Trouble (15 page)

All day, we hadn’t mentioned him. I felt a kind of barbed-wire fence around him as far as conversational topics went. Raquel and I rarely encountered such obstacles, and whenever we did, as soon as we realized this was the case, we broached them and trampled down the fence. This time, we were both cautiously and tacitly observing the barrier. It was very odd; I wasn’t sure why this should be so. We had parted from him the night before, shouting,
“¡Hasta mañana!”
and stumbling off in different directions, David toward his car with his sister, Raquel and I back to the Isabel. Nothing had happened that I could recall that might have caused this unspoken agreement not to mention him, but there it was.

We ordered another round. The bar was now jam-packed and full of smoke. David appeared by our table. Without asking, he sat at the empty chair and nodded hello to both of us; it was almost too noisy to try to talk. I could see David’s hair wasn’t freshly cut; it was wet and combed against his head. I was surprised that he’d joined us, and a little flattered, strangely, even though I wasn’t sure whether or not I liked him.

Someone tapped the mike and the house music was cut off abruptly. In rapid Spanish, a guy I couldn’t see said something I took to be an introduction. He said a triumphant “Jesus Morales!” and Chuy appeared to cheers and applause. He carried a guitar slung around his neck on a black strap decorated with skulls, which I was beginning to think of as the symbol of Mexico. He looked solemn and diffident and unpretentious, as always. He strummed a chord.

“¿Qué tal?”
he said into the mike, and then, almost without drawing a breath, he was singing in a high falsetto in Spanish, a capella. Raquel began to hum along in harmony, quietly, just so I could hear her. I turned to look at her and her face was burning with happiness, the way it had been the previous night, as if an actual fire had been lit in her skull. I had always been astounded by Raquel’s capacity for both joy and torment, which seemed to exceed that of almost everyone else I knew; this seemed to make her life more rich and interesting, but also more complicated and painful, than most. She saw me watching her and reached over and pinched my arm. I pinched her back. I had always loved Raquel’s voice; it was rich, crackly, and ballsy.

Jesus Morales was a razor-thin, six-foot-three self-proclaimed “wetback” who looked like an El Greco figure. He had been born in a village in northern Mexico and had crossed the border in Nogales with his family as a kid. His mother had died in the Arizona desert during the crossing, and one brother had been caught and deported. They never saw him again, and it turned out later that he had died in a knife fight in a bar near the border, trying to cross again. The rest of the family had gone first to Tucson and then ended up in Houston.

Chuy had buzz-cut gray hair bristling on his bony scalp, a thin beard and mustache, and soulful black eyes. He was sixty years old and looked it. The skin of his face and head hewed to the bones of his skull without any fat pads to cushion it; his cheekbones were very sharp, his eyes sunken deep in their sockets. His nose was a misshapen lump of smashed-in flesh. He wore tight leather jeans and a crucifix, without a bit of irony. He was as badass and earnest as any righteous old punk-rock survivor.

Raquel worshipped him, and he treated her like an adored, scrappy, tomboyish little sister who occasionally crossed some invisible line, and then he slapped her down like a puppy, and she cried and howled for a while and then got over it and bounced back to him. She had asked him to play on her new album, but he had given her a vague excuse about not feeling up to it. Chuy had always been a little competitive with Raquel, probably because she was, when all was said and done, a bigger star than he was, or at least she had been once, and might be again, once this new album came out. Raquel had told me that she got the feeling that he thought she should have paid a few more dues before becoming so successful, and that he himself deserved more fame than he’d gotten. But he’d asked Raquel to play on his albums more than once; she had performed with him in L.A. at a benefit concert, and that had been one of the biggest thrills of her life. His refusal to play on her album had hurt her feelings, and she had been nursing some private wounds ever since; she didn’t bounce back now as quickly as she used to. But the happiness of seeing him, in her present beleaguered straits, seemed to have wiped away her lingering sadness and hurt feelings.

I drank more mescal and hugged myself. David, I noticed, was watching Raquel. I didn’t blame him. I leaned back in my chair. Chuy sang with total abandon. I had noticed this about both him and Raquel; when they sang, it was as if the song burned through them, ripping from their chests and throats, and they let it. They didn’t resist; they turned themselves into slaves of the song. Sometimes it seemed as if it caused them physical pain they bore with a lack of ego, a willingness to be transformed, to be a fool, even ugly, for the song. Chuy’s throat was wide open and from it came words in Spanish I didn’t understand but was sure must have to do with longing and loss and other dark Latin emotions. His singing was ropy and abrasive. Raquel’s harmony burred against the melody and made it vibrate.

Then Chuy saw her; he might have heard her singing, maybe not, but his eyes were on her suddenly and through his singing I could tell that he saw her. He walked to the edge of the small stage and reached his hand out to her. She hopped up onto the stage. He made room for her at the mike; they sang the final verse of the song together, in unison, in the same register, Raquel craning her neck upward, Chuy stooping, making up for their differences in height, so their mouths both hit the mike. Some people in the crowd must have recognized her, because there was a burst of applause. They ended the song; above the wild clapping, Chuy said something in Spanish into the mike about Raquel, and the room was full of stamps and whistles. Someone brought another mike, tapped it, adjusted it to Raquel’s height.

Chuy said something briefly to her as he put his hands on the guitar. He played a few opening chords to a song, then accompanied her as she sang solo on Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song.”

I glanced at David. He was staring fixedly at Raquel; when he caught me watching him, he looked over to meet my eyes. His face seemed carved of wood. Why didn’t he ever seem to make normal human expressions? Maybe his facial muscles had been damaged in the same accident that had taken his arm, but I doubted it; I suspected he was just preternaturally reserved as a matter of choice. Maybe it suited him to seem mysterious. He reminded me of a cigar-store Indian; this struck me as pretentious, somehow.

I smiled at him, not out of warmth, but testing him, hoping he would surprise me and smile back. He quirked an eyebrow at me very slightly—as if, I thought, to suggest that I could try all I wanted to get him to act like a regular person but that he was onto me and wasn’t going to capitulate. A flash of attraction struck me out of nowhere, followed by an internal thunder boom of antipathy.

During the applause after the song ended, Chuy reached back and took his extra guitar from its stand and handed it to Raquel. She played rhythm and he played lead on the third song, something else in Spanish, a lilting, raucous song I leaned into as if it were a warm wind. Then they switched off for the next song, one of Raquel’s from her third album, a kick-ass song in English called “Suck It Up,” which she had written for me a long time ago when we were suffering through life together. She looked like a tough little cricket bouncing on her heels.

Their voices blended well together, and they seemed to be showing off for each other, resolving their differences by letting loose and giving each other room to shine. The audience was with them, singing along when they knew the words. Chuy sang a kind of rock-flamenco ballad and sobbed on the high notes, his face twisted and contorted, and Raquel kept a low sweet hum going in the harmony. Then she sang another one of her own songs, “Ojos Azules,” which she’d written for the love of her life, Ivan, who’d left her and married someone else. He was a sexy, hard-faced Russian documentary filmmaker, and he had been with her and helped her through the end of her junkie days. He’d possibly saved her life, then had left her when she’d gotten clean. “You only loved my need,” the song went; “you only loved my pain.” The waitress brought me another mescal, which I didn’t remember ordering but was very glad to see.

The set ended with Chuy’s biggest hit, a Tex-Mex waltz called “Los Caballeros de Nogales,” narrated in the voice of a self-loathing white guy crossing the border from Arizona to find a cheap Mexican prostitute. Raquel sang a plaintive harmony and strummed along with an easy rhythm. Chuy’s vocal snarled into the final verse, Raquel deepened her harmony, and finally they finished the song on a sustained unison note, her voice rich, his hollowed-out.

The crowd, including me, all yelled and whooped, while David sat very still and sipped at his bottle of beer. Chuy and Raquel came offstage smiling and ducking their heads, both of them, as if the music had been the star and to claim any praise for themselves would have been conceited and unseemly. Raquel’s stage persona, her whole being when she performed, was hot and vulnerable in an untouchable, impersonal way. After her shows, I could never quite reconcile the Raquel onstage with the Raquel I knew, and I had given up trying. Here she was, back again. I handed her the mescal the waitress had brought for her and she drained it in one gulp.

“Hey, Chuy!” I said, not sure whether or not he would remember me; we had met only once, all those years ago.

“Josie!” To my surprised pleasure, he put an arm around me and kissed my cheek. He smelled of smoke and sweat. Up close, his skin was gleaming and tightly stretched like a drum across his face.

“This is David,” said Raquel. “We met him on the Zócalo yesterday.”

“How about that ice-skating rink? Crazy, huh?” said Chuy.

“The mayor,” said David. “Instead of fixing any of the real problems, he sends poor Mexicans ice-skating. Stupid.”

“I love it,” said Raquel.

“What the fuck you doing down here, Dominguez?” said Chuy.

“Running from the paparazzi,” she said. “What about you?”

“I’m on a little tour of Mexico,” said Chuy.

“David Perez,” said David. Chuy leaned over and shook his hand. We ordered another round, drank more, watched people come up to talk to Chuy and Raquel, shake their hands, lean down and say things into their ears. When it was time for Chuy to get up and play again, he gestured to Raquel, inviting her up, but she demurred, waving her cigarette at him—no-no-no—so he got up and played the next set alone. He seemed galvanized; I had never heard him sing and play with so much fire. He kept grinning down at Raquel.
“Mi hermanita,”
he said between songs, tapping his heart and gesturing down to her, and everyone cheered again. This Mexican audience seemed to keep no distance from its performers, unlike audiences in New York; they listened with earnest and unfiltered feeling. Tears kept springing to my eyes while Chuy sang, and I let them.

 
e all left Pata Negra together at about 1:30 in the morning—Raquel, David, Chuy, and a crowd of people I had just met, including Miguel, who owned David’s house, and his wife, Luz, and a group of artists named Felipe, Alfredo, and Eugenia, who apparently all lived in Miguel’s apartment building, too. It appeared that we were all headed there together to look at Felipe’s paintings and have a late supper. Also, apparently, Alfredo and Eugenia were having a two-person opening the next night at an art gallery, which we were all going to go to. I gleaned all of this somehow, by making out some of their Spanish and having Raquel turn to me when she remembered to hurriedly translate. The Mexicans didn’t seem to realize I didn’t speak Spanish. Every now and then, one of them turned to me to include me in the conversation. I found that if I smiled at whoever was talking, the person felt as if I were part of things, and was reassured that he or she was doing a good job as host. I didn’t want them all to feel they had to switch to English just for me, assuming they all spoke it.

I could tell a lot about them just from watching their gestures and reading their inflections. I had often thought before about how little our intuitive knowledge of other people has to do with the actual content of their words. David, in a group, was charming but self-controlled. Eugenia evidently had a terrible crush on him; she shot frequent shy looks at him as she talked to make sure he was listening, and seemed to be slightly self-conscious but happy when he looked at her. I guessed that Luz was the alpha female of the group, a plump little woman with short curly hair and a motherly manner and a quiet but commanding voice. She had a full, pendulous lower lip that twisted slightly when she talked in an ugly-sexy way and showed her large square teeth.

The women were mysterious to me. They had none of the affectations or gestures I was used to in New York women. They were softer, more rounded, less edgy, not at all competitive with the men, more sure of their looks; they seemed grounded in a sense of their own entitlement to beauty, no matter what their shape or size. Latinas in New York were a little like that, but here they were quieter, less flaunting of their plumage, more sexually subdued, but no less confident or forthright.

We all hunched and hugged our jackets to us, shivering. We walked quickly through a small park and then turned left and headed down the same tree-lined street Raquel and I had come along earlier. Raquel was in a goofy, punch-drunk mood; she and Chuy were walking together, jabbering away in Spanish, laughing. Their building was one of the Jetson-era chrome ones. Miguel unlocked the front door and led us all through a tile-floored hallway into an entryway, then past a staircase that led to an upper floor. He ushered us into his apartment, a large, nearly bare room, the walls hung with paintings in various stages of completion. A long table in the middle was crammed full of jars and brushes and tubes of paint. I saw a courtyard through French doors, lit by a bare lightbulb, with a flowering bougainvillea covering the far wall and potted rubber plants around a tiled patio.

Miguel was striding around, turning on lights, offering a bottle of mescal. He poured shots into little glasses and we passed them around and toasted. Then Felipe led us all through the courtyard to the back. He unlocked one of the doors off the courtyard and led us into his apartment. We all stood around looking at his work. His paintings were of jungle vines, imaginary animals—part jaguar, part parrot, part lizard—and hulking futuristic machinery tangled in the leaves and branches as if it had either grown there or been overtaken by nature. Although it was extremely late and Raquel and I had been going all day, I wasn’t at all tired. The mescal was peppery and robust; it had some cocainelike quality that inspired wakefulness, hyperverbalness, and heightened observational skills. I felt great. By now, I wished like hell I spoke Spanish and felt like a complete retard for never having learned it after all those years in New York.

Felipe was a healthy-looking muscular guy with a slight, sexy lisp. His lips were very full. His eyes gleamed with what I took to be some unusual degree of intelligence and liveliness. I wondered which of these women was his girlfriend or wife; he didn’t seem to be attached to anyone, or so I thought, possibly hopefully. Was I attracted to him? I wondered. I wasn’t in the habit of being attracted to men anymore. With an electric tingle, I was aware of long-unused nerves and neurons shaking themselves awake, wide-awake, zingingly awake.

“You speak Spanish?” he said to me in English, as if he were sensing and responding to my interest in him. How old was he, anyway? How old was I? “Your name is Josefina, right?”

“No, and no,” I said. “It’s Josie. You speak really good English.”

“Yeah, I lived in Brooklyn for a while,” he said. “You’re from New York?”

“Right,” I said. “What were you doing in Brooklyn?”

“I lived in a loft with my friend Carlos,” he replied. “We were up there installing our work in a gallery for a show and I ended up staying a year and a half. And then I went back again the next winter and ended up staying another year. I like it there. But I like the art community better down here. It’s friendlier. Up there, you’re really on your own. Down here, it’s very small, we all know one another, and everyone goes to every show. You’ll see tomorrow night.”

“Right, the opening,” I said, remembering. I licked my lips, wanting more mescal. Everyone else seemed to have drifted back to Miguel and Luz’s apartment. “Are these meant to be political, these paintings?”

“All art is political,” he said with a flirtatiously disingenuous smile.

“I mean expressly.”

“Not really,” he said. “They’re more personal. I used to draw these types of weird things when I was a kid, these fantasy landscapes with made-up animals and strange machines in the plants. Then in art school and afterward, I got into video art and computer art for a long time. Then a little while ago, I realized that I was faking it. So I went back to what I did as a kid. I don’t care if they’re good or bad.”

“They’re good,” I said honestly.

“Yeah,” he said. “I know they’re better than that other shit I was doing. You can’t be trying to impress people. That never works. What do you do?”

“I’m a psychologist,” I said. “A therapist.”

He took a small step backward to appraise me anew. “What kind?”

“No method. I sort of make it up as I go.”

“Really?”

“Well, no. I should rephrase that. I try not to approach anyone with a dogmatic agenda.”

“So who are your patients?”

“Some couples, some families, but mostly individual people with all sorts of interesting problems.”

“Like depression?”

“Some, yes.”

“We hardly have any depression down here,” said Felipe. He had picked up a large dry paintbrush and was running the soft bristles over his palm, as if he liked the feeling. “Everyone works all the time and then you have your family and you go to church. There are all these festivals all the time, celebrations, and you’re not alone so much. You have people around you all the time. That can make you crazy in a different way, but not depressed.”

“Right,” I said. “That makes sense.”

He reached over with the paintbrush and ran it over my nose and down my face. I was instantly turned on. “So you would probably be out of work if you lived down here.”

“I bet I wouldn’t,” I said. “I bet I’d have plenty of business.”

“Tell that to all the macho Mexican guys. All the devout Católicas. They would laugh at you.”

“All right,” I said. “You win.”

He laughed. We were standing close together. I felt very, very awake.

“Want to see the apartment?” he said suddenly. “I’ll give you a tour.”

He led me around his place, which was small and airy, and had hardwood floors and sparse but solid and elegant furniture. Of course we ended up in his bedroom. He led me in and turned to me in the darkness without a word, and suddenly we were making out, first standing up, and then lying together on his bed. I was purely thrilled and delighted to be doing this. It was so unlike me, so not married and not professional and not mature and not sober. I seemed to be continuing what I had begun with Mick and then Peter the night of Indrani’s party. He smelled and tasted so good; none of this made any sense, but I figured why the hell not. I was starving. He pulled back to laugh down at me, his eyes slitted and his lips wet. His hand snaked up my shirt and under my bra to feel my bare breast, and I put my hand on his hard-on and rubbed it through his jeans. He put his hands around my waist and hoisted me up so I was straddling him and looking down at him, and then he caught both my breasts in his hands and arched his back to press his cock against me. I fell onto my elbows and kissed him openmouthed as we undulated, our crotches pressing together hard. I was so aroused I was gasping and laughing a little with the pleasure of touching him and being touched like this.

Then came the inevitable moment when all of this foreplay either was or was not going to progress to sex. It was a real question between us, one we batted around for a few rounds of kissing and wrestling. He made it clear to me wordlessly that he was perfectly willing to mate right there and then like happy, mindless animals, and I was dying to fuck him, but after what had happened with Peter, I didn’t want to feel like I was turning into a total slut. My inner Catholic forced me to pull back and look him in the eye. He got the message: We would postpone the inevitable, and meanwhile, it was time to disengage and join the others again and drink more mescal. We got up, grinning at each other, stretching, and brushed ourselves off, straightened our clothes and hair, and wandered across the courtyard and into Miguel and Luz’s kitchen, where Raquel, David, Eugenia, and Miguel were leaning against counters, drinking and smoking and talking. Felipe poured us both some mescal. “There you are,” said Raquel easily.

“Hi,” I said. She narrowed her eyes laughingly at me before turning back to David. He was, I could feel, in the middle of some sort of monologue, and Felipe and I had just come in, burning with pheromones, and interrupted him. Slightly chastened, I tried to dim my facial wattage a bit, but Felipe was resting his hand at the small of my back, gently moving a knuckle right at the base of my spine, and I wanted to climb him like a savage animal. I took a sip of mescal.

“They need press,” said David in English; I suspected he had been speaking Spanish but was switching for my benefit. “They need publicity and attention. It’s so easy for these huge corporations to bury their local pillage under the avalanche of other news. No one hears about the Chiapas logging. No one knows how the people from my village are risking their lives to save their livelihoods. And of course it’s happening everywhere; it’s not isolated. There are so many tiny pockets of people all over the world fighting alone against the huge multinationals. And these people in San Juan Chamula, I’m telling you, they can’t afford the time it takes away from their farming to try to save their forests. You know, in Chiapas they still farm with a pair of oxen hitched to plows on steep mountainsides, just the same way their ancestors did. Seriously, tilted on the hillside at a fifty-degree angle sometimes, it looks like insanity. They’re trying to just maintain the little they have, and meanwhile companies are set up only to get richer. It’s not enough to make the same amount they made last year; they have to make more every year, and that is the capitalist sickness. Everything has to expand, populations and annual profits, just like the universe, moving outward into nothingness, and why?”

Normally—for example, when delivered by Anthony—this sort of diatribe made me itch. I had been a little kid in the 1960s in California; as far as I was concerned, people could fling themselves in front of as many bulldozers as they wanted, stuff flowers into gun muzzles till they turned blue, and nothing would stop violence and greed. I had geared my whole life to helping make changes on a small, individual basis, but in no way did I imagine that doing so would combat any of the implacable forces of destructive ruin that David was talking about. David sounded determined and pissed off, the way I remembered the activists I’d listened to in the sixties had sounded, not my parents, of course, but a lot of the people around us.