Rachel Kushner - The Flamethrowers

I thought of Gloria, when she’d returned from India the winter before, with an air that wasn’t too far from Talia’s parody of her mother. Gloria had gone to Calcutta and came back announcing to everyone that artists needed to start using more bamboo. She was trying to convince Stanley to work in bamboo. “ You work in bamboo,” he’d said, when Sandro and I went there for dinner, to hear about her trip. “But I dance,” Gloria said. “My body is my material.” “Then shut up about bamboo,” Stanley said.

* * *

It came as no surprise that Talia and Sandro’s mother got along famously. Not in a mother-daughter way. More like two warriors taking a bit of time off together from rampaging the enemy. Talia had the right confidence and ease for Sandro’s mother; I could see that. She walked around the villa picking up little treasures and commenting on them, asking the right questions about various tapestries and busts, to the pleasure of her aunt. They were of the same pedigree, which removed the need for snobbery. They sat together, disarmed, and drank large amounts of wine and vodka and made each other laugh. They even made fun of Roberto, Talia walking stiffly across the lawn in her flip-flops as if with a stick up her ass, talking in a German accent, which was a little unfair, given that Roberto was totally and completely Italian, and yet the German accent had a comic logic that I wished I could openly appreciate, but they spoke in low tones and did not address me, and it would have been inappropriate to laugh along with them.

There were more interminable dinners for which we had to “dress,” or rather I did, as we moved slowly through the four long days until their departure. Sandro, as always, wore his one nice jacket, but over his standard uniform of faded black T-shirt, Carhartt pants, and scuffed steel-toed boots. Talia wore various elaborate kimonos and gowns of Sandro’s mother’s, and came to dinner barefoot, and was much complimented by her aunt for looking ravishing in this or that ancient and brightly colored garment, which she would inevitably take off halfway through dinner, revealing that underneath she wore a leotard and jeans, which was what I wished I had on myself, but I wore the things that Sandro had bought for me in Milan, unable to let go of the idea that I could please his mother by following her rules. I understood, as I followed her rules, that this was only causing her to despise me, but she intimidated me, so I smiled nervously and cleaved to politeness as if it were a lifesaver. It wasn’t.

The first night after Talia arrived, I dreamed that Sandro’s mother was friendly and open, a woman who spoke to me in the same soft tone she’d used when she said “there you are” to the Count of Bolzano. In my dream I was the you and she said it to me. There you are . Her nose was not black. She was not drunk or confused, as she sometimes seemed at the villa. I don’t know what language she spoke in my dream, but whatever it was, it was crystal clear, a language that she and I both understood perfectly. We smiled in complicity over something, some ciphered knowledge. “You know he really loves you,” she said, and then she conveyed a question to me silently, What are you going to do about it? It left a strong residue, that dream, and when I saw her the next morning, her stern gaze was a shock. Don’t think for a second I’m the woman in your dream, it said. There’s no softness for you.

“We are so seldom all together,” signora Valera said one evening. “We should take a photograph,” and she went off to fetch a camera. I offered to take it, to avoid the awkwardness of moving out of the frame. When the photos came back from the developing lab in Bellagio, signora Valera was unhappy. She said she looked old and tired.

“No,” I said. “You look beautiful.”

“I know what beauty is,” she snapped. “I used to be quite good-looking. You wouldn’t understand what it is to have that and then lose it. Every trip to the mirror is a nightmare.”

Talia burst out laughing. It wasn’t clear to me if she was laughing at me or at her aunt.

This inability to interpret was not only unpleasant, it also seemed to perpetuate itself. The less I understood, the less capable I was of understanding the next time someone made a comment that seemed possibly like an insult and someone else laughed. And the signora persisted in forgetting I understood Italian and would turn and say something to Talia, quick, vague, and idiomatic, that I didn’t catch. Talia would look at me. “Zia, she understands.” Sandro’s mother would reply in Italian how inconvenient it was, that usually guests could be discussed openly. I was constantly on alert when Sandro’s mother spoke to anyone but me, and when she spoke to me, even more so. You could say I was growing paranoid, but there were reasons for it.

There were place cards every night, even if there were just the five of us — Talia, Sandro, his mother, the old novelist, and myself. “It’s important to rotate and intermix the guests,” signora Valera said. “If I could, I would have dinners where only some of you were invited, but since you’re all staying here, it’s a bit awkward. But honestly, that’s how I would prefer to do it.” I was never placed next to Sandro. “You are a couple! I mean, how dull, how inane, to sit together!” she said when Sandro protested. “What is there to discuss?” I was always to sit with so-and-so, if not the old novelist, some crumbling viscount or count who would apparently like me. “He’ll be charmed by you.” As if to say, he goes in for that kind of thing (that most of us don’t go in for). She always seemed to seat Sandro next to Talia, free and easy Talia, who reached across the table, joked openly about the stale bread, the bad wine in a box, asked the cook to make her an egg when she didn’t like what was being served, a regional dish called pizzoccheri, heavy and rich with cheese and butter. And she did look good in signora Valera’s gowns, of red or purple silk, with her dark hair, which was now a bit longer, wisps of it almost reaching her chin. I imagined that her decision to cut it short, as it had been when I’d met her, was made under circumstances not unlike the decision to punch herself for Ronnie’s entertainment. A lark, a dare. A why the fuck not. If she had been nicer to me I would have wanted to know Talia Valera. It was always that way with women I found threatening, that there was some unfulfilled longing to be friends. I didn’t know quite why she threatened me. She was full of life and verve and a refreshing bluntness, and yet I wanted her contained instead of celebrated for these qualities I secretly admired.

Her third night at the villa, she appeared at the dinner table wearing what looked like the brown fedora I had given to Ronnie on that secret night long ago. Sandro’s mother smiled at the sight of the hat, and the pleasure in her expression was like the softness of her tone for the Count of Bolzano, it’s you, the way she reserved warmth for certain people in certain moments. The way I had dreamed of her.

“That hat,” she said to Talia, “looks absolutely fabulous on you.”

Talia took it off to show her aunt that it was a Borsalino. My Borsalino. So Ronnie and Talia were sleeping together. The girl on the layaway plan flashed into my thoughts. Her hopeful, young face.

How stupid I’d been to give it to Ronnie, even if I had stolen it to begin with. It was a naive generosity, to establish some connection. He had given it to Talia. See how little you meant? It was possible she’d simply found it in his apartment and claimed it, the way she claimed her aunt’s ornate gowns. Or that Ronnie had forgotten who had given him the hat to begin with. None of those scenarios consoled me much.