She walked back to the dining room, watching him as he sighed and put a newspaper down.
“There’s nothing here,” he said, rubbing his forehead. “Unless there’s a cryptic clue hidden in one of these old newspapers.”
“You look tired.”
“I was up late, working.”
“Want a cup of coffee?”
“Sure.”
She slid into the minuscule kitchen and put the kettle on the burner. She’d always wanted a nice kitchen. This one was falling apart. Peeling linoleum and sagging counters. But the landlord would never fix it.
She prepared two cups of coffee and brought out the sugar bowl. She was very proud of the dainty sugar bowl. It was real porcelain. She’d bought it at La Lagunilla, haggling until the woman selling it brought down her price. It wasn’t very ladylike to haggle, but Maite would bicker over a miserable peso like a furious wolf if it was necessary. It often was.
Maite placed the cup of coffee before him, and he smiled. A couple of days before she’d thought about inviting this man to her apartment, and there he was. And of course now that he was here, sitting in her dining room, she wasn’t sure what to say to him, although in her imagination she had asked him to fuck. Easily and plainly. Just because she could.
Maite was boring, and she was tired of being boring. But she couldn’t, didn’t quite, want to go there.
She wouldn’t be any better than the man with the floaty pens, who also collected pictures of pinups, his hungry eyes classifying every woman alive, measuring her, sliding her into the drawer of his memories. Their legs, their breasts, their torso. He’d been a sleaze, but she was somehow worse.
You’re perverse, she thought.Deep down, you’re a monster of perversity and you know it.All you have is cheap fantasies.
“How long have you been working at the print shop?” she asked.
“A couple of years, part-time. It’ll take a while to find something else. I dropped out of university so it’s not that easy getting a decent job.”
“What did you study?”
“Literature.”
Better than poetry, she thought grimly. Though not by much. Maybe he’d spend the rest of his life in that print shop, growing bent and grayed.
“Where do you work?” he asked.
“I’m a secretary at a law firm.”
“You like it there?”
“I hate it,” Maite said honestly, stirring her coffee and taking a sip.
“You could quit.”
“The pay at another job wouldn’t be any better.”
“It might be more fun.”
How odd, she thought. To think of a job as “fun” or “not fun” when a job was simply a paycheck. She supposed it was his youth that made him think like that. Ten years in the trenches, and he’d burn through those ideas.
Youth. All he had was his youth. He wasn’t attractive; he was too hairy for her taste and not nearly as sophisticated as she might have wanted. Still, he’d dated Leonora, and Leonora was beautiful. Maybe that’s how it went for men. It didn’t matter if you were the Hunchback of Notre Dame, you still had a chance to romance Esmeralda.
“How did you and Leonora meet?” she asked.
“At Asterisk. I’ve been designing flyers for them for a while, helping Jackie out like that and with other stuff. Leonora started showing up and we got to talking and we had a lot of stuff in common, so we started going out together.”
“For how long?”
“Over half a year. She’d just arrived in the city. She was a bit provincial, but not for long. And she was eager to make friends, to meet people, and everyone wanted to meet her. She has a glow about her, as you know.”
