Trouble (24 page)

The first matador acquitted himself slightly better with his second bull of the day; he managed to fell him with two swift stabs between the shoulder blades. But the second matador’s second fight was worse than his first one: His new bull was as phlegmatic and resigned as he was. They engaged in a tepid, protracted pas-de-deux with many lackluster moments of listless standoffs when both man and bull seemed to be thinking about their grocery lists in their respective corners of the ring. It ended finally when the bull seemed to charge in a kamikaze rush of bravado, throwing himself on the sword out of sheer boredom, wanting to be done with it.

“Is it over?” I asked Felipe.

“There’s one more bull.”

“I don’t know if I can take another one.”

“You want to go?”

“I don’t want to go.”

“I will go if you want,” he said.

“No, I want to stay.”

“Then we’ll stay.”

When his bull had been weakened and readied, the third matador returned without seeming to notice the crowd. He approached the bull and feinted, stepped aside calmly as the bull charged him, as if he were letting a bus go by. Bull and matador circled each other, their gazes locked. Then the matador flicked his wrist and the bull charged. The matador waited until the last possible split second as we all watched in silent suspense before he slipped out of the way as the bull went pounding past, then spun around in time to meet the bull’s eyes as the bull charged again. Then they circled each other for a while, each watching every move the other one made.

“This guy is good,” I said.

“He
is
good,” said Felipe. “He’s a big star.”

I was aware, as I hadn’t been in the previous bullfights, which had been more like cartoons, that this very slender, slight man was all alone in the bullring with a very unhappy, lethal animal, and he seemed to have the bull completely under his control. The matador moved; the bull responded. The matador provoked; the bull charged. The bull’s impending death began to feel like a release of tension we were all awaiting and committed to rejoicing in when it finally came.

“This is beautiful,” I said.

“Very beautiful,” Felipe agreed.

“Olé,” the crowd roared again as the matador executed another flawless do-si-do. The bull was weakening, but he was menacing still, even with his diminished blood supply. I imagined that the matador’s fixed attention and control was an analgesic distraction for the bull, a solid reality, an intimacy to organize his small brain around as he was being danced to his own oblivion. The matador elegantly sliced his body against the bull’s, getting blood on his trousers, then turned and allowed the bull to graze him again.

“Olé,” the crowd shouted, and “Olé!” again.

“It is very dangerous to do that,” said Felipe.

The stadium was silent except for these unison shouts. We were all holding our breath as if we possessed one big collective lung, as if we were as much in the matador’s thrall as the bull. Finally, the matador lifted his sword and, as the bull went by, plunged it with a snap of both arms into the bull’s back, high up on his neck. It went in cleanly. The bull plummeted to the ground and was still. The matador bowed his head for an instant.

The crowd exhaled and leapt to its feet, I along with everyone else, and cheered. The matador finally acknowledged us. He made the rounds of the stadium, bowing to section after section as hats and flowers were thrown into the ring, piling up around him. Camera bulbs flashed all over the stadium. Finally, the matador was carried out on several men’s shoulders, but he came back in to the ring a moment later to bow again as the crowd kept cheering and cheering. Finally, he was carried off again, and we all quieted down.

We slowly dispersed in a great mass of people out of the stadium. As our little group stood milling around outside, a limousine went by with the great matador’s name and picture emblazoned on it.

“Where’s he going?” I asked Felipe.

“Off to find food and drink and women.”

“He’s going to have a good night,” said Pirate.

“He’s going to have a great night,” said Raquel.

All seven of us set off for the subway together.

“I’ll come back to the Centro with you,” I said staunchly to Raquel as we clattered down the steps of the station.

“No, you won’t,” she said. “If you do, I’ll never forgive you, I swear. Hey, Felipe, where are you taking her?”

I looked over at Felipe.

“I’m taking her back to Roma,” he said.

“Good,” said Raquel. “Finally, I get a night off.”

In the subway car, Felipe and I leaned together near the door in fizzy anticipatory silence, occasionally meeting each other’s eyes and giving each other sneaky, triumphant smiles. I said good-bye to Raquel when we got out at Insurgentes. Raquel put her hands on my forearms for leverage and leaned up and kissed my cheek. I looked down into her; all I saw was resolution and self-reliance. “Have fun,” she said, pushing me away. “Bring back some stories for me to enjoy vicariously.”

“You’re so bad,” I said.

We both laughed, and then Felipe and I got off the train, climbed the stairs, and walked along the street. We walked briskly toward a bistro he knew.

“So were your families mad that you missed out on both Sunday dinners today?” I asked.

“They get plenty of me; you don’t have to worry about them. What about you? Are you missing your daughter?”

We went into the bistro, which was small and lit with candles whose flames guttered in the breeze as waitresses walked by with plates. Some sort of earnest world music was playing, which would normally have bugged me, but right then I didn’t care; it sounded beautiful. We sat at a small table near the back. The hostess handed us a wine list and went away to let us decide.

“Yes,” I said. “When I go home, I’ll move my stuff into my new apartment, but I’ll see Wendy as much as ever.”

“What about your husband?”

“Anthony,” I said. “I expect to like him a lot better when I don’t have to live with him and be married to him. Maybe we’ll be good friends in the end.”

Felipe laughed. “That’s exactly how it is with me and Carmen. We’re better friends now that we’ve split up. We were never a good couple.”

“Amazing how you can marry someone so wrong for you.”

“Is rioja okay?”

“Rioja is great.”

Felipe looked up at the waitress and ordered the wine. She brought it back, showed him the label, went through the ritual of pouring out a little for him to taste, then finally gave us a couple of full glasses and went away to let us talk and drink in peace. Here we were, on a date. It felt very proper and courtshiplike. Over escargot, which here were called
caracol
, Felipe talked about his kids, Luz and Hector, who were four and six. Over soup, he asked me about Wendy. As we ate our main courses, I told him about some of my clients, and he talked about his upcoming show.

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

“You asked me that once before,” said Felipe. “He’s my friend. Why?”

“I can’t figure him out. He seems so noble and good, but there’s something about him, something I don’t like.”

“David?” Felipe laughed. “What don’t you like about him?” “He seems too serious or something. I feel like he’s hiding a dark secret.”

“He is serious. He is from a very fucked-up part of Chiapas. He lost his arm. He has a sister with problems.”

“She’s a drug addict, right?”

“Yeah. He feels like he owes her because she raised him. It makes him really sad to see her live like that. Her boyfriend beats her. He tries to help her, but he can’t save her. He thinks she wants to go down. She feels guilty for something, but he doesn’t know what. He wonders if their father molested her. He is pretty tortured about her. If you see anything in him, it’s a lot of worry about things he can do nothing about no matter how hard he tries—the situation down in Chiapas, his sister, this country, everything.”

“Oh,” I said. “I feel bad for saying anything about him, but don’t you ever dislike someone for no reason?”

“I can see that you would,” he said. He was teasing me. It was the same expression he’d had when I’d bought the mask the other night at the gallery, a warm, indulgent appreciation of some frankly immature quality in me, my rashness, I supposed, my transparent passions. I had a fleeting thought that maybe he found these things appealing or charming now, but if we were married, would they enrage him eventually? Would he wind up punishing me for the very things he’d cherished? I studied his face for a sign of incipient cruelty, lurking scorn, but I saw only a steady, intelligent, humorous sweetness; if we were married, I thought, he would never make fun of me for bringing home a blue wolverine mask. He would never undercook spaghetti if I told him I didn’t like it that way. The thought made me suddenly sad, and to push it away, I said hastily, “Eugenia is in love with him, isn’t she?”

He laughed.
“Who?
”

“Eugenia.”

“Alfredo’s wife?”

“Yeah, I watch her when he talks or when she talks to him. She drools. She can’t hide her passion for him: Alfredo doesn’t even seem to notice! I thought Latin men were supposed to be macho and possessive of their women, but he doesn’t even seem to see it, and it’s so obvious. I don’t even know them, and I can see it.”

Felipe was laughing too hard to speak. He took a sip of his water, but he couldn’t stop laughing. “You are so funny,” he said when he caught a breath. “You are the most adorable thing I have ever seen.”

“Why am I funny?”

“David is gay,” he said.

“What do you mean, he’s gay?”

Felipe lifted one of my hands and kissed it. “I mean he likes men.”

“David?” I sat back and let everything I knew and thought about David rearrange itself into a wholly different picture. “He’s gay? Are you sure?”

Felipe kissed my hand again by way of an answer.

“Does Eugenia know he’s gay?” I asked.

He laughed again. “Of course,” he said.

“Oh,” I said, laughing at myself. “So is it dangerous to be gay in Mexico City?”

“It’s not so dangerous,” he said. “It is no more or less dangerous here than anywhere else. But David is very careful and a little bit shy about it. If he seems secretive to you, maybe that’s why.”

“His sister and her boyfriend sold drugs to Raquel,” I blurted. “David knew, and he didn’t tell me.”

“He probably didn’t tell you because he figured it was none of his business to interfere.”

“Maybe he’s in on it,” I said. “I’ve been wondering about this. Maybe that’s how he really raises money for his village, and those weavings are a front.”

“That is impossible.”

“Why is it impossible?”

“Because David hates drugs. He is more against them than anyone else I know.”

I stared at Felipe, thinking. He looked back at me with frank, laughing amusement.

“I feel like an idiot,” I said.

“You are no idiot. You watch and pay attention and draw conclusions, and sometimes they’re wrong, but not always. Often you are very perceptive. You were very perceptive about me, for instance, the night I met you. I knew right away that I could talk to you easily, say anything to you, because you really listen with all your attention.”

“Thank you for saying that,” I said.

“I imagine that you are very good at your work.”

“Sometimes,” I said.

“No more suspicion of my friend David, okay?”

“Okay,” I said, shaking my head, finally laughing myself.

We shared a chocolate mousse and drank two snifters of cognac and two espressos and drifted into silence, holding hands on the table, smiling stupidly at each other. I pounced on the check when it arrived and would not give it to him. After a real and apparent inner struggle, because he was, after all, a Mexican man, he thanked me and gave in. We left the restaurant and walked through the cold night toward his apartment building. I was on a date, and we were going back to his house. I was about to have sex with someone who wasn’t Anthony. It was all very unreal and amazing; I wasn’t entirely sure I was allowed to do this, but I didn’t care. There was no one around to stop me. And even if there had been, I wasn’t sure they could have.

 
ack at Felipe’s house, I felt suddenly shy for the first time since I had met him. He led me in and said, “Wait here. I’ll make us some tea.” On his way to the kitchen, he hit the play button on his CD player and music poured out, acoustic Cuban music, a woman singer with a guttural, haunting voice.

I paced around the living room, which was also his studio. The vines and flowers in the machine-strewn jungles of his paintings were alive with precision and vitality and weirdness, delicate but tough-seeming. The machines themselves were cunning, preposterous, improbable, as intricate as the vegetation but somehow comically naked and vulnerable, out of place in their jungle. I examined his bookshelf, which was full of poetry, philosophy, and novels, most of them by Spanish-language writers like Neruda, Paz, Bolaño, Fuentes, Márquez, and a lot I had never heard of, and a few translations: Dostoevsky,
The Magic Mountain, Catch-22
, Joan Didion, Robert A. Heinlein, Philip K. Dick, James Joyce, Saul Bellow, and
Under the Volcano
. Lower down were the big art books: Cézanne, van Gogh, Picasso, Kandinsky, Klimt, Guston, and so forth, all the big-league dudes with their swaggering artistic outputs and visions. A photo of two kids in a frame sat on the middle shelf; both of them were adorable little big-eyed versions of Felipe. On the floor by his worktable were a Lego set, a toy fire engine, a box of stuffed animals, and a toy stove with toy pots and pans and a matching toy cupboard containing tiny imitation food—little boxes of cereal and cans of soup—muffin tins, and a miniature tea set. I lifted out one of the tiny cups, remembering when Wendy had had a set a lot like this one. We had made cambric tea and drunk it out of these cute thimbles with animal-shaped cookies frosted pink and white.

On the coffee table were a ceramic skull, a tarot deck, and a vase of lilies. I was daunted by all of it. I sat on the couch, which was luxuriantly comfortable, and cursed my mother, who had been a devoted, self-sacrificing wifey-wife, and who had taught me nothing whatsoever about seducing men, about how to act in situations like these, probably because she had met my father as a young girl and had never, to my knowledge, looked back or around or askance. Anthony had been a seemingly irresistible force I had passively allowed to carry me off; I hadn’t had to think about anything. I had been young, naïve, and overwhelmed by the power of his personality. I had subsumed myself in him. That was what I had learned from my mother. This was different somehow; this was a real situation. I was wide-awake and older now. I couldn’t take refuge in blind ignorance, because Felipe and I were equals here. I was unequipped for this, now that the moment of truth was at hand.

I leaned back into the couch cushions, kicked off my shoes, and put my feet in their warm socks on the coffee table.

But this is nothing to be afraid of or intimidated by, I told myself, as if I were one of my clients. There is nothing here to cause self-doubt, and besides, it’s just a vacation fling. This is just an experiment, and if it fails, I’ll be back in my real life soon, and I’ll never have to see him again.

By the time Felipe came in with the teapot and two cups, I had managed to talk myself out of my momentary squirrelliness.

“I made this tea,” he said, setting everything on the coffee table and joining me on the couch, “and I don’t know why. I feel like my grandmother.”

I laughed. “I like tea,” I said stupidly.

We were silent for a moment. The teapot steamed gently from its spout. Neither of us made a move to pour any.

“I’m a little nervous now,” he said.

“Me, too,” I said quickly.

We laughed self-consciously.

We were both silent again. I looked down at my hands. I don’t know what he was looking at.

He made a noise, a cross between a grunt and loud exhale.

“I really like you,” he said. His tone suggested that this aggrieved him as much as it surprised him.

“Sorry,” I said, happy to hear this, laughing now for real.

“I was just having fun, before.”

“I know,” I said. “And you know that this is all your fault. We could have just slept together the other night when we were drunk and didn’t care.”

“That was so stupid of us not to,” he agreed.

“I know!”

“What was I thinking?”

“You were trying to be gallant, and now we like each other too much to use each other for cheap sport.”

He looked at me. “You were going to use me for cheap sport?”

I laughed. “I was going to objectify the hell out of you.”

We smiled at each other silently; I started to feel breathless.

“Now what do we do?” he asked.

“You could read my fortune.”

“What? Oh, that deck. I don’t read tarot cards.” He looked sheepish.

“Let me guess. They’re your wife’s.”

He looked even more sheepish and didn’t answer.

“You have a girlfriend?”

He looked over at me with a grimace. “I just met you three days ago. I can’t help it. I have no girlfriend. She and I have an arrangement. Don’t worry about her.”

“Hang on. Is your girlfriend going to show up here and kick my ass?”

“She is not my girlfriend, I promise.”

“She’s some kind of special friend who spends the night?”

“She’s some sort of friend who sometimes spends the night, but not very often.”

“Well then, what am I doing here?”

He rubbed a hand over his face and sighed. “I didn’t promise her anything. She doesn’t want anything. She comes around sometimes. What can I say? She used to be my student.”

“What do you teach?”

“I teach art,” he said, as if he were surprised I didn’t already know this. “That’s how I mostly make my living. So this girl, I hired her to clean my apartment and help take care of my kids, and sometimes she—”

“Oh my God, the plot thickens. She’s the babysitter.”

“It is not anything like what you’re thinking.”

“How do you know what I’m thinking?”

He was quiet. I had just been bantering with him; I didn’t care about this girl. But he looked truly upset.

“Maybe I should have told you before,” he said. “But honestly, I forgot about her.”

“Felipe,” I said, “I don’t really care. I don’t give a damn; it’s okay. Whatever happens with me doesn’t have to affect whatever you have with her. I’m fine with it if you are. It doesn’t matter.”

“No,” he said. He looked even more upset. “That’s the thing. It does matter. Not about her, but about you. Anyway, I don’t want you to go home. I don’t care about her at all. I like you more than I’ve liked a woman in a long, long time.”

“Really?” I said, startled and amazed.

“Yes!” he said. “So don’t talk about that babysitter anymore. She doesn’t care about me, either. We’re friends and nothing more, I promise. Come here.” He slid his arm around my shoulders and pulled me in to him. I didn’t resist. I relaxed against him and buried my face in his neck and twined my legs around his. “Now I feel better,” he said.

“You smell so good,” I said.

“So do you,” he replied. He slid his hand under my shirt and fondled my breasts as I ran my open palm under his shirt, touching the silky bare skin of his flat belly and then moving my hand up to his hard little nipple. His skin was velvety and warm and supple and so alive. My mouth and his mouth found each other. After a moment, we were both so heated up, we were gasping into each other’s mouths. The music ended. In the sudden silence, our breathing sounded raspy and loud.

We stood up and pulled off each other’s clothes with impatient clumsiness, and finally, by dint of determination, we both ended up naked. He was more beautiful without his clothes on; his body was creamy brown, muscled, and graceful. His cock bounced a little, sticking straight out from his thighs. I took it into my hand and began to slide my fist up and down the shaft; he slid his hand between my legs, where I was slick, open, and swollen. He plunged his fingers into me. He bent me slowly over until my hands were on the back of the couch and put his hands on my ass and slowly ran the tip of his cock back and forth to slide it against my wetness, teasing me with it, almost but not quite entering me. I was too far gone to worry about what I looked like from this angle. It felt like we were moving in slow motion; it drove me crazy. I wanted to do this forever. I finally tore myself away and turned around to sit on the couch, then took his cock into my mouth and engulfed it. I ran my open mouth and tongue over his cock, his balls, his inner thigh, and then put my mouth on his cock again and sucked it slowly, slowly, trying to match the slow motion he had almost, but not quite, fucked me with just before. Then I stood up and held his cock in my hand to keep it warm and kissed him while he put his hand between my legs and pressed hard, slid it gently but firmly back and forth, soaking it in my wetness. After about thirty seconds, I came hard, yelling out, while he rocked my pelvis back and forth with his hand until all the spasms had stopped. “Come into my bed,” he urged me.

Dizzy with the force of my orgasm, I curled myself into him, wrapped my arms around him, clung weakly to him like a baby monkey, and burrowed my face into his neck.

“Come into my bed,” he said again. We led each other by the genitals, laughing, into his bedroom and slid together under his ice-cold sheets, shivering with the sudden shock of cold. We found each other under the covers and pressed our bellies together like little kids. His cock throbbed hard against my stomach like a live animal trapped there. I slid on top of him and positioned myself over him and plunged him into me. I had been ready to fuck him for the past three days. It felt so good to have him inside me, I laughed out loud with joy. Gasping, he held my hips still and looked into my eyes and said, “Sssh, wait, wait. I need to put on a condom.”

“I hate condoms,” I said through gritted teeth.

“I hate them, too,” he replied.

He fucked me hard for a moment, unable to resist. I moaned like a cat. Every nerve ending in my body was awake and electrified. Every part of him fit with every part of me; everything he did felt as good to me as it must have to him.

“But we have to,” he whispered. “Come on, we have to.”

“Don’t stop,” I said with urgent bossiness. I was being an idiot, but I was starving.

He pulled out with a groan, rummaged in the drawer of his bedside table, pulled out a condom packet, tore it open with his teeth, put the condom on, and slid inside me again. I stretched out along the length of him, put my hands on his buttocks, and plunged him as deep into me as he could go and held still for a moment.

“This feels insane,” I said. “It feels so good. You are so hot.”

“You’re hot,” he said. “You are amazing.”

“You’re amazing,” I echoed with goofy ardor.

“The minute I met you, I wanted this,” he said.

He rolled us both over so he was on top of me and began fucking me slowly, his elbows by my head, his mouth on mine, our stomachs slipping against each other.

“I know,” I said into his mouth. “We were making out within half an hour.”

“I would have attacked you within five minutes, but I was polite. I let you make the first move.”

“I did not make the first move.”

“You threw yourself on me,” he said.

I reached up and cupped his face in both my hands. “I apologize,” I said.

“You should apologize.”

“You must have been so upset.”

“I was so upset,” he said.

We were talking absolute nonsense. I could not remember a time in my entire life when I had been happier. I felt as if the surfaces of our skin had some sort of weird subliminal communication going on. I lost all sense of time. We went deep into each other; his face shifted under my eyes from that of a young kid to an old man’s, then became unfamiliar and otherworldly, then turned opaque and angelic, then looked like that of a feral boy, and then his face came back to me as the Felipe I was used to, and through all of it I felt as if I deeply knew and trusted him, as if I could easily find him, whoever or whatever he was.

Much later, we lay together, awake, our hands idly wandering over each other’s bodies. I was sliding my hand along his thigh; he was cupping one of my buttocks with the arm he had around me and nestling the knuckle of the index finger of his other hand in the hollow of my neck. I could smell us both, a musky, sweet, good smell. We both sighed every now and then, but there was nothing to say. After a while, he slid himself under me and pulled my leg up so my pelvis was straddling his hips and then he slowly plunged his cock into me again as he reached for another condom. I was a little sore, which made it feel even better somehow, all the nerves on edge. I snapped awake, charged with renewed lust, as strong as ever.