Ghost Pains E-Book

Jessi Jezewska Stevens

• Herausgeber: And Other Stories
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 287

Beschreibung

Originally appearing in such venues as The Paris Review, Harper's and Tin House, these stories are at last readily available. In each, Stevens spies the big questions through the microscope of a shambolic human perspective. Ghost Pains is a triumphant statement of purpose from one of our greatest young writer-thinkers.

Leseprobe

Praise for The Exhibition of Persephone Q

a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and Wall Street Journal and Vogue Most Anticipated Book of 2020

“Stevens’s dreamlike first novel is a delicate and drifting exploration of Percy’s relationships with friends, lovers, neighbors, and the many not-quite strangers who form the fabric of city life. As Percy wanders, New York itself is reflected through the prism of her many identities … in luminous prose that captures the essence of a place in the middle of its most defining transformation. A stellar debut.”

Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Stevens’s writing proves that both time and technology are best understood in retrospect, sequences made logical long after each moment has passed. The novel has a romantic slowness, unfurling gracefully, little by little, to show how quickly the present gives way to the future, or concedes to the past.”

Haley Mlotek, New York Times

“I was magnetized not just by a great story, but one that felt uncannily timely … Percy is forced to confront questions of identity and selfhood that feel both poignant and meta during a time of crisis.”

Michael Baron, Literary Hub

“Jessi Stevens is the Muriel Spark of 21st century New York.”

Joshua Cohen

“Stevens has combined the surreal with the actual to create a book painfully relevant to this new age of female testimony … A fantastic debut.”

Noelle McManus, Women’s Review of Books

Praise for The Visitors

“A mordantly funny requiem for the early 21st century.”

Publishers Weekly

“It’s as if The Big Short were set in the dreamworld of Rachel Ingalls’s Mrs. Caliban.”

Audrey Wollen, New York Times

“You might not think Occupy Wall Street and prophetic garden gnomes would fit together within the confines of the same narrative. Now, here’s Jessi Jezewska Stevens’s new novel The Visitors to make the case that, yes, the two can mesh together seamlessly. It’s the kind of ambitious, madcap narrative combination that’s all too rare nowadays.”

Tobias Carroll, Tor.com

“The book accepts, and even delights in, the strenuous absurdity of its characters’ efforts to index the relationship between the virtual and the material, or to locate the source of reality in imagination.”

Daisy Hildyard, The Guardian

“Here is a refreshing novel by an author willing to take chances … The Visitors stands as a pensive and important work … rare and exciting company.”

Necessary Fiction

“It’s both a bold, imaginative play on very recent history and a trenchant prophecy of the terrifying times we’re collectively staring down the barrel of.”

Anna Cafolla, The Face Summer Reads 2022

“Jessi Jezewska Stevens’s frighteningly brilliant new novel The Visitors is both a bold reimagining of the recent past and an all-too-likely prophecy of what’s to come. Caustic, intimate, and consistently surprising, this novel cements Stevens’s place as one of the great chroniclers of our cruel and terrifying times.”

Andrew Martin

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First published in 2024 by And Other StoriesSheffield – London – New Yorkwww.andotherstories.org

Copyright © Jessi Jezewska Stevens 2024.

All rights reserved. The right of Jessi Jezewska Stevens to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

ISBN: 9781913505844eBook ISBN: 9781913505851

Editor: Jeremy M. Davies; Copy-editor: Bella Bosworth; Proofreader: Sarah Terry; Typesetting and eBook: Tetragon, London; Series Cover Design: Elisa von Randow, Alles Blau Studio, Brazil, after a concept by And Other Stories; Author Photo: Nina Subin.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

And Other Stories gratefully acknowledge that our work is supported using public funding by Arts Council England.

For S.

Contents

The Party Honeymoon Siberia Weimar Whore Gettysburg Ghost Pains Rumpel Letter to the Senator Duck, Duck, Orange Juice Dispatches from Berlin A New Book of Grotesques

‌The Party

The party was a failure. I can’t even tell you what a failure it was. There are no words. Only a great pain in my chest when I wake up. On the veranda. It’s better when I sit in the chair. Oh, but then I can see around. The gauzy curtains, pushed by the breeze! The glasses on the floor. Little ghosts! Last night the American walked around sniffing at them like a dog. He said, Who would leave all these dead soldiers behind? I couldn’t say. I am American as well, but lately I haven’t been feeling quite myself.

It’s not the sort of thing I do, hosting parties. The last time I hosted anyone but Ann? It must have been months and months ago. It would have been Ann and her sister and her sister’s friend. We ate schnitzel with Kartoffelsalat and plenty of pilsner, of course. The sister’s friend was confused over the nature of his relationship to Ann. There was an ambiguity there. It ended in disaster. There’s always an ambiguity with Ann—he should have known. I lost a perfectly nice vase that night and afterward I said to myself, Never again will I host even the smallest of parties. So who knows where it came from. The sudden urge. To invite everyone I know for drinks.

What a mistake! I was out here on the veranda, by the basil plant, as I often am when visited by caprice. I was by the basil plant having a smoke and thinking of the people in my life, specifically of Sylvia and the way she lights up a room in her light-blue dress. The bluebell sleeves that drape petal-thin over the styles of her arms. The way she holds a glass. With Sylvia it’s always elegance. When she stands in a Berlin apartment, by a window, it is as if the world has traveled back in time. The haute bourgeoisie—they would feel right at home at her wonderful soirees, where the light is always kind of blue and the rooms reverberate with rumors. The low murmurs of a great many people drift fashionably through the floor. They are predicting the future, maybe. The future is happening now. The future is happening and here you are, right in the middle of it: a bit of ash falls to the carpet and then a great work of art has been achieved. Or will soon be achieved. No matter that tomorrow, on the street, we are hardly artists at all. In T-shirts and jeans. Not up to much good. Freelancers. We work at flat-screen monitors, designing advertisements at hotel desks, because it doesn’t belong to you, does it, the desk isn’t yours. The following week it could belong to someone else. “Dead soldiers.” “Hotel desks.” As phrases they conjure a kind of elegance, though not as well as Sylvia can whenever she hosts one of her parties. And it’s quite possible it was Sylvia I was channeling out there by the basil plant last Friday when I resolved to throw a party myself. To feel, for a moment, as if my name were Sylvia. Or maybe Carlotta would suit. I tapped ash into the basil plant. If my name were Carlotta, I wouldn’t have done that, you see. I would have had a proper ashtray I picked up at some street market in southern Turkey, through whose haphazard aisles I had ventured on my own (so I’d tell my friends over cocktails) without even a scarf on my head. Because if my name were Carlotta, I wouldn’t have to follow other people’s rules. And my ashtray would be most divine. The basil plant was wilting. I caressed its leaves. I stamped my black ash into its soil. Then I set to work on my party, and I blame Carlotta for that. She lies. She ought to have dissuaded me. Sweetheart, she should have said, we’re not the same.

Email! The way all modern tragedies begin. I copied the list of recipients Sylvia had used for her last party. Then I made a butter sandwich. Liebe Freunde, I wrote, You are invited to the following celebration tomorrow at 8 p.m. I reviewed the list of invitees. I made a second sandwich. “Siri,” I said. “What’s the email for the Staatsbibliothek man?” She didn’t know. What’s the email for the American? For the Swede? I was really quite swept up in the Swede, though he broke my heart whenever we met by speaking of Sylvia the whole time. And of course I added Ann. She was first on the list. Oh, Ann. Even Sylvia dims a little by comparison. That’s Ann’s special talent—she dulls all the luster and leaves you groping about in the dark. We can sit for hours on the veranda, not talking, Ann and I. Chewing basil leaves. She says to me, You know Yugoslavia isn’t a country anymore? Quite right. She keeps it folded up inside her like a flag.

I went to make myself a third butter sandwich, but halfway through I lost my appetite. And then I was out of bread.

Really there’s no need for parties anymore. There never was. I can go for weeks without speaking to anyone but Ann and the cashiers at the BioMarkt. And occasionally my phone. What a stupid woman, Siri must think, who has to ask for directions all the time. I followed her across Maybachufer Straße to buy a bag of almonds. One can always trust an almond, especially the Jordan type. The BioMarkt is another story altogether—I never know what to buy. I stood in the aisles and stared at the labels for Maultaschen. And Apfelsaft. For egg noodles. What does a party need? But you can only be so ridiculous in public, asking your phone for answers all the time. I bought bread and chocolate. I bought a large bag of grapes. Twelve apples. And popcorn. I hadn’t seen it in a while. The kind you make in a pot. Not long ago I’d attended a Futurist dinner party some other girls threw featuring deconstructed spaghetti that spilled over tables and onto brown paper on the floor: here a pile of languid noodles; here a red lake of sauce. Well-dressed people crouched for fistfuls, hand to mouth. People have only just stopped talking about that party. It’s still on everyone’s mind. I imagined my bedroom filling with bowls and bowls of popcorn. Like snow. Like scatter art. I bought vodka and gin and plenty of apple juice, plus a liter of Club-Mate. Then it was back to my apartment, where I lit a cigarette and opened my email. No one had responded to my invitation but Ann.

Berlin has a habit of taking your life and smashing it back in your face. The Swede says that’s how it is in New York, but I completely disagree. The way I remember it, New York does its face-rubbing out in the open, by the light of day, while Berlin strikes at the loneliest hour, in the dead of night, when the emotion is most dense, when the dogs come out to fight their arbitrary fights. The evening fell like a sigh. I watched it from my veranda. The light fading, the voices echoing the way they do when people start disappearing into bars. I turned around. I looked into my rooms. The green chair. The chandelier left over from some other life. The French doors, open, framed the groceries on the table. The popcorn. The grapes. The apples waiting to be sliced. The melancholy of a lemon—! I have always harbored an envy for Dutch still life. The apples went into a bowl. The grapes. The bottle of Club-Mate shone like a polluted moon. I laid out forks and plates and knives and there it was, a whole banquet set for one. Or many—for all my ghosts and me. I popped a whole pot of popcorn and ate it all. I could hear the people stumbling through the courtyard out the window. The scavengers are out there, every night. On the ground floor is a halfway house and people wander in and out. Ich wohne hier! they say, insistent yet uncertain. I could hardly blame them—I felt very half-hearted myself. I didn’t feel like a Carlotta at all. To put it another way, I was reverting to myself. A woman alone with too much fruit. I’d have to invite Ann to help finish it all. Maybe tomorrow. We’d sit here eating grapes until all the grapes were gone. I opened the invitation I had sent. A change of plans. Due to an unforeseen scheduling conflict … Send. Then I lit a cigarette to burn away the shame. Every email makes me ashamed, it is inherent to the process. Send an email. Feel shame. Light a cigarette, like striking a match after taking a shit. “Dear Siri,” I said. “Where’s Ann?” “I’m sorry, I can’t help with that right now.” I heaved my heaviest sigh. My impossible life is always more impossible when Siri will not help.

By the way, I should explain about the dog. The day I decided to host the party I hadn’t heard from it in weeks. Of course at first I didn’t know it was a dog. My very first night in Berlin, I lay in my bed listening to the dubstep, the garage rock, the sound of people shuffling around the courtyard in the dark. The windows were open and the breeze was cool and fresh. I closed my eyes. I was very tired. I might have even slept. Then the night was torn by the most terrible scream. I sat up. The scream belonged to a very throaty woman or else a very young man. It rang and rang and then abruptly silenced. I waited. I expected a crash, the commotion of other people coming to the rescue. But there was no sound, everything was still. No one was helping at all. I stepped onto the veranda and looked up and down the boulevards, where the sidewalks were very empty. I went back to bed. Then the scream tore loose again.

Months like this! Imagine. I consulted Ann. What should I do? She suggested calling social services, but where would I tell them to go? I had no idea where the scream was coming from. It occurred to me it might even be of pleasure, not of pain. It was possible. Especially in Berlin. Every night I lay awake examining the quality of the pleasure-terror. I tried to read its origins. Fear or pain or ecstasy. I became a student of screams. I recorded them. “Siri,” I said, “play that back.” I composed a whole symphony for Ann. We listened on the U-Bahn, sharing gluey earbuds. The sound was weak but it was there. Every night? Every night. She was quiet. The earbud hung parasitically from her lobe. She shook her head. “I don’t know what to say,” she said. Meanwhile I couldn’t sleep. I alerted the landlady, who only shrugged. “I am not hearing this scream,” she said. “You Americans. So fussy.” After that I thought maybe it was only me. Something I heard in my mind. That only made the sleeping worse—I was afraid to go to bed.

One night I decided to put the landlady’s theory to the test. To follow the scream. To see if it led back to me. I brought a flashlight and plenty of cigarettes. And Siri. I told her, “Be ready for an emergency call.” I walked along the canal to the park. Looped back again. It was nearing two o’clock, when the scream usually began. I passed almost no one. The dealer was sitting by the footbridge, dealing weed. I don’t have any money, I said, but have you heard the scream? He looked at me as if I were the suspicious one. I walked away. In the park I sat on a bench and waited. I wondered if the landlady had been right all along. A woman walked her dog and I wished that I were her instead. The dog was small and white, a lapdog, a really superfluous-looking pet. The woman let it trot freely across the lawn. It sniffed a tree. A fence. Then it stopped at the base of a statue. And began to scream. I leapt from the bench. This tiny dog was staring at the statue and baring its teeth. It was the very scream I’d been looking for. The scream of a thousand people burning alive. At the stake. After a bomb. Only there were no bombs. No stakes. No armies marching in the streets. There was nothing around but the owner and her dog. Who could love such a creature? Knowing it held such a scream? After that I listened from my bed and knew the truth. Then the nights fell silent. Where could the dog have gone, I thought, as I drifted off to sleep.

On Saturday I woke up with a predictable sense of regret. About canceling the party. I had a long lie-in, staring at the fleurs-de-lis embossed on the tin ceiling. You could never afford a ceiling like that in America now, I thought. Not unless you were born beneath it. I slipped out of bed and into my robe. My favorite robe, my only robe. I always spend too much on lingerie. I have three dresses and thirty brassieres. I dress for myself, you might say. The bras are for me. The robe. I am a wraith, inhuman, alone in my room in chiffon hemmed with lace. I’m behind on my rent. Though it’s worth pointing out that while a robe costing one month’s habitation is an expensive robe indeed, rent in Berlin, if you know where to look, is extremely cheap.

For breakfast I had a cigarette, and the basil plant had ash. I wore my chiffon out on the veranda and watched the people passing in the street. They disappeared into the Bäckereien. For Brötchen. I read a little Adorno. I read some Rilke and made a mental note to visit all the libraries in Paris. From now on it was Rilke from whom I’d take my cues. I thought of going for a walk. Then I was reading again. Rilke did all the walking. It’s possible I might leave the apartment more, I thought, if I didn’t own so much elegant lingerie.

I was still sitting there on the veranda, in the robe, when evening fell. I was thinking I ought to see Ann. Give her a call. See if she might help me finish the vodka and the fruit for the party I wouldn’t have. Then it occurred to me that I might have already called her. This happens sometimes. I think of something I’ve already said as if I’ve never said it before—I blame Adorno. The illusion of the new. When really it’s all just kitsch, it’s all the same, everything’s already been said and done. Then the doorbell rang, and I rejoiced: so I had called her after all! I tied off my robe and sifted down the stairs—that’s the wonderful thing about chiffon, you do not walk but sift, you float—to the heavy wooden doors, expecting Ann, delighted about Ann, so grateful that no matter what happens I will always have Ann. But to my surprise, it was the American man. He was on the front step holding two half-liters of beer. “Where’s Ann?” The American shrugged. “Nice dress,” he said. And found his own way up the stairs.

Oh, the nuance of reply versus reply all! Not really so nuanced. Ann, the only guest to write back, was the only one to receive the cancellation: the perils of enthusiasm, incurred. I had in effect orchestrated the exact inverse of the evening I had planned. What a pity, Ann says, whenever anything goes wrong, no matter how disastrous. Her little Yugoslav heart! I could have used its support. I called but she didn’t answer. Then I called again. Meanwhile the American was opening the door to my apartment with a hip. He’s been here before, unfortunately—I’m afraid we had a tryst. The apartment was a mess. The apples and grapes and Club-Mate on the table, the table set for a banquet of ghosts. There was music playing somewhere, but in my apartment it was quiet. The doors to the veranda were open and the breeze was drifting through. The American opened the fridge and peered inside. It was empty save my collection of half-finished jams. “You did say tonight?” “Yes.” The party was tonight. The American nodded—he is one of those men who uses silence to tell you what to do. Then he stationed himself at the kitchen table and quickly fixed himself a drink. Looked around. At the kitchen. At the veranda. At the unmade bed beneath its fleurs-de-lis. “Right,” he said. “This won’t do at all. Do you have any glasses?” I pointed to the fleet of jam jars in the cupboard. Then I made the bed.

The American sliced lemons. Pale citrus rounds that gave my chest a pang. They sliced up my heart! He turned the radio on. It was all too similar to the last time he had been here, I thought, and he must have felt the same. He in the kitchen, I in my robe. The bed. Not talking. The radio on. I hadn’t called the American since that night. I’d left him right here in the sheets, in fact, after he’d fallen asleep. I walked around, I smoked. I went to Ann’s. He woke up all alone in my apartment. I heard from the Swede he was very upset. Now he was looking through the liquor bottles in a proprietary way and selecting Triple Sec, for punch. I stood in the French doors and watched as he poured the whole bottle into a bowl. I felt a wave of regret. “Why are you helping me?” The American answered without looking up. “National pride,” he said. He tuned the radio dial and a popular song came on, the same one playing downstairs. It was the most popular song in the world. The Swede knew the person who wrote it. That’s how it is in Sweden—it’s a small country, in the end. The song played. I longed for the Swede. “Now we’re cooking,” the American said. He snapped his fingers. Good to go. On a roll. Then the doorbell rang. The American fixed his hair and smoothed his tie. “So go get it,” he said. As if he were the host of the party.

Sometimes I think life is really just one long logic problem to be solved via process of elimination. Or perhaps that’s just how you know that you are growing old. When each gathering becomes a complex series of equations and permutations and postulates about whose presence excludes whom: If X and Y cause a fight, and Z and X are sleeping together, and Z is also sleeping with A, who carries a knife, and A and Y must meet for work, whom do you invite to dinner so that everyone has a date? When you solve the word problem that is my life, the correct answer is no one at all, no two people can be in the same room at once. QED. What I mean to say is, I really should have checked that list of Sylvia’s before copying it for purposes of my own. I had ignored this obvious precaution and now the apartment was filling with all the men I’d slept with, plus all the women they loved now or were sleeping with instead. The American. The Bulgarian. The Swiss. The Swede, who kept looking to the door every time someone new arrived. He was waiting for Sylvia, of course. I could have died. Instead, I did a lot of laughing. People kept arriving and I ran up and down the stairs to let them in. I acted as if I’d been drinking all day and didn’t expect to make it through the night. As if I didn’t notice that the men seemed to be purposely getting along extremely well while ignoring me, as if they’d established a whole nation of their own. I wanted to scream. The women were complimenting my robe as if it were a dress. Everyone was holding jelly jars. And jam jars. And jars for marmalade—I am always buying French preserves, you see, which come in the most luminescent shades, and which assume afterlives as tumblers for women in distressed jeans and glitter shoes, those sporty shirts that slide up the spine. The veranda! Completely full of fashionable people. I didn’t know any of them. Then Sylvia arrived, and everything went still.

Oh Sylvia, I thought. Must there really be more than one of you?

Under any other circumstances I would have been flattered beyond belief that Sylvia had graced a party of mine. I would have taken her by the arm, by the wrist, and welcomed her in a perfect imitation of herself. But I was stunned stupid by the beauty of the girls that she had brought. I lost entire minutes of my life trying to make their loveliness compute. How easily they wore it, like lines in novels you never forget: ‌We carry death within us like a stone within a fruit … The party swelled around the new arrivals, feeding on them like fish. I had to elbow my way through. Sylvia was basking in her own perfume. “Bisou,” she said, and bent to kiss my check. She almost seemed more beautiful by virtue of not being, technically, the most beautiful of all. The other girls were Platonic precedents for Sylvia herself. Sylvia: ideal woman in the flesh. She lifted the sleeve of my robe and let it fall with a trellised laugh. “Charming!” She explored my limbs as if she’d never seen anything like me before, a little mutant in chiffon. I should mention that the robe is quite transparent. As gauzy as the curtains and of a very light teal, like the copper patina of an old machine. What I’m saying is you can see right through it to my white balcony bra. Little rosettes fasten straps to cups. “So sweet,” Sylvia said, fingering the appliqués. “You’re a vision.” She laughed again. “I want to be just like you!” The kind of thing you can say only if you’re beautiful and French. Then she unzipped her slim and midnight jeans and stepped into the smooth suit of her skin, her long and lovely legs, the matching blue of her panties and bra. She walked across the room like a sea. I have often thought this of especially beautiful women, that they walk like the water through which everyone else wades. Everyone watched. The music stopped. She was so elegant, traveling through the dark. Like art. She accepted a drink. The music resumed. And all of a sudden the other girls were casually discarding clothes, as if this were the thing to do. As if we’d been served a kind of fairy-tale cue, midnight, for everyone to take off her dress. A moment before I had been barely clothed and now I was wearing more clothes than everyone else. I went around the room urging people to put their fashionable outfits on. “Oh, please. Put on your clothes.” “Please,” people said. “Take them off.” They clawed at my chiffon. The party pushed me onto the veranda with a coordinated shove. There I found the basil plant. On the ground. Soil scattered like black blood. How horrible! A death! The oldest of my two true friends. Inside they were singing the world’s most popular song. The Swede was drawing his tongue along Sylvia’s slender neck even as she carried on conversations with nearly naked friends. “Look here,” I said. “A death! Don’t you see?” And then of course the night was usurped by the dog with the human scream.

It was back! I was filled with flutters of joy. The joy of recognition. For someone I thought I’d lost. I smiled. Not even the landlady could doubt me now. I looked around my apartment and saw the faces blank with fear. The girls in their bras. The men with their drinks. The chandelier glinted somewhere near the ceiling, and the screaming went on and on. The only pauses were for breath. What is it, they whispered. I wanted to explain. I wanted to tell them, Don’t worry, it’s all in your head, it’s not your fault, it has nothing to do with you. But words failed me. I couldn’t help it—I began to laugh. It could have been the Triple Sec, or maybe it was grief. I cradled the pot in my arms. A grave for the lopsided plant. I laughed and laughed. People started dressing. First very slowly. Then in a panic. Trading clothes. Putting on whatever came first. I laughed so hard it hurt. I bowed over the basil, drawing inward as I laughed. We were a chorus, the dog and I. Of pleasure and of pain. The women began to cry. In the bruise-blue dark I caught a glimpse of Sylvia struggling to fit a foot through her too-tight jeans. Her wide forehead pushed through the collar of a shirt. Someone larger pushed her aside. People were leaving all at once, they even left behind their drinks. I laughed them out. I didn’t stop. Then it was only the American and me. And all the dead soldiers. Who would leave all these dead soldiers behind? He went around the room with a bag. He must have been deaf. I laughed myself to sleep. And then I woke up. Lit a cigarette. What a failure the party was. I almost miss the screams.

‌Honeymoon

For our honeymoon we went to Tuscany. This got a big sigh from me. I love my job, this city, my life. At home, in our apartment, the kitchen floor tiles are ivory and deep maroon, a chessboard for girls. I was sitting on them, like a squat little knight, unwrapping a casserole dish, when my husband wheeled a suitcase into the room. One of the most interesting discoveries about being married, I find, is that those things you choose not to say out loud don’t register at all. No one reads your mind. He gently snapped two fingers near my face.

“Babe,” he said. “You look a little dazed.”

The first thing I did when we arrived was set up my salves and creams and serums on the vanity. I laid out my hairbrush handle first. The tweezers. The tints. I like to keep everything in little rows, like soldiers ready for battle. It was Cicero, I believe, who while on an Aristotelian riff proclaimed that the essence of style is appropriateness with respect to time and place. I looked at my platoon of jars. The bouquet of brushes. The glint of the sun on the edge of a cup. All at once it struck me as too much. Perhaps it wasn’t so tasteful for a married woman to disclose all the secrets of her face. Perhaps she ought to keep some for herself. One by one, I replaced the vials and jars in their quilted armory. An air of mystery overtook the room. I was soothed. But the vanity looked rather spartan. Shouldn’t there be a nail file or at least a tube of lipstick? I glanced at my husband, asleep on the bed. The shape of him. Half my vials returned to the stage before the mirror, though this, too, seemed a losing compromise. At dinner, I spooled spaghetti onto my fork. I ordered a Negroni—or three. It struck me that a partial vanity capitalizes on only half the virtues of femininity, while retaining all its vices.

To be fair, I can’t really say that I enjoy vacations. In a sense I’m on vacation all the time, so when I’m away it feels like work. I am a jewelry consultant in the gift shop of a five-star hotel, where I tend to a nook filled with gems. (One works one’s way up; my husband was a former guest.) All week long I daydream to the sound of heels clacking across a polished marble floor. I could be miles away. I could be at the beach! Occasionally the phone rings, and then there’s some real excitement—a guest is placing an order for a surprise. The rest is a breeze. I take lunch twice. At two, I put a sign on the door and go for a jog. be back soon. No one seems to mind. Tuscany, likewise, was permanently on leave. Any direction I looked there was nothing but farms and hills and leisure time. A tractor churned. Someone opened a bottle of wine. The local cheese was Pecorino, and I wasn’t sure I had a taste for it, though my husband liked it fine. As for me, I craved a bagel. I missed Christopher Street Chinese. Lo mein. Pot stickers, steamed. At least in Tuscany the cigarettes were very cheap. I had one in the evening. I had two. My husband looked up from his phrase book and asked, “Is this a permanent thing?” “Of course,” I said. Because that’s the modus operandi of a marriage, permanence. He smiled. We traipsed to the pool. We wandered through medieval towns sipping different wines. Sometimes we strolled the grounds. We made love. I slipped into a sequined dress with Cinderella sleeves for drinks, and in the morning, I woke up early and watched my husband breathing in the sheets, half expecting him to get up and leave. He didn’t. Still, I dressed quietly so he would not be disturbed and change his mind. I slid on my shoes, my sweat-stained bra. I jogged.

On a Tuscan morning, Negronis linger; every step ricocheted inside my head. I followed the dirt road along the ridge for miles. The hangover grew worse and worse and then, suddenly, stopped. I breathed. I liked to jog early, before the sense of privacy could seep away like rainwater into the ground. At dawn, no one was around but the German tourists and the Milanese, who were always up, attending to their fitness. I saw them as I slogged over dusty crests, huffing heavily—I’m not used to hills. Fortunately the Germans seemed to prefer their mornings in the opposite direction. They were always going up when I was coming down.