Page 14 of Alone With You in the Ether

“What are you doing?” he asked, gesturing to her phone.

“Nothing. Instagram.”

He shrugged, giving her a wink and disappearing with one of his friends.

She waited until he was gone before unlocking her phone again, leaning back in the booth and glancing down at the Google results for Rinaldo Damiani. He didn’t have any form of social media as far as she could tell (there was a LinkedIn page that listed him as a student at the University of Chicago, which made sense given the textbook) but what had caught her attention had been the results on a page called ratemyprofessor.com.

Rinaldo—Aldo—had deplorably bad results. His overall rating was a 1.4 out of five, with a 7% “would take again” and a 4.8 level of difficulty. His tags were abysmal: “get ready to suffer,” “tough grader,” “impossible to understand,” “incredibly unsympathetic.”

The reviews were even more vitriolic: “Damiani is a dick,” said one student, describing how flippantly Aldo had dismissed his request for an extension.

“You’re better off with LITERALLY ANY OTHER T.A.,” said another.

One mildly flattering review said, “Damiani is really fucking smart and probably a lunatic. Good news is he grades strictly to the department-mandated curve, so statistically speaking someone will magically wind up with an A.”

The best of them, which had awarded him three stars, said, “Damiani likes argumentation, or at least seems to respect it in like, an ADHD kind of way. Even if your opinion is bullshit, he’ll like you more if it’s thoughtful enough.”

Regan took a sip from her drink, entranced. She hadn’t guessed Aldo was a teacher, though it was pretty obvious he wasn’t a very good one. Strangely, she found herself with a grudging sort of respect for him. It took someone painfully ambivalent or blissfully ignorant (or both) to be this out of touch with his students, and either way, she admired it. She found it interesting, which was certainly the highest praise she could offer anyone.

Eventually she ran out of material on the internet, finding herself somewhere between relieved Aldo didn’t have a Twitter and disappointed she hadn’t dug up anything particularly good. She wasn’t sure what she’d been expecting, really. She just found the whole thing very strange, and he’d stuck in her brain a little bit, embedding himself there like a thorn. Like something on the tip of her tongue or hovering just at the edge of her periphery. She half expected him to be inside every room she entered, or to be the footsteps just behind her on every set of stairs. She kept turning him over and over, analyzing the angles she could see and wondering what else she might’ve missed.

If she ever saw him again, she thought, she’d have to ask him some questions. She started compiling a mental list, though she couldn’t quite get past: Who are you? and, perhaps less flatteringly:Whatare you?

In her experience, curiosity about a person was never a good sign. Curiosity was unspeakably worse and far more addicting than sexual attraction. Curiosity usually meant a kindling of something highly flammable, which wasn’t at all what Regan wanted from this. Sure, she thought about leaving Marc from time to time (Marc’s primary business partner was always about one beat-too-long glance away from proposing a sordid tryst) but certainly not for something serious. Not for something prolonged. Having been in relationships that failed (and failed, and failed, and failed), Regan wasn’t looking for anything enduring. The only thing she’d be willing to leave Marc for was freedom, but that and curiosity about a man did not usually go hand in hand.

Still, he was intriguing.

“Regan,” Marc said, having returned, at which point she accepted the hand he offered her. Likely they’d grind a little on the dance floor, stay out too late, wake up partway through the afternoon. This was a life of no expectations, which was the safest kind of life. Regan always felt most secure in the hands of a man with no misconceptions of her flaws, because for better or worse, he would not be swayed by the possibility of their resurgence.

Regan suspected that Marclikedher a little broken; he liked expressing concern for her health, because caring for her made her grateful to him and therefore secured her as one of his treasures. She didn’t see herself and Marc in their matching rocking chairs when they were old and grey, no—but shedidsee them having polite affairs with other people at some point in their forties, bribing a waitress to come home with them after yoga had kept Regan fit and money kept Marc advantageous.

It wasn’tnotlove. She didn’tnotlove him, and he was enamored with her precisely the way she liked: no rousing speeches, no undue pedestals, and nothing promised beyond what he could keep. He was a perfect complement to her—something as difficult to find as a match—which was why, curiosity or not, Regan had no plans to speak to Aldo Damiani again.

THE NARRATOR, CHARLOTTE REGAN: Though if he speaks to me first, it would probably be rude to refuse.

part two, conversations.

It wasn’t that Aldo was lookingfor Charlotte Regan, because he wasn’t. Not that he spared much consideration for the imprecision of statistics (truly, the con artist of math) but as a matter of probability, it wasn’t inconceivable their paths might cross a second time. They’d already established that their lives intersected in at least one place: the art museum.

So really, this was purely coincidental.

“Regan,” he said, and she looked up the way strangers do; with surprise, and then a brief sense of dislocation. She had just finished a tour, and she glanced down at her watch before making her way over to him.

“Aldo,” she said, and then, “right?”

He suspected the addendum had been for her benefit, not his.

“Yes,” he said, indulging her. “How was the tour?”

“Oh, you know.” She waved a hand. “I’d say about half the people on any given tour are there against their will, so it’s mostly about playing to the most enthusiastic audience.”

“Makes sense.” Teaching was a similar experience.

“Yeah.” She tucked her hair behind her ear, which was a girlish sort of motion. She had a definite doe-like quality to her; wide almond eyes, a narrow tulip nose, with a heart-shaped face and a sense of tremulous vulnerability to the shape of her mouth. Her eye contact, though, was hawkish and exacting. Because she was so close to his height, it was impossible to miss.

“How’s your quest for time travel going?” she asked, and he shrugged.

“Depends how you look at it.”

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