Sparkling Creature - Part III
In Part II, adrift in her life, Hanneli gets into a fight with Cherie at work. While serving champagne during an opening, she meets Giancarlo in the gallery and feels reinvigorated by the potential of his artistry. Read Part III to see what happens next.
Looking back on that night, it was hard to remember the moments after I met Giancarlo. What I did remember came to me with the hazy quality of a movie, moments disparate from one another. Staccato bits of memory, flooding in indiscernible order. I could not recall the minutiae of the interactions around the gallery, but I remembered feeling there was an odd static in the air, and electricity akin to sorcery or witchcraft.
*****
Pretty soon into our conversation, Giancarlo had shared with me that he was a photographer. He had been looking for a gallery to place his work, and was invited to a few, including ours. He was trying to narrow it down.
I was impressed. It was rare for an artist to be courted like this, and I could feel the gravity of this fact. I was in awe that he had attention to spare on me. He spoke with me until a gallery patron came up to him. Most artists treated patrons like their bosses, but Giancarlo took his time peeling himself away from me. Before we parted, he asked for my number. After I typed it into his phone, he snapped my photo.
“What was that for?” I asked.
“I am interested in the alignment of your face. It’s not symmetrical, but it is still provocative.”
I frowned, desperate to ask him what this meant, but he had already walked away. I looked around to see if anyone had seen our interaction, but I only found Cherie glaring at me from across the room. I scuttled away to grab a new tray, and continued the service. I ran champagne in and out of rooms, up and down stairs, until the charity event finally ended. I looked for Giancarlo, but I couldn’t find him. I gave up. It was time to put on an apron and mop the floors, wipe down tables, and sanitize the door handles. I muled empty trays of champagne upstairs for the men of the kitchen to drain and clean. I wondered what the kitchen looked like at the end of the night. I remembered Ross, and thought about wishing him a good night. As I went to grab my bag, Giancarlo materialized in front of me.
“Want to go for a drive?”
So I walked out with him, me trailing like a hypnotized puppy. We walked through the parking lot as he pulled out a fresh cigarette and popped it in his mouth. I studied his face in the harsh light of the parking lot fluorescents. He no longer looked boyish, the hard lines of crows feet and parentheses around his mouth fully on display.
“Guess which is my car.”
The parking lot was full of beautiful cars. Mazeratis, Porches, and Ferraris.
“That one?” I asked, pointing at a sporty Bentley. He laughed and shook his head. He walked three steps ahead of me, farther and farther into the parking lot. We walked for so long, I began to wonder if he was leading me somewhere to murder me. Just when I thought I should turn around, leave this stranger, we got to a white beater. Giancarlo took a key out of his pocket and jingled it.
“This is mine,” he said, petting the car like it was going to purr.
He pushed a key into the handle to open. I got in, and found the air inside the car was stale. I turned a dial near my shin to open the window as Giancarlo connected his phone to the audio by plugging it into a cord leading up to a cassette tape. The tip of the cable had been duct-taped, which further ripped as he scrolled his phone for music. I had a fleeting worry, all of a sudden, that the car had been stolen. I stifled the thought. Too absurd.
Giancarlo started the car, and music began to play dimly.
“I want to show you a place,” Giancarlo said.
Once again, I was thrilled. It had been too long, maybe almost a year, since anyone had romanced me. To be catered to, courted, was an exotic sensation. I found it difficult to quell my nerves as we drove, first through the city, and then out. We got to the hills of the suburbs, and the streets narrowed as the roads became steeper. There was a moment he turned into a dark corner where I nearly felt my life flash in front of me. It happened again when he momentarily stalled the car on the steepest part of the hill. I saw that my life had not been all that interesting. I felt only shame for my capricious judgments. Here was a man who was trying to share something with me, perhaps intimacy, and all I could focus on was my half-baked life. I wanted to be in the moment now, because I understood now that I had lived like a ghost. I couldn’t accept the friends I had, so I had none. If I did the same with a man, I would end up a lonely, croaking woman like my mother would be when she departed from the earth. I needed to learn contentment.
We drove around for a bit longer, never landing on a destination. I wasn’t sure if he was lost, or if there had never been a place to show me. I didn’t care. In Giancarlo’s car, I forgot I had intended to quit my job. I forgot how furious the world of the gallery made me feel. For that ride, I was swept up in the feeling that I was meeting someone who would become significant to me. With him, I remembered my conviction that there were secret worlds everywhere. Portals to step out of and into. So after our date, at his invitation, I stepped into Giancarlo’s home.
*****
He lived in what looked like a bomb shelter. All his furniture was made from stacks of wooden pallets or cinder blocks, softened only by white sheets hung along the walls like tapestries, hammered into place with string lights all around. I couldn’t tell if it was an aesthetic or if he was just poor. I could see the moon through his window, the same sonic brightness as before.
As we drank, I let him kiss me wetly and grope under my shirt. I stopped his hands every time they slipped below my waist. I wondered if he would comment on my beauty. Any inkling that I could become a muse.
“You’re the only artist I know who doesn’t talk incessantly about your craft,” I said after a while.
“That is like turning on the lights at a concert. It’s expository.”
“I want to see more of your work.”
“Sharing one’s own art without intimacy places undue emotional pressure on the art.”
He tried to slip his hand into my waistband again.
“What about letting the mystery of the piece beget the chemistry?”
“To imagine you dissecting my art subjectively, from a distance….that is intolerable.”
A rage gurgled in the pit of my stomach. Rage against his stoic impenetrability. I wanted him to see me as I wanted to be seen. Why was there a lack of openness to my desire? Intimacy had to work in a specific way: intellectual, aesthetic, and finally physical. The order was everything. If I was to do this right, the order was what would make me a muse first, and lover second. It kept me from being bought, like the art of the gallery.
I got up to leave.
“Wait,” he said. “What is it you want?”
I stopped moving.
My heart pounded in my chest. Anger mutating back into the thump-thump of my derelict hope. I looked around his house. It was different from the homes of the gallery artists I had been in. They were obsessed with the optics of radicalization. They needed it to be known that they were so upset to be wealthy, that it was so unfair that anyone had to suffer, and they were doing their best to rectify the fact that suffering itself was a foreign concept to them. In fact, through this art, they were creating space to honor the voiceless within the walls of their own homes. Look at the artillery-palette combo in the grand foyer! See their sacrifice, evoking tragedy where they could be simply merrymaking, ignoring atrocities around the world. No one should resent their disproportionate wealth. They probably masturbated to their own sympathy. Giancarlo was different. He lived simply. He was discreet.
“I want to give you sex,” I said finally. “But I want things too.”
“Tell me.” His eyes were glistening.
“If you take me as a lover, then you must also take me as your erotic subject.”
I had never spoken so clearly in my life.
“Yes, absolutely,” he said.
“I will release my soul and body to you.”
“Phenomenal.”
“And you will use that for a photoshoot.”
He nodded into my neck, and this time, I let his hand slip down my pants.
To be continued…
Swati Sudarsan is a writer from Michigan, now based in Brooklyn on unceded Lenape land. She is a 2025 Asian American Writers' Workshop Margins Fellow, 2025 Periplus Fellow, and 2023 winner of the Bread Loaf Katharine Bakeless Nason Award. She is at work on a novel, which was longlisted for the Granum Prize in 2024. Her work is interested in both the burden and beauty of inhabiting a feminine body in the world. She is a Libra.
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