My Neighbor on the Eighth Offered Me More Than a Job

I had been out of work for three months when it all started. Three months locked inside an apartment I could barely afford, eating plain white rice and selling used books on Saturdays at a fair on the avenue. The rent on the ninth floor had been signed by my ex-boyfriend when we were still something, and by some bureaucratic miracle no one had come to demand the move from me.

What happened with Federico —my ex-boyfriend— fell apart on its own. One morning he stopped answering my messages and, a week later, my friend Carolina called to tell me he was living with a widow on the other side of the city. I didn’t cry that day. I cried later, when I saw my bank account and understood I was alone and no one was going to come save me.

That Monday I went down in the elevator with my last printed résumé, inside a pink cardboard folder, the only clean one I had left. I had an interview at ten with a cosmetics distributor. I lied on the CV: I said I spoke English. I didn’t.

The elevator stopped on the eighth and he got in.

Esteban —I later found out his name was Esteban— had to be about forty-five. White shirt without a tie, expensive perfume, a leather briefcase worn around the edges. He glanced at me sideways, nodded without smiling, and let out an automatic “good morning,” emotionless.

I answered in a voice that wasn’t mine. A low, slow voice, as if I were deliberately dragging out the syllables. “Good morning.”

He was surprised. Not much. He only lifted his eyebrows and looked back at the lit-up number panel. But I had seen him, and at that instant I knew, with a clarity that frightened me, that something was going to change that morning.

I don’t know where I found the strength. Maybe it was the last crumpled bills in my pocket. Maybe it was rage.

I moved half a step back, toward him. Esteban had his hands crossed over his belt, against his own body, that defensive posture men take when they ride alone with a woman in an elevator. My back ended up just inches from his fingers.

The elevator slowed on the seventh.

An older woman got in with a white poodle in her arms. She said hello. Pressed zero. Looked at the dog. Didn’t look at us.

I pressed my ass against Esteban’s crossed hands. Slowly. As if by accident, as if the elevator’s braking had pushed me there. I felt him go rigid behind me, felt him hold his breath behind my ear. And then, instead of pulling his hands away, he opened his fingers. Just a little. Just enough for his fingertips to register the seam of my trousers, the curve, the heat.

We went down the seven floors like that. Without talking. Without looking at each other. The poodle lady was humming something I never managed to identify.

On the ground floor we let her out first. Esteban waited. When the building door closed behind her, he turned and looked at me face to face for the first time.

“Did you have breakfast?” he asked.

I shook my head.

“Come on.”

We crossed to a small bar on the corner, one of those places with checkered tablecloths and watery coffee. He ordered two cortados and two medialunas. I ate them in silence while he watched me eat with the curiosity of someone observing a strange animal he didn’t quite understand.

“Why?” he said at last, stirring his coffee with the spoon.

I shrugged. I didn’t have a short answer. So I told him the long version. About the job, about Federico, about the rent, about the interview at ten that I was no longer going to make. I told him I had two eggs and half an onion in the fridge, and one hundred and twenty pesos left in my wallet.

I also told him other things. That I liked him. That men his age made me feel safe. That I didn’t care if he was married, that I didn’t want to bother anyone. That I was twenty-six, that my body had become heavy after months without anyone touching it, and that I needed a roof, food, and the feeling, even if it was a lie, that someone was looking after me.

I didn’t lie about everything. About my body, I didn’t lie.

Esteban listened without interrupting. Then he took a card from the inside pocket of his jacket, wrote a name and an address on the back, and slid it across the wooden table to me.

“Go this afternoon. Ask for Mauricio. Tell him you’re coming from me.”

I nodded. I put the card away as if it were a large bill.

“And come by the house afterward,” he added, without lifting his eyes from the coffee. “Eighth C. At seven.”

***

Mauricio was the commercial director of an appliance importer. The office occupied two floors of a glass tower in the city center. A woman with headphones and false nails received me and made me wait twenty minutes on a white sofa next to an artificial plant.

The interview lasted twelve minutes. Mauricio barely looked at the résumé. He asked if I could handle spreadsheets. I said yes. He asked if I could start the following Monday. I said yes. He jotted something in a notebook, shook my hand —firm, too long— and explained that human resources would call me for the paperwork.

When I stepped out onto the sidewalk, the midday sun hit me like a slap. I had a job. And I also had an unspoken arrangement that would begin that very night, two floors below mine.

***

I showered with the last bar of glycerin soap, put on the only lingerie set that wasn’t falling apart —black, simple, no lace— and over it the wrap dress my mother had given me for a birthday three years earlier. I went down the two floors by the stairs. I didn’t want the elevator.

Esteban opened the door in slippers. He smelled like a recent shower. The apartment was larger than mine, with expensive furniture and little personality, like a magazine catalog. An entire wall was lined with records.

“Champagne,” he said, showing me a bottle already uncorked. “I don’t have anything else cold.”

We drank in the living room. He asked me the usual things: where I was born, what I’d studied before I started working, whether I had siblings. I answered briefly. The conversation was a formality we both knew would end soon.

When I finished the second glass, I got up, went over to the wall of records, picked one at random —something jazz, I didn’t recognize the musician— and put it on the turntable. The needle crackled. A saxophone began, slow, rough.

I danced alone in the middle of the living room. Slowly. I untied the belt of my dress and let it fall to the floor in one motion. I stood there in my lingerie facing him. Esteban didn’t move from the sofa. He only watched me, with an expression that wasn’t hurried desire but something more like concentration, as if he were studying a painting.

I came closer, unbuttoned his shirt, lowered his zipper. I knelt on the rug. I had him in my mouth before he said a word. When I felt him firm against my palate, I lifted my face, bit his lower lip just a little, and rode him right there, on the white leather sofa, without taking everything off, with my bra slipping down over my ribs and my panties shoved to one side.

He came inside me. He didn’t ask. Neither did I. I had been on the pill for two years out of habit.

I was resting my head on his chest, my heart still racing, when the doorbell rang.

Esteban didn’t startle. He reached for the intercom, pressed the button, opened it.

“Mauricio,” he said, without looking at me. “I told you he was coming.”

***

I wasn’t outraged. I wasn’t surprised either, really. Some part of me had understood it at the bar, when he wrote that card without asking me for anything in return.

Mauricio came in with a bottle of red wine and the smile of a man who knows why he’s there. He kissed me on the cheek, as if we were old acquaintances at a barbecue. He took off his jacket and hung it over the back of a chair with a calm that told me he had been in that living room many times before.

“Esteban owed me a favor,” he explained, slowly, as if speaking to a little girl. “And you need a job. Everybody wins.”

I nodded. I stayed where I was, barefoot on the rug, with my dress on the floor.

What happened after that took two hours. They took turns. They learned my body in silence, with a strange efficiency, as if they had discussed it between themselves before I arrived. Mauricio was rough, impatient; Esteban, more attentive, lingering in the details. One held my wrists against the back of the sofa while the other entered me from behind. Then they switched places without saying a word to each other.

They made me come twice before they came themselves. It was something no man had taken the trouble to do in a long time, and I was surprised to discover that I could also feel pleasure in a scene like that, where the only thing I was supposed to feel was humiliation or calculation.

When we finished, the three of us silent on the white sofa, Mauricio went to the kitchen, poured three glasses of wine, came back, and we sat there as if we’d just finished dinner.

“How much do you need,” Esteban asked, “until your first paycheck?”

I gave him a number. I said it low, out of shame. Mauricio took out his wallet and gave me twice that amount, in new bills, without counting.

“It’s not a loan,” he said. “It’s a welcome.”

I put the bills in the pocket of my dress. I got dressed in silence, slowly. I went back up the two floors by the stairs, again, with trembling legs and a strange knot in my stomach that wasn’t regret but something else, something more like relief.

***

The following Monday I walked into the office in a pantsuit borrowed from Carolina. Mauricio introduced me as his new personal secretary. They gave me a computer, a desk facing his, a corporate card for lunches. I learned spreadsheets quickly. I learned the clients’ names quickly. I learned quickly when the office door had to be closed and when it didn’t.

Esteban came up to see me sometimes, Thursdays after six, with the excuse of coffee. Mauricio stayed some nights after hours, with the door closed and the blinds down. I learned to live between the two of them without asking, without requesting, without expecting anything that wasn’t agreed upon in silence that first night on the white sofa.

My rent is paid on time. My fridge is full. I changed the furniture in the apartment, bought a new sofa, two lamps, a rug that looks like Esteban’s but cheaper. Federico called me two weeks ago, drunk, saying he’d made a mistake. I didn’t answer.

The three of us know what I am. Me, Esteban, and Mauricio. It doesn’t have a pretty name, and I don’t mind not giving it one. I’m the girl from the ninth floor, and for the first time in a long time, I don’t owe anyone anything.