One day she suggests that they sit on the sofa.
He has never been in her living room. He doesn’t really take it in, except that there’s a balcony at one end, like there is in his mother’s apartment, with a balustrade made of panels of green safety glass.
They sit on the sofa.
“Have you ever kissed anyone properly?” she asks.
Embarrassed that the answer is no, he pretends not to be sure what she means. He doesn’t say anything anyway.
“Do you want to kiss me properly?” she asks.
“All right,” he says.
His heart is unexpectedly thumping.
“Yeah?” she says.
He just nods.
He can hear a clock ticking.
She touches her lips to his, like she’s done in the kitchen a few times, only now she keeps them there, and presses them more strongly against his.
Something about the angle at which they’re turned to each other is awkward and they shift their positions slightly.
She moves her lips to his again, and this time she opens her mouth and he feels her tongue on his lips and then opens his own mouth and her tongue goes into it.
He shuts his eyes so that he doesn’t have to see her, so that he only feels her lips, and her tongue inside his mouth.
“Was that nice?” she says.
He nods.
“Do you want to do it again?” she asks.
“Okay,” he says.
They do it again and while they’re doing it one of her hands brushes against his erection, which is pushing out the fabric of his trousers.
He was hardly aware of it himself until her hand accidentally brushed against it.
As soon as that happens, he feels her tense up.
Embarrassed, he pulls away from her.
“What is it?” she says, trying to take his hand.
He’s already on his feet.
“What is it?” she says again. “It’s okay.”
It’s not okay, he thinks, looking down at her.
She disgusts him. Without saying anything else, he leaves.
He goes down the stairs and out of the building and walks around for almost an hour without really knowing where he is or where he’s going.
When he gets back she’s waiting on the landing.
“Are you okay?” she asks.
“Yeah,” he says.
After that he’s sure that he isn’t going to kiss her again. Then, a few days later, when she asks if he wants to sit on the sofa with her, he finds that part of him does.
“Do you want to?” she asks.
They’re standing in her kitchen, facing each other.
She’s quite tall, nearly as tall as he is.
“Okay,” he says.
He follows her into the living room and they sit on the sofa and start to kiss again, with tongues.
This time, when her hand finds his erection, she seems deliberately not to do anything that might distress him. She just keeps kissing him in the same way and leaves her hand there, on top of his trousers. Then, after a few minutes, she starts to move it slowly up and down. She pushes her tongue farther into his mouth so that it’s almost too much, so that he instinctively moves his head away and she slightly withdraws her tongue. Her hand is still moving slowly up and down in a way that he likes, although it’s moving much more slowly than he would move his own hand, and maybe because of that, because it’s moving so much more slowly than he would move his own hand, he realizes too late that he’s about to come.
The sound he makes is like a gasp of pain.
A moment later he’s aware of the wetness inside his trousers, and then the smell of it.
It feels like a disaster, what’s happened.
He has no idea what to do, no idea if she will even understand.
She seems surprised too.
She has stopped kissing him.
He isn’t looking at her. He’s looking at the floor, at the fringed edge of the rug.
If he looked at her he would see that she was smiling at him. But he doesn’t look at her. He doesn’t want to see her. He is ashamed and also sort of horrified that he is doing this with someone old and ugly like her.
“Go on,” she says, and he stands up and leaves.
A little later there’s a knock at the door of the apartment.
It’s her.
He wonders if she wants to talk to his mother, who’s still at work—maybe to tell her what’s been happening, an idea that makes him feel something like terror.
Actually it’s him she wants to talk to.
“Are you all right?” she says.
She says it in a soft, kind voice that surprises him.
“Yes,” he says.
“What happened before,” she says. “I just want you to know—it’s okay. If you were embarrassed or I don’t know. You don’t need to be. It’s okay.”
He doesn’t say anything.
“I just wanted to say that,” she says. “That’s all.”
“Okay,” he says.
“Okay,” she says, and he shuts the door.
Sometimes at the weekend he works on her husband’s allotment. Her husband pays him to do that.
The thick mud sticks to his shoes so that after a while his feet feel heavy in them and start to look like lumps of mud themselves.
The lady’s husband says that he can’t do physically demanding work anymore.
He has heart trouble, he says.
He has to take pills.
István isn’t really listening. The days are getting warmer. He pulls off his sweater and hangs it on a fence post.
“You’re a good worker,” the lady’s husband says, offering him a cigarette. “Don’t you smoke?” he asks when István doesn’t immediately take it.
“Not really,” István says. His mother doesn’t know that he smokes and he’s worried that the lady’s husband will mention it to her.
“What does that mean? Do you want one or not?”
István takes one.
“For me they’re basically free,” the lady’s husband says, and explains that he works at the cigarette factory.
“Okay,” István says.
He stands there in a damp T-shirt enjoying the smoke and the feeling of the cool air on his sweaty forehead.
There’s the sound of the main road, which isn’t far away.
When they finish work that day, after they have washed their hands at the standpipe, the lady’s husband asks him if he wants a drink.
“I think we’ve earned one,” he says.
The place he takes him to is a sort of wine cellar, in a side street not far from the allotment, down some steps from the sidewalk. The lady’s husband seems to be well-known down there. Half-drunk old men say hello to him as he moves through the smoke.
The woman at the bar says hello to him as well and they exchange some chat as he orders the drinks—two white wine spritzers.
The woman lifts a lid set directly in the zinc bar and dips a ladle down there for the wine.
“This is István,” the lady’s husband says to her as she does that.
She just raises a painted-on eyebrow.
“He’s helping me on the allotment.”
“That’s nice.”
She adds soda to the glasses from a hose. There’s something suggestive about the way her hand holds the hose, István thinks, about the way the soda shoots out when she does something with her fingers.
“Bit more,” the lady’s husband says.
She shoots another slug of soda into the glass.
“Thanks,” he says.
He offers her a cigarette, which she takes.
“For me they’re basically free,” he says.
She nods, as if it’s something she’s heard before, and lets him light it for her.
With the cigarette in her mouth she takes the spritzers, one in each hand, and holds them out for them.
“I think we’ve earned that,” the lady’s husband says as they take their seats at a table.
He lifts his glass toward István for a moment and then drinks half of it in one go.
István starts on his more cautiously.
He doesn’t really like the taste of the wine.
“How you settling in?” the lady’s husband asks him. He knows that István is still quite new to the town.
“Okay,” István says.
The next time they sit on the sofa, she stops kissing and draws away from him. He opens his eyes. “Can I?” she asks, looking at him. She has started to undo his belt.