Enough About Love

STAN

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LOOKING OUT OF A HOTEL ROOM WINDOW, Stan watches the wintry night fall over Lisbon.

A long line of waiting taxis coils around Rossio Square, sheltered by plane trees. The evening shower has stopped, the pedestrians are no longer a ballet of black umbrellas. The next fare is a hefty woman weighed down with bags. She huffs and puffs, railing against the wind and the rain, everything is making her life difficult, her shopping, her soaked raincoat, her own weight. She is bound to go by some respectable name, Senhora Costa perhaps, yes, that’s it, Senhora Manuela Costa. She is in a hurry to get home so she can put it all away in closets before Senhor Costa comes home, and she is probably persuading herself that, as she has so much to carry, a taxi isn’t an unreasonable expense after all. She smiles and tells herself life is sometimes as beautiful as a large department store.

Behind Stan, under the sheets, a woman lies sleeping, her cheek crushed on the pillow. In this unconscious state, the vague resemblance to Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring that Stan managed to grant her evaporates altogether. The sleeper’s name is Marianne Laurent, she is married, admits to being thirty-five, laughs for no reason, and works in Lyon, at the Edouard Herriot Hospital, in Bongrand’s department, where she operates on corneas, which explains why she was at the sixth congress of the European Association for Vision and Eye Research. Stan now also knows that she has had work on her lips and breasts, has a pronounced predisposition to oral sex and a tendency to give short squealing sounds. They drank port together, too much of it, at the hotel bar. She was the one who dragged him to her room, her mind made up; he let her take the initiative before inverting the roles with a physical fury he did not know he was capable of.

Stan rests his forehead against the windowpane, his skin hoping to feel a bite of cold. Each taxi completes the same slow revolution around the fountain and Dom Pedro IV’s column. Stan has time to look at each driver’s face, to pick out the one who wears an ugly gray wool cardigan whatever the weather, the one who prefers a short-sleeved shirt to a polo shirt. They each have their own way of getting the customer inside. One turns around with a genuine smile, another waits for instructions, grumbling and keeping his eyes pinned on the steering wheel. If a driver has to put bags in the trunk, the routine procedure reveals everything about him, his sciatica, his filthy mood, his habits. Stan can give him a whole life, a wife, a mistress, one, two, or three children, he pictures the dog, a poodle or a bulldog, snoozing on the passenger seat.

Marianne Laurent snores artlessly, her mouth open. Anna used to say that for men, and sometimes for women, the sexual act could be — and this was her word—“vacuous.” Stan has to face the facts. He gave in to this woman’s moves, to the point of succumbing to his own body’s voracious appetites, and he took her without tenderness or love, striving for annihilation in a state of appalling loneliness. He closes his eyes. He would like to forget himself again in the passionate eagerness of those unfamiliar lips, lose himself one last time in that pliant, yearning flesh.

But the taxis keep circling the square and Stan is drawn into their slow spiral, which suddenly takes his thoughts back to Anna, to the grim thought of Anna’s naked body beneath someone else’s, and the image that looms in his mind pulverizes him.