Wild Woman

by Marina Sur Puhlovski

  But I’m not calm. I was calmer when he was giving me a hard time, I think, somewhat surprised, because I expected the opposite, I expected to feel a deep sense of calmness, to enjoy the flat without anybody pressuring me, making demands on me, except for the dog, to have time for myself, for books, for writing my senior thesis in philosophy, on which I’d been procrastinating, finally free, but everything has turned out the opposite, I’m not reading or writing, I spend all day long thinking about what’s happened to me and what I’m going to do, as if I’m a burden to myself. I walk the dog three times a day and wait for people to drop by: Adam, Dora, Irena, Filip, Petra... they all have their own problems and come to share them, because it seems that everybody has problems, that there’s nothing else but problems. The only exception is my relative Flora, who’s already graduated, found a job and is in a stable relationship, everything is going so smoothly in her life; that’s because she’s spineless and emotionally hollow, Filip once said after he’d seen her at my place, looking large and pretty and serene, like a celestial queen.

  I wait to see whom I’m going out with in the evening, Adam, or Filip, or Dora, who graduated but couldn’t find work in her field so she took a job at the Ledo ice cream factory packing ice cream, her boyfriend found it for her, he’s about to get his degree in electrical engineering, and then she found out that, while she was packing ice cream and freezing her butt off, he was having it off with some model in their flat.

  A model, imagine that, she exclaimed, as if models were something supernatural, to be found in magazines but not in life, in life girls were like her, shorter and chunkier, with imperfections, like hers, her left hand was scarred after she shoved it into hot water when she was a child. She was embarrassed by it and always kept that hand closed. That’s why he found me that job, so he could be with her while I was slaving away for the two of us, she moaned and decided to dye her dark hair blond, as if her hair was to blame for her unhappiness, because the model was blond and because, despite his despicable behaviour, she couldn’t get over her boyfriend.

  Meanwhile, Petra left Filip, that’s to say he left her after she’d gone to Italy with somebody else, gone in that somebody’s car, which he only learned when she got back, he told me.

  Words fell on the table like drunk whores; I remember the day, early on in her studies, when she tried to snare him with a few lines of poetry at the “Old Roofs” tavern, where we used to hang out, and she succeeded because he was a gentle soul and loved poetry, unlike her, she loved poetry but had a heart of stone, he said later, bitter and miserable, because first he had let himself be snared and then he had let himself be deceived, and I felt more for him than for Petra, although she had arguments of her own. After all, she hadn’t promised herself to Filip forever, she said when we met after they broke up; she’d had enough, that’s all, why should she have to take it, she said, adding that I should take a look at myself and how badly I’d been hurt because I hadn’t been able to leave in time, which was undeniable.

  You wasted your youth on somebody who wasn’t worth it, she said when she heard that he’d left and then later saw him gallivanting around town; once she saw him sitting by himself at the café Dubrovnik (as usual, I thought), but he wasn’t thrilled when she sat herself down at his table, he reacted as if she was disturbing him, although later he was more relaxed about it. She also saw him at Republic Square with my friend Irena and another good-looking woman. He smiled and waved, and was very chatty, as if making a play for your friend’s friend, in her tight skirt and high, high heels, teetering as if she would fall any minute, Petra said, making fun of her, but I didn’t comment.

  Sometimes, I go with Dora – who’s alone now because she’s broken up with her boyfriend, given up the apartment and returned to live with her mother – to an open-air disco, but I don’t dance, I just sit and ask myself what I’m doing there. I doll myself up, I want to look attractive, and I do attract, but what’s the point when nobody attracts me, I watch people open their mouths and talk, trying to be seductive, because it’s all about the opposite sex, hoping to meet somebody, or sniffing each other out, moving their arms and head and body, but there’s no expression on their face, it’s as if they’re on drugs and can barely see. If they’re not on drugs, then they’re pretending to be elsewhere, I realise, but actually they’re on the prowl, trying to make themselves more attractive by feigning a lack of interest, because elusiveness is attractive. I watch all this and wonder how I ever wound up here, amidst all this noise and affectation, after a life geared towards something else, towards books and writing, how I wound up where I don’t belong, even in secondary school I wasn’t comfortable in disco clubs, I felt like an alien body that had strayed into bedlam.

  Rather than go out with Dora, I choose Adam, who has a new plan for leaving the bank, he’s going to take a loan big enough for him to live on for a year, and use the money to repay it, he’ll rent a flat, a studio, whatever, that’s small and cheap, just to get away from his father and his plans, and, of course, from the bank, because his father and the bank are one and the same. He’ll write plays, he’s already embarked on one, and he’s got ideas for another two, if he puts his mind to it he needs only a year to finish them. And then he’ll sell them to one of the theatres, and have enough money to continue. What do you think of my plan, he asks me, I’ve never seen him so excited, he’s usually semi-comatose when he talks about the future. Your plan is on shaky legs, I tell him. What if – I want to warn him, we need to say it out loud and face the monster debt that potentially awaits him if he doesn’t earn anything, because he’ll have to repay the debt even after he’s used up the loan – what if, I say, you don’t find anybody to buy your plays, because I have no doubt that he’ll write them. On the other hand, who cares about buyers when there is something heroic, wonderfully imprudent, unselfish and sublime about the whole enterprise, and when you are famous it will become the stuff of legend; in short, what matters is that he write the plays, not whether he’ll find a market for them, and we’re both already thinking of these future plays and future fame as if they are happening now, and we’re both excited.

  Adam comes by more often than he used to now, partly because I’m on my own, and partly to update me on how his plan is going. He’s already submitted a loan application and is looking for a flat, and as soon as his application is approved he’ll hand in his notice, because he has to be able to work on his plays all day, he says. He still puts his hand on my knee and I remove it with a laugh that sounds hesitant, I know, though I pretend that I don’t know, and I still kiss him on the cheek not the mouth and if he moves to kiss me on the mouth I push him away and point to my cheek, here, I say giggling, because I find it funny to touch him. Funny is the right word for the two of us as a potential couple; I see us as incompatible, and he understands that though for him it’s serious, but he understands because he’s the same as me, because we’re like two faces of the same coin that will never meet because we are creatures of darkness.

  That becomes evident when one morning – it’s already the beginning of autumn – he tiptoes over from the little room where he was sleeping and slips into my bed. I’m awake but still collecting my dreams, putting off having to face the day and its worries, when he pulls the sheet over him and lies down next to me, quietly somehow, like the dog (which jumped off the bed the minute he got in), wearing a white undershirt and no underpants, all stiff and awkward, like me, except I’m the one caught by surprise, and not pleasantly so. It’s one thing to have a hand on your knee, and quite another to have a whole body next to yours, a body you pretty much find repulsive, white and fleshy, even if thin, and when he removes his undershirt I see that he’s pigeon-breasted, with red spots on heavy legs that are otherwise white as cheese, a body you don’t want to be too close to, especially if it’s naked. He removes his glasses, gazes at me with his rolling dreamy blue eyes, which are unfamiliar because they are always behind his lenses, so all you can see on the rest of his b
earded face is his huge nose.

  I register all this in a second, because I don’t want to look at him, and while I’m wondering what to do he slides his hand between my legs and squeezes, and I shudder and feel the pain of pleasure rise to my throat. But I don’t move, and he takes that to mean that I am OK with it, and the next minute he’s on top of me and then, pulling down my panties, he is grinding inside me, it’s all over in a minute. I don’t feel a thing except for the weight of his body and ridiculous movements, but most ridiculous of all is his face above mine, with its stupid, pathetic grimaces, the kind you make when you’re not engaged, with the vein popping out on his broad sweaty brow, and his equally unattractive thick, blond, damp hair, but it’s a friendly face that you don’t want to hurt, so you push him away, he must see for himself how ridiculous this is, I think with a laugh. He looks at me in surprise, as if he has just woken up, only now realising where he is, and then, of course, he laughs, too, still on top of me, propping himself up on his arms, and then he turns on his side, sits up and slips on his undershirt to hide his nakedness. He puts on his huge glasses with their brown rectangular frame, obtained through his national health insurance, then takes them off, cleans them with the tail of his undershirt, puts them back on, and then leaves to dress in the little room, barefoot, his step as heavy as an elephant’s, I think to myself. I jump out of bed, dress to put an end to this story, a horrible story in that it was unnecessary, and hurry to the kitchen to make us a coffee, because coffee opens up space for us to talk, our space, I think to myself, a space that doesn’t even need expanding.

  After he leaves, I open the windows wide and look out at the huge school playground across the way, where they are having a gymnastics class, like the one I used to go to for years, in my black gym outfit. That was in the good old days, I think to myself, when I was still slim and talented at gymnastics, I was constantly in love, it was one boy today, another tomorrow, I loved being in love, it made the whole day exciting, and I imagined becoming famous, I still didn’t know for what, but I’d be famous, that’s for sure, I would say, reading the biographies of famous people in the magazine Discoveries, which was where my mother worked, so we had issues of the magazine all over the house. By the age of twenty I already knew I would make a name for myself as a writer, don’t think I’m going to cook and clean house for you, no, your darling is seriously thinking of devoting herself to writing, I wrote to my love in the hospital in Rijeka, and sent him my first stories for his opinion, because we didn’t just love each other we were an association of writers, Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.

  Look at yourself, I tell myself, gazing at the girl in the black gym outfit in the school playground, the girl that I had once been but am no more, you’re twenty-five already and haven’t done a thing, you haven’t graduated, you haven’t written anything, you don’t even have a husband anymore, he’s off gallivanting and you’ve got a friend moving into your bed, I think to myself, trying to rationalise the situation and see what it looks like from the outside, so that I don’t lapse into daydreaming and completely lose it. And as these thoughts run through my mind, I suddenly notice, in front of the house by the railing towards the playground, a good-looking, olive-skinned man with shiny black hair, dark eyes, and the face of an actor, the ultimate in handsomeness, with straight, clear features like a Greek sculpture, no room for anything ugly here, he is slim, not too tall and not too short, everything set in perfect harmony, even his clothes, I notice, they must come from Trieste because we don’t have such clear, sharp colours, blue and green and red and yellow, bright but not loud, I muse, watching him step into the parked car that he is probably going to drive to work.

  In the afternoon I go to see if he has returned from work and, lo and behold, there he is, crossing the road nonchalantly like a Don Juan who has everybody’s eye, walking on the right side of the street, passing the two exits from the Cinémathèque, and then suddenly he disappears, where I wonder... Probably to the house above the Cinémathèque, I suppose, where you go up the steps and then cross a terrace that is in perpetual semi-darkness and as big as a playground, a building I’ve never been in, as if it’s forbidden, so I find it mysterious. I don’t even know the people who live there, they seem to live for themselves, in a world of their own. The only person I know is poor Neda, she has learning disabilities, is short, fat, with huge glasses covering her already wrinkled face, a screechy voice like a crow, and a mouth full of crooked teeth that you can see because her top lip rises up to her nose. But she is sweet and she is kind, she waves to me from far away to make sure that I notice her and then she waits for me to come up to her so that she can ask me something, ask me anything, like, if she notices I’m carrying a shopping bag, what have I bought, or am I going to the movies, and her unattractive face lights up to the roots of her straight red hair, and looks nice. She’s Jewish, her family built the house and the cinema before the war, but after the war everything was taken from them by the communists except for the flat they lived in, and they were resentful. It’s rumoured that the mother married her first cousin and that’s why Neda is as she is, and I notice there’s something nasty about these stories. The mother would dart out of the house after her like a wasp, as if Neda had run away from her – and she looks like a wasp, too, dark, thin, spiky, with vicious round eyes – and then drag her back into the house without even a nod in my direction.

  That’s where the street’s Latin dreamboat has disappeared, because it’s obviously where he lives, I think, tailing him, becoming increasingly excited the longer I spy on him, the first week it was from the window, but by the second week I had already revealed myself to him in the street, walking the dog in the morning when he was on his way to work, and then again in the afternoon when he was on his way home, until he finally noticed that I was looking at him, that I was there because of him, although I pretended the opposite, because it had been drummed into my head that I must never approach a man, he had to approach me: women don’t choose.

  Hello neighbour, he finally says one warm Indian summer afternoon when I run out into the street in high heels, and, because I’ve lost weight again, in a tight-fitting blouse and skirt – beige, I’m taking a little break from wearing black – with the dog running after me, and that handsome face of his smiles at me and I tremble.

  He tells me he’s already noticed me walking the dog when he comes home from work, he’s an economist, he says, from Šibenik, in Dalmatia, he says, he’s a subtenant living in the flat of a furrier and his three daughters, whom I must know. I tell him I don’t know them, and then the sweet face of a fifteen-year-old girl appears before my eyes, the face of a doll, who could be one of the furrier’s three daughters, so I say that I’ve just remembered, the youngest is a real beauty, I say, and he nods and we both laugh, who knows why. He goes on to say that she is a child and unaware of her looks, that’s to say she is fully developed but walks around the house half-naked, as if she were five years old, he finds it embarrassing, but how can he tell her when nobody else tells her, when he is the only person who notices. More laughter, then he looks at the dog and asks what breed she is (an incredible question considering that she is Disney’s world-famous Lady), a cocker spaniel, I automatically reply, without elaborating, because it hurts me to see how gorgeous he is up close, and finally he asks if I am free tomorrow, it’s Saturday and he doesn’t work, we could go out somewhere.

  And now here I am, entering my building, my heart in my mouth, as they say, that’s how fast it’s beating, I’m so excited I have to lean against the wall, put my hand on my chest and take a deep breath while the dog looks at me quizzically, wondering why we’re standing here. Then I rush up the stairs and into the flat to look in the mirror and see what he saw when he asked me out, I inspect my face and fix my hair as if he’s still looking at me and I have to puff up my hair because it’s fallen flat, damn it, and I smile and grin at the person in the mirror who has managed to turn his head.

  I spend the whole day
thinking about our date, set for eight in the evening in front of my house, getting ready, deciding what to wear, it has to be long, of course, because that’s the best look for me, brushing my teeth with bicarbonate of soda, it makes them whiter, removing the hairs from my armpits and legs with depilatory cream, and taking a long shower. I decide I won’t have anything to eat, I don’t want a bloated stomach, well, maybe just a nibble of a cheese and salami sandwich, but I’ll have something to drink, not too much though, I don’t want my mouth smelling of alcohol and I want to be in control, although I rarely get drunk. Every so often I give myself a break and sit down at the table with a cigarette, wondering how it will all go. There’s still my make-up to put on and my hair to fix, as I check my watch and my excitement grows, these are always the best moments, when you’re full of expectations, when everything is still possible and undamaged by the physical, which always spoils everything, because the imagination is always better than reality, because I’m alone when I imagine. Maybe I would have enjoyed being with Adam if I’d closed my eyes, I muse, but I didn’t because I seldom close them, not because I know that I have to keep them open, but because I usually want to see everything, even when it would be better if I didn’t... The logical conclusion being that I would be happiest if I were blind, blindness would solve everything. What stupid thoughts! Now I just have to spray on some deodorant, step through a cloud of the perfume I bought when I started going to the disco, take my obligatory cigarettes and lighter, my bag, then take a deep breath and walk out of the flat and into the street, where he’s already waiting for me by the car, and off we go.

  But where, I wonder, sitting beside him, remembering the perplexed look on his face when he saw my long, dark red skirt with its black stripes and no slit, as if he was expecting something else, bare legs, half-exposed breasts, not this Egyptian mummy, which is how I look with my skirt and blouse, buttoned up to the neck, with elbow-length, cuffed sleeves: I wanted to look interesting.