Carnaro

'Or his taste in chicken,' said Martina.

I put down the paper and looked out at the luminous floor of cloud below. Further down, appearing at intervals as indeterminate flashes of grey and brown, was America. Europe as I remembered it, as a repository of shadow and unreason, was gone forever. The light reflected by the clouds shone through the plane's window, spotlighting Martina's newly botoxed forehead. I looked down at her legs, her black nylon calves panther-sleek beneath the tight hem of her skirt. The elaborate facing of her polished ivory blouse mimicked the texture of the clouds outside, the bow at the neck giving way to an arrangement of folds like the inner structure of an organelle. The first time I had unbuttoned it, I was surprised at the ease with which it had come undone.

'Two more hours,' she said. 'Shall we eat?'

I nodded and she pressed the intercom.

'Gabriel, we're ready.'

'Oui madame, uno momento.'

'He needs to straighten out which Romance language he thinks he's speaking,' I said.

'You'll never guess what he wants to be.'

'A stunt cock?'

'A director. Darinko mark two. We may get to see growing up gay in Guadalajara after all.'

'Not him too.'

'I'm not sure, but at this stage I suspect all aesthetes.'

She was untypically quiet over dinner, as she had been since we had left New York.

'Are you alright?' I said.

'Shareholders. They freak me out,' she said. Her smile, when she looked up at me, was too bright. 'I can't handle their zeal. Especially the Americans.'

'You want a Xanax?'

'I've had one.'

I lost interest in my food and watched her eating, remembering what a hot widow she had made. The morning of the funeral, I had her put on just her veil and gloves before fucking her on the bed in which Mick had died. She seemed to take pleasure from defiling the sites that were repositories of certain memories of their life together. We had bought the hotel in Florence where she and Mick had honeymooned, for example, and thrown a week-long party before having the place bulldozed.

'You never talk about him,' I said.

'Who?' she said.

'You know.'

'You should have had the fish.' She pointed her knife at her plate.

'Mick liked fish,' I said. 'His fucking seafood fetish.'

She laughed.

'I know what you're trying to do,' she said. 'It's not going to work.'

'I just think it's strange,' I said. 'He was your husband. You had a life with the man. But you never mention him now.'

'They're called "dead" for a reason,' she said. 'What fucking use to me is he now?'

'Grieving is a process, they reckon,' I said.

'Grief is a good racket,' she said. 'When they're distraught, they'll buy anything you put in front of them.'

The ensuing silence was punctuated with the salacious hiss of compressed air. I shivered as we crossed into a former time zone. If we had kept flying west indefinitely, we might have travelled back to a day in July four years ago when we had first looked at each other across a hotel lobby. But the same regression, I realized, would also have brought Mick back to life. She would be with him again and I would be back where I had started, consoling myself with fantasies of flying to California aboard a private jet.

I never wanted to go back. The past was hateful to me, unreal, like the scenario of a forgettable movie. Her eyes, otherwise vacant, gazed into mine in sympathy. I didn't tell her enough how beautiful they were.

*

They had intended retiring to the house overlooking Lake Tahoe some day. Built in the Fifties as a summer retreat for an Oakland industrialist, it had been appropriated by his dissolute youngest son, a minor player in San Francisco's late Seventies porn scene. The crowd that gathered around him, a mixture of bohemian Bay Area yuppies and sex industry parasites, had stayed around until the money ran out, some time in the mid-Eighties. He had subsequently been busted for statutory rape and violating the Mann Act and had hung himself in his cell while on remand.

The house had stood empty for ten years before Mick and Martina bought it in 1995. She had taken a fascinating series of photos of the place as they had found it that first day. The remoteness of its location had kept the site free from looters and what Martina's camera had captured was a perfectly preserved record of its last days of human habitation. Here too, it seemed, everything had been permitted; in the massive sunken front lounge where an unopened bottle of tequila, maypoled in cobwebs, sat upon an old walnut bodied TV set; in the drained pool, whose walls were daubed with black handprints; in the rotted hot-tub, where snakes had made their home in the midst of a pile of discarded fuck-books, empty ether bottles and dot matrix print-outs.

I had the photos published for her, a limited edition of one, in a book I had presented to her on her last birthday. She had seemed more unnerved than touched by the gesture.

In restoring the place, they had remained as faithful as they could to the original design. The theme was ranch-house in accordance with the wishes of the original owner who had banal ideas about the frontier and the outdoor life. The weird touches -- a spiral staircase in gold leaf ascending to the attic, Romanesque windows of stained glass depicting scenes from the grail quest in one of the bathrooms -- were down to his second wife, an amphetamine psychotic former opera singer with a Wagner obsession. Martina had ordered exact reproductions of the windows but had managed to salvage and restore the original spiral staircase. 'A monument to Eisenhower-era insanity,' she said the first time we had climbed it together. The attic above had been converted into a scarcely used editing suite by the son -- another one with cinematic visionary delusions -- and Martina had retained it as such. That day, we had watched some rushes from a recent shoot in Jamaica -- wealthy middle-aged women, all friends of Martina, getting fucked by local teenage boys -- and she had sucked my cock to orgasm as I looked out at the lake through a bay window, the bliss of the climax tainted by a strange restlessness.

As the chopper approached the helipad cut into the left flank of the forest that surrounded the house on three sides, I felt that same sensation once again but decided it was only jetlag. Martina was exhausted but insisted that she had to finish some editing.

'This is supposed to be time off,' I said.

'Just a couple of hours,' she said, shouting to make herself heard over the noise of the departing helicopter. 'The new stuff from France with Anabel is pretty special.'

Bell, bell bell, repeated a bird somewhere in the forest.

She took my arm as we walked towards the back of the house.

'You know we have the same birthday?' she said.

'Who?'

'Me and Anabel. And it's so funny because she reminds me so much of myself at nineteen.'

'Because you were getting fucked up the ass for a living at nineteen as well.'

'I was dreaming about it. I was dreaming about this place.' She nodded to the house ahead of us. 'It was all of a piece. When I first came here, it was like it had been waiting for me. And you. You were here as well.'

'You've lost me.'

'You know what I'm talking about.' We had reached the steps that led up to the back porch. 'We've always been here. We've walked this ground so many times, in so many different forms.'

I saw her and I in the Fifties, masked and in evening dress at a New Year's Eve ball, drunk on champagne beneath the winking eye of a primitive satellite; hip, radical and luded out as the Sixties became the Seventies; loved up on Dallas X, full of scorn and pity for the decommissioned factories and earnestness of former generations at the dawn of the cybernetic Eighties.

'We're home,' said Martina.

*

She was taking off her make-up when I came into the bedroom, her skin waxy and shining with glycerin under the glare of the lightbulbs surrounding the mirror of her old theatrical dressing table. Her face looked vulnerable without paint, weak around the eyes that were otherwise so prominent. She let fall a blackened wipe that she had used to remove her mascara and looked at my reflection looking at hers.

I had given her the robe she had on. She wore it unbelted, allowing me to see a naked breast in profile, made delicious by the opal coloured silk about it. The colour matched her eyes, emphasized the quality of her skin. She turned around to face me, her slicked back hair flattened to her head and curling up inquisitively at the nape of her neck. The parting of her robe formed an aisle along the central length of her body, one that insisted upon being ascended.

Though it was supposed to be our room, I had no presence there, just as I lacked the same in every other part of the house. No matter how long I stayed there, I would never be anything more than an interloper. It was hers, all of it. The disquiet I had felt in the chopper blossomed in earnest, manifesting itself in an accelerating snowball of nausea. I looked down at my hands, disheartened by how the marks of age had begun to make them look unfamiliar. They belonged to a strange old man whose face I couldn't picture.

'You're pale,' she said. 'You should come to bed.'

The word lulled me.

'I don't feel too hot,' I said, bending down to untie my shoes.

'That's to be expected,' she said.

I stripped down to my boxers and lay upon the bed. In spite of my sickness, I had a painful hard-on. I felt crazed with the dissonance of being so physically aroused yet feeling such a total absence of lust. Martina wanted to fuck. I knew by the way she raised her arms to let her robe slip to the floor, the ceremonial stance of her naked body before the mirror. She had internalized the tropes of porn to such a degree that she had become pornographic, an emanation from a delirious, value-free world normally only glimpsed on the far side of an LCD. I touched my cock but the hardness still had the inorganic texture of a functional piece of hardware at the periphery of a network.

Martina stretched, thrusting her head back and her breasts forward, one hand moving in a circle on her stomach.

'I'm so tired and I'm not tired? Do you ever feel that way?' The bed sighed as she placed a knee on its edge. 'I don't know how I feel.'

She took my foot in her hands and began to massage it.

'You can cure a man via his feet,' she said. 'Or kill him.'

'How would you kill him?' I said.

'Find the weaknesses and work on them,' she said. 'Murder, by stealth. Death by increment. He's dead before he knows it.'

She moved a hand up to my knee, her tongue in the groove between my first and second toe.

'I could be dead, then,' I said.

'You could be.'

Her eyes were saurian beneath the vestigial remains of her brows above a tongue that crawled up my calf and onto my thigh in a sequence of figures of eight. The further north she moved, the more I felt of her substance; what had initially been the airiness of limbs in motion gave way to the density of the muscle and bone of her upper body. Stripped of all eroticism, I felt her movement as a shift in the balance of power, a gradual divestment of my physical autonomy. Once she had attained my thighs and climbed astride them, I was helpless.

Though I could feel the heat of her breath and of her cunt, she felt cold, indifferent; at once the sterility of ecclesiastical marble and the deathless stability of an as yet unsynthesized compound from which both the civic monuments and the prostheses of the future would be made. When she swooned forward, I thought of her and I arrayed as such, our new, post-human bodies capable of fucking passionlessly for entire millennia; expressing a pure sexuality, one no longer contaminated by the dynamics of emotion and reproduction; the fucking of android deities in the ideal of a virtual paradise.

Desire, the infinite stuff...It had no brain, no body.

I kissed her with my dead lips, searching with increasing hopelessness for even the memory of excitement but there was nothing.