Interesting Women by Andrea Lee (7 ebook reader txt) 📗

sense of practicality that appealed to me in that disordered stage of my existence, and with it she spent a surprising amount of energy trying to redirect my life. For someone who lived in a way I associated with cheese rinds and the ends of candles, she thought in the economic terms of a great demimondaine. An industrialist was courting me, and she told me that I should simply ask him to buy me a big expensive apartment in the best part of Milan.

Though I had no intention of following her advice, I amused myself by letting her show me an array of apartments whose prices were redolent of abused expense accounts: ten-room penthouses in the Montenapoleone or Magenta district, full of dirty wall-to-wall carpet. These places all had vast wet terraces covered with tubs of moribund oleanders, terraces from which you could sometimes view the prickly spires of the Duomo, and the wasteland of fog pierced by the sparks of the streetcars far below.

One November afternoon after we’d looked over a particularly dismal apartment in Via Visconti di Modrone, Nelda continued her rehabilitation campaign by convincing me that I had to track down a man I’d known briefly that summer in Sardinia. This was a lawyer from Varese who wore white patent-leather loafers, and who had astonished our little seaside colony of mothers and children by manifesting a sudden devotion to me as apparently respectable as it was intense. He would arrive at my door with flowers in the early evening when all the ladies, babysitters, and children were assembled on their condominium terraces, and take me out to one of the cheaper restaurants on the Costa Smeralda. He made the sign of the cross before he ate. On our third date, he asked me to marry him, and bear many children in an ancient brick farmhouse in the swampy midst of the Varese rice paddies, where frogs are so common they are included in risotto. He vanished quickly when I showed little enthusiasm for the project, and I had forgotten his last name. However Nelda seized on the idea that he was the man for me. “He may have seemed dull, but dull men can be the best husbands. There’s no disappointment, because you know what you have.”

She said we should get a detective and find him. I didn’t want the man, but the idea of sleuthing in the Northern Italian provinces had a dark frivolity that appealed intensely to me. So we made an appointment—telephoning, of course, from a bar—with a detective whose face had the benign look of a father confessor as he stared out of a half-page ad in the Milan yellow pages. His offices, on a fashionable street near Piazza San Babila, were big enough for a whole law firm and lined with dark green leather, and his beautiful receptionist had a brisk air of high-class tartiness. Seated at a mahogany desk littered with telephones, the famous investigator was small and bald, and wore the bland sacerdotal smile of his advertisement; he spoke, however, in a fast rough voice with a trace of a Calabrian accent. At once he began to ask me questions in a way that was so vulgar that it gave me a thrill. Instinctively, I prepared my body and mind to follow unexpected mysterious orders, as if I were visiting a medical specialist.

“Did you—” He made a back and forth motion with his fist.

“I don’t understand,” I said.

Nelda poked me. “Don’t act like a fool,” she whispered.

“Excuse me, Signorina, but I have to be blunt. If I am to help you, it’s important that I know everything. Did you have relations with this man?”

“Yes—well, no, not in the sex way that you mean. Well, not in any way, really.”

“How often did you see him?”

“We met on the beach, and then we went out for dinner four times.”

“What did he talk about when you were together?”

“About the fact that I was, well, a goddess—”

“A what?”

“A goddess.” I said the Italian word clearly, and the investigator wrote something down on a small pad of paper. “And he wanted me to come and live with him in an old farmhouse in the rice fields—”

“He asked her to marry him!” broke in Nelda. The investigator smiled fatuously at her, as men always smiled at Nelda. After a few minutes, he telephoned a minion and demanded information on restaurants on the Costa Smeralda. Then he put down the phone and said: “Signorina, it’s a clear case of breach of promise. I’ll find the individual in question for you, but it won’t necessarily be an easy path. For expenses I’ll need immediately from you a check for three million lire.”

Something I was never afterward able to reconcile with any idea of sanity was the unmistakable pleasure with which I drew out my checkbook and wrote a check for the outrageous amount of money—twice what an office worker would earn in a month, and money that I could not easily spare. I did it with a promptness that clearly surprised even the investigator. It was obvious that the desperate women he preyed on usually required at least a minimum of convincing. He had his mouth open, showing an unharmonious array of dental work, when I tore off the check and handed it to him with a flourish. “Signorina,” he stammered, “I want to explain—”

But I waved him aside with a gesture I didn’t know I possessed, the gesture of a grand duchess. “Trovalo a tutti costi,” I said. “Find him at all costs, my dear Mr. X.”

As we left—as in some psychiatrists’ offices, the exit was different from the entrance—Nelda squeezed my arm affectionately, like a mother proud of a clever child. I felt weak with relief. It seemed that there was a climactic folly in what I had just done that laid to rest whatever shades had been haunting me. I had paid a tithe to hell, and it could now absent itself from my mornings