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hannahssimblr · 2 months ago

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The restaurant is sea facing, our table on a balcony over the water, shimmering in the fading light. Astrid, in a linen dress, a thin gold chain around her neck. Supreme beauty, men turning to look at her as we sit. What it must feel like to be her, to be always the centre of attention, unable to escape the eyes of other people. I suspect I would hate it, that sometimes I’d grow tired of being looked at, and would wish I could hide from it. All those gazes, all the time. I want to shrink just thinking about it.

“Mi scusi,” she raises her hand for the waiter’s attention. “Le dispiace se spostiamo quel tavolo? Abbiamo altre due persone che si uniranno a noi.”

He shifts a table next to ours, then two chairs.

“Grazie” Astrid says sweetly.

“Well, that was easy.”

“I said it would be. You just have to ask.”

I think it depends on the person asking, personally, but instead of making my point, I simply nod and take the menu off the table to look through the pasta dishes.

Silvio and Suzana arrive arm in arm, drifting across the balcony. We stand to greet them, hug, shake hands, and as Suzana presents her cheek to me, I understand there is an expectation here to do that thing where I kiss her the way only people of a particular generation do. I press my cheek against hers and kind of kiss the air around the vicinity of her ear, feeling then, inauthentic and embarrassed.

Immediately, they clasp hands across the tablecloth. Letting go of one another for a minute is unthinkable for them, I suppose. They go on about how beautiful the view is, how tired they were after the sailboat tour, the nap they took afterwards, all while petting each other constantly. Silvio turns his palm over for Suzana to trace shapes with her nails as he explains the location of their hotel to us. She massages his forearm rhythmically, up to the crook of his elbow where his shirt is rucked, back down to his wrist again. I glance at Astrid to see what she makes of this, but her full attention is on their faces, making the right sounds so they know she’s listening. Comments to reinforce this: “Oh yes, how nice. Mmm, I’m sure.”

She isn’t the person to notice the strange behaviour of others and privately laugh about it. I can picture us later, at the villa, as she methodically undoes the buttons on her dress and hangs it in the wardrobe, saying: “Oh, Jude, that’s obviously how they show affection and stay connected to one another. Some people are just like that.” I’ll feel like bringing it up was redundant and frankly unkind.

After ordering variations of pasta dishes, our guests feed each other, dabbing sauce from one another’s faces. I offer Astrid some spaghetti, which she takes daintily off my plate and exchanges it for one piece of ravioli.

“How long is it that you are together?” Silvio asks. He has very intense, light, amber coloured eyes.

“Five months,” I say.

“Ah, that’s it? You seem you have been together longer.”

I twist spaghetti noodles around my fork.

“It’s because you seem relaxed together,” Suzana adds. “And mature.”

“Mm,” Astrid says. “That’s interesting.”

Then Silvio says: “How old are you two, anyway? It strikes me we never asked earlier.”

“Twenty-three,” she says smoothly. I rest my fork and stare across the table at her as she slides a piece of ravioli around in cream sauce. “Jude’s birthday is November, and mine December.”

“Oh, you are babies!” Suzana cries, and grasping her arm; “we shouldn’t be hanging around with you two, should we? You’re much too young.”

“Oh, I know, we’re so young, but really, we prefer to mix with an older crowd. We find more similarities than with our age group.”

Beneath the table, I nudge her chair with my shoe, and she adjusts herself and continues avoiding my eye. “And you? You know, since we’re being frank.”

“Well, I’m twenty-eight,” says Suzana. “Silvio is thirty-two.”

Astrid lifts one shoulder, an easy shrug. “Well,” she says. “There you go.”

They go on talking about other things, but again, I have been overcome by the strange, tight chested feeling I had on the boat, like my footing has gone, or like another person has come and snatched something belonging to me right out of my hands. The food seems no longer appetising, so I lay my fork on my plate and listen to fragments of their conversation interspersed with a buzzing sensation in my head.

“...love it there. It’s perfect. And, oh, I have to tell you about… now, I don’t know a lot about the history of it. To be quite honest, I’ve never been drawn to… but there is a boat that takes you a few times a day… one day I’d love to visit too. It sounds fabulous…”

I realise at one point that everyone is looking at me, and alarmed, I try to pull the last few minutes of garbled conversation out of the air and form it into something coherent, something to which I can add a point, or answer a question, or whatever else might warrant three faces staring expectantly in my direction.

“Sorry, excuse me, what was that again?”

“Asia,” Silvio says. “You’re going?”

“Ah, yeah.” For no reason, I pick up my fork and poke at the cooling pasta in the dish. Still no intention of eating it. “In June. My friend and I are heading out to Thailand for about a month.”

“What is it about Thailand?”

“Hm. Well, it was him, Jonas, that wanted to. He says he’s drawn to it, and I, well, I just kind of thought it’d be fun, to be honest. There isn’t any other reason in terms of like, research I’ve done or things I particularly want to see. I was just invited, and I said I’d go, so.”

It’s an unsatisfactory answer. I can tell by their faces, but once I have replied to their questions with enough bland, unexpanded answers, they leave me alone to stare at the tablecloth unbothered until my eyes lose focus. Two glass candle holders floating about. Twenty-three. Why did she say that? Is it she knows, through some experience, they would bother about twenty, but not twenty-three? Is it my nineteen that changes things, makes me, us, suddenly repellant?

Astrid could be. Twenty-three, that is. Or twenty-five, thirty, even, with her elegant, ageless beauty, and thoughtful conversation that spills from her clever mouth. Look at her there, the demure expression, her pale eyes practically sparkling, intelligent, squinting as she nods along to show she understands the point. What point? I have no idea. I would know if I were listening.

I am not twenty-three, and doubt I could pass myself as such. Too stupid, immature, a childish humour and no experience of the world. A lanky body, tall, yes, but not broad, face still feline, barely grown into my nose five minutes. My arms are more muscular now, of course, for all the work I’ve done, but I’m juvenile looking, too. More like those freakish child bodybuilders than an actual grown man with a full beard and significant hair on his chest.

Silvio, grand gestures, hairline retreating, the flash of brilliant white veneers too large for his mouth. I know those, my father warns patients against them for reasons of blatant artificiality. They make him look uncanny. Half man, half marionette. Would he care Astrid is twenty? I doubt it. He probably wouldn’t care if she was sixteen.

He watches her speaking, tongue wetting his upper lip, gaze flicking around her face, down, for a split second, to the seam on the collar of her dress. A stupid feeling comes then, like jealousy, competition, as though she isn’t already my girlfriend. He should envy me instead, the man who she lets do what every other man who has ever seen her wants to. Except that she hasn’t actually let me for a while, and when she has, she’s been dispassionate and obviously bored.

Then Suzana, with her round, pleasant face. Dippy, oblivious. I think of her, arms linked with Astrid earlier on the boat, and the way they spoke with their heads close, touching arms, voices lowered to scandalous whispers at different times, and their laughter, high and tinkling like bells, together. Is the lie for her? Is it Suzana she thinks would care? Does it, to be twenty-eight and hanging out with a twenty-year-old, feel the same as to be twenty and talking to a twelve-year-old? Is it accompanied by the same self consciousness? That to relate to that person points to some personality defect, some lack of appropriate intellectual maturity? Perhaps there is something else, some aspect of women and their friendships that I’ll never understand.

Or it’s me, and I, in fact, am the one that lacks maturity. Me, who cares too much about an age gap? But if that’s the case, then why–

“...menu. Jude, what do you think?” She’s speaking directly to me again, Astrid. And again, three staring faces.

“About dessert?” I venture. “I mean, none for me. I guess I’m not hungry, but if everyone else wants it, then go ahead.”

A strange look from her. Irritated. “We just decided we should skip dessert. I was asking if you agree.”

“Oh, well yes, then, obviously, I agree.”

“You’re distracted,” she says. “Where have you gone?”

“I think I’m just tired.”

“I always get tired after a day in the sun,” says Suzana, and gives me this warm, sympathetic smile, that although kind, makes me feel like I’m being spoken to by my primary school teacher.

“Yes, a good night’s sleep is needed then, I think.” I push my plate of stone-cold spaghetti away. “Maybe we should think about calling it a night.”

I feel my words ignored as Silvio leans in and lists bars where we can drink.

Oh yes, great, I think. More time with these near strangers we are actively lying to, for some reason, and then it’s twenty minutes later, and we are ordering shots at a sticky club with blasting hip hop music and people grinding against each other on the dancefloor.

Shots. Oh, God. It’s almost boring. Maybe if there were pills... I down mine, vodka, with a dull feeling, and wince, not because of the alcohol, but because Silvio and Suzana, and the way they cheer for themselves afterwards, like swallowing a shot is worthy of some sort of exuberant celebration. Surely Astrid hates that kind of thing. She’ll think it gauche. She doesn’t, however, meet my eye to confirm this.

The bartender asks for my ID when I order a second, and through loyalty to Astrid, I hide my year of birth from Silvio, hovering beside me, head bobbing to the beat. “They checked your ID?” He says, big weird smile. “I cannot remember the last time they wanted to see mine.”

Obviously. Crow’s feet. Lines on his forehead that don’t go away even when it’s relaxed. An elderly man.

“It’s the baby face,” that’s Suzana, hanging off him now, and his hands are on her arse right in front of me, like somehow I’d want to see that happening, his fingers squeezing her flesh through the stretch fabric of her dress. “Do you know you look so innocent? Like the way teenagers still have soft faces.”

Silvio laughs then. At me, maybe. It’s hard to tell. I’m downing the second shot when he says. “Don’t you think he’s handsome? Nice bone structure, hm?”

That’s not a normal thing to say. He’s likely making fun of me. I don’t know for certain, but I don’t think it’s common for someone to ask their girlfriend to rate someone else’s handsomeness. I assume she won’t answer.

“Hm,” she says, though, and appears to be genuinely examining me through the dry ice and the disco lights. Part of the joke, surely. “He reminds me of an actor. I can’t think of the name. You know I’m bad with the names.”

“I know, baby, but I don’t know who you mean.”

Baby. If I ever reached a stage of depressing cringe where I called a girl ‘baby’, especially in front of other people, then I would like to be assassinated. Euthanized like livestock. Where is Astrid?

Talking to someone else, someone new. Two stringy Italian men with gel-slick hair all spiked up. Oh, fantastic. I go to take her away, save her, because that’s my role, forever rescuing her from creepy men, from who she seems to have remarkably little instinct to save herself.

“Are you alright?” I’m blocking them, making a big, assertive point of it.

“Yes, I’m okay, they were asking me to dance, which is,” she rolls her eyes, “obviously pathetic. Like they really thought I would.”

“Well, come dance, then. Dance with me instead.” On the subject of women, I mostly have smoother ways of asking for what I want than coming out and saying it directly, with that tinge of pleading desperation in my tone as though frightened she, of all people, my actual girlfriend, will say no to me.

Blessedly, she agrees, and on the dancefloor together I realise I am already drunk. It’s the mostly empty stomach, the two shots of vodka in quick succession. It all makes the lights of the ceiling blurry, the music vivid. Heat, sweat, a hundred bodies and ours swaying among them. My hands touch her hips as she sways. Her gorgeous, slender body. Perfect. Like, 90% legs, somehow, and I’m instantly aching for her. The sweat in my hair, its sheen across her collarbone and my hands touching her here. It’s a sense memory. Her body on top of mine, sighing with luxurious pleasure. Oh, God, fuck–

“Can we go?” I’m murmuring into her ear. One song in, and the DJ is blasting an air horn. “I’m not into this club.”

“We have been here about ten minutes.”

Yes, but there are things I’d like to be doing other than dancing, if at all possible. I cannot go on touching her like this, being close, her body brushing against mine, as long as there are others around us. It’s indecent.

“Come on. Come home with me.”

He’s howling into the microphone now, suggesting repeatedly that we should make some noise. It’s horrific. Surely Guantanamo bay level torture, being in this club. We are part of a human experiment to see how long we can endure this DJ. She says, then: “Fine, yes. I’ll get my bag.”

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