The Foreigners

by Maxine Swann

  I had handed him a glass of wine. “Isn’t that awesome?”

  “Yeah, great scene.”

  “That’s what I admire. That guy knew exactly what he wanted.”

  He wiggled his butt a bit more, dancing. “I can’t help it,” he said. “I feel like I have a motor in my butt. Oh, but wait—” He stopped moving. “How’s the hunt going?”

  “Good,” I said. “It seems we’ve got him cornered.”

  “Are you serious? The great man?”

  I nodded. “He’s enthralled with her. You should see the way he acts. Like he puts an apron on and cooks for us.”

  “Really?” Gabriel paused. He seemed to be marveling. “Now, I’d like to see that.”

  fifteen

  I solde woke, heart pounding, thinking of Diego. She had to see him, it couldn’t wait. They’d met a few times since the time they’d kissed on the grassy slope of the Plaza San Martín, meetings that had been both tantalizing and frustrating. There had been people around. They’d only had a moment. Once, in a cab, on the way home from a dinner with a group of people, he’d lifted up her skirt and moved his fingers up her thigh, then licked both her nostrils. Impulsive, she’d put her hand on his crotch, too soon, it was clear. “Whoa,” he’d said, moving away.

  The way to reach Diego was through e-mail. You were much more likely to get a response than if you called. It was nine in the morning, early for Buenos Aires. Isolde bypassed her regular café and went directly to the locutorio on the corner. She’d written him yesterday, frustrated. It would be different if there were something blocking them being together, like he was married or even just with someone, but that was not the case. She checked her e-mail. He hadn’t answered.

  The locutorio was gradually filling up. There was a boy crouched over a computer, watching YouTube. There was a woman in a phone booth, not even talking, just fixing her makeup in the mirror there. A student with a washed-out look on her face was writing a paper. A man sitting in front of a computer was talking nonstop on his cell phone. This seemed to be his office. He had papers taped up all around his cubicle. A row of four kids, nine or ten years old, were sitting side by side playing video games. A woman entered, looking rushed. She glanced over her shoulder. Isolde watched her. Wasn’t it clear to everyone that she was having an affair? She went into a phone booth and made a quick call, all the while glancing furtively around.

  Isolde read her e-mails. Friends from Austria were getting married, having babies, changing jobs. She would still receive invitations to their events, and even to the events of people from college she hadn’t seen in years. One guy, who had briefly been a boyfriend of hers, had visited Buenos Aires five months ago. “But what are you doing here?” he’d asked. “You’re not doing anything !” he’d concluded with some derision. Now she thought of them all thinking of her like that, in Buenos Aires doing nothing. Their lives were going on and what about her? But she wasn’t necessarily jealous of her friends. Except maybe for one, who had married a British lawyer and moved to Sussex, they were all living normal lives, in Austrian cities and towns. In Uruguay last year, when she’d first arrived, she’d had a glimpse of something else for herself, something different, glowing. It was that glimpse that she was holding on to.

  Or was she? What did Diego have to do with that glimpse? Unlike Alfonso, he wasn’t rich or upper class, though he had friends in those circles. He’d grown up outside the city of Buenos Aires. He was smart and liked to play the maverick, the outsider, hiding that he was actually quite conventional at heart. He certainly didn’t want to marry—he had a whole long anti-marriage discourse—though surely, eventually, he would marry, still reluctantly, a much younger wife, and have a few children. But that was a long way off, ten years or so. By then, Isolde would be too old to have children. No, this choice of hers was not coherent with any of her plans. Only it didn’t feel like a choice, but a compulsion. Isolde felt that she would do anything for those moments when Diego looked at her with warmth, like that day on the grassy slope, kissed her as he had. These days, when she woke in the morning, facing another day when he wouldn’t write or call, the loneliness stretched out. She felt that she loved him. Without a doubt, he had disrupted her system. Granted that the stability of Isolde’s system was probably a bit wobblier than most.

  An old man came into the locutorio with some papers in his hand that needed to be typed out. He asked for help using the computer. A young woman was screaming on the phone, really screaming at her father. This was clear because she kept saying, “Papa!” She came out of the cubicle, her face streaming with tears. The guy at the cash register watched her, curious, deadpan. It began raining outside, that kind of Buenos Aires rain that made the whole sky turn dark. You’d think it was nighttime when it was only noon. Isolde looked up. Had the day passed already? It wouldn’t be the first time that she’d spent six hours here. But no, it was only noon.

  She checked the cultural pages of the Argentine newspapers online, browsed some opera websites. What if he never wrote her again, disappeared entirely? She pictured a blank world, desolate, without him.

  In that moment, Diego replied. “Sure, we can meet,” he said, as if it were entirely casual, something that happened every day. He proposed another downtown bar, again near the Plaza San Martín. Yes, Isolde thought, then we can go back and lie on the grass. That patch of grass had become enchanted ground in her mind.

  She hurriedly left the locutorio and went home, so as to figure out what to wear. Until she had decided, it would be impossible to go on with the rest of her day.

  “I like that idea, it’s a Kafka idea, that there’s been a misunderstanding and that misunderstanding is going to ruin your life,” Diego said. They were sitting in the window of the bar, facing the street.

  Isolde was wearing a peach-colored blouse, which the waitress had admired. There were certain days like this when people were always admiring and commenting on her clothes, as a way to articulate what was in fact a larger impression, of sunniness, freshness.

  Now she furrowed her brow. “What do you mean, there’s been a misunderstanding?”

  Diego shook his head. “Just that, there’s been a misunderstanding. There’s always a misunderstanding.”

  But then he was kissing her again, those deep tongue kisses that someone else might have found disgusting, but she loved.

  “Can we go somewhere?” He lived with his parents and she wasn’t allowed to have people at her apartment. Though she had decided that, if it was the only option, today she would break the rule.

  He laughed at her eagerness. “Okay, okay. Take it easy. Finish your drink.”

  Diego’s hair had grown longer. On the one hand, he looked shaggier than ever. On the other, he had a white leather bag, utterly unnecessary fingerless gloves, all these dandyish accoutrements. He’d stopped smoking all the time like before because it was making him sick and now just had the coveted few. Once outside, he lit a cigarette.

  He led her down the street just a few blocks away to a hotel transitorio, or telo. Isolde had heard about these places—they were everywhere throughout the city—where you could go to have sex, paying by the hour. The place was called The Three Princes. They stepped inside. There was a dark red patterned carpet on the floor and a person in a booth walled in by glass. Facing the booth was a screen with different room numbers on it. You could press a number and an image would appear of the corresponding room. Diego pressed a few of the numbers and the images appeared: the Empire State Building, the Taj Mahal.

  “Which one do you like?” he asked.

  She chose the jungle room. They turned to the glass booth. Diego paid and ordered three beers.

  “Three?” she asked.

  “Yeah, just in case,” he said. He seemed nervous.

  They took the elevator upstairs without touching, then walked down the hall to room number 48. Just inside the door was a plant with dark red and green leaves on a little table, lit by a lamp overhead. The walls were covered with
painted leaves and animals. The bedspread had tiger stripes, the chairs spots. Animal print was a very common wardrobe choice among Argentine women, Isolde had noticed, especially among a certain kind of celebrity crowd. Isolde used to wear it too sometimes before arriving, but since had stopped, not wanting to give off a cheapish air. There was a jungle swing and a large TV playing porn, where a guy with an enormous dick was getting a blow job.

  “I don’t like that,” Diego said, and turned it off.

  Isolde felt confused by what he wanted. Last time, when they were kissing she worried she’d been too proactive, excited. Maybe she should hold off, let him make the moves.

  He waved his hand in her direction. “Take off your clothes,” he said.

  He took off his clothes as well. She liked the way the hair was dispersed on his body, a nice amount everywhere, except for his lower legs, which were nearly hairless.

  Then, all at once, he was down on his knees on the floor, licking her with his very large tongue. She was at the edge of the bed. “It’s like a flower,” he murmured and went on licking. The men she’d been with recently had hardly even touched her, a few jerks with two fingers, and here he was licking. He seemed to like doing this very much. First lifting her head to watch, she then dropped it and let him.

  At one point, he pulled her feet over her head, as if she were a child, a baby, and licked her asshole. She was startled. No one had ever done this to her before. Although the rest of the encounter was nice as well—he was tentative at first, only gradually letting her touch him—this became the part she went over and over in her head. For a long time after that, at random moments throughout the day, she would feel the touch of his tongue there. It was like an imprint, something primitive. He had touched deep inside her. She would do anything to be touched like that by him again.

  When they came back downstairs, there was a sea of people waiting, a long line leading up to the glass booth, which spread out through the lobby, couples of all ages, some holding hands, some standing separate, more like strangers, their faces all registering divergent motives, the bleary-eyed, the frightened, the pros—for the young couple holding hands, it would be their first time. The vision veered between that of a group of individuals, each with a heart throbbing, a particular way of doing his or her hair, to a collection of types—there was something didactic in the bright light—representing the various ages, walks, intentions of humanity. The line spilled out onto the sidewalk, trailing down it to one side.

  Isolde and Diego walked up the street. Except for a few places here and there, a bar, a restaurant, probably a brothel, the downtown streets were deserted. They came upon a kiosk, lit up, and bought bottled water, then arrived at the Plaza San Martín. The trees were towering, the figures below looking minuscule.

  They crossed the street and entered the park. He held out his arm and she took it.

  “Hey, look at this. This is my favorite statue.” It was called Doubt, a present from the French, and featured two figures. One, a young man, was sitting on the ground with a worried expression. An older, toothless man was leaning in, whispering in the young man’s ear and smiling. Diego snickered. “Just look at the slimy, older guy,” he said.

  Behind them in the park, people shuffled on the benches, either homeless people sleeping or couples making out, it was too dark to see. They passed a monumental statue, military figures with their chests flung out.

  “It’s like I feel like Alexander the Great,” he said. “But I don’t see the Empire.”

  Isolde laughed. “Maybe you have to build the Empire.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m too lazy for that.”

  They headed down the hill, on one side ghostly downtown buildings, on the other, the dark, cool grass of the park.

  “According to quantum physics,” Diego said, “you can’t locate an object in space. All you can do is point at a cloud of probable places where it could be. An electron is not in a certain spot, but a little bit smeared everywhere.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Okay, take this example. You’re walking down a crowded street, like Florida, you know it, the pedestrian street right back there, people turn, dodge, shift position, so they won’t hit you. They accommodate themselves so as not to run into one another. In every next moment, a person will be somewhere different, on a different part of the street, walking, or stepping into a car. This is similar to the way the Greeks talked about potentiality. The next few steps could take you to different places. Or, if you’re running, the whole time you’re running, you’re realizing possibilities. We ourselves are like projections into the future, not certainties, but waves of probabilities. Beings in a potential state, a little bit everywhere. At any moment, we could do this or that.”

  sixteen

  Unlike animals, plants are immobile and can’t seek out sexual partners for reproduction, so they must devise other ways. In his book The Intelligence of Flowers, Maeterlinck writes beautifully about the plight of plants, condemned by their roots to stay fixed in one place. Consequently, among all living beings, flowers or the reproductive structures of plants are the most varied physically and possess the greatest diversity of reproductive strategies. Over eighty-five percent of flowering plants are hermaphroditic. Some have both male and female flowers, while others, like the Echinopsis spachiana, have bisexual flowers, otherwise known as perfect or complete flowers, possessing both male and female sexual organs, the pollen-producing stamen, or male part, and the seed-producing carpels, or female part. Many of these plants are self-fertile, the male parts pollinating the female parts of the same flower. Others have self-incompatibility clauses that make this impossible and promote outcrossing. Some plants undergo what is called sex-switching, expressing sexual difference at different stages of growth. In the case of the Arisaema triphyllum, the plant expresses a multitude of sexual conditions in the course of its lifetime, from nonsexual juvenile plants to young all-male plants, to plants with a mix of male and female flowers to large plants with mostly female flowers.

  Miguel was gone, traveling. He had lent Leonarda his house. She invited me over.

  I entered the lobby, passing by the doorman, the sleek wood floors, the interior pillars, a quiet view of the back garden. I rang the bell. I heard something and felt that she’d been waiting for me behind the door.

  She opened the door. She was dressed in men’s pants and a button-down shirt. She had a mustache on. Then she was hiding behind the door.

  “Wait, wait, let me see,” I said. She had turned her face to the wall. When I stepped nearer, she ran, still hiding her face. She went into the bathroom and closed the door.

  “I’m taking it off,” she said.

  “No, no, don’t take it off. I want to see you.”

  I waited in the hall. I barely breathed. I thought I could hear her breathing too, on the other side of the bathroom door.

  “Please, Leo,” I said, “I want to see you.”

  But I didn’t want to insist too much. She was quiet. A few minutes passed. Then I heard her opening the bathroom door. She came out again with the mustache still on. She looked different. In her proud mode, boyish, standing straight. In those minutes in the bathroom, she had allowed the transformation to occur. Knowing her, I was afraid that something else would happen. She would change again. I didn’t want to move, to do anything that would make her change again. She stepped near and pressed me against the wall. She kissed me. I could feel her breasts, full and round. But I could also feel as she pressed against me that she had a dick in her pants.

  She led me through the living room past the leather furniture and the operating lamp to the bed. She took off my clothes and had me lie down. I had imagined this moment many times and finally it was occurring. She licked me, delicately at first, like a cat. Then she pulled the mustache off and began to really lick, applying pressure with her teeth and tongue.

  I was so thrilled I couldn’t think.

  “See,” she said afterward, lifting her head, �
�I don’t need a dick.” Her face was flushed with triumph. “What can I bring you?”

  She brought me some juice, then went into the bathroom and changed her clothes, putting on makeup and perfume, coming out in a little pink T-shirt dress that reached mid-thigh. I was sitting up on the edge of the bed. She was girly, flirty. “Now I’m going to cook,” she said.

  These visits made me dizzy. The thrill was that she combined everything, girl, boy, youth. The one thing she was not was mature.

  The next visit, I asked if I could lick her this time.

  “Okay,” she said. She seemed nervous. She went to wash first, then came out and sat under the lamp. She had shaved. I could see the line of shaved hair going down from her belly button, on her pussy that glistening veil of snail trail substance. She tasted bitter, not in an unpleasant way. Her breasts were heavy, strong and nervous, pressing against her T-shirt.

  I would go back to my house to sleep and wake in the night, feeling disoriented. Not so much about where I was, which city, though that would happen too, than a deeper confusion inside my brain. It was as if my conception of the human adventure had changed. The things I had held to be important, at the center of my life, suddenly seemed insignificant, bits of stray matter swirling around. I felt that I needed to find new ideas, new ways of conceiving of a life, any life, including my own. I would find these ideas not within myself, but outside. And I would have to look beyond the systems I was used to, to seek out, insist on, disruption.

  Leonarda showed me what she’d been doing, acts of private vandalism throughout his house. She had mixed the colognes in the bathroom, opened a bottle of what she assured me was very good wine and half filled it with a bottle that was mediocre. She had been shifting paintings, objects, furniture slightly to the left, placing everything, however slightly, awry.