Aldo, I cry when it rains, I pick fights sometimes, I don’t know why. I look at the sky and feel this inexplicable sense of dread. I’m afraid that everything will end; are you ever afraid like that? No, you’re never afraid, you have numbers and thoughts and your genius to keep you warm. You don’t need me, I need you, and it will always be like that, unequal like that. I will always cling to you in gratitude and you will always be kind, you’re just made that way. You’ll let me do it but eventually I will make you unhappy, and then it will be on me to leave, because you are much too good to give me the ending we both know I deserve.
“Can I just come back there?” she asked, a little timidly, and he laughed.
“Of course. You miss Masso?”
“Yes, I miss Masso.” He feels more like home than my home, he’s kinder than my father. “I want cheese.”
“I can pick out cheese for you.”
“I could get on a plane right now.”
“You could, but it’s late. Are you sure you’re okay?”
She was quiet for a moment.
“I don’t think I really want to come back to L.A.,” she said. “I think I just want to come back to last week.”
“Ah.” He considered it. “Okay, then we’re in last week.”
“Together?”
“Of course. It’s last week, isn’t it?”
“Which moment last week?”
“You tell me.”
“Okay. Okay.” She fidgeted, toying with the beads on her dress. It was cold outside, and she started walking, because getting a cab on New Year’s Eve in River North wasn’t fucking happening.
“It’s that day you took me to the beach,” she said. The ocean wasn’t very close to Pasadena; it was a full day’s activity just to go there and back, and the water wasn’t particularly warm. Certainly not warm enough to get in, but she did, sort of. “I’m standing with my feet in the ocean, and you’re smiling at me like I’m an idiot.”
“I wasn’t smiling like that.”
“Yes, Rinaldo, you were.”
“No, I meant—I was just trying to keep you there, prolong it in my head. I guess I didn’t know I was smiling.”
The idea that even he didn’t recognize happiness when he felt it was comforting, in some way. She was comforted by knowing he was equally as stupid and hopeless as she was.
“You want to know what I was thinking?” she asked.
“Tell me.”
“I was thinking that sex on the beach is probably overrated.”
He laughed. “Yeah?”
“Yeah, the sand probably just gets everywhere, and besides, it was the first time I didn’t want to have sex with you.”
“Ouch.”
“No, I mean … not like that.” She pulled her coat tighter around her. “I was thinking about the way the water felt hitting my ankles, the way it could pull me away. I thought about how easy it would be to disappear, to get dragged under the waves and be lost forever, but you were standing right there, and I thought … all I’d have to do is reach out.”
She could feel his silence. She imagined him tracing the shadow of something foreign and incomprehensible on her skin, ancient letters that stood for ancient concepts.
“I’m going to try to get a flight tomorrow,” he said.
She exhaled swiftly, like a sob.
“You don’t have to.”
“Well, who knows if I’ll be able to, but still, I want to. I miss you.” Everything that had ever left Rinaldo Damiani’s mouth was a fact, and with the same degree of factual authority, he said, “Stay on the phone with me until you get home.”
Stay, stay, stay.
Regan stepped into the street, watching the streetlights glisten against the dampness of the asphalt. That day they’d suffered the sort of slushy, precipitous snowfall that left behind slickness and salt. Every bar had muddied floors, caution signs, a slosh of weather and spilled drinks beneath the din of clamoring voices. The hazy sheen of red, yellow, green at her feet winked and glittered, reflections of headlights temporarily blinding her where she stood.
“Aldo,” Regan said, “what’s the ether?”
“It’s what people used to believe the universe was filled with,” he said. “They believed light needed to pass through something, only Einstein proved light can be particles, which don’t need a medium to travel through. And before that,” he added, “ether was what they called the air in the realm of the gods. A shining, fluid substance.”