5 Women Usually Shave
Women Usually Shave
Why? Why did you come? Why did you pick up a business card that fell out of a book and think it was a sign?
Why did you keep it? Why did you think you’d find her in person if you’d been unable to track her, track me, down by phone?
Why didn’t you come until now? What made you think you’d find me?
Did you think I’d be so young and fun? What was the bookstore it was in, do you remember?
Why do you read? What kinds of books do you like?
What’s a bus driver doing reading and reading?
By his second beer, Mark had answered that he didn’t know to almost all the questions.
That he didn’t know, or didn’t remember, or that it was altogether a coincidence and that he actually thought that sometimes fate sent you messages that you had to catch on the fly.
He responded that he had nothing to lose, that sometimes you had to spice things up to break up the monotony, and that he didn’t imagine she’d be so young and so pretty.
He imagined her to be more like a university professor with reading glasses hanging over her breasts, an older lady, so thin, so bony, more .
. . But the thing he wouldn’t let her get away with was the offensive question about why a London bus driver might read.
Are we idiots? Or do you think only the preppies at Oxford read?
“I didn’t mean it like that.”
Gina apologized like someone who throws a stone and hides their hand and then pretends to be offended and misunderstood. And at the height of brazenness, makes others feel bad.
“Opening a book, I think, is like discovering new worlds, living other lives, giving meaning to our very own. Traveling forward and backward. Carving out stories. Laughing and crying. Newspapers are always the same. The days look too much the same. Nothing ever happens. And when something important happens, they don’t even tell you.
To me, reading books is maybe the only way to daydream a little bit.
Every one has its own system and concerns.
But, it’s the best solution, at least to me, to escape boredom and escape the revolving door. ”
Aside from being handsome and downing beer like it was water, this character was shaping up to be interesting.
“Sorry, what revolving door are you talking about?”
“The one of daily life. Getting up. Going to work. Putting on your uniform. Watching the clock. Doing the same thing all day. Stopping and starting. Routine knocks you senseless. I find repetition makes you dumber. Tower Hill, Monument, Cannon Street, Fleet Street, Aldwych, Stand, Trafalgar Square. And then here we go all over again. Route 15. I can do it with my eyes closed. Do you know what it’s like to do the same route eight times every day? ”
“Formula 1 drivers go in circles, and they don’t complain.”
“They don’t deal with traffic jams or stoplights.
They don’t have to brake and start. They don’t have to pull out without checking that there’s no one walking down the stairs.
They don’t have to answer questions from tourists who never know where they’re going.
Do you know how many bus stops there are in London? ”
Paulina took a gulp of Estrella. She took it as an opportunity to haphazardly calculate some approximate statistic.
“A thousand?”
“Fifteen thousand. In the city of London alone. And there’s more with the Routemasters, because the door is always open in the back, and they don’t bother the drivers.
But they’re starting to change the vehicles.
Everything has to be more secure, more comfortable, newer, more environmentally friendly.
They’re getting rid of the payment machines on the street.
They want us to oversee payment from people, so that no one sneaks on. ”
“Man, you need a vacation.”
“How’s Salu?”
“You mean Salou?” How can you be honest with someone who’s already reserved a room in Salou . . . ? “Do you like the beach?”
Mark Granger showed his top teeth when he laughed. They were white, straight, each in its place. He looked more like the chauffeur of some elegant sir at Westminster than the bus driver of a city route.
“Asking a Welshman if he likes the sun is like asking a Chelsea fan if they like soccer. Everyone likes what they don’t have. Why don’t you come along with me?”
Neither Gina nor Paulina knew what to say.
“Me? It’s just that I just . . .” she stumbled. The question had caught her by surprise in its directness, without a preamble, from one subject to the next. But she was conscious that deep down she was dying to.
“Two, three days. Just go with me and come back. Whatever you want.”
“Why not?” After she said yes, she let out a sigh. “But are you sure that there’s a room for me?”
“We’ll figure it out.”
They both understood. And they felt a surge of excitement and thought about how dazzling the world is sometimes that in the blink of an eye with a snap decision, with four words your lungs can fill up and you feel the bristles of the painter’s sweeping brushstroke on the immense canvas of life.
Sure of yourself, you dip the brush in the red pot, and, letting the drops drip upon the brown paper, you begin to outline with a sharp gesture, with the genius’s certainty.
Feelings accelerate, everything is quick, nothing is planned.
It’s all, in the very end, sexual desire. The call.
En route to Salou, in the middle lane of the highway, as he drove absentmindedly like Georg Philipp Telemann’s Water Music was playing, Mark thought, Oh my god.
In just a couple of hours he could be fucking Paulina Homs, the mysterious woman from the business card who had turned out to be a young woman in hippie clothes with curly hair and honey eyes.
Gina, with her eyes on escape, thought about how she’d navigate it if, upon arriving at the hotel, she was asked for her ID to register her for the room.
How would she hide it from Mark if she had to write down Georgina Castro?
Suddenly she felt the four-fingered hand on her knee, strong, warm, and with no intention of moving.
“Is Paulina a common name here?” Mark took advantage of the question to hide his daring gesture.
“Weren’t you supposed to tell me what happened?” It was the first time in their two days together that Gina had touched his hand.
“We should load up on gas.” He noticed that the gas light had come on. “My finger? It’s not that interesting, really . . .”
“You promised,” Gina said emphatically without a trace of affection.
“Okay then. Do you like fireworks?”
“Ugh. . . They scared me when I was little.”
“What about now?”
“It goes either way. My parents made me watch them with them from the balcony. I didn’t want to, and . . . But don’t change the subject.”
Mark smiled. Gina had come to know that this was her road trip buddy’s best expression. When he let loose, he seemed more honest and less British.
“I lit some fireworks at a children’s festival near Cardiff.
I had to light a row of them. Everything was well organized, laid out perfectly like a professional exhibit.
It was all going well: The wick, I just had to count to two, and move back before the firework soared.
But on one of the them, god dammit, I didn’t have time to do anything.
Just as I lit it, my finger was torn off and sent soaring with the firework. ”
“How awful.” Gina bravely dared to ask, “Do you have kids?”
“No.”
“You said you were at a children’s festival . . .” She tried justifying her reasoning. The question hadn’t come out of nowhere.
“I have three nephews. Three brats through and through.”
“And a partner?” Now that she had asked. “Do you have one?”
“Does it matter?” He lightly shifted to look at Paulina from the corner of his eye. “I’m on vacation, and I’m far from home. Do we owe anyone an explanation?”
“Not me.”
“Me neither.”
Half a kilometer south, once they passed under the blue exit sign for Vilafranca, Gina tried to apologize for the question.
“You’re not wearing a ring . . .”
“And what if I told you it went soaring with the firework?”
They laughed wholeheartedly, nervously. As the professional driver, Mark Granger knew how to best navigate the situation.
“I’m suggesting you don’t pry into my life. You’ll end up falling in love with me.”
“Oh right. You’ve made that very clear.”
And they laughed again, more honestly.
By the time they stopped to fill the diesel tank, the Welshman could tell that all the signs of attraction were lit up.
As soon as he turned the key to the ignition off, he leaned toward Paulina, and with his eyes closed, he sweetly bit her lip before kissing her.
She immediately put her tongue in his mouth, moving it without stopping from one side to the other, with a childish feeling of unease, as if with that wet and persistent tip she would have to perforate the tunnel below the Mancha canal.
Once the tank was filled, they continued until they reached Hotel de Franca de Salou.
Mark happily hummed to the music he played on the cassettes in the car.
Gina had not recognized even one of the songs.
He didn’t play any of the Beatles. He didn’t even care.
She thought about how she had never done it with a man twenty-two years older than her.
He was more than double her age. She also thought about the moment she would have to tell him that she wasn’t Paulina but rather her daughter.
As of now, tomorrow was another day . . .
What was it about secrets that was so addictive and exciting?