The Story of X: An Erotic Tale

T
HE
S
TORY OF
X

An Erotic Tale

A
.
J
.
M
OLLOY

D
EDICATION

For S

C
ONTENTS

C
HAPTER
O
NE

S
O HERE
I
am: the Caffè Gambrinus. I’m finally in Italy, having just completed my final exams,
sitting at a table on the open terrace of a famous cafe, on a famous street corner
in glorious Naples, and the air is warm, and the evening sky is cloudless, and I can
smell the garbage, which is piled
that
high across the road.

A cop walks down the street in front of a faded, crumbling, graffitied palazzo. He
looks like he is designed by Armani: he has the sunglasses, the gun, the look, the
tailored blue shirt and pants, the gleaming leather; the way of slouching as he walks.
A cop by Dolce & Gabbana.

He is handsome. There are lots of handsome men here. But the most handsome of them
all is sitting about three tables away.

“So who is he, then?”

Jess leans forward; she looks at me.

“Roscarrick.”

“Huh?”

My best friend from Dartmouth, Jessica Rushton—funny and sarcastic and pretty, British-born
and entirely cynical—raises her very plucked eyebrows and threads back her long, dark
hair. She tuts.

“You’ve never heard of Lord Roscarrick?”

“He’s a lord?”

Jessica laughs a nicotined laugh.

“Marcus James Anthony Xavier Mastrosso Di Angelo Roscarrick.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Close friends call him Marc.”

“Well, it saves time.”

Jessica grins.

“And he’s a billionaire. All of Naples knows
that
.”

I look across the tables of the cafe at this man, this apparently rich man. He looks
barely thirty, at most. He also looks
amazing
. There is no other word for it. A more complex word would be, well, too complex,
too unnecessary. He has dark skin—with distant and very pale blue eyes. A striking
contrast. Also a slightly severe and yet compelling profile: hawkish, animal, sad,
stubbled, and with a trace of boyishness mixed with pure adult, predatory masculinity.
He is sexy; very, very sexy.

This isn’t me. I’m not used to this instant reaction. I find myself adjusting my shoulder-length
blond hair, wishing I had paid more the last time I got it cut. Wondering if he will
look over. He doesn’t. He simply sips at his tiny espresso cup, sweetly lifting the
china to his lips. Sitting alone. Sipping. Staring at nothing. Impassive. Oh God.
That profile.

“You’re not falling in love
already,
X?”

Jess always calls me X. It was Jessica who
christened
me X when we first roomed together at Dartmouth. My full name is Alexandra Beckmann.
Alex B. X for short. I am Californian, blond, a little bit Jewish, and twenty-one
years old. Jess thinks I am naïve. She may be right. I am also reasonably smart and
definitely well educated. And I am in Naples.
In Italy
.

Jessica is still talking about this guy. I am just
looking
at him; can’t help it. I expected the men in Italy to be clichéd but hot, and maybe
a little irritating. This guy is hot, but
not
in a way I expected.

“Meh. Another good-looking bastard . . .”

She talks away. Lighting yet another cigarette, pluming smoke from her mouth into
her nose for a professional second. She didn’t used to do
that
back in New Hampshire.

“He looks . . . interesting,” I say.

It’s a helpless lie.

“Steer clear, babes.”

“Sorry?”

Jessica laughs smoke.

“Hello, lamb, meet slaughter.”

“He’s bad news?”

“Ladykiller, with an emphasis on the
killer.
Really, X. Not for the likes of you.”

I bridle; I can’t help it. I know Jess thinks I am pure white-bread, ingenuous and
innocent, just a one-guy girl, and she’s not entirely wrong: I am a little prudish
and mainstream—compared to her. All through our friendship she’s been the drinker,
the smoker, the man-eater, the one who has adventures, the one who rolls back to the
dorm at three
A.M.
with another nameless frat boy to spend a few hours snorting lines off the kitchen
counter and having sex on the kitchen table. Meanwhile I did the one-boyfriend-at-college
thing, convincing myself I was in love, and I definitely did the studying.

But the boyfriend got dull, or I eventually
realized
he was dull, at the same time the studies got more rewarding: I am aiming for grad
school. And so I am here in Italy, researching my senior thesis,
Camorra and Cosa Nostra: The Historical Origins of Italian Organized Crime in the
Mezzogiorno
.

I want to teach Italian history, but the only reason I chose to do this
precise
thesis was
so I could justify coming to Naples
—to hang out with Jess and have fun. She came out here as soon as she could, six months
back; she’s taking a year off college. She came to learn the language and teach some
English, and in her calls and e-mails she made it sound so exciting: the food, the
city, the men; yes, the men. Why not? I yearned to join her.

Because I want to have fun
. I am twenty-one and I have had two boyfriends, and one solitary miserable one-night
stand. That’s it. Jessica openly derides me: an Almost Virgin, the Madonna of New
Hampshire.

I turn. The man is looking over.
Gazing my way.
He smiles at me, briefly, sketchily, as if he is puzzled. As if he recognizes but
cannot place me.

Then he turns back to his coffee.

“He just looked over!”

Jess laughs again.

“Sometimes he does that, turns his head. It’s weird.”

“Oh, shut up. This is all new to me.” I finish my black stain of coffee; the coffee
is seriously good. “I’m not used to all these hot-looking men, Jess. All the boys
in Dartmouth are wearing those pastel polos and khakis, like East Coast rich kids.”

“Your boyfriend used to wear . . .” She shudders, visibly. “Deck shoes.”

“Ugh!” I laugh, too. “Deck shoes with gray socks. Please don’t.”

“What a total matador
he
was.”

Lord Roscarrick is sipping his coffee and not looking at me anymore. I need to defend
my ex-boyfriend.

“He was
very
good at math, though.”

“Yeah. But he looked like a beach donkey, X. Good thing you chucked him.”

“How’s it going here, anyway? You still working your way through the male population
of Campania?”

“Yes . . . or, at least, I
was
. . .”

Jessica shrugs, moues, and grinds out her cigarette. A supremely chic waiter instantly
whisks away the soiled ashtray and, with a charming gesture and a simple “
Signorina,”
replaces it with a clean one, glass and heavy, and engraved with the letters
C G
in belle époque style. The service is impeccable. The Caffè Gambrinus is frescoed
and chandeliered and famous. Now I wonder how much this is costing: these excellent
macchiatos and delicious little snacks—Napoli salami on the softest cubes of ciabatta.
I worked evenings in bars for six months to help pay for this three-month research
trip. My budget is limited.

But I don’t care, not tonight, not my first night in Naples!

The evening advances. This man Roscarrick is still sitting there; but he is studiously
looking the other way, in his fine suit, with his fine profile, and I decide to forget
him; there will be plenty more.

The streets beyond the cafe terrace are abuzz with life—couples strolling and flirting,
cops smiling and flirting, kids sitting on stationary green Piaggio scooters and flirting.
It is all slightly raffish, and superbly alive, and very Neapolitan—though how I can
judge this I don’t know, as this is my first visit to Naples, indeed to Italy. My
only previous visit to
Europe
was a rainy week in London at age eighteen, a present from Mom and Dad, a reward
for getting my Dartmouth scholarship.

Mom and Dad
. I get a sudden pang of nostalgia, maybe homesickness. No, it can’t be homesickness.
I only left home two days ago—the little house in San Jose, the sunny yard, the sprinklers,
suburbia, America.

Now I’m in Europe, deepest, darkest, decaying, grandiose old Europe. Already I love
it. What’s more, I am
determined
to love it.

“You can kinda go off the guys, actually,” says Jessica.

I look at her, surprised.

“Sorry? You told me you adored them. Gave me a list of names. Quite a long list.”

“Did I?” Her smile is lopsided, almost guilty. Embarrassed. “Sure. Okay. Yeah. There
have been a couple.” A pause. “Couple of dozen. They’re cute—what’s a girl to do?
But they are so bloody narcissistic, X, it starts to irritate.”

“What do you mean?”

“Half of them are mummy’s boys. They have a word for it,
mammone
. They live at home till they’re, like,
fifty
, and the clothes and the vanity, eeesh.” She chuckles some smoke from her ninth cigarette.
“Manbags. I mean, who knew? Manbags?”

“Purses for men?”

“Yeah. Leather accessories for men?
Way
too bloody metrosexual. And the socks, trousers without socks—what is that about?—walking
around in a business suit with no socks—put your damn socks on, silly boy—and all
the preening and tweaking. Christ, there are queues for the gents in the bars longer
than there are for the ladies, and after a while it starts to bloody get to you, I
mean look—
look
. . .” She gestures rather wildly, her silver bangles jangling on her slender, elegant,
suntanned arm, sweeping her hand across the view of Via Toledo and the Opera House
and the big square with the Royal Palace that, I think, leads down to the Tyrrhenian
Sea. “Look at the damn rubbish, the trash. Why can’t they just clean it up? Why not,
like, stop fuckin’ worrying about your manbag for a while, Signor No Socks, and clean
up your damn city. That’s what a
real
man would do.”

A silence descends.

“I need a drink,” she says.

Drinks are ordered. A couple of “Venezianos.” I have no idea what a Veneziano is.
Jess orders in almost flawless and very enviable Italian; she has gone from halting
stutters to apparent bilingualism in half a year. I am jealous. I can barely say
uno, due, tre.
That’s another thing I am going to fix while I’m here: I’m going to learn Italian.
That, and maybe, hopefully, please God, fall in love.

Oh God, I would like to fall in love. Really in love. Not pretend-in-love like I did
with Paul the Deck-Shoe Mathematician. If I fell in love it would be the first time.
And I am twenty-one. I am starting to think I am incapable; barren of love. Poor X.
Did you hear about X? Yeah, she can’t fall in love; the doctors have tried everything.
They say she’s going to spinster clinic.

“Signorina. Due aperitivi.”

The waiter sets the drinks on the table. Two large, long-stemmed glasses contain three
inches, each, of a lurid orange liquid.

I gaze suspiciously.

Jess smiles and laughs. Her dark hair looks very well cut. Different from how it was
in Hanover.

“It’s fine, X. I know it looks like radioactive effluent, but try it—
delizioso
, and fashionable, promise.”

I lift the drink, it smells—and tastes—orangey and sharp and bitter and very alcoholic.
It’s good.

“White wine, fizzy water, and an orange liqueur called Aperol—
not
with Campari.”

“Sorry?”

“That’s how you make it, X. A Veneziano. I find three or four
really
set me up for the evening. Or maybe five.”

We duly hit on two or three drinks, or five, until the night is squid-ink black and
the moon is high and gawping and the opera-goers are exiting in their finery across
the street, and we are giggling and joking like we are back in the old apartment,
the one with the crazy guy downstairs. And while Jessica is flirting with the waiter,
speaking Italian, I steal glances across the tables at
him
.

Because all through the evening
he
sits there, in that immaculate suit, and the pristine white shirt, with the silver-and-gemstone
cuff links, and the effortlessly silken violet necktie, sometimes taking calls on
his slender cell, sometimes standing to greet a friend or an acquaintance.

Every so often, a favored passerby is invited to sit down, and this guy, this amazing-looking
guy, with his dark looks and his dark frown and his dark curling locks of hair that
fall onto his crisp white collar
just so
, and the soft, pale, slightly sad eyes, and the cheekbones, the almost alien cheekbones,
this vision of a man gestures firmly and expressively. He is not quite like the other
Italian men; he seems calmer, more centered; distant. Aloof? No, distant. Perhaps
a little dangerous.

I realize with a kind of saddening pain in my heart, in my mind, that this man, this
tall, rich, untouchable, maybe-thirty-year-old man, is beautiful. Maybe the first
truly
beautiful
man I have seen, a darker Byron, a suntanned Bond. I’ve met plenty of pretty boys
before, plenty of funny, plausible, skinny, kick-back-and-play-the-guitar pretty boys;
there are lots of them in California; there was at least one at Dartmouth—and Jessica
slept with him. But this man is
beautiful
, in a masculine way. Not remotely gay, not metrosexual, not sockless in a business
suit and toting a manbag, but tall and male and adult and aquiline and lean and, God,
I am drunk.

Jessica tracks my thoughts, as always. She finishes her fourth Veneziano with a slovenly
yet lovable burp and says, “They say his wife died. Accident.
Or was it?
Then he turned the, like, family millions into billions. Roscarrick. English dad,
Italian mum. Google is your girlfriend, X. God, I’m hungry. Pizza?”

She is drunk. But so am I. Drunk on all of this. The orange aperitifs and the acid-yellow
Naples moon and the man in the fine gray English suit. Lord Roscarrick. Lord Marcus
Xavier whatwasit Roscarrick.