Page 59 of Alone With You in the Ether

“Tell me, Aldo, I want to know.”

Would he come back to this moment someday? Would he wish to? “You said one key,” he reminded her, and from what he could see of her face in moonlight, she looked exasperated.

“Yes, but I thought—” She stopped.

“You aren’t wrong,” he told her.

She pulled her knees into her chest. “I feel wrong.”

Rinaldo, where are we today? his father had asked him, and Aldo had said, We are somewhere in the depths of time, somewhere people only dare imagine in their dreams. We are floating in dark matter. We are trapped inside a star, which is locked inside a system, which is itself a galaxy we can’t escape and we are lost to each other, to ourselves, and to the inconsequence of space.

He reached out, unthinking, and she sucked in a breath as his hand met her cheek, stroking along the bone, darting beneath the corner of her jaw. He shifted to his knees, facing her, and she did the same, a mirror game again, her hands floating up to brush a curl back from his forehead. Her thumb lingered beside his temple and he caught her fingers with relief.

“What key?” she asked again. A second chance.

He shook his head, lips still pressed to her knuckles. “Your art,” he said.

Regan, he thought, Regan, this night is stolen, I want grand larceny and this is petty theft.

“I can’t give you that,” she said, but he only heard it after he felt it, the shutting of the doors and barring of the windows. Somewhere inside her she was triple-checking the locks, swallowing whatever keys remained, tossing them into flames and melting them down to be fashioned as jewelry, as armor, as chains. She was remaking herself as a vault and he felt it, the way she drifted away from him, even before she slid her hand from his.

“I don’t have that key anymore,” she said. “I probably never did.”

I know, he thought, I know.

“If you find it,” he told her, and didn’t finish the sentence.

She stepped back from the bed, one long leg enough to brace her steadily against the floor, and he felt the steps she took away from him like aftershocks beneath her feet.

“Goodnight,” she said.

He knew she would never forgive him. He had chosen his own end.

“Goodnight,” he told her, and the door opened, and then it closed, and then she was gone from him.

Gone, as she had never been before.

The grandfather clock in the living room belowinformed Regan that the day had long since changed; one to another. That soon, another sun would rise, and she would still be dirtied by the choices of the night before. She held her hands around herself and shivered, newly frozen in Aldo’s absence, and padded carefully down the hall, bare feet kissing the beams below.

She felt a mix of things, soft and hard. Things were compacting and expanding inside her. They’d been there before she’d entered the room, but now that she had left it, she felt exactly the same only worse. The same, only more so.

She snaked a path back to her bedroom, pausing beside the bathroom door. Inside her makeup bag was the Armani foundation, the Dior mascara, the Givenchy concealer she scarcely had reason to use. There was blush in there to mimic innocence, bronzer to imitate sun, gloss to postulate desire. It was a bag full of lies and somewhere at the base of it were orange translucent bottles calling for her attention, summoning the liar to her rightful place. I’ll take them, she thought, I’ll take them now, it’ll be fine, I was going to anyway, and she was. She’d been standing here in her bathroom just a matter of minutes ago, eyeing the bottles and thinking: I’ll take these pills right now, but then: No, I’ll go see Aldo first, the beat ofyou-and-me,you and me together,you-and-me-togetherbanging around the reckless channels of her veins.

She didn’t really know what she’d expected to find when she came to see him. No, untrue, she knew what she’d expected, but she hadn’t known what shewanted, and now all she knew was that she’d gotten nothing and was therefore more empty-handed than before. She’d wanted to assuage her curiosity, maybe; to have a taste of something so rushed and overwrought and lurid she’d have no choice but to deem it a disappointment and move on. She’d wanted to plead in his arms to be taken away from all this, from her pretense of a life. She’d wanted him to offer her his devotion, to transform into a nineteenth-century suitor and beg ardently for her hand. She’d wanted to fuck Rinaldo Damiani and then return to Marcus Waite and say: See, he wants me, I am valuable. See, I had a genius between my legs and held him inside me and swallowed him up, and then I made his brilliance mine.

Somewhere, a little voice reminded her that maybe what she’d wanted most of all was for Aldo to refuse her, to kiss her hand and say: Not tonight, Regan, not like this, not when you’re not mine. But he hadn’t even said that, not really, and now she felt nothing but loathing for the way she could only hate herself and still place no blame on him.

Her art. That was what he wanted.

She glanced down at her bag, contemplating the pills. She would take them, go to bed, and then tomorrow she would tell Aldo it was over between them, whatever it even was. It was done now, she had a boyfriend, she got swept up like she always got swept up; nothing they’d done was new or strange or even different. You asked too much of me, she thought to say. You wanted more from me than I am even worth.

Art. She’d never even been good at it, not really. Not in the way he would expect from her, and not in the way he would want. Her art would not satisfy him because it wasn’t art at all, wasn’t anything. Art was emotional truth and she had none of that, not one single truth, and this bag was proof of it along with everything else.

And anyway, it was one of her failures, and those were meant to belong exclusively to her.

Regan shook her head at her reflection—speaking of failures, a voice like her mother’s whispered in her head—and left the bathroom, wandering to her father’s office. She wasn’t technically allowed inside, but for once he wouldn’t be there. He would be sleeping soundly along with everyone else; except perhaps Aldo, but coincidentally the office was the room in her house that was furthest from where he was.

She cracked the door carefully and flicked on the light, wandering inside. Her father hadn’t decorated it himself, so in terms of personality, it was indicative of extremely little. Revelations as to John Regan’s private self were limited to the fact that he was neat, organized, and in possession of mass amounts of paper. He liked things in their place, as he always had.

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