Interesting Women. Andrea Lee

this Nicolò by sight; she has seen him at parties, always with a different oversized, underage beauty glued to his flank. He has even gone out with one of her friends, a lanky nineteen-year-old from Santo Domingo who is doing a lot of work for Armani this year. “Nicolò” she thinks of as a young name, impetuous, boyish, ardent, like the medieval revolutionary Cola di Rienzo, but this Nicolò is no boy. He has a head of bushy graying curls and weary, protuberant blue Lombard eyes with—surprising for a viveur—an expression of gentle, lugubrious sentimentality.

      He is well dressed like the others, but his clothes seem slightly too big, giving him a curious orphaned air that must, thinks Merope unkindly, be the secret of his success with women. That and his money. He is the only one of the three who is not newly rich: his family has professors in it, and a famous collection of Futurist art, and people say he keeps up the textile business his great-grandfather started only to satisfy his taste for very young models. (In fact his eyes glistened mournfully at the description of the Polish girl.) It is said that he falls in love constantly, with untidy results.

      He sits and talks about a big house in the Engadin Valley where his seventy-eight-year-old mother passes the winters making nutcake, skiing, hiking, fighting with the family board of directors via phone or fax.

      “She sounds fantastic,” Merope says. She tells him about her father’s mother, Jazelle, a school principal with a taste for Plutarch as well as for a certain type of hot yellow-pepper sauce—a tall, rigid, iron-colored woman who commanded obedience from family and pupils in a whispering deadly Montserratian voice that both awed and embarrassed her Americanized grandchildren. It’s just an impulse: her family is her own private thing that she doesn’t usually talk about with the people Clay trots out.

      “I don’t understand what you’re doing in Milan,” he says.

      “Well, I have to see the world. This is as good a place as any, maybe better.”

      Nicolò taps the base of his wineglass with his fingernail. “St. Augustine was converted in a garden here. I think that that was probably the last time this city has done anyone any good.”

      “I wonder where the garden was,” says Merope.

      Nicolò laughs and says it was a child’s voice that spoke to Augustine in the garden, and that he is thinking at the moment that Merope has the face of a child who knows too much. She reminds him, he says, of Velázquez’s Infanta Margarita. This is a nice compliment, but spoiled by being said in a self-satisfied, overly proficient manner that makes it clear that he habitually comes up with artistic comparisons to impress his very young models. It annoys Merope. She sees that he is quite interested, and this is puzzling, since she is not at all his type.

      They are interrupted from across the table by Claudio, the Roman shoemaker, who has heard them talking about the mountains. In between bouts of flirting outrageously with Clay, he starts reminiscing about a party given at Champfer in the sixties by a spendthrift cousin of Nicolò’s. The cousin had wanted to tent a forest for his guests to dance in like gnomes, but this was against Swiss law, so he filled a tent with tall potted larches specially imported from Austria. At dawn the men, a black phalanx in evening dress, had descended from Corviglia on skis.

      The two other men at the table chime in to exclaim nostalgically over how much time they spent in dinner jackets, their crowd of young blades, in the sixties. They were so stylish they never wore ski clothes even on ordinary days, but skied in three-piece suits, the wasp-waisted, flare-trousered sixties kind, with a highcollared shirt and a wide tie up under your chin. “We were dandies,” sighs Francesco.

      Clay says that they are still dandies, that it is a basic instinct of the Latin male to decorate himself. But are they still up to snuff physically, she asks in a rhetorical tone that makes Robin and Merope giggle. Tossing back her red fringe, she says she doubts it, and she commands without further ado that they show her their legs. Clay has an effect on men like a pistol held to the back of the neck: all three of them at the table—fathers of adult children and heads of companies—rise promptly from their places, considerably surprising the waiters and the other diners in the restaurant, and line up like naughty schoolboys in front of Clay, who, with a Circean smile, has swiveled in her chair to survey them. They pull up their trousers to reveal a variety of knobby, sock-covered ankles and calves. Clay keeps them standing there a second longer than necessary before pronouncing them acceptable and allowing them to file back to their dinners. “But you’ll have to work on that musculature, gentlemen!” she says.

      

      “Of course they behave this way because we’re foreigners,” Clay tells Merope a bit later in the ladies’ room. Clay has a frequently voiced conviction that Italian men view foreign women as escape hatches, vacations from the immemorial stress of life with Italian women, who are all descendants of exigent Mediterranean earth goddesses.

      “Italians are just intensified versions of men from anywhere,” says Merope. “The real mystery, the riddle of the ages, is why we go to buttock class and put ourselves through severe pain for their benefit. Look at them—those bony legs!”

      Merope is redoing her lips with a tint from a little pottery dish her ex-boyfriend brought her from Marrakech. Clay has left the toilet door open to talk to her and sits with her black skirt hiked up and her tights down, her chin propped on her hands and her elbows on her knees.

      When Clay is washing her hands, they start talking about Claudio the shoemaker, who, as Merope accurately observes, has been making passes at Clay like a Roman café waiter with a schoolgirl on a junior year abroad. Clay, always merciful when one least expects it, declares that there is no real harm in poor Claudio, who is upset about having less money than his friends and about having had his business partner hauled off to prison last month as a result of the government bribery scandal.

      “Well, if you’re so sympathetic, you should cure him of that behavior,” says Merope, dropping the Moroccan dish into her bag. “Why don’t you act like his charm has caused you to lose your head, and grab him in front of everybody and kiss him. Stick your tongue in his mouth. That would scare the shit out of him. It might change his life. At the very least it would teach him some manners.”

      Clay says it isn’t at all a bad idea, and when they are back at the table she actually does grab Claudio the shoemaker and give him a whammy of a kiss—a real bodice ripper, as she describes it later. She doesn’t do it right away but waits until they’ve had dessert and small cups of black coffee, which intrude on the languid meal like jolts of pure adrenaline.

      Merope sees Claudio reach out for the twentieth time and trail his fingers down Clay’s cheek while he formulates yet another outrageous compliment, and she watches Clay laugh, turn to him, grab his shoulders, and give him a long, extremely kinetic kiss. They all stare, and Robin from Christie’s claps her thin hands spontaneously like a child at the circus when the elephants come in. Clay lets Claudio go, and his face has blushed dark as a bruise. He is groping for an expression. The rest of them follow Robin and burst into applause, because there is nothing else to do, and people at other tables turn around to look.

      “Brava, Clay! That’s showing him,” calls Francesco.

      Clay herself is pale, but she has lost no equilibrium at all. She takes a sip of mineral water. “That was possible,” she says evenly, without a smile, “only because with Claudio there could never be the possibility of anything more.”

      Shrieks of laughter, invocations of the Texas fiancù, loud protests from the men, especially from Claudio himself, who has enough of the Roman genius for saving face to cover his tracks—to court Clay still more flamboyantly, to laugh artlessly at himself. But the atmosphere, observes Merope, is momentarily murderous; at least, under the voices, through the candlelight diffused beneath the white umbrella, travels a dire reverberation like that which follows the first bite of an ax into a tree trunk. She herself feels half angry at Clay for taking her at her word, half full of unwilling admiration.

      “So what do you think, precocious child?” Nicolò asks her a few minutes later, when Francesco reveals that he has paid the bill, and they all get up to leave.

      “That precocious