Gonzalo Torne - Divorce Is in the Air

I was overcome again by the color of the lighted pool, the smell of the dianthus, by the incomprehensible abundance of things that have shape and symmetry when you move among them holding the hand of the woman you desire. Helen was talking to me, but the words got lost in my ear without reaching my brain. My erotic imagination was running riot, composing complicated and tangled scenes the way it’s wont to do. The breadth of everyday desire had concentrated into a gluttonous craving to burrow into her innermost folds. My impatience distorted every step we took. It doesn’t matter how often I get this horny — I don’t think in this life I’ll ever get used to the lusty chaos that rides roughshod over my normal thought process.

I opened the hotel door for her, and we snuck stealthily in (what resonances words drag behind them, what echoes). We avoided the dining room, where a handful of mummies, animated by stubborn hearts ignoring all their bodies’ vital signs, were ingesting pastes and purees and other crap you can swallow without really needing to fire up the gastric ovens. Helen used to double over with laughter when I opened doors for her. If I pulled her chair out she trembled with a shameful pleasure, bubbles in her nose: the poor girl felt like a heroine in a historical drama. Sisi, or a Romanov princess, Anne Boleyn, any of the Tudors, it didn’t matter, to her they were all muddled with the same vague idea of a luxury she tasted only because she kissed a man who had been educated in the ancestral laws of courtliness. I had a hard time convincing her that it was out of deference that I let her enter the elevator last, that it was the done thing to let the most important person spend the least time in those moving coffins. That night, when she begged me to take the long way up because she’d had a dream that the elevator’s walls were closing in on her like a trap, I didn’t even try to make her understand why a gentleman must never let a lady go first on the stairs, especially if they’re not wearing skirts but jeans or white pants (Helen’s vulgar specialty) tight over the buttocks. It was late, we’d already fought, and bad as the food was, that vapor of seasoned aromas, of grease and oil singed on the grill, had woken my taste buds. If Helen turned her back on me I could start emptying my pockets of nuts without hearing her nutritional advice or renewed reproaches about my gut (which was barely even visible).

What’s more, Helen’s backside was intimately connected to her brain. She was the sort of person whose movement reminded you that, biologically speaking, we start out as tadpoles with a cerebral mass that lengthens into a strong medullary tail, protected by a bony spine, which melts into myriad nerves and vessels irrigating the adipose hills of the derriere. And I promise you that not only did those buttocks manage to express her moods more clearly than the features of her face (the social slog had taught her too many strategies of disguise), but you could also upset or calm her down depending whether you chose to caress or pinch it.

Anyway, I was on fire when I went through the door of that damn room, and it didn’t dampen my enthusiasm a bit that the floor and bed were littered with the wreckage of our battle. I’m not saying I expected her to kneel down and kiss my feet, but I certainly didn’t anticipate her scurrying away when I moved in resolutely to kiss her, two and three and four times in a row: she pressed her lips together, clenched her teeth and, worst of all, started ridiculously thrashing her tongue to interrupt my passionate crescendo.

“No.”

And she fell back onto the bed, cutting off the most natural channel of communication and starting a conversation instead, in a rather delirious, completely incongruous way.

“Please open the window.”

By this point I’m no longer surprised when a woman misinterprets my exquisitely suggestive moves as mere flirting; you all do it just because you feel like it, because you think it’s funny to see our reaction. And don’t give me that bullshit about the complexity of feminine sexuality — that is such a tired old excuse. Give me, a thousand times over, the vigorous straight line of my desire, which increases in potency and fervor as it gets closer to climax; such an efficient device, I don’t know how it could be improved upon. But what can you do? I know the rules of the game…I can live with the candles, the little massages, and the mortuary-style background music. It’s just that with Helen I’d gotten used to a generous response to my manly appetite. While I was opening the window and she was lighting a foul-smelling Lucky, I calculated that our night of reconciliation had already met two roadblocks. Enough was enough, I deserved some gratification, so I know I didn’t sound entirely calm.

“And now what?”

“We talk. We have to talk. Seriously.”

“About what?”

“I told you! On the way back here, I told you and you smiled! You don’t listen to me, you never listen, you’re such a hypocrite.”

I should have replied that I hadn’t understood because of the wretched wind, and because she’d been giving me a hickey (the term popped up in the sentence of its own accord, from God knows what warehouse of memories). But she was too upset by the mess of clothes, the scent of our recent battle. Helen was trying to hold back her rage, even as her thoughts kept slipping forward, driven by adrenaline. If I gave a wrong answer she might try to scratch out my eyes. I was going to let her talk — encourage her, even. The night could only end one way; my body deserved it. Being the more intelligent one had to be worth something.

“You said a lot of things.”

“It’s the only thing that matters to me — why do you think we’re here? About Jackson, we have to talk about Jackson!”

It was her tone of contained desperation, the still-damp tips of her hair, the ring of smoke that drifted from her lips…Helen clearly saw herself framed in a scene from the type of TV movie where a blonde and indomitable woman decides to fight, for her son’s good, against the man she loves.

“You heard me, but you haven’t said anything, you haven’t even thought about him, about what he means to me.”

Here she was wrong: ever since I found out that boy had made his way through her interior to plop into this feeling world, I’d been searching for stretch marks on Helen’s thighs, on her buttocks and belly, on the lower part of her back where her silhouette swelled into her hips. I couldn’t believe I’d missed the marks from giving birth.

“I thought we came here to save what’s left of our marriage.”

“We can’t fix anything if we don’t resolve Jackson’s future.”

So Grandma and Grandpa had grown tired of little Jackson. I couldn’t blame them, it must be shitty to be old, on top of having so little time left. Who would want to add dealing with the neglected child of their dizzy daughter, the long-jump princess, to all that?

“I don’t want him to live with his father.”

That line reminded me of my old problem on the court, when I could sense that my opponents’ movements were dangerous, but I couldn’t guess their intentions until my big body was already in a two against one. Helen wasn’t playing the role of the desperate wife; this scene belonged to a movie whose first half-hour I had missed, one that relegated me to a secondary role. It was the story of the war against that Kansas gynecologist, the first husband, whose seminal contribution had resulted in Jackson’s conception.

“They won’t let you take him?”

“Women in the United States are protected by good laws, it’s not like in Spain — I was born in a civilized country. Children belong to their mothers. Daddy arranged everything with a lawyer in Boston. I just need us to get married, more seriously this time, properly.”