Imperfect Delight

by Andrea de Carlo

  Wally looks at Muck and Michelle with skepticism, like they’re completely unworthy of him. “And which of these two asses do you plan on giving me?”

  Nick Cruickshank hesitates, because he’d like to tell him that he’s not going to give him a goddamn thing, that he can take his arrogant slobbery elsewhere. But they’re already here, and entertaining two guests would certainly be more justifiable in Aileen’s eyes than going off riding on his own. “Go ahead and take Michelle.”

  “Michelle? But she’s got a beard, she has!” Wally winks, in that horrible way of his.

  “Fuck, this one’s really jumpy!” Kimberly totters in the saddle on Tusk: she probably never rides her prize-show Hanoverians, or at most takes them out for a few laps, under the supervision of a very well-paid instructor who’s always ready to intervene.

  “He’s not jumpy at all. Just give him some reins.” Nick Cruickshank has to call on all the patience he possesses, which has never been very much.

  Wally tightens Michelle’s cinch by himself, in a show of dismissive expertise; he pulls too much on the strap.

  “Not so tight, you’ll bother her.” One reason Nick Cruickshank chose these horses is that they used to be used by smugglers to cross over the mountains on the most difficult trails, and the idea appealed to him.

  Wally pretends not to have even heard him; he closes the buckle, puts his left foot in the stirrup, lifts himself up by the sheer arm strength, plops his heavy rear end down on the saddle. Michelle is naturally annoyed, bucks slightly, raises her head. Wally pulls the reins this way and that like the moron he is, sniggering. “Whoah! Seems she’s offended by what I was saying about her before!”

  “Idiot.” Nick Cruickshank tries to keep his voice down as he tightens Muck’s cinch, but he’s not particularly successful.

  “What was that?” Wally’s hearing aid must be correctly regulated, nothing’s getting past him; he kicks with his heels, turns his mount around.

  “Nothing. Let’s go.” Nick Cruickshank saddles up, clears a path to lead them out of the paddock.

  “You called me an idiot, I heard you! Asshole!” Wally trots along behind him, red in the face.

  “Hey, Kimberly!” When they’re only a few yards from the fence Sadie, Rodney’s wife, walks up with her panoramic sunglasses and lynx jacket and thin-heeled little boots that make her even more unstable than Kimberly, an enormous Gucci bag over her shoulder. “We’re going to Saint-Tropez, to see Dimitri and Vanessa!”

  “To Saint-Tropez?” Kimberly yanks on Tusk’s reins as if she’s trying to rip his head off, forces him into a panicky retreat.

  “Uh-huh. You want to come with us?” Sadie too is chewing gum, with the energy usually dedicated to far more productive pursuits.

  “Yeah, yeah. Hold on.” Kimberly tries to dismount, in the most incorrect way possible; Tusk starts going around in a circle.

  “What the fuck is this, babe?” Wally gives the reins a rough jerk to move back toward her. “You’re not coming on this fucking ride?”

  “I’d rather go with Sadie; we have to check out a couple of stores.” Kimberly tries again to throw her right leg over the saddle.

  “What the fuck, babe! You’re just leaving me here?” Wally frowns like an overgrown spoiled brat: he puffs his cheeks out, snorts.

  Nick Cruickshank quickly dismounts, ties Muck’s reins to the fence with angry gestures, helps Kimberly dismount before she breaks a leg.

  “Hey, make sure you keep your hands off my wife’s ass!” Here’s say-it-again Wally once more. And what’s worse, he isn’t even completely joking: he watches attentively as Nick is forced to support her until she’s painstakingly managed to put her feet back on the ground.

  Kimberly immediately rips off the helmet, tries to fix her hair with her hands, snorts, gestures at her husband with a whirling index finger. “See you later, love!”

  “Fuck off, babe.” Wally, filled with resentment, watches her walk away with Sadie.

  Nick Cruickshank really does detest these two, but the strange thing is that he can’t help but feel a kind of admiration for how they’re united by the same flaws: clearly made for each other. It’s disconcerting, making him feel even more alone and encircled than he already did.

  “So, are we going?” Wally is already insisting, again.

  “Hold on.” Nick Cruickshank removes the saddle, saddlecloth, and reins from Tusk, who seems content not to have to carry Kimberly around; he hangs it all on the fence, quickly gets back on Muck, leads the way out of the paddock.

  “So, what’s the secret to waking this donkey up?” Wally goads Michelle on with his heels, to try to get out in front.

  Nick Cruickshank doesn’t bother replying; he immediately takes the path through the holm oaks, to avoid the Star Life people who are certainly looking for them and not be seen by Aileen and the whole troupe in action on the front lawn.

  They make their way through the trees at a good pace, avoiding the trunks, through the moistness of the undergrowth, amid the smell of mushrooms and rotten wood; after a few minutes they come out into the clearing where the secret cottage is located. Nick Cruickshank fell in love with it as soon as he saw it, before discovering that it belonged to a bordering property, which inspired him to make a new acquisition. But he’s never wanted to remodel it like he did the main house; he simply had the roof and windows repaired, furnished the inside with the bare essentials. He likes it this way: a simple and innocent place, a refuge when he needs one.

  “What the fuck is that?” Wally points to the cottage, continuing to smack Michelle’s flanks.

  “Nothing.” Nick Cruickshank certainly has no intention of explaining it to him.

  “What do you mean, nothing? It’s your secret fuck pad, admit it!” Wally intensifies his intrusive stare. “Who do you take in there? That young girl who serves at the table?”

  “Would you mind not bringing your repulsive filth into my life?” Like so many other times, his disgust for Wally encompasses the thought of having spent decades with him, with all that they have contained.

  “Who’s repulsive?! Would you listen to him! Asshole!” Wally digs his heels in to catch up. It’s incredible that he gets offended at being defined as repulsive, when he puts such ceaseless effort into being that way. “So the little server girl, what’s her name? If you’re not interested then maybe I’ll have a go, while Kim’s away!”

  “You’re disgusting, Wally!” Nick Cruickshank thinks with horror that there was a time when they both shared in this sickness, passing it off as being free-spirited and transgressive, bragging about it like barbarian warriors returning triumphant from their pillaging. The songs he and Rodney wrote about it are still among the most popular with both their male and, incredibly, female fans.

  “Oh, sure, and you’re so much better!” Wally squawks from behind him, continuing to prod Michelle, who switches into a slow trot and forces him to steady himself in the saddle.

  Nick Cruickshank pushes Muck to a trot as well, to avoid being overtaken; they quickly cross through the clearing, slip back into the undergrowth. They continue forward through the holm oaks, both of their two horses now snorting and shaking, competitive.

  Instead of calming Michelle, Wally continues goading her on with his heels, though he’s already having more and more trouble dodging the branches that risk bashing him in the face.

  “Hey, slow down!” To avoid trouble Nick Cruickshank pushes Muck through the trees in the direction of the open fields, lowering his head, bending it to the right or to the left depending on what comes at him. He comes out from between the trees, begins trotting alongside them, toward the olive grove.

  But Wally is hot on his heels, with the same fieriness he displayed in the eighties on his interminable bass solos: he slaps with his legs and shakes the reins until Michelle gets fed up carrying such an unpleasant rider and breaks into her much faster and quicker-stepped gallop.

  Nick Cruickshank has no choice but to push Muck to a gal
lop as well, to keep Wally behind him.

  Wally naturally refuses to tolerate being restrained: he spurs Michelle on even more frenetically, pants, grunts, leans forward. “Go, go, go! Go on, fucking hell!”

  “Slow down! Don’t be an idiot!” Nick Cruickshank tries to bar his way with his left arm, moving it up and down.

  Wally naturally sees it as a challenge and redoubles his efforts: he rides her like a lunatic, yelling in that guttural way of his. In a few seconds the horses are launched in a frenetic gallop, inflamed by their not having been mounted for days and probably by the excessive oats that René feeds them to make a good impression. Nick Cruickshank tries to restrain Muck, and Wally takes advantage to surpass him, crouching low over the horse’s neck, head down, ass up in the air—as if, just for a change, he feels the need to prove something to somebody. And at the very same moment there’s a rustling in the undergrowth and the brown alpaca shoots out of the woods, the two white ones hot on its heels; Michelle pulls up suddenly at a full gallop, kicks out, bucks furiously. Wally takes flight, human cannon style: he stays aloft for a good couple of seconds, lands badly, rolls like a sack of potatoes, lies motionless on his back.

  Nick Cruickshank struggles mightily to rein in Muck, all of whose instincts are telling him to rush off after Michelle as fast as he can.

  Wally is lying there still on the grass, in his silvered jacket and designer jeans, his shoes with the ultra-high-tech soles.

  Nick Cruickshank jumps down, pulling Muck along behind him, who’s still quivering and turning his head and pointing his ears toward Michelle, who only now begins to slow down, a good two or three hundred yards ahead. “Hey? Wall?” He crouches down beside him to get a closer look, tries to evaluate the situation.

  Wally emits a sort of wheeze; his stomach rises and falls. He’s not dead, but he’s certainly damaged.

  “Stay calm, Wall, don’t move.” Nick Cruickshank tries to go back over the accident in his mind, but even though it happened two minutes ago the sequence is confused; he can’t be sure whether he saw him hit his head.

  “Aaargh.” Wally groans anew, moves a leg, meaning that his cervical vertebrae should all be in one piece, but his eyes are closed, his breathing slow, his nose wheezing terribly.

  “Wall, can you hear me?” Nick Cruickshank holds the bridle with his left hand and with his right cautiously touches his legs, arms, to see what’s broken. He thinks that he doesn’t really hate Wally: he hates what Wally represents, but they have too much history together, they’ve been through too much together, all the ups and downs. This jackass is a piece of his life; the thought that from one moment to the next he might become a piece of his past is heartbreaking.

  Wally lets out another groan, moves his jaw slightly; he looks to be in really bad shape.

  “Hey, Wall?” Nick Cruickshank feels a wave of violent displeasure well up inside him, his trademark “cool” nowhere to be found. “Wall?” He touches his neck, his left shoulder, his right shoulder.

  “Fuuuuck!” Suddenly Wally lurches up into a sitting position, with the same expression he had during his worst period of generalized addiction, when he would come to, like Lazarus, after sniffing and ingesting and guzzling any combination of powders and pills and alcohol that came within reach and then crashing to the floor like a deadweight in some hotel suite.

  “Wall, good to have you back! You scared the crap out of me!” Nick Cruickshank is overcome by a sense of relief that he wouldn’t have imagined, places his hand on his right shoulder again, slowly.

  “Aaaaiaaah!” Wally has the raucous and exhausted voice of when he’s at his most plastered.

  Nick Cruickshank laughs, almost forgetting to hold on to Muck’s bridle to keep him from galloping off. And immediately his relief gives way to a disaster film that begins playing out in his head: ambulances with sirens blazing, hospitals where communication is difficult and discretion nonexistent, plaster casts, Kimberly furious, tomorrow’s party ruined, Aileen furious, Sunday’s concert called off, Baz Bennett furious, the fans furious.

  “That fucking pony broke my shoulder!” Wally holds it with one hand: white in the face with the pain, or maybe because he’s gone into one of his famous self-induced states, like the time he took some acid after a concert in Albuquerque and convinced himself that the fingertips of his left hand had become enormous. He continued yelling for hours at the other band members and anyone else he could, “I’ve turned into a fucking gecko!” Now he sits there on the grass, all signs of competitive daring vanished, like a professional victim.

  “Hey, calm down, Wall. Nothing’s broken.” Nick Cruickshank is not at all sure of it, but he says so to try to calm him down. He thinks that in truth he does hate him a little, now that his relief has melted away and he knows he’s neither dying nor paralyzed for life.

  “Fuck calming down! Fuck nothing wrong! You put me on that bullshit ponyyyyy!” Wally yells at close to the maximum of his significant vocal capabilities, holds his shoulder, continues grimacing.

  “You’re the one who goaded her on like a madman! I must have told you ten times not to do it!” There: Nick Cruickshank once again feels extraordinarily angry at him, and even more at himself, for getting into this situation.

  “How the fuck was I supposed to know that you keep fucking llamas in the woods, just waiting to cut you off?!” Wally has always been constitutionally incapable of admitting the truth; no reason for him to start now.

  “They’re alpacas! And you’re a moron!” Even though Nick Cruickshank keeps telling himself to hold his nerve, the words come out on their own, unstoppable.

  “And you’re a fucking asshole, to put me on that dangerous animal, and not tell me that you have a fucking safari park here!” Wally’s expression is a mix of pain and rancor, in which there’s no way of distinguishing truth from exaggeration.

  “You’re the one who’s been on my back for days to take this stupid horseback ride! And you’ve never had the slightest sense of limits, as long as I’ve known you!” Nick Cruickshank knows perfectly well that he’s only making things worse, that he shouldn’t even listen to him but put his mind instead to getting medical assistance, but he can’t help it.

  “Son of a bitch! You’ve always acted so superior, just because you’ve read a few books and because you’re the fucking asshole lead singer!” Wally yells with the liberating power of his most jarring interventions in the Bebonkers’ most chaotic encores, when the public’s ability to distinguish between good and bad has vanished completely.

  Nick Cruickshank makes the herculean effort to focus exclusively on what needs to be done. He takes his cell phone out of his pocket. “Don’t move. I’m going to call someone.”

  Wally too reaches gingerly inside his jacket and takes out his iPhone, with that ridiculous walnut-root cover with the solid gold border; he calls Kimberly, like a stupid and whiny little kid calling out for Mommy as soon as he gets hurt.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  MILENA MIGLIARI TAKES a small spoonful of fior di latte directly from the pan at the counter, places the fior di latte on her tongue and lets it melt slowly, swallows: yes, it came out well. Very well, actually; it’s one of the best batches of fior di latte she’s ever made, maybe the best. Creamy but not fatty, dense but airy, with an ideal point of sweetness, the languor of the vanilla accompanying poignantly the hints of flowers and grass in the milk. It’s a sort of miracle, considering her state of agitation from Viviane’s tattoo and all the destabilizing thoughts that continue racing through her head and heart. It could be interpreted as a calming message from the universe or as an alarm bell before everything falls apart. It depends.

  Whatever the case, it’s very close to the fior di latte she had in mind as she was preparing it, yet it surprises her with tiny unexpected differences. This only happens with her most successful flavors, the ones that bring tears of joy to her eyes: to be able to literally taste the distance between what she was aiming for and what she got. It’s simple and complic
ated, like every flavor, like the connections that every flavor moves you to make, the reasons it makes you happy or wistful, leaves you satisfied or restless. This fior di latte contains the essence of things experienced, or even barely grazed, or imagined; a collection of undefinable and elusive elements that to her are the essence of the imperfect marvel.

  But now she feels a desperate need for external feedback, and absolutely no one is coming into the shop, nor are they likely to do so in the next few hours. And if there’s no one to appreciate the marvel, assuming that she did, what was the point of capturing it? Who can tell her if she captured it, or merely fooled herself into thinking she did? Between tonight and tomorrow some people will probably drop by because it’s the weekend, and on Sunday there’ll certainly be thousands of people down at the airfield for the Bebonkers concert, but very few of them will be interested in her gelato, fewer still will be capable of giving her the sensitive and intelligent and articulate evaluation she needs. And she needs it now, when the fior di latte is literally just finished, incredibly fresh, throbbing, at the height of its expressive capabilities.

  Guadalupe is finishing up cleaning the batch freezer and the other equipment in the sink; she turns around as soon as Milena comes back into the lab.

  “Would you mind telling me what you think of the fior di latte?” Milena Migliari feels the urgency rush into her voice, her gestures.

  “Give me five minutes.” Guadalupe looks at her, slightly perplexed; she probably doesn’t know what more she wants from her, seeing as she tasted the mix during preparation and told her that it seemed really good.

  “No, right now! Please!” Milena Migliari feels the need for a response continuing to grow inside her; she’s no longer able to stand still.

  Guadalupe turns off the water, dries her hands, follows her into the shop. She tastes a teaspoonful of the fior di latte that Milena hands her, reflects for a few seconds, smiles. “Delicious.”