Rachel Kushner - The Flamethrowers

“You can flirt with Didi Bombonato,” Sandro said teasingly, and did a play flip of his hair.

I tried broaching the subject with Marvin at work the next day. My hope was that he’d say I could take a leave and come back and be assured of a job. But Marvin heard “Italy” and started off on a story.

“In the summer of 1967,” he said, “a friend of mine was working for the company that was going to distribute Contempt . He spoke Italian and French, so he was assigned to prepare the subtitles. When the print was ready, this friend invited me to its first showing. There were some funny errors in the subtitles. The Odyssey kept coming up ‘odious.’ Later this same friend did other Godard films, and there were more typos in his subtitles. My favorite was from La Chinoise . Hegel came out ‘Helga.’ ”

“Marvin, I want to go to Italy,” I said. “For three or four months, probably, enough time to travel with the Valera team. I’m hoping to make a film.”

“It’s not unusual for subtitles to run off onto the leaders,” Marvin continued.

Had he heard me? Was he responding in some coded way?

“Just a few frames from the girl cut into the negative as a calibration tool. You, or some other, there with a bit of accidental subtitle. Helga.”

When Eric came back from lunch, I told him I was hoping to go to Italy in the spring. He said it was fine, that I could keep my job as long as I returned by midsummer.

To be in Italy with Sandro and with the Valera team — it would be the grand tour compared to my time as a student in Florence, when I had no money to travel and lived in the walk-in closet of a fruit seller. Marvin gave me sixteen-millimeter film stock at such a discount it was practically free. There would be a demonstration of the Spirit of Italy at Monza and they were going to have me drive the car. I had an idea for the film, of filming up close, in dilated view, the poster of Flip Farmer. Going close to his face, scanning his body, the flameproof suit, his arm over the helmet. A meditation on that stilled image, the monstrously white, pure smile. And then intermixing myself. The Valera team. My own driving gloves. My helmet.

* * *

“He likes me to beat his ass,” Giddle said when I asked how things were going between her and Burdmoore.

We were at Rudy’s for the usual experience, as well as a final goodbye before Sandro and I left. It was winter, and dirty snow scuffed the curbs.

“It’s hard to imagine,” I said. “You’re so petite.”

“Not beat him up. Literally beat it. With a Ping-Pong paddle.”

“Oh.”

“He calls me Mama,” she said.

“I’m sure.”

There was new graffiti in the women’s bathroom at Rudy’s:

“Whoever talks about love destroys love.”

Someone had crossed out “love” and written “Ronnie Fontaine.”

“Whoever talks about Ronnie Fontaine destroys Ronnie Fontaine.”

The women’s bathroom often became unisex late on a drunken night. I wondered if it was Ronnie who was writing this stuff. Messages to himself.

Ronnie showed up and slid into the booth as we were talking about Burdmoore. “Oh, yeah,” he said, “that’s still on?”

Giddle said she was flattered Ronnie was interested, and yes, it was still “on.”

“I’m not that interested,” Ronnie said. “I just want to know if you tug on his beard. Apparently Brancusi, when he slept with Peggy Guggenheim, which is more than once, as I understand it, he told her not to touch his beard. It was forbidden. Anything else she could touch. Any body part or tuft. Not the beard.”

But Burdmoore had lost the beard, I saw as he made his way toward us through the crowd at Rudy’s. He’d lost the stringy locks of red hair, too. He’d cut his hair short and was clean-shaven. I found it hard to understand what he looked like now, because in his smooth face, his cropped hair, I saw only an agreement with Giddle, hair removal in exchange for something, unlimited sex maybe, and not a man who had decided to look a particular way.

Giddle made a toast, and gushed about how fabulous it would be to think of me in a racer’s suit, on a track, how thrilling. Also, she said, how necessary it was to spend time in Italy, that it was part of a gamine’s coming-of-age, a sort of finishing school, and she became her older-sister self with me as young protégée, which was a role she often played, and she was, in fact, probably ten years older. I had spent almost an entire year in Italy as a student, but I didn’t point this out to Giddle. She knew it, or at least I’d told her. She said I should consider coloring my sandy-blond hair red, that Italian women hennaed their hair. Nothing else was fashionable there but dyed red hair. Dyed hair and palazzo pants, she said. We have to get you some palazzo pants.

At some point she mentioned she’d never actually been to Italy. “But I can imagine it,” she said. “A place where old women scrub stone steps with a stiff brush and a bucket of soapy water. Where someone is always scrubbing stone steps, a widow in mourning clothes. No one does that in America. Scrubs steps. Wears mourning clothes.”

It was late and dark and smoky at Rudy’s. The booth had broken into several conversations, Ronnie next to Saul Oppler, who had fully forgiven him for killing his rabbits. Ronnie was looking at Saul’s hands. “Saul,” he said, “you have no fingerprints.” Saul looked at his own hands, old and giant and strong, hands that looked like they could pulverize rocks. He examined his smooth fingerpads and shrugged. He said he used his hands. To make paintings. Just worked the prints right off, he said.

Ronnie said he never knew it could be that easy.

“What do you mean, easy ?” Saul said. “I’ve been in the studio for forty-eight years. You call that easy?”

“I meant getting rid of your—”

“I didn’t get my first solo show until I was thirty-seven years old! Easy. To hell with it,” Saul said.

Sandro was at the bar, ordering more drinks. Burdmoore was next to Giddle, mutely watching her with a kind of wonder as she and I spoke. He seemed to feel no need to win her, to make her smitten with him. He just watched her with a steady gaze, like he was already thinking about later, what he and she would do later. I looked up as Sandro appeared with more drinks. Behind him, in the middle of the room, a girl stood alone facing our booth. Young and pale and thin and straw-blond, with a large face, a large head like a child. She stared at Ronnie, who was talking to Saul Oppler and didn’t look up, didn’t notice her. It was the girl on layaway.

“I’m so excited for your trip,” Giddle continued. She gazed into the glass of slivovitz that Sandro passed to her, turning it in her hands.

“I see octogenarian transvestites who are devoutly Catholic and may invite you over for tea,” she said. “You’ll go, wearing your palazzo pants. We have to get you some at Goodwill.” She took a sip of her slivovitz, and then peered back into the glass. “The old trannies will have curious furniture stuffed with horsehair, lace doilies draped over everything to cover the black mold.”

She’d known an Italian transvestite, she said, a player of chess and turn-of-the-century German opera recordings who had once told Giddle that every night she dreamed about popes. Popes in pure dazzling white, floating on clouds. And Giddle had asked which pope, the pope? Was it Paul VI? And the transvestite became disgusted and said no, certainly not! Not the one in the Vatican. Just popes . All in white, she’d said to Giddle, restoring her dreamy reverie. Beautiful popes, floating on clouds. Giddle thought that was really great. “Her vision was not molested by actual power,” she said. “It was just men floating on clouds.”