Housebroken (15 page)

He thought that he was going to cry. He wanted to cry out of relief, because he believed her, and he wanted to cry because he was afraid that she was lying, but mainly he wanted to cry because he had never felt so lonely as during the past week. He fastened his seat belt and then fastened hers and said nothing. He put his hand back in hers, which had remained waiting in her lap. He waited for her to ask if he loved her too, but the woman looked out of the window. He waited for her to ask at least why he hadn't responded to her sudden declaration of love, but the woman pulled him toward her and said: “Look! Land!” And like a little girl she was filled with excitement in anticipation of the landing.

They arrived home in the middle of a scorching day and found the shutters closed and the dog sleeping in the hallway on his rug. He heard their footsteps on the landing and their voices and the key turning in the lock, but he remained slumped on his side, one ear cocked and listening. They came up to him, surprised and concerned, and bent down to stroke him. He raised his head and looked at them, and then lowered it to the rug again and stared at the wall.

The house was tidy, and there was a smell of cleaning products in the air. On the kitchen table there was a bunch of flowers in a glass jar. The dog's bowl was full. On the table was a note addressed to them both. “Welcome home,” it said, with a row of exclamation marks. “I hope you had fun. Everything here was more or less as usual, except for one little accident: I ruined a white T-shirt of yours. I'll buy you a new one. I bought some food and cleaned up a bit. We'll talk later. Hope you had a good flight. We missed you.”

There were eighteen messages on the answering machine. Seven for the man, five for the woman, and six for both of them. They sat in the living room, their suitcases still in the hall, and listened to the messages. Then the woman went to shower and the man made iced coffee. They drank it in silence, smoking, parting from their vacation. In the afternoon they wandered around the dim apartment, careful not to bump into each other or to step on the dog, who remained motionless on his rug. When evening fell the woman opened the shutters and the windows and went into the bedroom to unpack. The man whistled to the dog.

They went to the beach, because the man thought there would be a breeze there, and sat on the sand looking at the last bathers coming out of the water, drying themselves with their towels. Most people on the beach were elderly, a few families with children, and a few youngsters hanging around doing nothing. There were a few dogs too, rushing around and barking and dashing into the sea and running back to the shore, shaking off the water.

You couldn't really call what had happened in Paris a crisis, thought the man. A crisis was something that was easier to deal with, defined, known, but what had happened in Paris was worse than a crisis: for the first time in his life, thought the man, he was afraid of being alone. He remembered sitting naked on the bed and waiting for the woman in that depressing hotel. He remembered the rain pouring down outside, the dirty brown color of the curtains, and someone shouting something down below, in the street, in the foreign language he had come to hate.

He had paced restlessly up and down the room, from the window to the bed and back to the window again, parting the curtains and looking down to see if the woman was coming. In his boredom he began to pick things up from the floor—her stockings, her bra, panties, hairpins he found scattered all over, not knowing if they were hers or if they belonged to some other woman who had been in the room before them. The hairpins annoyed him. He picked them all up, crawling over the carpet and examining it thoroughly, which kept him occupied for fifteen minutes, and then he put the handful of pins on the little table next to the woman's side of the bed.

He wasn't hungry, but he wanted his breakfast. He lay in bed and smoked and waited for her. He suddenly heard the sound of a woman laughing and the tapping of heels running up the stairs, and he stiffened and pulled up the blanket, ready to scold her as soon as she burst into the room, but it wasn't her. He heard a man's voice climbing up the stairs after the woman and continuing up the next flight to the floor above. It was another woman. With another man. Not his woman, who had disappeared without even leaving a note.

It never occurred to him that something might have happened to her. It was clear that her disappearance was deliberate, aimed against him, and even though it was only eleven o'clock it seemed to him that he hadn't seen the woman for hours, even days, that she had vanished long ago.

This was the first time in his life that he was afraid of being alone. This was the first time in his life that he took off his watch and held it in front of his eyes and watched the minutes passing. It was humiliating, but it distracted him from his thoughts and kept him busy for an hour, and when he suddenly heard her running up the stairs, and this time it was definitely his woman, he quickly put the watch down on his bedside table, and leaned back against the pillows.

A strange woman entered the room. It wasn't the hair that made her so strange—now, on the hot beach with the quiet dog at his side, he had to admit that the new haircut suited her—it was a jigsaw puzzle of female parts, all of which he knew, but whose composition made up a different picture, not the familiar picture that was born in their kitchen, but the picture of a beautiful woman in a foreign magazine.

“Where were you?” he asked, and now too, on the beach, he heard his hoarse voice in that room in France.

“Where were you?” he asked again, and his eye, which had become addicted to the watch hands moving, glanced at it quickly on the bedside table, as if another whole hour had passed between her entering the room and him repeating his question for the third time in the same two minutes: “Where the hell were you?”

She turned and smiled, jumped on the bed, and shook her head, splashing him with drops of water: “I had my hair cut.”

“Yes,” he said. “I see. But where were you?”

“At the barber's,” she said and ran to the mirror. “Do you like it?”

“All morning?” he asked. “You were at the barber's all morning?”

“No,” she said. “I wandered around a bit. I bought things. I had my hair cut right near here. I found a place. It looks pretty, don't you think?”

“No,” said the man. “I don't like it. It doesn't suit you.”

“It doesn't?” she asked.

“No. Definitely not.”

He sat leaning back in bed and lit another cigarette, slowly put his watch back on his wrist, and waited for the tears. She stood in front of the mirror with her back to him, quickly rearranged a few strands of hair, turned to him, and smiled again, but he shook his head and muttered: “No, it doesn't suit you.”

He looked at his watch—he couldn't stop doing it now—and waited for the woman to burst into tears. “But it'll grow back,” he said, “so it's not so terrible. It'll grow quickly.”

She jumped onto the bed again and, kneeling, shook her head at him and said: “It won't grow, because I want to keep it like this. I'm going to have it cut again in two weeks, when it begins to grow. It won't be a problem to find someone to do it, it's a simple haircut.” And then, as if remembering something, she hurried back to the mirror and said: “That's the only problem with this hairstyle, that you have to have it cut every two weeks.” Then she asked him what he wanted to do that day, and he said he was hungry and asked her what she'd brought to eat. She spread a big towel on the bed and laid their breakfast on it.

29

The summer was almost over and the man had not yet told the woman that he loved her too. At first he didn't say it because he was waiting for her to say it again, so that his “I love you” would be moderated, a response rather than a declaration. He continued to keep quiet because he was afraid she had lied to him in the plane, since after they came home she did nothing to prove her love. On the contrary, it seemed that she was a little cold, and in the end he stopped believing that he really loved her.

During the entire week of their vacation he had felt tired and irritable; he didn't know the language; he was completely dependent on her. For the first three days the woman was sure that the foreign city, the sights, the food, even the interminable rain, were the reasons for her happiness. On the fourth day she had woken up very early and looked at the man sleeping. He lay on his side, his knees raised to his stomach, one hand flung out to the side of the bed, the other clenched into a fist close to his mouth. Even in his sleep he looked worried. She looked at him until he suddenly turned over and his forehead touched her knee. He frowned, as if in thought, his eyelids fluttered over his darting, dreaming eyes, and his thumb touched his lips. She looked at him and thought: When he's sleeping he expresses more feeling than when he's awake.

She got dressed quietly and made up her face and took the big umbrella and left the room and descended the old wooden stairs and planned their day: she would come back with their breakfast and wake the man, they would eat together, chat a little, maybe they would make love, and afterward she would ask him to come on a walking tour of the city. He would refuse, he would say that he didn't feel like it, she would protest, but not too much, and then she'd leave him in the hotel. She reminded herself to buy him a newspaper in English, maybe a film magazine, so that he wouldn't be bored in her absence. In the evening they would meet again and go out to a restaurant. So she would be able to be with the man and also without him. She felt a surge of joy as she stepped out into the street and began to run in the direction of the delicatessen. He wasn't going to spoil it for her, she said to herself as she stood in front of the counter and pointed to the things she wanted, two of each. He couldn't spoil things for her, she thought, and suddenly it occurred to her that his unhappiness was the reason for her happiness now.

She remained standing in the entrance to the shop, thinking, deliberating whether to run back to the hotel, shake the sleeping man awake, hug him, and feed him, or whether to wander around the streets a little longer. If her happiness now depended on his unhappiness, returning to the room would make her unhappy. It seemed strange that it had to be this way—either her or him—and she wondered if it was the same with other couples, if all the men and women had to take turns being happy and unhappy. How did they keep it up for so many years? Perhaps the more time passed, the easier it became, because each of them knew when it was their turn, and perhaps they even learned to be happy when it was the other person's turn. It's either swings or seesaws; she suddenly remembered one of the first things she had said to him on their blind date.

She went into the first café she came across, put the delicatessen bag down on a chair, and ordered an espresso. She drank the coffee and smoked a cigarette, peeking at the watch of the person sitting at the next table because she had forgotten hers in the hotel room. It's already eleven o'clock, she thought. The man must have woken up long ago. She felt as if her whole body contracted to double its weight, as if rising from the chair the man's own weight would send her sailing through the air, over the rooftops, through the mist, right into the hotel room. The man was right: the room really was depressing.

She ordered another espresso and lit another cigarette, and glanced at the bag of goodies sitting on the chair, suddenly looking almost human, swollen and erect, with grease stains spreading over it: What will they decide? Where will they take me? And from moment to moment its contents were losing their freshness.

The woman looked at the bag and remembered the croissants and baguettes, the breakfast drying up before her eyes, and she stood up, paid, picked up the bag, and opened the umbrella—with the new skill she had acquired over the past few days—with one hand, and began to run in the direction of the hotel.

She could already see the green tiled roof and the pediments with the little gargoyles protruding into the street, and then the window of their room on the second floor. She noticed the little barbershop, three buildings away from the hotel. She turned her head to look at the window of their room, and then she went inside, pushing the glass door with her shoulder and stopping for a moment in alarm when the bell rang.

The place was empty; there was a smell of shaving cream in the air. There was something very masculine about it that did not welcome the dramatic entrance of the young woman with the huge umbrella and the decomposing paper bag. She sat down on a high chair, put the bag on the floor, and, when the old barber approached her and asked politely and with an air of surprise what she wanted, she said: “Short!”

He explained to her that this was a men's barbershop. He told her he had no experience in cutting women's hair, that he didn't know what she wanted, that he was afraid of disappointing her, that perhaps she should go to a ladies' salon, where they would be able to help her. He pointed with a long finger to the window, trying to explain to her how to get there, but she smiled at him and said. “Short. That's all.”

The barber sighed, touched her hair hesitantly, threw a white cloth over her, picked up his scissors, and began shuffling around her, examining possibilities, grumbling to himself. Slowly and cautiously, lock by lock, he snipped and pruned, stepping back to inspect his work after every snip. When he was finished the big clock on the wall said twelve o'clock. It was the longest short haircut of his life.

The woman remained seated in the high chair and smiled at herself in the mirror. The old barber stood behind her, resting his hands on the back of the chair, accepting her praise with a bowed head and curious little glances in the mirror. He was seventy-five years old, and he had never cut a woman's hair before. Sometimes he cut the hair of little girls who came with their fathers, but that was easy. This was the first woman who had ever sat in his chair and demanded, with a strange and charming impudence, that he cut her hair. It was a challenge, it was scary, and it had worked.