Advice for Italian Boys (21 page)

Nicolo felt a flash of perception, an unexpected insight into the appeal of this odd, counterintuitive activity, which seemed to him almost exactly like tossing money into a whirlwind. This must be the attraction, or one of them: the experience of a shared euphoria, a group celebration of a win or series of wins against the odds, or at least the potential for a victory. Looking out over the room, he saw the way in which the various activities—cards, slots, whirling
wheels, games of luck and chance—made of the participants and onlookers a tribe, a group who understood the rules and took pleasure in their logic, even though, or maybe even
because,
the probabilities were so unfavourable. Not his tribe, and not his pleasures, but he was pleased that he had worked it out, as if this was a puzzle that he had been set.

The woman’s luck turned. She lost four times in a row.

“Quit while you’re ahead, honey,” the friend holding her jacket counselled her. “There’s never no sense in chasing your losses. They ain’t never gonna be caught up with.”

The gambling woman shook her head. “I guess you’re right. It’s time to throw up the sponge,” she said. Her voice was soft, with an appealing foreign burr. She raised her shoulders and let them fall again and then accepted a bar-coded winnings ticket to take to the cashier.

Patrick had made an appointment for Nicolo with his massage therapist at two o’clock. A woman wearing white pants and a pale blue smock greeted him at the entrance to the spa and directed him to a change room, where he put on shorts and one of the spa’s thick robes. When Nicolo emerged, she led him to a small room in which everything was snowy or gold: blond wood floor, white table and cabinets, white walls and sheets, beige towels, white and gold light fixtures.

“We have you booked with Dylan today,” she murmured. “It will be on Mr. Alexander’s tab.” She directed Nicolo to take off his robe and arrange himself flat on the massage table. “You can leave your shorts on or take them off, as you choose.” She handed him a sheet to cover himself, and then exited and closed the door silently behind her.

Nicolo kept his shorts on. He hung his robe on a hook and arranged himself face down on the table—there was a recessed area at the top for his nose and chin and forehead to rest in. He reached around and pulled the sheet up over his legs and back. Noise trickled down from overhead speakers, a rushing and flowing sound that Nicolo identified after several repeated cycles as that of waves surging onto a shore.

After another minute, the door opened. Nicolo turned his head for a quick sideways glance. He saw first Dylan’s loose-fitting white pants, and then a white tunic with the spa’s logo embroidered on the yoke. Dylan had a strong, unshaven jaw and ski jump cheekbones. His straight, very shiny blond hair reached his collar. He matched the room perfectly. He was almost unsettlingly beautiful.

“Sage or lavender?” Dylan asked.

Nicolo couldn’t imagine what response he was intended to provide.

“Massage lotion?” Dylan clarified.

“Oh. Lavender, I guess.” Sage was something his mother put in chicken stuffing.

“Do you have low blood pressure?”

“No. Normal.”

“Because lavender can lower your blood pressure, so I really don’t advise lavender if your blood pressure is already low.”

“No. It’s fine. It’s good.”

“On the other hand, if you do have low blood pressure, the good news is that you’ll live forever. Ninety or a hundred at least. Especially if you remember to drink eight glasses of water every day.”

Nicolo could hear Dylan rubbing his hands back and forth slickly, warming the massage cream. For some reason the noise made him want to urinate. Dylan leaned over, pulled the sheet down to Nicolo’s waist, and began to push and pull against the muscles of his shoulders.

“You’re tense,” said Dylan.

“I guess I am,” said Nicolo. He was in fact tense and getting tenser. In response to, or in apprehension of, Dylan’s touch, his penis had begun to stir inside his shorts like a restless animal confined for too long inside a small cage.
Down,
he willed.

The muscles of his abdomen tightened and his scrotum gathered itself into a snug anticipatory bundle.
No,
he urged.

He shifted his hips from side to side in an effort to quell the insurrection, but this motion only accelerated a relentless expansion. Dylan lathered more massage cream onto his hands, making the same slippery sound, and then moved to work on Nicolo’s upper arms. This was better, since it felt more impersonal, and Nicolo began to think that he might be able to master the situation, but after several minutes Dylan began to massage first his right hand and then his left, bending and folding the fingers, pressing the pads at the base of each of his fingers and smoothing the webs between them. This was
intensely
personal. Nicolo’s face reddened, and he could feel sweat erupt on his forehead, under his arms and along the palms of his hands. His groin felt moist.

“You’re warm,” said Dylan. “This is normal. Lavender heats the blood. It is a relative of the mustard plant. To sweat is good. This will help to release the toxins.”

The concept of toxin release was a welcome and distracting thought. Nicolo imagined poisons seeping out of his pores under the pressure of Dylan’s manipulation. But where could they have come from in the first place? Perhaps from the beer and burger he had eaten the night before. He closed his eyes and summoned up an image of these toxic emanations—animal fats, sugars, alcohol—percolating out of his skin, swirling into the air, and then wafted away in unseen waves toward some unseen outtake vent. Toxins. Wafting. Waves. This was helping.

Dylan slapped Nicolo’s shoulders, once, twice, deliberately, pulled the sheet up to cover Nicolo’s back, and then reached and folded the bottom half of the sheet up toward his waist, uncovering his legs and shorts. Nicolo’s heart lurched. Could any evidence of his condition be seen?

Dylan began to push against Nicolo’s thighs, with enough force that Nicolo was rocked back and forth on the table. He was now a stew of intensely contradictory feelings: pleasure, horror, apprehension, anticipation and terror.

“Strong,” said Dylan.

“I lift weights,” said Nicolo. This was much worse than before, and painful enough that he was forced to consider what it might imply.

“Ummmm,” said Dylan. “Very nice.” He had made his way downward and was working now on Nicolo’s calves.

This went on for another half-hour. Nicolo felt as if he were being forced at gunpoint along a precipice in the dark, but every time he thought he might fall, he managed to pull himself together.

“Other side?” asked Dylan after he had completed Nicolo’s
feet. He motioned to Nicolo to flip over on to his back.

“Oh. No. No. Any more and I’ll be sleeping on you,” said Nicolo. Heat flooded his face. “I mean—it felt great, though. You’re very good.”

“I do personal appointments too,” said Dylan. “In your room if you like. They don’t have to be here in the spa. Some of my clients ask for more personal, one-on-one sessions.”

Eyes closed, Nicolo tried to discern what might be intended in Dylan’s proposal. Was this what Patrick had had in mind all along? An experiment to see what Nicolo might be tempted into? He could not come to any conclusion except this: that if he held his eyelids sealed together for long enough, Dylan might believe that he had fallen asleep.

Seven waves broke on the beach in succession, seeming to increase each time in their intensity.

“If you like,” said Dylan.

Nicolo considered. Was this what he wanted?

Five more waves surged and then ebbed.

“Or not,” said Dylan.

Nicolo waited until Dylan had gone before he trusted himself to sit up on the table. He felt a bit unsteady, but exhilarated too, as if he had passed a difficult test. He remembered Zoe’s advice, in the guise of non-advice, which had been that he should try to learn from everything, both good and bad. What he had learned, he thought, was that he would have to make choices in life, and that one choice was to set himself on a path that did not have Dylans on it.

Late that afternoon Nicolo grew bored and went up to the eleventh floor where Patrick’s team was still at work. Patrick had divided everyone into two subgroups, and had assigned them both the same task—reordering the lineup of songs in Frankie’s performance. They were to work independently at opposite sides of the room and present their conclusions at the end of an hour. The group working near the window was loud and argumentative, their discussion punctuated by derisive comments about one another’s ideas and suggestions. The other group, near the door, huddled intently and their voices were so low and complicit that little could be heard. “
Coloratura,
” one of them repeated several times, in an intense tone. “Shading,” suggested another.

“You are so completely full of crap,” someone in the window group said loudly.

Patrick sat in the middle of the room with his head in his hands, staring down at the reflective surface of the table. He glanced up and saw Nicolo. “Hey,” he said. “It’s still pumpkin. The performance, I mean. In case you’re wondering. Although Timothy’s still pumpkin too, as it turns out. Who was it who turned a pumpkin into a golden carriage? Not me, it seems.” He sat up straighter. “Now you’re here you might as well sit in. Maybe you’ll stimulate some new ideas. I’ve heard everything this mob has to suggest nine times over. What do you think? Pick a group, although I have to say I’m not sure there’s really any choosing between them.”

“I can listen if you like,” said Nicolo. “I don’t think I’ll have much to add.” The group beside the door looked too tightly huddled to break into, so Nicolo went to sit in an available
chair next to Leesa, at the far end of the room, near the window. With her were Claudia, one of the Stevens, Tatiana, Steph and Marlene.

Steven had been speaking when Nicolo came to sit down. He pursed his lips and straightened his shoulders, unconsciously asserting his territoriality within the group, and then cleared his throat. Leesa, mediating, patted Steven’s arm.

“Go on,” she said. “You were making a point.”

Nicolo admired how she achieved this—Steven was reassured and encouraged, but also oblivious to Leesa’s intervention.

“What we need to strive for, strive for, is a connection,” Steven said. “Something direct, unmediated, personal. That’s what I think.”

“How can we do that when we’re talking about a venue with, like, four thousand seats?” Tatiana objected. She said this from within a tangle of curling, vine-like blond hair, and she spoke each word distinctly, coating each syllable with disparagement.

“It might be that the best we can hope for is to create a sense of
false
intimacy,” said Leesa. She had the clear, rational tone of a level-headed woman.

“Audiences are too sophisticated these days for smoke and mirrors,” said Steph. “They’ll see through it. They need to be convinced to suspend disbelief.”

Steven persisted. “An overall sense of genuineness. Is that too much to ask? Is it just too much to bloody ask?”

“Have you even
met
Frankie?” Tatiana said, shaking her yellow head so that her hair coiled and recoiled against her cheeks and chin and shoulders. “He’s been singing since
he was fourteen or something and by now there’s nothing authentic left to him, not a single bone of his body, not a molecule or an atom.”

“Have we worked anything out here?” Patrick pulled a chair up to the table, between Steven and Leesa. Leesa moved her chair sideways, closer to Nicolo’s.

Each person presented a perspective. Steven argued that he, or someone else, should spend time with Frankie, talking to him, listening to him, in a dialogue, working at getting to the core, to something close to his “essence.” Tatiana took the view that more dancing would help. Marlene thought the show should include more of the old classic songs, “The ones people most identify with. That builds closeness, or a sense of closeness anyway. Prior knowledge and all that. People always confuse familiarity with understanding.” Leesa agreed overall with Marlene. Claudia and Steph had come up with a lineup that started and ended with new music. “That great Portuguese
fado,
” said Steph. “And that a cappella thing from Quebec.”

How opinionated they all were, Nicolo thought. How confident in themselves. But then a Zoe-like second thought occurred to him. Was it possible that the force with which they stated their views masked hidden doubts? Possibly, he concluded, it was some of both—confidence and doubt—and that the motivations didn’t matter so much as the debate, which generated ideas to which they all contributed and for which each could take credit.

“The other group more or less concluded that we should raze the theatre and tear up the contract,” Patrick said. “You guys may have been louder and more divided, but you’re certainly more constructive.”

Patrick stopped Nicolo at the door and put a hand on his shoulder. “What did you think, Nicco? What would the old lady have to say about this one? We’ve got to report out tomorrow.”

“
U bisognu ’mpara la via,
” said Nicolo. “That’s the one that comes to mind.”

“Meaning?”

“It translates as: Necessity will teach you the road to follow.”

“That’s not very much help, really, is it? When you get right down to it. Has it ever occurred to you that most of these sayings are variations on Doris Day? You know,
que será, será?
”

“Maybe, but I’m beginning to see why she uses it so often.” Nicolo paused, but he decided to give Patrick his own thoughts. It seemed that this is what people did. They offered up their opinions and felt lighter afterward, shed of the burden of holding on to a point of view. Once the opinion was given, then it was up to the recipient to decide what to do with it. You could control what you suggested, but you could not control how or whether the suggestion was taken. There were some situations in which giving counsel was dangerous. Even sound advice in the wrong time or place could lead to unintended results. Here, however, there was little risk. Advice was thrown around as heedlessly as coins were dropped into a slot machine.