Grace (14 page)

“I thought it would go away,” I said.

“I should have seen through her whole innocent act at the club, sorry. You know what happened to Matt.”

“You weren't the one thinking of taking her home. Yeah, I know.”

“What did she say to you?”

“Does it matter? It's the risk of taking someone home.”

“You know, and I'm not saying this because she's from the South, half of people still live in the nineteenth century.”

“You let it hinder you, or you take it in stride.”

“I'm glad you can make light of it.”

“Thanks to you,” I said.

“Fifty percent of people can't see beyond their own experience.”

“I'd say ninety.”

We let it drop, as Nell read my unarticulated thoughts, at least the ones that were uppermost. The thoughts beneath that were hidden from her. How could they not be? They were still hidden from me.

“Just find someone good and solid. There are tons of great girls. Only be careful,” she motioned with her hand to imply the city, to incriminate the Western world, “of the bad ones.”

“Well, as my Aunt Isadora would say, you do the best you can. The rest is in the hand of the Creator.”

“That is a nice thing to say. You don't believe it, do you?”

“It is what my aunt says.”

I was sanguine when I left Nell, but as I rode the subway home I was struck by how horrifically wrong things could have gone, and not only from taking home a stranger; from any arbitrary deed committed or not committed, by yourself or anyone else. A rushed decision, haphazard luck, bad timing. The world was full of disasters-in-waiting. It made me numb to think about, until the only way I could keep from being consumed by paralysis was to grasp that paralysis was exactly the trap laid by my enemies.

Once I saw this I tried to let the entire episode flow into the past. I knew the larger pattern and meaning, but it was not the rope that would hang me. Beyond that, I tried to find in myself the smallest parcel of empathy for Anna. More than that I could not do, but that tiny parcel was enough. From no higher principle than I believed forgiveness a virtue. Not a moral one, simply the self-preserving virtue of knowing the heart that cannot expand in forgiveness—even for those who slight it, even for those who have no claim to it whatsoever—is the most devilish instrument in the world.

It had been a wretched spring and, as I boarded the flight to Brazil, I was glad to be putting it behind me for what I hoped would be a new start. By the time I changed planes in Atlanta the hot air felt restorative, and I started immediately to relax, pleased to be out of the city, as the heat made me sweat and aware of my own body. Before boarding my onward flight I checked my messages, and saw Nicola had sent me a text telling me she would be in New York that week. I wrote back to let her know I would be out of town, then downed a sleeping pill.

As I turned on my noise-canceling headphones the artificial quietude was flooded by sour memories and the crippling feeling of a vast, cosmic emptiness. I realized I had lost my orientation, would not even know how to properly describe myself other than the role required of me in a particular context. My present role was traveler on an airplane, and I could neither name any self nor feel anything solid beyond the contours of my seat pushing up from the floor of the suspended flying machine. I had no other beliefs. The feeling attacked violently, from deep within, threatening to overwhelm all my faculties, until finally I plugged my headphones into the jack and turned on the in-flight entertainment system to crowd out the emptiness.

Twenty minutes into the movie, I started to doze off from the pill, and went to the bathroom to remove my contact lenses and brush my teeth.

I do not know what happened next, but when I awoke there was an oxygen mask over my face. The steward told me I had fainted in the aisle, but that it was probably only exhaustion. I nodded lethargically, and went back to sleep.

When I awoke it was morning, and we were over the coast of Bahia. I fell back asleep and did not wake again until the wheels of the plane touched the runway in Rio. I retrieved my luggage from the carousel, bought a newspaper and
café com leite
, then exited the terminal to find a taxi.

I was soon stuck in the morning rush hour, overwhelmed by motion sickness from the stop-and-go traffic. I opened the windows to let in the fresh, humid, air, but was soon choked by the exhaust of whizzing motorbikes and diesel fumes from trucks. I was forced to close the window again, and curled up in the seat and closed my eyes in an attempt to keep from vomiting.

The driver, seeing me fidget, caught my eye the next time I looked ahead, and asked if I was okay. I told him the pollution was making me ill, and he suggested an alternate, if longer, route. I agreed and we pulled off the highway at the next exit. When he saw I had regained my composure, he began to re-create for me an argument he had had with his wife that morning. My Portuguese was limited to the superficial amount I could remember from a college class, combined with cognates from other Latin languages, which was perfect for his purposes, since it allowed me to follow the story only if I kept absolutely alert to what he was saying. He gleaned this, and smiled. He needed someone to hear him, so I listened as he filled the sealed interior with his woes.

We finally pulled up to the hotel, a boxy, glass-and-steelaffair from the seventies whose best days were well in the past. Its single charm was in being directly on the beach, with palm trees offering shade all around, beckoning optimistically.

When I went up to my room I found the interior as rundown as the exterior, but was pleased to discover I had a little balcony that opened to the sea. It was still early in the morning, and I opened both the double doors to let in the breeze, then lay down for a nap.

I had only just closed my eyes and started immediately to dream, when a banging at the door blasted me wide awake. From the ruckus in the hall I knew it was my friends, and opened the door to find Schoeller, Freddo, and Doc, who lifted me in a great bear hug. “There he is, in the cheapest goddamned room he could find,” Doc said, peeking around the room. “We are glad you came, but why are you so mean to yourself? You live once. Everything is available to you. Why not take it?”

“I flew right,” I said.

Doc had arrived in college after a stint in the Navy, where he was stationed in the Pacific doing intelligence. He had spent two years after that living with a tribe in Micronesia, until it was time for him to either take a wife or come back to the West and try to unify his experiences. After all of that he took school with a grain of salt, working hard enough to get into medical school, but not so hard that there was ever a Friday he did not skip classes to play golf. “Come on, let's get this man to the beach,” he said to the others, after looking me over. “He needs a sun cure.”

They had been drinking since breakfast, and before I could change for the beach someone pushed a
caipirinha
into my hand. I went to get my swim trunks and bathing towel, and we headed down to Leblon.

It was nearly winter in the Southern Hemisphere, but still warm enough for the beaches to be packed, the tourists to be sunburned, and the homeless people to sleep out on the sidewalk. As we passed I gave a
real
to a mother begging with her child hitched against her hip, who was immediately harassed by the security guard from a nearby business, informing her she was begging too close to the entrance of a nearby mall. The way he spoke to her reminded me we were at the southern terminus of the old slave belt, whose northern edge was the Mason-Dixon line.

“You should let those people be,” Doc said to the guard: “Beggars are holy. They trust the universe to provide all they may need.”

“Maybe, but they're bad for business,” Schoeller said.

The city was in the midst of a financial boom, and the air along the grand boulevard at the front of the hotel was charged with the thrill of new money vying against the anxiety of the old.

All of it melted at the shore into the democracy of the sea, along with my own worries. It was my first time in Rio, and the country felt like the New World in miniature, so much so that by noon, as we lunched at a beachfront café, I felt perfectly at ease with what to expect.

We retired for a siesta after lunch, and did not go out again until evening, when we had a lavish dinner atop Santa Teresa. After eating we piled into taxis, and Doc gave the driver an address across town. We drove out through the hills surrounding the city, past the outskirts of a ghetto, which looked like every other ghetto—kids too old for their age, premature sicknesses, somewhere to buy liquor, somewhere to play
fútbol
, a dancehall, no visible means of egress. I felt my earlier sense of division return, and began to watch everything from a remove, trying to decipher the society around me, until we eventually reached an industrial district, where we rolled two levels down a garage ramp, before stopping at a security gate.

Schoeller spoke into the camera at the gate, and the metal barrier receded into the ground, opening onto another ramp, which took us down a third level, where we were greeted by a doorman at a lavish, well-guarded marble entranceway, with a discreet sign above the door that said unironically,
Cielo
.

The manager came to the entrance to welcome us, and escorted us into a sumptuous room with a walk-in humidor and wine cellar stocked with mature wines and aged cigars. In the room next to it was a chef grilling aged Argentinean steak, and in a larger room, girls in every corner, each more beautiful than the last. The room was furnished with antiques modeled after the Topkapi Palace, with rare Persian carpets and Ottoman artifacts. Only the girls were young. Tall girls, short girls, thin girls, buxom girls. Sweet girls, ruthless girls, desperate girls, good girls who had lost all trace of innocence, cynical girls whose experience of it had ended before their childhoods. Black, white, Asian, indigenous, mestizo, octoroon, quadroon,
cafuzo
,
castas
, they only have names for in the local language, and others they just invented with the last people to get off the boat and had not named yet. Whatever you wanted, whatever your unvoiced fantasy, whatever moved through you, dancing together in groups, laughing and winking, as we toured that palace of vice.

“Bunga bunga,” Freddo said.

“Technically,” Doc corrected, “bunga bunga requires the presence of water.”

“Please,” Schoeller begged, “don't be a fucking pedant tonight.”

“I can't believe you are having your bachelor party here,” Freddo said. “You're getting married.”

“And when I get married I will be married,” Schoeller answered. “I am not yet.”

“Do you mean you will give up places like this once you are married?” Doc pressed.

“No.”

“He's not marrying for love. Should he also give up pleasure?”

“What are you marrying for then?”

“Because we share the same values, and are devoted to the same way of life.”

“That makes it okay?”

“Once I'm married, it will mean something different to come to places like this, is all I mean.” He was marked by resignation as he looked around.

“I don't care that he's lying to his wife,” Freddo protested. “I care that he's flaunting it, and making all of us complicit in his lying.”

“Please shut up, Freddo.”

“I can't be here,” Freddo protested.

“Why not?” Doc demanded. “You are not forced to do anything. What are you afraid of?”

“It is because you see bodies. I see the poor girls I grew up with. I see my sister. My mother.”

“That is just a real cry for help.”

As much as I disliked agreeing with Freddo I shared his qualms, but for different reasons. Brothels were the nexus of everything I objected to. Besides commoditization of the body, the other interests colliding there were equally nefarious: human trafficking, drugs, violence, and a global network of corruption that flowed back into the legitimate economy. It was in fact one of the points where the legitimate and illegitimate markets mingled, and otherwise upstanding citizens aided all that civil society must necessarily abhor.

I did not say anything, but took it all in as we toured the rooms, more curious than anything else. I had never been inside one before. But the girls were beautiful, in so many different ways, as though someone had assembled a working definition of female beauty until, as we rounded a corner to the penultimate room, it was impossible to know where to focus your attention. There a forty-foot-high waterfall cascaded down from the ceiling, and a group of sirens frolicked in a pool beneath it.

“There,” Schoeller said, clapping his hands toward the water, as Doc fished in the interior pockets of his jacket and started passing around pills, “is the bunga, baby.”

“What's this?” Schoeller asked, taking one of the pills Doc had passed.

“Molly.”

“The others?”

“China. Bolivia. Adderall. Sugarcubes. Valium. Methadone. Morphine.”

I knew then it had been a bad idea to come, but simply declined everything, until Schoeller lit a long, thin-stemmed pipe and passed it my way.

“What kind of hash is this?” I asked, exhaling a beautifully exotic taste in a plume of violet smoke.

“The opium kind,” he answered.

My muscles relaxed, and soon turned liquid, as the room began to swim pleasantly around me; I found a divan to relax on, while the others fanned out through the club, each in search of his respective desire. The last I remember of any of them that night was watching Doc leave around midnight with a coven of flame-haired she-devils. To do what, I could scarcely imagine.

My mind was swimming happily along the edges of the room, watching the light bend and colors merge, as I fused deeper and deeper into the divan. I had the sensation of falling through a trap door and descending ever deeper, until all that existed was music and color and light. I was completely oblivious to where I was when an Amazonian goddess appeared from the ether, and sat down next to me. She only spoke Tariana, a native language, and our conversation was halting at first, but soon felt completely fluent as she opened an app on her tablet that showed pictures of various poses, starting with starfish, and growing progressively more tantric.