I haven’t been able to figure out what this next part means, and so I keep cutting details, pages, whole chapters, hoping to get down to the bone: the two of us standing by a glass wall on the sixth floor, admiring the torrential summer rain coming down, taking a short break from a meeting with the editor in chief, who’d been assigning books to each editor, our colleagues returning from their smoke break downstairs, or from the bathroom. I couldn’t ask her outright if she’d gone to bed with the editor in chief, and I felt like an idiot, standing there, silent, thinking that since he’d just proposed—without consulting me—that she handle the autobiography of a very old writer who lived on the Lombard lake where the director also had a small villa, then this meant the two of them were lovers, because that writer was too old to leave the house and she’d actually be the one writing the book, interviewing him, putting the transcribed interviews, letters, and diaries together for him to work on. She’d stay over with the writer and his caretaker a few days a week. I could picture her scuttling out of the villa and into the editor’s car.
If the illuminated part of me preserves the facts I’ve presented in the preceding chapter, the person I was that afternoon, that Marcello, enveloped in the white light of the vending machines glowing behind me, in the saturated air of that open-plan interior, with a piece of sponge cake in one hand, looking out the window at the rainy sky, the puddles in the empty garden, the sun turning the rain golden, I, that Marcello, felt myself reduced to a new low: I thought Eleonora had tossed me aside for her career. After her writer boyfriend, there was me, the editor-poet lover, and after me came the editor in chief. I attributed her career advancement to a strategy that was cynical, cruel. I was desperate because I sensed I was losing her, this fantastic, introspective woman. She didn’t have the subtle fear of most women, who, when they possess a man’s body, almost imperceptibly squeeze our hips with their legs, withdrawing from us when they are physically closest to us. Eleonora’s legs, in contrast, spread open like a yawn, and then closed. I would never feel her thighs around my hips again, and I wondered if I could keep working in that remote, paradoxical place of glass and darkness, that sprawling suburban building, so far from downtown Milan, if I could keep taking the high-speed train every week, the train, too, wrapped in glass but so stark, so bright inside that when I returned to Rome at night, I’d sometimes break into a cold sweat looking at that screen by the ceiling that listed our speed at three hundred kilometers an hour, while looking out the windows I barely saw anything at all, and that big, lit-up, plastic and alloy canister, filled with men and women and phones, gathering speed, all of us exposed, all of central Italy watching. The soulless absurdity of that commute. And I’d spend a few nights in a hotel in Milan, garishly lit … Could I go back just to living with my real girlfriend in Rome, who didn’t travel for work and who’d told me she couldn’t take that sort of life with me anymore?
Standing there by the windows in the lobby area, swallowing my cake, I caught Eleonora’s scent among the office smells of cardboard and steel, and I felt like I’d been jettisoned into space.
After the smokers returned, I didn’t go back to the meeting; I set off down the hall that ran around the entire floor of this glass building, set like a jewel in the garden. I turned right, to the Italian fiction section; I sat down at my desk, one of five lined up like school desks in the waiting room between the hall and the offices of the senior editors and the editor in chief. Each area had been designed with panels at about eye-level, and reinforced with bookshelves: the office hadn’t been reconfigured yet since the layoffs.
A man in front of me bent over a manuscript, head propped up on one hand, elbow on his knee, feet on a box of A4 paper. He was wearing earplugs. He’d been an editorial director and a publisher, and now was back to reading manuscripts, untroubled, not even going to meetings. He was bald, tall but not gangly; his neck was thick and tanned as hide, much darker than the beige jacket he wore. His neck was saying something to me—that there’d come a time when I’d give the same impression of strength and mortality.
No one came looking for me; I went back to the meeting. They were waiting to start, gossiping about an author and his literary jealousies: I joined in on the laughter. Everyone (or almost everyone) at that table was a published poet or novelist, and we all recognized the need for glory. I’m a poet, but I wasn’t writing anymore and hadn’t published in years. The editor in chief was a writer.
He began assigning books again, and one novel I admired went to Eleonora, even though I’d discovered the author and edited his previous book. Now sitting, rigid, I started to flush, and I asked myself what was going on. For three years, Eleonora’s talent had been my privilege to oversee: she answered to me, got her assignments from me. She’d work with the text, while I’d work on the author’s career, taking him to lunch when he was immersed in his book or suffering from writer’s block, submitting the book to prizes, introducing him to other writers who might get him more exposure or help him grow. I wouldn’t say I’d exploited Eleonora and her self-sacrificial tendency—because I also made sure my colleagues and the editor in chief knew right away how talented she was, that we’d taken on a thoroughbred—but even knowing she’d be free one day, I wasn’t prepared for this pain, this blind jealousy.
Ambition is an iceberg submerged in a sea of solitude from adolescence—even childhood—on. Dating back to high school, Eleonora’s iceberg had been submerged underwater, and I couldn’t take credit for its surfacing, it had just floated my way: I’d been the first person in the publishing industry who wasn’t in awe of her beauty, who treated her confidently. Maybe it helped that she’d been so thin, and not a noir sort of thin: she had the wide hips of someone built to be slightly heavy, she was a Botticelli-esque Venus on trim legs, almost always wearing running shoes, with a face—people might say she had a “creamy” complexion, but I thought she had a face more like shortbread, full of sugar and flour and raisin-moles and freckles. The first years we knew each other, I’d look at her as little as possible. If I stopped to examine her, I discovered irresistible details, like her lazy eye: her left eyelid was only half open from reading too much and keeping her nose in a book, in bed, on couches, and on buses, never relaxing, never finding a healthy position to read in (if those exist).
I haven’t really expressed how pretty she was before, because it didn’t have anything to do with her career, no matter what I thought that day in the office when I suspected she’d decided so coolly to fall in love with the editor in chief.
Writing this, I can feel that old knot in my throat that I used to get when I traveled up to Milan in the weeks before we’d become lovers and I felt the pleasure, not yet contaminated by sex, of having discovered a treasure hidden in plain sight, where no one thought to stoop and pick it up, at a creative writing workshop in Rome, where for a year and a half, no one had figured out how smart she was, maybe because she hadn’t joined the chorus of praise for the four or five hot authors at the time; the pleasure of knowing that weekly, whenever the professional need arose, I could see her.
The downpour had slowed to a drizzle. The sun beat down on the building, but the panels dividing the hallway blocked out the glory of the clearing sky; the fluorescent lights running along the ceiling, over every cubicle and room, overwhelmed the grainy light of that summer afternoon. I was watching this play of natural and artificial light when the editor in chief asked me, for the first time, if I wanted to handle the covers in Varia—that miscellany category of cookbooks, coaches’ biographies, etc.—since the editor was out on maternity leave.
“Okay, I’ll do the promotional copy,” I answered, my hands sweaty on the glass tabletop. Below the table, I glimpsed my colleagues’ ugly shoes: cheap rubber, Roman sandals, the editor in chief’s leather boot, firmly planted while he spoke—“Great, Marcè, I feel better knowing you’re on top of this”—his elbows on the table, that Treviso accent, his posing, with Roman slang and Anglicisms. He was small and round, and dressed casually, in tans and grays. He did have his charms—he was confident, polite—and over the years he’d perfected his style, understanding that with his secure position, all he had to do was try not to crush anyone. I removed my hands from the glass table and looked down at my own shoes, through the condensation left by my palms.
Eleonora’s legs, across from mine, were stretched out, relaxed and open, like a man’s; she was wearing a pair of turquoise capri pants and elaborate sneakers with white soles and black, synthetic-lace uppers. There was a love story going on between her sneakers and mine, in among all those other ugly shoes, like two lovers in a puppet show. Meanwhile, above the table, Eleonora was tapping her left index finger on the glass, her tic: slowly tapping, like there was a gratification button there. She pushed down, pushed down again, with hypnotic longing. She deserved to succeed, I thought, and this hurt even more; looking at the round face of the editor in chief I added to myself, I hope she ruins your life, buddy—but I knew she wouldn’t. Eleonora’s gift was in holding all of life’s demands in balance, moving straight ahead, focused and strong, without distraction, through time’s everlasting night, toward the great literature of the future.
* * *
We left the office together as a group and the commuter shuttle picked us all up in the spot out front, near the automatic doors. The asphalt was already beginning to dry. The driver dropped us off at the metro station at the edge of Milan, and Eleonora headed for her usual escalator, along with two older colleagues. The rest of the group scattered and I called Barbara, my girlfriend, then strolled around the bus terminal, reading a newspaper article on my phone. It was rush hour and the Milanese didn’t linger: immigrants hauled their bags of merchandise; I focused on the girls and boys from the fashion world, their haughty gait in their expensive sneakers, and I envied the streamlined, violent way they lived through their beauty, never locking it away.
I had a room reserved at a pensione by the station, which I often didn’t use: I’d agreed to settle up with the proprietor at my next visit. Sometimes I’d pay ahead, to stay in his good graces. I took the stairs down to the metro and traced Eleonora’s steps; I was wearing my dark backpack, tapered and inconspicuous, bought just for these Milan trips, since I never knew where I’d be sleeping and didn’t want to raise any suspicions if I ran into colleagues: it’s a small city, and in publishing, everybody knows everybody.
To get to her place, I’d walk along a canal until the blocks grew less dense and the old converted factories and condominiums began to spring up. (I’m not sure if I’m describing this correctly—memory’s map is imperfect.) Suddenly, I was in among the cocktail crowd, where the most attractive people in the world glide along, never mixing with normal folk, and the first group and the second both feel exquisite—the first by comparison and the second by proximity—and where the networking is relentless, as I saw one day, when a friend of mine in the fashion industry introduced me to some of her colleagues, and while I was getting up to use the bathroom, I noticed that one of them, sitting, facing me, was also checking out my picture online, reading up on me even as we spoke.
The apartment Eleonora rented was in one of the ex-factories: a residential area now, with no open bars or restaurants and no nightlife. The factories had been divided into apartments that were elegant but not overly luxurious, for professionals in fields far removed from our own.
I rang at the freshly painted gate, and twin lights went on from the surveillance camera in front of me. She let me in! Her apartment was on the second and third floor of one of two buildings in this complex, surrounded by a wall laced with barbed wire; I rang again, she buzzed me in, I took the stairs two at a time and stepped inside the door to this apartment I loved so well, where tomorrow, while I made my coffee, I’d look down and see the morning light playing over the table and onto the floor.
The lights weren’t on; the sun hadn’t set, and from up the wooden staircase with no handrail came the music of running water, Eleonora’s shower, which she’d stepped into right after answering my second ring. On this half-level there was a bathroom and the (empty) room of the man who rented to her, a friend of mine, a designer with his own line of streetwear shoes whom I’d met when I was writing a meaningless article on intellectuals and fashion and why the young entrepreneurs in design and similar fields didn’t rouse the least bit of interest in Roman intellectuals (one of those suicidal pieces I insisted on writing to get a reaction, and that the intellectuals on the Roman scene took as something not all that far removed from supporting fascism; my former friend Leone, a character who’ll figure into this story, wrote on social media that now he finally knew for sure that the roaring eighties were back and political commitment was dead once more). The stairs led up past that middle level, to Eleonora’s single room above, furnished with just a mattress; this apartment and its jutting spaces were shaped by those of the apartment next door.
The euphoric sense of freedom inspired by these nicely juxtaposed spaces and by the owner’s lifestyle—he was always traveling to Asia or the States to sell shoes—was something that she could only tolerate once or twice a month: she lived there, but when she was alone, she only worked. When we were there together, though, we breathed deeply in that atmosphere, knowing we’d never get to live so brightly anyplace else. We needed our unhappy relationships, but fucking in the bliss of feeling single let us pilfer some of the designer’s spiritual wealth. The cleaning and utility bills were two hundred euros a month and not a part of the lease, just what they’d arranged, because the designer wanted someone else to keep the place warm when he wasn’t around, but he’d stopped letting girls in fashion stay in the second room: they were always throwing parties, inviting god knows who, making a mess, empty bottles of liquor they never threw out, saved, as if their touch turned these bottles into trophies.
I went into the downstairs bathroom, washed up with some soap I kept in my backpack, then I went to the kitchen, got some ice and a bottle of vodka, and I sat down quietly at the table to have a drink, feeling a tingle of anticipation.
If not for this apartment and the agreement Eleonora had with her fiancé—that she could stay here during the week—she would have wound up feeling stuck and breaking up with him for sure, and we would have wound up sleeping together so often that I couldn’t possibly have stayed with Barbara. God knows what that young accountant thought of her. Why would anyone agree to such an arrangement? Barbara and I both honored our unwritten pact. Ideologically, we both hated the notion of family and couples, but we couldn’t help ourselves: we didn’t know how to live alone and preferred staying together to starting with someone new and winding up two or three years down the same road. But those two, what reason could they have? Maybe it was better not to wonder. I had an excuse for not sleeping with my girlfriend: I lived over five hundred kilometers from Milan. But how did Eleonora manage to convince her fiancé, whom she lived with in a rented apartment next door to his parents’ house along a state road that headed straight into the fog, like something that was more terrible and psychic than a mere road? It was absurd. It was absurd that our generation believed in “the couple” and that to keep clinging to our belief, we chose not to see all the absurdities needed to preserve this illusion.
Her fiancé had never slept here, on that mattress on the floor. Our complete delusion when it comes to the institution of the couple can lead to such aberrations, such abstractions, we can only blink, denying what’s plain to see. The accountant didn’t even feel the need to lay claim to that territory, sleeping and fucking on that mattress upstairs, yet he still pretended that society viewed him as Eleonora’s fiancé. When I was with her, after we made love, we’d both work for a few hours. We’d order delivery. Sometimes, if she worked too hard in bed, she couldn’t sleep, and she’d pull small clumps of hair out scratching her scalp because her anxiety meds had stopped working and gave her migraines, and she was afraid to start taking sleeping pills; then during the day, at work, I’d catch her sleeping at her desk, head to one side, or resting on a huge contemporary Indian novel, the first galleys she’d worked on when she started at the publishing house. She was thirty (I was almost forty) and she hadn’t considered whether or not she wanted children, or when, and if she did, if she’d go back to working at the same pace afterward. Her fiancé was the kind of man who told his partner that he wanted a family and then told his mother that they were still waiting, and that his partner was to blame: so her future mother-in-law, who had no other children, couldn’t stand Eleonora, who’d sit watching the game with them on Sundays and, after ten minutes, pull out a manuscript and start underlining and annotating. And yet, no one ever blurted out: you’re not a couple—this is fiction. And so, an entire family gathered in a living room in Lombardy defined the circumstances of my love life.
I heard the shower turn off, and Eleonora appeared at the top of the stairs in a towel and leaned over to see me at the table—“Bring up the bottle”—her damp hair dangling down.
I took my time, finished my drink in three slow sips, smiling all the while, because she still wanted me.
I climbed the stairs with the vodka and two glasses of ice, my backpack over my shoulder.
Her room had no door and was a depository for discarded belongings: shoes of various colors, T-shirts and blouses hanging on clothing racks, toys and pop memorabilia collected in Asia. The sheets on her mattress were soft, the color of marzipan. The left side of the room had floor-to-ceiling windows, and the setting sun dusted through the electric blinds with their wide, lacquer-wood slats. I was there once more, once more, and always for the last time.
The mattress lay on a wood floor that was so polished, you had to be careful walking across it in your socks. She was waiting for me, naked, on her back, propped up on her elbows, legs parted. What a joy it was to be there, she seemed so grown-up now, without me in charge of her assignments.
I knelt before her, and then, without speaking, gently slid into her. The room was warm, and soon, we were sticky with sweat. I loomed over her, on my knees so I wouldn’t crush her. It was natural, the kind of sex that makes you forget hunger, thirst, and fatigue, a trance that swells and pulls you along, almost makes you want to say “I love you,” though you know doing so would break the spell, which itself has nothing to do with love. The blue eyeliner smeared around her eyes, her wet bangs crowning her forehead and the long hair spread beneath her, over the pillow: she stayed like this, her legs splayed, never shifting her position. Our smells merged, mine yogurt, hers ginger. Her thighs recognized me. I had never asked her to leave her fiancé for me—I never thought she could understand me through and through. Early on, when our affair still threatened to end our respective relationships, I told her: “Can’t you see—you can’t build a marriage on what we have—there’s too much passion!”
The long fall into twilight, cocooned in saliva and sweat.
Afterward, we lay on our backs. We felt around in the dark for our clothes. We cooled down, spraying ourselves with raisin-scented water. The smell of rain rose from flowerbeds outside through the open windows. We checked our phones; I texted Barbara.
After sex, we’d usually stay quiet until we got into the bathtub together, but now, Eleonora remained sprawled out on the bed, so I took my phone and walked to the bathroom alone, like I was protecting Barbara from Eleonora (whom she’d never seen). I threw away my condom, turned on the hot water, put in the stopper, and climbed into the tub. The tub was small, the window was open, and I could feel the warmth from the tub mixing with the cool from the rain, and I waited a bit to pour in the bubble bath, to preserve the smell of wet trees.
Still, she didn’t join me. When I came out, she was in bed, fidgeting with a dented plastic bottle on the floor, tipping it over, standing it upright. She was lying on her side, her back to me.
Then she turned, stretched her arm toward me, not quite reaching me; as she moved, her right breast rose, and two folds appeared at her hip. “Can you leave now?” she said. “I want to work alone.”
I knelt, towel dropping, leaning toward her. She turned like she was about to kiss me, her mouth approached my bearded cheek, and she bit me—hard.
I yelped, rushed back to the bathroom, naked, and shoved my face under the faucet. In the mirror, her toothmarks were red. She didn’t call out that she was sorry—maybe she thought I was exaggerating—I was so pissed off, when I finished pouring water over the bite I went back to her room (she was texting with someone and didn’t look up), grabbed my clothes and backpack, and headed down the stairs, almost slipping, wet from my dripping hair. I got ready quickly and opened the door, my shoes still untied.
Before I slammed the door shut, though, I called up to her: “Congratulations on your career!”—a joke of ours—I’d heard a seventy-year-old intellectual say it at an elegant dinner while he was pumping away on the hand of another old man. Such a mysterious phrase. The perfect description of the foolishness of passing time.
[I began this chapter by saying I hadn’t been able to figure out what this part means. It’s a sentence I’ve kept since the first draft: I can’t manage to cut it even though over time, writing and revising, I’ve pretty much given a meaning to what happened that night. But I’m keeping that between us, along with the other details that make up this section, as a reminder that only the imagination, not opinion, can express inner feelings.]
I walked back along the road, to the canals, and ran into two friends and stopped for a drink. One of them was a woman who at some point—when, I couldn’t say—had gotten into the habit of emailing me without pretext and giving me extremely intimate hugs, more sexual than affectionate. When the other person left us on our own, I asked her to walk with me, and we wound up going to the station where my hotel was located, because she lived nearby. It was a nice long walk in that city that was always empty: on some of the wet, empty streets, the asphalt shone like marble.
She was a very pleasant woman, a PR rep, and very straightforward, even if her job (which she was good at) required subterfuge. A brief description of her—dark circles under her eyes, wrinkles, wavy hair, Mediterranean, languid breasts, sturdy legs but lush hips—harkens back to some fastidious nineteenth-century novel that points out a woman’s wilting beauty at thirty, forty … Yet in spite of my description, I think the current social-financial continuity between twenty and forty is creating a world where a woman can still look and feel like a girl while already possessing that generosity and complicity, the gentle air, that real young women lack.
When we were saying goodbye, she pressed into me, and we hugged closely, as we hadn’t done for a while. I smelled her hair, the only part of a person we can treat the way a dog would. She was wearing two or three layers of cotton, a dress and a cardigan, an impalpable, fleshy bundle, damp from our walk. She pressed against my erection, not pretending she wasn’t. “Man, why are you married? You’re not supposed to be married.”
“You’re so great. I’m not married.”
“But you are extremely taken.”
Copyright © 2018 by Francesco Pacifico
Copyright © 2021 by Elizabeth Harris