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This week's #TuesdayClassic comes from Clare Wigfall and was originally published in Litro #97: East London.   At age just 21, Faber and Faber offered Wigfall a book contract, based on reading a single story she had written. She worked on her debut collection for almost a decade until The Loudest Sound and Nothing was published in 2007 to critical acclaim. In 2008 she won the BBC National Short Story Award for one of the stories from her collection. She was also longlisted for the 2008 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Her stories have been published in Prospect, Tatler, The Dublin Review and commissioned for BBC Radio 4. In 2011 she published picture book Has anyone seen my Chihuahua? and was the BookTrust's fifth online Writer-in-Residence.   #TuesdayClassic   THE PARTY'S JUST GETTING STARTED by CLARE WIGFALL It was at a film producer’s rooftop garden party, talking with two maraschino cherries, that Adam learnt his ex-wife had moved into town. The cherries were maybe twins, he wasn’t sure. Their stalks were bobbing, their lips artificially glossed and reddened. He’d met one of them before. She was a performance artist. ‘I heard Guggenheim,’ she was saying. ‘Nothing’s been decided,’ he replied, looking about for his wife. ‘Yeah, but like –’ there was the faintest cruel glisten of an upcurl to her lip, ‘the director loves her.’ ‘He’s gay,’ said Adam. ‘Course he’s gay, honey,’ she returned inconsequentially. ‘Blushed-salmon blini?’ asked a waiter. ‘Sweetie-honey, you need sunblock,’ said the other cherry to Adam, ignoring the hors d’oeuvres. ‘Your shoulders are burning up.’ A guy in chain mail joined them and nodded at Adam’s crotch. ‘Love the costume.’ Adam felt their three pairs of eyes skimming his body and wished he was wearing more than a pair of handpainted underpants. ‘Eve’s idea,’ he shrugged in reply. ‘She’s so ironic,’ said one of the cherries nasally. ‘What I wanna know is how she keeps that figure after five kids.’ ‘What I wanna know is how she’s getting shows at the Guggenheim after five kids.’ Adam was used to people discussing his wife as if he weren’t present. ‘Hey,’ said the chain-mail guy, turning to him, ‘so your ex-wife’s moved into my apartment block.’ Shaken from his reverie, Adam almost choked on his blushed-salmon hors d’oeuvre. ‘What?’ he spluttered. ‘Lili? You mean Lili?’ ‘Did you just say ex-wife?’ one of the cherries practically yelled. ‘You have an ex-wife? How come Ididn’t know about this? You didn’t tell me he had an ex wife!’ she exclaimed, turning to the guy in the chain mail. ‘Didn’t know till she moved in down the hall.’ ‘You cannot be serious. Don’t tell me you were married before Eve.’ ‘We were young,’ said Adam, still struggling with the salmon in his windpipe. ‘But you and Eve,’ the cherry persisted. ‘I just don’t believe this. I mean, we always thought you must have been like childhood sweethearts or something.’ He knew exactly what the woman meant, that there was no way in the world a woman like Eve could have fallen for a guy like him unless it had been way before she became famous. Right now though, all Adam could think was Lili, fuck, Lili. He glanced around, trying to find Eve in the throng of cowboys and nuns and superheroes. Eve was over by the pool, talking with the film producer and a young actor who’d won an Oscar already for some performance Adam had never seen. She stood head and shoulders above the crowd, her hair streaming over her pale freckled shoulders, smiling at something the actor had said, that smile that had once adorned a million billboards and earned her a cover shot on Vogue magazine, all before she’d even picked up an Olympus OM30 to take her first portrait photograph. He’d given her that camera, and now everyone who was anyone just adored her work – its honesty, its integrity, its soul. Eve could earn more in an afternoon than Adam used to in a year of landscape gardening. Eve, sweet-natured and intelligent in a way no woman that beautiful ever deserved to be. Eve, who did a full hour of yoga every morning before she even had breakfast, who drank only white wine and never ate red meat, who saw her acupuncturist every week, who had photographed the country’s greatest living individuals and then some, and who still never forgot to leave a silver dollar under the kids’ pillows when they lost a tooth. Standing by the pool in a hand-painted string bikini, Eve looked incredible. Little wonder the cherries were bitter. ‘You know what,’ Adam apologised, ‘I’d better go check on the kids. Will you excuse me a second?’ Adam stepped away across the crowded terrace. Past beautiful girls in glittering costumes, their backs honeytanned and bare, past men in togas and RayBans. He grabbed for another glass of champagne as a waiter brushed past, and swallowed it in one. So Lili was back in town. And then all of a sudden there she was, walking down a leafy street near the park, with dark sunglasses over her eyes, a cigarette in her mouth, and a young Latino trailing from her shoulder. Just keep on wheeling the stroller, she’s not going to look your way, he told himself, at exactly the same moment as his ex-wife came to a halt on the sidewalk. ‘Adam? Fuck, is that you?’ ‘Lili?’ he said, jerking his head up with feigned surprise. His tone registered a notch too high. Nine-year-old Abe flashed a smirk at his father to demonstrate he’d noted her use of the f-word. Trust fucking Lili to swear in front of the kids. ‘Lili, wow,’ he continued, flailing. The Latino had on his face a look of contemptuous boredom. ‘I don’t believe this. My God, you’re looking –’ he scrabbled frantically to find an appropriate word, ‘great.’ Flattery could never fail to distract Lili. She dropped her eyes in a lipstick-stained smile, and for a moment Lili almost did look pretty, pretty in the way a faded streetwalker could look for a millisecond when they first grabbed your arm in the street. The truth was Lili looked terrible. An overstepped parody of herself, like she’d lurched out of a Nan Goldin print. Gutwrenching. Like a Goldin transvestite, her face clogged with foundation and her flesh bulging from beneath her corseted top and tight leather pants. Her hair was a dirty bleached blonde, short and uncombed, dark at the roots. How could he ever have been attracted to this woman, was the thought that went through Adam’s head. She was so not his sort. So sleazy. So unlike Eve. And then, before he could stop himself, he remembered absolutely the feel of her thighs clamped around him. That noise she used to make with her throat as she came. I have got to get out of here, thought Adam, as he stood there with his hands still on the stroller handles. ‘So what the fuck are you doing here, Adam?’ Adam held his grin. ‘Saturday morning. Just going along to the park. Taking the kids out,’ he continued, as if it needed an explanation. He gestured towards his progeny in the hope that maybe if she acknowledged them she’d tame her language. ‘The kids,’ he said, by way of introduction. She gazed down at the three of them. ‘Hi.’ ‘Hi,’ Abe and Azura replied, equally unenthusiastic. Kids were like dogs. They could tell when an adult didn’t like them. Seth in his stroller was chewing on a plush iguana. ‘Uh, this is Francisco,’ she said, running her hand down the torso of the Latino, who had turned his gaze away from the rest of them and was drawing on her cigarette. She let the s trail. Francisssco. He looked young enough to be her son. ‘So, you’re still with –’ ‘Eve, yeah.’ ‘God, that’s been a long time.’ ‘Married life for you.’ Adam made a frankly absurd fauxshucking noise out of the corner of his mouth. ‘Uh-huh,’ Lili nodded, her eyebrows smirking. ‘So, Eve, yeah.’ That bitch, said her smile. Adam nodded. ‘Dad,’ Azura moaned, pulling on his arm. ‘Can we go?’ Thank God for kids sometimes. ‘Hey, gimme your cell number, I’ll call you for lunch one day,’ said Lili, searching in her pocketbook. ‘Shit, where’s my – ?’ She continued her rummaging. ‘Where the fuck did it go?’ ‘Sure,’ Adam smiled, trying literally to push the kids out of earshot, ‘let’s do lunch. That’d be great.’ Lili, he thought as he walked away a minute later, Lili, fuck. They met in a new fusion restaurant where she knew the head chef. Had probably slept with the head chef, thought Adam, when she suggested it over the phone. He’d planned to say no, of course, tell her that lunch probably wasn’t a good idea, but instead he just said, ‘Tuesday, yeah, Tuesday’s good.’ He’d honestly meant to tell Eve, but when he came out of the shower that morning, she had already left. Not that it was a big deal, only lunch with his ex-wife. He left a note on the mirror in case Eve came back in: “Lili called. Meeting for lunch downtown. I’ll collect Azura. Cain is staying late for hockey practice. A x.” He spent almost half an hour deciding what to wear, wishing he had more than just Ralph Lauren shirts in his wardrobe. Eventually he chose a plain white T-shirt and jeans. Decided not to wear socks with his loafers. Adam knew he’d arrive first. His ex-wife had always liked to make an entrance. By the time she waltzed through the door, he’d read right through the menu twice and already finished a bottle of mineral water. She was as heavily made up as last time and her hair just as bed-mussed, but today she wore a floral silk dress, cut in low ruffles across her breasts, and red peep-toe sandals that buckled around her ankles, giving her feet a porcine quality. ‘Am I late? Crazy morning.’ She put her cell phone and cigarettes on the table, ordered a Cosmopolitan, then gave him a flirting up-and-down appraisal. He wished he’d worn the socks. Toying with her cigarette packet, she looked around for the waiter, ‘They’re gonna bitch if I smoke, aren’t they?’ ‘It is illegal.’ She gave him a look. Leaning back in her seat, Lili reviewed the other diners cursorily, then fixed her eyes back on Adam. Smiled. ‘So, this is weird.’ ‘It’s been a long time, Lili.’ ‘It’s Lilith.’ ‘You’re calling yourself Lilith now?’ ‘Lilith is my name,’ she replied coolly. ‘You looked at the menu?’ ‘Glanced.’ ‘Go for the lobster. Jean-Claude’s a total genius.’ She crossed her arms on the table. ‘So, tell me about your exciting life.’ ‘That’s kind of a big question to start things off.’ ‘Well, what do you want me to ask you about?’ ‘Are you happy?’ ‘Sure I am.’ ‘Well me too.’ She lit a cigarette and lowered her eyelids slightly as she drew on it. Adam looked away and threw an embarrassed smile at the couple at the next table. ‘The waiter’s going to tell you to put that out, you know.’ ‘So I’ll stub it out when he gets here. You gonna have the lobster?’ ‘I’m allergic to seafood, you know that.’ ‘What a drag,’ she said, narrowing her eyes. The waiter drew up neatly alongside her elbow. ‘I know, I know.’ She lowered her eyelashes to the man and with a shameless pout of her lips stubbed her cigarette out on a side plate. ‘I’ll have the lobster. And another Cosmo.’ It was strange how you could remember so fast what you’d grown to hate about a person. Adam wondered if she was thinking the same; he noted she hadn’t ordered an entrée. Lili was picking now at a lobster claw with a small silver utensil, holding the pinkie of her picking hand curled out in the air. ‘So, you gave up the landscape gardening business to be, like,’ she paused, ‘a house-husband?’ ‘I’m happy bringing up the kids.’ ‘Uh-huh,’ she sounded unconvinced. ‘Eve loves her job, I was getting tired of mine. You know. She’s having a retrospective at the Guggenheim,’ he blurted. Lili cocked her head. ‘Don’t you have to be dead to have a retrospective?’ ‘Dead,’ he granted. ‘Or famous.’ ‘Or fucking the director,’ she said with a shrug. ‘He’s gay.’ ‘Of course he is. I was talking hypothetically.’ Adam clenched his napkin in his fist and felt his chin take on a defensive thrust as he looked away. ‘Eve’s not fucking the director.’ ‘Everyone knows that, sweetie. She’s way too nice for that.’ ‘What do you know about Eve?’ ‘Everyone knows about Eve. Your wife’s famous, honey.’ ‘Well, she’s not fucking the director.’ ‘Sure she’s not.’ She dabbed at her lips with her napkin. ‘Anyway, guy’s gay as a fucking goose.’ ‘Exactly.’ ‘Exactly.’ She set her napkin down on the table. ‘God, I wish I could have a cigarette.’ Adam chose to say nothing. After a while she turned back to her meal. With an offhand arch to her eyebrows she said, as if it had just slipped out, ‘I dream of your cock, you know.’ ‘Lili!’ Adam seethed, looking around quickly to see if the people at the next table had overheard. ‘Don’t Lili me, honey. I’m only telling you the truth.’ She shovelled a forkful of rucola leaves into her painted mouth, marking the white cotton tablecloth with dark balsamic splashes. She’d marked everything. The napkin was smudged with her lipstick, her cigarette butt was redringed at the tip. Her dirty stain was left on everything she touched. ‘Wake up so fucking wet,’ she said, her mouth still full. ‘Hell, Lili,’ he said again, and looked away angrily. Did she always have to be so crude? She was like a one-trick pony, and he’d seen this trick God knows how many times before. Boring, that’s what she was. Goddamn boring. ‘What about that guy you were with?’ ‘What guy?’ ‘Puerto-Rican looking.’ ‘Him? Francisco? He’s twenty-two.’ He gave a scornful laugh. ‘That’s pretty young, isn’t it?’ ‘Is it?’ She looked up without a smile. Adam had lost his appetite. His meal was only half eaten, but he dropped his napkin on the plate. Across the table, Lili held her eyes on him for a long moment, then picked up the other lobster claw and began to tease at the flesh. For a while there was silence between them. Then, casually, she just said, ‘And everything’s blown over about –’ ‘About what?’ ‘You know.’ He gave her a look before he decided to reply. ‘It wasn’t Eve’s fault.’ ‘Nobody says it was. I’d have done the same thing. No question. And way before she did, I tell you.’ ‘Well.’ ‘Don’t give me your wells, Adam. What surprises me is you. I mean, gee honey, you were always so,’ she paused, ‘so fucking principled.’ ‘Can we stop talking about this?’ ‘Touché?’ ‘Lili.’ ‘Is it ever kinda weird when you’re buying apples at the supermarket?’ ‘Drop it, Lili.’ ‘Okay okay, just one last question.’ She held up a palm, the lobster fork still pinched between forefinger and thumb. ‘Would you do it again? I mean, if you were in that situation again, would you?’ ‘Lili, what did I just say?’ She pursed her mouth, and stared at him sharply to register her offence, then appeared, to Adam’s relief, to have decided to forget it. She laid down the claw and leant back in her seat, one hand pulling at the neckline of her dress, smiling loosely. He refused to meet her eye. This meeting had been a huge mistake. Adam glanced round for the waiter. ‘I’d better get the check. I’ll be late to pick up Azura from choir practice.’ Out of the corner of his eye, Adam saw her slip her finger beneath the silk neckline of her dress, stroking gently the top of her breast. ‘I just can’t get over it. This life you’ve made for yourself.’ ‘Yeah, well.’ ‘You’re so domestic. How many is it you have?’ ‘How many what?’ he said, knowing full well what she was referring to. ‘Kids.’ ‘Five,’ he said stonily. It sounded like a vast number as he said it, an unreasonable number, an irresponsible number, an old-joke-no-longer-funny of a number. ‘Only five.’ She just nodded, trying to control her smile. ‘Well,’ said Lili, ‘isn’t that nice.’ By the time he’d put the kids to bed Adam was exhausted. He knew he should put Cain’s hockey uniform in the laundry basket and hang out Abe’s swimming towel to dry, but for now he just stayed where he was, lying on the couch. He was thinking about Lili, and wondering how many men she’d slept with since she’d left him. Wife excluded, Lili was the only other woman he’d known intimately in his lifetime. Where had she been all these years? What had she been doing? He realised now he hadn’t even asked any questions. ‘It’s Lilith,’ she had again corrected, the last thing she’d said before turning to the street to hail a cab. In his breast pocket, Adam’s cell sounded. It made him jump. He pulled it out clumsily and flipped it open. Eve it said on the display. ‘Hey, babe. It’s me. I can’t hear you. You hear me?’ There was loud music in the background forcing her to yell. ‘I’m at Mario’s. The party’s just getting started. You want to call a sitter and come down?’ Adam stayed where he was after he hung up, his cell resting on his chest. Eve wouldn’t be home till late, then. He’d have to tell her about his lunch with Lili tomorrow. He’d tell her when he brought her her morning coffee, make her laugh over the story. Or maybe she’d be hungover. Too much white wine. She’d tell him to shut up and leave her to sleep. She probably wouldn’t be interested anyway. It wasn’t such a big deal. Just lunch with his ex-wife, nothing special; he’d probably never see her again after today. What would Eve care? Yeah, maybe he wouldn’t even tell her.     SIGNUP TO OUR MASTERCLASSES AND LEARN FROM AWARD WINNING AUTHORS AND WRITERS!     Copyright © 2020 Litro Magazine, All rights reserved.  Our mailing address is: 33 Irving Place New York, NY 10003

This week's #TuesdayClassic comes from Louise Stern and was originally published in Litro #97: East London.   This story also features in Chattering, Stern's collection of short stories published by Granta in 2011. Her first novel, Ismael and His Sisters was also published by Granta, in 2015. Stern has written plays, including The Ugly Birds and The Interpreter, which was performed at the Bush Theatre. She is also a visual artist and a filmmaker.   #TuesdayClassic   RIO by LOUISE STERN In Rio the velvety air felt easy and comfortable. We slept on Copacabana beach and our sandals were stolen by one of the bony, dark-skinned group in rags who had set up camp under the nearby palm trees ringed by bits of rubbish. In the night, after we felt in the sand by our heads for the rubber sandals and discovered them gone, Eva strode over, pointed at some of the boys and then pointed at her foot. Give me back, she gestured. You give me back. She banged her fist against one hand. —Me fight you. Come on. Give me back. Me fight you. One of the ragged, wily ones gave her our sandals. Her back seemed very straight next to theirs. One night we were drunk on the main boardwalk on lemony cold caipirinhas in plastic cups when a man walking by gave us some shells with the date and Copacabana scrawled on them in black Sharpie marker. He was white and had shrivelled calves covered with sunspots. Pale strands of hair hung off them. His eyes were like a rodent’s – hungry and lusty and unashamed that he would eat whatever he could find, but they were not malicious. He handed over the broken shells as if they were rosaries. I was sitting on the wall between the beach and the street watching Eva. Unusually, she was drunker than I was. Some of the Brazilian law students we had met a few nights before were there that night. —You crazy, she signed to them, pointing to them. One finger was going in circles beside her head. She laughed. We always wondered at her laughter, how people invariably looked at us, startled, when she laughed. Some childhood friends of hers had told her that her laugh sounded like a horse’s neigh, and she had been self-conscious about it since then. I could hear more than she could and told her that it didn’t sound like a horse, but I couldn’t hear well enough to know exactly what it did sound like, and nobody else would give a satisfying description. They just stared, and we never really felt we had any kind of handle on what was behind their bewilderment. Sometimes now I thought it was more bemusement, but whatever it was, it frustrated me to the point of tears. People would call it a pure sound, and we wondered if it was only pure because we couldn’t hear it. It was like an imaginary friend that everyone could see except for you, who insisted on attaching itself to you with gooey suction lips, and who everyone liked better than they liked you. It frustrated Eva even more, though. In her mind the horse’s neigh had turned into a donkey’s bray, spit flying everywhere through yellowed teeth like a whale’s baleen. The rodent man was attracted to her laugh. I saw it in his eyes as he looked at her, but then he scuttled away. I wondered at it for a minute – he seemed to me the kind to want a closer sniff at least. He was the kind to be attracted to shiny bits of broken glass, to want to grab them all up and hoard them in a box. But then later, when I went across the street to have a piss in the restaurant loo, there he was at a table, watching Eva through binoculars. He was delighted that I had seen him at it. On the paper covering the table he started scribbling, telling me who he was, where he had been, who he had been with, trying to show me the pieces of glass in his box. He had collected a lot. I saw him look at me sideways when he thought I wasn’t looking and he was grinning with sheer delight. He showed me a khaki canvas shoulder bag filled with broken shells like the ones he had given us earlier, and told me that he wandered Copacabana all day giving them out. He had other assorted trinkets in the bag, pads of paper and things that appeared to me either junk or esoteric fetishes, which he held up, tittering. He didn’t really ask about us, just wanted to tell me who he was. He had been an executive at a paper company, now retired and become beach bum. Eva had come over to the restaurant by that time and was hopping and skipping from table to table. The Brazilian law students had ended up at one table. At another was the huge black man with his heavy gold chains. With her strong rounded arms that always appeared to me to be a bit masculine in a pleasing way, Eva would tell me again and again how the thickest of his chains swayed into the air when he bent over to write to us on the night we’d first met him. The big gold cross on the end of it swung under our eyes. The way Eva signed it, the cross stayed in the air for a long, emphatic moment, swaying back and forth just a bit but always staying for a few seconds more at the height of its trajectory. That was how we remembered him, because that moment had been re-enacted over and over again, her fingers becoming that shiny huge cross hanging there longer than it should have. We loved it. Now he was here in the restaurant with all the others. They were all talking, chattering over me. As a child I had longed to be able to overhear. Not any more, usually. The girl on the right turned to me. —Oh, you hear not … she gestured. She held two fingers up to her mouth, miming drinking from a bottle. —Me drink, drink, drink. Her head was thrown back and her eyes closed, the throat in outline. Her skin had yellowish pores. Her hand, with its index finger and thumb extended, went up and down into her mouth again and again. —Drink, drink, drink. One finger went down one cheek, and then the other. —Me cry, cry, cry. Cry, cry, cry. Then she turned away and slid effortlessly into animated conversation with the black man. I wondered exactly where this sorrow she had just told me about was stored in her body, where she held it that she could call it up so fast and then dispose of it so fast. I wondered if it was because she could speak that she knew how to deposit the sorrow outside herself so efficiently. That was the part I envied. The rodent man came to the table. His eyes were brighter than before. He had caught the fever. He had a plan now and he was eager to tell us, but only if we went with him somewhere. It was a place for us to stay. We had no place to sleep anyway and had planned to sleep on Copacabana next to the same people who had stolen our sandals and who were now cautious, frightened by us. I liked this man well enough; he had already shown me all of his bits of glass, the shiny magpie collection of his mind, and I felt comfortable with it. — Okay we will go with you, I told him. — You stay here, I get car, come back for you, he mimed. Eva was drunker and drunker, flitting around the restaurant, so it suited me fine to stay there and wait for him and let her play it out. She was passed out flat on the pavement in front of the restaurant when he returned for us in a gleaming black executive car. He had showered and was neatly dressed in a pale blue button-down shirt with long sleeves and black stiff pants, the opposite of the dishevelled beach bum we had first met. I sat next to him in the car with Eva sprawled on the back seat asleep. After an hour’s drive through the dark warm streets, we came up to a set of imposing gates that matched the car. There was a mansion behind them, but it had an odd feel to it, not quite a house, not quite a hotel, but not quite anything else either. It was square and stolid like one of yhe more expensive chain hotels in the States, but with a tattiness to it that I had never seen in any hotel. A sign next to it read ‘Panda’. At the moment the car paused beside the Panda sign ready to go down the ramp into the concrete parking garage, Eva woke up and was overcome by the sight. She’d always had limpid fantasies of sex and luxury and our surroundings were a good backdrop for them. The garage was lit with fluorescent strip lights. The parking spaces were precisely marked out, two for each of the small doors that were set at regular intervals around the walls. It felt as if we were in a Super 8 motel. I wondered what this place really was. Up a narrow flight of steps was a nice-sized but unremarkable room like one in a pricey but far from beautiful airport hotel. It had the same beige wallpaper with thin brown pinstripes and the same black nubbly carpet that those places have. But the main room had a mirror on the ceiling and a wall-mounted television. The rodent man turned on the television to show us that it played only porn. It was American porn, starring platinum blonde lovelies. There was a waterbed in the centre of the room with a stiff red velvet cover. Off the main room was a white-tiled bathroom taken up almost entirely by a jacuzzi. On the wall in the bathroom above the his-and-hers sinks was one of those theatrical make-up mirrors with round light bulbs all around the top and the sides. —You two stay here, me come back for you in the morning, he mimed to me. Eva and I slithered around naked in the hot tub for a while after he left, gossiping and giggling in the bubbles, and then we jumped on the waterbed. We turned off the television and made faces to ourselves in the ceiling mirror. In the morning a maid brought us a huge spread of a breakfast. There were fried eggs with runny rich yolks and Brazilian bread, sweet pineapple and mango slices, strong coffee, tomatoes and cucumber wedges, creamy butter, and fresh-squeezed juices. It was delicious and we finished it all up. Soon the man came back and took us to a small dark café by the beach with wooden tables and benches, where we had more coffee. He told us it was the same café where the famous song ‘The Girl from Ipanema’ had been written. He had brought a yellow lined pad to scribble to us on. ‘Men always want silent women,’ he said. ‘You two are the perfect women. You are beautiful and no words come out of you to ruin the fantasy, and you can never hear the filth that is said around you. Completely untouched, untouchable. Men would pay anything you wanted, to be with you. I will introduce you to some.’ —What you got to offer us? I said with a tough cheekiness that surprised me. We do it without you. Eva laughed nervously and met my eyes, but of course neither of us wanted to do without the safety of the rodent man. We would be Marina and Kristina. He had a special affection for these schoolgirl names. We needed the appropriate costumes, he said. We went shopping in small boutiques with bright jewelled chandeliers. The other shoppers were the slender wives of Brazilian businessmen, the kind of rich women who always had a hard, crystallized certainty that I envied. Eva and I chose two tops – a small zebra-print tube that only covered our breasts, and another tight purple tie-dye top with ‘Olá’ written across the front that made us laugh. The rodent man vetoed a whorish pair of clear plastic stilettos that we wanted, to our disappointment. He told us to meet him that night in a café we knew along the Copacabana beach. The evening was like the other evenings we would spend with him in cafés in Rio, dressed in our costumes. At the end of each evening, he always told us when and where we would meet the next time. Sometimes we would meet two or three nights in a row. Other times we wouldn’t see him for three days before he reappeared. He always pointed out potential clients, mostly large businessmen with soft pouches under their necks and starched shirts. We dismissed each one for some madeup reason, or quoted an outrageously high price for our services. One night I showed him a slip of crumpled-up paper with a telephone number on it, writing to him that the number belonged to a potential client and that I would be sure to bring him in when fee negotiations reached the crucial stage. His eyes brightened and he had that rodent look again. After a few nights Eva and I wondered whether he actually wanted to close the deal with anyone, or whether sharing these possibilities with us was all he wanted, nothing else. During the day, if we hadn’t met anyone interesting, we would wander around, eat, sneak into the pools at the fancier hotels, laze around on the beach. We slept on Copacabana beach or at the house or apartment of whoever we’d met that day. The rodent man had asked us if we wanted to take up residence in the Panda, and it was tempting, but we didn’t like the idea of him always knowing where we were. Besides the Panda seemed to us a slightly boring place to stay for more than one night. We never had problems finding a place to sleep. A taxi driver took us to stay with his family in a favela, where we slept on the floor in the middle of the children’s room, surrounded by five painted metal bunk beds. We stayed up watching soccer on a television set on top of a plastic orange crate in the street with everyone in the neighbourhood crowded around, jumping up and down when Rio scored. Another night we stayed in a homeless shelter with a Brazilian Indian woman whose short hair curled around her generous face. Long lines spread from the outer corners of her eyes. We sat with her all day on the boardwalk behind the square of blue felt she used to display the cheap beaded jewellery she sold. The crack she also sold she kept safely in the front pocket of her long skirt. The night after, we stayed in the best hotel in Rio, with a glaringly white-toothed music producer from LA we’d met when we snuck into the pool area of his hotel. In our string bikinis – Eva’s was navy blue and mine tomato red – we looked like any other tourists, even though we had been living on the streets for months by then and hadn’t showered for a few days. The chlorinated water of the pool was shower enough. The producer wanted to party and talk. And the day after that we had been asked by the rodent man to meet him in the early afternoon. He’d asked us to meet him on a street corner in one of the better neighbourhoods. Was it a visit to a possible client? I was a bit excited by this idea, but at the same time, I didn’t want to meet a client in their home, in their territory, with their things and their own smell around them. The reality of it, whichever way it actually lay, would have more of a chance to take over then. This time he was dressed in neat khaki shorts and a mauve T-shirt. He took us up a wide white staircase into a clean, spacious apartment with dark polished wooden floors and French windows along one wall, looking onto the trees outside. A woman with a soft body and greystreaked hair got up from the flowered sofa to come over to us, and a young girl walked into the room. On his yellow pad, the rodent man wrote to us in a few fragmented words that this was his wife and daughter. Turning to them, he started talking, his mouth opening and closing, the thin wrinkled upper lip pressing tightly against the slightly fleshier lower lip. It was in Portuguese, so I didn’t even have a chance to catch a word or two on his lips, and I was thankful that I didn’t. He gestured towards us a few times, explaining us to them. Later we were served Earl Grey tea and Brazilian cake on a tray before leaving. We met him at a café in the evening, again dressed in our costumes, but there was a new and strange feeling of something closing in, a possibility of knowing exactly what it was that this man wanted from us, and I didn’t like it…And it had become boring to keep these assignations with him night after night. So one night we stood him up and never went back. A few weeks later, we saw the rodent man on the boardwalk in the middle of the carnival festivities. He was wearing a sign on his front with some words in Portuguese scrawled across it. Some people near us told us that the words meant ‘I’m a lesbian’. His eyes were fogged over and he didn’t recognize us. He was the only one who said it. I know, even if I often don’t want to believe it, that it is true what he said about the specific quality of our silence. It is potential and remains only potential. It is like water, the liquid clear and thin, something you can feel but not hold down in any way. That is the silence that surrounds me and Eva always.       SIGNUP TO OUR MASTERCLASSES AND LEARN FROM AWARD WINNING AUTHORS AND WRITERS!     Copyright © 2020 Litro Magazine, All rights reserved.  Our mailing address is: 33 Irving Place New York, NY 10003

This week's #TuesdayClassic comes from Naomi Alderman and was originally published in Litro #98: Money.   Alderman's literary début came in 2006 with Disobedience, which won her the 2006 Orange Award for New Writers and the 2007 Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. Her second novel, The Lessons, was published in 2010, followed by The Liars' Gospel in 2012. Her Doctor Who novel Borrowed Time was published in June 2011. In 2012, Alderman was selected as a protégée by Margaret Atwood as part of an international philanthropic programme that pairs masters in their disciplines with emerging talents, one result of this was her fourth novel, The Power (2016). The Power won the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction in 2017. The novel was also named by Barack Obama on his list of favourite books of the year. In 2013, Alderman was named one of the best Young British Novelists, in Granta's once-a-decade list.   #TuesdayClassic   I LOVE YOU CRAZY by NAOMI ALDERMAN So I’m lying in bed and suddenly I find that I’m thinking about you which I haven’t done for I don’t know how long but I’m remembering how you used to love it when I slept naked just like I’m doing right now. I’d keep it for special occasions when I wanted to know that I’d be able to drive you wild in a moment and otherwise wear pyjamas and you used to undo the buttons while you were kissing me and not even looking. And that makes me think about the sofas in our best room when I was growing up which my mother always kept the plastic covers on except when the priest came for tea or for Sunday lunch which he did two or three times a year and the rest of the time the covers were on so that if I sat on the sofa with bare legs or in shorts they’d get sweaty, a pool of moisture creeping up under my groin and when I stood up there’d be a sucking noise and the almost-pain of my skin unpeeling from the plastic. And almost-pain brings me back to thinking of you and the way I hardly ever did sleep naked all that time and now you’re not here to be driven wild by it and how you used to say that to me: “you drive me wild, baby”. So I get up and I make coffee which is strong and black and just what I need and I think about calling you and I wonder how I’d get your number. I try to remember where I put that address book that definitely had your last number in it or maybe if I can remember the name of that place where you worked you might still be there and I’d call like I used to and ask to speak to you in my business voice and you’d answer the phone saying your first name and second name and the name of the company just as if I was anyone else in the world. And then I’d say hey, it’s me. And you’d recognise my voice and suddenly you wouldn’t be all first-name-second-name-company-name any more, you’d be remembering love in the middle of the afternoon in a work place which is not a love kind of place at all. And thinking this I decide to call you because it’s the afternoon and it’s a thing I always used to like doing in the afternoon, so I start to look for that address book which I know is around here somewhere. I find a shoebox full of receipts, which I always keep because once you told me that it’s important to keep receipts, I think they can fine you if you don’t. I’m pretty sure that address book is in a shoebox somewhere. I have a distinct recollection of that, I can see it small and black with the gold half rubbed off the edges of the pages and with an elastic band stretched around it. I will have put it somewhere with important things that’s how it feels, I know it’s an important thing so I would have put it in a box with other things that you told me I ought to keep. I dump the receipts out onto the bed and start rummaging through them although it’s pretty obvious to me from the get-go that the little book isn’t in the box, but somehow I find myself liking looking at those old receipts because I don’t keep them so much any more but when you were here I always used to. So those receipts are from places we used to go together and things we used to do together. And I find that looking at them I can remember suddenly in so much detail it hurts exactly how it was each time. I find a thick silver paper from the outside of the ice cream you bought me in the park. It’s folded over itself which I must have done, I don’t know why I kept it but I know the ice cream was mint choc chip and that the pigeons fought over the end of my cone which I dropped by mistake. I’m wading through those scraps of paper, staring at each one like it’s a photograph with a memory embedded in the centre and I find myself alive in each of those receipts with you walking in the city or eating or going to the movies which you always called the cinema or taking in a show. I look at each one like it’s you. And what I find is not the address book at all which now I think about it was in that bag that got stolen that day when we went to the open-air market and I put it down in the dressing room because I was trying on a pair of black jeans and then forgot and because you paid I only remembered after we’d had our coffee in that café with the wooden floor that dips out over the canal and when I went to my bag to get the cigarettes I didn’t have it and when we went back to the jeans shop it had gone. What I find is your card. From your work. The card that you gave me the first time we met and I kept it for almost a week before I called you because you’d been so crazy for me that night and begging me to give you my number and I thought I should hold out for a long time just to make you crazier. And that card flips me right back to that first call I ever made to you I remember you sounded so surprised when you answered and I had to remind you who I was and you said oh and then again, deeper, oh. And I said I was in your neighbourhood and if you wanted to have a coffee we could and you said you were really busy and I said OK some other time then and you said no no. And ten minutes later we were having coffee and you paid. And I know that if I call you right now it’ll be just like that again, that it’s been so long and you always said that no one could make you crazier than I could and I know that you’ve been waiting for me to call. So I pick up the phone and dial. Someone else not you answers the phone with the name of the company and I put on my best business voice with the good accent and it hardly wavers at all when I say your name but they can’t seem to understand it so I try again, saying your name just like you do on the phone, first name, second name, name of the company. And I wait to hear your voice, crazy for me like you will be after all this time. And there’s a pause, and then they say, no, you’ve moved on. And I say oh. And they say was it important? And I say, no not really. And they say is there anyone else who could help? And I say no. And I ask if they know where you’ve gone but they don’t. And I sit down on the bed and then get up again and make myself another cup of coffee. I smoke a cigarette and I think that somewhere in the city there you are and maybe you’re smoking one too but you always wanted to give up so maybe not at all.       SIGNUP TO OUR MASTERCLASSES AND LEARN FROM AWARD WINNING AUTHORS AND WRITERS!     Copyright © 2020 Litro Magazine, All rights reserved.  Our mailing address is: 33 Irving Place New York, NY 10003

***EDITORIAL POSITIONS AT LITRO!*** Do you love Litro as much as we do? We are currently seeking editors to join our team on a volunteer basis. We run the editorial team with an all-volunteer staff, and are looking for a few more hands dedicated to giving their time in the pursuit of great literature, thoughtful critique, and giving a platform to otherwise unheard voices. We are looking for people with experience in the following area: Social Media Multimedia Design Fiction Digital Analyst To apply, send a resume to Eric Akoto and please include links to any published pieces, as well as appropriate social media handles.   #StorySundayUSA Chippendales by Wendy BooydeGraaff *** "But somehow, there I stood, at Aric and Lou’s garage sale, staring at the framed Chippendales poster propped against the legs of a dining room chair."   #Podcast A High-Tech Ancient Stillness An interview with Pico Iyer *** By pushing deep into the future, the stunning “art island” of Naoshima leads you into the best of the Japanese past. #EssaySaturdayUSA We've Only Just Begun, Frankie by Bethany Bruno *** "If you’re of Italian heritage, classical music is often softly playing as mourners say their goodbyes ... But I didn’t want to send my dad off with music he didn’t jam out to when he was alive."   Look, Listen and Read     The socialist roots of the US's most beloved song and a selection of correspondence from the editor's desk at Granta.     What people really say before they die and lest we forget it's election season over the pond - here's a handy list of Trump-atrocities.         Copyright © 2020, Litro Media Inc, All rights reserved. Our mailing address is: 33 Irving Place, New York, New York 10003, USA

This week's #TuesdayClassic comes from Richard House and was originally published in Litro #99: Russia. Richard House’s The Kills was shortlisted for the 2013 Man Booker Prize. His previous novels, Bruiser and Uninvited, were published by Serpent's Tail. His fiction and co-authored short films have received support from the Arts Council and the UK Film Council. He lectures in creative writing at the University of Birmingham.   #TuesdayClassic   MAX405 by RICHARD HOUSE   He finds him, Max405, Max, but not that Max, the same name but not the same person. Not quite. Similar features, to be sure: that mouth, that shorn red hair, those bright blue eyes, the achingly familiar incline to his shoulders. Max, who walked away without explanation, just upped and disappeared. He tracks the profile for one week then deletes it from his favourites for no good reason. The proximity of this uncannily familiar face, the very same name, the oddness of it just exhausts him. Two days later he runs a search and picks him out from 34 pages of Max and Maxims, amazed again, gutted, by this double. His mouth, his eyes: Max405, haughty and distant. He searches on Facebook, on MSN, and finds similar profiles under the same name, Max405, Max but not his Max. The information becomes confusing; details do not tally between the accounts: Max405 on Man2Man lives in London; Max405 on Facebook lives in Rome; Max504 on Gaydar lives in Berlin. He waits to catch him online. A green button in the top left corner. Green: I’m here. Red: I am away. Within one hour Max405 changes his location from London, to Rome, to Berlin, to New York, to Moscow. He sends a message: where are you? and receives a reply within the hour: I am in Moscow – Verkhnyaya Khokhlovka. And you? He closes his laptop, is halfway across the room before he changes his mind and returns to the profile, adds Max405 as a favourite, saves the message, makes sure not to lose him again, then downloads the three photographs from each of the profiles, which he opens in Photoshop. After increasing the image size, he doubles the pixels, trebles them, but this isn’t the movies, it isn’t CSI, and he can’t add information where nothing exists. He examines these photographs, off and on, for two entire days. Moscow, London, Rome, Berlin? The fuzz surrounding Max’s head tells him only what he already knows: Max405 stands on an external balcony, a grey sky beside him, indicative of no particular place. The apartment unscrolls behind him, the same balconies, the same windows, with no distinct information that tells him this is Moscow; this is not London, Rome, Berlin, or New York. Max405 stands on a balcony. The sky not grey so much, but certainly not white. His clothes, a marine-blue tracksuit top, Adidas, which might in Russia be an indication of status. In other photographs Max405 leans backward, shoulders against a plastered wall, his top open to show a honed body that carries a little extra weight. Max at the beach, his eyes blue, the sky blue, the camera lowered. His hands, just the fingertips, tuck under the waistband of his shorts. His skin is pale, almost dusty. His hair, a heavy red, is beginning to grow from one look into another. There is the suggestion of a beard. He pays to join the site. Gains access to a series of private photos, an album. He isn’t sure what he expects, a photograph of Red Square, Max405 outside the Kremlin? He uploads a photograph of himself and sends it to Max with the message I am in London. In two days he has more concrete information: Max405 lives in Russia, his days are spent in Moscow, in some outer park ringed with apartment blocks. Max405 works as a bouncer for a nightclub, and as a personal trainer for a health club, and is a certified masseur. He is not a prostitute. The photographs were taken by a private client, at a client’s apartment. Max405 prefers men a little older than himself, by one or two years. He does not have a type but prefers men who are active, men who look after themselves, men who are dominant, men who are not feminine. Max405 practices safe sex and says that he is versatile, he does not smoke, he does not take drugs, he does not like the smell of poppers. He lives in a similar apartment to the one in the photographs, which he shares with his sister. He swims twice a week in the summer in an outdoor pool. He takes morning runs through a grove of silver birch. Moscow has been hot this year, plagued with smog and smoke, but he has taken his morning run every day, despite the smoke, despite the heat. He keeps himself in shape, speaks three languages and wants to leave the city. Max405 has relatives in the Crimea, in Istanbul, in Berlin. Max405 likes to kiss and wrestle. He hopes one day for a steady long-term partner, although, right now, it is hard to meet men, and when he does the encounters are unsatisfying. He does not know exactly why, but he feels himself to be different when he is online. Max405 was beaten, humiliated at school, because of this he is stronger now, physically and in mind. He works for himself, he says, because this is easier. One day soon he hopes to visit London, Rome, Berlin, New York. Max405 marks him as a friend, a favourite, adds a star to his profile, and when they talk he takes off his shirt and sits in front of his computer flexing, proud of himself. You are handsome, he writes, I know you.       OUR MASTERCLASSES START 19TH SEPTEMBER! SIGNUP AND LEARN FROM AWARD WINNING TUTORS!     Copyright © 2020 Litro Magazine, All rights reserved.  Our mailing address is: 33 Irving Place New York, NY 10003