Interesting Women. Andrea Lee

fourth wife’s sprawling modern villa in a gated community near Como, and both of their spouses were off at the other end of the terrace, looking at samples of glass brick. But Ariel threw him handily off balance by laughing and taking up the idea. As she did so, she thought of how much affection she’d come to feel for good old Flavio since her early days in Italy, when she’d reserved for him the ritual loathing of a new wife for her husband’s best friend. Nowadays she was a compassionate observer of his dawning old age and its accoutrements, the karmic doom of any superannuated playboy: tinted aviator bifocals and reptilian complexion; a rich, tyrannical wife who imposed a strict diet of fidelity and bland foods; a little brown address book full of famous pals who no longer phoned. That afternoon, Ariel for the first time had the satisfaction of watching his composure crumble when she asked him sweetly to get her the number of the best call girl in Milan.

      “You’re not serious,” he sputtered. “Ariel, cara, you’ve known me long enough to know I was joking. You aren’t—”

      “Don’t go into that nice-girl, bad-girl Latin thing, Flavio. It’s a little dated, even for you.”

      “I was going to say only that you aren’t an Italian wife, and there are nuances you’ll never understand, even if you live here for a hundred years.”

      “Oh, please, spare me the anthropology,” said Ariel. It was pleasant to have rattled Flavio to this extent. The idea of the fanciulla, to which she had agreed on a mischievous impulse unusual for her, suddenly grew more concrete. “Just get me the number.”

      Flavio was silent for a few minutes, his fat, sun-speckled hands wreathing his glass of limoncello. “You’re still sleeping together?” he asked suddenly. “Is it all right?”

      “Yes. And yes.”

      “Allora, che diavolo stai facendo? What the hell are you doing? He’s faithful to you, you know. It’s an incredible thing for such a womanizer; you know about his first marriage. With you there have been a few little lapses, but nothing important.”

      Ariel nodded, not even the slightest bit offended. She knew about those lapses, had long before factored them into her expectations about the perpetual foreign life she had chosen. Nothing he said, however, could distract her from her purpose.

      Flavio sighed and cast his eyes heavenward. “Va bene; Okay. But you have to be very careful,” he said, shooting a glance down the terrace at his ever-vigilant wife, with her gold sandals and anorexic body. After a minute, he added cryptically, “Well, at least you’re Catholic. That’s something.”

      So, thanks to Flavio’s little brown book, Ariel is now talking to Beba. Beba—a toddler’s nickname. Ex-model in her twenties. Brazilian, but not a transsexual. Tall. Dark. Works in tandem with a Russian blonde. “The two of them are so gorgeous that when you see them it’s as if you have entered another sphere, a paradise where everything is simple and divine,” said Flavio, waxing lyrical during the series of planning phone calls he and Ariel shared, cozy conversations that made his wife suspicious and gave him the renewed pleasure of annoying Ariel. “The real danger is that Roberto might fall in love with one of them,” he remarked airily, during one of their chats. “No, probably not—he’s too stingy.”

      In contrast, it is easy talking to Beba. “How many men?” Beba asks, as matter-of-factly as a caterer. There is a secret happiness in her voice that tempts Ariel to investigate, to talk more than she normally would. It is an impulse she struggles to control. She knows from magazine articles that, like everyone else, prostitutes simply want to get their work done without a fuss.

      “Just my husband,” Ariel says, feeling a calm boldness settle over her.

      “And you?”

      Flavio has said that Beba is a favorite among rich Milanese ladies who are fond of extracurricular romps. Like the unlisted addresses where they buy their cashmere and have their abortions, she is top-of-the-line and highly private. Flavio urged Ariel to participate and gave a knowing chuckle when she refused. The chuckle meant that, like everyone else, he thinks Ariel is a prude. She isn’t—though the fact is obscured by her fatal air of efficiency, by her skill at writing out place cards, making homemade tagliatelle better than her Italian mother-in-law, and raising bilingual daughters. But no one realizes that over the years she has also invested that efficiency in a great many amorous games with the experienced and demanding Roberto. On their honeymoon, in Bangkok, they’d spent one night with two polite teenagers selected from a numbered lineup behind a large glass window. But that was twelve years ago, and although Ariel is not clear about her motives for giving this birthday present, she sees with perfect feminine good sense that she is not meant to be onstage with a pair of young whores who look like angels.

      The plan is that Ariel will make a date with Roberto for a dinner in town, and that instead of Ariel, Beba and her colleague will meet him. After dinner the three of them will go to the minuscule apartment near Corso Venezia that Flavio keeps as his sole gesture of independence from his wife. Ariel has insisted on dinner, though Flavio was against it, and Beba has told her, with a tinge of amusement, that it will cost a lot more. Most clients, she says, don’t request dinner. Why Ariel should insist that her husband sit around chummily with two hookers, ordering antipasto, first and second courses, and dessert is a mystery, even to Ariel. Yet she feels that it is the proper thing to do. That’s the way she wants it, and she can please herself, can’t she?

      As they finish making the arrangements, Ariel is embarrassed to hear herself say, “I do hope you two girls will make things very nice. My husband is a wonderful man.”

      And Beba, who is clearly used to talking to wives, assures her, with phenomenal patience, that she understands.

      

      As Ariel puts down the phone, it rings again, and of course it is her mother, calling from the States. “Well, you’re finally free,” says her mother, who seems to be chewing something, probably a lowcalorie bagel, since it is 8:00 A.M. in Bethesda. “Who on earth were you talking to for so long?”

      “I was planning Roberto’s birthday party,” Ariel says glibly. “We’re inviting some people to dinner at the golf club.”

      “Golf! I’ve never understood how you can live in Italy and be so suburban. Golf in the hills of Giotto!”

      “The hills of Giotto are in Umbria, Mom. This is Lombardy, so we’re allowed to play golf.”

      Ariel can envision her mother, unlike Beba, with perfect clarity: tiny; wiry, as if the muscles under her porcelain skin were steel guitar strings. Sitting bolt upright in her condominium kitchen, dressed in the chic, funky uniform of black jeans and cashmere T-shirt she wears to run the business she dreamed up: an improbably successful fleet of suburban messengers on Vespas, which she claims was inspired by her favorite film, Roman Holiday. Coffee and soy milk in front of her, quartz-and-silver earrings quivering, one glazed fingernail tapping the counter as her eyes probe the distance over land and ocean toward her only daughter.

      What would she say if she knew of the previous call? Almost certainly, Ariel thinks, she would be pleased with an act indicative of the gumption she finds constitutionally lacking in her child, whose lamentable conventionality has been a byword since Ariel was small. She herself is living out a green widowhood with notable style, and dating a much younger lobbyist, whose sexual tastes she would be glad to discuss, girl to girl, with her daughter. But she is loath to shock Ariel.

      With her Italian son-in-law, Ariel’s mother flirts shamelessly, the established joke being that she should have got there first. It’s a joke that never fails to pull a grudging smile from Roberto, and it goes over well with his mother, too: another glamorous widow, an intellectual from Padua who regards her daughter-in-law with the condescending solicitude one might reserve for a prize broodmare. For years, Ariel has lived in the dust stirred up by these two dynamos, and it looks as if her daughters, as they grow older—they are eight and ten—are beginning to side with their grandmothers. Not one of these females, it seems, can forgive Ariel for being herself. So Ariel keeps quiet about her new acquaintance with Beba, not from any prudishness but as a powerful amulet. The