Issue 19

Jesse Falzoi

A guy I met on a train to Madrid five years ago needed a place to stay for the night. He showed up at ten o’clock in the evening, as I was trying to watch a show a friend of mine had recommended to me. I was too tired, I’d been drifting off time and again, but when the doorbell rang, I unfortunately woke up and went to answer the door, expecting my wife, who was teaching at the community college on Tuesday evenings. But there was this guy, and it took me some time to remember who he was. In the end I recognized him by his terrible accent. “Long time no see,” he said, coming forward to hug me.

“Why didn’t you call?” I said after he’d let go of me again. He smelled like a bum. Maybe he was one now, I thought, looking at his dirty clothes, his too-tanned skin—we were in late October—and his run-down shoes.

He smiled. “No smart phone.”

Manuel was his name, I now remembered. “Any would have done the job,” I whispered, but he ignored me and literally pushed me back inside. “I need your bathroom, buddy,” he said, and after I pointed down the hall, he dropped his army bag and was gone for at least fifteen minutes. I was half expecting him to take a shower without asking, I once even imagined overhearing running water, but eventually he came out again, grinning, stroking his now long hair that reminded me of my sad attempt at the age of fifteen to copy Bob Marley.

“What happened?” I asked him. “Did you murder your wife?”

“I’ll tell you tomorrow,” he said. “Which bed is free?”

I nearly went to check my emails to find out whether I’d invited him over. There had been a few nights lately where I’d had a bit too much, but his name didn’t show up at all. “I’m really sorry,” I said, “but this isn’t a good idea. There’s a hostel down the road, I can help you out if you’re short of money.”

He looked at me dumbfounded.

“Look, my wife and I haven’t been on good terms lately.” I stopped, then my reluctance to have him stay over led me to say, “We’re getting a divorce. I should have moved out long ago. I don’t want to be thrown out in the middle of the night.”

He didn’t have time to answer, because there she was, my wife, and I felt thrown back thirty years, bringing home a friend my parents didn’t approve of. “Hey,” I said, trying to sound cool enough to not betray my lie about the divorce and yet satisfy my wife’s need for a warm welcome after her exhausting course. It was my fault that she was still doing it; she’d often complained about the lousy pay and the lazy students, but I’d gotten used to being alone on Tuesday nights, watching shows she didn’t approve of, drinking beer without her counting the bottles, accompanied by chips or junk food. So whenever she mentioned that she would quit I’d come up with something like, You’re doing a great job, or, If there’s only one whose talent isn’t wasted, it’s worth it, shit like that.

“Hey,” I said again, “how was it?”

She dropped her heavy bag right next to Manuel’s, then looked at him closely, as if she only now realized that he was there. “And you are?”

“Don’t tell me he didn’t mention my name at all,” Manuel said.

“No,” she said, “I don’t think so.”

“That’s Manuel,” I said. “We met in Madrid.”

“Right,” he said.

“On the train,” I said.

My wife looked at me, then at him, then at me again. “Are you fucking kidding me? When did you buy weed? I thought we had an agreement?”

Manuel held up his hands apologetically. “I am really sorry, it’s my fault, I wouldn’t have come by just like this. It’s just that …” Here he stopped and buried his face in his hands, and even though no noise came out it was clear that he was crying.

Which changed everything. My wife can be very hard, but tears, well, that’s another story. Unfortunately I can’t cry. It would have saved me a lot of problems.

“It’s okay,” she said in a voice I hadn’t heard in a long time. “Hey, why don’t you take a bath and a nice cup of tea afterward? Have you eaten?” She shoved me to the side and opened the cabinet in which we kept towels. “You can tell us tomorrow. We could all use some sleep now, don’t you think?”

In a couple of minutes he was locked up in the bathroom again, while I tried to explain to my wife why I’d lied about the divorce. “So tell him the truth,” she said.

“He’ll be gone tomorrow,” I said, “why bother?”

She gave me that look, then shrugged and after a while came back with my pillow and my blanket. “You started it,” she said before returning to our bedroom, out of which she wouldn’t reappear again. It’s not that we had sex every night, and it happened at least once a week that I dropped off on the sofa and didn’t wake up again, but to be banned out of our bed was a different thing. Yet I shrugged it off. Everything that would help to get rid of the unwanted visitor was fine.

“What’s up, buddy?” I heard him say behind me. I turned around. He was naked. “Let me give you one of my PJs,” I said, avoiding looking at him.

“Never mind,” he said, “I like it natural.”

I cleared my throat. “But my wife doesn’t.”

“So it’s better that you show me my bed instead of her, right?”

I quickly considered which would be more comfortable, the sofa or our daughter’s bed, who spent the holidays at my in-laws, then went for the sofa myself, planning to continue watching my show—I wouldn’t be able to sleep for another hour at least, I assumed—and led him to our daughter’s room.

“Pretty in pink,” he said, grinning.

“Do you have kids?” I said, not even trying to hide my anger.

“Three,” he said. “I showed you photographs, don’t you remember?”

“No,” I said, but that was a lie, too. I clearly remembered them now, two daughters and a son, all of them fair, like their mother, a real beauty, and very intelligent too, a neuroscientist, I think she was. “Anyway,” I said, “you gotta go tomorrow. It’s difficult enough as it is. Our daughter’s coming back. She wouldn’t want to have a strange man in her bed.”

He let himself fall on her Lillifee blanket, grinning. “Strange and naked.”

“As I said,” I said, “there’s a hostel down the road.”

“Fine,” he said.

“Do you need money?” I said.

“Nope,” he said.

“Well then, good night,” I said.

“Nighty-night, sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite,” he mumbled, but I had the feeling that he wasn’t talking to me anymore, so I shut the door behind me without further ado. I gave the show another try, turned the TV off when I failed again to follow the plot, and lay sleepless until five o’clock in the morning, with a killing pain in my back and a growing anger inside of me, which I hardly could attribute to the intruder only. Yet, he had to go, I said to myself, and unfortunately it would be my wife’s job to take care of it because I had to get up for work in an hour, whereas it was her day off. At seven o’clock I wrote her a message, inventing some disturbing facts about Manuel, belittling our encounter—actually we spent a whole week together but since we were drunk most of the time it didn’t count—and underlining twice that I wouldn’t want to see him when I was returning from work. At the end, I added a warning: “He’s naked!”

I left when there was still no sound coming from the rooms. It was an important day for my company because a huge contract was on the verge of being made, and it was mainly my baby, so I forgot about the situation at home until I was on the subway, later than usual, but during our daughter’s absence we’d silently agreed to loosen family habits. I expected my wife to have already eaten—or written me a note telling me that she had other dinner plans with friends or colleagues—so when I passed the new Argentinean restaurant I was tempted by the smell and ordered a steak there. It was nine thirty when I came home and found my wife and Manuel in the kitchen. They’d had steak too. “There’s one left for you,” my wife said.

They were smoking despite our agreement to smoke outside if at all. The ashtray was full. The wine bottle, on the contrary, was empty. It was the one I’d gotten from a client some years ago and never touched because I wanted to save it for a special occasion, which my wife knew, of course. “You’re having a party or what?”

“Don’t panic, you’re invited too.” My wife got up and opened the fridge. “You prefer beer anyway, right?”

I turned around and went to the bathroom to have a shower. When I joined them again, Manuel was gone. “I couldn’t do it,” my wife said.

“What exactly?”

“He’s in some kind of problem. He needs a place to stay.”

I took a sip from the bottle, which she’d already opened. The beer was stale and warm by now. “How long?”

She shrugged. “He didn’t tell.”

“Why didn’t you ask?” I got up again, dumped the rest of the beer in the sink and said, “I’m going to bed.”

“Wrong door,” my wife yelled after me as I stopped in front of our bedroom.

“Whatever,” I mumbled but obediently walked on to the sofa, on which my crumbled blanket and pillow reminded me of the previous sleepless night. That night, though, I fell asleep immediately.

The next morning, I met my wife in the kitchen. She offered me a cup of coffee and took another one back to bed. “Don’t you have to work?” I called after her.

“Later,” she answered.

I sat down, turned on my tablet to read the news, and finished my coffee. In the bathroom Manuel’s clothes had been hung to dry. I locked the door, turned on the shower and when I came out again, I picked one of his pairs of boxer shorts and dressed in the clothes I’d been wearing the day before. When I met him in the hall shortly after, I didn’t mind that he was naked again. I didn’t mind either that he was still here. “How are you?” I said.

He looked at me skeptically and then said, “Fine. What about you, did you sleep well?”

“I did,” I said. “Actually I slept very well,” I said.

“You’re off to work?” he said.

“I’m off to work,” I said.

He returned to our daughter’s room and came back with a towel wrapped around his hips, while I was looking for my keys. “What is it again that you’re doing?”

It was the towel our daughter had been born in. The midwife told us to bring a dark red towel to wrap her in once she was out. “It’s the same color she’s been used to when still in the womb,” she’d said. We didn’t have dark red towels so we went to the store to buy one. My wife made a big fuss—it had to be the perfect shade, the perfect size, the perfect cotton. “Feel it,” she would ask me time and again. “It will be the first thing she sees and smells and touches.”

“It’s a fucking towel,” I wanted to say, but played along, and finally she was satisfied. It was the most expensive towel we ever bought. Now, after numerous washings, the colors and the smoothness were long gone, and yet I could hardly stand to see it wrapped around Manuel’s hips. I opened the front door. “What?”

“Your work,” he said.

“I’m an architect.”

“Right,” he said. “Now I remember.”

I closed the door again. “Do you?”

He took a step back. “I’ll be gone tomorrow. Don’t worry.”

I smiled. “No,” I said. “Stay. Stay as long as you want. Really, I don’t mind. The room’s free until the end of next week, I think. But let me make sure.” I passed him and stopped in front of the bedroom door. “Milena isn’t coming back until the end of next week, right?” I yelled and my wife yelled back, “What is your problem?”

But I just turned around and walked out. Maybe I said something like, Have a nice day, you two.

In the afternoon, when I was in the gents, fumbling with his boxers, I realized that I’d never met him before. The guy I spent that crazy week with had blue eyes. I now remembered him telling me about his Swedish grandmother and how it was possible even though both of his parents had brown eyes. I remembered the drawing he made in his notebook, which he gave me when we separated again and which I lost two hours later in a café. We’d exchanged addresses, so maybe the fake Manuel asked the real Manuel for a place to stay in Berlin and the real Manuel said, “Hey, I know a guy in Berlin, we’ve been drunk the whole time, he wouldn’t even notice.”

So when I came back in the evening, I went to the kitchen where he and my wife were cooking again and said to him, “What was it again that you do for a living?”

“He’s an actor,” my wife said. “Didn’t you know?”

“An actor, of course,” I said.

“And a fucking famous one,” she added proudly, as if she were his manager.

“Fucking famous?” I repeated.

“Well,” Manuel said, holding the spoon toward me, but I stepped back, so he passed it on to my wife, who willingly accepted it and licked her lips in reply. “In Spain some people might know me,” he added.

“He was in that Pedro fucking Almodóvar movie, don’t you remember, the one that we watched when we first met?”

I’d hated that movie. I’d never told her, of course. “Smells good,” I said. “What is it?”

“Escamoles.” He opened the cabinet, took out a plate, filled it with the yellowish mass and gave it to me. “Escamoles a la mantequilla.”

I sat down and looked at it closer. “Looks like beans, tiny beans.”

“Why don’t you try it?” he said. “It won’t kill you.”

“You’re sure?” I said, but obediently picked up a small amount with my fork.

Manuel smiled at me. “And?”

“Oh, my God.” I tried some more. “Oh, my God,” I said again.

My wife started to laugh. “It’s good, isn’t it?”

I wasn’t able to say anything until I’d finished my plate. I’d never eaten anything that tasty.

“There’s more,” Manuel said.

I leaned back and sighed. “You gotta give me the recipe.”

“It’s the caviar of the desert,” my wife said, grinning.

I greedily stared at my second filling and picked up my fork. “I don’t care what it is,” I said with my mouth full.

“It’s basically ant eggs,” the fake Manuel said. “Not easy to get here, I suppose.”

I dropped my fork and pushed back my plate. “You brought them back from Madrid?”

He grinned. “I have my sources.”

In the meantime he had filled my wife’s plate. She didn’t say anything, but her whole body seemed aroused and stoned at the same time. I’d never seen her that way apart from the first months we’d made love, the months before she became pregnant. It had never been a topic, most probably we both supposed that things had to change when all of a sudden there was somebody else in your life, somebody who depended on you, on you staying together, and you somehow accepted it, but now, as my wife was sitting opposite me, eating this strange food, which had been cooked by a fraud, I felt an unexpected, incredible urge to grab her, undress her, fuck her, right here on the kitchen table. I stood up. “I’m going shopping. Do you need anything?”

She looked up and when her gaze came to a halt at my crotch, her eyes widened and she started to laugh. Before she could say anything I fled.

It was after midnight when I came back. I’d gone to a pub and then to another and then to another. There were a few familiar faces here and there, with whom I’d hung around before I met my wife and who had, like me, disappeared for a while and returned again. Some of them were part-time fathers, some of them had new girlfriends, the usual stuff. When I told them that we were still together, they nodded knowingly, but didn’t specify what they knew, and I was happy about it. One had the nerve to say, “We’re getting old,” but he was dead drunk.

I felt fine when I came back, drunk but not too drunk, and with Manuel present I knew that my wife wouldn’t say anything. Walking home, I realized that my urge to get rid of him had diminished. All in all, things had become easier. We didn’t exactly fight, my wife and I, especially not in front of our daughter; both of us had grown up with violent fathers—mine psychologically, hers physically—and were careful not to pass on this heritage. But the tension had grown, one of the reasons why we’d accepted her in-laws’ proposal to take our daughter for two weeks, even though she’d never been away from both of us for longer than a night.

I can’t say what we expected from these two weeks without her. My hope had been that they both would go, like every year. Not for screwing around, only to have some time off from being the Family Guy. Mostly I worked longer hours. But I liked to have the place for myself. I liked to decide when and what and where to eat and drink and talk. I liked to unlock the front door, to know that nobody would be there or come later. Two weeks with my wife in the absence of our daughter was something I didn’t want to think about, and so I hadn’t, and now the fraud was there and he made it easy to keep it that way.

But when I came into the kitchen to grab a last beer, I found my wife fucking him. He was lying on the table, and she sat above him, with numerous candles burning around them, like in a Catholic church. His eyes were closed; maybe he’d fallen asleep. Which didn’t prevent her from riding him, up and down, up and down, accompanied by a strange singing, so strange that I first took it for a CD. But it was her, as I could see now that she was turning her face toward me, and she didn’t stop singing nor did she show surprise or remorse. She looked at me and this strange music kept coming out of her mouth, then she suddenly stopped and turned her body around as well, not to climb down and apologize, but to continue riding him backward now. And he helped her doing it, and when she got used to her new position, he held her hips and helped her find the right rhythm, and I could see his and her crotch, his dick appearing and disappearing again, her pussy rising and falling, rising and falling, and then I looked to my right and saw our leftovers, what I’d taken for tiny beans, and even though we ate so much of it, there were still hundreds and hundreds of eggs, and then I looked to my left, out of the window, thinking of my neighbors, feeling them standing behind their windows, in the dark, watching us. I wanted to run but couldn’t move.

My wife continued looking at me. But I was not sure if she really saw me. Her eyes reminded me of my sister’s dolls she’d placed next to her bed like a female army. It was him, Manuel, I now knew for sure, who’d undressed her, who’d made her climb on top of him, who moved her up and down now, and who would dress her again, once they were done.

“It’s me,” I finally managed to say. “Your husband.”

There was no reaction, neither from her nor from him. I could have been a ghost. Maybe it isn’t real, I thought, maybe I should go out again and come back in an hour and everything would be as it was before. But my legs stuck to the ground and so I stayed and continued watching them.

Years later, after we got divorced and found new homes, with new partners and new kids, we still talk about that strange scene sometimes. Neither of us shared it with anybody else; it is our most profound bond. It is what makes me reach for her hand before separating again, pressing it for a long time. And it is what makes her respond to the pressure. That night I watched her as she came, soundless, motionless, bodiless it seemed, yet so intense that I could feel it too, and it was the most beautiful and the most terrible thing I’d ever seen in my life.

I don’t remember what happened afterward, how I got to bed—not the sofa, but our bedroom—and who undressed me. When I woke up, it was just me and my wife. We both called in sick, foodora came by twice a day, and we hardly left the bed. We were like kids having a sleepover, giggling a lot, telling each other ghost stories, watching black-and-white movies. The night before our daughter came back we finally dared to make love. We would be all right, I thought then. And then she jumped out of the train in the afternoon, and my wife and I laughed and took her into our arms and we stood there, the three of us, hugging each other, for a very long time, and then we walked home, holding hands, and I was so happy that I couldn’t stop smiling. That day, I remember, I was happy.