The Foreigners - Maxine Swann [23]
“That’s okay,” I said, patting her back.
“Don’t treat me like a dog.”
I hesitated for a second, then said, “Good little dog,” and went on patting.
It turned out to be the right calculation. She laughed and in that moment, we were interrupted by exactly what we’d come for, guys. Since we’d arrived, they hadn’t taken their eyes off Leonarda. She’d removed her glasses and was showing considerable cleavage with her negligee.
“Where are you girls from?” a man with a red sweater over his shoulders asked.
Leonarda quickly perked up. “Estonia. I am, and she’s from Latvia.”
“Really? Hey”—he turned to his friend—“these girls are from Estonia, and what was the other one?”
“Latvia,” I said.
His friend, blonder, leaned in too.
“Do you like Buenos Aires?”
“We love it,” Leonarda said. “We’re neurologists. We’ve come to study the effect of Viagra on jet lag.”
The first guy made a swirling motion with his head, indicating confusion. “What?”
“Yeah, we carry Viagra with us all the time,” Leonarda said. “We have some on us now. We love it. It’s great for women too.”
She turned to me.
“See,” she said, softly, “isn’t this fun? Now the really funny thing would be if we kissed.”
“Really?” I asked.
“Yeah, then they really don’t know what to do.”
“Okay,” I said. If I had been wearing glasses, I would have taken them off.
Her mouth seemed bright and full of teeth. She was laughing. “Are you ready?”
I nodded. If only I was drunker, but we’d barely taken two sips. It seemed she was always doing this to me, acting crazy before we’d even had time to get drunk. Unlike me, she clearly didn’t need to drink to behave in any way she pleased.
She put her hand on my back and brought her face near mine. She kissed me very gently, almost too gently, lightly, it was like a butterfly, with just a little bit of tongue.
The gesture did cause a stir. Before, there had been a little space around us. Suddenly, there was none. Was it an illusion? It was like something I’d seen in an Antonioni film, Monica Vitti standing on a ledge with white stone stairs below. More and more men gather on the stairs, looking up at her, hemming her in. The place now seemed to be wall-to-wall guys, with leering male faces everywhere we turned.
“Oh, shit,” Leonarda said. “Let’s get out of here.”
She slipped her arm through mine and pulled me off my stool. She was crouching down, slinking, moving through the crowd.
“Hey, wait.” I lumbered behind, realizing we hadn’t paid. I hadn’t picked up on this habit of hers of going places and leaving without paying.
As we headed toward the exit, the crowd pressed even tighter. Was it my imagination? Suddenly, they were frantic, pawing and pulling at us. One guy’s arm went around my neck from behind. I lunged my head back and shook him off.
We rushed down the stairs. A few of the drunker, younger guys were following. We made it to the street. Leonarda took my hand and we ran. Several guys came tumbling out the doorway, yelling. One or two began to run after us, then stopped.
We turned the corner of a street and were in a plaza, lugubrious, half lit, with those huge, squat, sprawling trees, the ombu, their trunks and roots undulating like human bodies. There were people on benches making out. Oh, I remembered, we just kissed. I looked over at Leonarda shyly.
But she was already on to something else.
“C’mon, I want to show you something,” she said.
She stopped a bus and we got on. Because of the crowd, we were separated slightly. I was glad for the distance, which allowed me to be alone for a moment and absorb what I was feeling. It seemed to me that everything was quivering, the lights, the sidewalk, the leaves on the trees and the dark, huddled shapes of people walking by.
“Here we are,” Leonarda said after a while, reaching over someone and pulling on my sleeve. We both stepped down from the bus.
I felt something