Trouble (21 page)

After a brief pause, he said with a pained sound that suggested this was true even though he would have given anything to have it be otherwise, “I bet she’s still at the cantina right now.”

“David,” I said, “is that what’s going on?”

“Maria’s boyfriend,” he said. He looked back down at his book, shaking his head.

“Did you know Raquel’s an ex-junkie?” I asked him accusingly.

He turned a page of his book.

“You’re not really reading,” I said. “You’re pretending to read so I’ll leave, but I want you to know that my friend is an ex-junkie who OD’d and almost died twice and finally got clean ten years ago after three trips to rehab. She’s desperate right now and self-destructive and maybe suicidal. If you’re helping her get drugs, you deserve to rot in the lowest hell in the universe. I mean it. You’re vermin. If you sell her any more drugs, I will kill you with my bare hands.”

“I’m sure you will,” he said, not looking up. “But you’re attacking the wrong person. I’m on your side. I tried to stop her from going there, but she wouldn’t listen to me.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I said. “At the opening, right? When you guys disappeared. Why didn’t you warn me what was going on?”

“She got herself a cab,” said David. “She asked me to help her and I said no. She went off in a cab. I am not her keeper, and I am not your informant.”

“Right,” I said. “We’re rich gringos, not Chiapan peasants, so why should you care what happens to us?”

“If you’re worried about her,” he said, not unsympathetically, “then go and find her.”

I stood there impotently. He kept his eyes on his book, then turned another page. I gave a small gasp of frustration, then left him and walked back across the Zócalo toward Avenida Cinco de Mayo, trudging with my hands in my pockets over the hard, high sidewalks to the taxi-dancer cantina where we had introduced ourselves to David the other night. I went up the stairs and ducked into the red-draped room. Even though it was afternoon, loud music played, people sat drinking at the little tables, and several helmet-coifed, stout women jogged on the tiny dance floor with various drunk, stout men. I saw David’s sister Maria dancing with El Borracho from the other night, or maybe it was one of his two million doppelgangers.

I went to the back of the room, peering through the dimness, and found Raquel at the table nearest the bathrooms, sitting alone with a shot of tequila and a bottle of mineral water in front of her. Her eyes were closed. I sat down next to her and shook her gently. She opened her eyes, but they fluttered shut again. I shook her again. She focused on me with some evident difficulty. Her pupils were tiny pinpoints.

“Josie,” she said with a puckish little smile. “I thought I’d get a start on my day’s drinking.”

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Living my life,” she replied.

“Are you doing that stuff again?”

“Josie,” she said, “I’m on vacation.”

“Do you remember how hard it was to get off that shit?”

“Yeah,” she said, “but it was always there, waiting for me to come back.”

“Bullshit,” I said. “This is such bullshit. You’re acting like some idiotic bullshit rock star cliché. If you do any more, I mean even once more, I’m going to leave you here and get the next plane back to New York.”

“I know,” she said. “I deserve that. You’re right. Tough love.”

“Shut up,” I said. The waitress came over. I ordered a tequila and shook a cigarette out of Raquel’s pack and lit it.

“You’re smoking,” she said. “You’re drinking.”

“That’s within the bounds of acceptable immature behavior. Weed is okay, too. But heroin is out of bounds. Heroin is a breach of contract.”

“Actually, I relapsed with the first tequila,” she said. “I’m just continuing what I started. Don’t you know anything?”

“You were never an alcoholic,” I said.

“Doesn’t matter,” she said. “That’s what they told me in rehab. The brain doesn’t distinguish between intoxicants. I’ve been completely straight for ten years. You should have started worrying about me days ago, Jo. You’re a little late now.”

“Addiction is obviously not my area of expertise,” I said ruefully. “But that isn’t the point.”

My tequila arrived. Recklessly, because I was angry, I tossed it off at one go and signaled to the waitress for another one. She nodded without expression; she wanted no part of our personal business. She probably thought we were two dykes having a lovers’ quarrel. I ignored the horrible cough-syrup sangrita. She took the empty shot glass and went away.

“Then what is the point?” Raquel asked with a smack-addled grin.

“Are you trying to kill yourself?”

“Maybe,” she said seductively. She was still smiling, but I knew she wasn’t kidding.

“Please don’t,” I said. “Raquel, please. I need you.”

“You
need
me,” she repeated. “Oh, sweetheart, you do not.” She laughed. “No one does. I do not say that with self-pity, believe me.”

I didn’t answer. I watched her and waited. I wasn’t sure what I was waiting for; I had a feeling she needed some silence for a moment so she could realize what we were really talking about.

After a while, she said with a flash of sheepish ruefulness, “Sorry.”

“I don’t take any of this personally,” I said. “You don’t owe me an apology.”

“Okay,” she said. “But I wanted to say it anyway.”

“I can well understand the temptation,” I said. My second tequila arrived. I took a sip of it. “You’re in psychic pain, and heroin’s a psychic pain reliever.”

“Really the best,” she said. “Everyone would agree.”

“You’re taking Advil for your headache,” I said. “I understand. But in this case, the Advil is addictive and eventually maybe lethal. Better to suffer through the headache till it goes away on its own, don’t you think?”

“Blah blah blah,” she said, but she didn’t say it nastily; she said it with comical subversiveness. I laughed. On the dance floor, David’s sister allowed herself to be turned and spun by El Borracho’s twin.

“Really, Josie,” said Raquel, “I don’t want to die of an overdose. You have to be under thirty for it to have any legitimacy.”

“So I’m not going to have to watch you like a hawk till we both go home?”

“Please don’t. You’re on vacation, too. You’re off duty.”

“Did you get it from David’s sister?” I asked swiftly, sneaking the question in like a shiv between her ribs while I had her softened up.

She raised her eyebrows and didn’t answer.

“I saw David earlier on the Zócalo,” I said. “He said I would probably find you here.”

“Yeah, I saw him earlier, too,” she said. “I told him I was heading over to watch his sister ply her trade.”

“He told me her boyfriend sells it. Did you take a cab to his house to cop the other night?”

She leaned over and kissed my cheek. Her lips were warm and dry; she smelled of expensive shampoo. “You sound like a detective in a noir movie,” she said. “Come on, Jo, let me have my nostalgic little bit of smack. My trip down memory lane. I’m floating here in a nice little bubble of relief. Analgesic relief. I know what I’m doing here. Okay?”

“You sound like Wendy when she’s trying to talk me into letting her stay out past her curfew. ‘Mom, it’s not like I’m going to be sleep-deprived. Tomorrow’s Saturday; I can sleep late.’ I’m not your mother, Raq. I told you: I won’t stay here if you keep doing it, but I can’t stop you.” I fished around in my bag and pulled out a paper bag and handed it to her. “Present for you.”

“I love presents,” she said, pouncing on it. She took out the
Amor
pouch from the witchcraft market and smelled it. “Thank you! I love it! I need ninety of these things. But I’m not sure how to use it. What do I do? Put it under my pillow? Brew it for tea? Maybe both.” She hailed the waitress and ordered us both tequilas.

“I feel so much better right now,” she said. “Tequila wasn’t cutting it, and neither was weed. Maybe I can go home soon, get back on my feet. They didn’t find me down here. I got a nice break from the shit storm.”

“Good,” I said. “But this is the second time you’ve done it. You could be sliding back into serious addiction.”

“Listen to you,” said Raquel. “And you say you’re not a substance-abuse specialist.”

I gave her a sidelong look. She was flushed and rosy and looked happy as hell. Our tequilas arrived. We clacked our glasses together and drank. I had a nice buzz going now. At this rate, I was going to be a wet-brained, raving alcoholic within a week. Maybe I would never make it back to New York. Maybe I’d be a taxi dancer here at this cantina. Felipe and I could live in sin. I giggled.

“What’s so funny?” Raquel asked.

I told her my vision of where my life was headed.

“Are you at all worried about being single again?”

“I’m thrilled about being single again,” I said.

“Yeah, I can imagine,” she said. “How is Anthony taking it?”

“Like he takes everything. He’s always prepared for the shit to hit the fan. He’s so infuriating. Admit it. You never liked him.”

“I always liked him! But liking Anthony is easy. He’s a likable guy.”

I looked skeptically at her. “Come on,” I said.

“Okay,” she said. “I didn’t like how you were with him. It seemed to me that you made yourself smaller with him. That wasn’t his fault, but you’re so much more of a person than he is. He’s limited in ways that you aren’t. I mean, you’re so much more open and aware, emotionally. He’s closed off, right? Sort of emotionally unimaginative, or one-dimensional, or something. It’s like you had to scale yourself down to fit with him. I always wondered if you liked being diminished like that.”

I thought about this, looking at the tip of my cigarette as if it knew the answer. The question, coming from Raquel rather than Indrani, seemed genuinely curious, wholly without judgment.

“I guess I must have,” I said. “Then I stopped liking it. You’re pretty perceptive, to have seen that.”

“I had to read between some lines there,” said Raquel. “You always said everything was fine.”

“I needed to think everything was fine. But you’re right: That’s exactly what happened. Indrani told me I’m pathetic.”

“Oh, Indrani,” said Raquel. She laughed. “She’s like a little kid. She wants the fairy tale to be true. I love the girl, but she’s so dumb sometimes.”

“She’s not dumb.”

“Intellectually, she’s brilliant. Emotionally, she’s retarded. I should talk.”

“I should talk, too.”

“We’re all retarded.”

“Are you pissed off about me and Felipe?”

“Why, you think I’m jealous of your happiness or something? Possessive of you? Come on. I’m happy for you. You deserve it.”

I smiled at her. “He asked me to go to the bullfight with him tomorrow.”

She burst out laughing. “What a perfect date.”

“Is the bullfight romantic?”

“No way,” she said. “It’s bloody and weird and beautiful and horrible. You’ll go home after and fuck his brains out to forget what you saw.”

“I’m still married,” I said, as if I were warning or testing her.

“So what?” She rolled her eyes.

“I love you,” I said.

“I love you right back. Thank God you came.”

“I needed it,” I said. I took another sip of tequila, then went silent and watchful, my eyes on Raquel’s face.

Raquel waited, too, looking right back at me as if we were playing a game of psychological chicken. But I was a pro at this; she was just an amateur. “Oh man,” she said on an exhale after a moment. “I don’t know what to do next. All my life, I’ve felt like I had it going on. Even in my worst junkie days, I was still young enough to make a fresh start; I knew I’d get through. I don’t know, Jo. I’m not feeling that way anymore.”

I nodded slowly, watching her.

She was quiet, thinking. Then she said with sudden sober calm, deadly serious, “I feel like it’s over. I do. The game is over for me, and I lost. My new album is not good enough. I know it, and it’s killing me. It’s trying too hard. It’s the work of a washed-up has-been desperate for attention. It’s a squawking, frenetic, empty, overproduced cry for help.”

“Squawking and frenetic,” I repeated. “I don’t believe you.”

“Well, believe me,” she said. “When I go back to L.A., I have to face that. That’s why Chuy didn’t want to play on it. Because he knew, and I knew he knew, that it was bad. I held it against him, but he was right, and I knew that. The other night, he was trying to remind me who I am, musically. He was bringing me back to myself. It almost worked. I love that dude with all my heart.”

She was silent again for a while. I waited. It reminded me of when Wendy was a little kid and got the stomach flu. She would vomit and then subside; I would empty the bowl and rinse it out, and then I would go right back to her, knowing she wasn’t done yet. It was the same thing now with Raquel.

“But he couldn’t,” she said. “I mean, he can’t save my album; I can’t, either. I wake up every morning just dreading the day it comes out. The critics, if they even give a shit, are going to rape me. I’m already hearing the reviews in my head.”

“You could be being paranoid,” I said. “You always have these times of self-doubt right before a new album is released.”

“If my album had been great, I would never have fallen for someone like Jimmy Black. I used him to distract myself, in part at least.” She hesitated, and then she smiled with some effort. “It’s funny that I always call him Jimmy Black. Some people always get called by their first and last names. I jumped all over him and licked his face like a puppy dog demanding to be kicked. So he kicked me. It served me right.”

“No way,” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “I did. I was a puppy dog, and I got kicked. That’s what I deserved. And you can reassure me or not; it doesn’t matter. I know that was the end of love for me. My album sucks; love is finished. Might as well check out. I’m just talking, Joze. Don’t worry. This isn’t a threat.”

“Yes,” I said. “It is a threat. Don’t you worry. I hear you loud and clear.”

“No,” she said, laughing. “No no no. I’m just talking out my ass here. Self-pity.”

“I’m going to break the rules,” I said. “I’m going to tell you what to do. Are you ready?”