Her left arm swings away from her body, as though possessed, and then she feels the base of her palm crash against his nose.
A sound like tires over gravel.
She has no technique, nothing but brute rage on her side; the pain is sudden and immense, a flaming band around her wrist.
The man stumbles forward, toward Margot, as though he might faint into her arms. Blood gushes from one of his nostrils. His lips are coated in it. He brings a hand close to his face and then his fingers flutter away.
“I’m Louise’s sister,” she says, even more unsure of what to do now.
“My god,” says the man.
Right then the woman in the white T-shirt and black jeans comes running into the courtyard, waving a brochure and saying they owe fifteen euros for visiting the ruins, doesn’t matter if they took the tour or not.
“Something has happened.” The man touches his cheekbone and winces. He spits blood onto the ancient soil.
“Fifteen euros.” The woman points a brochure at him, then marches back inside.
“I don’t have any money,” Margot says. “The bankomat ate my card.”
He stares at her for what feels like a long time, the blood slowing to a trickle, and then takes out his wallet. She roots around in her purse and hands him a napkin. He twists the paper into a cone and pushes it up his nostril. Perhaps it is this exchange, reciprocal in nature, that makes it possible for them to leave the castle together and walk back into the village center, in total silence, that is until he turns to her and asks if he can buy her a meal, a drink.
* * *
Margot has always wanted to be the kind of person who can become too distraught to eat, but the truth is funerals make her hungry. They pick the first restaurant they come upon. By then it’s early evening, although the fog makes it feel later. There’s a cover for sitting outside, in the chill, so they take an unsteady table in an empty grotto. He sits with his back to the wall, the paper tail of the cone dangling from his nostril, blood crusted to his upper lip. The waiter lingers on his face while delivering menus, then returns with a thin stack of paper napkins and a glass filled with ice. The man glances down at the glinting cubes, but does not make a move.
“Don’t you want to clean up?” Margot asks.
“Not particularly,” he replies, and she gets it: he wants to make her look at the damage. In the well-lit restaurant she detects new details—the dawn of a receding hairline, the high arch of his eyebrows, twin bridges. Something about his eyes, deep-set and arctic blue, and the stubble darkening his cheeks gives him the look of a person who is exhausted in a way that sleep will not cure.
She goes to the bathroom and splashes cold water on her face. She hears birds chirping. She looks all around, thinking a bird has flown into the bathroom and gotten trapped, only to realize the restaurant is piping birdsong through the walls.
When she returns, the man is finishing a martini. Margot remembers his glazed eyes when he accosted her at the foundation and it is something like comfort, to sit with another drinker right now, to not have to pretend to be different or better.
She asks for a martini too and the least expensive pasta dish, one with tomato and mint, forgetting that he’s already offered to pay. The man orders another drink and the veal.
“You were impersonating Louise,” he says. “Do you have plans to blackmail me?”
“It was only a name tag.”
If she had cried out her right name, what would have happened? Would he have straightened her underwear, lowered her dress? She isn’t so sure. She finishes her martini and orders another.
“Where is Louise?” he says next.
“Gone,” Margot says. “Missing.”
Their food arrives. She eats a bite of pasta, cooked in a broth that tastes beautifully of seawater. She wants to drink from the bowl. She decides she will treat this meal as an interrogation, root out whatever he knows about Louise. She will take all the information she wants and offer nothing in return.
“She’s gone missing and I have to find her.” Margot pauses. “What can you tell me about my sister?”
He raises his fork, a clump of veal stuck to the tines. “We fuck.”
“Did you meet at a conference?” She takes a drink, holds the cold in her mouth.
“What else are conferences for?” A blade of accusation in his voice, as though anyone who attends a conference event should be prepared for whatever happens there.
“I think she might be in Rome,” Margot says. “Do you know anything about Rome?”
“Do I know anything about Rome?”
“She has an old friend in Monti, or she used to. If only I could remember a name.”
“I’m afraid Louise and I don’t spend much time in conversation.” They’ve both emptied their cocktail glasses, leaving behind a twist of lemon, a cool shimmer; he orders a carafe of wine.
“Are you a physicist?” she asks.
“Berkeley.” He fishes an ice cube from the glass and presses it gingerly to his nose. “You?”
Margot explains about the environmental nonprofit.
“Aha,” he says. “A do-gooder.”
“It’s a paycheck.” Already she’s too buzzed to be completely dishonest. “The Earth is dying and we are too late to save it.”
“An optimist too, I see. Maybe you should teach self-defense lessons instead.”
She remarks that there might be a market for such lessons in Minneapolis, given that all summer they were menaced by a man running around and slapping women in the face.
The man opens his hand and a sliver of ice slides down his palm. He hunches over in his chair, hangs his head. His shoulders tremble inside his houndstooth coat. At first she thinks he’s crying and is alarmed, ashamed—but no, he’s laughing.
“It took a long time for the police to catch him.” Under the table she feels her fingers curl into her palms. She feels her voice get big. She imagines her words shaking the laughter right out of him. “You could never let your guard down. Not for one moment.”
He looks up. His eyes have that sheen again. The grotto is still empty, no sign of their waiter even, though Margot can hear activity in the kitchen, the hiss of steam, the clank of metal.
“You got slapped,” he says. “So you slapped me.”
“I never got slapped,” she says. “Leave Minneapolis out of this.”
“Then what possessed you?” He used the lip of his glass to gesture at his bruised face.
“You know what.” She hadn’t protested in the shadowed hallway—that was true. She had felt overwhelmed by the sheer gravitational pull of the moment: the weight of his body pressed against hers, the slur of Louise in his wet mouth, her failure to find the words to explain that she had taken her sister’s name for the night, even though the explanation was, in hindsight, quite simple. She had just wanted a warm room and a few free drinks and a little revenge on Louise for leaving her alone out here; she hadn’t considered what playing the role of her sister would require of her and hadn’t that been her first mistake, to not imagine the twisted and dangerous side paths she might find herself on should she veer off course. At the same time, she knew she was lucky that something like this hadn’t happened sooner, given the nights she had stumbled through, scarcely aware that she was still on planet Earth. She looked at the man sitting across from her and wondered when he had last felt the euphoria of having been spared.
He picks up the carafe and slops more wine into his glass. “Do I?”
“Why else would you run away from me?” Margot knows he’s trying to derail her, to throw her onto a different scent. She begs herself to not fall for it.
“So what will you tell your sister? You can’t possibly be planning on the truth.”
“What will you tell her? That you couldn’t see the difference between her and another woman? That you didn’t want to?”
“Like I said, we aren’t big on small talk.”
“Well,” she says. “I can’t tell her
anything until I find her.”
He slurps his wine, narrows his arctic eyes. “You want your sister’s life. Is that it?”
She shakes her head. “No.”
He pounds his fist on the table. “Why else would you impersonate her!”
It’s true what she’s saying, that she has never desired Louise’s life. All she wants is to feel like she isn’t being destroyed by the world, even as she doubts she has any right to feel destroyed at all—she has a job and a place to live and she hasn’t even been slapped! She’s long believed her sister, her brilliant and effortless Louise, figured out the trick—and it’s only now, sitting in this damp grotto across from Louise’s bloodied lover, that Margot is awakening to the depths of her wrongness, to how much she has missed.
There is no telling where Louise is right now and she can see this man has no intention of helping her.
She stands, her chair clattering, and in the bathroom she vomits into the toilet, to the sound of artificial birdsong. In the grotto, she finds that the bill has been paid in full, as promised, and that the man is gone, his white napkin slung over the back of his chair.
* * *
Outside Margot is unsteady on her feet. Night has fallen; the goldish eyes of the streetlamps are pressed against the smoky fog. She can no longer hear the racing cars. At long last, silence. She feels something silky brush against her fingertips. The tall white dog trots past, pace brisk, ears alert—as though he is hurrying to keep an appointment.
Her mind feels mercifully blank, her muscles loose.
She wanders the village, gets lost in a tangle of dark, narrow streets, has a few more drinks in a restaurant, this one crowded with drivers in their satin racing costumes. She is heading back in the direction of the hotel when she sees a familiar man cross the central piazza and slip into the bakery, even though the sign on the door reads CHIUSO. Through the window she observes Filippo handing a leather envelope to a young woman in an orange faux fur jacket that swallows up her shoulders. Margot squints at the envelope, large and purse-like, and feels a clutching in her stomach. Yet when the young woman unzips the envelope she pulls out not a passport, but a thin sheet of paper. She disappears into the back and returns carrying what looks to be an enormous cake on a white cardboard sheet, covered in a red gingham cloth. Filippo peeks under the cloth as he talks to her, his free hand rising and falling like an orchestra conductor’s, though Margot can’t make out his words.
She takes a seat at a wrought-iron café table in the piazza and waits. The café itself is closed, the table lit by a single streetlight.
When Filippo steps outside, holding the cake, he pauses and looks both ways, like he’s preparing to navigate a busy street. Margot calls his name, her voice cutting through the darkness and fog. He crosses the piazza and carefully sets the cake down on the café table.
“Oh.” His face is pinched with disappointment. “It’s you.”
“Were you expecting someone else?”
He lights a cigarette and exhales skyward, looking even more tired than he had at the hotel. The single streetlamp illuminates one side of his body, leaves the other in shadow.
“What do you have here?” Margot imagines sinking her hands into a soft, sweet cake. She imagines giving herself, and then Filippo, a mustache made of icing.
Filippo lifts the gingham cloth and she sees that the cake is not a cake at all; rather it is a giant marzipan lamb, rendered in extraordinary detail: the white curls of fur, the seashell-pink color of the inner ears.
“Next week the hotel is hosting a wedding reception.” He flicks his cigarette into a thicket of shadow. He sits down. “The bride will want to inspect the marzipan.”
In the piazza, her head swimming as it is, the future feels like a fiction, a point on the continuum that’s been bundled in fog and pushed out to sea.
“I have to go to Rome,” she tells him. “I have to find my sister.”
“The race is over,” Filippo says. “I’ll call you a taxi in the morning myself.”
“I can’t go anywhere without my passport.” She has no idea where the closest U.S. embassy is located. Trapani? Palermo? “Did you take it? Are you going to give it back?”
“I suppose you’ll find out tomorrow.” He unclips the silver watch and places it on the table. He shakes out his wrist. “Do you people ever consider the possibility that none of you have anything that we want?”
She stares down at the lamb’s polished hooves and silvered snout, its round white belly. The longer she looks the more bloated the belly seems, so pink and swollen that if she found a knife and cut it open something alive would tumble out.
“This looks very real.” With her fingernail she taps a marzipan hoof.
He tells her it is not enough for the lamb to look real—it must look at once like a real lamb and like something sprung from a dream. It must have a certain aura. That was what separated the marzipan amateurs from the masters, the ability to create the right aura.
“An aura,” Margot repeats. Once a coworker at the nonprofit told her that she had an unsettled aura about her. She closes her eyes and is visited by a disembodied hand holding a white linen napkin. The hand shakes the napkin like a matador luring a bull.
Her eyes snap open. She sniffs the air and catches a hint of smoke.
“The hillsides are on fire,” she says.
“The firefighters only get paid if there are fires.” Filippo pulls the gingham cloth over the lamb. “So they start the fires and then run around putting them out.”
She hears a rushing sound and then the white dog gallops across the piazza, leading a pack of a dozen—no, two dozen, three dozen—strays. She watches the leader fling its massive paws into the night, white fur rigid as armor. Some dogs run in a long canter, others in a chop. They make her want to get down on all fours. They make her want to go fast and far. How do she and Filippo know that they are not just living inside a dog’s dream?
“Louise,” Filippo says.
She clutches the iron arms of her chair. It is a terrible shock, that name. She remembers walking through the automatic doors of the hotel, feeling jet-lagged and bewildered by her sister’s garbled call. She remembers setting her suitcase down at the front desk and saying Louise.
She looks down at the silver watch on the table, the hands clocking the changing hour. It is nearly midnight.
Through the cloth she strokes the marzipan lamb’s fat belly. “My name is Margot.”
“Margot?” He frowns. “Who’s Margot?”
When it happens she thinks, For as long as I live I’ll never forget this sound.
In the village, all the church bells begin to ring.
In the hillsides, the dogs howl.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I’m wildly and eternally grateful to the magazines that first published these stories and the editors who worked hard to make them better: Emily Nemens at The Paris Review; Paul Reyes and Allison Wright at the Virginia Quarterly Review; David Lynn and Caitlin Horrocks at the Kenyon Review; Lincoln Michel and Nadxieli Nieto for Tiny Crimes: Very Short Tales of Mystery and Murder; Nicole Chung at Catapult; Libby Flores and Andrew Bourne at BOMB; Claire Boyle at McSweeney’s; Halimah Marcus at Electric Literature; and Molly Elizalde at Lenny Letter.
I am enormously indebted to the Civitella Ranieri Foundation for the magical time in Umbertide, where some of these stories were written. Special thanks to Dana, Ilaria, Diego, and to my kind and brilliant cohort of artists. I’m grateful as well to the Writers’ Room of Boston for space and to the New York Public Library and American Short Fiction for encouragement along the way. And thank you to my Boston fight fam—I have never been so happy to spend time with people who are trying to punch me in the face.
Thank you to my early readers—Elliott, Lauren, Jami, R.O., Mike, and Josh. I would still be at sea without you.
I am grateful daily to have found a home at FSG. Bottomless thanks to Chloe Texier-Rose and to Jackson Howard for all that you do. Thanks also
to Na Kim for the killer cover, and to Debra Helfand, Rebecca Caine, and Frieda Duggan. At Curtis Brown, thank you to Holly Frederick, Maddie Tavis, Sarah Gerton, and Jazmina Young.
Emily Bell and Katherine Fausset—I am the luckiest to get to work with you. Thank you for everything, on the page and off.
My family—I have never been more grateful for you.
Mom—thank you for being there.
Marigold—welcome to the world, babe. You are giving us all hope.
Dad—I miss you every day. Thank you for believing that I could write stories.
Paul—you are my heart and you make everything possible. Thank you into infinity.
ALSO BY LAURA VAN DEN BERG
What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us
The Isle of Youth
Find Me
The Third Hotel
A Note About the Author
Laura van den Berg is the author of the story collections What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us and The Isle of Youth, and the novels Find Me and The Third Hotel, the latter of which was a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award and an Indie Next pick, and was named a best book of 2018 by more than a dozen publications. She is the recipient of a Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Bard Fiction Prize, a PEN/O. Henry Prize, and a MacDowell Colony fellowship, and is a two-time finalist for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Born and raised in Florida, she lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her husband and dog. You can sign up for email updates here.
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