The City of Mirrors
Page 49

What I found couldn’t have been more different. They lived in Riverdale, which, though technically the Bronx, was as tony as any neighborhood I’d ever seen, in a huge stone Tudor that looked as if it had been hijacked from the English countryside. No spaghetti and meatballs here, no household shrines to the Madonna, no arm-waving drama of any sort; the house was as stultifying as a tomb. Thanksgiving dinner was served by a Guatemalan housemaid in an aproned uniform, and afterward, everybody repaired to a room they actually called “the study,” to listen to a radio broadcast of Wagner’s interminable Ring cycle. Lucessi had told me that his family was in “the restaurant business” (thus the pizza parlor of my imagination), but in fact his father was chief financial officer of the restaurant division of Goldman Sachs, to whose Wall Street offices he commuted every day in a Lincoln Continental the size of a tank. I’d known that Lucessi had a younger sister; he had failed to mention that she was a bona fide Mediterranean goddess, quite possibly the most beautiful girl I’d ever laid eyes on—regally tall, with lustrous black hair, a complexion so creamy I wanted to drink it, and a habit of traipsing into a room wearing nothing more than a slip. Her name was Arianna. She was home from boarding school, someplace in Virginia where they rode horses all day, and when she wasn’t lounging around in her underwear, reading magazines and eating buttered toast and talking loudly on the phone, she was striding through the house in tall riding boots and clanking spurs and tight breeches, a costume no less powerful than the slip in its ability to send the blood dumping to my loins. Arianna was completely out of my league, in other words, a fact as obvious as the weather, yet she went out of her way to remind me of it, calling me “Tom” no matter how many times her brother corrected her and nailing me with looks of such dismissive contempt it was like being doused by cold water.
My final night in Riverdale, I awoke sometime after midnight to discover that I was hungry. I had been instructed to treat the house “as if it were my own”—laughably impossible—yet I knew I would not sleep unless I put something in my stomach. I slipped on a pair of sweatpants and crept downstairs to the kitchen, where I discovered Arianna at the table in a flannel bathrobe, paging through Cosmopolitan with her elegant hands and spooning cereal into her flawlessly formed, generously lipped mouth. A box of Cheerios and a gallon of milk sat on the counter. My first instinct was to retreat, but she had already noticed me, standing like an idiot in the doorway.
“Do you mind?” I asked. “I thought I’d get a snack.”
Her attention had already returned to her magazine. She took a bite of cereal and gave a backhanded wave. “Do what you want.”
I helped myself to a bowl. There was no place else to sit, so I joined her at the table. Even in the flannel bathrobe, her face without makeup and her hair uncombed, she was magnificent. I had no idea what to say to such a creature.
“You’re looking at me,” she said, turning a page.
I felt the blood rushing to my cheeks. “No, I wasn’t.”
She said nothing more. I had no place to put my eyes, so I looked at my cereal. The crunch of my chewing seemed intensely loud.
“What are you reading?” I asked finally.
She sighed irritably, closed her magazine, and looked up. “Okay, fine. Here I am.”
“I was just trying to make conversation.”
“Can we not? Please? I’ve seen you watching me, Tim.”
“So you know my name.”
“Tim, Tom, whatever.” She rolled her eyes. “Oh, all right. Let’s get this over with.”
She parted the top of her robe. Beneath it she was wearing only a bra of shimmering pink silk. The sight aroused me indescribably.
“Go on,” she urged.
“Go on what?”
She was looking at me with an expression of bored mockery. “Don’t be dense, Harvard boy. Here, let me help you.”
She took my hand and placed it, rather mechanically, against her left breast. A magnificent breast it was! I had never touched a goddess before. Its spherical softness, sheathed in high-dollar silk with a scallop of delicate lace at the edges, filled my palm like a peach. I sensed she was making fun of me, but I hardly cared. What would happen now? Would I be permitted to kiss her?
Apparently not. As I was constructing a complete sexual narrative in my head, the wonderful things we might do together, culminating in breathy intercourse upon the kitchen floor, she abruptly pulled my hand away and let it fall on the table with the same contemptuous gesture one might use for dropping trash into a bin.
“So,” she said, reopening her magazine, “did you get what you wanted? Did that satisfy you?”
I was utterly flummoxed. She turned a page, then another. What the hell had just happened?
“I don’t understand you at all,” I said.
“Of course you don’t.” She looked up again, wrinkling her nose in distaste. “Tell me something. Why are you even friends with him? I mean, all things considered, you seem sort of normal.”
This was, I supposed, what passed for a compliment. It also aroused in me a fiercely protective instinct toward her brother. Who was she to talk about him like that? Who did she think she was, teasing me this way?
“You’re awful,” I said.
She gave a nasty little laugh. “Sticks and stones, Harvard boy. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m trying to read.”
And that was the end of it. I returned to bed, so sexually charged I barely slept, and in the morning, before anybody else in the house was awake, Lucessi’s father drove us to the train station in his monstrous Lincoln. As we disembarked, in an awkward reversal of customary courtesy, he thanked me for coming in a manner that suggested that he, too, felt a little baffled by my friendship with his son. A picture was emerging: Lucessi was the runt of the litter, an object of family-wide pity and embarrassment. I felt profoundly sorry for him, even as I recognized his situation’s similarity to my own. We were a couple of castaways, the two of us.