Gringa (9 page)

In the cavern rooms I had put my feet down carefully; one slip, I thought, and I would plunge into the belly of the cave. That, and the damp chill, made me shiver. On the way home I told Richard I was happy for the trip. He pulled onto a side road and taught me, forty miles from nowhere, how my mouth could give everything. I closed my eyes and saw again the deep black pools in the caves. There was no bottom to their depth.

There were others besides Richard. An almost-engaged man has only so much time. The others were, like him, no longer boys. I never understood how they knew to call me, where they came from. Who had spread the word? I knew I had a reputation, that I was getting in deeper and deeper, but it was like good money after bad. I kept thinking my value would rise for one of them. And I didn't know how to refuse. What grounds did I have? These young men had lost the raw freshness of boyhood. They had more to say, though mostly about themselves, and they had learned a few things. They all sold things during the day, or wrote things down at desks, and they weren't tired in the evenings. They swelled willingness on me like the vanilla stench of Shalimar. I took Farin's advice and saw a doctor. I thought of going out with men as walking along a bluff blindfolded; I knew I would fall, I only didn't know when.

I lay with Richard on blankets in the back of his station wagon, the night mild and bright under a half moon and a sky full of stars. I felt suddenly that I could not make love to men who took no pains to please me. Not any more. And Richard—he should have known! I had once opened my heart to him. It was so hard to swallow the lump in my throat, to find the courage to say, “Richard, I'm unhappy, I've had enough of this, being whatever I am, not your girlfriend, it's not enough, it's not right, it has to change.” My voice quivered. I knew I was cutting myself off from him. I meant no challenge, no ultimatum, I fully expected never to see him again. What I wanted was for him to understand why that had to be. Why I deserved more.

Richard was, like me, naked below his shirt, sitting half-raised to lean against the side of the car, smoking in a lazy way. He didn't answer me for a long time, though I saw that he was looking at me as if I were a strange animal who had slunk through a crack in the wall. I felt a surge of anger, so much anger it flushed through me and made me hot and agitated, and then, before I could speak of it, regret washed through and made the anger weak. Richard rolled the window down to toss out his cigarette, and then he turned and moved on me roughly, putting his hand over my mouth as he bit at my belly and breasts. I twisted one leg over the other to lock him out, and he used his knee to break this silly barrier. “I don't want to!” I gasped, summoning resources for a fight. We were fifteen miles from town on an unpaved service road. What a ridiculous spot I'd picked to end an affair based on my own weakness. And Richard—Richard was the best of the lot. At least I thought he liked me. I shuddered, and he put his mouth on mine. I clung to his shoulders and drew him in; I stopped thinking. Only like this could I find release, only like this could a man want me.

“You're bored, is that it?” Richard grunted. There was nothing for me to say. Richard poised just above me, speaking harshly. “You think I don't know how much you fuck?” Plunge. “Farin, and me.” I twisted, making room for him. “Howard Black, and Bob Slaughter.” He dug his hands into my buttocks and came, savagely, short of the crest I sought. He fell on me, and my moan rose higher than his sigh, despairing, toward the sky. His weight on me was monstrous, the smell of him unbearable. If I had had a knife, I would have sunk it into his back, no, into his belly. “Still not enough, is it?” he spit at me. He grabbed my hand and yanked it down on me. “So you do it!” he commanded. He raised up and sat back, his legs arched over me. “Rub it, bitch,” he said. I turned my head, and he slapped me. “Rub it!” he said. This was new. I curved slightly into my side, as much I could manage with him straddling me, and, weeping now, I rubbed my finger back and forth until the friction hurt and my hand ached. Richard got out of the car, and I used the blanket to dab at myself. I dressed and moved to the front seat. Richard climbed into the driver's seat and started the car. “What is it, exactly, that you think I owe you?” he said evenly.

“Nothing, nothing,” I said miserably. “But all these months we've made love—”

He whooped. “Made love! Listen, cunt, it's called fucking. Fucking. You make love to your lover. You fuck a cunt.”

My stomach heaved. “I might be sick.”

He stopped the car with a lurch. “Outside.”

“I'm okay,” I said, humiliated. I got out and stood for a moment by the car. And I thought; he's right. If you call things what they are, you are less likely to make them into something else. Words can fool you, but only if you let them.

I got back in and he said, “You're kidding yourself. Some girls are born cunts. That's you. Jesus, that's you.”

Shame licked at me like fire. What he said was true.

“We'll try a little experiment,” he said. “We'll wait until you want it again. You call me, any weeknight. I won't call you. You have to ask for it, next time.”

“Never!” I said. But I was wrong.

ABILENE got up late one morning, washed a few things, and took them out on the terrace to drape over chairs to dry. Below on the street, Michael Sage was coming toward the building. She dropped a pair of panties to the sidewalk and called his name. There was no one else in sight. What Mexican would want to be seen near him? He was so tall! He looked up and saw her. She pointed to the underwear. He scooped up her fallen laundry and waved it above his head, shouting something she couldn't hear. She ran down the stairs and buried her face in his chest. “I don't believe it,” she said half a dozen times. He put his hands in her hair.

They made love, and after, lay watching the sun pool on the floor beside the bed. “Shit!” Sage said. “What is it?” Abilene asked timidly. Her manner made him laugh at her. “In Claude Girard's apartment,” he said. “In his goddamned bed!” Abilene laughed with him at that.

They went to the Plaza Garibaldi and made their way through the bustle to a sausage vendor. They ate, drank beer, and talked about what they saw going on around them, as if in naming things they made them matter. “It makes me dizzy after a while,” Sage said. “How I hate cities!”

“But what have you done in Mexico?” Abilene asked. She had been wondering how they would pass the day. It was a relief to discover—and a surprise, too—that he had never done anything in the city. He had never been to Chapultapec or Xochimilco; he had been to none of the museums; he had in fact only been to the city to do business with bureaucrats. He said his eyes stung, and the noise was driving him wild.

She took him to the park. “On summer Sundays there are a million people here,” she told him. They found a spot in the shade near a pond where children were calling to ducks and the children's parents were laying out a picnic.

Abilene saw that Sage was watching the children.

“Do you see your kids? Do you miss them?” she asked.

“No. Yes, sometimes. They're in Houston. I'm going to go soon for a week and take them over to the gulf, to Padre Island. I wish you could come. White sand, no buildings.”

She didn't think it was a real invitation.

“Then I've got to get back to work. Actually I shouldn't go at all, shouldn't leave the ranch. But she thinks I won't come to see them. She thinks I'll just send money and leave them alone. It's what she wants, and if I skip a summer, she'll say I don't want them, and that they're forgetting—Shit.”

Abilene didn't understand the feelings Sage was talking about; she didn't think her father had ever missed her. Of course she'd been much older. She'd had her time.

Sage went on with his earlier train of thought. “I've got my foreman staying in the house twenty-four hours a day while I'm gone.”

“Is something wrong?”

“Oh sure something's wrong. The whole damned place is turning into a funhouse. The clutch went out on a jeep and it ran right off into the river. Of course the water's only fifteen inches high, and nobody was hurt, but what a nuisance! And then there have been problems with the generator. That's not new, but so often! And more serious things. Tonio's keeping brave bulls at his father's ranch now, adjacent to mine, and some asshole left a gate down. One of my men was gored—”

“That doesn't sound quite right!”

Sage looked at her sharply. “Meaning what?”

She had steered them into a bad place. “I just meant, anything Tonio does is usually taken care of. Gates—”

“Well this one wasn't!”

“Come on, let's go to the museum. Look, it's almost time for the afternoon squall. Everyone is getting out of here.”

He wasn't interested in old things. He wanted to talk. They bought beer and went back to Claude's apartment. Abilene dreaded talking. “How long can you stay?” she asked when they were just inside the door. She held her keys in her hand as though she expected to let him out again in a moment. He looked at her so oddly, she was suddenly embarrassed, and went around pushing things into place to cover the embarrassment.

“Today, tomorrow. I'll take the Thursday plane back.”

“What do you have to do while you're here?” She assumed he had business.

He looked disgusted. “I came to see you, woman. What did you think I was here for?”

She thought: At least Tonio never asks me questions! Never pushes me to say things!

The truth was Tonio wasn't interested in what she thought about anything, she knew that. He'd never wanted to know about her life, her family. Oh, he'd wanted to know about her sex life. “Tell me about all the boys,” he'd put it. “And girls, too, if there were any!” He said it so playfully, relished the good parts, cut her short when he was bored. So was Sage so different? she thought angrily. He'd asked the very same things!

At least he hadn't interrupted. He'd seemed genuinely interested. When she had asked him about his youth, he had told her long anecdotes about girls in high school, his boyhood's easy lays. She'd tried not to show how deeply shocked she was at the careless way he trotted those girls out: gang-bangs after baseball games; once a girl, blindfolded, sorted out the names of five of them. There hadn't even been the gentling effect of ruefulness in his telling; it was palaver without compassion. She'd felt choked on it before he was done.

Remembering gave her a reason to be angry. “Christ!” she said. “How would I know what you came for? Who ever went across town to see me?!” She kicked a pillow across the room and went around turning on all of Claude's stupid little lamps. It had begun to rain hard. The bare windows looked slick with dying light and water.

He was looking at her, trying to figure her out, she knew. When Tonio looked at her, he looked right through her, like there was nothing in there to stop his gaze. Sage gave her more credit; he thought there must be some reason for the way she acted. She couldn't explain herself, though, and that was the end of that.

She went to the kitchen window and put her hand on it. The keys, still hanging off her thumb like a toy or a talisman, rang against the glass. “There's wind,” she said.

Sage went to her and made her put everything down on the counter: the beers she had opened for them, the keys. “I want to get things settled between us,” he said very quietly. She wondered if that had the ring of ultimatum, if he didn't know you had to start at the beginning, where she had never ever been. She waited curiously to hear what he had to say. He looked at her, looked and looked, and he didn't speak. She picked up a beer again and went in and sat on the floor. He drank his beer standing above her, noisily, with defiance. Tension lay on them like the air before the summer monsoon. She didn't know what would come. She had to break the silence.

“Aren't you going to ask what I'm doing here? Aren't you even curious?”

He sat down, shrugged. “Girard said it was female trouble.”

She blinked. “Oh he did?” And who told him? Sage had registered no emotion whatsoever, as if he had said the jeep had a flat.

Oh what would you say! she thought. If you knew. If you only knew!

“And my face? Didn't you notice?”

“Yes, but I didn't know what to say. What's it all about? What happened to you?”

“It was for the scars, Sage. Don't you see?” She leaned closer and ran her finger along the line she knew lay beneath her eye, where the scab had stopped. She thought he would put his finger there then, and such a gesture, tender, would pull them together, but he didn't.

“A favor from Velez?”

She pulled away. “Of course. You didn't think I paid for it with green stamps, did you?”

“Shut up.” He began to make love to her on the floor. Sounds of protest rose in her throat and she swallowed them again. His roughness worked as she had thought tenderness would; she moved beneath him, though her back hurt against the bare floor.

“Come back with me,” he murmured. “Come back now.”

She moved her hands.

“I love you, Abby.” She felt that he was close to climax. It made her shiver. Now he would move faster, urgently, pushing away all her thoughts. “I love you!” he said again, and this time she heard, and it stopped her cold. Her hands were caught, one on his shoulder, the other low on his back. Her hips would not move. “What's wrong?” he breathed into her hair. He sounded a long way away.

When she didn't answer he moved and lay on his side. “So where did you go, lady?” he asked in a tight low voice. He put his hand along the side of her jaw and pulled her face to make her look at him. “I said, what's going on?”

She was thinking: he didn't say that before. Nobody ever has said that. Oh, he'd said he loved her, in April, but it was part of some silly argument he was posing, it wasn't like this, at such a moment—

She didn't believe him.

“I don't know, Sage,” she said miserably. She shook her head to clear it.

“No? No you won't come? No I don't love you? No you don't love me? What are you shaking your head for?”

“It's too—hot—” she gulped. “The doctor says I can't go back to the Huasteca until after the rains.”

“I don't mean that! What just happened? Talk to me. Damn you, Abby, you talk to me.”

There was nothing to say.

She could feel his anger vibrating between them. She knew exactly where it would take them.

“You know what I want to know,” he said. Venom was seeping into his voice.

She shook her head again.

“Oh, you do too. Don't be a bitch.”

She felt so weary. “If I say I love him, you'll go away. Won't you?”

“What else? What would be the point after that?”

“So.”

“So is that what you're saying? Is that what I came to fucking Mexico City to hear?”

He had played Judy Collins and Joan Baez records for her. He had made spaghetti for her, and he had made her laugh. He even made her laugh at Claude Girard, pompous as he was.

“I'm not saying that! Don't push me! Listen. If I say I never loved him, I'm the whore everyone says I am. You'll despise me for that.”

“I don't think anybody could love him!”

“If I say I did love him, even if I don't anymore, you'll make a cancer of it. You'll let it eat you up. How could I love a man like that? That's what you'll think, what you'll say. You're thinking of his vanity, his cruelty.” You're jealous.

“I'm thinking this is the craziest thing ever. I was making love to you, Abby. I was fucking you—”

That was it. “Which were you doing?” she asked him. What she knew was that everyone who knew Tonio wanted to get back at him.

“I wish I had known—” she began, looking away. Sage was pulling on his pants. “I wish I'd known how miserable—” He opened another beer; the sound of the cap coming off was like a gunshot. He sat down beside her and she said, “If I had it all to do again, I'd go to all the boys—the ones with the glasses and plaid shirts, the ones who worked with their dads digging fence holes, or in the fields—they had burned raw faces all year round, they didn't talk to anyone at school, not ever. I'd go to each of them, one by one, and I'd make love to them. I'd hang out with them.” She wanted him to know she didn't take any of it back—her past, her mistakes. She was who she was.

She could see by the look on his face that he didn't have any idea what she was talking about.

In the morning he said, “You can come to the ranch whenever you want. When you feel ready. I know how you feel about the Huasteca, that you love it like I do—”

“Sage, I—”

“Shhh. He's not your father, Abilene. He's certainly not your husband. You can do whatever you want to do.”

She shook her head yes, to satisfy him. He didn't see that Tonio was both those things, and more, and less.

Sage said he didn't have a house in Tampico anymore, but he often stayed in a hotel there. They kept mail for him. She took the address. She understood that he didn't want her to write him at the Arcadia anymore. She gave him Adele's address. They were like spies setting up drops. It was absurd.

She thought of all the things she hadn't said, hadn't known how to say, and should have said: That his ranch wasn't his ranch at all, but Tonio's. That even if it were, they would still be under Tonio's shadow there. That if she didn't go back to the Tecoluca, she couldn't go back at all.

That she didn't think she knew Sage, and yet he wanted her to hand her life over to him exactly as she had handed it to Tonio.

That she hadn't decided if she wanted to live without Tonio. Oh, that was the heart of it; that was why they couldn't talk about it; that was what Sage knew and hated.

She thought: Maybe if I leave Tonio that will be all that Sage really wanted, and where will I be?

She touched his face, kissed him, felt his arms around her, and he was a stranger.

They went to Xochimilco, the floating gardens. She scooped a flower out of the water and as Sage watched, she plucked away the petals one by one and collected them in her lap.

“Is this a flower?” she asked, gesturing with the stem in one hand, “or is this?” she said, scooping up petals with the other hand.

“I didn't ask for a fucking Zen lesson!” he growled. She knew he was terribly frustrated with her. He had made such a romantic gesture, and she was not taking it up as he had planned.

“Oh you did,” she whispered back. “Yes yes yes, you surely did, Michael Sage.” She dropped the bits of flower. She was twisting her thin gold bracelet around and around her wrist—the bracelet Tonio had given her. As if she could really choose!

“I don't know what to do,” she said. There was so much dead space inside her, it crowded her heart. Sage, sullen now, couldn't help. He had said, “We're so much alike, you and I.” She was afraid he was right. Neither of them was good enough to bring the other along.