24
MAYBE IT WAS because of all the bright northern African sunshine around him, or maybe it was the clamor of the city streets here on the Mediterranean’s southern shores as he hurried back to the apartment, but he bought her roses. He suddenly felt a longing for something like love, so he whispered to her, there on the terrace of the penthouse, “Tell me, how much do you love me?”
An agitated crowd was thronging below.
She gazed into his eyes, which he found arousing.
“What? We fuck, but no mind-fucks,” she said. “The gentleman would like proof of my love? Do I bare my heart? Why not give those flowers to that little girl of yours, your manager who believes in a better world? Where the two of you will be in charge together, welcoming guests to your dinner parties, right?”
She laughed in his face, then went inside. He followed her, an erection bulging in his pants. He didn’t understand the logic behind these erections, but they kept coming—they simply kept coming. He seized her around the waist and spun her around toward him, grabbing her ass with one hand. He wanted to kiss her.
“No way, no sex for you today,” she said. “Stay in the realm of love today.”
He released her.
“You started so nice and look at you now.”
She entered her room, closed the door, and turned the key.
I hate her, he thought. The woman was making him feel like a beggar, a beggar for something, he didn’t know for what—since he was actually the one paying her.
A beggar for truth, he thought. I need some truth to hang on to in this whole lie. I got what I wanted. This is what she has to offer—a damned mirror. She is a criminal. Oh yessiree a criminal. He didn’t know why these words seemed so compelling to him, but he kept repeating them, like an inebriating explanation.
He felt as if she were the one in charge here, even though he couldn’t find a rational explanation for the feeling, since, realistically speaking, he was making all the decisions. He had decided to take her with him, he was the one in the know. She was just traveling with him, going along like a suitcase. Where did the absurd feeling come from that she was the one in charge?
He turned on the TV and flipped to CNN.
He had leased this huge apartment in the center of the city because he was trying to avoid hotels and security cameras. Here he had everything he needed, no surplus.
• • •
Lipša lay on her back, smoking a cigarette.
She was having a conversation with herself in her head; she had practiced this to perfection as a kind of therapy.
“What is he thinking? That I’ve never had a guy like him before? As if all those other bosses were easy to deal with.”
“You’re right, don’t let him draw you in. You’re not stupid. Once was enough.”
For her, this was a way of staying in touch with herself, she engaged in her dialogues, sometimes even out loud, as if talking to a friend, the savvy friend she didn’t have.
“All right, so you trade something, sacrifice a piece or two, give pussy from time to time, but that way—give your pussy voluntarily, and not unwillingly as if it’s being taken from you. I’ve been telling you this all along.”
“When I’m giving, I am giving, or at least I’m acting that way, I’m not suffering, I don’t fuck with suffering.”
“You must understand, to suffer means to admit defeat, to recognize their authority.”
“I’m not suffering.”
“You’re really not suffering?”
“No,” she said, “I’m not going to suffer. Where would I be if I gave in to suffering? I would be constantly suffering. I’d already have dropped dead.”
“Your lack of suffering seems to bother him. You’re giving the impression of being undefeated, and he doesn’t like that.”
“I know. It’s his vanity. Asshole. He’d like to pull me in. If I allow myself to fall in love with him just for a second, if I begin hoping for his love, I’ll immediately begin to suffer. Then he’ll be satisfied. Then he’ll know I’ve fallen under his sway, he’ll know he mattered.”
“He doesn’t matter.”
“He must keep not mattering.”
“He’s not the man for you.”
“And who is?”
“You haven’t met that man yet.”
“I certainly haven’t.”
“Are you waiting for him?”
“Not really sure.”
“And why should you? Let him find you.”
“Where would I wait, anyway?”
“This is what it is.”
“No way am I going to suffer because of this, I decided that a long time ago.”
“And who should you be suffering for?”
“Probably for myself. I don’t know.”
“Why should you be suffering for yourself? To make your own life miserable? And all that for yourself?”
“Why do others suffer without love?”
“They have ideas about how their lives should be, so they suffer. They think everything’s lost because they failed to meet the bar they set. You used to have such ideas.”
“Luckily, I no longer have any ideas about what my life should be like.”
“You’re free as a bird. You’ve already ascended to a higher level.”
• • •
Oleg really had no interest whatsoever in the ordinary women who embraced suffering, thinking of it as a currency they could use to endear themselves to him, and, eventually, in their dreams and maybe even permanently, bind him to them. He was fed up with these maneuvers, which, after all, completely spoiled the pleasure for him and also evoked a feeling of guilt, the archetypal guilt—alas, I made her miserable—and the class guilt, which washed over him every time he hooked up with an impoverished woman, who would then start hoping her relationship with this promising gentleman might become something more than a one-night stand.
These women simply wanted to leave their lives behind, lives they found even more unbearable after they’d had a taste of something else, he knew this full well, damn it, and while he felt pity for some of them, he couldn’t rescue them one by one—you can rescue only one, no more—and every single time this led to the tears of a penniless woman who couldn’t bear feeling like a whore, but he made her feel that way, of course, which was terrible, terrible. All of this was horrible, he’d been horrible throughout the affair, and eventually, their sex would also be horrible. Sometimes, truth be told, it was from the very start.
If you imagine me with no money, exactly as I am—you’ll see that I’m not a good man, nor am I handsome. Why suffer over me? He said this once over the phone to the physiotherapist he’d tangled with at a wellness center—where she was employed, and lived nearby as well—a tryst that soon became a steamy adventure at the hot springs.
He thought maybe this way of thinking would make everything easier for her.
Yet she claimed she loved him and sobbed over the phone.
Now that woman wasn’t actually poor, though when he thought about her “poor” was the word that sprang to mind. No, he thought, hers isn’t real poverty. It is the ordinary average poverty of those who watch TV and read the trashy magazines, of those who follow what celebrities do and where they spend their summer holidays, thus becoming poor from all the things they desire. They are poorer than the poor; those paupers of television and tabloids, they are the poorest, their poverty is in images, in the luxury of yachts and flashy cars, in high-fashion clothing brands and fantasies about tourist destinations. Their poverty is thorough and complete, with no pride or rebellion, for they keep hoping, they project themselves into images, they save up and buy one of the things they desire, something similar to what they’ve seen in the images—they indulge themselves in something, and, I should say, deservedly enjoy it, but then have to pay it off and go on fa
ding in front of their TVs and those sleazy magazines. Such paupers were incredibly common—they seemed to constitute the majority of the population. The poverty of the people who obsess about wealth is vast—and he could feel this emptiness on the skin of young women, even in their sorrows, in those misfortunes of love he indulged them in, because he was a swine.
“Then why such suffering over me?” he asked her.
“You got under my skin.”
He realized there was nothing to be done here. If they conceived of me as a door to a better world, then it’s useless to think afterward that I’m someone else. If they, to lay everything bare, were involved with me because they saw me as a source of money and a pathway to a better world, then they are in the whorish game from the get-go, but they can’t face thinking of it that way so they fall in love, they deny it all by falling in love: falling in love is a form of lying in this case, and I’m expected to sweep the game under the carpet—and turn it into love—otherwise, everything is just terrible. . . . But yes, it is, indeed, terrible.
There was no need to explain this to Lipša. She didn’t come from the class of the miserable consumers of images. She gave pussy differently—even though even she wouldn’t be willing to fuck me were I not seen as money-work-world—she wouldn’t, but this whore wasn’t unable to face the air of whorishness, she was insolent in all of that, as if she were telling a truth, an insolent fucker, she’d screw when and how she wanted. He appreciated her as one appreciates those self-made gangsters arrogantly clawing their way up from the very bottom, and he was in a way becoming a little crazy over her, her sexy provocations, those looks she gave him, the paradoxical relationship between them, in which certain strange feelings of respect, companionship, and affection had begun slowly sneaking in—he was hoping these feelings would soon disappear—for this could lead nowhere, no way.
He knew there was no reason to trust her, and she certainly hadn’t asked him to.
As he was buying her flowers, he was thinking of them as a childish prank, he hoped they’d pretend to be in love on this trip, far away from the world that defined them. But the prank was rejected.
“Shit,” he said.
The city they were in had just shown up on CNN.
• • •
Oleg went out onto the terrace with a beer in his hand and looked down from the sixth floor. Down there on the street, people were walking hurriedly, maybe nervously, now and then a group of young men could be seen walking at a faster pace than the rest. The crowd from before was not there anymore. He lit a cigarette. He’d taken a couple of drags when he heard the door on the right opening—each of them had their own entrance to the terrace. Lipša appeared.
“Oh, what are you doing out here?” she said, sleepily.
“Passing through,” he said.
Watching her stretch brought a smile to his face.
“Do you have any plans for today?” he asked.
“I really don’t know. I should probably eat something. To spend these wages my company’s paid me.”
No-Signal Area Page 28