The Peacock Emporium(50)

Several days, or occasionally a week, later she would call again.

His own feelings about the arrangement had often verged on the ambivalent. Alejandro had always been discreetly selective when it came to sexual partners, uncomfortable with the idea of falling in love. While he felt a sympathy for her predicament, he knew he didn’t love Sofia; he wasn’t even sure he always liked her. What they shared, and what neither had ever been quite brave enough to acknowledge, was a fierce sexual chemistry that ratified Sofia’s enduring belief in her own desirability, and lifted Alejandro out of his habitual reticence, even if his exterior did little to suggest it.

“Why do you never look at me when you come?”

Alejandro closed the door quietly behind him, and stood over the prostrate figure of Sofia on the bed. He was used now to these abrupt opening gambits: it was as if the abbreviated nature of their meetings left no room for any kind of nicety. “I do look at you.” He considered removing his jacket, then changed his mind.

Sofia rolled over on to her stomach so that she could reach the ashtray. The action caused her skirt to ride up her legs. A pornographic film was playing on the television; he glanced at it, wondered if she had been watching it while she waited for him.

“No, you don’t. Not when you come,” she said. “I watch you.”

He knew she was right. He had never opened his eyes to any woman at that moment; no doubt his uncle, the psychoanalyst, would have said it betrayed something ungenerous about him, some determination not to reveal himself. “I don’t know,” he said. “I hadn’t thought about it.”

Sofia pushed herself upright, lifting one knee so that a long expanse of thigh was clearly visible. Normally this would have been enough to elicit powerful waves of desire in him; today he felt curiously detached, as if he were already thousands of miles from here.

“Eduardo thinks we should have a baby.”

Next door someone opened a window. Through the wall, Alejandro could just make out the dull murmur of voices. “A baby,” he repeated.

“You’re not going to ask me how?”

“I think I understand the biology of it by now.”

She wasn’t smiling. “He wants to do it at a clinic. He says it will be the best way to make sure it happens quickly. I think it is just because he doesn’t want to make love to me.”

Alejandro sat on the corner of the bed. The couple on the television were now engaged in an orgiastic frenzy; he wondered whether Sofia would mind if he turned it off. He had told her several times that such films did nothing for him, but she would just smile as if she knew better, as if repeated exposure to them would change his mind. “I don’t think making babies is something you can do by yourself.”

She had kicked off her shoes in separate corners of the room—Eduardo liked things to be neat, orderly, she had told him before. When she was with Alejandro, she liked to scatter her clothes about, a kind of secret rebellion.

“I don’t think he really wants a kid. All those diapers—plastic toys everywhere, baby puke on his shoulders. He just wants to look virile. You know he’s losing his hair? I told him it would be cheaper for both of us if he got hair plugs. But he says he wants a baby.”

“And what do you want?”

She looked at him sharply, smirked at his psychoanalytic tone. “What do I want?” She pulled a face, stubbed out her cigarette. “I don’t know. Some other life, probably.” She pushed herself off the bed and walked up to him, close enough for him to smell her perfume, and placed a cool hand against his cheek, letting it slide slowly over his skin. Her hair, which was loose around her shoulders, was slightly matted, as if she had spent some time lying on the bed before he arrived. “I’ve been thinking about you,” she said. She leaned forward and kissed him, leaving the taste of lipstick and cigarettes on his lips. Then she cocked her head to one side. “What’s up?”

She surprised him like this every now and then. He had believed her to be spoiled and self-absorbed, and yet occasionally she would pick up on some subtle change in atmosphere, like a dog.

He wondered whether there was any way to soften it. “I’m going away.”

Her eyes widened. The woman on the screen had contorted herself into a position that made Alejandro uncomfortable for her. He was longing to turn off the television.

“For long?”

“A year . . . I don’t know.”

He had been primed for an explosion. But she merely stood very still, then sighed and sat down on the bed, reaching for her cigarettes.

“It’s work. I’ve got a job in a hospital in England.”

“England.”

“I leave next week.”

“Oh.”

He moved closer to her, put a hand on her arm. “I shall miss you.”

They sat like that for some minutes, vaguely conscious of the sound of muffled lovemaking next door. There had been a time when he would have found it embarrassing.

“Why?” She turned to him. “Why are you going?”

“Buenos Aires . . . is too full of ghosts.”

“It has always been full of ghosts. Always will be.” She shrugged. “You just have to choose not to see them.”

He swallowed. “I can’t.” He reached for Sofia then, perhaps because she had not reacted as he had expected, suddenly desiring her, desperate to lose himself inside her. But she extricated herself from his grasp, twisting nimbly, and stood up. She lifted one hand to her hair, smoothed it, walked to the television, and flicked it off.