Trouble (10 page)

“My God,” I said, scrolling down to read the gossip about Raquel. “She
is
mean. No wonder Raquel is so freaked-out. This is unbelievable. Did she draw these horns on her head? And what’s that stuff that’s supposed to be coming out of her crotch?”

“She draws that stuff all the time. The crotch stuff is supposed to mean she has an STD or something. I know. And everyone reads her, like, everyone in the entire world.”

“‘My sources tell me,’” I read out loud, in horror for Raquel, “‘that Rock-hell Dominguez has slithered out of town since we broke the story of her home-wrecker activities this morning. Good riddance to a poisonous snake. Meanwhile, we hear that Jimmy Black is available now, for all you homo horndogs!’”

“‘Rock-hell,’” echoed Wendy admiringly. “So totally stupid. Mom, I am serious; you have to go meet her. She’s probably really, really upset. I command you to go. We’ll be fine without you. We’ll eat takeout.”

I laughed as I turned off the computer. “You ‘command’ me?”

Wendy laughed, too. “Ariel and I always say that.”

She had started bantering with her father a few minutes ago, and now she was including me in her and Ariel’s private world. Maybe I should have left Anthony years ago. Maybe Wendy had been shut down and closed off because daughters learned how to behave from their mothers. I wasn’t naïve enough to think that this heralded a whole new change in our relationship; once the shock of this new development wore off, she’d probably slam the door again. But for now, this was an unexpected joy.

“Can you keep a secret from Ariel?” I asked.

“I never have before,” said Wendy. “But maybe I could keep this one, for Raquel.”

“Tell me tomorrow if you think you really and truly can keep what I’m going to tell you between us.”

“Okay,” she said. “I’ll think about it.” To her credit, she neither tried to wheedle it out of me nor promised glibly. Such a good girl.

Later that night, when Anthony came to bed, I was lying awake, waiting for him. He got into bed quietly, easing himself onto the mattress so he wouldn’t jostle me, sliding under the covers so he wouldn’t steal them from me. I had trained him to do this early in our marriage; it was one of my major (and only) triumphs as his wife, at least in terms of positively affecting his behavior.

“I’m awake,” I said as he carefully laid his head on his pillow.

“Oh!” He jumped. “God, I almost had a heart attack.”

“Sorry.”

He settled himself more comfortably on the mattress.

“You okay?” I asked.

“Considering that my wife is leaving me,” he said.

“That’s what I meant.”

“Never been better,” he said. I scooched over and found his nearest arm, moved it so it was around me, and fitted myself to him, my own arm draped over his stomach. He smelled very strongly of toothpaste and, underneath that, whiskey. “I’ve gained some weight,” he said, resting his head against mine. “I hadn’t really noticed till tonight.”

His stomach was warm and fairly firm under my hand; he hadn’t gained much weight, but he did need to exercise. “Till someone saw you naked for the first time in months?”

“Well,” he said. “Yes. It was sobering.”

“All you need,” I said, “is exercise.”

“What kind?”

I wasn’t falling for this. He tended to grill me about what I thought he needed to do to improve himself, all of which advice he would proceed to ignore and then use against me, somehow, in our next argument about why he was such a lousy husband, as evidence that I nagged and pushed him too much. “You figure it out,” I said. “You’re a big boy.”

“You won’t tell me?”

“I’ve resigned as your life coach, effective immediately.”

He readjusted his leg so it fit better between mine. “I guess I’ll have to learn how to cook something besides horrible spaghetti.”

Here we were again, Sonny and Cher, our jaunty new personae.

“I talked to Raquel,” I said. “She’s in deep trouble. She’s going down to Mexico City tonight, and she asked me to meet her there on Wednesday.”

“Are you going?”

“Wendy commanded me to.”

He gave a small groan. “You’re leaving us,” he said.

“I didn’t say I was going,” I replied.

“No, you’re leaving us in a larger sense. You’re really going to move out, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” I said.

He groaned again. “It’s very sad,” he said.

“I know.”

“Why Mexico City?” he asked. “The whole valley is caked with excrement and garbage and human remains. Every warm breeze that blows through the streets is filled with dried bits of shit and ash and decomposed bodies and chemicals and small particulate matter and chemicals and bacteria. New York is slightly cleaner, but not really by much.”

I drummed my fingers on his stomach. He put his hand over mine to make it hold still.

“It’s true,” he said.

“Thank you, Santa Claus.”

He laughed. “Now go to sleep.”

We both sighed in unison and fell silent. A long time later, his body went lax as he slipped away into sleep. At some point, I must have followed, because the next thing I knew, it was morning again, and I was in bed alone, again.

I got up and put on my bathrobe. In the kitchen, Wendy sat at the table in pink pajamas, eating cereal and reading a book. Anthony sat across from her in his bathrobe, his hair spiraling out in odd directions, not eating, reading the
New York Times
. Neither of them looked up or said a word as I entered the kitchen and poured myself a cup of coffee. I didn’t say anything, either. Their silence felt punitive and injured; my answering silence was stoic and resolved. It could not have escaped anyone’s notice that I took the “Real Estate” section from its nest in the whole paper on the table. I tucked it under my arm and took it and my cup of coffee into the living room. I plugged in the Christmas tree lights and sat on the couch, sipping hot black coffee. All of the previous night’s foxhole festivity had evaporated. The hard gray sky outside matched the apartment’s inner weather in a grimly satisfying way.

It would have been so easy to change my mind and stay there. All I would have had to do was go into the kitchen and announce that I had decided not to go, and Anthony and Wendy would have looked up, expressed something—gladness, I imagined, but maybe not—and then we would have all gone on in exactly the way we always had. In another four or five years, Wendy would be gone, and then Anthony and I could settle into stolid, companionable lives lived parallel to each other, without really touching, until death did us part. Or I could leave then, once Wendy was safely settled in college.

I found three apartments that looked possible, but of course you never knew. I finished my coffee, went into the bedroom, and called the numbers listed on the ads. I got three Realtors’ voice mails in a row, and left three identical messages, leaving my cell number and fervently avowing my excitement about the description of the place and my absolute availability anytime that weekend to go and take a look at it. I had already decided that if any one of the three turned out to be acceptably livable, I would take it. I didn’t need much, just a simple one-bedroom with enough space in the living room for a foldout couch for Wendy if she ever cared to stay over. I could afford to pay the going rate. Eventually, when the divorce was final, I would find a place I wanted to settle into long-term. I would use as my down payment some of the money my parents had left me, part of which had been earmarked for Wendy’s college education. We would figure out how to augment her tuition in the meantime, assuming she could get in anywhere in this brutally competitive climate.

God, this was sad. No one and nothing was forcing me to do this. It felt at once artificial, monumentally difficult, urgent, and exhausting. The thought of packing, dividing up all the books and dishes, the little things we’d accumulated over so many years, made me want to go back to bed and pull the covers over my head. But goading me was the sense that this would not always be the case. I was going toward life, away from numbed stasis and paralyzed discontent. Now things would begin to change, inevitably, probably in ways I hadn’t anticipated, but certainly in ways I was desperately starving for. In my chest, a bubble of excitement was encased in an obdurate shell of dread. This nugget of fizzy, energetic hope would be all that I would have to draw on for a while in the way of sustenance and comfort.

Okay, I thought. I got dressed in jeans, a sweater, and boots. I went out to the foyer, put on my coat, and slung my bag across my body.

“I’m going out,” I called. “Anyone want anything?”

“No,” Wendy said curtly.

“World peace,” came Anthony’s rote response; I doubted he even heard the question anymore.

As I walked to a diner on Eighth Avenue, I got out my cell phone and checked my office machine. “Three new messages,” the robotic male voice announced. No surprise there; a few clients always generated crises to keep me involved with them during the break. I listened to all three, which were predictably urgent, saved them all to deal with after I’d eaten, and went into the diner. I ordered fried eggs, toast, potatoes, bacon, coffee, and grapefruit juice and, covertly, watched all the other people in the diner in the mirror over the long counter. My breakfast came, greasy and piping hot. I ate it all, wiping the egg yolk from the plate with buttered rye toast, then got the check.

Outside on the street again, I made my way through the crowds of people thronging the stores, trying to find the right things for their kids and spouses on the last Saturday before Christmas. With my usual efficient forethought, I had bought Wendy’s and Anthony’s presents already: a new iPod with vast amounts of memory for Wendy, three very handsome new sweaters for Anthony, plus the usual books and CDs and socks and other things. I had mailed presents to my sisters’ kids the week before. I had been planning to shop that weekend for Indrani, who always came over for brunch and present opening on Christmas Day, but now I wasn’t sure I wanted to buy her anything or have her come over. I couldn’t disinvite her, of course, but I felt like it. And I had already given her that wine opener, which had been expensive. The memory of the fight the day before was acrid in my brain.

It would be so good to see Raquel and explore an exotic new city and have an adventure and be autonomous, neither mother nor wife, for the first time in so many years.

I realized then that I must have decided at some point to go, because instead of walking down to the West Village boutiques, I seemed to be heading toward the luggage store on Seventh Avenue to buy a wheeled suitcase. I had evidently begun to allow my guts to start making my decisions without consulting my brain; it was like turning the piloting of a ship over to the guy down in the engine room, bypassing the captain entirely, the charts and binoculars and compass. Well, my brain hadn’t steered me anywhere too good lately, so I figured I might as well take a chance on the engineer. “I am the mechanic of my ship,” I muttered to myself. “I am the grease monkey of my soul.” Finally, that B.A. in English was earning its keep.

I carried my new empty suitcase back to my building, hauled it upstairs, and wheeled it into the bedroom. I called each of the three clients back, talked them all off whatever ledge they’d put themselves on, reassured them that I would be back in two weeks, and had them promise to call my substitute shrink if they needed help in the meantime.

When I came out of the shower, there were messages from two Realtors. They both sounded skeptical of me and annoyed at having to call me back. This real estate market was as cutthroat as the college-application process. There were too many people now, and the systems weren’t keeping pace, as Anthony loved to point out.

Soon, with any luck, I’d live in a place that didn’t contain a man who insisted on pointing out such things all the time, I thought as I dialed the first Realtor’s number. And so it went, the dismantling of a marriage: step by instinctive step, fumblingly, sadly, with none of the heady delight that had fueled its beginning.

 
he plane lowered itself into a gigantic valley crammed absolutely full of concrete buildings, a valley so huge and so crowded it lived up to all my expectations, as did the air, which was yellow-gray and thick. The plane landed; I got off, disoriented. Down there on the ground, the air had a sharp but hazy quality; everything looked a little darker but also a little larger and clearer than normal. This airport smelled totally different from the ones in New York, some kind of harsh disinfectant, exotic food, different particulate matter blowing around. I wheeled my suitcase behind me to customs, my passport and filled-out forms in hand. I got in line behind all the other non-Mexicans, waited my turn, yawning, and then they stamped everything and waved me through.

I struck off down a long, wide hallway, following signs that said
TAXI
, armed with a sheet of instructions I had scribbled as Raquel had dictated them over the phone: Withdraw a hundred dollars’ worth of pesos from any bank machine. At the taxi stand, I would see two different companies side by side: I should use the one on the left. She had told me the amount the cab would be in pesos, the amount to tip, the address of the hotel in Spanish. Also, I should never get into a roving taxi cab in Mexico City because some drivers held you up, stole your debit card, demanded your password, and withdrew your daily limit until your bank account was empty, and meanwhile they held you hostage in a cheap, filthy hotel. Also, I should never be too friendly to Mexican men; they would get the wrong idea. They thought from TV and movies all American women were easy lays. I should act formal and distant and respectable. “Unleash your inner Catholic,” she had said.

And when I got to the hotel, I was to ask for her by the fake name she’d registered under, an alias she’d chosen in honor of Wilde and Eliot, or rather, in honor of me, because we’d read and loved
The Importance of Being Earnest
and “Sweeney Among the Nightingales” together in college.

I waited at the curb with my taxi chit until a car pulled up. It was surprisingly chilly, although the sun was shining. I was glad I was wearing my jacket. I let the driver take my suitcase and put it into the trunk, got in, read the address carefully off the sheet of paper, and tried to give my reflection in his rearview mirror a respectable, formal expression. We drove off, bouncing gently on shot shocks, into a chaotic city made of concrete. Signs and business names were painted directly onto the front walls of buildings in bright bird-plumage colors—electric blue, pink, purple, magenta, acid yellow, bright green. We whizzed down an avenue with palm trees growing out of the divider, then plunged into old streets lined with grand colonial buildings, sidewalks massed with street vendors selling CDs, snacks, and piles of things on tables. Every ground-level entryway was the gaping mouth of a store hung and stuffed with bags or clothes or electronics for sale, or a taco stand with people sitting at a small counter eating, or a bright, shiny convenience store. The sidewalks were crammed with people trundling along as if they had somewhere to go and something to do—chop chop, gotta go, gotta go— exactly the way people walked in New York. Everyone was short. A lot of people were shaped like gnomes. Old Indian women in shapeless dresses, buttoned cardigans, and house slippers carried huge, bulging plastic sacks as if they weighed nothing. Dapper men in suits bustled along with cell phones. It was all exactly as I had expected, down to the guy on a bike with boxes strapped onto the back, towering over his head as he wobbled through traffic without capsizing or dropping anything.

In front of the hotel, I offered money to the driver and was deposited with my bag on the sidewalk. I went in past a uniformed guard and a small dank-looking hotel bar into a big lobby with couches, chairs, and tables everywhere. Overhead was a ceiling made of glass blocks glowing with daylight. A big fish tank sat on a high credenza under a painting of Queen Isabella. Looking off to the right, through an archway, I saw a homey-looking restaurant. The young man behind the front desk had a cheerful brown face, just like one of the photogenic, friendly natives whose pictures you always saw in the Lonely Planet guides.

“Hello,” I said brightly to him. Raquel had told me they all spoke English. “I’m looking for Cecily Sweeney in room two oh three. I’m her friend from uh, New York City. Nueva York?”

“Dumbass,” came Raquel’s voice from behind me. “I’m right here.” She laughed as she came forward to hug me. “‘Nueva York,’” she chortled into my ear. She was so tiny; I always forgot when I went without seeing her for a while. “Come on,” she said. “I’ll take you up to the room. God, it’s so good to see you.”

She led me past the front desk to a mirrored hallway, then up two very long, winding flights of stairs. We came into an upstairs courtyard, three stories high, lined with balconies with balustrades. She led me around the courtyard, past one set of doors after another, then ducked into a small alcove. She unlocked the tall double doors, flung them open, and gestured for me to go in. “Welcome to Casa Home Wrecker,” she said. “It’s not much, but it’s ours.”

I wheeled my silly little suitcase over an old gray carpet through an empty foyer and into a large room with a ridiculously high ceiling. French doors opened to a small balcony. Glancing through them, I saw a domed churchlike building across the street. The room was done in sixties drab—two beds with plain wooden headboards and a nightstand between them, an imitation Eames-era armchair, a huge armoire with a mirror, and a long vanity table of fake blond wood.

“No frills,” I said. “But I like it.” I felt dizzy and out of breath from the fast climb up the stairs, and my leg muscles were tight. I was in okay shape, so this was no doubt due to oxygen deprivation from being a mile high, breathing poor-quality air.

“I know, it’s no palace,” she said. She seemed perversely happy to be in this bare-bones hotel, which was what I had expected of her—she had always preferred unpretentious hotels and restaurants to tony, fancy ones. “Sorry. No matter how rich I get, I can’t stand the luxury shit. It’s totally removed from real life. Comes from having a Marxist father, maybe.”

“And from rebelling against your mother, maybe,” I said. Raquel’s mother, Suzie Weinstein, was a Realtor who lived alone on the Upper East Side in a ritzy apartment in a doorman building; she loved to give the place an overhaul every few years, up-ping the chintz and brocade quotient with every redecoration. I had met her a few times through the years and liked her; she was warm and direct and funny. But Raquel, an only child, adored her father and couldn’t stand her mother.

“This hotel used to be a whorehouse,” said Raquel. “In the sixteenth or seventeenth century. Across the street, that building was a nunnery filled with cats. Two cathouses, facing off.”

I set my suitcase on the bed that was clearly not Raquel’s, since it was crisply made with an ugly bedspread, and the other one was rumpled, as if a wild animal had fought a lesser creature to its death at some point in its covers. But her stuff was all neatly organized, her toiletries on the vanity, her clothes all unpacked and out of sight. Raquel had oddly incompatible habits: In matters having to do with her own personal upkeep and wardrobe, she was obsessively fastidious, and in others, such as anything pertaining to housekeeping, she was like a sloppy ten-year-old boy. Her bungalow in Silver Lake was a study in this split personality, but luckily, she had a maid.

“Let me get a look at you,” I said. I turned and studied her.

“I look like sheer crap,” she said. “I’m a wreck. Ask me if I’ve slept one minute. Last night, I got drunk downstairs in the hotel bar and sang along to Bob Dylan songs with two dorky industrial engineers till the bar closed and they threw us out. What did I tell you about acting formal and not too friendly, right?”

“So did you bring them up here with you?”

“Thank God, no. I made it safely home alone.”

Raquel looked gorgeous. Her hair was dyed its usual dark red, and she’d added a blond streak by her right ear. Her dark, exotic face, with its high cheekbones, sexy beak of a nose, deep-set dark eyes, and full mouth, which she’d been blessed with via a craggy-faced Mexican father and Jewish blood on her mother’s side, had become even more beautiful with age and experience— and dermatological intervention, and obsessive health habits, although those seemed to have gone out the window down in Mexico. She was just lighting up a cigarette. She wore a fitted long-sleeved dark red wool dress that came demurely down to her bare knees, and black Frye motorcycle boots. She looked glamorously, almost painfully thin.

“How much do you weigh right now?” I asked her.

“Eighty-nine pounds,” she said. “I know, I’m barely human. I’m like a bag of bird bones.”

“You’ve never looked better,” I said. “I mean it. Scandal becomes you.”

She threw her arms around me. I felt like a huge, hulking oak tree being embraced by a wood nymph. “You look good yourself,” she said, looking up at me. “Divorce becomes
you.”
Smoke from her cigarette wafted past my nose. It smelled so good, I suddenly craved one. I was tremendously glad to be there. “Let’s go get a drink,” I said.

“Let’s start at the fancy place and work our way down to the dives,” she said.

Outside in the bracingly chilly air, we turned left and headed along Avenida Isabel la Católica. Raquel led me along several blocks, past a vendor with multiple stacked baskets of luridly colored nuts and seeds and candies for sale, past a wee dark-eyed beggar woman sitting on the sidewalk with a baby, past an organ-grinder in an ersatz army uniform. The sidewalks were about a foot higher than I was used to and very narrow. It was like walking on a tricky platform; every time we crossed the street, I had to remember to step down far enough. Sexy young women in tight police uniforms blew whistles madly at every intersection and made emphatic arm gestures at the onrushing cars.

We turned right onto Avenida Cinco de Mayo. The shop windows were fancier here, more upscale, a lot of jewelry stores, expensive-looking clothing emporia whose windows were hung with leather jackets and silk dresses that had been au courant in New York circa 1983; this was evidently the Madison Avenue of Mexico City.

“This is where we get our coffee in the morning,” said Raquel, gesturing at El Café Popular. “Across the street, we get our fresh juice. We’ll take them to the Zócalo. We’ll be there in a minute. You can see it up ahead.”

We came out onto an open square, so big that it was like a flat, paved plain. A curving snake of one-way traffic streamed around its perimeter. An ice rink took up a large portion of the square; skaters in street clothes, no coats or hats, were gliding around in groups, falling, laughing, clutching one another. A huge crowd stood watching. Several groups of Indians in headdresses were dancing and drumming while other Indians waved burning herbs at people. Blankets on the ground were heaped with things for sale.

I wanted to stop and gawk and take it all in, but Raquel kept going, making a beeline for the other side of the square. Beyond the dancers, near the courtyard of the cathedral, were vendors with their wares spread out on blankets. A few artists had set up easels and were making portraits of tourists. A young one-armed man sat in a chair under an umbrella, working with his one hand, making something that looked like a landscape painting, but he was weaving, rather than painting, out of some material I couldn’t identify because Raquel rushed me by so fast.

“We’ll go into the cathedral later, after lunch,” she called over her shoulder, “and honor our ancestors.” Raquel had always proudly pretended to be a lapsed Catholic; although she had been raised agnostic, she had always identified more with her Catholic forebears than her Jewish ones, but she had never gone to church until we were in college and went together to an Easter Mass.

Behind the cathedral, she turned onto a small street, at the end of which, near some ancient ruins in some stage of excavation, was a small café called Las Sirenas. This was evidently our destination, because Raquel plunked herself down at one of the outside tables. I sat across from her. A waiter in a uniform brought big leather-bound menus, but Raquel waved him away and unleashed a cloud of Spanish. He smiled at her, nodded, and went off to fetch whatever she’d asked for.