The Story of X: An Erotic Tale (10 page)

C
HAPTER
T
WELVE

H
E SMILES AT
me, and at my mother, as if nothing untoward has happened between him and me, ever.
It’s the same, confident, handsome-sad masculine smile. His manicured hand is extended.
His suit is an immaculately dark charcoal-gray, verging on black. The shirt is blinding
white; the silk tie aquamarine and primrose. I had forgotten how tall he is.

“
Buona sera
, X.”

“Um . . .” I am flustered, stammering like a fool; glancing at both my mom and Marcus.
“Um . . . Ah . . . Uh . . .”

My mom. Oh God. She is staring up at Marc as if Jesus had just descended from the
heavens to give her a new Bulgari purse. Her expression is somewhere close to adoration,
mixed—incontrovertibly—with desire. My mom is experiencing
urges
.

Even worse, I am feeling a slight tinge of embarrassment for my mom; now I see her
from Marc’s perspective. This overweight American woman in her department-store clothes,
her Gap jeans, her mussed gray hair. What will Marc think?

But why should I damn well care what Marc thinks? This is
my mom
and I love her and he can go to hell with his stupid beautiful suits. What right
does he have to exude superiority?

And why am I so angry at myself if I don’t care about Marc?

“X?”

Marc’s voice interrupts my thoughts. Calm but firm.

I come to my senses with a jolt. I’ve been standing here vexing for twenty seconds.
Both Marc and my mom are looking at
me.

“Sorry. Uh . . . Sorry.”

Come on, Alexandra, get a grip.

“
Mom, this is . . . Marc. Marc Roscarrick. He’s a . . . He’s a . . .”
Spit it out
. “He’s a friend, um . . . a friend I made here. In Naples, I mean.”

Excellent . . . not.

I hurry on.

“And this is my mom, Marc. Angela. From San Jose. She’s here on vacation. We’re going
to the Gambrinus, just for a coffee.”

Marc’s suntanned hand reaches out and takes my mother’s and he lifts it to his mouth
and imperceptibly kisses it, graciously and courteously, with that Old World insouciance
that is simultaneously amused and amusing.

“I am grateful for the pleasure,” he says, staring deep into her bespectacled Californian
eyes.

I think my mom is actually going to swoon.

“Well, isn’t this nice!” she says, in a kind of falsetto, whooping, I-may-have-recently-inhaled-helium
voice; a voice I have literally never heard before. “It’s so nice to meet you! So
nice!”

Oh lord.

“So, Mom, ah, Marc and I . . .”

I begin to explain our friendship, but then I trail off, embarrassed. What can I say?
Oh, Mom, meet Marc, he’s a billionaire aristocrat into prehistoric S&M who fucked
me into blissful oblivion the other night; shall we have some coffee? A bit of me
wants
to say this, of course. To show off. To tell her that I—yes, me, Alex Beckmann, the
studious daughter, Spinster of the Year, two years running—
I snared a gorgeous billionaire. Then I chucked him
.

However, it doesn’t really matter what I think because Mom is off, doing her own thing:
she is trying to speak
Italian
.

The only problem with this is that my mom cannot speak Italian. As far as I know she
has never spoken a foreign language, ever. Trying not to blush, resisting the urge
to cover my eyes with my hands in mortification, I stare fixedly at the umbrella pines
at the corner of the square beside the dingy royal palace, as Mom says: “Aha! So . . .
um . . .
buon gonna, señor
.”

Señor?
Does she think he’s Spanish?

“Stop now, Mom. Please?

“
Due
. . .” she stumbles on. “ . . .
señor
Rascorr . . .
Mie amigo
.”

Please. Stop. Mom.

At last she stops, realizing she is making an idiot of herself, and I can see she
is beginning to flush, the color is rising in her cheeks and she is evidently embarrassed.
Why should Marc humiliate her like this?

Before I can hit him, or cause a diverting scene, perhaps by assaulting a pigeon,
Marc smiles and touches her gently on the shoulder and he laughs that warm, calm laugh
and says, “Mrs. Beckmann,
per favore
, the painful truth is, most
Neapolitans
cannot speak Italian, so you really need not trouble yourself on my behalf.”

It’s a tiny little joke but it’s just
exactly
the right little joke to relieve my mother of her embarrassment and now she giggles
girlishly, her humiliation gone. But my confusion is returning in fine style. Marc
has said exactly the right thing; my mom is swooning; I think I want to fly to Rome.

“You were going to the Gambrinus?”

Marc is talking to me.

“Yes . . .”

“Will you allow me to buy you and your charming mother an aperitif? It would be my
absolute pleasure.”

I am in no position to say no. He knows we’re going to the Caffè G. My mom now looks
like a dog that has just been promised one of those filet steaks from Japan that cost
three hundred dollars.

Reluctantly, I surrender. “Sure.”

And so we cross the Piazza del Plebiscito and, of course, when we reach the Gambrinus,
the waiters make a big fuss of Marc, escorting him, with much feudal bowing and scraping,
to his usual table, the best table in the best cafe in Naples. Then the three of us
sit down, and we drink Venezianos, and we look out at thronging, lively, triangular
Piazza Trieste e Trento. And as the drinks come and go, Marc tells my mom stories
about Naples life and she laughs and sips the glowing orange aperitifs, and nibbles
the tiny prosciutto rolls, and laughs some more.

Then Marc stands and pays our bill, tipping the waiters lavishly. Finally, he kisses
my mom’s hand one last time—I suspect she won’t wash it for a week—and then he disappears
into the Neapolitan dusk.

Mom looks at me. She shakes her head as if amazed.

“Well, my word! What a
lovely
man! Why didn’t you tell me you had such lovely friends? Tell me all about him!”

I tell her something about him, and then add some lies. I tell her I met him at a
couple of parties in Marechiaro and the Chiaia. I tell her we are friends and leave
it at that. She gazes at me as I speak, sipping her Veneziano. She nods and eats the
last delicious miniature pizza. And then she says, “He’s not entirely unattractive,
is he?”

“Mom.”

“What? I’m just
saying
.”

“So . . . ?”

“I may be three hundred years old, Alex, but I am not blind. And I am still a woman.”

“He’s okay.”

“I’m guessing he’s rich, too. The way he is . . . The way he acts and dresses. A kind
of confidence?”

I mumble something about “import export” and “maybe a few million.” Mom eyes me. I
fidget and squirm, like a petulant child. This is predictable. I don’t know why people
worry about aging. All you have to do to knock all the years away is hang out with
your parents. They can reduce you to a whining teenage brat in a matter of minutes.
It’s a species of magic.

But I want to move on.

“Shall we get some dinner? We can have pizza—there’s a nice place near my apartment,
on the Via Partenope.”

Mom nods and wipes her mouth with a napkin. And says: “Is he married?”

“Who?”

“Darling.”

“No.”

“Engaged?”

“Don’t know. How would I know? He goes out with models. Actresses. You know. People
who appear in
People
magazine.
People
people.”

“A rich, handsome man in want of a wife.” Her expression is shrewd. Calculating.

“Don’t try to marry me off, Mom. Not again. Remember you wanted me to marry Jeff Myerson
in San Jose.”

“He has Apple shares.”

“He’s five foot six.”

“He could wear heels at the wedding?”

Our laughter is shared. Some kind of sanity is restored between us; the mother-daughter
equilibrium has returned. We stand and she takes my arm and together we walk back
to the seafront and the restaurants and pizzerias of Via Partenope. And over a margherita
and a marinara, Mom tells me all about the family, how my younger brother Paul (major-league
jock, should have studied medicine) is faring at the University of Texas, at Austin,
and how my older brother, Jonathan (bit of a stoner, never gonna settle down), has
finally sorted himself out and got a nice girlfriend and a well-paying job at Google,
and might now settle down.

I listen to all this quite happily, sipping my Montepulciano, literally the cheapest
wine on the menu. None of my mom’s tattle is news to me—I Skyped both my brothers
over the weekend, as I do every week—but there is something comforting in simply hearing
her say it, in her warm, loving, heedless chattering way. I am back in San Jose in
the big family kitchen that smells of lemon and baking, and the sun is streaming in,
and Mom is struggling to make sorbet and laughing as the gunk goes everywhere. And
I am eleven years old and happy.

I had a happy childhood; my parents were kind and loving. I loved my brothers. Even
the family dog was cute. It feels like a guilty secret, but it is true. Until I was
twelve or thirteen I was entirely happy. It was in my teens that the boredom kicked
in, or maybe it was something more than boredom: an existential tedium, something
deep. Something that has never been satisfied. Going to the East Coast to study was
an attempt to quench this thirst, but it wasn’t enough. I want to
experience
. I crave something
more
. Life can’t just be baking and sorbets and kids and a nice dog, wonderful as they
are.

Mom has finished gossiping. I take her back to her hotel and kiss her in the lobby,
and tell her how much it means to me, her coming to see me—and it does, it does. And
I promise to meet her in the morning at ten to take her sightseeing.

And so I do. And, as I expected, it all goes very seriously downhill.

Mom doesn’t like Naples.

I suspected she wouldn’t. It’s not her kind of place. Too wild, too outrageous, too
pungent. Everywhere we go I see her wincing at the piles of garbage, or inwardly tutting
at the graffiti, or staring in frank displeasure at the Vietnamese prostitutes inexplicably
sitting on sofas in the middle of seedy, smelly, narrow cobblestoned streets by the
Stazione Centrale.

Part of me wants to remonstrate with Mom. To tell her to take off her bourgeois suburban
spectacles and see the beauty of Naples beneath the dirt and squalor: to see the authenticity,
the realness, the incredible history. To see the old women polishing the sacred skulls
in the caves of the cemetery of Fontanelle as they have done for centuries; to look
in the single windows of the bassi and see the aging men in string vests with hairy
shoulders eating friarelli greens, in houses built over buried Roman temples; to simply
stand on my balcony and gaze down on streets laid out by Ancient Greeks, then look
to the west and feel your heart rush at the twilit colors of sunset over Sorrento,
a cassata of faded pink, pale violet, Barolo red, and pistachio green—finally melting
into the black of night and the diamantine stars.

But my mom sees the grime and the drug addicts, and she doesn’t like it. She even
dislikes the lack of tourists, one of Naples’s main attractions.

We are sitting on a terrace outside a cafe in the Old City, by the archaeological
museum, and she frowns and looks tired and says, “Where is everyone?”

We are surrounded by Italians—yammering, gesturing, laughing, arguing Italians. We
have barely managed to find a decent place to sit, but my mom is wondering where “everyone”
is, by which she means “Where are all the sensible people?”—the tourists, her fellow
Americans, English speakers, normal types.

I could tell her that they have all been chased away by the squalor and crime of Naples,
and the reputation of the various mafias, but I’m not sure that will assist her mood.
Or my mood, for that matter.

Because, if these few days have been a bit of a disappointment for my mom, they have
been a total trial for me, too. The encounter with Marc has left me unsettled, agitated,
as confused as before, missing him again. Worse still, everywhere we have been in
Naples—me and Mom—has somehow served to
remind
me of him.

In the Duomo, the cathedral, we saw the great relic housing the sacred blood of St.
Jenuarius—and this reminded me of that blissful roseate wine he served me for lunch,
the Moscato Rosa. Every palazzo we explored along Via Toledo has reminded of the one
palazzo above all others: The Palazzo Roscarrick.

And then we went to the museum of Capodimonte, a rigid Bourbon palace, standing stiff
and forlorn and unvisited on its sunny little hill, in its dusty little park. This
is one of the world’s great museums, and this time my mom was actually happy, enjoying
her time alone with the Raphaels and Titians, the El Grecos and Bellinis—yet I was
transfixed by one particular painting, by Caravaggio.

And the painting was
The Flagellation
.

What can you do? I can be nice to my lovely mom. On the last afternoon we take a taxi
to the station; she’s getting a train down the coast to meet her friend Margo in Amalfi.

It’s four
P.M
. Mom looks at the waiter and says, proudly, in her improving Italian, “
Un Cappuccino, per favore
.” I remind myself not to cringe. Was this what I was like when I first arrived? Ordering
cappuccino after twelve noon? Now I know it is a total faux pas. Did I eat spaghetti
with knife and fork, like Mom? Probably. Oh dear. And now I hate myself for judging
my mom. What a mess. Marc, what have you done?

Mom sits and sips at her cappuccino, trying not to look at the beggars across the
great station hall. I have to be honest.