The Point of Vanishing (12 page)

The swiftness of the calculations was awful.

“Merry Christmas,” I said.

“Merry Christmas.”

She stepped back inside her house, let the screen door close. But before closing the inner door, she held up one hand to the glass pane. She held it waist-high, lightly, as though she were just reassuring herself that the glass existed. Maybe she was being dramatic again, but something about it moved me terribly.

I drove slowly back through town, then up into the woods. Dusk had fallen. The dark beyond the farmhouse didn't feel heavy, so much as something that could rise up and swallow a man. The yellow cone of light from the headlights was a thin protection. The trees were so bright inside the light, so dark beyond. It felt like other people had once been in these woods, but now they had disappeared.

The week after the party, I found myself taking more walks than usual, examining faces more closely beneath the porticoes on Via Irnerio. Wherever I went, Milena's presence felt close to me, as though I was perpetually on the verge of seeing her. Even inside the apartment, I found myself getting up from my desk at odd times, poking my head out into the stairwell, listening for footsteps or a voice. I wondered if I would recognize her voice—I couldn't remember it exactly, only the smoothness of it, the
way it seemed not to interrupt the moonlight. I told myself to calm down, not to be such a daydreamer, but the feeling I'd had when we were on the roof kept coming over me, stealing between me and whatever I was trying to write. It was like distant music, sometimes louder, sometimes softer, and it stole into every gap in my day—at breakfast over my cereal, on my walks down Via Zamboni, in the evening as I came out of the shower. It was always waiting, and I desperately hoped it would turn into more than just music. I'd never felt anything like it. It seemed too persistent, too beautiful not to come closer and take form.

Juan Ignacio told me she lived upstairs, but just coming out of our apartment and looking up the drafty stairs made my heart hammer in my chest. Besides, what had started between us had started in a way that didn't follow any conventions, and I felt almost superstitious about letting it continue that way. Usually, if I liked a girl and there were signs she liked me, I was able to ask her out without hesitation. But this was entirely different. Nothing from my past seemed to apply. Since the eye accident, I hadn't had a girlfriend. Senior year, I'd dated more than ever before, but that just meant staying one step ahead of intimacy, a kind of musical chairs, so I'd never have to face myself or a woman when the music stopped. But what I'd felt on the rooftop with Milena had connected with a longing that frightened me in its intensity. Perhaps it had always been there, but it had become palpable only since the accident. I didn't know what it was made of exactly, but it had something to do with that gap between what was behind my eyes and what was outside them, and with the need to be with a woman who could make contact with both, who could make each realm as real as the other.

But as the March days wore on, and as I ate lunch with Juan Ignacio trying to pay attention to his rhapsodies about Italian women, my doubts began to grow. Had I misread our conversation? Had that softness in her eyes not been for me but just for
something she was remembering about herself, that teenager in her grandmother's garden? The possibility made it difficult to eat. I'd been so certain when we said good-bye that we'd see each other again. But a week had passed. Sometimes, staring out my window late in the day, the shadows of the porticoes slanting long in the street, I knew she'd felt it, knew we'd both felt it moving below us. Maybe it had scared her for some reason. Maybe I had to go find her. But then I'd remember the two men she'd been dancing with and my stomach would catch. Maybe every man fell in love with her a little. Maybe she was out of my league. Maybe our rooftop conversation had been just a pleasant diversion for her, a minor perk in her evening.

But whatever I told myself, however I tried to slow my heart, the distant music kept on playing. Reading at night on my mattress, I came across a beautiful passage in
All the Pretty Horses
, and I imagined reading it to her, imagined how she would enjoy it. When I ate at the stand-up pizzeria on Via Irnerio, I thought of bringing her there, not to eat but just to introduce her to the stout pizza lady who called me
Caro
and always asked if I had a girl. Strangely, I was more aware of what I enjoyed—just having Milena in my thoughts somehow made my life more worthwhile, justified it in a way. My days at my desk, my afternoons walking the city, took on meaning in what I imagined to be her eyes.

But now nearly two weeks had passed since the party, and still I hadn't seen her. I steeled my courage, put on my blue button-down, the one I thought made my eyes look best, and started up the stairs. It was just dusk, not too late to go calling on her, whatever that meant, and I hit the glowing switch in the stairwell to turn on the light. I tried to clear my head, to think what I might say, and I told myself not to say too much. But as I rounded the landing between our floors, there she was.

“It is you,” she said.

I nodded.

“I am just coming to knock on your door. It is this floor?”

“One floor down,” I said. My voice had turned into a bird that might or might not be trained.

“But you are here?”

I didn't understand.

“You are friends with them?” She pointed to the door.

“I was coming to see you.”

“But I am upstairs.”

“I was on my way up.”

“This is strange.”

“Yes.” What we were saying wasn't what we were saying.

She looked down at her feet for a moment. “You like to bicycle?”

“I don't have one here.”

“But I borrow you one. Tomorrow we ride into the hills and make a picnic. I have no classes. You are free? The weather is good.”

Everything waiting on my desk, everything I'd been hoping to finish the following day, didn't matter anymore.

“We leave in the morning. You have an appointment or so?”

The stairwell light buzzed off. It was on a timer. For a moment, I couldn't see her. Slowly the stairs appeared again, the shadow of the elevator grate. She was in silhouette. She rested her hand by the small orange glow on the wall, but did not press the switch.

“It is beautiful in the hills,” she whispered.

“Yes?”

“You will like it. You come?”

The main door opened downstairs. The light buzzed on. I squinted, took a step back. We had been standing very close.

“Yes,” I said.

“Good. Now I must go.”

She turned and went nimbly up the stairs. I listened as her footsteps faded above me. I listened until there was nothing more to listen to.

The moonlight made it impossible to sleep. It washed over the window ledge and turned the floorboards and blanket ghostly white. The snow had stopped, at least for the moment, but it carried into the room with the moonlight, as though the whole room were being buried in transparent snow. It was probably two or three in the morning, but I pulled on my snowpants, my wool sweater, and climbed up to the roof. There was a wood panel at the top of the stairs—you just had to duck your head and push hard with your shoulders—and it opened into a small square room with no heat, windows on all sides, a kind of look-out tower. The windows were opaque with frost. I picked up the shovel and wedged my way out the door, the snow waist-high. The night was astonishing. The air so clean, the tang of woodsmoke from the chimney. The sky soft and oceanic, with a few thin archipelagoes of clouds. The stars didn't shimmer as austerely as against a black sky, but they seemed more at ease. The snow in front of the house was so blue, so luminous, it looked lit from below. I began shoveling, careful not to nick the tar-paper roof, stopping every now and then to look out at the woods. The snow on the trees glittered wildly, every movement of my eye returned by millions of flecked blue shimmers. The night was so quiet. The moon was watching, and the stars were watching, and the snow slid off the edge of the roof and landed quietly on the snow below. Each time I stopped to join in the watching, I had the feeling I was showing the night's beauty to someone else, sharing it with someone who understood. I shoveled the full perimeter of the roof, a thin sweat beneath my clothes. When I turned to luxuriate in the night once more, I felt a presence behind me, a hand reaching for my hand.

“It's beautiful, isn't it?” I said.

I could feel her breathing. I could feel the touch of her hand through my glove. We looked out at the strange illuminated night, at the lunar peace of it all. There was too much beauty to be able to breathe it in alone. I didn't need to turn, didn't need to see her face.

A chill caught me from behind, the hairs at the back of my neck prickled. Without any movement, the trees seemed to go naked, the night's enchantment dissolved. Again, every star, every tree, was just survival. Everything was fighting for itself. The chill stole the air from my chest, invaded my lungs. There was no one beside me. I knew I was alone.

She rode ahead of me, opening the cool Bologna morning as she went. The sky was clear blue and we rode past the women window-shopping beneath the porticoes, past the short line at the
La Repubblica
newspaper stand, past the man from the motorcycle store out in his purple jumpsuit, then left onto Via Indipendenza, her hand signaling and nearly touching an orange city bus sweeping its turn beside her, two boys in the window pointing and smiling, then the bus pulled ahead, and the street opened to its full size: banners draped above the broad avenue with announcements I didn't try to understand, the porticoes extending in classic perspective all the way down to Piazza Maggiore. Milena glanced back, said something I didn't catch. Then she rode standing again, speeding forward towards the hills as though pulled by a magnetic force. I pedaled hard to keep pace, forgetting everything but the sunlight opening on the high walls of the apartment buildings and the ease of the invitation. It had all been so simple.

As we came into Piazza Maggiore, a man's voice was spreading through the open square over a loudspeaker. We were riding side by side now, past the Neptune statue with its shooting
fonts, past the city hall that looked like the keel of an old ship, and towards a small crowd gathered by the steps of the church. Beyond the church the street was cobblestoned, no porticoes, and soon we were on the outskirts of the city. Even now, as we rode, it was still going on. I'd felt it during her invitation on the stairwell and as we packed our picnic shoulder to shoulder in my kitchen. It had been more than two weeks since our conversation on the roof, but the conversation had never stopped. It had gone on without us. I told myself that was all it was, all I needed it to be—a conversation, a hum, a hue in the air. Slowly, I told myself, whatever happened, I would proceed slowly, and just let the feeling unfurl.

We turned up a very steep side street and it climbed like a vine. The pedals grew tight, and Milena smiled at me as I gave in and walked my bike beside her. Around the curve at the top of the hill, the pale yellow and burnt red houses stopped and the trees changed, leafy branches making a canopy over the edge of the road, tufted grasses high at their trunks. The road grew flat, and we rode easily again, the sun warm in flashes, the air cool in pockets, and then the dilapidated wooden fence that had been running alongside us stopped, and the trees stopped, and we rounded another bend and came out to a ridge. The hill sloped down steeply all green with the tops of the cypresses and pines, and far down below was Bologna. I'd felt so at ease, almost like we were riding bikes in my own neighborhood, and it was a wonder to remember we were in Italy. Milena nodded towards it, and I rode slowly behind her, looking down over the terra-cotta roofs pink in the distance and the Two Towers, streets radiating out from them in all directions, and Piazza Maggiore, neat and model-sized. I thought she'd stop, but she kept pedaling, and the ridge curved back into the trees, dipped into leafy shadow, then up a small rise, the trees fell away again, and when we emerged into the sunlight, I knew we were somewhere.

Milena braked and I pulled up beside her. “The park is not far,” she said, breathing fast. “Just on the other side of the hill. There is a road you do not see. We eat there, no?”

I looked up to our right—long grasses and wildflowers made the land sway in the breeze. The hillside formed a broad horseshoe, or a kind of bowl, rows of apple trees, with crooked branches and small white blossoms, sloping down below us.

I nodded upwards.

“But here?” she said. “It is not a park.”

A shallow ditch lined the road, and I wheeled my bike over to it and leaned one handlebar against the grassy embankment. “There's no fence.”

“Naya, maybe it is OK. I think nobody comes.”

She leaned her bike ahead of mine. We found a less steep place to begin the climb and started up. The soil was clumped between the grasses, the footing not so sure, and I thought to offer my hand. But I didn't know what would happen if we touched. I kept climbing. The hillside leveled into a little plateau before it rose up again, the tall grass wet with dew. We couldn't see the road and the road couldn't see us.

“Good?” she said.

We shook out the blanket from her pack and spread it on the grass. The blue heat buzzed. Back behind the bowl of apple trees, the road reemerged and curved around to the left, and above it, the green hills were hazed in sunlight.

“You enjoy life very much.”

I turned. She was sitting on the blanket, her hand held to her forehead. Her eyes were shaded and very deep-set with the sun. It was strange—I'd forgotten she was there, or, really, forgotten I was there, forgotten she could see me. I didn't know why I was so at home with her. It made me uneasy.

I began to unpack the sandwiches with sun-dried tomatoes and cream cheese, the blood oranges, the bottles of water.