1
I began researching Ari Soriano when I was fifteen years old and living at a boarding school in Normandy.
I liked the school, but I couldn’t seem to acclimatize to the coastal wind.
I lay awake at night listening to it, the way it howled and whined around the buildings.
I’d read somewhere that if sleep doesn’t come, there’s no sense chasing it, so after a half-hour or so I’d make a little fort under the blankets to avoid waking my roommate, fire up my tablet, and resume my research project in the airless dark.
In those years I was angry in a permanent, low-level way that made me feel unhinged sometimes, especially at night.
My life was a slippery, confusing thing.
I didn’t like being fifteen and was desperate for adulthood. It was important to have a project.
Ari was a philanthropist. My school had been a recipient of her generosity, which meant that half of my classes were in Soriano Hall.
The new opera house in Paris was the Soriano-Kalisa Opera House, named for Ari and her current spouse, and there was a Soriano School for disadvantaged children of refugees just north of Paris.
She had a great deal of money, from somewhere, and this was the part I found interesting.
Her past seemed complicated. She walked with a cane and a serious limp.
Her left leg had been badly injured in the explosion that had killed her second husband, an infamous episode in which anti-dome extremists had sent a boat laden with explosives down the Seine.
Was her wealth from Bill Soriano’s life insurance policy?
Possibly, but she’d also engaged in illegal activities.
I imagined duffel bags stuffed with cash, high-speed shootouts on American highways, Ari holding a gun to someone’s head.
Before she’d come to Paris, Ari had been a criminal in the former United States, or in Italy, or in both.
The particulars of the crime were unclear, but my mother told me she’d served time in an American federal prison.
“I don’t know why Ari was in prison,” Gloria said when I asked.
This was near the beginning of my research project, and she was accompanying me back to boarding school after the holidays.
We were waiting under an awning in the rain at the Bayeux train station.
The school transport bus was late, per usual. “It seemed rude to ask.”
“It seemed rude to ask,” I repeated. “I don’t know, Gloria, I kind of feel like if I were interviewing a potential roommate, I’d maybe ask why she’d done time in a federal prison?”
“I don’t appreciate your tone,” Gloria said.
“Then get on the next fucking train and go back to Paris. I don’t know why you came with me.” I’d gotten drunk with a childhood friend the night before, and now I had a headache and very little patience.
I watched Gloria perform a cost/benefit calculation re: getting into a fight with me. She averted her eyes and studied a vine that was curling around a nearby signpost.
“My cousin was her cellmate for a while, and she told me Ari wasn’t violent. They got along.” Gloria shrugged.
“But you told me she was in prison for something like fifteen or twenty years,” I said.
“That implies violence, does it not?” Does it not was a formulation I’d been experimenting with lately.
I was aware it was pretentious but it seemed to give adults pause, like they’d look at me for just an extra beat before they moved on with the conversation, and destabilizing adults was a hobby of mine.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Gloria said, retreating into vagueness. “Not necessarily.”
“Come on,” I said. “That’s an extreme sentence.”
“Not by American standards, my little Parisian,” she said, and for just a second I heard Nico in her voice.
My little Parisian was the kind of thing Nico would say.
I may have winced. On the list of things I hated most in those days—bananas, humidity, falling-down socks, the Paris dome, being embarrassed in front of people my own age—any point of overlap between Nico and Gloria was near the top.
Nico had left France four days ago on one of her research trips, and I missed her already.
“Anyway, why are you so interested in Ari Soriano?”
“She has my father’s painting,” I said. “That was the only thing I had of his in the world.”
“It was . . .” Gloria had started to say It was mine to sell, but we’d been having this argument since I was seven so she didn’t finish the sentence.
I heard the low electric whirr of the academy bus before I saw it, rounding the corner between low buildings.
The bus looked a little shabbier now than it had last year, red paint fading to pink.
“Are you happy there?” Gloria asked, watching the bus’s approach. “At the school?”
“Seriously,” I said, “what do you care?”
“Of course I care,” she said. “I’m your mother.”
“If you say so, Gloria. I was raised by reality TV until Nico showed up.”
“I don’t think that’s quite fair,” she said.
I rolled my eyes, but I saw she was about to cry, so I said nothing further.
The conduct of the president was unforgivable, one of my history professors had said a while back, in relation to some long-ago financial scandal, and the phrase had stayed with me because that was how I thought of my mother.
I thought her conduct as a parent had been unforgivable, but on the other hand I didn’t actually want her weeping and causing a scene on a train platform.
A guy from the year above me was moving down the platform, also headed for the bus.
We exchanged stiff nods. My mother didn’t start crying in front of him and social disaster was averted.
But if I’d just answered the question instead of going on the attack, the answer was that I was happy at boarding school, for the most part.
I was having a good time there. School had always been easy for me, and I’d been learning a lot about drugs and petty theft from the degenerate offspring of the international elite.
I wasn’t bad-looking. My American ancestry lent an air of tragedy that was helpful with the girls, especially the girls who did well in history.
“I could visit you,” she said. “During the school year?”
“Bit late to take an interest, isn’t it?”
“Sebastian,” she said, with a pained expression, but there was nothing she could really say to this. I basked for a moment in victory as the bus glided to a stop.
“Gloria,” I said, “someone told me Ari Soriano’s been married three times. Who was her first husband?”
“I don’t know,” she said, and then “I really don’t, Sebastian,” in response to the look I gave her. “All of that drama was after I knew her.”
2
Ari Soriano’s current spouse was a woman, the pianist Eddie Kalisa.
They were a glamorous couple, both well into their fifties by the time they married.
They had an enormous apartment in the 7th, or so I’d been told.
Their dinner parties were legendary. My friend Cole had attended one of them with his parents—his parents and Eddie were opera friends—and I grilled him on Ari, on the paintings, the layout of the apartment, the other guests, until he told me to shut up.
“She was intimidating,” he said, about Ari, but struggled to articulate what he meant by this.
When I asked Nico if she’d ever been to a dinner party there, she laughed at me.
“I’m probably the last person she’d invite to a dinner party,” she said.
She’d visited Ari in the hospital a few times, she told me, after the explosion.
They’d talked, and then argued. They’d nearly come to blows.
“But she still paid my tuition,” I said to Nico, who shrugged.
“I asked her to,” Nico said, “and she said yes. One thing I’ll say for her, she does what she says she’s going to do.”
“But why would she do that for a kid she doesn’t know?”
“Guilt, maybe? The source of her wealth isn’t exactly aboveboard, Sebastian. She was a criminal for most of her life.”
“Well, she did seem a bit volatile,” Cole said when I told him that.
We were smoking on a park bench in the village by the school, with my other friend Obie and this girl Aurélie who was friends with Obie.
Obie always had cigarettes. Obie’s curse in life was that he’d been born to Shakespearean actors and his legal name was Oberon.
His father was a marginal figure who’d long since abandoned acting for petty crime, and his mother had died some years earlier during a heat wave in Spain.
“Volatile how?” I asked. It’s important to know your enemy.
“Like a panther at the zoo,” Cole said. “Volatile’s maybe not the right word. Like perfectly calm, but you felt like she’d kill you at the first opportunity.”
“Tightly wound,” Obie said. “That’s what you mean, not volatile. Like a coiled spring. My dad’s like that.”
“All springs are coiled,” Aurélie said, “or they wouldn’t be springs.”
“Not all springs,” Obie said.
“No, they’ve all got that spiralling thing,” Cole said, “you know, like—”
“Why are you so hung up on this person?” Obie asked.
“I’m planning on stealing a painting from her,” I said. I sensed a shift among my friends, an increased admiration. We respected criminality, as a group. Aurélie looked interested.
“You should talk to my dad,” Obie said. “He’s good at stealing stuff.”
“Why do you want that painting so badly?” Cole asked.
“I never met my father.” I couldn’t quite meet my friends’ eyes when I talked about this. “The painting was his.”
“Then you should get it back,” Aurélie said. The other two grunted in a noncommittal way. No one taunted me.
What I didn’t say: I used to stare at that painting by the hour, and imagine my father staring at it in the past, and then imagine time collapsing so we were looking at it together, and there was comfort in that. When my mother sold the painting, the only trace I had of my father was gone.