One of my most memorable yeah-I've-made-her-laugh episodes took half a week of the trip to the Canaries. In the airport in Moscow I was looking at the girls in our group of travel agents going on a FAM-trip to Tenerife, savoring the anticipated contrast between their outbound semi-indifference and the feeble sense of intimacy with one of them on our way back.
Not an irresistible Casanova, not at all, still I was sure I score this time - the conviction that grew inside me with many journeys - just like the one ahead.
Three days later my friend asked two girls out - the tall one for me and the feisty girlie all to himself.
The best discotheque at the Playa de las Americas is Metropolis, full of people who are either taking rest from the Ibiza’s craziness or getting in the mood for a trip to the island next summer. No dance floor nakedness, no in-site fucking but even without these extremes Metropolis is very up-to-date and vibrant.
All-modern and chic with the pathetic and quite endearing insertions of a few Russian girls in fluffy dresses, heavily made up, trying to look and act brave but evidently confused from the mousse-held elaborate constructions made of hair to the freakish pumps or brand-new running shoes. Trying to ignore the smirks of European girls - who made a point of displaying their gym-flattened ads-worthy tan midsections with ring-pierced navels to their gorgeous European boyfriends, having no doubts there is no real competition.
But now and then a few English or Dutch boys engaged in a brief and halting conversations with the strange birds, inviting them to the tables, looking amused and ready for a taste of a weird but strangely touching romance - something different from the repetitiveness of dressing and acting the way it’s prescribed by the glossy monthly manuals with galvanizing names.
They took the girls for a walk somewhere dark but came back just a couple minutes later, smiling the uneasy smile of freshly - and very unexpectedly - rejected. Ha, they’ve thought a fling with a handsome foreigner is all these girls need, all they could possible hope for. Big mistake. The girls were here to get married. They’ve flown here on the 4-5 hundred dollars they’ve managed to save in a year of sacrifice, they live in a shabby hotel miles from the beach, they’ve spent the pre-evening hours getting ready, ironing the fluffs, rubbing the extra-strong gel into the hair. And they are not going through all that grind just to be screwed in a back alley outside of some snobbish disco.
Some of the girls are either shy of foreigners or truly patriotic, but you will not see them at the Playa’s discotheques - at least not without the recently acquired escort of the same origin. They spend an extra money to go on excursions to some boring volcano in a hope of meeting a New Russian, an overworked and overachieving stockbroker, a loner whose eyes are hungry for a smiling pretty face atop a young shapely body, decently covered with just a hint of seductiveness - the marriage material, not a candidate for a paid participation in a quickie hotel room encounter.
Perhaps I look like one. Not a stockbroker for sure, but a guy who made it big in something. These days to look that way you don’t have to wear something gold-embroidered. A good shorts and a polo from Gap ($ 40 both) will do the trick. Add quality sandals and a golden Visa in the short’s pocket plus a self- assured look of a man who has no doubts where the life is taking him.
Well, that’s who I am - sans success and a Visa in a pocket.
Olga made no secret she favors me before the skinny British guy who’d tried to talk to her at the disco while I was out to fetch some Spanish beer the name and taste of which I do not remember. San Miguel, no? I’ve caught only the glimpse of the guy’s back as he was drunkenly making his way through the crowd - out!
- I’ve told him I’m here with my fiancйe. - She looked at me expectantly.
I’ve made a show of searching for the fiancйe under the table, some chairs and finished it by lifting the ashtray from the plastic tabletop. - Well, it seems he is not here. Seems to me you’ve forgotten the poor guy in Moscow. -
That was the first time I’ve made her laugh. The one of too many.
In the next three days she was always laughing a few minutes past the reasonable limit. I am not such a great guy to be with - I sulk, I have my moods, the remarks I aim at nearly everyone are unsettlingly precise and acerbic - there is nothing feel-good about my attitude. Yet the girl was tossing her head backward at the slightest provocation and letting me know my jokes - well, not only the jokes, almost all of my phrases - are wildly appreciated.
She is tall and slender, with gorgeous hair and gray eyes. She wears her weightless satin dresses like a model.
Olga is what they call overdue for marriage. She is 29, maybe 30 already - she would not admit.
There is a huge birthmark on her right thigh - something for a loving man to adore and for indifferent brute like me to despise. She is a very decent girl. Also stupid. We have nothing in common. Our conversation is the stripes of my bored derisive banter heavily layered with her fits of laughter.
She is wasting her time with me. I am still married - but that’s not the reason I would not call her in Moscow. The combination of her wounded and pleading stare I glimpse when I catch her unaware with her frenetic laughter when she is “working on me” is driving me crazy. The nightly compensation is not enough. In her nocturnal she trades the laughter for even more excessive moaning and the sense the provocation is too slight to justify such a sonic outpour is not something a man can be comfortable with.
Still we are fucking.
That’s what my friend says - Don’t even think about dumping her, you big oaf.
There is only 4, 3, 2 days left. Are you sure you’ll find yourself a girl with Olga’s great ripe body who will also make you dizzy with her intelligence?
Have you met such a perfect combination in all of your 30 years in this world? Are you seriously expecting this to happen in the next 4, 3, 2 days?
Right, right, I say.
But Sergey is not stopping at that. Suppose you tell her to get lost. What will you do this night at the Metropolis? Look at me and Larissa smooch and fondle? Or - even better - stay at the hotel with some paperback?
Larissa is an oil heiress from Siberia. Her Dad goes all the way to bring her up as a nice young lady. She obliges. But also she has the ideas of her own. Fucking Sergey during her period - just to see what comes out of it - is one of them. She is pretty, smart, dynamic and she smilingly hates everyone on the face of Earth.
I want to visit her tight angry twat but she is not after the big guys. This is what Sergey says.
Sergey, I am not only bored and cringing from her stupid laughter. Something has brought her here. Something beside the need to crown my every remark with her inhuman ua-gha-gha and give me a chance to feel guilty about avoiding to touch her ugly birthmark while pounding her into the damp bed.
She needs a husband and she saved all the year to go look for him at that shitty - but very famous - island. And hanging out with me is not taking her that way, not an inch.
Fuck her in the ear, Sasha. Don’t even bother to think of that stupid nonsense. It’s you or some other sneaky fucker. Who she’s gonna find here - for the rest of her dumb life, heh? Is she a good lay? I think so - it shows in the way she moves.
Yes, Serge, I suppose it comes with experience. Lots of it.
Ain’t we jealous?! Hey, who wants to marry - you or her? You big jerk!
We smile and give the high fives. He slaps my back. I gingerly knee- kick him in the groin with the 15 % of the strength that’s needed to crush his balls into the puree.
Well, what I learn the next day if not the rumor my Olga is going out with another guy - for the last four hours. This man is serious - tells me Larissa.
I feel nothing. Swim in a pool, pump some iron. Have a couple beers in the bar with Vova the hockey player and Sergey my wise friend. Was it San Miguel?
Anyway, we polish the beer with a shot of Vova’s Privet vodka, clear as a tear.
I stay in my room with a book and Sergey comes by in an hour with two bottles - gin and tonic, Shweppes quite unexpectedly is the smaller of the two. I am not asking for explanations but he still feels obliged to mumble something about that piece of...
In the plane the new guy approaches me to demand the explanations of what the fuck I was doing with Olga all these days, the girl sending the furtive glances my way. I promise to stuff his inquiring little cock into his Mentos-smelling little mouth. He goes away - there are no other options for him.
Olga walks the aisle to the noisy brunet from Caucasus - I vaguely remember seeing them together the first days. The macho is drunk. He calls the girl I had a privilege to hold in my arms a whore - for all to hear. I raise and go to get him but his mind is wandering, going places. The man begins to cry as a child and calls himself a piece of donkey dung - something very ethnic. Can I demand of him anything more? Guess not. Donkey Dung.
I take my seat and see Olga looking at me. Her male harem is exhausted. She has no one else to show me. So she is just looking at me silently.
Looking at her at the moment you’ll never guess she is stupid. Or that her laughter is anything but the joyous silvery twinkle that sends the tiny wave of tenderness down a man’s spine.
I also look at her.
The plane starts to descend and our eyes are disengaged - fasten your seatbelts.
It’s an early February, the Moscow below is a patchwork of black and dirty white.
I walk toward the exit, putting between me and her as many passengers as I can.
My friend waits for me outside the customs, we are both worried - he’s just told me the payment for a very important clients already in Cancun has not arrived yet. That’s pretty bad, Misha, I say.
And then I notice her, stooped over her mother, trying to help her get the jacket out of amorphous bag - the cheapest variety both of them. The jacket and the bag. She puts it on and vanishes in the almost colorless - something bluish - folds.
They begin to walk towards the exit and Olga’s head jerks, quite abruptly, I suspect some quiet but angry exchange. It seems the mother could not wait till later to ask The Question. Maybe she could guess the answer right away and decided to save herself from an hour’s torture of hope for what’s not bound to happen, to start the way home not with the unfounded stupid flicker but with the first minutes of the new resolve instead - to start putting away the money and have a try the next year. But Olga is not ready to make the plans, not yet.
I point at their backs with a haste - it’s Misha’s last chance to see them, the women are almost out.
- See? That’s the girl I’ve been fucking the whole last week! -