Trouble (19 page)

“Your show is excellent,” I said to Eugenia. “Congratulations.”

“Thank you,” she said.

“I bought the blue mask,” I said. “The one that looks like a wild dog. But they’re all beautiful.”

“We worked very hard,” she said, unable to hide her pure joy at her and her husband’s success; apparently, I gathered, their work had sold very well at the opening, unexpectedly so. Eugenia was the opposite of David; she flashed one strong, pure, intense emotion after another, as if she were a lighthouse of feeling, a beacon of blue-eyed light. I suspected instinctively that she was occasionally rash and impulsive in her passions, sometimes misguided in the way of the impetuous but compassionate and well-intentioned. I realized that this could be said of me, too. Come to think of it, she looked a little like me; she could have been my younger, fairer cousin. Anyway, she evidently saw nothing objectionable about David, to put it mildly, and she knew him much better than I did.

I was staring at David through cold, narrowed eyes, thinking about all of this. Suddenly, he flicked his glance over to me and caught my expression. Without reacting in any way, he flicked his eyes away again, back at Alfredo, but I knew he had seen how I felt. I drank another tequila and ate a plate of very good broiled garlic shrimp with rice and salad. The cantina was huge but felt warm and convivial because of its crowded bustle, waiters rushing to and fro with trays, dominoes clacking cozily, the constant buzz of voices and blue haze of smoke.

“Were you both raised Catholic?” I asked Felipe and Eugenia. They had been asking me about where I had grown up, who my family was, and my work as a therapist, and I was starting to get sick of the sound of my own voice.

“Yes,” said Eugenia. “My mother is especially religious. But I am not.”

“And my father is especially religious,” said Felipe. “But I am not.”

“So you’re both like me,” I said. “Religious parents, but you’re not.”

“Yes,” said Eugenia, laughing. “My sisters are also not at all Catholic.”

“Neither is my sister,” said Felipe. “Most people our age are not. The Church is losing power with us. It is very complicated, the Catholic Church in Mexico. Ever since the beginning, it has been a difficult, violent, complicated history. The Church is as corrupt as our government.”

Eugenia waved her hands. “Let’s not talk about this with the dinner,” she said.

“Anyway,” said Felipe, “Josie, do you want to go to the bullfight with me on Sunday? Unless you’re like Eugenia and you can’t take anything too violent.”

Eugenia grimaced at him.

“I would like to see the bullfight,” I said. “If
like
is really the word. I’m curious, but I don’t blame Eugenia for wanting to avoid it.”

“Thank you,” said Eugenia.

“But don’t you have to go to your two family dinners?” I asked Felipe.

“I can miss one week,” he said. “My parents will survive the disappointment, and I’m seeing my kids tomorrow.”

After we had all pored over the bill and paid our shares, we straggled out to stand in a loose-knit clump under the red awning. It was 10:30, exactly the turning point at which a night ended at a reasonable hour or evolved into a drunken wee-hour revelry. Raquel stood at my elbow. “They’re all thinking of going back to Luz and Miguel’s to smoke some weed. And there’s a chocolate cake Luz baked today for Eugenia and Alfredo.”

I tried to disguise the excitement I felt about going back to Felipe’s building and possibly ending up in his bed. “Do you want to go?”

“Sure,” she said. “I love me some nice weed.”

“Not to mention some nice cake,” I added.

“Especially when it’s beefcake.”

“You should talk,” I said.

“What do you mean?” she said. “I was talking about Felipe.” A few people went off, waving good night, and the rest of us regrouped ourselves into a few taxis and disembarked in front of Luz and Miguel’s house. Inside, we assembled around the dining room table, which was still draped in the cloth from the night before. Luz lit the candles; Miguel poured tequilas. Luz disappeared and came back with a large frosted chocolate cake, which she set on the table, along with a knife. She went back into the kitchen for forks and plates while Eugenia sliced the cake. Raquel and I sat at the far end of the table, Felipe on my other side and David on hers. The air between David and me was, I thought, fraught with growing animosity, but maybe it was just coming from my end. After my misunderstanding earlier with Felipe in the gallery, I wasn’t sure anymore about anyone else’s feelings, only my own.

Plates came around with wedges of cake on them. I took a bite; it was still warm, very dense and moist and bittersweet, with a lot of cinnamon. Next, a pipe, sticky from the cake, came around the table; I took a hit off it every time it passed, and soon, between the chocolate and the weed, I felt a warm glow in my chest, a beatific smile on my face. “I’m stoned,” said Raquel with a big grin at me. “How about you?”

“Yeah,” I said. “This is really good stuff. Sometimes when I smoke, my brain goes on a psychodrama Habitrail. I hate that.”

“Oh my God, remember that time we were house-sitting and we ate brownies from the freezer and forgot we’d called out for Chinese food?”

“We thought the delivery guy was breaking in,” I said, cracking up. “We called the cops, but we were too stoned to remember our address.”

“But we thought we were thinking rationally,” said Raquel.

“We didn’t know the brownies had marijuana in them,” I told Felipe.

Alfredo got out a guitar; Eugenia brought an accordion from another room. They pulled two chairs away from the table and started playing; Raquel drifted over to them and sang harmony with Alfredo. Listening to them, I missed Chuy. Raquel’s voice overpowered Alfredo’s light, amateur baritone, although I could tell she was throttling herself back.

Felipe’s hand had snaked up my thigh. I was resting my arm across his shoulders and leaning against him, feeling like a twenty-year-old bohemian. This was extremely pleasant all around. Soon, maybe, we would go to his place and take off all our clothes and get into his bed naked and have dreamy, ecstatic, carnal sex. But I didn’t feel any rush. This anticipation was one of the nicest experiences I had had in a very long time. The most amazing thing was that nothing had happened yet to cause my excitement about Felipe to ebb or lessen. He was so easy, so consistent and quick-witted and warm. My mother had once told me that you could know everything essential about a person in the first twenty-four hours of meeting them. She also claimed to have known she was going to marry my father after being with him for only one day, so I had always suspected there was something a bit self-justifying in this. Anthony and I had married after a year of dating; I supposed I’d known from the beginning that we’d get married, but I certainly didn’t know everything essential about him after one day. However, there was something about Felipe that made me think, for the first time, that my mother might have known what she was talking about, and I could easily imagine remaining friends with him after this fun little vacation fling was over, after I went back home.

I flicked a glance at David. From the side, his face looked even flatter, more severe. He turned and met my gaze.

“Do you know this song?” I asked him, for something to say.

“I’ve heard it,” he said. “It’s an old tragic Mexican song about a guy whose wife ran off with a rich guy from another town.”

“Did your family sing a lot of these old songs in Chicago?”

His eyes were hard and black and shiny. He smiled a little. “We didn’t sing much,” he said.

“My family didn’t, either, come to think of it,” I said.

“Hey,” he said. “I have to go soon to pick up my sister from her job at the cantina. It’s right near your hotel. Do you and Raquel want a ride back?”

“I don’t know,” I said, turning to Felipe.

“Come with me,” said Felipe.

I followed him out of the candlelit dining room into the harshly lit kitchen with its overhead fluorescent tubing. Suddenly, I was self-conscious. Did I look haggard, I wondered, or was I having a youthful moment? It was hard to know, at my age. I hoped the gods were on my side right now.

Felipe leaned against the counter and pulled me to him. I slid my arms around his shoulders; he rested his forearms against my butt and held me close. “I want to make love with you very much,” he said into my hair. “You know.”

“Should I stay?” I asked.

“I have been thinking,” he said.

“Thinking is no good,” I replied, laughing.

“You are separated from your husband,” he said. “You’re not divorced yet.”

“But it’s okay,” I said. “It’s totally over.”

“For me, it’s no problem. He is up there; I am here—good for me. But for you, it’s more complicated. ¿
Claro?
”

“No,” I said. “There’s no complication on my side whatsoever.”

“You are emotional,” he said. He leaned back so he was looking directly into my eyes. “I do not want to take advantage of this.”

“You have no idea how much that makes me want to fuck you,” I said, laughing, my mouth on his.

“Yes, I do,” he said with something like a groan. He tasted so good; he felt so good. It was a while before I let him talk again. But finally he emphatically kissed me and then pulled his mouth free of mine. “We’ll go to the bullfight on Sunday.”

I was quiet for a moment. “You’re a good man,” I said.

“Not so good, don’t worry,” he said, laughing at me.

A little while later, Raquel and I left the house with David and got into his beat-up old Volkswagen Rabbit. I sat in back. The inside of the car smelled musty; it was very cold. He turned on the heater; it blew cold dry air in our faces while the car warmed up.

“We have some time,” said David. “Want to go for a little drive?”

“Where to?” asked Raquel.

“Down to Coyoacán? There’s no traffic this time of night; the streets are empty.”

“Coyoacán,” said Raquel to me, “is where the rich folks live.”

“Sure,” I said. “Why not?”

David pulled into the street, and we were off. We drove through some sleeping smaller streets and merged onto an almost-empty, double-decker freeway that gradually lifted itself high above the city on stilts, snaking through the concrete sea of buildings, hugger-mugger. In dreamy silence, we drove for a long time, watching the billboards float by. In the distance were skyscrapers. We eventually came down off the freeway into more sleeping streets, but these were leafier and walled.

“Behind these walls are amazing villas,” said David. “The government all lives here. The richest people in Mexico.”

The street we were on twisted and turned like a country road; it was hard to tell, in the darkness, what it really looked like. We came out into a kind of square. David parked his car, and we all got out. We walked through the little square in the dark, deserted town. Dogs barked in the distance, but otherwise, there was an eerie silence. The night was so frosty we could see our breath. I could almost feel money oozing from every brick in the town. Suddenly, a car pulled up silently next to us. Two guys got out, and David briefly talked to them in Spanish. They got back into their car and drove off again. “They don’t fuck around with security here,” said David. “Those are undercover cops.”

We got back into the car. I sat in front this time. About five minutes after we started driving, I could feel a dead space back there where Raquel’s wakeful presence had been. She had always had the ability to fall sound asleep anywhere, anytime, at will. We drove back along the crooked little tree-lined road with its walled-off mansions, back onto the floating freeway in the sky.

“How do you like this city?” David asked after a while.

“I like it,” I said warily. I sensed the question held some implicit criticism. “But I imagine it’s very different if you live here.”

“How so?” His tone was neutral.

“It’s easy to be a tourist,” I said.

“For you it is, maybe.”

“What do you think you know about me?” I asked, my tone as carefully neutral as his.

“I overheard your conversation on the Zócalo.”

“Eavesdropper.”

“You guys weren’t keeping your voices down. Americans never do in foreign countries; they always assume no one can understand them.”

“You’re American,” I said. “Come on. You grew up in Chicago.”

We were staring straight ahead at the road, not looking at each other at all.

“No, I’m a Mexican kid who grew up in Chicago,” he said in his flat midwestern accent.

“Identity is not that stable when you’re little,” I said. “My daughter is American. She was born in China, but she’s as American now as you are.”

“I never felt North American. The whole culture is rotten and lazy and corporate.”

He spoke blandly, but there was a keen knife’s edge in his words that felt personal for some reason, directed at me. “In other words,” I said, “you despise North Americans. Well, I’m a North American, so I assume you mean I’m those things. But how can you think you know a single thing about me from one private conversation with my best friend?”

He was silent.

I said after a moment, when I realized he wasn’t going to answer me, “I can’t defend North Americans in general. And I certainly can’t defend myself when I don’t even know what you’re accusing me of.”

“I’m not asking you to,” he said.

“Raquel is Mexican,” I added defensively.

“Half,” he said back. “And she was born up there.”

“You think I’m a spoiled rich bitch from New York who cheated on her husband with a stranger and left her kid alone to come down here to do God knows what.”

“Really,” he said mildly. “You’re putting words in my mouth. Raquel seems to need a friend right now. You came.”

I subsided against the back of the seat. “I need a friend right now, too,” I said.

I saw that we were rattling along the now-familiar cobblestones of El Centro. When David pulled up in front of the Isabel and stopped, Raquel said only, “Good night, David. Thanks for the ride,” and got out. I thanked him, too, and we rang the doorbell for the sleepy hotel clerk, who let us in. Up in our room, we got ready for bed in silence. We climbed into our separate beds and Raquel turned out the light.