We land in Rome at the most beautiful moment of the evening, just before the sunset. By the time I make my way through immigration and customs and hail a taxi to take me to Orlovsky’s apartment on the Palatine Hill, it’s twilight. He’s expecting me. I sent a telegram on Saturday night, and though I hadn’t received a reply by the time I left for the airport, I didn’t need one. He can’t possibly refuse me.
All right, so those extravagant lies I told the nice lady on board the Antigone weren’t entirely truthless. I first met Valeri Valierovich Orlovsky only a couple of weeks after arriving in Rome in 1939. He was, in fact, a Russian émigré. He could have styled himself a prince, if he chose to, but in his professional life he was simply Orlovsky. He’d arrived in Rome twenty years earlier, young and penniless, and apprenticed himself to a tailor. Now he was head of one of the great fashion houses in Italy. He had married a beautiful Roman aristocrat who went into rages whenever he got a new mistress and could only be mollified by diamonds of the first water, and his atelier was the most beautiful building I had ever seen. He kept a private studio on the piano nobile, decorated—he said—by those Carracci frescoes I mentioned earlier, although as I knew nothing about frescoes, then or now, I can’t say whether he was telling the truth. They were mesmerizing, however. Whenever we slept together, I would stare for ages at those entwined nude figures that so mimicked our own and thought how erotic Rome was, how you simply couldn’t do this back in New York City—sprawl with your lover on a studio couch in the middle of the afternoon and gaze at some ancient, obscene painting that was part of the wall itself.
This is the building where I direct the taxi. So far as I know, his wife has neither died nor divorced him (she’s Catholic, and they have seven or eight children together at last count) nor yet murdered him herself, as I would have done. I admit, I feel a little anxious when I ring the bell. Will he meet me? Will he care at all? We parted in such terrible anger, after all.
But the door opens, and there he stands, a million years old. His hair has turned gray, his jowls now merge seamlessly into his neck. His famous black eyes glitter as he holds out his arms to me. “Bambina!” he says in his curious accent—Italy by way of old St. Petersburg, a residual disdain for definite articles. “I thought you would be married with dozen children by now.”
I allow myself to be folded into his embrace. “Who says I’m not?”
“Your figure, bambina. So slim and beautiful still. And your skin, smooth like butter. But come inside. I brought out some good wine for you.”
It’s like I never left—like the past dozen years never passed. The vestibule is exactly the same, down to the single umbrella and four ivory-handled walking sticks in the wrought-iron stand. The little courtyard holds the same lemon trees—a few feet taller—and the same stone benches I recall. The staircase curves upward in the same spiral, the stone steps are worn down in the same shiny, dark divots. When he opens the familiar thick wooden door to the studio, every stick of furniture sits where I remember it. I stand next to the large, wide couch, which bears the same soft upholstery, and stare yet again at the domed ceiling, where the nymphs still gambol with their satyrs.
“You haven’t changed a thing.”
“Why should I? This way I am never old. I am always young man with beautiful young woman. Wine?”
“Oh, damn,” I murmur.
“Is that yes or no?”
“Yes. I was just thinking about old buildings, that’s all. Our fanatical need to keep them exactly as they were. I still live in my parents’ old apartment in New York.”
“But you have redecorated.”
“Some of it. Not all.”
He hands me the wine and nods. “Because if it stays as it was, they are not entirely dead, yes? Your childhood still there in walls.”
“What I’ve always hated about you, Orlovsky, is that you understood me better than anybody. Next you’ll be telling me you were actually in love with me.” I clink my glass against his. “Cheers.”
“But I was in love with you. I love each girl I sleep with. I love them with all my heart.” He presses his hand against his chest, where this generous organ resides. “But especially you, bambina.”
“Oh, of course.”
“No, is true. You have quality, special quality in your spirit, I cannot find word in English.”
“Don’t bother. I’m not twenty-two anymore, and I’m not here to be seduced. We can be perfectly honest with each other.”
“But I am always honest with you, bambina. When did I ever tell lie to you?”
I make a skeptical noise. “Shall we sit? I don’t imagine we have much time. The princess will want you home.”
“My wife? No, she is not so particular now.” He half shrugs, half gestures to the couch. “We are both getting old, yes? More kind to each other. Forgiveness. You see, it is relief to let go of passions.”
I sit not on the couch, but on the armchair next to it—a massive, ancient hulk made of unyielding dark wood upholstered in sumptuous bronze and green tapestry, which contains its own set of memories. I recall a few as I arrange myself, things I haven’t remembered in years, and I wonder at my own youthful abandon. What happened to that gamine blond girl who so gleefully straddled a married man in a chair built for a Medici prince and made him howl like some kind of Siberian wolf? Does she still exist? Or is age and wisdom a permanent affliction? The wine surprises me. “Oh, you’ve finally gone native, have you?”
“It seemed patriotic thing to do, in time of war. Then I developed taste for it.” He brushes his hand over the corner of the sofa nearest me and sits like an old man, stiff and deliberate, not altogether confident in his joints. My God, what the war’s done to him. Twelve years, and he’s transformed from a vigorous, distinguished, infinitely charismatic man enjoying a singularly virile middle age to this creaking roué. “You approve? Is some champagne in cellar, I think.”
“No, I like it.” I fiddle with the stem. I’ve realized it was stupid to come here right off the airplane, so tired and disoriented, not just from the marathon flight but from Rome itself. I lived here less than a year—why did it take such an outsized hold of my imagination? “I saw your fall collection. Marvelous. That tweed dress with the—”
“Bambina,” he says sadly, “you did not come all the way to Roma to talk to old man about his clothes, did you?”
“No.”
“Then tell me what you want. What this besotted old lover can do for you to make amends for his sins.”
“I need your help.”
“So I am guessing. What do you need? Some money? Some work for new model?”
“Nothing so simple, I’m afraid. It’s my sister, Iris. I think she’s in terrible trouble.”
He frowns. “Your sister? Little brown mouse with luscious tits?”
“The same.”
“What kind of trouble? She needs husband? My son Giovanni—”
“A husband? God, no. The husband’s the trouble.” I set the empty wineglass on the floor and lean toward him, bracing my folded arms on my knees. “I need your help to go to Moscow and rescue her.”
Let’s return, for just a moment, to those sins Orlovsky mentioned.
As I said, I have some moral advantage over Orlovsky, which I never intended to use. Moral advantage has its own priceless value, after all, a hefty solid weight in the column of your assets, and if you cash it in, you don’t possess this credit any longer. You’re no longer wealthy in the only currency that human beings really care about.