“Well, anyway, you really like these useless rich girls even when they don’t dress like rich girls.”
“That’s right.”
“The kind who only jerk you off.”
“That’s how I like it.”
“Bitches.”
“Well, I’ve seen worse bitches than that.”
Sergino and Nico don’t hang out often. Nico isn’t wild about Sergio’s passion for cocktails and barella and hotel parties in Midtown and the Meatpacking District. Sergio calls cocaine barella because he’s a social climber and uses Milanese slang.
“I know what you’ve been through with that asshole, so I’m not surprised about all this.” Then, emphatically: “Isn’t it wonderful that the two of us are here, you and me? I mean, look at the view, man. Isn’t it wonderful that we get to see this? Tullio doesn’t get to see it. No view for Tullio. What the fuck does he want? Does he want this view, too? He wants to come here and get the view?” It’s a dogged and random performance, very Serginesque, a barrage of insults and compliments that crescendo beautifully: “And what does Gustavo’s sexual life really amount to, anyway? Kissing his children on their mouths? It’s all wrong, zi. You’re only trying to right the wrongs, man, one hand job at a time.” This last part is spoken in a John Rambo voice. “Tullio can’t judge you. He’s Evil incarnate, that guy.”
Whenever it’s your turn to play the video game, Sergio’s on Twitter. He’s tweeting about “Darth Vader Bone Machine,” Tullio’s old nickname: “Keep your children locked away at home (you don’t have children, pederasti!).” He’s been obsessed with Tullio’s dick for ten or fifteen years.
He’s gone off and found a fancy paper straw in the cutlery drawer, and now he’s snorting coke from the little plate to stave off sleep. The plate reflects the glare from his track lighting. It’s gotten dark. He speaks in phrases borrowed from the English language, calques that sound perfect in translation. “You don’t deserve this,” he says. “You don’t deserve the Tullish Inquisition.”
“They made me feel evil, man, like I’m the villain.”
—
WHY DOES NICO always fall back on the Catholic paradigm and talk evil and villains? I know he enjoys his life; he likes it. Why is it that he’s always into discussing the way other people see him? Why does he do that if he really loves the way he lives?
—
LATER, AT DINNERTIME, he’s dozed off at his Irish friend Natalie’s house, because Edele keeps snubbing him. Natalie lives a few blocks south of Sergio in a loft with the warmest, whitest interior lighting he’s ever seen. The supersized windows face a narrow Brooklyn street and look north toward the Williamsburg Bridge, framing a single, elegant slice of the pale blue structure, its arches a perfect echo of the garlands of Christmas lights that run along Natalie’s walls in transparent rubber tubes, a cheerful mess that wends its way up a beautiful plant with big leaves and reaches all the way to the ceiling.
At Natalie’s he can pop some Xanax, doze off on the couch’s rough upholstery. Natalie wakes him up an hour later with a cup of jasmine tea and listens to the story of the hand job.
“…So Tullio tells me, ‘You shall not sleep with a married woman.’ ”
Then they go into the guest bedroom and lie down. The bed is perched on a high, wooden base that wobbles with their every movement. Nico repeats the hand-job story—this time with more details about the sex itself—as he caresses first her ankles, then her thighs, her bush, her clit.
You love this home, Nicolino, and she loves to get off on your sex stories, which you always tell in your calmest, most careful voice. She climaxes with an iiiiiiii sound, a weird noise that seems to lack an h. As she rests, you smell your hand. She’s with you now, it can’t be denied. She keeps her left hand on her belly, the age-old instinct to cover up stretch marks. She’s wearing a long vest the color of the apartment’s furniture and walls. She owns several of these, each a slightly different combination of white and beige pallor.
“I’m glad I could at least use this whole mess to make you come. It really hurt me.”
“Poor Nico, I feel so sorry for you.”
“I was messo in mezzo.”
“You’re so sweet, and people are always giving you such a hard time.”
“Stop joking around, baby.”
“Let me blow you right now.”
“No.”
“But tonight it’d be so right.”
“No, come on. I like our arrangement.”
“Okay, but just know that I would love to.”
“Baby, you know how much you like to idle.”
“Nico, my geisha.”
They lie side by side, their fingers woven together after they’ve brushed each other’s hips with studied carelessness. They’re pleased and proud of this little thing of theirs, where he tells the story and she climaxes and warmth is generated.
“It’ll work out, Nicolino. You’ll see. Because you’re good, you really are.” Nat is whispering benevolent words in his ear, her fingers in his fingers.
“No, my love, no. Just tell me you care for me.”
“I care for you.”
“I am good.”
“You are good.”
**See “Notes for The Happy Life of Nico Berengo”.
PART III
BRAINWASH
A half-empty pack of Gocciole ExtraDark on the kitchen island. Tullio sits on a stool, ready to dunk the remaining cookies in a glass of cold milk. His suit is still on, his tie folded over in his jacket pocket. Tullio looks at his wife’s ass and her shoulders as she loads the dishwasher. The dishes from the old house look smaller here, in this new, square kitchen, bigger than the original.
The girls—the five-year-old and the six-year-old—were put to bed while he was still out on his TMax scooter, riding down Via Salaria, passing on the right to try to make it home in time. He’s still upset by the first thing he saw when he walked in: unwanted toys spread out across the wooden floor by the entrance, abandoned in the dark. It’s an intentional act of desertion: the girls have left these toys behind. In the old house, the foyer was a neat rectangle—when Tullio walked in every evening, he felt as if every room and all their occupants were visible, tangible. But in the new house, the foyer extends around the corner, and now he feels a tinge of pain whenever he comes home: it’s as if the girls have vanished into the darkness, like a sunset you’ve just missed. The two buildings are on the same side of the same street, and on a recent Saturday, a very solemn afternoon, the girls loaded their favorite toys into a supermarket shopping cart and moved them into their new home.
I Maschi, the two sons, are playing in their room, and Esther…well, she’s almost a grown-up. The only babies he has left are the little girls, and Maria puts them to bed right on schedule. She does this on purpose: she knows how much her husband loves rules, how much he fixates on them, and here she’s managed to manipulate his predilections to his disadvantage. This afternoon the girls made jackets out of Scotch tape and rags and shreds of tablecloth. These are costumes for a fashion show slated for Saturday at their grandparents’ new home, the apartment they inherited from Gustavo. They’ll sleep there on Friday night to avoid interfering with the move, which will colonize the third Saturday in a row. Each new box they move reveals forgotten and surprising things: two hair dryers no one remembers buying; a set of matching Hawaiian shirts, ostensibly for weekend outings; battery chargers and extension cords intended for specific sockets, soon to be plugged into new sockets and stored in new containers on new shelves that come in new colors. The family will marvel at these old objects and their new trajectories, looking at them reflected in the new bathroom mirror and through the new kitchen window. Tullio, though, Tullio’s not interested in things.
Maria’s ass isn’t calling to him, not anymore. Right now, the woman it protrudes from is one with the sink. She’s all ass and straight, black hair done up in a bun. You can see her olive skin and her tiny, wide body, but you can’t see her
little nose, not from here. You strangle your mouth and your taste buds with the Gocciole, the extra-dark chocolate luscious and overwhelming. You find it shocking—or something close to shocking—that she insists on keeping her back toward you as she does the washing up. No contact.
Tullio crosses his heart with his thumb. It isn’t fair that he has to miss out on the girls’ debut as fashion models. His wife puts the detergent capsules into the dishwasher, and as he begins to get up, she tells him about the fashion show. “They saw how Mom worked the sewing machine and started improvising immediately: they found old T-shirts and started putting Scotch tape all over them, singing the whole time. Ta-ta-ta-ta-ta, diligent and enthusiastic.”
A tear wells up in his left eye, and as he tries his hardest to keep it from sliding down his cheek, the veins in his forehead throb unbearably. Maria has brought Sara and Betta’s big day to an early close, and the head of the family has been transformed into a cookie thief. Tomorrow the kids will see that their cookies are all gone, and they’ll have to make do with cornflakes.
Though these are the final moments of Sara and Betta’s paradisiacal youth—his last chance to smell the brilliant, innocent odor of their young sweat—the Tullios are done with children. Maria’s faith isn’t strong enough, so now, for the first time, they’ll start buying condoms. Will they have to hide their purchase from the vicar? It’s either that or he’ll need to start pulling out again.
I Maschi play football with their dad, and they’re decent at guitar, but they’ve begun to smell bad, and they’ll soon come into contact with desires Gustavo doesn’t want any Catholic boy to ever know about. (In his time he was a great French kisser, the hallway at school his base of operations. Out in the park, he’d always manage to sneak a peek at the older girls’ tits.) The boys’ formaggia—his eighth-grade term for the smelly residue between his toes—suggests that I Maschi are about to abandon him. Maybe the older one is already locking himself in the bathroom; Tullio isn’t around enough to know for sure. Esther, meanwhile, is a difficult woman, a sharp strategist, and she’s already mastered Maria’s fierce hand gesture, the one that accompanies the vafangul, mouthed but never spoken. The whole display freaks Tullio and his mother out.
I Maschi aren’t allowed to play their music too loud, so they have to use headphones, and these must be turned down low. Esther has her new room, with its own closet. She’s the only person in the family with her own room, but she’s not satisfied: she’s coming off three years of proud preadolescence sleeping in the storage closet at the old house, her furniture little more than a mattress on the floor of a non-space. She’d begged them for weeks to let her have her internal exile; her new room is so much more civilized.
Maria scrubs the sink, washes her hands with soap, dries them on her apron, exhales, takes the apron off, dries her hands some more on her sweatpants and her generous ass. “Will you put I Maschi to bed?” she asks.
“Yep.”
“If you’re going to finish those cookies, write a note on the fridge so I remember to buy more.”
“Just buy them.”
“No, please write a note. It’ll help my peace of mind.” She pulls a stray lock of hair back behind her ear and arches her brows—her classic gesture of superiority. Going part-time at work has given her the ultimate moral advantage; he’s to blame for asking her to do it in the first place.
“Okay, in bed in twenty. You do I Maschi; I do Esther. It’s better that way.”
“You don’t really need to put her to bed,” he murmurs as he looks down at the few Gocciole still left in the pack.
“We’ll just chat for a minute,” she says, and she’s gone.
He picks up three whole Gocciole, dunks them in cold milk, crushes them with a teaspoon, waits, drinks the milk, and picks up the little bits with his hand to get an even mouthful of cookies and milk. Then fills the glass up and starts over. He unfastens his belt and takes a breath. After round two, with four more Gocciole, there are only three left, and he saves these for later, for after the goodnights. He leaves the glass half full on the counter and writes “Gocciole dark” on the magnetic notepad on the refrigerator. He leaves his jacket draped over a stool in his American-style kitchen.
I Maschi’s room has no memory, no past, just winter clothes arranged neatly in the new lime-green chest of drawers, the toys they got for Christmas and from New York, the guitars, the old Acer desktop with the HD mic and the MIDI mixer and no internet connection—last year’s gift from Berengo, so that the boys could record their “minimal songs” as a “postpunk post-meaning duo,” as he put it. The band’s name is I Maschi. Their mother dresses them in vests or Cosby sweaters, but when they record or do a photoshoot with the computer camera, they put on their dark blue scarves themselves.
Tullius pulls the two boys away from the computer, switches it off after saving the song files, his movements sound-tracked by their little whines. He pushes them into bed.
He sits on the floor with his legs crossed, then lies down and stretches his legs. He lets out a sigh. “Let’s do the recap.”
“Yessir.”
“Homework.”
“Yessir.” Only the older one is answering; he’s responsible for the younger one.
“Teeth brushed?”
“Yessir.”
“Did you record any tracks today?”
“Yes!”
“Yes!”
“Good. What about outdoor activities?”
“No.”
“No.”
“Hmm. I wanted to tell you boys also that there’s a problem, a minor problem. It’s about the Eurock.”
The Eurock system will remain in use until the children begin to need real currency. Esther already has a privileged Euro-Eurock exchange rate, and now Marco is pushing to get the same deal. Tullius would love it if their kids spent their whole lives using only Eurocks. He’s had to restrain himself from introducing financial mechanisms into the system, like an interest rate that would increase along with their Eurock savings rate, making it more fun—and more inscrutable. But he wants the system to stay pure. Maybe, though, this is the time to put something into action. I Maschi want to buy an electric guitar, a Fender rip-off, for €400, or 8,000 Eurocks. Tullius and Maria hate saying no to their children without the possibility of redemption or at least ambiguity, but they also hate saying yes. So the rates haven’t changed: the reward for clearing the table after lunch is 2 Eurock credits, or 10 cents, meaning that the kids will have to save for an excruciatingly long time without incentives or changes in the underlying financial reality. If Tullio instituted an interest rate, though, unused money would make them more money. Wouldn’t it be fun to teach I Maschi something about finance?
“The problem,” he says, still lying on the ground, serious but also quietly amused, or at least content, “is that you don’t rinse the dishes before putting them into the washing machine.”
“No, Dad. It’s not like that!”
“Dad, that’s not it, exactly!”
“I’m just saying: you have to pay attention. Mom has started to notice. Don’t tell her I told you. Just pay attention.”
“All right.”
“All right.”
They always buy milk before dinner: 3 Eurocks. If he’s right about what they’re up to, what they’re longing for, they might end up needing to scrub the toilet—another chore. How much would that be worth?
As he steps into his own bedroom, lit by a dim lightbulb under a pale green lamp shade, Maria tells him that the girl from New York, Ludovica, ended up baby-sitting for a couple hours. “She just helped me run some errands. You know, because she has a car.”
“Did you pay her?”
“Cash,” Maria says in English.
That word, a residue of her hip-hop lingo, is doubly offensive here: accepting this young woman’s ludicrous offer in the first place (a thirty-one-year-old babysitter—the girls from church are fourteen) and then indulging in her own desire to act like a sign
ora with a driver-slash-babysitter.
“Pff,” she half-says, trying to keep him from going to the kitchen. “Where are you going? You already finished the cookies.”
When Tullio is upset he usually goes to the living room, takes a few deep breaths to try to somehow expel his anger from his body, says a prayer. The room, illuminated by a single floor lamp, hasn’t been consolidated yet. The kids’ toys have descended like an army, a multitude of mutilated dolls and toy cars and blocks. Their early childhood will take shape here, but something is already lost.
Berengo had ordered him to pray for his wife, and it felt so potent that it’s as if Berengo’s father, Morelli, the architect, was the one who had given him the advice. Tullio never seems to find the time to pay Morelli a visit; he doesn’t want to see him get old, though he always keeps him in his thoughts and his prayers. Nicola is a bad son: he uses the byline Morelli Berengo to trade on his mother’s family’s name, and in the end everybody ends up calling him Berengo.
There isn’t much in the room yet, other than the toys and the cardboard boxes labeled with the different elements of the old living room. What has been unpacked is modest but essential: a few candles, the old Bible open on its carved lectern, the photograph of the founder of the Comunità, the blessed palm hanging outside the door. The classical guitars, to be played during celebrations, will go into the closet. Morelli used to pray at night, both in the living room and as he walked along the corridor, watching over his wife and son. Now he walks in circles in his new apartment with its €1,000 monthly mortgage payment, which he’s able to afford because his in-laws sold their garage and gave them money for the down payment. This is the second time Gustavo and Maria have taken out a mortgage; they transferred the first one to his parents. Tullio is trying to pray for his children, but he keeps getting distracted. He prays for his wife: “that poor beast, that pet, please steer her right, Holy Father.” He prays for the many objects in his children’s world, constantly disassembled and reassembled, atomizing in cardboard boxes and then exploded again in Maria’s divine—no, demiurgic—hands in this new, bigger place.
Class Page 10
