Class

by Francesco Pacifico

  “I’m Gustavo, by the way,” he shakes her dirty hand. “Oh, no need to stand up.”

  He sits down and faces her. The pancakes are good, and they discuss the weather, the surprisingly sunny days. The tracksuit man’s sad appearance is calming. She spreads butter on her pancakes and drenches them in maple syrup. Her head is light.

  Suddenly, Gustavo Tullio is preaching: “Ludovica. Well. Now that it’s just the two of us here, I must tell you straight away that I’m sincerely uncomfortable being here with you, like this.” He continues, encouraged by her shy smile. “I find it immoral.” He pours her more orange juice, then some coffee. “I find it immoral that Nicola is hosting married men and women, in this, well, combination.”

  Ludovica smiles, swallows, spreads more butter on a bite of pancake, just happens to lick the messy knife. “Sorry,” she just happens to say.

  “You are as much a victim as I am. I hadn’t been advised of your presence. Otherwise I would have said no, stayed somewhere else, out of respect for you and your husband.” Gustavo licks the wet crumbs from his fingers.

  “What do you mean, exactly?”

  He sits upright, his arms glued to his body, cutlery again in hand now that he’s wiped his drool-covered fingers with a napkin. Chews. Drinks. Talks. “I’m sorry to take the liberty of bringing it up, but, well, I have three daughters, so it’s an occupational hazard, no? To raise the issue of how fair it is for a woman to find herself in such a predicament.”

  “You have three daughters. That’s so lovely, I’m jealous.”

  “If you were my daughter, well, I’d pull you up by the ears.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  He’s silent for a moment. Ludovica stares at her plate.

  “You sound like a real father. You’re making me feel ashamed. I feel like I can’t look at you,” she laughs. “Is it the same for them? For your girls?”

  “Forgive me. I shouldn’t have.”

  “May I raise my eyes?”

  “Of course you can.”

  La Sposina slowly lifts her head and knows she’s trying to be liked. She looks him in the eyes, sees his embarrassment, sees how he quickly lowers his own head and stares down at his plate.

  “How old are your girls?”

  “Well, one of them is not so little anymore. She’s thirteen. A few weeks ago she wanted to go to a Fabri Fibra concert, but I said no. Her mother loves hip-hop, though, so she ended up seeing the show.”

  “Her mother! Why did you say no?”

  “It’s vulgar.”

  “Yes, that’s true. And a bit misogynistic.”

  “I agree. Her mother hasn’t told her that she went. She’d go crazy.”

  “Are there many rules they have to follow?”

  “Many,” he says with a laugh.

  “I can picture you at home. You have authority.”

  You search his eyes for the smallest shifts. Your dialogue—composed, gentle, mature—reminds you of Ozu: an awkward father, his mannered gestures and his careful way with plates and glasses, the short sentences, the exclamations partially repressed, less spoken than coughed up.

  “We don’t listen to Fabri Fibra at home. I’m sorry, forgive me for insisting on this, but Nicola is crazy. He left two married people alone in the house—not good manners, I don’t think. I have five children, and he’s the one who complains about getting panic attacks.”

  “I have them, too.”

  “You, though…I’m sorry, but I have to say this…I don’t think Nico slept in my room last night.”

  “Oh, you’re laying it down hard.” She tries to make eye contact and manages to hold it for a beat, but he is still very interested in his plate.

  “He probably went to visit some lover of his in the building.” Tullio must be waiting for his plate to nod at what he just said; that’s the only possible explanation for why he keeps staring at it so intently.

  “Please, Gustavo…”

  He continues to bend over the table, and you can’t help but smile at the rare curls and endless skin on his head.

  “He didn’t sleep in my room, anyway. And I must tell you,” he tells his plate, with the firmness of a man from another era, “that you should think this over. Does it really do you any good being here? This home is no good.”

  Sunday: viral marketing in a coffee shop. It’s just after ten, four p.m. in Italy. Right now your mother is napping in the bedroom, right now your father is looking over the bookstore’s books and his investments as he listens to football commentary live on the radio in the living room, a blanket between his lap and his laptop.

  “It’s settled, Daddy,” you write. “I’m flying back. I changed my tickets.”

  “Oh what splendid news. It’s a gift, my love.” And straight away: “Use my credit card. You still have my information?”

  There’s a one-way ticket for €630 but via Warsaw, so you scratch it. Then you scratch all the nondirect flights. The cheapest one-way flight today is €950, but you want it to be expensive, you want your father to pay dearly for the privilege. You look at return tickets, so that in case the sadness lifts, you can come back to New York…when? Let’s say one month from now? You buy a round-trip ticket with a February 20 return date, €1370 euros, nonstop, Alitalia/Delta. You’ve never dared to pay this much for anything before, and you feel a pang of revenge.

  Then you get to work. “We wouldn’t want to rob you of the pleasures of your first time,” you write in the introductory post on a new forum on women’s razors. It’s you—yeah you, La Sposina, Ludovica—it’s you who writes things like: “A brand-new campaign, straight out of the oven! Yummy!” and “The account? Pfizer. The goal? Testing out their new web community: a laboratory for the study of sexuality.” You draft emails for the buzz-marketing forum. “Sex is everywhere; everyone’s talking about it,” you write with your belly in mind (the belly Berengo got sticky), you write with Lorenzo’s hands in mind, enmeshed between your legs after your sad, comic performance. Your eyes squint and your throat hardens, the skin on your face softens and heats up, tears wet your cheeks. You wipe your eyes and your nose with a handkerchief. “There’s not much talk of sex education, though. And now’s the time. Have fun!”

  —

  IN THE AFTERNOON, you stare out the window at a skyscraper. It stands there, posing for you as you take a picture. In the brilliant winter light it seems to contain every hue at once: turquoise, pink, eggplant, tangerine, cobalt, copper. The glass panels seem inconsistent—some are fuchsia, others are green—and the hues and flares pile up, exaggerated and tacky, inspired and affecting. Further south is the wide, brick Belvedere Hotel, its windows pimpled with air conditioners. You snap more photos and apply the essential filters. No frame, no background, just a wall of ACs and tiny windows.

  Berengo’s not coming home tonight, and you sleep alone, slightly scared.

  —

  ON MONDAY, THE sun is beautiful. “When most Italians look for vacation souvenirs, they usually choose local food. Do you fit the description?” This is you, your voice. “Do you buy pesto with capers, or pesto with wild fennel, or anchovies in oil and pepper, or salt-baked sea bass, or jam, or Sicilian chocolate bars, or…?” I let you write all this because you are this. You’re the woman who jerked off Berengo, the lead actress in that little scene in the boutique directed by your sweet, melodramatic husband. “Now it’s your turn! Post your favorite local dish from your region!”

  It’s late, and Nicola isn’t back yet. You haven’t even managed to pull the blinds closed, because you think you have to keep watch. You’re hypnotized by the hollow tank of air that separates you from the other buildings nearby. You take some weed from Nico’s little box, but smoking alone proves a mistake. You have a horrible thought: of the thousands of people you’ve seen throughout your entire life—on buses, on trains, in restaurants—how many of them died the day you saw them? You don’t close your eyes until four in the morning.

  —

  TUESDAY. T
HE SNOW begins to fall before dawn, you feel the harsh pain of PMS. Is it a delayed period due to the distress of the last few days? It begins to drizzle at nine: clouds linger over the top of The New York Times Building, its spire lost to gray blankness. It hasn’t rained in weeks, and at three p.m., it’s still raining. The snow begins to melt.

  You work on the Adidas and Colgate campaigns in bed, then fine-tune the copy for Dash Stain Remover: “Bad news, guys—this promo is for girls only.” It’s you who’s writing this. You studied the philosophy of language, la Societè du Spectacle, the ability of monkeys to figure out other monkeys’ intentions. And then instead of getting your PhD, you began to work for your professor’s private enterprise, researching viral marketing and analytics and buzz. Everything seemed to fit. Now, in bed, after a deep but complicated sleep, after an early afternoon nap in the deserted apartment, you work. You write: “There are so many campaigns for boys out there, but with this product, it’s the ladies we’re targeting first, because they’re the ones who do most of the chores.” (You are La Sposina. You’re the protagonist in a bourgeois story that concerns me only tangentially, which I’ve been asked to observe. I honor you, I may even like you.)

  You take the elevator down to the laundry room in the basement to wash your clothes before tomorrow’s flight. Your belly aches. You sit down on the carpeted floor. You take the elevator back up as soon as the fear gets to you. You go back down, put the cold wet clothes in the drier. You go up, wait fifty minutes, go down. The clothes are warm, some of them even hot, and you stick them in the hamper at random, without folding or ironing.

  Going up and down in the elevator for hundreds of feet at a time has left you dizzy. Every time you step off, the floor is unsteady under your feet, like a soft earthquake. The windowless space is geometric, abstract, hanging above the earth at an ever-changing distance according to some immutable logic.

  Nicola comes home in the evening, but he won’t talk to you. He withdraws into his bedroom, and you remain unseen behind the screen, unsure of how to tell him you’re leaving. You place two pillows under your belly before you fall asleep.

  —

  IN THE MORNING you put away the extension, return the pillow and the eye mask to the hall closet. You brush off the couch and spread two bedspreads over it. This home, you realize, will endure without you, and you wave the view goodbye. You bought a bag at American Apparel that now sits zipped up on the glass coffee table. You admire its fullness, its air of finality. I’m finished here, you think: I won’t be coming back to New York.

  And now, the trip: the filthy proximity to strangers, your own inescapability, another day without human talk. You couldn’t bring yourself to pick up your things from Lorenzo’s because it would have seemed too final. It’s less fraught this way: you’re leaving them behind for him as collateral.

  You abandon Manhattan by train, losing what was, until just now, your city. You bury your face in your scarf. You travel through Brooklyn and Queens, through neighborhoods full of unlucky black people—too scarred, you think, or too unhealthy, or too poor, or none of the above, in worn brown suits—who survive in this city without any privileges, this city you’re being forced out of.

  The Delta terminal at JFK resembles a bus station. Institutional blue carpet, gray wallpaper, ambiguously quiet, quiet children and pacified children and terrified children, the shuffling of pages, the dim yellow light, unsmiling adults drinking coffee from huge paper cups, the smell of hand sanitizer, the narrow aisles no one complains about, bathroom stalls whose metal doors begin twelve inches above the floor—you hide in one at the end of the row and put in a tampon. You drink a caramel frappuccino and think of it as a “consolino,” your mother’s word for the dessert she’d buy you when you were having a bad day.

  When you ask for a glass of water to swallow your Ibuprofen in the middle of the sky, the American flight attendants smile and call you “honey.” The night is short but uneasy, and the plane isn’t one of the newer ones, the ones with individual TV screens. You read Vanity Fair and barely sleep. Taking off in the dark was distressing, so the whole flight feels like a long emergency landing. Two hours before landing, you fall asleep for real. You wake up when the flight begins its initial descent to Rome. You fall asleep again, and when the belly of the plane seems to scratch the earth, you wake up with a gulp, convinced you’re dying. Then you realize you’re home.

  PART II

  THE UNHAPPY LIVES OF KEPT ROMANS IN NEW YORK

  They sleep together on the sofa in the living room, he and Ludovica, with their feet pointing toward the window, the same position he takes whenever his parents come to visit and colonize the bedroom. Nico stares into the void outside the L-shaped window. The buildings look like thin glass reeds floating in a lake of air and light, the landscape disturbed from time to time by private helicopters and planes on their way to Newark.

  The night’s dusty redness has vanished, the predawn sky clear and still. He turns carefully onto his side to figure out how close she is to waking. She lies facedown, with her mouth agape, her cheek nestled in the sheets, and her forehead against the hem of the pillow. He’s convinced that if he could always feel the way he feels at this moment, he’d be a saint. The way he feels toward Ludovica is the way God sees women.

  He’s sitting like a girl now, his arms around his knees, his legs pointing left, his right foot pointing down. He stares at Ludovica but doesn’t touch her: her round shoulders, the generic mass of chestnut hair. Her forehead looks more sloped when she’s asleep, a little more aggressive. Over night, the fabric has carved small rivulets into her skin. Her face is serenely inhuman, a little bit of crust around her right eye, her mouth dirty, letting out the occasional wheeze or gust of rank morning breath: his guest is a creature, a living being. Nico recites the Lord’s Prayer, gets up and takes a shower without waking her or Gustavo Tullio.

  He pulls a razor blade from its little cartridge using the rubberized metal handle, squeezes some shaving gel into his hand, rubs it on his head and his cheeks and starts shaving his scalp to prepare for today’s lunch, where he’ll introduce James Murphy to Gustavo. As of now, Tullius remains unaware of the project known as The Happy Life of Nico Berengo, of the way Murphy is trying to tell his story, of the pages and pages of notes the author’s taken about him.**

  He rides the elevator down to the gym, an iPad in his hand and a duffel bag with clean clothes hoisted over his shoulder. He runs on the treadmill for half an hour, exchanges friendly glances with the familiar faces, showers again with lemon-scented soap, buys a bag of cookies from the vending machine in the lobby, and finishes it by the time he’s standing in line at Starbucks, waiting for his coffee.

  Today is a slow day. He needs to check his bank account to see if he can afford presents for Gustavo’s children: the €6,000 from his father’s last bank transfer, for the fourth quarter of 2010, has gone quickly, and the first payment of the year usually arrives a little late; his father needs time to divest. Checking the account always makes him feel anxious. He sees that the €260 for his Coldplay interview has finally come in, so now all he needs to know is whether Tullius, who has strong opinions about parenting, will bless Nico’s desire to buy his children presents. Later that afternoon, he’ll sit down and map out his review of Kanye and Jay-Z’s upcoming album for Vice Italy. He’s decided to describe it track by track without actually listening to it, to show that the Society of Spectacle doesn’t actually need to produce or consume any actual works of art. He texts Tullio and tells him he’ll meet him at FAO Schwarz at 11:30.

  He strolls through the park to the reservoir, thinking about Jay, Kanye’s mentor, then about the woman he’s left in the living room. What does it mean for someone to be married? What kind of damage did he do last night? It doesn’t seem possible that vague third parties could find themselves in trouble simply because of a soothing, friendly late-night conversation, unconducive to the spread of STDs and utterly lacking in malice. He brings his bag forwar
d to keep his erection hidden. Why does such a sweet, pleasant thing—sex between two people who haven’t been formally assigned to each other—feel so destabilizing?

  He recaps the sex he’s had over the last week with growing arousal: beating up Vera, Edele’s breasts, and now Ludovica. His face is stolid and dignified as he walks, his mouth shut tight. He’s breathing through his nose but now he’s gasping, so he stops, opens his mouth wide, and stretches out his arms to fill his lungs. He’s shifting around in his acid-green down jacket, and his mind returns to the scene last night, when Ludovica stuck a hand down his underpants. This is how he loves to do it: no passion, no aggression, and total availability—a circumvention of everything fraught.

  —

  YOU LEAD GUSTAVO Tullio—Tullius—through aisles filled with jigsaw puzzles, Lego sets, stuffed animals, board games, toy cars. When I see you there, on the second floor, I see you as a composite image, stitched together across different times and different aisles. In the eighties, your parents would always come here at the end of their trips to buy presents for everyone back home.

  You dissuade Tullio from buying a Chicco DJ Guitar for Sara, who is six years old. It’s a flimsy piece of plastic with many red, blue, and green keys, appropriate for children between zero and thirty-six months of age. Sara will learn to play guitar like other sisters do: from her older brothers, who are ten and eleven. As you walk along the crowded, colorful aisles, you hear Tullio’s detailed account of his children’s likes and dislikes. “Sara, she wants to fare l’americana: the night before my flight, she asked if we could cook burgers together, just the two of us. She moved the processed cheese sottiletta onto the patty after I’d put it on the plate.”