Love Is Strange (A Paranormal Romance) (25 page)

“I hate you forever now. I never have any luck with men! This is the worst!
Maledetta
, why am I a woman? Why am I cursed like this? I hate Capri! I want to go back to Brazil! I want the deepest, darkest jungle on earth... A place where I will never see a man again! I should go to the Amazon and turn into a lesbian like the Amazons.”

Gavin put both his hands over his face. Then, he looked up between his fingers. “Farfalla, we are never gonna work this out, if you keep cracking me up like that. That is just the funniest thing I ever heard anyone say. You are
so adorable
. I swear that I would
kill myself
to see you happy! Please, have some pity on me! Take anything from me! You can have anything you want!”

“I
already promised that to you
... and that didn’t work! Why is life like this, for us? We must be crazy.”

“Look, we can’t possibly be trapped like this. There must be
some
way out for us. Look, we both
know the future!
Maybe we know it in two very different ways, but obviously, we both know the future. I mean, I know you know, and you know I know. We are in complete agreement about that, right? We can’t just stare at each other like a snake and a chicken.”

“You go your snake way, and I’ll go my chicken way.”

“
You’re
the snake. I’m the chicken!”

“What kind of man are you? You’re a chicken, you’re not a man! We should be lighting candles in the Jacuzzi now! You should be rubbing my feet.” Farfalla began to sob. “All I get all this cold, ugly, future talk, when all I wanted to do was make a fool of myself over you! You have broken my heart! I hate you! My life is horrible! My life is a long, cold, gloomy winter.”

“I’m from Seattle! We live for that kind of weather.”

“Go home.”

“Right.” He nodded. “Well, I expected that from you. I knew it would come to this moment. Because it had to come to this. Sooner or later. Better now, before we make a big mistake.”

“Go home, Gavin. Don’t look at me at me anymore. Go, go now. Go away and never come back here. Save yourself. I love you, but I am poison to you... Get up, leave me, save your life. Please go.”

He did it. He nodded and obeyed her. He clambered to his feet, slung his bag over his shoulder. He left without looking back. He just marched off, steady as a martyred hero, downhill, toward the chairlift and down to the little town, waiting below.

He vanished from her world.

An hour later, very drunk, Farfalla also left the mountaintop. She had to stagger down the hill, down the long, tottering slopes, in the menacing darkness, because of her stark terror about the chairlift.

The wobbling heel snapped from her shoe. Her injured ankle was swollen and blue. She limped and reeled.

Her borrowed car was littered with yellow traffic tickets.

10
“This is ridicolous! I want Lega Nord here, and kill the major of this ugly place!”

11
“I love you! My heart is yours! Is hot in here or is the nearness of you?”

Chapter Fifteen: Consequences Ever After

Gavin caught a cab in the plaza near the base of the chairlift. There would be no sleep for him on this starry, jet-lagged night.

It would take everything he had just to hold himself together, tonight.

Just a few hours until he left the island. He knew those hours already. He could see them in their stark ugliness. They would be bitter, wakeful, grainy-eyed hours of second-guessing, of bitter recrimination...
Why didn’t I do this for her? Why didn’t I try for her?
Bitter, soul-piercing moments.

Gavin leaned his dizzy head against the taxi window. The hours of anguish would pass. The hours were already passing. The terrible urgency of his crisis was becoming one with the past.

A failed love affair was like almost being hit by a car. At first, you can’t believe it’s happening at all. It’s startling, it’s jolting, it destroys your sense of security. The heart pounding, the hands sweating, the hair standing up on the back of your neck.

Then, it dawns on you that the car did not crush you. Maybe skill, maybe dumb luck, but you remain untouched. The long chain of terrible events that follows being smashed by a car is not happening. It is now trouble that you dodged in your past. It is not your future.

Gavin avoided the gabbling, jostling convention crowd in the hotel lobby. He hustled up the empty stairs to his hotel room. He methodically packed his bags.

Then, he had to venture over to Eliza’s hotel, in the deepest, darkest middle of the night, to assemble and pack her scattered, teenage possessions. Eliza had simply run off, scampered off to her discos, abandoning all of it.

“If you don’t get that stuff, I’m leaving it all behind.” That was her text message. He couldn’t blame her for being so stubborn because, as her brother, he knew where that family trait came from.

Such a cute, funky little place, Eliza’s cool hotel. So full of off-the-wall Old World charm. She had scattered her striped Gothic socks everywhere, thrown a big ugly towel onto the floor by the window... Eliza’s bathroom was cluttered with her leaky cosmetic toys, with unlikely names like “Hard Candy” and “Urban Decay.”

Gavin could have stayed in this hotel room, so happily... Rolled around in the linen sheets on that very bed there, maybe, even — but no. Don’t think about that prospect. That didn’t happen. Thank God.

He was never coming back to Capri. Not ever. That lesson had been burned into him like a branding iron. It was still smarting, and it was still painful, but he could see the future shape of that scar now. It was a spiritual tattoo.

After clearing things with the concierge on the graveyard shift, Gavin called another cab. He could have easily walked the small distance to his own hotel, but he felt a superstitious certainty that he would somehow run into Farfalla Corrado, somewhere on the sidewalk. There was no reason for Farfalla Corrado to be wandering the streets of Capri at midnight, but there was no reason for her to be anywhere else, either.

Thank God that she had lost her temper and told him to leave. He would never have managed to leave her, not on his own. He lacked the willpower to free himself from her. Her power over him had him helpless.

What a strange thing to learn about himself. Farfalla Corrado would always be proof to him that he didn’t know himself. That little Italian girl in her silly high-heel shoes had kicked the foundation-blocks of his psyche apart. Her blinding presence in his life was like a cave-dweller’s one glimpse of sunlight.

Lightning from a clear blue sky. Well, he did not want any more boy-meets-girl scenarios. Boy-meets-girl, whenever that happened, was supposed to be good, cute fun, like a romantic comedy. This event had not been good, cute fun. This was a shattering encounter with the feminine principle. She had spun his universe like a yin-yang.

He could no longer trust himself, his own impulses. Her number was still in his phone, for heaven’s sake. He knew her email. How long before he lost his last scrap of pride, and went begging to her? The Italian opera scenario! Mad love, daggers, screaming, poisons, and stilettos!

Who would be his ally in a situation like this? Who would help him out of this danger? Madeleine — Madeleine could help him, but of course, he could never tell
her
about this... He could never tell
anyone
. It would have to be someone who knew nothing about this.

No such person existed! What kind of savior did a man have, a rescuer who did not even exist? Important people, who could save you from yourself, but who did not even exist...

An insight came to him. It rose from within his distress, as a piece of genuine wisdom. A saying from his guru, Dr. Gustav Y. Svante. “Real Futurists have children.”

And that was it. That was the key. That important. That natural. An idea of utter simplicity.

His children were important people who did not exist.

His unborn kids, the future. His father’s grandchildren. A man should live to see his grandchildren. That was right, and that was proper. There were other people in this world who mattered, besides Gavin Tremaine. When he put his self-pity aside, his temptations, his own needs, his own greeds, the answer was obvious.

The son gives his father a grandson. A tremendous consolation prize from life, which only a child can give to a parent. That adult act on his part would transform his father’s wintry suffering. It would temper his father’s fruitless anguish, the real estate crisis, his declining fortunes, his fear, his illness, his many miseries. Good old Granddad would sit in his easy chair with a happy tot on his knee. A new agenda, new players in the game. The people of a transformed world.

It was time for him to do this. That was the great future lesson that events had offered. He could no longer be the thoughtless, footloose young man who had come to this island. Gavin Tremaine had to become a different man.

He could knowledgeably prepare himself for the inevitable.

Gavin left his hotel room. The phone might ring up there, he might be found in that room, that was too dangerous. He hauled the luggage downstairs, checked out at the hotel desk, and hid inside the hotel’s reading room. He had never seen any human soul reading books in the hotel reading room, so he felt safe from any disturbance there. He could brood there, plotand scheme about his future, undisturbed.

Gavin pulled another Mark Twain book from the huge fake-antique bookcase. The great American comic novelist had written heaps of travel books, apparently. Gavin sat in a leather reading chair with the Twain book flopped open in his lap. Gavin took on the studious look of a man in deep literary communion. Just in case anyone dropped by.

Gavin was not reading, but thinking. He was thinking hard about an American girl. Actually, Gavin was thinking about baseball. The two concepts were deeply connected for him.

There had been a time, at the age of seventeen, when Gavin had been pretty good at playing baseball. Great at baseball, because he was so lousy at everything else. He’d been failing at his posh private school, because it was so obvious that the things taught there were not true. The things his teachers said about the past were self-serving and inaccurate. Their corny notions of the future were flabby and delusional.

Being seventeen years old, Gavin had had to point these facts out to his teachers. Not to be combative or surly, but just because he knew better — and his father hit the roof. It was the first time in his life when he and his father were seriously on the outs. The old man had cracked down on him, told him to stop sassing off. Gavin’s grades went to hell. Every day brought ugly struggle. The atmosphere at home was icy, mixed with fury.

So, Gavin changed schools. At his Seattle public high school, he went out for baseball. Gavin Tremaine: the baseball jock. He was a big, strong 17-year-old guy in a uniform, with a club in his hands. Whacking baseballs out of the park was something active he could do that didn’t involve pounding his father.

Gavin played left field. He wasn’t the strongest kid on his team, or the fastest. He did have one supreme talent at the sport of baseball, though. He knew what was going to happen during the game.

Baseball had a narrative. Baseball had a flow. You could listen to baseball on radio, and get the whole game clear in your head, without even seeing the players. “The count is two and two, now the shortstop is closing in...” Narrating baseball games was practically as exciting as baseball itself.

They made him the captain of the team. He was a natural for that role. A polite, good-looking kid, his dad on the city council, from a socially prominent family... He showed up for every practice, stayed in shape, had a good arm, led the league in stolen bases. Who wouldn’t like that?

The captain is the motivator of the team. He’s the strategist, he’s the inspiration. Gavin was the captain of a winning baseball team. A team that traditionally sucked pretty badly, but not when he was the captain. Put him in the dugout, and he could lead a rally. He had a winning season. And every teamloves a winning season. The parents love it. . The school loves it. Everybody loves a winner.

The baseball diamond was the arena in which his troubled life seemed pretty good. A winning team has fans. And one of those fans was a girl even from his own school. She was from a rival school, but she watched all the games.

More to the point, she watched him. Gavin was not the kind of dork to miss a pretty girl giving him the eye, so he asked around. It turned out that this pretty girl was “Madeleine Lindholm.” Madeleine’s dad was his dad’s worst enemy. They made Seattle council meetings raucous, banging heads about their city planning schemes. Council member Tremaine and Council member Lindholm hated each other’s guts.

So, what was with Juliet, sitting up in the stands? Well, Romeo was good-looking. Madeleine Lindholm thought he was cute. She had a crush on the captain of the baseball team. As simple as that, really.

Madeleine Lindholm was approachable. She was a sensible girl. She was given to flat, realistic assessments about things. Straight talk. “Our parents are being a pain.” Stuff like that. “It sucks that our dads fight all the time.” Madeleine was easy to understand.

Gavin enjoyed taking Madeleine Lindholm home to meet his folks. Little Elizabeth loathed and feared Madeleine, but she was just a goofy little kid. His mom was kind and polite to Madeleine. His dad was frankly flummoxed by the situation. His dad was plainly conflicted by it all. His dad couldn’t very well declare, “Son, you shouldn’t be having sex in your car every Friday night with the daughter of my worst enemy.” Obviously, this was the part of the story that his dad secretly thought was terrific.

Madeleine was his peacemaker. Some guy’s girlfriends howled at them, or yelled, or clung, or made crazy emotional demands. Not Madeleine. Madeleine was a supportive and stabilizing presence in his life.

Gavin got along fine with Madeleine’s family. The Lindholms were nouveau-riche right-wingers. Progressive Seattle had so few seriously right-wing people that Madeleine’s family was a broadening source of insight for Gavin. To know them was to know why certain things in America were always the way they were. He cherished them.