‘I thought I was the only one in the world,’ Javier confessed. ‘I thought it was a crazy fabrication of my mind. And then there it was, in the book.’
Lydia didn’t realize her mouth was hanging open until she closed it. She sat back onto her stool with a bump.
‘But I thought I was the only one,’ she said.
Javier straightened his body away from the counter. ‘You also?’
Lydia nodded.
‘Well, my God,’ he said in English. And then he laughed. ‘We will start a support group.’
And then he stood there, talking with her for so long that she eventually offered him a cup of coffee, which he accepted. She pulled a stool around to the far side of the counter so he could drink it in comfort. He was careful not to get foam on his mustache. They talked about literature and poetry and economics and politics and the music they both adored, and he stayed for nearly two hours, until she began to worry that he’d be missed somewhere, but he waved his hand dismissively.
‘There is nothing out there more important than this.’
It was just as Lydia had always hoped life in her bookstore would be one day. In between the workaday drudgery of running a business, that she might entertain customers who were as lively and engaging as the books around them.
‘If I had three more customers like you, I’d be set for life,’ she said, taking her last sip of coffee.
He placed a hand across his chest and bowed slightly. ‘I shall try to be enough.’ And then he said casually, softly, ‘If I had met you in a different life, I would ask you to marry me.’
Lydia stood abruptly from her stool and shook her head.
‘I’m sorry,’ Javier said. ‘I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable.’
She gathered the cups in silence. The treachery wasn’t in receiving his confession. The treachery was in her unspoken response: in a different life, she might’ve said yes.
‘I should get back to work,’ she said instead. ‘I have to place an order this afternoon. I have to prepare some parcels for the mail.’
He took seven new books with him that day, three of which were Lydia’s recommendations.
On the following Friday morning a summer shower washed down the street, and two large, worrisome men crowded themselves in beneath the awning that hung above Lydia’s bookshop door. Moments later, Javier appeared, and Lydia felt a strong measure of happiness. There would be new books to discuss! She tried to behave naturally, but as she watched those men in the doorway, her breath constricted in her chest.
‘They make you nervous,’ Javier observed.
‘I just don’t know what they want.’ Lydia paced from her usual position, emerging from behind the register. She, like all the other shop owners on this street, already paid the monthly mordidas imposed by the cartel. She couldn’t afford to pay more.
‘I will send them off,’ Javier said.
Lydia protested, grabbing his arm, growing louder even as Javier’s voice dropped to a comforting hush. He stepped around her when she tried to block his path.
‘They will hurt you,’ she whispered as severely as she could without raising alarm.
He smiled at her in a way that made his mustache twitch and assured her, ‘They will not.’
Lydia ducked behind the counter, lowering her head as Javier opened the door and stepped outside. She watched in astonishment as he spoke to the two bulky thugs beneath her awning. Both men gestured to the rain, but Javier pointed a finger, made a shooing gesture with his hand, and the men trotted off into the downpour.
Lydia was reluctant to understand. Even as his visits continued and lengthened, as their conversations deepened into more personal matters, as she caught fleeting glimpses of the men on two other occasions, Lydia willfully forgot the power Javier had wielded on that rainy morning. When eventually he spoke adoringly about his wife, whom he called la reina de mi corazón, the queen of my heart, Lydia felt her defenses relax. Those shields dropped further still when he revealed the existence of a young mistress, whom he called la reina de mis pantalones, the queen of my pants.
‘Disgusting,’ she said, but she surprised herself by laughing, too.
It was hardly unusual for a man to have an affair, but talking so openly about it with another woman was something else. For that reason, the confession served both to cure Lydia of any flattered wisp of attachment and, as Javier revealed more and more of his secret self, to turn the key in the intimate lock of their friendship. They became confidants, sharing jokes and observations and disappointments. They even spoke at times about the irritating things their spouses did.
‘If you were married to me, I would never behave that way,’ Javier said when she complained about Sebastián leaving his dirty socks on the kitchen counter.
‘Of course not.’ She laughed. ‘You’d be an ideal husband.’
‘I’d wash every sock in the house.’
‘Sure.’
‘I’d burn all the socks and buy new ones each week.’
‘Mm-hmm.’
‘I’d forgo socks altogether, if it would make you happy.’
Lydia laughed in spite of herself. She’d learned to roll her eyes at these proclamations because, in the weather of their friendship, his flirtation was only a passing cloud. There were far more important storms between them. They discovered, for example, that both of their fathers had died young from cancer, a fact that would’ve bonded them all by itself. They’d both had good dads, and then lost them.
‘It’s like being a member of the shittiest club in the world,’ Javier said to her.
For Lydia, it had been nearly fifteen years, and though her sorrow was now irregular, when she did stumble into it, her grief was still as acute as the day her father had died.
‘I know,’ Javier said, even though she didn’t say these things out loud.
So she endured his intense flattery, and he, in turn, accepted, perhaps even relished, her wholesale rejection of his flirtation. She came to think of it as part of his charm.
‘But, Lydia,’ he told her reverently, placing both hands on his heart, ‘my other loves notwithstanding, you truly are la reina de mi alma.’ The queen of my soul.
‘And what would your poor wife say about that?’ she countered.
‘My magnificent wife only wants me to be happy.’
‘She’s a saint!’
He spoke frequently of his only child, a sixteen-year-old daughter who was at boarding school in Barcelona. Everything about him changed when he talked about her – his voice, his face, his manner. His love for her was so earnest that he handled even the subject of her with tremendous care. Her name was like a fine glass bauble he was afraid of dropping.