A beautiful gray fluffy tomcat appears at the door as the girl is opening it, but it runs away to hide as soon as it realizes there’s a man with her. “Come on, Max, you’re really antisocial,” she says. He’s easily frightened, she says. She offers him a coffee. Abaitua is no longer worried about caffeine. He’d like one. She leaves the living room and goes to make it. You see almost the whole house from the entrance—the bathroom, the kitchen, the bedroom, and the living room. The latter has a wide window, and through the blind, which is not wholly closed, you can see the naked white light at the train platform, which makes everything inside bright enough to be able to see without any difficulty. Going up to the door, he can see a bit of the kitchen, which is very clean—the sink, a bit of the table with a plate full of fruit on it that looks like it’s been put there as decoration, and a refrigerator with colorful magnets on its door. He’d say she doesn’t cook a lot. The coffee maker is a French press. She puts the grounds in carefully and presses them down with a little spoon. She says she doesn’t know how well it’s going to turn out. In the living room there’s a big sofa and two armchairs upholstered in light-colored cloth, a triangular wooden coffee table, three chairs made of the same wood, and a bookshelf. On the wall there’s a small engraving of a flower, a water lily whose phallic calyx is blue rather than yellow. In general, it feels very minimalist and clean, very uncluttered. He knows many of the books on the shelves, especially the latest issues of the Perinatal Survey. She has the American and the British issues together on one shelf, which seems to be exclusively for work-related books.
It’s obviously an educated woman’s house, comfortable and welcoming.
He’s in the dark, the girl says as she brings in a tray with the coffee things. She asks him to turn the lights on, but he says they’re fine like that. It’s a ghostly light. A few books on the shelves are placed so that their covers are showing, resting against the backs of the other books as if they were pictures. They could be the ones she likes best, or the covers she thinks especially pretty. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse. A slip of land under the horizon, a lighthouse on it. A dinghy by the waterside, children playing. In the foreground, at the edge of the beach, on the grass, three or four people wearing hats, one of them with an open umbrella. Henry James, The Bostonians. Two women wearing long, elegant dresses while sitting and talking on a sofa in a rich person’s living room. Two slim legs wearing tights with horizontal stripes, fastened with clasps, perhaps. Angela Carter, Wise Children. He picks that up, not knowing what to do. He’s looking through it when Lynn says that the coffee’s getting cold. She asks if he wants milk and points at the small jug. A small milk jug, the coffee pot, white and brown sugar, two small truffles, embroidered napkins. He thinks she knew he was going to come up and tells himself, without much conviction, that he’s still in time to say that the coffee’s good, that he’s operating tomorrow morning, and then get out of there. The best thing to do, no doubt about it.
He asks her about the cat. She says he’s very shy and has hidden under the bed. Apparently, he doesn’t trust people until he’s been with them at least a dozen times. She asks if he wants to listen to music, and he says yes. He doesn’t listen to much music, generally just classical music while reading, and when he operates, too, almost always sonatas, but it’s in order to isolate himself from other sounds. He could listen to the same sonata twenty times without realizing it. He thinks that must be insulting for anybody who really likes music. Words, on the other hand, move him, so they distract him. For that reason, with just a few exceptions, he doesn’t listen to vocal music. The girl puts a CD on and sits next to him on the edge of the sofa, her legs together—a very different posture from the one she must adopt when she’s wearing pants, he thinks—her body straight, stirring the coffee inside the cup that she’s holding on the saucer in the palm of her hand. They listen to “Mad about the Boy.” He ventures the opinion that in addition to their technique, those black women must have something special, something physical, attributes that allow them to be able to sing so clearly, make themselves so easy to understand.
The girl now looks at her hands, folded in her lap. She has long thighs, and they look very white in the shadow play projected by the light. The movement he would have to make to take her in his arms and kiss her wouldn’t be very natural. He hasn’t been in a situation like this for a long time, and he feels like a young boy who’s supposed to give the first kiss. He stands up to put the book back on the shelf and his attention is attracted by another one. He can’t help laughing when he reads the back cover. She asks what he’s laughing about. He’s embarrassed to read aloud in English, but he does: “The lives of these men and women come together to give a fascinating portrait of the Basques, a strange and fiercely independent people to whom principles sometimes mean more than life itself.” Margaret Shedd, A Silence in Bilbao. So that’s what brought her to the Basque Country. “Exactly.” She walks up to him in her bare feet, takes the book off him, and throws it onto the sofa. She tells him to forget about principles for a bit, puts both her arms around his neck, and kisses him lightly on the lips. Then she takes him by the hand and leads him into the bedroom.
She says she’s going to the bathroom for a moment, and Abaitua stands there waiting for her, looking at the starkly lighted train platform through the gaps in the blind. Stations at night have always seemed gloomy to him. Despite the music, he can hear running water and wonders if she’s taking a shower. He, too, should go to the bathroom, but he feels awkward about going into the intimacy of other people’s restrooms. He’s afraid to move, too, because he knows he shouldn’t be in that room that has nothing other than a bed in it. A room for sleeping in. A low bed, no headboard, a comforter with geometrical blue designs on it, two bedside tables, with a flex lamp and an alarm clock on one of them and two or three books piled up on top of one another. And a small Matisse engraving on the opposite wall. She bought it in New York for next to nothing, she says when he asks if it’s genuine. She takes it with her everywhere, like Max the cat. She seems to be proud of that purchase.
Abaitua leans down to look for the cat, because he can’t even bring himself to sit down on that untouched bed. He sees its eyes shining, he wants to get it to come out, but the cat pays no attention to his calls. “Don’t go getting ideas, Max won’t trust you for a long time.” She comes in and closes the door behind her. She turns the music off, as well, and Abaitua is astonished that she does so in the middle of a song. To him it seems like an insult to the artist. She tells him about the cat as she takes off her blouse. Then she takes her skirt off and clips it onto a hanger. As if she were alone. And she opens the bed, too, folding it down with care. Just like the Lynn in Montauk. He decides to sit on the side of the bed and take his shoes off. It wouldn’t be good for a man of his age to appear to be embarrassed, and in any case, the girl knows his body already. The girl’s naked, she has the alarm clock in her hand, maybe she’s turning the alarm off. He doesn’t normally need an alarm clock, most mornings he’s already awake by the time he has to get up.
The girl smiles when she realizes he’s looking at her. He would like her to have gotten undressed more slowly. He smiles at her, as well. She has very little pubic hair, just a thin strip. Women arrange it now, sometimes into peculiar shapes. He asks her if she does that, as well, trying to sound natural, even a little daring. She looks at him for a moment and says no, that’s just how her body is, she doesn’t have much hair. She doesn’t seem to care about it, she’s certainly not embarrassed about it. Abaitua’s always been amazed at how naturally women move around in the nude after they’ve done it with someone for the first time. She comes up to him and undoes his shirt buttons.
Another memory from Montauk: “Her body is younger than her face.” When he read that, he thought that the writer might have had that impression because he hadn’t seen a young naked body for some time and so was amazed by the characteristics of youth that he’d forgotten. He d
oesn’t know why, but it’s a fact that bodies and faces often don’t age in harmony with each other. Just as internal organs don’t. Normally, because we’re more used to looking at faces than at bodies, it can be easier to notice the first signs of decrepitude there. But Abaitua could tell a woman’s age as well or better from her vulva than from her face.
What could be said about this Lynn is that she has a lot of expression lines—horizontal lines rather than the vertical lines, which come with age—because she moves her face around continually. As is to be expected, she smiles when she’s happy, but she also does so when she asks for something or says or does something that she doesn’t want people to take the wrong way, and her face wrinkles up completely. She frowns when she’s worried or paying attention or listening to someone. Thousands of tiny tightenings on her forehead every day, between her eyes, and they’ve left their marks around her eyes and lips. But her breasts, too, firm and robust though they are, speak of the proximity of maturity; the equilibrium of her body’s good form is precarious. As far as her belly, which may be the youngest part of her anatomy, is concerned it’s flat and comfortable; her linea nigra—the line between the belly button and the pubis that darkens during pregnancy—looks as if it’s been sprinkled with gold dust. However, he also sees a trace of suffering in her youthful beauty: a wide scar, more than two inches long, the result of clumsy surgery.
It would be enough for him to see her naked, just being as intimate as that with her would be enough for him, but the girl’s fingers are skillful, and she turns him on.
He tries to stop her from standing up, but she’s agile and strong. She moves away from him and, after locating a thin blue cloth on one of the bedside tables, covers the lamp with it. He’s lying face up, and she sits on top of him, her legs to either side; she holds his wrists and forces him to keep his arms open. She bends down toward him and whispers, “Relax, just relax,” into his ear.
She squeezes her legs around him like pincers, and he feels her moisture on his waist.
The cat gets onto the bed and sniffs at him with curiosity, it seems to consider him an outsider. Lynn shoos him away, “Get out of here, Max!” The cat stays there looking at them from the floor. The girl takes the man’s hands to her breasts. They’re swollen and firm, he strokes them. Her nipples get harder and harder, she asks him to do it stronger, and he does, until two drops of milk come out, very white, thick, they stay there without running down, he spreads the milk around with his thumbs, strokes her nipples with it, and then licks them.
The girl is breathing through her mouth as if she couldn’t get enough air, and she stretches away from him to enjoy her own pleasure, a pleasure that moves and frightens him at the same time. She grips the sheets with both hands, her body curves and tenses, she has spasms in her belly, her eyes go white, she groans, and, finally, she falls back, exhausted.
The sound of a train roughly breaks the silence, and its wake, like that of a scream, stays in the air. Then they clearly hear the echo of a television, which they hadn’t noticed until then. He feels as if he’s suddenly recovered consciousness, and he finds it hard to come back from something so pleasurable. Lynn is curled up against his chest, and he feels the cat’s smooth angora on his back. He pets it, and the animal replies with a grateful purr. “Oh Max, you’ve given yourself on the first day,” she says without opening her eyes. “I don’t blame you; this man is irresistible.”
The shadows are dancing on the ceiling; the wind, which blows strongly from time to time, moves the top branches of the trees that are in the path of the light coming from the train stop. Abaitua sits up to see if Lynn is asleep, and she opens her eyes and smiles at him. Before closing her eyes again, she asks him what he’s thinking about, and he says he wasn’t thinking about anything. He thinks she’s going to say that she doesn’t believe him, but she doesn’t. She says a sentence from Montauk has come to her. So she’s been thinking about Montauk, as well. Amazing though it is, he doesn’t tell her about the coincidence. He doesn’t know why. What the girl remembers is something Max says: “Every first time with a woman is the first time all over again.” She asks what he makes of that. He doesn’t know what to say. In any case, he wouldn’t like to talk about other first times. He says that maybe that effect, that impression, if you like, is always the same whenever you become intimate with someone for the first time, and it’s a feeling that can drown out everything else. There’s a short silence in which a man’s voice is clearly heard, though they don’t understand what it’s saying. That’s the way men think, says Lynn. The first time, they don’t realize what’s going on at all, they don’t see anything, they’re fucking something ideal. To fuck the ideal. She says, standing on top of the bed, that that’s what happens the first two or three times, in fact, and that’s why she doesn’t mind being naked. Because she knows he still can’t see her. She laughs. In a short time, she says she doesn’t know when, because it varies from one man to another, he’ll start seeing her, and then he’ll realize she has stretch marks—she pinches her hips—and saggy breasts, and she’ll look ugly to him. And he’ll run away from her.
He says that’s not true. He holds her by the waist and makes her lie down on the bed again. He isn’t blind, and he’s certainly seen her ugly scar; that alone would be enough to ever prevent her from being a model. She tells him the worst thing about it is that her chances for a career as a stripper were ruined all because she once pretended to have a stomachache to get out of school. She’s sure she didn’t have appendicitis when they operated on her. Doctors really are terrible, he says after trying to bite her scar, and the girl stops him by holding onto his head. How insensitive, pointing out my defects when it’s just our second time. She gets up and leaves the room on tiptoe, followed by the cat. She says there’s another sentence in Montauk she likes a lot. She comes back with a book in her hands and lies next to him, resting on her elbows and belly, her feet crossed up in the air, leafing through the book for the page she wants. It’s the French edition. She doesn’t have the English one, and she’s afraid she may never get it back. She laughs, and when he asks why she’s worried about that, she says it’s a long story. Pointing at the lines, she asks him to read aloud. Abaitua isn’t embarrassed to read in French for an American: “Après elle reste nue, Lynn dans la kitchenette, tandis que lui, l’invité habillé, est assis à table et parle, maintenant content de la langue étrangère qui lui donne le sentiment qu’il dit tout pour la première fois.” It says that afterward, Lynn stays in the kitchenette, naked, while he, the guest in his clothes, sits at the table and talks, happy now to be speaking in a foreign language because it gives him the feeling that he’s saying everything for the first time.
Talking about Montauk is talking about an uncommitted relationship between a girl and an older man, a relationship with no future.
What is Lynn thinking about now?
She looks at him slowly and laughs before she speaks. She often does that, and he thinks it’s so that he won’t be put out by what she’s going to say. That gesture of tucking her hair behind her ears. She says she, too, has that feeling, that feeling of always saying things for the first time. Feeling them for the first time, too. “Oh dear, I’m frightening you.” Abaitua suddenly feels like saying “I love you.” If he told her he loved her at that moment, it wouldn’t be a lie, but instead he has to tell her as quickly as possible that he can’t stay the night, he has to go.
The sensation of fleeing from the scene of the crime.
Lynn is standing up, the cat in her arms, watching him get dressed, until she realizes that it makes him uncomfortable. He hears her turning the faucet on in the kitchen and talking to the cat. There’s the sound of voices from the lower floor, too, and he thinks that they must be able to hear them talking, as well. It’s two o’clock in the morning. He sees a box of medicine on the bedside table when he looks at the alarm clock to check the time. Amitriptyline. He isn’t shocked by the young A
merican taking antidepressants, but he is surprised she’s taking something other than Prozac. He leaves the subject for a more appropriate moment and gets dressed in a hurry. He doesn’t put on his cufflinks or his tie. He looks around to see if he’s forgotten anything, as if he were leaving a hotel room. Lynn is leaning against the wall and waiting for him; she bends over and puts the cat on the floor. The cat walks toward him, tail up in the air. He sniffs at Abaitua’s shoes and rubs against his pants. He can’t resist leaning over to pet it, and when he does so, the cat offers him his belly. The greatest purrs of contentment he’s ever heard. Lynn: “You insatiable cat.” She opens the door. Does he really feel like going outside? They give each other a short kiss, as if they were two people who’ve just met. Abaitua thinks she’s making an effort not to try to keep him there, so that he won’t feel bad. They’ll see each other tomorrow. Today, that is, at this point.
Martutene Page 49
