He meets her husband at the entrance of the building.
“Hello, István,” he says. “How are you?”
“Okay.”
“After you,” her husband says, holding the heavy front door open for him. It’s made of metal with two panels of security glass.
István goes in first and they walk through the low entrance hall past the mailboxes and up the concrete stairs together.
“What have you been up to?” her husband asks.
“Nothing much,” István says.
For a few days he doesn’t see her. He masturbates quite a lot, at least twice a day. Usually when he does that he’s thinking of her, and of the things they have done together. Otherwise he doesn’t think of her much. Except that he finds he does want to fuck her again. After a while he is unable to stop thinking about that, and the thought that it might not happen again is surprisingly difficult to deal with. Sometimes he wonders if he should knock on her door. Something always stops him.
Then, at the end of the week, she knocks on his door. He pauses the computer game that he’s playing and opens it.
“Hello,” she says.
He doesn’t say anything, embarrassed that he already has a hard-on at just the sight of her standing there.
He puts his hands in his pockets.
She asks if he can come to the supermarket with her.
“Okay,” he says. “I’ll put my shoes on.”
She nods.
They walk to the supermarket initially in silence as usual.
Then, as they wait at the traffic lights, she says to him, “What are you listening to?”
“What?” he says.
“What are you listening to?”
He has his headphones on and is listening to music.
“MC Hammer,” he says.
“What’s it like?”
He shrugs.
“Can I listen?” she asks.
He passes her the headphones, and she puts them over her ears.
“I don’t like it,” she says, after only a few seconds.
“Okay,” he says.
When they get back he puts the groceries on her kitchen table. It’s a warm day and his T-shirt is sticking to his skin.
She asks him if he wants some ice cream.
“Okay,” he says.
“Sit down, then,” she says.
He sits and waits while she serves him some ice cream in one of those glass bowls she has.
“Rákóczi túrós,” she says.
“Okay,” he says.
“You like that, don’t you?”
He nods.
While he is eating it she sits down next to him. After just sitting there for a minute, she puts her hand on his knee.
“Is your mother at home?” she asks.
“No,” he says.
“Try not to come so quickly,” she says.
She twists and thrusts her hips while he lies there looking at the underside of the pine shelf on the wall above his bed.
Her movements become more urgent and he has a strange feeling that she’s no longer aware of him.
Suddenly she stops moving altogether.
There’s a moment of tension.
Then something happens.
She goes limp.
She puts her arms around him and lies still for a minute.
He feels the sweat on her, and on himself. It’s hard to say whose sweat it is. There’s a slippery layer of sweat between them.
Outside the sun is shining. The shutter is down but there are some small holes in it which let a bit of light through, enough to see her as she dresses, now that his eyes are used to the semi-darkness.
She has pubic hair, and a track of hair on her belly.
In porn none of the women have pubic hair, or not that much anyway.
None of the women have weird nipples like hers.
As long as no one knows about it, it’s like it isn’t really happening.
It’s like it exists in the same way that his fantasies exist, as something he’s just imagining.
That’s how it seems to him sometimes.
He doesn’t see her at the weekend, when her husband is at home.
He just wanders around the town.
He spends a long time in the secondhand shop looking at the computer games, the crate of cassettes in scuffed plastic boxes. The games are pirate copies, with badly photocopied instructions.
There’s pirated music too, all the latest stuff from the West—Vanilla Ice, Madonna, Guns N’ Roses.
He leaves the shop without buying anything.
The weekend seems to last forever.
On Monday they do it twice. In between they just lie there on the bed. There’s the sound of the rain on the window—they can hear it sometimes but they can’t see it because the shutter is down. After they have been lying there for a while she starts to suck him and he quickly becomes hard again. “Do you want to take me from behind?” she asks.
“Okay,” he says.
She turns, and he sort of kneels on the soft mattress trying to find the place.
The rain patters on the window.
“No not there,” she says.
She has to reach back with her hand to help him.
She’s already extremely wet.
It feels different from that angle.
She worries, afterward, that they didn’t use a condom the second time.
He isn’t sure why she’s worrying—he assumed she was too old to get pregnant.
“How old are you?” he asks her.
“Forty-two,” she says.
“Do you look at pornography?” she asks him.
“No,” he says.
“Don’t lie,” she says.
He wonders how she knew that he was lying. He doesn’t say anything.
“Do you have some?”
“Why?”
“Do you?”
She laughs and asks to see it. “Please,” she says.
He goes to his desk and opens the lowest drawer and feels with his hand on the floor underneath.
The magazine is starting to slightly fall apart.
“Are you embarrassed?” she asks, as he hands it to her.
“Yeah, a bit,” he says.
“Why are these pages stuck together?” she asks.
“Why d’you think?”
“Oh,” she says, and laughs again.
Prizing the pages apart, she looks at the pictures. They look at them together. There’s something about doing that that he likes. The window shutter isn’t down. They leave it open now. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” she says. “The women all shave their… you know.”
“Yeah.”
“Do you want me to do that?” she asks, looking up at him.
“No,” he says.
“Be honest,” she says.
“I am being honest.”
“You don’t want me to shave it?”
“No,” he says.
“So you like my hair?” she says.
“Yeah,” he says.
He doesn’t know if that’s true or not.
“Your mother will be home soon,” she says.
She gets up from the bed.
“This is my favorite bit of the day,” she says. “I don’t mean when I leave.” She moves around, picking her clothes up from the floor and putting them on. “I mean when I’m here.”
Still lying on the bed, he watches her.
She’s nearly dressed now.
“What’s your favorite bit of the day?” she asks.
“Don’t know. This, I suppose,” he says.
When she leaves he thinks about what they did. He tries to kind of hold on to the reality of it. As soon as she isn’t there it seems slightly unreal.
“Do you think about me when we’re not together?” she asks.
“Sometimes,” he says.
“I think about you,” she says.
“Yeah?”
“Yes,” she says.
“What do you think about?” he asks.
“This mostly.” She takes his dick in her hand. She laughs. He laughs too. He likes it that she says things like that. He has never talked to anybody the way he talks to her, the way they talk to each other.
She puts baby oil on her breasts and he fucks them. She has a weird expression on her face, trying to look at what’s happening and lifting and squeezing her breasts together at the same time. The veins stand out in the middle of her forehead. When he comes it goes on her face and she shrieks with excitement, almost as if she’s coming herself.