Chapter 17 London
LONDON
ALEXANDER
In my adult life (such as it is), I’ve suffered occasional spasms of feeling like “a better man” under the influence of a woman. It’s always temporary, leaving me weak and wrung out, like food poisoning, to recuperate slowly and rebound to being the scoundrel I was before my affliction.
I know the signs. My replies to texts and emails are more prompt and less sarcastic.
I’m already a generous tipper, but during a Better Man phase, it becomes borderline extravagant, a festival of “paying it forward” and spontaneous acts of largesse.
For a brief time, I eat healthier, floss more thoroughly, and dust off the hardbound classics on my bookshelves.
It’s performative—I recognize that—but not for the benefit of the other person. I’m playacting for myself, like a bored, lonely child in an attic with a box full of loose clothing, trying on disguises before a dusty mirror.
I’ve often been accused of being a chameleon, altering myself right down to the vocal mannerisms and accent to fit in.
Many women have criticized this tendency in me as being manipulative, and I reckon that tracks with my image, so I never dispute it.
But the truth is, I don’t quite know who I am when I’m by myself, without the reference point of who I am to another person.
Something is different this time.
After returning to London, I hole up in my flat, hermitlike.
I’m afraid that if I go out, I’ll fall into doing what I usually do in one of these phases, like buying the ingredients for smoothies and salads, or dropping ￡100 notes into charity collection boxes.
If I did so, it would mean that this—the perplexing thing I’m feeling for Sage—isn’t new or meaningful but merely the latest iteration of the same old game.
So for several days, I just sit with the bewildering emotions, and neither try to distract myself from nor capitalize upon them.
I work on a few piano pieces (Coltrane’s “Giant Steps,” which is complex but not insurmountable, and Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No.
2, which is strictly for masochists). I let myself survive off pistachio gelato and red wine and stupidly dear cheeses and sourdough from Little Bread Pedlar.
I fall asleep reading airport suspense-thrillers whilst vulgar reality TV shows play on mute in the background.
Several times I open my laptop and try to write an intro for a glowing article about Sage, something to annul the terrible things I once posted on my blog. But everything comes out wrong. It’s too slick, or trite, or downright fucking mawkish.
Trying to do her justice affords me ample opportunity to reflect on what the bloody hell it is about this woman that’s knocked me for six. She undeniably makes me feel some type of way.
With other women, it was easy to view their “on paper” assets. But I find I can’t define Sage as a list. Not to say such a list wouldn’t be long; it absolutely is. She’s talented, beautiful, spirited, sexually voracious, and possesses a wicked sense of humor.
But what I love about Salvi—oh God… am I truly thinking that word: love?
—is a hundred small, subtle things. The way she’s always singing (and poorly).
Her cackling laugh that’s not unlike waterfowl being violated.
The perforated trails of a half-dozen earring holes in each lobe, placed unevenly in a way that suggests she might have impulsively done some of them herself.
The set of her lips when she’s thinking.
The thick, raised seam of scar tissue where her appendix was removed.
The way her hotel rooms are chaotic records of everything she’s done since walking through the doors, surfaces littered with her story.
Ultimately, the fucking enigma of her. I want to spend years exploring it, unearthing her details with the care and reverence of an archaeologist at a Bronze Age settlement.
It feels an apt metaphor. I don’t know what’s buried down there… not with either of us. Her mystery, my emotions. Who I am, for that matter. It’s humbling that for the first time in my life, I want to know. Enough so that I’m ready to get my hands dirty with the excavation.
A week before the GP at Imola, I get a message from my mother asking me to come see her at the Auto Racing Journal offices.
When I arrive, our front desk receptionist, Callum, barely looks up, he’s so riveted to whatever’s on his computer screen.
His hands are clasped under his chin, and his adoring gaze is straight out of a cartoon.
“Och, the little angel… did you ever see the like!” he coos.
I pause at the desk, clearing my throat. Callum gives me a flicker of a glance, then focuses again on his screen. I scan the room and note that everyone is similarly rapt, staring at their computers.
“She yawned!” I hear a high voice that’s unmistakably my coworker Gillian, coming both from across the room and from Callum’s computer screen. “That is too adorable.”
Stepping to the side of the reception desk, I peer to see what the fuss is about. On the screen, familiar faces from around the office appear in a grid flanking a box in which my former coworker Natalia Evans appears, holding a new-looking infant swaddled in a pink blanket.
“Ah,” I say. “Did that happen already?”
Callum makes a shooing motion with his hand.
“Lovely to see you too,” I tell him blandly. “Oi, Evans!” I direct at Natalia, leaning down into the camera’s frame. “Congrats on the bundle of joy. What’s its name?”
“Hi, Alex. Her name is Leonie.”
“Right, then. Well done.” I give her a little parting salute, keenly feeling Callum’s desire to get rid of me. As I start to stand, Natalia speaks up again.
“Sorry I didn’t send you an invite for the call,” she says. “But I figured you, uh, weren’t back from purgatory.”
“Not fussed,” I dismiss with a shrug. “Another time.”
In one of the little squares, I see Brigitte—the leggy Parisian who was in my bed the morning I was cast into servitude with Emerald—lift a hand and address me.
“Ohhhh, tête de noeud,” she says in a long-suffering way, stretching those lovely French vowels, “come to my desk and you can sit in. That ees okay, Natalia?” she checks.
“Sure, fine.”
I look up and see Brigitte stand and beckon from a desk near the break room.
She’s apparently been enticed into a staff position with the magazine—my mother must have offered a fortune to get exclusive rights to Brigitte’s formidable talent.
There’s a nameplate on the desk announcing her new title: brIGITTE MICHAUD, CHIEF PHOTOGRAPHER.
I grab a chair from a break room table and set it beside hers, close enough to see the screen but not impose myself or catch the triggering fruity-powdery scent of Lanc?me Trésor.
She gives me a businesslike nod. “Allo, Alexandaire.”
Normally I’d launch into flirting, but I just nod back with a smile I hope doesn’t look too stiff. “Nice to see you, pet. You’re looking well.”
She rolls her jewel-bright eyes. “And you look like shit.”
“Oh, cheers.”
A slight smile cracks her facade. “I am joking. But you do look sad around the eyes.” She twists back to face her laptop and unmutes herself.
The group call goes on, and I listen politely.
Natalia looks appropriately blissful, though with an undercurrent of exhaustion.
When discussion veers into maintenance matters such as nappies and spit-up, I give a cordial wave and excuse myself.
Before heading to my mother’s office, I pop into my own.
It’s silent and has the stagnant air of a storage room.
I wander to the desk and pick up a favorite pen I left behind, pocketing it and staring out the window at the gray spring afternoon.
I wonder what Sage is doing right now. Is she in Italy yet? It’s an hour later in Imola. I glance at my watch. Just gone two o’clock here. Is she in a meeting? Working out? Attending one of her many obligatory publicity-boosting events?
Does she think of me during the day?
A voice snaps me from my reverie. “Alekos, come give your mother a kiss. I’m in a dreadful hurry.”
I pivot and cross to her, depositing a peck on her rouged cheek.
“Walk with me.” She strides off, leaving me to trail behind. In the open office area, it sounds like the call with Natalia is winding down.
I sweep a hand toward someone’s computer screen as we pass. “You didn’t catch any of that? Evans’s new bambino?”
“Spoke with her yesterday,” she tells me. “But I was on a call with Spain during this.”
It’s amusing how she phrases it as “a call with Spain,” as if the entire country is a single entity, presumably one that was grateful for the attention of Nefeli Laskaris.
My parents, bless them, are the most self-congratulatory people I’ve ever known. Admittedly, they’re both frightfully smart. But it’s no wonder I turned out to be such an arsehole, coming from two such as my mum and dad.
My mother goes into the glass cube that is her office, and when I pass her through the doorway, she sweeps a look out at everyone saying their goodbyes to Natalia.
Closing the door, she says, “Cute little thing, Nat’s baby.
She’ll be a stunner, with that mother and Klaus Franke for a dad.
” She ducks behind her desk and proceeds to dig in a drawer for something.
“Do my ears deceive me, or is the frosty Empress Laskaris sounding a bit sentimental?” I settle into a chair. “I hope you’re not waiting for a grandchild. I don’t plan to have any until I’m an inappropriately ancient and rich ninety-year-old marrying a twentysomething supermodel.”
She gives up on whatever item she was hunting and slams the drawer. “Sentimental my arse. I’d sell your baby teeth for a tenner.”
“There’s the mother I know.”
She checks her little wristwatch. “I’m on the horn with Lucia in Milan in seven minutes. Enough chitchat—on to business.”