Wonderland (29 page)

He’s been making me playlists, sonic valentines that are also helping me catch up, although I’m not sure that I’ll ever quite catch up now. Once you step away, you will always be at least a breath behind. The beat moves on. Was the world this tender, this open before? Is it love or is it real, my sense from what he plays for me that he comes from a lighter, faster, more fluid generation where melancholy is the aquifer? When did this happen? He listens to music from Thailand, from Zimbabwe, to 1930s gospel. Time is negotiable for him; history pleats easily. His biceps, handsome though they are, remain a mystery to me, because he never muscles his way into anything. It isn’t his youth that throws me off balance, it’s his lightness. He zips across the world, the worlds, a glowing streak of ambition. He aspires to a kind of frictionless hypermobility I don’t truly understand. “I go deep with you,” he has said to me. “I get the bends.” I think this is a compliment, but it might also be a warning. And, of course, it’s true. Something has happened.

The bullet train flies on. I touch the little twisted slug in my pocket. The sea is steady outside the windows, done with hide-and-seek for the moment. Zelda is sleeping in Alicia’s lap, one of her curls wrapped around Alicia’s finger. Zach yawns, palms his head. “Are you hungry? I’m hungry.”

“You’re always hungry.”

He gnashes his teeth. “I am.” He propels himself up out of the seat, duck-foots up the aisle, stopping by Terry to lean down, confer, laugh.

Out the window on our side of the train, houses begin to appear, first many beats apart, then just a few, then in a rhythm too fast to feel as separate notes. They become a long chord. Before too long, the chord rises, punctuated by taller buildings, glimpses of highway, power lines. The train slows. As we approach a nondescript apartment building, someone flings open a double set of windows, breaking the structure’s gray surface: within, light and movement, rooms opening into other rooms, flash of sun from the windows on the wall perpendicular to the façade. I can’t make out much more than that, and then we’re past it, although the image remains—a blur, a bit of movement—pressed into my memory.

Zach returns with several elaborately painted bento boxes full of brightly colored food I don’t recognize, sits down, and begins spreading it out on our little table. I am happy to see him.

He smiles at me. “Almost there,” he says.

I am grateful to the Guggenheim Foundation, Beatrice Monti della Corte and the Santa Maddalena Foundation, Columbia University, the American Academy in Rome, and the MacDowell Colony for the gift of time and space. I was also fortunate to have the company of the Bartlett family, with special thanks to Gunner Caldwell, who named the band. I owe a particular debt of gratitude to Thomas Bartlett, also known as Doveman, for his advice and support. Without his unparalleled generosity of mind and spirit, this book could not have been written. Nor could it have been written without the support and intelligence of Maud Casey, Jennifer Charles of Elysian Fields, the incomparable Bill Clegg, Larry Cooper, Ephen Glenn Colter, Jeanne Fury, my wonderful editor Jenna Johnson, William Kentridge, Daiken Nelson, Christopher Potter, Elizabeth Povinelli, Alicia Jo Rabins, Frances Richard, and Jason Sellards and Scissor Sisters. I also thank Martin Glaz Serup and his poem “Marken,” or “The Field,” for the image of a field in crisis.

S
TACEY
D’E
RASMO
is a recipient of Guggenheim and Stegner Fellowships, the author of three previous novels and a book of nonfiction,
The Art of Intimacy.
Her work has also appeared in
The New York Times
(
Magazine
and
Book Review
),
Bookforum,
and
Ploughshares,
among others. She teaches in Columbia University’s MFA program.