by Arvin Ahmadi
“Fuck ’em.”
“Jahan.”
“Yes, fuck ’em,” said the café owner. She was a short-haired, short-bodied, thick-armed Italian woman with a big mole on her lip.
“See, even the lesbian said to fuck ’em!”
“I don’t think she meant it the way you mean it …” I laughed. “Oh, Jahan. I can’t believe you’re leaving Rome next week.”
“If I manage to pass this algebra class,” Jahan said, knocking back another shot of espresso. “Ahh. It’s not looking so good right now. I keep failing these damn practice tests. I came up, like, two questions short on the last one.”
“Shut up. What the hell are we doing here, then?”
We went back to Jahan’s apartment, where I practically shoved his algebra textbook into his hands. It seemed counterproductive—I wanted Jahan to stay in Rome, didn’t I?—but I wanted him to pass this exam more, and I felt personally invested in it, so I quizzed him on the Pythagorean theorem and made him tell me what PEMDAS stood for, and then I made him use it to solve an annoyingly complex equation, and finally, when he was tired of my “authoritarian drill-sergeant bullshit,” I forced him to take a practice test.
After he handed me his test to grade, Jahan went into his room to take a nap. I finished grading pretty quickly. He didn’t do very well, so instead of waking him up, I went and flipped through some of the books scattered around his living room. There were more poetry books—poets I had never heard of, like Gwendolyn Brooks and Ocean Vuong—as well as Persian short story collections, fairy tales, the complete works of Hafiz.
After a while, Jahan emerged from his room and sat on the floor next to me.
“You should take that one,” he said. I was reading the back cover of The Pomegranate Lady and Her Sons by Goli Taraghi. “There’s a story about a polite thief who barges into this family’s house in Tehran and asks if he can take their things.”
“Only in Iran would the thieves have manners,” I said.
“Yeah. The grandma comes out with a rifle or some shit, and the thief is just like, ma’am, please don’t get violent, I’m simply going to take this expensive bowl and leave.” Jahan yawned and wiped his watery eyes. “Shit gets real. Post-revolutionary Iran, man.”
I shook my head. “Hey, you have some ghey in your eye.”
“Some what?”
“Ghey,” I repeated. “You have ghey in your eye.”
Jahan frowned. “Amir, you’re being extremely homophobic right now. …”
My ears got red. “No, I just …” I ran into the kitchen to get a paper towel, came back, and wiped the thin mucus out of Jahan’s eye.
“Ohhh, you mean sleep?” Jahan said.
“Yeah, that. I can never remember the English word for it. My mom always called it ‘ghey.’”
Jahan took out his phone to look up the word on his Persian dictionary app. “So it says here that ‘ghey’ means ‘vomit.’ Must be like vomit of the eye or something. Isn’t that neat? See, I would much rather be learning Farsi than this algebra crap.”
“I thought you spoke Farsi.”
“I took a semester in college, but I didn’t speak it growing up like you. My dad barely spoke it himself. He was second generation.” Jahan patted my face. “But hey, you’re as Persian as they come. And you have a little ghey, too.”
I touched the inside of my eye, but there was nothing there. “Ahh.” I rolled my eyes. “I guess I do.”
The next night, Giovanni invited me over to his apartment by the Colosseum for a drink and pizza. I said sure. I thought it was important that I start hanging out more with Giovanni and his friends. Not only was Jahan leaving next week, but Neil had just told me that he and Francesco were thinking of moving to the countryside.
It wasn’t like I was going home anytime soon. It had been a week since the last time my family had tried contacting me. I’d even checked my old phone that morning to see if I had any texts or voicemails from them. Nothing. As much as I wanted to believe I had moved on, I hadn’t. It was like I’d torn up a letter and tossed it in the wind just to have the pieces blow back in my face.
But maybe I had to accept that this was my life now. Maybe Rome was my new home. I was even starting to think about enrolling at John Cabot, an American university in Rome. That way I could apply for a student visa. Plus, Jahan said he knew someone who worked there who could help me get a scholarship.
I decided to walk to Giovanni’s instead of taking the tram. It was a trek across the river, past the ancient ruins with all the cats hanging around. The walk took nearly an hour, but I thought it might take a load off my mind.
When I got to his apartment, Giovanni opened the door in his towel. I was stunned; there were just so many abs. I didn’t know a person could be in possession of that many abdominal muscles.
“Sorry,” Giovanni said, slightly out of breath. “I just returned from the gym and have to take a quick shower.”
“Where are the others?” I asked.
“Jahan is studying for algebra,” Giovanni said, leading me through his ornate living room. “His exam is on Wednesday, but he says he will join us later. Rocco is held up at work. Here, let me fix you a drink. What do you want?”
“Whatever’s easy,” I said.
Giovanni poured me a drink, and we kept walking through his massive apartment, the dining room with the giant Caravaggio, all the way until we reached his changing room. It was about the size of a classroom.
“I will be quick,” he said, and he went into the shower.
I gulped my first drink down fast—it was nice and cool, and there was no air-conditioning in this beautiful apartment. When Giovanni got out of the shower, he fixed two more, one for me and one for himself. We took them back into the changing room.
“I was thinking about our conversation the other night,” Giovanni said. He was standing in front of a full-length mirror, his hair dripping wet. “The Italian men, running down the street, tipping one another’s hats off. Chasing one another into the darkness. I think that would make a great opening for my book.”
“You don’t have an opening yet?”
“I have toyed around with about ten million different ideas, but none of them seem to work,” he said.
I took a big gulp of my drink. “I think that would be a cool opening, yeah.”
Giovanni undid the white towel wrapped around his waist. I was sitting in the far corner of the changing room, where there was a staircase leading upstairs. “I simply need something more exciting,” he said. “Something that will grab your attention.”
I stared at his back. It was like a map; uncharted territory. If Jackson and Valerio were boys, the maps I knew well, then Giovanni was Westeros. His ass was in full view, and although he was covering his dick with his hand, his abs were still very much on display through the mirror.
My eyes jumped between Giovanni’s body in front of me, hot, the empty glass of ice cubes in my hand, cold, and the flesh in my pants, hard.
“When do you think you’ll finish your book?” I asked, my mouth dry.
“Oh, who can say?” Giovanni said. He slipped on a pair of underwear, finally. “Is a book ever really finished?”
I looked up; Giovanni was eyeing me like a wolf.
He took a step forward.
“I always thought you were handsome, Amir,” Giovanni said. “From that very first party, when Jahan brought you here.”
He moved closer. His abs were at eye level. “Thanks” was all I could manage to get out.
Giovanni was suddenly towering over me, one bare leg jutted forward, and somehow my arm brushed against it like he was tracing a vocabulary word in my notebook, like he was my tutor, like he was Jackson—
And then there were mouths. There were hands. There were torsos. And there was motion, from the changing area to the old couch in the dining room. It all happened so fast, but I can say it happened under the Caravaggio.
My phone fell out of my pocket. It must have been w
hile Giovanni was pulling my pants off. I found it under one of the old chairs. Thankfully, the screen wasn’t shattered, and I saw I had two missed calls from Jahan and a text from Valerio. My heart dropped.
I wasn’t beholden to Valerio, I reminded myself. I wasn’t beholden to anyone. Neither was Giovanni, who was in an open relationship. Still, I felt like I had just done something stupid, like driving with my eyes closed, even if I’d come out of it unscathed.
Giovanni finally put some clothes on, and we went out for pizza, hardly saying much to each other as we zigzagged the busy side streets. It was a Saturday night. Rome was filling up with more and more tourists.
We sat down a table at a restaurant just off Piazza Santa Maria in Trastevere. I could hear the faintest sound of the fountain splashing in the background, the sound of children laughing, just like Jahan had told me.
Giovanni glanced up from the menu. “It is interesting to me how you Americans always seem to inspect your menus very carefully,” he said, “as if they contain some kind of nuclear code.”
I straightened my back. “They have so many different pizzas here. I don’t know which one to pick.”
“Just pick the one you want,” Giovanni said.
He reached over and tapped my wrist. I gripped the edges of my menu. Earlier in the night, Giovanni’s touch was all I wanted. He was much older than Valerio and Jackson, wealthier, more spectacularly built … but now I was nervous to be seen with him. Now that we were out in public, his touch felt illicit.
Giovanni pulled his hand back. “I hear you have been seeing Valerio,” he said.
I frowned. “I’d appreciate if you could keep what just happened between us,” I said, lowering my voice.
“Of course. But it is not like you are married,” Giovanni said with a flick of his wrist.
“True.” I exhaled. “How does it work with you and Rocco?”
Giovanni cocked his head. “We are not married either …”
“I mean the open relationship.”
He let out a long sigh, the kind that dropped and hit every note in the scale. “It does not. That is how it works. Things like this happen and I do not tell him.”
We ordered a pizza with cherry tomatoes and mushrooms on it, and some beer. “Are you happy with Rocco?” I asked Giovanni.
Giovanni chewed on the thought for a second. “We were happy for a while,” he said. “We have been together for two years now, and I would say for the first year, we were happy ninety-five percent of the time. The next six months, seventy-five. The last six months I would say it has sunk to under fifty.”
The waitress dropped off our beers. “Salute,” we said, clinking glasses.
“We just get into these explosive fights,” Giovanni continued. “Look. I get it. I have been working on my novel for nearly five years now. I am lazy, but who isn’t? I come from money, I am entitled, I attempted to be part of the family business but left to go to pilot school, then I went to college in the UK, and then I dropped out to party for a year and re-enrolled. I have lived a whole life in my twenties and it is not even over yet. But Rocco. He remains in Rome his whole life. He has been comfortable. He thinks his art is his escape, but it is not going anywhere. I keep telling him if he would just go out and see the world, his art would soar. That is all I want for him. To succeed. I believe that is the real source of our fights. It is not because I am lazy, or slutty, or all the other things he accuses me of. It is his own failure.”
“Wow. The floodgates have come down,” I said, genuinely shocked that Giovanni would share so much with me.
Giovanni shrugged. “I cannot talk to anyone else about it.” He lit a cigarette and took a long drag, blowing the smoke across the table.
“You haven’t talked to Jahan or Neil about it?”
“God, no. Jahan is very close with Rocco, and besides, you know Jahan—he can cut someone out of this group just as quickly as he can bring them in,” Giovanni said. “Neil and I do not talk much, but I am sure he and Rocco hooked up at some point. He has a slutty history but wants to pretend he is a ‘good girl’ now.”
“Really?”
“Oh yes. Don’t let the domestic image fool you. Neil used to have more fun than all of us. He was a real troublemaker.”
I couldn’t pinpoint exactly why that made me feel sad, to think of Neil as anything but the committed boyfriend I knew him to be.
“What do you mean, Jahan can cut someone out?” I asked. “Has he done that before?”
Giovanni laughed. “Remember Gaetano?” I nodded; he was the one who read the story in Italian about how Jahan made him feel accepted. “Oh, that whole performance was bullshit. Jahan cannot stand Gaetano. He was part of our friend group for a while, but he got on Jahan’s nerves, and they had some kind of beef. Snip. We stopped seeing him.”
He continued: “And Gaetano—let me tell you, I do not feel bad for him one bit. He is cheating on his boyfriend, Pier Paolo. Yes, they started dating only six months ago, and Gaetano is already sleeping with Rocco. I think they are in love or something. Rocco never told me, of course. But I saw his texts with Gaetano, telling him to break up with Pier Paolo.” Giovanni shook his head. “I do not even care at this point.”
The waiter arrived carrying our pizza. She set it on the table, and I dove in. It burnt my tongue, the roof of my mouth, but it was delicious. And it took my mind off the fact that Giovanni had just wiped away the perfect image I had of these people, wiped it away clean like an Etch A Sketch.
“We are all pretty fucked, Amir,” Giovanni added quietly, washing down the last of his beer. “I know things are not great with your family back home, but we are all quite fucked over here, too.”
When we got back to Giovanni’s place, Jahan opened the door for us, a glass of wine in hand.
“You’re back!” he exclaimed. “Finally. Rocco’s gone and raided the liquor cabinet. He’s in a bit of a grumpy mood. How was dinner?”
“Dinner was good,” Giovanni said. “We went to that pizza place off Piazza Santa Maria.”
“That’s the one with the owner who used to own the kebob shop on the Viale, no?” Jahan said. “Remember when the Bengali worker got locked in that basement and everyone thought it was the owner who did it? They must have had major beef. Or should I say, shawarma …” Jahan snickered to himself. “Anyway, Rocco is guzzling whiskey or scotch, something manly like that, in the living room. I’m a classy lady, so I’m sticking to wine.”
Giovanni went and poured himself a glass of wine. He asked if I wanted one, and I said I was good.
“You have been working very hard lately, Jahan,” Giovanni said.
“Don’t remind me. I’m actually stressed,” Jahan moaned. “I shouldn’t even be here right now.”
“You’ll be fine,” I said to him. “You were a beast with the Pythagorean theorem yesterday. You’re going to kill it.”
Jahan nodded. “Yeah, I hope so.”
We gathered around the dining room, under the Caravaggio. I quickly scanned the room for any trace of Giovanni and me. A hair, a sock, anything we might have left behind when we were hooking up.
“Caravaggio never had to learn algebra,” Jahan muttered.
“Caravaggio murdered someone, did he not?” Rocco said. He was sitting on the couch where Giovanni and I had gotten frisky just a couple hours earlier.
Giovanni rolled his eyes. “Yes, and it got him exiled from Rome. Which is one way to get someone out of this city.”
Rocco glared at his boyfriend and said something sharp in Italian.
“I suppose da Vinci was a mathematical genius,” Jahan said, defusing the tension. “So maybe there’s some merit to knowing math as an artist.”
“Plus, he had all those hidden clues in his artwork,” I added.
“Ooh, someone’s seen The Da Vinci Code!” Jahan teased. I blushed. That was definitely how I knew that.
We finished our drinks and moved on to the bar, some kind of basement spot where I got carded for
the first time in Italy. Giovanni and Rocco were bickering on and off, and within five minutes they had to go back outside for a full-on argument. Jahan and I turned our attention to one of the many screens in the bar; they were all playing dramatic scenes from decades’ worth of gay movies. Jahan was shocked that I had hardly seen any of them, and he made me pull out my phone and take down the names: God’s Own Country, Milk, Paris Is Burning. It was a long list.
“What’s going on with Giovanni and Rocco?” I asked.
“Oh, they’re always like this,” Jahan said. “I’m surprised you haven’t noticed before.”
I inhaled sharply. The air was smoky down there. “How close are you with Rocco?”
Jahan smiled. “Rocco is my best friend in the world.”
“What about Gaetano?”
Jahan turned. “What about him?”
“I, I just—” I stammered. “He told that story the other night.”
“He sure did,” Jahan said, rolling his eyes. “No, Gaetano’s fine. He’s sweet. We’re just not that close anymore.”
I couldn’t help but see Jahan in a different light after what Giovanni had told me. He wasn’t just the sun of the friend group; Jahan was also the shade, capable of shutting people out of his sunlight.
Somehow, despite Rocco and Giovanni’s fighting, we stayed out until six in the morning. At the end of the night, we all walked back to their apartment by the Colosseum and hugged goodbye. Before he turned around with Rocco, Giovanni winked at me. Jahan definitely noticed, but I didn’t say anything.
Jahan walked back with me across the glistening Tiber River. It was six thirty by the time I got home. I had a snack—leftover bread sticks—and passed out with crumbs all over my bed. When I woke up, I thought I was still dreaming, because someone had commented on my last Instagram post.
“Thx for fucking my fucking boyfriend”
Six Days Ago
IT WAS NINE thirty, almost ten in the morning. I deleted the comment right away and texted Giovanni, but he wasn’t responding. Then I texted Jahan. Miraculously, he was awake, so I put on some clothes and ran over to his apartment, arriving sweaty and out of breath.
