The Red Arrow by William Brewer

Author:William Brewer [Brewer, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2022-05-17T00:00:00+00:00

The subterranean light of the high-speed rail terminal of Bologna Centrale is all halogen and LED, cold blue modern alien light that makes it feel like it’s always night, but it isn’t, not yet. I’m in 12D of car 7 on Frecciarossa train 9601, actively departing for Roma Termini, heading back the way I came. The interior is identical to this morning’s car: gray leather seats, hard plastic armrests, clean oblong windows, clean floors, small TVs above the aisle, accordion doors between the cars; but there’s a difference. If the morning’s smelled of disinfectant and humans freshly scrubbed and perfumed, it smells like that now, but in decay. The bitter dirt tinge of espresso and cigarette breath. Cologne spritzed directly onto the damp underarm fabric of an oxford shirt. Sweat in the air, yes, and exhaustion—I’ve already seen one person’s head yo-yo in involuntary sleep. Someone, I’m pretty sure, is eating cured meats. Yet it still feels clean and elegant and even cheerful. The real difference is, I think, that whatever the day was going to do it’s already gone ahead and done. An unwinding. And where this morning’s train was starting its journey fresh, I’m joining this one halfway through its own. The car feels like a little village that has accepted me—small smiles curled up as I came aboard, found my seat—and together just now we’ve reemerged aboveground into an early evening possessed by light like hammered copper that has the whole ruddy city glowing as if someone plugged it in.

When I arrive in Roma Termini in time for dinner, I’ll stroll for thirty minutes in the newfound lightness of my body over to SantoPalato—a newer trattoria in San Giovanni much praised for its commitment to rehabbing Roman classics, forgotten staples hardly eaten by the young, which is to say they’ve been praised for going backward—where I’ll meet Annie and we can enjoy the last days of our honeymoon. I can see her now, in her black jeans and white linen shirt, her pointed orange loafer-slides with a fashion heel, elegant and big eyed, eager to eat, smiling at me with her imperfect smile, not that it isn’t perfect in its beauty—it is—but dentally speaking it isn’t uniform because her left central incisor, her left-front tooth, is angled slightly away from the crescent curve held by the rest of her top row, a “flaw” she hates but which I love precisely for its radical remove from the uniform impersonal smile obtained by everyone in our generation thanks to the explosion of the orthodontics industry, a “flaw” that conveys so much confidence—old-school European model/film-star confidence—that I’ve seen people, women and men, subconsciously slide their tongues under their teeth while talking to her, trying to nudge out their left central incisor like hers. We will embrace. She will smell like Chanel No. 5. She’ll genuinely ask me to tell her everything. And what will I tell her? I’m still making sense of it myself.

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