Fuga
I can’t do this anymore,” he says.
She thinks it’s a coward excuse for leaving her. She takes the blow, curling around her gut, and closes her eyes. He just said something that killed part of her. She can see herself in the room, close to him. Next, she sees their story like a movie. *** They met five years ago, during a layover in Paris. He was en route to Mumbai, she was headed home to Minnesota. There was an airline strike and a shortage of cabs. With a voucher to the same hotel, they shared a car. He smelled of cedar and musk, pointed shortcuts to the driver in French and carried her suitcase to her room. Their eyes met twice and twice she felt delicious guilt. He kept a respectful distance in the elevator, a step behind her. But all along the ride, he was detailing her silhouette. When their eyes crossed again in the side mirror, she gave him a shy look and straightened her shoulders, just enough to stretch her silk blouse. Two hours later, they were on the dance floor of the underground hotel bar, Besame mucho playing at his request. His hand hardly left the small of her back, his eyes stroked her neck, and in the stuffy Paris night her dress crept high on her thighs. He pulled her against him and said, “Do you know how to tango? Just look into my eyes and let me do the rest.” Weeks later they would be married. But not to each other. She never told him she was engaged, but he did, early the next morning in his room, his finger tracing her curves . “I’ll be stuck with the same person all my life now.” And he made love to her again, with a rage close to desperation. She too felt hopelessness creeping in. She would soon marry her brother’s best friend, a man she’d known all her life, honest and solid and faithful. They had shared everything from the sandbox to the discovery of sex. Their starter furniture was ordered, their apartment freshly painted. It was as if her life had built up to this culminating moment: this marriage. Now, in the arms of the stranger, the comfort of suburban predictability colored her future in nightmarish hues. Nothing new would happen. |
Yet it was the life she wanted, and she would not change it. Its problem was blandness: The solution was spice. The stranger was easily convinced to at least try it. In the years that followed they escaped their everyday lives for the excitement of the forbidden and the value of the rare. The affair became the lifeline by which she survived routine and disillusions without resorting to chemicals or alcohol or therapy the way most of her friends did.“I can’t do this anymore,” he just said, pulling her back into the present. Now he cups her face in his hands. “Tomorrow, I’m telling her.” It’s the first time he alludes to his wife. They lived their parenthetical story in a bubble, never telling one another about the rest of their lives. Her nail traces his lips, as if to commit them to memory. She allows a tear to roll down her cheek. She can be tough, but she’s not cold. “Then I’m leaving her. Packing my stuff and leaving.” Her fingernail claws on his cheek. For a while, there will be a tiny scar there. He’s not done. “It’s with you I want to be. All the time.” Surely she misunderstood. He goes on, “I want to fall asleep each night on your bellybutton and wake up next to you every morning.” His breath caresses her dreamy eyes. “You’ll have a good life. You won’t have to travel anymore…” care… every day… no more travel… just the two of us… His words echo like footsteps in a death row, each of them stabbing the life in her. But she’s a fighter, and he’ll get over it. She’ll find another lover. |