Chapter 4

Much of our interaction was in pieces, broken, shaped perhaps by emails and short messages. We could keep the same conversation over weeks, but only saying a few phrases at a time. Other times the conversation was quick, dry and just to the point yet deeper and more sincere than usual. Many of the moments I remember are like that, almost like flash stories.

I sometimes dream about her.

"I dreamed of you the other day."

"You did?"

She was almost asleep. So was I.

"I did."

"What was the dream about?" she mumbled.

"Not sure. We were somewhere, I don't know where. A hotel, perhaps. We wanted to be with each other but we couldn't, because there were other people. Then I took you to an empty room somehow, but when I kissed you, everything dissolved and I woke up."

"At least you kissed me."

Then we fell asleep.

"Do you think I'm fat?"

Women. I'd had the vain impression that Athena would be smarter than that.

"Yes. Very fat."

"Fuck you!" She said, slapping me playfully.

"I'm sorry, should I have lied?"

Athena had a beautiful body, not anorexic like it's fashion nowadays. Sometimes she made me think of a cat; the way she moved when she was on all fours, or how she could suddenly jump around quickly. I was fond of her body, and it certainly turned me on. I liked her legs, smooth, silky to the touch, probably tended two times a day with special creams.

"Hell yeah!" she laughed.

"I learned that women don't believe when we tell them the truth. If I had answered, ‛No, I think you are fine', you wouldn't have believed me. The secret is to answer so hyperbolically that there's no way the woman would believe. She gets pissed off at your answer, and it all goes well. You know, women are complicated, dear."

"Oh, just fuck off, we're not like that," she said, still smiling.

"Of course not," I said in the most sarcastic tone I could find.

"You're worthless. Come here and pay for your words," she said, spreading her legs.

"I like this."

I had fallen asleep. "What?"

"The after."

"Sex?"

"Yes. Dozing off, feeling my legs tired, the eyelids heavy. The peace. The drunkenness of orgasm," she quoted.

"Some people feel depressed."

"Post-coitus."

"Don't you ever?" I asked.

"Sometimes. Not when I let myself go."

"Do you?"

"With you? I do."

"Only with me?" I asked.

"It's none of your business."

"No, it isn't."

I waited, almost falling asleep again.

"Do you feel depressed?" she asked me.

"Sometimes. After one-night stands. Started when I was in college, a sophomore or so. Sex had become usual, and it was more a physical need than a pleasure."

"Did it often?"

"What?"

"Casual sex."

"A bit."

"How much is a bit?"

"None of your business."

"That's a lot."

"I hated it, fucking and leaving, fucking and telling someone to leave, fucking and waking up with a stranger that I felt no connection to but for the sexual attraction the night before."

"But you still did it."

"Less and less. Until I practically stopped."

"Never had a girlfriend?"

"Of course I did. Why?"

"What was sex with her like?"

"It was better."

I knew what she was going to ask. "What about me?"

"I feel really depressed. When I walk out through that door."

She hugged me tighter.

"The first time we did it ... I arrived home feeling guilt, sick, disgusted with myself. I hated myself," Athena said. "I took a long bath, very long, because I could not clean myself. Then he arrived, behaving as he ever did. And through the next week, everything was the same. Nothing had changed. He arrived late as usual. He fucked me as usual, he noticed no difference. I wrote better than usual. You said that yourself, when I sent you a story, weeks later, that I had written then. You didn't know when I had written it. You said it was more powerful, stronger, filled with emotion."

She took her breath back.

"He travels a lot. He really does, I know it, it's not an excuse. Sometimes he spends only one day away, goes out early in the morning and comes back at night, sometimes he spends a few days out. It's his job, but ... You're a guy. Is he cheating on me?"

"I don't know him."

"You know men."

"Not all men are the same."

"What would the average one do?"

I wanted to avoid answering that question, but she talked again while I tried to find a way out of it.

"I think he does not have another woman, but he screws around. Bars. Hookers, maybe. Expensive escorts, I mean. That's more like him. I am right, am I not?" I shrugged. Quite possible, going out when he was hundreds of miles away with whoever he was working with there, maybe a strip club, maybe a bar, maybe a fancy whorehouse, maybe an escort that he saw regularly, fucking her and later talking about his wife. Perhaps he did have a mistress, how would I know? "I don't know him."

"You have a polite way to say yes. Funny, that," she said, hiding her head on my neck. It took her a long while to ask her next question. "Are you married, Marquis?"

"No, I'm not."

"I ... wouldn't mind if you were. Who am I to say anything?"

"I'm really not." I hesitated, but something made me say the whole truth. Athena made me feel comfortable, at home. "I was."

"You were?"

"Yes."

"What ... happened?"

"We were young and stupid." I only realized what I had said after I said it; but Athena didn't seem to have taken the phrase personally. I thought of Emily, and I felt nothing. There was no love, no anger, no sadness anymore. "Just that. We should never had married."

"For how long were you married?"

"Almost three years. Two years longer than we should, actually. We didn't even cheat on each other. We were too tired from fighting with each other. One day I just walked out of the apartment. I went to a hotel, sat in front of the window for most of the night, and we got a divorce."

"Oh," she said. "It must be awful to go through a divorce."

"It wasn't much worse than going through our marriage," I said, before I could think. I once loved Emily, very much. "Actually, we were so tired of arguing with each other that the divorce wasn't difficult. We both just wanted to get over it."

I paused, suddenly feeling very tired.

"I think I'm getting old, Athena. I look back at some parts of my life and they seem so distant that they could have been just a movie I watched, or a story I invented."

"Don't you want to marry again?" Athena asked. I remember to have been astonished.

"I think that thought had never crossed my mind," I said, and I meant it, at least up until that very minute.

In hindsight, one of the most pleasing aspects of our relationship was the complete openness. No subject was taboo—even things that at first would have been out of question to know, names, jobs, addresses, the tags that the world uses to label people—were later no big deal; they were uninteresting or just didn't matter. What would I gain asking her real name? I already had a name for her, one that I could whisper into her ear.

"Do you like giving blow jobs?"

The question just slipped out of my mouth. I was lying over my back, my chest covered with fresh semen, some still oozing from my penis. I remember the change in her expression, from the satisfaction of a cat that just ate a mouse to bewilderment.

"What?"

"Do you? I mean, I don't think women mind it doing it these days, but do you enjoy it it?"

After another moment of bewilderment, she started to laugh.

"What? What is wrong with that question?"

In my defense, the question was valid. Blow jobs, for Athena, seemed to be about the performance of pleasure; not like your cheap porn, not just looking straight into your eye with a wickedly naughty smile. No, she was the archetypal girl-next-door, grown up enough to know what sex is and how to do it, but not to be decadent and slutty. Her face was of interest and a touch of lust, of love for what she was doing, always intense but not tense. Her movements were slow and deliberate. The first time she blew me like this—her countenance being a sex act by itself, paused, not her mouth seeking flesh here and there in a fast ping-pong of built-up foreplay—, I was overwhelmed. It took my entire will not to come in less than a minute.