The Buenos Aires Broken Hearts Club (5 page)

“Wouldn’t that drive Jeff crazy,” I said, smiling for the first time that day. More surprising, I realized there was a teeny-tiny part of me that maybe could almost want to go. Unfortunately, that part was generally accessible only after six or seven ounces of vodka. When I was sober, the idea of traveling across the world by myself scared the crap out of me. With all that had happened, my life being turned upside down as it was, just the idea of being alone in my own hometown was terrifying enough—but, it dawned on me, not quite as terrifying as the idea of running into Jeff and Lauren. If I couldn’t wipe Jeff off the face of the earth, maybe this was the next best thing.

“He’ll go insane,” Trish said with a sly smile. “Imagine all the tortured nights he’ll spend imagining you with an Antonio Banderas look-alike. We erupted into a fit of conspiratorial giggles. It felt good thinking of something other than my boyfriendless, apartmentless, jobless state. Oh, God, it hit me, I don’t have a job.

“I don’t have a job.”

“Who needs a job when you’ve got Antonio?”

“No job, no money. Even if I did want to go—and I’m not saying I do—I can’t afford a trip like this. My severance check isn’t going to cover me for longer than a couple of months. Oh, jeez.” I paused as the weight of it sank in. “I
am
Cathy Fischer.” Just when I thought I was all cried out, my eyes filled again and spilled unceremoniously onto the faux wood finish of Sam’s desk.

“Okay, let’s not panic.” Trish, resident problem solver, scrunched her face up the way she always did when she was deciding something important. She leaned forward, touched my left hand, and smiled knowingly. Sam put her hand on top of Trish’s, Three Musketeers–style. I did the same with my right hand, not wanting to ruin this sweet
Sex and the City
moment. “No, you goofballs.” Trish laughed, lifting my left hand up to my face.

Sam and I ooohed in unison. “Trish,” I said, my long-lost smile creeping back onto my lips, “have I ever told you that you’re absolutely brilliant?”

In that moment, my hand thrust triumphantly in the air, my best friends by my side, I believed that maybe, just maybe, things really do happen for a reason. Ten minutes later, the symbol of Jeff’s undying love was on eBay.

Two weeks later, I am strapped into an American Airlines jet, sharing my story with a kind Argentine woman. I have no fiancé, no job, no permanent mailing address, and, for reasons that are becoming less and less clear as the lights of Seattle become farther and farther away through the oval window on my left, I am headed to South America.

South America. As in not North. As in don’t drink the tap water. As in you can’t trust the police. As in me rotting in a prison cell, denied food and tainted tap water because I tried to buy fake Fendi from some guy on the street. As in me lying dead in a ditch somewhere, for God knows what reason, my poor parents made to fly down to identify the body and missing a number of favorite televised programs to do so. As in one step away from falling off the edge of the earth.

How did my so-called friends and loving family let me go through with this? Okay, my mother didn’t so much let me as choose to believe that I wouldn’t go right up until I passed the security point. I could still hear her yelling at my poor stepdad for letting me go when the red-faced customs agent with a chunk of broccoli protruding between two front teeth looked at my ticket and snorted, “Have fun getting kidnapped.” As if anything anyone could say would terrify me more than I already was.

“I don’t speak a word of Spanish,” I tell my sedated seatmate. She nods and smiles sympathetically. “I freckle easily.” She tsks compassionately. “I think I might be coming down with something.”

She puts her hand on mine, and I ease up on the armrest. She digs in her purse and retrieves the bottle of small purple pills. “Take one,” she whispers. “It will make the flying more easy.” I’ve never before taken so much as an M&M from a stranger, but then I’ve never been en route to Buenos Aires before either. And easy anything sounds really good right about now. I shrug, pop one in my mouth, and take a swig of bottled water.

“You will love Buenos Aires,” she says with a dreamy purr. “The city is magic. You will see. This trip will be the best thing that ever happened to you.”

I can’t help but cringe a little when I hear these words. “Right,” I say. “I’m thinking of having that put on a T-shirt.”

She gives me the look of confusion and mild amusement again, well deserved this time. “This is a joke?”

“Yeah. A joke.” And it’s on me.

But before I can wade any deeper into my self-pity, a velvety Valiumness takes over and ushers me tenderly toward the edge of sleep. I am so tired. The plane takes off, and I feel my body sinking into the scratchy blue fabric of my upright seat. I don’t look out the window, can’t stand to see home getting smaller and smaller. I close my eyes.

I wake sometime later as the meal cart creaks by, reminding me where I am. I shake a fuzzy head at the stewardess. I’m not hungry, though I probably should be. Food won’t fill this hole. I am already homesick. For a blurry moment, I am Judy Garland, and when I lift the thin airline blanket covering my legs, I see red sequined shoes. I try to tap my heels together, but my feet are so heavy, like concrete blocks attached to steel rebar. When I wake again, groggy and dry-mouthed, I am startled to find myself on a dark, sleeping airplane. The buzz of air-conditioning mixes with snores. I check my watch. About ten more hours to go—ten hours and six months. I stare out the window and see nothing but black.

CHAPTER THREE

W
e touch down on the tarmac with a light bump, and my stomach lurches. I open my eyes and turn as slowly as possible to the window on my left. American Airlines jets. Luggage trucks. Small men in reflective vests. It could easily be Sea-Tac or LAX or JFK. Then, in the distance, I spot what looks suspiciously like a donkey pulling a cart. Yep, that’s a donkey, all right. No doubt about it, I am in Argentina. Cassie Moore is in Argentina. There are so many things wrong with this picture I can’t even wrap my head around it. My eyes latch on to every detail of the airplane, my safe cocoon for the past twenty hours. The mysterious stain on the headrest in front of me, the dog-eared in-flight magazine, the small TV screen hanging from the ceiling two rows up, even the lit sign for the washroom—it’s all comfortingly familiar, and I soak it up as long as I can, desperate to ignore the flurry of excited activity around me as passengers prepare to disembark. One by one, they file out, orderly but impatient to get off.

I am studying the intricacies of the complimentary headset when my friendly drug dealer returns from a final trip to the bathroom freshly brushed, powdered, and lipsticked. “
Chica,
you are excited now, yes?” We are the last two people on the plane, and I want to tell her not to go yet, because once she does, I will have no choice but to get up, grab my bag from the overhead compartment, and step out that exit. But her smile is so kindly hopeful, I have no choice but to nod and smile back. She reaches down and squeezes my forearm, leaving little moons in my skin from her flawless red nails. “I knew! Good. Have a wonderful trip.” She collects a small case from under the seat, and I watch her glide down the aisle. My turn.

Exiting the plane, I brace myself for the worst. The flight attendants smile and nod, oblivious to anything beyond upright trays and seatbacks. But I know. According to the six guidebooks I’ve read in the past two weeks, Buenos Aires is miles and miles of concrete teeming with over thirteen million people, many of them jobless, most of them penniless, all of whom will surely see me as pure U.S.A.-grade evil. I’m not quite sure what the worst would be, though the image of being splashed with red paint comes to mind. At the very least, I’m sure to be harassed at customs. I would shrug my shoulders, but I don’t have the energy to lift them. Let the worst begin.

To my surprise, the airport is fairly modern, clean, and free of chickens. In fact, it looks a lot like the airport where this journey began. There is no strip search, no drug dogs. No one even looks inside my luggage. The fact that I don’t speak Spanish doesn’t matter, since Argentine customs officers communicate in that universal language of dismissive grunts and hand gestures. My passport is swiped and stamped. I am waved here, then there. As I pass each checkpoint without issue, a fresh wave of relief rushes over me. Nothing is ever as awful as you imagine it, I remind myself. Bit by bit, I might just be able to get through this.

And then I leave the airport.

I find a cab outside. The night is clear, the sky tar-black. I roll down the window for air but am immediately chastised. “
Por favor, chica.
No safe,” the driver says, shaking his head. “Late,
entiende
?” I roll it back up and stare through the smudged glass. The driver, well intentioned, I’m sure, takes it upon himself to give me a security rundown in broken English. In half an hour, I learn which neighborhoods I should not live in (most), which neighborhoods I can safely walk around in after dark (none), and which cabs are fake and, thus, dangerous (these instructions are vague and only serve to make me scared to be in any cab, present company included). I try to absorb both his warnings and the city whirring past me in the night, a blur of neon and headlights. Hundreds of cars, my cab included, weave around each other with no regard to lanes, and the whole extraordinary scene seems a choreographed dance to the familiar Beach Boys tune coming from the car radio. Together, everything is strange and different and awful and too much. I am not home. I am not a cell phone away from meeting Sam and Trish at Jimmy’s. I am not a fifteen-minute cab ride from everyone and everything I know and love. I am on a whole other continent. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do here. Worst of all, I don’t know who I am supposed to be. There is no plan, and without a plan, there is no Cassie. It’s all so overwhelmingly wrong that I have to concentrate on my breathing to keep from hyperventilating. There is no way I am going to make it six months.

So I break it down like any good project manager. I focus on the next few minutes, on arriving at the address on the piece of paper I’ve been clutching so hard it’s already softening. I suspect that the apartment I rented in my drunken state, though nice enough in the online photos, might not be so spectacular in reality, but sleep on the flight was sporadic at best (Valium, shmalium), and the idea of putting my head down somewhere, anywhere, helps get me through the long cab ride. I rest my forehead against the cool window as the cabdriver prattles on, now completely in Spanish. The clogged streets give way to cobblestone roads lined with malnourished trees, and eventually, we thump to a stop.

“You here,” the driver says happily.

“Don’t remind me,” I mumble to myself.

He peeks through his passenger window. “Good house.”

The “house” he refers to is a massive yellow wall relieved only by a forbidding wood door, two windows all but obscured by thick iron bars, and several disturbing fissures that run from sidewalk to roof. The website said the suite was bright and had a nice garden view, but the chances of that being true look pretty slim. The only things growing on this sadly sloped, graffiti-stained street are persistent weeds that stretch up hopefully through cracks in the concrete, and stunted trees standing limply every twenty feet or so. Seattle’s docks, heavy with rusting ship skeletons and rustier merchant marines, have more greenery.

It’s barely been a day, and I miss it so much already. If you get up early enough, you can buy fresh fish, fruit, flowers, pretty much anything, down at the docks. Not that I ever did, but I always knew I could, and now—now I can’t. Now those docks are a world away. People who aren’t from Seattle don’t understand the city. They think we are all Pike-Place-fish-throwing, Kurt-Cobain-mourning, plaid-shirt-wearing coffee addicts. You can’t know Seattle’s heart and soul unless you walk the streets first thing in the morning, eat hot dogs from a street vendor downtown at noon, hang out in a jazz bar on a Tuesday night, cure your hangover with a 5 Spot Café breakfast. Why did I want to leave, even for a second? I’ve never wanted to be anywhere else. Besides long weekends in Vegas and that trip after graduation to New York with Trish, I’ve never given traveling much thought. I don’t have wanderlust. Don’t even have any real curiosity about other cultures, to be honest. I’m glad they’re out there—I just don’t feel any need to be out there in them. Seattle in all its wet, sleepy, grungy glory has always suited me just fine. Yet here I am, thousands of miles from where I was and from who I want to be. Instead of salt-worn wood planks solid under my feet, I have a crumbling cobblestone sidewalk mined with dog crap.

If I’ve set my watch correctly, it’s very late, but I have no choice but to knock. While the driver gets my bags, I negotiate sidewalk cracks and crap and locate the door buzzer on the massive yellow wall. If not for the building’s cheerful color, I’d swear I was about to check in to a convent. Maybe this is all part of some twisted Argentine plot to indoctrinate young foreign women into the sisterhood—a theory immediately dispelled when I notice a couple of transvestite hookers parked on the corner behind us. One of them smiles at me and says something in Spanish to her/his friend. I smile back and they laugh. Nothing I haven’t seen in Seattle, but this one similarity doesn’t exactly fill me with comfort. I sigh deeply and shake my head at the few moments when I let myself believe this might not be so bad after all. My finger slowly moves toward the buzzer as my brain calculates whether I have enough room left on my credit card for a room at the Buenos Aires Howard Johnson.

Before I reach a tally, the door swings wide, pouring three squirming dogs and a giggling redheaded child onto the sidewalk. Behind them comes a tiny redheaded woman in a floral-print jumpsuit who throws her arms open at the sight of me and shouts, “
¡Hola!
” She smiles almost as loudly as she speaks. I clearly haven’t woken anyone up. “You must be Cassandra!” she exclaims, her accent strong, though different from the cabdriver’s.

“Cassie,” I say, smiling sheepishly, too tired and discombobulated to feign her level of enthusiasm. At my voice, one of the dogs jumps at me. I stumble back but manage to stay relatively upright. The tiny woman scolds the animal sternly in Spanish—no translation needed—and it runs into the house, followed by the others. None of this bodes well, and I am more apprehensive than before about venturing inside. Is this the Argentine equivalent of white trash? I wonder. The woman looks nice, her small curvy figure and soft curly hair giving her a motherly quality that is highly appealing at the moment, but will her husband be a wife-beater-wearing gaucho? Already paid, the cabdriver slips off with a friendly nod during the commotion. I watch the cab longingly as it sputters away.

“Cassandra, I am Andrea,” my host says, pronouncing it An-dray-ah, then throws her arms up in the air as though she has just finished her routine on the uneven bars. “And this—this beautiful chico is Jorge.” Hor-hay. The child, no longer giggling, runs behind his mother’s legs, peeking out from behind a floral thigh just enough so he can keep one eye on me. I extend my hand, but Andrea ignores it and moves in to give me a bear hug (or a cub hug, in her case) and a kiss on my right cheek. The little boy is dragged forward and back again with her movements, that eye looking up at me all the time, wide with disbelief. I want to tell him I know exactly how he feels. “No handshakes in Buenos Aires, Cassandra. Only hugs and kisses. Isn’t it marvelous? Well, let’s get you inside. Come, come.”

Andrea’s English is quite good, which is lucky for me, because her accent is thick and she talks as fast as she walks, even with Jorge hoisted on one hip. I do my best to keep up with her as she shuttles me down a long indoor driveway that houses no car save a tot-sized plastic convertible piled with stuffed animals ready to go for a spin. She slips left through a narrow door in the wall and begins to climb a dark, narrow staircase that seems to unwind endlessly. I catch something about my apartment being the servants’ quarters at some point. The rest is a confusing tattoo of rolled R’s. Still, it’s reassuring to hear so much English in her indulgently maternal singsong tone as she goes through a list of things I need to know, like how to use the key (giant and antiquated, it looks like a prop from a Merchant Ivory film), how to flush the toilet (there’s a string dangling from the ceiling; apparently, plumbing is not a national strong point), how not to use the bidet (didn’t need to know that), and so on. With her free hand, she makes gestures I can’t see about things I only partially understand. When we finally reach the top step, me huffing and puffing and grateful my spinning instructor can’t see me now, Andrea unlocks the door, swings it open, and reaches inside to switch on the light, all with Jorge still attached to her hip.

A warm amber wall sconce illuminates a small foyer with floral wallpaper not dissimilar to the pattern of Andrea’s jumpsuit, a small rustic wood table, and a narrow mirror with stained-glass trim. “I think you will like it very much. I decorate it myself.” Andrea beams proudly. The hallway to our right bends out of reach of the light. I envision a horror of floral wallpaper, floral sofa cushions, floral carpeting . . . I should be so lucky, I remind myself. More likely, I’m about to spend the next six months staring at cracked stucco walls and stained gray Formica. But it smells freshly cleaned—the best thing I’ve smelled in hours, in fact, between the faint stench of airsickness and the taxi’s mix of cigarettes and stale sweat—and at this point that puts Andrea’s servants’ quarters on par with the W Hotel back home.

“I show you everything now?” Andrea smiles at me expectantly, hitching up Jorge, who buries his face against her neck.

“Oh, no, that’s okay,” I say a bit too quickly. “
Soy . . . Soy . . .
” I grope for remnants of grade-eight Spanish. Didn’t Trish promise it would all come back to me? No such luck. Still, Andrea leans forward and nods, visibly excited by my attempt. “I’m very tired,” I say. Translation: I’m about to burst into tears and no one needs to see that.

Andrea is clearly disappointed—and determined. Her frown slides easily back into a grin, and she throws up her free arm like a mad conductor. “Then you come for some tea.” It’s more statement than question.

Tea? It’s almost midnight—I think. “Thank you. Thank you very much.
Gracias. Mucho.
I’ll probably just go right to sleep.” Translation: I’m going to crawl into bed, fully clothed, lights off, curl into a fetal position, and stay that way until the Jaws of Life pry me apart. I fake a yawn.

Andrea nods understandingly and hands me the key. “We see you in the morning, then. You have breakfast with us.”

“Oh, okay. I’ll try,” I reply, knowing full well that I won’t. “But I don’t think I’ll be getting up early.” Not before two or three days, at least. I search my brain for the Spanish words for “depression-induced coma,” but my hostess is already letting herself out of the apartment.

“Any hour is good,” she sings cheerfully over her shoulder as she shifts Jorge to the other hip before starting back down the staircase. Jorge tucks his face into his mother’s mass of red curls, blending their two heads into one impossibly huge Ronald McDonald wig. “We wait.”