The sight of the moon dissolves the flippant self-confidence Merope caught from Clay, which carried her through dinner and the party. She looks down at her bare knees emerging like polished wood from black silk, shifts her body in the enveloping softness of the leather seat, and feels not small, as such encounters with celestial bodies are supposed to make one feel, but simply in error. Out of step.
Once, four or five years ago, on vacation in Senegal, she and her sister sneaked out of Club Med and went to a New Year’s Eve dance in the town gymnasium and a local boy led her onto the floor, where a sweating, ecstatic crowd was surging in an oddly decorous rhythm of small, synchronized stops and starts; and in those beautiful African arms she’d taken one step and realized that it was wrong. And not just that the step was wrong in itself but that it led to a whole chain of wrong steps and that she—who had assumed she was the heiress of the entire continent of Africa—couldn’t for the life of her catch that beat. Sitting now in this car, where she has no real desire or need to be, she experiences a similar dismay. She feels that a far-reaching mistake has been made, not now but long ago, as if she and Nicolò and Clay and the other people she knows are condemned to endless repetitions of a tiresome antique blunder to which the impassive moon continues to bear witness.
“I think it’s time to go back now,” she says, breaking into whatever Nicolò is confessing; then she feels unreasonably annoyed by the polite promptness with which he falls silent, makes a U-turn, and heads toward the city. For a second she wishes intensely that something would happen to surprise her. She sees it in a complete, swift sequence, the way she dreams up those freelance scripts: Nicolò stops the car, turns to her, and bites her bare shoulder to the bone. Or an angel suddenly steps out on the road, wings and arm outstretched, and explains each of them to the other in a kindly, efficient, bilingual manner, rather like a senior UN interpreter. From the radio, which has been on since they reached the canal road, comes a fuzz of static and a few faint phrases of Sam Cooke’s “Cupid.” Merope looks down at her hands in her lap and when she looks up again they are passing an old farmhouse set close to the road: one of the rambling brick peasant cascine, big enough for half a dozen families, that dot the Bassa Padana lowlands like fortresses. Even at night it is clear that this place is half in ruins, but as they pass by she sees a figure standing in front and gives an involuntary cry.
Nicolò has good reflexes and simply slows the car without bringing it to a halt. “What is it?”
“There was someone standing in front of that cascina—it looked like a woman holding a child.”
“That’s not impossible. Some of these big abandoned houses close to the city have been taken over by squatters. Foreigners, again: Albanians, Filipinos, Moroccans, Somalians, Yugoslav gypsies. What I’m afraid we’re facing is a new barbarian invasion.”
She hardly notices what he says, because she is busy trying to understand what she saw back in front of the old farmhouse, whose walls, she realizes with delayed comprehension, seemed to have been festooned with spray-paint graffiti like a Bronx subway stop, like an East London squat. The figure she saw in the moonlight could have been a wild-haired woman holding a baby but could just as easily have been a man with dreadlocks cradling something else: a bundle, a small dog. The clothing of the figure was indeterminate, the skin definitely dark, the face an oval of shadow. Thinking of it and remembering her thoughts beforehand, she feels an absurd flash of terror, from which she quickly pulls back.
You aren’t drunk, she tells herself in her mother’s most commonsense tone, and you have taken no dicey pharmaceuticals, so stop worrying yourself at once. Just stop. When Nicolò notices that she is shaken up and asks if she is feeling all right, Merope says she is overtired and leaves it at that. She is sorry she cried out: it makes it seem that the two of them have shared some dangerous intimate experience.
Back in Milan they go speeding along the deserted tram tracks, and the moon disappears behind masses of architecture. Merope wants above all things to be back in her apartment, in her own bed, under the ikat quilt her ex-boyfriend made for her. She has to drive to Bologna for a meeting tomorrow afternoon and in the morning has a series of appointments for which, she thinks, she will be about as alert as a hibernating frog. By the time they are standing outside the thick oak carriage doors of her apartment house, in Via Francesco Sforza, her fit of nerves has passed.
Nicolò, looking a bit sheepish after the amount he has said, invites her to have dinner next week.
“I can’t see how that would help either one of us,” replies Merope, but she says it without the malicious energy of earlier that evening. In fact she says it as a joke, because she doesn’t really mind him anymore. She doesn’t give him her number, but she knows he’ll get it from Clay or from someone else, and this knowledge leaves her so unmoved that for a minute she is filled with pity, for him and probably for herself as well. Without adding anything she kisses him on both cheeks and then lets the small, heavy pedestrians’ door close between them.
Then she takes off her shoes and in her stocking feet runs across the cold, slippery paving stones of the courtyard into her wing of the building. She steps into the old glass-and-wooden elevator, careful not to bang the double doors and awaken Massimo the porter, who sleeps nearby. As she goes up she feels the buzzing mental clarity that comes from exhaustion. In the back of her mind have risen the words from the ghost story at the party, the baleful pronouncement engraved on a stone slab: “Siete tutti maledetti.” And for a few seconds she finds herself laboring over that phrase, attempting with a feverish automatic kind of energy to fix it—to substitute a milder word for cursed—as she might correct a bad line of copy.
The phone is ringing as she lets herself into the apartment, and she grins as she picks it up: Clay is worse than a dorm mother.
“What if I decide to go to bed with somebody?” she says into the phone.
“You won’t—not with him, anyway. You’re not the charitable type,” says Clay. She gives a loud yawn: she’s probably been lying there talking to the Texan, who calls every night. “I just wanted to make sure you made curfew.”
“What time is curfew at this school?”
“Oh, around noon the next day.”
“Clay, shame on you. You kissed that man.”
“There was no man there. It was a trick of lighting.”
They start giggling, egg each other on. For the first time that night Merope is having fun; courage warms her and the dreadlocked apparition by the farmhouse steps back into whatever waiting room in the imagination is reserved for catchpenny roadside omens. A few months later, she will discover that this was the night she decided to stop living in Italy; that here, in a small burst of instinct, began her transition to somewhere else. But at this moment on the bare edge of a new day in Milan, only one image comes to mind: herself and Clay in evening dresses out of a thirties film, foxtrotting together like two Ginger Rogerses around and around an empty piazza. Full of bravado, they laugh loud American bad-girl laughter as they dance; they whirl faster until they outrun gravity and start to rise over the worn gray face of the city, their satin skirts spinning out in a white disk that tosses casual light down on factories and streetcar lines, on gardens, palaces, and the bristling spires of the Duomo.
Merope sits down on the bed and wedges the phone between her shoulder and ear. “Did you see the moon?” she asks.