Class

by Francesco Pacifico

  You chat with people. James Murphy,* the kind, bald fifty-year-old, is a novelist. You own one of his books, I Rockwell—it won him the Pulitzer Prize. Berengo is a friend of his. And Berengo thinks Lorenzo has no talent. Even worse: James Murphy tells you he likes Berengo and Cugino Hitler so much he’s taking notes on them. It’s a book project, but you don’t ask for the details. Does this mean, then, that even Cugino Hitler is a more interesting person than Lorenzo? That he’s an artist? And does that mean…? Every question she doesn’t ask makes her want to start cutting her forearms like she used to.

  Ludovica recognizes the long-haired girl, not just from last night but from the boutique; she’s come in a few times to sell her old clothes. Her name is Anna. She’s entertaining some of the guests with a theatrical deliberation over whether to pose naked for a chic erotic magazine. Anna sits at the end of a chair, then stands up, agitated, and begins to walk back and forth on the parquet floor, her Lacca oxfords making loud clicking noises. A friend of Hitler’s is streaming some of the magazine’s clips: a big, pale girl with a head of perfectly curly hair rides a bicycle. She’s wearing a skirt but no panties, her soft breasts moving gently in the breeze. Everyone agrees that the video is legit. “We’ll finally get to see your pussy,” Cugino Hitler says thoughtfully. Anna brags that she can’t be bothered to accept the job and punches Hitler’s puny frame, generating a pitiful shriek. She brags some more, frowning: she’ll be forced to accept Terry Richardson’s offer after all. Ludovica gathers that Anna also works at a gallery in Chelsea.

  Anna pretends not to recognize you; you can tell she’ll never talk to you.

  Three of the guests are photographers who seem like they’re everywhere. There’s a gay Italian—a literary scout and former tour manager—who rolls his rs in a funny way. (You add him to the list of people you envy, but it’s something more potent than envy: he’s about to find out, from you of all people, that like him your husband studied philosophy at Villa Mirafiori, but unlike him he’s at Columbia for a year on university money. So he’ll ask, “Is he raccomandato? Has he got family connections with the board?” You’ll be forced to lie and say no, and he’ll know you’re lying. The scout’s name is Sergio de Simone—with me he always went by Sergino—and he hates well-connected people with easy access to grant money. He sniffed the odor of your husband’s connections on you. He’s the one who’ll think up the big prank, and ask me to join him.) Sergio de Simone has a smug, fake American accent, his Italian swims in a sea of “kinda” and “sorta.” He’s from Via Tiburtina in eastern Rome: shaved head, no beard. He’s wearing pistachio-green pants with ridiculous triple-folded hems.

  “So,” he says with affected bonhomie, “who are his connections? His relatives?”

  “Are you kidding me?” She’s baffled, as if it were offensive to bring up that particular name.

  “So how could he get a grant from Villa Mirafiori to do work abroad, then?”

  “I guess he’s good?”

  They engage in this back-and-forth as they nibble gyoza from a communal plate. She’s hungry, but she walks away.

  More problems from another guy—“Marcello.” Cugino Hitler introduces him and explains that this kid—a wealthy twenty-five-year-old from Parioli, Rome, tall and black haired, in a Ralph Lauren polo with a diagonal stripe, tight red pants, and designer sneakers—only speaks broken English. He’s a rapper who’s about to make the ultimate italorap ammericano record. “I’m doing the artwork.”

  The playlist is Arab hip-hop, noise, calypso, grind, Italia anni Sessanta, italodisco. (When there’s just the two of us at the apartment, we use the projector for videos, mostly HD documentaries about wildlife or the solar system, nighttime videos of cities shot from helicopters, Tokyo from the first car of a monorail. The city muffles this apartment, spins a silk around it that lets us out but doesn’t let anyone else in. At night, with the lights off, all we see are the videos flickering on the canvas, our phone screens dimmed for darkness, the LEDs from electronic devices. There’s no place I’d rather be. Which doesn’t mean I’m incapable of living in Rome without him; I have a full life there, and I have other homes I can go to, and even other little boxes under other beds. But they’re secondary boxes, they’re not The Box.)

  You’re not okay with his inviting people over two nights in a row. He’s not the same when he’s around people. When you suggest that “Marcello” is veramente poco easy, he dismisses you without looking up from the game on his phone, the one with the frog that tries to eat as much candy as possible. “A young man has to take himself seriously,” he says, leaning on the bookshelves, “if he’s to achieve anything.”

  You laugh at his affectation and respond in half-Italian, half-English: “Sì, Nico, and yet, è poco easy.”

  “Don’t judge. With all the velleitari we have in Italy—they’re so content, so savvy, even though they’re really no good at anything—‘Marcello’ produced fucking Gassa. I think that’s enough.”

  When Berengo says velleitari—the aspirants who dabble in the arts with little talent or stamina or awareness—does he mean Lorenzo? If so, it’s your duty to walk out the door and go back to your husband. Instead you strike back: “But he seems so uptight, he’s super intense.”

  “Look, bella, he’s a serious person. He’s not an allegrone who thinks he’ll find his place in the world thanks to his congeniality.”

  This is unambiguously Lorenzo. But how can he say it so openly?

  “Well, regardless, your friend is poco easy.” You’re weakened and losing, and you’re waiting for this to stop so you can reach the bedroom and lie down, but then the conversation takes a turn.

  “You say ‘easy’ one more time, and I’ll kick your ass.”

  “You’re so boring! That guy talks like an idiot, and I can’t say ‘easy.’ You’re poco easy yourself, you know?” You place your hands on his forearm—your form of self-defense.

  “I told you. I’ll kick your ass.” But this time he says it warmly.

  “Oh yeah? And what exactly are you going to do?”

  “Beat you up, sweetie pie.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Come to my room, then. I’ll beat you up.” You stare at him with a smile—only connect…—then head for the fridge.

  —

  THE LATE EVENING walk is a relief. It’s barely snowing now, and the temperature has risen. Nicola stayed home, and La Sposina is tagging along with the other guests, who are on their way to the subway or about to hail cabs. The street and the sidewalk have blurred into each other, the landscape shiny and brittle. La Sposina holds on to Cugino Hitler’s arm, afraid she might slip, but the snow lends her steps a grainy friction. The square around the corner from Berengo’s is transformed: the big planters with the Japanese maple trees are a bright white, as are the bollards and the metal chairs and the round tables chained to the cobblestones. The doormen are invisible—this weather is beyond their pay grade—but the supers and the janitors are everywhere, shoveling their little sections of the sidewalk. The air hums and crackles. The few parked cars on the street and those stacked like tin cans in expensive lots are glazed over, nearly invisible. La Sposina’s crew weaves through the choreography of late-night hard work: polite, uncomplaining slaves with shovels in their hands. The snow begins to fall again as the Italians reach Times Square, where they meet new shovelers illuminated by the bright blur of the place, the snow on the plaza lit up in the green and yellow and red of the unceasing billboards. It’s wondrous, this nighttime labor performed by those we don’t love? Isn’t it, Ludovica?

  It’s just the three of you now: you and Cugino Hitler and “Marcello,” the poco easy guy, who entertains the two of you with his weird Italo-English slang: “niggaz we hate,” “hos we wanna bone.” He gesticulates furiously, a monkey in a Loden coat.

  “Marcello” and Hitler tell her about their current project: trying to sleep with Anna. “We’ll date-rape her pronto. Bright pussy lights.”

&nbs
p; She ignores the sexism and tries to play along. “Anna is a talker. She wouldn’t act on it is my guess.”

  “Must be punished. Constantly talking cock.” That’s Cugino Hitler.

  A Fox News cameraman shoots b-roll in the middle of the deserted square: a heavy-duty snow blower and its operator alone with the elements. The sidewalks have been swept clean, but the five o’clock shadow of new snow gives both the shoveled and the neglected parts of the square an uneven texture, like a floor in need of polish.

  “So what, then, should we all bang her together?” they ask her.

  “Is she game?” she replies. “I doubt it.”

  “She’s all about the cock talk.”

  “She’s not going to do it.”

  “You don’t think so?”

  “Talkers aren’t doers.”

  “Which are you?”

  “I’m a woman,” she points out. The young men hold her arms as they walk through pools of pure color and light.

  “Mmm. A woman, Hitler, capisc’?”

  “Listen, Ludovichina, since you’re a woman, would you like to get on your hands and knees and be, like, a slinking woman for our album cover?”

  “A slinking woman?” she sniggers.

  “We’re in love with you. You inspire us. Vuittone inspire us. We inspire Vuittone.”

  “You think you can play the part of a slinking woman? Our thinking is…We’ve got your imposing beauty, your ankles, and Louis Vuitton. And ‘Marcello’s’ record, his love for a real woman…”

  “You guys are crazy. Are you really making a record? Or are you just shooting the shit? Do you even have a contract, or are you just teasing me? Why don’t you ask Anna to do it?”

  “Women in Willy, they expect it, Ludovica. They want you to ask them to degrade themselves.”

  “I’m a woman in Willy.”

  “Naaaah. The Willy women, they’re all affected. They’re not natural, like you’d be. We’ll give you the shoes.”

  “The concetto of the cover: you be our model, foot model; we buy the shoes, Louis Vuitton; we take the pictures of your feet in shoes Vuittone.”

  “But do you have a contract?”

  “We do! ‘Marcello’ is with an indie in Rome who could work it out with EMI to get them to distribute it. But this is wicked shit, because it’s broken English rap, some far-out shit from this rich kid from Parioli, this kid here, who’s worse than the toughest Puerto Rican.”

  “Aiiight.”

  “He definitely looks like a Parioli kid to me.”

  “Exactly!” they giggle.

  “And you want to take pictures of me kneeling in the Louis Vuitton shoes? They’re expensive!”

  “We’ll find a way to bring them back to the store afterwards. You have to take risks, you know? And if it doesn’t work out, you’ve won a pair of shoes.”

  “We no pay you; we debase you for glory.”

  “But you really do have a contract?”

  “James Murphy is pushing us, networking-wise. The super-queer guy tonight, Sergio, he works with Gassa, the rapper. ‘Marcello’ was a producer on one of Gassa’s tracks. So in Italy we’re covered, and here in New York we have James, Nico, and some guy at Vice. Nico says he’s talked up our project with people at XL Mag in Rome. And in Milan Rolling Stone is on it. And then there are all of Gassa’s connections.”

  “I’ve never done a photoshoot.”

  “Oh, come on. It’s solid shit. I took portraits of James; I sold one to New York.”

  Every sign resonates in the snow, each logo an imperfection. Sbarro, Mamma Mia!, Wonderland, McDonald’s, Maxwell House, Barilla, JVC, Coca-Cola, M&Ms, Forever 21: circles, doodles, cheerful puppets, the tabloid news, the Nikkei ticker.

  “You have to hold me up or I’ll die!” she squeals, laughing, and then tells them about the blood clot. They greet the news as a kind of encouragement and tenderly stroke her back and her hips. They distance themselves from the stragglers and the disoriented tourists and stop to watch the ads. They’re silent for a whole minute. Then they escort her back to Berengo’s and ask her for her phone number.

  —

  SHE UNBUTTONS HER coat in the elevator next to an Asian couple in red slippers on their way back from the laundry room. Their clothing bags give off a pleasant chemical smell.

  She tidies up the room a bit, slides the window open, lets the cold air in and the smoke out, picks up the bedspread from the sofa she still hasn’t properly slept on. Berengo’s door is shut. After closing the window, Ludovica changes into Berengo’s tracksuit, which she finds stuffed between cushions, and gazes out at the snowflakes. They’re eerily still, or maybe they’re floating upward.

  “My bed, my fucking bed, at last.” She pulls out the extension, takes the sheets and the pillow out of the hall closet. On her way to the bathroom she hears an alarming thud coming from Berengo’s room, then a pause, then two more thuds. Nicola and his girlfriend grunt. Silence, more thuds, more grunts. She stands in front of the door, swallowing all her saliva, until the sense of danger recedes; these are consensual grunts, deliberate thuds. “Oh, nel bel mezzo della festa,” she says to herself, quoting Woolf, “ecco la morte.”

  Back at her window, she takes off the track pants and places her knees on either side of the A/C window unit, letting the warm air blow between her legs. She’s alert to the solitude of the hollow red air, the surfaces receding into a darkness busy with snow. She looks out at the top of the Times building, its roof floodlit and ominous. The thuds and grunts go on and then stop as she keeps playing with the warm gust of dusty air, lies down on the bed to climax, to relax, fall into sleep, barely able to pick up the pants and put them on and cover herself with sheets and the duvet cover.

  —

  A WAN MORNING, pale and white. Before meeting Cugino Hitler and his rapper friend at Louis Vuitton, La Sposina, book in hand, takes a self-guided architectural tour of the East Side’s postmodern skyscrapers. The little round temple at the corner of Lexington and Fifty-Seventh, Acropolis-like; the colorful indoor mall, straight out of the seventies (posted to Facebook mid–coffee break); the pink granite silliness of 550 Madison; Trump Tower, all its surfaces either pink or gilded or both, its lobby open to the public (a beneficial compromise) and overwhelmed with fountains and mosaics and mirrors. She doesn’t like what she sees, finds all of it repellent and distasteful, until she gets to the Dior boutique, housed in an angular building faced with teal glass, the work of a French architect. It has the look and tone of a tall woman standing in silhouette, her elegant profile wedged between two nondescript buildings, one from the twenties, the other from the eighties. Perhaps her taste for the French hasn’t disappeared entirely.

  She meets them in front of the large Vuitton windows on Fifth Avenue, currently an orgy of stuffed animals. Against a quilted velvet background somewhere between jade and moss, the animals pose in impossible shoes, their weirdly colored heels and platforms made of unexpected materials. Some of the animals are composed of scraps of fabric and leather and even metal studs, their grotesque forms imprisoned inside glass reliquaries. Roosters, beavers, deer—all of them not just dressed up in leather that strongly suggests S&M, but manufactured from it: ex-handbags, ripped suspenders, stray tassels. Their golden claws, which protrude from their cute little paws, are made of clips pulled off $150 key rings. Animal cruelty. A stuffed giraffe poses with three enormous scarves—red, black, pink—inside an oversized photo frame. Under the giraffe are two suitcases and one hatbox. On the sidewalk two kids laugh hysterically and point their fingers and jump on top of each other, trying to get a better look at one of the windows. Inside the window that provokes their fascination is a female mannequin in furs and stilettos, arranged in a desperate, kneeling position. She looks out toward Madison Avenue, praying for a lifeline.

  They take her by the arm to a Pain Quotidien. They wear identical furry white earflaps under their baseball caps.

  “Marcello” is quiet. “What’s with him?” she asks.r />
  “He’s excited. He thinks today’s the day, the shoot and everything. He’s superstoked, he’s nervous…”

  “Marcé, you could at least speak Italian with me.”

  “Baby baby baby, it’s my drive, it’s my ambition.”

  “See, we’ve entered the Vuitton orbit, and now we’re a little discombobulated. It’s just a bunch of Vuittoning in the Vuitton void-a-thon.”

  “Too much Vuittonné in my blue balls, bae.”

  “Marcello” asks for tea in his ostentatiously bad English, his order full of words she doesn’t understand. The place is packed: tourists, people who work in nice offices, maybe even at Condé Nast.

  The three of them eat tartines. Capers and mesclun leaves fall off the paté-smeared crostini onto their plates. The boys, whom La Sposina has christened Chip n’ Dale, tell her about their projects and discuss the possibility that her blood clot could become part of the artwork.