Advice for Italian Boys (19 page)

Third, at nineteen, once only, with a woman who worked at the bakery, Talia Carrara, aged thirty or so, near the end of a fourteen-week friendship. She had been fired a week later for being overfamiliar with customers and had moved back to Montreal. Talia had responded to a question that had been left hanging as heavily as a medicine ball: he had found her wiry, muscled body beautiful, including her breasts, like golden oranges, and her ballet-slipper-like vagina.

Fourth, at twenty-one, over the space of a week, with another woman, his own age, Stefania, visiting from Melville, Australia, a sub at the gym. Stefania was the first person who had taken any time at all. She had examined every part of him and told him, in case he was interested, that he was perfect.

Fifth, with Camila, who was younger by a year or two, in a bedroom at a house party at which they met and had too much to drink. Afterward, when they were sitting on the front steps, she cried and began to tell Nicolo that she had
issues, father issues, but partway into her story, a girlfriend interrupted and took her home.

And then Stefania again, for three months, when she came back to teach yoga while Barb was on mat leave from the gym.

Sixth, and most recently, rarely but over a longer period, close to an almost-chaste half-year, quiet Francesca, twenty-three years old, who was plump and modest, but who grew even less talkative than usual toward the end of their five and a half months, and who finally told him gently but firmly on the telephone that the widower who owned the garden supplies store where she worked had asked her to marry him and that she had decided to say yes for the sake of his three young children whom he neglected and who needed her.

When Nicolo disclosed this breach to Father Bem, the young Nigerian priest at St. Francis, Father Bem, whose skin was so dark Nicolo could never interpret his expression or mood, asked whether he too intended to marry, a question that Nicolo found impossible to answer. He didn’t know, he said. He wasn’t sure. Then, in response to Father Bem’s furrowed forehead, he went on to say that he thought he might—because, after all, although he didn’t say this part aloud, wasn’t this what everyone did in the end; how else was it possible to live your life?

“Best get on with it, then,” Father Bem counselled, and his tone might have had in it impatience or humour or both. “These bodies that God himself saw fit to give us can be a serious source of trouble unless brought early into harness.”

Nicolo thought of this exchange with Father Bem when he went to borrow a suitcase from his older brother Enzo, a black, zippered case on wheels that Enzo had bought for his
honeymoon trip to Montreal with Mima. He asked younger Enzo for advice on what clothes to take with him. Enzo looked up the question on the Internet. “It’s already hot there. Much warmer than here. Take one pair of long pants and a light jacket in case you get called into any of Patrick’s meetings—even if that’s not very likely, it’s always better to be prepared—a few decent shirts, one pair of real shoes, a pair of shorts, a couple of T-shirts, sandals, a bathing suit. Socks and underwear. A toothbrush and toothpaste. Shaving stuff. That should about do it. I can’t think of anything else.”

“
Statti ccu dui piedi intra ’na scarpa,
” said Nonna at dinner. Keep your two feet in one shoe—a saying meant to ward off imprudence.

He asked Carla, the woman in his psychology class, if she could take notes from the class he would be missing, and she smiled self-consciously at the request.

“I don’t take the best notes,” she said. “But I’ll do my best and I’ll make you a copy. Maybe,” she added, and she touched the sleeve of his shirt on his upper arm, “maybe we can get together after you’re back, to study for the next test.” Nicolo nodded although he felt that Carla was not the kind of study companion that Enzo had had in mind. He would, he thought, be distracted by Carla’s mind, which seemed not quite settled, and by her hands, which were red and rough. Her bitten nails were both repellent and fascinating. He had the strange feeling that he could mend them if he held them for long enough between his own.

Zoe telephoned Nicolo to thank him for taking her to the play, and he let her know that he would be gone for three days. He wanted her to understand, although he did not say
this, that he would have liked to see her again, if he had not agreed to go. Nicolo told her what Massimo had said when Nicolo told his father about the trip: “
Chine ’un fha pazzie in gioventù, e’ fha a ra vecchjaia.
” If you don’t do foolish things in your youth, you’ll do them when you are old.

“The best advice I ever heard was not to take anyone’s advice,” Zoe answered. “But for what it’s worth, my dad’s advice is always that we should try to learn from everything, good and bad. He says that way nothing in life is wasted.”

T
he first sight of Las Vegas at night was startling: uncountable lights throbbing and wheeling below a wide, bare blue-black desert sky. Enormous, brilliantly lit hotels and billboards could be seen through the airplane window, quite close, as if the pilot intended to land the plane on a thoroughfare in the centre of the city. Nicolo thought of what his nonna had told him about the cathedral in Naples, the one time she had seen it, on her way to the ship that took her away from Italy—that she was fortunate that she had heard it described in advance by the village priest since its magnificence could otherwise blind the unprepared eye. The plane banked and then dropped upon the runway at a high rate of speed and with a roar of the engines that seemed to
create or restrain stresses that threatened to pull apart rivets and bolts. When the brakes were applied, hard, with another intense throb of noise, the passengers were thrown forward in their seats, and as they fell back again a collection of young women toward the rear of the airplane broke into cheers.

These women surged down the aisle before Nicolo had undone the buckle of his seat belt. They were dressed in short pleated skirts and brightly coloured T-shirts, many of them with slogans and illustrations.
Catholic Girl Gone Bad. Little Miss Naughty. If I Can’t Set a Good Example, Then I’ll Settle for Being a Warning to Others. If You Aren’t Living on the Edge, You’re Taking Up Too Much Space.
Two or three of the women slowed when they passed Nicolo’s seat and gave him appraising looks. “He’d do,” he heard one of them say. Nicolo was left in a cloud of their sharp mingled scents and the echo of the purposeful slap of their sandals against their bare feet.

Inside the airport he followed the signs toward the luggage carousel, passing banks of slot machines, at some of which people were playing intently, hunched close so that the fortune disgorged by the ringing, blinking machines, good, bad or fair, could not be discerned by passersby. He found his bag easily—Enzo had advised him to mark it with a length of yellow twine around the handle. When he turned to search out where he might be able to get a taxi, a sign with his name caught his eye. At the front of a waiting throng, a small, thin man wearing a dark and oversized suit stood holding up a piece of cardboard with
PAVONE
handwritten on it.

“Are you looking for me?” Nicolo asked him.

“Mr. Pavone? In that case, yes. My name’s Mick. Mr. Patrick Alexander from Pure Lane Productions has sent over a car to take you to your hotel. You have all of your luggage already?”

Mick led Nicolo past a slowly snaking taxi queue to a silver Lincoln Town Car. He held open the back door for Nicolo, clicked it closed behind him, and flipped Nicolo’s suitcase into the trunk. He left open the sliding window between the driver’s seat and the back, and provided observations as they drove.

“First time here? Okay, I’m going to give you all you’re ever going to need to know in five minutes or less. A free service that I throw in for the unenlightened and the uninitiated. Take it or leave it. No charge. See, even though Las Vegas means green grass, there wasn’t enough water here for a city until they built the dam. That’s the Hoover Dam, a make-work project to keep people working back in the Dirty Thirties. Some people go out to see it, but to me it’s just a big wall and a lot of water, always makes me thirsty just to look at it. Aside from the dam—and that’s outside of town, remember—nobody and nothing here is exactly real. Everything is a replica or a reproduction or a representation of somewhere else, or of some other time in history. Some people get into the back of my car and the first thing they ask is they want me to take them to see the ‘real’ Las Vegas. They want to know where it is, like there’s some secret place where the locals keep the true, authentic place stashed behind all the scenery. But there isn’t one. This is it, as real as it gets. The settings are fake and the history is fake, even the grass is fake, most of it. You can have a good time while you’re here, but it’s all flim-flam, you got me?”

“But what about the people who work here?” said Nicolo. “They must have homes and go to stores and send their kids to school, and get married. Isn’t that all real?”

“Well, I don’t know about that,” said Mike. “I guess that’s true, as far as it goes.” His tone was dubious, but then he brightened. “Yes, there’s something to what you say, but that part, where people live, that isn’t Vegas.” He stopped the car. “Here we are,” he said.

Patrick rushed at Nicolo as soon as Nicolo stepped through the heavy door into the cavernous air-conditioned hotel lobby, in which several dozen people milled. Signs overhead pointed in a dozen directions—
POOL AND SPA. BELL DESK. REGISTRATION. RESTAURANTS. CASINO. MEETING PLACE. TERRACE BISTRO. SYBARITE’S LOUNGE. SILHOUETTE BAR. GUEST ELEVATORS. SELF-PARKING. GAMES ROOM. LAUGHING STATUES
. Patrick rose up on the balls of his feet and he waved his arms like the blades of a windmill. He was grinning.

“Everyone’s up on eleven. We’ve been at it for a day and a half already, pulling the show apart and dissecting it with tweezers, atom by atom by agonizing atom. It’s as painful as having your chest hairs yanked out one by one, but it has to be done, there’s no way around it. There’s something missing in the show. You know, that thing,
sprezzatura
—artlessness, guilelessness, innocence. It’s all too contrived and heavy somehow, like an overweight, middle-aged bride in a corset and pancake makeup. We’re trying to figure out how to turn it from a lump of lead into something weightless, effortless—a balloon, a feather, a soufflé, the lightest possible, most fleeting notion, a dream. It would be pure alchemy if we can do it, base metal into gold. There’s still no guaran
tees at this point. I made sure they paid me in advance, if you know what I mean. And, meanwhile, I’ve got this killer stress headache in a knot at the back of my head, which might be the first signs of a brain tumour for all I know, and tension all through my shoulders, they’ve completely seized up, so I’ve booked an appointment in an hour with this masseuse in the spa. I can’t tell you how good he is. Hands like absolute Roto-Rooters; he gets into every muscle. It feels like getting worked over by the more vicious kind of debt collector, but it is so,
so
worth it. We’ll have to get you an appointment for tomorrow. His name’s Dylan, can you believe it? One of those names ditzy parents gave their kids in the seventies. But you’ll feel like butter afterward—melted butter. Did I mention he’s an Adonis? An absolute feast for the eyes. I promise you’ll fall in love with him. And after that, we plan to work late, so you and I will have to get our workout in first thing tomorrow. I’m up at the crack of dawn, nine or a bit later—that counts as early around here. We can get started then. Maybe you can try to chase down Timothy while I’m at the spa. But first, you have to come up. Come up, come in and see where the so-called magic happens. I’ll introduce you to everyone.”

Nicolo felt—as he often did when he was with Patrick—swept up into the windstorm of his energy and enthusiasm. Patrick was hard to resist. Nicolo followed Patrick into a mirrored elevator, which took them to the eleventh floor, and then along a hall to the meeting room. The room had a high ceiling and an enormous window with thick drapes, and it held a dozen people sitting around or near two long tables that had been pushed together. On the tables were pens, high
lighters, stacks and loose sheets of printed paper, half-filled glasses, and plates with scraps of food—sandwich crusts, fruit peels, shrimp carcasses, broken potato chips. One of the men was drawing intently on a large pad of paper. Over beside the window two women with very short hair were leaning toward each other talking intently. Everyone else was sitting on chairs, not obviously engaged in any activity.

“Nicolo, this is Dawn, Derrick, Leesa, Claudia, Steven M., Steven S., Walt, Marshall, Tatiana and Jean-Pierre, and over there are Marlene and Steph. Everyone, this is Nicolo, my trainer. He’s the best there is. He’s helped me to see the light. Healthy mind in a healthy body. So trite and yet so true.”

Nicolo sat down in an upholstered chair in a corner of the room. Jean-Pierre, the man who had been drawing when Nicolo and Patrick came in, held up his sketch and delivered to the group a short lecture on the importance of vanishing points. Perception and perspective were everything. If tickets were two hundred dollars and up, the audience needed to be visually inundated if they were to feel as if they got their money’s worth. The current sets were too small, too monochromatic, too lacking in drama. Patrick entirely, completely agreed with him. Marlene and Claudia were concerned about the music. There was too much reliance on Frankie’s old hits from the eighties. For what people were being asked to fork out for tickets, they were entitled to expect something new, even if they were mixed in with the standards. Patrick thought this was a brilliant, and easily overlooked point. Walt was worried about pacing. We can’t let the momentum flag for so much as a heartbeat, not for an instant, he warned. Patrick tugged on his chin and looked
worried as well. Marlene and Steph thought it might be wise to get Bianca out from New York to jazz up the choreography. Patrick said he would call her immediately to see if she might be able to pop out for a few days. Patrick also shared Leesa’s quietly stated concern about the lighting—too dim, too diffuse, too pastel—and was inclined to see the point of Tatiana’s much more vocal objection to the use of multiple projected images of Frankie’s twin daughters when Frankie sang that song about childhood.

“They’re ugly,” she shouted. “Why can’t we all admit they look like a mismatched pair of pug dogs? We might as well get that little fact right out on the table right now.” She slapped her open palms on the table. “It’s no use pussyfooting around it. They’re like Mutt and Jeff. Someone will just have to tell him. If he won’t use those infant models we found, you know, the ones with the gorgeous curly hair from Seattle, then someone will have to talk him into leaving that song out.”

Patrick mentioned that he had been meaning to have a word.

Meanwhile, the two Stevens were plugging a tangle of cables into the back of two computers and several matching electronic boxes at the far end of the table. “We’re ready. We’re ready,” one of them called out, and the other sprinted across the room and pushed two buttons on the far wall. One of these activated a mechanism that briskly closed the cream-coloured curtains. The metal cleats sewn to the top slid first, and then the rest followed, with a swish of the long, rich swaths of damask. The other button switched off the overhead lights. Patrick pulled a flying-saucer-shaped module
across the table toward him and flicked a toggle that caused a coloured course of active light to beam from one of the black boxes onto a rippled screen formed by the closed curtains. Frankie could be seen on stage, a barrel-chested man in a stiff suit, wearing a high-necked shirt buttoned to the top and a wide, striped tie. An orchestra at his feet started up with a swell of violins and flutes. Frankie waited one beat, two, a third, and then opened his mouth into a perfect O and began to sing. No part of him moved aside from his lips and jaw. He was like a life-sized, wind-up automaton but one with a fabulous built-in sound system and hidden speakers. Occasionally he pressed an inward-turned fist to his chest and thumped himself there twice—a gesture meant to emulate passion. Once or twice he swivelled his hips. Otherwise he held his body immobile. Nicolo thought he might be able to see where the challenge lay: a paying audience would want to feel that they were in the presence of an actual breathing, living star, and not an over-mannered robot.

Nicolo stayed for an hour and watched the group at work. He noticed how Patrick kept the discussion focused, worked the room for support of ideas that he considered valuable, and let other suggestions drift blamelessly away into the air. Patrick had a small black Palm Pilot that he used to send e-mails, and another mechanism, a silvery phone with a short antenna and multiple buttons, that he used to connect others in to the discussion or to convey instructions or leave messages. He kept page after page of notes in a small book and he reached every now and then to check or cross off a task that he viewed as completed. This was all a revelation to Nicolo, who had never considered the possibility that Patrick was capable of
seriousness and that he might be good at the work that he did. When Patrick left for his massage, Nicolo walked with him to the hotel gym, and as they walked, Patrick gave Nicolo a description of Timothy—short, dark-haired, muscular, thinner than Nicolo, actually not unlike him overall but with round-lensed, wire-rimmed glasses—and the places he might be: the pool until eight o’clock when it closed, and after that, Sybarite’s Lounge most likely, or one of the other restaurants or clubs in the hotel.

Nicolo found his room, which was a smaller version of the meeting room below, but with a bed the size of a tidy suburban garden plot instead of a conference table. He tested the various doors and switches as well as the vast mattress on which were layered not two but three sheets, the top two encasing a light, fleecy blanket the colour of wheat, and over that a white down comforter and then a silky, diamond-patterned pale gold bedspread. There were several doors in addition to the entrance; two pairs of doors opened to two closets and another hid the bathroom. The last door was dead-bolted, but seemed only to connect to an adjoining room. He read the labels on the short, round bottles on the marble counter in the bathroom. The contents each had a distinctive, glimmering colour: lime–mint mouthwash, rose–lavender soap, orange–oatmeal shampoo and lemon–sage conditioner. Bio-Seremic face cream (pale pearly blue) came in a miniature, corked test tube with a set of printed instructions pasted on the side. “Cleanse skin and then apply gently with balls of fingertips around areas that may be prone to lines prior to your habitual beauty routine,” it advised. In the top drawer of one of the two bedside tables was a Bible with limp vinyl
covers. The book fell open in his hands when he pulled it out. Three twenty-dollar bills fluttered out from between pages 590 and 591 and landed at his feet. A previous reader had highlighted with a yellow marker a passage from the book of Matthew at the top of page 591. “When they had crucified him, they divided up his clothes by casting lots.” Nicolo held the money in his hand, uncertain. The right thing might be to turn it in to the reception desk and let the hotel decide what to do with it. Or he could ask Patrick what he thought. Then he remembered what Zoe had said—“The best advice is not to take anyone’s advice.” He hesitated but put the money in his pocket.