The Romans were sex crazed in some ways. Up from the academy was a place called the Bar Gianicolo and on Saturday nights, it became a rendezvous point for stylish Roman couples to meet before adjourning to sex parties — orgies, if you like — or so my lady friend told me. I believed her. The few times we went in there together on a Saturday night for a coffee, men always approached her. One evening a couple came by to drop a card on our little bistro table: I don’t think I was part of the deal, but in any case, she, thinking that they, despite their elegant finery, were what the Italians called schifozi—what my mother called gente baja—was not the sort to have ever taken them up on that kind of thing.
She wasn’t very good with money, spending most of it on clothes. At one point, to pay for her tuition in a fashion design school located just off the Piazza Farnese, she worked as a showroom model for designers in the city; another job that kept her in the fashion loop took her down to the Piazza di Spagna, where in a leather goods shop whose name escapes me now, she waited on the wealthiest of tourists, among them, she’d casually mention every so often, the occasional movie star. She drove a Fiat 500, a piggy bank on wheels but commodious enough for us to make a few trips south to Naples, where we scoured the rebranding fashion salons for bargains. Out at Capri, she almost got me drowned by accepting a boat ride into the bay with a couple of Mafiosi, who kept urging me to try water-skiing — one of those fellows, who could not get his eyes off her, had a perpetual erection inside his gold spandex and kept whispering to his chum what seemed to me some rather sinister notions. But if they were devious hoods, they obviously decided that murdering me wasn’t worth the trouble. (For the record, once we made landfall again, I would not talk to her, beauty that she was, for a day or so. On the other hand, looking back on it now, I find it incredibly funny.)
She was really a cheerful and good-natured woman, bright and outgoing: The gardeners and crew at the academy and all the gatekeepers liked her — every week, someone or other would ask me if we were going to get married. (A funny thing: Even Francine du Plessix Gray, a beautiful woman herself, visiting the academy with her husband, the artist Clive Gray, always seemed unable to take her eyes off of Sojin when she happened to be around.) The only people there, in fact, who seemed to resent her were certain of the female academicians. Though Sojin spoke Japanese, Chinese, Russian, German, Italian, French, and English, one such academician always referred to her as the “bimbo.” I’d look the other way — what did I care? We were having a nice time together, no matter what we happened to be doing. After all, it was all part of the dream I seemed to be living in Italy, whose lovely and quite passionate energies slipped bit by bit into my writing, while my own affections for that woman, later to be displaced and abused, seemed so real and something that I then believed would never be forgotten.
I stayed on in Rome for almost another year after my fellowship ran out, and because I had some money saved and no particular place to go, I rented a largish apartment some ten blocks from the academy, by a marketplace, its back windows looking out over a series of descending terraces and gardens. There we lived as tranquilly and, I think, as happily as possible, though I did have an upstairs neighbor, a red-haired Sicilian actress, who might have wanted to have something with me (or perhaps with Sojin). In another flat in the same building, a kept woman, also of dazzling good looks, who, bored to death with her arrangement with a rather solemn fellow from Milano, would sometimes take me with her to see the opera. (Sojin, I am certain, thought we might have had something between us but didn’t seem to care.)
In that residence, while left alone, I worked on my novel, but it was something that slipped in and out of my life; weeks would go by when I wouldn’t write a word — namely because, quite frankly, I didn’t think anyone would care about such a book — and thusly bored, I’d look around for something to do with myself. That came down to music. Walking along the street, if I heard someone with any kind of chops playing an electric instrument, I somehow mustered the nerve to ring the bell. Eventually, I had my first real success with a bass player, Stefano, who not only invited me up to jam but produced a huge chunk of hashish — or cioccolato (which the Spaniards were also crazy about) — to enhance our performing pleasure. In turn, he knew of a few other musicians, among them a guitarist (with a ton of equipment), a keyboard player, and a drummer, and getting together every weekend in the basement room of a warehouse-sized bakery out by the Via Appia, we started to put together a repertoire of mainly reggae and Eric Clapton covers, which these Italians, hash- and potheads to the core, particularly cherished. But once again, I had a capricious musical career: We played a few gigs in the homes of friends, a blues bar in Trastevere (to a house that would have been empty were it not for our friends), and, that next Christmas, a dance party at the academy, for which we received permission to rehearse on the academy grounds (unheard of, I believe) and whose high point, at least from my group’s perspective, came when they were all invited into the academy dining hall for dinner, a great honor, no matter how spotty the food was in those days. (And our performance? Not too bad, as I recall, and quite nicely dressed up by Sojin swaying to the music.)
I really enjoyed their friendship — but once they found out that I had my own place, with two bedrooms, my apartment became their lovers’ retreat; these Romans, cool as they could be, lived at home with their families, which would pretty much be their story until they’d get married, and even then, having one’s own domicile wasn’t a certainty; housing was so tight in that city, unless you were a foreigner renting, that young couples would go anywhere they could to make it: At night the road behind the academy, a street on which stood religious institutes and priestly housing, was often lined with rocking, bobbing automobiles whose windows always seemed to be steamed up in the winter, and in Trastevere, there was a Thai bar and restaurant right off the Via dei Panieri, a massive joint with bamboo décor, that rented curtained booths to young couples for the evening so that they would have some privacy in which to pass their amorous time — a venue, by the way, that most academy folk did not have a clue about.