The Foreigners - Maxine Swann [77]
His timing was propitious. Isolde had had a hard day. She was tired. Her hands were tired. She’d been working with them all day. Her legs were tired. She was someone who liked company. She went in and sat with him. In a moment, she would continue on up to her apartment, get dressed for the cocktail party she meant to go to, but for now she would rest.
The guy, Hernán, had untidy brown hair that fell into his eyes. He put music on. He was cooking. He seemed to feel that was enough, to be in each other’s presence, cooking with the music on. Usually, Isolde would have felt uncomfortable with such a lack of chatter but, after the daylong chatter at the beauty parlor, silence was a relief. And the smell and sound of food cooking. He had a comfortable chair with cushions. She let herself sink into it.
After that, from time to time, she’d stop in and have tea with him at the end of her day. Once tea led to dinner. He was actually a good cook, surprising in an Argentine man. Except for the barbecue, which was a field of macho competition, very few Argentine men she’d met could cook.
Now and then he mentioned a friend, but it seemed that, on the whole, he lived in his own world. He didn’t seem to expect her to invite him to her place or to do anything really. He didn’t ask her any troubling questions about her life. He was not much of a talker in general. But she could feel how content he was with her presence. One day it occurred to her to wonder what he liked about her. Certainly not the things she would imagine a person would like about her. She never acted like her glamorous self in front of him. She was often tired, never dressed up, hardly bothered to charm. And she certainly wasn’t supplying sexual favors. They hadn’t so much as brushed hands in passing.
She didn’t mind his seeing her going out to a party dressed to the nines, as he sometimes did, but she was embarrassed that he would know what kind of work she did. She didn’t tell him. He didn’t ask. Then one day she found herself simply talking about something that had happened in the beauty parlor, something funny, it came tumbling out. It must have been that she was feeling so comfortable. In any case, it didn’t seem to matter. He enjoyed her story, listened and laughed, and didn’t seem in the least surprised about where she worked. Had he known it all along? She didn’t ask, simply left it at that.
One day, playing, she showed up in her black wig. “That looks nice on you,” he said.
“Do you prefer dark-haired women or blondes?”
He shrugged. “Either way. I like both.”
“Oh, come on, that’s impossible. You must have a type.”
He shrugged. “Not really. Take you. You look great both ways.”
Another day, she inadvertently discovered that his mother was institutionalized. In and out of depression for most of her life, she had tried to kill herself the year Hernán had turned thirty. She hadn’t succeeded, only enough to turn herself into a vegetable. “Probably better that way, poor thing,” he said. “She seems to suffer less.” He had grown up with her, his father gone, though it was from his father’s side that he’d come into the rental properties, a few apartments, some Chinese grocery stores. One of them was this apartment where he lived now. The others generated enough for him to live off the rents.
Once after a particularly harrowing day—she’d had a prostitute client who’d kept falling asleep as Isolde was doing her nails, then waking and saying that she didn’t like the color, so that Isolde had had to start all over again—Isolde stayed on later than usual at Hernán’s.
“Here,” he said, seeing how tired she was, “why don’t you lie down?” She let him put her in his bed, take off her shoes. She turned away and collapsed, her blond hair on the pillow. Hernán sat across the room in an armchair, watching her for a while.
Isolde woke, surprised, looked over, alarmed. But she was still in her clothes, while he, also fully clothed, slept soundly in the armchair. She felt a first