Trouble (25 page)

“It’s so hard to wait to get the thing on,” he said. “It’s almost impossible to pull out of you now.” He inhaled sharply as he pulled out, as if it were painful, and managed to get the condom on, and then he was back inside me, filling me with hard heat. This time it lasted until I was dizzy from gasping, until we were both drooling a little from prolonged, intense pleasure. I felt myself spinning out on some plain of total rapture, hovering. “Hey,” he whispered in my ear, “Josie,” and then I stared into his eyes. His brown eyes were so close to mine, I could see again the gold coronas bursting around his irises. His skin smelled familiar to me now. We were both comically slack-faced, but we weren’t laughing. We were earnestly focused, barely moving, moving very subtly, then almost not moving at all, just the slightest motion of rocking together with him deep, deep inside me, our pelvic bones locked together. I felt increasing heat and pressure building, then even more, slowly and inevitably, as if every part of my existence were concentrated in my groin and then my cunt, and then all of my entire being and consciousness was funneled into the tiny nub of my clitoris, and then, with a hard thunderclap of a shout in unison, we both came together in a series of long, slow throbs that emptied us into each other.

Finally, we fell asleep, naked and damp and hot under the covers. When I woke up, the air was bright with sunshine against my closed eyelids. Without opening my eyes, I stirred against Felipe very slightly so I could place myself in relation to him. His legs were between mine. One of my arms was under him and the other rested on his belly. My face was smooshed into the crook of his shoulder. The sole of my right foot was pressed against his calf. An aerial view would have shown me clinging to him as if I were drowning and him lying there flat on his back, one arm around me, his hand cradling my jutting hip, the other hand tucked with his legs between mine. I rose up through sleep until I was fully awake, but I didn’t move. I lay there and savored this, knowing that the instant he woke up, we would fuck again, which excited me, but I also felt like I wanted to guard as long as I could this sleeping ease and fluency with each other’s unconscious bodies.

He slept on. The room got brighter. His bed was wide and firm, but softer than the beds at the Isabel. He had a hard scratchy wool woven blanket and a thin down coverlet. The clock on his nightstand was the old-fashioned windup kind. It ticked loudly; I couldn’t see its face from where I lay. The room smelled of skin and breath and sex and morning city air leaking through the invisible pores and cracks in the outer walls. Suddenly, Felipe was staring right into my eyes, smiling. I smiled back. Then he was inside me again, groaning because he had forgotten again to put on a condom.

“Aren’t we running out of condoms?” I croaked through a dry mouth.

“I have more,” he said sleepily.

“Let me get it,” I said.

With him still inside me, I leaned over, not caring whether or not my breasts looked saggy as they swung in his face; we were well past that now. I found a fresh condom packet, brought it back to our huddle, tore it open, lifted my hips so he slid out of me, rolled it onto him, and then tucked him back inside me all snug and hot and hard.

“This is how I like to wake up in the morning,” he muttered into my ear.

“I am so sore.” I laughed.

“Me, too,” he said, laughing.

I repositioned myself so he went in deeper and I closed around him even more completely, so we fit together like a ball in a socket. We both grunted with the pain and pleasure of it.

“I think I’m chapped,” I said.

“What does that mean?”

“Like when the weather is cold and windy and your lips get raw and dry and the skin rubs off them,” I said.

“But it’s not cold in here,” he said suggestively.

Felipe’s shoulder was satiny under my mouth, and his hips were moving in the most slinky, sinuous way. “I just realized we’re two lapsed Catholics committing double adultery,” I said.

“I thought about that.”

“Does some part of you think we’re going to hell for this?”

“Do you?”

“The Catholics lost me a long time ago. It made no sense to me even as a kid.”

“Me, too,” he said. “It seemed crazy. All the things you had to feel bad about.”

“Making people feel bad and then good again is how the Church keeps its power over them. I say, cut out the middleman and do your own reckoning.”

He laughed.

“We’re going to hell,” I said. “Aren’t we?”

“If you’re there, it might be nice,” he said.

After we finished, we took a hot shower together and almost fucked again, but then we admitted and agreed that we were too weak with hunger to go another round, so we got out and dried off. I put on the previous day’s jeans, sweater, underwear, and socks, wishing I had fresh clothes but glad that at least I was clean myself. In the kitchen, Felipe made coffee and I rummaged in his fridge, which was surprisingly well stocked for a bachelor’s.

“You have a lot of food in here,” I said.

“My kids,” he said. “Always hungry.”

I took out eggs, tomatoes, butter, and cheese, along with a bowl of homemade black beans and some fresh hot peppers. I found a frying pan and a bowl to crack the eggs into and concocted a big, messy, spicy omelette oozing with melted cheese, with hot beans and warm tortillas on the side. We carried our plates and cups of coffee out to the courtyard and sat in wrought-iron chairs at a little table. It was sunny and almost warm, and birds chirped madly. The bougainvillea looked surreally bright and luridly hot pink against the scuffed whitewashed cinder-block wall. The enormous science fiction-y potted rubber plants reminded me of Felipe’s paintings; I would have bet he’d used them as his models.

“Buenos días,”
said David, coming out of the door across the courtyard, carrying a newspaper and his own cup of coffee.

He didn’t seem to blink an eye or miss a beat, finding me there with Felipe. I guessed our courtship had been as obvious to everyone else as it had been to us. We had been making out in front of them all since the instant we’d met each other.

“Siéntate”
said Felipe, kicking a chair closer to him.

David sat and stretched his legs out under the table and almost, but not quite, smiled at us. “Did you sleep well?” he asked.

Felipe and I laughed and didn’t answer.

“Did you?” I asked him.

“Just fine,” he said. “How is Raquel?”

“I don’t know,” I said with a pang of worry. How indeed was Raquel right this minute? I hoped she was enjoying a nice breakfast in the hotel restaurant. “I’d better get back to the hotel soon and find her.”

“Is she sick?” Felipe asked. “She seemed all right yesterday.”

“Her life is sick, I guess.” I looked over at David. “Sorry about the other day,” I said.

“It’s okay,” he said. “You just wanted someone to blame.”

“You want some breakfast?” I asked him.

“What is it?”

“An omelette,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”

I went into the kitchen, put some food on a plate for David, and took it out to him. The three of us ate in silence. I could not believe how hungry I’d been since arriving in Mexico and how much I was eating. I didn’t feel as if I had gained any weight; maybe it was all the walking and cigarettes.

Felipe passed cigarettes around when we’d finished eating and we all lit up. It felt so decadent and luxurious to smoke. I hadn’t smoked since I was in my early thirties, before Wendy, in those fun early days of marriage when I had gone to parties or bars with Anthony, stayed out late. He had always been a big drinker, but back then he had been social about it rather than solitary. Every now and then he and I would tie one on; we’d buy a pack of cigarettes and smoke the whole thing between us in one night and wake up the next day relaxed, hungover, and euphoric. We had been good drinking buddies, my husband and I; I remembered sitting hunkered down with him in a bar years ago, our heads close together, talking and drinking and smoking. Of course, he had done the lion’s share of all three, but I had tried to keep up.

It was remarkable how little I had thought, the whole time I had been in Mexico, about Anthony and Wendy, my clients, my “real life.” I was undergoing something that had to do only with me. My subterranean tectonic psyche was shifting and heaving. My outer landscape was changing just as fast, but it was all coming from somewhere way below. I felt nothing but relief and a slight sadness at the end of my marriage, the emotional equivalent of getting a rotten tooth pulled. I knew in my bones that Wendy was okay. At that moment, I could hardly think about anything besides sitting in this funny courtyard. I felt the sated, soaring, goofy joy that came from the untrammeled, augmented commingling with another person, the pleasure of magnificent, requited lust, somehow suddenly right in myself. But I wasn’t young or free; I had to resist being pulled into the opiated osmosis of a new love affair. My friend was in trouble; my daughter needed me at home; I had to get back and support myself while I disentangled my marriage, which was not going to be simple or fun. I needed all my faculties. This was not the time for falling in love. I was going to have to let Felipe go, I realized. It was getting harder and harder to accept this, but I hadn’t forgotten it, and I wouldn’t.

I covertly watched David’s face. I had been so wrong about him. I hoped he had a nice boyfriend. I hoped those peasants could save their forest.

“What’s going on in Chiapas?” I asked him out of the blue.

He said promptly, as if this subject was never far from his thoughts and he was glad to be asked about it so he didn’t have to keep everything inside for a moment, “You know about the Belt of Misery?”

“What belt of misery?” I asked, picturing a chastity device or a self-torture leather thing.

“Tens of thousands of people live in a belt around San Cristóbal de las Casas in the most terrible conditions. It is a slum of slums. They converted to evangelical Protestantism, and the Catholics sent them away, violently.”

“Your family did this?”

“My uncle is one of the worst,” said David. “These used to be his neighbors and friends. Just thrown out of their lives to go and live in the dirt in shacks they’ve built from garbage, with no plumbing or electricity. All around San Cristóbal de las Casas, they’ve built these tragic shantytowns. San Cristóbal de las Casas is a beautiful little city in the most amazing mountain valley. The air is so clean, the mountains rise up, and the presence of God is everywhere if you swing that way. You know?”

“And these are your people,” I said.

“You said it,” said David. “I love my uncle and I want to help my father’s town, but I think what they’ve done is as bad as anything the corporate loggers are doing. I tell him, ‘You’ve got the most bizarre church I’ve ever seen, but you’re not persecuted for your own deviance from orthodox Catholicism.’ But he says the evangelicals are infidels and sinners.”

“Life is complicated,” said Felipe.

“Life is fucking complicated,” David agreed. “And of course the reason the
caciques
hate the evangelicals is also economic. In their rituals, they use candles and a corn liquor called p-o-x, pronounced
posh
, and they’re expensive. The evangelicals stopped using them, so the local economy was disrupted. Also, there’s not enough farmland to go around. When you scratch it, it’s all about money. The way of the world.”

“Not everything is about money,” I said.

“No?” said David.

“No,” I said.

“Easy for you to say,” replied David. He said it in a friendly way. “Who wouldn’t be optimistic if they had just been to bed with my amigo Felipe here?”

I laughed. After an instant, when he saw that we were just teasing and neither of us had anything but good will toward each other, Felipe did, too.

“I have to get back to the Isabel and find Raquel,” I said. “Maybe we’ll go to Mass after that lovely conversation. I’ll pray for the Belt of Misery.”

“They don’t want your damn Catholic prayers,” said David amiably. “Do you want a ride? I’m driving over to the Centro in a little while, after I run an errand.”

“That would be great,” I said. I collected the plates and took them inside. Felipe followed with the cups and ashtray.

“I’ll wash the dishes,” he said. “Leave them and come and sit with me before you go.”

I followed him into the living room. He sat on the couch. I sat down next to him and curled into him. He put his arm around me and rested his chin on top of my head.

“I wanted to be a painter,” I said, “when I was younger. I studied art in college, but I lacked both the talent and the discipline for it. All I had was a romantic idea about being an artist.”

Felipe laughed. “That was your first mistake. It’s not romantic at all.”

“Do you think you’ll go back up to New York to live again anytime soon?” I had decided not to bring up anything to do with the future, but I couldn’t help myself.

“I wish I could,” he said. “But as long as my kids are little, I want to be here all the time. I don’t want them to forget about me. They need me.”

“Of course.” I was examining his hand, his broad, clean fingernails, his strong, stubby fingers, and the flat of his palm, which was paler than the rest of his skin and etched with dark purple lines.

“I want to see you every night,” he said.

“Me, too,” I said.

“Can you come back here tonight? I can cook a dinner for you.”

Maybe because of our conversation about her making an album with Chuy, maybe because the photographers had found her and there was nothing left to hide from, I had a feeling Raquel was just starting to get itchy to go home, and without her here, there would be nothing keeping me here. I would leave when she did.

“I don’t know if that’s possible,” I said. “I’m not supposed to be down here to meet a man. I came down to think about ending my marriage and to help Raquel. Actually, I’m feeling a little bad about leaving her alone all night.”

“How bad do you feel, Josefina?” he asked sneakily.

I laughed. It was a smutty, dark, glutted chuckle I had never heard myself make before. “Okay,” I said. “Not that bad.”