I lent my wife to the dry cleaner for a thousand

It’s been almost a year since that Thursday in March, and still there are afternoons when Renata laughs in the kitchen while she washes the dishes and the weight of the phone in my hand comes back to me, along with the sound of her voice on the other end of the line saying yes to another man. The envelope with the thousand pesos is still in the drawer of the bedside table. She never spent it. Sometimes, when we fight over some stupid thing, she takes it out and sets it on the bed as if challenging me to remember what we did.

Don Hilario had run the dry cleaner on the corner since before we moved into the neighborhood. A man of about fifty-five, with the enormous hands of someone who’d spent his life hauling sacks, nails always clipped short, wrists broad. A look in his eyes that he never bothered to hide when Renata came in to drop off my shirts. We’d spent years hearing him toss compliments at her: saying she looked tired and he’d know how to make her rest, that that white blouse deserved a bigger mirror, that a woman like her shouldn’t have to carry the heavy bags alone.

At first Renata told me about it as a joke, laughing like someone who knows she’s desired and doesn’t care. But I could see something in her eyes that wasn’t innocent amusement. A glint of curiosity. A question she asked herself and didn’t dare say out loud.

What set everything off was the bill. One afternoon Renata went out to the greengrocer with two hundred pesos in her purse and, when she came back, she was short the change to pay for the last thing she’d picked up. She crossed the street to Don Hilario’s and asked him to break the bill. He took it, held it up to the light, then looked at her, and without losing his smile he offered her something different: she could keep a five-hundred instead of the two-hundred if she accepted the deal.

Renata turned red. She laughed. She told him that at those prices the dry cleaner would go under, and she left with her exact two hundred pesos, without taking the five-hundred. But the offer kept buzzing in her head all day.

—And what would you have done if the offer had been different? —I asked her that night, staring at the ceiling, pretending the subject meant nothing to me.

—Different how?

—More serious.

Renata went quiet. She switched off the lamp and turned on her side, with her back to me. For the first time in years of marriage I heard that kind of silence that says things. Then she gave a little laugh, as if asking my permission to understand what I was suggesting.

—You’re a degenerate —she said, and laughed again.

—You didn’t answer me.

—Not for two hundred. I already told you that.

—For a thousand?

She went still. I heard her breathing faster. Then she slowly turned over and found my hand under the sheet.

—Are you serious? —she whispered.

—I want to see you do it —I replied, and I was surprised by the steadiness of my own voice—. I want him to pay you. A thousand pesos. I want him to feel like he’s buying you. I want you to feel like a whore for an hour. And then you come back to me.

—And what do you do meanwhile?

—I listen.

To have it said in the dark, I thought, is almost the same as not having said it at all.

That night we made love as we hadn’t in months. Renata came three times, once straddling me with her back arched and her mouth open, not a single cry, just dry air coming out. I finished on top of her stomach, exhausted, my head spinning because I already knew this wasn’t going to stay a pillow fantasy. We had put it into words. And we were going to do it.

***

The following week, on a Tuesday morning, Renata went to drop off two sheets at the dry cleaner. She came back home with the receipt between her fingers and a smile I’d never seen before.

—I told him yes —she announced, not taking off her coat—. I asked for a thousand. He didn’t hesitate for a second. He asked me what day, I told him Thursday after lunch. He has an apartment above the shop, two floors up.

—Did you tell him anything about me?

—I told him my husband works until seven. That I have two hours. That I don’t want anyone in the neighborhood seeing me go in.

I nodded. I hugged her from behind while she looked out the window toward the corner, where the dry cleaner’s red sign was still lit at that hour. I kissed her neck. I tucked her hair behind her ear. And I asked her for one more thing, just one.

—When you’re with him, answer my phone call. Don’t talk to me. Just leave the line open.

—You want to listen?

—I want to hear you. Right when he’s inside you. I want to know what you sound like when you moan with him.

Renata looked at me for a long time, as if weighing whether I could withstand what I was asking for. Then she bit her lip and nodded slowly.

***

Thursday dawned sunny and I couldn’t work. I asked for leave because of a family emergency and stayed home pacing from the dining room to the bathroom and from the bathroom to the dining room. At two in the afternoon I dropped her off at a corner three blocks from the building, gave her a long kiss, and straightened the collar of her coat. Underneath she wore a short black dress and a red lace thong she’d bought the day before. Don Hilario didn’t know I existed as an accomplice. For him, that afternoon she was going alone, slipping away from me, breaking the rules.

I sat down in a bar six blocks from the building. I ordered a coffee and a glass of water. I set my phone against the ashtray and stared at the screen like a teenager waiting for a reply. At two twenty she texted me: “I’m going in.” At two twenty-two: “He’s pouring me a whiskey.” At two thirty: “I’m not texting anymore, leave me.” I respected the silence. I calculated in my head how long the preliminaries would take for a fifty-five-year-old man who’d been wanting a woman for a long time and finally had her on his sofa. I gave them a long forty minutes.

At three ten I called.

She answered on the third ring. She didn’t speak. She was only breathing. I pressed the phone to my ear and closed my eyes.

—Was that your husband? —I heard him ask, far away, his voice thick with whiskey.

—Yes, I already told him I’m at my mother’s place —she answered, and her voice came to me so close I could picture her with her mouth inches from the microphone.

—Turn that thing off.

—I put it on silent. Leave it there, it won’t bother us.

There was a rustle. Then the sound of fabric against leather, a heavy breath that wasn’t hers, and right after that Renata’s voice again, but no longer speaking to me, no longer speaking to him either. A low moan, like when she starts to open, that sound I know by heart because she gave it to me for ten years, and that afternoon she was giving it to the dry cleaner’s owner.

Then it turned into a crescendo. She was panting. He was thrusting. At times she said, “like that, like that, give it to me,” and I clenched my jaw so hard my teeth hurt. My shame and my excitement were indistinguishable. I had a rock-hard erection under the bar table and didn’t dare move. The waiter brought me the coffee and I barely nodded. On the phone, Renata moved from panting to a muffled cry. Then I heard the man grunt something, an incomprehensible word, and a wet, hard slap of flesh against flesh that ended in a long exhale from both of them.

She hung up without saying goodbye. The phone screen went dark. I left the coffee untouched and paid with a bill I didn’t even look at.

***

I walked to the agreed place with weak legs. Renata appeared from the opposite corner, crossing the street with her coat half-buttoned and her hair still damp at the nape of her neck. She saw me and smiled in a way I’d never seen before. A smile from someone who has just done something big and still can’t quite believe it.

—Take me home —she said, grabbing my arm.

She didn’t want a taxi. She wanted to walk the fifteen blocks with me, telling me everything in a low voice, her voice still rough. She told me he let her in and offered her whiskey, which she only accepted to have something in her hand. That he confessed he’d been imagining that afternoon for seven years, ever since the first time she came in wearing a white blouse and denim shorts to drop off one of my jackets. That when he pulled down her dress and saw the red thong, he went speechless for a few seconds, as if he hadn’t expected to find a married woman wearing lingerie like that reserved for him.

—At one point he went soft —she told me, biting back a smile—. He was nervous. I got off him, knelt down, and sucked him until he got hard again. He loved it. He asked me if I liked blowing and I told him it was what I liked most in the world.

—And what did he do?

—Then he fucked me and didn’t pull out until he came. He fingered me for a long while before that, right there standing up, with two fingers. He asked me if you’d fucked me the night before. I told him no, that it had been days. I lied, obviously. You know you fucked me like an animal last night.

—You lied to get him hot.

—I lied so he’d feel like the first of the month. Today it was him. Today he earned it.

I walked in silence for half a block, processing it. Then I asked if she’d kissed him. She said yes, on the mouth, twice, at the beginning and at the end. I asked if it had hurt. She said no, that he was gentle, that he was more careful than she’d expected. I asked if she’d do it again. She thought about it a good while before answering me.

—I don’t know. Depends on you.

—On you too.

—On both of us —she said, and squeezed my arm harder.

***

We got home after five. As soon as I shut the door, she unbuttoned her coat and let the dress fall in the hallway. The red thong was still on, slipped a little to one side. She smelled like men’s cologne, like someone else’s sweat, like cheap whiskey and something else I didn’t dare name. I shoved her against the dining-room wall and pulled her thong down with my teeth. She laughed and grabbed my hair with both hands.

—Fuck me before it wears off —she told me.

I fucked her right there, standing up, with her legs around my waist and her back against the wall. She held me so tightly I understood for the first time what it was to want to mark territory. I fucked her over the other man’s smell. I fucked her over his voice on the phone. I fucked her over the mental image I’d built of Renata kneeling down and sucking the dry cleaner’s cock until it got hard again. I came inside her while biting her neck, and she came with me, and we both ended up sliding to the floor, soaked in sweat and everything else.

Afterward, when we were lying on the rug staring at the ceiling, she stretched out her arm and grabbed her purse. She took out a white envelope. She set it on my chest.

—There’s the thousand. I earned it. I’m a whore.

I told her to keep it, to buy whatever she wanted, that the money was hers because the job had been hers. That my payment had already been collected, and it had been listening to her. That from now on, every time we passed the corner and Don Hilario greeted us from the shop door, the two of us would have a secret he would never fully know: that his unforgettable afternoon had really been our shared fantasy, and that the man she slept with that night and the next and the next was still me.

Renata put the envelope back in the drawer of the bedside table. It’s still there, unopened. Sometimes she still takes it out. And every time she does, the two of us go back to the phone.