“Your Sandy”…
I still won’t let myself deliver a kiss, not even to a silly scrap of cardboard.
But maybe in Italy I’ll finally test out those pretty lips of his.
17
LONDON
ALEXANDER
In my adult life (such as it is), I’ve suffered occasional spasms of feeling like “a better man” under the influence of a woman. It’s always temporary, leaving me weak and wrung out, like food poisoning, to recuperate slowly and rebound to being the scoundrel I was before my affliction.
I know the signs. My replies to texts and emails are more prompt and less sarcastic. I’m already a generous tipper, but during a Better Man phase, it becomes borderline extravagant, a festival of “paying it forward” and spontaneous acts of largesse. For a brief time, I eat healthier, floss more thoroughly, and dust off the hardbound classics on my bookshelves.
It’s performative—I recognize that—but not for the benefit of the other person. I’m playacting for myself, like a bored, lonely child in an attic with a box full of loose clothing, trying on disguises before a dusty mirror.
I’ve often been accused of being a chameleon, alteringmyself right down to the vocal mannerisms and accent to fit in. Many women have criticized this tendency in me as being manipulative, and I reckon that tracks with my image, so I never dispute it. But the truth is, I don’t quite know who I am when I’m by myself, without the reference point of who I am to another person.
Something is different this time.
After returning to London, I hole up in my flat, hermitlike. I’m afraid that if I go out, I’ll fall into doing what I usually do in one of these phases, like buying the ingredients for smoothies and salads, or dropping £100 notes into charity collection boxes. If I did so, it would mean thatthis—the perplexing thing I’m feeling for Sage—isn’t new or meaningful but merely the latest iteration of the same old game.
So for several days, I just sit with the bewildering emotions, and neither try to distract myself from nor capitalize upon them. I work on a few piano pieces (Coltrane’s “Giant Steps,” which is complex but not insurmountable, and Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 2, which is strictly for masochists). I let myself survive off pistachio gelato and red wine and stupidly dear cheeses and sourdough from Little Bread Pedlar. I fall asleep reading airport suspense-thrillers whilst vulgar reality TV shows play on mute in the background.
Several times I open my laptop and try to write an intro for a glowing article about Sage, something to annul the terrible things I once posted on my blog. But everything comes out wrong. It’s too slick, or trite, or downright fucking mawkish.
Trying to do her justice affords me ample opportunity to reflect on what the bloody hell itisabout this woman that’sknocked me for six. She undeniably makes me feel some type of way.
With other women, it was easy to view their “on paper” assets. But I find I can’t define Sage as a list. Not to say such a list wouldn’t be long; it absolutely is. She’s talented, beautiful, spirited, sexually voracious, and possesses a wicked sense of humor.
But what I love about Salvi—oh God… am I truly thinking that word:love?—is a hundred small, subtle things. The way she’s always singing (and poorly). Her cackling laugh that’s not unlike waterfowl being violated. The perforated trails of a half-dozen earring holes in each lobe, placed unevenly in a way that suggests she might have impulsively done some of them herself. The set of her lips when she’s thinking. The thick, raised seam of scar tissue where her appendix was removed. The way her hotel rooms are chaotic records of everything she’s done since walking through the doors, surfaces littered with her story.
Ultimately, the fucking enigma of her. I want to spend years exploring it, unearthing her details with the care and reverence of an archaeologist at a Bronze Age settlement.
It feels an apt metaphor. I don’t know what’s buried down there… not with either of us. Her mystery, my emotions. Who Iam, for that matter. It’s humbling that for the first time in my life, I want to know. Enough so that I’m ready to get my hands dirty with the excavation.
A week before the GP at Imola, I get a message from my mother asking me to come see her at theAuto Racing Journaloffices. When I arrive, our front desk receptionist, Callum, barely looks up, he’s so riveted to whatever’s on his computer screen. His hands are clasped under his chin, and his adoring gaze is straight out of a cartoon.
“Och, the little angel… did you ever see the like!” he coos.
I pause at the desk, clearing my throat. Callum gives me a flicker of a glance, then focuses again on his screen. I scan the room and note that everyone is similarly rapt, staring at their computers.
“She yawned!” I hear a high voice that’s unmistakably my coworker Gillian, coming both from across the room and from Callum’s computer screen. “That istooadorable.”
Stepping to the side of the reception desk, I peer to see what the fuss is about. On the screen, familiar faces from around the office appear in a grid flanking a box in which my former coworker Natalia Evans appears, holding a new-looking infant swaddled in a pink blanket.
“Ah,” I say. “Did that happen already?”
Callum makes a shooing motion with his hand.
“Lovely to see you too,” I tell him blandly. “Oi, Evans!” I direct at Natalia, leaning down into the camera’s frame. “Congrats on the bundle of joy. What’s its name?”
“Hi, Alex.Hername is Leonie.”
“Right, then. Well done.” I give her a little parting salute, keenly feeling Callum’s desire to get rid of me. As I start to stand, Natalia speaks up again.
“Sorry I didn’t send you an invite for the call,” she says. “But I figured you, uh, weren’t back from purgatory.”
