Interesting Women. Andrea Lee

anything the matter?” asks her mother. “Your voice sounds strange. You and Roberto aren’t fighting, are you?” She sighs. “I have told you a hundred times that these spoiled Italian men are naturally promiscuous, so they need a woman who commands interest. You need to be effervescent, on your toes, a little bit slutty, too, if you’ll pardon me, darling. Otherwise, they just go elsewhere.”

      

      Inspired by her own lie, Ariel actually gives a dinner at the golf club, two days before Roberto’s birthday. The clubhouse is a refurbished nineteenth-century castle built by an industrialist, and the terrace where the party is held overlooks the pool and an artificial lake. Three dozen of their friends gather in the late September chill to eat a faux-rustic seasonal feast, consisting of polenta and Fassone beefsteaks, and the pungent yellow mushrooms called funghi reali, all covered with layers of shaved Alba truffles. Ariel is proud of the meal, planned with the club chef in less time than she spent talking to Beba on the phone.

      Roberto is a lawyer, chief counsel for a centrist political party that is moderately honest as Italian political parties go, and his friends all have the same gloss of material success and moderate honesty. Though the group is an international one—many of the men have indulged in American wives as they have in German cars—the humor is typically bourgeois Italian. That is: gossipy, casually cruel, and—in honor of Roberto—all about sex and potency. Somebody passes around an article from L’Espresso which celebrates men over fifty with third and fourth wives in their twenties, and everyone glances slyly at Ariel. And Roberto’s two oldest friends, Flavio and Michele, appear, bearing a large gift-wrapped box. It turns out to hold not a midget stripper, as someone guesses, but a smaller box, and a third, and a fourth and fifth, until, to cheers, Roberto unwraps a tiny package of Viagra.

      Standing over fifty-five smoking candles in a huge pear-and-chocolate torte, he thanks his friends with truculent grace. Everyone laughs and claps—Roberto Furioso, as his nickname goes, is famous for his ornery disposition. He doesn’t look at Ariel, who is leading the applause in her role as popular second wife and good sport. She doesn’t have to look at him to feel his presence, as always, burned into her consciousness. He is a small, charismatic man with a large Greek head, thick, brush-cut black hair turning a uniform steel gray, thin lips hooking downward in an ingrained frown like those of his grandfather, a Sicilian baron. When Ariel met him, a dozen years ago, at the wedding of a distant cousin of hers outside Florence, she immediately recognized the overriding will she had always dreamed of, a force capable of conferring a shape on her own personality. He, prisoner of his desire as surely as she was, looked at this preposterously tall, absurdly placid American beauty as they danced for the third time. And blurted out—a magical phrase that fixed forever the parameters of Ariel’s private mythology—“Tu sai che ti sposerò. You know I’m going to marry you.”

      Nowadays Roberto is still furioso, but it is at himself for getting old, and at her for witnessing it. So he bullies her, and feels quite justified in doing so. Like all second wives, Ariel was supposed to be a solution, and now she has simply enlarged the problem.

      Roberto’s birthday begins with blinding sunlight, announcing the brilliant fall weather that arrives when transalpine winds bundle the smog out to sea. The view from Ariel’s house on the hill is suddenly endless, as if a curtain had been yanked aside. The steel blue Alps are the first thing she sees through the window at seven-thirty, when her daughters, according to family custom, burst into their parents’ bedroom pushing a battered baby carriage with balloons tied to it, and presents inside. Elisa and Cristina, giggling, singing “Happy Birthday,” tossing their pretty blunt-cut hair, serene in the knowledge that their irascible father, who loathes sudden awakenings, is putty in their hands. Squeals, kisses, tumbling in the bed, so that Ariel can feel how their cherished small limbs are growing polished, sleeker, more muscular with weekly horseback riding and gymnastics. Bilingual, thanks to their summers in Maryland, they are still more Italian than American; at odd detached moments in her genuinely blissful hours of maternal bustling, Ariel has noticed how, like all other young Italian girls, they exude a precocious maturity. And though they are at times suffocatingly attached to her, there has never been a question about which parent takes precedence. For their father’s presents, they have clubbed together to buy from the Body Shop some soap and eye gel and face cream that are made with royal jelly. “To make you look younger, Papa,” says Elisa, arriving, as usual, at the painful crux of the matter.

      “Are we really going to spend the night at Nonna Silvana’s?” Cristina asks Ariel.

      “Yes,” Ariel replies, feeling a blush rising from under her nightgown. “Yes, because Papa and I are going to dinner in the city.”

      The girls cheer. They love staying with their Italian grandmother, who stuffs them with marrons glacés and Kit Kat bars and lets them try on all her Pucci outfits from the sixties.

      When breakfast—a birthday breakfast, with chocolate brioche—is finished, and the girls are waiting in the car for her to take them to school, Ariel hands Roberto a small gift-wrapped package. He is on the way out the door, his jovial paternal mask back in its secret compartment. “A surprise,” she says. “Don’t open it before this evening.” He looks it over and shakes it suspiciously. “I hope you didn’t go and spend money on something else I don’t need,” he says. “That party—”

      “Oh, you’ll find a use for this,” says Ariel in the seamlessly cheerful voice she has perfected over the years. Inside the package is a million lire in large bills, and the key to Flavio’s apartment, as well as a gorgeous pair of silk-and-lace underpants that Ariel has purchased in a size smaller than she usually wears. There is also a note suggesting that Roberto, like a prince in a fairy tale, should search for the best fit in the company in which he finds himself. The note is witty and slightly obscene, the kind of thing Roberto likes. An elegant, wifely touch for a husband who, like all Italian men, is fussy about small things.

      

      Dropping off the girls at the International School, Ariel runs through the usual catechism about when and where they will be picked up, reminders about gym clothes, a note to a geography teacher. She restrains herself from kissing them with febrile intensity, as if she were about to depart on a long journey. Instead she watches as they disappear into a thicket of coltish legs, quilted navy blue jackets, giggles and secrets. She waves to other mothers, Italian, American, Swiss: well-groomed women with tragic morning expressions, looking small inside huge Land Cruisers that could carry them, if necessary, through Lapland or across the Zambezi.

      Ariel doesn’t want to talk to anyone this morning, but her rambunctious English friend Carinth nabs her and insists on coffee. The two women sit in the small pasticceria where all the mothers buy their pastries and chocolates, and Ariel sips barley cappuccino and listens to Carinth go on about her cystitis. Although Ariel is deeply distracted, she is damned if she is going to let anything slip, not even to her loyal friend with the milkmaid’s complexion and the lascivious eyes. Damned if she will turn Roberto’s birthday into just another easily retailed feminine secret. Avoiding temptation, she looks defiantly around the shop at shelves of meringues, marzipan, candied violets, chocolate chests filled with gilded chocolate cigars, glazed almonds for weddings and first communions, birthday cakes like Palm Beach mansions. The smell of sugar is overpowering. And, for just a second, for the only time all day, her eyes sting with tears.

      At home, there are hours to get through. First, she e-mails an article on a Milanese packaging designer to one of the American magazines for which she does freelance translations. Then she telephones to cancel her lesson in the neighboring village with an old artisan who is teaching her to restore antique papiers peints, a craft she loves and at which her large hands are surprisingly skillful. Then she goes outside to talk to the garden contractors—three illegal Romanian immigrants who are rebuilding an eroded slope on the east side of the property. She has to haggle with them, and as she does, the leader, an outrageously handsome boy of twenty, looks her over with insolent admiration. Pretty boys don’t go unnoticed by Ariel, who sometimes imagines complicated sex with strangers in uncomfortable public places. But they don’t really exist for her, just as the men who flirt with her at parties don’t count. Only Roberto exists, which is how it has been since that