Rachel Kushner - The Flamethrowers

“I’m going to just come out and ask you, Sandro,” Luigi said, “since I cannot infer from the work alone: Are you an ass man or a leg man? Which is it?”

I could tell from Sandro’s slow, quaking smile that this would be immediately assimilated as a favorite story. There needn’t be an answer. There need only be the story itself, archived in the asking. Although later that night, after the matter of shooing out the moth and diving under the covers, Sandro declared that he was both an ass and a leg man, a breast man, also. Interested in knees, the lower back, the neck, the little place where the collarbones meet. The mouth. “Your mouth,” he said, pressing his fingertips to my lips. Sandro said it was limited to think in terms of such metonymy . Didier’s word, plucked like a ghost from our life in New York.

The next day was quiet and serene and unseasonably warm. The groundskeeper had cleaned out the swimming pool at signora Valera’s request, because Sandro loved to swim. He’d heated it to eighty degrees, and with the air about seventy, steam rose from the water’s surface in periodic light drifts, ghostly apparitions veiled in gauze. Chesil Jones was already down at the pool when Sandro and I arrived. He was lying on the stones next to the edge, nude except for a hand towel that was folded into a small square and balanced over his privates, his eyes closed as though he were encased in a tomb of sunlight. Sandro flashed me a look of amusement and tugged me toward the open pavilion next to the pool, a raised platform with couches. He picked me up and tossed me into a pile of throw pillows on the couch. When I giggled a bit too loudly, the old novelist sat up and glanced at us, squinting against the sun and holding his inadequate hand towel over his crotch like a tiny curtain. He began gathering his things. Leaving the young to their privacy, I felt him think. Although Sandro wasn’t all that young, which made his departure a generosity. The young drive out the old. He was leaving by choice. But before doing so, he stood in front of the pavilion, preparing, I sensed, to deliver one of his minor speeches.

“A splendid aspect,” he said to me, “the swimming pool. Wonderful that you’re getting the opportunity to use it. Notice the patio stones. That was Alba’s idea. La signora, I mean, ha-ha. The stones are actually for grinding polenta. They’re the tools of a peasant’s existence, a peasant’s meager fare, bland mush you cook in a copper pot. A few years ago she and I were rambling around the hills above Argegno and she saw a stack of them next to a quarry and asked this fellow if she could buy an entire lot, to make a patio. It’s very original, and quite funny in a way, a patio of stones that give the swimming pool its elegance, place it so beautifully in its wild setting, and yet their rough-hewn softness is from thousands of hours of peasants toiling away. In any case, enjoy.”

“Thank God,” Sandro said, watching him make his way up the path toward the house.

I assumed he and Sandro’s mother were lovers, but sensed this would be a taboo subject with Sandro, who rolled his eyes at Chesil Jones and didn’t say anything more than that he was a blowhard.

When he had disappeared up the path, Sandro pulled me toward him. He wanted to fool around there, in the pool house, but I was nervous about it.

“What about the groundskeeper?” I said. He had been skimming the last few leaves from the pool’s surface when we arrived. Perhaps he was still lurking around.

“Oh, he’s really going to object,” Sandro said. “Maybe he’s watching us right now. Let’s give him a show.”

“No.”

“Well, then we’ll have to be discreet,” he said softly, staring at me, his fingers grazing the back of my knee.

“I’ll just help you out,” he whispered, and pulled me down onto his lap, working the zipper of my jeans, fitting his hand into my underwear. “And no one will know. I promise. Not even your groundskeeper.”

Sandro was generous that way, seemed not to tally what he offered against what he got in return. I had chalked this up to his age, as if maturity meant that pleasing others gave back to him in certain ways. But there was power in this, for him, to watch my face with such scrutiny, to observe the effects of his own touch, as I sat over him on that couch, the two of us silent, me trying to hasten things, because I could not shake the feeling that the groundskeeper was somewhere nearby, watching as Sandro had joked he was.

We spent the whole first part of the day there, reading on the couches in the swimming pool pavilion, Sandro’s arm resting lightly around me, stroking my hair absentmindedly. I closed my eyes and heard nothing but wind brushing through the trees and Sandro turning his page.

I could get used to this place, I told myself. If I could just suffer a bit more time with these rude, rich people. Soon they’d all be gone. “We can’t just show up and not see my mother,” Sandro had said when we planned the trip. “I’ve got to give her a week.” After the family meeting at the Valera factory in just a few days, his mother would return to Milan, and Chesil Jones would go with her. Sandro and I would have the villa all to ourselves, and then I’d go to Monza.

Probably they would just roll out the Spirit of Italy and have me pose in front of it, the team manager said when I spoke to him on the phone. Giddle had reminded me to ask how much I’d be paid. That way, she said, whatever you do or don’t do with it, you’re still making something: money.

I was in the pool, floating on my back, letting my legs sink into the water, when I heard bare feet on the patio stones. The polenta stones. I opened my eyes to the wavering trees, thinking that whoever it was, I would just go on floating and sinking, sinking and floating. A gust of wind sprinkled a few leaves into the water. I smelled cigarette smoke.

“Sanndroo!” a huskily familiar voice said.

It seemed a voice out of a dream, but it was real. Talia Valera, walking toward the pavilion.

“You people swim in March? How ridiculous.”

Sandro had not mentioned she was coming. I made my way to the edge of the pool and got out.

“How is it?” she asked me.

“Warm,” I said.

“Hey, maybe I’ll swim, too. Sandro?”

A moment later she had stripped off her clothes and was naked and walking toward the water. As she took heavy steps toward the edge of the pool, extra flesh on her bottom and the backs of her legs went into a kind of systemwide jiggle.

She dove in, moved across the bottom of the pool silently.

Sandro laughed and stubbed out her cigarette, which she’d left perched on the edge of a table.

She lay on her back, taking large lungfuls of breath in the same way I liked to do, to rise, float, and then slowly sink, then rise and float.

A servant brought lunch down to the pool pavilion, and we ate listening to Talia talk about the various men, and women as well, who had recently become obsessed with her, so much so that she’d had to leave New York. “I was getting bored there anyway,” she said. And then she had gone back to London but her old boyfriend had made a habit of standing below the windows of her flat and crying, and the scene there was boring to her, too, so she’d decided to do her mother a favor and attend the Valera Company meeting on her mother’s behalf. Her mother had gone to India and according to Talia was not coming back.

“Have you ever been to India?” she asked me, aiming her chin up in a slightly arch manner. I realized she was looking at herself in the mirror that hung down across from us in the pavilion.

I shook my head.

“Then you can’t understand,” she said, meeting her own gaze, drawing a lock of her hair down along the side of her face, inspecting her reflection with pleasure and satisfaction. “There’s a lot about the world, about humanity, you just can’t see . No, you absolutely must go to India. Immerse yourself in its colors and smells, in the cycle of life and death… you don’t know anything about life, Talia. How can you, if you’ve never been to India?” She changed her tone. “My mother thinks wearing silk saris and burning incense will keep her from killing herself.”