The Sun and Other Stars (11 page)

“Over here,” he says, leading us toward the dance floor and the VIP cabanas. He takes the Reserved sign off one of the tables and calls a cabana boy over.

“Whatever they want. Gratis.”

“Thanks, Guido.”

“Anything for friends. Have fun! Drink! Dance! Drink some more! And I’ll be back to check on you soon.”

He disappears in a wake of blondes, and soon the cabana boy brings over two bottles of champagne. We drink a few clichéd toasts that Fede and Bocca make me translate, and everyone starts stretching and preening and jockeying for position. The music is moaning and wailing out of speakers as big as the walk-ins in the shop, and before I know it, Fede and Bocca have dragged Hansel and Gretel off to the dance floor, leaving me with the same one from the back seat of the truck. She must be freezing, even with the generous padding on her arms, but I don’t offer her my hoodie. She arches her back, and I can see she’s rubbed glitter or something into the downspout between her bocce.

“I don’t dance,” I say, cutting off any ideas she might have.

“No?” She grabs her shoulders and shivers, like Jessica Lange in
King Kong.
I know it’s not for me. I know she’s just biding her time and using me as a prop so another guy will look over and see how much fun she is. Well, he can have it. The giggling, the half-open shirt, all of it. The wind picks up, flapping the edges of the cabana.

“So, then, Etto-who-does-not-dance,” the Austrian girl says, trying to create a conversation where there is none, “what
do
you do, then?”

I shrug. “Try to put one foot in front of the other, you know. Try to make it from one day to the next. But that’s basically what we’re all doing here, aren’t we?”

She smiles, a tight-lipped, condescending smile, as if she’s sliding it grudgingly over a counter. “I mean, what is your
profession
?”

“Oh, you mean how much money do I make and how interesting am I, and am I worth the time it took to put your makeup on?”

“Do you always invent what other people are thinking?”

“I work for my father. He’s a butcher.”

“See?” she says. “That wasn’t so bad.”

She’s actually not as ugly as I first thought. She’s got loads of makeup on, but I’ll bet if you shot a fire hose at her and put her next to an uglier friend, she might make out all right.

“Actually, it’s pretty soulless,” I say. “Maybe not as bad as being a lawyer or something, but all you’re doing is chopping up dead animals and trying to make them look nice.”

She smiles widely—again, not for me. I look toward the dance floor, but all I see is clothes and hair, tanned limbs and flashes of jewelry. No sign of Fede or Bocca or anyone else.

“Well, it’s probably interesting to talk to everyone who comes into the shop, then,” the Austrian girl continues. This must be torture for her, but we both know she has to keep the conversation aloft at whatever cost. I could get up at any moment, leaving her to sit alone like a zero, and everyone knows zeroes don’t get hit on.

“Not really,” I say. “It’s basically the same conversation over and over, forty times a day, six days a week. Buongiorno. You’re looking well, signora. How can I help you? Why don’t you try the chops? Have a nice day. See you soon. Nobody really means any of it anyway.”

She stares at me, her mouth slightly open, deciding what to say. She has those prominent dog fangs a lot of Germans and Austrians have, just to the right and left of center.

“You know,” she finally says, “you’re not a very nice person.”

“I know.”

We lapse into silence. I down two glasses of champagne like shots, one after the other, and she lifts her glass delicately and sips her champagne like she’s giving me fottuto etiquette lessons. Each time she takes a drink, she lets her eyes roam the room, looking sullenly for her escape, but then, it’s as if she realizes this is not the fun! fun! fun! she wants to project, so she forces her pout into a smile. She glances down to check that her shirt is appropriately slutty but not downright whorish, then fixes her eyes on a spot over my left shoulder.

I turn around to see who the poser is.

“Ehi. Ciao, Etto.”

“Aristone?” And not only is it Aristone, but Aristone-back-from-university-and-twenty-kilos-lighter-with-new-glasses Aristone. Shit, he actually looks good.

“It’s just Aristo now. You know . . . lost some weight.”

“Shit, Aristone, you actually look good.”

“You mind if I sit with you?”

“I think you would be her savior if you did.”

“Aristo,” he says, leaning over and taking the girl’s hand.

“Tisi,” she says.

“German?”

“Austrian.”

And then Aristone, he kisses her hand and says, “Es ist eine Scheisse deine Wiener zu schnitzeln,” or something that sounds really überpolite and makes her bocce stand up and take notice. And before I know it, they’re jabbering away in German or Austrian or whatever, and I remember that Aristone has been in Genoa studying languages for the past three years, though none of us ever thought to ask him which ones. The girl leans forward and hunches her shoulders. I think for a second that her shirt is going to part like the Red Sea, but she must have some secret contraption holding it together. Ah, Tisi, you have gotten the last laugh. I feel the champagne swirling around and coating the inside of my skull.

“I didn’t know you studied German, Aristone,” I mumble, but I might as well be invisible. Aristone orders a bottle of vodka, that skinny big shot, and when the cabana boy comes, he pretends it’s a surprise to him that Guido is comping us, and he gives the cabana boy a big tip like he’s an American, flipping his wallet wide open. Good for you, Aristone. Good for you that you are thin now. Good for you that you speak Kartoffel and that you might get something tonight. Tutto bene. Salute. Cin-cin. Vaffan’.

We do six shots. Bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. Actually, they do one, I do six. And it helps. It waters down my vision, making all these obnoxious stronzos on Campari blur into a nice, soft, harmless haze. I can feel the hard edges inside me melting a little, until I’m actually happy for Aristo. I should drink more often. I’m not much of a dancer, but I’m a pretty good drunk. At least I don’t get obnoxious like Bocca.

“May I have this dance?” Aristone asks the Austrian girl. This time in English. Show-off. She leans back and crosses her arms. “I don’t think I’m in the mood to dance,” she says.

Aristone stands up, holds out his hand, and pouts. “Oh, please. Just one. One tiny, little dance.” So pathetic. Aristone, please don’t beg. Everyone knows it’s an amateur move. It’s much better to pretend you don’t care. Ignore a girl long enough, and she will come to you.

“Well . . . okay,” Tisi says, grinning, and she’s on her feet.

They walk out under the circles of lights. The song is a fast one, and everybody’s hopping up and down and slamming together like idiot prisoners on some chain gang assigned to have fun. I spot Griffolino and Capocchio circling around, looking for customers.

“Hey, Etto, you want to fly tonight?” Capocchio asks me on his fourth or fifth lap.

“I’m high on life, can’t you tell?” I answer, and Capocchio laughs, the pockmarks that riddle his cheeks stretching into lines.

I take another shot of vodka and wait for the song to end, but when it does, they stay out there. Two songs. Three. For every song, I take a shot. Couples on their way from the dance floor to the staircases stare at me in pity, and the cabana boy starts to smirk every time he passes. But just as I’m about to feel sorry for myself, I happen to look up at the deejay booth, where Guido is standing behind Nicola Nicolini, who, when he’s not turning people’s living rooms into fashionable deserts, moonlights as a deejay. It’s hard to tell if Guido is looking at Nicola Nicolini, the soundboard, the crowd of thrashing people, or out onto the endless sea, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone as lonely as Guido in that moment, hovering high above the dance floor, unmoving in the wind.

“I didn’t expect to see you here, Etto.” Signora Semirami slides onto the divan next to me, her hand already massaging my knee. Shit. I feel my jeans pull tighter, and I slide farther down the divan.

She laughs, flashing her teeth. “What’s the matter, Etto? I won’t bite,” she says. She’s about the same age as Mamma would be, not unattractive, but with the look of a bad remodel that shows the previous attempts.

“And what brings you to Le Rocce, Signora Semirami?”

She laughs again, flipping her long, dark hair over her shoulders like a curtain. “I don’t know. Maybe I’m here because I heard there is a too-serious but not unattractive young man who needs to be not so serious for a little while.” She slides over until she’s pressing up against me. She’s wearing a short, white denim skirt, the bony valley between her breasts framed by an open white shirt and a black bra, the aging flesh falling off her chest and thighs. “And you can call me Valeria.”

“Your bra is showing, Valeria.”

Again the laugh. She reaches over me for the bottle of vodka and two shot glasses. “You know, Etto, your friends did not complain when Valeria came to cheer them up. Your brother did not complain.”

“As if.”

She raises her eyebrows at me. “Believe what you want, then.”

They say Signora Semirami keeps the newspaper lists of the middle school graduations, seducing the boys one by one through their years in high school. No one admits to having been with her, but I know from how she pursues me that I am one of the few left on a list she wants to retire. She pours two vodkas and pushes one in front of me.

“Here,” she says. “Have a little drink. It will relax you.”

“And where is Signor Semirami tonight?” I ask.

“Ah, ah, ah, ah.” She wags her finger at me. “Don’t you worry about Signor Semirami.”

She grabs my knee and draws her nails slowly up my thigh. The hair on my neck tingles, the charge enough to ignite the pool of accelerant in my stomach. I jump up just before her hand reaches my crotch.

“I have to go.”

Signora Semirami shrugs and raises her eyebrows. I push my way through the crowd on the dance floor, still pounding out their reel, and I end up a couple of staircases down, facing the sea, on an empty stretch between the shadows of two couples making out. One of them is a girl from Laigueglia who went out with Bocca for a while, but the rule on the staircases is never to acknowledge anyone just in case they are not with the person they are supposed to be with. I light a cigarette and lean forward against the ledge. The cold stone hits my thigh, and I feel my pisello slowly deflating.

The music has been cycling from French crap to Italian crap to Spanish crap to American crap all night, but here, the sea washes over the melodies until they sound like whale songs, distant and haunting. An edge of wind blows a part in my hair, and the waves roil around the rocks in the cove, turning it into a pot of bubbling acid, as if anything dipped into it would come out a skeleton like in the old 1950s alien-ray-gun movies. I stretch my arms out on the stone ledge, and I imagine taking a swan dive and hitting my head on one of the rocks below, which thanks to the vodka have become a moving target. Papà would hear about it immediately from Silvio, and the two of them would rush over here. Guido would close the disco for the night, and a thousand drunken kids would squeeze through the exits, speculating about me with fake concern.

“Etto, what the cazzo are you doing?” It’s Fede and the pretty Austrian.

“What?”

“Well, for a second, you looked like you were about to jump.”

“No, Fede, you deficiente, I was not about to jump.”

The pretty girl giggles, and I wonder how they’ve managed to communicate all night.

“Come on, let’s go back to the cabanas,” Fede says.

“Where’s Bocca?”

“Still working on the other girl. I think it’s going to be a while.” The pretty girl is clinging to Fede’s side, her hand practically down his pants.

“I’ll wait here,” I say.

“Why? You scared of Valeria? Don’t worry, she just left with Aristone’s little brother. Come on, let’s go have a drink.”

“I’ll be there in a minute.”

Fede stares at me.

“I said, I’ll be there in a minute.”

“All right, but don’t think too much, and if you’re not back in five minutes, I’m coming to get you. You’re having fun tonight, Etto, whether you like it or not.” The girl giggles.

The last thing I want tonight is to be pitied, to sit around the table and play the violin to their fottuto Noah’s ark, everyone paired off two by two, Fede, Bocca, and Aristone laughing because they already know the night will end up with Jacopo sneaking them a room key at the back door of his parents’ hotel. And sure, I could probably find some girl out of the hundreds here and take advantage of Jacopo’s offer for once, but there’s something so pathetic and Neanderthal about it—two people banging up against each other like flint, hoping for a spark to warm themselves. Cazzo, if that’s how it is, I’d rather be alone for the rest of my life. A cold shot of air slaps me right across the face, and I can feel the vodka leaking out my eyes.

“Ciao.”

I turn, and suddenly I’m looking into those eyes of hers, flashing, even in the darkness.

“Everything okay?” she says.

I wipe my eyes. “Fine. Fine. Tutto a posto. The wind . . . my glasses . . .”

She’s wearing jeans and the same green warm-up jacket she was wearing at Martina’s the other day, and for some reason, the fact that she didn’t put on a miniskirt and a glob of makeup to come here makes me feel less alone. She leans against the ledge and looks down at the rocks in the cove. The alcohol in my stomach and my head sloshes around, one clockwise, the other counterclockwise, and I have to look at the horizon to realign everything.

“It is so beautiful here,” she says, her dark curls in motion around her face like a school of small, black fish.

“I guess.”

“We have a nice seaside in Ukraine, too.”

“You do?”

“I know, nobody knows anything about Ukraine.”

“I know some things.”

“Really?”

And before I can stop myself, I start mumbling about Stalin and the mass starvations of 1932, Chernobyl, that politician who got his face burned off with poison, and then—thank you, Papà—I start singing the fottuto national anthem. Shche ne vmerla Ukrayina, ni slava, ni volya. The words come out loose and watery, and it feels like I’m gargling on them. She’s smiling by the end of it, but I can’t tell if it’s because she likes me or if she’s just amused by this babbling, drunken deficiente in front of her.