Class Read online

  “Didn’t Elisabetta feel left out?”

  “Totally. So then Sara made a burger for Elisabetta—I was giving her instructions the whole time—and as Betta ate it, I could hear Sara talking to herself, saying ‘Compliments to the chef!’ ”

  “That’s cute.”

  You tell him that he has to buy Sara the bracelet kit. And for the two girls, the Sit ‘n’ Play Activity Tray and the plush toy shaped like SpongeBob Square Pants; for I Maschi, the Transformers Hot Wheels racetrack with the 360-degree loop and two 3-D puzzles of Chicago and Las Vegas. You drag him—with his green sweater, his black windbreaker, his blue pants, his Timberlands, the sweat accumulating on his balding temples—to every corner of the loud, warm, cheerful store. Tullius lets you take him by the arm, and you almost seem to dance around him, jumping from section to section on the tips of your shoes.

  Gustavo Tullio always leaves for New York with a travel bag and an empty suitcase. For his children, the empty suitcase exists as a private myth, a story they tell one another throughout the year. Before every trip, each child inspects the suitcase to confirm that it’s actually empty, that it can accommodate as many presents as possible. America is the family myth: Tullio always envied the trips you took with your family after the two of you got back from scout camps. He’d head to Nettuno beach in a station wagon weighed down by suitcases and bikes tied to the roof, but you’d be in a different car, sleepy but jittery, on your way to the long-term parking lot by Fiumicino. The myth endures, though these days you can find all of these toys—these luxurious New York toys—in Italy. Which means that Tullio can never quite reproduce the glamour of the presents Berengo would bring back for him in the nineties: the marshmallows, the Cherry Cokes, the special Transformers sets. He tells you that he’s planning an American trip with the entire family, all seven of them. They’ll go west, to the National Parks. This is, you know, the kind of family Tullio has always dreamed of.

  Your feelings for him are complex, but you do care. You’d love to make music with his two sons; you just can’t muster up the courage to ask. You can imagine yourself flying to Rome to show the kids how to use the latest music software, how to make songs using basic samples. Still, you keep your distance: you won’t even let yourself introduce I Maschi to music that’s cooler and less hopelessly out of date than the stuff they listen to. You know that for Tullio, it’s important that the kids not feel too inspired by art, too seduced by it. What he wants them to avoid, above all, is an undefined life, a life like yours.

  You feel happy when he tells you that Marco and Luca want to be “Rockstar americane.”

  “Is that their expression or yours?”

  “They came up with it. I asked them, ‘Not just rock stars?’ ‘No,’ they said. ‘Americane.’”

  “That sounds just right. But they’re not listening to dub step? Or grime?”

  “No, just rock. It’s because I told them that Mom is rap, and I am rock.”

  “Good, clear ideas to live by.”

  Tullio has ensured that the kids will grow up in a parallel reality: a familiar combination of piccolo-borghese vulgarity and a Christianity built on the terror of all desires—theirs as well as other people’s. You care for him, so you won’t object. It’s almost as if it weren’t a coincidence that you’re short and he’s tall and large.

  “They want to live in a skyscraper. They want to see your apartment.”

  “Bring them!”

  “They’d have to become famous, first…”

  “Well, let’s go to a guitar shop, then.”

  “No, it’s too early for electric guitars. They already make too much noise as it is, and that’s just with classical guitars. God, they’ll be horny teenagers in no time. I’m terrified. But what can I do? Esther is already scaring me, and she’s not even a boy.”

  “How old is she?”

  “Thirteen. She’s into Fabri Fibra.” Fabri Fibra’s rudeness and vulgarity are a bad influence on a young girl, but worse is his depressiveness. He’s a self-proclaimed miserabilist who calls women whores.

  You ask for updates on the Eurock, the currency his kids can use to buy sweets and toys. Every chore is worth a certain amount of Eurocks. (I Maschi came up with the name.) The family is moving to a new apartment soon, which means more demanding and difficult tasks, which means more Eurocks. You were the one who told him about this system twenty years ago—your mother’s family had used it back in the day. “They’ll become good people, Papa,” you tell him. “I’m happy you stayed with me,” you add. “You sleep well?”

  Tullio doesn’t answer. Instead he talks about how unbelievable it is—how frustrating and unbelievable—that Esther will soon be the same age as his high-school girlfriend Daria (that’s me) was when he first sodomized her (fifteen). You listen intently and offer advice.

  Tullio blames Esther’s hip-hop rebellion on his wife, Maria, and you go out on a limb and defend her: “You have to find a way to care for Maria between now and when Betta and Sara come of age. One day you’ll be alone, like you were before Esther was born, and you’ll need to love her again.” Of course he won’t actually be alone; the members of the Neocatecumenali, the Catholic organization Tullio belongs to, tend to still have young kids at home when their older children start to get married and have children, so as the last of the children enter adolescence, there are grandkids to take care of.

  “Sometimes…sometimes it’s hard to love her.”

  “Do you pray for her?” You know he loves metaphysical talk.

  “I have to say it’s hard. Praying with her is easier because we do it every night before we go to sleep and in the morning when we wake up.”

  You keep going. “It’s important that you pray for her,” you say with feeling. You’re trying to support him, encourage him, and you want to make him feel that the church roots of your friendship are still alive. You like that he marvels at your faith every time you talk to him, that he knows you’re more of a mystic than he is.

  “I have too much guilt. It’s impossible for me to pray for her.”

  “That’s the devil putting thoughts in your brain.”

  “You think so?”

  You do. You think praying gets you closer to God. This morning you stared at the married woman asleep in your bed and prayed. You think that as long as you keep praying, you’re going to be a good man. “Yes. It’s the devil trying to convince you that you can’t pray for her.”

  As you talk you pull toys in and out of their little compartments, store shelves that serve as temporary homes that they’ll soon abandon for new shelves in the elegant homes of solvent, well-managed families, where their physical forms will matter less than their subtext: once they leave FAO Schwarz, they’ll serve as stand-ins for love and warmth.

  “The devil exploits your one weakness: you don’t respect your wife intellectually. You despise her.”

  “Ugh. That hurts, ciccio!”

  He called you ciccio! He cares about you, even though he’s convinced you’ve slept with a married woman. Maybe he’s not being himself.

  “You think of her as your inferior. And this is a problem. Hey, what are we buying for Esther?”

  “No, no toys for Esther; she’ll just throw them at me.”

  “Isn’t it incredible that you can pray for someone you just fucked in the ass, and also for someone you don’t respect intellectually?”

  “You’re crazy,” he laughs. “I don’t fuck my wife in the ass.”

  Back in high school, when he and I were together, Gustavo Tullio was a fan of anal sex. It feels like a distant era: rote translations from Ancient Greek; clear-cut duties, all easily dispensed with; and then, during all the stray half hours and half days that weren’t accounted for, the grand experiments with smells and underwear, and in summer, the ecstasy of sweaty armpits and fainting with desire.

  “That’s the problem!” you say with a laugh.

  “Ugh, Nico, stop it. You’re shooting a bullet right through my hear
t, old man,” he says with a laugh, the hair on his knuckles dancing as he mimes his wound. “No sodomy.”

  You let him pay for the 3-D puzzles you thought you would pay for yourself. The two of you had gathered three big bags’ worth of toys, and you were happy when you saw how confidently he pulled the credit card out of his pocket to cover them. He was always so desperate to succeed, and now he seems so content, so proud. And you’re so proud that he made it. You hope he’ll keep calling you ciccio with this kind of intimacy; to you it still sounds like the king inviting the commoners for dinner at his castle. In the scouts, he was the king, and you were the little one, Nicolino, a tiny blond boy with colitis who captured the friendship of the camp king, all thanks to me. I was your friend, and I was one year younger than Gustavo and two years older than you. I had red hair, and I felt soft, so all of you wanted to hug me in the polyester blue sweaters I wore that covered more of my thighs than my daisy dukes.

  You two met on those thighs, which were pale and covered with little moles, and the mystery of time transformed them into distinct phenomena: for you, a kid, they were grown-up stuff, but for him they were already sweet and young and tender things.

  Tullio was three years older than you and one year older than me. Back then such age differences mattered. At twelve you were a little blond bear, overweight, your arm hair wispy and downy, your skin smooth; a year later, Tullio fucked me in the ass.

  You cared for each other. Tullio was a man, a giant, You see him in his short, tight jeans covered in grass stains, drinking from the fiery glass of the river at sunset, hunched over it with cup-shaped hands, his bony ankles protruding from his gym socks, the black hair on his long calves. He always shaved by the river, twenty meters downstream from where he drank his water, his facial hair and his shaving cream dispersing in the stream among the rocks.

  You’ve come a long way: you’re about to introduce him to a Pulitzer Prize–winning writer who’s taking notes on you.

  The two of you take the subway down to SoHo and walk around leisurely, searching for fashion accessories for his older daughter. Now you’re on the south side of Houston, and you cross the street and cut through the small park wedged between Houston and First Street.

  There’s James Murphy pacing back and forth in front of Prune, his hands deep in the pockets of a Loden coat he bought on your recommendation. Tullio quickens his step. “He looks nice, Murphy,” he says.

  —

  IT’S BEEN LESS than half an hour since the men sat down, and Nicolino is drunk and full of shame. He keeps his eyes down and chats with Edele on WhatsApp, reporting on the turn his lunch has taken: James Murphy and Gustavo Tullio, the two moralists, have judged him and humiliated him: first for talking about yesterday’s fling with the married woman, then for the time he made a woman pay him for kisses. “Edele, I’m being messo in mezzo.” She knows that expression of Berengo’s, knows he has a big persecution complex. He always thinks he’s messo in mezzo. She consoles him, but he can tell she’s not especially eager to humor him; he is, after all, talking about another woman.

  At the end of Murphy’s story, the one about payment for kisses, Nicola stands up. “Bene,” he says in Italian. “Vi auguro un buon pomeriggio.” Before he walks away from the table, he kicks the bags of toys with his left foot, a sad and clumsy gesture. He almost gets tangled in his coat as he tries to put it on while he walks toward the door. It’s only when he hits the freezing air that he regains a little bit of composure.

  —

  IT’S FUNNY THAT after everything I’ve been through with Nicolino, I’m now forced to navigate a day in his life as a bambino adulto. Even without a body, all this surveillance and scanning of Nicolino’s life is tiring and bureaucratic. For this observer, his life, so full of pleasure, is little more than a slog. It’s especially annoying that our prior topic was my supposed blame for the Big Prank, and now here we are with him, who didn’t even take part.

  —

  NICO WALKS BACK to SoHo and enters Miu Miu with an overwhelming sense of anxiety, the cold wind blowing in behind him. He buys an expensive craquelé calfskin crocodile-print keychain for Edele, but she texts to say that she’s unavailable this afternoon. Maybe she’s just jealous, but in any case, the handoff won’t work: he won’t be able to give her the present, so he returns to Miu Miu and gets his $200 back. Instead he decides to bring a couple of bottles of Sonoma cabernet to Sergio de Simone’s. He knows that Sergio hates Tullio, and he’ll be happy to hear his rants. He’ll console Nico in his incredible living room on the Williamsburg waterfront, on the twenty-fourth floor, twelve-meter windows looming over the river.

  There, Berengo steps out onto the balcony and feels so dizzy that he has to get back inside and hide behind the supporting column in the middle of the living room. He sits down on the couch, but he can still see the terrifying view: the gray river, the skyscrapers thin as matchsticks, the island much longer and wider than it looks on the map, the surprising expanse of the power plant at the east end of Fourteenth Street. Even from here, the view is unencumbered: the balcony has a modest steel and glass railing that leaves no part of the landscape to the imagination. He steps out again. The twenty-fourth floor is so high that Manhattan feels frayed and low and endless, New Jersey’s humble skyscrapers visible in the background. He goes back inside.

  Berengo doesn’t go onto the terrace because he’s afraid of heights. Sergino thinks of Berengo as his savior, the man who got him out of Italy, introduced him to people. So the apartment is su casa: Nico is free to do what he likes, including spending the entire afternoon complaining on the couch and walking around barefoot on Sergio’s soft, sheepskin rug, his wallet resting on a bronze Vishnu head, his electric-green down jacket on the chair.

  Sergio is proud of the place. The birch wood furniture, the translucent white curtains, the low coffee table surrounded by pillows (for more sophisticated reclining), the huge flat screen TV that takes up most of one wall.

  “I can’t really tell you what happened. I was messo in mezzo. They ganged up on me. So I got up and left. They’re such bastards.”

  “What? What do you mean? What did they tell you?”

  There’s a dessert plate with a small pile of coke, a video game—“DJ Hero”—on the TV, and audio blasting through a Bang and Olufsen stereo system. They sit on the couch and take turns using the controller: it’s a mock-turntable with buttons, levers, and a little rotating black disk to simulate scratching and filtering. They shuffle through Beastie Boys, Jay-Z, Tiësto, Morillo, and Gorillaz, pausing the game every other second to talk and register their outrage, sometimes in falsetto.

  “Oh man, Tullius was heavy as fuck. He told James, ‘I saw him lead a married woman to commit a mortal sin.’ That’s what he said! Those exact words! He’s such a shit. ‘You don’t go around sleeping with married women,’ he told him, and me. And also: ‘You’re setting a bad example for the kids hanging out at your place.’ There was nothing he wouldn’t have said to make me look bad in James’s eyes. He doesn’t like it that I get to have James.”

  “Right. So he wants his job in Finmeccanica, with the salary, the five children, and church on Sundays, but he also wants to be friends with James Murphy? Mmm.” Sergio grabs his phone, tweets, “And he’d love the messa in culo,” a bit of teenage wordplay shorn of context: messa, meaning “Catholic mass,” and messa in culo, meaning “fucking in the ass.” “Exactly! The messa in culo. Shall I bend? Shall I? Bend?”

  The conversation cracks them up.

  “Tullio said, like, ‘I work, I come to New York for work, I’m your guest. You have nothing to do all day—it’s your choice. You think you’re brave for choosing this lifestyle, but you’re not ballsy enough to handle other people’s judgment, even though you’re always showing off your lifestyle choices.’ ”

  “He said this shit to you?”

  “Swear to God. He said, ‘This is what it comes down to: you do drugs, you’re a fucking mantenuto, a “trustafarian,”
and you always act like some kind of philosopher about everything. But you haven’t done shit with your life, you’ve accomplished nothing, so you’re going crazy and that’s why you get these panic attacks.’ Isn’t that awful?”

  “What did James do?”

  “Oh, that asshole finally lost his shit. He basically admitted to being a Puritanical douchebag, so he took Tullius’s side. Tullius was like, ‘You’re empty!’ I’m empty? Come on! Am I empty?”

  “You’re not empty.”

  Sergio owes him, so he always takes his side. He can now afford to live in corporate Williamsburg, and he’s done it—skyscrapers with built-in gyms, the eleventh floor of an apartment building whose units have been up for sale for little more than a year—but he owes it to Berengo who connected him to the right people. I don’t know exactly who lent him the apartment, if it was a friend or some kind of formal sugar daddy. From the island, now, a shaft of artificial light as the day dies, from Midtown to the Upper East Side; on the right, blurry and abstract, you can see the Chrysler building.

  They laugh and Berengo pauses the videogame and takes Sergio’s iPad out. He goes on YouTube and finds the short film shot by the husband of his female guest.

  “Oh,” Sergino says when he recognizes her, head to toe in yellow. “That’s the wife of the raccomandato. So she’s the one who jerked you off.”

  “Just look at her. She was so good—so sweet, so friendly.”

  “Yeah, but these people are so lame. It’s a lousy, lousy short film. I talked to her at your place, when was that, Tuesday night? She kept insisting that her husband wasn’t a raccomandato in the philosophy department, that he’d managed to get the year at Columbia totally on his own.”

  “Poor thing. She’s cute, though, isn’t she? A neurotic rich Roma Nord girl, you know? I’ve always dug those, always will.”

  “Annoying as fuck.”

  “No, it was sweet.”

  “The husband—that guy’s raccomandatissimo.”

  “For sure. And no talent, zero.”