Page 93 of Alone With You in the Ether

It brought him back to memories of his grandmother, his nonna, who had died of a blood clot when Aldo was in his early twenties. He and his father had sat there through the night, silent except for the prayers she requested. I hope she’ll wake up, Masso said hoarsely, his eyes red-rimmed and swollen, and Aldo, a scientist—amathematician—pondered how to explain it to him. You see, Dad, he said gently, she’s lost so much blood already, irreparable damage has been done, the human body is fragile. Even a minute, even a second without that which it needs to survive leaves it crippled, weak, uncertain how to proceed as it has always done. Yes, she could open her eyes, she could begin breathing on her own, miracles are not unheard of. But the body cannot come back, it cannot rebuild itself. It cannot suffer a loss and become what it was before, no, it doesn’t work that way. If she comes back, Aldo told his father, she will be different. Will she be less? Who’s to say (yes, definitely, but this was his Nonna, and Masso wouldn’t want to hear it) but either way, she will not be the person you remember. She cannot be, even in resurrection, what she was in life.

This was what Regan did to Aldo: irreparable damage to his former self. Regan was Regan, but she was also the loss of a former life to which he could never return. Of course he didn’t wish to, but that wasn’t the point. It could never exist a second time. He considered what she’d said—if it all fails, Aldo, go back and erase us, make it like we never happened—and he understood that while it would be a cruelty, it would be a kindness in equal measures. Because the old him was dead, and what existed of him now could die, too, a painful death, if he were capable of doing what she asked. What he was now, some toddler of a man learning how to breathe again, would be gone. His life before her, his life without her, the Parthenon, they would all be ancient rubble. Only stories would remain to give them value. Charlotte Regan had killed him once and she could kill him again, easily. She could kill him, and that was what Masso had feared, even if he didn’t know it. She could kill him, and now Aldo understood.

So this is what it is to love something you cannot control, he thought. It felt precisely like terror.

He studied her, as that was in his nature. For Aldo, to love something was to study it; to devote every spare thought to understanding it. He knew how to study and he’d been doing it for years; learning was more at the core of his being than teaching. He researched her, trying to identify her laws and constants, starting with how she looked at relationships.

“Why don’t you like your sister’s husband?”

“I don’t know, they’re just so conventional together.”

“That sounds like a dirty word for normal.”

“No, normal is a nice word for boring.”

“I suppose you’re better at words than I am.”

“Well, that’s part of it, isn’t it? Carter is so unspecial and Madeline isn’t. It seems like a waste.”

“What does that have to do with me and words?”

“Oh, only that you’re so terrible with them but so good with numbers. Sorry, I guess I didn’t explain that.”

(Regan explained very little. Half of what she said existed in silences that Aldo tried and struggled to interpret.)

“So I’m not unspecial?” he asked.

“Of course not.”

“And you’re certainly not unspecial.”

“Sweet of you.”

“So should unspecial people only deserve each other, then?”

“I don’t know,” she said listlessly, “I just don’t like him. But Madeline does, so why do I have to?”

“You don’t, I just wanted to know why.”

He was worried she’d become agitated, but she seemed to settle instead.

“Ah,” she said, smoothing out the furrow in his brow. “Trying to solve me again?”

“What makes you think that?”

“Oh, only that I know your equation face so well by now.”

He felt desperately uninformed. “Equation face?”

“No, you know what it is? It’s the little moan you make,” she said, as if that was as unremarkable a detail about him as the color of his hair. “That sound has a face, and that face is very similar to your equation-solving face. It’s frustration and restraint,” she clarified, surer now after having built some momentum, “like you want the satisfaction of the end result, but not too quickly, not too easily. If it comes too easily, it’s not worth doing. You know how good it’ll feel to figure it out, but you don’t want it yet so you’re pushing it away. It’s like that,” she said.

Regan always spoke about sex with an incredible, incomprehensible ease. For Aldo, sex had always been a little dirty, a little taboo, certainly not something to discuss. She brought it up easily, without batting an eye. For her, sex was part of her humanity. It was part of how she experienced the world.

“I don’t think you can ever really know a person without fucking them,” she said once, which was a moderately disturbing thing to hear. “I don’t need to knoweveryone,” she said, watching his face change and laughing a little to herself. “Not everyone is worth knowing in full, I’m just saying, you can’t know someone until you’ve had sex with them. I mean, look at all the kinks a person can have, the things they can be attracted to, whether they have to feel love or not feel it. Whether they enjoy it or not. It’s all so comprehensive to who a person is. Can you really understand someone without knowing what brings them pleasure? No, you really can’t, so we have to resign ourselves to knowing that we won’t know most of the people in our lives at all.” Then she added, conspiratorially, “But that doesn’t mean I can’t make guesses.”

She confessed to him that her relationships with men, which he’d already understood in an abstract way to be flawed, were like that because she was constantly thinking of herself as a sexual object.

“I think it was just like that, from so early on,” she told him. “For boys, sex is a part of life, a rite of passage. Boys look at porn when they’re twelve, thirteen! Boys get to have sex just as it is, just sex. Girls are taught fairy tales, they’re taughthappily ever after,they’re taught sex as a consequence of marriage. Imagine seeing the world that way, as if sex isn’t a right but a rung on a ladder. We have to withhold it, can you imagine that? Because it’s so brainless and simple that if men get it too easily, they’ll just leave. Because really, how the fuck is my vagina different from any other woman’s? No, the thing that makes me different is somewhere else, literally anywhere else, but I can’t enjoy sex without some archaic sociological risk. And if you think about that it’s even worse, because look at the vagina, Aldo. It can haveinfiniteorgasms. It doesn’t require any recovery time. It can come and come and come and what, maybe it gets dry? Lube it up again, easy. If any sexual organ is omnipotent it’s the fucking cunt but no, penises are the ones who get to decide whether a woman has value. Who let that happen? Really, Aldo, who? Maybe this is why men rule the world, because they were clever enough to convince women that virginity is precious, that sex itself should be secret, that beingpenetratedwas sacrosanct. It’s idiotic, it’s even dumber than it is cruel and that’s the worst part. The idea that I should want sex less than you, why does that exist?”

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