The Villa(7)
From: [email protected]
Buongiorno, Chess! Your stay at the luxurious Villa Aestas is all set! Thank you again for trusting me to set up the PERFECT summer vacation for you. I think you’re absolutely going to be delighted with Villa Aestas and the entire Orvieto area. Here’s a bit from the website:
Nestled in the hills around Orvieto in Umbria, Villa Aestas is an oasis of calm and serenity, full of historical charm while still catering to the sophisticated twenty-first-century traveler. While many of the home’s original furnishings from the 1800s have been preserved, the kitchen is fully modern, and the property’s three bathrooms have recently been remodeled. Only a fifteen-minute drive from the city center, Villa Aestas provides privacy and convenience, and for an added fee, a daily maid and chef service is available. Enjoy your stay in one of Umbria’s hidden gems!
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Chess, you neglected to mention that this is a Murder House.
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Does one murder a Murder House make? Besides, it was a bunch of rock star types in the seventies—honestly if murder hadn’t happened, it would be more of a surprise.
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
I do think one murder makes a Murder House, as a matter of fact! There’s a podcast about it! If some guy in an ironic graphic tee and stupid hat has spent ten hours narrating the terrible thing that happened in the house, it is a verified Murder House!
(But you’re right, this house is also gorgeous and I’m excited, and I promise to only mention the murder five times AT MOST.)
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
There’s my girl.
I see you in my dreams, he says to me as we lay together/Girl, you haunt me every night.
But he haunts my days, every waking moment/when he’s with her, there in the light.
And I wish I could hate her/wish I could hate him/wish I could set myself free.
But we three are tied together/a golden chain unbroken/and I think it’s strangling me.
“Golden Chain,” Lara Larchmont, from the album Aestas (1977)
MARI, 1974—LONDON
It’s raining again.
But then it’s always raining, the rainiest summer Mari can remember, and as she sits at the kitchen window of her more-than-slightly shabby flat, she leans her forehead against the glass, watching the water run down the wavy glass, the people on the street rushing by in a mass of black umbrellas.
The smog mixes with the rain, the sky more of a noxious yellow than gray, and she suddenly longs to be anywhere but London. Back to Scotland, maybe, where she’d spent a year when she was thirteen, living with friends of her father. The air had been clear there, cold and crisp, and she thinks air like that might be the only thing that can clear her head, that can sweep away the pain of this disastrous year.
In the other room, she hears Pierce laugh, and she knows she needs to get up from this hiding spot, to go talk to the various people gathered in their living room, and play the part of Pierce’s loving girlfriend. It’s what she’s been doing for the past year, after all, ever since they moved to this flat.
It’s too quiet here, he’d said, and had proceeded to fill the place with noise at every opportunity.
Mari understood that he thrived with an audience and didn’t blame him for it, but she’d wanted to write today—he knew she’d wanted to write today—which is why she’s holed up at the kitchen table they’ve squeezed into this tiny corner of their tiny kitchen, a notebook open and only two words written across the top of the page.
Houses remember.
She has no idea where she’s going with that thought, but it had popped into her brain this morning, and she’d written it down, sure it was the beginning of … something. Something big, some story just sitting coiled inside of her, ready to spring out fully formed.
Mari used to have these moments more often. When she was a kid, scribbling in her journal on her bed, the words had poured out of her, fragments of stories that never managed to materialize into anything as formal as a book, but still. Everything she read, she wanted to write. When she got into her stepmother’s collection of Victoria Holts, she wrote Gothic melodramas. When her father’s history books caught her eye, suddenly her journal was full of Napoleonic battles and tragedy on the high seas. Mari felt she could write anything, everything, and she had. She had reams and reams of paper stuffed in her tiny bedroom, peeping out of drawers, crumpled between books on her shelves, stacked up on her desk in messy piles.
She’d thought the words would always be that easy, that free.
That’s what life with Pierce was supposed to be about, after all. Both of them pursuing their art: Pierce through his music, Mari through her writing.
A lovely idea. An idyllic one.
The only issue was that it didn’t bloody work.
It was hard for two people to be artists when the rugs needed hoovering, and food needed to be purchased, dishes washed. And somehow, those things kept falling on her.
She might have had a perfect line in her head this morning, but when she’d gotten up, she’d discovered they were out of milk, out of bread, and, most important, out of wine, and Pierce was already strumming his guitar on the sofa, so she’d been the one to go to the shops.