Naked Men

by Alicia Giménez-Bartlett

  It’s weird, right? Problems are piling up in my life, and my response is to start pondering my host’s literary education. The most generous explanation is that I just want to return the favor. He gives me work, a roof over my head, and moral support, while I try to transmit to him the only thing of value I’ve got: the pleasure of reading. The harsher interpretation is that introducing him to books is just my way of trying to make him worthier of me. Iván is primal, sexist, uncouth, marginal—but what if literature could have some miraculous influence on him? I want to be his Pygmalion; worse, I’m acting like one of those partners in an out-of-sync couple who wants to transform his lover to match his own image and likeness. Pathetic. I’ve turned into a real jackass.

  Where do I get off? Iván is far superior to me. I’ve tumbled down the social ladder; I’m a pariah, a loser. A man who got fired from his job and whose girlfriend gave him three days to get out. Whereas Iván’s managed to make a living, get a move on, turn the difficult circumstances of his past into a comfortable, anguish-free reality. He goes out, hustles, shows his face. And me? I shake my sad bones in a striptease show because he got me the spot.

  What would my life have been like if I hadn’t gone to Iván’s grandmother’s funeral? I’d still be unemployed. I’d still have Sandra. But what for? It’s clear our relationship was an arrangement whose rules of operation were dictated by other people. That’s always the way things are—when you’re standing outside an apparatus, you see exactly how the gears work, the whole mechanism. All the pieces have to be in place. We were a simple case: a young couple, both with jobs. Good collaboration on household tasks. Supportive: you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours. Friends in common. Shared interests. Agreed-on outings: to the movies, to dinner. Laid-back weekends. Safe, realiable sex. Everything in its place. Change just one element of that structure—for example, write “stripper” where it says “teacher”—and the whole thing falls apart. The guy changing jobs is the same—me—but the machine no longer runs smooth. It locks up, no longer functions. No option but to repair or change it out. Sandra has opted to change. I imagine she’ll look for a replacement part that says “lawyer” or “paper pusher” or “gardener”—it doesn’t matter, anything to complete the mechanism so it will start humming along again as smoothly as ever.

  Enough, enough—I don’t want to play this game. I don’t want to be interchangeable. I have my identity. I am who I am, no matter what. From now on I’m even going to be proud of working at the club. I’m going to take off my clothes with conviction, with professionalism, and anyone who doesn’t want to see it doesn’t have to look.

  * * *

  “Business is bad, business is bad.” I know, I know! I don’t need the manager hounding me constantly with that refrain. No doubt he has more information than I do; even our most recent hire probably has more information. But I’m fed up. They need me there for everything now. The manager spends his days telling me about everything that’s going wrong. He’s looking to cover his ass. He doesn’t want to be accused of being lackadaisical.

  “Maybe we should sell,” I snapped one day.

  “It’s too late. The way things are right now, if someone bought us out, we’d lose a ton of money. When your father was still alive and things were starting to go downhill, I recommended he sell. A family business of this size can’t go toe to toe with the multinational corporations. Of course he refused to listen to me.”

  “I wouldn’t have listened to you either.”

  “You don’t listen to me now, Irene. Maybe if you were more involved in the business . . . ”

  Enough, man, I don’t want to hear your whining. You’re anxious to put the responsibility for the coming disaster on me, but I have no intention of falling into your trap. I don’t blame you for anything, but don’t you blame me. He’s scared. I don’t understand how Papá could have trusted him so much. He felt secure under my father’s protection, and in theory he’d have given his life for him. All of us would have, though I get the sense that ultimately we’ve all failed him, even me. Me and, of course, that parasite David. I should be thankful my father isn’t here to witness this decline, to see my marriage fall apart, but I’m not. I get angrier and angrier as time goes by. People keep looking at me pityingly: “Poor thing, her husband left her for a younger woman.” If they only knew how little I care about that! I’ve dumped a deadweight. What I really can’t stand is the way David’s betrayed my father. When David left I was numb, but now the anesthesia’s worn off and the pain has kicked in. I guess I should get aggressive and fight for the company, get it back on its feet, bring back the boom times, make everybody’s jaws drop in amazement. But I’m tired. I haven’t been sleeping well lately. I wake up at four in the morning, get up, drink some water, go to the bathroom, head back to bed, and am unable to fall asleep again.

  I’ve done everything all wrong! After David left me, I was dazed, unable to react. Later, I was aggrieved. Then I started hanging out with Genoveva. And now, just when I’d almost forgotten about David, indignation is keeping me awake. Maybe I should go to a psychiatrist, but I don’t want to tell someone all about my life—I don’t like to talk.

  “Lay off more workers. Do what you have to do to keep the business afloat a little longer.”

  “I’m not sure that makes sense, Irene.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “If that’s what you want . . . You’re the boss.”

  I read his thoughts: “Spoiled little girl. Silly little girl. She thought the world was her oyster, but now that her father’s not around, she’s let everything go downhill.” He heads toward the door, but I stop him.

  “What do you suggest we do?”

  “Stop paying the invoices.”

  “We will do that, but not right now. Wait a bit longer.”

  I don’t want to confirm my failure quite yet. Not after my divorce. It’ll happen. There’s always time to fall apart. Maybe letting a few employees go is enough. I don’t want people laughing at me.

  I’m finally going to the psychiatrist. Like everything else, he comes on Genoveva’s recommendation. She says he’s worked wonders for her. He prescribes her sleeping pills and antianxiety medication. I tell her that’s what I want too. She praises him to the skies: pleasant, competent, and discreet. He has an office downtown. He’s a nice-looking fifty-something, the standard-issue psychiatrist for wealthy women like us. He doesn’t smile, and neither do I. He puts on a poker face, and so do I. He asks if I’m depressed. I tell him I’m not. Am I distressed? No. Am I nervous? No. I tell him I wake up in the night and have a hard time getting back to sleep. He asks if I’ve had a traumatic experience recently. I tell him my father died a year back, my company’s not doing well. He asks if I’m married. Not anymore. Divorced? For a few months now. He asks if I want us to talk about that. I tell him I don’t.

  “A rough patch,” he says.

  “Exactly,” I say.

  He prescribes an anxiolytic and a sleep aid. He explains that the sleep aid isn’t as addictive as your typical sleeping pill. He gives me a follow-up appointment in two weeks. We’ll see. His receptionist charges me a bundle.

  * * *

  A lot of the time I’m alone in Iván’s apartment. He’ll be out somewhere—he never tells me where he goes. I wander through the rooms, shamelessly poking around. I don’t open drawers or closets, of course. I just look at the décor, and everything I see surprises me. Iván mixes modern objects that aren’t bad with kitschier stuff. He has a nice designer lamp next to his computer and, next to that, several imitation Lladró figurines that are just horrendous: a child shepherdess with a lamb over her shoulders, a lady with a parasol covered in bows. I don’t get it. How can that cheesy, sappy stuff appeal to a tough guy like him? Were they gifts? Does he have them on display because they’ve got some kind of sentimental value, or does he really like the way they look?

  S
ome equally disconcerting paintings are hanging on the walls. There are reproductions of abstract art whose primary hue matches the curtains. He’s got atrocious posters of cars and kung fu movies that he’s placed in ornate gold frames. The contrast produces a strange effect. It’s mind-boggling to think that Iván took these posters to be framed with the clear intention of making them beautiful. This rough-hewn man clearly harbors a love of order and beauty.

  I stop and review: rough-hewn man, love of order and beauty. In my thoughts, I’m starting to use the vocabulary of a bad novel, the kind that pathetic writers self-publish under the delusion that they’re fantastic: a melodramatic, hollow vocabulary. I guess I’m terrified that the dangers threatening me in this new situation might crash down on me: vulgarity, bad taste, lumpen sensibilities. My fear proves I’m not above anything or anybody. I thought I’d overcome a lot of prejudices, but I haven’t. I feel panicky. In the blink of an eye, all of my benchmarks have gone to shit. First, my job, which, though it wasn’t very stable, still gave me a certain status. Gone. Second, my friends, who read Murakami novels and watched Coen brothers movies without dubbing into Spanish. Gone. Finally, I’ve lost my partner, who slotted me seamlessly into a normal life. As a result of this last and most fundamental loss, I’ve also lost my house, my books on display, my corner of the world.

  I’ve lost all of it consciously. I took the job as a stripper because I couldn’t stand feeling useless. I pulled away from my friends because I was embarrassed about being a stripper. Sandra left me because she can’t stand having her partner be a stripper. Every action has consequences, and those consequences lead to further consequences. If you choose not to act, it makes no difference: failure to act has its own consequences. And so it goes until you die. The first mistake humans make is not committing suicide as soon as they achieve the barest use of their capacity for reason.

  Iván never shuts down the computer, so I’ve brazenly glanced through some of his chats. He writes the same crap that everybody else does, uses tons of emojis, posts photos of himself wearing new clothes, recommends records and movies . . . all of it rife with spelling errors and marked by an extraordinary conceptual simplicity. “I like it, I don’t like it”: that’s the prevailing logic in his online conversations.

  In the solitude of the apartment, with Iván’s personality always thoroughly present, I’ve started wondering about him. He leads a mysterious life. We see each other bright and early. He drinks a cup of coffee while chatting on the computer, as I’ve confirmed, and then takes off. “Later, man,” he says, and never tells me where he’s going or what his plans are. He comes back at night, generally so late that I’m already in bed. He wears brand-name clothes, snorts all the cocaine he wants, pays his rent, has a car that he can afford to fill with gas, goes out for drinks, I imagine. It’s a simple question: where does he get the money? The club doesn’t pay that much, as I well know. So . . . ?

  Once he asked me to spend the night somewhere else. “I’m bringing a girl back here,” he said. I suggested I could just stay in my room and not come out, but he didn’t like the idea. “Look, teach, I don’t usually bring girls home, but this is going to happen every once in a while, and it’ll be better for you not to be around.” I took off—it was his house, and I couldn’t forget that. I put my book, toothbrush, and pajamas in a duffel bag and got a room in a cheap hotel. According to Iván, I could come back at noon at the next day. He hasn’t thrown me out again since, but it was like a warning, and that day I started looking for a place of my own to rent.

  Finding an affordable apartment is no mean feat with the amount I earn. Prices here in the city are astronomical—I never would have imagined it. I assiduously studied the classifieds, and one day I saw something that might work: a studio in a neighborhood on the outskirts of the city. I didn’t really care if it was on the moon as long as there was access to the subway and buses nearby. Living in a studio didn’t seem too bad either. I don’t need a lot of space, and living in a single room can even be cozy if you get a little creative. When I saw it, though, my stomach dropped. It was shabby, dark, stuffy, pretty noisy. The tiny bathroom was disgusting, and the kitchen consisted of a hotplate in one corner. The lodgings described in the novels of Victor Hugo and Émile Zola probably weren’t any more squalid. I was outraged that someone could demand money for such a hole.

  I told Iván about it—I didn’t want him to think I wasn’t trying to find my own place, that I was planning to keep staying in his apartment forever, taking advantage of his generosity.

  “Don’t worry about it, man, don’t worry about it. You’ll find something. For now, you’re here. You’re not in my way.”

  The teacher’s worrying again, and I get it—it must suck to be living in somebody else’s house. But I don’t think the rents are going to come down with this crisis going on. People who have an apartment, even if it’s a piece of crap not fit for keeping chickens, think they can squeeze money out of poor schlubs who’ve been foreclosed on by the bank for not paying their mortgage and have nowhere else to go. The world’s totally screwed, a pit of pure shit, and eventually you’re going to wind up getting dumped into it and have to find some way to crawl back out.

  “I’ll keep trying. I left my contact info with a couple of rental agencies. They’ve told me as soon as they have anything that meets my criteria, they’ll let me know.”

  “Well then, you just have to wait.”

  But don’t hold your breath, Javierito, because all those agencies are interested in is making their percentage on the transaction. If you go and tell them you want a closet with kitchen access that doesn’t cost too much, they’re just going to blow you off. They won’t say it to your face—they’ll be nothing but nice to you—but once you walk out, they’ll toss your information in the wastebasket and move on.

  “Have you considered a shared apartment? Sometimes I see things on the Internet.”

  “I could look, yeah.”

  I could, but I never will. I’m too old for that. I wouldn’t be able to live with someone I don’t know, share the kitchen and bathroom. Best not to think about it—it would be all underachievers like me or maybe university students whose life is nothing but assignments, chaos, and noise. I’d rather live in a cheap hotel, like a character in a Galdós novel. The problem is, with my paltry resources, I don’t really have a choice, so I’ll be forced to relinquish my moments of solitary reading, my privacy.

  “Don’t worry about it yet, man. Things are rough right now, and the club’s a drag, so it really can’t get any worse. There’s nowhere to go but up, otherwise . . . ”

  But poor teach doesn’t perk up—I don’t think he ever will. He’s a cream puff in a cruel world. I’m going to end up having to lend him a hand again, offer him something else. After that, it’s going to be all up to him.

  * * *

  I’ve decided to go on my own to the rooftop bar Genoveva took me to. I know it’s a place for making contact, but just getting a drink doesn’t mean any sort of obligation. I sit down at a table and order a gin and tonic from the waiter.

  I’ve brought an issue of Vogue magazine to flip through if I can’t figure out what else to do. Discreetly, I watch the other tables: an older couple chatting in a corner, a touristy-looking guy who must be staying at the hotel. After half an hour, when it’s starting to get dark, more people arrive. I pretend to be fiddling with my phone, but from time to time I lift my head to look around. On one of those occasions I notice a new customer sitting by himself: thirty-something, nicely dressed in a cream-colored blazer, dark pants, and gleaming loafers. I don’t have experience at this, but I’d swear he might be one of them. I don’t dare watch him too long, so I perform a somewhat artificial maneuver, tossing my hair back, and get a better look. He’s handsome, he’s tanned, he’s staring at me. I start to feel anxious, so I order another gin and tonic to boost my courage. When the waiter arrives, I steal another look,
and yes, he’s still staring at me. I meet his gaze for a second. Later it’s two seconds, maybe three. The alcohol is starting to unravel my tensions. I relax. I start to enjoy the situation. I smile at him, and that’s the clincher; he gets up and walks toward me.

  In the very brief time it takes him to arrive, my mind is racing. I think: I must be going mad. What the hell am I doing here? What kind of wild tear am I on? What if he’s a jerk? What if he thinks I’m a nymphomaniac? What if he takes me for a prostitute offering her services? That would be hilarious, really turn things upside down! I’m asking for trouble, I’m an idiot, I feel like screaming.

  “Good evening. Would you mind if I sit down?”

  He has big teeth. I feel like crying.

  “OK.”

  OK? I sound like a schoolgirl, a moron. You don’t say “OK” to a man in this situation. Maybe something like “It’s a free country. Have a seat.” I decide not to talk, to let him talk instead. After all, he’s the one who came over here.

  “The city looks beautiful from here, don’t you think?”

  “Very beautiful. Do you live here?” I ask.

  “I was born here! Did you think I was from somewhere else?”

  “Well, we are at a hotel . . . ”