The evening Roberto was expected back from Rome was a Sunday, which was the staff’s day off. Signora Valera complained bitterly that the staff hid from her on Sundays.

“It isn’t how things used to be. When you have a staff and they live on the grounds, you don’t pretend you don’t see them on Sundays! If they are there and something needs to get done, it used to be they would simply do it. They certainly wouldn’t claim arbitrarily that because it was Sunday, they could not. Or worse, pretend not to see me, or think they don’t have to answer when I ring them. Everyone is counting their hours and overtime now. They want to buy a stupidity box,” she said, meaning a television, like the one she watched many hours of each night. That was when I had sympathy for Sandro’s mother, imagining that it was a relief to be upstairs and alone. Where she could safely feel herself to be what she was, a counter of ham slices. There would be no pretending in her private quarters. She could be done with the constricting ribbons of her stacked espadrilles, which caused her swollen ankles to bulge in a crisscross waffle pattern, off duty from the vigilance of meting out her venom in controlled little gasps. Her bedroom television at an obscene volume, in that cell of noise she could be the kind of person who enjoyed her stupidity box. Every night I heard the familiar harmonica wail, loud and distorted, of Sanford and Son leak through the closed door that led up the stairs, the voice of an Italian-dubbed Lamont, Babbo, ma dai! Smettila, Babbo!

“But you can’t possibly know Rome by seeing it once,” he said, “as a tourist.” He was right. I could never know the Rome that Roberto knew. Just as the villa itself, even if unpleasant, was an experience of Italy to which I would have had no access as a student in Florence. It seemed to me that if you were poor and went to a foreign place, you met poor people who weren’t all that foreign to you, like the bikers and their girlfriends I’d hung around with at the squalid bar near the train station in Florence. And the opposite was probably true, too. For the rich, the world would be a series of elegantly appointed rooms, similar rooms and legible social customs, familiar categories of privilege the world over.

Demonstrations were temporarily banned by the government. There was to be no loitering, no collecting in groups. People all over the city responded to this. Someone figured out how to trip the traffic lights, and they all turned red and stayed red for an afternoon, causing gridlock. Other acts were coordinated by the radio station that was broadcast from inside the apartment, a soundproofed room next to Bene’s. Durutti went on the air and invited Romans who were hungry to go out, order food, eat it, and refuse to pay. The radio station was a central coordinating voice. Not a government, but a way to speak to each person, a voice addressing each autonomous person. These are the new figures for rent, the voice said. Pay this amount to the electric company. The things Roberto complained about: this was how they were done. The radio pulsed through a network. A network of people who acted in concert against the government, against the factories, against everything that was against them. We’ll take what we can and pay what we want. We’ll pay nothing for what is already ours. Bene and Lidia hosted an hourlong morning show addressed to women. One day it was dedicated to the housewives of Rome; the next, to the working prostitutes of Termini. To the women in the armed struggle. The women inside Rebibbia. To the men who have reduced the world to a pile of trash. To our lesbian comrades. The show was called Everyday Violence.

“Hey, listen. I don’t know what you were doing over there in Italy besides having melodramas with Sandro. But the place must suit you or something. You look good.”

“Thanks,” I said, fairly sure I looked no different. I was in cutoffs and knee-high socks, the men’s kind with blue and red stripes around the ribbing at the top. Those socks weren’t allowed when I was with Sandro. “Come on, seriously,” he’d say. “You’ll make me look like your father, like I’m taking you to your basketball game.”

I had on a leather jacket; maybe that was the difference Ronnie noticed. And I had the bike, outside, unseen, but it had become a kind of mental armor.

“Yeah, you look like you’ve grown up a little.” He was looking at me from various angles. “See, now you’re doing that whole smiling-woman thing. That’s good.”

I’d had a fantasy, back at Sandro’s mother’s villa, of saying something to Ronnie, letting him know he was a bastard for giving Talia my hat. But now I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Talia wasn’t here. She didn’t matter. I would make her matter by bringing her up.

“When the revolution comes it won’t make any difference,” Gloria said. “They’ll have a special guillotine for girls like that. With an even rustier blade for the artists who ogle her. These people here don’t matter. It’s MTA workers who need to see her rosy butt cheeks. But no, she wears a trench coat on the subway and reserves her hot little ass for us people who have already seen any number of hot little asses. Barbara Hodes was making see-through dresses in 1971. Eric Emerson wore chaps and a jockstrap upstairs at Max’s, and Cherry Vanilla only goes topless. It is so done. Done done done.”

Ronnie’s loft had the same high ceilings and industrial grime as Sandro’s, but it was more cluttered. The cakey smell from the fortune cookie factory on the ground floor filled the room, a rising sweetness in the middle of the night. The floor Ronnie occupied had been an Asian import foods warehouse before Ronnie took it over, and he had kept a lot of what had been left behind. Huge barrels that said MSG on them, where he stored the clothes he bought and wore and then threw away instead of laundering. Against one wall were crates of canned lychee packed in heavy syrup, whose labels he said he found beautiful, and meant to do something with at some point. There was a 1954 calendar on the wall, an Asian woman whose prettiness was meant to promote some product, her face faded to grayish-green, smiling under all that lapsed time.

“The woman toweling her hair. She… it could have been me and you know it. Tell me the truth.”

“It could have been you, yeah. And then what? You think you want to be with me? Act on some desire you felt long ago, that we both felt?”

I bit my lip.

“Look,” he said, and petted my hair. His expression held something like pity. “I have no problem carrying around a small curiosity about lying down with you again. About more than that, okay? Okay? About looking at your cake-box face and your fucked-up teeth, which make you, frankly, extra-cute. About some kind of project of actually getting to know you. Because I honestly don’t think you know yourself. Which is why you love egotistical jerks. But I’ll tell you something about us, about me and about you, and what happens when two people decide to share some kind of life together. One of them eventually becomes curious about something else, someone else. And where does that leave you?”

My heart was pounding. I felt an ache of sadness spreading through me, down to the ends of my fingers.

“You want another Sandro, and I can just screw whoever I want, to keep myself entertained? Because it wasn’t just Talia that he was gifting himself with. It wasn’t just Giddle, either, who, well, see Giddle is like a piece of furniture, necessary but ultimately insignificant, something to lie down on occasionally. And it wasn’t merely Gloria, who has been Sandro’s leftovers for at least a decade, picked up and discarded when he wants. In fact, gee. Name a woman you have met through Sandro, or that he has met through you, and you’ll find that—”

“Stop it,” I said, tears rolling down my face. “Stop. Why are you doing this?”

“To show you the uselessness of the truth,” he said.

Traffic was almost at a standstill. I could have gone between lanes, but I had no place I was trying to get to. A group of people wheeled racks out of Says Who? Plus-size Styles. Farther down the block, two men backed through the broken window of an Orange Julius, each lifting one side of an industrial juicer. They struggled along the sidewalk with it and then swung one two three through the plate glass of a pawnshop.

WE BUY GOLD ANY CONDITION

People knew what they were doing. Like they’d been waiting for the lights to go out.

You had to believe in the system, I thought, to feel it was wrong to take things without paying for them. You had to believe in a system that said you can want things if you work, if you are employed, or if you were just born lucky, born rich.

The city was in the process of being looted. Chain stores and mom-and-pop stores that owners, families, tried to defend with baseball bats, tire irons, shotguns. People said it was despicable that looters would turn on their own, and target struggling and honest neighborhood businesses. Their own. But they misunderstood. It didn’t matter whether looters hit a chain or the local jeweler. To expect them to identify particular stores as enemies and others as friends was a confusion. We buy gold, any condition.

Looting wasn’t stealing, or shopping by other means. It was a declaration, one I understood, watching the juicer crash through the window: the system is in “off” mode. And in “off” mode, there was no private property, no difference between Burger King and Alvin’s Television Repair. Everything previously hoarded behind steel and glass was up for grabs.

I woke to a red sun pouring into my curtainless windows, the electricity still out. My night came back to me in pieces almost as if I’d been drunk, the people behind the green door and the way the movie’s mysteries, unveiled, gave way to a night of suspended time, a city unmasked by darkness.

A Chemical Bank had burned on First Avenue and Fourteenth Street, I heard when I went out in search of coffee (no luck: I bought a warm RC Cola). There had been no available fire truck to come and put out the fire, a suspected arson. The fire had swept through and gutted the building rapidly. Three Chemical Bank employees, either forced under threat of termination to remain on site for security, or voluntary recruits who’d been offered triple overtime, were inside. What was the difference? All three died.

[...] After the war, walking to school in Brera, Sandro and Roberto were pelted with rocks. Their father moved them back up to Bellagio, where the boys were pelted with cow chips, and once misled into a swarm of angry bees that stung and restung them more times than Sandro had thought possible. Was he stung because he lacked natural virtues, ones the children who pushed them into the bee swarm possessed? Had those children stood up to Mussolini? No. Did it matter who possessed natural virtues? No. A blend of good and bad characterized all humans, and to pretend to sort that out was an insult to human complexity. But at the same time, Sandro understood that people only tended to allow their own contradictions, and not those of others. It was okay to be murky to yourself, to know you weren’t an angel, but other people had to be more cleanly divided into good and bad.