Alone with You in the Ether

by Olivie Blake

Phillips-head, paintbrush, saturation scale, the attraction of unavailable men; it was all the same category of functionality.

once upon a time, men looked at the world, took in all its beauty, and still only saw it flat.

AND NOW, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, we are proud to present … Aldo Damiani’s thoughts!

she began to understand that there was power in devaluing her worth to others.

her subject of choice, The Fraught Lies of Beauty, was inappropriate for someone who had only narrowly avoided federal prison for white collar crime. “There’s candor, Charlotte, and then there’s hubris,”

She often thought of him as an accessory that matched with everything; some sort of magical mood ring that adapted to whatever persona she had currently filled. When she wanted silence, he was silent. When she wanted to talk, he was generally apt to listen. When she wanted sex, which she often did, he was easily persuaded. Eventually she would marry him, and then everything she was would vanish into his name. She’d attend parties as Mrs. Marcus Waite, and no one would ever have to know a thing about her. She could shrug him on like some kind of cloak of invisibility and vanish entirely from sight.

Regan believes there are two ways to manipulate a man: either to let him pursue you or to let him pursue you in a way that makes him feel he’s the pursuit.

Your future self will always see what your present self is blind to. This is the problem with mortality, which is in fact a problem of time.

In fact, he felt the place he usually reserved for rote mechanization and the occasional wandering thought would be vastly improved by her presence.

The thing about women and clothes was, in Regan’s mind, that nothing was ever a permanent expression; it wasn’t any sort of commitment to being this type of girl or that one, but purely today, I am. It was just whichever version of herself she wanted to project for the time being.

Churches were their own kinds of museums—with their devotion to ritual, at least, if not to God—and to exist inside of one was to dwarf oneself with inequity.

“It’s very … austere, isn’t it?” “That’s a cold word,”

His palm was warm and dry, closing gently around her knuckles. This prayer she knew.

He wasn’t just unconventionally handsome, she realized. He was uncommonly beautiful.

Without the volatility of her extremes, what was she?

Fascinating, really, to see what she saw. Bewildering that she could turn something in her mind into something real. Practical magic.

He turned her over in his head, facts and details and observations, wrapping his mind around her the way his fingers had done.

Plus she’d never been to her mother’s taste before, and she certainly wasn’t going to manage it now.

There was nothing worse than being predictable. Nothing smaller than feeling ordinary.

The muscles around his shoulders, the places where his wings would be,

Men loved that. They were so fucking easy. The whole thing was so tragically primal.

l’appel du vide, the call of the void. In Aldo’s experience, the void spoke many languages.

“Bees are for you.”

There was wonder here, even if Regan no longer saw it. Even if she no longer felt it, he would feel it for both of them. He would translate it for her later. He would learn to draw it for her, he thought, or to write it, or graph it.

she would know that even this, with its ordinary features, was wonder and glory, too.

You wouldn’t make love with him, you’d make art. Maybe that would be worth it, but still, art is tragedy. Art is loss.

If I am a lover of impossible problems then you will have loved me for my impossibilities,

With the way moonlight fell over them it seemed to him that they were each one half of a person, divided in two, each fraction left to be the other’s reflection.

She’d wanted to fuck Rinaldo Damiani and then return to Marcus Waite and say: See, he wants me, I am valuable. See, I had a genius between my legs and held him inside me and swallowed him up, and then I made his brilliance mine.

“That thing I don’t understand?” “That thing you don’t understand, yes.” “I understand very little.” “Nice of you to admit it. Most people in my department don’t.” “Tell them to get a new hobby.” “I’ve been advised not to advise people.” “Probably best. Nobody likes to listen.”

Because he will know what it means, because he asked me to, because he asked. Because he’s the thing I can’t unsee. Because I don’t know if I can get him right without looking, without proof, but also because I need to know, because I’ve already tried. Because either this is how everything changes, or this is how it ends.

Time is a function of lies, a trick of the light, a mistranslation.

There had been no mother to kiss away the pain, and now the mark of inattention would remain.

Do you understand, do you know what you hold in your hands, do you know how readily it breaks?

what a waste of time doing anything else but holding her.

he doesn’t want to be the person she hides from, he wants to be the person she hides with.

I want to have your thoughts, I want to bottle them, I want to put them in my drawer for safekeeping.

If this is what it is to burn, he thought, then I will be worth more as scattered ash than any of my unscathed pieces.

I came to look at art, to marvel at something, and here you are and so I will.

For Aldo, to love something was to study it; to devote every spare thought to understanding it.

Yes, it is perilously wonderful to suffer so sweetly with you.

What kind of sad,

unremarkable nothingness have you so callously lived that you can witness the splendor of her existence and not fall to your knees for having missed it, for having misunderstood it all this time?

She is my hope and for that she is dangerous, unequivocally, but she is also alive, unreservedly.

“I’ll do whatever she wants me to

This painting, Aldo, it’s about God. They cannot hang it in the Louvre, they will have to put it in the Vatican, because what we are is holy,