Trouble (18 page)

“Where’s your little boyfriend?” came Raquel’s voice from just behind me.

I was so happy to see her, I threw my arms around her.

She pushed me away and laughed up at me. “Lush,” she said.

“I’m not drunk,” I said to her. “Well, not too drunk. Hey, I bought some art.”

“Yeah, this stuff is great,” she said. “I might buy one of these masks, too.”

“Is Chuy still around?” I asked.

“He went home this afternoon,” she said. “I miss him already. It was so good to see him. I love him so much.”

“Where were you just now?” I asked.

She waved the question away like irritating cigarette smoke. “Which one did you buy?”

I pointed to my wolverine. She squinted at it. “How much are they?” she asked.

“Five hundred bucks, plus shipping,” I said.

“Not bad. I like that cougar over there.”

I laughed. “That’s a cougar?”

“Fuck yeah, it is. I’m gonna buy it.”

Raquel looked happy and dreamy; her eyes were glittering, and she had lost her earlier expression of haunted tension. Oh no, I thought with a flash of protective dread, she’s falling in love with David; she’s desperate, on the edge, on the rebound, and he’s some kind of safety net. I was beginning to dislike him, I realized then, for no reason I could identify.

“Talk to that guy there,” I said, pointing. “With Felipe.”

“Why aren’t you talking to Felipe?”

“He doesn’t like me anymore since I bought the mask. Suddenly, I turned into the elitist rich white turista.”

“Bullshit,” said Raquel. “You’re being totally paranoid. Look at his skin color; he’s descended from mostly Spaniards, not Indians. He’s as white and probably as rich and maybe even as educated as you are. Come on, let’s go see about the mask.”

We went over to the small group of men, who smiled at both of us as we approached them. Raquel began negotiating with the gallery guy in rapid Spanish, pointing to the mask of a big cat face with a cruel laughing red mouth. Felipe and Alfredo looked at me expectantly, as if I had been about to say something interesting.

“Raquel is buying one of your pieces, too,” I said to Alfredo slowly, in case he could understand without having Felipe translate. “They are very good.”

“Thank you very much,” said Alfredo in stiff English.

Felipe’s hand went to the small of my back and rested there, and I felt that everything might be easy and okay again between us.

Raquel took out a wad of cash and counted out five thousand pesos; then the gallery guy said something to her and she added a few more bills, no doubt for shipping. She was conducting her own transaction in Spanish, in cash, and so her purchase didn’t cause the same icky First World/Third World schism my own had. I had a strong feeling that I wasn’t being paranoid about that. And I was glad Felipe seemed to have forgiven me for who I was, but now I was a little wary of our alliance, whereas before I had been completely and naively trusting of our parity. How dumb of me. I was glad to know now how things really stood, the possible pitfalls. My take was like Anthony’s on the NPR announcers, measuring the world in even, serene, optimistic tea-spoonfuls of good intentions and fair-mindedness. But this was only because I could afford to; or rather, I had no reason not to. I was a victim of nothing; I had the luxury of urbanely eschewing any jungle tactics, any savage teeth baring or snarling to protect what was mine.

I stood there feeling weak, silly, and mealymouthed. Eugenia came up and slid her arm around her husband. He said something in her ear, evidently telling her that Raquel and I had bought two of the masks, and her narrow face caught fire with joy. She beamed two radiant blue headlights at me, then turned to Raquel and gave her two kisses, one on each cheek, yakking in fast Spanish. She and Raquel huddled together in conversation for a moment; Alfredo and Felipe laughed at them.

“Eugenia seems thrilled,” I said.

“Eugenia is very emotional about everything,” said Felipe to me, teasing. “Like you.”

“I’m not emotional!” I said.

“Yes, you are,” he said, kissing my forehead. “You should have seen your face when you bought that mask.”

“Why?”

“Like a little kid. Just like Eugenia now.”

“How dare you laugh at me,” I said, laughing myself. “I’ll get you back for that.”

“I am not afraid of you,” he said.

So that had been it. He had just been teasing me, watching me, not recoiling. I really was an idiot. Jesus! I needed some dinner.

“Is anyone else hungry?” I asked.

“I am very hungry,” said Felipe.

What seemed like hours but was really more like twenty minutes later, a group of us had marshaled ourselves into a few taxis and pointed them toward the same destination: Covadonga, an old, formerly all-male dominoes club that now allowed women, and which also, equally crucially, served food. According to Felipe, this was the destination of choice after all the art openings. Also according to Felipe, the entire art world of Mexico City had been present at the opening.

“What does Covadonga mean?” I asked.

“It’s a region of Spain,” said Felipe.

“Do they play a lot of dominoes there or something?”

“They must,” he said.

We got out of the cab; it had been a very short ride, but we had all decided it was too cold to walk. We ducked under a red awning and went into a lobby that led into a great echoing hall filled with the clack of dominoes, cigarette smoke, and waiters rushing around in black jackets and pants, white shirts, and bow ties. I greatly loved the fact that seemingly all the waitpersons in Mexico, male and female, wore rather formal, old-fashioned uniforms. It seemed to translate into excellent, impersonally professional service.

Two of these waiters scurried around, pushing chairs and tables together in order to seat us all together. I had thought the place was jammed to the rafters when we walked in, but within five minutes, we were seated at four tables pushed together with exactly enough chairs to seat all fourteen of us. I found myself between Felipe and Eugenia; Raquel was at the foot of the table, deep in conversation with the large, sweet German girl. On Raquel’s other side sat David. I was certain now that I had seen them at the gates to the mews, and that they had slipped off together into the street. I had a bad feeling about this, but why this should be, I wasn’t sure.

Raquel was smiling at the German girl as if she found her very interesting and was enjoying herself; this was almost certainly genuine, since Raquel never suffered fools, never pretended to be interested in someone when she wasn’t. She was not a people-pleaser, which naturally caused her to charm and endear herself to almost everyone she met. She and David seemed to be ignoring each other completely. If I hadn’t known better, I would have thought they had never met.

Mystified, I watched them out of the corner of my eye while I asked Felipe about himself and learned that he was thirty-seven; I was secretly relieved, because I had feared he might have been much younger. Somehow, that would have been a bit unseemly, although I had no problem whatsoever with Raquel sleeping with a twenty-three-year-old. Raquel could get away with seducing a guy half her age, but it would have made me self-conscious to have a much younger man see my naked body. A guy closer to my own age wasn’t nearly as daunting a prospect.

Felipe had grown up in Tlalpan, a town to the south. His parents lived in two different houses on the same street where he had grown up. After their divorce, they had sold the house where he and his sister had been born and raised, a big, sprawling, beautiful house his father had designed and built. His father’s new house, which he had also built himself, was right next door. Felipe could stand up on his roof and look into his old bedroom, see the garden where he had played as a boy, where a new family was now living, with new kids playing there. His mother lived four doors away from his father’s new house in a simple cinder-block one-story house with a courtyard.

“Do she and your father get along?” I asked.

“My father goes over there for dinner all the time,” said Felipe. “And every Sunday afternoon, we all show up and eat a big meal, just like we’re some regular Mexican family. Then afterward, we all leave and my mother gets to be by herself. It’s exactly what she wants. My father keeps asking her to marry him again, says he’s sick of all these young girlfriends, that he loves only her, but she keeps saying no, she’s so much happier with him four houses away. It’s a perfect arrangement. He doesn’t admit it, but he likes it, too. When he’s sick, she comes over with
sopa de lima
and does his laundry for him, then goes home. He is more old-fashioned and macho and religious and philosophical, and she is kind of a hippie, more of a free spirit, into more untraditional spiritual stuff, and when they lived together, they fought all the time about everything.”

I noticed that a waiter was standing above us, awaiting our order. “What’s good here?” I asked Felipe.

“Nothing, really,” he said under his breath. “You don’t come here for the food. Get the shrimp; it’s not bad. Want me to order for you?”

“Los camarones, por favor,”
I said, surprising myself.
“Una herradura blanco con sangrita, y un agua mineral.”

“Y yo también, lo mismo de todo,”
said Felipe to the waiter, and then said to me, “
¡Qué bueno!”

“Gracias,”
I said. “Are your parents pressuring you to get married?”

“I am married,” said Felipe. I think I must have given a slight gasp of surprise, but he didn’t seem to notice. “My wife lives with her parents, with both our kids.”

“So you have kids!” I said, even more surprised.

“Everyone in Mexico has at least two,” he said, laughing. “But my wife and I can’t live together; we fight all the time. I go over to her house on Sunday nights for a second dinner after I visit my parents, and once or twice during the week. I never spend the night there. We no longer desire each other at all.”

“Why don’t you get a divorce?”

“Too much trouble,” he said. “Mexicans don’t really get divorced much, my parents aside. It’s not like I want to get married again to anyone else, and she doesn’t, either. We worked it out; we’re both happier like this. She goes her way, and obviously, as you might have noticed, except for the kids, I go mine.” He offered me a cigarette; I took it gladly, and we lit up. “What about you?” he asked.

I looked at him, surprised. “What about me?”

“Are your parents pressuring you to marry?”

I laughed. “They’re dead, first of all,” I said.

“You’re laughing at that?”

I shook my head, unable to explain. “I am married,” I added. I had taken off my wedding ring on the plane from New York; it had seemed symbolically appropriate, somehow. “But I’m separated from my husband,” I added. “Since last week.”

He looked interested and didn’t say anything, just waited for me to go on.

“I’m down here as a sort of vacation before I move out,” I said. “I just realized right before Christmas that our marriage is over. I told him, and he took it okay. It really is over. I am going to divorce him.”

“You must be sad,” he said.

“A little,” I replied. “We have a daughter named Wendy. She’s thirteen. She’s at home with her father right now. She decided to live with him. I’m moving out, to a place nearby, and I imagine I’ll be at their house all the time. But like you, I’ll be a lot happier living apart from my husband.”

“How long are you here for?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I came down here to help Raquel. She’s my oldest, best friend, and she’s in some trouble.”

“What trouble?”

“She’s … I’m not sure how to explain. She got involved with a young guy with a pregnant girlfriend. … You know, maybe she wouldn’t want me to talk about it.”

Felipe looked down the table at Raquel. “She’s a great singer,” he said.

“What do you think of David?” I asked abruptly.

Felipe smiled and ducked his head, picked a piece of tobacco from his lower lip. He was such a sexy boy, delectably good-looking. He had sculpted cheekbones and a beautiful mouth. My thigh was relaxed against his; I could feel how strong his haunch was. The urge to fuck him returned with a flash of wild heat from wherever it had gone into remission. I felt my face go a little slack with lust, watching him watch David.

“He is a close friend of mine,” said Felipe.

“What’s his art like? Not the stuff he does on the Zócalo, his real work.”

“He used to be a sculptor,” said Felipe. “Then he lost his arm. Now he takes photographs. Pictures of people, not portraits, almost abstract. I can’t explain it well. You have to see it. He is very good.”

“David?” Eugenia interjected, leaning in to talk to us. “Yes. I think he is a genius.”

Our drinks arrived; the conversation halted momentarily while the waiter poured mineral water over ice into tall glasses, arranged glasses of tequila and sangrita in front of each of us.

As soon as the waiter had moved on, Eugenia said to Felipe, leaning across me, “Have you seen the new series he is working on? The mummies’ faces.” She tried and failed to continue in English, then added something in Spanish with an apologetic smile at me.

Felipe nodded at her and then translated for me: “He took digital pictures of twelve mummified people in a crypt in Ex Convento del Carmen in San Angel. You are not allowed to photograph them, but he bribed the guard. He’s printing these negatives on the computer and then developing these pictures using simple chemicals and water and sunlight. So they are dead, dried faces resurrected first with technology and then with water and sunlight.”

“Yes,” said Eugenia to me. “Some of them look like they are screaming or smiling. It is very powerful to see.”

“So how does he connect this work with the stuff he does on the Zócalo?” I asked, trying not to sound skeptical.

“That is separate,” said Felipe. “To raise awareness of the prahleen in Chiapas and money for the struggle, it’s what he is giving back to his village. His other work is what he does for himself.”

“I see,” I said. I looked down the table at David, who was listening to Alfredo, his back turned to Raquel, even though their shoulder blades were almost touching.