Divorce Is in the Air (7 page)

So I guess we invited her because we liked her way of savoring Spanish words and the way her pallid freckles danced when her expression changed; because she had caught my friends' attention and now they wanted to talk to her far from the cafeteria and classrooms, in a territory foreign to Helen and familiar to them. Thanks to an annoying back sprain I got as I was leaving a dull meeting with Passgard, I missed the first evening that Helen spent among us. Vicente had told me about how she'd been unable to respect people's personal space, but no one prepared me for the uninhibited relationship she had with her prizewinning anatomy, an ease on display every time she went for a canapé or another glass. In a country full of boys and girls defined by habits of expressive restraint (we were eager to get naked but didn't know where to start), Helen could only astonish us.

When I imagine those parties where the furniture fades into the background, I see myself standing among people whose names and features blur together. Entire hours have vanished, and what a bore it would be if we ever had to relive the past in real time. But Helen was sure she had seen me one night while I was holding court, seated like a Chinese emperor (an odd association) and attended by two beautiful girls (she herself was feeling ugly that day), sipping my gin haughtily, my sunglasses still on (it was cool then not to take them off inside). She didn't even notice the ironed handkerchief I'd tucked into my breast pocket (in imitation of and homage to Dad), nor the toasty shade of my jacket, nor the waves drawn in the cloth of my white shirt with a very fine blue thread—sartorial details I'd calculated with the meticulousness of a nightingale choosing branches, leaves, and plants for its nest: mating rituals.

So I guess she was already thinking about me when she leaned against the upright piano as if it were the arm of a couch, and I guess her defiant smile was meant for me. I caught her turning her head several times—she seemed fascinated by her image in the mirror. She was having one of those evenings (later I learned to recognize them by the vibration of the air around her) when she felt comfortable in her skin, when the contours of her body coincided with her spirit's intentions. She seemed to harbor a patient fury—a girl with a mind boiling furiously. If she looked so relaxed it was because she'd granted herself some time to calculate what her ambitions were worth, and where she should channel the energy she generated with those healthy young thighs. She was after someone who would help her propel her life forward, and judging from the way she looked at the light striking the folds of my jacket, she was reaching a conclusion. That's why she exhaled the smoke so slowly (enough that she thought she did it slowly); that's why those dark corpuscles in the blue of her irises were set in motion. It was something subtler and less intuitive than rating my attractiveness—she was trying to see herself through my body, catch a glimpse of what her future would be like if she were to mingle it with mine.

She emitted a sharper frequency than the other Madrid friends Vicente had invited. Together they composed a fuzzy and fanciful scene: figurines, fairies, and elves, ornamental effigies on a frame within which Helen swayed to the beat of the cloying music, full of that otherworldly American self-sufficiency. I can still see her moving among the minor players like a squirrel scampering among branches. I can see her now, holding her glass and wearing an aquamarine dress that was probably only green. I see her leaning with that torsion of the hips that is so her, as if propping her buttock atop her thigh….Now she's wearing a dress the color of acorns, saffron, and beeswax. But no, I haven't bought her that dress yet, we still haven't even been introduced.

We had a conversation, but the sentences we used were important not for their semantic value but for the part they played in the attack strategy I'd established before ever opening my mouth: I wanted to leave with that girl. I went to look for her coat (an unbearable combination of stripes and plaid) and I said good-bye to Vicente, host and eternal geography student. He'd papered the living room wall with an enormous, detailed map of the mountains surrounding Madrid, the topography like isobars on weather charts. When I see Helen's figure against that background, my imagination, falling victim to the euphoria and ambiguity of the picture, will always think of that modest map as a hyperrealist painting of brain circuits. Glass in hand, Helen looked like an idea formed by the nervous stimuli of those neurons. She looked taller than she was (that was the only day I ever saw her without having taken a tactile measure of her body), and so young she had only to reach out her arm to effortlessly touch the end of her adolescence. And why not admit it: standing there, holding both of our coats, I felt a fearful hand grip my throat. I was afraid I wouldn't be alive enough for her.

I ruled out taking her to my apartment, so things went a step or two down toward more sordid settings. To make up for it I spared her public transportation, which was how she usually got around. We hailed a cab and headed off toward a house in Delicias where they rented rooms by the hour. It was two in the morning, and La Castellana was still humming. I remember how the car's shocks were so worn out that the undercarriage scraped against the damp pavement, I remember all those fences Madrid has around gardens, houses, offices, banks—the vegetation of a secret city—and I remember I was ashamed to take her into a rathole where the same play had been performed by different actors over a good ten years. I diverted the taxi toward a decent hotel.

The same play! I had no idea back then about the diversity of sexual appetites, the violence and the good they can do you. I was only a child, and though I passed myself off as an expert I wasn't at the level of my peers, who had scrawled their first lusty paragraphs on the blank pages of prostitutes' bodies. I only had to imagine that mechanical touch, the professional who kept one eye on the clock and added up the bill, to know that brothels weren't for me. My sexual history was dominated by mutual nervousness and occasional girlfriends. Now I was going to face my first American girl with only a few basic tricks (I knew about the sensitive zones of the neck, the ears; I wasn't sure if that one girl's armpits had just been a personal preference). It hadn't been even three years since I'd discovered the benefits of caressing the inner thighs and the vulva, of summoning between her lips with my middle finger the dampness so crucial to coaxing out her retractive organ—my great ally in that labyrinth of folds. If Helen let me—her attitude wasn't like other girls', with whose modesty I had to negotiate every elastic band—I was pretty sure the trick would work. It was a physical reflex, like closing your eyes when someone threatens to throw something in your face. Though I must say, if I thought about it much, natural lubrication still provoked discomfort, admiration, and a bit of apprehension in me. When I opened the taxi door for Helen, she managed to step onto the curb wrapped in an aura of innocence, as if that night we'd do no more than embrace.

The moon looked like a newly crystallized liquid. Helen was lively from the wine and the dancing and the fresh air, and she didn't stay still for a second while I was checking in. Under the elevator's light I had the thought that the cross formed by her septum and cheekbones was the skeleton of an unformed soul. Within Helen flowed all sorts of contradictory, intense emotions. Her turbulence didn't repel me in the least, I didn't kid myself about that. From her very first kiss (avid, ferocious, American) I knew I preferred her to a fully formed woman with clear and fixed ideas. It's good when you find a simpler person, one whose entire story you can contain in a telling, and experience, for once, the power of the storyteller.

Helen didn't complain about the dim bathroom or the paint peeling from the ceiling. If the smell of disinfectant bothered her, she kept it to herself. Like those little animals that focus the spotlight of their vision on a shiny object, she was fascinated by the rectangular shape of the bed, as if the sheets were emanating an inviting air. But she was so confident inside that body straining against the fabric of her jeans (who knows where that dress went?), there was really no confusing her with some little wallaby or wildcat—she was no shy creature.

She dropped backward onto the mattress, and the creak of the springs made the muscles in my back tense up. She laughed, she was laughing and her marvelous laughter filled that hovel to the brim, and she let me undress her and we fell upon each other, fascinated by the provocative design of our flesh, the indentations so wisely placed, the warm openings. It was like spreading out enormous wings that swept away the habits of everyday thought, all the coldness and distrust. I don't remember the sequence of events or any details, but I know that at some point I summoned up my courage and it was as if my glans were searching for something in Helen's mouth; she pushed me away with open palms and we fell laughing onto the sheets. The pupils of the girl who would be my first wife were moving under a watery film. I embraced her, trembling at the intuition that we were on the brink of something, only we didn't know what. The path lay hidden by a whimsical orography, and we laughed because we felt complicit enough to travel it together.

I must have done something right for Helen to start building her new life project around our satisfied bodies. She never objected when I wanted to see her, sometimes with less than an hour's notice and on the other side of Madrid. My business was getting going, meetings were multiplying, but Helen would take the metro, buses, or taxis (that I would pay for) and she'd wait for me with a patent-leather handbag and her arms pressed close to her sides. I allowed myself the pleasure of letting her enter the rooms before me, of watching the surprise on her face as she calculated the square footage while she undid the swan of folded towels. She loved the lace curtains and bathtubs, the TVs and remote controls that she always grabbed first. One of the good things about that period was that I still hadn't learned the vast set of expressions Helen's features could make. It was exciting not to know what face awaited me at the end of a kiss, or after she turned over, half asleep, or when, with one move in that game of bodies that settled us as a couple, her nose would come to rest a few centimeters from my eyes. She liked to order more food and drink than we could consume, and if I had to rush off, I'd let her stay draped over the unbound swan-skins, surrounded by the scent of bodies and the steam from the shower, dunking the succulent thighs of something like chicken into chemical sauces. We went back to the hotel from our first night, and we even visited the place that charged by the hour, though I regretted bringing her there. She was so lovely in the white shirt we'd bought at the market, the stockings with claret-colored thread that she wore to add a risqué touch. Girls in love can also be blank pages to paint upon.

It's hard for me to visualize Helen without adding filters that belong to the future of that couple who used to seek each other out under the welcoming Madrid skies. I'm learning to adjust the viewfinder so it only lets in enough light to show the Helen that fits this part of the story. And so I discover again, among clumps of insignificant phrases and lovebird idiocies, that she was living in a poorly ventilated dump with three other students (Peter, Mark, and the amazing Ali), that they had revoked her scholarship, that she was supposed to go back to Montana in one month but she didn't have the strength to write to her parents and tell them, or to buy a ticket (and I never did figure out how she managed to stay afloat in Madrid without any money). Ultimately, if for a few weeks she'd nursed the dream of a reckless life in a Spanish paradise of tapas and bullfights, it was time to start bidding it farewell. So for her, our first night must have been like the lucid hangover of her dream state: here was a guy to sink her teeth into, a southern specimen, not too dark-skinned, who appreciated the touch of her splendid body, which was the only thing Helen had to offer. We were two naked and confused kids (because things weren't actually going so swimmingly for me, either: bonds, shares, letters of credit, benefits, preferred stocks, property, contracts, and loans…all orbiting the flame that was gradually cooking my family) who found themselves at the end of their teenage boredom marked by plans gone awry, discovering that the greed they have for each other can occupy their minds for hours on end. That together, they can compress their worries into something that fits inside a fist.

So when Helen showed up at my apartment in a green wool dress, wearing rain boots and dragging a suitcase with tags from suspicious airports, I thought about throwing her out—enough was enough. The impulse flashed into my mind the same way you realize you've cut your fingertip with a knife before you even see the wound or the blood. Helen stood stock-still with her feet together and her stomach sucked in, wheedling, with that lower lip of hers too thick to be taken for a sign of intelligence. She was quiet, she swallowed, she was solicitous. She told me that something beautiful depended on me, and I discovered I would have been a magnanimous god: I sent her out for bread and ham and half a liter of wine. I went into the bathroom and splashed water on my face. I understood fully, I knew perfectly well what that “you can stay here” really meant, but when I tried to make out the implications for my future, my sight grew dim. My gray matter has never been good at calculating the medium term, and for me the word “future” meant next Wednesday.

It wasn't hard to force the little lock and open her suitcase, though it was slightly harder to convince her it had already been broken. In one week I'd seen three-quarters of her wardrobe: there was the suit skirt, the striped T-shirts, the jacket that was too big for her, the red blouse with shoulder pads, the tube miniskirt, the patent-leather mini, and some kind of polka-dotted garment. The panties and stockings and bras (which we'll get to later) that she'd packed were proof she had no intention of leaving. My father had informed me of that female peculiarity while smoking a rancid cigar on the sofa, so it must have been a Sunday and I must have been anxious to escape. It was the kind of transfer of manly information that leaves both parties fairly disconcerted—it was hardly his intellectual legacy. It's ridiculous how those half-heard ideas end up permeating our beings. But it was a good piece of advice: after I found your cruel note, the thing that convinced me you were serious this time was the fact that you'd taken the portion of the underwear that you wore. You only left behind a single green stocking, balled up where I found it later, at the back of the drawer where you couldn't reach.