by Jerry Cole
Mario spread his palms across his thighs, gazing at Christine. He tried to remember his first reaction to her, upon her entrance into his classroom. He’d probably assumed her to be naive, weak, child-like. Perhaps she was. What strides she’d taken, since then. He supposed that’s what life was — just floundering forward, taking the occasional leap. Now, she was two billion dollars ahead, living in the immense flat of Peter Eclaire. Surely she felt she was on top of the world.
“Was it worth it?” Mario suddenly asked her, his nostrils flared.
This question seemed to make Christine vaguely squeamish. She flashed her eyes back and forth, looking achy. “Mario…” she began.
“What happened? Why the hell did he burn down his building?” Mario blurted, anxiety brimming in his stomach. “How did it ever get so far? You must have told him. You couldn’t keep it…”
“How the hell could I keep something like that a secret?” Christine blared.
It was then that Peter entered back into the room, humming to himself. It was clear he knew the two were bickering, and he seemed to delight in it. It was like his fuel.
“Darling Christine and Mario!” he said. “It’s a necessity that I order more provisions. Anything you require? Christine, I know your love for wine, my little dearest. Mario? What about you? Still have an affinity for tequila?”
***
Hours later, the flat looked every bit the way Mario had imagined it. It looked like the middle of a rock star biopic film, in which straggling musicians rushed into the apartment in various stages of dress and undress — pumping bottles of champagne into the air and screaming in wild languages: French, Italian, English, Thai, even Japanese. Drugs were drawn in lines on nearly every surface. Mario abstained, despite several offerings, giving them wry looks when they said, “Man, Mario. You’re not who you used to be, huh? What happened to you? Going home made you soft?”
Mario wasn’t entirely certain, at first, why so many of them knew where he’d gone after he’d left the “scene.” As he inspected the crowd from the corner of the room, his hand sloshing his wine glass, he began to recognize that Christine was very much doted upon in the group. They regarded her as a kind of little sister, of sorts — despite very much attempting to get her as wasted as possible. It seemed that Christine had grown into a kind of celebrity, due to the painting.
An Irish poet named Malcolm burst into the apartment just past midnight, fumbling for words as he leafed through his pockets for cigarettes. He winked at Mario, immediately darting toward him. He popped a cigarette between his lips, puffing away. Back in the old days, Mario had liked Malcolm much more than the others. He had a wicked sense of rhythm, of words, and normally took Mario on a sort of audiovisual journey each time they spoke.
“Mario! I dare say, I didn’t imagine I’d ever see you back here, old boy,” Malcolm said. He smacked his lips atop Mario’s cheek, then dotted his hand over his shoulder.
In previous years, Mario had suspected that Malcolm was closeted, or perhaps just not wanting that particular raucous crowd to know anything about his sexuality.
“I didn’t imagine I’d be back,” Mario offered, his voice raspy.
“I gotta say. When I first saw the painting…” Malcolm began.
“God dammit, that painting,” Mario murmured.
“It’s really something, isn’t it?” Malcolm said, his eyes sparkling with good humor. “She’s more or less copied your entire schtick, hasn’t she? And profited even more than you ever did. The thing is, her entire plot worked.”
“What plot?” Mario asked.
“Well, hers and now Peter’s, of course,” Malcolm said.
Mario felt the sweat pooling up behind his neck once more. He leaned heavily against the window behind him, drawing his head back. His tongue ached for the grit and dirt and tobacco of a cigarette. He didn’t bother to ask Malcolm for one, choosing to live in the anxiety of not having.
“She wanted you to find her. And she just so happened to stumble into precisely the sort of person wanting to put you in that situation,” Malcolm said. “It’s more or less genius, really. And now, you’re here. Peter has you back.”
“I’m not the same man I was,” Mario said. “I’ve changed. I’ve cleaned myself up. I… I fell in love…” He paused, as he hadn’t expected those words to come tumbling out.
“Oh yeah? Everyone’s falling in love these days,” Malcolm said. “I’d say that nearly every person at this party is in love.” He twirled around, casting his shoulder to the side so that he stood as a kind of model.
The pair of them watched the raucous party, the apparent “people in love.” Peter had yanked Christine up from the counter and slid her over his shoulders. He bobbed about, drunken, as she flailed her thin arms through the air. Others danced around them. It looked vaguely like a kind of religious ceremony, or just a cult. One man, a washed-up rockstar, around fifty years old, slipped his hairy arm over another’s shoulder and yanked him toward him, drawing his teeth over his ear. The man with the ear cut his mouth wide open, letting out a wild yell — one of pleasure, rather than pain. The music pumped, jostling Mario’s eardrums.
“Anyway,” Malcolm continued, after his attempt to completely discredit any concept of love. “Christine and Peter. They’re trapping you here, sure. But haven’t you considered what it would mean if you stayed? Your artwork is long-talked about here in Paris. People trade your stuff for upwards of 500,000 thousand euro. Jesus Christ, man, I don’t know why you thought it made any sense to return to Venice and teach at that school. Course, everything happens for a reason, doesn’t it? And I guess we’re all looking for something.”
Mario flicked his tongue along his bottom lip. “What are you looking for?” he asked Malcolm, starting to feel the wine make his thoughts sloshy.
Malcolm shrugged. “You know I’m always just looking for a good piece of ass,” he said.
Seconds later, Malcolm disappeared back into the crowd. Mario watched as Christine slipped down Peter’s shoulders, nearly knocking her skull against the pole that connected between the top of the winding staircase and the bottom of the living area, where the speaker system blared. She cackled, spinning fast toward the crowd and motioning, saying something like, “Did you see what I just almost did? I almost died!” However, nobody heard her.
At this, Mario swept forward, sensing his time. He reached Christine and squeezed the top of her shoulder, making her swirl her head toward him. Her grin was crooked and youthful, another reminder of her nineteen years. She rolled her eyes back. “You aren’t here to scold me, are you?” she sighed.
“Why did you paint that painting?” Mario demanded, hating how forceful he sounded.
The music pumped, making the air thick around them. Christine batted her eyelashes fast, making a single tear glisten down her cheek. Mario felt her body crumple slightly. She swept toward the staircase, gripping the railing and pulling herself up. Mario hesitated for only a moment before following, thrusting himself to the top level. Christine collapsed at the edge of Peter’s white-satin bed, a bed that resembled a sort of heavenly cloud. Her neck was draped forward like a swan’s.
“You have to understand. I didn’t know anything about Peter,” Christine murmured. “But when he suggested all of this. The money. When he said he was falling for me… Mario, I’m completely alone here.”
Mario stood before her, his arms crossed over his chest. The bit of wine he’d drunk, along with the insane stress of the day, made him sway back and forth like a ship at sea.
“I was an idiot girl, Mario,” she tittered, slapping her palm across her cheek and swiping it toward her ear. “An idiot girl to love you. An idiot girl to think that you could love me, too.”
“Christine, no,” Mario sighed. “I never thought you were an idiot. You’re… you’re young. You’re younger than I was before I took any sort of risk. It’s like you’re braver than any person I’ve met in my life, if only because you value your feelings and emot
ions above all other things. Above reason, even.”
Mario swept toward the bed, sitting a full foot to the right of Christine. Her back shifted, showing her stifled sob.
“What did you feel for my dad?” Christine asked, finally turning her eyes toward Mario. “Was it anything like what I felt for you? I mean. It must not have been. Since you… you, well.”
“What?”
“You abandoned him, didn’t you? That’s why he burned down his building. That’s why nobody has heard from him in months. The last time I talked to my mom, even, she hadn’t heard anything. Like, the man lived with my mother for twenty years. He didn’t tell her everything — like, how he was gay, for example,” she said ruefully, “But he never disappeared on her for months at a time, like this. She’s terribly worried.” She batted her eyelashes fast. “You haven’t heard from him, have you?”
“No,” Mario murmured. “No.”
There was a long silence. Downstairs, something shattered — perhaps a wine glass, maybe something larger. The music pumped on, seemingly without notice.
“I had never felt the way I felt for your father,” Mario finally said, cutting through the silence between them. “In fact, I didn’t know it was possible to feel like that.”
Christine sniffed. Perhaps the words were like a punch, but a necessary one. Perhaps they’d cleared the cobwebs.
“Then why did you leave him?” she asked. “I — I never would have left you, if you hadn’t left first.”
Mario swiped his tongue over his teeth, feeling the smoothness of the bones. He remembered how Max’s tongue had tasted against his, so sensual and easy, occasionally tasting of cigarettes and wine and something uniquely himself.
“I grew terrified that I was making the wrong decision, attaching myself to someone,” Mario sighed. “I suppose the term in English is ‘cold feet.’ I wondered if I could truly become the kind of artist I wanted to be, if I were in love. It sounds terribly foolish, and I know that. And by the time I realized I’d given up on a beautiful thing, a thing that was worthy of everything, I turned on the news and saw what he’d done. The fire. The running away. It’s a miracle he wasn’t arrested. I imagine he can’t come back to Italy any time soon.”
“No,” Christine said, chuckling slightly. “I don’t think your people are terribly happy with him.” She swallowed. “I remember it clearly, when he was starting to add on and change the plans to the building. I was incredulous, feeling as though he’d lost his mind. He ordinarily stuck to the script. He trusted his original idea, rather than going with his gut. He spoke about things in a more fantastical way. He took risks…” Christine chuckled, arching her back so that it popped slightly. “I suppose it was you, all along. The one who made him switch. The one who took him off his regular planning…”
Mario’s stomach felt strangely warm. He hesitated, opening and closing his mouth twice. He wished Christine had some sort of answer for him. Something that would tell him that someday, somehow, he would have Max back by his side. They felt far from any sort of path of that sort of reunion.
“I miss him,” Mario murmured.
“I miss him, too,” Christine said.
They sat with this for a long time, both stirring with apprehension. Max slipped his hand over Christine’s on the bed, suddenly overwhelmed with a feeling of supreme loss. “The art of losing isn’t hard to master,” he murmured to himself, remembering an old poem he’d read, long ago. Still, it was difficult to imagine the permanence of this loss.
“I’m going to stay in Paris,” Mario said, his voice low.
Christine let out a strange, sad sigh. “You don’t have to do that.”
“I need to make sure Peter doesn’t hurt you,” he said.
“I can take care of myself,” Christine offered.
“I’m not saying you can’t,” Mario continued. “It’s only that Peter’s a complete imbecile. If you’re truly falling in love with him, fine. Fine. You’re allowed to love whomever you wish. However, as a member of Peter’s previous crew, I know what he’s capable of. If I have any respect, any love for Max at all, I know where I need to be.”
At this, Christine flung her little waif-like arms around his neck and hugged him close. Her cheeks were wet with tears. “You don’t have to do this,” she murmured, her voice edged with all the panic that told him that yes, yes, he had to. He had to remain.
Because of what they’d gone through together, now, they had to remain close. He was like her only family. As he held her close against him, feeling her shake with mourning at the loss of her father, Mario tried to imagine telling the story of this to his previous self — the self of only six months before. He imagined that Mario guffawing, saying, “Absolutely not. No fucking way. That’s a ridiculous story.”
Risk. Love. The horrors of trusting anyone. These decisions all led to the biggest, strangest elements of life. Mario couldn’t take it back. He supposed he didn’t want to.
Chapter Seventeen
Max
It was difficult to believe it had been almost two years since Max and Amanda had ended their marriage.
Two years since Max had taken that fateful trip to Venice.
Two years since Max had met Mario, the man who had turned his life upside down and then ripped it apart.
During those two years, Max had kept an incredibly low profile, living mostly at Julie’s cabin in upstate New York. He grew a shaggy beard, learned to grow vegetables, had taken up a slight friendship with some of the woods’ neighbors —none of whom knew a lick about architecture, art, or even the city—which was enviable to Max. He had little contact with anyone he’d known in his previous life, choosing instead to start painting, writing, reading, and filling his brain up with things that, at least to him now, “mattered,” rather than the memories he’d created in Venice.
Of course, he still kept them. He kept all of them like a sort of library collection, dating all the way back to his early twenties, when they’d first had Christine. He often awoke in the middle of the night, his body heaving with sweat, as images of his previous lives flashed behind his eyes. “Stop,” he would mutter. “Please. It’s too much…”
Throughout each day, when the sun gleamed heavy atop the little cabin, he learned to shove his emotional trauma into art and writing. He lined the walls of his cabin with strange self-portraits, with landscapes of the surrounding area, with bizarre paintings that seemed to capture the anger he contained from his past lives. He wondered if one day he would allow the world to see them, but he also grew to not care at all.
Max had spotted a newspaper article about him — him, of all people — the last time he’d trucked into town. The title? “ARCHITECT MAX EVERETT STILL IN HIDING.” It seemed his allure had grown stronger in the years since he’d disappeared. He had shrugged and flipped open the paper, reading about some journalist’s account of Max’s most recent spotting (not since Venice!) and his perception about where the man (him!) might be.
As a result of Max’s disappearance, the journalist wrote that the painting of Mario (rumored to be Max Everett’s lover!) had grown even more and more expensive. After some rockstar named Peter had purchased it, he’d subsequently sold it for four billion dollars, “After the breakup of Christine, Max’s young daughter, and Peter Eclaire, Peter said he hadn’t a wish to keep the painting in his possession.”
Rockstar? Boyfriend? Max felt a strange panic, as if he should have somehow been involved in this tragedy that had befallen his daughter. It all seemed far away, a story that was playing out to someone he’d never known.
“Of Christine Everett, these days, little is known,” the paper continued. “Perhaps she’s become as reclusive as her father. Let’s hope she’s still painting. What she gave to the world with VENICE IS BURNING is a true miracle.”
***
When Peter Eclaire himself appeared in front of Max’s cabin on a particularly ruefully hot day in August, Max didn’t recognize him. Perhaps this was a devastating fac
t for Peter Eclaire, who, Max read later, was one of the most sought-after rock stars, photographed in countless tabloid magazines. He stopped scrunching up his face, tried to recover from Max’s, “Who the hell are you and why are you on my property?”
“Sir. I’m Peter Eclaire,” he said, speaking with a French accent. Of course, around upper New York, Max hadn’t heard any sort of European accent at all. Rather, he’d grown accustomed to the grunts and vague Canadian accents, stuff that told him he was wild lands away from where he’d grown, where he’d become a world-renowned artist. He existed in a land of his own creation.
“Who?” he demanded of this blonde-haired, blue-eyed wonder, who seemed to declare himself worthy to march onto Max’s property.
“I used to date your daughter,” Peter offered.
Max gazed at him, stony-faced. He tried to imagine this clear rich asshole, sitting alongside his daughter doing the most menial tasks. Had they eaten dinner together? Had they watched television together? Had he noticed how she made that “sigh” sound when she was tired, the way she always had when she was a young child?
“I haven’t spoken to my daughter in almost two years.”
“I know that,” Peter continued.
He was carrying a shoddy-looking backpack. It hung on his left shoulder, making him sag to the left. He shifted his feet, making the dead leaves from last November crinkle beneath him. “Listen, man,” he said. How strange to hear “man” with a French accent. “Listen, I’ve hiked a long way to get up here. Do you mind if I come in? Get a drink of water?”
Peter tossed his bag on the table as he entered, nearly toppling over Max’s array of paint, all perfectly mixed for the painting he was currently working on. Peter’s eyes glossed over the paintings. He made a little noise in the back of his throat, something that reminded Max of a wild, caged animal. “I see all this shit runs in the family, huh?”
“Do you want a drink of water, or what?” Max demanded.
Max filled a glass of water to the brim, watching as Peter struggled with it, holding it delicately to ensure the water didn’t topple out of the side. Peter cleared his throat and set the glass back onto the table, smearing the back of his hand over his lips.
