Naked Men

by Alicia Giménez-Bartlett

  “I’d rather you looked for a real job, even as a street sweeper, and act like a guy who’s got what it takes.”

  “Careful, Sandra, your words can cause real hurt.”

  She stops talking. She stares at me. Her beautiful dark eyes narrow to two furious slits. Her face is growing flushed. She slams her fist on the table, making the rice and the Chinese noodles and the water in our glasses jump. She lets out a howl that’s huge and deep, savage like that of a woman giving birth.

  “I’m sick of it! Sick of it! I’m through! I can’t take you acting like a goddamn saint! You’re no saint, Javier, just so you know! You’re a goddamn denialist: you deny problems, deny reality. You’re directing your own movie about life, but life’s not like that, Javier.”

  She covers her face with her hands and starts to cry. Her right elbow is very close to the bowl of sweet-and-sour sauce. I’m afraid it might stain the tablecloth. I don’t know what I’m feeling right now. On the one hand, I’m deeply troubled by her distress; on the other, I don’t care. I stretch one hand across the table and touch her elbow. I also move the bowl of sauce.

  “Don’t cry, Sandra. Let’s be reasonable about this,” I say soothingly.

  She emerges from behind her hands, suddenly serene. She dries her eyes with the napkin. She gets up and goes to the refrigerator. She takes out a beer. She asks if I want one too. I accept. We open our cans. We take swigs directly from them. She starts to speak, her voice calm:

  “We’ve reached a point of no return, Javier. I think we should go our separate ways. Even if you found another job as a teacher, nothing would be the same. I’ve thought about it a lot. I haven’t come to this decision in anger. We don’t have any obligations—no kids or mortgages to complicate things. We’ve had some good years; let’s leave it at that.”

  “You don’t see any way for us to stay together?”

  “Something has broken. I’m not saying it’s your fault—maybe I need a different kind of man, or maybe what I really want is to be alone.”

  It’s so hard to say this to him! I’d like to fling myself into his arms so he can cradle me, comfort me, kiss me, like he has so many times before. “Come on, woman, don’t fret. Problems may seem huge in the moment, but time proves they never are.” With those simple words, Javier always released me from the anguish provoked by life’s little obstacles—but now he’s the problem. I don’t want to end up like one of those women whose romantic relationships have made them permanently bitter. I don’t want to get used to things I fundamentally abhor. I don’t want to cry. Javier doesn’t consume my whole life—there’s room for lots of other things. I’ll start over.

  “If we can just get through this, maybe I’ll find a job down the line.”

  “Please don’t make this harder than it already is, Javier.”

  Actually, he’s making it easier with his attitude. His calm face, his tender expression, like a man who really wants to make up, are starting to seem pathetic. He’s like a lapdog: “Please don’t leave me.” But what’s a lapdog doing dancing naked in a club? No, he knows what he’s doing—he’s changed his life, and there’s no room in the new version for me.

  “I’ll spend this weekend at my parents’ house. That’ll leave you the apartment free. Please take all your things with you. Don’t leave anything so you can come pick it up some other time—that never turns out well. If you don’t have enough time, let me know and I’ll stay away longer.”

  “All right, Sandra, I’ll do it.”

  Very simply: goodbye. There’s that pragmatic female spirit that’s always surprised me in my friends’ breakups. I’ll go—maybe it’s for the best. If there’s any possibility of reconciliation, it’ll come with time. It’s pointless to try to force it now.

  Three days to collect my things. Three days to bring our love to a close. It’s not a lot, but why would I need more? Corpses rot. I have no intention of begging or throwing myself at her feet. These last months have been hard on me too. I’m not planning to perform a comic sketch or a Greek tragedy. I’ll leave with no soundtrack to play me out. Every object I collect from her house will be freighted with shared memories, and it will pain me. But that’s life—every change is experienced as a loss, and every loss hurts. And there aren’t too many things here that belong to me alone: my clothing and my books. My books! How the hell am I going to move them? Where will I put them? There’s that pragmatic male spirit that’s always surprised me in my friends’ breakups, and that I never thought I’d have.

  * * *

  “Don’t you worry, man. We’ll figure something out.”

  Out on the fucking street! I can’t believe it—this dude’s stepped in shit, but not in a good way. He’s got crappy luck, though I already figured things would turn out this way, saw it coming a mile off. But it’s rough, man, shit, one day to the next: “Pick up your things and get out.” Six years they’d been together, he says. And it’s all hunky-dory until the moment of truth: “You have forty-eight hours to vacate the conjugal abode, so beat it.” Worse than being evicted, man, because in that case you haven’t been living with the judge for six years, sharing table and bed. When I get back, I don’t want to see a trace of you or our memories, and sweep the floor on your way out. The hell with that! And if you have to sleep in an ATM booth, that’s your problem, bub.

  I’m more pleased with my own way of doing things every day. Chicks only work at a distance. What good are they? Romance and coupling and starting a family and all that . . . The people who buy into that crap can keep it. I see this issue as clearly as if I had X-ray vision, but Javier’s still got his head in the clouds. He doesn’t criticize his girlfriend, hasn’t said a bad thing about her. In fact, he makes excuses for her: “Well, Iván, it’s no surprise she made this decision. By the end, we were leading very separate lives. She wants something else, an emotional stability I may not be able to provide . . . ” She’s screwed us, Javier! Of course she wants something else: a guy with a good job who brings in money at the end of the month and goes to the grocery store with her on the weekends. Shit, she’s textbook! But he doesn’t get upset: “Poor thing, she needs emotional stability.” The hell with that! If he’d at least get a little pissed and cuss her out a little, maybe fuck that bitch and the horse she rode in on or something, he’d be more relaxed. I mean, if my approach all this time had just been to grin and bear it when people gave me shit, like he does, I’d have burst like a kid’s balloon. I can’t do it—I give them a piece of my mind. Of course, I remember the insults afterward. If someone pulls that shit on me, I don’t forget it. I’m not saying I’ll follow them around with a sawed-off shotgun waiting for my opportunity, but if I run into them again and have a chance to mess with them, I take it. What goes around comes around. I don’t forgive or forget. The damn teacher, though—that’s some bad luck! First they run him out of his job, and now his chick has kicked him out too. And what would the guy have done without me? He may not get pissed, but he does worry . . . At the very least, his world would come crashing in.

  “I don’t know how I’m going to do it, Iván. Do you realize how much stuff a person accumulates in six years?”

  “What are you looking to take with you, the mattress?”

  “Just my clothing and my books.”

  “That’s a piece of cake, man. I’ve got a friend who works as a manager at a grocery store. I’ll ask him for some cardboard boxes, we’ll pack everything up, and you’re all set!”

  “It’s not that easy. Plus, I can’t let you put me up in your house. I’ve been enough of a burden on you already.”

  “Shit, man, don’t be an ass! I’ve got the space.”

  “I’ll look for a place and get out of your way as soon as possible.”

  “No rush, teach, no rush.”

  Like I said, he worries. He’s too nice a guy—that’s why these things happen to him. If he were a jerk, things woul
d be different. He’d be dealing the cards, he’d be in control. Of course, even when he accepts the invitation to stay at my house for a while, he starts worrying about whether it’s a pain for me, so there’s no way for him to be even a little bit happy. He should know I only invite people I like, and there aren’t many of those. If I didn’t like him, I’d keep my trap shut, since I don’t give a shit about putting on a good face for other people. So all right, this weekend I’ll help him move, and we’ll see if he starts worrying because of me too.

  I go over to his house on Saturday morning. It’s the first time I’ve been inside. It isn’t bad—your standard little apartment. He tells me he’s already got the clothing packed up in two suitcases. I went by my friend’s grocery store, and he gave me a ton of boxes. We just have to fold them back into shape and reinforce them with tape, which I’ve remembered to buy. I don’t get why he wants to take all these books, though. If he’s already read them, he could just leave them here—or sell them to a junk shop. Not that I care, really. If he wants them . . .

  He leads me to the kitchen and makes me some coffee. We sip it, sitting pleasantly at a little table. He looks pretty down, which is to be expected. All guys go through it when their chicks dump them. I pretend not to notice so he doesn’t start droning on about pointless shit. I hurry him up to distract him from his funk:

  “All right, man, show me the stuff we’ve got to pack up.”

  “All the books are in the back room.”

  Fuck me, it’s like the library back in school! Rows and rows running along every wall that seem practically endless. Shit, now I get why he was so overwhelmed thinking about his books!

  “Hey, man, listen, are these all yours?”

  “Iván! They’re all the books I’ve accumulated over my whole life, and there aren’t that many of them.”

  “Shit! And have you read them all?”

  “Almost.”

  “Good for you, dude, but if you’ve already read them, wouldn’t it be more practical to just throw them out?”

  “Don’t be an imbecile, Iván. Books are for keeping, you don’t throw them away.”

  “So how about giving them to somebody?”

  “They’re mine, I want them—it’s like they’re part of me.”

  There must be some mystery here I’m not getting, but let’s get on with it! If it’s so damn important to take the damn books, I’m not going to stand in his way. Of course, we can’t just dump them all over my place, and I don’t have any bookcases. We’ll leave everything in the boxes till he finds an apartment. I imagine he won’t mind if I put them in my storage room, where I keep my bike. Of course, if they’re part of him, he might want to keep them close and look at them at night. I think all that studying rotted the teacher’s brain. With what rent runs around here, he’s going to have to find a huge place to fit everything in.

  I had to go get more boxes, of course. Books, books, books, heavy as hell. Six hours hauling books, packing them up, carrying them down to the car! I never dreamed anyone could read so much. To be honest, I didn’t even do the required reading at school because I thought it was a drag.

  By the end of the morning, we were exhausted, our hands filthy—wiped out. But the fucking books were gone from the shelves. The only ones left were the books Javier said belonged to Sandra. Mission accomplished.

  “Let’s go eat, Iván, we’ve earned it.”

  “Eating’s not a bad plan, man, but I could really use a beer.”

  We went to a bar he knew and got drinks and wolfed down a couple of ham sandwiches so big they barely fit on the plate. They tasted amazing after the hell we’d just been through. Then the teacher goes and gets sentimental on me: I’m so grateful for everything you’re doing for me, I don’t know what I’d do if you weren’t helping me . . . I waved my hand in the air like I was erasing his words. “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “We’re friends, right? Well, a guy will do anything for a good friend.”

  “I know we’re friends, but while I’m living here I’d like to help out with expenses. You know, part of the rent, electricity, water . . . ”

  He’s a cool guy, but this sharing expenses business is a little risky. I want to help out, but I don’t want him settling in for good, and if he pays his part, it’ll seem like he has the right to stay as long as he wants, and that’s not an option. My life plan has me flying solo. I’ve never thought I might enjoy living with someone else. I don’t even live with a girlfriend, let alone a buddy. I’m not a bad guy, but it puts me on edge to have my freedom taken away. I come and go as I please. When I don’t want to see anybody, I order in pizza or Chinese food or kebabs and eat in front of the TV, happy as a clam. That’s the way I am, and I have no interest in changing.

  “Look, man, don’t worry about that. You’re only going to be here a little while, so there’s no point in reaching for your wallet. You’re going to need that money for when you find a decent place.”

  Finally we went to my house and I showed him his room, which is pretty sweet. It has a built-in closet and even some trendy curtains I bought at El Corte Inglés, the department store. Plus there’s a guest bathroom. He liked it a lot, of course. He put his stuff on the bed and we went out to the living room to have a beer.

  The teacher was a little shy. He looked at all the CDs and DVDs I have, a ton of them. I showed him my collection of Jackie Chan movies. I told him I’m not one of those guys who’s obsessed with martial arts, but I like those movies—the dude makes me laugh, and I enjoy the way he leaps around and fucks shit up. Suddenly the teacher asks me if I read books, and I tell him I don’t have time: between the gym, TV, the computer, my job, and going out . . . my schedule’s packed. He says he’ll give me a book and I say OK—what else am I supposed to say? He might be offended if I tell him reading makes me tense since I’m not used to it. He also says I should at least let him buy some food and beer to stock the fridge. I tell him fine, if that’ll make him feel better . . . though I hardly ever eat in. Cooking’s a drag. I fry an egg from time to time, with bacon and potato chips. When I was first living here, I hired Puri, one of my mother’s friends, to come in one day a week and clean the place. She’d cook for me too, soups and that sort of thing. But then she got annoying, insisting I needed to take care of myself, eat healthy and all that crap, and she’d leave me a ton of food in the fridge. And then what would happen? Well, the soup would go bad and I’d have to chuck it out. How should I know whether I’m going to be eating at home? I don’t have to clock in like an office worker. Things come up during the day, and I’m not going to stop doing what I’m doing so I can go home and eat some goddamn soup. I told her to forget about cooking. Plus, I didn’t like it that she was getting so familiar. I had to stop her a couple of times, especially when she tried to talk to me about my mother. Puri goes to see her in the psych ward at the prison, and then she comes at me with this spiel about how my mother’s not a bad woman, she’s had rotten luck in life, the poor thing is getting skinny . . . That was it—I don’t want to hear about it. I don’t talk shit about my mother or go to the clink to rub her face in it, do I? So bug off.

  I’ll tell Puri I’ve got a friend staying with me so she can iron his clothes too, though I don’t think Javier ever wears dress shirts, just tees. The poor guy’s a little wet behind the ears. I’m going to have to teach him a few things about life. I’m curious to know how much he gets in unemployment. Probably crap. That’s probably why Sandra kicked him out. Women love suckers like Javier at first, but after a while they get sick of putting up with them. I bet my balls she met a guy who’s loaded. I don’t believe she’s so narrow-minded she can’t handle the idea of her boyfriend working in a club. Come on, girl! Don’t ask where money comes from when it’s already in your pocket. He should look into it—if I were him, I’d hire a private eye to trail her. It wouldn’t take him more than a couple of days to come back with photos of the broad with a
nother dude picking her up from work. In a car, of course.

  As part of welcoming him to the house, I’ve showed him my Facebook profile with my nice-guy photo and my Twitter account. He was amazed because I have a lot of followers. I told him that’s a breeze—if you say a lot of bullshit, you’re sure to get a bunch of followers. Really, though, this networking business is a waste of time and I don’t give a shit. Some of my friends are really into it, but not me. The real stuff happens out in the real world, not on the computer. But a lot of people never have anything happen to them because they’re chicken—that’s the truth.

  By about seven o’clock, we’ve opened some cans of cockles and tuna to munch on before we go to work. You can’t work on an empty stomach. Javier seems to have cheered up by the time we leave the house. When we get to the club, he acts like he’s in his element. He never seemed happy to be there before—the look on his face always suggested he hated the place. Not today. Today he said hi to everybody, cracked a couple jokes, practiced some of the moves from his dance number, that sort of thing. I think his girlfriend had him brainwashed and all screwed up. It’s probably for the best that she’s kicked him out.

  * * *

  Here I am, with a roof over my head thanks to charity, brotherly solidarity, whatever you want to call it. And my benefactor’s a guy with whom I have no familial, social, or cultural bond. A guy who’s never read a book in his life. He’s proved he’s my friend, that’s for sure, and the hardest part is I don’t know how to thank him. I thought about giving him a book he might like, a book that would immerse him in one of the greatest human pleasures, but I have no idea which to choose. I ruled out the classics: they’re not easy reading, and they’d probably remind him of homework. I wonder what kind of student he was, though I can imagine: a troublemaker, written off as the product of a fractured family and with the corresponding conduct. He probably skipped school all the time—I doubt his grandmother, bless her, was able to persuade him to go to class. I also doubt she put much stock in her grandson’s education. It was enough trouble just putting up with him, keeping him fed. With the classics ruled out, I also considered gripping contemporary stuff—Palahniuk, Cheever, Carver—but I don’t know if he’d be interested. Maybe I should lower my sights a little and buy him a Stephen King novel, or just the opposite, raise them as high as possible and give him Crime and Punishment in a modern translation. Sometimes that kind of thing works and pure narrative essence manages to win over even stone.