I woke you up the following Monday before your alarm went off.
“All right,” I said, gripping your bare shoulder. “Let’s go.”
“Really?” You rubbed your eyes. “Are you sure?”
And then the alarm began to sound. I pulled the covers over my head until your sleepy hand found the snooze button.
* * *
—
I woke up from our post-flight nap around three, in our new apartment in Moema, panicked. It took a few blinks of my eyes to register where I was—all I saw were the bare walls, whirling fan, and the damp sheets where you no longer lay. Even after my mind compiled the pieces and located my body in space—here, São Paulo, Brazil, and you, probably in the kitchen—the dread remained. It expanded inside my chest cavity. Mornings in our bedroom back home floated in front of my eyes. Dust particles hovering in the rays of sunlight. Each morning I would inspect my terrarium on the windowsill, the only plants I managed to keep alive, pink and green succulents and a leafy fern. I fussed over them adoringly, misting their leaves, picking off the dead bits, and reorganizing the stems so that they didn’t block one another’s light. My face began to tense and prickle, a sure indication that tears would follow, and they did—two streams in the corners of my eyes that crossed over my ears and fell to the pillow.
But then I thought of you, somewhere nearby, and how thrilled you were in the taxi, scratching your newly grown beard, endlessly observing the billboards and graffiti we passed.
“Dennis?” I called.
“I’m in the kitchen!” I heard you say, and for a moment I calmed, feeling like we could have been anywhere. When I found you in the kitchen, you hadn’t opened any of the boxes, but you had discovered a bag of white rice and canned beans in the cabinet. I stood close to you as you stirred beans on the stove.
“Sustenance,” you said, and revealed the bottle of cachaça we’d bought at duty free.
“Already?”
“Come on,” you said, and tore open a box labeled DISHES, CUPS. You unwrapped two coffee mugs. “It’s a celebration!”
In the evening we tried to make love on the mattress—you thumbed at my bra clasp, clumsily kissing my neck while I raised my arms in the air—but I was too tipsy to keep balance and collapsed on the bed. We gave up and went to sleep in our clothes.
* * *
—
The heat woke me early. I prodded my way through the kitchen and nuked the leftover rice and beans. The tiles felt cool on the soles of my feet and I imagined spreading my entire body, star-shaped and naked, to temper the heat. You woke soon after and spooned bean-stained rice, chewing as you unpacked kitchen items, seemingly unaffected by your hangover.
Marta would arrive the following day, while you were checking in at the university, filling out paperwork. I knew having a maid meant that cooking and cleaning, the things I usually took care of in our home, would go to her. But I didn’t fully appreciate that she would be there, physically, another person in the apartment, every day. I wish I’d breathed more deeply into our aloneness that day, huddled together in the empty space, before you became mired with obligation, and before Marta, the apartment, and I became one.
I stood and walked to the living room windows with my bowl of rice and beans in hand. You came too, held me by the waist, and we looked outside at the canopy of beige and brown buildings, the Ginásio do Ibirapuera stadium across the street, and beyond that two water fountains jutting from the pond in the park. The pink morning sky hovered just above the buildings, as if the city had somehow been raised to the clouds, or the clouds lowered to it. We cracked the windows and kept the ceiling fan spinning, the ambient drill a background hum that we would, in time, unhear.
The first time I met Marta she walked like she had water in her shoes. Her niece had opened a beauty salon in Atibaia, the town where she lived, and cut her toenails too short. I remember how raw they looked, wedged in her sandals, each nail painted blue with a gold star.
You had left early that morning to fill out paperwork at the university before classes began in a couple of weeks. You asked me to come with you, but I was eager to meet Marta. Technically she wasn’t supposed to come until school was in session, but she had called ahead to say she would stop by to ensure everything was in order for us.
When she arrived, she knocked twice at the back door as a forewarning, then let herself in. For some reason I had the impression that Marta was an older woman by the way the Provost had described her, someone old-fashioned and stately, but Marta looked more like a rebel aunt than a wise grandma. She penciled her eyebrows into high arches that rose to her hairline when she spoke. Her sleeves were rolled all the way to her shoulders, revealing plump, toned arms and a weathered tattoo of a black star on her bicep, a symbol for her Ghanaian ancestors, she told me.
I held out my hand.
“I’m Linda,” I said.
“Bom dia, Linda. I’m Marta.” She cupped my hand in both of hers and, instead of shaking it, settled for a moment, like a hen incubating an egg. “Can you help me? I have lost something important.”
She was looking for the spare key to the walk-in closet in the back of the laundry room, a space that was reserved for her. She ate meals and stored her personal belongings there. Normally it was in the drawer under the microwave, she said, but it had gone missing.
“It is a small gold key with a piece of green tape on the end. Did you see it?”
I hadn’t, and so we embarked on a hunt to look for it. We rifled through drawers and cabinets, shook out the rugs, lifted our boxes and, when that turned up nothing, opened them to search through the books and photographs we had packed, as though the key could have slipped inside. It felt strangely thrilling to search with her, like she had instantly seen me as someone who had a particular knack for finding things. So it was disappointing, sharply so, when it was she, not I, who found the key. I was sure I’d be the one to find it.
“Aqui!” she said and revealed a small gold key on top of a jar of dried beans. “Here it is.”
“Oh,” I said. “And you’re sure that’s the one?”
“Yes. Olha.” She pointed to the green tape. “This is the one.”
And with that, she walked away. She headed straight for the closet, unlocked it, closed the door, and disappeared. I wasn’t sure if I was meant to wait for her, so I slinked into the living room and pretended to busy myself with a stack of books you had left on the coffee table.
When Marta emerged she was wearing a purple apron with ladybugs embroidered along the hem. She used this apron like a tool kit; inside was a bamboo toothbrush, a small Swiss Army knife, a cloth handkerchief, and a fan that she unfurled when she was hot, revealing a lily garden and a koi fish pond.