My Mother-in-Law Drinks

by Diego De Silva

  From behind her incredibly cool passion-violet-orange Alain Mikli glasses, Ale shot me a sidelong glance captioned: “So get a load of this guy.”

  “He must be a conscientious objector,” I commented aloud.

  Alessandra Persiano emitted a raspberry of a snicker confined entirely to her nose. For a moment the receptionist remained motionless, then he started up again, completed the necessary series of steps to assign a hotel room, and finally handed over the electronic key card, though not before he’d informed us (with his face turned in the opposite direction ) that the card (that’s right, he used the English word, with a pretentious mushy French r in place of a proper trilled Italian one) also turned the power in the room on and off, so we should be sure to remember to insert it in the appropriate slot.

  This wasn’t the first time that I’d encountered this misguided sense of discretion on the part of hoteliers. As if there were a rule book somewhere that stated that couples without luggage asking for a room must necessarily be having some kind of illicit affair. Maybe it’s the time of day that arouses suspicion; who knows. But the reception desks of the world are crowded with clerks who act all discreet while ushering you through the check-in process, so that when they’re done with you, you head for the elevator with your head bowed, perhaps with your wife hurrying after you, asking what’s your rush.

  Just in case you’re wondering whether I didn’t feel like a little bit of an idiot for agreeing to the idea of going to a hotel to rub up against each other when we could have just as easily holed up at home (and, as we say in Naples, enjoyed ourselves on the cheap and cheerful): yes, in fact, I felt like a complete idiot. In part because the room cost something like 190 euros, with breakfast included, one of those rooms with satellite TV that welcomes you by name when you walk in and a pseudo-Montblanc pen on display on the nightstand, the kind that the minute you see it you say to yourself: “I’m taking that with me.”

  But Alessandra Persiano had decided to indulge in a naughty whim to place a narrative seal on our recovery as a couple (you would not believe the emphasis that women put on narrativizing the events of their love lives), so there was no way I could safely object. Among other things these kinds of hotels, where they’re always holding conferences on topics like The Consequences of Secondhand Smoke on the Pathologies of the Middle Ear, or else Repersuading the Badly Advised Client: What Investment Scenarios? with that distinctive patented technoluxe gloss, always get on my nerves after a while. Because instead of putting you at your ease, they force you to act like a government official traveling on business.

  When you walk into those earth-tone rooms, where there’s a button for everything and the piped-in chill-out music that you’d expect from a CD that comes free with a shrink-wrapped newsweekly like L’Espresso follows you into the bathroom along with the pervasive scent of lavender, you inevitably begin to assume certain preprogrammed behaviors, like taking off your jacket and rolling your shirtsleeves halfway up your forearm, brushing back your hair, and loosening your tie, even if you don’t wear one.

  It’s a typical example of environmental mimicry, the kind that can temporarily turn you into a total asshole, so that if you don’t take a moment to get your head screwed on straight again, you might end up walking into an elevator a short while later and running into an old childhood friend, who you haven’t seen in thirty years and who now works there as a bellboy, and pretend not to recognize him, just for instance.

  Still, I have to admit that the sexual benefits obtained in return for the investment were well worth it, and then some.

  The minute we shut the door behind us, Alessandra Persiano wrapped herself around me with such greediness that I didn’t even have time to slip the electronic key card into the slot to turn on the electricity, and so, not knowing what to do with it, I held it in my hand for at least the first five minutes of copulation, until she noticed it, tore it from my grasp, and threw it over her shoulder with a defiant and ultra-erotic backhand that seemed as if she’d done it just to say to me: “You poor middle-class idiot imprisoned in your minor-league insignificant preplanned mediocre life, in this moment of total spontaneity, what are you doing, clinging to reality? You’re worrying about the key card for the light? What are you thinking, that you might not be able to find it when we’re done (i.e., you’re already thinking about afterward)? Forget about the details, to hell with them, ignore them, they don’t matter: we’re about to destroy all that pointless nonsense right now.”

  A very nice speech, no doubt about it (at least I assume it was: because all Alessandra Persiano actually did was throw the key away, if we’re being honest); in response to which, nonetheless, it would have been child’s play for me to say: “So did we really need to spend 190 euros to perform this fabulous iconoclastic act?” But the sex was going so remarkably well that not even my dialectical autism could spoil it.

  The really memorable thing is that, once we were done with the first session, and I mean immediately after, like maybe a minute later, not even enough time to go freshen up a little, Alessandra Persiano had already climbed back in the saddle on top of me (just for fun, really, playacting at being the insatiable nympho, I’m guessing) and I, thinking that I would need at least a couple of the delectable gianduia chocolates available on the nightstand to recharge my batteries, felt myself practically respond on command, astonished (because I’m astonished every single time) at how my old playfellow had just confirmed himself to be a stubborn freelancer, refusing to accept full-time positions and always doing more or less what he pleases (and in fact when she felt herself suddenly tipped off-balance by the upstanding handbrake, she commented, her eyes widening: “Oh, Vince’, holy crap”).

  So anyway, if the purpose of that impulsive nooner was to capture and preserve the love that we’d rediscovered on the street and perhaps persuade it to stick around (because love, by its very nature, is something that comes and goes freely: the challenge is to trust it to return, and not pull any stupid-ass moves while it’s away), I’m not saying we nailed it, but we were close.

  But before delving into the story of the incident that just a short while later came close to sending everything to hell in a handbasket without any hope of remediation, I think it’s appropriate to report the text of the postcoital conversation that began after the regulation five minutes of depression that overtakes virtually every woman after her second orgasm (when she turns over on her side with her back to you as if you’d somehow offended her, or else lies flat on her back staring at the ceiling, catatonic, and you lie there, waiting for who knows what, without any idea what the fuck to say now).

  Ale: You know what just occurred to me?

  Me: No, can I think it over for twenty minutes or so?

  Ale: Idiot. Something that my mother told me a while ago.

  Me: It’s all fine, as long as it’s strictly recreational.

  Ale: You’ll like this.

  Me: If you tell me, I might.

  Ale: All right then. When my parents met on the street, I mean whenever they ran into each other by chance, they’d fall in love all over again.

  Me: Get out of here.

  Ale: Really. And I’m not talking about who knows how long ago, they’d already been married for twenty-five years, give or take. They practically lived separate lives, at home they didn’t pay all that much attention to each other, they talked no more than the union minimum required, they squabbled over trivial matters, the way people do when they can’t stand looking at the same damned face day after day. And yet, this miracle would happen: all they had to do was meet by chance in the street and they’d start courting like a couple of kids. Mamma told me that a thrill would sweep over her, an urge to go somewhere and have lunch together, to have him take her to pick out a dress, to go back home and get along.

  Me: What about your dad?

  Ale: Same thing! Mamma says that he got all awkward and funny and clumsy; h
e’d ask if he could walk with her, if she had any other plans for the day; if he had plans of his own, errands or appointments, he’d immediately cancel them . . . in other words, he became heartbreakingly solicitous and loving, like a young man courting and afraid he’ll be told no.

  Me: Hey, your eyes are starting to glisten.

  Ale: It’s just that it strikes me as so . . . rare. Like a blessing reserved for the two of them alone.

  Me: That’s true. But did they run into each other by chance all that often?

  Ale: Well, I don’t know about often. It happened occasionally, I guess. But it was something completely spontaneous, you know what I mean? Not only did they fall in love, they acted as if they’d just fallen in love for the first time.

  Me: So what you’re telling me is that you and I just made a remake of the way your parents used to fall in love in the street.

  Ale: Well, yes. More or less. But I only realized it just now, when I saw you on the street before I wasn’t thinking about it at all. And . . . and there’s something about it that I like. It’s like a bridge between me and my folks. That is, I meant to say, between my folks and us.

  Me: Eh, I’m pretty sure that if my father had run into my mother in the middle of the day, the most he would have said to her would have been: “Are you sure that Vincenzo went to school today?”

  It was at that exact instant, just as Alessandra Persiano—after the moment of astonishment that always comes over her after I’ve spouted one of my more memorable pieces of bullshit—was about to burst out laughing, that the sound of another text message coming through on my cell phone greeted our ears.

  Uh-oh, I thought.

  I lay there frozen, stretched out on that fucking 190-euro-a-night bed, mentally kicking myself for having forgotten once again to turn off or silence that miserable fucking spy of a phone, while Alessandra Persiano’s profile took on the suspicious angularity of solid evidence.

  “Message for you,” she said, definitely hostile. “Another one.”

  “Eh?”

  “What’s wrong, didn’t you hear the chime?”

  “Ah, my cell phone, you mean? Sure.”

  “Well, why don’t you check and see who’s writing you?”

  “I don’t feel like getting up.”

  Wrong answer: because immediately, as if I’d spoon-fed her the answer she’d been waiting for, she started to get up herself.

  “Okay, I’ll get it for you.”

  I promptly grabbed her arm.

  Another obvious screw-up.

  She dropped her gaze to my offending hand, then looked up at my face and stared at me, glassy-eyed.

  “Come on, who gives a damn about that,” I said, trying to pull her toward me, but I must have seemed absolutely ridiculous in that attempt to sidetrack her. “It’s so nice to just lie here together.”

  She pulled away, with a studied slowness, even.

  “Do you not want me to know who’s texting you?”

  I faked a weak, ambiguous laugh, then answered like a certified moron.

  “What are you talking about?”

  Silence.

  Then I tried stroking her hair.

  She jerked her head to one side.

  There are various types of disdain. But the kind that sneaks into lovers’ arguments I consider to be the most detestable of all.

  “Hey,” I said, with a pathetic smile. “I didn’t know you were so suspicious.”

  She went on staring at me, chilly and inquisitorial, kneeling on the bed, wonderfully indifferent to the nakedness of her magnificent breasts which were now facing me like two no-entry signs.

  At this point I had no option but to bluff.

  So I bluffed.

  “Okay, Detective Persiano: would you mind getting my cell phone out of my jacket, and while you’re at it, could you also read me the text message that just came in, just to save me the trouble?”

  You know when you put a DVD into your DVD player to watch a certain scene and you hit fast-forward and click through to 32x to zip straight to the point in the movie you want?

  Well, that’s the exact speed at which my whole life passed in front of my eyes as Alessandra Persiano pondered whether to take the high road (the option I was hoping for) or to put me to the test.

  “You’re such a child,” I shamefully stammered when, a second later, she went for the second option.

  I came close to begging her not to do it, as she stood up and grabbed my jacket.

  She pulled my cell phone out of my jacket pocket.

  She flipped it open.

  Stretched out on that bed, I was already a dead man.

  So I couldn’t believe what I was seeing when she narrowed her eyes, opened them wide, went momentarily apneic in disbelief, and then exploded in laughter so hard that she practically folded over in half.

  “What’s gotten into you?” I asked, sitting up straight.

  But she couldn’t stop. She went on reading and laughing as if the cell phone were showing a comedy. She’d entered into the usual endless loop of interactive hypnosis for the sake of ha-has in which the more you look at the subject of the ridiculous situation, the harder you laugh, as if you somehow couldn’t wrap your mind around the fact of its existence, and so you go on staring at it to fix it in your memory before it vanishes.

  I almost had to shout to make myself heard.

  “Who the fuck is it from, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  She replied by sort of spitting and grabbing her belly with one hand.

  “I don’t . . . know . . . pffh . . . it’s a number without a name . . . hee, hee, hee!”

  With tears streaming down her face coming dangerously close to falling with every step, she came over to me and held the phone scant inches from my face.

  Don’t ask me why, Filippo, but I need to see you tonight. Please, come by whenever you’re free. No matter what time it is.

  It was as if someone had turned the air conditioner up as high as it would go.

  Probably the biggest piece of dumb luck of my whole life.

  I could hardly believe it.

  I blessed my innate laziness for not having put that idiot woman’s name in my directory.

  I looked around.

  No sign of the angel.

  “Filippo?” I said, playing the part (I suspect badly, partly because I threw in a little fake-baffled smile; but Alessandra Persiano was too red in the face from laughing to catch me).

  Even I felt like laughing at the thought that that idiot had been so simpleminded in her attempt to make me jealous that she’d actually included the name of her imaginary (or perhaps real: fat lot I cared) lover, thus unintentionally rescuing me.

  Taking big gulps of air between the hiccups that were finally subsiding, Alessandra Persiano got back up on the bed and dragged herself on her knees to my side, wiping away her tears with her pinkies.

  “Hey, Filippo, how’s it going?” she said, intending to milk a while longer the effects of what she thought was a misunderstanding.

  “Ha, ha, funny you,” I replied, with a barefaced nerve that on its own deserved a Nobel Prize.

  “What are you doing tonight, hee, hee, hee, are you going to come by?”

  “Sure, sure, go ahead and joke about it,” I added, in a hypocritical crescendo that makes me shiver just to think about it. “But what if I’d really just gotten a text message from my lover instead of an obvious wrong number? Eh? Then what would I have told you? Ah?”

  “What an idiot you are, Vince’.”

  “No, what an idiot you are, to think another woman was texting me.”

  At that point, the angel appeared. Right there, between the curtains and the TV. Arms crossed and right foot tapping on the hardwood floor.

  “Jesus God, you really are a filthy pig,” he sa
id.

  “Nice hotel, eh?” I replied telepathically.

  “Well, if you want to know the truth, it seemed like you were acting a little defensive, earlier,” Alessandra Persiano admitted.

  “Just because I wanted to stay cuddled up with you in bed? You’re so dishonest, you women.”

  The busybody angel slapped a hand to his forehead and shook his head in disgust.

  “Oh. But wait,” Alessandra Persiano said at a certain point, suddenly very serious.

  “But wait what?”

  “Nothing, it’s just that . . . I was thinking about that Filippo. I wonder what kind of stallion he must be for her to be begging him like that.”

  “What?”

  She didn’t answer. She was smiling, as if she’d just had a clever idea.

  “Hey, Persiano,” I scolded her in feigned horror, “I don’t even know who you are anymore.”

  “You know what we should do? We should call up the girl right now; that is, I’ll call her, which works better, and I’ll say: Listen, I just got this text message, would you mind giving me the right number for Filippo? No, you see, it’s just that you texted my boyfriend by accident, and he’s the opposite of Filippo, as far as those things go he’s not exactly a . . . Get it? Hee, hee, hee.”

  It took me a few moments for it to sink in that I’d actually heard her right.

  “Get what? Fuck you!”

  “Come on,” and she tried to grab my cell phone (which at that point I wouldn’t have surrendered even under armed threat), “can’t you imagine how funny it would be?”

  Ooooh, we’d die laughing, I thought.

  “Just forget about this brilliant idea, okay?”

  “But why? Come on!”

  “Because number one, it’s a prank only an asshole would pull; two, it’s in bad taste; three, I don’t see why you have to call from my phone, if you don’t mind.”

  During the pause that followed, I realized I’d just put my foot in it.