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  The two of them are lying in each other’s arms, shaking with laughter as they haven’t done for months, even years. And Ariel is swept for an instant by a heady sense of accomplishment. “Which of them won the underpants?” she asks.

  “What? Oh, I didn’t give them away. They were handmade, silk. Expensive stuff—too nice for a hooker. I kept them for you.”

  “But they’re too small for me,” protests Ariel.

  “Well, exchange them. You did save the receipt, I hope.” Roberto’s voice, which has been affectionate, indulgent, as in their best times together, takes on a shade of its normal domineering impatience. But it is clear that he is still abundantly pleased, both with himself and with her. Yawning, he announces that he has to get some sleep, that he’s out of training for this kind of marathon. That he didn’t even fortify himself with his birthday Viagra. He alludes to an old private joke of theirs by remarking that Ariel’s present proves conclusively that his mother was right in warning him against immoral American women; and he gives her a final kiss. Adding a possessive, an uxorious, squeeze of her bottom. Then he settles down and lies so still that she thinks he is already asleep. Until, out of a long silence, he whispers, “Thank you.”

  * * *

  In a few minutes he is snoring. But Ariel lies still and relaxed, with her arms at her sides and her eyes wide open. She has always rationed her illusions, and has been married too long to be shocked by the swiftness with which her carefully perverse entertainment has dissolved into the fathomless triviality of domestic life. In a certain way that swiftness is Ariel’s triumph—a measure of the strength of the quite ordinary bondage that, years ago, she chose for herself. So it doesn’t displease her to know that she will wake up tomorrow, make plans to retrieve her daughters, and find that nothing has changed.

  But no, she thinks, turning on her side, something is different. A sense of loss is creeping over her, and she realizes it is because she misses Beba. Beba who for two weeks has lent a penumbral glamour to Ariel’s days. Beba, who, in the best of fantasies, might have sent a comradely message home to her through Roberto. But, of course, there is no message, and it is clear that the party is over. The angels have flown, leaving Ariel—good wife and faithful spirit—awake in the dark with considerable consolations: a sleeping man, a silent house, and the knowledge that, with her usual practicality, she has kept Beba’s number.

  Full Moon over Milan

  It began with rubber bands. The silly sentence bobs up in Merope’s mind as she sits over a plate of stewed octopus that along with everyone else’s dinner will be paid for by one of the rich men at the table. Rogue phrases have been invading her brain ever since she arrived in Milan and started living in another language: she’ll be in a meeting with her boss and a client, chatting away in Italian about headlines and body copy for a Sicilian wine or the latest miracle panty liner, when a few words in English will flit across the periphery of her thoughts like a film subtitle gone wild.

  Her friend Clay with typical extravagance says that the phrases are distress signals from the American in her who refuses to die, but Merope has never intended to stop being American. Her grandparents came from the British Caribbean island of Montserrat, and her earliest continuous memories are of her mother and father, both teachers, wearing themselves out in New Rochelle to bestow a seamless Yankee childhood on their two ungrateful daughters. Such immigrants’ gifts always come with strings attached that appear after decades, that span continents and oceans: at twenty-eight Merope can no more permanently abandon America than she could turn away from the exasperating love engraved on her parents’ faces. So she is writing copy in Italy on a sort of indefinite sabbatical, an extension of her role as family grasshopper, the daughter who at college dabbled in every arcane do-it-yourself feminist Third World folklorish arts-and-crafts kind of course as her sister Maia plowed dutifully along toward Wharton; who no sooner graduated than went off to Manhattan to live for a mercifully brief spell with a crazed sculptor from whom she was lucky enough to catch nothing worse than lice.

  With family and lovers Merope learned early to defend her own behavior by adopting the role of ironic spectator, an over-perceptive little girl observing unsurprised the foibles of her elders. The role suits her: she is small with large unsettling eyes and nowadays a stylish little Eton crop of slicked-back straightened hair. Milan suits her, too: after two years she is still intrigued by its tenacious eighties-style vulgarity and by the immemorial Gothic sense of doom that lies like a medieval stone wall beneath the flimsy revelry of the fashion business. The sun and communal warmth of the Mezzogiorno have never attracted her as they do her English girlfriends; she likes the northern Italian fog—it feels like Europe. She respects as well the profound indifference of the city to its visitors from other countries. From the beginning she’s been smart enough to understand that the more energetically one sets oneself to master all kinds of idioms in a foreign country, the sooner one uncovers the bare, incontrovertible fact that one is foreign. The linked words that appear and flit about her brain seemingly by sheerest accident, like bats in a summer cottage, seem to Merope to be a logical response to her life in a place where most really interesting things are hidden. The phrases are playful, but like other ephemera—dreams, advertisements, slips of the tongue—if you catch and examine them, they offer oblique comment on events at hand.

  This dinner, for example—three Italian men and three foreign women gathered without affection but with a lot of noisy laughter on a May evening in the outdoor half of a restaurant in the Brera district. It did in a certain way come about through rubber bands—the oversized pink ones that provide fruitful resistance to the limbs of the women in the exercise class where Merope met Clay at noon. If Merope hadn’t been dripping with sweat and demoralized by the pain she would have said no, as she has privately resolved to do whenever Clay gets that glint in her eye and starts talking about extremely interesting, extremely successful men.

  The exercise class they attend is a notorious one in Milan: it is dedicated entirely to buttocks, and is even called simply “Buttocks”—“Glutei.” Rich Milanese housewives, foreign businesswomen, and models without any hips to speak of flock to the Conture Gym to be put through their paces by a Serbian ex-gymnast named Nadia, in an atmosphere of groaning and mass agony that suggests a labor ward in a charity clinic. Merope is annoyed at herself for being insecure enough to attend—her small, lofty Caribbean backside, after all, ranks on the list of charms she sometimes allows her boyfriends to enumerate. Yet, Tuesdays and Thursdays at midday, she finds herself there, resentfully squatted on a springy green mat. Sometimes, looking around her, she draws a professional bead on those quivering international ranks of fannies: she sees them in a freeze-frame, an ad for universal feminine folly.

  Her friend Clay, on the other hand, adores Ass Class, or the Butt Club, as she alternately calls it. She says that she likes her perversions to work for her. Clay is the class star, the class clown. In a glistening white Avengers-style unitard, she hoists and gyrates her legs with gusto, lets out elemental whoops of pain, swaps wisecracks in Italian with Nadia, flops about exuberantly in her bonds, tossing her sweat-soaked red hair like a captive mermaid, occasionally sending a snapped rubber band zinging across the dance floor. Merope sometimes thinks that if Clay didn’t exist it would be necessary to invent her—at least for her, Merope’s, own survival on the frequent days when Milan appears through the mist as a dull provincial town.

  A case in point: last Sunday, when Merope and Clay and a friend of Clay’s, a Colorado blonde who works at Christie’s, were taking the train over the Swiss border to Lugano to see the American Impressionist show at the Thyssen-Bornemisza, Clay got up to go to the toilet, found the toilet in their train compartment not up to her exacting standards, went down to the next car, and there suddenly found herself left behind in Italy as the train divided in two at the border. Merope and the other woman sat staring dumbly at Clay’s beautiful ostrich-skin bag on the seat a
s their half of the train tootled merrily on into Switzerland.

  However, after a few minutes, the train drew to a halt in a small suburban station not on the schedule of express stops, and as the few other people in the car began peering curiously out of the window, a clanking, clanging sound announced the arrival of another train behind them. Merope and the other girl jumped up, ran to the end platform of the car, and saw arriving a sort of yellow toy engine, the kind used for track repair, and inside, flanked by two Italian conductors wearing besotted grins, was Clay, red hair flying, waving like the Queen Mother.

  Clay is busy these days ironing out the last wrinkles of a complicated divorce from a rich Milanese who manufactures something rarely thought of but essential, like tongue depressors. Then she is immediately getting married again, to a Texan, with dazzling blue eyes and a glibber tongue than an Irishman’s, who won Clay by falling on his knees and proposing in front of an intensely interested crowd of well-dressed drinkers at Baretto, in Via Sant’Andrea. Maybe Texas will be big enough for her. Italy, thinks Merope, has always seemed a bit confining for her friend, like one of those tight couture jackets Clay puts on to go to the office, where for the past few years she has run a gift-buying service for Italian companies who want to shower Bulgari trinkets on crucial Japanese. Nowadays she’s shutting down the business, talks about Texas real estate, about marketing Italian cellulite creams in America, about having babies.

  Merope feels a predictable resentment toward the Texas Lochinvar who rode out of the West and broke up the eleven months of high times she and Clay had been enjoying as bachelorettes in Milan. Now she would have to start a real life in Milan—unlikely, this—or return home. Her weather instincts tell her that her friend’s engagement means that she herself will fall in love again soon: another partner will come along in a few beats to become essential as salt, to put her through changes, perhaps definitive ones. Clay says that what she wants most in the world to see before she leaves for Houston is Merope settled with a nice man; every time they go out together, she parades an international array of prospects, as if Merope were a particularly picky executive client.

  Merope isn’t in the mood yet to settle down with a nice man; in fact last October, when she met Clay, she had just made a nice man move out of the apartment they’d shared for a year and a half in the Navigli district. She’d explained this to Clay in the first five minutes they’d started talking, at a party in the so-called Chinese district, near Corso Bramante. “He was awfully dear. He was Dutch: sweet in the way those northern men can be sweet. Crazy about me the way a man from one of those colonizing countries can be about a brown-skinned woman. A photographer. Never fell in love with models, and he cooked fantastic Indonesian food. But he was making me wicked.”

  Clay, shoehorned into a Chanel suit of an otherworldly pink, stuck her chin into her empty wineglass and puffed out her cheeks. Across the room she’d looked like a schoolgirl, wandering through the crowd with downcast eyes, smiling at some naughty thought of her own; up close her beautiful face was a magnet for light, might have been Jewish or not, might have been thirtyish or not, might or might not have undergone a few surgical nips and tucks. Merope had at first glance classified her, erroneously, as “Fashion”—as belonging to the flamboyant tribe of ageless nomads who follow the collections between Europe and New York as migrant workers follow the harvests.

  Clay, however, was beyond Fashion. “Because he was too good,” she said in a thoughtful voice, of Merope’s Dutch ex-boyfriend. Her accent in English, like her face, was hard to define: a few European aspirates that slid unexpectedly into an unabashed American flattening of vowels. “No respectable woman,” she added, “should have to put up with that.”

  The party was given by a friend of Merope’s—a model married to an Italian journalist, who occasionally got together with some of the other black American and Caribbean models to cook barbecue. The models got raunchy and loud on these occasions, and that night hung intertwined over the beer and ribs, hooting with laughter, forming a sort of gazebo of long, beautiful brown limbs, while a bit of Fashion and a few artistic Milanese buzzed around the edges. Merope had arrived with a painter who dressed only in red and kept goats in his city garden—the type of character who through some minor law of the universe inevitably appears in the social life of a young woman who has just broken off a stable relationship. When the painter left her side and went off to flirt vampirishly with everyone else in the room, Merope started talking with Clay and instantly realized, with the sense of pure recognition one has in falling in love, or in the much rarer and more subtle process of identifying a new friend, that this was the person she had been looking for to get in trouble with in Milan.

  Clay’s too hastily proffered description was of a family vaguely highborn, vaguely European, vaguely American (her passport, like her pithy syntax, demonstrated the latter) and of a childhood passed in a sort of whistle-stop tour of the oddest combination of places—Madrid; Bristol, England; Gainesville, Florida. By comparison, Merope’s own family seemed as stable as Plymouth Rock. She was tickled: Clay gave her a school’s-out feeling after her model friends, who, for all their wild looks and the noise they made, were really just sweet, hardworking, secretly studious girls.

  Over that fall and winter she and Clay, without finding out much more about each other, spent a lot of time together, chivying a string of Italian and foreign suitors and behaving like overage sorority sisters. They hardly ever went to bed with anybody, not from fear of AIDS but from sheer contrariness, and they called each other late at night after dates and giggled. They cock-teased. Merope wondered occasionally how it was possible for fully employed grown women to act this way: did adolescence, like malaria, return in feverish flashbacks?

  * * *

  The same thought occurs to her again tonight in the restaurant garden, because she can feel the spring getting to her. After a cold wet April, warm weather has finally arrived, bringing wan flourishes of magnolia and sultry brown evenings heavy with industrial exhaust. The hordes of Fashion in town for the prêt-à-porter collections have been and gone like passenger pigeons, leaving in their wake not desolation but a faint genuine scent of pleasure. Tonight there is even a full moon: coming in the taxi from work, she caught a glimpse of it, big and shockingly red as a setting sun. Moons and other heavenly personages are rare in Milan: this one vanished under the smog by the time she reached the restaurant. Now between the potted hedge and the edges of the big white umbrellas overhead she sees only the cobblestones of Piazza del Carmine, a twilit church facade, and part of a big modern sculpture that looks like a Greek torso opened for autopsy.

  Across the table, Clay is looking good in black. The man to Clay’s right is obviously impressed. His name is Claudio, he is a Roman who lives half the time in Milan, and he owns shoe factories out in the mists beyond Linate: a labyrinthine artisanal conglomerate whose products, baptized with the holy names of the great designers, decorate shop windows up and down Via Spiga and Via Montenapoleone. He’s been making not awfully discreet pawing motions at Clay since they all met up at Baretto at eight-thirty. He is touching the huge gilt buttons of her jacket with feigned professional interest, and her hands and the tip of her nose with no excuse at all, and Clay is laughing and talking about her fiancé in Texas and brushing him off like a mosquito or maybe not even brushing him off but playing absentmindedly with him, the way a child uses a few light taps to keep a balloon dancing in the air.

  The other men at the table are designed along the same lines as this Claudio, though one is Venetian and the other a true Milanese. All three are fortyish men-about-town whom Merope has been seeing at parties for the last two years: graying, tanned, with the beauty that profligate Nature bestows on Italian males northern or southern, of all levels of intelligence and social class. They are dressed in magnificent hybrid fabrics of silk and wool, and their faces hold the faintly wary expression of rich divorced men.

  Like all the dinner companions Clay has
provided recently, they are all impossible, for more reasons than Merope could list on a manuscript the length of the Magna Carta. Without having been out with them before, she knows from experience that soon they will begin vying with each other to pay for this dinner, will get up and pretend to visit the toilet but really go off to settle things with the headwaiter or to discover with irritation that one of the others pretending to visit the toilet has gotten there beforehand. When it has been revealed that someone has succeeded in paying, the other men will groan and laughingly take to task the beaming victor, who has managed to buy the contents of their stomachs.

  The other woman at the table is Robin, the Colorado Christie’s blonde from the train incident. She is pretty but borderline anorexic, with a disconcerting habit of jerking her head sharply to one side as she laughs. Clay uses her shamelessly to round out gatherings where another woman is wanted who won’t be competition. Merope likes her but pities her because after five years in Italy she hasn’t yet understood the mixture of playfulness and deep conservatism in Italian men and goes from one disastrous love affair to another. Just a few weeks ago, she spent a night shivering in a car in front of a house where her latest lover was dallying. Now she’s looking hopefully around, as if she’s eager to get burned again.

  On the right side of Merope, the Venetian, Francesco, is recounting something that happened to him last month: a girl of about sixteen, a Polish immigrant who had been in the country only a few months, had bluffed her way in to see him in the offices of his knitwear business and without preamble pulled off her shirt. “She told me that she’d done a bit of lingerie modeling—you can imagine the body—but that she wasn’t making enough money, and she proposed for me to keep her. Viewed with the greatest possible objectivity, era una fica pazzesca—she was an amazing piece of ass. She said that she didn’t care about luxury, that she’d accept one room in any neighborhood, that she didn’t dress couture, only Gaultier Junior, and that she rode a motorbike, so that her overhead costs would be very low. She used that expression: ‘overhead costs.’ ”