David Unger - The Mastermind

Are you hard? I am lying in bed naked.

Where are you? I want to eat you.

I just painted my nails green. Next time I see you with my father I will wear sandals so you can see my sexy feet and imagine how wet I am for you.

I almost came last night just thinking of slipping between your legs.

I shaved tonight.

And then their messages become more elaborate, like the one he receives one Saturday morning when he’s taking Andrea to her swimming lessons at the Pomona.

Guillermo, last night I couldn’t sleep thinking of you. I feel like such a fool. Here I am married to Samir and you are quickly becoming the most important person in my life. My phone has become an extension of my body, awaiting your next text message. And what if I were to become aroused when I am having dinner with Samir or my father? It would be a disaster. Yesterday, remembering some of our get-togethers, I cursed you for how much you mean to me. I don’t know what we’ve started, but it feels not only a bit crazy, but also quite dangerous. And who knows where this romance is going, or how it will end. I want to see you all the time, but am beginning to see the danger that this will put us both in. We must be more careful.

He realizes he can’t simply give a brief answer to a text of this complexity. So while Andrea is taking her backstroke and butterfly lessons, he drinks a coffee in the café at the Pomona.

Maryam, your e-mail made me very sad. Everything you say is true. Maybe it has all happened too quickly and it would have been better if we had not taken our feelings for each other to the next level. I know you think you are at a huge disadvantage but it isn’t so, since both of us are married. It seems senseless to even expect that one day the two of us might end up together. And I know I couldn’t ask that of you. Making love to you is like finding heaven on earth and I don’t really believe in those things. I don’t want your father to find out about us because, though I know he is my friend, he would hate me for tampering with your marriage.

* * *

When Andrea’s swimming lesson is over, she scours the Pomona looking for her father, who she finds hunched over his phone in the café.

“You were here all this time,” she says.

“Something came up at work,” he responds, smiling awkwardly.

“Dad!”

He smiles tensely and says, “Yes, my dear?”

“Don’t you remember telling me you’d watch my lesson?”

He looks at her wet hair and red eyes, barely recognizing who he’s talking to.

“Forget it!” she snaps, stomping out.

He gets up slowly. “Wait, young woman! Don’t run out on me like your mother.”

The café’s glass door has shut, as if to define how Guillermo relates to his children: as if through a filter.

* * *

Sometimes their text messages are short, almost salutations.

Good night, my love.

Good night, my king.

Or they erupt, like the Pacaya volcano, into a stream of words.

I feel better this morning, though I still miss you terribly. Maybe we shouldn’t text each other so much because it just increases my level of anxiety, especially on weekends when I imagine you having lunch or dinner with your wife and family. Sometimes I think I have fallen in love with your words more than with you. I don’t enjoy feeling enslaved to your words, which enslave me to this fantasy, which I can’t even talk about. And then when reality sets in, I realize we’ve embarked on a dangerous path that can only end in pain. But then I start thinking that there is something very unique and strong between us and that it is foolish to cut it off just as we are getting started. What are we going to do? Tell me, you who have more experience in these kinds of things. .

Their text messages are full of contradictory feelings, as one would expect between people in the throes of an illicit love — to commit or not to commit; to risk all or to risk nothing and go back to their humdrum lives.

They meet only at the Stofella in the beginning, which is both exciting and dangerous, and at some points terrifying. At any moment someone in the hotel restaurant or meeting rooms might recognize them walking in or out, or dropping off their cars in the nearby garages. After all, the hotel is in the heart of the Zona Viva, where all strata of Guatemala’s upper society circulate, where they are safe from assault but not from curious eyes. All in all, Guatemala City is a small town.

Guillermo thinks of blowing several hundred bucks to meet Maryam at the Grand Tikal Futura Hotel on the Calzada Roosevelt. But the Futura is just minutes away from Ibrahim’s textile factory, and is managed by a Lebanese man she knows. It’s also risky because there are always huge traffic jams getting in and out of the hotel and neither Maryam nor Guillermo can afford to be late. They could go to the Quinta Real just outside of town, but his law firm represents the owners.

Guillermo makes other inquiries. The Mercure Casa Veranda rents suites and rooms by the month on 12th Street in Zone 10, and so does the Barceló, but the cost would be a small fortune, and the possibility of being seen at either would be greater than at the Stofella. In the end, he decides to rent a furnished one-bedroom in an innocuous building overlooking the Plazuela España, which is less than a mile from his offices in the Próceres building. It is also only two blocks from Rosa Esther’s sacred Union Church, but since she only goes there on Wednesdays — the day he eats over at Maryam’s house with her father — and Sundays, a day the lovers will never meet, the apartment is ideal. They are no more than a ten- or fifteen-minute ride from each of their homes and from Guillermo and Ibrahim’s offices, and there is a garage in the basement allowing them to come and go largely unseen.

Before either one of them realizes it, they are seeing each other three days a week. They make love two or three times each afternoon. There’s never enough time for simple conversation. Neither is the least bit interested in the daily particulars of each other’s lives, but they would both likely discuss music, books, movies, food, the increased violence on the public buses, and the poor neighborhoods of Guatemala City if they had the time.

But the only place that really matters to them is the bed. Before they know it, two hours have elapsed and the last few minutes together are filled with showering and dressing, and sometimes with slight recriminations for not being able to find a better way to be together more.

One day Guillermo promises to devise a plan for them to get away for a long weekend to Ambergris Cay in Belize.

Maryam looks at him with doubt. “You must be dreaming.”

“I can make it work,” he tells her. “Just watch me.”

In the end, they are afraid to even take an afternoon in La Antigua, only thirty-five kilometers away.

* * *

Thursday when they meet, Maryam insists they talk.

They sit in the ersatz living room, he on a chaise longue and she in an overstuffed green chair that overlooks the fountain in the Plazuela España. They are sitting as far from each other as they ever have in this apartment.

“I can’t go on like this, Guillermo.”

When she says this, his heart panics. He suspects the end is near. Both of them are fully invested in the relationship, but he feels he has no right to insist they continue to see one another secretly. He is afraid to divorce Rosa Esther for what it might do to her and their children: he is convinced his family is helpless without him.

Guillermo and Maryam’s relationship is not ideal — what in life is? He doesn’t want to change anything. At least they are able to be with one another on a regular basis. And a divorce, even a separation, could affect his business.