By S’s side, I learned that vanity is good business, and I encountered the multiverse theory for the first time. For S had a parallel life with another wife and son. This other son was the same age as the one he had with the wife I knew.
We were sipping coffee when S received a telegram from someone who knew him well enough to put the coffeehouse as the address.
Sonofafuckingbitch, S said, and then he explained that before arriving at the town where we were headed that afternoon, we would have to make two stops.
The first was at a perfumery we’d already visited, where S asked them to pay an invoice in advance, before the eye shadows, lipsticks, and hair gels were delivered to their respective shelves. On S’s request, I acted with greater drama than usual, and I even pretended to faint when S mentioned his sister, my supposedly bedridden mother.
The sorrow is dizzying, he said, lifting me to my feet and counting the notes.
Second stop: we pulled up outside a house. S reached for the envelope containing the money and slipped it into his pocket.
“Wait here,” he said.
A woman opened the door, S went inside, and, soon after, a miniature S peeped out the window.
We looked at each other and waved.
There were two possibilities: either the door that S had stepped through was a passage to the past, and in that case the boy looking at me through the window was S forty years earlier; or, S had a child who was none of the children I knew (those children went to my school).
A while later, a small hand rapped on the door of the Citroneta and offered me a glass of juice.
When I gave him back the empty glass, the boy peeped through the car window, leaned half his body through it, and gave me a hug.
For as long as the hug lasted, I pretended to be the sister he would never meet. I pretended, the boy pretended, S was pretending; the world was a ridiculous theatre.
I watched him go back to his house and knew at that moment that sometimes it’s best to let things lie. So, when S came out and shut the front door with a bang, which was followed by a vase being hurled from inside the house, he got into the car and was met with my most perfect silence.
The silence was so conspicuous that when we pulled into a petrol station, after filling the tank, S went inside and bought me an ice cream.
I decided to place what I’d seen in the category of “Things I Maybe Imagined” and, since I couldn’t keep quiet forever, as a topic of conversation I brought up a game I’d learned in math class that was perfectly designed for talking without saying anything.
“Think of a number from 1 to 9 and multiply it by 9.”
“Done.”
“Now add up the two digits, subtract 5, and think of the letter it corresponds to in the alphabet.”
“What?” (S had no patience, but he kept playing because he was afraid I would go quiet again.)
“Well if the number is 1 it’s A, if it’s 2, then B, if it’s 3, then C…”
“Got it.”
“Do you have the letter?”
“Yes.”
“Now think of a country that begins with that letter.”
“Okay.”
“And with the second letter of that country, think of an animal.”
“Is there much to go?”
“This is the last bit. Have you thought of an animal?”
“Yes.”
“But there are no elephants in Denmark.”
“How the fuck did you do that?”
Any number from 1 to 9 multiplied by 9 gives two digits that, when added together, are 9. On subtracting 5, that number will always be 4, which corresponds, in alphabetical order, to the letter D. And, when thinking about a country that starts with the letter D, 99 percent of human beings think of Denmark, and 97 percent, on focusing on an animal starting with E, think of an elephant. The margin of error is very small.
But instead of saying that to S, I said, “I guessed it.”
“In that case, guess whether they’ll buy something from us in the next store.”
“They won’t buy anything.”
“Well then, we’re finished for the day,” said S, at the same time as he did a U-turn in the middle of the road.
“Let’s go eat till we pop,” he concluded.
So we parked in the town square and headed for a coffeehouse, where we asked for two coffees: a regular (mine), and a half serve (S’s).
S filled the remainder with whisky from a flask he always carried in his pocket. It was a habit the waiters knew about (S had been visiting the same coffeehouses for twenty years) and which they no longer remarked upon because, from what I observed in those years, waiters, same as traveling salesmen, pick their battles carefully.
“To help me deal with the misadjustments, do you get me, M?”
“Gotcha.”
To celebrate this communion between two human beings, something that didn’t happen every day, we rounded out our coffees with four slabs of thousand layer cake, which we finished right when D showed up to collect me.