The Foreigners - Maxine Swann [76]
“What’s that?” She glanced around quickly. Miss Techie to boot. It was almost like a caricature. That’s right, of course, I thought, she’s pathologically paranoid.
“No, nothing,” I said.
I laughed. In that moment, I remembered something else that Canetti says, this time about laughter. “A human being who falls down reminds us of an animal we might have hunted and brought down ourselves. Every sudden fall that arouses laughter does so because it suggests helplessness and reminds us that the fallen can, if we want, be treated as prey. We laugh instead of eating it.”
I was working to destabilize her in one way or another.
She hadn’t lasted long living at the guy’s place, which wasn’t to say that she was through with him. She’d found lodging in a house with several other young women. “Come visit me,” she said. “I have the cutest little room.”
I timed it so that I was on my way out for the evening. I was meeting up with Pablo, the guy I’d met that night in the bar with Gabriel.
“Can I take a shower?” I asked. I took a shower in the little bathroom off her room. I came back out. “Do you have anything lacy?”
“Why?”
I shrugged. “Just to look nice. I have a meeting.”
She stood, opened a drawer, looked through her clothes. She was clearly unhappy and not adept at hiding it.
I tried on one negligee after another and finally decided on a purple one.
“You like that one?” she said. “Good. Let’s go.”
“What do you mean?” I laughed.
“Let’s go, I’m going with you.” She gripped the back of my neck with her hand.
I shrugged her off, laughing, started putting eyeliner on in the mirror. “I wish I could bring you,” I said. “But I can’t.”
That encounter gave me an idea. Her place was centrally located. At every possible opportunity, whether she was there or not, I would stop by on my way out for the evening. I would use her bathroom. I would pee or take a shower, drying off with her towel. My excuse was always that the water wasn’t working at my place. I would use her deodorant, her perfume. Or if I had perfume with me, I would spray it around. Once I even touched myself and left a snail trail on her washcloth.
Silly as they might sound, these gestures were satisfying me. With each one, I wriggled freer from the trap.
Her bras didn’t fit me, but once I borrowed some underwear, leaving a pair of mine in her dirty-clothes basket. I left a trace of lipstick on the sheet. A few blond hairs in her hairbrush, contrasting markedly with her dark ones. I shaved my armpits with her razor.
The idea was to scatter pheromones around. I kept a litany in my head of the substances containing pheromones: snail trail, spit, snot, perfume, sweat, pee.
If she was there, I would lie back on the bed, stretch my arms out, baring my armpits.
“This guy I’m meeting tonight is a writer, quite good, I think. At least, he has original ideas.”
Sometimes I would actually be meeting someone—I had picked up the habit of going to that bar and occasionally going home with someone. At other times, as in this case, it was a lie.
“What do you know about original ideas?” she snapped.
What mattered was that I had captured her attention in a new way. Her energy, usually so diversified, was caught and she with it, here in this little cage of a room. The key, of course, was that I had somewhere to go. I had no delusions, the whole situation was predicated on that. If I was fleeing, she had no need to.
“Oops, it’s late,” I said, sitting up.
twenty-seven
One day, as she was coming home from the beauty parlor, Isolde’s downstairs neighbor, a man in his forties, asked. “Would you like to come in for a cup of tea?”
Isolde was taken aback, which made her answer somewhat brusquely. “Oh, no, no, I can’t. Thank you.” She couldn’t imagine any interest in having tea with this man. In fact, a moment later as she was opening her apartment door, she had a hard time even recollecting his face. Was he that nondescript or simply off her radar?
The guy