“Is your sister still in anger-management therapy?” I ask Charles.
“She never started.”
“Hence the lack of progress.”
We change stations and proceed to work our shoulders and backs.
“Anyway, Zoe’s fit. You could take her to dinner, Michael,” Charles suggests.
Christ! “Charles, you’re the last of the romantics. Zoe isn’t looking for dinner.”
“Maybe she’d appreciate an appetizer and a glass of winebeforehand,” he emphasizes. “Oh, sorry, I forgot you’re not into courtship, foreplay, or anything else that could make a date resemble the beginning of a relationship.”
“A relationship isn’t among my priorities at the moment.”
“Is that why you’re seeing two different women?” he shoots back. “Sheila and ... Denise?”
“Danielle,” I say. “Eyes for everyone, heart for no one.” That’s my motto, and it’s worked well up to now: Sheila is a masseuse at a spa in Maida Vale. She’s sweet and attentive, with absurdly long shifts thatprevent a social life, and I see her whenever I need a cuddle. Danielle is a copilot for British Airways who I see on her two days off every week for forty-eight hours of practically uninterrupted sex. I’ve never stepped out in public with either of them. Neither of them has been to my place. And they know nothing about my private life.
“I, on the other hand, am starting to feel ready for the old ‘May death do us part.’”
I almost drop my weight. “Huh?”
“You heard me. Marriage, children ...” Charles insists.
“A Labrador retriever, full pension plan, and a Volvo,” I laugh. “Come on!”
“You’ll wake up one day wanting the same thing, and then it will be my turn to tolerate you, Michael,” says Charles.
“I can’t bear to be in a relationship with someone who can’t keep up with me. I don’t want to spend my life with a woman who indulges me all day long just to keep me happy and whose whole world revolves around me. If it’s going to be forever, I want it to be with someone who isn’t afraid to push back against me; I want someone who can put up a good fight instead of just agreeing with me all the time, someone who makes me want to wake up every morning just to hear what they have to say.”
“You wouldn’t last a week with someone like that.” Charles looks at me skeptically. “You’re too proud to apologize after an argument. You’d break up before you even got together.”
“Better than the generational anxiety you have. Mister ‘All my friends from uni are getting married and having children, and I’m still cutting the crusts off my toast.’”
“Sebastian, Duke, and Ashford all seem rather happy with their married lives. Harring is getting married too! And in any case, that doesn’t mean I don’t feel ready of my own accord.”
“Whatever makes you happy.” I dismiss the topic.
“What do you think happened to all those kids we spent the summers with in Tuscany?” he asks me out of the blue.
“Why?”
“They’re more or less our age. It would be nice to know how they’ve landed. Giada, for example.”
So that’s where he’s going with this. One point for Charles. “You’re really desperate if you’re fantasizing about your childhood crush,” I say.
“I’m not fantasizing. I just remembered our summers in Chianti, and she was part of them. The end.” At the estate, in addition to the four of us, there were also the children of the count’s employees, and all together, we were a little gang of terrors.
“I won’t believe it even if you swear on your life.”
“In spite of your cynicism, you must admit we had fun. Do you remember Elisa, her younger sister?”
Click.
Charles unlocks a memory for me. “Elisa!” I exclaim, with a little too much excitement.
She and I were complicit in every Machiavellian plan, like Chip and Dale, like the cat and the fox. At night, we went to the neighbor’s farm to steal watermelons, we took showers under the jet of the garden sprinklers, we played vet with the chickens and rabbits on the estate, we opened roadside kiosks to sell slimy mud pies, and we played hide-and-seek in the barn. When one of us had a thought, the other said it, and vice versa ...
