Imperfect Delight

by Andrea de Carlo

  Aileen continues glancing toward the door to the house; she doesn’t want to stay out here anymore, her legs are getting antsy. “Okay, I’m going in.”

  “Go, go.” Nick Cruickshank watches her walk away, a half smile on his lips that doesn’t mean much of anything. If he thinks about it, it doesn’t feel like Aileen’s attention for him has gradually waned, in that almost imperceptible way that any form of attention probably wanes, sooner or later. It seems like he sat down in front of her one night at dinner and began telling her something, then realized that her attention was no longer the same. Or, more precisely, that it was no longer directed solely at him, in the incredibly strenuous mental and emotional ping-pong that made their exchanges so special. At the time he panicked: accused her of not listening to him, pounded his fist on the table, spilled red wine on the tablecloth. Aileen didn’t lose her head, but very calmly repeated everything he had said to her up to that moment word for word; which, of course, wasn’t the actual issue. He felt stupid, thinking that maybe he had mistaken a momentary distraction for a permanent change. But their mental and emotional ping-pong didn’t regain its previous creative tension the day after either, or the day after that. Then he had to begin recording the new Bebonkers album in Los Angeles, and there hasn’t been much more time to think about it.

  It’s not as if they don’t get along anymore, don’t talk to each other, or don’t make love; but there has certainly been a decline; a part of the electricity that charged every single one of their dialogues has disappeared. Is this what happens when two people have been together long enough? He’s certainly no expert on long-term relationships: even if he’s always thought of himself as fundamentally monogamous, his relationships have never lasted more than six or seven years. Are both he and Aileen to blame, assuming it even makes sense to talk about blame? Has he too lost interest, curiosity, tension in her regard? How much did it matter that in the beginning he was still married to his second wife, giving their romance an aura of illicitness and adventure, and then he divorced, transforming them into a perfectly legitimate couple? What was the role of the explosive success of Anti-leather in the distraction of a part of Aileen’s prodigious attention?

  He certainly has encouraged her to raise the bar continually in her work, pushing her to make the switch from costume designer to stylist, stylist to entrepreneur. And it’s not like the Bebonkers are always on tour; far from it. What was a skilled, impatient, and energetic woman like her supposed to do? Knit him caps and vests in her free time? Design onstage costumes for a rival band? Work for some stupid TV talent show? It seemed logical to push her to put her skills to work, and even to give her significant financial backing, partly because he believed in her, partly so that he might at least some of the time have an outlet for his extreme restlessness. His accountant was convinced it would be a waste of money, but the Anti-leather business has surpassed even the rosiest expectations. Aileen has revealed a business sense on par with her sense of aesthetics. If as a consequence her prodigious attention is no longer directed 100 percent at him, it’s hardly the end of the world: he’s certainly not going to start playing the victim. After all, when he really needs her attention, she gives it to him, though maybe not exactly instantaneously, maybe not exactly as intensively or for as long as she used to. But he still gets the right advice, her amazing organizational ability is still there. It’s even possible that after Saturday, the situation might improve significantly; it’s one of the reasons he let himself be persuaded to take this sort of step. Again, despite the fact that it certainly didn’t go too well the past two times.

  The Italian gelato lady comes out of the kitchen door with her two empty coolers, followed by Aldino, who keeps an eye on her like he’s still expecting some dirty trick.

  Nick Cruickshank nods to her with his chin. “Everything all right?”

  The Italian gelato lady nods, looks at him with a slightly inquisitive expression. The light has changed, but she’s still so full of colors: in her eyes, her clothes, the way she moves. And it’s now confirmed that she hasn’t recognized him, which, truth be told, is quite unusual.

  For an instant Nick Cruickshank feels like he’s seeing himself through her eyes, and the picture looks pretty bleak, once he’s stripped of his famous name and the echo of the songs he’s written, without the legendary aura that envelops the Bebonkers. What is he, to her? A rich and well-aged Anglo-Irish bohemian who comes to the South of France to lounge around with his super-enterprising girlfriend and their hangers-on, drowning in a sea of poses?

  The Italian gelato lady puts the coolers back in the van, closes the doors. She looks at him a little uncertainly, then smiles, unexpectedly. Her smile has nothing of the blend of instant admiration and morbid curiosity that he encounters daily; it seems to contain a strange postponement of questions.

  Nick Cruickshank is momentarily disconcerted, uncertain whether to make an attempt at conversation, as he sometimes does with the locals; but somehow he thinks it would only end up worsening the already sobering image of himself that he’s given her. All he’s able to do is raise a hand in a good-bye wave: quite poorly executed, for that matter.

  She replies with a rapid gesture, sits down behind the wheel, closes the door, turns on the engine, backs up; in two minutes her little orange van has already disappeared down the access road.

  Nick Cruickshank scratches his forehead, thinks about the things he has no desire to do in the next few days, turns to look at Aldino, who seems to be finally relaxing. They both go back inside, with different types of undulating strides.

  SEVEN

  MILENA MIGLIARI OPENS the smaller side door, pushes the inner gate open with her foot, puts the two coolers down on the ugly tiles of the slant-roofed, glass-enclosed patio. It always reminds her of someplace in Mexico: with these extravagant flowers, the arches, the staircase leading to the second floor, the humid heat that immediately slams into you. She could just as easily use the main door, but for some reason she always comes in here.

  Viviane looks out from the second-floor external landing, comes down the steps; one look is enough to see she’s really tense. “Damn blackout!” She runs a hand through hair that’s longer on top and shorter at the temples and on the sides, pushes back the main tuft. “Today of all days, when I took the morning off to work on the book, for crying out loud!”

  Milena Migliari considers telling her how all the equipment in her store suddenly turned off and that if it hadn’t been for the Brits’ miraculous order she would have had to throw it all away. But it occurs to her that for a while now her conversations with Viviane have turned more and more into an exchange of complaints: about work, the economy, the government, the weather, about almost everything. She still hasn’t figured out why, but it happens. Maybe it depends on Viviane’s tendency to see things in a pessimistic light, and she ends up conforming almost automatically; maybe it’s because finding reasons for being content requires more creativity than complaining. That’s why she smiles now, pointing with her chin toward the two empty coolers.

  “What?” Viviane looks at her with those blue-gray eyes, intense behind her transparent-frame lenses: faded gray T-shirt, faded jeans, sturdy feet in blue socks with little yellow stars on them. She looks at the coolers, looks back at her.

  “Some Brits ordered twenty pounds of gelato, just when I was sure I’d have to throw it all away.” Milena Migliari makes a sweeping gesture that embraces her shop, the Brits’ house, all the space in between.

  “Twenty pounds?” Viviane studies her; in her line of work she can glean more information from Milena’s posture than from the look on her face.

  “They have a large property above Callian, with lots of guests, staff, other people.” Milena Migliari touches one of the coolers with the tip of her toe. “But I hope they eat it right away and don’t leave it for days in the freezer, when it’ll be hard as a rock and all crystallized. Maybe I should only have left them ten pounds, taken the rest back with me.”
>
  “Oh my God, Milena!” The explosion of Viviane’s voice has long-simmering causes. “Artistic integrity or whatever the heck you want to call it is one thing, but for crying out loud! Would it really matter, even if it did get a little crystallized?!”

  “It would matter, because it would no longer be my gelato, all right? The consistency is one of its most important characteristics!” Milena Migliari gets a combative tone every time she’s accused of being too much of a perfectionist, or incapable of dealing with reality. Like back in July, when two rosy-cheeked and corpulent Belgians asked her emphatically for a non-dark chocolate and she replied that not only did she not have one, but that for them she didn’t have any flavors because they obviously didn’t know anything about gelato, that they’d be better off getting a couple of cones from the Carpigiani soft-serve machine at the bar under the parking lot. She had said it passionately, though without resentment, but they were mortally offended, and within a few minutes had written horrible things on TripAdvisor. But the worst part was that when she told Viviane about it later that night, partly looking for some sympathy and partly to have a laugh together, Viviane treated her like a crazy fundamentalist, worse than the two Belgians: told her that if she carried on this way they’d never be able to pay back the bank loan, that she needed to stop walking around with her head in the clouds, come to grips with reality. It hurt her even more than she was later able to explain: the sensation that for the first time (maybe the second, or the third) the two of them weren’t exactly on the same wavelength.

  “Just who were these Brits?” In Viviane’s expression there’s a flicker of curiosity, but buried under several layers of mistrust.

  Milena Migliari forces herself to adopt a lighter tone of voice: she recounts details from her trip to Les Vieux Oliviers, including the alpacas chasing and then viciously biting each other, and the giant Italian bodyguard who couldn’t figure out who opened the gate for her, the lady of the house’s blue boots and red leather jacket, the master of the house who looked like an old pirate with that earring in his left lobe.

  “And what’s the proprietor’s name?” Viviane rubs one of her stockings on the dog-vomit-colored tiles, the only detail they weren’t enamored with when they decided to buy this place, before discovering that the real problem was that the glass roof turns the patio into a furnace and makes it practically uninhabitable from spring through late autumn. Just look at them now: between their agitation, the humidity, and the temperature they’re covered in sweat, in the second half of November.

  “Cruc something. Cruc . . . Crucshan, I think.” Milena Migliari isn’t sure she remembers the name correctly, the woman in the kitchen mentioned it while receiving the gelato and listening unwillingly to her instructions on how to serve it.

  “Cruickshank?” Viviane lunges forward with her face, the way she does when something strikes her.

  “Maybe.” Milena Migliari nods, noting the sudden change in attitude.

  “Nick Cruickshank?” Viviane becomes even more pressing, whatever the reason is.

  “Might be.” Milena Migliari shakes her head. “Who is he?”

  “What do you mean, who is he?! Damn, Milena!” Viviane adopts that insistently realistic tone that’s now become part and parcel of their division of roles: one absent-minded and the other with her feet firmly on the ground. These are simplifications, because Viviane is also sensitive in addition to being concrete, and because making good gelato requires practicality as well as imagination.

  Milena Migliari shrugs. She couldn’t say when they began assigning roles to each other. Maybe right from the start, but back then it seemed more like a game than anything, with affectionate and erotic connotations. It made her feel partly reassured, partly turned on; but she thought the roles were flexible, switchable, or even cancelable at any moment. Instead, they’ve become more and more consolidated, until hers has begun to feel a little too constricting. Sometimes much too constricting.

  “Hey, can you see me, from way up there?” Viviane looks up high, pretends to reel in invisible string around an invisible spool, to pull her down out of the sky. “He’s the lead singer of the Bebonkers. Ever heard of them? Not even one song? Maybe on the radio, by accident? Does ‘Enough Isn’t Enough’ ring a bell? On top of everything they’re doing a benefit concert down at the airfield in Fayence this Sunday. There are posters everywhere!”

  “Of course I’ve heard of them.” Now Milena Migliari is getting fed up, seeing herself treated like a naïve simpleton. She has listened to the Bebonkers, like practically everyone else living in the Western world during the past thirty years or so. And come to think of it the English guy did look familiar to her somehow; but she was nervous because of the blackout and the strangeness of the order, and concerned about the conservation of the gelato, and dazed at being treated like an intruder.

  “Well, that’s something.” Viviane feigns a gesture of relief; she runs two fingers across her forehead, laughs. “Welcome back to earth.”

  “Sorry, but when you see someone out of context it’s easy not to recognize them, right?” Milena Migliari tries to resist the temptation to feel guilty for not recognizing Nick Cruickshank of the Bebonkers: it’s something that happens to her when she realizes she’s uninformed about world events or has a gap in her general knowledge, and even more so when she makes a mistake in French. And anyway, even if she likes music she’s never been one to worship those who create it; she’s never had any musical idols. If anything struck her about that Nick Cruickshank it wasn’t his rock-star appearance, but rather the deeply perplexed look on his face: deeply perplexed.

  “All right, anyway, typical Milena.” Viviane is still laughing; she comes closer, gives her a pat on the backside.

  Even this “typical Milena” business: sometimes it’s amusing, sometimes not at all. Now, for instance, not at all; she immediately tries to reroute the conversation. “And how about you, how’s your book going?”

  “I’d rather not talk about it, thank you!” Viviane reacts predictably, because she’s struggling mightily to put together her manual on the Fournier Method. That’s what it’s called because Fournier is her last name. It’s a method of high-intensity postural massage, which loosens the body’s knots and liberates the flow of energy. Viviane practices it in her studio in Draguignan five days a week, and on Monday afternoons in a center for sports medicine in Grasse; by now she’s put together a nice following who swear she’s made them as good as new. But it’s one thing to invent and perfect new massage techniques, another to write a book in which her theory and practices are explained in detail. Viviane has been working on it for months but isn’t the least bit satisfied with the results, which naturally influences her mood and their relationship.

  Milena Migliari brings her two hands from high to low in a gesture she’s learned to use in moments of tension. “Hey, it was just a question, okay?”

  “Thanks for asking!” Viviane paces back and forth, the soles of her feet smacking against the tiles; she stops. “You know what, I called Dr. Lapointe, in Grasse.”

  “Ah.” Milena Migliari feels her blood run cold, from one moment to the next. “And what did he say?”

  Viviane clears her throat, with that nervous cough she gets when she’s going through intense emotions. “That we can start on Monday.”

  “Monday?” Milena Migliari’s stomach contracts, she has trouble breathing. But she’s been expecting to hear this for days; for at least a week.

  “Aren’t you happy?” Viviane scrutinizes her, registers the position of her head, her arms, her legs.