This Is Where We Live - By Janelle Brown Page 0,137
it was threatening to rain again, but this hotel room was sweltering; moisture gathered in Jeremy’s armpits, trapped underneath two layers of fine Italian wool. The table lamp in the corner of the hotel room spotlit an empty jar of Nutella sitting on an abandoned lunch cart, alongside a ravaged basket of pastries, a congealing pitcher of milk, and two espresso cups ringed with violet lip prints. It was his third day in Rome, or maybe his fourth; he couldn’t remember anymore.
The woman stirred, opening one eye to assess Jeremy. “Ciao,” she said.
Jeremy removed his coat—a Pierre Powers original, still fresh from the designer’s showroom, like the rest of his wardrobe—and dropped it on one of the armchairs. He sat down, covertly scrutinizing the shadowy region below the woman’s pubic mound. “Where’s Aoki?” he asked.
The woman turned on her side, haphazardly tugging the sheet up over her body. It slid right back off, landing in a puddle below her breasts. “Who eez Aoki?” she asked, in an indeterminate accent.
“The Japanese woman,” Jeremy said. “The artist.”
The woman smiled, revealing crooked milk teeth, and rolled onto her back. “She wanted fromage. She went to Roscioli.”
A little shock of excitement shot through him—Aoki is finally back—as he unwound the scarf from around his neck. He folded the scarf in thirds with fumbling hands. “So, who are you, where are you from?” he asked, in a voice as colloquially neutral as he could muster. “Are you Italian? German?”
“I am Ulla.” The woman pulled a feather pillow toward her and hugged it, demurely, to her chest. “You like to take a sleep?”
“No, thank you,” Jeremy said, unsure if this was an invitation. He wondered whether Aoki had just seduced this woman, or whether she had invited a stranger to take a nap in their bed for more altruistic reasons. Perhaps Ulla was a prostitute, or a homeless person, or a famous European actress in need of a disco nap. Any of the above was possible with Aoki. That’s why life with her was so exciting, wasn’t it? It was astonishing how quickly he was adjusting to this, the strangers that drifted in and out of their hotel suites, pieds-à-terre, vacation villas. Two months in Europe, and he felt as if he’d been drunk for a decade—as if existence had become an endless, intoxicating whirlwind that kept him always slightly off balance and perpetually giddy, but without the wicked hangover in the morning.
They’d lasted only twenty-six days in Paris before Aoki packed them up and sent them on a cross-continental scavenger hunt, in pursuit of an elusive art dealer from Cannes they’d never located. Instead, they’d ended up at a black-tie gala at a London museum, where Aoki had been invited as the guest of honor but left early after she slapped Damien Hirst; then Berlin, to iron over some sort of conflict with Aoki’s gallerist there; and finally a ski resort in Moldavia for the Christmas holiday, where they connected with an alcoholic journalist from Vanity Fair who was writing a profile of Aoki. In order to recover from that, Aoki required a recuperative stay at the Positano villa of an Argentinian photographer she’d met the previous summer. It rained, and the two women argued about food and fascism and the meaning of the word obscene. They left Positano abruptly and landed here, in Rome, for no good reason whatsoever.
Jeremy hadn’t seen Aoki since they checked into the hotel on Tuesday evening. She vanished at the concierge desk, just as a bellboy wearing a little blue fez trundled their luggage away. “I have to meet an old friend for drinks,” she said, and stood on tiptoe to kiss Jeremy. “I’ll be at this enoteca by Piazza Navona if you need me. We can have dinner later—there’s a place in the old Jewish ghetto I want to take you, run by this deaf old grandmama who makes the most pornographic fried artichokes.” And then she vanished back out into the night, leaving Jeremy standing alone on a flat field of marble in the chilly hotel lobby, where a pianist was mournfully playing a Liszt étude to an elderly couple swaddled in minks.
Aoki never returned. Jeremy went down to the Piazza Navona around midnight that night, thinking she might still be there with her friend, and quickly realized that there were about fifty wine bars in the three-block radius surrounding the square. Aoki was at none of them. When he woke up the next morning to see