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The following story is told as best as I understood it. Any factual errors are unintentional. When details, names, events, or dates are blurry, I have tried to indicate my sense of confusion. But this is my experience, told to the best of my recollection.
THE RITZ
ASIA ARGENTO AND I were headed for her hotel room at the Ritz-Carlton in San Francisco. As we left Chinatown, I thought about telling the cab driver to switch directions and take us instead to my place down in the flatlands. The taxi accelerated and bit down at each steep crest of hill, the glitter of downtown yawning into the black water of the bay. I doubt she would have approved of my ratty bed, or of my boyfriend, Jonathan, reading a book on the couch.
Id met Asia in Italy the year before, and since then, I was obsessed. I combed, dressed, and prepared my meals with Asia in a secret chamber of my mind. When I selected music, I wondered whether she would like it. She had a way of snubbing things with such exacting disdaina flip of her head, a gutteral sound of disgust deep in the throat from the same place that one cries or laughs. Id abandoned a crocheted wallet and a white leather clutch on the street because once shed glanced at them with scorn, saying, You are like an old lady. My face had flushed with embarrassment. But my crocheted wallet and white clutch had suited me, even if they didnt suit her. There was nothing that I enjoyed more than catching sight of an old lady sitting primly on the bus, hands gloved, hat perched, wool suit lint-rolled, on her best foot to the post office or opera. And there were things that Asia wore that didnt appeal to me: lacy, frilly things, not to mention a furry pink bag she always carried with her during those days we spent in Rome. This ber-feminine style suited her. She flounced around in stiletto heels and skin-tight jeans scrawled with Bic pen. She could karate kick in those heels. Once Id seen her hold an ice cream cone in one hand as she thrust her legs in the air, landing evenly back on her glistening crocodile toes. She had just done a voiceover for a schmaltzy action movie with Vin Diesel. After we had gone for a gelato, and I think the excitement of the movie overtook her.
This was the first time Asia and I had seen each other since our time in Rome a year ago, and she would only be in San Francisco until the next morning. I wanted to take her out to eat sushi, show her Dolores Park, and the ruined battlements at the mouth of the bay, with my favorite flight of stairs that fell off into the ocean. My stomach knotted. I hardly knew her, this woman Id thought about every day for a year.
Without giving a hint of what she was thinking, she glanced at me with heavy eyes then took a drag on her cigarette. Her features seemed to change constantly, looking demure and feminine in one second, edgy and dissolute in the next. The city lights beyond the cab window pulsed against her messy cropped hair. The suspension of the car bounced. I didnt say a word to the driver.
The cab jostled to a stop, and she rummaged in her bag, a Fendi that could have cost as much as my years rent. It seemed to have replaced her old pink furry thing. Though little known in the US, she was a huge celebrity in Italy. So much so that fashion houses paid her to wear their clothes. She looked at me and said, JT, you gotta some change? Her voice was a growlmuch deeper than mine, and I envied its resonance. I combed my pockets. At least I could give her one thing that really belonged to me.
The bellman opened the door. He wore a tailcoat and a turreted hat that made him look like a rook. We traipsed through the lobby. A crystal chandelier drooped from the ceiling, and a red and gold oriental brocade rug hung from the wall. I snatched a green apple from a crystal bowl and caught myself fantasizing about snatching the poor bellmans hat to impress her. Would that impress her? If I were a real boy, I thought, maybe I would do that. But humiliating the doorman was ultimately not a very sexy thing to do. I plopped one, two, three apples into my bag. Not one of the staff even turned a head. My actions became bolder around her, as if I belonged beside her in this world where one never worried about losing socks at the laundromat or tallying the cost of coffee each week. The trick seemed to be to treat ones privilege with indifference.
I was curious to try on the ease that came from money and celebrity, though I didnt think stealing apples from the lobby of a hotel quite qualified. But filching the apples was definitely in JTs character. He was a scavenger, but what was I? Asia bent toward the elevator button console, wrestling her plastic key into the slot. Got a room on the umpteenth floor, she said playfully.
We shuffled down a long corridor, and I watched her swagger. I was enchanted by her contradictions. She was graceful and almost aristocratic, and yet she could be tough and vulgar. Id seen her spit on people, throw chairs, and say Fuck you with impeccable nonchalance. My attraction to her was a muddle of wanting her and wanting to learn how to be like her. I looked back at the trail of lavender carpet turned against its nap and poked her with a static finger. She tossed me a mischievous grin. I stared at the brass door-knocker, feeling both anticipation and dread. Id waited for this moment since wed first met over a year agoduring what was ostensibly my book tour. Shed given me her grandfathers sweater and a vintage Gucci belt. Id given her a pair of jodphurs, one of my first sewing endeavors. They had brass buttons emblazoned with crowns. And they were too tight in the ankles so they sagged at the butt and constrained that sensitive part behind the thigh. I hoped she would like them, because in truth I had no other gifts to give her. The books were not from me, I hadnt written them. That was what she really wanted: an option for the movie rights to my book, or what she thought was my book, The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things.
Too renegade to spend her life kissing the likes of Vin Diesel, she was living up to the legacy of her father, Dario, the renowned Italian horror movie director. She treated me to extravagant feastsplatters of oysters, scallops, and speckled crab claws suspended on islands of kelp. She taught me never to toast without looking company directly in the eye, an ancient Italian tradition meant to detect betrayal. I cringed each time I raised my glass and said, Salud. She also taught me that when you saw sheepand we passed a lot of sheep on that tripyou were supposed to flick your finger like there was something sticky on it, to bring money. And when wine spilled you dabbed it behind your ears like perfume. Now, I cant remember why. I had done all of it at her beckoning.
On my last night in Rome, Asia lay down on our rose printed comforter and I began to rub her back, pushing my stubby fingers into her sinewy muscles. Id inherited my fathers hands, short and thick, like an ogres. Creeper vines on the windows obscured the streetlight from the hotel room, redolent of mildew and frying garlic. The horns and buzz of traffic echoed, making the silence between us more obtuse. She grunted as I pressed into a knot in her muscles.
My sister-in-law, Laura, had been there. Shed watched us sideways as she flung clothes and magazines from one pile to another, preparing to pack. She was the author of JTs books. The process involved re-piling everything while reciting soliloquies. She began packing gifts for her son Thor, as he was known in JT land. Laura was known as Speedie.
