Wednesday, May 17
We sleep late, tangled together in a towel on top of the sheets. When I blink my eyes open Marco’s still dozing, sun-kissed
cheek flat against his pillow and the soft sound of his breathing. That’s when I realize that I’m staring at someone I love.
He blinks his eyes open, as if he can feel the realization settling in my stomach.
I love you, I mouth.
His lips twitch. I love you, too, he mouths back.
While Marco sleeps, I sit on the balcony with my bare feet pressed against the wrought iron bars, letting the sun soak into
my skin. I don’t know why but after months of ignoring almost every part of my “old” life, I open my email. It’s an absolute
moratorium for a world I no longer recognize.
One email stands out to me. The subject line is just “Hey” and I see it’s from K. W. McClain. The sight of his initials sends
an immediate, reptilian jolt through me, like a betta fish seeing its own reflection. If I were a cat, I’d be hissing.
Kai .
Hey, not super proud of how we left things. Not gonna lie, I miss ur energy. If it were up to me, I would have pushed for a personal improvement plan and some vacation time. Srsly, ur talent is missed greatly.
Btw, New York office is hiring a Creative Director. Ud be perfect.
No hard feelings?
-K
I stare at the email until my eyes go dry.
No hard feelings. A long-lost rage needles at my stomach. Is this who I used to subject myself to? Grown men who can’t be fucked to type out
an entire three-letter word or attempt an apostrophe? He didn’t even have the decency to send such an anemic, vacuous email
from his iPhone. No, he opened his laptop and chose to type like a seventh-grade boy who’d recently discovered negging.
I miss ur energy?
Such a load-bearing sentence. So few words with such little substance and yet he’d been relying on them to do so much. In Kai’s mind, I was probably still sitting dead-eyed and exhausted with tearstained cheeks, gripping my last advertising
award for Best Thirty-Second Short, praying he’d call. I was never capable of moving on from the emotional potency of our
situationship. It was just too good, wasn’t it? Watching him talk, uninterrupted, about A24’s latest juggernaut after five
minutes of vigorous, silent humping.
Forget about me moving to a new city, getting a new job, and finding someone so wholly, so globally better than him.
What an embarrassing little fuckface.
Oh, Kai, I want to type. You sweet idiot. There’s no going backward for me now. And you are so very, very backward. I’ve met a man who takes my picture. Who gets jealous of whales for being my favorite animal. Who brings me to Italy and makes love to me in a way that makes me want to use the phrase “make love.”
But I won’t do that. The door to that part of my life is closed, locked.
There is no going backward.
My fingers quiver with energy, with excitement, as I delete his email.
“Paola invited us to her family home in Fregene tonight. It’s about twenty minutes away, right on the sea. She said we can
stay the night.”
“Wow.” I look up from the creased paperback I’d been trying and failing to read. Marco’s sitting across from me at the breakfast
table situated in the corner of our bedroom, eating an apple in front of his laptop. It’s kind of funny, and I think back
to Allie’s wonderment and delight. Celebs — they’re everywhere . Eating apples. Typing on their laptops. Going to the beach. Making people fall in love with them. “That sounds amazing.”
“Good.” He stands and stretches, idly running a hand over the soft, curly hair that runs down the center of his chest. Then
he comes around, looping an arm around my neck and bringing his sticky, sweet lips to my temple. “Bring your bathing suit.”
“Oh, no way am I letting any of them see me in a bathing suit.”
“What the fuck?” Marco jerks back, away from me. He sounds genuinely pissed. “I love your body.”
“Sorry to yuck your yum. I’d just feel weird in a bikini around people like that. They’re all bony in that generationally wealthy sort of way.” I shrug, shutting my book and tossing it onto the table. “I’m not their type of person.”
Marco brings his hands to rest on my shoulders, fingers crossing over my throat. “You’re exactly their type of people, Nadia.”
I’m flattered he thinks I could somehow be a person in his world, but certainly not delusional enough to believe him. I tilt
my head back against his stomach. “Are any of them writers?”
“Not like you.” He gently chucks me under the chin. There’s a hum of pleasure through me. Not like you. “I think Giorgio runs an online Marxist zine.” We both roll our eyes. “Paola directs plays for the English theater, but I
don’t think she writes anything.”
I guess I am a real writer, even if I’ve sold my soul for pennies on the pound. “Won’t they call me a sellout?”
Marco’s mouth twists into a wicked grin. “From behind their designer glasses? Maybe.” He presses his lips to my hairline.
“Everyone loves you already, I promise.”
He pulls away and heads for the bathroom, but before he disappears behind a closed door, I call out to him. “Wait! I hate
to ask this, but... will you be the most famous person there?”
He throws his head back and laughs.
We drive out to Fregene for a classically late Italian dinner, taking the beltway through a neighborhood that looks, theoretically, rough, but still, I find myself wondering desperately what it would be like to live in one of never-ending rows of brutalist, concrete apartment buildings with pollution-stained balcony railings. To line dry all my clothes. To sit out by a single-pump gas station and smoke a cigarette, watching the sunset over the umbrella pines, knowing that once upon a time, Hannibal and Julius had done this, too. Through thin lace drapes, I spy TVs turned to the news, soccer matches, and game shows; kitchen tables set with colorful cloth; overflowing ashtrays; and I see my parents.
This is where they fell in love. Young and beautiful and full of hope, under this sun.
Here, I kind of see Evergreen. The last few days have been an insulated bubble of privilege, completely submerged in Marco’s
world. A wonderful, warm escape. But I miss home, I realize. Not Philly, not the ultra-cool studio I used to rent near the
El.
I miss Evergreen, the little beach apartment with the leaking skylight. Sitting on the balcony with my sister, smoking a joint
with Soph and Allie on the beach. I miss the produce stand, I think when we drive past an Ape truck selling peaches out of its minuscule bed. I miss my peaches.
Marco squeezes my thigh when we’re stopped at a red light, and I startle out of my daydream just as the road opens up and
we turn toward the sea.
Paola’s family home is a low-slung vermilion villa on a gravel-coated country road that juts right up to the beach. When we
pull up to the gate, it unlocks with a horrifying electric buzzing sound and then slowly, noisily rolls open. Paola’s on the
other side—all limbs and angles in a pair of linen overalls and a bandanna tied around her head. She’s tanned deeply, even
though it’s only May, her black hair pulled over a shoulder.
“Buona sera!” she calls, waving us over to a parking spot under the shade of an olive tree. As soon as we step out of the car, she begins a double-speed monologue in near-perfect English, includ ing a posh British accent, while taking my hand in hers. To my surprise, it’s warm and soft.
“Welcome to the countryside! We’re so glad you two could make it. Giorgio’s always sort of sad around his birthday, but I
convinced him a dinner with our American friends isn’t even about him.” She throws a wink at me, leading us down a stone-lined path, past a pond and a row of squat palm trees, toward a pergola.
Cicadas write their music all around us, and everything smells like honeysuckle. “Tia will bring a cake—of course, not for
Giorgio. Who has dinner with no cake? And Martina, his sister—hold on, Martina !” Beneath the pergola is a long wooden table, already set for dinner. A woman with honey-colored hair, still wet from the
sea, jumps up at the sound of what must be her name. “Martina brought a parmigiana , and Giorgio will grill lamb. Do you eat lamb?” This question is aimed at me.
“I-I’ll eat anything,” I stutter. In a house like this, I really would eat anything. Suckling calf. A human heart. The last Atlas lion. “Everything. Whatever you have.”
She grins, revealing an adorable chip in one of her front teeth. “Good girl.”
The meal unfolds like an orchestral symphony.
The best part is, for the first time all week, I don’t feel like I need Marco. Of course I love having him next to me, squeezing
my thigh under the table, his fingertips grazing idly over my upper arms as I answer Giorgio’s questions about the upcoming
American election and the newest litfic starlet. I love knowing he could drive us back to our hotel if I suddenly became too
anxious, that if I said I needed a Band-Aid or wanted to eat half a dozen cream puffs, he’d be the first person to hunt down
either.
Conversation flows easy, like the plum-colored wine Paola retrieves from inside the house. Giorgio sloshes out generous portions from the wicker-covered cask (to everyone except Marco and me), and about halfway through the bottle, the Overton window shifts when Martina tells us titty-fucking is called “Spanish sex” in Italian.
“That’s so beautiful,” I say. “We just call it titty-fucking. That’s the only name it’s got.”
“Tit- tee fucking?” Martina repeats, her mouth pulled down into an exaggerated blowfish frown, a cigarette burning down to the quick
between her manicured fingers.
“Uh huh,” Marco says dryly, leaning back in his chair. He has one arm draped around my shoulders, his thumb burning a lovely
path as it grazes up and down my skin. “It’s like trash can or crosswalk . We just call things what they are.”
I let out a deep hum of agreement and take my final bite of lamb chop. “Exactly. Well said.”
Marco’s eyes slide sideways to me. He’s smirking, eyes flickering like the last embers in a bonfire. “Thanks, baby.”
“How vulgar .” Martina guffaws. Then, she holds up her glass for a refill. “How horrible this tit-tee fuck sounds.”
After cake and sorbet, Giorgio and Marco wander off toward the property line to stare out at the last boats coming back in
from sunset cruises or a day of fishing. In lieu of singing “Happy Birthday,” Tia demands that I make some sort of writerly
statement. It’s such a crazy demand and all I can do is flap my jaw like Slappy. They all egg me on and eventually I pull
a quote out of my ass—something I’d read in a book by Ferrante, underlining it until my ballpoint pen ripped through the paper.
Eventually, I’d written it down on a Post-it note and put it on my vanity mirror, next to the note from Audrey.
It was a line about fucked-up people from a fucked-up place trying desperately to make sense of their own violence, against
each other and themselves, each choice another turn down a dark hallway. That was how I’d felt, always.
Each time I made a decision that drew me farther away from my family, I turned another corner. Each time I tried to double
back, I found the last place I’d been was now consumed by darkness. So, I wandered, room to room, darkened corner to darkened
corner. All I wanted to be was a new whole version of myself—instead, I kept breaking apart.
Now, months later, I realize maybe that’s the point. Maybe that’s what being alive is. You don’t get to resurface, new. You
break away; you start again; you molt old skin, altogether too tight and wrong, and while scars fade, they never disappear.
At least not right away.
I lift my glass filled with water and say, “ In what disorder we lived, how many fragments of ourselves were scattered, as if to live were to explode into splinters. ”
Giorgio, with his big, wet eyes and kind smile, tilts his head. “Ferrante. Impressive.”
I nod and lift my glass in his direction. “Cheers to another year of splintering.”
Tia brings out a platter overflowing with fresh fruit alongside tiny glasses filled with grappa. We watch the men trolling
around the parameter with their fists pressed into their hips, giggling at how much they remind us of our fathers’ friends.
“You’re Italian, right, Nadia?” she asks, setting another scoop of lemon sorbet into the crystal plate.
I nod. “My parents are from the south, Calabria, but I guess I’m not really—”
“But you know a lot about Italy?” Paola jumps in, pushing a perfectly ripe fig in my direction. I’d already eaten one—the
sweetest, creamiest fruit that had ever passed between my lips. Was I really allowed to have another?
“Of course she does,” Martina says, with a series of shoulder shrugs. “She can quote Ferrante.”
“That’s because I want to be Ferrante,” I gush suddenly. “I’m hoping to absorb some of her talent through osmosis. If I could just write one single grocery
list as beautiful as her prose, I’d die happy.”
“Of course you can,” Martina says, throwing around her favorite phrase. To Martina, everything is of course. She slips another cigarette from her half-empty pack and pushes it between her lips. “You’re Italian.”
Her logic is so simple, it makes instant sense. I want to bottle up Martina’s confidence and carry it around with me forever.
“I don’t know,” I say, nervous laughter dotting my speech. “I guess I haven’t tried.”
Paola bumps her shoulder against mine. “If you ever do, let me read it first.”
“You will.” Marco reappears, plopping back down into the chair next to me. “When you’re ready to, you will.”
“Well, excuse me,” I say, turning in his direction. “How long have you been holding on to that astute little observation?”
He smirks, skimming his fingers over his hair, pushing it away from his eyes. “It took me a minute, but I got a read on you
now.”
Before I can come back at him with a clever retort, Martina grabs ahold of my arm and squeezes. “You should write one of those books where the narrator is a liar!”
“I love those,” Paola gasps. I want Martina’s confidence and Paola’s ability to experience the world so orgasmically. “A saucy
heroine with a deadly secret!”
Martina and Tia shriek and cackle. “Daje!”
A memoir, I want to say. Instead, I shove another fig in my mouth and let them cook up the perfect story.
With the last sip of grappa drained from Giorgio’s glass, we all kiss and hug goodbye. Marco and Paola take a moment to embrace,
and I can hear him thanking her, over and over, for everything.
“Take her to the beach, Marco,” she urges him, under her breath. “You must .”
Thankfully, he listens to her. We drive down to the end of the gravel road, where the pebbles turn to sand.
“That was quite the quote you pulled out,” Marco says, grasping my hand and helping me up the steep incline that leads to
the beach. “I’ve never seen Giorgio impressed before.”
“I love your friends. They’re brilliant.” I couldn’t possibly be drunk, but the softness of the evening has seeped into me.
With one hand holding on to my shoes and the other wagging in the air to keep my balance, we make our way down toward the
nearly silent tide. “Tonight was incredible. Fun and... and, I don’t know, electric . I miss being around other artists, I guess.” The shoreline is deep and the sand has retained its warmth from the day, grittier and sturdier than Evergreen’s beach. I can imagine the sea as it looked when we drove by earlier—a lazy swirl of cobalt and aquamarine—but right now it’s a glassy stretch of indigo calm.
The wind keeps us from moving quickly toward the tide, blowing back the fabric of my dress and melding Marco’s T-shirt to
the curvature of his frame. We find a spot where the sand turns moist and solid, then we sit.
Marco leans backward onto his elbows, looking up at me with an expression that must mirror my own: a hazy, heavy look of deep
satisfaction. “I told you. You’re meant for a world like theirs, for big things. You fit in perfectly.”
For some reason, this hurts more than an actual insult from Marco might. I almost can’t stand that he thinks my life is the
way it is because I’m in a stage of transition. I almost can’t stand how well I’ve tricked him into thinking I am still someone
who takes great risks and lives an interesting life.
I can’t stand that he thinks he’s just a pit stop on a very long road unfurling ahead of me, filled with just the right amount
of twists and turns. To Marco, it’s certainly not a road that ends abruptly, when I’m still young. It’s not a road checkered
with gaping potholes or endless loops backward.
No, I want to say, falling in love with you is the greatest thing I will ever do. Being here with you, under all of these stars. This is me peaking .
He takes my silence in stride. Marco is, after all, very good at listening. He takes the quiet the way he takes my words.
I bring my knees into my chest, hugging myself. Finally, I say: “I like living a small life. I like living by the beach and
working for Soph. Maybe that sounds sad or pathetic, but when I keep things small...”
When I keep things small, I can manage. I can manage my depression. I can manage being sick.
I squeeze my eyes shut and try to find different words. “Getting to where I did in my career before took everything out of me. That job was my life, and I can’t even believe what I missed out on because of it. I wouldn’t see the sun for
days sometimes. I’d get to work before the sun rose and leave when it was dark out. I’d fall asleep at my desk. I kept an
emergency toothbrush and change of clothes in case I had to stay all night. And doing what?” I shake my head. “Writing commercials?
Designing pitch decks?
“Martina and Giorgio... your friends. You . You guys are different from me. You’re... rich people. You were born to write like Ferrante and take beautiful pictures
and eat figs under a Mediterranean sunset. I’m... utilitarian.”
Marco pushes himself up suddenly, dusting the sand off his hands. “Are you fucking kidding me?”
I snap my eyes over to Marco. “What?”
“Nadia, you’re fucking brilliant—”
“You don’t have to say that. I’m not fishing—”
“Yes.” He laughs incredulously. “Yes, I do. I’ve been around you. Every day. For almost a month. You know so many things. You read constantly—more than Giorgio ever has. You remember details about people and places you hear one time.
You’re basically a fucking botanist.”
“Please tell Soph that. They’ll laugh until they shit.”
“Seriously,” Marco says. “Why are you so hard on yourself?”
“Why are you so hard on yourself?” I counter. “You called yourself a user. If this is how you use people, sign me up for life.” The sentence flies out of my mouth before I can stop it, but I’m not
embarrassed. It’s the truth.
“Because I am,” he replies quietly. “And I come from a long line of users. But I want to be different—”
“You.” I take hold of his face in my hands. “Are. You are different. You love me, Marco. And I don’t mean that in an emotional way, I mean that in an active verb kind of way. You love me down to my core.
You fill me up with goodness, make me feel seen and safe and like I could just—”
My mouth stalls. Suddenly, my eyes prick with tears.
I feel the warm planes of his hands moving up and down my arms. “What?”
“I’ve been lying to you.” I suck down a shaky breath. “I’ve been lying about who I am, Marco. All of this. This person I’m
being for May. It’s a lie. The real Nadia is fucking...”
I try. I really do. I try to force the word sick to my lips, but it just won’t come.
Instead I say: “ Depressed . She lies in bed for weeks on end and eats too much candy and doesn’t brush her teeth. She reads books because they take
her out of her body. I hate my body.”
“Hey—it’s okay.” He brings his hands to my cheeks, now slick with tears.
“The real Nadia is a runner. As soon as things get hard, she runs and hides and cowers.”
“Then I guess I’m a liar, too,” he says, his voice deep and catching. “I haven’t dated a woman for more than three dates in
years. I’ve never lived with a woman, traveled with a woman, woken up next to a woman and not felt shame and anxiety. I’ve never been in love before. And worst of all, I lied to you to get you here—I told you it would only be for May and I knew I’d want
more. I looked at you and I thought, I can be different. I can do this. And I feel like...” He pauses to let out a short, joyful laugh. “Like I am better with you. I don’t know what you were
like before, but maybe we can keep going, you know? Beyond May.”
There is no before, I want to tell him. Instead, I press my forehead to his. “Maybe.”
He doesn’t push me any further. Instead, he holds me. We stay like this, bowed close together, reverent.
“Why did we do this to ourselves?” he whispers eventually.
“Chaos demons,” I reply. “We left our chaos demons chained up for too long.”
A chuckle thrums through his chest. I burrow my face into his neck and breathe in the scent of him as he says, “Let’s just
stay here , then”
“Fine, I’ll run away to Italy with you.”
“Twist my damn arm, Nadia.”
Finally, we’re laughing again. He tightens his arms around me, then pulls us backward until we’re lying flat in the sand,
his stubble grazing back and forth across my forehead.
I think back to the moment we first met—I’d been so afraid of becoming some sort of footnote or side quest in Marco’s long
and fabulous life, discarded after three days like an old rag. Instead, I’d fallen into something bigger. What are we doing? I want to ask, desperately. Why are we doing this? If there’s one thing I know with total certainty, it’s that Marco and I seem obsessed with, alarmingly drawn to, hurting
ourselves. Are we good for each other?
Instead, I ask, “Hey, why did you publish your photographs as Adam West?”
“Adam West’s the original Batman. He was a total stud.”
“Really?” I lean away to look up at him. “ That’s why?”
“Not everything has to be complicated, Nadia. Not everything is a deep, treacherous metaphor.”
“Oh, right,” I chuckle. “Silly me.”