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  “Thin blood. It teach the lesson. But what lesson?”

  Chip n’ Dale have gotten rid of their protective strata of winter clothes. They’re lean and thin and asexual. “Marcello” is intense: big brows, wavy curls, face snobby and unhappy. Cugino Hitler is mousier, more flexible, more welcoming, pensive, bald, fair. La Sposina has forced them to take off their caps with a rhetorical flourish: “We’re in France here, not America.”

  “Are you kidding me?”

  “Place is Belgian, bi-atch. Ma we love Parigi, doll, we love Roma, we’re from Kansas City and we heart Milano.”

  La Sposina has stopped seeking out literal meaning in “Marcello” ’s words. She hands the book of architectural sights to Cugino Hitler, who is intrigued. The three of them end up in Bryant Park after a cab ride paid for by Chip n’ Dale. They’re delighted by their nicknames, even more delighted by the chance to walk around and gaze up at art deco buildings while waiting for La Sposina to agree to pose for demeaning pictures. The American Radiator Building, a decadent tower made of black gold, evokes the coal its first owners helped make obsolete. The boys take out their notepads and cameras. She thinks they’re cute, concentrating. Chip n’ Dale convert to art deco at the corner of Lexington and Forty-Second, the Chrysler Building on one side, the Chanin Building on the other: “Gay under, cock over,” “Pink polo, zio!” “Terracotta and bas reliefs!” Then they tackle the Chanin’s lobby, shooting until the black doorman asks them to stop. “All gold,” they exclaim. “Elevator, gold,” “Gold newsstand, gold letterbox,” “that black fucking doorman.” And finally: “Che fascismo! Che fascismo!” “Duce duce duce!” They shout and laugh and punch each other’s backs.

  “Are you nuts?” La Sposina asks. “What’s fascist about it? It’s so exotic! It’s like a forest.” But they can’t be convinced. Deco, they insist, is “fascist sublime.”

  They finally leave the building, and La Sposina is tired; she wants to go home, she’s exhausted: now the kids are discussing the new artwork they’ve just conceived of, inspired, of course, by the Chanin: “Fake mosaics with hip-hop niggers in place of nigger slaves building the Chrysler and the Chanin. Niggers building white popular culture for us to exploit! Che fascismo!”

  “No Vuitton, then? Can I go?”

  “Not at all! You’re pivotal! We’ll find a way to make you kneel in Vuitton shoes in the middle of all the deco niggers.”

  “Seriously, guys, are you fascists now? Is this a joke?”

  “Woman. You degradation o you no degradation?”

  “Sure sure, Marce, it’s not like you’re just saying random shit and I’m so impressed with your intelligence.” She hails a cab as Hitler checks his pockets and tries handing her $20, but she refuses.

  Hitler: “Well then, call us if you want to pose!”

  “Marcello”: “Bi-atch!”

  She climbs into the cab. The driver, a huge Indian guy, is swallowing his last bite of non-Indian food. He places the Tupperware container on the seat next to him and stares at her through the rearview mirror. La Sposina, who hasn’t shut the door, catches the stranger’s windblown eyes and turns to Cugino Hitler and runs a hand through her hair. “Okay, get inside.”

  So the three of them head down toward Union Square, to the apartment where they’re staying. They’re so excited that she’s changed her mind that they start brainstorming what shoes they can use for the test shots, and when to go back to Vuitton.

  “Let’s first see if I’m even right for it.”

  The house where they’re crashing is another New York fantasyland dreamed up for Italian consumption. It’s not Willy, or Midtown, but the Village: fancy little streets, rusty fire escapes. Lorenzo’s friends live in places like this, and so does Carrie Bradshaw, leaning on the windowsill after writing down her latest reflections on sex; an old reference, whose relevance weirdly seems to linger. Up the carpeted stairs, through a metal door painted beige, and inside to two rooms: one bedroom and one glorious living room with an exposed brick wall, a long sofa under two large windows. Outside: snow clumped on dead branches, one car drifting by, then another, a row of confident buildings just like this one, under a bright, gray sky.

  It’s a grown-up’s apartment. It’s furnished with a big TV and an antique cupboard. Over that, the boys have imposed a layer of their own mess: sweaters everywhere, big sneakers thrown into a corner, grocery store tote bags with cereal boxes.

  “It’s nice, goddamn it.”

  “You can come by any time.”

  “Marcello” sits on a stool at the kitchenette counter, rolling a joint.

  “You happy?”

  “Ludovica, you bella fica, ’course I’m contento.”

  “You’re two babies. I like you.”

  “Two babies with humongous cocks.”

  “Of course, love.”

  And when, finally, after a couple of puffs, Ludovica kneels on the floor, shoeless, in a skirt that she found in the owner’s closet and that she can’t zip up all the way, facing away from the windows and from the boys, who shoot her from the couch with a reflex and a mobile, she recites one of her favorite lines to herself, Clarissa Dalloway on Sally Seton: “Aveva un egoismo così naturale e il desiderio che si pensasse a lei per prima era scoperto.” She brings the novel along on every trip, evidence that women have souls even when they make mistakes.

  “The absolute best would be seeing you crawl around on stage like that.”

  Her panties are yellow and high-waisted, and the skirt is gray, a sad thing a lawyer might wear. Cugino Hitler stands up occasionally to gently pull the skirt around or up or down, not to expose her lingerie but to figure out her legs.

  “You’re beautiful,” he says with real emotion. “These legs you have—they’re big but they’re not fat. No offense.” Tenderly: “You’re like this donna cannone, you’re majestic.” He shoots her from the back, then from the front.

  “Should I make a face?”

  “No, these are for me, for my personal archive. You look good in a white shirt, you know. I’d unbutton it a bit.”

  “My back hurts. Can I sit down for a minute?”

  She sits on the floor. They look at each other, she and Cugino Hitler. “Marcello” keeps his eyes on the ground, aroused and tense. Her husband could never talk to these people, but she can. They know that making Italian movies isn’t the answer, not anymore; this is. Maybe Italian cinema is dead. Lorenzo should try to understand these people. She doesn’t get them, yet she’s here and now she’s kneeling again and Cugino Hitler is snapping away. Will she look okay? Will the black stockings hide every last hair?

  —

  LATER, IN A cab with Hitler’s twenty-dollar bill in her purse, she realizes that what she loved most of all was the way Chip n’ Dale were dying to ask her for something more but couldn’t. Her husband keeps begging her to come back home, and her texts in response are more composed, more confident. She only loses the confidence when she drafts an email to her father. At Berengo’s, she watches YouTube videos of girls sniffing condoms.

  * JAMES MURPHY, 52, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Rockwells, born and raised in Akron, Ohio. After majoring in Economics and minoring in Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, he returns home to work at his father’s temp job agency and write a novel on capitalism, as seen from inside the private sector as opposed to the academy. He publishes The Rockwells in 1996 when he is in his late thirties. While initially viewed as a “cult author” and an “experimentalist,” Murphy and his views on literature are de facto popularized by the success of Don DeLillo’s Underworld and the works of contemporaries like David Foster Wallace, George Saunders, Ralph Moody, Marcus. Since counterculture has been transformed by the Internet into a game of nods, which is also a way to describe Murphy’s prose, the new millennium transforms Murphy’s cold cerebral non-empathic style into a new empathy. Murphy writes two bestselling books dominated by a helicopter-as-metaphor conceit and tamed by a traditional realism bo
rrowed from Henry James—a slim pseudo-memoir titled Godspeed and the novel The Rockwells. For Murphy, the obnoxious abundance of helicopters has a real life origin: his younger brother Jonathan died in a helicopter accident in Ohio in 2003. Jonathan had made his money in an online shopping start-up, “perverting the dear American simplicity of our family style,” as Murphy writes, and giving in to a tacky, provincial, luxury lifestyle. Jonathan later crashes in a field somewhere in fly-over country after the spare car parts he invested part of his money on fail. After Jonathan’s death, Murhpy takes three years off from writing. Then, after a burst of a few months’ writing and one year of editing, he publishes the pretend memoir Godspeed (awfully titled, in the Italian edition, La ballata degli elicotteri, “The ballad of the helicopters”), in which a reflection on his difficult relationship with his brother and his reaction to Jonathan’s death is complicated, storytelling-wise, by the fact that the parallel reality of the pretend memoir, otherwise identical to our reality, sees all the people in his life dying from helicopter crashes—including his mother and father and wife and daughters. The streak of imaginary tragedies starts with his brother’s actual death. The helicopter, in Godspeed, ends up identifying with death and the human condition, overwhelming through repetition the original need to mourn his brother, anticipating future deaths.

  She takes the train back to Willy on Thursday, around noon. Rosa, the owner of the boutique, has ordered her to stop by and discuss her new schedule. Rosa is a Neapolitan who moved first to Milan, then to Brooklyn. A spinster with a heart of gold disguised under hip, becoming looks, she must have let Lorenzo convince her to lure Ludovica back to the neighborhood. On the C train, La Sposina examines a ripped gay guy, two unpretentious yuppies, a family of tourists. On the L, she’s reunited with men and women dressed exactly the way she likes them to be dressed, their asymmetric faces ravishing. They stand pressed against Hispanic men reading romance novels and black teens in electric-green basketball sneakers.

  Outside the Bedford stop she sees the familiar double-breasted SS-style coats; fitted down jackets; blazers with ridiculously large lapels; checkered lumberjack blouses. It’s a parade of fresh, elongated, unwrinkled faces that are almost perfect, marred only by buggy eyes and overdetermined glasses. New trash bags are lined up along the curb under a sharp sun and a layer of snow that’s alternately gilded and dirty. It’s warmer than it was yesterday; the sky is a confident blue. The boutique encounter is obviously a plan hatched by Lorenzo, an ambush plotted with Rosa’s not quite witting participation. La Sposina walks warily on the frozen sidewalk.

  The boutique’s door is unlocked, but the sign apologizes: SORRY WE’RE CLOSED. A long hug with Rosa. She’s forty, short, and dense and tough, with close-cut hair dyed red and two creases on her thick neck. She wears a tight white sleeveless T-shirt, a vast knee-length skirt over heavy black stockings, a gold vest with a single button, and a shawl covered in skulls.

  “What’s going on with those pants, love? Here, go try this on.” Her Neapolitan accent has gotten Milanesthetized with the years. She hands La Sposina a light gray skirt, felt with uneven stitching along the edges. “Maybe these stockings, too? I’m doing inventory; the shop’s closed all morning. I meant to do it yesterday, but I just couldn’t make myself.”

  “You got yourself a male intern?”

  Rosa pretends to miss the joke; that’s how she is. Warm and affectionate—less a boss than a member of the family, and indeed, Ludovica got the gig through her cousin, who met Rosa at the Istituto Europeo di Deisgn. Middle age is cruel to her: she wears layers of foundation and has no men in her life, except for the occasional boys in their twenties who develop a crush and offer themselves up and then vanish, leaving her alone at home with her posters, Mad Men and Wong Kar-Wai. She’s spent the last few months transforming La Sposina’s style, using the boutique’s best merchandise. She points a finger toward the back of the shop. A mirror covers the entire back wall like at a ballet school. There are racks of clothes barely illuminated by the dim light of a table lamp and two curtained booths, one of them obviously concealing Lorenzo. So La Sposina ignores the booths and positions herself in front of the mirror; if her husband is really lurking behind the curtain, this is exactly what he wants to see: his wife with her back to him, undressing and trying on a new skirt.

  When she stands in front of a mirror, it’s hard to pretend that she’s Jasmine Trinca. In a large mirror, she has to accept herself for what she is. She’s not a nimble headstrong moretta like Trinca; she’s too big, a donnone who overlaps with contemporary standards of beauty only in a few key respects: no belly, an interesting face with almond-shaped eyes a reasonable distance from each other, a nondescript nose, a full mouth. The rest: a chin so thin that from certain angles it disappears entirely; big, round shoulders; an ass that appeals exclusively to real ass-lovers, too wide and soft; legs that aren’t huge but certainly too noticeable, saved only by elegant ankles that tie together what she’s always thought was an impossible balancing act. Rosa has spent the last few months making her more attractive: she forced her to get bangs, encircling her face with hair, and persuaded her to abandon the Sorbonne style, which fit neither her body type, nor the neighborhood. This self-effacement was a prerequisite for the job: no more uptight coats; no more Parisian stockings, which gave her monstre legs; no more blouses that never closed properly (she has a large, flat chest; her torso is unfortunately wide). Though Willy is full of perfect girls, people appreciate atypical beauties, and Rosa made her into one.

  She stands there in black stockings and a man’s shirt buttoned up to her neck. Rosa is pumping music from the other room, a confusing mix of trap rap and free jazz. Since Lorenzo hasn’t come out yet—she stands still for a second to see if he’s in there, playing hide-and-seek—Ludovica puts her skirt on and zips it up high on her waist, over her belly button. This is how Rosa likes her: the vertical and horizontal lines of her body all mixed up so that her facial features stand out. A hipster Mina—and that’s how Lorenzo wants her. Now, for him, she pulls the skirt up in the back, so he can see her ass from the room. At least the thick, black stockings make it look smaller.

  Lorenzo emerges, slightly discolored, as if transported from some other dimension, and La Sposina feels her sternum snapping.

  “Don’t move, love.”

  The wife holds on to the little handrail in front of the mirror. Beloved husband, bourgeois director, she can’t find the strength to utter the words: no, no, please, not the scena madre, the big scene, the drama. She feels she owes it to him. Which male sexual fantasy is worse, her husband’s or Chip ‘n’ Dale’s? In the mirror she sees the husband, the ragazzone from Prati with the nice oval face and the pretty yellow-toothed smile, one horizontal wrinkle on his forehead; curls pressed down by the wool cap he has just pulled off his head; glasses with big tinted lenses and a thick gray frame, a figure out of a 1970s Italian gangster movie; unshaven with sideburns; a horizontal scar on his chin from falling off his bicycle; wool scarf; the black sweater, half unzipped; the striped Muji shirt you can glimpse beneath, a few buttons undone; black jeans, slightly faded, tight but not too tight; and finally, his boots, his boots, his boots. He’s begun to look unfamiliar—especially compared to the subtle androgyny of casa Berengo—though it’s only been three days since she’s seen him.

  And here’s the sceneggiata:

  “Careful, I’ve got stockings on!” she yells as he grabs her.

  “Don’t turn around.”

  “Muccino mio, my stockings.”

  “Don’t move, silly.”

  “Rosa’s in the other room.”

  La Sposina wants him, and wanting him comforts her. When he’s done she’ll be able to ask him the question she’s been avoiding. And then she’ll fly to Rome. She looks his reflection in the eyes: he is focused and hurt. She lifts her skirt knowing he’ll never tire of this scene: a woman lifting her skirt, moaning, caving in. She waits before pulling down her stockings and panties just e
nough, but then she hears a metallic snip, a pair of scissors. “What are you doing?” she asks, though she knows the answer.

  “Don’t move. You’ll get hurt. Rosa’s gone.”

  “Is this a movie? Fucking scissors?”

  No response as he continues to widen the hole in the crotch of her stockings.

  “Are you shooting a porno, love? Is this our big break? A porno?”

  “I love you.”

  She feels two wet fingers push past the curtain of stockings and panties. The director and protagonist enters her and moans like a man who’s just gotten inside a woman, and she moans like a woman. His hands are warm—he knows she hates cold hands—and she feels him lift her shirt up over her bra like in those American Apparel ads he likes, the ones where the models always have their clothes sexily askew. When she’s fully naked she’s not as pretty as she used to be, but with clothes on she’s different every time. It’s like being with a whole bunch of women. He pulls one breast out of her bra.

  So here they are, these two, the boy and the girl who landed in JFK after sending a link to the short film and news of the movie award to a couple of émigré acquaintances, including a friend of a friend of Lorenzo’s, Elisa, a cockteaser currently in New York, for whom Lorenzo has at times lost interest in Ludovica. The daughter of a producer, the cockteaser has never gone through with anything, but the two friends have talked it all over. Ludovica hasn’t been shocked by this stuff; she’s practical, and the girl’s friend (the daughter of a Center-Left senator) could prove useful. The short film really had seemed good when they were leaving for New York, and at JFK, she’d felt lucky to have this Mastroianni guy by her side: an enthusiastic philosopher/filmmaker—could you ask for more from a husband?

  So here they are, in front of Rosa’s large mirror, her hands on the bar as if clinging to a ledge. She shuts her eyes the moment she sees a sigh on her mother’s face—no, it’s Ludovica’s, no, her mother’s face—as the focused, stern-looking man-child pounds against her through the warm tingle of the shredded stockings, disappearing behind her because they’re the same height. Lorenzo’s hands cling to her breasts, her hands cling to the bar. They exchange gasps and affected quips: