Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen

by Alix Kates Shulman

  I walked into my hotel, too weary for midmorning. I was way off schedule. I would have to face the world twice today.

  “Any messages?” I asked at the desk.

  “No messages, signora.”

  I walked up the three flights to my room.

  Stockings and underwear were strung across the room on a portable clothesline. They stretched from bedpost to light fixture to doorknob, cutting off access to the chair. So much dirty laundry. I made for the bed. Why shouldn’t I take a siesta like the Italians? So what if I took mine before midday? I knew I ought to be giving myself a pep talk, studying the guidebook to regain my enthusiasm, picking out my afternoon excursion. But little puddles were forming under each piece of laundry dripping onto the discolored marble floor of my room, and I wasn’t up to tourism.

  So much had changed since I had first arrived in the Eternal City full of energy and resolve. On my husbandless high, I had slid into my new life with wide eyes and a loose schedule, taking Rome slowly like old wine. One sight a day, preceded by plenty of homework. Like James’s lady, Isabel Archer herself, I had gone about Rome in a “repressed ecstasy” over the “rugged ruins” and “mossy marbles,” wandering among ruins that had once been emperors’ palaces. I had sat in cafés behind dark glasses watching the crowds, or, tiptoeing through naves and apses, been dazzled by medieval mosaics and Renaissance paintings. To be taken for more than a superficial tourist while I wrote my play was all I’d wanted. “I’ll be living in Rome for a while,” I had written everyone at home, giving a genuine street address, not merely American Express.

  Now, after only a few months, I had apparently succeeded. Even when I conspicuously carried a guidebook, no one took me for a tourist any more. I was becoming a fixture at this café and that tabac. But far from being fulfilled by my permanent status, I had become exposed. The only purpose I could produce had vanished. If I wasn’t a tourist, then what was I doing here?

  People had various justifications for being in Rome. Frank’s old friends the Ericksons up at the American Academy were here on a prestigious grant—that is, Paul Erickson was. There were painters here, businessmen, and plenty of genuine tourists too, distinguishable by having departure dates. Some had eccentric purposes, like the twenty-one-year-old Oklahoman I met at the Vatican who, passing for a tourist, briefly attached himself to me, even courting me by the guidebooks. After a week of Alfredo’s for fettuccini Alfredo, Sistine Chapel for Michelangelo, Via Condotti for neckties, he finally confessed what he was up to. (Too bad; I had enjoyed being with such a seeming innocent in that sly old city, a tourist again myself.) We were exploring a recess of the catacombs together one Sunday, searching out ancient Christian bones with flashlights, when suddenly he touched my arm gingerly and threw himself on my mercy. His father, he said, had sent him abroad to get laid.

  No shit! I tried to imagine my father sending me to Europe to get laid. There was a smell of old martyrs in the tomb. I felt old and jaded.

  Now, he said, it was almost time for him to return to the States and he still hadn’t made it. Wouldn’t I help him out? I, married, with nothing to lose, an older woman, a Jewess, worldly, understanding—

  “You’re a sweet boy, George, but I’m off sex.” He probably didn’t even find me pretty.

  “I didn’t think you would. I just thought—I mean, I hoped—”

  “I’m really sorry, George.”

  “Oh well. It’s been very nice knowing you anyway, Sasha. I liked you.”

  If I wasn’t a tourist, then what was I doing here? The streets answered for me: Manhunting. Like secretaries on a cruise; like “career girls” in Washington; like college girls, nurses, entertainers, stewardesses, actresses, models—like all unclaimed women: looking for a man. No answer I could give was half as good as Nancy Erickson’s “my husband is at the Academy,” though what Academy wives actually did was of interest to no one. They kept house, visited the ruins, studied Italian or Italian cooking. Some took special courses arranged by the Academy for Academy wives. Even so, in some ways poor Nancy Erickson was better off than the starlets and models on the Via Veneto who all had that recognizable haunted look, as though they were being spooked. I couldn’t take my eyes off them. They were pure parsley, nothing but garnish—worthless without a man to adorn. If they sat alone in a café they kept looking nervously at their watches, pretending they were waiting for someone in particular. I knew that syndrome. Mannequin was the perfect word for them: somewhere they had given away their souls and now they had only bodies, lovely bodies, left to show.

  My program was different from theirs, but in form only. Mornings writing in some café; lunch; Roman culture in the afternoon; dinner. And always my book to read. They looked at their watches pretending they had a man; I looked at my book pretending I didn’t want one. But we were all waiting. As I observed the models from behind my book, I wondered if they knew all about me, too.

  “What are you doing in Rome?” “Studying Roman culture”; “gathering material for a play.” However sincerely I gave my answers, they all sounded as flimsy as “I’m an actress, temporarily unemployed.” The moment we appeared on the streets available, we were all tossed into the same salad, consumed fresh or deposited in the crisper to wait. It was impossible to make oneself out an exception. And so, as the weeks slipped by, I found myself spending more and more time like this, just lying around in my room avoiding the streets, watching the puddles under the laundry enlarging drop by drop into days and weeks, waiting. Waiting for messages; waiting for inspiration; waiting for my money to run out.

  The buzzer, like a shot of adrenalin, startled me off the bed.

  “Pronto, pronto”—my best Italian word.

  “Telefono, signora; signore Leonardo Bucatelli.”

  “I’ll be right down.”

  Quickly I inspected my face and ran a comb through my hair (impossible to leave the room without); then, avoiding the puddles on the floor, I picked my way to the door and dashed down the stairs to the lobby to answer the phone.

  I had met Leonardo in the American restaurant I sometimes went to for a hamburger with catsup and french fries or a chocolate milkshake. Reading The Portrait of a Lady while I ate, I had noticed out of the corner of my eye one of the lean-trousered Italians eyeing me through dark glasses from across the room. While my eyes stayed on the book, I tracked him with my antennae, getting ready to rebuff him if he sat with me. But when I peeked up, I saw him walking to my table with Gregory, the restaurant owner, for a proper introduction.

  As soon as we were introduced, Leonardo picked up my book, turned it over, and said in English but with the lilt of Italian, “Ah, Henry James.”

  “You know Henry James?” I asked surprised.

  “Leonardo’s half American and his wife is American,” said Gregory, as though that were explanation enough.

  “My former wife,” said Leonardo. He asked if he could sit with me, then ordered American coffee.

  I was impressed that he did not start in whispering sibilants in my ear. In the course of the conversation he mentioned he was leaving the following evening for Sicily.

  “Sicily! How lucky you are!” I said.

  “Why don’t you come along? I’ll be back in less than a week.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Sure. I have some work to do, but it will be nice to have company the rest of the time. Gregory can vouch for me.”

  For the first time in months I did not feel, sitting with a man, as though I were parading before the judges.

  Speeding down the famous coast into the fragrance of lemon trees and the soothing breezes of the Mediterranean, Leonardo told me his story. His father was Italian, his mother American. He had grown up rich in Italy, then gone to college in Florida. There he had taken a full-blooded American wife, transplanted her to Rome, and given her “everything.” He would never understand how she could, only months before, have left him for Miami. “Isn’t it a woman’s duty,” he cried, throwing his arms da
ngerously in the air on one of that shoreline’s spectacular curves, “to live where her husband lives?” When his hands returned to earth, one of them made for the steering wheel, and one of them made for me.

  I suppose it was foolish of me not to have made my position absolutely clear before setting one foot inside Leonardo’s white Alfa Romeo. I ought to have declared straight out: No fucking; I want to see scenery, not bed sheets. But as it was, the blue miles were speeding by and my explanation was still only an unconfirmed hypothesis. It could not, as I had hoped, go without saying.

  Finally I cleared my throat and began. (It’s always so hard to explain oneself.) “It’s not that I’m against sex on principle,” I heard myself saying. “It’s just that it usually makes for unpleasant complications.” When I looked over, Leonardo was eyeing me suspiciously.

  It did sound prudish—shades of Girl Alive—it was not what I meant.

  I tried again. “I mean, in principle I believe in free love. But in practice, I try to avoid it.”

  His look was getting worse—as though I were some sort of proselytizing religious creep. I still wasn’t saying it right. The sea breeze, free and capricious, mocked my failing efforts at precision.

  “What I mean is,” I tried one last time, shouting now to cover my uncertainty, “I like you very much and I’m sure we’ll have a fine time together in Sicily, but I never intended that we’d sleep together. I mean, can’t we take separate rooms and split the expenses?”

  It sounded absurd, like something out of a B movie or a teenage novel. Listening to myself, with the voluptuous smell of lemon trees enfolding us and now and then the rush of the sea, I was ashamed to find myself sitting inside a rather unpleasant American prude. I knew she was a fraud: there were times when she fucked like a bunny, yet now she was acting like a Midwestern schoolteacher, sounding positively dowdy. No wonder the poor driver looked uncomfortable. I wanted to expose her, but I knew I couldn’t say a word without becoming implicated. Well, she would just have to explain herself; I had all I could do to watch the speedometer and the treacherous road, on which Leonardo, finding himself a captive, was driving faster and faster in a futile effort to escape.

  Part way down the coast we stopped for the night in Sorrento, where I rejoiced to see my first unpotted palms. The air was lush as the song. I stood awkwardly aside as Leonardo spoke to the desk clerk in Italian; more awkwardly still when he informed me that there were no single rooms left, only double rooms at fifteen dollars apiece. “Do you really want a separate room?” He seemed almost as embarrassed as I. And what could the desk clerk be thinking?

  My position was untenable. “I guess we can share a room,” I said.

  In the room, we were both surprised to find only one (double) bed. “I’ll sleep in the chair,” offered Leonardo.

  It was insulting. Did I impress him as really so inflexible that I would insist he spend the night sitting upright in a chair? “That’s all right,” I threw back, moving off to the bathroom with my toothbrush and robe. “We can share the bed.”

  Lying next to Leonardo in the dark, sensing the hot breath in his lungs and the blood in his veins, I felt miserably misunderstood. How had I managed, despite such care, to wind up once again in this predicament? My life looked like a repeating decimal. Lying apart on my side of the bed was tantamount to declaring myself frigid. That silly prude in the car had contaminated me with her dowdiness, and now I needed a good cleansing.

  “Goodnight,” said Leonardo politely.

  “Goodnight,” I said. But longing to merge with my antithesis into a clean, new creature, I made some slight sign for Leonardo to approach me.

  Our encounter in romantic Sorrento was quick and gentle, of little moment in itself; but as we fell apart to sleep I felt it take on a special significance. For, as unwittingly as a Typhoid Mary or the lucky one-millionth depositor in the Bank of America, uncircumcised Leonardo Bucatelli obligingly becoming my twenty-fifth lover, had boosted my lifetime average up over one a year. Another first.

  The next day we drove down to Messina where there was a car ferry to Sicily. On the way, Leonardo inquired into my views. He listened thoughtfully as I denounced the double standard, sexual hypocrisy, and lechery. I used the largest words I knew to defend my position. He nodded gravely now and then, treating me with all the respect due a woman who not only fucks but insists on paying her own way. Mine, he said, was a rare and liberal doctrine. “I have always preferred intelligent, liberated women to the beautiful sluts on the Via Veneto.” Though he noted my words as pure philosophy, appreciating that he had stumbled onto a good thing, he had no idea what to make of me.

  Sicily meant Taormina, the pride of the travel folders, with perfume added. In the mornings in Sicily we took our breakfast together on the terrace of our hotel overlooking the sea, and after gobbling those rich native pastries that are made so poorly by comparison in Rome, we went separate ways, coming together again at suppertime. Enchanted by the Sicilian seaside I, who had never before seen free-growing cactus, steeped myself in the surprise of cactus fruit sparkling like garnets in the sunlight and the magenta profusion of bougainvillaea. Leonardo set off in the mornings in a business suit to act out PR Man for a prestigious American firm, and spent the afternoons in bermuda shorts marching through the streets of the picturesque village with his camera glued to his eye like any American, snapping his own native hibiscus. Nothing but sex ever passed between us.

  In order to avoid the stigma of being a whore, I posed as an intellectual, abandoning all pretensions to voluptuousness. It was scary to find myself in sensuous Sicily disarmed of my best weapon. Instead I used my second best. “Don’t you go anywhere without your notebook?” asked Leonardo. Oh, I was hooked on my book. “You know,” he said, joining me for an hour on the beach, appraising me coolly in that hot sun, “you ought to get yourself a bikini. Your body is really very nice. You should show it off a bit.”

  Discovered by some foreign connoisseur, like the Greek ruins of Sicily! Leonardo’s invidious compliments only provoked more of my bookish rhetoric, so inappropriate in that tropical setting. I turned my back to the sun to hide my mustache (if any) and took refuge in the warm water Ulysses himself was said to have sailed.

  Floating on the surface, I communicated with the outer world through a snorkel and studied the stylish fishes who swam up to my mask enticing me after them, only to wriggle effortlessly out of my reach after prizes of their own. Though my back burned, that warm water was my element and those fishes my paradigm. It was they whom I missed when the time came to ferry back through Scylla and Charybdis and drive on up the coast to Rome.

  I could tell by Leonardo’s manner as soon as I picked up the phone in the Alberto lobby that there was something wrong. I hadn’t heard from him once since we had returned to Rome, and now all of a sudden he had to talk to me about something “very serious.”

  “Is there something the matter, Leonardo?”

  “Yes. We’ll talk about it later. Do you want to meet me at the Ristorante Navona in an hour?”

  “An hour’s fine,” I said. “I hope it’s nothing terrible.”

  “We’ll talk about it at lunch,” he said ominously.

  Anyway, lunch. Whatever he wanted to discuss, at least today I wouldn’t have to brave a restaurant alone. “Ciao,” I said and returned to my room to fix myself up.

  Perhaps, I thought, slipping my feet into Italian shoes, I’d give the poem another try tomorrow after all; maybe the play would come too if I could loosen up.

  Leonardo, suntanned and manicured, sat chewing a toothpick and girl-watching behind his dark glasses. It was a little past noon—the most revealing hour under the cruel Roman sun. The café glittered elegantly in its finely wrought Piazza Navona setting. As I fluffed my hair and walked to his table, Leonardo popped up to pull out a chair for me. “Let’s sit inside,” I said, shading my face.

  Inside, I had the good sense to keep talking all the way through the pasta, so that we were
well into the meat course before Leonardo came to the point. Even during the small talk he had revealed his mean intentions by sprinkling the conversation with sarcasm like so much grated cheese. Now, despite visible efforts, he was barely able to keep the fury out of his voice.

  He wiped his mouth and put down his napkin. Was I aware, he asked at last, of being ill?

  Yes, I was.

  Then why, he demanded, had I not warned him about my disease before assaulting him in bed? Why had I not at least allowed him to take precautions? However the same stunt may have been pulled on me, there was no excuse for me to pull it on him, who had been nothing if not kind to me.

  I put down my fork, rising to the attack. “Wait a minute, Leonardo. Who assaulted who?  ” Vindication rose in my throat. “I told you as soon as I got into your car that I had no intention of sleeping with you.”

  “Yes, you told me your intentions. You and your high-minded theories. I was fool enough to fall for them.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  He gripped the table and pushed a reddening face toward me. “Your disease. I’ve caught it.”

  I relaxed, relieved. “But that’s impossible, Leonardo,” I said kindly, resuming the meal. “In the first place, what I have isn’t catching. And in the second place, even if it were, you couldn’t get it. It’s a female disease.”

  He looked at me with contempt. “Look, Sasha. You might as well face it. What I’ve got is gonorrhea, and I got it from you. Now, if you have any concern at all for the people of Italy, you will come quietly to my physician and take the cure.”