Temporary Perfections (17 page)

I did some quick math in my head: When she was nineteen, I was twenty-four. What was I doing at age twenty-four? I had just received my college degree. I hadn’t yet met
Sara, my ex-wife. My parents were still alive. Practically speaking, when Nadia was embarking on her adventures in the real world, though I was five years older than she, I was just an overgrown boy.

“I wanted to be independent. I wanted to get away from home. I hated my boring, ordinary family life. I couldn’t stand that modest apartment, three bedrooms, a kitchen, and a bathroom, filled with objects in miserable taste and the smell of mothballs that wafted out of their bedroom. I couldn’t stand their meaningless conversations and their pathetic prospects: pay the monthly installments on the car, find a little two-star
pensione
for our summer vacations, count the years until Dad can retire. I couldn’t stand the calculations they performed to balance the family budget, warmed-over pasta for dinner, my big sister’s hand-me-down clothes, the shiny oilskin tablecloth. But there was one thing I hated more than anything else.”

“What was that?”

“My father drank a little wine, at lunch and at dinner. Just a little, but every day, twice a day. Of course, we couldn’t afford expensive wine, so when we went to the grocery store, we always bought wine in cartons. There was always a carton of wine on the table, and I remember exactly how it went: My mother snipped the carton open with a pair of scissors; my father filled his glass halfway and then diluted the wine with water; at the end of the meal my mother pinched the mouth of the carton closed with a clothespin and put it away; then she put it back on the table for dinner. My God, I hated it. There are times when I relive it, and I can hardly breathe, just the way I could barely breathe then. Other times, I’m just overwhelmed by a suffocating sense of guilt.”

“That’s inevitable, I guess.”

“Sure, I think so. Anyway, I was a good-looking girl, so I got a job with an agency that provided staff and services for conferences, political rallies, and other events. One day, one of the men organizing a convention for drug company representatives asked me out to dinner, after work. He was a gentleman of about fifty, very distinguished, very well-mannered. I accepted the invitation and arranged to meet him far from my house, because I was ashamed to have him see where we lived.”

“Where did you live?”

“It was public housing, over near the church of the Redentore—you know, the Salesian church.”

“Sure, I box right near there.”

“You box? You mean you fight, in a ring?”

“Yes.”

“You know you’re not normal, right?”

“Come on, tell the story.”

“He came to pick me up in a Ferrari Thema and took me to dinner at a well-known restaurant, one of the restaurants I used to dream about eating in. I remember it as if it were yesterday. I remember everything: the tablecloth, the silverware—real silver—the crystal glasses, the waiters treating me like a lady, even though I was just a kid. And I can still remember everything we ate and the wine we drank. It was a Brunello. It must have cost a fortune, and I can still taste and smell the flavor and aroma of that wine right here, right now, while I’m talking.”

“Which restaurant was it?”

She told me the name, and I remembered it well. Twenty years earlier it had been one of the area’s fanciest restaurants. It was just outside of Bari. I’d never gone there. I
didn’t go when I was a young man because I couldn’t afford it, and I didn’t go when I was an adult, because it had gone out of business, vanished into the void, like so many other things from that period.

“After dinner, he invited me to his place for a drink.”

Her tone of voice was neutral. Still, you could sense tension and a climax arriving in the narrative. One of those stories with an ending you already know. An ending you don’t particularly like, but there’s nothing you can do to ward it off or change it.

“I thought he lived alone, and that he was taking me to his home. But in fact he was married, and he had a son about my age. He took me to a little apartment, a sort of pied-à-terre, and it all happened very naturally. When it was time to go, he gave me three hundred thousand lire.”

She paused and looked at me for a few seconds before continuing in a tone of voice with an almost imperceptible note of challenge to it.

“And you know what? I really liked taking that money. I felt as if I was taking control of my life.”

“It didn’t make you uncomfortable?”

“Incredible as it might sound, no. I’d been with boys, I even had a boyfriend then. But this was different, and it all felt very natural. We hadn’t talked about money beforehand, but, I can’t say why, I just knew right away that he was hiring me, giving me a kind of assignment. It wasn’t fun, but it wasn’t repulsive either.”

She paused again. I sat there, uncertain what to say, or for that matter what to think.

“After that night, I saw the gentleman in question a number of times. His name was Vito. I was sorry to hear that he died a few years ago. Going out with him wasn’t
exactly like being a whore. I mean, we’d get together and go out for dinner, and then we’d have sex, and then he’d give me a gift. I haven’t been married myself, but I think that in many cases it works in the exact same way.”

Her words hung in the damp air for a few seconds. The clouds began to thin, and you could see patches of night sky here and there. I would have liked to have sat on a bench and continued talking, but everything was wet from the rain. So we just kept walking, with Pino beside us, though he didn’t have much to add to the conversation.

“Then things changed.”

“What happened?”

“One night, as we were leaving his pied-à-terre, Vito asked me if I’d do him a favor.”

“What favor?”

“He asked me if I’d go out with a man he knew. He was a businessman, and Vito was discussing a number of important deals with him. He was scheduled to come to town the following day. Vito told me he was a very distinguished, impeccable gentleman, and handsome, too. Vito wanted him to be in a good mood so he’d sign a big contract. I can’t remember if I said anything or not. In the next image in my mind, he’s smiling, pulling out his wallet, and counting out ten hundred-thousand-lire bills. He handed them to me, and then he pinched my cheek affectionately, like I’d been a good girl and behaved nicely.”

I was about to tell her I didn’t want to hear the rest. Then I realized that I didn’t want to hear it, and yet, at the same time, I did. I get that feeling sometimes with books or movies when they’re about subjects I find disturbing, things I’d prefer to ignore.

“After that, from time to time Vito would ask me if I felt
like going out with some friend of his, but he wouldn’t pay. From there I started building a client list of my own. Word of mouth. There were a couple of judges on that list. One of them is dead now; the other is very prominent. Sometimes I see his picture in the newspaper. He always has a very serious expression on his face.”

She let that hang in the air for a moment, clearly implying that the judge in question wasn’t always as serious as he appeared to be in those photographs. She didn’t say his name, and I appreciated that, though it took a certain amount of self-control to keep myself from asking who it was.

“I know this all sounds depressing, and it probably is. But—how can I put this—it was hard to see that at the time. It was hard to tell the difference between my dates and real dates. Lots of my clients took me out to dinner, to the movies, to see shows, and lots of them wanted someone to talk to. As time went by, I realized that for some of them those other things were at least as important as the sex.

“One thing that you often hear prostitutes say is that many men want a woman they can fuck in peace and talk to in peace. Without being judged for one thing or the other. And from my own experience, I can say that’s true. But that’s always where the problems lie.”

“What problems?”

“Sometimes, a client got confused and mistook fiction for reality. In other words, he’d fall in love. When that happened, I cut them off immediately. It seemed like the fair thing to do, the ethical thing. Okay, I know it might seem odd to hear a whore talking about professional ethics, but I think everyone clings to a system of rules to keep things clear, no matter what profession they practice. Ethics aside,
it was just smart to put a quick end to those relationships. You never know what goes on in people’s heads. A girlfriend of mine was stalked and practically beaten to death after she rejected a client who’d fallen in love with her.”

“Of course, you moved out of your parents’ apartment?”

“Of course. I told my parents the money came from a job I’d found selling clothing wholesale. I have no idea whether they actually believed me. In fact, I don’t know if my mother and father ever figured out what I really did. By the time I was arrested and the whole thing became a matter of public record, they’d both been dead for years.”

“So, how did it end?”

“The rest isn’t all that interesting, that is, if what I’ve told you so far was interesting at all. Anyway, what happened later is pretty unclear in my memory. For a while I made movies, but not for long. The pay was much better for prostitution. Then I started having other girls work for me, and that paid even better. I hadn’t worked as a prostitute in quite a while by the time they arrested me. Anyway, you know that part of the story, since you were my lawyer.”

She seemed to have finished, and I was about to say something, when she started talking again—as if she’d remembered an important detail.

“But there was something I never told you when you were my lawyer.”

“What’s that?”

“When they arrested me, I was almost relieved. I couldn’t take that life anymore, and things got a lot worse once I started running a prostitution ring. It was much easier for me to maintain my equilibrium when I was just a whore. Once I started to manage other girls, I had a better picture of how depressing it all was. I probably didn’t realize it—and
in any case I can’t remember it clearly—but I think I wanted to find a way out. That wasn’t easy, though. The work paid so well, and I had no other skills.”

We’d walked a long way, from the waterfront to the neighborhood around the Teatro Petruzzelli. I couldn’t quite decipher Nadia’s story. I wasn’t sure of the emotions behind it. She’d described everything that happened to her in a neutral tone of voice, but it was obvious that there was something boiling just beneath the surface. I couldn’t figure out what it was. Pino continued walking close to his mistress’s left leg, and it occurred to me how nice it would be to have a silent, discreet companion on my nightly walks. I’d never thought of getting a dog before, but just then I decided I liked the idea.

Nadia’s voice broke into my thoughts. There was a slightly different tone in her voice than when she was relating her story.

“Can I tell you something silly?”

“I like silly things.”

“After my arrest, I asked a friend—not a customer—for a referral to a lawyer. He gave me your name. He said that you were a very good lawyer and a very respectable person, and from the way he said it, I pictured you as some old, chubby bald guy. Somebody’s uncle. But then you showed up in the prison visiting room.”

“I showed up, and then what?” Sometimes I can be really good at missing the point.

“Well, you’re not that old, and you’re not chubby or bald. Though you certainly were very serious and very professional.”

“You were very serious, too. An ideal client, actually—no pointless chitchat, no ridiculous demands.”

“I had to be serious. I didn’t want to seem like what I was, which was a whore, even if I was a high-end whore. I figured that any manifestation of femininity would be taken the wrong way.”

She stopped for a moment, as if thinking about what she’d just said.

“Or maybe the right way. Anyway, the only thing that I could figure out to do was to give you a book, after the trial. Do you remember?”

“How could I forget?
The Revolution of Hope
by Erich Fromm.”

“I suspected you already had a copy, even though you said you didn’t. You thanked me and said how happy you were to have it. You said you’d been thinking about buying it for some time now, and you were going to read it right away.”

I smiled. I didn’t remember saying any of those things, but it was typical of me, the sort of things I always said in that situation. When someone gives me a book that I’ve already read, I hate to disappoint the gift giver, so I lie.

“Well, in fact, I had already read it.”

She smiled, but there was something in her eyes that caused a pang in my heart, completely out of proportion and unconnected to the episode of the book. As if a door had swung open, for a few moments, and I had glimpsed a terrible pool of sorrow.

“What about afterward?”

“What do you mean, afterward?”

“After the trial.”

“Oh, right. I’ve been smart enough to stay clean since then. I had plenty of savings, and I’d invested them wisely. Low-risk mutual funds with moderate but reliable yields. I
own three apartments in good neighborhoods, with good tenants paying reasonably high rents. A fourth apartment that I live in. In other words, I could afford to retire, while I tried to figure out what to do with the second half of my life. I traveled a little. Then I got the bad news I told you about, but I had good doctors, and I think they caught it early enough. I think that’s over. So when I got back—from my trips and from my time in the hospital—I decided to enroll in college.”

“Studying what?”

“Contemporary literature. I’m taking my exams. Can you believe that? Just another couple of years and I’ll have my degree.”

“Have you decided on a thesis?”

She smiled again, but this time there were no shadows behind her eyes. If anything, a gleam of gratitude that I had taken her seriously.

“No, not yet. But I’d like to do something related to film history. I love movies.”

I said nothing. As we walked, I cast her a sidelong glance. But she was looking straight ahead. That is, she wasn’t looking at anything. A few minutes went by.