Leather
The neighbor’s voice sounded young. Forceful, strong, used to getting what it wanted. This assessment might have been colored by the fact that she first heard the voice when it was clearly fucking its wife. But who can say.
When she first saw the owner of the voice, sitting on its balcony, smoking a cigarette and drinking a tall glass of orange juice, she was stunned speechless. The body from which the voice emerged was small, bald, wrinkled, and over-tanned from that particularly northern European habit of spending every single warm moment after February in the bright, full sun. His posture in his creaky little folding chair made him seem self-possessed and a touch perverted. This was a man who could enjoy pain, she thought.
He looked up at her with a flash of curiosity and nodded at her, adding a jaunty “hallo” as he returned the glass of juice to his mouth. “Oh,” was all she could say back. She went inside, closed the door to the balcony, and told herself she would not stay home to listen for his voice through the walls that evening. Under no circumstances would she waste her coming days wondering where he was, what he was saying, or who he was saying it to. She would erase the image of him in his chair, exposed to the sun, smoking, letting his mind wander.
She drew the curtains against the day and turned on the radio. Maybe she had time to take a nap before the first of her work calls.
Weeks later, she was browsing idly at the department store, wasting time. She liked to take late mornings to wander and waste time, before her afternoon work began. On the phone with New York, she reported the results of her data analysis—something it usually took her less than two hours to do, though in her reportage she felt a strong need to give a general impression of difficulty, of a certain laboriousness, to the analysis. This was all she could do, she knew, to make her easily replaceable job seem less so.
Up the silent escalators, on the second floor, everything in the store beckoned, glistened—waiting for her, wanting her. On the plush beige carpeting, in perfect, flattering light, stood rows and rows of shoes. Beautiful shoes, ugly shoes, shoes for every possible social engagement.
Most of them would clearly wear their wearer; their purpose, whether seduction, distraction, assimilation, or confrontation, was much too clear. She lingered by the highest of high heels, contemplating the possibility of walking over cobblestones in them. Too difficult, she determined. Too likely to result in a twisted ankle or a sprained wrist, if she were to try to catch herself and land wrong. The boots were equally as boring, she found. If they weren’t designed to handle a long, cold, wet winter, they were made to flaunt a certain disregard for the winter. These ones announce that the wearer is driven everywhere, and the winter matters very little—is merely an excuse to wear more black and apply more expensive French face cream at night. And these ones announce that the wearer is proud to walk everywhere, is prepared to trudge through the slush to the U-Bahn entrance, is proud that her sense of style is intact under wintry conditions.
But then there are these ones, she said to herself. These ones that seem to be a perfect, unexpected union of all the options spread out before her—utilitarian but sexy, and suggestive of a life in both worlds. She contemplated them for a moment before picking one up to hold it, to feel it. She stroked the buttery leather, feeling the weight of the thick sole in her hand, before placing it back on its pedestal. She admired the way the ankles and calves of the boot were exceptionally slim, the way the leather reached up to the knee and invited anyone looking to continue the gaze upward. She knew instantly what she would wear with these boots, though her wardrobe was minimal, and not particularly curated or even special.
Lost in reverie, she is shocked and begins to sweat immediately when she hears the voice, right beside her. “Magst du?”
Do I like them indeed, she thinks. She turns to him. His eyes are serious, somber almost. “Yes,” she says, because her inner world is now and forever wedded to English, and it will take her years to lose the habit of speaking quickly in English whenever she is shocked or surprised.
“Oh,” he said. “I didn’t know. I expected not German, but not this.”
“Not this?” she asked. She is taken aback by the rudeness of it. “Not English?”
“Tut mir leid. I am sorry. I’m speaking English since thirty years—perhaps as long as you have been alive—but I am,” he paused, “I am a little bit clumsy.”
He wants to know how old I am, she thinks. Her pulse quickens at the thought.
“Kein problem,” she said. He raised an eyebrow at her.
“From a distance, I observed your attention to the shoes,” he said. She wondered how long he had watched her. Had she been standing up straight? What did her hair look like from the side, today? She realized she didn’t put much thought into her appearance before she left her apartment. She didn’t anticipate being noticed. “And then I realized I had already met you,” he concluded.
“Have we met only once?” she asked, knowing the exact answer, knowing how often she had turned their first moment over in her mind.
“Yes,” he said.
“I’ve not met your wife yet, though.”
“My wife?” he asked, as though the words surprised him.
She nodded calmly in response. “Well, I suppose I do have one,” he replied.
“Kein problem,” she said, without thinking.
“Try them,” he said.
“The boots?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said with an air of insistence. “You must try them if they have captured your imagination.”
He flagged down a store employee with total confidence. After the appropriate size was determined, the store employee retrieved the boots from the back. He took the box from the employee, offered a terse danke schön as a dismissal, and opened the box. It was made of thick, heavy, glossy, waterproofed cardboard, with a dark fabric lining the inside. He lifted one of the boots, studying it from all angles. He brought it to his face and inhaled deeply. He closed his eyes for a brief second, before handing it over to her. “Alright,” he said. “Try.”
She stared into his eyes. She feared her hands might shake as she took the boot from him. He touched her arm as she stood up to see the boots in the full-length mirror. His eyes gave little away as he took in the sight of her. She was enamored, entranced. In the mirror, she was powerful, graceful, not feminine, but femininity itself. Was she real?
“They are yours,” he said.
She was speechless. She nodded in agreement. She was incapable of refusing.
Silently, they exited the store and rode the U-Bahn back to their building. Sitting side by side, neither of them said a word. He touched her thigh with the tip of his pointer finger, gently, carefully, and she slowly nudged her leg toward his touch.
Silently, they walked up the four flights of stairs to her apartment. As she opened her door, he placed his hands on her waist. Berlin was a city full of places to meet in secret. It was not a good sign, she realized, that neither of them had thought to lead them elsewhere. But his touch was perfect. Calm, assured, hungry.
Silently, she gave her mouth to his.
“You must leave the boots on,” he said. His voice, so close to hers, filled her with anxiety and excitement.
“Natürlich,” she said.
“You must be silent,” he added, nodding in the direction of his apartment, where his wife was no doubt at home. Maybe she was fixing herself a cup of tea.
“So must you,” she said.
“Otherwise she will want to join us,” he said, with a strange wink. She couldn’t tell if he was joking or not. The compact tautness of his body is all she wanted to think about. Somehow, she thought, he is both restrained and wild. A tightly bridled horse, and an entirely undomesticated thing. Was he real?
He had never before experienced a surrender like hers. It had a prideful, resistant quality which made the final moment of letting go all the more satisfying to witness. Look what he could help unleash, he realized. Look how he could help her find within herself the source of everything that is.
Staring at her face in profile on the bed next to him, he wasn’t sure what he found beautiful about her. It was not present in any particular feature. But her beauty was undeniable to him, overwhelming to him. In it, he saw that he was not the center of the world—not even the center of his world. He vowed to never speak to her again, after this moment, after today.
“We will never do this again,” he said.
She turned to him and saw a flash of fear in his eyes. So her initial assessment had been wrong, then. He was not a man who could enjoy pain. She felt the sting of his practicality. It was an arrow shot straight through her. If she was going to travel to the land of lust, he would not go with her. She would go it alone.
Her last word to him: fine.
Six months later, when she would move out of the apartment and into another one, she would put the boots on to load her scant boxes and her plants into the rented moving van, knowing he would see her from his window, that he would watch her sweating in them. He would take a long, long look at the shape of her body, at the way the boots seemed to belong to a body like hers, at the way she moved inside her body. Maybe he would smile to himself and turn away from the window. She would finish loading the van and drop the apartment keys in the mailbox, and then she would drive away, never to return to that building, never to hear his voice outside of her memory.
Lindsay Lerman is the author of two books, I'm From Nowhere (2020) and What Are You (2022). She is the translator of François Laruelle's first book, Phenomenon and Difference. Her short stories, essays, and interviews have been published in The Los Angeles Review of Books, New York Tyrant, Archway Editions, The Creative Independent, and elsewhere. She has a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada. She lives in Berlin.