counterpoint; chapter two.
Title: Counterpoint
Chapter: 2 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 next three. Many, many thanks to all who read and commented on the first chapter.
Feedback > life. Constructive criticism is always welcome.
| Chapter 1 |
The city and the sea.
Some people struggle with starting things, intimidated by their magnitude or the length that they may ultimately take. Others struggle with finishing things that they've started, having overestimated their own strength, their own talents. Fernando Torres was not one of those people. He had a compulsive need to complete everything that he began, and he only began things that he knew himself capable of completing. This didn't necessarily limit him; he was a man of intelligence and ambition, a man who knew how to manage his time and cater to the standards of capricious audiences.
His career looked as though it had been planned in advance by someone lacking any concept of frivolity. He studied communications in the city's best university, completing a double major in writing and in 'textual studies', which was basically a means of studying novels without having to resort to the pointlessness of an English degree. In his second year, he volunteered at his neighbourhood newspaper, serving coffee and witnessing the sublime lack of effort that went into writing a story about the local teenage rugby competition or the annual auction held by the children of old people on the brink of death. In his third year, he wrote a few articles for a not-for-profit magazine which specialised in stories about fauna on the brink of extinction. In his final year, he landed an internship at a national television station, working on an evening current affairs program that attacked politicians on the brink of electoral defeat.
After university, he thought about traveling, but that was too much trouble for someone with little money saved up, little knowledge of how to travel on one's own in the hostel circuit, and little desire to gain that knowledge. He found that he'd rather dive straight into work than try to competitively chalk up the experiences that his fellow youth were garnering; it was all far too complicated, forcing sociability where he had none, manufacturing a sense of adventure where he'd sooner settle into bed with a book and a paycheck.
He got a permanent job at the television station, writing the introductory spiels that the hosts would rattle off of a teleprompter before launching into their prey. Miserable but comfortable, he stayed on for two years before he saw an advertisement in the subway newspaper for a job opening in the (two page) arts section. He filled in his application, attached his résumé and hoped that they didn't have an interview process, and was relieved to receive a call a couple of weeks later offering him a position as a book reviewer.
It was here that he finally got the chance to flourish. His love was for words and to read them and write them made deadlines recede to the faintest lines around what felt like a hobby that gave him money. He only had to review one book a week, and sometimes he did two, depending on how much time he had, because whatever he started, he finished. It was a blissful cocoon, trapped in the quiet of his apartment with his books and his writing on books, and every day began and ended as the books dictated. He slept at the ends of chapters, and he ate slowly as though mirroring his processing of the passages he'd read with the processing of his food. He gladly went out and saw people when an author would make a surprising, perfect observation on a tiny facet of human life, and he retreated into solitude when his ability to articulate his enthusiasm for those small moments of exact harmony between reader and writer would betray him, and he would hole himself up in front of his computer until the late hours of the night would finish his review for him.
Because he liked to keep his options open and assure himself that the option he had chosen was the best of all, Fernando consulted the careers section of various newspapers regularly. In the days before Sergio turned up at his door, dripping rainwater and grinning as though he had any right to be dripping rainwater onto the carpet of the apartment building corridor, Fernando found an ad for a job at the city's largest advertising agency. But, thinking of Sergio, as he always did, he continued turning the pages and figured that it was just one of those opportunities that had to be passed up for the sake of sanity.
Much of what Fernando did was entrenched in a safe routine, such that he could never be caught unawares by the unforeseen consequences of his own whims. It would always be difficult to house regret in a mind that never allowed him to act out of character. He planned his wardrobe for the week, put extra change in his pocket if it was a warm day and the homeless men would be begging near the subway station, and, of course, always had a novel of some sort in his backpack in the event that somene else's lack of foresight would leave him waiting for them. He was one of those people who walked into his local café and ordered 'the regular'. His friend Álvaro went with him once and gaped, making some inane comment about how that only happens in movies. Fernando wasn't proud. It was just another way in which his life was characteristically, sometimes depressingly, subject to routine.
He found himself getting excited by the smallest accidents of the world around him purely because they shook up the patterns of the life he had so carefully constructed for himself. He marveled at the guy who came by three times in the space of one week to sell him a set of encyclopaedias because he was clearly too hungover or stoned to realise he'd already been to that front door. He quietly enjoyed the times he would accidentally get onto the wrong train because the railway company had decided to mix things up and find himself somewhere near the outskirts of the city. And he would always emerge smiling on the other side of moments when it started to pour and he didn't have an umbrella, and was forced to take refuge in a nearby store, which would inevitably be one of those bric-a-brac specialties that sells everything and nothing at the same time.
It was as though Sergio had arrived in his life, all those years ago, purely to throw off the balance of it, its equilibrium. Where Fernando made plans, Sergio would greedily lay claim to them, either throwing them in the trash or scribbling his names into any available spaces. He would tag along to house parties and force his way into the world of Fernando's friends, who would invariably find him charming and elicit glares of hurt disapproval from Fernando. He would dismiss Fernando's intentions to stay in bed ("You can sleep when you're -" "Being dead isn't sleeping, Sergio.") and instead drag him to a cinema and laugh when they turned up and saw that the cinema hadn't opened yet. Or he would inject small bursts of himself into arenas that were formerly all Fernando's, by leaving a bag with a newly purchased shirt outside his door, or charging his (often dormant) mobile phone, or slamming a hand across the newspaper when Fernando was about to turn to the careers section and demanding that they do the crossword together first.
That's what he missed the most when he let go of Sergio - the surprises, the moments of painstakingly planned unpredictability. He supposed that he should have missed more than that, but it was hardly in his control, what he missed and what he didn't.
The things that Fernando didn't miss about Sergio included but were not limited to:
One: Sergio's need for Fernando to constantly explain himself, as though he were a piece of postmodern literature that Sergio's heavily structured mind couldn't fathom on its own.
Two: Sergio's sense of humour. Fernando didn't really have one - or if he did, it was best described as 'deadpan'.
Three: The way Sergio looked at him and smiled, for no apparent reason, as though he had seen a joke hidden in the curves on Fernando's prematurely lined face, or as though he had suddenly come to an understanding about Fernando that Fernando himself would not comprehend until a long while later.
When Sergio first visited Fernando's apartment, he had leaned onto the desk opposite Fernando's haphazardly arranged bookshelf, and had smiled when he said, "I love your books."
Fernando had looked up in surprise. "Have you read them?"
Sergio had merely laughed, which Fernando had felt was somewhat inappropriate, but inappropriate laughter was, he reasoned, better than inappropriate anything else.
The music had been loud in the bar where they'd met, and he hadn't been able to understand much of what Sergio was saying. He came to learn, later on, that not being able to hear Sergio was always a blessing in disguise. He frowned, though, at the time, and leaned in closer, and nodded solemnly when Sergio made it clear that he was commenting on the nice lighting in the place or on the bartender's "snappy" shoes. And Fernando's attention drifted in and out, until he leaned in again and Sergio didn't repeat himself and, instead, kissed him.
The days after that had been a confusing combination of self-loathing and an a wholly unfamiliar type of bliss. Fernando had felt a lightness in his limbs, and a strange emptiness in his head, as though he'd been ripped of all thought and emotion and was just waiting for something to shake him up, for the tide to throw him back onto the shore. It was such a tentative happiness, and he stood on the edge, unsure of whether he was allowed to walk into it totally. He found himself listening to bad pop songs on the radio and - God forbid - appreciating the soaring, hyperbolic lyrics about excess and heartbeats and the inability to function. And he would pull himself back, and still his pulse, and force himself to function, at least until his brain emptied itself and all that was left was Sergio, again.
Sergio's stock reaction was laughter. "I remember when I was a kid, I fell in love with at least one person every month," he laughed when Fernando confessed that he might be in love with Sergio. "There was my fourth grade teacher. She was a real firecracker. A guy who used to play hockey in the field near my house. He was so skinny, and so shit at hockey, man, but I thought it was adorable. Honestly, what you felt - that delirious shit? - I felt all the time as a kid. Like a freight train. The best fucking rollercoaster imaginable."
"I don't think I was ever a kid," Fernando had replied sadly. "Only a child."
"Why 'only'?"
"A kid is a child who enjoys being a child."
It was this kind of abandon that Fernando refused to allow himself to feel, and that he saw in Sergio as he stood beaming at him with the same you-can't-refuse-me confidence to which Fernando hadn't had to succumb for almost a year.
"No," he nonetheless said flaty as Sergio dripped onto the carpet with his seaside tan and his improbably large suitcase. "Absolutely not. Are you - no."
"Why not?" Sergio asked as though merely curious. "I haven't got anywhere else to go. And I love you," he tacked onto the end, an afterthought that apparently went without saying, but that stopped Fernando in the tracks of his hurriedly protesting thoughts.
"I..." Fernando felt a bit weak, as though Sergio was pulling him towards him and he would only flail unattractively if he tried to resist. "Hang on, I'll get you a towel," he eventually said heavily.
Optimism.
David Villa had an impressive résumé, but it was entirely composed of lies.
Caterer (waiter at a bad pie shop).
Educator (door-to-door encyclopaedia salesman).
Sexual health worker (distributor of free condoms at a pharmacy).
Photographer (the guy who presses the button on the computer to take photos of people as they plummet from the highest point of a rollercoaster).
Office assistant (window cleaner).
Really, he had just a spent a lifetime specialising in the art of selling people shit that they didn't need. (Nobody looked out of those office windows, anyway, and what else was rain for?)
Almost ironic, then, that he couldn't convince Silva that he needed him.
He had shirked the tiny, comfortable refuge that was Silva's apartment for a month after his attempt to contribute to their relationship, to build something that didn't rest on Silva's own sacrifices but instead on the chance thrown into his lap by Sergio Ramos, of all people. Inexplicably ashamed at his inability to pull Silva from his hollow, Villa took a few weeks to wallow in his relative uselessness. He didn't hear from Silva at all.
His role for some months now, he thought, had been facilitator, initiator, rescuer, and creator of memories of evenings in yellow light and of easy yawns. He had been the light at the end of the tunnel that took Silva from one end of the subway station to the other. He had been a refuge just as Silva had been a refuge for him.
But when he took it upon himself to disappear, nobody came running down that tunnel with desperate, breathless steps. And why should they, after all, when there was nothing to run after but Villa? What he had to offer was himself, alone, and if that wasn't enough, he didn't have a party favour or a free gift with purchase to throw out as a consolation prize. And, he thought sadly, perhaps he, alone, just wasn't enough.
Uselessness had forever been a competition at home and Villa was usually the winner. He and his father would take turns pointing out each other's exhibitions of indolence, though, of course, they were kidding themselves that this was all an exercise in mockery. It always ended up being a gross reminder not of the fact that they were as bad as each other - because Villa the younger was always worse - but that they had so much ammunition to fire at one another, and the final result was always self-exposure via exposing the other.
Not inherited from his father but, rather, entirely his own creation was his temper. His father would laugh when Villa would attack his (sometimes literal) eating away of his pension money, and he would laugh when Villa would stammer something about the job market being tough at this time of year (no matter what time of year it was; apparently April was just as bad as December). But Villa always walked away fuming, feeling like less of himself, or as though more of himself consisted of the bad stuff than he'd thought, with less space taken up by the good. There was little laughter on his side of it, because shame, like its cousins humiliation and regret, has always been hardest to laugh through.
He snapped at people, though they didn't notice because swearing was commonplace (they didn't know that for Villa, it wasn't) and sarcasm was no longer seen to be the lowest form of wit (they didn't know that for Villa, it was). The only person who saw through it was Silva, because life likes to make the people you hurt the most the only ones capable of seeing it.
"What's he do?" Silva asked with a reluctant, grumbling sort of curiosity, a few hours after Villa had decided that he'd been in loneliness for too long now, and had come back to him, daring to mention Sergio's name in order to show him just how little the situation had affected him.
Villa grinned. "He writes jingles."
Silva's stare hardened in disbelief as though looking for a lie. "For ads?"
"It's probably actually more ridiculous than it sounds."
". . . Was he the guy who came up with 'Pink lady, no more ink, baby'?"
"Most likely," Villa shrugged. "He is the kind who uses the word 'baby' pretty liberally."
"Good God. And you wanted me to go and live in his house?"
"It's surprisingly tasteful."
"Coming from you, that's not very reassuring."
"Fuck you."
"Ugh, you know what I mean."
"Yeah, what you said."
". . . Yes. Look, you're not exactly - never mind."
Villa shook his head but took care to keep smiling, to keep the semblance of lightness up, though the demand that he stop talking went, as ever, unheeded. "You're a dick sometimes," he said. "You can't just say that to people, you know? What you said to me."
There was a pause. Out of pride, perhaps, Silva didn't drop his gaze. "You're different," he replied defensively.
"Why should I be different?"
"I don't know - time? The fact that you live here?"
"I've earned it, you mean?" Villa almost laughed. "The privilege of your unfettered honesty?"
Silva shrugged. "Maybe I mean that I have."
Villa didn't reply, mostly because unfettered honesty between two people who don't know if they can use it leads only to tense, careful silences.
After Villa had grown silent and moody, and Silva had told him to man up, and Villa had made some excuse about a job interview and closed the door a little too firmly behind him, Villa paced the streets purposelessly though with an aggression and a swiftness that made him look like someone whose existence actually had a point. He wished, somewhere in between scolding himself and cursing Silva, that he too had earned something.
Villa and Silva had reached the terrain of the deep and the vertiginous before covering the basics. Villa knew Silva's views on mortality (God-given, with an afterlife bonus) before he knew his phone number. He knew that Silva deplored romanticist literature before he knew whether he had any siblings, or that he preferred tea to coffee, or whether he was one of those people who would sooner text than call (he later discovered that Silva did neither). He knew that he loved Silva before he'd learnt his name.
They hadn't been, at the beginning, personalities - not even people. They had been drunken, lonely bodies, perfectly formed for one another, equally depressed by the oppressive music that drowned out their conversation. They had stumbled back to Silva's apartment after Villa had concluded that the friend he'd come in with was too busy chatting up some freckled twink to notice his absence.
They had fucked, and drunk more vodka, and talked until the sun came up and Silva threatened to vomit into Villa's shoes. They had promised to do it again, and Villa had stood squinting in the face of the sun that crept above building-tops, looking at the façade of Silva's apartment block such that he would never be able to forget what it looked like. He came back the next night, and the next, fell in love by the seventh, and it wasn't until the fourteenth or fifteenth that he saw the name 'David Silva' on an envelope on the living room floor.
On his way home, through the rich part of town until he reached the dregs of the east, he saw a dark-haired man loading suitcases into the back of a gratuitously large car. He stopped, wondering where he'd seen him before. Maybe they were soulmates, visitors in each other's dreams. Or maybe he'd just served him a pie once.
Castles in the sand.
Xabi was one of those list-writing, post-it note-using, agenda-scribbling people whose lives seemed to become unretrievably unglued if he found himself left to his own devices, with only his head to rely on. It was messy up there - no evenly ruled lines, no chronologically ordered pages, no means of colour-coding the professional from the personal. He didn't know how other people did it.
He should have written down the reasons why he'd thought that this stint-at-a-beach-house deal was a good one. It might have looked something like this:
One: Fresh air and a renewed relationship with nature benefits both physical and mental health.
Two: Spending time with loved ones brings you closer together.
Three: Taking a vacation once in a while boosts productivity at work.
Four: The beach is nice.
Though, really, those hadn't been the reasons at all. What they had been, Xabi didn't know, because he hadn't written them down. But as the waves crashed like a rainstorm and he lay in bed next to Steven and wondered, distressed, whether it would be awkward to reach over to the bedside table and check his emails on his Blackberry, he found himself really wishing he could remember at least one of those reasons. He needed something to cling to, something to prove that he hadn't merely had a crisis of judgment, or of premature mid-life.
The Steven of the city had been perfect because whatever it was that they had had been rooted in an unchanging routine. Xabi would sometimes stay at Steven's - never the other way around, because Xabi's home was a retreat for him and him alone, and he knew that Steven felt uncomfortable being there for a mere half hour, let alone overnight. He would always nervously brush the fabric of the sofa to smooth it, and insist on taking his shoes off. It was sweet. It was convenient.
Xabi and Steven would have coffee in the morning before heading to their respective offices. They met again for lunch, on occasion, when Xabi's employees decided to summon competence enough to cope without him for an hour. Xabi went to the gym after work, whereas Steven went in the morning while Xabi read the newspaper. (Steven didn't bother with papers; it was always bad news, anyway.) Steven sometimes deigned to cook dinner. He was a good chef, if not a particularly patient one. When he was feeling too lazy to cook, Xabi would pick a restaurant according to whether or not he could stomach oily food (according to whether or not he had a presentation the next day).
Xabi would always shower first because he didn't like going into a bathroom with a wet floor. Steven would record his sitcoms and watch them in the morning as he got ready for work, because that was when he was incapable of thinking, and when Xabi would be holed up on the balcony with his coffee and headlines. Steven walked on the left because Xabi carried a briefcase in his right hand. Xabi would turn up fifteen minutes late because Steven inevitably took a lifetime to get ready before leaving the house, for any occasion. Steven would eat the cereal; Xabi the toast. Steven would drink all the table water at the restaurant; Xabi would choose the wine.
They hadn't had to experience the worst of each other because the routine had kept them safe from it. But now Xabi found himself so departed from the comforting familiarity of Steven's kitchen, and the balcony, and the drive to the city-centre, and the restaurants, and the space in which he and Steven would dance around each other. He found that they were having to make decisions they had never had to make before. Their conversations now began with the likes of "I'm going for a walk; should I leave the back door open or take a key?" and "So... do you want to, uh, hang out now, or are you still reading?"
They had to make decisions that had previously consisted of inseparable problem-solution dichotomies where choices almost seemed to have been made for them. Their perfect harmony was shaken up by the smallest of things, like the fact that they both used a lot of milk and ran out more quickly than expected, or that Xabi would sometimes choose to eschew lunch, and Steven would complain that he felt like a pig eating a sandwich while Xabi sat there like the man who needs no food. Xabi found himself driven somewhat numb with irritation when, while watching brainless television, Steven stood up in each commercial break purely to stretch his legs, fidgeting and looking aimlessly out of the windows toward the sea while Xabi stared unfeelingly at Unicef advertisements.
Of course, they had had to confront the small things at the very beginning, when they hadn't yet known that they both drank coffee in the mornings, or that Steven didn't like seafood, or that Xabi didn't like to be kissed before teeth were brushed. But that didn't stop Xabi from hating every moment of take two - the second time he found Steven inaccessible, the second time Steven failed to understand him.
Steven was complaining - something about how the experience wasn't what it had said on the tin. Something about how spending this much time with Xabi had proven to be different to what he'd expected: quieter, perhaps dull. Xabi didn't listen. He missed scheduled silences, so he moped himself into one, whether or not Steven was going to join him. Steven tacked a vague throw-back question - the type that seeks validation rather than an actual opinion - onto the end of his spiel and Xabi sighed, and forced himself to smile.
"I've never really thought about it," he said at last - the easiest way to say this has never been a problem before.
There was a long pause in which neither of them could think of anything to say. "I love that cliff over there," Steven offered feebly. "I'd love to go there, and... be on the edge."
Xabi said nothing until he commented on the fact that it was getting darker and colder, and he stood up to go and order dinner over the phone. Later, when Steven was pretending to be asleep and Xabi stood up to walk off his insomnia, he thought about Steven standing on the edge of the cliff. In his late night haze, as his thoughts tumbled messily over one another as though they knew that they would be forgotten in the morning, he wondered whether Steven's inability not to test the limits of things would ever fade. He thought about Steven slipping, or falling, and about how Steven wouldn't have so much as entertained thoughts of doing either. He thought of Steven as careless, a man of accidents. He didn't interrupt his thoughts to wonder whether Steven had meant to tease his life in between his hands when he'd romanticised dancing on the edge of the world, begging for Xabi to grab it and keep it safe. He just shook his head, and the word 'idiot' appeared somewhere in there.
Perhaps this was him starting to like Steven a little less every day. A little less with every tiny disagreement or hesitation. A little less every time Steven boiled too little water in the morning, or left the lights on at night. Perhaps this was Steven becoming annoying, incompetent.
"It's not the end of the world, you know," Steven said when Xabi snapped at him for letting lunch sit in the microwave so long that it started beeping. He smiled, and it was a teen-like ambivalence that Xabi saw in it rather than the pity or concern that someone else might have seen. "Our lives aren't falling apart because you don't like some of the things that I do."
It took a moment for Xabi to find his words. "I - I didn't say anything about like."
"It's okay to dislike me sometimes. Like is different from love."
Xabi frowned. "You dislike me. Sometimes." It was the first time he'd so much as thought it.
"Of course, it's only natural."
The matter-of-factness of it took Xabi's words away again. He didn't listen to the "You're not perfect. You come close, though," that Steven added with a warmer smile this time. He lost his head in a question about whether, somewhere along the way, he had married his need to be understood with that banal, simpleton's wish to be liked. And he wondered why it was so horribly confronting and belittling that he cared so much about the answer that Steven, who understood him so well, had tossed out so casually.
Dust particles flew in the air, and he knew that a door had been opened. Steven's breaths were heavy and loud, and his feet seemed to have taken on a smell. He smiled at nothing, and started making a cup of tea without asking Xabi if he'd like one too.
The voice in his head was telling him to tell Steven nothing, but Xabi was stubborn and refused to listen to disembodied voices that couldn't be emanating from himself since he knew better than any of them what he himself wanted. And what he wanted to say was, "This isn't working."
Steven was quite still, quite calm, his eyes dropping and his teeth biting his bottom lip, almost a nod that was contained entirely in his facial expression. His fingers dropped from the sunglasses he had been about to take off of his head. It seemed that he had expected this much. Xabi was relieved that he didn't have to spell it out, that he could throw the rehearsed explanations away.
"Do you want to go back?"
"No," Xabi replied, because he didn't want to go back. "I think I need some time alone. To think."
Now the furrowed brow came - confusion, incredulity. "You want me to go back? On my own?"
"Could you?" Xabi asked with a grovelling sort of politeness, as though he was asking Steven to take out the garbage or cancel an appointment on his behalf. "It would -" mean the world to him? Save him a lot of grief? Xabi had no idea how he was planning to end that sentence. It would be for the best? That one was probably closest, because it was the most general.
Steven saved him from having to say it. "If that's what you want."
| Chapter 3 |
Chapter: 2 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 next three. Many, many thanks to all who read and commented on the first chapter.
Feedback > life. Constructive criticism is always welcome.
| Chapter 1 |
The city and the sea.
Some people struggle with starting things, intimidated by their magnitude or the length that they may ultimately take. Others struggle with finishing things that they've started, having overestimated their own strength, their own talents. Fernando Torres was not one of those people. He had a compulsive need to complete everything that he began, and he only began things that he knew himself capable of completing. This didn't necessarily limit him; he was a man of intelligence and ambition, a man who knew how to manage his time and cater to the standards of capricious audiences.
His career looked as though it had been planned in advance by someone lacking any concept of frivolity. He studied communications in the city's best university, completing a double major in writing and in 'textual studies', which was basically a means of studying novels without having to resort to the pointlessness of an English degree. In his second year, he volunteered at his neighbourhood newspaper, serving coffee and witnessing the sublime lack of effort that went into writing a story about the local teenage rugby competition or the annual auction held by the children of old people on the brink of death. In his third year, he wrote a few articles for a not-for-profit magazine which specialised in stories about fauna on the brink of extinction. In his final year, he landed an internship at a national television station, working on an evening current affairs program that attacked politicians on the brink of electoral defeat.
After university, he thought about traveling, but that was too much trouble for someone with little money saved up, little knowledge of how to travel on one's own in the hostel circuit, and little desire to gain that knowledge. He found that he'd rather dive straight into work than try to competitively chalk up the experiences that his fellow youth were garnering; it was all far too complicated, forcing sociability where he had none, manufacturing a sense of adventure where he'd sooner settle into bed with a book and a paycheck.
He got a permanent job at the television station, writing the introductory spiels that the hosts would rattle off of a teleprompter before launching into their prey. Miserable but comfortable, he stayed on for two years before he saw an advertisement in the subway newspaper for a job opening in the (two page) arts section. He filled in his application, attached his résumé and hoped that they didn't have an interview process, and was relieved to receive a call a couple of weeks later offering him a position as a book reviewer.
It was here that he finally got the chance to flourish. His love was for words and to read them and write them made deadlines recede to the faintest lines around what felt like a hobby that gave him money. He only had to review one book a week, and sometimes he did two, depending on how much time he had, because whatever he started, he finished. It was a blissful cocoon, trapped in the quiet of his apartment with his books and his writing on books, and every day began and ended as the books dictated. He slept at the ends of chapters, and he ate slowly as though mirroring his processing of the passages he'd read with the processing of his food. He gladly went out and saw people when an author would make a surprising, perfect observation on a tiny facet of human life, and he retreated into solitude when his ability to articulate his enthusiasm for those small moments of exact harmony between reader and writer would betray him, and he would hole himself up in front of his computer until the late hours of the night would finish his review for him.
Because he liked to keep his options open and assure himself that the option he had chosen was the best of all, Fernando consulted the careers section of various newspapers regularly. In the days before Sergio turned up at his door, dripping rainwater and grinning as though he had any right to be dripping rainwater onto the carpet of the apartment building corridor, Fernando found an ad for a job at the city's largest advertising agency. But, thinking of Sergio, as he always did, he continued turning the pages and figured that it was just one of those opportunities that had to be passed up for the sake of sanity.
Much of what Fernando did was entrenched in a safe routine, such that he could never be caught unawares by the unforeseen consequences of his own whims. It would always be difficult to house regret in a mind that never allowed him to act out of character. He planned his wardrobe for the week, put extra change in his pocket if it was a warm day and the homeless men would be begging near the subway station, and, of course, always had a novel of some sort in his backpack in the event that somene else's lack of foresight would leave him waiting for them. He was one of those people who walked into his local café and ordered 'the regular'. His friend Álvaro went with him once and gaped, making some inane comment about how that only happens in movies. Fernando wasn't proud. It was just another way in which his life was characteristically, sometimes depressingly, subject to routine.
He found himself getting excited by the smallest accidents of the world around him purely because they shook up the patterns of the life he had so carefully constructed for himself. He marveled at the guy who came by three times in the space of one week to sell him a set of encyclopaedias because he was clearly too hungover or stoned to realise he'd already been to that front door. He quietly enjoyed the times he would accidentally get onto the wrong train because the railway company had decided to mix things up and find himself somewhere near the outskirts of the city. And he would always emerge smiling on the other side of moments when it started to pour and he didn't have an umbrella, and was forced to take refuge in a nearby store, which would inevitably be one of those bric-a-brac specialties that sells everything and nothing at the same time.
It was as though Sergio had arrived in his life, all those years ago, purely to throw off the balance of it, its equilibrium. Where Fernando made plans, Sergio would greedily lay claim to them, either throwing them in the trash or scribbling his names into any available spaces. He would tag along to house parties and force his way into the world of Fernando's friends, who would invariably find him charming and elicit glares of hurt disapproval from Fernando. He would dismiss Fernando's intentions to stay in bed ("You can sleep when you're -" "Being dead isn't sleeping, Sergio.") and instead drag him to a cinema and laugh when they turned up and saw that the cinema hadn't opened yet. Or he would inject small bursts of himself into arenas that were formerly all Fernando's, by leaving a bag with a newly purchased shirt outside his door, or charging his (often dormant) mobile phone, or slamming a hand across the newspaper when Fernando was about to turn to the careers section and demanding that they do the crossword together first.
That's what he missed the most when he let go of Sergio - the surprises, the moments of painstakingly planned unpredictability. He supposed that he should have missed more than that, but it was hardly in his control, what he missed and what he didn't.
The things that Fernando didn't miss about Sergio included but were not limited to:
One: Sergio's need for Fernando to constantly explain himself, as though he were a piece of postmodern literature that Sergio's heavily structured mind couldn't fathom on its own.
Two: Sergio's sense of humour. Fernando didn't really have one - or if he did, it was best described as 'deadpan'.
Three: The way Sergio looked at him and smiled, for no apparent reason, as though he had seen a joke hidden in the curves on Fernando's prematurely lined face, or as though he had suddenly come to an understanding about Fernando that Fernando himself would not comprehend until a long while later.
When Sergio first visited Fernando's apartment, he had leaned onto the desk opposite Fernando's haphazardly arranged bookshelf, and had smiled when he said, "I love your books."
Fernando had looked up in surprise. "Have you read them?"
Sergio had merely laughed, which Fernando had felt was somewhat inappropriate, but inappropriate laughter was, he reasoned, better than inappropriate anything else.
The music had been loud in the bar where they'd met, and he hadn't been able to understand much of what Sergio was saying. He came to learn, later on, that not being able to hear Sergio was always a blessing in disguise. He frowned, though, at the time, and leaned in closer, and nodded solemnly when Sergio made it clear that he was commenting on the nice lighting in the place or on the bartender's "snappy" shoes. And Fernando's attention drifted in and out, until he leaned in again and Sergio didn't repeat himself and, instead, kissed him.
The days after that had been a confusing combination of self-loathing and an a wholly unfamiliar type of bliss. Fernando had felt a lightness in his limbs, and a strange emptiness in his head, as though he'd been ripped of all thought and emotion and was just waiting for something to shake him up, for the tide to throw him back onto the shore. It was such a tentative happiness, and he stood on the edge, unsure of whether he was allowed to walk into it totally. He found himself listening to bad pop songs on the radio and - God forbid - appreciating the soaring, hyperbolic lyrics about excess and heartbeats and the inability to function. And he would pull himself back, and still his pulse, and force himself to function, at least until his brain emptied itself and all that was left was Sergio, again.
Sergio's stock reaction was laughter. "I remember when I was a kid, I fell in love with at least one person every month," he laughed when Fernando confessed that he might be in love with Sergio. "There was my fourth grade teacher. She was a real firecracker. A guy who used to play hockey in the field near my house. He was so skinny, and so shit at hockey, man, but I thought it was adorable. Honestly, what you felt - that delirious shit? - I felt all the time as a kid. Like a freight train. The best fucking rollercoaster imaginable."
"I don't think I was ever a kid," Fernando had replied sadly. "Only a child."
"Why 'only'?"
"A kid is a child who enjoys being a child."
It was this kind of abandon that Fernando refused to allow himself to feel, and that he saw in Sergio as he stood beaming at him with the same you-can't-refuse-me confidence to which Fernando hadn't had to succumb for almost a year.
"No," he nonetheless said flaty as Sergio dripped onto the carpet with his seaside tan and his improbably large suitcase. "Absolutely not. Are you - no."
"Why not?" Sergio asked as though merely curious. "I haven't got anywhere else to go. And I love you," he tacked onto the end, an afterthought that apparently went without saying, but that stopped Fernando in the tracks of his hurriedly protesting thoughts.
"I..." Fernando felt a bit weak, as though Sergio was pulling him towards him and he would only flail unattractively if he tried to resist. "Hang on, I'll get you a towel," he eventually said heavily.
Optimism.
David Villa had an impressive résumé, but it was entirely composed of lies.
Caterer (waiter at a bad pie shop).
Educator (door-to-door encyclopaedia salesman).
Sexual health worker (distributor of free condoms at a pharmacy).
Photographer (the guy who presses the button on the computer to take photos of people as they plummet from the highest point of a rollercoaster).
Office assistant (window cleaner).
Really, he had just a spent a lifetime specialising in the art of selling people shit that they didn't need. (Nobody looked out of those office windows, anyway, and what else was rain for?)
Almost ironic, then, that he couldn't convince Silva that he needed him.
He had shirked the tiny, comfortable refuge that was Silva's apartment for a month after his attempt to contribute to their relationship, to build something that didn't rest on Silva's own sacrifices but instead on the chance thrown into his lap by Sergio Ramos, of all people. Inexplicably ashamed at his inability to pull Silva from his hollow, Villa took a few weeks to wallow in his relative uselessness. He didn't hear from Silva at all.
His role for some months now, he thought, had been facilitator, initiator, rescuer, and creator of memories of evenings in yellow light and of easy yawns. He had been the light at the end of the tunnel that took Silva from one end of the subway station to the other. He had been a refuge just as Silva had been a refuge for him.
But when he took it upon himself to disappear, nobody came running down that tunnel with desperate, breathless steps. And why should they, after all, when there was nothing to run after but Villa? What he had to offer was himself, alone, and if that wasn't enough, he didn't have a party favour or a free gift with purchase to throw out as a consolation prize. And, he thought sadly, perhaps he, alone, just wasn't enough.
Uselessness had forever been a competition at home and Villa was usually the winner. He and his father would take turns pointing out each other's exhibitions of indolence, though, of course, they were kidding themselves that this was all an exercise in mockery. It always ended up being a gross reminder not of the fact that they were as bad as each other - because Villa the younger was always worse - but that they had so much ammunition to fire at one another, and the final result was always self-exposure via exposing the other.
Not inherited from his father but, rather, entirely his own creation was his temper. His father would laugh when Villa would attack his (sometimes literal) eating away of his pension money, and he would laugh when Villa would stammer something about the job market being tough at this time of year (no matter what time of year it was; apparently April was just as bad as December). But Villa always walked away fuming, feeling like less of himself, or as though more of himself consisted of the bad stuff than he'd thought, with less space taken up by the good. There was little laughter on his side of it, because shame, like its cousins humiliation and regret, has always been hardest to laugh through.
He snapped at people, though they didn't notice because swearing was commonplace (they didn't know that for Villa, it wasn't) and sarcasm was no longer seen to be the lowest form of wit (they didn't know that for Villa, it was). The only person who saw through it was Silva, because life likes to make the people you hurt the most the only ones capable of seeing it.
"What's he do?" Silva asked with a reluctant, grumbling sort of curiosity, a few hours after Villa had decided that he'd been in loneliness for too long now, and had come back to him, daring to mention Sergio's name in order to show him just how little the situation had affected him.
Villa grinned. "He writes jingles."
Silva's stare hardened in disbelief as though looking for a lie. "For ads?"
"It's probably actually more ridiculous than it sounds."
". . . Was he the guy who came up with 'Pink lady, no more ink, baby'?"
"Most likely," Villa shrugged. "He is the kind who uses the word 'baby' pretty liberally."
"Good God. And you wanted me to go and live in his house?"
"It's surprisingly tasteful."
"Coming from you, that's not very reassuring."
"Fuck you."
"Ugh, you know what I mean."
"Yeah, what you said."
". . . Yes. Look, you're not exactly - never mind."
Villa shook his head but took care to keep smiling, to keep the semblance of lightness up, though the demand that he stop talking went, as ever, unheeded. "You're a dick sometimes," he said. "You can't just say that to people, you know? What you said to me."
There was a pause. Out of pride, perhaps, Silva didn't drop his gaze. "You're different," he replied defensively.
"Why should I be different?"
"I don't know - time? The fact that you live here?"
"I've earned it, you mean?" Villa almost laughed. "The privilege of your unfettered honesty?"
Silva shrugged. "Maybe I mean that I have."
Villa didn't reply, mostly because unfettered honesty between two people who don't know if they can use it leads only to tense, careful silences.
After Villa had grown silent and moody, and Silva had told him to man up, and Villa had made some excuse about a job interview and closed the door a little too firmly behind him, Villa paced the streets purposelessly though with an aggression and a swiftness that made him look like someone whose existence actually had a point. He wished, somewhere in between scolding himself and cursing Silva, that he too had earned something.
Villa and Silva had reached the terrain of the deep and the vertiginous before covering the basics. Villa knew Silva's views on mortality (God-given, with an afterlife bonus) before he knew his phone number. He knew that Silva deplored romanticist literature before he knew whether he had any siblings, or that he preferred tea to coffee, or whether he was one of those people who would sooner text than call (he later discovered that Silva did neither). He knew that he loved Silva before he'd learnt his name.
They hadn't been, at the beginning, personalities - not even people. They had been drunken, lonely bodies, perfectly formed for one another, equally depressed by the oppressive music that drowned out their conversation. They had stumbled back to Silva's apartment after Villa had concluded that the friend he'd come in with was too busy chatting up some freckled twink to notice his absence.
They had fucked, and drunk more vodka, and talked until the sun came up and Silva threatened to vomit into Villa's shoes. They had promised to do it again, and Villa had stood squinting in the face of the sun that crept above building-tops, looking at the façade of Silva's apartment block such that he would never be able to forget what it looked like. He came back the next night, and the next, fell in love by the seventh, and it wasn't until the fourteenth or fifteenth that he saw the name 'David Silva' on an envelope on the living room floor.
On his way home, through the rich part of town until he reached the dregs of the east, he saw a dark-haired man loading suitcases into the back of a gratuitously large car. He stopped, wondering where he'd seen him before. Maybe they were soulmates, visitors in each other's dreams. Or maybe he'd just served him a pie once.
Castles in the sand.
Xabi was one of those list-writing, post-it note-using, agenda-scribbling people whose lives seemed to become unretrievably unglued if he found himself left to his own devices, with only his head to rely on. It was messy up there - no evenly ruled lines, no chronologically ordered pages, no means of colour-coding the professional from the personal. He didn't know how other people did it.
He should have written down the reasons why he'd thought that this stint-at-a-beach-house deal was a good one. It might have looked something like this:
One: Fresh air and a renewed relationship with nature benefits both physical and mental health.
Two: Spending time with loved ones brings you closer together.
Three: Taking a vacation once in a while boosts productivity at work.
Four: The beach is nice.
Though, really, those hadn't been the reasons at all. What they had been, Xabi didn't know, because he hadn't written them down. But as the waves crashed like a rainstorm and he lay in bed next to Steven and wondered, distressed, whether it would be awkward to reach over to the bedside table and check his emails on his Blackberry, he found himself really wishing he could remember at least one of those reasons. He needed something to cling to, something to prove that he hadn't merely had a crisis of judgment, or of premature mid-life.
The Steven of the city had been perfect because whatever it was that they had had been rooted in an unchanging routine. Xabi would sometimes stay at Steven's - never the other way around, because Xabi's home was a retreat for him and him alone, and he knew that Steven felt uncomfortable being there for a mere half hour, let alone overnight. He would always nervously brush the fabric of the sofa to smooth it, and insist on taking his shoes off. It was sweet. It was convenient.
Xabi and Steven would have coffee in the morning before heading to their respective offices. They met again for lunch, on occasion, when Xabi's employees decided to summon competence enough to cope without him for an hour. Xabi went to the gym after work, whereas Steven went in the morning while Xabi read the newspaper. (Steven didn't bother with papers; it was always bad news, anyway.) Steven sometimes deigned to cook dinner. He was a good chef, if not a particularly patient one. When he was feeling too lazy to cook, Xabi would pick a restaurant according to whether or not he could stomach oily food (according to whether or not he had a presentation the next day).
Xabi would always shower first because he didn't like going into a bathroom with a wet floor. Steven would record his sitcoms and watch them in the morning as he got ready for work, because that was when he was incapable of thinking, and when Xabi would be holed up on the balcony with his coffee and headlines. Steven walked on the left because Xabi carried a briefcase in his right hand. Xabi would turn up fifteen minutes late because Steven inevitably took a lifetime to get ready before leaving the house, for any occasion. Steven would eat the cereal; Xabi the toast. Steven would drink all the table water at the restaurant; Xabi would choose the wine.
They hadn't had to experience the worst of each other because the routine had kept them safe from it. But now Xabi found himself so departed from the comforting familiarity of Steven's kitchen, and the balcony, and the drive to the city-centre, and the restaurants, and the space in which he and Steven would dance around each other. He found that they were having to make decisions they had never had to make before. Their conversations now began with the likes of "I'm going for a walk; should I leave the back door open or take a key?" and "So... do you want to, uh, hang out now, or are you still reading?"
They had to make decisions that had previously consisted of inseparable problem-solution dichotomies where choices almost seemed to have been made for them. Their perfect harmony was shaken up by the smallest of things, like the fact that they both used a lot of milk and ran out more quickly than expected, or that Xabi would sometimes choose to eschew lunch, and Steven would complain that he felt like a pig eating a sandwich while Xabi sat there like the man who needs no food. Xabi found himself driven somewhat numb with irritation when, while watching brainless television, Steven stood up in each commercial break purely to stretch his legs, fidgeting and looking aimlessly out of the windows toward the sea while Xabi stared unfeelingly at Unicef advertisements.
Of course, they had had to confront the small things at the very beginning, when they hadn't yet known that they both drank coffee in the mornings, or that Steven didn't like seafood, or that Xabi didn't like to be kissed before teeth were brushed. But that didn't stop Xabi from hating every moment of take two - the second time he found Steven inaccessible, the second time Steven failed to understand him.
Steven was complaining - something about how the experience wasn't what it had said on the tin. Something about how spending this much time with Xabi had proven to be different to what he'd expected: quieter, perhaps dull. Xabi didn't listen. He missed scheduled silences, so he moped himself into one, whether or not Steven was going to join him. Steven tacked a vague throw-back question - the type that seeks validation rather than an actual opinion - onto the end of his spiel and Xabi sighed, and forced himself to smile.
"I've never really thought about it," he said at last - the easiest way to say this has never been a problem before.
There was a long pause in which neither of them could think of anything to say. "I love that cliff over there," Steven offered feebly. "I'd love to go there, and... be on the edge."
Xabi said nothing until he commented on the fact that it was getting darker and colder, and he stood up to go and order dinner over the phone. Later, when Steven was pretending to be asleep and Xabi stood up to walk off his insomnia, he thought about Steven standing on the edge of the cliff. In his late night haze, as his thoughts tumbled messily over one another as though they knew that they would be forgotten in the morning, he wondered whether Steven's inability not to test the limits of things would ever fade. He thought about Steven slipping, or falling, and about how Steven wouldn't have so much as entertained thoughts of doing either. He thought of Steven as careless, a man of accidents. He didn't interrupt his thoughts to wonder whether Steven had meant to tease his life in between his hands when he'd romanticised dancing on the edge of the world, begging for Xabi to grab it and keep it safe. He just shook his head, and the word 'idiot' appeared somewhere in there.
Perhaps this was him starting to like Steven a little less every day. A little less with every tiny disagreement or hesitation. A little less every time Steven boiled too little water in the morning, or left the lights on at night. Perhaps this was Steven becoming annoying, incompetent.
"It's not the end of the world, you know," Steven said when Xabi snapped at him for letting lunch sit in the microwave so long that it started beeping. He smiled, and it was a teen-like ambivalence that Xabi saw in it rather than the pity or concern that someone else might have seen. "Our lives aren't falling apart because you don't like some of the things that I do."
It took a moment for Xabi to find his words. "I - I didn't say anything about like."
"It's okay to dislike me sometimes. Like is different from love."
Xabi frowned. "You dislike me. Sometimes." It was the first time he'd so much as thought it.
"Of course, it's only natural."
The matter-of-factness of it took Xabi's words away again. He didn't listen to the "You're not perfect. You come close, though," that Steven added with a warmer smile this time. He lost his head in a question about whether, somewhere along the way, he had married his need to be understood with that banal, simpleton's wish to be liked. And he wondered why it was so horribly confronting and belittling that he cared so much about the answer that Steven, who understood him so well, had tossed out so casually.
Dust particles flew in the air, and he knew that a door had been opened. Steven's breaths were heavy and loud, and his feet seemed to have taken on a smell. He smiled at nothing, and started making a cup of tea without asking Xabi if he'd like one too.
The voice in his head was telling him to tell Steven nothing, but Xabi was stubborn and refused to listen to disembodied voices that couldn't be emanating from himself since he knew better than any of them what he himself wanted. And what he wanted to say was, "This isn't working."
Steven was quite still, quite calm, his eyes dropping and his teeth biting his bottom lip, almost a nod that was contained entirely in his facial expression. His fingers dropped from the sunglasses he had been about to take off of his head. It seemed that he had expected this much. Xabi was relieved that he didn't have to spell it out, that he could throw the rehearsed explanations away.
"Do you want to go back?"
"No," Xabi replied, because he didn't want to go back. "I think I need some time alone. To think."
Now the furrowed brow came - confusion, incredulity. "You want me to go back? On my own?"
"Could you?" Xabi asked with a grovelling sort of politeness, as though he was asking Steven to take out the garbage or cancel an appointment on his behalf. "It would -" mean the world to him? Save him a lot of grief? Xabi had no idea how he was planning to end that sentence. It would be for the best? That one was probably closest, because it was the most general.
Steven saved him from having to say it. "If that's what you want."
| Chapter 3 |