Use the stars to get your bearings

Paolo Cognetti

Bet's a waitress. I just hang around.

She works in a restaurant at a rest stop on the Modena Nord highway. As soon as she got settled in, I began stopping by around lunchtime to see how she looked standing behind a counter and whether she could slip me something to eat. Bet is the best thing that's ever happened to me: take Elisabeth Shue, add four inches, and put her with someone like me, someone who's lost and who's trying to get his bearings. Someone who took her away from home at nineteen, who forced her to reject everything in exchange for this waitressing job on the highway running between the Autostrada del Sole and Brennero. Would we make it? Would love conquer all?

Bet's favorite poets are Neruda and Mayakovsky. She's someone who believes in love. I've got skills-I know how to do electrical work on cars, install car stereos and alarms, and I can hide a fuse box in the dark reaches of a car where not even Mr. Ford would think to look for it--but I'm at a point now where things are literally slipping out of my hands. There's always a mistake somewhere.

I'm someone who needs structure. Wake up before ten, make coffee, shove my head under a cold shower, catch the shuttle to the autogrill. A hundred and twenty employees work in shifts at the Modena Nord autogrill, between the supermarket, restaurant, snack bar, bar, body shop, and gas station, one on either side of the highway with a two-star Holiday Inn in the middle. There's a slogan posted everywhere--Making you feel at home is our business--and an overpass, so that it's not as impossible as it seems to get from one side to the other.

Bet works on the west side of the highway. She has the personality you need to face forty tables full of starving people while dressed like a pin-up girl. The other girls are pretty too, but Bet's got something else: she's good with people. She's pleasant, not just professional, and she's quick without seeming frantic. She knows what people like, and can convince you that you really do want gnocchi when they're out of everything else.

Sometimes we play Bonnie and Clyde. Bet slides me the daily special, shoots me a kiss over the counter, and I whisper in her ear, "Betti, you're a real peach." She laughs, fastening a button on her shirt that keeps popping open. She says that's how she knows I'm nearby.

Later on I go down to the shop to shoot the shit with the mechanics, or over to the bar on the east side to have a cup of coffee and joke around with the girls. It's April. Sometimes on sunny days I stretch out on the grass in the picnic area. That big sky over the open fields swallows everything, even the noise of the highway, and I think about me and Bet, about the summer, about the chocolate-colored birthmark at the base of her spine, about the latest of her Interrupted Poems, abandoned in the kitchen:

   We're in fourth gear
   He looks out at the road
   He doesn't notice I'm awake
   (I'm not even sure I've slept.)

At the beginning of May, it turns out there's a job at the tire shop that opened up when the previous tire guy, a Pole named Kristof, went back to the open road. Apparently Kristof was suddenly dumped by the siren he'd left his truck for--a widow with a car-rental business near Parma. Rocco, the head mechanic, someone I've been buttering up for a month with coffee and cigarettes, tells me the whole story and then says, "The pay's not much--you know how it is. But it's a start."

I've watched him work, and the job doesn't seem like a big deal. There's a tire delivery once a week, the shop to keep clean, inventory, orders. A bit of a workout hefting the truck wheels. Lots of down time. So that evening I decide to surprise Bet, and I show up at the restaurant in my yellow-and-gray Shell coveralls. I tell her about my new job and she puts on a fake smile I've never seen before and says something like, "Well. Welcome to the family."

In bed, when I ask her what's wrong, Bet puts her hand in my underwear, takes my dick and begins to rub it against my stomach in little circles. Then she peels off her nightshirt, climbs on top of me, and it goes without saying that we don't finish that conversation.

The next day, she turns weird: she gets up at dawn and shuts herself in the bathroom to wash her hair and iron her uniform, and, later, at lunch, she blurts out that it's better if she stops giving me free food, since the supervisors are starting to make her nervous. It's almost one o'clock, and on the other side of the restaurant there's this gorilla wearing a dark suit and leaning up against the cash register. He's got hardly any forehead, and his hair is slicked back with gel. When he bends over to whisper something to the cashier, the tip of his tie brushes her cleavage; it tickles, she laughs, and his eyes dive down her shirt. I say, "Who, him?"

At night, she becomes some kind of nymphomaniac. At first, I like this, don't get me wrong, I mean, we've never been into acrobatics. She's stopped using perfume, and her scent changes in bed: she becomes a wild animal, covering my stomach and chest with bites and little kisses. She straddles my face, lets me eat her out, grips my head between her undulating thighs. I wiggle out of her grip, I slip her under my legs, I mount her from behind, and when I enter her, Bet says things like, "Is that it? I can't feel you," or "What are you doing? Come on!" until I'm so offended I really start to give it to her, and she buries her head in the pillow, bites it, screams. In the middle of the night, she wakes me up and we begin again. In the morning I'm alone, with a glass of orange juice and a little square of bitter chocolate on the night table and a note from her stuck to the bathroom mirror: Give in to change as you would give in to curves in the road. I read it a few times, wondering whether I should put it in my wallet or leave it where I've found it. In any case, I'm big enough to appreciate the general idea. I get it. I like it.