"The stars remind me of The Little Prince," Marisa said.
"I read that book as a boy and loved it," Robert commented while Eliana kept quiet.
"It's only with the heart that one can see rightly. What is essential is invisible to the eye," Marco quoted.
"That's it. And among a thousand people, the one that goes to the trouble of captivating us becomes unique," continued Marisa. "I reread The Little Prince last year and was surprised that a story for children could deliver such profound truths. Do you remember the ending with the stars?"
"Actually, I don't. What I never forgot was that line by the fox."
"Before returning to his star, the little prince laughed and said from then on his aviator friend would remember him and his laughter every time he saw the stars in the sky, and all the stars would be laughing for the aviator. They would hold a special meaning and never be the same because both friends had captivated each other."
And I, every time I see a dark and glossy jabuticaba berry, remember you and your eyes, Marco, she thought with a strange commotion as she recalled the scene where the little prince bode farewell to his friend. All of a sudden there was no longer laughter in the sky, which now seemed to her a dark cemetery lit up with a myriad of tiny bluish crosses. Marisa missed the girl she had been one day, that one reading for the first time The Little Prince in her childhood. And then came the melancholy of comparing her to the woman she was today, seated there contemplating somber stars. She didn't mention the book again.
The conversation wended to constellations, legends and distant planets. At one point, the unbearable beauty of the stars turned uncomfortable, commanding secret reflections, longings and pains. None of them wanted to confront those so they left the chaise lounges vaguely disquiet, staring at their own feet and the deck expanse with its illusion of firm ground.
They went back to the central pool and found Zoe taking off with Jean-Philippe and half a dozen musicians. She invited them to tag along to the Opal Lounge where they would be having a jam session. And who could resist Zoe with her rainbow hair and her cheeks ruddy with music, dance and mojitos? The four friends joined the noisy retinue down the stairs to Deck 6.
Their destination was a spacious venue that doubled as a game room and nightclub. The group passed by the pool, chess and backgammon area to reach a nostalgic salon in the back. Its ambiance evocative of the 1940s greeted them with elegant wooden-paneled walls, tranquil lighting and tables lapped by semicircular, cream-leathered seats that spread around the dance floor and on a curved platform further behind. They paused at the bar for a line of shots lit up by the bartender. A trail of fire enveloped the drinks on the counter for a few seconds, and when the orange flames died away, they applauded, turned up their glasses and proceeded to the dance floor
The cover band on duty jammed with guests and it wasn't long before Zoe and her friends jumped to the stage. On Eliana's request they sang If You're Going to San Francisco. With a dreamy smile, she hugged Marco's waist and he put his arm around her shoulders. They performed a duet as they knew the lyrics by heart. Marisa didn't and returned annoyed to the bar as soon as the song ended. The unmistakable riffs of Satisfaction took the lounge by assault and everybody sang along with the band.
While Marisa ordered another shot, Marco approached her, the sleeves of his shirt rolled up and the coat thrown over one shoulder. Despite a serious countenance, his face beamed. Marisa offered him a drink. He declined, said he was going to change his clothes and departed. There was no conversation. With a surge of sadness, Marisa concluded Marco couldn't care less about her letter. Robert soon joined her, ordering a shot too. The flames on the counter danced and extinguished. The two drank in one go.
"Tired of singing?" Robert asked, contracting his face as the alcohol made its way down his throat.
She shrugged. They looked at the stage where Eliana and Zoe improvised: I can get no, I can get no...
"Eliana loves to sing. She wouldn't leave that stage even if you tried to drag her away." He turned to Marisa. "Want to go for a stroll on the deck?"
She assented. They walked and talked about music until arriving at the heliport on the far end of the bow. There they marveled at the starry sky and, with the ardor of the drinks in their bodies, decided to move up to Deck 13, crossing the mini-golf course of sinuous green paths, marks and lampposts extending to the stern. In an impulse, they lay down with their heads on the raised border of the lawn under an explosion of stars.
Robert propped himself on one elbow and stared at Marisa.
"Finally," he said.
Marco tossed his coat on the sofa and grabbed a bottle of water in the minibar. Sitting on the balcony, he contemplated the ocean. It wasn't the ocean, though, what he saw. It was Eliana singing next to him like she had years before in San Francisco, making him relive a sentiment he had deemed dead. Marco reminisced the details of that evening from the past and, more than anything, the impressions imprinted in his innermost: her voice caressing his ear, the greenish brown eyes on his, the distracted hand on his waist—the same hand that had encircled him moments ago, not with distraction but rather deliberation... Or maybe he was dreaming? Anyone who saw them would say Eliana's gesture was a mere display of friendship. He could have imagined her warmth when she sought him and the warmth of his own body's response.
He could have imagined it. But he knew. He knew in that instant Eliana wasn't singing along with him. She was singing for him.
You are in motion
Toward a new devotion
So when the storm towers
Remember the flowers
When he first met Eliana, she attended singing classes. She said they helped her unleash her repressed emotions. He asked which emotions. Eliana took a long time to reply and he thought she had forgotten the question. Then she said all emotions had a deep layer of pain—the pain of losing what you once had, the pain from the fear of losing what you had now. And pain was what he felt that evening after his mother told him Lorena was pregnant with her second child. The pain of having lost and keep losing. His mind, his body, his heart couldn't cope and he fell bedridden with a nasty flu.
Eliana knocked on his door bringing a bowl of soup, jumped over the clothes on the floor, transposed the barricade of books piled by the bed and forced him to eat. To his objections she replied it was a homemade soup and would do him good. When she heard the news about Lorena, Eliana had a singular reaction. She yanked off his blankets and instructed him to wash and get dressed. They were going to a karaoke bar.
The one thing Marco wished was to sink into bed and disappear. The last was to end the night at a karaoke bar. Eliana, deaf to his protests, shoved the last spoonfuls of soup into his mouth and dragged him to the shower. While he washed, she chatted behind the door and guaranteed that singing would exorcize Lorena and all her descendants. Marco said he could sing another time, he even promised that one of those nights he would make a solo with the soft setting of the waves on Ocean Beach until he lost his voice.
She insisted that no, it wasn't the same thing to sing alone on the beach or around a bonfire with friends. That would be comfortable. There was a different energy in poisoning your liver with a row of drinks and going onstage not only to sing but to expose your own dignity to an audience of strangers, expose the out-of-tune notes, the out-of-tune feelings, until the toxins of the heart were all purged.
He argued that karaoke bars were tacky and the beach, with its natural environment, was the ideal place for sentimental expansions. She, however, was no longer there to listen. When Marco returned wrapped in a robe, he found Eliana seated on the edge of the bed leafing through one of his education compendiums. In the bedroom dominated by the bookcase heavy with books, she suddenly seemed to him the perfect fit.
Eliana was right, of course. And at the bar Marco did everything he shouldn't. He drank to the brim, drank cold beverages and, instead of sparing his throat, bawled into the microphone like a madman. It wasn't the time for sparing himself. A solitary ballad on the beach would make a good scene for a saccharine film, with a mysterious chorus of violins descending from transcendental heights to move the audience. It wasn't time for saccharine ballads but for pouring out bile. And as he got intoxicated and sang, Marco felt miraculously better. He felt good.
Amidst the alcoholic vapors and the blue beams onstage, he experienced a lightness that had nothing to do with his empty glass on the table. He stared at Eliana with gratitude. She smiled and hugged him to the sound of San Francisco. On her face, Marco recognized the features of a savior saint and of a temptation he didn't want to resist. He wanted to kiss her. Eliana sensed it. She didn't lean in nor refuse him—under the satiny moonlight onstage, her irises glistened with the intensity of her indecision.
"I missed talking to you," said Robert.
"Did you?" Marisa half-lifted herself to gaze at him.
In the ocean of his eyes, the blue waters overflowed with all the light Robert saw in her. Marisa's breathing changed, and in that breath she realized how long it had been since Marco looked at her that way. It was a reassuring balm, it was almost euphoria for feeling alive again. She orbited on that feeling and a sparkle ignited somewhere in her heart, in the arid apsis where a crouching woman sobbed.
Robert stroked her face and brushed aside a brown strand that had escaped from the ribbon. It was a slow gesture, in recognition of each filament of hair, his fingers sliding delicately across her temple and her face. Marisa fought the tears.
"You're going through a rough patch too, eh?"
She didn't reply.
"You have gone through a lot of changes in your life, Marisa. Starting a new chapter at college, then starting it all over again in another country. You haven't had the time to adapt to any of those changes. But you're going back home."
What was home?, she asked herself. Living with Marco and picking up the pieces of their relationship? Going back to her mother's? Renting an apartment while she studied and searched for a job without having any experience?
This was her home: an uncertain future.
But the future was always uncertain. She had planned to graduate in one subject and that went down the drain. She had believed in the steadiness of her relationship with Marco and now skidded in quicksand. Things change, he always said. Marisa remembered a book by Marshall Berman that a teacher from college had recommended. The title intrigued her: All that is Solid Melts into Air.
"How is the end of a relationship, Robert?"
He meditated for a moment. The answer flowed with ease: "Empty. Full of melancholy. Like the sadness you feel on a gray day. As if the solid color of the sky threatened to crush the earth. After placing your bets in a relationship, you refuse to accept it's over. The signs are there. It's you who don't want to see them."
She pictured her white days in Toronto and the livid sky within herself. Robert described with accuracy what she had felt—what she was feeling. Marco disdained the costume she had bought for him and what was in its pocket. Maybe their relationship had reached the last breath. Marisa reviewed her few relationships before meeting him and tried to relive the feeling of the end. It was a futile attempt: none compared to the bond with Marco because before meeting him she had never loved.
The whisper of the breeze brought back Madame Lefèvre's gloomy premonition. When Marisa had heard it in Toronto, she gasped for air. That night, though, she received it with the resignation of someone finally accepting fate.
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Yep. Now we're going down a very steep road. Fasten your seatbelts. xoxo