12. Rome, September
ROME, SEPTEMBER
TWO YEARS PRIOR
There’s a term in ceramics that I love: quartz inversion. When clay is fired, there’s a moment when all the water is burned off, and the molecules become fixed and fused together. It’s a point of no return, after which the shape of an object can no longer be altered.
The night I first met Mary in Rome was a Friday in early September. We were outside a crowded bar in Piazza San Calisto in Trastevere. It was a meeting that produced a fusion between us, an inversion of my life from which there was no recovery.
Before Rome, I’d only visited Europe a handful of times, in my early twenties, taking eerily cheap flights that landed miles away from the city I intended to visit.
Growing up, I’d fantasized about the trips abroad that would elevate me into a different, better being.
Each city—Prague, Amsterdam, Vienna—was carefully selected as a portal to adventure.
But I never got it right. The parties that occurred in my hostels—the only places I could afford to stay in—repelled and embarrassed me, but I would end up joining them anyway, because I was lonely.
The next morning, disorientated and hungover, I would flock to recognizable fast-food chains to eat lunches; I would get the timings of the galleries and museums wrong.
Part of the reason my trips abroad were so underwhelming was that I was only ever observing a place, never belonging to it. My residency in Rome, I hoped, would change this. I’d have three months to find my feet there, with a stipend and a room of my own.
Ten days in, the first flush of excitement was already starting to waver.
I was struggling with the cost of food; I hadn’t yet learned how to source vegetables and dried goods from the street markets, and so I was up against the city’s bewilderingly expensive supermarkets, those narrow, gray-lit stores where the cost of a can of chickpeas exceeded five euros.
The residency would last until Christmas, but I’d begun to worry my savings wouldn’t stretch that far.
I’d spent the early part of that Friday evening searching for employment in the winding streets filled with bars, on the left bank of the Tiber.
Unsuccessful and disheartened, I gave up and collapsed into a chair outside the nearest place I could find, exhausted by the rejection and the isolation of feeling poor and hungry in one of Europe’s choicest restaurant districts.
The bar, I later found out, was a popular spot in Trastevere, but there was nothing special about its interior: an aluminum bar counter lit by strip bulbs, the walls pasted with faded Lazio football memorabilia.
People seemed to like the place out of sheer necessity, because it was cheap and Rome was expensive.
I sat there with a beer, engrossed in my book about two young girls in Naples, when a sudden sound interrupted me: cheering from a crowd of men nearby. I looked up. They had become distracted from the football game they were watching and were now applauding the arrival of a group of girls instead.
I liked how the row of girls reacted to the harassment, morphing into a single file, each managing to raise a middle finger at the hooting men without turning to engage them. When they’d made it through the crowd, they sat down at the empty table next to me.
I stole glances over the pages of my book.
One girl was tall and dark blond, the other even taller, and there were two very fair freckled girls, twins, at the further end of the table.
Their long, thick hair and their charismatic, well-bred faces belonged in bewitching online profiles, or perhaps short encounters on the Tube—agonizingly brief, always me staring, never receiving the same interest back.
At the bar, I gazed pointedly at the blurred text of my page, then over at them. My body burned with interest.
“Can I take this?” said the blond girl. The prettiest. She gestured to the seat I was resting my feet on. Her voice sounded expensively hoarse, like it had been overused and you were lucky to hear it. Mary.
I swung my feet free, and she draped her jacket on the seat: a stiff, red military piece that looked like an heirloom.
She thanked me. Our eyes met. Then she turned back around.
The skin on her bare shoulders was tanned, but the surface was scaly and dry, in the way the sea dries on skin.
I tried to focus on the pages of my book, but something in my attention had awoken. Also in my skin.
I glanced around at the group: the twins chattered to each other, playing with the pug that the taller girl had brought along with her.
When, unprompted, the waiter brought over a tray of shots, they knocked them back without any celebration or theatrical fuss.
Not how people drank them at home: tongue out, wedge of lemon at the gums, loud grunts of disgust. When the antipasti was placed in front of them, they picked at the meat and left the bread, lighting and relighting endless cigarettes.
Their conversation flowed noisily and irreverently. I ordered another beer, then a shot for myself, eventually abandoning my book completely to listen as they teased Mary about someone she was texting.
“Not Vincenzo again? You’re obsessed .”
I quickly gathered they were going to a party that night. The conversation moved on to whether Vincenzo would be there, if they were too underdressed, about the quality of cocaine that would be provided.
Intermittently, Mary complained about her mother, counting the number of messages that arrived on her phone, asking if she knew the whereabouts of her father.
“Five,” she said, waving her phone screen. “Six! Fuck me, she’s really on one.”
Eventually, they started gossiping about their classes at school.
Because of how they were dressed and the way they spoke, I guessed they were artists.
My stomach ached with longing; my peers at Creta spoke almost no English, and I envied this group’s casual intimacy.
When I heard one of the twins discussing a model casting that was taking place at their school the following day, and that the work was paid, my spirits lifted.
Here, finally, was a route into their conversation.
For a moment or two, I deliberated, nervous to make the approach, and then I drained my bottle and stood up.
“Sorry to interrupt you,” I said, leaning forward and raising a hand in greeting.
“I just overheard your conversation.” All at once, the girls stopped talking and looked at me.
The room slowed, the piazza drained of all noise.
The only sound I could hear was my own blood marching in my ears.
“Did you say you were looking for…” I paused.
The phrase itself seemed ridiculous. “Life models?”
Their gaze flitted over my appearance. Then they exploded with encouragement.
“Oh my God, yes! You must come,” said the girl with the pug.
“Are you English?” one of the twins asked, pulling up a chair. “You don’t have to be.”
“She looks French,” said the other, pouring me wine. “Are you French? You know, we urgently need models like you.”
“Like me?” I replied, half laughing from relief. They beckoned for me to drag my chair closer in, toward their table. “What does that mean?”
“Different!”
“Pale!”
“Young!”
“Last term, for some reason, we only got these really old men to paint,” the taller girl said, tipping ash from her cigarette with disdain.
“Those shriveled old cocks.” Mary shuddered. “I wonder what was worse,” she said, turning to one of the twins. “Painting those cocks, or your face?”
“Everyone failed last term,” one of them explained.
“Our tutor, Law, was furious,” said Mary. I noticed a squarish brown birthmark near her collarbone as she brought a cigarette to her lips. She offered me one, and I took it.
“Not with you,” said the girl with the pug teasingly. “You’re his next big project. He’s obsessed with you.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Mary said sharply.
“Guys,” said one of the twins, gesturing to me. “Don’t scare her.”
I laughed. It felt good, being the object of their attention. Mary rolled a lighter toward me and smiled again. She introduced herself. “And this is Frida,” she said, pointing to the dog. “Decca’s her owner.”
“I’m Cleo,” said the smaller of the twins. “This is Bea.”
“Are you sure you have the time to sit for us?” Mary asked, taking her lighter back. I inhaled on my cigarette and let my eyes wander over her face for a moment. She had thick eyebrows, a beautiful wide mouth, and that rich-girl skin: poreless and shiny, as though it were lit from the inside.
“It’s paid, isn’t it?” I asked, the cigarette curdling my stomach.
“Of course,” she said. “It’s just, kind of a commitment. Like, fifteen or twenty sittings at least.”
“She’s lying,” said Decca. “Mary needs double that.”
“Only because she’s a perfectionist,” warned Bea.
“I’ve got the time,” I said, not wanting to mention how desperately I needed work. “I’m doing a residency at Creta. It’s not too full-on.”
“What’s Creta?” one of the twins asked.
Her sister smiled broadly at me. “We’re very ignorant.”
“Ceramics, right?” Mary said, glancing down at the cover of my book. “What are you reading?”
“ My Brilliant Friend ,” we both said simultaneously.
She laughed and I blushed.
Decca tossed her phone down onto the table.
“Our lift’s here.” I looked about, wondering who was driving them, whether it might be that guy Vincenzo.
“You’ll need to come in tomorrow morning at ten,” she said, turning to me and scooping up her dog.
“It’s the Melrose Academy on Via Renella. Look fabulous.”
“Not fabulous,” Mary corrected, putting on her jacket and stuffing her cigarettes into her handbag. She paused and cocked her head at me. “Just like this.”