Page 89 of Alone With You in the Ether

If this is what it is to burn, he thought, then I will be worth more as scattered ash than any of my unscathed pieces.

“You,” he said, and she smiled, leaning against his shoulder as if to say, Okay.

Okay, so let’s do this, then.

Regan, always consciousof overstayingher welcome, came back to Chicago a week before Aldo did. She would resume the practice of normalcy, doing things like the laundering of clothes, the buying of groceries, the running of nameless errands. She would schedule her annual gynecological exam. She would return to the Art Institute, reconvene her usual tours. She thought perhaps she would return Marc’s calls, grudgingly. She might return her mother’s calls, impassively. Whatever tasks were required to begin approximating normal life activities, she would do them, responsibly.

In the end, she did only one of those things. The calls remained unanswered and the pap smear would have to wait. Without Aldo, Regan felt an uneasiness, a restlessness, something close to recklessness or, perhaps, far beyond it. She felt a vibrating sense of blankness, like the buzz of a fluorescent sign. Closed, open, vacancy, no vacancy. She felt like a door swinging open and shut, things coming and going, and she was merely the operator saying, Hold please. She sat on the floor of her studio with her dearth of possessions and thought: I should get on a plane, I don’t remember how to be without him, maybe if I ask him nicely he’ll say yes.

Part of her thrilled with the idea of anemergency. Yes, an emergency, she thought, that would certainly bring him home. She thought about catching pneumonia; it would be easy. She’d only have to walk outside and stand in the snow for a few minutes until she turned blue. She imagined herself being found, unconscious, the emergency contact being dialed, Poor girl, Aldo sitting with his father and receiving the call, the phone falling from his hand as he shouted at his father: I have to go, I have to, she needs me and I need her!

Regan didn’t want todie, obviously—nothingthatemergent. She just wanted something reasonably compelling; something that would make him think about how precious time was, how every moment of it should be spent at her side, the two of them together. Eventually, though, her capacity for rational thought would return and she would remind herself that walking into traffic and getting hit by a car (“MASSO, I HAVE TO GO, SHE’S LYING IN A HOSPITAL BED AND IF I LOSE HER NOW WHAT WILL I DO, WHO WILL I BE?”) would be an unpleasant experience, and probably not even worth it. No, maybe it would be worth it, but what kind of sex could she have with a broken leg? Just wait, she told herself, just wait.

Of the things she told herself she would do, returning to the Art Institute was the only one that seemed manageable, largely because she thought she could walk into the armory and see Aldo there, overlaying a hologram of him from her memory onto the empty floor. Sir, you can’t sit there, she’d say in her thoughts, and he would turn to her and say, Can’t I? And she would say, Sir, please, this is a museum, and he would take her in his arms and without hesitation he would take her standing up, holding her against the wall. He’d fuck her slowly, tormentingly, his eyes never straying from hers. He’d say: I came to look at art, to marvel at something, and here you are and so I will.

Reality, to her displeasure, left little time for fantasy. Many of her volunteer colleagues remained on vacation along with the tourists, which left Regan with larger groups, more tours, forced to chatter endlessly about this painting or that one. It was monotonous, which it had always been; it was a task she had chosen for the purpose of invoking monotony. That had been comforting to her once, though it was infected now by the bizarre and ill-founded hope that she would look out into the crowd and see Aldo standing there, a puzzled little frown furrowed into his brow. She started giving tours as if he actuallywasstanding there, answering questions she thought he might want to ask. What does this painting show, how is one intended to feel, what makes this a masterpiece, why is it this size, why did they choose to set it off with this lighting, why this frame? She could feel herself pounding technicalities into her audience, who were largely uninterested. They wanted tidbits, morsels, postcard-sized facts to tell their friends and family, like did you know this artist painted nothing but haystacks formonths? Karen, did you know this one was addicted todrugs? Truly, Jennifer, art is for the ill.

Meanwhile, all Regan could think of was Aldo; the things only he would see and only he would miss, the many things she longed to show him. No no, Monet didn’t paint mundanity just for mundanity’s sake, Aldo, it was to show thetransience of light, don’t you see? He painted wonder, he painted… fuck, Aldo, he painted TIME! She wanted to shout it, to dial him right then: Monet, he’s obsessed with time too, he just thinks of it like light, like color. Look at these fucking haystacks, Aldo! Who would do this??! Who would do this unless they, like you, were trying to grasp the way time passes; to put it in terms they would struggle for a lifetime to understand?

She felt different because of him, immensely changed, and therefore it frustrated her that her reflexes were the same. It enraged her that she still observed who was attractive in a crowd, or who in all likelihood had a dick worth temporarily considering. Every now and then she felt herself, distressingly, considering that the man who was not-so-secretly eyeing her across the wine aisle might be an acceptable way to pass the time, to calm the reverberations in her head. She had the same imaginings of herself pulling a nameless man somewhere cloistered and dark, only now she was whispering to him: You’d better make this good, don’t disappoint me, you have no idea what it cost.

Now, in her post-Aldo fantasies, she was the rough one, the artless one. She was the one saying to them: You’d better make me feel it or this has been a waste of time. Then Aldo would burst in, he’d point a finger at her in disgust, he’d say, I knew it, I knew what you were, how dare you, Regan? And she’d chase after him; she’d cling to him, begging forgiveness. He’d push her away, merciless, and even that she would relish, perversely. He’d push and he’d flee and she, like a half-starved junkie, would only crave him all the more.

After a week, her fantasies, grotesque as they were, began to revolve around him leaving her. Regan, how could you do this? Aldo, please, please I’m so sorry. Regan, you disgust me. Aldo, you can’t mean that! Regan, you’re toxic, you make me sick. Aldo, Aldo, if you go, what will happen to me?

She wanted to cry, needed compulsively to suffer. Jesus, she thought, you really have a fucking problem, and so she left all her madness out of her phone calls to Aldo. When she talked to him, she tried to make all her words beautiful, sensual, like she was painting for him with her voice. She didn’t tell him the depravity of her imaginings, or the repulsion she felt with them, or with herself.

“I miss you,” she said, as if missing were sexy. She spun her voice into the image of herself sprawled out on satin bed sheets, legs spread, inviting. She shaped her missing him into something far less ugly than it was. (She was lonely, needy, heartsick. It really wasn’t cute.)

“I miss you too, I’ll be home soon.” His missing her was warm, like a golden retriever.I’ll be home soon. Once he said that she could finally relax and sit upright, take off the imaginary silk robe she’d vocally donned and return to herself in her yoga pants, her cashmere sweater, the enormous socks because fuck, Chicago was cold in the winter.

She’d end her little astral projection with a grudging return to corporeality, and then she’d say, “Aldo, just send me a picture of your dick or something,” and he’d laugh.

“Regan, I’m starting to feel a little used,” he’d say, and she’d smile and ache and imagine him stabbing her heart with a dull pair of scissors.

She went out on New Year’s Eve, mostly out of boredom, and ran into Marc. The problem with sharing the same portion of a city with someone for so long is that no places belong exclusively to you anymore. You share them, and then forget to divvy them up after all is said and done. You know the things he knows, he knows what you know, so of course he’s at the same bar, why did she even try.

He sees her and makes a fucking coke line straight towards her.

“I see you’re here alone.”

“Yeah, but not really.”

“You’re really fucking that math guy?”

“I’m not fucking him, Marc, I’m with him.”

“Then where is he?”

“In L.A., with his dad.”

“He left you alone on New Year’s?”

“Some things are more important than sex on the first day of the year.”

“I disagree.”

“Well, fuck you.”

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