Trouble (12 page)

“I want to go and buy that thing now,” I said to Raquel. I had the feeling I had insulted the artist somehow by trying to bargain with him, and I wanted to show him I had been sincere in wanting to buy his work and was willing to pay what he felt it was worth. Somehow, I couldn’t admit to Raquel that I wanted to right some balance I had upset with that one-armed guy; I didn’t want her to think I was a sucker, and I was feeling a bit vulnerable, newly arrived in this strange city, tired, tipsy, and sad. I hadn’t seen Raquel in more than a year, and she was so brittle right now herself; I would have to be clear about my own state of mind. She could lean on me, of course, but I wasn’t unbreakable, and I needed something from her at the moment, too. “I thought it was beautiful,” I added.

She glanced at me and said with brusque amusement, “It’s your money. Come on.”

We went back to the Zócalo and found his umbrella again. The guy was still working on the same weaving, his head bent. He didn’t look up as we approached. As soon as we were within earshot, Raquel called something quickly in Spanish to him. When he saw us, his face was blank and careless. “I’ll handle this,” I muttered, annoyed at Raquel for intervening, especially in Spanish, when he spoke perfect English and this was my thing.

“It’s almost finished,” he said directly to me, which made me glad I had insisted that we return. “You still want it?”

“Yes,” I said. “I do.” I handed him one hundred pesos. He set his work on his thigh and took it, set it on his other thigh, extracted a leather billfold from the breast pocket of his blue denim work shirt, and deftly stuffed the money inside. He had a muscular, veiny forearm, I noticed, and his hand was square and strong, with flat, clean nails. He went back to work matter-of-factly. Raquel and I stood in the chilly, dry air, squinting out into the Zócalo, waiting for him to finish. A glossy dark red curl of Raquel’s hair lodged in her mouth; she freed it.

“So what happened with Indrani?” she asked me. “Did you make up with her?”

“She came for Christmas,” I said. “It was stilted and weird.”

I had managed to pretty much ignore Indrani the entire day and evening; we had focused energetically on Anthony and Wendy as we all ate coffee cake, opened presents, walked to the movie theater in the cold, quiet city. Indrani had given me a cashmere sweater. I hadn’t given her anything, but Wendy had given her a CD by a band called Tokio Hotel, which she was fanatically passionate about. Anthony had begged off the movie; the three of us “girls,” as Indrani always referred to us, had seen two movies in a row, emerged from the theater, and said good night; Indrani had gone uptown alone in a cab. Since that time, Indrani and I had not spoken.

“What does she know about any of it, anyway?” said Raquel. She lifted her writhing mass of hair with both hands and tossed it down her back. “Has she ever separated from a husband or been set up by a villainous asshole and had gossip bloggers smear her name all over the world?”

I took an elastic hair band from my bag, bunched Raquel’s hair with both my hands while keeping the band around my right palm, slipped the band around her hair, and gave her a high ponytail. While I ministered to her hair, she leaned against me like a little kid or a dog.

“Does she know about what happened with me and Jimmy Black?” Raquel asked.

“Yeah,” I said reluctantly.

Raquel gave me a sharp, inquisitive look. “And?”

“Of course she’s worried about you. To put it mildly.”

“You mean she’s judging me,” said Raquel. “I feel bad for her that she’s still single and that it upsets her so much, but maybe there’s a reason why no man can stay with her. Maybe it’s because she’s so stuck and afraid to come unstuck. She can’t bend to anyone else, ever. Even though she’s overly accommodating, she’s strangely rigid underneath that. You know what I mean?”

“I do,” I said, and I meant it. “But I don’t know why I can’t just let this go. I feel silly, staying mad at her over this. We’ve been friends forever.”

Raquel looked me dead in the eye. “What did she say about the whole thing with me?”

I looked away. “Do I have to tell you?”

“Of course you have to tell me.”

I cleared my throat. “She said … Raquel, I don’t want to get in the middle of this, I really don’t. You can probably imagine what she said.”

“Probably,” Raquel said in a hard voice. “I’m sure she said it’s pathetic, at my age, and what was I thinking? And how could I be such a bitch to that poor pregnant girl, stealing her ‘fiancé,’ which he so was not, no matter what she’s saying now. And what’s wrong with me? Do I think I’m in my twenties?”

I laughed.

“I knew it,” she said. Her eyes were narrowed. “She’s judging both of us. Where does she get off?”

“Thank God you’re not,” I said.

“Why would I judge you? You’re separating from your husband. So what? People do it all the time. And he’s been kind of a jerk to you, let’s face it.”

“How did I stay with him for so long?”

“’Cause you love the hell out of him, and it takes a while to notice that the reality isn’t matching the idea.”

“He just completely let me go,” I said. “He said he understood why I needed to leave and he agreed that I should. Poor Anthony.” A brief but intense memory of kissing Peter came back to me, the harsh taste of wine in my throat, his insistent, inquisitive mouth. “Oh my God, I forgot to tell you. I did something really incredibly weird, for me at least.”

“What?”

“I gave this guy a blow job the other night, this guy I met in a bar. After Indrani’s Christmas party, I went out for a nightcap and ended up getting picked up by him.”

Raquel stared at me and then let out a whoop; the one-armed weaver guy continued to ignore us. “You did not!”

“I did!”

She cackled. “Jo-zee! You slut!”

“Who knew?” I said, laughing, too.

“Hey,” said the guy. “Your weaving is finished.” He wrapped the thing in a piece of newspaper and stuffed it into a plastic sack, then handed it to me. Of course he had heard every word we had just said, but he looked at us as if he had never seen us before in his life. He obviously had a lot more on his mind than the exploits of two middle-aged women. He had real problems. Who knew where he lived, how he got by?

“Thank you so much,” I said.

We headed back to the hotel. I felt as if I had grains of grit and sand behind my eyelids, and my limbs were so heavy, I could hardly move them. My head was pounding. “I don’t feel well,” I said as we walked along Avenida Cinco de Mayo.

“It’s the altitude,” said Raquel sympathetically. “You’ll adjust, but it’s hell at first. How long can you stay? Did you decide?”

“I have an open ticket.”

“Be still my heart,” she said.

Back in our hotel room, we lay on our beds, with the balcony doors shut to block out the noise of traffic and organ-grinders and the CD stand around the corner. I couldn’t fall asleep right away. My narrow bed was too hard, and I wasn’t used to these new sounds: different traffic noises, voices out in the hotel, Raquel’s breathing, so different from Anthony’s—lighter, more irregular. My head was fizzing from fatigue and stress, like static on a TV set.

When I woke up, it was dark, and I smelled cigarette smoke. The balcony doors were open. Raquel’s bed was empty. “Raquel,” I called.

“I’m out here,” she said, and stuck her head in from the balcony. “How’d you sleep?”

“What time is it?”

“Almost eight.”

“I’m starving.”

“Good, because I’m taking you to my favorite cantina right around the corner for tacos as soon as you’re ready.”

I sat up. I felt like shit. My mouth tasted like a rodent had died in it weeks before. My head was pounding, and my eyes were grainier than ever. “Damn,” I said.

“Headache?”

“Yeah.”

“You’ll get used to it. I promise.”

She led me around the block and over to a street that was lit up and filled with loud music. Outside the cantina was a guy at a stand heaped with piles of odd-looking meat, which he pulled from a bubbling drum of oily water, chopped, and threw onto a hot grill, then scooped up into two oily corn tortillas and sprinkled with radish, cilantro, and onion and slid onto a plastic plate, then handed them over to the next customer, who doused them with a green sauce from a dish on the counter. As we stood in line, Raquel said, “I’m ordering you two chorizo tacos. Trust me.”

“What else is there?”

“Tongue, eye, tripe, foot, brain.”

I made a dramatically disgusted face. “Isn’t chorizo basically all that stuff in a sausage casing anyway?”

“With chorizo, you don’t think about it; it’s just spicy sausage. All that other stuff, you have to think about.”

We took our plates into the cantina and got a table. I took a bite of a taco. Raquel watched me as I chewed and swallowed. “It’s really good,” I said, and this was an understatement.

A tall, angelic-faced waiter in a suit approached.

“Tequila con sangrita, por favor,”
I said before Raquel could order for me.

“Dos
Herraduras blancos,”
said Raquel. “Con
sangrita para mi también.”

When he had gone away, we wolfed our tacos. Our drinks arrived. We clacked glasses. “To your health,” she said to me. “Which is really all that matters in life, when you get right down to it.”

Two boys went up to the jukebox and put in money and punched in numbers. Mexican pop music blared out of the speakers. The boys sat down at their table and sang along with the song in loud, passionate voices. I looked over at them. They were tough-looking guys in jeans and leather jackets, but they sang without any irony or self-consciousness, looking at each other as if they were having a conversation.

“Want more tacos?” Raquel asked. “Or should we smoke now? This is great. I’ve been good for so long, and suddenly I don’t give a fuck.”

I took two cigarettes from the pack she’d set on the table and handed her one. We lit up and smoked and finished our tequilas. Then we ordered more, and at a certain point, Raquel got up and fetched another round of tacos.

Much later, we were drunk, full of grease and booze. My altitude sickness was gone. I felt fantastic. I had begun to fervently wish I knew the words to the songs on the jukebox so I could sing along, too.

“How did you meet him?” I asked Raquel, shouting over the music and loud conversations. We were analyzing what had happened with Jimmy Black, how Raquel could have been naïve enough to get involved with him—her word, of course, not mine. There was no point in saying anything that might make her feel worse than she already felt, and if she wanted my advice, she would ask for it. Until then, I had nothing but empathy; that was the primary job of a friend. I was so mad at Indrani; it felt like a big bruise on my heart. “Let nothing human be foreign to me,” the Roman playwright Terence had written, and that sounded good to me.

I picked up my tequila glass and had another sip, then a sip of sangrita. I felt like I never wanted to drink anything else but this for the rest of my life.

“We met at a club,” said Raquel. “A stupid club in Hollywood. I don’t even know why I was there. I was bored that night, and a friend asked if I wanted to go hear a famous deejay. Jimmy and I started talking. We hit it off. He was horny and drunk. I was horny and sober, so I don’t even have the excuse of intoxication. We had a one-night stand, and it was incredible, but I thought that was it. Then he called me the next day and said he couldn’t stop thinking about me. I guess I was flattered. I had been feeling pretty down, over-the-hill, lonely. And he’s so young, so beautiful, I couldn’t resist. So we started to see each other. I fell in love with him. Such an idiot.”

“You weren’t an idiot,” I said. “People fall in love. It’s what people do.”

“He’s an
actor”
she said. “They’re like poodles, but stupid.”

I laughed.

“He talked about ‘the work,’” she said. “‘The work,’ as in, ‘The work is very demanding.’ And ‘The work forces me to dig so deep.’ And I listened like it was the most brilliant shit. No, seriously, Jo, I was an idiot. He’s a TV actor.”

I laughed again. “He’s hot, right?”

“You’ve never seen his show?”

“I had never heard of him before.”

“It’s called
Endless Pool,”
said Raquel. “He plays the son of a guy who owns a pool-supply store. His character makes house calls to service malfunctioning swimming pools in Scottsdale, Arizona, and, wouldn’t you know, he gets seduced by all the bored Republican housewives while their husbands play golf. ‘The work.’ Give me a break. He’s barely even acting.” She signaled to the waiter, who came over. She said something in Spanish. “I’m getting the check,” she told me. “Then we’re going upstairs, next door. I want you to see the dancing ladies. It’s a trip.”

We finished our last round. Raquel left money on the table and waved me away violently when I tried to pay. We stumbled out onto the sidewalk. “Los Portales de what?” I said, reading the mat by the cantina’s front door. “What the hell is that name?”

“Come on,” she said. She led me up a staircase. We entered another cantina, this one smaller, with red-draped walls and tiny round tables. Music roared from overhead speakers. There was a small dance floor; several couples were doing some kind of Mexican polka. The women all wore red evening gowns. Most of them were stout and middle-aged, with neat coifs and hard faces.

Raquel and I sat near the back. “Do you want another tequila?” she asked me.

“I’d better switch to water,” I said. “I’m sloshed.”

“Oh, come on,” she said. “You’re on vacation.”

She told the waitress what we wanted. We lit cigarettes and leaned back in our chairs. “What’s the deal with this place?”

“They’re called
ficheras
. They’re dime-a-dance girls. Like taxi dancers.”

“They all look like grandmothers,” I said. “Like church ladies.”

Raquel laughed and rolled her eyes at me. “Yeah, right. And thirty pesos gets you one dance.”

“Hey,” I said. “There’s that one-armed guy from earlier, who made that thing I bought.”

I nudged her and pointed. He was sitting alone at a table near the front. A woman had just approached him, which was why I had noticed him. She had bronze-colored hair, a round belly, and a flat face, and she looked about twenty years older than he was.