In any case, Fabrizia was all over me at the party. First she and some fat British filmmaker took turns kissing me on the eyelids. Then, as she was having one of those very angry Italian äppärät chats on the couch, she spread her legs to flash me her neon panties, her thick Mediterranean pubic hairs clearly visible. She took time out of her sexy screaming and furious typing to say to me in English: “You’ve become a lot more decadent since I’ve met you, Lenny.”
“I’m trying,” I stuttered.
“Try harder,” she said. She snapped her legs shut, which nearly killed me, and then went back to her äppärät assault. I wanted to feel those elegant forty-year-old breasts one more time. I made a few slow gyrating motions toward her and batted my eyelashes (that is to say, blinked a lot), trying, with a dose of East Coast irony, to resemble some hot Cinecittà leading lady of the 1960s. Fabrizia blinked back and stuck one hand down her panties. A few minutes later, we opened the door to her bedroom to discover her three-year-old boy hiding beneath a pillow, a cloud of smoke from the main rooms draping him twice-fold. “Fuck,” Fabrizia said, watching the small, asthmatic child crawling toward her on the bed.
“Mama,” the child whispered. “Aiuto me.”
“Katia!” she screamed. “Puttana! She supposed to watch him. Stay here, Lenny.” She went off looking for her Ukrainian nanny, her little boy stumbling through the Hollywood-grade smoke behind her.
I went into the corridor, which seemed like the arrivals lounge at Fiumicino Airport, with couples meeting, coming together, disappearing into rooms, coming out of rooms, fixing their blouses, tightening their belts, coming apart. I took out my dated äppärät, with its retro walnut finish and its dusty screen blinking with slow data, trying to get a read on whether there were any High Net Worth Individuals in the room-last chance to find some new clients for my boss, Joshie, after having found a grand total of one client during the whole year-but no one’s face was famous enough to register on my display. A sort-of well-known Mediastud, a Bolognese visual artist, sullen and shy in person, watched his girlfriend flirting ridiculously with a less accomplished man. “I work a little, play a little,” someone was saying in accented English, followed by cute, hollow female laughter. A recently arrived American girl, a yoga teacher to the stars, was being reduced to tears by a much older local woman, who kept stabbing her in the heart with one long, painted fingernail and accusing her, personally, of the U.S. invasion of Venezuela. A domestic came carrying a large plate of marinated anchovies. The bald man known as “Cancer Boy” followed dejectedly on the heels of the Afghani princess to whom he had given his heart. A slightly famous Rai actor started telling me about how he had impregnated a girl of good standing in Chile and then fled back to Rome before Chilean law could hold him accountable. When a fellow Neapolitan showed up, he said to me: “Excuse us, Lenny, we have to speak in dialect.”
I continued to wait for my Fabrizia while nibbling on an anchovy, feeling like the horniest thirty-nine-year-old man in Rome-a very serious distinction. Perhaps my occasional lover had fallen into another’s arms during our brief separation. I did not have a girl waiting for me in New York, I wasn’t sure I even had a job waiting for me in New York after my failures in Europe, so I really wanted to screw Fabrizia. She was the softest woman I had ever touched, the muscles stirring somewhere deep beneath her skin like phantom gears, and her breath, like her son’s, was shallow and hard, so that when she “made the love” (her words), it sounded like she was in danger of expiring.
I caught sight of a Roman fixture, an old American sculptor of small stature and dying teeth who wore his hair in a Beatlesque mop and liked to mention his friendship with the iconic Tribeca actor “Bobby D.” Several times I have pushed his drunken rotundity into a taxi, telling the cabbies his prestigious address on the Gianicolo Hill, and handing them twenty of my own precious euros.
I had almost failed to notice the young woman in front of him, a small Korean (I’ve dated two previously, both delightfully insane), with her hair up in a provocative bun so that she resembled vaguely a very young Asian Audrey Hepburn. She had full shiny lips and a lovely if incongruous splash of freckles across her nose, and could not have weighed more than eighty pounds, a compactness which made me tremble with bad thoughts. I wondered, for example, if her mother, probably a tiny, immaculate woman humming with immigrant anxiety and bad religion, knew that her little girl was no longer a virgin.
“Oh, it’s Lenny,” the American sculptor said when I came around to shake his hand. He was a High Net Worth Individual, if barely, and I had tried to court him on several occasions. The young Korean woman glanced at me with what I took to be serious lack of interest (her default position seemed to be a scowl), her hands clenched tightly before her. I thought I had blundered onto a new couple and was about to make my apologies, but the American was already starting to introduce us. “The lovely Eunice Kim from Fort Lee, New Jersey, via Elderbird College, Mass.,” he said in the brawling Brooklyn accent he thought was charmingly authentic. “Euny’s an art-history student.”
“Eunice Park,” she corrected him. “I don’t really study art history. I’m not even a college student anymore.”
I was pleased by her humility, acquiring a steady, throbbing erection.
“This is Lenny Abraham. He helps old stockbrokers live a little longer.”
“It’s Abramov,” I said, with a subservient bow to the young lady. I noticed the glass of inky Sicilian red in my hand and drank it in one go. All of a sudden I was sweating all over my freshly laundered shirt and ugly loafers. I took out my äppärät, flicked it open in a gesture that was au courant maybe a decade ago, held it stupidly in front of me, put it back in my shirt pocket, then reached for a nearby bottle and refilled my glass. It was incumbent upon me to say something impressive about myself. “I do nanotechnology and stuff.”
“Like a scientist?” Eunice Park asked.
“More like a salesman,” the American sculptor rumbled. He was notoriously competitive over women. At the last party, he had championed over a young Milanese animator to get a blow job from Fabrizia’s nineteen-year-old cousin. In Rome this passed for breaking news.
The sculptor made a half-turn toward Eunice, partly obscuring me with one thick shoulder. I took that as my sign to leave, but whenever I began to do so, she would glance my way, casually tossing me a lifeline. Maybe she was scared of the sculptor herself, worried she would end up on her knees in a dimly lit room.
I drank heavily, eyeing the sculptor’s broad attempts to impress the thoroughly unimpressible Eunice Park. “So I says to her, ‘Contessa, you can stay in my beach house in Puglia until you get back on your feet.’ I don’t have time for the beach anyway. They want me to take up a commission in Shanghai. Six million yuan for two pieces. That’s what-fifty million dollars? I says to her, ‘Don’t cry, contessa, you sly old bird. I’ve been down to nothing myself. Not a centavo to my name. Practically grew up in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. First thing I remember was a sock to the face. Bam!’”
I felt sad for the sculptor, and not just because I doubted his chances with Eunice Park, but because I realized he would soon be dead. From an ex-lover of his I had learned that his advanced diabetes had almost cost him two toes, and the heavy cocaine use was maxing out his aging circulatory system. In the business we called him an ITP, Impossible to Preserve, the vital signs too far gone for current interventions, the psychological indicators showing an “extreme willingness/desire to perish.” Even more despairing was his financial status. I’m quoting directly from my report to boss man Joshie: “Income yearly $2.24 million, pegged to the yuan; obligations, including alimony and child support, $3.12 million; investible assets (excluding real estate)-northern euro 22,000,000; real estate $5.4 million, pegged to the yuan; total debts outstanding $12.9 million, unpegged.” A mess, in other words.