The Last Romantics(60)

Joe can hear her pushing something—is it the dresser? the TV table?—in front of the door and then the flinging of various things against the wall, the run of water in the sink, then the shower, and again more banging and flinging, drawers opening and closing, their closet door slamming repeatedly. Joe remains seated and stares at the TV screen: the ER bustles now with some medical emergency; electric paddles are placed on a man’s hairy chest, and his body lurches with the jolt.

Joe sleeps that night on the couch, and the next morning he leaves the apartment early. He goes to the gym, where he lifts weights and runs on a treadmill until he is light-headed and drenched in sweat. His muscles shaking, breath on fire. He showers at the gym and returns to find Sandrine gone, her clothes and shoes, knickknacks and DVDs cleared out, the apartment as empty and clean as a sand-polished shell washed up with the tide.



“So that was it,” Joe said, looking at Luna across the table. “Sandrine wanted more. More what? I didn’t know there was a scorecard. Like a point system or something.”

“Fifteen for flowers,” said Luna. “Fifty at least for jewelry.” She was on her third margarita, the salt heavy along the rim. This woman Sandrine seemed to Luna an exotic animal, one rarely sighted in the wild but the subject of much study and anxious calculation. The last man Luna slept with had been married, with two young children at home, and he liked to drip hot wax onto her back. He’d seen it in a movie, he told her, and the small, bright burn on her skin transformed almost immediately to warmth.

“I’ll give you twenty points for dinner tonight. Another ten if we go dancing after,” Luna said.

Joe smiled. “Deal.”

The waitress brought their meals. They were at a Mexican restaurant, and the smell of warming corn tortillas made Luna momentarily ill. When she was a child in Nicaragua, her mother had made tortillas—grinding the corn, rolling the dough into disks, frying them over the open fire in the yard. It took all day, the tortilla making, and by the end of it her mother’s shoulders would curl forward, her back nearly parallel to the floor.

Luna sliced through the fancy dish and chewed without tasting. She hadn’t seen her mother in five years, her sister Mariana in five and a half. Now Luna bought her tortillas from the Cuban grocer on the corner where they wrapped them in plastic and charged by the pound.

After dinner Joe took Luna dancing. They drank Mo?t and slipped small pills the color of sky into their mouths and felt a universe of sensation expand with each driving bass note and shudder of strobe.

“Fifty points!” Luna called above the music. “One hundred,” she whispered into his ear.

At dawn Joe checked them into a suite at the Betsy Hotel, a quiet, cool space larger than Luna’s apartment. They left the lights on, but the solid raft of Joe’s back and his long-reaching arms surrounded her in darkness, and afterward she closed her eyes and slept as though she were at the bottom of the sea.

*

Joe told Luna everything. It was mundane and it was tragic. He’d fallen in love with Sandrine completely. After all the women, all the girlfriends, all the dates and hookups and one-night stands and never thinking it was enough. The more, more, more of it, skin, tongue, breast, pussy, my God, so many women, how could he choose just one? But everything about Sandrine was enough. Enough because hadn’t it become exhausting? It came down to the smells, the multitude of smells, all of them on him, bodies and perfume, the way a woman had one smell at her neck, another under her arms, another between her legs. And each woman was different! How could he keep up? He worried that he was losing it, his sense of smell, that soon every woman would register as the same, which seemed the worst kind of fate. With Sandrine he focused on each specific part of her: he knew what to expect on the inside of her wrist, her hair when they were going out. He found comfort in knowing with certainty who was beside him. In knowing what she wanted and what she could do. The knowing became more important than the surprise. He understood at last—at last!—what was enough.

But he had been wrong.

*

One night Donny followed Luna to the parking lot after her shift ended. It was 4:00 a.m., and a slight chill moved off the water. The restaurant’s dumpsters pulsed with stink. Usually Dima or Jorge walked her to her car, but tonight she’d been slow to clean up, slow to count her tips, and so Rodrigo left her the keys to lock up. Had Donny been watching the bar? How had he known?

“Luna,” he said. “It’s nice to see you.”

“Donny. It’s late. I’m going home. I’m tired.” She kept her voice steady. Donny’s gaze held a clear purpose that scared her, a sharpness that cut her into tiny, separable pieces. Behind her back Luna slid her hand into her purse and felt for her keys. Donny was roughly ten feet away, a distance covered in seconds if you moved fast. Luna remembered him as someone who worked out every day, and he still looked it: biceps that popped, thighs that pulled his jeans tight.

“You should get home, too,” Luna said. “Don’t you have work tomorrow? I’m sure you do.” Her hand closed around the keys, and she began to step backward to the car, a dented Subaru she’d bought last year. Two hundred twenty thousand miles, and still it ran like a dream.

“Nope,” Donny said, his voice friendly. “No work tomorrow. I’m partying all night. Come with me, Luna. Remember? Our parties?”