A Certain Age (13 page)

as if imitating Lady Ottoline Morrell or Diana Vreeland. A short, withered man who might have been put together with Krazy Glue acted as if his dissipation had been acquired deliberately and at much cost. Usually Florence took a quick survey of any room and judged herself the most attractive woman, but for the first time she thought she looked ordinary, and that she belonged in some Midwest beauty pageant whose entrants would only be sneered at here.

He was handsomer than she had remembered, but to her disappointment he was at a table with three women and two men. He rose to greet her, then introduced her—the women gave her cold, brittle smiles, their eyes dead with disappointment equal to hers. "This is my friend Michelle, visiting from Argentina," Raffaello said, "and my cousin Paola, from Italy, and her friend Letizia, also from Italy. And this is Tommaso, and Marco, so you are alone in being an American. Sit down. We have already ordered, I'm afraid. We were all starving. Are you very hungry?" He flicked his wrist and a waitress appeared with a menu. She was of Thai ancestry, or Vietnamese, dressed in a skimpy black outfit, in dark red lipstick, impossibly beautiful. Florence looked at her with jealousy. She could bet that Raffaello would get the waitress's phone number at some point in the evening. Already he was smiling at her. "And another champagne glass for the lady," he said. The most beautiful waitresses worked at the most fashionable restaurants. It was a position similar to working at an art gallery or auction house: advertising oneself as available for marriage. The difference was, the waitresses all claimed to be actresses, while those in the galleries were scheming or claiming to scheme to become consultants for private collectors.

The group were chattering among themselves in Italian, probably about the waitress. In New York the Italians gathered with the Italians, the French with the French, the English with the English, and so on; though they had left their countries and moved to New York, some temporarily and some permanently, they could not feel comfortable with Americans. The trick was to have as little to do with them as possible—the Americans, even the New Yorkers,

were so provincial, so lacking in humor. It was no different from a group of ex-pat Americans associating only with one another in Paris or in London; after all, it was the Americans who, even at the end of the twentieth century, continued to be unsophisticated. The foreigners lived in the city but felt superior to it; unlike the Americans, they did not have to take any of it seriously, they knew this place did not really exist at all.

The Italian conversation escalated into what sounded like a heated argument. Florence didn't mind being left out; it gave her a chance to recoup. She looked down at the menu. As soon as she no longer appeared to be paying attention, Raffaello began talking to her. "They are discussing the Giacometti retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art," he murmured, leaning over toward her ear. His aftershave seemed to reach paralyzing tentacles up her nose. "You have seen this exhibition?"

"I think I'll have the baby artichoke, Gorgonzola and tomato salad," she said, closing the menu.

"Is that all?" He raised his eyebrows as if she had made some terrible social error, but she ignored this. "Come with me for a moment, I must make a telephone call."

"You can't call by yourself?"

His nostrils flared slightly. "I would prefer your company." She took a swallow of champagne and rose stiltedly. "Take your glass, please. Excuse us for one moment, please." He half bowed to the others at the table. "I must place a call to Monica."

"Who's Monica?" she said as she followed him down the pink marble stairs at the back of the restaurant.

"Monica is my wife. Are you jealous?"

"No," she said. "Just disgusted."

"Why?"

She couldn't think. She supposed she was disgusted with herself, to rush downtown to have dinner on what she thought was a date, only to find herself with a married man and a group of his friends. She could hardly say this, however, as it would imply she
had
thought this was a date. But he saw through her all too clearly

in any event. "So where is your wife?" she said, trying to cover up. "How come she couldn't come to dinner? Don't you let her?"

"My wife is in Venice, where she lives. We are separated. She has just had a baby. I am calling to find how they are doing as to their health. I hope to wake her for my little revenge."

"Who's baby is it?"

"Mine." The telephones were in glass sarcophagi in the back, beyond the toilets, and before she knew quite what was happening, he had pushed her in the booth ahead of him and had the back of his fist, sprinkled with a line of powder, under her nose. "Breathe!" He gave her a jab. "Breathe!" She inhaled; it was cocaine, fairly smooth. "Good, no? I am afraid it is all I have left, but I thought you would like some. You seem very nervous." He grinned his wolfish grin, a smirk of satisfaction.

"I'm not nervous!" But she was even more disgusted with herself—how could she not have known exactly what was going on? Going to the telephones or the bathroom with a man meant only one thing, and she had always done her best to avoid it—it was only too clear that to begin an evening this way was never going to lead to any genuine relationship. At least in this instance she didn't have to worry; a married Italian with a new baby, even if separated from his wife, wasn't about to get a divorce and marry her. She hadn't meant to go out and start snorting coke on a Sunday night. If she was fortunate, that would be all the drugs he had.

Anyway, she couldn't feel entirely ungrateful. The air suddenly seemed brighter, rich in oxygen; it was as if she had been handed a pair of glasses without even knowing she needed them. She gave him a brisk smile.

"Good?" he said patronizingly. "That's all I have." He squeezed past her into the booth and sat on the stool, pulling her onto his lap while he dialed a colossal string of numbers, somehow managing to relight a fat cigar at the same time. He stroked her hair and the back of her neck while he jabbered away into the receiver in Italian. Her fingertips examined the faint, delineated

stubble on his chin—he had obviously not shaved that day on purpose, a deliberate weekend look—but irritatedly he pushed her hand away. Such expensive clothing, a Sea Island cotton shirt, everything so crisp and heavily scented; she wondered what it would be like to grow up as a rich Italian boy. No doubt he had grown up in an average or ordinary apartment in Milan, on a family estate in Tuscany, whatever; experienced the same sort of daily activities—breakfast, soccer practice—as any growing boy. But what was so wrong or peculiar was the absence—in him, in them all—of what she thought of as emotion or affect.

He was shouting into the phone now. She would have thought he had forgotten all about her, except that he reached one hand up under her skirt and tried to pull her panties down as he half tilted her off his lap. She struggled to escape. For the longest time he held on to the elastic. It was hard to understand how she could feel flattered, aroused and annoyed all at the same time. One part of her—the nice girl—was indignant. The part with low self-esteem was pleased at the attention. And her body responded without any connection to her mind.

Just when it seemed he was determined to rip off her clothes right there in the public phone booth, she broke free. As she went back upstairs she turned to find him looking at her with an amused grin while he continued to argue, in Italian, into the phone.

II

When she returned everyone
except Tommaso was smoking cigars. The women had skinny black ones that gave off a not-unpleasant odor. They stopped talking as she approached their table. The restaurant had been written up in the press as the first public smokers' club in the city; an updated incarnation of Josephine Baker prowled from table to table selling various forms of tobacco. Now she was sorry Raffaello didn't have any more coke. She had no idea what she was doing here, with this table of complete strangers. Tommaso was fat—at least pudgy—with the

slinky, saturated, hooded-eye expression of a character in a Fellini film. He might have been forty-five. Marco was younger— perhaps younger than she—with longish hair and a sporty look, maybe the Italian equivalent of a surfer dude; he probably ran from the ski slopes of the Italian Alps to the windsurfing resorts of the Caribbean, or wherever these people windsurfed and raced cigarette boats.

She didn't even bother to inspect the women. She almost never did, actually. She could hardly think of a use for them. She had nothing in common with other women; if she began a conversation, it seemed invariably the other female curled her lip and turned away. She never got to the point with those of her gender where any real confidences were exchanged. Men could be drawn out, she could tease them; all in all, she felt more affinity with the opposite sex than her own. If a man told her something boring— the plot of a movie—it was a kind of wooing, a kind of intimacy. If a woman told her the plot of a movie, or details of her job, or plans for decorating a bedroom, what was in it for her?

The Italians, who had been staring at her, suddenly looked embarrassed and,
en masse,
began chattering again. Tommaso pulled out her chair and gestured for her to take her seat; she had left her champagne glass in the phone booth, but new glasses arrived and the waiter poured red wine. "I am afraid we were discussing your name. Do not take it personally, but for us, you understand, in Italy you would be called Firenze, you know, which is our city of Florence for you. So it is amusing to us; as Paola was saying, as if here a person was named Detroit."

Florence gave Paola a quick glance. It was impossible to guess if Paola was trying to be bitchy or if there was no hostility intended. In a way, every human interaction was a double effort: the first, to attempt to keep some conversation flowing; the second, to gauge the underlying intention of the words being used. The woman had to be forty-five. Often by that age women stopped being so hostile to other women; that she was a foreigner made her less easy to interpret. They were incredibly sophisticated, these Italian women. Paola's hair was casually polished, lopped off at

the nape of her neck; she wore a pair of harlequin glasses in tortoiseshell, a gray mannish suit, beautifully, loosely tailored. Letizia was more glamorous, less arty. She wore a rope of huge moony pearls, crisp striped cotton dress, cashmere cardigan clipped fifties style, with a little chain at the neck. Michelle had on a black cocktail dress and looked as if she had stepped out of a Bunvel film.

Such spontaneously casual elegance; to look so perfect and so casual was a real accomplishment, elements of design intended purely to be noticed only by other women. It had to be that way: there were no men to notice. The gay men were too busy looking at other men; the straight men were looking only at the twenty-year-olds, or were already married and didn't dare.

Paola was still staring at her. She felt awkward. "I'm terribly sorry," said Paola. "I should have asked you sooner. Would you care for a cigar?"

"No, no thanks," Florence muttered.

"What did you say was your surname?" Tommaso said.

"Florence Collins."

"Oh!" He practically shrieked. "Collins, Collins! Do you know, I lived with Harry Collins for nearly four years?" He was trying to be friendly, but the wall of sound he produced succeeded only in blocking her out. Another European would have understood the code, jumped in to participate in the overly animated frenzy, like a flock of cockatoos descending on a field of grain.

"With who?"

"Harry Collins." This was pronounced "Hairy Coleens." "You do not know Harry? He looks so much like you, I thought you were perhaps related. Although you are more beautiful as a girl than Harry is as a man. Of course, he is a considerable amount older than you. He lives right here in New York. You are not related? He has the most beautiful apartment I have ever seen in this city. I decorated it for him. It is more than seventy thousand square feet."

"Seventy thousand?"

"Yes, believe it! He owns two entire floors of thirty-five thou-

sand square feet in what was formerly and old bank on Wall Street. One floor, however, we devoted entirely to plants and birds. He loves birds, especially chickens."

"Chickens?"

"Oh!" Tommaso shrieked indignantly. "Chickens can be very beautiful! These are very fancy, rare chickens, with many plumes and colorful wattles. Wattles, you call them, yes? It was my idea, however, to raise orchids. Beautiful orchids, many of which are incredibly valuable."

"Orchids are beautiful. Chickens, I don't know."

"If you saw these chickens, you will change your mind. You must promise to come with me some day to view the chickens. I miss them terribly. Marco, weren't my chickens incredibly elegant and beautiful?" Marco shrugged and went on talking to the other women. "He knows nothing. He is interested only in mountain climbing. Do you like to mountain climb?"

"No. I mean, no."

"Good. Nor am I. So much work! To climb and climb, and then you are at the top of the mountain and must climb back down. I think it is silly, don't you agree?"

"Yes."

"So tell me, where do you know Raffaello? He is always meeting new people. What sort of business do you do?"

"I work at Quayle's—I'm in the jewelry department."

"Oh, I love jewelry! I have so much jewelry, which I have picked up on my travels over the years, and an extensive collection from the family—rubies, pearls and diamonds, that sort of thing—which I have been meaning to have appraised for the insurance. There is a marvelous diamond tiara which belonged to my great-grandmother I think you would like very much. Do you do that sort of thing?" His white clownish face represented some grinning terminus at the end of a line of Italian aristocracy. She seemed to recognize its origins in a Renaissance painting by Fra Angelico.