It was after ten o’clock by the time we finished getting dressed. She pulled out her cell phone, to call her husband I suppose. Before dialing she asked me where we were going to have dinner. I told her that she was eating at her house, I was having dinner with Raul like I’d already planned, and to call for two taxis.
I found him and the movie critic’s wife in a rather mediocre French place where we’d agreed at midday to meet up. They were already finishing dinner when I arrived. By coincidence an old friend came walking by our table. He used to be a novelist and now works taking pictures of people’s auras for curative purposes. I went off with him to a techno club so as not to inconvenience Raul and his lover at the house. We ended up dancing with some drop-dead ugly girls.
Thursday, March 26.
Susana. Bluish white, strong shapely legs, ethereal dress, expensive shoes, huge enigmatic purse. She went out for a while with Socrates when they both lived in London. She says that she’s his best friend, and isn’t sure if he does it with men, but that he definitely can’t do it with women. Susana is my new editor’s ex; his wife introduced her to me at breakfast when we were discussing the terms of the contract for my cookbook, on which I haven’t made the slightest progress.
Susana has a research permit for the History Institute at the Universidad. The idea was that she’d take care of the paperwork so that I’d be able to study the letters before tomorrow, which will be my last working day in Mexico. She doesn’t mess around: we were eating breakfast at a crêperie in San Ángel when she suddenly pulled a library catalog out of her bag. Without saying anything, she stood up and told me we were leaving because they were just opening up the archives desk at the university.
Once in the privacy of her Volkswagen she asked me if I was the chef who ended up becoming famous because Teresa had dumped me. I told her that chefs weren’t famous, and that those were two separate events; that I’d earned a certain amount of recognition because I have a disciplined imagination and a tremendous capacity for work, and that Teresa lost me because she was a stupid cunt. That made her laugh, and she told me that as soon as Teresa learned that I was going to sign with the publisher she started phoning her just as if they were best friends. She’s looking for you, big guy. I shrugged my shoulders and said that she could find me if she wanted to. You’ll see, she told me. Today she’ll just casually show up when you’re having dinner with those gallery owners from Colonia Roma. And how do you know who I’m having dinner with? I asked her. Now she was the one shrugging.
Of course it turned out to be impossible to gain access to study the damned letters. The best we could get was the vague promise that they’d scan them within a few weeks, and Susana would mail them to me. On the spot, she pulled the discs to burn them onto out of her bag. I asked her if she always carried around blank discs. She told me they were re-recordable, like her.
It was by now past twelve o’clock, so we went down to celebrate the snafu with a vermouth at a bar in Coyoacán with tables on its patio. We had lunch on the other side of the plaza, at a place with more sophistication than taste. Naturally she no longer felt like going back to the publishing house, so when we got around to her dropping me off at Raul’s house, I invited her to come in and sleep it off, and then we could have a coffee. She thought that was a good idea.
She took off her dress and shoes in a flash and got right into bed under the blankets: houses in Mexico are always really fucking cold. Now lying comfortably by her side — chastely, I swear — I told her that she seemed to be the only thirty-something woman in Mexico that didn’t have at least one, if not several, boyfriends. Not for long, was her reply: in my new role as a star of international gastronomy, I was going to need a real tough bitch by my side. Then she fell into a comatose sleep.
Her nose in my neck woke me up. She was lying comfortably on top of me, resolutely naked. You’re really warm, she said to me when she noticed that I’d opened my eyes. I liked the smell of her fine, straight hair all mussed up, almost like a baby’s. She flicked out the tip of her tongue and began licking up the sweat that had pooled in my collarbone, then she worked her way up to the embarrassing gob of saliva in the corner of my mouth. Before thrusting her tongue down to my tonsils she said that, yes, this was an ambush.
She yanked off the blankets and slid down to my knees. She pulled down my shorts as I took off my T-shirt, my calves clenched tightly between hers. She has a large mouth, just the right temperature; getting head from her was more like getting a massage than the kind of sharp pleasure that most women deliver. Give me something too, I told her, and she turned her body around so we formed a sixty-nine. To access her rather pale sex required parting the curtains of her fleshy lips. Quite suddenly, she raised herself into a squatting position, rearing and bucking, using my groin like a handhold.
She’s got perfect breasts: round, high-set, intelligent. Grasping her thighs, I let her do the work but she didn’t come until I stretched her upright, squeezing her breasts, her back arching sharply, her nails sunk into the backs of my knees. I laid her out beneath me. She clenched the bedstead rail, her breasts even more beautiful in repose. Like a salsa dancer, she had smooth, still shoulders and a voracious agitation in her legs and hips. Put your tongue here, she said, panting like a wounded doe, pointing her nose at her left armpit: I don’t use deodorant. She’d spread herself out across the bed like a manta ray. I came for a long time, while she went on making even more noise. She wrapped her legs around mine and took advantage of my slow softening to masturbate by pressing her clitoris against the base of my pubis. I remember her spine pulsing from the successive waves of pleasure. She murmured: my pleat, my pleat, my pleat, from inside some joyous place where I was no longer present. After she stretched herself out again she spent a very long time running her fingertips up and down my shivering back. I fell asleep again.
She woke me when it was almost evening. You’ve got to get cleaned up, she said, so you can look handsome. I gave a little smile, trying to seem sweet. Don’t look at me with that face like a toy clown: I’m sure it helps you to get laid, but it looks pretty lame to me. It’s the only face I’ve got, I answered her. You’re just sad because nobody’s treated you like a star. She told me to turn over and then she gave me a massage from my neck down to the soles of my feet. When she finished I had an erection again. She hopped off the bed and said: Wait for me, just a minute. I planned on doing whatever she told me to. She reached for her bag and took out a silk scarf that she used to tie both my hands to the bed rails. She knelt over me with her open legs resting on mine, her whole sex exposed for my benefit, and began to masturbate with consummate skill. I’m dry, she said, speaking to herself, I believe, without the least affectation. She brought her sex close to me so that I could moisten it. At first my tongue burned from the lingering drops of my semen but soon enough I was going full steam again. She moved her hips in circles then suddenly said that was enough, pulling away from me and continuing to rub herself with her hand. At a certain point she gave a long sigh, went quiet, and then asked me to wait just a moment. She reached for her bag again and after digging through it a bit extracted a slender, elegant metallic vibrator. Do you always carry a vibrator in your purse? I asked with amused curiosity. “I’m only interested in really insecure guys, and, you know, they can’t always. .” she said. I thought about this later on and didn’t find it so funny, but at that moment I wasn’t in the mood for contemplation. She slipped the silver missile into her sex and turned the switch at its base, tensing and twisting as the vibration in her hand was transmitted throughout her body.