Trouble (14 page)

Late that night, or, rather, early the next morning, Raquel stood out on the balcony, smoking, and I lay awake in bed in the dark room, still drunk. I had called Wendy’s cell phone earlier from the desk in the hotel lobby, but I had just gotten her voice mail. She must have known it was me; how many calls would come up “International” on her caller ID? Maybe she had been on the subway, or maybe she had been in the middle of something. Since she was never without her cell phone, even put it on the bathroom sink with the ringer turned to loud when she took a shower so she wouldn’t miss a call, I could only surmise that she had screened me, which hurt my feelings a little. I had left her a message; that was all I could do, but I missed her, and I was worried about her. I had no desire to talk to Anthony. I was really angry at him now, finally, after years of pretending to myself that everything was just fine. What a Pollyanna I had been. It was my fault as much as anyone else’s that things had come to this between us, but still, even so, it enraged me that Anthony had allowed our marriage to end like this. It made me want to punch him in the head. It made me feel that he had never really cared about me at all. Fifteen years of marriage had ended with a whimper, with a terrible sense of defeat. I felt annihilated, somehow, as if I hadn’t existed since our wedding, when I was thirty, all those years ago. Who was I, apart from Anthony?

I heard Raquel singing to herself outside, something in Spanish. The sound of her voice comforted me, a long-familiar sound that had always been associated with good things. My parents were both dead; my sisters and I were about as different as three sisters could be and still share DNA. My marriage was over, and Wendy was emotionally distant and growing up and beginning to leave me. Raquel and Indrani were my real family, my real sisters.

I fell asleep and had dreams in which I was alone in one way or another; all of them were tense with the knowledge that I had nothing to protect me.

When I awoke, Raquel was snoring softly in the next bed. The light in the room was a bright gray. I checked my physical being for damages from the night before and was surprised to realize that I wasn’t hungover, just a little muzzy around the edges. I took a long, hot shower, being careful not to swallow even a speck of water. As I washed my hair and skin, I imagined the water at the microscopic level, teeming with fecal microorganisms. It seemed ironic to be washing myself in this sewage-tainted stuff. All those years of living with Anthony’s preoccupation with environmental rack and ruin had left their mark. I emerged from the shower, dried off, brushed my teeth using the bottled water Raquel had thoughtfully left on the shelf by the mirror, dressed in my usual jeans and sweater, combed my wet hair and tousled it so it would dry wavy, and then my low-maintenance morning regime was done.

“Ecch,” Raquel said. She sat straight up. Her face was pale, her eyes little slits in puffy bags. “Fuck me,” she added.

I laughed. She did, too.

“Morning, Jo,” she said. “Oh my God. I beg of you, will you go down and get me a cup of hot water so I can stick a detox tea bag in it?”

“Sure, sweet cheeks,” I said. I was feeling exceedingly cheerful. “Anything else?”

“How about some
chilaquiles
and fresh orange juice?”

Normally, I might very well have told her to get her own damn breakfast, but today, for some reason, I felt like acquiescing. “Whatever you like.”

“Holy shit,” she said. “You’re a goddess. Thanks. I owe you.” She rubbed her eyes and lay back down.

I waited; I was willing to make one trip out there, but only one. “Anything else?”

“Well,” she said. “If you want to see the newspapers, you could get us a
Jornada
and a
Herald
. At Sanborn’s, right down the street, on the corner, like two blocks from here. The newspapers are in the back, by the books.”

“Okay,” I said, getting my bag, putting on my jacket.

“I love your ass,” said Raquel. “Seriously, this is so nice of you. And if you want to check that gossip blog for any updates, feel free.”

I returned forty-two minutes later, laden like a burro, still feeling unnaturally cheerful. I put the tray of plates and cups down on top of the vanity table and handed over the newspapers to Raquel, who had showered in my absence and dressed in peg-leg black trousers and a white wifebeater under a moss green jacket that looked as if it were made out of a combination of felt and wild grasses. She took the cup of hot water I handed her and stuck a tea bag into it. Already, she looked more like herself, just from the shower and being upright instead of lying down. How does she do it? I wondered. I was going to look like shit from now till the end of my life if I kept smoking and drinking the way I had the night before, which I fully intended to do as long as I was down here.

“What are these?” I asked, picking up my own plate of
chilaquiles
.

“Just eat them. What did that cunt say about me?”

That cunt had said quite a lot, as it happened, but I was just going to stick to the bare bones. “She mentioned Jimmy Black’s ex-girlfriend. Who is she, anyway? Is she some kind of starlet?”

“Yeah,” said Raquel. “She’s on some show about privileged teens having nervous breakdowns.”

“Well, apparently she had a nervous breakdown herself just now and almost lost her baby. Allegedly.”

“Oh my God,” said Raquel avidly. “How horrible. And now they’ll want my head on a stake. So what names did she call me?”

“Stop it,” I said. “Just cut it out. You’re a grown woman, not some high school kid. What do you care what she said? You’re torturing yourself for nothing.”

“I’ve seen the things she says about other people,” said Raquel. “She is a mean and nasty girl. She has power. Whatever she writes, millions of people read. She serves us up to them, and they eat us like nothing, like we’re potato chips. Someone should assassinate her.”

I sat on my bed with my plate of food, shoveling it into my mouth, crisp-fried wedges of corn tortillas soaked in a thick, slightly spicy red sauce, layered with savory chunks of chicken and slices of sweet raw onion.

“Or maybe I mean someone should murder her,” said Raquel. “Is it only
assassinate
if it’s a political figure?”

“Gandhi was assassinated,” I said. “But was John Lennon?”

“Was he? I can’t remember.”

“Remind me to Google it.”

“The point is,” she said, “it’s terrible to have such things said about you.”

“I know it is,” I said. “I know. But they don’t matter, Raquel. She’s not really talking about you; she’s just playing with voodoo dolls, trying to stir up trouble.”

“Voodoo dolls,” she repeated with a smile.

After breakfast, we went down to the lobby. As I was handing the room key over to the desk clerk, I heard someone say, “Hello, please, Raquel Dominguez.”

I turned around, to see two smiling Japanese girls approaching Raquel, holding pieces of paper and pens in front of them, giggling, with their other hands over their mouths, as if to show that they meant no harm. Even so, Raquel met my eyes, a flick of a fearful glance, then smiled back at the girls and obligingly gave them her autograph. “Sorry to bother you,” said one of them, her English strongly accented.

“It’s no problem,” she said politely.

The girls went off. “Rock star,” I said to Raquel.

“Those people always scare me,” she replied. “I have no idea why.”

We made our way to the subway and took two swift, clean, silent, rubber-wheeled trains to Chapultepec, a huge green park nicknamed the “Lungs of Mexico City.” We walked on paved roads under green trees for a while and finally climbed a steep hill high up to a grand castle, paid the admission fee, and went in. The castle had been built in 1785, apparently; I envisioned Mexican workers and various beasts of burden dragging enormous slabs of marble and heavy timber up that same hill we had just struggled up empty-handed.

I read the little plaque and managed to understand much of the Spanish: The viceroys of Nueva Espana had lived here, and in the 1840s it became a military academy. When the French had invaded and briefly ruled Mexico, the emperor Maximilian had refurbished the place for himself and his wife, the empress Carlotta. It now housed the National History Museum.

The residential part of the castle contained room after room of fantastic, elaborately carved furniture, embroidered hangings, parquet floors inlaid with marble. These rooms were flanked on two sides by a deep, vast marble-floored balcony that looked out far into the hazy air over the city. We went up onto the upper floor and inspected the gorgeous rooms around a roof courtyard where the emperor and empress had lived and visiting dignitaries had stayed. The wallpaper was hand-painted; the snuffboxes were carved of ivory and inlaid with mother-of-pearl; the pillowcases were richly embroidered, white on white, the product of hours and hours of squinting, painstaking work that you could hardly even see.

“Can you imagine living like this?” I asked Raquel.

“Yeah,” she said. “With servants watching your every move.”

“It’s pretty amazing, though, you have to admit,” I said. “This whole place.”

“Built with blood,” she said tersely.

“Hey, they’re your ancestors, not mine.”

“Oh, please,” said Raquel. “All my people on both sides were persecuted like nobody’s business. Meanwhile, look at you, with all your French and English.”

“Touché,” I said. “No wonder I wish I lived here.”

We wandered down the hill and struck out onto a wooded road. We stumbled eventually onto a gravel area where vendors had set up a row of food shacks. We bought some chicken tacos and bottles of tamarind pop and sat at a white plastic table in white plastic chairs and had lunch. Then we threw away our trash and went on to the anthropological museum.

We stayed until after dark, and left only because they were closing, emerging blinking and confused into the suddenly chilly wet air streaming with car headlights. My head was filled with life-size dioramas, riveting in their details, showing how little difference there was between long-ago and present-day Mexican Indian village life. Now the Indians had lamps and little tin saints and wooden crucifixes, but aside from the obvious additions of Catholicism and kerosene, the prehistoric Mayans might have felt right at home in the Yucatán now. I wondered how fundamentally the Mayan language had changed over the millennia. And the contrast between those elaborately amazing fairy-tale things in the castle and the Indians’ simple and functional stuff—straw baskets, handwoven family sleeping hammocks, three-legged stools, clay cooking pots—was strong in my mind. The reconstructions of the thatch-roofed huts of the Yucatán had shown whole families living in places the size of our bathroom at the Isabel, yet it hadn’t seemed crowded or forlorn; it seemed smart, shipshape, efficient, and solidly in keeping with the scale of things. Anthony would have had a lot to say about all of it, but he was far away, so I kept all of my thoughts to myself. I also wanted to discuss the brutal but alluring human-sacrifice tools and the ingenious gigantic stone Mayan sun-wheel calendars, but Raquel was hungry and a little crabby, and in any case, she had seen it all before; she had indulged me by playing tour guide, so I didn’t want to try her patience with any earnest ruminations.

Raquel led me along a wide avenue out of the park to a sudden dizzying cluster of skyscrapers. We went down into the subway again; we took a train, passing several stops and then coming out into a quiet neighborhood of trees, modern apartment buildings, little cafés, and old houses. A family sat at a table on the sidewalk, cooking their dinner on an outdoor brazier and listening to the radio. A skinny dog skulked around them. They all ignored him, even the littlest kids.

“Where are we?” I asked, breaking a silence of almost an hour.

“This is Roma,” she said. “We’ll eat across Zona Rosa, then go hear Chuy.”

She took me to a small upstairs Korean place.

“I cannot believe Chuy is here,” Raquel said, lighting a cigarette when the dishes had been cleared away. “He’s like my good angel. You and Chuy, and you’re both here.”

I sneakily paid the dinner check while Raquel was in the bathroom, and then we set off into the night. The rain had stopped, and the air was soft now and almost warm. This part of the city was very different from the Centro Histórico—not as old, of course, and not nearly as grandiose. The streets were narrower and lined with houses; every now and then, I caught a glimpse into a house through an open door and saw a jumble of rubber-plant fronds in a courtyard, TV screens, kids playing on the linoleum floor, clothes tumbling from an open bureau drawer, and heard birds squawking, smelled hot fat and spices. We walked along under trees with spreading branches, through yellow lights spilling from windows, past Jetsons-era apartment buildings with chrome flourishes and curved glass-block windows. Purebred dogs on leashes passed homeless mutts with matted fur sleeping in doorways, as if they were two different, mutually exclusive species.

Pata Negra was a new bar on a corner near a small park. Inside, it was all gleaming wood, airy, modern. Behind the bar were rows of different tequilas and mescals. The bar was about half-full; we got a table near the stage in the back. Raquel ordered us glasses of mescal and lit a cigarette, then offered me one, but I waved it away. She scanned the crowd, looking toward the door every time someone came in, jiggling one leg up and down. She looked like a jittery hummingbird.

“So how’s your shrink business going?” she asked.

“Booming,” I said.

“Got any good stories for me?”

“One of my clients is having an affair with another doctor she works with,” I said. “They’re both in their early fifties, married, with kids. They might bust up both their families while I’m down here, but I tried to get her not to do anything drastic.”

“Big deal,” said Raquel. “Come on. Something really interesting. Hey, there’s David. Check out that shirt.”

David was wearing a black cowboy shirt with embroidered red roses and mother-of-pearl buttons. His hair looked as if he’d just had it cut. He saw us and inclined his head by way of greeting, then turned to talk to someone else.