I began to think of these people as my clients. The client I liked best was an obstetrician who worked at the city’s most exclusive hospital. Her name was Claudia. Claudia was in her forties, and she had a directness of manner and speech that impressed me, a sense of her bearings; the way she carried herself made me think male colleagues would know better than to mishandle her. At the hospital she attended several foreign women per month and wanted to communicate more easily with them. The husbands are always more nervous than the wives, she said.
“And I always know when one of them, one of the husbands, is not faithful,” she said. I gave lessons at her apartment in the evening or, occasionally, the early morning. When we met in the morning her family would smash around through breakfast in the next room. They were people I heard and never saw. “He will give a lot of time talking to the male doctors and talk with me not so much. Only the husbands who are guilty cannot talk to an attractive woman,” Claudia said.
“He will spend a lot of time,” I said.
To prepare for our lessons, I taught myself medical vocabulary. The terms were unfamiliar to me even in English—vernix, lochia, oedema, words that weren’t English, really, but specimens cut from the cadavers of Greek and Latin and then preserved in the formaldehyde of a medical dictionary.
I worked for Claudia; I was her employee. She had other employees. This was a category of people in her life, the category I belonged to. I saw the housekeeper when I came to the apartment. Days for Claudia’s housekeeper began very early and ended very late. She arrived in darkness and left in darkness. I was paid more by the hour but was involved much less intimately in Claudia’s life than the housekeeper, a woman who bought groceries and changed the linens and walked the two dogs and polished the frames of the family photographs; and yet I was the one who came by way of the social elevator, like a guest. Claudia never required me to use the service elevator—which the housekeeper surely never had to be told that she was expected to use. The difference, I supposed, was that I also lived in an apartment like Claudia’s. She was indeed an attractive woman.
Marcos paid me in envelopes. Claudia folded bills around her thumb and then handed them to me. In one case the money was invisible, in the other it was unregarded.
It was work whose purpose was to relieve boredom rather than to earn a living—which made it not work at all, but a pastime.
Sometimes my husband met me after work for a drink at a boteco near Maison Monet. It was on the corner, by a frozen river of traffic, the chairs arranged carelessly on the sidewalk. The neighborhood men clustered there in the evenings, eating pastéis and bolinhos, while the owner himself brought out more bottles of Antarctica beer. Some nights musicians would set up inside and play songs of old Brazil. The men at the tables talked and talked. It was a country of never-ending social obligation, social approach. We knew the owner—the bar had been his father’s, it had been in business fifty years. Passengers in cars stuck in traffic would roll down the windows and chat with the men at the tables, and one of the men would hand over a glass, a sip of cold beer before the light changed, a fleeting scene under the city glow of dusk. Evenings: the ashtrays quickly filled up, and the owner came around to replace them.
“Although usually you come home much later than this.”
“I wouldn’t say usually.”
“You’re frequently absent.”
“I don’t think that’s fair.”
“Let me say it differently, then. This is nice, being here with you like this. I wish it happened more often.”
“The reason I stay late isn’t that I don’t want to be here.”
“But you like what the late hours signify. You’re central to the enterprise. Without you, the ship would sail off course.”
“I want to be good at my job, yes.”
“My point is that you already miss things.”
“I wouldn’t miss anything important. Not something truly important.”
Brazilians loved to tell you about New York City. They had been there, they hadn’t been there, and in any case they had glowing reviews. Here I am referring to rich Brazilians. Everything is so organized, they said. Everything works so well there, they said. They would all live there if they could.
After a lesson at his office, Marcos gave me a ride. It wasn’t the direction he would go normally, but he had a dinner in Brooklin; my husband was at a dinner as well, somewhere else. “Blindado,” I said, touching the leather detailing on the inside of the door. Bulletproof. I’d learned the word from the signs hanging at every car dealership—bulletproofing your vehicle was the standard practice. But Marcos corrected me: his car was unproofed. “If you have it, they notice you. It is not a good idea unless you are already a target. I don’t want to be asking for attention. People here have cars that are much more …” He didn’t have the word he wanted in English. I supplied it: “Flashy.” “Flashy,” he said, taking possession of the term. “Yes. This is what I want to avoid.”
I learned that the name of my neighborhood came from the Tupi-Guarani word for lie. Apparently, there was an epic poem written in the late eighteenth century—which, I was assured, all Brazilians once knew by heart—in which the word was used as the name of a female character. She was symbolic, the incarnation of false love.
My husband invited me to join him at an airline-industry trade fair. It was part of an annual convention. I’d never been to a convention of any kind and was curious. For centuries conventional pertained simply to any agreement between parties, to coming together, and only in later usage did it swerve into synonymy with unoriginal, and then boring. He said there would be cocktails.
The booths were like little stages: elevated, illuminated, gleaming with expensive chrome surfaces. Those booths cost money—you have to buy to sell. There were booths for tarmac guys, engine-part guys, emergency lighting system guys. I admired a booth that belonged to a designer of cabin interiors. A quartet of airplane seats was on display to show off the company’s work. The lighting was soft and invitational. Everything about it was the opposite of actually being on an airplane. Passing conventiongoers stopped to regard the seats as if they were art.
He hadn’t lied about the cocktails. At many of the booths, women dressed like private escorts mixed caipirinhas and chatted with the men who approached. Men wandered the convention floor solo, with the verve of partygoers. The women moved in groups and seemed less sure of themselves.
From the far end of the hall, I heard shouting—a sound growing, something happening, but I couldn’t see what it was. My husband was elsewhere. I went in the direction of the noise and arrived in time to see a group of men in matching blue jackets celebrating. They gave the impression of a tribe. People nearby smiled, the way spectators smile at a winner in a casino. I had no idea. I was the anthropologist, missing information. There were drinks at a nearby booth, and I went there. A girl gave me a caipirinha and a man who was standing nearby spoke to me in Portuguese. I smiled, out of instinct, which must have encouraged him; he kept going even as I failed to understand almost anything he said. His face was tanned, shining. I detected a kind of spoiled masculinity in him, a negative current in whatever he was saying. He talked ceaselessly, as if he would lose me the second he paused for breath. I knew that at any moment he would begin to touch me. I moved away. He never stopped talking, and I never stopped smiling.
“Why are we here? Why are you here?”
“You know. Meeting people.”
“To
