Interesting Women. Andrea Lee
vulgarity and by the immemorial Gothic sense of doom that lies like a medieval stone wall beneath the flimsy revelry of the fashion business. The sun and communal warmth of the Mezzogiorno have never attracted her as they do her English girlfriends; she likes the northern Italian fog—it feels like Europe. She respects as well the profound indifference of the city to its visitors from other countries. From the beginning she’s been smart enough to understand that the more energetically one sets oneself to master all kinds of idioms in a foreign country, the sooner one uncovers the bare, incontrovertible fact that one is foreign. The linked words that appear and flit about her brain seemingly by sheerest accident, like bats in a summer cottage, seem to Merope to be a logical response to her life in a place where most really interesting things are hidden. The phrases are playful, but like other ephemera—dreams, advertisements, slips of the tongue—if you catch and examine them, they offer oblique comment on events at hand.
This dinner, for example—three Italian men and three foreign women gathered without affection but with a lot of noisy laughter on a May evening in the outdoor half of a restaurant in the Brera district. It did in a certain way come about through rubber bands—the oversized pink ones that provide fruitful resistance to the limbs of the women in the exercise class where Merope met Clay at noon. If Merope hadn’t been dripping with sweat and demoralized by the pain she would have said no, as she has privately resolved to do whenever Clay gets that glint in her eye and starts talking about extremely interesting, extremely successful men.
The exercise class they attend is a notorious one in Milan: it is dedicated entirely to buttocks, and is even called simply “Buttocks”—“Glutei.” Rich Milanese housewives, foreign businesswomen, and models without any hips to speak of flock to the Conture Gym to be put through their paces by a Serbian exgymnast named Nadia, in an atmosphere of groaning and mass agony that suggests a labor ward in a charity clinic. Merope is annoyed at herself for being insecure enough to attend—her small, lofty Caribbean backside, after all, ranks on the list of charms she sometimes allows her boyfriends to enumerate. Yet, Tuesdays and Thursdays at midday, she finds herself there, resentfully squatted on a springy green mat. Sometimes, looking around her, she draws a professional bead on those quivering international ranks of fannies: she sees them in a freeze-frame, an ad for universal feminine folly.
Her friend Clay, on the other hand, adores Ass Class, or the Butt Club, as she alternately calls it. She says that she likes her perversions to work for her. Clay is the class star, the class clown. In a glistening white Avengers-style unitard, she hoists and gyrates her legs with gusto, lets out elemental whoops of pain, swaps wisecracks in Italian with Nadia, flops about exuberantly in her bonds, tossing her sweat-soaked red hair like a captive mermaid, occasionally sending a snapped rubber band zinging across the dance floor. Merope sometimes thinks that if Clay didn’t exist it would be necessary to invent her—at least for her, Merope’s, own survival on the frequent days when Milan appears through the mist as a dull provincial town.
A case in point: last Sunday, when Merope and Clay and a friend of Clay’s, a Colorado blonde who works at Christie’s, were taking the train over the Swiss border to Lugano to see the American Impressionist show at the Thyssen-Bornemisza, Clay got up to go to the toilet, found the toilet in their train compartment not up to her exacting standards, went down to the next car, and there suddenly found herself left behind in Italy as the train divided in two at the border. Merope and the other woman sat staring dumbly at Clay’s beautiful ostrich-skin bag on the seat as their half of the train tootled merrily on into Switzerland.
However, after a few minutes, the train drew to a halt in a small suburban station not on the schedule of express stops, and as the few other people in the car began peering curiously out of the window, a clanking, clanging sound announced the arrival of another train behind them. Merope and the other girl jumped up, ran to the end platform of the car, and saw arriving a sort of yellow toy engine, the kind used for track repair, and inside, flanked by two Italian conductors wearing besotted grins, was Clay, red hair flying, waving like the Queen Mother.
Clay is busy these days ironing out the last wrinkles of a complicated divorce from a rich Milanese who manufactures something rarely thought of but essential, like tongue depressors. Then she is immediately getting married again, to a Texan, with dazzling blue eyes and a glibber tongue than an Irishman’s, who won Clay by falling on his knees and proposing in front of an intensely interested crowd of well-dressed drinkers at Baretto, in Via Sant’ Andrea. Maybe Texas will be big enough for her. Italy, thinks Merope, has always seemed a bit confining for her friend, like one of those tight couture jackets Clay puts on to go to the office, where for the past few years she has run a gift-buying service for Italian companies who want to shower Bulgari trinkets on crucial Japanese. Nowadays she’s shutting down the business, talks about Texas real estate, about marketing Italian cellulite creams in America, about having babies.
Merope feels a predictable resentment toward the Texas Lochinvar who rode out of the West and broke up the eleven months of high times she and Clay had been enjoying as bachelorettes in Milan. Now she would have to start a real life in Milan—unlikely, this—or return home. Her weather instincts tell her that her friend’s engagement means that she herself will fall in love again soon: another partner will come along in a few beats to become essential as salt, to put her through changes, perhaps definitive ones. Clay says that what she wants most in the world to see before she leaves for Houston is Merope settled with a nice man; every time they go out together, she parades an international array of prospects, as if Merope were a particularly picky executive client.
Merope isn’t in the mood yet to settle down with a nice man; in fact last October, when she met Clay, she had just made a nice man move out of the apartment they’d shared for a year and a half in the Navigli district. She’d explained this to Clay in the first five minutes they’d started talking, at a party in the so-called Chinese district, near Corso Bramante. “He was awfully dear. He was Dutch: sweet in the way those northern men can be sweet. Crazy about me the way a man from one of those colonizing countries can be about a brown-skinned woman. A photographer. Never fell in love with models, and he cooked fantastic Indonesian food. But he was making me wicked.”
Clay, shoehorned into a Chanel suit of an otherworldly pink, stuck her chin into her empty wineglass and puffed out her cheeks. Across the room she’d looked like a schoolgirl, wandering through the crowd with downcast eyes, smiling at some naughty thought of her own; up close her beautiful face was a magnet for light, might have been Jewish or not, might have been thirtyish or not, might or might not have undergone a few surgical nips and tucks. Merope had at first glance classified her, erroneously, as “Fashion”—as belonging to the flamboyant tribe of ageless nomads who follow the collections between Europe and New York as migrant workers follow the harvests.
Clay, however, was beyond Fashion. “Because he was too good,” she said in a thoughtful voice, of Merope’s Dutch ex-boyfriend. Her accent in English, like her face, was hard to define: a few European aspirates that slid unexpectedly into an unabashed American flattening of vowels. “No respectable woman,” she added, “should have to put up with that.”
The party was given by a friend of Merope’s—a model married to an Italian journalist, who occasionally got together with some of the other black American and Caribbean models to cook barbecue. The models got raunchy and loud on these occasions, and that night hung intertwined over the beer and ribs, hooting with laughter, forming a sort of gazebo of long, beautiful brown limbs, while a bit of Fashion and a few artistic Milanese buzzed around the edges. Merope had arrived with a painter who dressed only in red and kept goats in his city garden—the type of character who through some minor law of the universe inevitably appears in the social life of a young woman who has just broken off a stable relationship. When the painter left her side and went off to flirt vampirishly with everyone else in the room, Merope started talking with Clay and instantly realized, with the sense of pure recognition one has in falling in love, or in the much rarer and more subtle process of identifying a new friend, that this was the person she had been looking for to get in trouble with in Milan.
Clay’s too hastily proffered description was of a family vaguely highborn, vaguely European, vaguely American (her passport, like her pithy syntax, demonstrated the latter) and of a childhood passed in a sort of whistle-stop