Then you take it away from him.
Then you take away the dimpled chin and gold-green eyes, the haughty cheekbones and perfect lips. You take away the woman whose pure and talismanic beauty transforms her into a goddess. You take away the woman whose eyes hold all his secrets. The same kind of scorn he learned to fear from a mother who could either kiss or hit him with no warning. A heart that hurts the same as his, that breaks the same as his. The only woman he can never possess, rejecting him all the way to Rome, and quickly taking up with the greatest bullfighter alive. It takes him a few weeks to realize that she’s serious this time, that she’s walking out on him for good. By then, it’s much too late.
This loss will propel him into sublime art, the kind that seems almost holy, but he will never recover. No one else will know him as deeply, and he will never surrender his heart to another woman ever again. He will build shrines to her in his home, little altars with photographs and candles and old letters. He will have one of her photos enlarged into a ten-foot tall poster—and shoot bullets at her face all night long, until he passes out from exhaustion. The rest of his life he will search for what he had with her, gorging himself on earthly pleasures while painfully remembering the ambrosia of heaven. Other people didn’t observe heaven between them, but to the lovers, it was there.
It was there, but now it’s gone.
Or is it?
Years later, she sits in her apartment in Madrid and plays his records at top volume. This is where she goes to be with him, for in these songs time and space are suspended, dissolved, fractured, cracked like doorways. On the other side of the door shines once again the flicker of his eye, and she begins to speak to the records themselves, responding to his songs as if in conversation. “No, no, don’t say that.” Then, “yes, I know.” Then, “darling, you must forget…” All the while she seems on the verge of tears. Remembering, suffering. She lapses eventually into a wordless communion with him, staring out the window as if he is just across the plaza from her. Maybe he is, in that amorphous but tangible way that a former lover can be. Or perhaps the door is pushed further open. They lock eyes, and in this shared glance is greater intimacy and feeling than in any physical touch—or indeed, proximity. They lock eyes, and a tear falls down her face, its beauty decaying but undiminished.
A flash of blue, then he vanishes. “See you later, baby,” she says, and lights another cigarette. Her current lover emerges from the next room.
“I’m still here, my darling.”
“Yes, I know. That was Francis. He really had a lot to say tonight.”
This is the story of Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner.