Beauty and Charm but Strange
She broods in the hotel courtyard under the crescent moon. It’s long past two and he still hasn’t appeared. The vodka bottle sits on the wall beside her, half-drunk. She’s considering smashing it for emphasis.
They’re somewhere near Siena, in the balmy middle of Italy. The summer night swirls around her; the stars are so bright they seem arranged deliberately - like a disco for those missing all the fun.
This is the kind of holiday he prefers: business with pleasure, she thinks sourly. Something about the junction between mathematics and physics, all those absurd jargons - chromodynamics, topology, symmetry breaking. And he can’t even wallpaper.
She’d overheard them at the bar after dinner. His talk had apparently gone well; people wanted to congratulate him, discuss, explore further. This woman in particular: so confident, so at ease with herself - long hair, perfect makeup, the skirt which barely qualified. And they say female scientists are dowdy.
And so very young.
She’d caught fragments as they stood at the counter, too close together, while she sat in the corner, invisible.
“Once we went to local patches,” he was saying, “It was beautiful - so smooth in every direction, that's where the action was...”
Her ears had pricked at that.
“We could just go for it,” the woman said softly, “or do you think we need a ring first?”
“Maybe we should look for a field,” he answered. “No need to make things complex too soon...”
The woman’s voice lowered. “We should go over it again, somewhere quieter. We might explore a more… injective relationship, don’t you think?”
Then the hand on his arm, the turn of the shoulder, and the two of them ascending the stairs toward the rooms above.
They did not look round.
Now the hours have drifted. Empty hours, the kind that fill themselves with repetition and darkness. Her thoughts have churned and settled. The night presses close; the cicadas have fallen silent. She understands the culture here, how you deal with disrespect.
He’ll come through that archway soon, she thinks, across this courtyard to their room. He’ll have that dazed, happy, sated look - the one she hasn’t seen directed at her in years.
If she stands just here, very still, she can get the swing, the speed, the angle.
People often trip over flower tubs when they’ve drunk half a bottle of vodka.
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