great—”
“I don’t call that submerged,” protests Nathaniel. “Think of her and the horse.”
Merope tells him that the horse is a myth and that anyway the video limits itself to onion domes and fur-edged décolletage. Then she describes another video, in which the model fantasizes about being a Mafia princess, climbs out of a black Mercedes with an Uzi in her hand while the voice-over observes that she has looks to kill for.
The two men giggle, and then the Englishman asks Merope about Ivo, her Dutch ex-boyfriend. When she says that she left him almost a year ago, he leans toward her looking simultaneously lascivious and avuncular and says, “I hope you haven’t gone over to the wops. My child,” he goes on, “I have a definite paternal concern for your romantic future. Too many nice girls come over here and get flummoxed by the Eyetalians. Bad situation—very, as Mr. Jingle would say. Because, all indications of myth and popular tradition to the contrary, the Italian—”
“Is the most difficult male on the planet,” interjects Nathaniel, with the happy air of one climbing onto an old and beloved hobbyhorse.
“That stands, though I was about to say conservative,” says the Englishman. “Difficult, because with the Asian, the African male—”
“Don’t forget the Indian,” adds Nathaniel.
“You know where you are,” says the Englishman. “And one expects behavior along primitive authoritarian lines. But the Italian has a veneer of modernity that makes him infinitely more dangerous. Underneath the flashy design is a veritable root system of archaic beliefs and primitive loyalties. In Milan it’s better hidden—that’s all.”
Getting excited, he waves across the room at, of all people, Nicolò, possibly because he’s seen him come in with Merope. “Just pick an example! One look at him and the discerning eye sees not just an overdressed example of the Riace bronzes but an apartment! Yes, behind every Milanese playboy lurks an immense, dark, rambling bourgeois apartment in the Magenta district, with garlands on the ceiling and the smell of generations of pasta in brodo—oh, that brodo!—borne to the table by generations of maidservants with mustaches.
“And the tribal life in these apartments—all-powerful mothers, linen closets, respectful tradesmen presenting yearly bills, respectful priests subtly skimming the household wealth, ceremonial annual removals to the mountains and the sea, young men and young wives slowly suffocating, gold clinking in coffers to a rhythm that says, family, family, family.”
He fixes Merope with a sparkling periwinkle eye. “One grows up in one of these miniature purgatories with a sense of sin ingrained in one’s cells—a sense that human compromise and human corruption are inevitable. It’s the belief at the root of all the wickedness in this city—and this is a very wicked city. Wicked in a silly and not even very interesting way. An exotic American like you can’t comprehend the weight of it.”
Presumptuous old donkey, thinks Merope, who has been looking around and only half listening. It would be nice to get through an evening out without hearing the word exotic. “I have a family, too,” she says, distinctly.
“It’s eminently clear that you are a sheltered and highly educated flower of the New World, and that makes you more vulnerable.” He points to Clay. “That’s the kind of girl who gets on in Italy: hit and run.”
Clay is standing across the room talking to one of the twins. Unlike anyone else, she looks better as the night wears on: her eyes and earrings gleam and she seems more voluptuous, whiter, redder, more emphatic. By her side hovers Claudio the shoemaker, who has not left her since she gave him that kiss. If he was annoyingly forward in his behavior before the event, now he is desperate.
“Yes, that intelligent young woman has had the good sense to hook up with a cattle baron and get the hell out.”
“You sound jealous,” says Merope.
“Oh, extremely,” says the Englishman. “But it’s too late for me.”
“At this point we’re fixtures,” sighs Nathaniel.
One of the twins darts over and compliments Merope on the wonderful new shoes she has on, which are black with straps, and this somehow gets everyone talking about the British Royal Family, since Nathaniel claims to have heard on reliable authority that what the Prince of Wales really desires in his troubled marriage is straps, plenty of them, but that the Princess declines to oblige.
Clay waltzes up and plops down on the Englishman’s lap, nearly knocking him over; meanwhile they start discussing a new conspiracy theory that links the Queen with the latest Mafia executions in Palermo. They go on to the fiasco of the AIDS benefit gala held the previous week at the Sforza Castle, where a freak storm fried the outdoor lights and nearly electrocuted an international crowd of celebrities. After that they argue over the significance of the appearance of a noted art critic on a late-night television sex show hosted by a beautiful hermaphrodite. Then they thoroughly dissect the latest addendum to the sensational divorce case of a publishing magnate: his wife’s claim that he violated her with a zucchini and then served his friends the offending vegetable as part of a risotto.
Nicolò has come over and sat down on the arm of a couch next to Merope, and through all the laughter she feels him watching
