Gasoline (4 page)

Farther on is the teenage girl section, most of them unaccompanied, in positions of self-gratification, and in black and white. The magazines of men with men are all in another department, a bit farther on. One of the guys in charge of the store is busy attaching price tags to a pile of inflatable dolls, which, inside their clear plastic bags, look a lot like dead bodies.

The people in the store are mostly middle-aged men. When he entered, he thought he would find more teenagers. The men must be office workers, killing time after work (Heribert looks at his wristwatch; a little after 5:00
p.m.
) before going home. There are old men, too, with that defeated look some retired people develop. A guy of about twenty-five is looking at a magazine that shows a woman and a Great Dane.

Heribert continues on, toward the back of the place, where the booths are located, announced by a large neon sign:
peepshow
.
On the door of each booth hang two pictures and two titles, each of which, respectively, corresponds to one of the two films projected there. He looks at the doors to each of the booths and at each of the titles. By one of the walls next to the first booth there are two video games with Martians, and there’s a boy playing at one of them.

He gets change from a machine he spots in the back. He looks at all the doors once again. He has trouble deciding which picture to choose. He goes into the one whose protagonist’s face was the prettiest in the photograph.

The space he is enclosed in measures less than a square meter. Against one of the four walls there is a bench. He sits down on it. In front of him is a white surface. On the wall to the right, two machines with slots for coins labeled
a
and
b
.
He sticks a coin into the slot labeled
b
.
The light in the cabin goes out and the movie appears before his eyes, emerging from a projector (he stands up to get a better look) whose light flows out onto a tilted mirror located over the head of the seated spectator. From the mirror, the image is cast onto the white surface (he touches it: formica). On the screen, two girls (one blonde, one with light brown hair) and a boy (with dark brown hair) appear on a sofa. The boy is wearing a polo shirt (sky blue, with a Lacoste alligator); the girls (one of whom was white and the other black) are wearing stockings and garters (white stockings on the one with the white garters and gold on the one with the black garters) and high-heeled shoes (black for both of them). The boy is penetrating one of the girls, while the other goes from kissing the girl being penetrated, to kissing the boy, to kissing both of their genitals. Heribert quickly realizes that the booth is just isolated enough from the outside so that its occupant (aroused by the film) can masturbate in peace. He looks for traces on the walls, the surface of the screen, the floor set with shiny, irregular, multicolored tiles, the bench; it’s dark, though, so he doesn’t find any. When he looks up at the screen again (“What a jerk,” he thinks, “I’m missing the movie.”), the position of the officiants has shifted: the blond is performing fellatio on the boy as he performs cunnilingus on the brown-haired girl, who is sitting on top of him. At this point, the projection comes to a halt and the light in the booth goes on. Heribert inserts another coin. The action continues. Now the camera focuses, close up, on the activities of the blond girl, until the boy discharges all over her eyes, nose, and lips; she smiles contentedly. The boy and the brown-haired girl are also smiling contentedly. Then there is a brief pause (of only a few seconds), and the same girls appear, now sitting down, all dressed and demure, drinking from tall glasses. One of them moves her lips in silence, as if speaking, and the other nods in agreement as she runs her tongue over her upper lip. The blond girl picks up the receiver and dials a number. The brown-haired girl drinks her drink and smiles. The blonde sits down. A short while later they look at the door with a surprised expression on their faces (conveying the impression that someone has knocked). The brown-haired girl goes to open it and finds the same boy from before at the door, wearing the same polo shirt, but now with pants, carrying a cardboard box the size of a pizza. Gesturing and moving their lips, they invite him in. He comes in. He seems shy. The brown-haired girl takes out her handbag, gives him a five-dollar bill, and searches for change (obviously to give him a tip), but she only comes up with big bills. She looks surprised as the other girl searches through her handbag and also finds no change. Without missing a beat, they get out another glass for the boy, fill it for him, refill their own, and smile at him. He smiles, too, but shyly. The blond unbuttons two buttons on her blouse, gazing at the boy and bending down to flick the ash from her cigarette into the ashtray (suddenly they are smoking; had he not noticed until that moment, or has the cigarette appeared magically?), revealing a good expanse of breast. The brown-haired girl runs her tongue over her lower lip. The boy smiles broadly to indicate that he’s understood. He kisses the brown-haired girl, who runs her hand up the boy’s leg until she reaches his groin, in exaggerated evidence
. . .

The projection breaks off again. He leaves. Another man is leaving another booth at the very same moment, staring at the ground, his face red as a beet. Heribert looks at the man’s shoes to see if he has splattered. He thinks he could have put a coin in slot
a
, to see what it was. He walks out into the street, wondering why he hasn’t had an erection the whole time, neither leafing through the magazines nor in the booth.

•

He goes into a state of rapture at a newsstand, looking at the magazine covers. He sees a magazine (
Mademoiselle
) displaying articles on clothing, beauty, health, and love, aimed especially at women and with Brooke Shields’s face on the cover. He remembers how, as a boy, he had only had fashion magazines to masturbate to. He buys it. He leafs through it. He feels a foggy twinge of arousal. He goes into the first bar he finds. He sits at the bar. He orders a whiskey. He pays up. He takes a drink. He leafs through the magazine. A woman with very red lips hides her face behind a veil, to promote Revlon lipsticks. A well-known TV actress, with a bottle of Max Factor perfume in her hand, says: “Part of the art of being a woman is knowing when not to be too much of a lady.” There is a striped bathing suit, with a tutu, from Saks Fifth Avenue. He finds the model absolutely beautiful. Cacharel, on the facing page, announces a perfume called Anaïs Anaïs (a reference to Anaïs Nin?). On a motorcycle rides a young man in a black jacket and a young woman in a slip, also black, both wearing Carrera glasses. A girl is jogging in Max Factor WaterProof. Dexatrim shows a photograph of Melody Mahoney of Warren (Indiana), who lost 105 pounds in thirty-six weeks by taking one Dexatrim capsule a day. There is also an interview with Michael Caine: “the man women love to love.” Another ad for a bathing suit with tutu, by Lakeside. Angie Dickinson reports that California avocadoes have only seventeen calories a slice (“If you take into account,” it says in one corner of the ad, “that there are sixteen slices to a medium-sized avocado.”) The headline for Sambuca Romana says, “If they try to tell you that Sambuca Romana is an after-dinner drink, tell them you weren’t born yesterday. You just look that way.” Chimère says: “Chimère perfume: From a distance, it’s discreet and elegant; from close up, it’s out of this world.” The page is split between two shots. On top, a woman at an office desk is surrounded by three men. Underneath, she’s embracing one man. (One of the three from the picture on the top? A new one?) He has another drink of whiskey. He heads toward the bathroom.

There is an article on how to stop biting your nails. A girl wrapped in a pink towel says, “I never felt like this until I tried Caress.” Caress is a soap. Many pages on how to sunbathe. A long article titled “The Elegant Art of Flirting.” A report on dressing in ecological colors. Two girls look out at him from an article titled “Love in the Afternoon,” which begins: “Don’t wait for the sun to set to put on a sexy dress. We have a series of new designs for you that can be worn all day long
. . .
” He unzips his pants and begins to fondle himself. What if he were to fall in love with one of those models with almond eyes who look out at him from the ads? Searching for them and finding out whether they were as seductive in the flesh as they are on paper would be a struggle
. . .
Even to have thought of falling in love with them makes him smile. And yet, he has fallen in love a few times: many years ago
. . .
Has he really been in love, though, or is it an illusion he half-remembers that doesn’t jibe with the dictionary definition of the word? It occurs to him that it must be an arduous task to write a dictionary, to have a precise knowledge of all sentiments and to define them, to know exactly what it is to fall in love, what passion is, where the line between good and evil and between pleasure and perversion falls, or between abundant, numerous, plethoric, overflowing, considerable
. . .

He is thinking all of this as he stares at the tiles, the pictures in the magazine long forgotten. He is profoundly bored. He lets go. His erection goes limp and disappears at once. He leaves the magazine on top of the paper towel dispenser, goes back out to the bar, drinks up the third gulp of whiskey, and opens the door to the street.

In
the subway, the guy sitting across from him is so odious that he wishes him dead. But he soon cools off. Wishing him dead is too much of an exertion. He looks away from the man and realizes that if he had to describe him without looking he would no longer remember him. This pleases him. When he looks back at him (the flabby face, the fish eyes, the pencil mustache, the idiotic smile
. . .
), he no longer hates him. He is entirely indifferent to him.

He gets home. Helena is pulling dead leaves off the plants. She tells him they’re dying for lack of air and light. If he would only keep them upstairs, in the studio, they’d be better off. But since he refuses
. . .
She doesn’t understand why Heribert has this phobia about plants. In any case, they’ll have to move soon, Helena says, and if they decide to leave the city, she’ll make sure to find a place with a nice garden and a deck. She also says they’ll have to buy another car, because the one they have now won’t do for commuting back and forth to the city every day.

Helena has decided that she needs to disconnect a little from work. She’s always running around, tying up loose ends, dashing from one meeting to the next
. . .
By the way, she’s met a very interesting young artist, whom she’d like him to meet. Helena has seen what he does, and she thinks it’s very exciting. This artist would like to talk with Heribert; she imagines he wants advice. But he seems shy, so she suggests that Heribert be the one to call him the following day, before he takes the car in to the repair shop, which Heribert emphatically refuses to do, saying that since he hasn’t used it lately, it’s not up to him to take it into the shop.

Helena observes that not only is this affirmation true but it constitutes clear proof that, in fact, Heribert does nothing all day long: he never leaves the house because he has no obligations beyond painting. He could take it into the shop, she goes on, before he starts painting, and this point reminds her that she hasn’t asked him how his work has gone that day, nor if he’s got a lot done. Her questions go unanswered because Heribert isn’t listening: he needs all his powers of concentration to recall that the last time he used the car was about a month and a half ago, when he and Helena went for dinner at Sardi’s (and the dinner was lousy), and that when they left, he stained the upholstery with the cognac that spilled from the glass he had taken from the restaurant, hidden in the pocket of his raincoat, before they got mugged while making out in a park. He still has a box of matches from that dinner at Sardi’s. He looks for it on the bookshelves. He finds it on a high shelf between a ceramic vase he never liked and a book of cocktail recipes. He looks at it, wondering how many matches there are in a matchbox. It seems evident to him that matchboxes must contain a fixed number of matches. How many, though? Is it, let’s say, an exact number, which coincides with some attractive multiple of ten, like fifty or a hundred? Or is it some less elegant multiple of ten, say, sixty or eighty? He considers it inconceivable for the chosen number to be something fussy along the lines of, say, seventy-eight. Of course no one would ordinarily think of counting them, even though, the way things are, you never could tell. What if they cheated and, instead of a hundred matches (if the number of matches meant to fill each box is, indeed, one hundred), they only pack ninety-nine? That would be a gold mine, thanks to the millions of innocent people in the world who buy boxes of matches every day without counting how many there are. And how do they fill the boxes? The image of an endless conveyor belt moving matches along and letting them fall one by one into each box makes him laugh. And how do you make a wooden match? How about a wax match? Suddenly he’s very interested in learning how they do it. He remembers a Warner Brothers cartoon he saw on television as a child in which toothpicks were manufactured by cutting down a tree, taking it to the lumberyard, and stripping it of all its excess wood until all that is left is a toothpick, which ends up in a box. Then, they cut down another tree . . .

Helena is standing in front of him, with a scrap of paper in her hand.

“Here. Take it. His name is Humbert. Call him. I told you, he’s a little shy, and he won’t dare call you. Be nice. I have to go now. (Wow, it’s late!) I’m having dinner with Hipòlita, and I’ll be late if I don’t run. Big kiss.”

Heribert sticks the note in his pants pocket and plops into a chair. Since when should he (the, shall we say, established artist who hardly knows how to find the time to work and work in order to maintain the preeminent place he’s in) be the one to call the neophyte? In these cases, it’s always the one who has more to gain who calls; and the one who has more to gain, in this case, is definitely not Heribert. Still, if Helena is so insistent, it must be someone worthwhile. But he’s so shy he doesn’t dare to pick up the phone and dial? Or is it that, neophyte and all, he already has a big head? Helena lets the door slam. Heribert falls asleep, strangely certain that he will dream that he awakens after not having had a dream.

He awakens certain of not having had a dream. He thinks of calling Hildegarda to go out to dinner. Then he remembers that he hasn’t asked Helena to ask Hipòlita for the Dave Brubeck quartet record.

He’s about to call her and ask her to give it to Helena. But just the thought of hearing Hipòlita’s voice is too much for him. And if, in addition to hearing her voice, he also has to ask for the record
. . .
If Helena lent it to her, it’s Helena who has to get it back. This is what he’ll do: he’ll wait a half hour to call Hipòlita’s house. That way, when Hipòlita answers, he’ll be certain that Helena will have arrived; he will greet Hipòlita briefly (politely, but briefly), and he’ll ask to speak with Helena, reminding her that it’s about time to ask Hipòlita to return the record.

A half hour later he dials Hipòlita’s number, thinking perhaps he’s waited too long and they may already have left. As he hears the phone ring on the other end, he thinks to himself that, in point of fact, he could buy another copy of the record and give it to Hildegarda. He’s never given her anything. Well, nothing but one of his silkscreens (after she posed for him, a little less than a month ago), but as a gift that seems pretty cheesy. Hildegarda, in contrast, had given him a set of cufflinks set with a dog’s head and an old recording of
The Marriage of Figaro
by Marino DelNonno. When he hears Hipòlita’s voice answer, he feels like hanging up, but the fear of having to wander through all the record stores in the city looking for such an old record stops him. Hipòlita repeats, “Hello.” Heribert decides to speak. He says his name. Hipòlita says it’s nice to hear from him. Heribert asks her how things are going. Hipòlita says they’re fine and that they should get together soon. Heribert says one of these days, and asks her to put Helena on.

“Helena?”

“Yes, Helena. Weren’t you having dinner together?”

“Dinner? Yes! We’re having dinner, but
. . .
she’s not here yet and
. . .
”

It is so obvious that Hipòlita is not expecting Helena for dinner that for a moment Heribert feels like going on with the conversation, forcing her to add facts and details she can’t know in order to contrast them later with the facts and details Helena will give him when he subjects her to a similar interrogation. But he prefers to say goodbye to Hipòlita and hang up the phone.

•

As he shaves, his face masked with white soap, Heribert reflects over and over on whether it isn’t strange that he’s never been jealous. He’s never doubted that Helena must be going out with other men. In the end, what does “going out with other men” mean? What does it mean that he goes out with other women? That he embraces another person, caressing her occasionally between sheets that are different from the usual ones? What he finds disconcerting is her telling a lie so flimsy that it falls apart right away. Is Helena having an affair? Of course she is. Who isn’t? What is it he finds surprising? That he hasn’t ever seen the signs? Why hasn’t he ever thought about it before? Is it because he thinks maybe it’s too petty to worry about? Or is it because now he’s so bored
. . . ?
“I’m so bored that
. . .
” As he repeats this phrase he thinks of his easel, and the big white room where he paints, and he sees it all through a very fine dust, gold, or gray, like a fossil.

Whom was she having the affair with? An innocent adolescent? What if it was a tough guy, a sweaty truck driver with a three-day beard? Or a milquetoast? Or a priest? What if it was a girl? A salesman from a clothing store? A Mafia
capo
? What if it was Hug? He bursts out laughing. If it was Hug he’d buy them a bottle of champagne, if only for the show they put on pretending they can’t stand each other.

He changes his shoes. He puts on his gray jacket and his black overcoat. Out on the street, he raises his fist to hail a cab. Between the curb and the cab a river of slush is running. The driver opens the door for him. From the curb, Heribert tries to jump into the cab, but his left foot slips and he steps into the slush.

In the restaurant, everyone’s having drinks at the bar. Hilari introduces them: Hilda, Herundina, Heribert. Heribert can see that Hilari’s after Hilda by the way he takes her arm as they sit. So as he unfolds the napkin before putting it on his lap, Heribert looks at Herundina: she has brilliant eyes and fleshy lips, painted soft red. She has short hair, like so many women this winter, and she’s wearing enormous black and white plastic earrings. Hilari says:

“Even if you don’t know Herundina, you should recognize her.”

The waiter brings the menus and distributes them.

“Why?”

Herundina laughs.

“No,” says Heribert. “Why would we know each other, Herundina?”

“It’s not that you should know her,” Hilari persists, “but you should recognize her. Though I’m not sure you would actually have seen her.”

“So why should I recognize you?”

“You used to go out with my sister.”

“Don’t you see the resemblance?” says Hilari.

“Are you Henrietta’s sister?”

“No.”

“Heloise’s?”

“No, silly. I’m Hannah’s sister!”

Any other day, both to break the ice and to try and cover up for the gaffe of mentioning two names that have no connection with her, he would literally have banged his head on the table, which would have made everyone laugh and got the situation flowing to a point that would have allowed for some serious courting. How many times hadn’t he seen her! So many. Often, when he had gone to pick Hannah up and once when he had seen the two of them walking down the street together. Any other time, he would have found the perverse detail of going out with the sister of an old girlfriend exciting.

“She had to kill her sister to come to dinner with us today,” says Hilari. “She didn’t want her to come. When she told Hannah you were going to be here, too, it awakened old passions.”

Heribert usually finds Hilari’s repartee pretty clever, but today it seems old and tired. How he had always laughed at the guy’s constant jokes, his unending stream of lies and stories; now they make him sick. Hilari asks him if something is wrong. He shakes his head. The girl looks at him. Heribert feels incredibly old, and the feeling grows stronger and stronger until, at the end of the meal, he gets up from the table very slowly, hunched over, as if carrying the weight of a century on his shoulders. Hilari thinks he’s joking and congratulates him on recovering his good mood. He takes Heribert’s arm, takes him aside, and inquires—
sincerely
—as to how he’s feeling, and if there’s anything wrong. That’s what friends are for, he says. He also says that he’s been acting distracted and touchy for days, as if he were having problems. He goes on for quite a while about the problem thing, repeats his offer of help, and reminds him that it is precisely in these situations where you discover who your friends are because, often, the very people you thought were irreproachable friends, turn out, when push comes to shove, to be selfish bums incapable of helping someone who would have done anything for them. Heribert stoically puts up with this rant, but when Hilari puts his hand on his shoulder and pats him a few times on the back, he’s had enough: he looks him straight in the eye and in all seriousness stamps on his foot with all the strength he can muster.

•

Herundina smiles.

“So
. . . ?
”

“So what?”

“So what? Oh, nothing. I thought you were going to say something.”

“Not me.”

“Where would you like to go?”

“Beats me.”

“Want to go for a drink?”

“A drink?”

“No, not if you don’t want one.”

“No, no. A drink would be just fine.”

“No, not unless you want one. It’s up to you.”

“I can’t think of anyplace to go.”

“I certainly can’t. It was you who didn’t want to go out dancing with the others.”

“Did you want to go?”

“No. I don’t care one way or the other. But I thought you had another place in mind.”

“Like where?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, neither do I.”

“Want to go for a walk?”

As soon as he says it, he sees that it’s a ridiculous proposition. He doesn’t know how to behave. Suddenly he feels entirely unschooled in the art of flirting. He feels as if he had amnesia, as if he were an adolescent again. Worse, because at least as an adolescent he had desire, which egged him on, even though his cheeks always got red and gave him away. What does one do with a woman? Chat her up? If only one could chat without saying anything
. . .
Or if one could only come up with a fake language, made up of exotic sounds, and say: “Babatoo infrechemina, sadafa nogra ptsu allirà?” And if only she, to all that, were capable of responding, “Troc atodrefa mimenyac!
. . .”