One More Day

by Fabio Volo

  I’ve always been this way. When I talk on the phone and I hear I’ve received a message, I’m not interested in the conversation anymore, because I’m dying to find out who sent it. I’m distracted from the task at hand. This has always been my approach to women. I’ve always believed that if I was with one I would have missed out on all the others. I’ve been like this with everything else, too. When it comes to sports, for instance, I’ve practiced karate, ping-pong, soccer, and basketball. I’ve never focused on just one thing. I’ve been digging a thousand holes, and maybe this is why I’ve never found anything.

  Michela had taught me something important.

  But I didn’t know it yet.

  13

  First Shower (and First Night) Together

  That night we went to dinner together again. Luckily, it was a restaurant this time. Before leaving the hotel I also managed to go to the bathroom: score! We ate at the Macelleria restaurant, in the Meatpacking District. I remember that at the table next to ours, there was a couple and he had a tattoo on his neck: red lips, like those you get after a kiss with lipstick. I’ve never had the courage to get a tattoo. It’s related to my fear of “forever.” Maybe one day I’ll do it. But not on my neck.

  “Do you have any tattoos?”

  “No, but I’d like to get one.”

  “Where?”

  “Maybe on my ankle.”

  “What would you choose?”

  “Well, I’ve been thinking about it for a while, but I’ve yet to find something I really like. How about you, do you have one?”

  “No… But sooner or later I’ll get one.”

  After dinner, we walked around and sat on a bench in Father Demo Square, because two Japanese musicians were playing there. He on guitar and she on bass. They were playing famous songs from western movies. As we watched them, I found myself wishing they were a couple. I don’t know why but I liked the idea of them living together, traveling the world, and playing everywhere.

  “Do you think they only play together or are they actually a couple?” I asked Michela.

  “I think they’re a couple.”

  “Me too.”

  Then we crossed 6th Avenue and stumbled onto a small street, Minetta Street. There, as we were chatting, we kissed for the first time. I remember brushing her hair aside and holding her face in my hands. A beautiful kiss. Long, soft, slow. Real. As soon as our lips touched, I felt a spark. I was happy like when, after looking for a missing piece to a puzzle, you find it and you can finally complete the sky. It could be that I’m a kisser; that’s why I’m always moved when it happens. I really like kissing. I am the same fifteen-year-old boy I used to be. I never stopped kissing, not even as an adult. I like kissing before making love, but also during and after it. I’m one of those men who like kissing after making love also. Actually, I like doing it even if it doesn’t lead to sex. I like to sit down comfortably on the couch and to keep doing it till my jaw hurts and my lips burn. I consume women’s lips. Preferably without lipstick or sticky gloss. I like them raw. I also like stolen kisses. Like when you pass by her to get something from the fridge and you stop for a kiss. You push her against the wall and you clobber her with a kiss. Sudden kisses, unexpected ones. Sometimes I happen to interrupt her while she’s talking just because I can’t wait. I look at the lips of the woman I like and I can’t even hear what she’s saying anymore. I only want to feel those lips on mine and so I take them.

  That night I slept at her place and, even before making love, we took a shower together. The body of the girl from the tram, which I had imagined for months, appeared in front of me all at once. I didn’t take her clothes off piece by piece, as it happens most of the time. Only after, I began to look at her and recognize her details. She told me “I’m taking a shower,” and I couldn’t help saying “can I join you?” It came out just like that. Like a child who doesn’t think about the right thing to say, but rather states his desires without censoring them. On top of that, it’s not like I have a great body that helps me seduce women. On the contrary. In fact, I immediately began to list all my defects because I thought that, by doing it myself, I would have prevented her from doing so. She didn’t seem too interested, she looked at me tenderly and she even laughed at my jokes. My body is full of defects. Some of them are inexplicable, like, for instance, the fact that although I’m not a hairy man, on my back, just below my shoulder blades, I have two tufts of hair. Two hairy islands. They’re not thick but they’re there. I wonder what purpose they serve. I didn’t list that defect that evening because I could hide it since it was behind me.

  When I asked her, she answered immediately without even thinking about it, “Sure. I’ll get you a clean towel.”

  After a few minutes she started undressing in the bathroom, I could see her through the thin line that separated the door from the frame. I was curious to see the shape of her body. I was about to open the door and she was going to be there, waiting for me, and I was allowed to touch her. I could caress her, continue to desire her, and have her. When I got into the shower she was already under the hot water. It was nice to see her hair stick to her head as it got wet. I immediately understood that what she called “hot enough,” for me was “scalding hot.” I tried to hide the fact that I was ashamed of bringing an erection into the shower. We kissed. Her skin was soft. I washed her. I took some soap from one of the bottles sitting on the shower floor and I soaped her up. Her shoulders, her neck, her breasts, her stomach. Her back. I tried to not go there immediately, even though that’s exactly where I wanted to touch her. Then I knelt down and washed her feet, as if she were a goddess and to me she really was. Then her legs, and finally there. All while kneeling. I couldn’t believe I was able to touch and kiss her like that. I kissed her from that position. I can say I drank her. I also drank the water that trickled down her body.

  I didn’t enter her. We didn’t make love. After I finished washing her, she washed me.

  When we got out I took the towel, I knelt down again and started drying her so she wouldn’t get cold. I started with her feet. I would dry her and immediately place my lips on her skin and kiss her. I liked kissing her feet. And I worked my way up from there. Her legs, her knees. I dried, touched, and kissed everything. She smelled good. I reached her breasts, her neck, her shoulders. I carefully kissed her ears. Then I quickly dried myself off and immediately returned to her. Her hair. I brushed it and then I kissed her there, too, on her head.

  We went to bed: a high, white, soft bed. It looked like a cloud. I put lotion on her. I didn’t massage her. I put her lotion on. I thought that giving her a massage would have been a little cliché. While she was lying on her stomach, I ran my hand along her legs and I crossed the border. She was turned on. Me, too. I wanted to drive us both crazy. I wanted to make love to her as she had never done before. I wanted her to forget all the other times. I wanted it to be her first time. At least in that respect, the fact that I had had many women helped me. From an emotional point of view, I am tied up, locked, contracted, but when I make love I feel in charge of the situation. I wanted to tell her what my mechanic always tells me when I drop off my car, “Don’t worry, trust me, you’re in good hands.” But it didn’t seem like the best thing to say. Michela had told me she had had very few men, while they were in a relationship and in love. Almost always, those are the ones who fuck the worst.

  I began to touch her. After hearing her panting for a little bit, gently, I asked her to turn on her back and keep her eyes closed. I started to kiss her, jumping from one corner of her body to the next. I wanted her to find out where my lips were only at the last moment, when they touched her. I wanted to make her feel my breath. I kept doing it for a long time. It was important to meet her flavor before making love to her. To steal it with the tip of my tongue as if it were the nectar from a flower. To steal it with my fingers in order to take it to her lips, her mouth. I kept on doing it for a long time. When I entered her, she had been waiting for so long, that, in
a few moments, she climaxed. I remembered it happened on the notes of Pink Floyd’s The Division Bell. To touch her skin, to look her in the eyes, to smell her, to push my body against hers, to squeeze her breasts against my chest. To see her, and to feel her climax on the notes of Cluster One or Marooned or Coming Back to Life was a sublime experience.

  I don’t know if I managed to make her forget the other men. I hope so. After making love, we stayed in bed with our heads on the same pillow, looking at each other in silence. Then we went to the kitchen to brew some herbal tea. She was wrapped in white sheet, like a madonna. I had put my boxers back on. The room was dark, illuminated only by the dim light of the stove, the one above the burners. Michela, her white sheet, her post-orgasmic-chill hair, the two white cups, and her, who looked like she was fishing abstract thoughts with the string of her tea bag: I’m not sure why, but that image really struck me. It often comes back to my mind. Maybe it was the perfect union between my fantasies and reality. Like the horizon line where two worlds meet, heaven and earth. She drank her tea perched on a chair, her arms around her knees. Small and sexy. At that moment I remember I thought exactly that. Michela was exceedingly sexy. To die for. The way she thought was sexy. The way she talked, laughed, walked. The smell of her skin gave my heart an erection. As we made love I thought that I only wanted to do that for the rest of my life. To be on top of her as long as possible.

  Then we went to bed and, holding each other’s hands by the pinky, we fell asleep. At six thirty I was already awake. A little light filtered through the window. The bed was high. Michela’s bed has four pillows, and I noticed that she sleeps on one side, in fetal position, with one pillow between her legs. There are many strange ways of sleeping. I, for example, often sleep with one leg under the blanket and the other outside it. I ride them.

  I got off the bed slowly, so as not to wake her. The whole house creaked as I walked. The wood floor gave voice to my steps. I went to the bathroom to pee. I always wondered whether when you go to the bathroom and your woman is sleeping if it’s better to flush and risk waking her or rather leaving everything the way it is. I flushed; she didn’t wake up. I went to the kitchen and I tried to make breakfast, but I didn’t know what she usually ate. I didn’t know her that well yet. I made some coffee, some tea, I took the orange juice out of the fridge, I toasted some bread, and I put it on the table with all the jams I could find. Then I turned on the stereo in the kitchen and put on a CD. There were about ten of them and didn’t know which one to choose. In the end, considering my preferences, I was left with Norah Jones’s album Come Away with Me or Morcheeba’s Big Calm. I chose the first. I lowered the volume and I woke Michela up, asking her what she wanted.

  “Coffee.”

  I brought coffee to her in bed. I took a shower. I put my pants on, and she came to the table. She ate a little toast with jam.

  “Thanks for breakfast,” she said in a crumbled voice.

  I sat on the couch to finish my coffee. She had put on the first thing she had found: my shirt. It was definitely too big; it went down to her knees. To see her leg coming out from underneath it was a very exciting image. We looked at each other for a moment as she was raising her cup to her lips, hiding her face and leaving only her eyes visible. A clear, direct, and deep look. The she crossed her legs and I lost control. I got up, I sat on her lap, I took her face in my hands, and I kissed her. I pushed my tongue in her mouth as far as it would go. I dragged her to the floor. I unbuttoned her shirt and her light skin hypnotized me. I took one of her breasts in my hand, while I held her neck with the other to protect her from the floor. I lingered a while on her shoulders and neck. Everything was soft and smelled like morning. I entered her. Her kisses, her tongue, tasted like coffee. With one hand she grabbed the leg of the table and squeezed it hard. That image has impressed itself indelibly on my mind. When we came we were in bed. That was a proper good morning. We even told each other, laughing, at the end, as we were doing nose-nose-eyelashes-eyelashes, “Good morning.”

  Then I walked her to work.

  14

  The Game

  That morning I had her smell on me; I liked it. I didn’t take a shower on purpose. With her smell on me, I had the impression that men were nicer to me that day.

  After walking her to work, I wandered around a bit and I ended up at Lotus Lounge Café, at the corner of Clinton and Stanton Street. Red floor, wooden tables and chairs, all in different shapes and colors, and at the back of the room, a bookcase. This place was also full of people who were writing, reading, thinking, and looking out the windows, sitting by themselves. I don’t remember ever seeing someone alone at a café in my hometown. Here it’s normal. Back home you go to a café for a quick espresso, or you go there with a group of people. Here, on their computers, they work for hours and when their battery runs out, they plug them in without asking. I drank my coffee; I looked outside. The sky was dark; there was no sun that morning. The passing of people mesmerized me. Almost everyone had a coffee in a paper cup, the people on bikes were carrying messenger bags, yellow cabs, cars with engines so powerful they sounded like ships. I felt as if I was at the movies. I was in a movie. I sent Silvia a message, “I made love. This time it was really her.” A few minutes later she called me. We chatted for a long time. A male friend would have immediately asked me about her body and about the way she fucked. Silvia, however, was more interested in the way I felt, what we talked about, if I liked her as much as before or if anything had changed. After I told her everything, I understood from the sound of her voice and what she was saying that she was happy for me. When that happens I can feel it. I remember that before hanging up she told me, “I’d like to be there to see the expression on your face.”

  Suddenly, a very beautiful girl entered the room. Light skin, dark hair, red lips. She spoke with a French accent. She was holding a black puppy. It was tiny. One of those images that move even an uncouth person like me. She put it down to pick up and pay for her coffee. After a moment the dog peed on the floor. The girl apologized and used a few napkins to clean it up but the guy behind the counter kindly told her not to worry and that he would take care of it. I thought about one time, when I was little and my father had already moved out, my grandmother took me to one of her friends’ telling me there was a surprise for me. When we got there my grandmother’s friend showed me to his backyard where there was a box with four puppies in it.

  My grandma told me, “Pick one.” I didn’t know what to do; I wanted to keep all four of them. Deciding which one to take was practically impossible, so much so that at a certain point grandma told me, “Come on, Giacomo, pick one, we can’t take all of them home.”

  I wanted to tell her, “Are you sure? They’re small, they can all fit in my room.”

  In the end, one of them tried to get out of the box, jumping and falling on its back. I picked that one. I didn’t pick my dog, rather it picked me. It was a male, and I named him Cochi. However, my mother didn’t want him in the house because he made a mess and scratched the floor. So, even though it was my dog, he stayed at my grandma’s. Plus, I was there most of the time anyway, so it didn’t make much of a difference.

  I remember that one day, shortly after we took him in, Cochi peed in the kitchen. When grandma realized it she picked up the dog, grabbing him by the head, and as if he were a towel she wiped the pee with him. She wiped the pee with the dog’s head. I started to cry. I had never seen grandma do something so cruel, it was unlike her. Then she explained that it was a way of teaching him not to do it. I stopped crying, I picked up the dog and I spoke to him, telling him not to do it anymore. He didn’t have any more accidents after that, at least when I was around. I can’t tell if he did when I wasn’t there. Now I wanted to tell the beautiful girl to wipe the pee with her dog’s face instead of the napkins. I wonder how she would have reacted to my suggestion. I didn’t say anything and left.

  It started to rain. It was raining hard. In America, when it rains hard, they sa
y: it’s raining cats and dogs… Go figure!

  As I was seeking shelter from the rain, I ended up under the awning of a movie theater. It was the Sunshine Cinema, on East Houston Street. It was ten thirty in the morning and I saw that the first show was scheduled for eleven. Movies in the morning: what a dream. I bought a ticket and went in. I could smell popcorn, but that early in the morning it made my stomach turn. At that point I was the only one in the theater. When the movie started there were five of us.

  My English teacher used to tell me that one of the fastest ways to learn a language is to go to the movies or to the theater even though you don’t understand a word. It must be a popular theory since everyone in the room looked foreign.

  To the list of things I like about life I will add: going to the movies in the morning.

  When I came out of the movies there was a message from Michela, “I’ll take a break around two. If you want, we can have lunch together. I’d like to make you a proposal.”

  I stopped by the hotel and then I went to meet her. Just outside the hotel I bumped into Alfred, who, for the usual dollar, told me another joke, the first one I got, “A man goes to his doctor and says: ‘Excuse me, doctor, I have a problem. I have a hard-on twenty-four hours a day. What can you give me?’ The doctor smiles and then she answers: ‘I’ll give you room, board, and a thousand dollars a month…’”

  Michela took me to eat at a shop where they sold yarn and all the necessary tools to knit. You can eat there since there’s a bar, but it’s mainly a shop where people sit at the tables and knit. They eat, drink, chat, and in the meanwhile they make sweaters, scarves, or something else. There are also a bunch of men who knit away like old ladies. It’s called the Point and it’s on Bedford Street.