Interesting Women. Andrea Lee

own family seemed as stable as Plymouth Rock. She was tickled: Clay gave her a school’s-out feeling after her model friends, who, for all their wild looks and the noise they made, were really just sweet, hardworking, secretly studious girls.

      Over that fall and winter she and Clay, without finding out much more about each other, spent a lot of time together, chivying a string of Italian and foreign suitors and behaving like overage sorority sisters. They hardly ever went to bed with anybody, not from fear of AIDS but from sheer contrariness, and they called each other late at night after dates and giggled. They cockteased. Merope wondered occasionally how it was possible for fully employed grown women to act this way: did adolescence, like malaria, return in feverish flashbacks?

      

      The same thought occurs to her again tonight in the restaurant garden, because she can feel the spring getting to her. After a cold wet April, warm weather has finally arrived, bringing wan flourishes of magnolia and sultry brown evenings heavy with industrial exhaust. The hordes of Fashion in town for the prêt-à-porter collections have been and gone like passenger pigeons, leaving in their wake not desolation but a faint genuine scent of pleasure. Tonight there is even a full moon: coming in the taxi from work, she caught a glimpse of it, big and shockingly red as a setting sun. Moons and other heavenly personages are rare in Milan: this one vanished under the smog by the time she reached the restaurant. Now between the potted hedge and the edges of the big white umbrellas overhead she sees only the cobblestones of Piazza del Carmine, a twilit church facade, and part of a big modern sculpture that looks like a Greek torso opened for autopsy.

      Across the table, Clay is looking good in black. The man to Clay’s right is obviously impressed. His name is Claudio, he is a Roman who lives half the time in Milan, and he owns shoe factories out in the mists beyond Linate: a labyrinthine artisanal conglomerate whose products, baptized with the holy names of the great designers, decorate shop windows up and down Via Spiga and Via Montenapoleone. He’s been making not awfully discreet pawing motions at Clay since they all met up at Baretto at eight-thirty. He is touching the huge gilt buttons of her jacket with feigned professional interest, and her hands and the tip of her nose with no excuse at all, and Clay is laughing and talking about her fiancé in Texas and brushing him off like a mosquito or maybe not even brushing him off but playing absentmindedly with him, the way a child uses a few light taps to keep a balloon dancing in the air.

      The other men at the table are designed along the same lines as this Claudio, though one is Venetian and the other a true Milanese. All three are fortyish men-about-town whom Merope has been seeing at parties for the last two years: graying, tanned, with the beauty that profligate Nature bestows on Italian males northern or southern, of all levels of intelligence and social class. They are dressed in magnificent hybrid fabrics of silk and wool, and their faces hold the faintly wary expression of rich divorced men.

      Like all the dinner companions Clay has provided recently, they are all impossible, for more reasons than Merope could list on a manuscript the length of the Magna Carta. Without having been out with them before, she knows from experience that soon they will begin vying with each other to pay for this dinner, will get up and pretend to visit the toilet but really go off to settle things with the headwaiter or to discover with irritation that one of the others pretending to visit the toilet has gotten there beforehand. When it has been revealed that someone has succeeded in paying, the other men will groan and laughingly take to task the beaming victor, who has managed to buy the contents of their stomachs.

      The other woman at the table is Robin, the Colorado Christie’s blonde from the train incident. She is pretty but borderline anorexic, with a disconcerting habit of jerking her head sharply to one side as she laughs. Clay uses her shamelessly to round out gatherings where another woman is wanted who won’t be competition. Merope likes her but pities her because after five years in Italy she hasn’t yet understood the mixture of playfulness and deep conservatism in Italian men and goes from one disastrous love affair to another. Just a few weeks ago, she spent a night shivering in a car in front of a house where her latest lover was dallying. Now she’s looking hopefully around, as if she’s eager to get burned again.

      On the right side of Merope, the Venetian, Francesco, is recounting something that happened to him last month: a girl of about sixteen, a Polish immigrant who had been in the country only a few months, had bluffed her way in to see him in the offices of his knitwear business and without preamble pulled off her shirt. “She told me that she’d done a bit of lingerie modeling—you can imagine the body—but that she wasn’t making enough money, and she proposed for me to keep her. Viewed with the greatest possible objectivity, era una fica pazzesca—she was an amazing piece of ass. She said that she didn’t care about luxury, that she’d accept one room in any neighborhood, that she didn’t dress couture, only Gaultier Junior, and that she rode a motorbike, so that her overhead costs would be very low. She used that expression: ‘overhead costs.’”

      “Well, what did you do?” demands Clay.

      Francesco pauses to scrape a mussel from its shell, and then glances around the table with his shrewd, pale Venetian eyes. He seems pleased with the story and with himself. “I don’t like complications, so I kept my head with extreme difficulty, made her put her shirt on, and sent her away. And lucky for her, not morally but practically, because a week ago I ran into her at the gala the Socialists gave at La Scala—covered with jewels, on the arm of old Petralzo the rug man, who must be seventy-five.”

      “Lucky girl,” says Clay. “So she has minimum work for maximum compensation.”

      “It’s an inspiring story,” Merope says. “Even ideologically. When you think of her, born under Polish socialism, progressing to the Italian brand—”

      A waiter dashes up and shows them an enormous boiled sea bass, lead-colored in the candlelight, and then runs off to bone it. Though they are all laughing, the story about the Polish girl has changed the atmosphere of the group, momentarily causing each one of them to envision the candlelit outdoor restaurant with its stylish diners as a temporary and unstable oasis of safety, an illuminated bubble poised at the murky edges of the chaos going on not far enough away to the East: the Wall toppled and strewn; teenage Germans nonchalantly resuscitating the Third Reich; international mafiosi and ex-apparatchiks making pacts in the shadow of the Kremlin; Croats slicing heads off Montenegrins; Czech whores servicing the flights between Vienna and Prague; dissolution spilling over into the once safe and prosperous fields of Western Europe in the form of refugee hordes from every tattered state on earth. Each of the men at the table thinks of certain investments and says an inward prayer. The three American women experience a brief, simultaneous thrill of empathy with that coldhearted young girl, as foreign as they are.

      Subdued, they finish off two bottles of Piedmontese red wine and eat the fish with thin flat salad greens called barba di frate—“friar’s beard.” Merope chats with the man on her left, who has a posh Milanese accent with a glottal r that sounds as if he’s constantly clearing his throat. His name is Nicolò, and he agreeably surprises her by accepting without comment the fact that she is American of African-Caribbean ancestry—most Italians feel obliged to observe that she doesn’t look American, as if one could—and that she actually works in advertising rather than at one of the jobs that many otherwise intelligent people in Milan consider the only possibility for a pretty young woman with skin the color of cedarwood: runway work, or shaking her behind in television ads for tropical juice.

      She tells him that at work she has set herself the private task of trying to change attitudes and images, a generally futile ambition in a small Italian agency grateful for any accounts it can attract. Italians aren’t natural racists, she explains, not like Americans, but they tend to view foreigners in a series of absurd roles as set as those of the commedia dell’arte. “It’s funny, really. The last campaign we did for an air conditioner, what the kids in the creative department held out for was two black models dressed as cannibals carrying the air conditioner slung on a stick. Cannibals, can you imagine? Bare breasts, strings of teeth around their necks, little grass umbrellas around the hips. The company directors loved it. I screamed and yelled.”

      Nicolò smiles. “They must love you.”

      “Well,