By ten-thirty, she is sitting up in bed with the Herald Tribune, reading a history of the FBI’s Most Wanted list. Every few seconds, she attempts quite coolly to think of what Roberto is inevitably doing by now, but she determines that it is actually impossible to do so. Those two pages in her imagination are stuck together.
She does, however, recall the evening in Bangkok that she and Roberto spent with the pair of massage girls. How the four of them walked in silence to a fluorescent-lit room with a huge plastic bathtub, and how the two terrifyingly polite, terrifyingly young girls, slick with soapsuds, massaging her with their small plump breasts and shaven pubes, reminded her of nothing so much as chickens washed and trussed for the oven. And how the whole event threatened to become a theater of disaster, until Ariel saw that she would have to manage things. How she indicated to the girls by a number of discreet signs that the three of them were together in acting out a private performance for the man in the room. How the girls understood and even seemed relieved, and how much pleasure her husband took in what, under her covert direction, they all contrived. How she felt less like an erotic performer than a social director setting out to save an awkward party. And how silent she was afterward—not the silence of shocked schoolgirl sensibilities, as Roberto, no doubt, assumed, but the silence of amazement at a world where she always had to be a hostess.
She turns out the light and dreams that she is flying with other people in a plane precariously tacked together from wooden crates and old car parts. They land in the Andes, and she sees that all the others are women and that they are naked, as she is. They are all sizes and colors, and she is far from being the prettiest, but is not the ugliest, either. They are there to film an educational television special, BBC or PBS, and the script says to improvise a dance, which they all do earnestly and clumsily: Scottish reels, belly dancing, and then Ariel suggests ring-around-the-rosy, which turns out to be more fun than anyone had bargained for, as they all flop down, giggling at the end. The odd thing about this dream is how completely happy it is.
She wakes to noise in the room, and Roberto climbing into bed and embracing her. “Dutiful,” she thinks, as he kisses her and reaches for her breasts, but then she lets the thought go. He smells alarmingly clean, but it is a soap she knows. As they make love, he offers her a series of verbal sketches from the evening he has just passed, a bit like a child listing his new toys. What he says is not exciting, but it is exciting to hear him trying, for her benefit, to sound scornful and detached. And the familiar geography of his body has acquired a passing air of mystery, simply because she knows that other women—no matter how resolutely transient and hasty—have been examining it. For the first time in as long as she can remember, she is curious about Roberto.
“Were they really so beautiful?” she asks, when, lying in the dark, they resume coherent conversation. “Flavio said that seeing them was like entering paradise.”
Roberto gives an arrogant, joyful laugh that sounds as young as a teenage boy’s.
“Only for an old idiot like Flavio. They were flashy, let’s put it that way. The dark one, Beba, had an amazing body, but her friend had a better face. The worst thing was having to eat with them—and in that horrendous restaurant. Whose idea was that, yours or Flavio’s?” His voice grows comically aggrieved. “It was the kind of tourist place where they wheel a cart of mints and chewing gum to your table after the coffee. And those girls asked for doggie bags, can you imagine? They filled them with Chiclets!”
The two of them are lying in each other’s arms, shaking with laughter as they haven’t done for months, even years. And Ariel is swept for an instant by a heady sense of accomplishment. “Which of them won the underpants?” she asks.
“What? Oh, I didn’t give them away. They were handmade, silk. Expensive stuff—too nice for a hooker. I kept them for you.”
“But they’re too small for me,” protests Ariel.
“Well, exchange them. You did save the receipt, I hope.” Roberto’s voice, which has been affectionate, indulgent, as in their best times together, takes on a shade of its normal domineering impatience. But it is clear that he is still abundantly pleased, both with himself and with her. Yawning, he announces that he has to get some sleep, that he’s out of training for this kind of marathon. That he didn’t even fortify himself with his birthday Viagra. He alludes to an old private joke of theirs by remarking that Ariel’s present proves conclusively that his mother was right in warning him against immoral American women; and he gives her a final kiss. Adding a possessive, an uxorious, squeeze of her bottom. Then he settles down and lies so still that she thinks he is already asleep. Until, out of a long silence, he whispers, “Thank you.”
In a few minutes he is snoring. But Ariel lies still and relaxed, with her arms at her sides and her eyes wide open. She has always rationed her illusions, and has been married too long to be shocked by the swiftness with which her carefully perverse entertainment has dissolved into the fathomless triviality of domestic life. In a certain way that swiftness is Ariel’s triumph—a measure of the strength of the quite ordinary bondage that, years ago, she chose for herself. So it doesn’t displease her to know that she will wake up tomorrow, make plans to retrieve her daughters, and find that nothing has changed.
But no, she thinks, turning on her side, something is different. A sense of loss is creeping over her, and she realizes it is because she misses Beba. Beba who for two weeks has lent a penumbral glamour to Ariel’s days. Beba, who, in the best of fantasies, might have sent a comradely message home to her through Roberto. But, of course, there is no message, and it is clear that the party is over. The angels have flown, leaving Ariel—good wife and faithful spirit—awake in the dark with considerable consolations: a sleeping man, a silent house, and the knowledge that, with her usual practicality, she has kept Beba’s number.
It began with rubber bands. The silly sentence bobs up in Merope’s mind as she sits over a plate of stewed octopus that along with everyone else’s dinner will be paid for by one of the rich men at the table. Rogue phrases have been invading her brain ever since she arrived in Milan and started living in another language: she’ll be in a meeting with her boss and a client, chatting away in Italian about headlines and body copy for a Sicilian wine or the latest miracle panty liner, when a few words in English will flit across the periphery of her thoughts like a film subtitle gone wild.
Her friend Clay with typical extravagance says that the phrases are distress signals from the American in her who refuses to die, but Merope has never intended to stop being American. Her grandparents came from the British Caribbean island of Montserrat, and her earliest continuous memories are of her mother and father, both teachers, wearing themselves out in New Rochelle to bestow a seamless Yankee childhood on their two ungrateful daughters. Such immigrants’ gifts always come with strings attached that appear after decades, that span continents and oceans: at twenty-eight Merope can no more permanently abandon America than she could turn away from the exasperating love engraved on her parents’ faces. So she is writing copy in Italy on a sort of indefinite sabbatical, an extension of her role as family grasshopper, the daughter who at college dabbled in every arcane do-it-yourself feminist Third World folklorish arts-and-crafts kind of course as her sister Maia plowed dutifully along toward Wharton; who no sooner graduated than went off to Manhattan to live for a mercifully brief spell with a crazed sculptor from whom she was lucky enough to catch nothing worse than lice.
With family and lovers Merope learned early to defend her own behavior by adopting the role of ironic spectator, an overperceptive little girl observing unsurprised the foibles of her elders. The role suits her: she is small with large unsettling eyes and nowadays a stylish little Eton crop of slicked-back straightened