18. Rome, November #2
Outside, the streets and bars were busy, but we managed to find a table somewhere on the Piazza di Santa Maria.
My studio was across the river from the Melrose, only a five-minute walk from the Colosseum but in a far cheaper and younger part of the city.
To me, Trastevere was an ossified place, a tourist trap, whereas Monti had its own realness.
It was past ten, and the streets were full of spirited drinkers, either spilling out of bars or squatting along the pavement.
Over near the fountain in the middle of the square, a female busker was singing jazz covers that Mary kept singing along with.
I smiled happily as I watched her approach the busker with a handful of scrunched-up euro notes.
Now that I was with Mary, I felt no inclination to text Jean.
“I still find it weird seeing you out,” Mary said, sitting back down. There was an empty bottle on the table between us, and we’d just called for another. “I spend so much time observing you that I forget sometimes you’re actually this real person, moving about the world, making stuff. It’s cool.”
I smiled and sipped my wine, but it hurt.
Mary was a constant presence in my mind.
When she was quiet over text, I was racked with unease.
Earlier this week, she had gone silent for a few days because she was in London, dealing with some family drama.
Jean had tried her best to calm me down, but I’d barely slept.
“I was on damage control duty,” Mary said, when I asked her what had happened. “Mum got photographed in Annabel’s with some MP. Dad’s devastated. She’s such a cow.”
“Fuck,” I said, though my stomach swam with excitement at the scandal, the fact that I’d been trusted enough to be told. Mary assured me that it was fine, that it happened all the time.
“The first time I saw my mum with another man, I was, what, eight?”
“Wow, actually?”
“They just carted me off to therapy.” Her hands trembled slightly as she lit her cigarette.
“Did it work?”
Mary gestured to the table around her, scattered with bottles, and looked doubtful. “Nope!” We both laughed.
“I guess, on one level, I admire how my parents didn’t stop their lives when they had me,” she said. “I made no difference to how they lived. They just partied on. I’ve always been the third wheel in their relationship, which is why they spoil me.”
“Same,” I said, leaning back in my chair and exhaling smoke. In what felt like a pathetically dishonest way of leveling with her, I heard myself say, “Dad spoiled me, too.”
“Ugh.” Mary sighed.
“It was oppressive.”
“Precisely,” she exclaimed, then she leaned forward and rapped the table. “I just needed things to be normal.”
“Right—”
“I was so jealous of the children I saw in films who had yellow school buses and lunch boxes and homework. You wouldn’t believe how badly I craved an ordinary life.
You should see all my doodles from my childhood—it’s all drawn on hotel stationery.
Like, here’s my home, and my imaginary pet dog, and our car, but it’s all scrawled over a pad of paper from the Chateau Marmont, you know?
” For a moment, she turned away and asked the waiter for something in Italian.
“Your parents took you around with them?”
“Everywhere. Until I was about thirteen. India, Méribel, Kenya. Wherever they were seeking inspiration.”
“Amazing.”
“I guess so. I only know about it from photos.” She scratched at her face. “Large parts of my childhood, I honestly just can’t remember.”
I asked her if she had been homeschooled. She asked me if I could tell, and I said, “Sorry, but yes.” That made her laugh, and she regaled me with stories about her useless tutors, who mainly took her skiing or to the beach.
“All bigger wasters than my parents. They did whatever they wanted with me. It took them fifteen fucking years to figure out I was dyslexic.”
She went on like that, listing all the ways her privilege had constrained her.
I nodded along, embarrassed to think of my own background.
If Mary was going to want me, she’d need to think there were parallels between our lives.
So I made my childhood sound if not as glamorous as hers then eccentric in its own way.
When we talked during our portrait sessions, I made out that my parents were members of a made-up intelligentsia: teachers, rather than classroom assistants.
Then, perhaps most inventively of all, I made out that my parents were devoted to me.
I was the apple of their eye, their life’s focus, and not the source of an awkward problem they wanted to tidy away.
We had just ordered a third bottle of wine when Mary’s phone flashed on the table in front of us. She snatched up the handset and swore. It was Vincenzo. I panicked. “I’m supposed to be going over,” she said, looking conflicted.
I swallowed down a tight knot of envy. “To his?”
“Yeah. He just got back from a work trip in Milan.”
“But it’s late,” I said, taking in the polished sheen on her face, all the studs and hoops that were stacked along her earlobes. She hadn’t dressed up for me, then—it was all for him.
“Do you think it’s too late?” Mary asked, biting her lip guiltily.
“That depends.” I tried to keep my voice even. “Do you actually like him?”
She grimaced. “I’m not sure. Is feeling flattered the same as liking someone?” She paused. “He can be weird.”
“What do you mean?”
Mary adjusted her position in the chair, took a large mouthful of wine, and described in detail the strange ways that Vincenzo liked to fuck her.
Of course, he tied her up. That was, she said, pretty standard.
The worst bit was how he finished: holding on to her head and staring blankly at the middle of her forehead, moving forcefully, with the rhythm of a man coldly ducking his enemy under the sea.
She gave a pitying laugh, like it was all a game.
“And sometimes, when he’s not concentrating, he kisses with all of his teeth, like he’s eating an apple.”
“Gross,” I said, trying to wrinkle my nose. My face felt rigid.
“And if he doesn’t want proper sex,” she said, in mock outrage, “then he just pushes your head down toward his crotch. Like this.” She clasped her fingers together. “Like I’m a French press!”
Mary giggled as she told me about it. I produced a laugh, too, but the images of Mary together with this man made my insides feel stale, like I’d smoked too many cigarettes. That phrase kept tormenting me: proper sex .
I managed to stall her by drinking slowly.
By the time the bar closed, there were three empty wine bottles on the table, and other glasses, which contained remnants of grappa and limoncello.
Mary seemed wasted enough to have forgotten about Vincenzo.
Then the bill arrived, which Mary grabbed off me in a gesture of secrecy.
“There’s another present in the loo for you,” she said, her eyes glinting. “Go. Quickly.”
“I can’t,” I began. Then I stopped. Inexperienced as I was, it occurred to me that if Mary had already taken drugs, then pretty soon, she’d want to do more of them. And that if I did them, too, she’d stay with me and not go to Vincenzo. I stopped protesting.
The line of cocaine she had left on the cistern of the toilet was as fat as a slug, and lay alongside a rolled-up note.
I inspected it for a while, inexpertly took what I could manage, pocketed the money, then swept the rest away.
When I came out, our table was gone. Mary was standing in the piazza, twirling a rose that she’d bought from a street hawker.
“Where should we go now?” I said, squaring up to her. The inside of my nose dripped and burned, and everything suddenly felt very urgent. She placed the rose between her teeth and brought my face next to hers, leveling her gaze with mine. Our jaws were identically stiffened. “Afters at your place?”
Her face softened and she leaned her chin toward me, passing the rose into my open mouth. She used her fingers to seal my lips around it. “Heaven,” she said. There was the sharp sensation of thorns puncturing my lip. When I squealed in pain, she dropped the flower and waltzed away, laughing.
We snaked our way through the streets of Monti toward the Forum, talking rapidly about our surroundings.
We loved that smell of night jasmine, which could descend on you suddenly, drenching you like a thundercloud; we loved the crumbling plaster on the front of each building; every shut-up restaurant we passed we vowed to visit later, because it looked delicious.
Every so often, we stopped and pointed upward to large, lit-up apartment windows that displayed faraway adult worlds.
We speculated about their stuffy adult lives with rotating bookshelves, discerning artworks, and decanters of wine.
We laughed if we managed to glimpse the owners: The men wore waistcoats and had slicked-back hair; the women were in various stages of pregnancy.
Mary said that she’d rather die than be any of those people.
I disagreed and said I’d happily wear a waistcoat for life, if I owned an apartment like that.
We kept on walking and talking about what it felt like to live here.
There were times, I said, when I found the city to be so beautiful, I felt the need to make a fist and punch through the air to check that it moved, that I wasn’t standing against some theatrical stage set.
Mary told me she used to feel the same, but she worried sometimes if she was taking it all for granted.