Wonderland (21 page)

“Arezzo tomorrow,” I said. It was the
Bang Bang
tour.

“The last day,” Simon said. He sighed. “Anna.”

“Should we move here?” I said. “Bring the underground city back to life.”

“What would we be?”

“Lamplighters. Work at night, make love and art all day.”

He laughed. He tucked his chin in when he laughed, closed his eyes, boyishly gave himself over to it. “I would write poems and you would write music?”

“Yes. In a sooty sort of way.”

“Songs about lamps?” He cocked his head, his hawk’s eye soft.

“Songs about sparks and shadows.”

He came and stood close to me, put his hands on my shoulders, studied my face, held my face in his hands. “You are very beautiful to me. I never thought I would find anyone like you. I wish I had known that you existed.”

“I was right, you know”—I tried to point east, although I had no idea where east was—“over there. In the other place. Now I’m here.” I heard a bell ring somewhere. East? West?

Simon rested his warm cheek against mine. “I would like to make songs with you about sparks and shadows.”

“Okay. We’ll start one in Arezzo.”

He hummed a melody into my ear, perhaps four or five notes.

Z
ACH SENDS EVERYONE
a text message that says, “Hey, kids, let’s have a band meeting.” Boone and I, having breakfast in the windowless hotel dining room with the terrifying buffet, receive it at the same time. I think I slept a bit.

“For fuck’s sake,” I say. “What a baby.”

Boone taps his spoon against his cup. “You have to be the one to handle this.”

“I know that.”

“Look—”

“Just,” I say. “Goddamnit. They know better than this, don’t they? That this is what happens.”

Boone shrugs, strokes the ends of his mustache, which nearly reach his chin. He has begun to look like the wheeler-dealer that he is, someone who might own a white Ducati. He turns his palms up. “This is what you wanted. This is what happens, too.”

“Go fuck yourself.”

About an hour later, we all crowd into Zach’s small room—and that’s a tactical error right there, I know that, going to him. Zach perches on the desk. Next to him is a yellow legal pad with bullet points that are legible from across the room, where I take the only armchair. Not much of a move, but it’s all I’ve got at the moment. Tom and Alicia are sitting on the end of the double bed, looking as if it is they who are about to be punished. Boone leans against the wall by the door. I desperately wish to be somewhere else. When I’m awake, I want to be asleep; when I’m asleep, which isn’t often, I wake up many times, alarmed. I touch the nubbly chair arm and think,
My father is dead,
but somehow the chairness of the chair refutes this fact. How can my father be dead and the chair still be itself? How can I be awake if I’m asleep? What time is it? Which life is this? The window blinds are drawn, the bedside lamp is on, further confusing me about the time of day, or night.

“Look, you guys, Anna,” Zach says, “I am totally committed to this project, you all know that. This tour was like my dream come true.” He palms his head. “But I have to be straight-up here. I think we’re in trouble.” He picks up the legal pad. “Okay, one: leadership.” He doesn’t look at me. “No one has to be, like, a dictator, but it seems to me, in my humble opinion, that we’ve lost some focus. We don’t seem to be playing
with
each other out there and it’s bumming me out. A lot. Two: rehearsals. I’m thinking maybe we need to get some rehearsal time in. Boone, I know it’s expensive finding space, but—”

“Well—” Boone equivocates, looking at me.

“It’s important,” Zach interjects, warming to his theme. “See, this is what I’m saying, it’s like—”

I stand up. “You don’t know what it’s like. Don’t kid yourself.” On my feet, I am at eye level with Zach, sitting on the desk. “You couldn’t possibly know what it’s
like.
It isn’t
like
anything. It’s like sometimes shit falls apart, sometimes you fail, sometimes it’s just not there. Chances are, I’m over, that’s what it’s like. I couldn’t do it. I thought I could, but I couldn’t.” Tom and Alicia stare uneasily at me, careful not to break eye contact. Zach licks his lips.

“Anna—” Boone says, holding out his hand.

“I sold the only thing I had to sell. My father just died. We’re tanking. I’m going to have to go back to teaching little rich girls how to make birdfeeders for the rest of my life. You want to get off the tour? Go ahead. There’s the door. I can’t. I’ve got nowhere else to go. I have to ride this train all the way down whether I like it or not. So I don’t give a shit what you do, Zach. We can pick up another bass player.”

Zach lowers his head and begins to cry. Tom and Alicia have obviously left their bodies; their shells are speechless. Boone has put his hand over his eyes.

“Jesus, Anna,” says Zach, weeping, “I love you. I love all of you. I’m being such an asshole. Let’s rock this thing.” He makes a fist in the air. Alicia raises an eyebrow.

What else can I do? I’m out of ideas. I hug him and his absurd biceps, tell him it’s all right, apologize for my distraction. Looking at Boone, I tell Zach that we’ll find rehearsal space somewhere, this is an amazing band, I’m not myself, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. Zach takes amazing care of the guitars, they’d be a mess without him. We all troop down to the dark little bar and I buy everyone a drink, even though it’s ten-thirty in the morning. And I am sorry. I drink my drink as if what I want is a drink between breakfast and lunch. They all say how awful they feel about my loss, am I okay? On the television screen over the bar, men in yellow dart toward and away from men in black. They look as if they’ve been choreographed in their seemingly random motion, so balletic are their near-misses.

When I finally get back to my room, exhausted beyond exhausted, I find that the tip of the phone has gone red.

I
N AREZZO, A
Mylar balloon with the madly smiling face of Mickey Mouse printed on it bumped lightly against the ceiling of the Basilica di San Francesco. The silver of the balloon, the flat black paddles of Mickey’s enormous ears, the round, blank, black eyes and oversized grin seemed almost supernaturally present compared to the intricate, faded, demi-erased Piero della Francesca frescoes,
The Legend of the True Cross,
which covered the walls of two adjoining rooms behind the nave of the church. Tourists were crowded into the nave, making that low tourist hum; the line to get in snaked all the way outside, onto the square. Everyone so eager to see the ghosts, the knights, and the martyrs and saints of long ago. I sat down in a pew, unaccountably irritated. The famed church smelled like old wood and dust. I half wanted it to burn down. At times all of Italy seemed like a crypt, or maybe that was just since I had realized that
Bang Bang
was undeniably a disaster. Bang bang, you’re dead. I watched the silver balloon bob in the rafters, making grinning Mickey dance. Simon, in a thin overcoat and with his big black glasses on his sharp face, walked up and down the length of the church, peering, considering. His movements were brisk. I knew he was thinking about the relative distribution of stone, air, and arc. I traced a little pattern on my hand, a rhythm maybe. Was it the rhythm of the swifts? One could never tell if they were flying up or down, their movements were so erratic. Or maybe it was the inner sound of
Bang Bang,
the absent deer, which no one but me and my lost tribe from the chateau would ever hear properly. Mickey smiled down at me, or possibly he was smirking. Hard to say. It struck me as funny, a rebuke to all the piety. I laughed, thinking,
Well, Mickey has a point.

Simon sat down in the pew next to me. His hair had gotten long; it was making small, fanciful graying curls at his collar, lengthening his face. Always, after a lengthy bout of sex, that nearly formal distance between us, the caesura. Not a turning away but a standing apart, face to face, as the waves dispersed. I still longed for his body beneath his clothes, but at the same time didn’t want to touch him again, not yet. I loved him so much that I could hardly bear to look at him. I pointed to Mickey above, but my smile was fading.

“It’s like that inflatable bat in the club in Perugia on Halloween, remember?” he said.

“That was two days ago. Too soon for nostalgia.” I never liked the last day. We had had nearly four days and several cities together, a great luxury. I reminded myself of that, of how lucky I was to have had that, to have such a pure love with Simon, a love so rare.

“He was a very funny bat.” He squeezed my hand. I didn’t return the squeeze. He would be on a plane home that evening. The band and I would go on to Florence in the morning. That night I would sleep alone, order room service for breakfast, leave the closet doors open, the bed unmade, towels on the floor, empty Limonata cans placed neatly next to the wastebasket, hangers empty, rocking. I would toss out the tourist map with the black circle he had drawn around the Vasari house. Glance out the window at the ceaseless parabolas of the swifts in flight. Click of the door behind me, the hung-over faces of my guys in the lobby, luggage piled around them. No one would ask where the older man was, because they didn’t like him all that much. At home, because the people there loved that older man, no one would press him to confirm where he’d said he’d been—instead, presents for the kids, a sincere kiss for the wife, a walk after dinner alone, the uncanny privacy and carefully closed doors of marriage. That’s the part that astonished me, the part I never understood: that silence between him and his wife, something almost courtly about it, like a bow and curtsy to each other, a deference to one another’s inherent unknowability. She knew, without being told, when to become preoccupied with a child’s cold, someone’s sister’s money troubles, redoing the upstairs bathroom. Even after I was married myself, I didn’t understand that kind of marriage. Simon called me in Florence, sounding resolved, sorrowful, distant. He made sure to keep the conversation brief. I said, “Please don’t do this. Please. Simon, please.” And then I went down.

In the pew, we two unmarried, profane lovers, adulterers, looked up together at the Mylar Mickey Mouse balloon smiling down crazily from the ancient rafters. Simon crossed himself with his free hand, caught my eye, laughed.

I
WAIT FOR
Simon in Hamburg’s Hauptbahnhof in the afternoon. I am wearing a black wrap dress, expensive black stockings with tiny diamond shapes embroidered on the ankles, pointy high-heeled shoes, a belted white coat. I have put my hair up into a loose chignon, not unlike the ones worn by the women in the club where we failed so miserably last night. I sit down on a long wooden bench, cross my legs. I have chosen this look with what I can only describe as a certain recklessness. It has been seven years, and I am sure I look older. How could I not? He will be older, too. I smooth the lap of the white coat, tuck a stray strand of hair behind my ear. Europeans come and go around me, hurrying through lives I only half understand. I flip through
Die Zeit.
A photo of a group of people carrying signs, shouting. What are they protesting? Would I be for or against? Announcements in German.

Train number 161, from Zurich, pulls in. I stand up, tilt over one heel, then right myself again. Simon walks toward me down the platform. I wave a tiny wave. His face looks longer, sharper, with closely trimmed hair. His glasses are small, rimless. He is carrying a briefcase. He nods at me, as if I really am a business colleague he is meeting here, as if I am carrying my own briefcase filled with documents to be signed. Then he smiles, glances down, up again, meeting my eye. I blush and smile. I walk forward to meet him. When we are within reach, we stand for a moment, not touching, looking into each other’s faces. Simon shrugs, holds his arms out, palms up:
This is me
now.
I laugh—I am so happy to see him, it is absurd, I know how absurd it is, how ridiculous I am, how I have come undone in three seconds flat. Even my hair is already coming loose from the casual, swirling arrangement it took me forty minutes to construct. We embrace, kiss on both cheeks. As if I have never noticed it before, I am surprised all over again by the strength of him, his density. Weight coils inside him, invisible but heavy in my arms, his warm skin. Just like before. His briefcase rests between us; he touches my face. “Ah, Anna,” he says. “What you must have been through. Dear girl, I wish I had known.” As if we’ve been seeing each other all this time, as if the seven years have been seven days.

“It was very unexpected. A heart attack.”

He stands back, regarding me. His dark eyes dart over my face. “You look terrific.”

“So do you.”

“Terrific ” is the approximation, the shorthand: he does look strong and healthy, well groomed, but “terrific” is a word for a dessert, a car, and it sounds awkward in his accent. “Terrific”doesn’t express what I feel when I see that there is an age spot near his hairline and that his hair is short, precisely combed back; the comb lines are so evenly spaced. I feel thrilled, I feel giddy, as if we have come through something terribly dangerous together and now stand, shaking, alive, shocked, on solid ground.
We almost didn’t make it,
I want to say to him.
Jesus Christ, what a miracle.
The skin on his face is looser, but also pinker, smoother. He doesn’t look younger, of course, but the seven years that have passed seem to have planed away several surface layers, revealing a smaller, sweeter man. His smile is more open, more naked, or was that always the case? He is past fifty. I am well past forty. What does he see when he looks at me besides terrific?

“Shall we go?” he says, picking up his briefcase. We walk down the platform; no one gives us a second glance, because now we don’t look an odd couple at all. The intervening time has shrunk the visual difference between us, though we have been apart for much longer than we were ever together. I am still taller, of course, but otherwise—in my wrap dress, my pointy shoes, and white coat—I could easily be, at the very least, his longtime mistress, if not his younger second wife. Maybe I am his longtime mistress, maybe I have been his mistress since we met, since before we met. I hate the word “mistress.” He puts his hand on my back. “I haven’t been here in years,” he says, looking around at the station. “Terrible city, really.”