The Foreigners - Maxine Swann [73]
“It’s already ruined,” he said. The tendons on his neck and forearms were standing out.
She dipped her finger in, tasted, wrinkled her nose in an awful way.
He threw his hands up violently in the air, turned and left the room.
She called me again. The phone vibrated outside, stirring the jasmine, right at my wrist. It was 10:30.
She walked into the living room where he was wobbling on the couch, smoking his pipe, visibly strung out.
“This is weird. I think something’s up. I’m going to her house.” She had put short boots on instead of her heels.
She left.
A moment after the door closed, he got up. He went into the kitchen and threw the risotto out. He took the ducks out of the oven, poured himself some wine and ate some snails. Then he put a DVD into his computer and sat down at his desk to watch it. Leonarda had told me that he liked to watch American TV series, like Sex and the City. He gradually relaxed. Every now and then he laughed.
I closed my eyes and rested the back of my head against the wall.
After a little while, Leonarda returned. Now she was the one in a state. “What the fuck? She’s not there. I went inside and everything.”
“You went in?”
“Yeah, I have the key.”
He set about warming up the meal. “Let’s eat,” he said.
She flung herself down at the table.
“Have some wine,” he said.
She didn’t touch her wine. I was enjoying this. She hardly touched her food, pulled the snails out of their shells curiously, as if it were an experiment, and left them lying there on her plate.
“I’m not hungry,” she said after a while. She got up and left the table.
He didn’t say anything, though his silence seemed to require considerable control, poured himself some more wine, finished his meal.
My mouth was watering as I watched. Finally, he got up and walked down the hall toward the bathroom. She was nowhere in sight, must have retreated to the kid’s room.
The window by the table was open onto the garden. She had hardly touched her baby duck. Dare I? I leaned in and plucked the bird off her plate. I carried it across the grass to the little bench in the far corner of the garden, where I sat down and ate it swiftly with my hands.
twenty-five
At first, she felt queasy. She was holding her breath, trying not to smell things. She had sought out a place as far away as possible from her usual stomping ground, so she wouldn’t have to run into anyone she knew. This neighborhood was literally outside the city. She’d also taken the extra precaution of wearing a wig, sleek, black, shoulder-length, with bangs.
At first, she kept her distance from the other women there. But she couldn’t help overhearing their conversations, and then following them from day to day. One woman in particular narrated things very well.
The day she’d hired her, the owner, Juana, had asked, “What do you do?”
“Makeup and hands,” she’d said.
There wasn’t much makeup work, so she began with hands. She did her first few pairs with repugnance, holding her breath. Then one day she worked a miracle on a pair of fingernails, making these ugly things—they’d been a particularly ugly pair, long, dirty, cracked—beautiful. Okay, she thought, think of it that way. The work required confronting ugliness, making it beautiful. This was something she could understand.
Another day a woman came in with her daughter. It was the daughter’s fifteenth birthday. They both needed makeup. Juana called her over.
She was nervous, but everything she put on the girl made her look so pretty that she gained confidence. Next she did the mother. Everyone in the beauty parlor exclaimed at her skill. “Now we don’t even know who’s the mother and who’s the daughter,” they said. One of the girls working there was going out on an important date that night. “Hey, can you make me up?” she asked.
Going home on the bus that night, Isolde felt so happy she wanted to shout. Then she caught herself and felt strange, as if she must be living in a warped world. Could that really make her so happy, to put makeup on a working