counterpoint; chapter one.
Title: Counterpoint
Chapter: 1 of 4
Characters: David Silva / David Villa; Sergio Ramos / Fernando Torres; Steven Gerrard / Xabi Alonso
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: Lies.
Notes: AU. A story told out of time in twelve parts; here are the first three. Be aware that apparently I'm fond of backstory and tangents. Also, shamelessly nicked from Wikipedia: Counterpoint is the relationship between two or more voices that are independent in contour and rhythm and are harmonically interdependent.
Feedback > life. Constructive criticism is always welcome.
Automation.
Three things stood in the way of David Silva's rent being paid.
One: David Villa.
Two: David Villa's lack of a job.
Three: David Silva's inability to call David Villa out on his lack of a job.
David Silva owed one hundred and ten dollars a week to his landlord. He made an impressive two-hundred a week. He lived on cheap take-out and McDonalds, so he'd managed to get his food expenses down from eighty to fifty. Some weeks - particularly horrible weeks, when he didn't have time for lunch or was simply too depressed to bother going out to buy some, he managed a sweet thirty-five. Forty was lost on bills - electricity and water only, since he didn't need gas and had convinced himself that he didn't need a telephone, television or internet. This left a grand total of nothing for anything else - except in those particularly horrible weeks, the ends of which were always a ironic little silver lining of ten-dollar notes that he'd inevitably farewell in exchange for toilet paper, soap and his weekly subway ticket before Monday shot around again.
It was an unhappy cycle.
When he found himself in the deepest ridges of the unhappiness that would sometimes swallow him up before he realised he had wandered away from cold, determined contentment, he was almost relieved to find himself alone. Villa never spent more than eight hours in the studio, and they were always hanging off of midnight. He disappeared in the mornings to crash on his mother's couch - sometimes his father's, When his mother went abroad to work, his father decided that, as the patriarch, he had the right to claim everything as his own again - and Villa happily claimed the prince's throne via a blanket on the sofa and porn magazines underneath it. But all of Villa's actual living was done at Silva's.
Silva didn't like to blame Villa's father for the way he turned out, but - apples and trees, etcetera.
Silva manned telephones at a call centre for an electricals company, specialising in matters as important and varied as 'what to do when your microwave refuses to open and your food explodes inside it' and 'knowing when and when not to kick your oversized television'. It was a useless job, but someone had to do it. Silva was a useless person, and he had to do something.
Five years earlier, he would never had envisioned himself wearing jumpers that smelled like mothballs and had awkwardly misshapen shoulders from wire coathangers, sitting at a cubicle with what looked like a piss stain beneath his feet and a shitload of user manuals littering his desk. Five years earlier, he had been somebody, on his way to becoming somebody important.
He should have known that an English major wasn't going to get him anywhere, but at the time, he felt fucking indestructible. He was clever, and had a way with words, and used his cleverness and way with words to dominate class discussions about everything from twentieth century Marxism to the relevance to contemporary society of the romantic literary movement. He wrote not only for his university newspaper and arts bulletin, but for the gazette of the city's rival university - purely because he was better than anyone at that university was, and he was charitable enough with his talents, recognising a burgeoning arts society in need.
He wrote in his spare time with the same routine matter-of-factness with which he ate and brushed his teeth and lied to his mother about how much he was enjoying med science. It was just another thing he did; it was a way of life. He imagined a future in which newspapers and independent magazines would clamour for his talents, and he would inevitably turn them all away in favour of freelance work, eschewing the restrictions of institutions that didn't get his progressivisim, his eloquence, the nuanced sophistication that he poured, effortlessly, into every word he touched. He imagined a glorious future for himself.
But five years later, he was surrounded by piss stains and user manuals, and the only thing he could hold above the rest of the population in order to assert his own inherent superiority was the fact that they, the idiots, hadn't bothered to retain their user manuals.
What kept Silva going were the highlights. Sometimes, a day would have many. Other days would have none, and those were the ones on which every customer sounded like just a little more of an imbecile than the last, and every mouth and armpit and sweaty collar that he had to stand next to on the subway smelt just a little worse.
Highlights included but were not limited to:
One: When Xavi, who worked two cubicles away, would sidle up to him at the water cooler and tell him generously that Elsa from reception had been eyeing him again. (An ego boost is an ego boost.)
Two: When he passed a homeless person on the street, reached into his pocket, and found an actual coin. It didn't matter whether he decided to give it to the guy or not. It was the fact that he had more money than he'd thought.
Three: When he saw someone run for the subway and actually make it to the closing doors in time. This was a highlight primarily because seeing people miss their trains after hurtling down flights of stairs was so fucking pathetic that its opposite just automatically restored him a little.
Four: When he managed to grab one of the free subway newspapers and could jostle enough space in the train to actually read it.
Five (a more recent addition): When he would open the door to his apartment, tired and somewhat out of breath, and find Villa already there.
A few months earlier, he'd opened the door and yelped in a rather unbecoming way as he lifted his head and saw Villa sitting by the window. It was perhaps the silhouette that frightened him, black against the smoky grey of the night outside, and only visible when you really looked for it. Or, alternatively, it was Silva wondering, in a fleeting instant, whether something terrible had happened. Because this was the first time Villa had turned up before Silva was planning to turn the lights out. This was the first time they would actually have a conversation before having sex.
Villa had smiled - whether this was at Silva's terror, he didn't know - and said, over a cup of tea (which Silva only noticed when Villa's words worked their way through the steam), "I have some news."
He was sitting on a plastic chair, one of his legs curled up beneath him, his arms wrapped in sweater sleeves that were too long. Silva thought how very warm he looked, how homey. He thought, without quite realising that he was thinking it, that it'd be nice to come home to that image every night.
"News?" Silva raised his eyebrows as he dragged his wallet out and put it, with his keys, onto the kitchen bench, upon which he then leaned, arms crossed, to hear what his lover had to reveal.
"A friend of mine - Sergio? Did I tell you about him? Well, anyway, he lives out by the coast, and - as of next week - he's fucking off to go work interstate or something, and his place is going to be totally empty for a few months."
"And."
"And he thought about renting it out but he doesn't like the idea of tenants - too much legal bullshit, and you can't really tell them not to impregnate your furniture with coffee and sperm and vodka and vomit unless you go through all the legal bullshit, right?"
"And."
"And so he thought he'd just let a friend stay there. you know, keep house for him? And, well, guess who's the lucky bastard who happens to be his friend."
Silva thought about not having to pay his rent, about living in a mansion by the sea for a season or two, about finding a new job for a few months, or perhaps just writing in said mansion by said sea. He thought about a life where Villa would be his during the days as well as the nights; when he would see him for more than twenty ugly minutes in the blur of mornings. He thought about his five year old dreams of living a clandestine life, letting other people borrow the beauty he was capable of producing while they obliviously allowed him to mooch off of their ignorant generosity.
But he shook his head, and didn't look at Villa as he said, "I can't just leave my job. They need me."
And need him they did. He was the best fucking manual-reader in the building. Nobody knew trouble-shooting like he did.
A few minutes passed, in which Villa pretended not to be disappointed, and offered Silva some of the tea for which Silva himself had paid out of his fifty dollar food allowance. Silva declined, again, like declining was his speciality, and Villa left a few minutes later. The next morning, Silva cleared up his half-drunk tea and moved the chair from the window back to the table.
He didn't see Villa for another month after that.
Idealism.
Sergio was not particularly self-aware. He didn't notice that he sashayed and skipped and powerwalked while everybody else walked like normal people. He didn't see that caps perched backwards on the top of his head made him look like a teenager. He didn't understand that his in-your-face method of socialising was seen as somewhat abrasive and tiresome. He was well-intentioned; that's all that mattered.
He was the guy who ran in the mornings, chatted at a speed of about ten words a second to tired baristas as he grabbed his morning coffees, bopped his head energetically on the subway as music filtered out from his earphones, tinny and annoying. He was the guy who demanded high-fives and slapped people on the back if they weren't up for a high-five. He forced his way into the lives of the people around him. His voice was loud, his clothes sharp, his cologne strong and his zest for life insatiable.
He was exhausting.
Sergio had a lot of time on his hands with which to run and chat to people, and to read blogs about exactly why the next Michael Bay movie was going to suck so hard, spend forty minutes on the phone with the electricals company to figure out whether he could get a deal on a bigger television on which to watch the next Michael Bay movie, and down expensive drinks at expensive clubs where he would discuss, with a combination of workmates and acquaintances upon whom he had once forced himself, the next Michael Bay movie.
He wasted none of his time. He had once been on a train passing a large billboard that said either "Cherish the moment" or "It's a Cherry Ripe moment" and, preferring to believe that it was the former, he had had one of those epiphanies that nobody wants to hear about because they themselves haven't had one and therefore refuse to acknowledge that they exist, during which he decided that the millions of moments that constituted every second of every day could no longer go by unused. He had to pack something into all of them. And when you're possessed with the endless bounds of energy that Sergio had, such a task is as easy as switching to a new brand of bottled water. (For the record, Sergio switched up his bottled water brand every month. He didn't like the idea of forking out all of his hard-earned money to help only one bottled water company become a monopoly. Besides, some of them helped the rainforests.)
This was a huge part of the reason why Sergio and Fernando broke up.
It happened on a Monday, which was Sergio's favourite day of the week, because it signalled new beginnings, and he had decided that he was totally into that. The weather was awkward - not wet but humid, not hot but sticky - so Fernando was in a bad mood. He had walked into the restaurant where Sergio had agreed to meet him, and hadn't apologised for being late, hadn't acknowledged the fact that Sergio, too, had a home to get to and a train ticket that would expire when it hit midnight. He complained about work - both his job and his writing - and he complained about the awkward weather. He complained when the soup that the waiter brought him was too hot and burnt his tongue, and he complained when Sergio told him to stop complaining.
Sergio had then tried to cheer him up, and the only way in which Sergio knew how to do this was to make suggestions. He made many that night, including but not limited to:
One: That they go to the movies.
Two: That Fernando go back down to the coast with him.
Three: That Fernando allow Sergio to look at his writing, just this once.
Four: That Sergio take Fernando home so that he could sleep it off.
Five: That Sergio take Fernando home so that he could sleep it off with Sergio.
Fernando got progressively more irritable as Sergio tried to find ways to distract Fernando out of his frustration, but Fernando was inevitably in one of those ruts that he found quite comfortable. It sometimes seemed to Sergio that Fernando enjoyed misery - the self-absorption of it, the inability to be rescued. It was as though he saw something deterministic in it, as though this was a battle that he had been chosen to fight through, and he flatly refused to let anyone drag him out of it. Sergio's proactivism was so antithetical to that kind of stubborn passivity. Fernando would later tell Sergio that he found it offensive, almost, that Sergio even briefly entertained the idea that those suggestions could provide any kind of meaningful remedy. Sergio would find that, in turn, even more offensive.
"I think I should stop seeing you," Fernando had finally said to his soup.
Sergio sighed. Fernando had said this several times before. It was usually accompanied by something like for your own good or just temporarily, you know. And so he waited for that accompanying phrase, with his eyes threatening to roll and his fingers drumming on the table the way that teachers always seemed to do when he was in school.
But what Fernando said after that was, "For real, this time. I don't think we're good for each other."
Fernando was irritated, Sergio reasoned, and therefore apt to making blanket decisions that felt huge but that would inevitably be torn off when he found the consequences of his impulse too oppressive, too much. So he didn't panic. He said, "Okay, whatever you want", and he hugged him after they left the unfinished soup and the plate of bread that Sergio had made his way through as he'd waited for Fernando to show up. And he then waited for Fernando to rip that blanket up.
He didn't hear from Fernando at all after that.
Sergio's job dragged him, one or two days a week, on long subway trips from the coast to a large office that overlooked the city's most glamorous and useless park, a healthy salary and the bonus of being surrounded by similarly young, wealthy, ambitious if dim social butterflies who made him feel like he had found his place in the world. The hours were short, Fernando always appeared on either side, and the light at the end of this easy tunnel was that he had always had that beautiful house by the sea to sink into when the exhaustion of being on and up and in sporadic transit finally captured him.
But there had always been too little of Fernando, Sergio realised when he found himself with no Fernando at all. He had always been another activity in his day, slotted in between drinks at five and late-night supermarket runs at eleven. And his beautiful house by the sea felt emptier in the knowledge that perhaps Fernando's promise to "one day, not now, but one day" come and visit would never actually be seen through.
He came up with a plan of attack, because Sergio didn't like leaving things to chance, and the thought of busying himself with steps in that plan - steps to orchestrate change, in a plan to orchestrate a moment, an experience, a turning-point - filled him with the same kind of satisfaction that he got from deciding to force the pretty receptionist at the electricals company to talk to him, or to take the stairs instead of the escalator and shake hands with someone who did the same, or to tell his boss in no uncertain terms just how much he admired him - because that kind of proactivism could only lead to more good than bad.
Villa was dwarfed by the white largeness of the kitchen as Sergio did his best to advertise the place to him.
"It's a great neighbourhood - bike tracks and restaurants by the water and did you know that they're building an indoor rockclimbing centre next to the gym? Amazing idea, I don't know why I'm leaving. Uh - all these surfaces here," he continued, running a hand along the benchtop as Villa watched him do it, "are made of some amazing material that pretty much never needs to be cleaned. Uh, they collect the trash twice a week - twice! - which is so much better than that once-a-week shit you have to deal with in the city. Uh, it's obviously big. Easy to live in. Just - I mean, come on. Try to come up with a single reason why you wouldn't want to live here."
"I can't pay you anything for it," Villa shrugged, and then smiled. "I don't know why you'd call me over in the first place."
"I don't need you to pay for it!" Sergio replied as though it was quite commonplace to distribute free leases on beautiful beachside properties. "I'll be moving in with my boyfriend, so I won't be paying anything extra. This isn't an income thing. I just don't want the place to get dusty when I'm gone."
"I don't know," Villa hesitated. "David..."
"This is the least you can do for David," Sergio said sternly. "After - what? - years of camping out in his house and not paying any rent? Just mooching off him like a massive fucking moocher? The least you can do is save him from paying what you're not paying for."
"Look," Villa started, wearing the expression of someone about to launch into an ill-planned defensive that he would try to disguise as an offensive, "we have an arrangement, and I don't even live there, I just sleep there, and -"
"You leave the place in a mess, you eat the food that he pays for so that he has to spend even more money buying more food for himself, you turn up when he's at work and use the water and the electricity, and -"
"How the fuck do you know, asshole?"
"You used to do the same to me."
"Yeah, well, you're fucking loaded."
"And he's not."
"Then why doesn't he ever say anything?"
"Because he loves you," Sergio replied matter-of-factly, because Sergio knew whom he loved and who loved him, and he assumed that it was the same for everyone else.
He didn't notice the hesitation in Villa's "Right, of course."
"Well, listen, go and ask him, and if he says no, don't worry about it. My boss is coming over in a few, and I think he'll totally be up for it."
"Your boss?"
"Yeah, he mentioned something about wanting to take a year off just to 'sit back and live' - those were his words exactly, and I thought, fuck, that's so great, you know? I mean, we should all do something like that at some point. Discover ourselves and shit."
"You're a joke."
"And he's so rich, I mean, he's not going to lose very much by taking a few months off."
"Your boss? You'd give your house to your boss?"
"He's such a cool guy, David," Sergio replied earnestly. "Seriously, he is probably the greatest human being I have ever met. He's so together, so smart, so well-dressed."
"Being well-dressed is very important." Sergio didn't notice the sarcasm. "Well, listen. I'll ask David, but make sure you do your whole easy-to-clean-benchtops pitch to your boss, okay?"
He made to get up, and Sergio held out a hand as if it would stop him. "Going so soon? It's not like you have a job."
"My job is my man. It's what I do," Villa joked, but his smile was quick to fade.
All our tomorrows.
Steven wondered how much they would be able to do in three to six months, how much living they would be able to get done. He imagined the quiet succour of lazy, slept-in days bookending the opportunities they would take to experience the things that their busy, solitary lives in the city had always kept from them. He saw the upcoming break as an adventure to be made rather than had, empty lines upon which to mark the moments that they hadn't even thought of living yet.
He found his mind wandering off at inopportune moments - at his desk, inside Xabi - wondering what a life with Xabi would come to consist of. His life alone was dull and routine; though not far removed from the life anyone would have expected him to lead and therefore nothing to sniff at. He took people on and laid people off, faced barrages of angry letters from people who had no legal right to whine about their new-found unemployment, and at the end of the week, shook hands with his fellow take-onners and lay-offers and tried not to think about the futility of life as a middle-manager. Again - it was nothing to sniff at.
Though it had been several years, he and Xabi still lived apart. This was more to do with there never really having been a need for them to live together than an absence of want for a harmonised home life. Xabi often talked up his own independence by reference to annoying habits and idiosyncracies that Steven had never witnessed but, Xabi assured him, would have been a pain to live with. He often spoke of the importance of space in a relationship, and Steven caught him seconds away from spouting a near plagiarised version of absence makes the heart grow fonder. Xabi seemed happier when making revelations like these, and Xabi's happiness was Steven's happiness.
That it was an absence of want for a harmonised home life on Xabi's part was a thought that Steven didn't like to indulge. Xabi's insistence that living apart was a stellar idea was, Steven preferred to think, reassurance for himself. It wasn't him trying to stave off Steven's potential early-thirties clinginess, because Steven didn't have any of that. He didn't show it, anyway.
It was for this reason that Steven said to Xabi, "You're not serious," three times in the space of a minute when Xabi turned up to dinner one night, with the faintest sun-tan and the look of a man unsure about a decision he'd made, and told him that he thought that he and Steven should move into his employee's beach house for "an undecided length of time". He rattled off a rehearsed list of reasons as to why the idea wasn't actually as out-of-character as it seemed, the structured argument of a man who was intelligent but lacked a little common sense.
"We have jobs," Steven interrupted as Xabi was up to point three in his four point plan to convince him of the move.
(Point three demonstrated how the beach house would solve all of their problems, after points one and two introduced the idea of the beach house and the - rather alarming and unexpected - idea that they had problems in the first place. They had a lack of communication? They didn't know each other's tastes? Steven was familiar with the four point plan, but it always managed to floor him regardless.)
"We have jobs that we hate and more than enough money saved up to abandon them for a few months."
"We've never lived together before!" Steven exclaimed, wishing he could wave the obvious in Xabi's face. "You're the one who's always on about how it's better this way, with our separate lives -"
"I don't go on about it," Xabi contradicted him immediately. "I point out that it isn't a bad arrangement, not that it's a good one."
"Tomatoes, tomahtoes."
"We both say tomahtoes."
"Are you honestly trying to tell me that we're on the same page here? Because for a long time now, you've been on another page and I've gone, well, if he wants to sit there, on that page, I suppose I'd better let him, but it's in another fucking language, so I can't go and sit there with him -"
"Are you saying you don't want to live with me?"
"I'm not saying that at all. I'm asking whether you're saying that you want to."
"Don't I normally say what I think?"
"Well - tonight. . . you're not normal."
Xabi smiled at this. "Maybe you're only just beginning to see what normal is."
Steven had a very well-established sense of what was normal, he thought. The fact that Xabi would sometimes turn up at his front door in the middle of the night because he thought he'd used the wrong word in an ad treatment (unique rather than exclusive) was normal. The way in which Xabi would politely pay the bill and then completely slate a restaurant in an online review due to the fact that their soup was overly hot was normal. The fact that Steven had a key to Xabi's apartment but was never allowed to let himself in when Xabi wasn't there was normal.
Xabi asking him to move in with him to his employee's beach house, however, was one of those little quirks that was just a little too quirky.
The build-up to the move was predictably chaotic. Suitcases were never big enough for their possessions, their cars weren't big enough for the suitcases, and the days weren't long enough to fix it all. If a half-hour went by without a call from work or from his friends asking him if he was still going ahead with it or from various organisations confirming a temporary change of address, he would be sure to receive at least two calls in the following half-hour. It rained when he had to do last-minute laundry and it was sweltering when he had to lug oversized suitcases into undersized cars.
Unpredictable, however, was Xabi's behaviour. He didn't seem stressed in the usual ways - that is, in the ways in which Steven was stressed. Pragmatic concerns appeared to have been displaced by larger, intangible ones that Steven couldn't quite see or understand. He panicked at Steven's panic, not at what Steven was panicking at. He sought confirmations and re-confirmations of everything, sometimes phoning people who had already phoned Steven just to make sure that everything was taken care of. More than anything, his panic was directed at any sign that this entire frivolity would fall through.
"You're still sure about this, right?" he asked Steven rather tensely one morning when Steven made the mistake of complaining about how Jamie had complained when Steven had told him that his lay-off duties would be doubling over the coming months.
"Of course, I just -"
"Good, good, carry on," Xabi had interrupted, disappearing to phone someone for the umpteenth time or to refasten the zippers on Steven's suitcases.
And then, days later, the storm ended, and everything was very, very calm.
The house was, as Xabi had promised, large and gorgeous. The paintings on the wall were the kind that you'd miss if you abandoned them for a year. In the study were big blanks of space in which Sergio's work had once sat, and certain CDs had been removed from racks. The clothes that Sergio had left behind were too young for either Steven or Xabi, and, frankly, too garish for both of them combined. Drawers had been filled with photos of Sergio and another man, a man whose smile was always a little forced, a man who clearly didn't like his picture being taken in these beautiful places. The main bedroom overlooked the seaside and the rhythmic rush of waves set them to sleep easily every night despite their lack of fatigue from lack of activity. The walls were tall and bounced back the sounds that they made as they settled into the calm of the house - or as the calm of the house settled into them.
"I didn't imagine it to be like this," he heard himself say one evening, as they sat on the porch that leaked off of the kitchen and looked out at the water.
"Like what?"
"I didn't think it'd be so quiet," Steven explained, gesturing before him as though to point at the silence that inhabited the house with them. "I thought we'd still have work to do, and then we'd talk about work, and drink whiskey, not wine. I thought we'd go and see places, or just, I don't know, bike-ride and run, just for the sake of it. I imagined we'd be busier." Xabi didn't say anything. "But here we are, and it's quiet. And we're not doing very much. We sleep and we drink wine instead of whiskey. And we read; I've never read so much. I was never much of a reader." Still, Xabi was quiet. "I don't know; our lives were so busy before. And now I feel like we should be... doing things. Having epiphanies out on the water. Always talking and thinking and doing things. Is this how you imagined it would be, if we ever lived together?"
Xabi sighed, and he smiled. "I've never really thought about it."
| Chapter 2 |
Chapter: 1 of 4
Characters: David Silva / David Villa; Sergio Ramos / Fernando Torres; Steven Gerrard / Xabi Alonso
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: Lies.
Notes: AU. A story told out of time in twelve parts; here are the first three. Be aware that apparently I'm fond of backstory and tangents. Also, shamelessly nicked from Wikipedia: Counterpoint is the relationship between two or more voices that are independent in contour and rhythm and are harmonically interdependent.
Feedback > life. Constructive criticism is always welcome.
Automation.
Three things stood in the way of David Silva's rent being paid.
One: David Villa.
Two: David Villa's lack of a job.
Three: David Silva's inability to call David Villa out on his lack of a job.
David Silva owed one hundred and ten dollars a week to his landlord. He made an impressive two-hundred a week. He lived on cheap take-out and McDonalds, so he'd managed to get his food expenses down from eighty to fifty. Some weeks - particularly horrible weeks, when he didn't have time for lunch or was simply too depressed to bother going out to buy some, he managed a sweet thirty-five. Forty was lost on bills - electricity and water only, since he didn't need gas and had convinced himself that he didn't need a telephone, television or internet. This left a grand total of nothing for anything else - except in those particularly horrible weeks, the ends of which were always a ironic little silver lining of ten-dollar notes that he'd inevitably farewell in exchange for toilet paper, soap and his weekly subway ticket before Monday shot around again.
It was an unhappy cycle.
When he found himself in the deepest ridges of the unhappiness that would sometimes swallow him up before he realised he had wandered away from cold, determined contentment, he was almost relieved to find himself alone. Villa never spent more than eight hours in the studio, and they were always hanging off of midnight. He disappeared in the mornings to crash on his mother's couch - sometimes his father's, When his mother went abroad to work, his father decided that, as the patriarch, he had the right to claim everything as his own again - and Villa happily claimed the prince's throne via a blanket on the sofa and porn magazines underneath it. But all of Villa's actual living was done at Silva's.
Silva didn't like to blame Villa's father for the way he turned out, but - apples and trees, etcetera.
Silva manned telephones at a call centre for an electricals company, specialising in matters as important and varied as 'what to do when your microwave refuses to open and your food explodes inside it' and 'knowing when and when not to kick your oversized television'. It was a useless job, but someone had to do it. Silva was a useless person, and he had to do something.
Five years earlier, he would never had envisioned himself wearing jumpers that smelled like mothballs and had awkwardly misshapen shoulders from wire coathangers, sitting at a cubicle with what looked like a piss stain beneath his feet and a shitload of user manuals littering his desk. Five years earlier, he had been somebody, on his way to becoming somebody important.
He should have known that an English major wasn't going to get him anywhere, but at the time, he felt fucking indestructible. He was clever, and had a way with words, and used his cleverness and way with words to dominate class discussions about everything from twentieth century Marxism to the relevance to contemporary society of the romantic literary movement. He wrote not only for his university newspaper and arts bulletin, but for the gazette of the city's rival university - purely because he was better than anyone at that university was, and he was charitable enough with his talents, recognising a burgeoning arts society in need.
He wrote in his spare time with the same routine matter-of-factness with which he ate and brushed his teeth and lied to his mother about how much he was enjoying med science. It was just another thing he did; it was a way of life. He imagined a future in which newspapers and independent magazines would clamour for his talents, and he would inevitably turn them all away in favour of freelance work, eschewing the restrictions of institutions that didn't get his progressivisim, his eloquence, the nuanced sophistication that he poured, effortlessly, into every word he touched. He imagined a glorious future for himself.
But five years later, he was surrounded by piss stains and user manuals, and the only thing he could hold above the rest of the population in order to assert his own inherent superiority was the fact that they, the idiots, hadn't bothered to retain their user manuals.
What kept Silva going were the highlights. Sometimes, a day would have many. Other days would have none, and those were the ones on which every customer sounded like just a little more of an imbecile than the last, and every mouth and armpit and sweaty collar that he had to stand next to on the subway smelt just a little worse.
Highlights included but were not limited to:
One: When Xavi, who worked two cubicles away, would sidle up to him at the water cooler and tell him generously that Elsa from reception had been eyeing him again. (An ego boost is an ego boost.)
Two: When he passed a homeless person on the street, reached into his pocket, and found an actual coin. It didn't matter whether he decided to give it to the guy or not. It was the fact that he had more money than he'd thought.
Three: When he saw someone run for the subway and actually make it to the closing doors in time. This was a highlight primarily because seeing people miss their trains after hurtling down flights of stairs was so fucking pathetic that its opposite just automatically restored him a little.
Four: When he managed to grab one of the free subway newspapers and could jostle enough space in the train to actually read it.
Five (a more recent addition): When he would open the door to his apartment, tired and somewhat out of breath, and find Villa already there.
A few months earlier, he'd opened the door and yelped in a rather unbecoming way as he lifted his head and saw Villa sitting by the window. It was perhaps the silhouette that frightened him, black against the smoky grey of the night outside, and only visible when you really looked for it. Or, alternatively, it was Silva wondering, in a fleeting instant, whether something terrible had happened. Because this was the first time Villa had turned up before Silva was planning to turn the lights out. This was the first time they would actually have a conversation before having sex.
Villa had smiled - whether this was at Silva's terror, he didn't know - and said, over a cup of tea (which Silva only noticed when Villa's words worked their way through the steam), "I have some news."
He was sitting on a plastic chair, one of his legs curled up beneath him, his arms wrapped in sweater sleeves that were too long. Silva thought how very warm he looked, how homey. He thought, without quite realising that he was thinking it, that it'd be nice to come home to that image every night.
"News?" Silva raised his eyebrows as he dragged his wallet out and put it, with his keys, onto the kitchen bench, upon which he then leaned, arms crossed, to hear what his lover had to reveal.
"A friend of mine - Sergio? Did I tell you about him? Well, anyway, he lives out by the coast, and - as of next week - he's fucking off to go work interstate or something, and his place is going to be totally empty for a few months."
"And."
"And he thought about renting it out but he doesn't like the idea of tenants - too much legal bullshit, and you can't really tell them not to impregnate your furniture with coffee and sperm and vodka and vomit unless you go through all the legal bullshit, right?"
"And."
"And so he thought he'd just let a friend stay there. you know, keep house for him? And, well, guess who's the lucky bastard who happens to be his friend."
Silva thought about not having to pay his rent, about living in a mansion by the sea for a season or two, about finding a new job for a few months, or perhaps just writing in said mansion by said sea. He thought about a life where Villa would be his during the days as well as the nights; when he would see him for more than twenty ugly minutes in the blur of mornings. He thought about his five year old dreams of living a clandestine life, letting other people borrow the beauty he was capable of producing while they obliviously allowed him to mooch off of their ignorant generosity.
But he shook his head, and didn't look at Villa as he said, "I can't just leave my job. They need me."
And need him they did. He was the best fucking manual-reader in the building. Nobody knew trouble-shooting like he did.
A few minutes passed, in which Villa pretended not to be disappointed, and offered Silva some of the tea for which Silva himself had paid out of his fifty dollar food allowance. Silva declined, again, like declining was his speciality, and Villa left a few minutes later. The next morning, Silva cleared up his half-drunk tea and moved the chair from the window back to the table.
He didn't see Villa for another month after that.
Idealism.
Sergio was not particularly self-aware. He didn't notice that he sashayed and skipped and powerwalked while everybody else walked like normal people. He didn't see that caps perched backwards on the top of his head made him look like a teenager. He didn't understand that his in-your-face method of socialising was seen as somewhat abrasive and tiresome. He was well-intentioned; that's all that mattered.
He was the guy who ran in the mornings, chatted at a speed of about ten words a second to tired baristas as he grabbed his morning coffees, bopped his head energetically on the subway as music filtered out from his earphones, tinny and annoying. He was the guy who demanded high-fives and slapped people on the back if they weren't up for a high-five. He forced his way into the lives of the people around him. His voice was loud, his clothes sharp, his cologne strong and his zest for life insatiable.
He was exhausting.
Sergio had a lot of time on his hands with which to run and chat to people, and to read blogs about exactly why the next Michael Bay movie was going to suck so hard, spend forty minutes on the phone with the electricals company to figure out whether he could get a deal on a bigger television on which to watch the next Michael Bay movie, and down expensive drinks at expensive clubs where he would discuss, with a combination of workmates and acquaintances upon whom he had once forced himself, the next Michael Bay movie.
He wasted none of his time. He had once been on a train passing a large billboard that said either "Cherish the moment" or "It's a Cherry Ripe moment" and, preferring to believe that it was the former, he had had one of those epiphanies that nobody wants to hear about because they themselves haven't had one and therefore refuse to acknowledge that they exist, during which he decided that the millions of moments that constituted every second of every day could no longer go by unused. He had to pack something into all of them. And when you're possessed with the endless bounds of energy that Sergio had, such a task is as easy as switching to a new brand of bottled water. (For the record, Sergio switched up his bottled water brand every month. He didn't like the idea of forking out all of his hard-earned money to help only one bottled water company become a monopoly. Besides, some of them helped the rainforests.)
This was a huge part of the reason why Sergio and Fernando broke up.
It happened on a Monday, which was Sergio's favourite day of the week, because it signalled new beginnings, and he had decided that he was totally into that. The weather was awkward - not wet but humid, not hot but sticky - so Fernando was in a bad mood. He had walked into the restaurant where Sergio had agreed to meet him, and hadn't apologised for being late, hadn't acknowledged the fact that Sergio, too, had a home to get to and a train ticket that would expire when it hit midnight. He complained about work - both his job and his writing - and he complained about the awkward weather. He complained when the soup that the waiter brought him was too hot and burnt his tongue, and he complained when Sergio told him to stop complaining.
Sergio had then tried to cheer him up, and the only way in which Sergio knew how to do this was to make suggestions. He made many that night, including but not limited to:
One: That they go to the movies.
Two: That Fernando go back down to the coast with him.
Three: That Fernando allow Sergio to look at his writing, just this once.
Four: That Sergio take Fernando home so that he could sleep it off.
Five: That Sergio take Fernando home so that he could sleep it off with Sergio.
Fernando got progressively more irritable as Sergio tried to find ways to distract Fernando out of his frustration, but Fernando was inevitably in one of those ruts that he found quite comfortable. It sometimes seemed to Sergio that Fernando enjoyed misery - the self-absorption of it, the inability to be rescued. It was as though he saw something deterministic in it, as though this was a battle that he had been chosen to fight through, and he flatly refused to let anyone drag him out of it. Sergio's proactivism was so antithetical to that kind of stubborn passivity. Fernando would later tell Sergio that he found it offensive, almost, that Sergio even briefly entertained the idea that those suggestions could provide any kind of meaningful remedy. Sergio would find that, in turn, even more offensive.
"I think I should stop seeing you," Fernando had finally said to his soup.
Sergio sighed. Fernando had said this several times before. It was usually accompanied by something like for your own good or just temporarily, you know. And so he waited for that accompanying phrase, with his eyes threatening to roll and his fingers drumming on the table the way that teachers always seemed to do when he was in school.
But what Fernando said after that was, "For real, this time. I don't think we're good for each other."
Fernando was irritated, Sergio reasoned, and therefore apt to making blanket decisions that felt huge but that would inevitably be torn off when he found the consequences of his impulse too oppressive, too much. So he didn't panic. He said, "Okay, whatever you want", and he hugged him after they left the unfinished soup and the plate of bread that Sergio had made his way through as he'd waited for Fernando to show up. And he then waited for Fernando to rip that blanket up.
He didn't hear from Fernando at all after that.
Sergio's job dragged him, one or two days a week, on long subway trips from the coast to a large office that overlooked the city's most glamorous and useless park, a healthy salary and the bonus of being surrounded by similarly young, wealthy, ambitious if dim social butterflies who made him feel like he had found his place in the world. The hours were short, Fernando always appeared on either side, and the light at the end of this easy tunnel was that he had always had that beautiful house by the sea to sink into when the exhaustion of being on and up and in sporadic transit finally captured him.
But there had always been too little of Fernando, Sergio realised when he found himself with no Fernando at all. He had always been another activity in his day, slotted in between drinks at five and late-night supermarket runs at eleven. And his beautiful house by the sea felt emptier in the knowledge that perhaps Fernando's promise to "one day, not now, but one day" come and visit would never actually be seen through.
He came up with a plan of attack, because Sergio didn't like leaving things to chance, and the thought of busying himself with steps in that plan - steps to orchestrate change, in a plan to orchestrate a moment, an experience, a turning-point - filled him with the same kind of satisfaction that he got from deciding to force the pretty receptionist at the electricals company to talk to him, or to take the stairs instead of the escalator and shake hands with someone who did the same, or to tell his boss in no uncertain terms just how much he admired him - because that kind of proactivism could only lead to more good than bad.
Villa was dwarfed by the white largeness of the kitchen as Sergio did his best to advertise the place to him.
"It's a great neighbourhood - bike tracks and restaurants by the water and did you know that they're building an indoor rockclimbing centre next to the gym? Amazing idea, I don't know why I'm leaving. Uh - all these surfaces here," he continued, running a hand along the benchtop as Villa watched him do it, "are made of some amazing material that pretty much never needs to be cleaned. Uh, they collect the trash twice a week - twice! - which is so much better than that once-a-week shit you have to deal with in the city. Uh, it's obviously big. Easy to live in. Just - I mean, come on. Try to come up with a single reason why you wouldn't want to live here."
"I can't pay you anything for it," Villa shrugged, and then smiled. "I don't know why you'd call me over in the first place."
"I don't need you to pay for it!" Sergio replied as though it was quite commonplace to distribute free leases on beautiful beachside properties. "I'll be moving in with my boyfriend, so I won't be paying anything extra. This isn't an income thing. I just don't want the place to get dusty when I'm gone."
"I don't know," Villa hesitated. "David..."
"This is the least you can do for David," Sergio said sternly. "After - what? - years of camping out in his house and not paying any rent? Just mooching off him like a massive fucking moocher? The least you can do is save him from paying what you're not paying for."
"Look," Villa started, wearing the expression of someone about to launch into an ill-planned defensive that he would try to disguise as an offensive, "we have an arrangement, and I don't even live there, I just sleep there, and -"
"You leave the place in a mess, you eat the food that he pays for so that he has to spend even more money buying more food for himself, you turn up when he's at work and use the water and the electricity, and -"
"How the fuck do you know, asshole?"
"You used to do the same to me."
"Yeah, well, you're fucking loaded."
"And he's not."
"Then why doesn't he ever say anything?"
"Because he loves you," Sergio replied matter-of-factly, because Sergio knew whom he loved and who loved him, and he assumed that it was the same for everyone else.
He didn't notice the hesitation in Villa's "Right, of course."
"Well, listen, go and ask him, and if he says no, don't worry about it. My boss is coming over in a few, and I think he'll totally be up for it."
"Your boss?"
"Yeah, he mentioned something about wanting to take a year off just to 'sit back and live' - those were his words exactly, and I thought, fuck, that's so great, you know? I mean, we should all do something like that at some point. Discover ourselves and shit."
"You're a joke."
"And he's so rich, I mean, he's not going to lose very much by taking a few months off."
"Your boss? You'd give your house to your boss?"
"He's such a cool guy, David," Sergio replied earnestly. "Seriously, he is probably the greatest human being I have ever met. He's so together, so smart, so well-dressed."
"Being well-dressed is very important." Sergio didn't notice the sarcasm. "Well, listen. I'll ask David, but make sure you do your whole easy-to-clean-benchtops pitch to your boss, okay?"
He made to get up, and Sergio held out a hand as if it would stop him. "Going so soon? It's not like you have a job."
"My job is my man. It's what I do," Villa joked, but his smile was quick to fade.
All our tomorrows.
Steven wondered how much they would be able to do in three to six months, how much living they would be able to get done. He imagined the quiet succour of lazy, slept-in days bookending the opportunities they would take to experience the things that their busy, solitary lives in the city had always kept from them. He saw the upcoming break as an adventure to be made rather than had, empty lines upon which to mark the moments that they hadn't even thought of living yet.
He found his mind wandering off at inopportune moments - at his desk, inside Xabi - wondering what a life with Xabi would come to consist of. His life alone was dull and routine; though not far removed from the life anyone would have expected him to lead and therefore nothing to sniff at. He took people on and laid people off, faced barrages of angry letters from people who had no legal right to whine about their new-found unemployment, and at the end of the week, shook hands with his fellow take-onners and lay-offers and tried not to think about the futility of life as a middle-manager. Again - it was nothing to sniff at.
Though it had been several years, he and Xabi still lived apart. This was more to do with there never really having been a need for them to live together than an absence of want for a harmonised home life. Xabi often talked up his own independence by reference to annoying habits and idiosyncracies that Steven had never witnessed but, Xabi assured him, would have been a pain to live with. He often spoke of the importance of space in a relationship, and Steven caught him seconds away from spouting a near plagiarised version of absence makes the heart grow fonder. Xabi seemed happier when making revelations like these, and Xabi's happiness was Steven's happiness.
That it was an absence of want for a harmonised home life on Xabi's part was a thought that Steven didn't like to indulge. Xabi's insistence that living apart was a stellar idea was, Steven preferred to think, reassurance for himself. It wasn't him trying to stave off Steven's potential early-thirties clinginess, because Steven didn't have any of that. He didn't show it, anyway.
It was for this reason that Steven said to Xabi, "You're not serious," three times in the space of a minute when Xabi turned up to dinner one night, with the faintest sun-tan and the look of a man unsure about a decision he'd made, and told him that he thought that he and Steven should move into his employee's beach house for "an undecided length of time". He rattled off a rehearsed list of reasons as to why the idea wasn't actually as out-of-character as it seemed, the structured argument of a man who was intelligent but lacked a little common sense.
"We have jobs," Steven interrupted as Xabi was up to point three in his four point plan to convince him of the move.
(Point three demonstrated how the beach house would solve all of their problems, after points one and two introduced the idea of the beach house and the - rather alarming and unexpected - idea that they had problems in the first place. They had a lack of communication? They didn't know each other's tastes? Steven was familiar with the four point plan, but it always managed to floor him regardless.)
"We have jobs that we hate and more than enough money saved up to abandon them for a few months."
"We've never lived together before!" Steven exclaimed, wishing he could wave the obvious in Xabi's face. "You're the one who's always on about how it's better this way, with our separate lives -"
"I don't go on about it," Xabi contradicted him immediately. "I point out that it isn't a bad arrangement, not that it's a good one."
"Tomatoes, tomahtoes."
"We both say tomahtoes."
"Are you honestly trying to tell me that we're on the same page here? Because for a long time now, you've been on another page and I've gone, well, if he wants to sit there, on that page, I suppose I'd better let him, but it's in another fucking language, so I can't go and sit there with him -"
"Are you saying you don't want to live with me?"
"I'm not saying that at all. I'm asking whether you're saying that you want to."
"Don't I normally say what I think?"
"Well - tonight. . . you're not normal."
Xabi smiled at this. "Maybe you're only just beginning to see what normal is."
Steven had a very well-established sense of what was normal, he thought. The fact that Xabi would sometimes turn up at his front door in the middle of the night because he thought he'd used the wrong word in an ad treatment (unique rather than exclusive) was normal. The way in which Xabi would politely pay the bill and then completely slate a restaurant in an online review due to the fact that their soup was overly hot was normal. The fact that Steven had a key to Xabi's apartment but was never allowed to let himself in when Xabi wasn't there was normal.
Xabi asking him to move in with him to his employee's beach house, however, was one of those little quirks that was just a little too quirky.
The build-up to the move was predictably chaotic. Suitcases were never big enough for their possessions, their cars weren't big enough for the suitcases, and the days weren't long enough to fix it all. If a half-hour went by without a call from work or from his friends asking him if he was still going ahead with it or from various organisations confirming a temporary change of address, he would be sure to receive at least two calls in the following half-hour. It rained when he had to do last-minute laundry and it was sweltering when he had to lug oversized suitcases into undersized cars.
Unpredictable, however, was Xabi's behaviour. He didn't seem stressed in the usual ways - that is, in the ways in which Steven was stressed. Pragmatic concerns appeared to have been displaced by larger, intangible ones that Steven couldn't quite see or understand. He panicked at Steven's panic, not at what Steven was panicking at. He sought confirmations and re-confirmations of everything, sometimes phoning people who had already phoned Steven just to make sure that everything was taken care of. More than anything, his panic was directed at any sign that this entire frivolity would fall through.
"You're still sure about this, right?" he asked Steven rather tensely one morning when Steven made the mistake of complaining about how Jamie had complained when Steven had told him that his lay-off duties would be doubling over the coming months.
"Of course, I just -"
"Good, good, carry on," Xabi had interrupted, disappearing to phone someone for the umpteenth time or to refasten the zippers on Steven's suitcases.
And then, days later, the storm ended, and everything was very, very calm.
The house was, as Xabi had promised, large and gorgeous. The paintings on the wall were the kind that you'd miss if you abandoned them for a year. In the study were big blanks of space in which Sergio's work had once sat, and certain CDs had been removed from racks. The clothes that Sergio had left behind were too young for either Steven or Xabi, and, frankly, too garish for both of them combined. Drawers had been filled with photos of Sergio and another man, a man whose smile was always a little forced, a man who clearly didn't like his picture being taken in these beautiful places. The main bedroom overlooked the seaside and the rhythmic rush of waves set them to sleep easily every night despite their lack of fatigue from lack of activity. The walls were tall and bounced back the sounds that they made as they settled into the calm of the house - or as the calm of the house settled into them.
"I didn't imagine it to be like this," he heard himself say one evening, as they sat on the porch that leaked off of the kitchen and looked out at the water.
"Like what?"
"I didn't think it'd be so quiet," Steven explained, gesturing before him as though to point at the silence that inhabited the house with them. "I thought we'd still have work to do, and then we'd talk about work, and drink whiskey, not wine. I thought we'd go and see places, or just, I don't know, bike-ride and run, just for the sake of it. I imagined we'd be busier." Xabi didn't say anything. "But here we are, and it's quiet. And we're not doing very much. We sleep and we drink wine instead of whiskey. And we read; I've never read so much. I was never much of a reader." Still, Xabi was quiet. "I don't know; our lives were so busy before. And now I feel like we should be... doing things. Having epiphanies out on the water. Always talking and thinking and doing things. Is this how you imagined it would be, if we ever lived together?"
Xabi sighed, and he smiled. "I've never really thought about it."
| Chapter 2 |