Better Than Easy (19 page)

I'm not quite sure what I'm scared of, but I feel the need to see him in a public place on neutral territory. Maybe, it's to control my anger. Or more likely I'm scared that if I go to his place, he'll say, “Suck this,” again. Maybe I'm scared I would be unable to say ‘no'. Again.

Approaching the restaurant, I see him standing outside kicking a stone. He's casually dressed in jeans and a navy polo, and as I reach his side, he looks up and smiles broadly. “Hi,” he says, standing aside, and ushering me into the restaurant.

We're shown to a small table against the big plate-glass window, and the waitress, a biker-chick with heavy eyeliner and black fingernails hands us menus.

“So why the mystery?” he asks, “With Jenny, I mean.”

I frown. “Oh, it's just – she asks me questions about you all the time. It's hard enough lying without having to explain what we talk about.”

Ricardo nods, glances at the menu, then looks back at me. “Just tell her you like me,” he says.

I nod vaguely and check my own menu.

“You
do
like me?” he says doubtfully.

I clear my throat. “I didn't really come here to talk about how I
like
you Ricardo. I came here to say that what happened was crazy. And we have to agree that no-one needs to know.”

He frowns at me. “Oh,” he says.

“I
…
I'm feeling a bit confused to be honest,” I tell him. “I don't even know
why
that happened. And it wasn't even an accident. You came to visit me. You knew what you were doing. Why?”

“Because it's nice?” he offers.

“It's not though, is it?” I say. “It's just sex, and lies, and
…
”

“Videotape?” he says.

I laugh weakly. “Hopefully not. It's all just pointless though. No good can come of it.”

“You think?” he says. “I see.”

He sounds genuinely disappointed, so I glance up
from my menu to study his face, but he's studiously reading, giving nothing away. “I thought it was
…
” he says vaguely, flicking his brown eyes at me, “something
good.”

“Did you?” I say, puzzled. “You left pretty quickly afterwards.”

He frowns at me. “Yes. I had to go see a friend,” he says. “It was arranged. And I had to change first.”

I nod. “I thought maybe you were going to work,” I say. “But even so, it was a quick exit.”

He looks at me blankly. “Even doctors don't work on Christmas day,” he says.

“As a
pompier
, I mean,” I say.

He snorts lightly. “Ah, the uniform. No, that was just for you. Because you say you like.”

I take this in, and turn and stare out at the street for a while. “I still don't see why you did that really,” I say. “It's a crazy situation. A stupid situation. How did we get here?”

When I turn back to him he's looking at me soulfully. “I think it's nice,” he says naively.

“Nice?”
I repeat.

He frowns at me. “I don't understand. You seem sad. I am happy.”

I give a cynical gasp. “Why? Because you're cheating on your girlfriend?”

He looks shocked. “Because I
…
” he says, his voice fading away.

“Oh come on Ricardo. It's hardly
Love Story
is it?”

He stares at me unmoving. His eyes look soft and glassy. “Sorry,” he says. “I thought
…
”

“What?”

He laughs, and raises his eyebrows in the middle, arching them above the bridge of his nose. “I thought you liked me,” he says. He looks genuinely hurt.

I sigh and soften my voice. “I do. But that's not really what this is about, is it? It's like you said. It's just chocolate. But it's so
dangerous
– for everything
else.”

He pushes his lips out and shakes his head. “Not for me, no. But
…
” He turns away and stares across the room. Without looking at me he says, quietly, “So, you just want to stop?”

I frown at these words. They reveal something shocking to me. That he sees us in the middle of a
process
. He doesn't see this as just a freak event that has occurred between us. I'm aghast.

He turns back to face me and raises an eyebrow. “You could? Just stop?” he says.

I stare at him. “You're serious aren't you?” I say.

He vaguely shrugs his shoulders. “Serious?”

“You want this to
…
to
carry on
somehow?”

He nods. “Yes,” he says. “But I
… pensait. Je pensait?”

“You thought,” I prompt.

“Yes, I
thought
you
…
like me too.”

I swallow with difficulty. “I do,” I say. “Only
…
”

“But you could just
stop?”
he says, nodding, circumspectly as if this possibility is only slowly percolating into his brain.

We are interrupted by the waitress. After a bit of frantic menu-scanning we both order no-brainer, four-seasons pizzas, more to make her go away than anything else. The interruption gives the time required for this fresh idea to percolate into
my
mind. Ricardo is being serious here. This
wasn't
just a quicky, it wasn't just a staged porn show. He wants more. And that realisation transforms everything I have been thinking about him. And I start to wish,
not
that I had never slept with him, but that everything
else
was different.

He nods at me. “It's OK,” he says. “It's just – it will be hard for me. I think I
…
” he shrugs. “I think it is different for you. You have what you want I suppose.”

I frown. “With Tom?” I say. “But so do you.”

He nods. “I never met a guy I liked before. Not in
that way, this way
…
So
…
” he shrugs. “It's special for me.”

We sit in silence for a few minutes. Ricardo stares out of the window. He seems to swell and redden slowly. When he looks back at me he has a forced smile on his lips and a shine in the corner of his eye. “It's OK,” he says bravely. “I'm an idiot.”

I reach for his hand across the table and grasp his fingers. I sigh. “I'm sorry,” I say. “I don't know what's going on in your head Ricardo. You're really sweet. But this
is
crazy. You're just feeling confused. Jenny will be back soon.”

He shakes his head gravely. “But I don't want,” he says. “Jenny is nice. But
…
” There is a long pause. He shakes his head and stares at me soulfully and for the life of me I don't know what to say to the guy. Everything seems stranger by the moment, and my emotions are shifting so fast they're leaving my brain behind.

Eventually he smiles sadly at me and says, “I thought about you today.”

“Don't,” I say.

“You didn't?” he asks.

“No, I did,” I reply. “Of course I've been thinking about you.”

“So it's OK,” he says.

“No, it's crazy,” I say. “It's a momentary thing. And it can't go anywhere. It's a blip. A random blip on a radar screen, destined to fade away.” I think as I say it that he'll have no idea what I mean.

“I think to just stop,” he says. “Just
…
” he clicks his fingers. “I think it's too hard.”

I nod. “But Jenny will be back.”

He swallows. “The day after tomorrow. But let's be
…
let's be gentle with our heart,” he says.

I'm sure that this accident of poetry has more to do with his lack of English than anything else, but the words, and the contradiction of this most complex of guys, the blokey fireman, the suited spiv, the straight
boy, gay boy, porn boy,
lost
boy before me, saying, “Let's be gentle with our heart,” cracks me wide open leaving my heart raw and pulsating in the middle of the table between us. And in this instant, he, or perhaps the dream of him, the fantasy that he represents, is everything I ever wanted, everything I ever hoped for. I realise in that moment, that at some point I stopped believing in true love, and started believing in pragmatism. Tom is nice, lovely even. But Tom was never
it
. Tom was never
The One
, and nor were any of the others. Except maybe Steve. For I do remember feeling this raw the first time I met Steve, sat at a table around two different pizzas in another restaurant not half a mile away. That was the last time the dream seemed within reach, and then I grew up. Because, of course, it
wasn't
possible, and I saw so clearly that that was
it
, and that it would only ever happen once.

A clearing of a throat to my left averts me to the presence of the waitress. She's holding two steaming pizzas. I realise I'm grasping Ricardo's hand, and, starting to blush, I release it. I avoid eye contact with the waitress as she places the food and our carafe of wine on the table and then slowly I raise my line of vision until I'm looking through my watery lenses into Ricardo's eyes. They are shiny with a similar emotion to my own. He smiles at me.

“Two days,” he says. He sighs, and then shrugs. “It's too late anyway.”

I stare at him.

“Can't we just pretend?” he says. “Can't we just enjoy two days? Is it such a sin? Like the kiss? Is two days worse than one?”

And I say, weakly, “OK.”

I can't think of anything sensible to say. It feels like the end of the world. It seems like someone has announced that the end of the world, the moment when everything comes crashing down, is forty-eight hours from now.

And faced with the end of the world, there is no sensible reply to anything – anything
nice
that is – except, “OK.”

It's astonishingly easy to slip into a different life. I come to understand how sudden ruptures happen after decades of marriage. The open landscape of a new relationship – no limits, no expectations – is so easy to run to from the slowly narrowing corridor of predictable behaviour and hammered-out, ever more restrictive roles.

Ricardo stays at my flat that first night and though we don't have sex, it all feels appallingly easy, shockingly natural. We lie side by side in the new bed (at least this isn't quite the bed that Tom and I have been sleeping in) and talk until the small hours of the morning, mainly about France and the French and the contrasts with our home countries. I finally fall asleep listening to the lilting English and then the almost perfect French of Ricardo's Latino accent, rambling on and on into my dreams about, yet again, the many different kinds of rain in Bogotá.

The next morning, he's up and out before I am compos mentis, rushing off home at seven a.m. to get changed into his work attire.

During the day, I repaint the ceiling (which with the new paint, finally covers) and then the walls (which against the sparkling new ceiling have started to look distinctly dowdy.)

Driven out by the smell of paint, I return that evening to Ricardo's place, and we eat takeaway Thai food on a foldout table set against the window and the vista of the port beyond.

Ricardo is different today, gentle and thoughtful, calm and collected. He tells me about his previous experiences with men (maximum duration three nights) and his longest relationship with a tormented Argentinean painter called Adriana.

Tom and Jenny play on my mind, but when I try to mention either, Ricardo says simply what I presume to be a translation of a Colombian proverb:
Don't waste a sunny day crying about rain.

That second night on his sofa bed, the lights of the harbour twinkling in the distance, we have slower, gentler sex; no penetration, just three hours of rubbing and stroking, exploring each others bodies. Despite what I said to Jenny, it doesn't bore me at all.

Ricardo sleeps well, snoring often, clamped to my back like a bear, but what with thinking about the future and fighting to enjoy every second of the present – I, myself, barely sleep at all.

The next morning – the day of our personal Armageddon, Ricardo surprises me. He has somehow organised a day off work. We go back to my place – God, I'm calling it
my
place again – and I lend him a set of bike leathers. They're a bit too big around the waist, but he looks stunning. Ricardo likes what he sees as well and parades in front of the mirror, a distinct bulge at the groin. “Jenny would like, he declares, the only time he mentions her during the entire forty-eight hours.

“Jenny?” I say, surprised. “She has a leather fetish too?”

“Oh, everyone has leather fetish,” he informs me.

And so it is, that with Ricardo clamped around my waist again, we bob and weave and wind our way in and out of the warm sun, in and out of the chilling shadows, back up to the place where I first ever saw him at the roadside – Chatauneuf d'Entraunes.

As I ride past the very point where we met he squeezes my waist and shouts, “You remember?” and I shout, “Yes,” and spend the remainder of the climb wondering how he can continue to be so easily romantic, so impossibly optimistic in the midst of such confusion and potential destruction.

I can see from a distance that the gîte is still boarded up, all the windows dead or shuttered, but I
ride all the way to the top and park in the courtyard.

“So this is it!” Ricardo declares, clambering down from the bike and pulling off his crash helmet. “That was great. I miss my bike now,” he says. “Adriana hated bikes. But I should have kept it.”

We wander around the grounds, picking up wind-toppled chairs and peering in dirty windows. Ricardo is unexpectedly enthusiastic about it. “You should put small table here,” he declares. “Catch the evening sun. Serve expensive aperitifs. And over here, maybe a pool one day, or maybe it's too cold. Maybe an ice rink!”