counterpoint; chapter three.
Title: Counterpoint
Chapter: 3 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. Apologies for the wait.
Feedback > life. Constructive criticism is always welcome.
| Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 |
Crash.
Silva never lied to himself. He merely skipped around a few facts. He thought of them as analogous to the deleted scenes that could never feasibly improve a bad film but that petty execs feel compelled - out of a straw-grabbing wank for a morsel of credibility - to throw onto the DVD.
He told himself that he was too secure a person to call Villa out on something like rent payment. He told himself that he wasn't the type of lover who wanted to know his movements, and required monetary notes of affection every few weeks or so just to prove that the affection was still obliged. In truth, he was terrified of losing him, a man whose presence in Silva's life was predicated on a comfortable, loose sense of choice.
He didn't mind Villa talking to other men, flirting with them, thinking about them when, ordinarily, he should have been thinking about Silva. It was so much more reassuring, so much more gratifying, to know that, after perusing the catalogues of men that the world had to offer, Villa still came home to Silva - still kissed him and fucked him with the same hunger. Of course, if he didn't, if he decided that Silva paled next to some lumbering, chatty, smooth put-on of a man, Silva would have questioned Villa's judgment and left it at that. It was all an exercise in ego.
Jealousy wasn't an issue. Had he thought about jealousy - had he deigned to acknowledge its existence - he would have been throwing a purple prose metaphor into a fucking *NSYNC song. He would have been looking for something deeper where his relationship with Villa was entirely casual. And not even on a subconscious level could he allow himself to be so desperate.
They hadn't done much in terms of progress but the boxes had been checked so quickly. Or, rather, where the years had passed and not changed much in the relationships that Silva had with other people, he became so much closer to Villa, so much more reliant upon him and upon Villa's reliance upon him that it made him flick through the silences between conversations and the days between sex which, rather than the moments together, were when time felt as though it was moving quickly, inconsequentially.
When Villa was with him, Silva was living. When Villa was not, Silva slept, unconsciously waiting for time to bring meaning back. So the instants where jealousy might have crept in, or loneliness taken shape, were lost to the knowledge that he would wake, a knowledge that Silva could so easily have taken for granted.
Iker was clearing weeds from the tiny garden outside the apartment building when Silva left in the morning.
"I need your rent, man."
"Yeah, this evening," Silva mumbled. "Sorry."
"Are you . . ." Iker looked up, and threw the pathetic little yellow flowers back onto the ground. "If you're struggling to pay - I mean, I know you have a guy living with you -"
"He's not living with me." Silva turned red.
"Well, he's over every night, so -"
"He's not -"
"Why don't you get him to pay half?" Iker spoke kindly, which made Silva more embarrassed. The pity of a landlord was surely a new kind of low. "I've got a lot of couples here, and -"
"We're not a couple."
"It's okay, David, I -"
"In the evening, Iker, okay?" Silva looked at him beseechingly, and Iker dropped it.
"Alright. My daughter's graduating next week, okay? So I need that money. Got to buy her a plaque or something," he smiled.
"Well, tell her 'congratulations' for me."
"Will do. She did communications - writing and textual studies. That's what you did, right?"
Silva pretended that he hadn't heard.
He fished in his pocket for loose change and was twenty cents short for a cup of coffee. The homeless lady outside the subway station got the rest. He swiped his weekly train ticket in the gate and decided that he would call Villa today, perhaps to ask him to lunch, perhaps just to ask him how he was going. He thought about the little café that they might go to, and the looks that people would give them when it became so glaringly obvious to anyone within a five-mile radius that they were incontrovertibly in love, on a level so fundamental that the conversational inanity of other couples would seem like overcompensation. They would sip their tea and look at each other though they already knew each other's faces. They would smile at jokes they had once told without retelling them, and everything would be lost to the quiet cocoon which was love's only requirement.
He realised, when he was staring at a billboard with a Cherry Ripe on it, that he didn't have Villa's phone number. He had the feeling that he'd written it down once, but it was one of those peripheral pieces of information that he hadn't thought important enough to retain. He sighed. Tea and silence would have to wait until Villa made it happen in Silva's kitchen.
There was a long-haired man on the train whose hands seemed itching to play imaginary drums to whatever song it was that he listening to on his ipod. Silva watched him. He liked him. He liked it when he reached into his bag and pulled out a tie, already fashioned into a windsor knot, and slung it his over his head, tightening it as he used the carriage window as a mirror. He liked the man's vigour. He liked the way he couldn't seem to help humming the song's chorus whenever it came around. He seemed so in control yet so willing to let small things, the things that Silva never touched, take a hold of him.
The manager looked upset, as though this was causing him more pain than it was causing Silva. Silva wanted to snap his fingers in his face and tell him that faux empathy was hardly any comfort at the moment, but he realised that his body had frozen on him somewhat, and all he could do was wait for it and hope that Xavi had been wrong when he'd told him that Gerrard had wanted to see him.
"We really wish we didn't have to do this. But, y'know. . . Outsourcing." Silva couldn't say anything. "Those folk in India," Gerrard laughed humourlessly. "They're sending us under."
"They're not sending you under."
"No, but -" He inhaled quickly. "We don't like having to do this."
"What do I get?"
"There's a - there are people to help sort that out. They'll be getting in touch with you. And, obviously, we're not going to leave you without medical. And you'll get a few months' pay."
"A few months."
"We really appreciate all the work you've done for us."
"I answered telephones. There's not much to appreciate."
"Well, anyway. We appreciate -"
"Stop using the royal 'we'. Just - please."
Gerrard inhaled again and looked away. A thought seemed to fly into his head and he opened his mouth to share it before evidently judging it not appropriate enough.
"So I have two more weeks."
"Yes."
"You expect me to get myself up in the morning, and be polite to people, and tell them to have a nice day, and have coffees with the people who haven't been fired, and -"
"Well, we - we are downsizing, so it's not just you. And - and we have a strict no-drinks policy at the desks, so if you've been -"
"This is bullshit."
"I'm sorry."
"I don't want two weeks."
"You don't have to take them."
"It's like - it's like - telling someone, 'Oh, you can't live in this house, because you can't afford it, and you'll never be able to afford it, but you can go live there for a few months, if you like. Just don't damage anything.'"
Gerrard's face contorted slightly, and Silva shook his head and left.
A part of him revelled in the fact that he would perhaps never have to take this route again. He wouldn't have to look at the homeless people by the station, or wrinkle his nose at the faint smell of urine that greeted him at the end of the tunnel, or wish he had money to buy one of the doughnuts that wafted at him from that shitty looking stall, or scramble for a seat in the train carriage only to give it up to someone so old that they shouldn't be in the fucking city anyway.
He didn't scramble that evening, or smell the doughnuts. He absently took a subway paper from the poor guy handing them out until his three-hour shift ended, squeezed into the closest carriage and looked at the feet of people who would continue in this routine every day.
He opened up the paper and, a few pages in, saw a book review written by a vaguely familiar name. He didn't think anything of it, but he was filled with the bitter sort of uneasiness that run-ins with old familiarities always brought out in him. The paper was rubbish, as ever, but he didn't have the energy to pretend that it wasn't. He tossed it onto the floor and watched as the long-haired man from the morning picked it up and absorbed himself in it.
As he moved toward the doors, waiting for his stop, the train swerved and Silva went flying into the man. "No problem, buddy," he said magnanimously in reply to Silva's clumsy apologies after an initial God damn it! He left the station with burning cheeks and a sweaty neck, wishing he were even a fraction less meagre than he felt.
Two minutes after he got home, Iker knocked on the door, not even trying to look as though he hadn't been waiting for him to get home. Why should he, Silva supposed, when he was the one being cheated out of his money by this low-life, manual-reading piece of shit?
He was halfway through a sentence that began, "Look, Iker, I know I told you I'd -" when he remembered that Fernando Torres, the book reviewer, had sat next to him a few times at university, when Silva was the absentee king of campus, and other people's names and faces were hardly worth remembering.
"Well, shit."
"Sorry?" Iker asked, puzzled and impatient, not noticing that his hand was outstretched in anticipation of his weekly rent.
Accidents.
Jamie didn't even try to hide his surprise when Steven turned up on a Tuesday morning with puffy eyes and a complete lack of desire to give anyone any kind of explanation.
"You're back."
"Yeah." Steven threw his wallet onto his desk and sighed at the sight of the computer from which he thought he'd escaped for longer than a mere month. "Cut it short. Just missed this place too much." The sarcasm felt like vomit on his tongue.
"I told you he was a dickhead."
"Drop it."
The path to the corner office in which Steven and Jamie sat for a good six days before Steven finally poured his heart out over a pitcher of beer was short and marked with the words 'lucky break' written in big, red letters. He had once been one of those guys who manned the telephones and his name would have been among those to be fired this week. He hadn't been bad at it. His phone manner was perhaps slightly impatient, but who could blame him? People were idiots. He clocked up some good numbers while managing to argue with people on online football forums in between phonecalls. It sounds like the kind of meaningless, repetitive existence that should be the subject of an Alan Ball montage, but Steven was content. He had comfort.
What had gotten him through the routine that might have made a less easily satisfied man weep in the bathroom were the people in the cubicles on either side of him: Jamie and Michael. They were equally simple, equally happy to sail through the days and share stories of the worst clients of the day once five o'clock ticked over. They were the types of people who threw a sandwich onto Steven's desk after getting back from a lunch break, left porn magazines in his drawer (with the good pages dog-eared for his ease of access) and threw wads of paper and saliva across each other's cubicles as though for the sole purpose of making Steven, for once in his life, feel like the mature one. They were comfort.
Two years before he met Xabi, Steven was hungover after a bad night with a man who wore too much cologne and had downed his fourth cup of coffee before lunch. Jamie was tapping out an annoying non-rhythm on his desk with his fingers, but Steven felt ill-placed to complain because it mirrored the nonsensical clacking of keyboards around the room. Michael, though, on Steven's other side, had chosen this morning of all mornings to choose a new ringtone for his phone. Being less than wealthy and therefore having an inexpensive phone meant that all of those ringtones were jarring beyond belief. The tinny tones were like the banging of a bass drum inside Steven's ears.
"Michael, stop it."
"Hang on, maybe this one -"
"Michael, please stop it." He took a long gulp of coffee.
"How about this?" It was a horrible ringtone version of what seemed to be salsa music. Steven could have thrown up.
"Michael, can you do that on your lunch break?"
"I'm having lunch with Louise."
"Who the fuck is Louise?"
"Oh, didn't I tell you about her? Hey, there's a Macarena one -"
"Oh, fuck no -"
"Stevie!"
"No, you - give me the fucking phone, Michael -"
"Oy! I paid for -"
"Ah, turn it off, turn it off -"
"Fuck, Stevie -"
"Fuck! Fuck, Michael!"
Steven's cup of coffee had been knocked over by Michael's grappling hand - a pool of yellow-brown on the carpet that would come to resemble a piss stain. They had glared at each other with fear weaving its way in between them, as five-year-old siblings do when they break something during playtime and wonder whether blaming each other will make mother go easier on them. Steven sat down again, slowly, and put Michael's phone in his desk drawer.
"I'll need that back before lunch," Michael said softly.
The boss had summoned them both, separately, and Steven had breathed a sigh of relief when he had only asked one question: who had knocked down the cup of coffee. Three years later, Steven was the man who would be summoning low-level miscreant employees and frightening them with single questions. Three years later, Michael was still manning telephones.
One of Steven's first duties as manager was to slip in a friendly but authoritative visit to the advertising firm in the north of the city and, if all went to plan, to meet with a man who would write the jingle for the company's latest refridgerator advertisement for two-thirds of his usual fee. Steven was hesitant. The brief said something about rhyming the words 'storage' and 'your fridge' and he didn't quite know if it could be done. But he nonetheless found himself in front of the elevator at the bottom of a building with windows
As Steven waited, a small man with dark hair and a goatee came by to clean the office windows, which were so brightly lit that one couldn't help but see through them from the outside, as whiteness had eaten up the possibility of reflection. The advertising industry: they spared nothing.
The guy had a whole elevator's worth of cleaning supplies that dwarfed him. Steven glanced at his watch; he was cutting it pretty fine. The elevator doors opened and the window-cleaner graciously allowed Steven to enter ("I'll take the next one; glad to put this off for as long as possible") and Steven walked in to see that someone was already there, and had already pressed the button for the fourth floor - though Steven had thought that the man had pressed an up arrow, and had searched somewhat maniacally for the number four, leading to a swift, embarrassed realisation and an awkward explanation about his lack of common sense, and his even more worrisome lack of eyesight ("I guess that's why I've been sent to do the music and not the visuals, huh? Ahhh. . . Yeah."). The man had evidently found it all rather charming in its self-deprecation, because he found himself in Steven's bedroom a mere week later, and regularly after that for the next four years.
Steven had been intimidated by Xabi's obvious intelligence and more so by his knowledge of his own intelligence. He had a smile that seemed to find Steven amusing, and Steven sometimes caught himself wondering, late at night, in bed, whether Xabi would ever cease to find him amusing - whether that was the only thing keeping him coming back.
They didn't have much to talk about at first. They then progressed to talking about tiny non-topics, like whether chilli had any place in pasta sauce and whether Dan Brown was worth reading. One slow evening, they were watching the same news story on CNN and shaking their head at the same parts of the report, thereby realising that they had similar political views. Steven convinced Xabi to follow the same football team ("The league doesn't matter, not really; it's the European Cup that's important, and we won it five -" "Shush, I'm trying to listen to the commentary."). They eschewed the church together but found themselves feeling a little guilty come Christmas, and trudged to mass on December 24th. They ended up on the same page - though once you're there, there's nowhere to go.
Steven created the illusion of movement by always stating the obvious, because it eased talk; it shortened gaps in conversation and gave one's opposite the impression that they could mount the obstacle that was getting to know another person, because all that was required was discussion of what they already knew.
Steven discovered, over the years spent at parties and bars, in waiting rooms and in shops, that Xabi had no talent for this type of conversation, and as a result, people never had the chance to get comfortable around him. It was like they had to have something special for Xabi to allow them in; he didn't leave the door open for just anybody. And, with a glimmer of foolish pride that made him rejoice in the secrecy of his own thoughts, Steven was glad that he was one of those special people without even trying.
In the weeks before he had asked Steven to leave the house by the sea, Xabi got angry with him for always stating the obvious. He suddenly drew out a list as though from a drawer inside his head, and rattled off moments in front of paintings at galleries, on the sofa watching comedies, in the air planning itineraries for weekend holidays.
"I know all of that! I know that Las Meninas is supposed to invert the reality-art paradigm!" Steven stayed silent, not quite knowing what the word 'paradigm' meant but supposing that now was not the time to ask. "I know that we should go and visit the old churches when we travel, and that references to the Russians haven't been funny since the eighties, and that the beach is nicer when it's empty, and you don't have to -" He inhaled deeply, looking so much more troubled that Steven thought it was worth feeling. "Aren't we beyond all that? All of this surface stuff? Aren't we supposed to take all of that for granted and go a bit deeper?"
Steven stayed silent, not quite knowing whether he knew how to go deeper. He found himself, every day after that, whether for an hour or for a sliver of a second, wondering whether he was an unintelligent, vacuous person, because Xabi seemed to like him less for it.
After those first six days back at work, Steven scrambled, hungover, onto a train where he flicked through a two-day-old subway paper and wished he were less hungover. He walked quickly out of the station and toward the edge of the city, past couples who went jogging together and parents who watched their children attempt to conquer their training wheels.
He stood on the edge of the cliff and the wind rushed past his ears until he couldn't hear his muddied thoughts. He felt his body move a little, and sat down, looking out at the horizontal line of the water as though waiting for something to dance across it.
He supposed it was pointless wishing that Xabi were there with him, because that would be to wish for the impossible - like wishing for the rain to disappear for a year, or for the sky to never darken.
Windows.
"I'm all you've got."
Of course, what he'd wanted to say was "You're all I've got", but perhaps this was the moment where Sergio finally gave up and saved himself.
It had begun with one of Fernando's fits of moodiness. The cause was composite: the unwelcome stench of very badly cooked Chinese wafting into the living room from next door; the complete incomprehensibility of the essays on George Eliot that he'd been sentenced to read and review (as though George Eliot weren't impossible enough); the bitterness of that morning's tea; the headache just above his left eye. He was stubbornly resistant to being cheered up, refusing to smile as Sergio explored the world of puns, more content to cross his arms and keep his eyebrows furrowed in a frown.
Sergio made his usual mistake.
"Why don't we go somewhere," he began excitedly. "I read this really good restaurant review on the internet. There's this one guy who, I swear, has been everywhere in this city, and he writes reviews on all of them, and they're always so spot-on, Fer. Like, this guy points out everything from whether the wine that the waiters recommend -"
"No."
Sergio wasn't disheartened. "No, okay, maybe something else. We could go for a walk, maybe down by that new park next to the court house, the flowers there smell really good -"
"Flowers, Sergio? Really?"
"You have to get out of the house, Fernando."
"I don't have to do anything."
"But you're shitty because you're trapped in here all day long, so you need to get outside. Just, like, talk to people, and eat ice-cream, and maybe do some exercise -"
"Oh, God. don't. just - don't. It's offensive."
"Offensive?"
"Yes, it's fucking - you think you're -" Fernando shook his head as he tried to spit out the words. "You think you're experiencing more of the world, this way you're living. But you're not living any more than I am, Sergio. Eating ice-cream and then running it off, and smiling at strangers who aren't going to remember you - that's not living, Sergio. That's wasting your own fucking time and kidding yourself."
"Where the hell did this come from?"
"When you die, the obituary will still say 'Sergio Ramos: he wrote those shitty jingles that got stuck in your head.' It's not going to talk about how fucking chatty you were, or how you appreciated the sound of the crickets in the evening. No one's going to remember you for that shit."
Sergio was now taken aback, and, in hindsight, shuddered to think how much of a stunned mullet his face must have resembled in those moments. "None of this is about being remembered. It's about having things to remember. I don't do it for you or for anyone else."
"I know - it's just for you, for your own personal satisfaction. Just like everything you do. Having these little experiences so that you can feel like you've achieved something in between the cocktails and the wheatgrass shots. But tell me, Sergio. Is it really all that satisfying? I mean, really? Are you really achieving anything that I'm not?"
"Either that or hole myself up with a pile of books and forget that there's a world out there."
"That's not the world. The world isn't sunshine and strangers. The world is people who cry inside their living rooms because assholes like you force them to smile every fucking day."
"Oh? How do you know? You don't have anything to do with the world!"
"It made me."
"It made a mistake with you."
"It won't say that in my obituary, either."
Sergio had been living with Fernando for four months, during which time he discovered how little Fernando did with his time. It wasn't that he seemed hyperbolically static in comparison to Sergio's ceaseless activity; he didn't have to be compared to an extreme for his own idiosyncrasies to become lit up. He was introverted to a degree that conversations with other people exhausted him and sent him into a day-long solitude for recovery. He was so opposite to the types of people who are seemingly attached to their cell phones that he would lose his in the mess of other things he didn't care about: clothes, shoes, bills. He lay in bed for an hour after waking to stare at the ceiling and "think".
Sergio had felt, for so long, that he'd been living on the periphery of Fernando's life, only to realise that there was nothing happening on the inside. He was all thoughts and opinions, but nothing was turning around them. They didn't form choices, they didn't prompt changes. They didn't even bring colour to his face.
He found Fernando so opaque at times. He would say that he was happy, but he didn't look happy. He would say that he'd really enjoyed a film or a concert or Sergio's company, but Sergio would never be able to tell. He would say that he loved Sergio, but Sergio had to take his word for it. It was something about the matter-of-factness with which he said these things. There was no grand revelation, no epiphany that came to the fore. He spoke of his passions and of his surprises with the same vigour that shaped observations about the weather. It would have confused the life out of Sergio if he hadn't had so much life in him.
Everything he knew of Fernando was what Fernando offered to him. Sergio took nothing for himself, content - or obliged, or resigned - to wait until Fernando explicitly showed him something or told him something that would open up a little hole through which that part of Fernando's life would be allowed to be seen. He showed nothing accidentally, undeliberately. Sergio had to wait to be let in.
"I don't do very much," Fernando had said when they first met. "Or rather, I don't do very many things. But the things that I do, I do very much," he added, like a disclaimer.
"What things do you do?"
"I write. I write prose, about the relationships between people, and the habits that they can't shake themselves of, and the difference between how they view themselves and how they're viewed by everyone else. I read books about politics, very slowly, in the hope that I'll figure out what I believe in. I purchase objects from around the world to convince myself that it doesn't matter that I don't travel."
He had said all of this very mechanically.
"And you?" he then asked out of politeness without bothering to construe his features into anything resembling inquisitiveness, as though he'd been told once that it was rude not to reciprocate curiosity even if desire was entirely lacking.
Sergio had smiled though he felt small and purposeless and ill-fitted for conversation with this man who was so rigid that there was no scope for him to be moulded to accommodate someone else.
"I do a lot of things, and I don't do very much with them," he had eventually replied.
He had learnt more about Fernando in that bar which, over the hours, emptied around them than he had learnt about most people after a lifetime of apparently knowing them. There was a deliberateness to Fernando, as though he didn't believe in conversation without a purpose, or conversation as an end in itself rather than as a means.
Sergio learnt that Fernando drank four litres of water a day because he had drunk a lot of wine every night that he'd worked at his local newspaper and now feared that only excessive water would cure the damage he'd done to his liver. He learnt that Fernando feared death because he was tormented by childhood memories of being at his (now deceased) aunt's house and being forced to drink her terrible tea, and asking God every night as a child whether his hatred of that tea had led to her death. He learnt that Fernando was fascinated by very tall people, because he wondered what it was like to never be able to hide.
"Are you cold?" Sergio had asked when Fernando pulled on a jacket twenty minutes into their conversation.
"No, I'm just not warm," Fernando had explained - he didn't speak about himself, but explained himself, in every conversation he would ever have with Sergio. It was as though he thought of himself as a riddle that everyone else would otherwise struggle to solve, and he thought fit to give Sergio a headstart. "I like to be warm."
About a week passed during which Sergio found his insides shuddering a little when he flicked through the paper and came across the obituaries section. He had decided that this day was going to be different to those that preceded it. He wouldn't sit back and allow Fernando to sulk his way through breakfast. He wouldn't sit back and pretend to be okay with the silence or warm the bed for a quiet fuck.
But Fernando came in and smiled.
"What's wrong with you?" Fernando asked laughingly when Sergio merely stared at him. "Did I snore last night?"
"What's wrong with you?"
"Nothing's wrong with me."
"Why are you smiling?"
"You say that like I never smile."
"Well -"
"Okay, I'm not smiling anymore. Happy?"
"No, I didn't -"
"Just - forget it."
"I'm sorry."
"Forget it."
"You just - I don't know. I try to make you smile, and you don't. And then you turn up happy and I'm like -"
"I don't -"
". . . What?"
"I don't think you understand the least thing about me."
"Oh, come on. I came back here for you."
"Very selfless."
"What do you want?"
"I already know what I want and I have it. I'm not the one sitting here and demanding things of you. Do you want a cup of tea?"
"Would you rather I left?"
"Fuck, all I did was smile."
"Why is it never me that makes you smile? Why is it always something inside your own head?"
"Sometimes you're in my head."
"What, a better version of me?"
"Oh, come on, Sergio. Don't be an ass. Last chance to get a cup of tea."
"I don't want to be this person who demands things of you."
"Then don't."
"I can't not."
"You can't just let things be?"
"No."
Fernando looked up and seemed to be relieved, as though he had wanted to say this for a while now. "You're just scared of being alone." The smile returned, smaller this time. "Apparently, you can work past that. I read about it somewhere."
Later in the day, in a café over an oily pasta, Sergio realised that he'd been disappointed, more than anything, that Fernando didn't seem to need him at all. He had always thought that he'd rather be wanted than needed - that he'd rather know that someone was with him purely for the pleasure of his company than because of some uncontrollable void that needed to be filled.
But he remembered the days when Fernando would call him and beg to be talked at about anything other than whatever had gotten him into miserable spirits, and would fall asleep within ten minutes. Sergio remembered how, even this year, Fernando would sometimes come home and smile upon seeing him. but those small instances of consolation faded as Sergio got to know how Fernando led his life. The sight of Sergio frowning into a Henry James novel made Fernando laugh, but it was nothing more than entertainment, a sideshow. He fucked him and fell asleep as though he'd done another item on his checklist. He treated Sergio as though he was something distant, temporary; something he couldn't relate to but sometimes enjoyed observing from afar, to be laughed at rather than with - which is perhaps all that Fernando intended Sergio to be.
Fernando didn't need other people, or distractions. They drained him. Everything Sergio did was everything that Fernando needed less of.
The more he thought about it, the more ridiculous the two of them seemed. Having similar tastes or both being morning people seemed so trivial alongside their massive, overbearing differences in character. They could never have had a life together; they valued such different things. And Fernando - he had realised this over a year earlier.
There was embarrassment accompanying the disappointment now.
Sergio was too tired to walk back home - the first sign that something inside him was falling apart. It was the illusion, more than anything, that he'd been loved as he'd loved Fernando. He didn't resent Fernando for his distance or his coldness. He just wished he hadn't kidded himself that he could somehow bridge it.
The bustle of the subway station swallowed him up and he felt sick for home. He wondered, in between shaking his head at a homeless man and ignoring the rancid smell of the underground, whether his boss and his lover would mind sharing the house. Sergio could take the couch in the basement; he didn't mind. He got onto the train wearing the kind of sadness that he hadn't so much as looked at in years. It was ill-fitting. He didn't know what to do with it. Constantly doing had gotten him into it and it probably wouldn't get him out. Was this why people hated sadness so much - because nothing could be done about it? Because you had to just let it sit and brood until it got too heavy and fell off of you?
He grabbed a copy of the subway paper that someone had left behind in the carriage. He tried to read it but the words were lines of nothing. A small man swayed into him when the train moved swiftly around a corner, and he managed a "No problem, buddy" though, really, he was put out that his façade of pretending to read a paper and empty his head and be busy had been interrupted.
He hated this helplessness. He hated knowing that none of this was in his hands anymore; or, worse still, that it being in his hands was the last thing Fernando wanted.
He got home to an empty house. Fernando must have been out shopping for groceries or doing something else purely because it had to be done (if it didn't have to be done, Fernando would sooner have stayed in). Sergio looked around the apartment at the books on the shelves, at the television remotes covered in dust, at the windows that were never opened, at the air fresheners that made it okay for the windows to always be shut.
He went to the bedroom and began packing his suitcase, hoping that Fernando would find him in the process and stop him from leaving.
| Chapter 4 |
Chapter: 3 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. Apologies for the wait.
Feedback > life. Constructive criticism is always welcome.
| Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 |
Crash.
Silva never lied to himself. He merely skipped around a few facts. He thought of them as analogous to the deleted scenes that could never feasibly improve a bad film but that petty execs feel compelled - out of a straw-grabbing wank for a morsel of credibility - to throw onto the DVD.
He told himself that he was too secure a person to call Villa out on something like rent payment. He told himself that he wasn't the type of lover who wanted to know his movements, and required monetary notes of affection every few weeks or so just to prove that the affection was still obliged. In truth, he was terrified of losing him, a man whose presence in Silva's life was predicated on a comfortable, loose sense of choice.
He didn't mind Villa talking to other men, flirting with them, thinking about them when, ordinarily, he should have been thinking about Silva. It was so much more reassuring, so much more gratifying, to know that, after perusing the catalogues of men that the world had to offer, Villa still came home to Silva - still kissed him and fucked him with the same hunger. Of course, if he didn't, if he decided that Silva paled next to some lumbering, chatty, smooth put-on of a man, Silva would have questioned Villa's judgment and left it at that. It was all an exercise in ego.
Jealousy wasn't an issue. Had he thought about jealousy - had he deigned to acknowledge its existence - he would have been throwing a purple prose metaphor into a fucking *NSYNC song. He would have been looking for something deeper where his relationship with Villa was entirely casual. And not even on a subconscious level could he allow himself to be so desperate.
They hadn't done much in terms of progress but the boxes had been checked so quickly. Or, rather, where the years had passed and not changed much in the relationships that Silva had with other people, he became so much closer to Villa, so much more reliant upon him and upon Villa's reliance upon him that it made him flick through the silences between conversations and the days between sex which, rather than the moments together, were when time felt as though it was moving quickly, inconsequentially.
When Villa was with him, Silva was living. When Villa was not, Silva slept, unconsciously waiting for time to bring meaning back. So the instants where jealousy might have crept in, or loneliness taken shape, were lost to the knowledge that he would wake, a knowledge that Silva could so easily have taken for granted.
Iker was clearing weeds from the tiny garden outside the apartment building when Silva left in the morning.
"I need your rent, man."
"Yeah, this evening," Silva mumbled. "Sorry."
"Are you . . ." Iker looked up, and threw the pathetic little yellow flowers back onto the ground. "If you're struggling to pay - I mean, I know you have a guy living with you -"
"He's not living with me." Silva turned red.
"Well, he's over every night, so -"
"He's not -"
"Why don't you get him to pay half?" Iker spoke kindly, which made Silva more embarrassed. The pity of a landlord was surely a new kind of low. "I've got a lot of couples here, and -"
"We're not a couple."
"It's okay, David, I -"
"In the evening, Iker, okay?" Silva looked at him beseechingly, and Iker dropped it.
"Alright. My daughter's graduating next week, okay? So I need that money. Got to buy her a plaque or something," he smiled.
"Well, tell her 'congratulations' for me."
"Will do. She did communications - writing and textual studies. That's what you did, right?"
Silva pretended that he hadn't heard.
He fished in his pocket for loose change and was twenty cents short for a cup of coffee. The homeless lady outside the subway station got the rest. He swiped his weekly train ticket in the gate and decided that he would call Villa today, perhaps to ask him to lunch, perhaps just to ask him how he was going. He thought about the little café that they might go to, and the looks that people would give them when it became so glaringly obvious to anyone within a five-mile radius that they were incontrovertibly in love, on a level so fundamental that the conversational inanity of other couples would seem like overcompensation. They would sip their tea and look at each other though they already knew each other's faces. They would smile at jokes they had once told without retelling them, and everything would be lost to the quiet cocoon which was love's only requirement.
He realised, when he was staring at a billboard with a Cherry Ripe on it, that he didn't have Villa's phone number. He had the feeling that he'd written it down once, but it was one of those peripheral pieces of information that he hadn't thought important enough to retain. He sighed. Tea and silence would have to wait until Villa made it happen in Silva's kitchen.
There was a long-haired man on the train whose hands seemed itching to play imaginary drums to whatever song it was that he listening to on his ipod. Silva watched him. He liked him. He liked it when he reached into his bag and pulled out a tie, already fashioned into a windsor knot, and slung it his over his head, tightening it as he used the carriage window as a mirror. He liked the man's vigour. He liked the way he couldn't seem to help humming the song's chorus whenever it came around. He seemed so in control yet so willing to let small things, the things that Silva never touched, take a hold of him.
The manager looked upset, as though this was causing him more pain than it was causing Silva. Silva wanted to snap his fingers in his face and tell him that faux empathy was hardly any comfort at the moment, but he realised that his body had frozen on him somewhat, and all he could do was wait for it and hope that Xavi had been wrong when he'd told him that Gerrard had wanted to see him.
"We really wish we didn't have to do this. But, y'know. . . Outsourcing." Silva couldn't say anything. "Those folk in India," Gerrard laughed humourlessly. "They're sending us under."
"They're not sending you under."
"No, but -" He inhaled quickly. "We don't like having to do this."
"What do I get?"
"There's a - there are people to help sort that out. They'll be getting in touch with you. And, obviously, we're not going to leave you without medical. And you'll get a few months' pay."
"A few months."
"We really appreciate all the work you've done for us."
"I answered telephones. There's not much to appreciate."
"Well, anyway. We appreciate -"
"Stop using the royal 'we'. Just - please."
Gerrard inhaled again and looked away. A thought seemed to fly into his head and he opened his mouth to share it before evidently judging it not appropriate enough.
"So I have two more weeks."
"Yes."
"You expect me to get myself up in the morning, and be polite to people, and tell them to have a nice day, and have coffees with the people who haven't been fired, and -"
"Well, we - we are downsizing, so it's not just you. And - and we have a strict no-drinks policy at the desks, so if you've been -"
"This is bullshit."
"I'm sorry."
"I don't want two weeks."
"You don't have to take them."
"It's like - it's like - telling someone, 'Oh, you can't live in this house, because you can't afford it, and you'll never be able to afford it, but you can go live there for a few months, if you like. Just don't damage anything.'"
Gerrard's face contorted slightly, and Silva shook his head and left.
A part of him revelled in the fact that he would perhaps never have to take this route again. He wouldn't have to look at the homeless people by the station, or wrinkle his nose at the faint smell of urine that greeted him at the end of the tunnel, or wish he had money to buy one of the doughnuts that wafted at him from that shitty looking stall, or scramble for a seat in the train carriage only to give it up to someone so old that they shouldn't be in the fucking city anyway.
He didn't scramble that evening, or smell the doughnuts. He absently took a subway paper from the poor guy handing them out until his three-hour shift ended, squeezed into the closest carriage and looked at the feet of people who would continue in this routine every day.
He opened up the paper and, a few pages in, saw a book review written by a vaguely familiar name. He didn't think anything of it, but he was filled with the bitter sort of uneasiness that run-ins with old familiarities always brought out in him. The paper was rubbish, as ever, but he didn't have the energy to pretend that it wasn't. He tossed it onto the floor and watched as the long-haired man from the morning picked it up and absorbed himself in it.
As he moved toward the doors, waiting for his stop, the train swerved and Silva went flying into the man. "No problem, buddy," he said magnanimously in reply to Silva's clumsy apologies after an initial God damn it! He left the station with burning cheeks and a sweaty neck, wishing he were even a fraction less meagre than he felt.
Two minutes after he got home, Iker knocked on the door, not even trying to look as though he hadn't been waiting for him to get home. Why should he, Silva supposed, when he was the one being cheated out of his money by this low-life, manual-reading piece of shit?
He was halfway through a sentence that began, "Look, Iker, I know I told you I'd -" when he remembered that Fernando Torres, the book reviewer, had sat next to him a few times at university, when Silva was the absentee king of campus, and other people's names and faces were hardly worth remembering.
"Well, shit."
"Sorry?" Iker asked, puzzled and impatient, not noticing that his hand was outstretched in anticipation of his weekly rent.
Accidents.
Jamie didn't even try to hide his surprise when Steven turned up on a Tuesday morning with puffy eyes and a complete lack of desire to give anyone any kind of explanation.
"You're back."
"Yeah." Steven threw his wallet onto his desk and sighed at the sight of the computer from which he thought he'd escaped for longer than a mere month. "Cut it short. Just missed this place too much." The sarcasm felt like vomit on his tongue.
"I told you he was a dickhead."
"Drop it."
The path to the corner office in which Steven and Jamie sat for a good six days before Steven finally poured his heart out over a pitcher of beer was short and marked with the words 'lucky break' written in big, red letters. He had once been one of those guys who manned the telephones and his name would have been among those to be fired this week. He hadn't been bad at it. His phone manner was perhaps slightly impatient, but who could blame him? People were idiots. He clocked up some good numbers while managing to argue with people on online football forums in between phonecalls. It sounds like the kind of meaningless, repetitive existence that should be the subject of an Alan Ball montage, but Steven was content. He had comfort.
What had gotten him through the routine that might have made a less easily satisfied man weep in the bathroom were the people in the cubicles on either side of him: Jamie and Michael. They were equally simple, equally happy to sail through the days and share stories of the worst clients of the day once five o'clock ticked over. They were the types of people who threw a sandwich onto Steven's desk after getting back from a lunch break, left porn magazines in his drawer (with the good pages dog-eared for his ease of access) and threw wads of paper and saliva across each other's cubicles as though for the sole purpose of making Steven, for once in his life, feel like the mature one. They were comfort.
Two years before he met Xabi, Steven was hungover after a bad night with a man who wore too much cologne and had downed his fourth cup of coffee before lunch. Jamie was tapping out an annoying non-rhythm on his desk with his fingers, but Steven felt ill-placed to complain because it mirrored the nonsensical clacking of keyboards around the room. Michael, though, on Steven's other side, had chosen this morning of all mornings to choose a new ringtone for his phone. Being less than wealthy and therefore having an inexpensive phone meant that all of those ringtones were jarring beyond belief. The tinny tones were like the banging of a bass drum inside Steven's ears.
"Michael, stop it."
"Hang on, maybe this one -"
"Michael, please stop it." He took a long gulp of coffee.
"How about this?" It was a horrible ringtone version of what seemed to be salsa music. Steven could have thrown up.
"Michael, can you do that on your lunch break?"
"I'm having lunch with Louise."
"Who the fuck is Louise?"
"Oh, didn't I tell you about her? Hey, there's a Macarena one -"
"Oh, fuck no -"
"Stevie!"
"No, you - give me the fucking phone, Michael -"
"Oy! I paid for -"
"Ah, turn it off, turn it off -"
"Fuck, Stevie -"
"Fuck! Fuck, Michael!"
Steven's cup of coffee had been knocked over by Michael's grappling hand - a pool of yellow-brown on the carpet that would come to resemble a piss stain. They had glared at each other with fear weaving its way in between them, as five-year-old siblings do when they break something during playtime and wonder whether blaming each other will make mother go easier on them. Steven sat down again, slowly, and put Michael's phone in his desk drawer.
"I'll need that back before lunch," Michael said softly.
The boss had summoned them both, separately, and Steven had breathed a sigh of relief when he had only asked one question: who had knocked down the cup of coffee. Three years later, Steven was the man who would be summoning low-level miscreant employees and frightening them with single questions. Three years later, Michael was still manning telephones.
One of Steven's first duties as manager was to slip in a friendly but authoritative visit to the advertising firm in the north of the city and, if all went to plan, to meet with a man who would write the jingle for the company's latest refridgerator advertisement for two-thirds of his usual fee. Steven was hesitant. The brief said something about rhyming the words 'storage' and 'your fridge' and he didn't quite know if it could be done. But he nonetheless found himself in front of the elevator at the bottom of a building with windows
As Steven waited, a small man with dark hair and a goatee came by to clean the office windows, which were so brightly lit that one couldn't help but see through them from the outside, as whiteness had eaten up the possibility of reflection. The advertising industry: they spared nothing.
The guy had a whole elevator's worth of cleaning supplies that dwarfed him. Steven glanced at his watch; he was cutting it pretty fine. The elevator doors opened and the window-cleaner graciously allowed Steven to enter ("I'll take the next one; glad to put this off for as long as possible") and Steven walked in to see that someone was already there, and had already pressed the button for the fourth floor - though Steven had thought that the man had pressed an up arrow, and had searched somewhat maniacally for the number four, leading to a swift, embarrassed realisation and an awkward explanation about his lack of common sense, and his even more worrisome lack of eyesight ("I guess that's why I've been sent to do the music and not the visuals, huh? Ahhh. . . Yeah."). The man had evidently found it all rather charming in its self-deprecation, because he found himself in Steven's bedroom a mere week later, and regularly after that for the next four years.
Steven had been intimidated by Xabi's obvious intelligence and more so by his knowledge of his own intelligence. He had a smile that seemed to find Steven amusing, and Steven sometimes caught himself wondering, late at night, in bed, whether Xabi would ever cease to find him amusing - whether that was the only thing keeping him coming back.
They didn't have much to talk about at first. They then progressed to talking about tiny non-topics, like whether chilli had any place in pasta sauce and whether Dan Brown was worth reading. One slow evening, they were watching the same news story on CNN and shaking their head at the same parts of the report, thereby realising that they had similar political views. Steven convinced Xabi to follow the same football team ("The league doesn't matter, not really; it's the European Cup that's important, and we won it five -" "Shush, I'm trying to listen to the commentary."). They eschewed the church together but found themselves feeling a little guilty come Christmas, and trudged to mass on December 24th. They ended up on the same page - though once you're there, there's nowhere to go.
Steven created the illusion of movement by always stating the obvious, because it eased talk; it shortened gaps in conversation and gave one's opposite the impression that they could mount the obstacle that was getting to know another person, because all that was required was discussion of what they already knew.
Steven discovered, over the years spent at parties and bars, in waiting rooms and in shops, that Xabi had no talent for this type of conversation, and as a result, people never had the chance to get comfortable around him. It was like they had to have something special for Xabi to allow them in; he didn't leave the door open for just anybody. And, with a glimmer of foolish pride that made him rejoice in the secrecy of his own thoughts, Steven was glad that he was one of those special people without even trying.
In the weeks before he had asked Steven to leave the house by the sea, Xabi got angry with him for always stating the obvious. He suddenly drew out a list as though from a drawer inside his head, and rattled off moments in front of paintings at galleries, on the sofa watching comedies, in the air planning itineraries for weekend holidays.
"I know all of that! I know that Las Meninas is supposed to invert the reality-art paradigm!" Steven stayed silent, not quite knowing what the word 'paradigm' meant but supposing that now was not the time to ask. "I know that we should go and visit the old churches when we travel, and that references to the Russians haven't been funny since the eighties, and that the beach is nicer when it's empty, and you don't have to -" He inhaled deeply, looking so much more troubled that Steven thought it was worth feeling. "Aren't we beyond all that? All of this surface stuff? Aren't we supposed to take all of that for granted and go a bit deeper?"
Steven stayed silent, not quite knowing whether he knew how to go deeper. He found himself, every day after that, whether for an hour or for a sliver of a second, wondering whether he was an unintelligent, vacuous person, because Xabi seemed to like him less for it.
After those first six days back at work, Steven scrambled, hungover, onto a train where he flicked through a two-day-old subway paper and wished he were less hungover. He walked quickly out of the station and toward the edge of the city, past couples who went jogging together and parents who watched their children attempt to conquer their training wheels.
He stood on the edge of the cliff and the wind rushed past his ears until he couldn't hear his muddied thoughts. He felt his body move a little, and sat down, looking out at the horizontal line of the water as though waiting for something to dance across it.
He supposed it was pointless wishing that Xabi were there with him, because that would be to wish for the impossible - like wishing for the rain to disappear for a year, or for the sky to never darken.
Windows.
"I'm all you've got."
Of course, what he'd wanted to say was "You're all I've got", but perhaps this was the moment where Sergio finally gave up and saved himself.
It had begun with one of Fernando's fits of moodiness. The cause was composite: the unwelcome stench of very badly cooked Chinese wafting into the living room from next door; the complete incomprehensibility of the essays on George Eliot that he'd been sentenced to read and review (as though George Eliot weren't impossible enough); the bitterness of that morning's tea; the headache just above his left eye. He was stubbornly resistant to being cheered up, refusing to smile as Sergio explored the world of puns, more content to cross his arms and keep his eyebrows furrowed in a frown.
Sergio made his usual mistake.
"Why don't we go somewhere," he began excitedly. "I read this really good restaurant review on the internet. There's this one guy who, I swear, has been everywhere in this city, and he writes reviews on all of them, and they're always so spot-on, Fer. Like, this guy points out everything from whether the wine that the waiters recommend -"
"No."
Sergio wasn't disheartened. "No, okay, maybe something else. We could go for a walk, maybe down by that new park next to the court house, the flowers there smell really good -"
"Flowers, Sergio? Really?"
"You have to get out of the house, Fernando."
"I don't have to do anything."
"But you're shitty because you're trapped in here all day long, so you need to get outside. Just, like, talk to people, and eat ice-cream, and maybe do some exercise -"
"Oh, God. don't. just - don't. It's offensive."
"Offensive?"
"Yes, it's fucking - you think you're -" Fernando shook his head as he tried to spit out the words. "You think you're experiencing more of the world, this way you're living. But you're not living any more than I am, Sergio. Eating ice-cream and then running it off, and smiling at strangers who aren't going to remember you - that's not living, Sergio. That's wasting your own fucking time and kidding yourself."
"Where the hell did this come from?"
"When you die, the obituary will still say 'Sergio Ramos: he wrote those shitty jingles that got stuck in your head.' It's not going to talk about how fucking chatty you were, or how you appreciated the sound of the crickets in the evening. No one's going to remember you for that shit."
Sergio was now taken aback, and, in hindsight, shuddered to think how much of a stunned mullet his face must have resembled in those moments. "None of this is about being remembered. It's about having things to remember. I don't do it for you or for anyone else."
"I know - it's just for you, for your own personal satisfaction. Just like everything you do. Having these little experiences so that you can feel like you've achieved something in between the cocktails and the wheatgrass shots. But tell me, Sergio. Is it really all that satisfying? I mean, really? Are you really achieving anything that I'm not?"
"Either that or hole myself up with a pile of books and forget that there's a world out there."
"That's not the world. The world isn't sunshine and strangers. The world is people who cry inside their living rooms because assholes like you force them to smile every fucking day."
"Oh? How do you know? You don't have anything to do with the world!"
"It made me."
"It made a mistake with you."
"It won't say that in my obituary, either."
Sergio had been living with Fernando for four months, during which time he discovered how little Fernando did with his time. It wasn't that he seemed hyperbolically static in comparison to Sergio's ceaseless activity; he didn't have to be compared to an extreme for his own idiosyncrasies to become lit up. He was introverted to a degree that conversations with other people exhausted him and sent him into a day-long solitude for recovery. He was so opposite to the types of people who are seemingly attached to their cell phones that he would lose his in the mess of other things he didn't care about: clothes, shoes, bills. He lay in bed for an hour after waking to stare at the ceiling and "think".
Sergio had felt, for so long, that he'd been living on the periphery of Fernando's life, only to realise that there was nothing happening on the inside. He was all thoughts and opinions, but nothing was turning around them. They didn't form choices, they didn't prompt changes. They didn't even bring colour to his face.
He found Fernando so opaque at times. He would say that he was happy, but he didn't look happy. He would say that he'd really enjoyed a film or a concert or Sergio's company, but Sergio would never be able to tell. He would say that he loved Sergio, but Sergio had to take his word for it. It was something about the matter-of-factness with which he said these things. There was no grand revelation, no epiphany that came to the fore. He spoke of his passions and of his surprises with the same vigour that shaped observations about the weather. It would have confused the life out of Sergio if he hadn't had so much life in him.
Everything he knew of Fernando was what Fernando offered to him. Sergio took nothing for himself, content - or obliged, or resigned - to wait until Fernando explicitly showed him something or told him something that would open up a little hole through which that part of Fernando's life would be allowed to be seen. He showed nothing accidentally, undeliberately. Sergio had to wait to be let in.
"I don't do very much," Fernando had said when they first met. "Or rather, I don't do very many things. But the things that I do, I do very much," he added, like a disclaimer.
"What things do you do?"
"I write. I write prose, about the relationships between people, and the habits that they can't shake themselves of, and the difference between how they view themselves and how they're viewed by everyone else. I read books about politics, very slowly, in the hope that I'll figure out what I believe in. I purchase objects from around the world to convince myself that it doesn't matter that I don't travel."
He had said all of this very mechanically.
"And you?" he then asked out of politeness without bothering to construe his features into anything resembling inquisitiveness, as though he'd been told once that it was rude not to reciprocate curiosity even if desire was entirely lacking.
Sergio had smiled though he felt small and purposeless and ill-fitted for conversation with this man who was so rigid that there was no scope for him to be moulded to accommodate someone else.
"I do a lot of things, and I don't do very much with them," he had eventually replied.
He had learnt more about Fernando in that bar which, over the hours, emptied around them than he had learnt about most people after a lifetime of apparently knowing them. There was a deliberateness to Fernando, as though he didn't believe in conversation without a purpose, or conversation as an end in itself rather than as a means.
Sergio learnt that Fernando drank four litres of water a day because he had drunk a lot of wine every night that he'd worked at his local newspaper and now feared that only excessive water would cure the damage he'd done to his liver. He learnt that Fernando feared death because he was tormented by childhood memories of being at his (now deceased) aunt's house and being forced to drink her terrible tea, and asking God every night as a child whether his hatred of that tea had led to her death. He learnt that Fernando was fascinated by very tall people, because he wondered what it was like to never be able to hide.
"Are you cold?" Sergio had asked when Fernando pulled on a jacket twenty minutes into their conversation.
"No, I'm just not warm," Fernando had explained - he didn't speak about himself, but explained himself, in every conversation he would ever have with Sergio. It was as though he thought of himself as a riddle that everyone else would otherwise struggle to solve, and he thought fit to give Sergio a headstart. "I like to be warm."
About a week passed during which Sergio found his insides shuddering a little when he flicked through the paper and came across the obituaries section. He had decided that this day was going to be different to those that preceded it. He wouldn't sit back and allow Fernando to sulk his way through breakfast. He wouldn't sit back and pretend to be okay with the silence or warm the bed for a quiet fuck.
But Fernando came in and smiled.
"What's wrong with you?" Fernando asked laughingly when Sergio merely stared at him. "Did I snore last night?"
"What's wrong with you?"
"Nothing's wrong with me."
"Why are you smiling?"
"You say that like I never smile."
"Well -"
"Okay, I'm not smiling anymore. Happy?"
"No, I didn't -"
"Just - forget it."
"I'm sorry."
"Forget it."
"You just - I don't know. I try to make you smile, and you don't. And then you turn up happy and I'm like -"
"I don't -"
". . . What?"
"I don't think you understand the least thing about me."
"Oh, come on. I came back here for you."
"Very selfless."
"What do you want?"
"I already know what I want and I have it. I'm not the one sitting here and demanding things of you. Do you want a cup of tea?"
"Would you rather I left?"
"Fuck, all I did was smile."
"Why is it never me that makes you smile? Why is it always something inside your own head?"
"Sometimes you're in my head."
"What, a better version of me?"
"Oh, come on, Sergio. Don't be an ass. Last chance to get a cup of tea."
"I don't want to be this person who demands things of you."
"Then don't."
"I can't not."
"You can't just let things be?"
"No."
Fernando looked up and seemed to be relieved, as though he had wanted to say this for a while now. "You're just scared of being alone." The smile returned, smaller this time. "Apparently, you can work past that. I read about it somewhere."
Later in the day, in a café over an oily pasta, Sergio realised that he'd been disappointed, more than anything, that Fernando didn't seem to need him at all. He had always thought that he'd rather be wanted than needed - that he'd rather know that someone was with him purely for the pleasure of his company than because of some uncontrollable void that needed to be filled.
But he remembered the days when Fernando would call him and beg to be talked at about anything other than whatever had gotten him into miserable spirits, and would fall asleep within ten minutes. Sergio remembered how, even this year, Fernando would sometimes come home and smile upon seeing him. but those small instances of consolation faded as Sergio got to know how Fernando led his life. The sight of Sergio frowning into a Henry James novel made Fernando laugh, but it was nothing more than entertainment, a sideshow. He fucked him and fell asleep as though he'd done another item on his checklist. He treated Sergio as though he was something distant, temporary; something he couldn't relate to but sometimes enjoyed observing from afar, to be laughed at rather than with - which is perhaps all that Fernando intended Sergio to be.
Fernando didn't need other people, or distractions. They drained him. Everything Sergio did was everything that Fernando needed less of.
The more he thought about it, the more ridiculous the two of them seemed. Having similar tastes or both being morning people seemed so trivial alongside their massive, overbearing differences in character. They could never have had a life together; they valued such different things. And Fernando - he had realised this over a year earlier.
There was embarrassment accompanying the disappointment now.
Sergio was too tired to walk back home - the first sign that something inside him was falling apart. It was the illusion, more than anything, that he'd been loved as he'd loved Fernando. He didn't resent Fernando for his distance or his coldness. He just wished he hadn't kidded himself that he could somehow bridge it.
The bustle of the subway station swallowed him up and he felt sick for home. He wondered, in between shaking his head at a homeless man and ignoring the rancid smell of the underground, whether his boss and his lover would mind sharing the house. Sergio could take the couch in the basement; he didn't mind. He got onto the train wearing the kind of sadness that he hadn't so much as looked at in years. It was ill-fitting. He didn't know what to do with it. Constantly doing had gotten him into it and it probably wouldn't get him out. Was this why people hated sadness so much - because nothing could be done about it? Because you had to just let it sit and brood until it got too heavy and fell off of you?
He grabbed a copy of the subway paper that someone had left behind in the carriage. He tried to read it but the words were lines of nothing. A small man swayed into him when the train moved swiftly around a corner, and he managed a "No problem, buddy" though, really, he was put out that his façade of pretending to read a paper and empty his head and be busy had been interrupted.
He hated this helplessness. He hated knowing that none of this was in his hands anymore; or, worse still, that it being in his hands was the last thing Fernando wanted.
He got home to an empty house. Fernando must have been out shopping for groceries or doing something else purely because it had to be done (if it didn't have to be done, Fernando would sooner have stayed in). Sergio looked around the apartment at the books on the shelves, at the television remotes covered in dust, at the windows that were never opened, at the air fresheners that made it okay for the windows to always be shut.
He went to the bedroom and began packing his suitcase, hoping that Fernando would find him in the process and stop him from leaving.
| Chapter 4 |