2 A Lover in Your Arms
A Lover in Your Arms
Gina, who never wore makeup, curled her eyelashes.
Her hair pulled up, she stepped into a dress she had on the floor.
She put her legs into the dress, and in one fell swoop, she slipped it over her body.
She buttoned the three buttons at her waist; she looked at the mirror next to the poster; she opened her bedroom window to ventilate the room; she stretched out her patterned comforter; she grabbed her school folders and her Walkman headphones, and left quickly to get to the university.
From the hallway, she could hear the snores.
“I’m leaving.” Her father, completely immobile, hadn’t heard her. Not even the end theme of the news channel stirred him. She approached him and spoke a little louder. “I said I’m leaving.”
Like a log. His daily evening nap in the armchair, the one she’d always seen in the dining room of the house.
She realized that in the photos of her grandparents’ apartment, that armchair always appeared.
At its worst, in order to survive the passing of time, they had refilled the cushions and reupholstered it with a darker, more durable velvet so that it looked new.
She shook him by his shoulder to wake him up.
“It’s like you’re seventy years old.”
“What?”
“You keep passing out in front of the TV.”
“I’m exhausted,” he responded, hardly opening his mouth and his eyes.
“I’m leaving. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Where are you going?”
“To class, Dad.” Where else would I be going? she thought.
“‘I’ll see you tomorrow’?”
Gina had no intention of explaining further, and pretending she hadn’t heard, she walked toward the hallway, motorcycle helmet in hand and Gloria Gaynor’s music blasting in her ears, due to the small, cushioned round headphones.
“I asked you where you were going.” Her father was waking up and starting to act like himself.
“To class.”
“You said ‘See you tomorrow.’”
“Aren’t you going to Bilbao?”
“So? I wanna know where you’re going when I’m not home.”
“We’ll see where I end up after class.” It wasn’t the first time Gina asserted the right to keep secrets.
“May I know what your plans are?”
“First of all, I’m not sure, Dad. I’m not sure where I’ll go, who I’ll see, and when I’ll come back once class lets out. Second of all, I’m eighteen years old, and I do whatever I want.”
“The hell you do.” She had managed to fully wake him up. “As if you were twenty-eight. While you live under my roof, you tell me where you’re going and what you’re doing.”
“And what about you?”
“What about me?”
“You won’t explain anything to me? We’re two strangers living here, it feels . . .”
“What’s next?”
“Who are you going to Bilbao with?”
Her father, the shape of his butt imprinted on the armchair, couldn’t muster the energy to tell her he was going alone, that he was just taking the last flight of the day between Barcelona and Bilbao, and that in the morning he’d be meeting with a lawyer for a company that made rods for windshield wipers in Galdakao, and that he couldn’t stand landing in the Sondika airport because there was always a gust of wind that shook the wings back and forth so it seemed like they would touch the ground before the wheels even could.
He had accumulated a lot of bad memories at that exact airport.
Let’s be honest, Manuel Castro did not like planes, and he only took them when he had no other choice.
And when he couldn’t avoid it, he spent the whole flight with a knot in his throat, silently murmuring one Our Father after the other, his lips never moving, until the seat belt light was turned off.
Instead of mentioning any of that—Manuel had spent years keeping things close to his chest—he looked Gina up and down.
“Will they let you into the university with a dead woman’s clothes?”
“You always do that. You . . .”
She hated how her father said “a dead woman’s clothes” with an emphasis on the d and a contempt that irked her.
She couldn’t stand it when he criticized the way she dressed and lived her life.
And laughed. And thought and ate (in small, healthy portions).
She grabbed the keys to the motorcycle that hung from the Tintin rocket on the front dresser; she opened the door, stepped out, and without saying a word, closed it less angrily than she would have liked.
Once she got back home at 8:45, there was no one home. Isabel had left at six after ironing and preparing dinner.
“Come in. You’ve never been over before?”
“When would I have come over?”
Biel guessed that, based on the kiss Gina had given him in the elevator, this evening might be one he’d never forget.
“I don’t know. When we went to school together, did you come over to play at some point?”
“No.”
“Or for some birthday party . . .”
“We were never really friends . . .”
“But we could have been. What do I know?”
“Is this your room?”
“Does it look like my dad’s, dork?” Gina walked to the window. “It faces the back courtyard. A garage with asbestos isn’t the prettiest of views.”
“It’s nice. It looks like a guy’s room.” He tried to clarify. “I mean it’s not a girly color or too cheesy . . .”
“Right, right.”
Biel’s eyes fell directly on the poster on the wardrobe.
“That’s a sick picture . . .”
“Only one person isn’t wearing 3D glasses. Let’s see if you can find him.”
Biel positioned himself inches away from the poster. He decided to filter down each row. Never without a strategy. He fixed his eyes on the lower right-hand corner of the photo and raised his gaze, in a zigzag, row after row, person after person.
“Are you sure one of them isn’t wearing glasses?”
“Are you giving up?”
“Never.”
“Just a hint.” Gina wrapped her arms around him and rested her chin on his shoulder. “It’s a little boy.”
Biel, pretending he hadn’t heard, continued scrutinizing the audience from right to left and up and down.
“Found him. Here.” He pointed. “It’s a little boy.”
“I told you. Do you think he’s still alive?”
“Oh man . . .”
“Oh woman . . .”
“He must have been ten or twelve years old? Of course he might still be alive. He would be—how old? In his middle age?”
“And the rest?”
“If this is from 1952 . . . Do you know what they were watching?”
“I looked it up, yes.” She thought hard. “Bwana Devil, the first 3D movie.”
During her first year of college, Gina had distracted herself by learning about the poster hanging in her room, on the door of her winter clothing wardrobe.
There’d been a screenwriter for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Milton Gunzburg, who had an ophthalmologist brother.
Between the two of them, Milton and Julian had invented a type of cinema called “Natural Vision.” No one paid any attention, not to them or to their invention.
Not until a producer and radio personality, Arch Oboler, realized the enormous business opportunities offered by the kinds of projections where the audience felt like they were part of the story, falling off a cliff like the main characters or dodging as the murderers throw themselves into the crowd.
It premiered on November 26, 1952, at the Paramount Theatre in Hollywood in Los Angeles, and J.
R. Eyerman took a photo that was turned into the front cover of Life, a long time before Gina Homs hung it up in her bedroom.
For her, as a first-year student of art history at the University of Barcelona, the best part of it all was finding the posters that announced the first 3D movie.
The slogan cried “A lion in your lap! A lover in your arms!”
“A lover in your arms.” Gina hugged Biel.
“I really like your room,” he responded, just inches away from her.
“What I like most . . . is the bed.” Gina let go of him and jumped onto the mattress with a leap revealing it wasn’t her first time. It was so gentle that the wool blanket warmly received her without letting her bounce back. “Come here.”
Gina unbuttoned her dress and let it slide down onto the room’s rug.
A dead woman’s clothes, she thought, to hell with that.
She let Biel take care of her bra and panties, which didn’t even pretend to match.
With the delight of a child who gets to play outside, the boy took pains to do so.
He knew not much was expected from him, but that if his guitarist’s fingers were used to their utmost talents, with a finger inside her and the other on her nipple, he could make Gina climax before he finished performing the Concierto de Aranjuez.
He knew by the first arpeggios that he had been able to surprise Gina, that she was living the experience in 3D with her eyes closed.
Fifty gasps later, and with a cushion pressed to her face so that the neighbors wouldn’t hear her scream, she let herself go.
Once finished, he, having undressed on his own, quickly climbed on top of her. He was also quick in his thrusts. And finally, too quick so he could catch up with her. As if it were written in the handbook on misunderstandings that sex was a game that always ended without winners or losers.
He had just pulled away, his breathing still ragged, when Biel asked a question. One he shouldn’t have.
“How was it?”
Even as a young woman, Gina couldn’t stand the damn obsession men had, at all ages, to be graded at every hookup.
Like everything could be boiled down to a statistic.
Like every man thought they deserved an outstanding score or higher.
To avoid grading him, to avoid turning the night into a forum of sexual debate that she didn’t like, she changed the subject.
“Who would have thought that I’d hook up with the ugliest guy in class?”
“Oh man . . .”
“Oh woman . . .”
“But I got better, right?”
“Don’t get your hopes up. We’re not getting married.”
They laughed. Biel finished drying himself off with the hand towel that Gina had passed him at the exact moment so he wouldn’t stain the sheets.
He threw it on the floor next to his shoes.
He took a deep breath and lay on his back, staring up at the ceiling.
He gently caressed the hair on Gina’s forearm.
For a couple of minutes, as they recovered their breath, they were silent.
Relaxed and empty, the boy with the crooked nose and thick oversized eyebrows became chatty.
“I’ll never forget the first time I noticed you.”
Biel was thankful and euphoric, because he had conquered an old schoolmate he never thought he would. He whispered everything like sleepaway camp friends, who make confessions in the dark between bunk beds.
He told her about the bet he made with Alex in the library, some Wednesday in the afternoon when they realized that a man they had never seen before was coming to the school through the courtyard with three pines.
The man spoke to one person after another with a grave expression until they brought out Gina Castro from the arts classroom.
Gina, who at that time still went by Georgina Castro, left her Miró painting halfway done, and the cool guy Torío was waving goodbye with the brush in his hand, while the school principal watched tensely from the secretary’s door.
The mysterious man and their third-grade classmate wearing her backpack got into the taxi and entered into civilization.
Gina listened to the story, like it was alien to her, like it hadn’t been the most impactful day of her life.
She didn’t understand how, being one of the most grave hours, she didn’t remember anything, and how everything Biel revealed, she seemed, at most, to have lived in a foggy and brief dream.
She also had never thought about how her classmates had found out about the death of her mother.
She hadn’t ever thought, not even for an instant, about what they said about her in the moment she became the center of attention without knowing it.
Or what her classmates thought about her when they saw her in the courtyard, in the lunchroom, or in class as an orphan girl left without a mother at nine years old, just like that, in a flash, without warning.
She didn’t understand what strange oxytocin had made her forget that whole afternoon at school, like none of it had ever happened.
“Actually, do you know what the worst part is? I’m eighteen, and I don’t remember my mother. Not her voice or smell or anything at all. What can you expect of a nine-year-old? If it was my choice, I’d have rather shown my vagina to all the boys in the third grade.”
They laughed again. In the silence, Biel picked up on a sharp noise. Like a closing door.
“What’s that?”
“Nothing. Just the elevator.”
“It’s not in here?”
“Chill out, my dad’s on a trip.”
“I hear it in here.”
“It must be the neighbors.” Gina wasn’t worried. “They have six kids.”
But suddenly she recognized the jingle of her dad’s keys. Everyone, due to routine, slides their key into the lock in a unique way.
“Shit, it’s my dad.”
And that exact sound, she had heard many times every day for so long.
“Gina, what the hell are you saying?”
“Get under the bed.”
Biel jumped over Gina, and in the same leap ducked under the mattress. He had traced a perfect parabola in the air, just like the one of his nose. She gathered all his clothes, and like a winning bowling strike, she threw them behind the bed.
“Hello, honey,” her dad called out from the entrance before closing the door.
“My shoes, my shoes,” Biel whispered.
“What happened to Bilbao?” Gina called out as she quickly pulled on her pajamas.
“My shoes,” Biel repeated nervously, so low that Gina didn’t hear him.
“Storm at the airport.” Her dad’s thundering voice sounded closer and closer each moment. “They didn’t let us take off.”
“Just a second, Dad, I’m changing.”
“They said there was a downpour up north, for Christ’s ache. I mean, for Christ’s sake . . .”
Based on the footsteps, Biel could hear that he was already there.
“Don’t come in,” said Gina, putting her hands to her head.
“You know I can’t stand locked doors.”
And then Manuel Castro, widowed in his first marriage, to Paulina Homs, opened the door.