She had slept through most of the flight to Rome, somehow avoiding jet lag. Her two days in Rome were spent wandering on foot and going on a single Hinge date, which proved to be, if not romantically or erotically stimulating, at least practical because the guy—his name was Antonio or something—helped her navigate the city and paid for several meals and wasn’t that pushy about sex.
Travel was a matter of balancing novelty with comfort and she wasn’t doing too badly with that—though she was a little bored.
Novelty, for Matilda, was, in general, hard to come by. In Austin, where she’d lived for almost a decade—having moved from New York after graduation—it was just her cat, Leo, and the random guys she’d hook up with, about once a week, usually on a Friday or Saturday, in the wake of her breakup with Tom (who had been unremarkably there for a few years before she’d found the motivation to end things).
She loved her apartment; she loved her local coffee shop; she was even—she had to admit it—glad to be in Texas for the pandemic rather than in a coastal city; but none of her interactions really seemed to stick, to acquire meaning and substance. She hesitated to call this sensation, or this absence of sensation, depression because it wasn’t clinical or chemical or embodied in any way. It was just a sense, an awareness.
Often, she found herself on Monday mornings staring through the big glass windows of her apartment at the Texas sunrise, a cup of coffee on her counter, her phone on her lap, on the verge of tears while her laptop, which was her portal to office life, booted up. Nothing was wrong; work wasn’t horrible or hard; she just didn’t want to do it; she just didn’t want to be there. The sheer weightlessness involved in the daily entry into the screenworld gave her the feeling of being torn from herself each and every morning. It was a ritual in which she made a sacrifice of herself.
And yet, there was no compensation, no divine reward for what she gave up. The ritual simply entailed future performance of the ritual, that was all. Loneliness and repetition seemed to be the same thing—or two elements of a larger complex of experiences and emotions which didn’t have a name, but which frightened her. The causal loop seemed so tightly bound that nothing could break it.
Thus, Rome. And after Rome came Florence: perhaps her favorite city in Europe—the place where she’d once studied abroad and fallen in love (or thought she had). Rome was too big for her personally (like New York), but Florence, which incarnated so much beauty, was hers: a vector for whatever romantic ideals she still had. She looked forward to Florence specifically because she looked forward to meeting an old version of herself—the person she was when she was basically carefree, inquisitive, open, and emotionally daring rather than closed off (as she would gradually become over the course of her twenties).
Conveniently, her friend Jess, an American, had moved to Italy during the pandemic and had a guest room. Jess had, after quitting her office job when Covid hit, transformed into an upscale sex worker, catering to crypto and high-end art guys who lived in villas in the hills above the city or in palazzos along the river.
Matilda and Jess, friends and foils, were both 30 years old and had gone to Sarah Lawrence together. While they, in practice, were very different people, they complemented each other precisely because they never wanted exactly the same thing at the same time; they never had to play the zero sum game that ruined so many other friendships.
They had very different perspectives on Italy, as Matilda had learned from their WhatsApp conversations. Matilda spent afternoons at museums; Jess spent afternoons on her phone. Jess, miraculously, moreover, hadn’t learned a word of Italian; Matilda was trying to remember what she could from college and at least attempted to order food in Italian.
Secretly, Matilda took pleasure in being a deeper person than her friend, enjoying the strong contrast that staying with Jess provided her. She could afford a hotel or AirBnB, but that would have been much less interesting than living parallel to this radically different person.
Her first night in town, they went to a sex party, which made for good people-watching, but was decidedly not sexy.
Matilda didn’t fuck. She wore a Venetian mask and drank champagne and let an older and very tan Italian man kiss her and touch her. That was the sum of it.
Jess had a better time. “I came so many times,” Jess said on the walk home along the Arno, without any apparent exaggeration or shame.
For her part, even though she had kept her carnival mask on, Matilda still dreaded running into someone she recognized from the party the next day. It was such a small town.
In the early afternoon, after they woke up, Jess made coffee, which they drank out of French style bowl-cups, which felt sophisticated even if it was just different. Matilda understood that she was participating in the moral sensory deprivation that her friend had cultivated here—substances and fucking and, if you wanted, money. She didn’t want to think about the spiritual consequences. Matilda wanted to chill, wanted to be chill. It was only a few days, anyway—or less, if she decided to change her plans (she wasn’t tied to anything really).
“God I’m fucking exhausted—” Jess said, somewhat happily, her wrists and cheeks splotched with the sunlight coming through the tall windows. The apartment was so big and cool; life was so much more efficiently constructed in the past, Matilda reflected; there wasn’t so much waste. Just being here you felt like you had to do less, adjust less; you were less managed and more free, and that was actually all just a matter of design. Florence didn’t take as much energy; the city, on the material level, actually, seemed to promote the conservation of energy, so your own energy could be spent in short, concentrated bursts.
“Yeah, I’m pretty wiped…. fun night.”
“So fun, ” Jess echoed.
“So dope,” Matilda replied immediately, to hide her insecurity.
“I understand it’s not like inherently your thing…”
“It’s not like I’m a prude—” Matilda asserted, though it came off more like a question.
“No, I know—” Jess said, casting her gaze out the window, avoiding Matilda’s green eyes.
“I just feel like I’m shaking off the rust.”
“That’s how I felt when I made the whole European move.”
“Do you like—feel European?”
“Mostly! Kinda! I feel healthier!”
Matilda had to admit that Jess did look a little healthier: thinner in the face, skin more glowy. The difference in the quality of food and water must have overridden all the hedonism. People didn’t have the haggard look of American people in big cities (or small towns like where she was from for that matter).
The idea of ecological determinism was bothersome. Matilda didn’t want to think about herself as a vessel for environmental poisons; she didn’t want to think that, to some degree, escape was a matter of visas and spontaneity. Weirdly, though, the thought was omnipresent; there was no way to be innocent to the invisible forces shaping body and soul. All the discourse she had been absorbing on Twitter during the pandemic, especially, made it hard to turn away, to think otherwise.
“I think I’m going to go for a run.”
“It’s going to get so fucking hot.”
“That’s fine. I like the sun—” Matilda asserted.
“Your funeral.”
“No it will feel good. I need to sweat out last night.”
“Did you enjoy Rome by the way?” Jess asked while swiping through Instagram idly.
“It was alright, but I think I like the smaller vibes better.”
“Yeah—it’s so walkable. Rome is such chaos; it’s too much like New York or something.”
“How long were you in New York again?”
“Like five years or something. How do you like Austin?”
“It’s changing a lot—since the pandemic especially.”
“Yeah? Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”
“I think it’s pretty shitty; it was a lot better when I first moved there after college. I feel like there’s just like this one specific type of unbearable person that I’m meeting more and more–”
“Everywhere good is filling up with that person. It’s happening here too.”
“Yeah there were some douches at the party last night.”
“I guess that’s to be expected.”
“Yup.”
Matilda watched as Jess scrolled and listened to the silence that emerged between them. There really wasn’t that much to say and Jess didn’t seem like the kind of person who really needed much small talk to feel comfortable to her credit. Matilda wondered, however, if she was—if she was the person who couldn’t just be. She envied how much pure vivacity Jess seemed to have injected herself with. It was kind of amazing. She didn’t really do anything; she’d stopped trying to do things in a proper sense; she wasn’t productive of anything other than pleasure. Her business was literally being in her body.
Time was money, but so was desire. Desire created time. Desire cleared an opening in the homogeneous experience of midcareer life. Jess had gotten out and Matilda had stayed in. Matilda ’s desires had no effect on time; Matilda’s life conformed to time, not other way around; her desires conformed to what she had time for, energy for—which, at least before this trip, was very little, increasingly little.
“What are you using on your face?” Matilda asked Jess, somewhat innocently. “Your skin looks amazing.”
“Oh like mostly retinols. And just like—eating better.”
“All good things.”
Jess was so plain in so many ways: brown eyes, average tits, not super skinny… but she was so fun, so exuberant—had such style, such presence, which was really what mattered (vibes). Jess exuded freedom and that was where her sex appeal lay. The retinol and the resveratrol or whatever she was getting from all the red wine she was drinking was secondary; the secret to Jess was internal, Matilda decided (because it would have been less interesting otherwise). If Jess simply had some quotient of magic, after all, Matilda couldn’t blame herself for not having it (she was probably more natively hot than Jess); if the secret was biological rather than metaphysical, however, water, food, sun, exercise, fucking—then there was less of an excuse; then she, Matilda, was not doing enough, plain and simple; then she was just letting herself decay.
It was kind of disturbing to think about what would happen to Millennial women as they aged (like aged aged past the point of no return). There was a lack of preparedness, lack of plan or structure; unlike even the fucking Boomers, there was no real access to forms of security that made any sense. The Boomers became Yuppies, but the Millennials were having trouble making the same move; there was an attachment to the past, a nostalgia, that prohibited leaving the ages of innocence behind. Even coming back to Florence, where she had done study abroad, was a kind of a retread; Jess’s taking root here was merely the coincidence that Matilda used to justify returning to the one place in Europe where she knew the streets and could walk without Google maps and where she had some kind of intense (or formerly intense) connection.
“What are you up to today?” Jess asked, half-looking at Matilda.
“I have no idea,” Matilda said after a moment.
The next few days were essentially the same: party til dawn, maybe fuck someone, sleep til 14:00, drink lots of water, coffee, run, healthy lunch, shower, skin care, dress, dinner, go out. Jess and Matilda had a threesome with one of Jess’s clients and Jess offered Matilda money, which she declined. Matilda had no idea if she felt amazing or if she felt nothing. It didn’t seem to matter either way.
In truth, by the end, there was the matter of meeting up with Vittoria, the only woman she had ever fallen in love (or lust) with, and whose willingness to catch up after what must have been nine years (since Matilda had been an undergraduate doing a summer art history course) was both surprising and exciting.
Neither of them had really considered themselves bi or anything like that at the time; it simply happened three or four times in Vittoria’s childhood bedroom—sex… incredibly intense sex.
Vittoria was just a friend at first. They had met at the fountain at Santo Spirito where teens and college students went to drink wine and where Matilda would go to get away from her cloying host family and journal. At first, Matilda was just glad to have a friend outside her program (which was run by Syracuse University and full of basic people)—but after a few weeks, she and Vittoria were inseparable, and Matilda’s entire experience of Florence had melded with Vittoria’s native’s understanding of it.
The simultaneous ease and naivete with which Italians, more specifically, Florentines, entered into friendship had intimidated Matilda, who, at that time, had only known friendship within the context of high school and college—which is to say strategic friendships. Vittoria had simply extended generosity—invited her to bars, over for dinner, introduced her to friends—without questioning what she might get in return. Vittoria had given her Italian lessons, taught her a little about wine and food, even read Dante to her (she had been home for the summer from Bologna where she was studying medieval lit).
So, before they even kissed, undressed, performed oral, made each other cum—Matilda had felt intensely ashamed to know Vittoria, felt intensely inadequate.
The cafe that Vittoria picked was disappointingly modern—outdoors, with an American style menu (matcha lattes, drip coffees) written in chalk in English and Italian. Maybe it was just convenient, but Matilda couldn’t help but feel that the whole setup was unconsciously condescending towards herself; she couldn’t help but feel like a tourist whose hand needed to be held. It was on the south side of the Arno, at least, which was the place where locals hung out, which was at least slightly comforting. Maybe Millennial Italians had just become Americanized—maybe this was just their normal (although that seemed like the most depressing explanation).
Vittoria was late, which indicated that at least something hadn’t changed. Matilda was nervous as fuck. She had brought a book with her, Moravia’s Boredom, which a friend recommended, and which, though she had admittedly brought it on the trip mostly as a token of culture, was actually extremely fucking good and fucking absorbing.
Matilda had to piss, but it wasn’t so bad that she would risk going to the bathroom and missing Vittoria (who tended to be flighty). She hadn’t ordered anything because she was embarrassed of her own pidgeon Italian and even more embarrassed of depending on English.
After probably thirty minutes—without so much as a single WhatsApp message—Vittoria arrived, totally chill, waving and smiling as she approached.