by Paul Pen
“Do you really think I have the power to make you do everything I want you to do?”
The question’s double meaning was so forward that Frank stammered, unable to think of an answer to match it. It had been too long since anyone had teased him in such a way.
“Seriously, a lot of people buy this system,” she went on, visibly satisfied at having unbalanced him.
“Yeah, yeah,” he said. “You turn your house into Fort Knox if you want. I’ll take the motor home without surveillance cameras or customized horns, thanks. And guarantee me that the upgrade I’ve accepted costs the same as the discount you’re offering.”
“I promise—don’t you trust me?”
A quick bat of the eyelashes embellished the question.
“Not much.”
They smiled at each other, making eye contact for much longer than any saleswoman would normally look at her customer. In silence. Then they both looked down at the ground, not knowing how to continue.
That morning, Frank signed the reservation and paid the deposit. The sales agent asked him for a period seven to ten days to complete the paperwork and prepare the vehicle. But before the week was over, on the Tuesday morning, Frank received a call from Mara Miller, as she introduced herself on the telephone. The saleswoman apologized for forgetting to ask him to sign an essential document. The dealership would send out the paperwork that afternoon, and if they didn’t have everything in order, it would delay delivery for another week. Repeating her apology, the saleswoman advised Frank to visit the dealership as soon as possible, advice he accepted. Though he kept telling himself he was only going there to sign a document, a whirl of excitement began to revolve in his stomach that had nothing to do with a simple sales transaction. Denying to himself what his actions made obvious, Frank visited the bathroom next to his office and took out the deodorant he kept in the last drawer for when the days dragged on longer than expected. That day he still smelled like the soap from his morning shower, but he wanted to be sure. He also made himself urinate even though he didn’t feel the need. And when he dried himself with the cheap toilet paper the hotel bought and some remnants were left on his penis, he removed them carefully, one by one, until no trace remained.
Mara Miller received him in a hut in a corner of the premises rather than in the central building where they’d finalized the sale. She was wearing the same uniform she’d worn on the Saturday, but a lowered front zipper turned what had been a round neck into cleavage. Frank’s eyes flicked to the uncovered flesh. The saleswoman thanked him for coming so quickly as she got up from the desk. She was shoeless, and her tights brushed against the floor with each step toward the door. Frank had left it open, but she closed it. She resembled a woman receiving a visitor at home, or in her bedroom, perhaps. It was as if an open cleavage and stockinged feet had stripped her of her professionalism. The thought annoyed Frank because it was a manifestation of the internalized sexism of which Audrey sometimes accused him and which he denied. But his daughter was right, because there he was, thinking a saleswoman is less credible if she’s made herself more comfortable during her lunch break, a conclusion he would never have reached had it been a salesman receiving him with his jacket off and his tie loosened. Of course, maybe it wasn’t all internalized sexism—maybe in reality there was nothing professional about the way the saleswoman rested against the edge of the desk, stretching her back to accentuate the curves of her spine and breasts. Or the way she looked at him with her thumb between her teeth in a half-opened mouth.
“Have you come to sign the document?” Her tone had lost the polite distance she had maintained the last time. “Or was there some other unfinished business?”
Frank wasn’t the kind of man who was presented with this kind of opportunity, never had been. Not for a lack of confidence, or because he didn’t feel attractive—he knew he was—but because he had never given off the sexual energy needed to prompt women to offer themselves to him. Not before he was married, let alone after. Faithfulness and monogamy were fundamental values of his marriage with Grace, and they both honored them. Even now, when their sex life had stagnated to the point that they felt ashamed when other couples spoke about theirs at a dinner party. That was why Frank had been the first to be surprised at the exchange of looks between him and the saleswoman the other day. Maybe it wasn’t that he was effortlessly honoring the pledges of monogamy and faithfulness but simply that he’d never been presented with such a clear opportunity to break them. Certainly, no woman had offered herself to him in such an obvious way as the saleswoman was now, looking him up and down with her gray eyes, pausing unashamedly at the hands he was using to try to hide what was happening in his pants.
“We both want it,” she said. “And there’s nothing stopping us. I’m single, too, if that’s what’s worrying you.”
Frank removed his hands from his groin to show Mara with his bulge that she wasn’t wrong. While the saleswoman lowered his zipper, Frank thought of Grace, the wife who, at that moment, didn’t exist in his or in Mara’s head. He thought of Audrey, of Simon. Each click of the zipper triggered another image of a happy family life. Click. Simon humming the melody Gizmo sang in Gremlins, which gave him his nickname. Click. Audrey applauding her ferrets when they obeyed her order to roll over on the rug. Click. The smell of cream on Grace’s hands. Click. Him buying popcorn for the four of them at the movie theater. Click. Click. Click. The zipper was open, and all his thoughts vanished in a novel wave of pleasure—the pleasure of unknown lips doing something to him that Grace no longer did. He managed to banish his family from his mind during several of the acts that came after that. Until the saleswoman, her dress at her ankles, positioned herself in front of the window, inviting him to take her from behind. From there, through the venetian blinds and the grating on the outside, Frank saw the motor home he was about to buy. Its kitchen window brought to mind a family breakfast scene which, against his will, gradually took shape with each thrust with which he penetrated the woman in his hands: Grace’s delicious omelets, Simon picking out the blue Froot Loops to eat them first, Audrey staring at her cell phone but laughing with the others when they remembered the jokes in the movie they’d seen the ni—
Frank let out a final grunt to force his family from his mind as he pulled out of the saleswoman to spill himself between her legs.
He didn’t run off, ashamed of himself, as he would have expected he would. While they dressed, Frank was surprised at how calm he felt. He found it very easy to rationalize what had happened as something meaningless. Because it really meant nothing. The scent Grace left on her pillow when she got up first aroused more feelings in him than a stupid five-second orgasm with a saleswoman who, at any rate, didn’t seem quite so attractive now.
“What document do I have to sign?”
He asked it as if he’d just walked into the hut. The saleswoman ran the zipper on the front of her dress up to the top, making the neckline round again. She also put on her shoes before sitting at the desk and taking a folder containing the papers out of a drawer. She checked one of them and put on a surprised face.
“Oh, it seems it was already signed.”
She embellished the announcement with a triumphant smile.
At first Frank was annoyed he’d been tricked, but then it excited him to imagine her hatching her plan to get what she wanted. To get him. He left the hut certain that what had happened wouldn’t be repeated, that he’d just slipped up. The saleswoman had made it too easy for him, and all he had done was satisfy a physical need, one his wife no longer satisfied as she had before. He didn’t blame Grace at all—he knew he no longer satisfied her, either. It was a mutual thing, a deterioration for which they were both responsible. Their bodies were too familiar to each other. For ten years, they had enjoyed a passionate sex life together. If they’d been statues, they would have eroded to nothing from the number of times their bodies had rubbed together, they would’ve been reduced to two heaps of dust on the floor. But they we
re of flesh and bone, and their bodies didn’t wear down. They remained intact, pressed together, year after year, seeing their desire disappear and unable to do anything to prevent it. They didn’t want to attach too much importance to it. They even avoided talking about the subject, so that it wasn’t real—it didn’t seem right that something as trivial as their physical relationship should put other, much more important, connections between them at risk, connections that hadn’t deteriorated over time, not even slightly.
Frank wanted to forget the incident. He denied to himself that it had happened or that it was worth remembering. Until the day came when they had to collect the RV. He showed up at the dealership on another Saturday morning, one when, this time, the sun wasn’t shining. He walked anxiously, squeezing his umbrella handle so hard his thumbnail turned white. He had no desire to see Mara and remember his mistake. Or to talk about what had happened. As he approached the dealership’s central building, he decided to act as if nothing had happened. As if he were just another customer coming to get his vehicle. The door opened before he reached it. Frank squared his shoulders. Someone was coming out, and it must be Mara Miller. Frank puffed out his chest. He had to remain impassive.
“Your motor home’s ready for you.” A salesman with a jacketed uniform held out his hand. “So you can take it somewhere with better weather than here.”
While he accompanied Frank to his vehicle, the salesman apologized on behalf of his colleague. He said she had wanted to hand the keys to him herself, but she was attending to other customers at that moment. First Frank felt relieved, but his relief soon turned into another unexpected feeling, of wounded pride. Were those other customers more important than him? Did she sleep with every buyer who turned up there?
The fact that she didn’t seem to care whether she saw him or not, even though it would be the last chance they would have, was a sharp stab to his ego. He had prayed inwardly that they wouldn’t encounter her, but now that she really wasn’t there, he missed the injection of adrenaline that having her close would have given him. He looked at the hut in the distance, searching for sparks of excitement to light up his gray morning. He thought he saw movement inside, as if someone had let the corner of the blind drop. Mara. Maybe she was spying on him from there, licking her lips while she watched him through the gap she had opened between two slats with her fingers. Perhaps she was—
“—I can help you with?” the salesman was asking.
“What did you say?” answered Frank, who hadn’t heard a thing.
“Is there anything else I can help you with?”
Audrey, Simon, and Grace were outside the house to welcome him. They celebrated his arrival with their arms in the air, as if he’d crossed the finish line to win an Olympic gold. At last the RV was theirs, and it was time to plan their first big trip.
It would be a few months before the children finished school, so they had more than enough time to decide whether they wanted to go north, or south, to the coast, or to the mountains. “Let’s go everywhere,” said Simon, summarizing in a few words the philosophy that Frank had been trying to instill in Grace for the last year.
That night, Frank received a text message on his cell phone: Yes, I was watching you from the hut. It was true I had other customers. You looked great in those pants, although I prefer you without. MM. Frank had to lock himself in the guest bathroom, overcome with the excitement of knowing that a woman desired him this much, something that hadn’t happened since the early years of his relationship with Grace. Rereading the message, he masturbated in the lavatory. Before he’d finished, another one arrived: Do you want my address? MM. When Frank ejaculated, he knew he would answer yes to that question. Because he wanted her address. Because he wanted to enter her again. Because he wanted to continue sampling a new body. Because he was a man. Because as much as he loved his wife, he also desired other women. Other breasts. Other waists. Other ankles. And this was a fact, even if he’d spent years containing it, masturbating every morning in the shower, trying at the start of each day to satisfy the suppressed desire that ate away at him from the inside.
He turned the tap handle to wash the sink, to wash away the sticky discharge that couldn’t be so important. What difference did it make if he spilled it in secret into the sink at his house, or in secret into the shower drain, or in secret onto the floor of a sales hut? What did it matter if he spilled it onto another woman’s sheets, between her breasts? All he had to do was wash it away as he was doing now, and nothing about his feelings for his wife would change. He would be no less certain he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her. To love her until they were old.
In the end it was several—many—times that he spilled himself on Mara Miller’s bed. And in other parts of her apartment. A modern property, high up in one of the towering buildings built when home automation was coming into its own, decked out from top to bottom with voice recognition technology, including the elevator. “I didn’t know you motor-home salespeople earned such good money,” Frank said the first time he went in.
“Only the best ones,” she replied before throwing him against a glass panel to fuck right there, in the living room. They also did it against shiny white walls, against others of bare concrete, in the hot tub on the balcony, or on top of the state-of-the-art appliances integrated into the apartment’s design. With Mara, Frank did everything he no longer did with Grace, frolicking for hours like a youngster, or rather, as if he were her age again, not yet thirty. Mara undressed him as soon as he walked through the door because she really lusted after him, unlike Grace, who always asked him to take a shower first. It excited Mara to do it in the kitchen, and even to add an ingredient or two from the cupboard or refrigerator. She sucked him in places he didn’t know could be sucked, and her finger went in places previously untouched. On the first afternoon they spent together in the apartment, submerged in the hot tub on a glass-enclosed balcony Frank would have loved to have himself, Mara emerged from the bubbling water with a mischievous look on her face.
“Do you want to make some amateur porn?”
She pointed at the camera in a corner of the ceiling.
“Wow, what you said about your security system was true.”
“Good saleswomen never lie. We have a reputation for being the least honest profession in existence, but I know you can go further with the truth than with lies. Always. Though I admit I was economical with the truth when I said I’d installed them because they’re cheap—that was a sales ploy to introduce the word cheap.”
“I knew it.”
“These actually come with the apartment. You’ve seen how modern the building is. We even have hot tubs on the balconies.”
“You don’t say.” He stroked her back under the hot water. “Well, I didn’t believe a word you said. Does anyone really install surveillance systems in a motor home?”
“A lot of people do, and what I offered you at the dealership was a bargain. Now, do you want to keep talking about security or shall we make that movie?”
Holding on to Frank to stop herself from slipping, Mara stood up in the hot tub. She rested a foot on the edge, on the side that wouldn’t obstruct the shot. She offered him what was between her legs and he savored it like a fruit from which he was extracting all the juice. Afterward, with towels around their waists, they watched the recording on a monitor integrated into the wall at the entrance to the apartment. Frank had never seen himself having sex. In a high-angle shot, he saw himself with his face between her legs. In the grayscale image he saw himself stand up, and he was surprised at how big his erection looked from the side. Seeing the muscles in his legs contract excited him, and the expressions of pleasure on his own face excited him even more. Watching the recording beside him, Mara noticed how his towel was lifting. They knelt right there and started again, on the floor, reaching their second orgasm at the same time they reached their first on the screen.
Once the excitement was over, however, the video’s existence didn’t se
em such a good idea to Frank.
“How do you delete it?” he asked, still naked.
He tried to interact with the touchscreen but, each time he tapped it, a red padlock flashed. His fingers began to tremble—he suddenly couldn’t understand how he had allowed himself to be recorded, had provided a stranger with a file that was so dangerous for a married man.
“Relax, I’ll do it.”
“I’m awful with technology,” he said, feigning calm.
“You won’t let me keep the video so I can watch it by myself whenever I want?”
“I’d rather not,” replied Frank, forcing a smile and an excuse. “I wouldn’t want you to get bored of me.”
Mara pressed her thumb against a fingerprint reader to unblock the system. Tapping the screen several times, she accessed the saved files, selected them, and deleted them in front of him.
“They delete automatically at midnight, in any case,” she explained. “So we’ll have to record some more.”
Frank, suddenly overcome with regret again, didn’t bother to think of a witty response to the suggestion. He left there that first afternoon convinced that he wouldn’t reoffend. Just as he did on many future occasions—during the eight months the affair lasted—as he went down in the elevator lit with blue LEDs, repeating to himself that it would be the last time. That he’d satisfied his appetite for a new body. That the fantasies he’d fulfilled with Mara formed a bank of memories he could access during many future masturbations. He would cross the building’s entrance hall to the exit certain that what he had with this girl could barely be described as an affair. He wasn’t the kind of unfaithful husband he’d criticized so many times, because Mara wasn’t his lover. She couldn’t be his lover if he didn’t have feelings for her. If anything, what he felt when he climbed into his car was a strong desire not to see her ever again. Driving home, he would promise himself he would never again give in to the temptation and would go back to being the old Frank, the one who didn’t sleep with another woman in secret. The one who only needed his family to be happy.