When the phone rang, she ignored it. It rang fifteen times before it stopped. A minute later, there was a knock on the door. Pip stood up and opened it, afraid it would be Pedro, but it was Andreas. He was pale, tight-lipped, furious.
“You’ve been here an hour and a half,” he said. “You didn’t hear the phone ring?”
“Come in for a second.”
He looked up and down the hallway and came in. “I need to be able to trust you,” he said, locking the door. “This is not a good start.”
“Maybe you just won’t be able to trust me.”
“That’s not acceptable.”
“I have poor impulse control. This is a known fact about me. You knew what you were getting into.”
Still pale, still angry, he moved toward her, backing her into the corner behind the TV. He grasped her arms. Her skin felt alive to his, but she didn’t dare be the one to make the move.
“What are you going to do?” she said. “Strangle me?”
He could have found this funny, but he didn’t. “What do you want?” he said.
“What does every girl want from you?”
This did seem to amuse him. He let go of her arms and smiled wistfully. “They want to tell me their secrets.”
“Really. I find that hard to relate to, not having any myself.”
“You’re an open book.”
“Pretty much.”
He walked away and sat down on the bed. “You know,” he said, “it’s difficult to trust a person with no secrets.”
“I find it hard to trust people, period.”
“I’m not happy that Pedro knows I’m up here with you. But now that I’m here, we’re not leaving until I know I can trust you.”
“Then we could be here quite a while.”
“Do you want to hear my theory of secrets?”
“Do I have a choice?”
“My theory is that identity consists of two contradictory imperatives.”
“OK.”
“There’s the imperative to keep secrets, and the imperative to have them known. How do you know that you’re a person, distinct from other people? By keeping certain things to yourself. You guard them inside you, because, if you don’t, there’s no distinction between inside and outside. Secrets are the way you know you even have an inside. A radical exhibitionist is a person who has forfeited his identity. But identity in a vacuum is also meaningless. Sooner or later, the inside of you needs a witness. Otherwise you’re just a cow, a cat, a stone, a thing in the world, trapped in your thingness. To have an identity, you have to believe that other identities equally exist. You need closeness with other people. And how is closeness built? By sharing secrets. Colleen knows what you secretly think of Willow. You know what Colleen secretly thinks of Flor. Your identity exists at the intersection of these lines of trust. Am I making any sense?”
“Sort of,” Pip said. “But it’s a pretty weird theory for a person who exposes people’s secrets for a living.”
“Were you not listening in the restaurant? I got trapped into this job. I hate the Internet as much as I hated my motherland.”
“I guess you did say that.”
“Were you not even listening to yourself? I’m not doing this job because I still believe in it. It’s all about me now. It’s my identity.”
He made a gesture of self-disgust.
“I don’t know what to say to you,” Pip said. “I already told you my secret. I told you my real name.”
“Your name is nothing to be ashamed of.”
“I also went through a shoplifting phase in middle school. I had quite a masturbation thing going when I was ten.”
“Didn’t everyone?”
“OK, so there’s nothing. I’m boring and ordinary. Like I said, you knew what you were getting into.”
Suddenly, without her quite knowing how he’d traversed the distance between them, he was pressing her into the corner again. He had his mouth to her ear and his hand wedged between her legs. There was a weird suspenseful moment of adjustment. She couldn’t breathe, but she could hear him breathing heavily. Then his hand moved up to her belly and down again into her jeans and underpants.
“What about this,” he murmured in her ear. “Is this not a private thing of yours?”
“Fairly private, yes,” she said, heart pounding.
“This is the reason I trust you?”
She couldn’t believe what was happening. He was putting a fingertip inside her, and her body wasn’t exactly saying no to it.
“I don’t know,” she whispered. “Maybe.”
“Do I have your permission for this?”
“Um…”
“Just tell me what you want.”
She didn’t know what to say, but she probably should have said something, because, in the absence of a response, he was unzipping her jeans with his free hand.
“I know I was asking for it,” she whispered. “But…”
He drew his head back. There was an avid gleam in his eyes. “But what?”
“Well,” she said, squirming a little, “isn’t it kind of customary to kiss a person before you stick your finger in her?”
“That’s what you want? A kiss?”
“Well, I guess, between the two things, right at this moment, yes.”
He brought his hands up to her face and cupped her cheeks. She could smell her own private scent as well as his male body smell, a European smell, not unpleasant. She closed her eyes to receive his kiss. But when it came, she didn’t respond to it. Somehow it wasn’t what she wanted. Her eyes opened and found his looking into them.
“You have to believe this wasn’t why I brought you here,” he said.
“Are you sure it’s what you want even now?”
“In strict honesty? Not as much as I want to kiss a different part of you.”
“Whoa.”
“I think you’d like it. And then you could leave, and I could trust you.”
“Is this the way you always are with women? Was this how things went with Toni Field?”
He shook his head. “I told you. I’m not myself in transactions like that. I’m showing my true self to you because I want us to trust each other.”
“OK, but, I’m sorry — how does this make you trust me?”
“You said it yourself. If Colleen finds out about this, she won’t forgive you. None of the interns will. I want you to have a secret that only I know.”
She frowned, trying to understand the logic.
“Will you give me that secret?” He put his hands on her cheeks again. “Come lie down with me.”
“Maybe it’s better if I just go back.”
“You’re the one who wanted to go to your room. You’re the one who made me come up here.”
“You’re right. I did.”
“So come lie down. The person I honestly am is a person who wants his tongue in you. Will you let me do that? Please let me do that.”
Why did she follow him to the bed? To be brave. To submit to the fact of the hotel room. To have her revenge on the indifferent men she’d left behind in Oakland. To do the very thing her mother had been afraid would happen. To punish Colleen for caring more about Andreas than about her. To be the person who’d come to South America and landed the famous, powerful man. She had any number of dubious reasons, and for a while, on the bed, as he slowed down the action, kissing her eyes and stroking her hair, kissing her neck, unbuttoning her shirt, helping her out of her bra, touching her breasts with his gaze and his hands and his mouth, tenderly easing down her jeans, even more tenderly peeling off her underpants, her reasons were all in harmony. She could feel his hands trembling on her hips, feel his own excitement, and this was something — it was a lot. He seemed honestly to want her private thing. It was really this knowledge, more than the negocitos he was expertly transacting with his mouth, that caused her to come with such violent alacrity.