Class

by Francesco Pacifico

  “You should talk to my brother,” she says.

  Tullio prays silently: “You know what’s on my mind, Lord. But she was a child and before that she was just a thought in Your mind. And one day she asked her mother to let her try on her eye shadow, and now she can use it any way she wants, but Lord, you will make a saint out of me.” He finishes telling her the story: how he recited the rosary and hurt his knees; how his back solidified into hard cement; how, by the end of the long fifteen minutes, he was almost shouting his Hail Marys. He says he watched kids and grown-ups praying out loud on the moonlit field, everyone turned toward their own Mecca…the temple of God is the human heart…everyone bent in increasing effort, some crying. In the midst of this surreal chaos, he had a terrifying insight: God is mighty enough to come down and steal them away with His love, mighty enough to summon them all up into heaven right at that moment, just as they were, in shorts and t-shirts. This image, he says, seeing that she has stopped sipping her spritz, stopped looking away to watch the end of the practice, the boys dragging their small goals to the sidelines and finishing the night with dribbling drills, this image of God’s rapture—of the sudden disappearance of the membrane that separates the living from the dead—made it clear to him how vast His might could really be. His reasoning wasn’t totally cogent, he knew, but “if I could be that scared by a full moon and a bunch of poor people praying, just think of the fear our actual God might induce, our formidable God who made the heavens and the earth.”

  Luca comes up to the table. His mother has recently shaved his head, making it look even more like a ball. He has thick eyebrows and a round chin as soft and big as a third cheek. He walks like a boy, without a hint of ease or naturalness, a wholly contrived creature. “Coach is fu-ri-ous.”

  “You’re exactly like your father.” A daring statement, as daring as the pat she gives Luca on his butt, or rather his warm-up jacket, which is triple his size.

  “Naah,” Luca whines amiably. “Ludo, please, I’m begging you, can we go without showering today?” For a moment his father imagines his pubic hair–less child in the shower with her, with her loose, thick hair and her pubic hair of indeterminate shape and color and her areola of unknown width, and what kind of belly button does she have? But the moment passes, and Tullio wonders why Luca is asking his babysitter for permission and not his father.

  “You definitely need to shower, kiddo.”

  “Oh no, dad, please?”

  “Since they started going to this preppy club,” Tullio says, “they’ve become disgustingly preppy.”

  “They’re not spoiled. Right, Luca? What do you think?”

  “Not! At! All! Can I play PlayStation?”

  This is when Ludovica winks at Gustavo Tullio.

  “Fifteen minutes. Tops. Shower first. And don’t rush.” Dinner’s at half-past seven. They’ll be late, but he can’t bring himself to say no.

  Luca runs away. His father and his babysitter shrug.

  Marco plays center back. He is tall, and his hair is a big brown tuft. He hates his jacket, but he’s wearing it when he joins them at their table to avoid being ordered to put it on. He sees that Ludovica is still there. “You waited around for us,” he says, placing his left hand on her wrist in a silly, affected gesture. “That’s nice.” And then, to his father, “Hello.” He’s still gasping for air, while his milky sweat accumulates on the invisible blond mustache he’s never shaved. It’s at this moment that Tullio realizes that Ludovica, too, has an invisible blond mustache.

  “Hi, sweetheart.”

  “What are we doing? Maybe I’ll get a drink,” by which he means a Gatorade. He’s only a year older than Luca.

  “Yeah, go talk to the barkeep, cat,” Tullio teases as he hands him a two-euro coin. “Share it with Luca.”

  “All right, but only if he’s fast,” he replies, taking the coin from his father’s palm with practiced aloofness, unfazed by the transaction. Then to Ludovica, without losing his aplomb: “Are you in a rush, or will I catch you later?”

  Ludovica hugs him and ruffles his hair and kisses him on his head, then pushes him away. “They’re so cool,” she says to his father. “If only they knew that their dad was a PlayStation phenom,” punctuating their complicity with a sly wink.

  “You think they need to learn the awful truth sooner or later?”

  “I think so, yes.” She unbuttons her cardigan, and her shirt creases ever so slightly with her breathing and her joking, gentle shifts like a sea at dawn.

  “Okay, but you’re not allowed to tell them. I get to decide when they find out.”

  “I wouldn’t dare! Boss.”

  “Good.”

  “It’s so weird that I’m working for you. It feels like a hundred years ago that we first met…”

  Gustavo Tullio doesn’t react. He doesn’t even move a muscle, except for his jaw, so instead he glances at her mustache, that new discovery. A moment later she’s embarrassed and changes the topic. “So, why exactly did you stop playing football, then?”

  “Oh, you know, I just happened to see the way God sees us. I saw mortals on their knees in the position we all occupy when God summons us to heaven, when He separates us from life and from the vanity of all our possessions.”

  “Whoa. And you couldn’t play anymore.”

  “I told you.”

  “That’s far out.”

  Tullio laughs. “The day after the prayer, after lunch, seeing all the same people on the same pitch getting ready for another game like nothing had happened, I couldn’t bring myself to play. When I looked at them I couldn’t see them as footballers, only as the mortal souls they’d been when they were on their knees, their backs nearly broken because of this tremendous need they’d had for God. So I started to realize that human history, culture, all of it is just the effort to ignore that cemetery hidden behind the pitch.”

  Ludovica is unable to grasp every nuance of Tullio’s conversion narrative, but she honors him and his story with silence as a throng of children begins to surround them. The kids exit the pitches to the busy small talk of lawyers; the bankers’ cheerful, competitive banter; the vague shouts of rich mothers; the indecision of dusk, gasping in the cool, veiled sky.

  Later, as he says goodbye, Tullio knows better than to kiss her on the cheeks. But when he’s in the car with his kids he makes the mistake of asking them to sing “Rock and Roll Forever,” and he realizes that the song now reminds him of the babysitter. After dinner he will tell his wife that Ludovica has developed a morbid affection for I Maschi. “And we have always been clear about babysitters and their morbid affections. She cannot and will not invade the family sphere.”

  —

  A MORNING IN spring. Tullio is in his office in Finmeccanica, near Via Veneto, where he has never let anyone seduce him; always chosen the moral path; never allowed himself the leisure of an afternoon coffee in a bar with his female colleagues, even as springtime oozed its magic; never shown favor to one woman or another by taking her to lunch; never sought out an office wife as a recipient of some token or another of platonic love. Ludovica, who hasn’t worked for the Tullios since that night at the Futbolclub, texts him:

  “Gustavo, I need to talk to someone about a family matter, urgently. Can I stop by for lunch?”

  “Is everything all right?”

  “Everything is not all right. Please?”

  You email your colleagues to say you’ll have the revised Power-Point ready by four p.m.

  You tell her to meet you at the intersection with Via Veneto and you walk slightly ahead, make sure you don’t look at her too closely (lace shirt, hair loose, no makeup, the light blonde mustache that revealed itself as a relative of Marco’s preadolescent down), and lead her to a place far enough from work that your colleagues would never wander in: a sleek New York–style place called T-Bone Station on Via Crispi. You walk briskly and realize that a few steps back, she’d asked you how the kids were doing and you gave her some kind of answer, but you h
ave no idea what it was. Your strides are long: you’re trying to put as much distance as you can between yourself and Ludovica and the office while she apologizes and thanks you and tells you over and over again that she owes you big time. “I’d love to come visit I Maschi,” she says, “but these weeks have been a mess…I’ll tell you right away when things calm down…”

  “Oh, don’t bother, our weeks are full right now, too…Maybe when we get closer to spring…”

  “But it’s already here, thank God.”

  “Let’s not thank God for Christmas…”

  “But don’t you smell the air? It’s so sweet.”

  Sweet, healthy, cozy air—perfect for fucking in the park (a devilish memory, a flicker from a past Tullio and I once shared).

  Ludovica orders a cheeseburger, Tullio a bacon cheeseburger. The restaurant looks like the Wild West cleaned up for general consumption: leather booths, brown wood, brushed-steel lamps, black-and-white photos in tasteful frames. Her shirt is buttoned to the top; the round collar forming a kind of white mustache on her neck, an echo of the invisible mustache that laces her gorgeous upper lip. She thanks him again for agreeing to see her. “You shouldn’t thank me or apologize to me,” he says sternly. “Just tell me what’s the matter. Start by keeping both feet on the ground. If you have a serious matter, you should be serious and try to avoid a half hour’s worth of small talk.”

  Tiny tears appear in her eyes. “It’s embarrassing.”

  “What is? Talking to me?”

  “No, no. Talking to you is calming. It really is. The embarrassing thing is what I’m about to say. It’s nothing, it’s…”

  “Don’t say ‘it’s nothing.’ If it’s nothing, how can I help you? How can I take your side?”

  She smiles gratefully, her eyes gleaming with the faintest trace of tears, her neck tilted down and to the right. “You’re right. I know. It’s a bad habit.”

  “So?”

  “I have to tell you about Fofi, the guy who works in my bookstore. Or, well it’s my father’s bookstore, really…”

  “Don’t do that.”

  More gratitude and submission in her clear eyes, eyes slightly darker than her face, eyes that haven’t slept much, that may have spent most of the last few days crying. “Anyhow, Fofi—I don’t know what Fofi thinks of me at this point, but when I was in the U.S. he turned against me, and now I’ve come back and he’s been so rude. It’s like I’ve lost all my rights, all my liberties.”

  “Look at me. Don’t cry. Just tell me what’s going on.”

  “Sorry. No, no sorrys. The bookstore was my family’s business—my business—and now it feels like it’s his.”

  You ask her to tell you more about her year abroad, and you quickly hear enough to come to a decisive conclusion: “It’s your fault. The first thing you have to do is accept that immediately.”

  “What?”

  “It’s very likely that it’s your fault.”

  She lowers her gaze. “But…” She lets you hear her sighs and then a “why?” so soft it barely leaves her lips.

  “Ask your father to lay you off, to let you go. You shouldn’t have gone to New York.”

  “Why…what? What about Lorenzo? And his grant?”

  “No. You two didn’t think this through from the very beginning. Your husband should have found a European university and then just traveled back and forth…”

  You eat the cheeseburgers with your hands, and the conversation gets buried in drool and pork fat and melted cheese, in grease and oil that shimmers in the glare of the restaurant’s silver lamps. You stare at the grease that coats her lips and think of the stark smells you wish you could smell, smells that this lunch only modestly alludes to, her mouth and her mustache drenched in kisses, your head between her legs, your mouth glinting wet in the shadow…So when Ludovica sighs and hiccups and swallows her food in a messy, emotional burst and snot spurts from her nose too quickly for her to blow it back in, you grab a napkin to help her clean her face. It’s a father’s instinct. You pet her nose and her wet mustache through the napkin. She has my face—my shy, soft face—and you’re reminded of me. When you feel the cartilage of her nose through the napkin, you bend it.

  “Listen,” you say, handing her the napkin and leaning back in your chair, your hands under the table. “The only thing I can tell you is this: think about your responsibilities. Start there. How much did you make before leaving for the U.S.?”

  “Depends on the hours.”

  “Right, but it’s your family’s bookstore, not Fofi’s. So you should figure out how much it was, exactly, and how many hours were involved, and you have to decide if you’re willing to commit to the job, given those numbers.”

  “You know I really needed somebody to talk to me like this, openly and honestly.” And a few moments later: “Gustavo, I needed you, needed to hear you.” She starts weeping again. The burgers are gone. You drain the last of your Coke, put down the glass, and look at her.

  “So what is Fofi actually doing to you, specifically?”

  “I don’t know if it’s anything specific. It’s little things. The way he asks questions. He’s really demeaning. He always tells me not to let the espresso percolate too much and checks if I’m rinsing stuff before putting it in the washing machine. It’s hard to explain.”

  And it’s at this moment, as you order two espressos from the waitress, that you understand what Fofi sees in this immature, mustached girl, this girl who won’t do what she’s supposed to while he tries to run the store and has no choice but to want to treat her badly. Because Ludovica looks like someone who was designed to be mistreated.

  “What am I supposed to ask my father to do, Gustavo? To let him go?”

  “You should walk.”

  “And who would benefit from that? What happens when my husband gets to the end of his grant and we have no idea where his next grant is supposed to come from or what we’ll do next?”

  “You’re right. I don’t know. Listen to me.” The coffee arrives, and you both pour two sugar packets in—white for you, brown for her. “You’re in pain. You’re not doing well, and you’re feeling lost. I don’t know if I can give you any advice. I think that many of the things you’ve done are wrong, starting from…how can I put it, starting from where and how we met: why that apartment, why New York…What’s your rationale for any of this? How do you make decisions?”

  “Oh that was just a mistake, that’s all. It was…”

  “Okay, but it’s one mistake after another. They’re all linked. But I guess you’ve decided that I can tell you what things are really like.”

  This last bit, I can tell you what things are really like, is the same thing you used to say to me whenever you tried to convince me that I had to study harder in school, be better at one thing or another, pay more attention to my translations from the ancient Greek so that they’d actually make sense in Italian, “cultivate myself,” “become less ignorant.” “Sometimes you sound illiterate,” you’d say. “You have this cow face, you don’t understand anything, you ask the wrong questions,” but you’d say that only after you’d fucked me in the ass in the single bed you and your brother shared, though he was never home. It was always in silence: you’d muffle my face with your hand because your mother was in the living room, and I couldn’t climax, but you could. All this came back to you with total clarity, in vivid colors, when you told Ludovica that you could tell what things are really like, and so you find yourself saying something totally different from what you’d planned to say. When you remember me and us you feel weak, and instead of saying to Ludovica “You should make your father understand that Fofi is a douche bag and he’s taking advantage of the family,” the sentence you had planned, you come up with something totally different: “You remember what I said about giving up football? You want to know the really ludicrous thing? And then we can change the subject?”

  “What?”

  “I didn’t even want to get Sky Calcio on TV at home
.”

  She’s laughing, relieved.

  “But then, at night, after I put the children to bed, when everyone is asleep”—by “everyone” you mean your wife, but you’re too embarrassed to mention her—“I sneak into the kitchen to stream games from pirate sites…Anything: football, South American football, basketball, American football. I’m disgusting.”

  For a minute you feel free. She smiles and with a warm roll of her eyes confirms that this habit you deem so unacceptable is of course anything but. “Lorenzo streams games, too.”

  “Is he back in Rome?”

  She lowers her head, and your posture changes. Your fingers tense when you pick up the credit card receipt. She thanks you again, and you both get up from the table. You don’t say anything until you’re holding the door for her: “Sure,” coldly, through clenched teeth. Then you step out into the day’s unforgiving warmth, into the sweet odor of armpits flowing through the city center and the thwack of tourists’ flip-flops and the invisible smolder of their naked shoulders.

  —

  BETTA SITS IN her father’s arms. She’s wearing a teal dress, and after gazing at her father’s face for a while, gives him a kiss on the lips. Sara walks in circles around the living room, snorting and pointing at her wrist because Betta is late, though it’s unclear for what. I Maschi are in their room getting ready for an afternoon performance for their father, who has just returned from Brussels, where last night he had his first online chat with Ludovica.

  Esther is out in the city, shopping with Maria. Spring makes its way into the house through the open windows and carries the scent of Maria’s new garden. Betta’s fresh legs under her dress push up against Gustavo Tullio’s big thighs, clad in Bermuda shorts. Betta is the only one who hasn’t yet abandoned the paradise of total childhood. Sara has already changed. She stands by the chair and addresses her father: “Dad, I don’t think it’s appropriate for you to keep kissing Betta when you don’t kiss the other kids.”