As they finish making the arrangements, Ariel is embarrassed to hear herself say, “I do hope you two girls will make things very nice. My husband is a wonderful man.”
And Beba, who is clearly used to talking to wives, assures her, with phenomenal patience, that she understands.
As Ariel puts down the phone, it rings again, and of course it is her mother, calling from the States. “Well, you’re finally free,” says her mother, who seems to be chewing something, probably a low-calorie bagel, since it is 8:00 A.M. in Bethesda. “Who on earth were you talking to for so long?”
“I was planning Roberto’s birthday party,” Ariel says glibly. “We’re inviting some people to dinner at the golf club.”
“Golf! I’ve never understood how you can live in Italy and be so suburban. Golf in the hills of Giotto!”
“The hills of Giotto are in Umbria, Mom. This is Lombardy, so we’re allowed to play golf.”
Ariel can envision her mother, unlike Beba, with perfect clarity: tiny; wiry, as if the muscles under her porcelain skin were steel guitar strings. Sitting bolt upright in her condominium kitchen, dressed in the chic, funky uniform of black jeans and cashmere T-shirt she wears to run the business she dreamed up: an improbably successful fleet of suburban messengers on Vespas, which she claims was inspired by her favorite film, Roman Holiday. Coffee and soy milk in front of her, quartz-and-silver earrings quivering, one glazed fingernail tapping the counter as her eyes probe the distance over land and ocean toward her only daughter.
What would she say if she knew of the previous call? Almost certainly, Ariel thinks, she would be pleased with an act indicative of the gumption she finds constitutionally lacking in her child, whose lamentable conventionality has been a byword since Ariel was small. She herself is living out a green widowhood with notable style, and dating a much younger lobbyist, whose sexual tastes she would be glad to discuss, girl to girl, with her daughter. But she is loath to shock Ariel.
With her Italian son-in-law, Ariel’s mother flirts shamelessly, the established joke being that she should have got there first. It’s a joke that never fails to pull a grudging smile from Roberto, and it goes over well with his mother, too: another glamorous widow, an intellectual from Padua who regards her daughter-in-law with the condescending solicitude one might reserve for a prize broodmare. For years, Ariel has lived in the dust stirred up by these two dynamos, and it looks as if her daughters, as they grow older—they are eight and ten—are beginning to side with their grandmothers. Not one of these females, it seems, can forgive Ariel for being herself. So Ariel keeps quiet about her new acquaintance with Beba, not from any prudishness but as a powerful amulet. The way, at fourteen, she hugged close the knowledge that she was no longer a virgin.
“Is anything the matter?” asks her mother. “Your voice sounds strange. You and Roberto aren’t fighting, are you?” She sighs. “I have told you a hundred times that these spoiled Italian men are naturally promiscuous, so they need a woman who commands interest. You need to be effervescent, on your toes, a little bit slutty, too, if you’ll pardon me, darling. Otherwise, they just go elsewhere.”
Inspired by her own lie, Ariel actually gives a dinner at the golf club, two days before Roberto’s birthday. The clubhouse is a refurbished nineteenth-century castle built by an industrialist, and the terrace where the party is held overlooks the pool and an artificial lake. Three dozen of their friends gather in the late September chill to eat a faux-rustic seasonal feast, consisting of polenta and Fassone beefsteaks, and the pungent yellow mushrooms called funghi reali, all covered with layers of shaved Alba truffles. Ariel is proud of the meal, planned with the club chef in less time than she spent talking to Beba on the phone.
Roberto is a lawyer, chief counsel for a centrist political party that is moderately honest as Italian political parties go, and his friends all have the same gloss of material success and moderate honesty. Though the group is an international one—many of the men have indulged in American wives as they have in German cars—the humor is typically bourgeois Italian. That is: gossipy, casually cruel, and—in honor of Roberto—all about sex and potency. Somebody passes around an article from L’Espresso which celebrates men over fifty with third and fourth wives in their twenties, and everyone glances slyly at Ariel. And Roberto’s two oldest friends, Flavio and Michele, appear, bearing a large gift-wrapped box. It turns out to hold not a midget stripper, as someone guesses, but a smaller box, and a third, and a fourth and fifth, until, to cheers, Roberto unwraps a tiny package of Viagra.
Standing over fifty-five smoking candles in a huge pear-and-chocolate torte, he thanks his friends with truculent grace. Everyone laughs and claps—Roberto Furioso, as his nickname goes, is famous for his ornery disposition. He doesn’t look at Ariel, who is leading the applause in her role as popular second wife and good sport. She doesn’t have to look at him to feel his presence, as always, burned into her consciousness. He is a small, charismatic man with a large Greek head, thick, brush-cut black hair turning a uniform steel gray, thin lips hooking downward in an ingrained frown like those of his grandfather, a Sicilian baron. When Ariel met him, a dozen years ago, at the wedding of a distant cousin of hers outside Florence, she immediately recognized the overriding will she had always dreamed of, a force capable of conferring a shape on her own personality. He, prisoner of his desire as surely as she was, looked at this preposterously tall, absurdly placid American
