A Certain Age (14 page)

"We can—"

"And is that how you meet Raffaello? Did you see his new cuff

links? Very lovely, I think, though not to my taste. I prefer something a bit more sparkly, with a bit of a flash. I am like a child in that respect, though many say my taste is not discreet. But I am doing all the talking. Were you with Raffaello in the Hamptons this weekend? I rarely go to the Hamptons. I am allergic to the countryside, I think. Everyone is talking of the big scandal."

"What big scandal?"

"It occurred at a woman's house, a woman who is the editor of a magazine, I believe. She had a house guest who attempted to drown her daughter, a little girl, and seduce her husband. Somehow, before she left, she managed to destroy the hostess's house. Burnt it down, I think."

"Burnt it down," Florence repeated blankly.

"It is like one of those movies, don't you think? Or perhaps there was already a movie of this sort, about a nanny who went crazy. It was a good film, very frightening."

Raffaello returned from the phone with a pleased expression. "Why do none of you offer my friend a cigar?" He pointed at Florence and she suddenly realized he probably had forgotten her name.

"They did offer," Florence said. "I don't—"

"You don't smoke a cigar?" He took a puff. "It's delicious. To me, there is nothing like a really good-quality cigar. It's such a shame that the Cuban cigars are not the quality they once were."

"Raffaello, you only started smoking cigars last month," said Paola.

"Yes, but when I take up a hobby, I do it only in the right way. So!" He smacked the table for emphasis. "I have decided. I am getting a divorce." He gave Florence a wink.

"Oh, Raffaello!" The women murmured condolences. "It is for the best," said one. "But so sad, with the little baby only three months old. Still, she is crazy."

"Completely
pazza,
" Raffaello agreed. He addressed Florence. "Very beautiful, she was a ballet dancer, but she had to retire at only twenty-three years of age when she broke her legs in a skiing accident. Her career was finished. Of course, I do not believe she

would ever have had much of a career—and I think she must have known this, too, or she wouldn't have gone skiing—"

"And with such a terrible drug problem," Letizia said. To Florence the story—their lives, their very existence—seemed completely unreal; it was impossible not to imagine that when she left the room they would disappear completely. To think that each of them felt themselves to be the center of the universe! Cardboard cutouts with a sense of self-importance. Yet if she were suddenly transported inside one of their heads, she supposed she would appear as unbelievable, as unreal, as they did to her.

"She doesn't want the baby," Raffaello said. "My mother will look after it."

"Not to want her own baby! Why don't you give it to me? I'll look after it."

The food arrived. By now she was somewhat drunk, though alertly so. The group resumed talking in Italian. "We will go as soon as we have finished our meal," Raffaello muttered out of the side of his mouth without looking at her. One of the restaurant's owners, a chubby-faced Londoner, came and sat down at their table, and gave their waiter some lengthy instructions: shortly the waiter reappeared with a bottle of grappa—produced, apparently, on Raffaello's estate in Tuscany—which was poured out in short glasses. The grappa, dense and viscous, tasted the way nail polish remover smelled; her mouth felt stripped of saliva. The women at the table—and Tommaso—merely sipped it, but everyone praised it highly and reached over to stroke Raffaello as if he, personally, had spent hours preparing an antifreeze cocktail just for them. She wondered if he had been in some kind of fight, or boxed as an amateur: glancing at him from the side, she saw his nose had been broken; it was part of what gave him that slightly sinister expression he had whenever he looked at her.

She had spent her whole adult life in New York preparing for this. The perfect clothes, the expensive grooming, the sleek pelt of hair, the job in an auction house. There were hundreds, perhaps thousands, of women like herself: they worked in art galleries, on magazines, for investment companies. They all had poise, little

black cocktail dresses, black pumps with the latest heel. They went to screenings, to parties at the Museum of Modern Art, to fashion shows. They had manners, conversational skills, apartments furnished with flea-market finds, forties glass coffee tables; their clothes were dry-cleaned; they worked out at the gym. They skied in Colorado in winter and managed to get in a trip to St. Barts in the spring. Summers they weekended in the Hamptons. Hundreds of these women, aged twenty-five, twenty-seven, thirty-three, ageless, and if they showed signs of age, they knew the right plastic surgeon and were prepared to spend. But the men—their counterparts—Raffaello—were so few and far between! Now here she was, she had found one: tall, handsome, moneyed, Italian, he had stepped from the pages of a magazine and together they would exit through the door of the restaurant and into the future like a god and goddess, ready not to rule the world—who would want that?—but to bask on a silvery beach, to ride across the Pampas on some Paso Fino steed, to climb Mount Kilimanjaro and glimpse the rare snow leopard.

All at once she was nervous. There were a million others more qualified than she. She couldn't imagine what he wanted from her. Perhaps it was a joke. They would go outside and he would see another woman—richer, more beautiful, younger, a tawny princess who had everything going for her that she did not. "I am afraid this must be extremely dull for you." He gingerly stroked her blond hair as if she were a doll, and she felt herself melt. If she had been a cat, she would have wanted to rub against his legs. He seemed to sense this. "Come, we will go."

The others were ignoring them, chatting among themselves as Raffaello rose with Florence and said good-bye. "We are still discussing your name." Tommaso looked up at her with a mischievous smile. He was familiar, but perhaps only because he was a specific type whom she could not exactly place. "Letizia is thinking of what she will name her next child—we have decided it will be called Dusseldorf."

"No, no!" Letizia cried. "I am still preferring Detroit."

"Quito."

"Cleveland."

They left them arguing in loud voices that did not even make a dent in the dense wall of noise created by the French accordion music of the thirties blaring over the loudspeakers, the shouting of the other diners and the tiny rattle of forks and knives against the white china plates.

As the hot air from the street met the air-conditioned interior, the smell of grilling meat and perfume permeated her nostrils, thick as embalming fluid.

PART TWO

I

In the taxi he
insisted she stop by his place for a nightcap. It was on her way home, but still, she was uncertain. If she went back with him, he would expect to sleep with her. What else did she have going for her except that she hadn't yet slept with him? How fortunate the women of China were going to be in twenty years; and those in fifty, the luckiest of all. Already through selective abortion there were a third more boys born than girls. Soon nobody there would give birth to a girl at all. The occasional accidental female who did get born would be in such demand, outnumbered

by men ninety to one, life would be complete paradise. Men would gather outside her window, sending up jewels, bouquets of lemony orchids, spewing forth love letters, like a crowd of male dogs in front of the home of a red-ribboned poodle in heat.

While she was brooding over this he asked her a question about some man who had been in the news recently—something to do with left-wing views, or right-wing views, but whether the man (who was actually in the news every day) was Speaker of the House, or Secretary of State, or of Defense, she had no idea. She tried to cover up, muttering something along the lines that the man was just another white American male. She was certain Raffaello saw through her. Had he questioned her as to what the man's official title or position was, she would have been caught out. She paid no attention to politics.

Her education had been minimal but standard. There had been some differences between Sarah Lawrence, to which she had transferred, and the local community college where she had spent her first two years—not so much in the quality of the courses but in the caliber and type of the students. At Sarah Lawrence they had seemed to her, at first, to be extremely sophisticated: some lived in Manhattan, they all came to classes dressed in black, with surly expressions and expensive, messy haircuts. The women saw the latest movies, attended concerts of modern music in small East Village basements, had lesbian affairs and took drugs. At the community college many of the students had been older people who worked all day at jobs in Wal-Mart or as house cleaners and who were going back to school hoping to get better jobs. But whether she was at the community college or the private college, Florence had still pieced her education together out of "Introduction to" courses.

She had had introductory philosophy, where various weeks were devoted to Plato, Hobbes, Kant, Hegel and Heidegger. Introduction to Anthropology: a standard textbook, and then a choice of monographs to read and write an essay on—kinship relations of the Pawnee, the Australian aborigine, the pygmy or the Yoruba.

Someone had once visited these people, studied them, extracted any juice, life, personality or warmth and written about the culture in as dry a manner as possible. In any event, as she knew full well, these were all people who (if they still existed) were sitting around watching TV or selling tchotchkes to tourists.

There were studio art classes (painting still lifes); pottery classes (lab and materials fees extra); the required science class (Geology for Poets); Basic Computer 1; freshman English (a week on Chaucer, a poem by Blake, a poem by Pope, a little Milton, then excerpts from Spenser, Hardy, James, D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce), with two-page essays each week and a final paper of ten to fifteen pages. Other English classes: theater history (Aristophanes'
The Frogs, Gammer Gurton's Needle,
a play by Sheridan, by Shakespeare, by Ibsen, by Chekov, by Clifford Odets, Harold Pinter and Edward Albee). One could take classes where the work of women was featured and discussed, but these were usually listed in separate categories under Gender Studies. None of it added up to a thing; all of history was chopped up, broken into little bits—the Pre-Raphaelites, Afro-American literature, Native Americans, gay and lesbian studies, French I and II—the academic attempt to make sense of the world left only a mess of crumbs on the kitchen floor.

Finally she settled on art as her major. There were art history surveys: surveys that began with Egypt and continued to the Middle Ages; surveys that covered cathedrals (Romanesque through High Gothic); twentieth-century art and sculpture. History of Photography, History of Cinema; and a few specialized classes— Braque and Picasso, Fellini, Japanese Architecture, Pop Art.

It was the sort of education a young woman might once have had simply in order to be able to make civilized conversation at dinner. In no way did it prepare her for life, for a job or even, really, to think for herself—the emphasis was on writing papers (very short in length, for the most part) that simply repeated either the statements of the teacher or those in the textbook. What was she being prepared for? Ninety percent of the women at Sarah

Lawrence were well-to-do—or so it appeared to her—and though no one would dare say or think it, the objective after graduation was to get married. Nevertheless, apart from those who had family business or other connections, eighty percent would go on to get degrees, which would prepare them only for entry-level jobs in all fields, where shortly it would be made clear that nothing much was going to happen to them in the working world.

As for her skill in carrying on a civilized conversation at a dinner party: it was less her education that had provided her with an encyclopedia of references than life in the city. Hoffman, Alvar Aalto and Bugatti: furniture designers. Falling Water: home designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. George Eliot: it was less important that she was author of
The Mill on the Floss
than that when she married at sixty, her husband was twenty years younger. Feng Shui: Chinese philosophy whose practical application involved moving bits of furniture around the room until bad vibrations or demons chose other locations to inhabit. Eighteenth-century figure of a Guanyin (valued at eight to ten thousand dollars), Yoruba twin figures, the Neapolitan mastiff, John Lobb shoes, the difference between pashmina and shatoosh. The Rudolf Steiner School, ancient Peruvian textiles, Adlerian psychiatry, Brandywine tomatoes, photographs by Tina Modotti, Russian icons, Celtic torques, the work of Otto Dix. She knew where to get a horsehair mattress custom-made and who was the most important florist—not that she could afford either. Simply trying to keep up was enough to drive a person out of her mind. And this factual information would be of use to her only so long as it was fashionable and current. Soon other, more obscure references would be in use. If only she had been a gay man, somehow, she thought, it all would have come naturally to her.

But she had never been to a dinner party where there really was any conversation. It was always either superficial discussion of the above (never any talk of aesthetics, only who had bought what, where and for how much) or else various monologues in which people bragged about how important, influential or success-