Out of nowhere, as if they were old friends, Charlie asked him to tell her a secret.
“What kind of secret?” Larry asked, and she said, “One that no more than two people know.”
“A secret . . .” said Larry, pretending to think, and she laughed. She had him trapped.
There was no way out, no possible excuse: everybody’s got a secret, or lots of them. A sin, a hidden desire, a loathing that nobody else knows, an aberration.
“Tell you what,” Charlie said. “Hand me your glass, and while you’re thinking I’ll go get us some more gin.”
“On one condition: you tell me one too.”
They shook on the deal, and she went to fetch the drinks. Larry still felt cornered. When she returned, he tried to throw her off: “I have several varieties of secrets. Which kind do you want? Level C is little secrets, level B is regular secrets, and level A is big secrets.”
“Level A, of course.”
“I need more time for that kind of secret,” he said. “But I’ve got some real high-quality level C ones.”
“I’m willing to negotiate. Tell me a level B secret.”
They clinked their glasses and drank. Larry cleared his throat.
“A few years back, not long after I arrived in London, having decided it was where I was going to live, I did my first grocery run and spotted these bags of lentils and tossed one in my cart because I was craving a home-cooked meal. I called my mom for the recipe; she doesn’t cook, but she asked around and found out for me. Since I didn’t have a pressure cooker, it was going to be a slow process, but I wasn’t in a hurry. I just left the lentils cooking and would occasionally go in and stir them with a wooden spoon. I started watching a movie on TV, and by the time I got back to the kitchen, the spoon wasn’t there anymore.”
Larry fell silent. Charlie prodded him. “And?”
“It disappeared. Maybe it dissolved in the soup.”
Charlie looked at him mockingly. Crossing her arms, she asked, “So what’s the secret?”
“Well, nobody else knows that story.”
“No, that doesn’t count.”
“What about if I tell you that I once, in a fit of love-induced spite, drank two bottles of whiskey all by myself, sitting on a wall beside the Thames?”
“That doesn’t either.”
“Aha,” Larry said. He leaned his head back and pondered. She watched him. Feeling awkward under the pressure, he said, “Once, when I left school, instead of going home I told the driver to take us to Éxito. I was with two friends, and we knew exactly why we were going: to shoplift.”
“Hang on,” Charlie broke in. “That doesn’t count either.”
“Let me finish,” Larry said. “The secret isn’t the shoplifting. So yeah, we were going to steal things, stupid crap we could stick in our pockets and down our pants. We’d done it once before. We each got our own stash and then bought something cheap to explain the alarm. We’d showed the guard our receipt and walked through. The alarm went off, and they let us through. That’s how it worked the first time, and we thought it would be exactly the same.”
“Did you get caught?”
“Hold your horses. We waited in line at different cash registers, and before we’d paid, a man in a suit and tie came up to one of my friends. He took him off to get my other friend, and finally they came for me. The man asked us to go with him. He led us to this little room, like an office supply storeroom. He asked us to empty our pockets. We refused, and he threatened to call the police. At that, very slowly, we started putting the items we’d stolen on a table.”
“What did you steal?”
“A bunch of crap, like I said. I’d nicked some dental floss, a lipstick . . .”
“A lipstick?”
“I wanted to give it to my mother.” Larry took a sip and cleared his throat. Something changed in his voice. “The man ordered us to pull down our pants. We refused again, and again he threatened to turn us over to the police. Reluctantly, we unbuttoned our pants and pulled them halfway down our thighs. A few more small things fell out. He told us to put them on the table, next to the others. Then he felt around my friends’ underwear, and when he got to me, he didn’t just feel around outside.”
“Jesus,” Charlie said, and Larry nodded. “What did you do?”
Larry took another long sip and said, “Nothing. I think I closed my eyes . . .” He took a deep breath and added, “No. I didn’t, because I clearly remember the look on my friends’ faces. All three of us were shaking, and they were staring at me in horror. Maybe they thought the guy was going to do the same thing to them, but he fondled me for a while and then told us to leave, said if he ever saw us there again, the next search would be at the police station.”
“That’s outrageous.”
“Yeah. When I got home, I heaved my guts out.”
“You didn’t tell your parents?”
Larry shook his head.
If I answer that question, I’ll have to reveal another secret. If I’d told Fernanda, she definitely would have told Libardo, and he’d have killed me for letting somebody touch me, he’d have killed the man who touched me, all of the employees, the owners, he’d have blown up the store, every single location, the delivery trucks, the billboards, everything, absolutely everything . . .
“No,” Larry said, “it stayed between me and my friends, and we never talked about it again.”
Charlie let out an indignant sigh. The noise of the engines was ricocheting inside their skulls. Larry shook his head and said, “All right, your turn.”