Sarah Rifky:
His sister scowled at him “250.000 Euros! Just say that’s what you want!” He hesitated for a moment, he didn’t want to lose the job by requesting an unusually high sum for a cultural worker, he thought. “Fuck it.” 250.000 Euros. Click. Send. He didn’t want to hold up his sister’s drinking party downstairs. The next morning, Mardi was offered the job of his dreams. That same morning, Mardi work up with the worst hangover he could ever imagine.
***
“Sweetie, I am allowed two bags cross Atlantic! And I most certainly don’t need a Schengen visa to transit for 40 minutes in Rome. For God’s sake,” he muttered “it’s less than an hour!” The pretty girl from the Bronx wouldn’t take his patronizing tone. “Sweetie – humph!” she thought, eyeing Mardi curiously from the waist up as she called her supervisor. A woman, who looked like his mother walked up to him, in uniform. “I ‘ave a solucion: we’ll geet you in a wheelchair – dat way you can caaary one of your bags on your laaap while we whiz you through securité.” “But I don’t need – ” his mother’s look alike, with a foreign accent he couldn’t place, wouldn’t take it. A second later he was being wheeled through security checkpoints up until the boarding gate. “Sir,” a flight stewardess with uneven lipstick announced leaning over towards him slightly “you have been upgraded to seat 1E.” Mardi flew first class for the first time, enjoying complimentary (very palatable, he thought) champagne all the way. He arrived in Rome with a hangover.
***
He stayed up all night, carousing with people he imagined he wanted to be. The spectacle of art in an English lounge, the curator as object of contemplation, he thought to himself for an instant, drowsy-drunk but happy. What was it again? Yes. The curator. Being a curator. A vocational flâneur. He sunk in the depth of brown leather armchairs, lifting his left sole to meet the edge of the mahogany table – at once casual, but classy he thought. Unfocused, trying to get a glimpse of the tip of his boot. He couldn’t remember which pair he had worn. He hoped to not be wearing faux-leather (but of course he was). A beautiful woman, articulate and funny, leaned over, accidentally brushed his hand and continued to flirt with him all evening. Stray thoughts with undercurrents of sexual tension and play teased him throughout the night. A proclamation of a love of sorts was made. Perhaps, he thought to himself, she was “the One”. Promises of catching the 9AM train down to Amsterdam the next morning were made. Mardi woke up with a furry mouth and a taste of satisfaction and fulfillment. He fondled his phone for a moment only to realize that the snooze button flickered 11:18 and his head was pounding. He had missed the train and a go at love – or something similar. He caught the noon train, alone, the most miserable he had ever been, hung over, cursing good fortunes that materialized for everybody else but him.
