Come On Up

by jordi Nopca

  The music is so loud that I have to ring the bell four times. When they hear me, someone lowers the volume and approaches the peephole.

  “I know it’s a little late, but I’d like to join the celebration,” I say, holding up the bottle of red wine.

  It’s the same girl from the day before yesterday, who opened the door first in shorts and then in a robe. She’s wearing a red dress, and her eye makeup is smeared.

  “I brought some fuel,” I insist as she eyes me warily.

  “You really want to come in? If the music’s bothering you, we can turn it down. I’m sorry.”

  The girl ends up letting me in and introducing me to the group of friends sitting on sofas in the living room. The air is heavy with smoke, the illicit greenish sort, which invades my lungs and relaxes me. You don’t know what you’re missing, Ester! On the coffee table there are a dozen empty plastic cups. Luckily, there are still four or five full ones.

  “Anyone want some wine?” I ask, even translating the last word into English for the crowd.

  No one accepts my offer, not even when I’ve got the bottle opened. Determined to get drunk, I gulp down a couple of cups myself. The friends discuss English poetry. I have nothing to say on the subject, but I like listening to them. I’m aware of time passing, because the songs begin and end while the group continues to deliberate on texts they must be studying at the university. We’ve never had any programming at the community center about John Keats. These students are taken with a couple of verses about eternal youth. Every so often, someone dramatically recites them, determined to make them the catchphrase of the evening:

  For ever warm and still to be enjoy’d,

  For ever panting, and for ever young …

  When I tire of being a spectator—everything has its limits; even English poetry can grow wearisome—I announce that I have to go to the bathroom for a minute. The girl who let me into the apartment, whose name I still don’t know, leads me to a dark hallway.

  “It’s the second door on the right,” she says. “Good luck.”

  I don’t get why I would need luck until I’m inside the bathroom. As soon as I switch the light on, a whiny voice from the bathtub asks me to turn it off.

  “You should try the candles,” the voice says in English.

  Before the darkness returns, I have time to see a hat covering her eyes, a tight skirt, and a pair of high boots that gleam cockroach black. She thanks me and applauds. Then she offers me a box of matches so I can light the candles on the end of the bathtub where her feet are.

  “Thank you again, honey.”

  The girl lifts her hat and tells me her name, which I don’t catch, not even after two tries. Finally, she decides to write it out on the wall with her finger. E-E-V-I. She says she’s Finnish. She also writes out the name of where she’s from, M-I-E-H-I-K-K-Ä-L-Ä, and she smiles when I say that’s a funny name. I’d like to ask her how she ended up in the bathtub, but instead I go over to the sink and start to wash my hands. She says that if I need to use the toilet, she’ll close her eyes and cover her ears.

  “I won’t see anything. I won’t hear anything.”

  I tell her that I just want to wash my hands and splash a little water on my face. I add that the temperature in the living room is too high. She agrees; she admits she left for the same reason. The porcelain bathtub is cool and pleasant. She invites me to touch it.

  “It’s freezing cold,” she promises.

  Està gelada, I translate in my head. I prefer to splash my face and the nape of my neck with water. I tell her it’s the Mediterranean way. She asks if I’m referencing a popular beer commercial. I say no, but maybe I was a little.

  “You should go back to the party, don’t you think?”

  Go back to the party? I don’t feel like it. “They’re probably still talking about John Keats,” I tell her.

  “The great lost poet,” she says, then pulls out a cigarette from the depths of the tub, beyond the luminous scope of the candles, and lights it on one of the dim flames.

  Suddenly, she wants to know things about me. She asks what my link is to the party and what I do for work, and she listens with her hat lifted. I sense that I should tell the truth. I spill it all: that they fired me from the community center, that my cell phone disappeared after lunch with an old college friend, and that two days prior, I lost, almost simultaneously, my house keys and my girlfriend.

  “She left because she couldn’t stand me anymore,” I said in English. “Worst of all is that I think she was right: I’m frigging useless, a loser and a liar.”

  Before I’m finished, I add that I don’t even know the name of the girl who let me into the party, because we’ve barely spoken a couple of times—brief encounters, always motivated by my lost keys—but I came upstairs because I couldn’t sleep; the music was reverberating through my entire apartment.

  “Poor thing,” she says. “That’s a terrible story.”

  Eevi gets out of the tub and throws her cigarette into the toilet. Before stretching out in her porcelain bed again, she pinches my cheek and tells me I’m a gloomy person.

  “You’re so sad.”

  It’s strange, because I’m actually feeling pretty good right now. I’m convinced that this bathroom encounter will be the start of a long friendship, and maybe even something more. Sooner or later, Eevi will have to return to her country, and since I probably won’t have found a job and Ester probably won’t have forgiven me (to get into the apartment, she’ll have to ring the bell, because I’ll have changed the lock), I’ll stuff everything I own into a couple of suitcases and we’ll move to Helsinki together. I bet there will be tons of community centers up there just thirsting for some Mediterranean warmth. I’ll do whatever it takes, even if I have to work my way up by mopping floors and washing windows. Eevi will be a fantastic English teacher.

  CINÉMA D’AUTEUR

  Joan and Marina exited the auditorium of Casa Àsia with their hands in the pockets of their parkas. His was army green. Hers was soft pink, floral, and slightly porcine. They’d met in high school. Before long, they became inseparable friends, united by their eccentricities, which most of their classmates disparaged. Joan thought he’d fallen in love with Marina at the end of senior year, when she’d told him that, after thinking long and hard, she’d decided to study biology. He had his mind set on working with computers. Thinking about continuing his academic life without Marina made him realize he was feeling something more than friendship for her. Almost subconsciously, he had swapped out the silicone imagery that inspired his nocturnal self-satisfying and tried to stimulate himself by thinking about Marina’s whitish body surface. The change had been hard at first, and he hadn’t gotten used to it until it was almost time for the University Access Exams. Joan had decided that he would declare his feelings as soon as the tests were over. He tried to steel his courage in a Chinese restaurant with karaoke, while most of their classmates were singing songs by the Beatles, Michael Jackson, and Alejandro Sanz. He’d guzzled down quite a bit of sangria to bolster his resolve, but when he finally turned to announce to Marina that he wanted to tell her something, he found her awkwardly trying to light a cigarette.

  “You smoke?” he asked her, his tone curious and slightly reproachful.

  She had singed part of one finger, which ended up in Joan’s drink.

  “I never knew you were into sadism.”

  They laughed with their mouths wide open, pointing up at the ceiling, like two characters in a Japanese comic book. The moment for his confession had vanished.

  ###

  Eight months after that night, as they walked down the stairs that separated the Casa Àsia auditorium from the Avinguda Diagonal, Joan still hadn’t taken the leap. What’s more, for a few days now he hadn’t been so sure that he wanted to date his best friend, although he couldn’t really explain that unexpected change of heart.

  “I have to go to the bathroom,” he said, his hands still in the pockets of his army green
parka, head bowed.

  “The bathroom is on the lower level,” she replied, and then she pulled up her pants, which she’d bought in the last post-Christmas sales but which were already loose on her hips.

  They continued descending the stairs. The lower level was farther down than Joan was expecting.

  “This is like a David Lynch movie,” said the teen. At the same time, he checked with his index finger to see if the pimples that had appeared that morning were still staining his red face.

  “Or a Wong Kar-wai film.”

  “Wong Kar …”

  “Fa yeung nin wa?”

  “You mean In the Mood for Love?”

  “Exactly.”

  Marina had been studying Chinese for the last four years, and she used it every chance she could, even though often the only things she could say were film or song titles. That evening, as the names of the actors in Ba xing bao xi—the kooky romantic comedy they’d seen—rolled by on the screen, she could decipher only one of them. She felt so disappointed that she hadn’t paid attention to the sound track, a technopop cover of a piece by Johann Strauss the Younger that her friend had identified, out loud, during the screening, showing off his expertise in German: “An der schönen blauen Donau!”

  There were six people waiting in the bathroom of Casa Àsia. There was only one line, and it started very close to one of the three cubicles without a gleaming white sign that read, in Catalan, Spanish, English, French, and Chinese, OUT OF ORDER.

  “Man, what a drag,” murmured Joan.

  Sometimes it seemed appropriate to employ expressions he’d learned in high school between classes. In the computer science department, where he now studied, nobody ever said anything: Loud sighs, concentration, and hang-ups accumulated in front of the monitor, and were rarely interrupted by any words.

  “Yeah,” replied Marina, still uncomfortably having to hitch up her pants.

  “I don’t know how long this’ll take. Maybe it’d be better if you waited out front for me.”

  “I have to use the bathroom, too.”

  “Ah.”

  Joan swallowed hard, nervously. If she had to go to the bathroom, too, the situation changed considerably, especially because there was no separation between men and women, and it was pretty clear that in those tiny stalls you could hear everything that was happening in the one next to yours. Joan wasn’t prepared for any of the noises that might emerge from the stall Marina went into. He doubted that he’d want to ask her out after going through this. He didn’t feel able to accept the fearsome quotidianity so soon, when he’d never been with any girl before. He still thought that girls didn’t do the same gross things in the bathroom that he did. It was a compromising situation. Joan unzipped his coat, because he was afraid he’d start sweating, and even though it was Saturday—and he’d disconnected from the safe virtual world of his computer—he hadn’t showered.

  “Did you like the movie?”

  “Ba xing bao xi?”

  “I think that’s the only one we saw, Ba-gin-bau-gi. …”

  “It’s really funny to hear you speak Cantonese.”

  “Oh, yeah. As funny as you speaking German.”

  “All right, don’t be like that. I did study it for two years. …”

  “Two years are nothing. German’s a real bitch.”

  “So’s Chinese.”

  “Sure, but I have no interest in Chinese.”

  “Whatever, but it’s the language of the future.”

  Two women exited stalls almost simultaneously and two other women entered. There were only four people in line ahead of them.

  “But did you like the movie or what?”

  “Yeah! A lot!” Marina timidly clapped her hands to show her enthusiasm.

  In the auditorium, she never would have made a display like that, but now, with her only friend, she not only felt she could applaud but she even dared to pull a folder out of her backpack with all the pages she’d printed out at home.

  “These are some of the reviews of Ba xing bao xi that I found online. … Did you know that Johnnie To has made more than fifty films in just twenty years?”

  “No, I didn’t know that, but I’ve seen some of them, and they were all a lot better than this one.”

  “But they must’ve been action movies. …”

  “No.”

  “Come on, name one film you’ve seen lately that wasn’t all fight scenes.”

  Two more stalls opened up, and a girl with hazy shades and a man who looked like a tortured high school teacher took their turns. Now there was only a fiftysomething married couple, who looked French, in front of them in line. Joan thought that because of their skin, which was the color of sunflower oil, and also because of those plaid shirts, which he figured must be a smoke screen for their real jobs: programming events at a regional contemporary art museum.

  “I saw one I thought was amazing. Me and millions of other people.”

  “What?”

  “The Dark Knight.”

  “Gimme a break, Joan. … You’re not trying to tell me that the latest Batman film isn’t an action flick.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong. The Dark Knight is pure epic; it’s a masterpiece, and Heath Ledger’s best acting ever. He’s going to win the Oscar for sure.”

  “He’ll only win it because he committed suicide.”

  “He’ll win it because his Joker is five thousand times better than Jack Nicholson’s, whose Joker is bullshit next to Heath Ledger’s.”

  “I couldn’t really care less whose was better. I was asking you if you’d seen anything besides action movies this past month.”

  A man of about eighty came out of the third stall, which Joan had been thinking was out of order, since its door hadn’t opened once in all that time. The woman of the supposedly French couple went in without batting an eyelash. There were brave people left in this world.

  “I saw Bolt, too.”

  “Which starts out like Terminator or Rambo.”

  “Exactly, it’s a parody of action films! Bolt is an adventure movie filled with memorable moments. It’s got a romantic side, too … right?”

  “You and I have to go to the movies together more often.”

  Her intonation on that last sentence—commanding, inviting—made Joan very nervous. He suddenly got a stab of pain in his lower intestine and had to stifle one of those lethal gases he released in front of the computer (at home, but in class, too). Could it be that Marina felt something for him? Joan took off his backpack and started rummaging around in its greasy interior, befuddled.

  “What are you looking for?” she asked.

  He made an attempt at a smile but didn’t quite succeed, since he was not used to expressing such positive emotions.

  “No … nothing …”

  Should I take off my jacket? he wondered. It had never occurred to Joan that the outer coat he was wearing could have any other name. Underneath it, he had on a shirt with three small oil stains, and with so much light, Marina would surely notice them. Joan hesitated until his fingers hit upon something interesting at the bottom of his backpack.

  “Here it is!”

  “What?”

  He showed her an unmarked CD.

  “It’s the death metal compilation I wanted to bring you last week. Remember when I told you about it?”

  “Yes … but you know I’m not really into that kind of music.”

  “And you know that I’m not super into this kind of movie. …”

  “Cinéma d’auteur, you mean?”

  “Yeah, exactly, cinéma d’auteur, all those strange movies you download, they’re not really my style. We have to learn to tolerate each other’s tastes, if we want to …”

  “If we want to what?”

  Joan stopped for a moment. The bathrooms of Casa Àsia weren’t the best setting to ask Marina if she wanted to go out with him. And he still wasn’t convinced he should even ask. Did he really like her that much? Shouldn’t he try to meet so
me other girl, even if only to compare them and decide which one he would venture to kiss, hug, and, if everything went well, take it a little further?

  “If we want to … I don’t know, I lost my train of thought.”

  Marina had taken off her parka and was holding it. That way, she could hide the fact that her fingers were sweating, a ton, because she wanted Joan to take the leap. She didn’t care if the setting was a restaurant with dim lighting, a fast-food joint lit up like a chicken farm, or here, in front of this sad row of toilet stalls. Two doors opened at the same time and out came the supposed Frenchwoman and the guy who looked like a tortured high school teacher. The man in line ahead of them quickly entered a stall. There was one available.

  “You go ahead,” Joan said to Marina. “I’m sure you need more time.”

  She listened to him, although she didn’t really know what he meant by that. She stroked the parka’s pink hood with her fingertips, sweaty as all get out, as she walked toward the farthest stall, the third one, inhabited until relatively recently by the octogenarian. She locked herself inside.

  Joan looked at himself in the mirror above the only sink while the supposedly French woman washed her hands. He had the impression that he looked worse than ever. His pimples had mysteriously multiplied, and a flamboyant eruption had appeared on his forehead. He shifted his gaze to the grayish door that Marina had just opened and closed. The woman left without her companion, and Joan, who had no one behind him in line, slowly approached the stall with his best friend inside so he could better hear what was happening on the other side of the door. It was a nasty fixation he’d gotten past a while ago, when one day his father had caught him with his ear glued to the bathroom door at home, listening in on his older sister’s attack of diarrhea. Today, almost without realizing it—maybe because he was very nervous—he was spellbound a few centimeters from Marina’s stall door. At this point, from what he could hear, she’d only coughed a couple of times.

  He wasn’t expecting the supposed Frenchman to suddenly emerge from the next stall, much less for the guy to shoot him a dirty look before going over to the sink to wash his hands. That was how it went down. It was a question of a few very fleeting but ultrasonic seconds, during which Joan almost ran into the empty toilet stall.