Interesting Women. Andrea Lee

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СКАЧАТЬ been a wild-haired woman holding a baby but could just as easily have been a man with dreadlocks cradling something else: a bundle, a small dog. The clothing of the figure was indeterminate, the skin definitely dark, the face an oval of shadow. Thinking of it and remembering her thoughts beforehand, she feels an absurd flash of terror, from which she quickly pulls back.

      You aren’t drunk, she tells herself in her mother’s most commonsense tone, and you have taken no dicey pharmaceuticals, so stop worrying yourself at once. Just stop. When Nicolò notices that she is shaken up and asks if she is feeling all right, Merope says she is overtired and leaves it at that. She is sorry she cried out: it makes it seem that the two of them have shared some dangerous intimate experience.

      

      Back in Milan they go speeding along the deserted tram tracks, and the moon disappears behind masses of architecture. Merope wants above all things to be back in her apartment, in her own bed, under the ikat quilt her ex-boyfriend made for her. She has to drive to Bologna for a meeting tomorrow afternoon and in the morning has a series of appointments for which, she thinks, she will be about as alert as a hibernating frog. By the time they are standing outside the thick oak carriage doors of her apartment house, in Via Francesco Sforza, her fit of nerves has passed.

      Nicolò, looking a bit sheepish after the amount he has said, invites her to have dinner next week.

      “I can’t see how that would help either one of us,” replies Merope, but she says it without the malicious energy of earlier that evening. In fact she says it as a joke, because she doesn’t really mind him anymore. She doesn’t give him her number, but she knows he’ll get it from Clay or from someone else, and this knowledge leaves her so unmoved that for a minute she is filled with pity, for him and probably for herself as well. Without adding anything she kisses him on both cheeks and then lets the small, heavy pedestrians’ door close between them.

      Then she takes off her shoes and in her stocking feet runs across the cold, slippery paving stones of the courtyard into her wing of the building. She steps into the old glass-and-wooden elevator, careful not to bang the double doors and awaken Massimo the porter, who sleeps nearby. As she goes up she feels the buzzing mental clarity that comes from exhaustion. In the back of her mind have risen the words from the ghost story at the party, the baleful pronouncement engraved on a stone slab: “Siete tutti maledetti.” And for a few seconds she finds herself laboring over that phrase, attempting with a feverish automatic kind of energy to fix it—to substitute a milder word for cursed—as she might correct a bad line of copy.

      The phone is ringing as she lets herself into the apartment, and she grins as she picks it up: Clay is worse than a dorm mother.

      “What if I decide to go to bed with somebody?” she says into the phone.

      “You won’t—not with him, anyway. You’re not the charitable type,” says Clay. She gives a loud yawn: she’s probably been lying there talking to the Texan, who calls every night. “I just wanted to make sure you made curfew.”

      “What time is curfew at this school?”

      “Oh, around noon the next day.”

      “Clay, shame on you. You kissed that man.”

      “There was no man there. It was a trick of lighting.”

      They start giggling, egg each other on. For the first time that night Merope is having fun; courage warms her and the dreadlocked apparition by the farmhouse steps back into whatever waiting room in the imagination is reserved for catchpenny roadside omens. A few months later, she will discover that this was the night she decided to stop living in Italy; that here, in a small burst of instinct, began her transition to somewhere else. But at this moment on the bare edge of a new day in Milan, only one image comes to mind: herself and Clay in evening dresses out of a thirties film, foxtrotting together like two Ginger Rogerses around and around an empty piazza. Full of bravado, they laugh loud American bad-girl laughter as they dance; they whirl faster until they outrun gravity and start to rise over the worn gray face of the city, their satin skirts spinning out in a white disk that tosses casual light down on factories and streetcar lines, on gardens, palaces, and the bristling spires of the Duomo.

      Merope sits down on the bed and wedges the phone between her shoulder and ear. “Did you see the moon?” she asks.

       Brothers and Sisters Around the World

      “I took them around the point toward Dzamandzar,” Michel tells me. “Those two little whores. Just ten minutes. They asked me for a ride when I was down on the beach bailing out the Zodiac. It was rough and I went too fast on purpose. You should have seen their titties bounce!”

      He tells me this in French, but with a carefree lewdness that could be Roman. He is, in fact, half Italian, product of the officially French no man’s land where the Ligurian Alps touch the Massif Central. In love, like so many of his Mediterranean compatriots, with boats, with hot blue seas, with dusky women, with the steamy belt of tropics that girdles the earth. We live above Cannes, in Mougins, where it is always sunny, but on vacation we travel the world to get hotter and wilder. Islands are what Michel prefers: in Asia, Oceania, Africa, the Caribbean, it doesn’t matter. Any place where the people are the color of different grades of coffee, and mangoes plop in mushy heaps on the ground, and the reef fish are brilliant as a box of new crayons. On vacation Michel sheds his manicured adman image and with innocent glee sets about turning himself into a Eurotrash version of Tarzan. Bronzed muscles well in evidence, shark’s tooth on a leather thong, fishing knife stuck into the waist of a threadbare pareu, and a wispy sunstreaked ponytail that he tends painstakingly along with a chin crop of Hollywood stubble.

      He loves me for a number of wrong reasons connected with his dreams of hot islands. It makes no difference to him that I grew up in Massachusetts, wearing L. L. Bean boots more often than sandals; after eight years of marriage, he doesn’t seem to see that what gives strength to the spine of an American black woman, however exotic she appears, is a steely Protestant core. A core that in its absolutism is curiously cold and Nordic. The fact is that I’m not crazy about the tropics, but Michel doesn’t want to acknowledge that. Mysteriously, we continue to get along. In fact, our marriage is surprisingly robust, though at the time of our wedding, my mother, my sister, and my girlfriends all gave it a year. I sometimes think the secret is that we don’t know each other and never will. Both of us are lazy by nature, and that makes it convenient to hang on to the fantasies we conjured up back when we met in Milan: mine of the French gentleman-adventurer, and his of a pliant black goddess whose feelings accord with his. It’s no surprise to me when Michel tries to share the ribald thoughts that run through the labyrinth of his Roman Catholic mind. He doubtless thought that I would get a kick out of hearing about his boat ride with a pair of African sluts.

      Those girls have been sitting around watching us from under the mango tree since the day we rolled up from the airport to spend August in the house we borrowed from our friend Jean-Claude. Michel was driving Jean-Claude’s car, a Citroën so rump-sprung from the unpaved roads that it moves like a tractor. Our four-year-old son, Lele, can drag his sneakers in red dust through the holes in the floor. The car smells of failure, like the house, which is built on an island off the northern coast of Madagascar, on a beach where a wide scalloped bay spreads like two blue wings, melting into the sky and the wild archipelago of lemur islands beyond. Behind the garden stretch fields of sugarcane and groves of silvery, arthritic-looking ylang-ylang trees, whose flowers lend a tang of Africa to French perfume.

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