Nick Cruickshank takes a roll of bills out of his pocket, counts several of them off to him, shakes his hand; as soon as the bearded guy has left he leans back in the window. “So?”
Milena Migliari thinks that she’d probably feel more comfortable if she really were a thief come to steal something, but since that’s not the case it seems that the only two alternatives are smiling enigmatically and driving away or telling the truth. She takes a deep breath, tries to calm herself down. “I wanted to get your opinion. If you have five minutes.”
“Yeah?” Nick Cruickshank seems curious, intrigued.
The younger guy comes back, cell phone in hand. “Monsieur Crucsànc, un selfie, s’il vous plaît?”
Nick Cruickshank consents, with only the slightest hint of impatience: he turns to get the right light, moves his head close to the assistant’s. He immediately says good-bye, leans back in the window. “An opinion about what? Career choices? Life choices?”
Milena Migliari feels herself blush, though she isn’t sure whether he’s aware of it. “About two flavors of gelato.”
Nick Cruickshank steps back, makes a wide semicircular gesture, as if to offer her the sumptuous gift of the space in which to park her van.
Milena Migliari follows the gesture, even if a part of her would prefer to head straight for the access road while there’s still time. She pulls a few feet forward, stops alongside the wall of the house. When she gets out she feels even more exposed than she’d imagined, suddenly deprived of the means of escape. To compensate she immediately walks around the Kangoo, grabs the cooler, holds it up in front of her, like a shield.
The impatient and ill-mannered guy who was tailgating her all the way here has taken a large speaker out of his white van, he’s pushing it on a cart; he looks stunned when he recognizes Nick Cruickshank.
“Which flavors?” Nick Cruickshank ignores all the activity around him, staring at her in that extremely focused way of his from yesterday, when he made his surprise entrance at the gelateria.
“Better not to tell you now.” Milena Migliari thinks that at this point it’s too late to save face; she might as well be herself to the bitter end. “So you’ll be objective.”
Nick Cruickshank thinks about it, serious; he nods. “Makes sense. But we need someplace quiet to taste it, right? Away from all this chaos?”
Milena nods too, in a way very similar to his; once again it’s like their mannerisms are mutually infectious, it’s difficult to explain.
Even Nick Cruickshank might realize it, because he stands there staring at her for a moment; then he points in the opposite direction of everyone busy unloading and transporting things and sets off.
Milena Migliari follows him, but she realizes she’s running the risk of transforming the gelato tasting into a sort of moment of truth, the opposite of what she had in mind when she followed the absurd impulse to come here and ask for his opinion. She had imagined unceremoniously preparing him a cup or a cone, hearing his impressions; it seems like she’s managed to make an already bad idea worse.
Nick Cruickshank guides her to the end of the west side of the house, but instead of opening the door he makes a quick gesture and continues walking, with his strangely elastic and undulated stride. They pass through a patch of lawn, walk alongside a wooden fence inside of which are several small dark horses that approach the fence to observe them. Just beyond is a wood of holm oaks, dense.
Milena Migliari would like to say that it isn’t necessary to go so far for the tasting, that any old reasonably quiet room is fine; instead she remains silent and follows him, gripping the handle of her stupid flowery cooler.
Nick Cruickshank turns to glance at her, motions, takes off down a path in the woods without saying anything. He doesn’t even have a coat or winter jacket on now, just that red one with the purple stripes.
The farther they go into the woods, the more Milena Migliari wonders whether he hasn’t interpreted her request for an opinion on two gelato flavors in the most mistaken way possible: after all, he is a first-class predatory male, probably accustomed to snatching any female who comes within his reach. But she’s far from sure about it; and anyway, she continues walking behind him, borne by a current in which puzzlement and curiosity are mixed in almost equal measure.
They walk in silence, at a good pace; Nick Cruickshank turns around a couple of times to check that she’s still following him; he gives her just the hint of a smile, in the shadows of the woods. There are leaves that rustle beneath their feet, branches that crunch; the smells of bark, of moss, of mushrooms. Milena Migliari is reminded of an article she read about “forest baths,” and the mental and physical benefits of walking among the trees, owing not simply to the purity of the air and the distance from the built-up and inhabited world, but also to several volatile organic compounds that trees release in their immediate vicinity to protect themselves from molds and bacteria. Two Japanese scholars did experiments on urbanites and discovered that after walking for a while in the woods their blood pressure and heart rate diminished, along with their levels of adrenaline. She doesn’t know if this is really the case, but it’s a fact that she feels less agitated than a few minutes ago, though her confusion hasn’t dissipated. But it’s a muffled confusion, soft, almost pleasant: more a state of suspension than disorientation. She follows Nick Cruickshank, who walks among the trees with his strange gait and his lively colors against the monochromatic background of the trunks, and in a couple of instances she thinks that this situation could be purely imaginary if it weren’t for the very real weight of the cooler she holds in her hand. She also thinks that she’d like to make a woods-flavored gelato; not wild berry, but woods, pure and simple. She wonders how she might go about it, without making use of clichés like the pine essences used in air fresheners. It’s far from simple: What do the woods taste like?
It seems like they could continue walking along the path indefinitely, but instead they suddenly come out into the light of a clearing, in a circular meadow on the edge of which is a small stone cottage. Nick Cruickshank points to it, with an expression that seems strangely timid.
Milena Migliari would once again like to say something, so as not to worsen any misunderstanding that might have been created; but once again she’s silent, gazing at the little house.
Nick Cruickshank heads straight for the door, bends down to fish around in a bush, pulls out a key, opens the door, turns around, and gestures to invite her in.
Milena Migliari walks inside, with cautious steps: it’s almost dark, apart from a few swaths of light filtering in. It smells of lemon verbena, damp wood, the smoke of burnt wood and burnt grass. There’s a winter jacket and raincoat hanging from a rack, a pair of rubber boots on the rough planks of the floor.
Nick Cruickshank goes to open the shutters of three small windows, lets the light in from outside: the room is spartan, with a stone sink, a camping cooker on a shelf, an old rustic table, three straw-bottomed chairs, a Provençal-style couch, a vertical piano, a wood-burning stove in a corner, chopped wood in a basket.
Milena Migliari sets her cooler down on the table, trying to gather her thoughts. She thinks about telling Nick Cruickshank that this place has too dense an atmosphere, that it risks confounding the gelato tasting rather than making it more transparent. But she doesn’t.
“It’s the only refuge from the invasion.” Nick Cruickshank looks at her, and he doesn’t seem at all like the first-class predatory male who just succeeded in attracting a female into his den: on the contrary, he too seems deeply perplexed. He opens one of the windows, looking out in the direction of the main house, but all that’s visible are the clearing and the trees. Only noises reach them, muffled by the woods and the distance: electric saws or drills, some yelling.
Milena Migliari starts to ask why he doesn’t consider her a part of the invasion as well; then she thinks that she doesn’t want to know.
Nick Cruickshank closes the window, goes to open the door to the stove: insi
de it’s already prepared with paper and wood, of various sizes. He strikes a match, lights the paper, blows on the first tiny flames until the fire catches. He crouches there watching, transfixed.
Milena Migliari walks over to the window, turns back; she walks over to the sink, turns back. She tries to keep some distance between them, though she isn’t sure it’s necessary; the same way she isn’t sure it’s necessary to light the stove for the gelato tasting. She points to the cooler on the table. “It’ll only take five minutes.”
Nick Cruickshank nods, but immediately points to a wooden staircase in a corner of the room. “You want to see upstairs?”
Milena Migliari thinks about saying no, but he’s already going up, so she follows him, up the little stairs that creak. She looks around extremely cautiously, watches him open the shutters of three more small windows: in the afternoon light emerge the blue of the bedcover, the yellows and reds and greens of some books on two shelves, the black and white of the cases of a guitar and a smaller instrument, the oxidized-copper color of the stovepipe that crackles and pops as the fire below slowly heats it.
Nick Cruickshank gestures as if to say That’s it. He smiles, again with that strange hint of shyness, so unexpected in someone like him.
“So, are we going to do the tasting?” Milena Migliari tries to refocus on the original reason for their incursion, but she has to make an effort, because she is finding it very difficult to concentrate, every tiny detail distracts her. She goes down the wooden stairs, back to the room below.
Nick Cruickshank follows her down, almost immediately; he stops at the foot of the stairs, waiting.
Milena Migliari opens the cooler on the old walnut table, a bit worm-eaten and fissured but still as solid as the tree it came from. She takes out the one-pound Styrofoam container, the spatula, the paper boxes with cones, cups, and spoons. Arranging everything gives her a sense of purpose, attenuates the confusion inside her. She takes a breath, tears off the tape keeping the cover on.
Nick Cruickshank comes a few steps closer; he stops to look at the container, looks back at her.
“Don’t look yet.” She thinks that she might as well trust her instincts now, stop trying to complicate matters.
“Okay.” He lifts his hands up, covering his eyes.
“Wait.” She’s surprised at how fluid the communication is between them, as soon as rationality is taken out of the equation. “What do you want, a cone or a cup?”
He lowers his hands, looking at her. “It makes a big difference, right?”
She nods, serious; even if being serious now seems like a kind of game to her, just like everything else.
“Explain it to me.” He smiles, but he really is waiting for an explanation; his patience contrasts spectacularly with the urgency he communicated to her the other times she’s seen him.
“To begin with, the cone requires only one hand.” These are things she’s reflected on many times to herself but never said out loud to anyone. “It’s perfectly fine if you want to eat your gelato while you’re walking and talking and looking around.”
“So it’s the most superficial choice?” He has this way of looking at her, as if he isn’t expecting just any old response, but the truth, and not only about this.
“Not necessarily.” She shakes her head; she feels intense pleasure at the responsibility he just assigned her, and in the attention with which he’s observing her, seemingly unlimited in both depth and duration.
“Because, on the other hand, the cone requires no intermediation, right?” He continues staring at her; they’re on the identical wavelength.
“It lets you establish the most direct possible connection between your mouth and the gelato.” She realizes she’s emphasizing words the same way he does, but it isn’t mimicry: she used to do it when she was a little girl, too; she’s always done it. They’re similar in this.
“Like our ancestors who ate fruit straight off the tree, without even picking it off first with their hands.” He moves a hand as if it’s a branch approaching his mouth, flaring out his lips with the expression of a ravenous hominid.
She laughs; she thinks that his mimicking abilities shouldn’t surprise her, given his line of work, but they do. “Or like a baby sucking milk from a breast.”
He laughs too, but quickly turns serious. “So the cup is the most mediated choice?”
She thinks that she could have spared herself the comment about the baby and the breast; she shakes her head. “Not necessarily.”
He tilts his head to one side: he’s clearly examining the question from every possible angle, with a surprising lack of preconceptions. “The type of spoon you use is important as well, right?”
“Yes, obviously.” She nods energetically, and yet it still doesn’t seem enough. “It changes everything; for example, if your tongue slides over plastic, or picks up the cold taste of metal. It makes a big difference.”
“Huge.” The emphasis in his voice might suggest he’s mocking her, but one look at his eyes suffices to know that that’s not the case. One look at him. “And which one do you prefer?”
“Wood.” She gets real pleasure out of replying immediately, without a pause. “Slightly porous, so the tongue has to scratch its surface a little as it seeks out the flavor.” It’s like a contact sport now: like grabbing each other’s arms and pushing each other back and forth, with strength and gentleness.
He pulls on a lock of his hair. He has this extraordinarily flexible physique: forward, backward, to one side, to the other. But he’s also very sturdy, standing there with his feet firmly planted. “So what are the advantages of the cup, with respect to the cone?”
She tilts her head as well, practically the same way he did; much as she’s thought about it, she’s never been able to reach a definitive conclusion. “It certainly forces you to concentrate more on the gelato. To look at it more as well.”
He cups his hands around his eyes as if to look, with a candor that seems impossible but must be real. “You get a better idea of when it’s about to end, too.”
“Yes. Yes.” She realizes she’s had a terrible need to communicate like this to someone, for who knows how long. Forever, really. Or at least since elementary school, when she spent entire afternoons talking and laughing and playing with her friend Tania; it’s a need both very strange and completely natural. “The little wooden spoon scrapes on the waxed paper bottom, the empty cup makes that sound like the crackle of a small speaker.”
“But it is a little speaker!” His body trembles, his eyes light up. “When I was a little boy in Manchester my brother and I would take two empty cups of that awful industrial ice cream that every so often we managed to get my parents to buy for us, we’d make a little hole in the bottoms, string a thread through them, knot it and pull it taut, and we had a telephone!”
“I did that too, with my friend Tania!” She’s shaken by the realization that they both had the same experience, over such a great distance of time and space; and once again it seems like it couldn’t be any other way.
“But if you have a cone the end is much more gradual, right?” He continues in this unfiltered, exhilarating flow of communication. “Your tongue is able to reach a tiny amount of gelato even when it seems like there’s none left.”
“And after a certain point the gelato’s flavor and consistency blend with those of the cone.” She can taste the contrasting flavors and consistencies with perfect clarity, just by talking about them.
“Oh, yes!” He moves in front of her like he’s entirely possessed by the sensations they’re evoking. “And when the gelato is all finished you can go on munching on what’s left of the cone, all the way down to the point. You can make it last a minute longer, or much more. You can even hold that little piece of empty half-eaten cone in your hand for an hour if you want.”
“Yes, but the gelato is finished.” She’d like to say something else, but she’s unable to choose among all the different impulses passing through her body.
Both of them are silent, looking at each other and not looking, in the cottage in the middle of the woods, in the damp air slowly warming up from the fire in the stove.
“And how about eating gelato in a crystal cup?” He gestures with deliberate theatricality, in a sort of self-reference. “With a silver spoon?”
“Baaah.” She grimaces in disgust, sincerely. “It doesn’t get any more wrong than that, if you want my opinion.”
“Of course I want your opinion.” He grins widely. “It’s an even exchange, seeing as how you want mine, right?”
“Uh-huh.” But she wonders what exactly she really wants his opinion about. About her fior di latte and persimmon gelato? About the sense in making it? About what’s supposed to happen on Monday? About the future? About right now?
“Anyway, the other night I ate your gelato straight out of the container.” He laughs. “Unlike the others, who had it served to them in crystal cups.”
She realizes she has forgotten why they’re here; she recovers with a twitch, takes the cover off the container.
He backs up, rather than approaching. “But we still haven’t decided how I have to taste it.”
She shakes her head. “I certainly can’t tell you. You have to choose.” Yes, there’s something delicious about this game, and worrisome, for how innocent it is and is not.
He puts his hand on his forehead: a gesture she saw him make the other day in the gelateria, as well as in a music video a few years ago. He closes his eyes. “Cup. No. Cone.”
“Make up your mind.” She goads him on; she likes this, too.
“I don’t know.” He shakes his head. “It seems like each of the two possibilities implies an intolerable sacrifice.”
She feels a tickle rise within her, a current of delight that’s electrifying. “Who said that there are only two possibilities?”
He suddenly looks dismayed; from his expression it’s clear that his thoughts are traveling rapidly in various directions. “You mean I could taste it straight out of the tub?”
Imperfect Delight Page 21
