Trouble (26 page)

“I agree,” said Felipe. “Not that bad. Can you come tomorrow at seven?”

“Yes,” I said. “I’ll come tomorrow. What will you cook for me?”

“I’ll make you a
cochinita pibil,”
he said. “It’s a big piece of pork in spices that’s roasted in the oven all day. It’s a Yucatecan dish. My mother was born in Mérida, in the Yucatán, and she made it all the time when I was a kid.”

“My mouth is already watering, and I just had breakfast.”

“You love to eat. How are you so thin?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess I’m lucky.”

“It’s not bad to be fat,” he said. “Just different.”

“Is your girlfriend fat?” As soon as I said it, I regretted it.

He smiled at me. “She is not my girlfriend, Josefina.”

“I know,” I said. I was feeling an ache behind my eyes, in the bones of my skull, a sadness that meant I was saying good-bye to Felipe without really saying it. “She’s the lucky one,” I said. “To live so close to you and see you all the time.”

He was silent. So was I then. We sat this way for a long time, entwined around each other but not talking, until David appeared in Felipe’s doorway. I got up slowly. I brushed at my cheeks with the heels of my hands and turned to face Felipe. “See you tomorrow night,” I said, thinking as I said it that I might very well be on my way home by then, but then again, I might not. Who knew?

“I’m going to the market tomorrow for the
cochinita,”
he said, standing to face me.

“Thank you,” I said. “I’ll bring some good red wine.”

I kissed him. He stood still, not kissing me back, as if, I thought, by withholding himself from me now, I would be sure to return later. He wanted this as much as I did; I had no doubt of that.

David’s car smelled as dank and airless as it had the night when we’d driven on the raised freeway to Coyoacán. He pulled into the street and we were off.

“The other night at the gallery,” I blurted. “How did Raquel know she could get drugs from your sister if you didn’t tell her?”

“I denied it,” he said. “I told her my sister was clean. I tried to steer her away.”

“Then how did she know?”

“She has a nose,” he said. “She knew I was lying.”

“A nose,” I said skeptically.

“She can smell them,” he said. “She told me she always knows who’s got them, that she honed her antennae when she was a junkie and she never lost the second sense. Then she came by the Zócalo the other day, before you showed up, to ask for Maria’s phone number, but I wouldn’t give it to her. She took off without another word.”

“She found Maria at the cantina,” I said.

“Yes,” said David. “Poor Maria. She’s in a very bad way. You can’t blame her.”

“Of course not,” I said. “Raquel would have gotten the stuff one way or another, no matter what.”

“She’s in a bad way, too,” he said. “Maybe you can help her. You’re a therapist; you probably have some kind of magic spell to cure drug addiction.”

I laughed. “I wish,” I said.

He pulled up in front of the Isabel. “Hey, if I don’t see you again, it was good to meet you.”

“Likewise,” I said. “Good luck with your work, all of it.”

“You, too,” he said.

I kissed him on the cheek and got out and waved as he drove off. I walked into the lobby, smiling at the guard, as I always did. I decided to call Wendy and check my E-mail later and see what Raquel was up to first. At the front desk, I asked for the room key in case she had gone out, but the key wasn’t there, so apparently she hadn’t left, which made me almost giddy with relief. I had been more worried than I’d known, I realized, that she had relapsed, afraid that I would find her again at the cantina, beyond my reach.

I ran up both flights of stairs to our room. I could almost do it now without getting out of breath. I knocked on our door, calling, “Raquel! I’m home.”

While I waited for her to come to the door, I looked around the bright, cheerful courtyard. The plants on the balustrades were a little dry. They ought to water them, I thought. They would perk right up; plants always did with a little water.

I knocked again, even though I had a sudden strong feeling that she’d gone out and forgotten to give the key to the desk clerk and was now God knew where. “Raq,” I called, “it’s me.” A maid came along with her cart; I indicated with sign language that I needed to be let into the room. Obligingly, with a smile, and without the least bit of suspicion, because no doubt she’d seen me around the hotel in the past few days, she unlocked the door for me. I tipped her twenty pesos. She looked surprised and happy and burbled off with her cart; the maids at this hotel were amazingly friendly and cheery, I had noticed. Actually, almost everyone in Mexico City was, no matter how menial their job. It probably had to do with what Felipe had pointed out to me the other night, the fact that their lives were communal and filled with ritual and festivity.

The room was dark; the doors to the balcony were closed, and the lights were off. I went in quietly, in case she was still sleeping. It was almost noon already, and we’d been waking up pretty early as a rule, but I figured she had probably tied one on with her new pals the night before. When I saw Raquel’s tiny form in her bed, curled under the covers, her wild spray of hair over her pillow, I felt a second huge wave of relief. Thank God she hadn’t gone back to David’s sister’s cantina, that she wasn’t on some terrible destructive mission. I would never have forgiven myself for leaving her alone.

I climbed into my own bed and turned on my reading lamp and opened
A Passage to India
, which Raquel had left on my pillow. I looked over at her, afraid I’d disturbed her and that she’d be pissed at me for waking her up, but apparently I had been quiet enough, because she hadn’t stirred. A piece of paper fell out of the book. Glancing at it, I saw her handwriting. It reminded me of sharing books when we were in college. I would find her comments penciled in the margins, something like “Fucking crock of horseshit!” or “Stinks of ego” in Henry James, or “I am so in love with this novel, I could scream” in
The House of Mirth
, or “How much acid did she take?” in
Pale Horse, Pale Rider
. I opened the sheet of paper, expecting a “Memsahib” and snarky, affectionate jokes about the British abroad.

“Dear Josie,” the letter said in that familiar loopy scrawl. “I am so sorry to do this to you. Please try to forgive me. It’s nothing but a big relief to get out of here. I love you, retard. Tell Chuy if he’s up to it, he can try to save my new album, remix it, sing backup on it, turn it into Muzak, anything he wants. Raquel. P. S. You don’t have to do anything, but I want to be buried down here, next to my grandparents. Here’s my dad’s phone number and the name of the church. My will is with my lawyer. Here’s his phone number. Just so you know, I left you my house. You can sell it or give it to Wendy when she’s ready for it.”

I put the paper down, my lips dry and my eyes wide and all my veins running with cold fluid. I turned to look at her. She looked like herself, asleep.

“Raquel,” I whispered.

Of course she didn’t move.

“Raq,” I said.

I gave three harsh sobs, and then I pulled myself together with a strong internal slap, leaned over, and touched her face. Of course it was cold. I saw then that her lips were bluish.

I don’t know why I did it, but I pulled the covers back to look at her whole body. I was flooded with love, and then grief so fierce I was paralyzed for a moment. She lay on her side, scrawny and beautiful and naked, curled into herself like a fetus, her arms crossed on her chest, her legs drawn up. She was marked by a green lizard tattoo on her ankle, a brilliant sunflower in the small of her back, and a line from Dorothy Parker on her shoulder: “What fresh hell is this?” I knew the stories behind all her tattoos, and had been with her when she got two of them, the ones on her ankle and the small of her back, such painful places to get tattoos that both times she had almost broken my hand, squeezing it. Nestled by her body were five glassine packets, all of them empty. Cradled in her arms was a mescal bottle, also empty.

There was a rapid, hard knock on the door.

“Who is it?” I shrieked.

“It’s Malcolm,” he said. “I came to see if you guys wanted to have some lunch.”

I went to the door and opened it. The ginger-headed photographer stood there looking pale and scruffy and a little hungover. I was so happy to see a familiar face, I could have kissed him. “I need your help,” I said. “Raquel is in trouble.”

“Is she sick?” he asked in a low voice.

I looked into his face to gauge his reaction, to see whether or not I could trust him not to panic, to help me figure out what to do next: a doctor, an ambulance, all the phone calls, the funeral. It suddenly hit me, what lay ahead, and I was suddenly enraged. If she’d stayed alive, we could all be on our way out to lunch now, I thought, and none of this would have to unfold the way it’s about to.

“She’s dead,” I said.

“In there?” “In her bed.”

“How did it happen?”

I didn’t answer, because I wasn’t sure. She had overdosed, of course, but there was no needle, and she had no marks on her arms. Could one snort oneself to death? I wondered. She weighed only eighty-nine pounds, after all. Her tolerance was low now that she’d been clean for so long. She must have snorted herself to death.

While I stood pondering this, Malcolm pushed past me and went into the room and stood over Raquel’s naked body. I crossed the room in three long strides and pounced on him, ready to tear his face off if that was what it took to get the camera away before he could photograph her, but I was too weak and slow, and he was too good at his job. While he fended me off, his camera flashed once, then twice; then he was out of the room, running, gone. It was too late, but I drew the covers back up anyway and tucked her in. I flushed the glassine packets down the toilet and put the empty mescal bottle into the trash can, and then I went to the phone and called down to the front desk and told the friendly round-faced boy what had happened.

 
ess than half an hour later, three authoritative young men arrived in a blur of Spanish-speaking officialdom. I told them I had just come in and found her, and they took one look at her and all three of them nodded sagely in unison, as if they assumed she had wasted away from starvation or consumption. Probably because I was crying and couldn’t stop, I was handed a pill by one of these vaguely medical-seeming bureaucrats, which I took without any questions concerning its identity. I sat on my bed and watched mutely as Raquel’s body was examined, pronounced dead, wrapped in a white sheath, and taken away on a stretcher. After they’d taken her, I sat alone in the quiet, empty room for a few minutes, numb from the pill. From its subtly sedative effect, I assumed it was a Valium.

Finally, in a haze, I got up and went downstairs and began to set things in motion. None of the paparazzi was anywhere in sight. Maybe they had followed Raquel to the morgue or the funeral home and had bribed the officials there and were madly photographing her corpse right this minute, but there was nothing I could do about that.

I used the phone at the lobby desk, since the entire hotel already knew what had happened. This had become a comforting, familiar spot, standing on the phone by the hotel desk. I called Raquel’s father in L.A. and then her mother in New York. Rafael Dominguez collapsed on the phone; his fourth and most recent wife, Maryann, a very capable-sounding, friendly woman I had never met, took the receiver from him and said good-bye quickly to follow him, she told me, to their bedroom to make sure he hadn’t had a heart attack.

Raquel’s mother, Suzie Weinstein, didn’t break down or collapse. As the mother of a daughter myself, I knew right away that her instant organizational overdrive was a brittle dam holding back the howls of grief she couldn’t let loose because she feared she might never be able to stop. My heart broke for her.

“I’ll be down as soon as I can get there,” she said at the end of the call, after I had told her all about our trip, Raquel’s state of mind, everything I knew that had led up to her death. “What’s the number of the place where they took her? I’ll call them. Call me back for any reason whatsoever. I have my cell with me at all times.”

I told her to bring a warm coat and promised to let her know everything I found out.

Indrani broke down; she was incoherent with grief. I cried with her. We were family to each other, and we had just lost our sister. There was almost nothing to say except how much we looked forward to seeing each other when I got home, how comforting that would be for us both.

Chuy shouted and swore at the phone and told me he was with me and to tell him what to do, that he’d do anything. I told him Raquel had wanted him to fix her new album, but I wasn’t sure he heard me. I decided I would have to say it again, in a calmer moment.

Anthony wasn’t home when I called my own number, so I had to tell Wendy, so at least she wouldn’t learn it on the Internet or hear it on the news. She was hysterical, hiccupping into the phone. I soothed her, crying also, while the desk clerk kindly looked elsewhere and the other people in the lobby all eavesdropped openly. I didn’t care what they thought or knew; I held on to the phone, talking with Wendy until I was dizzy, not wanting to release her, knowing she would be home alone after we hung up, but she finally said she was okay and made sure I was, too. She promised to call Anthony’s cell phone immediately, and then we said we loved each other and hung up, both of us still crying. I went into the ladies’ room off the lobby and washed my face, blew my nose.

When I came back out, I called the
Los Angeles Times
and asked about an obituary; they had already heard that she was dead. I didn’t waste any energy cursing my stupidity at letting Malcolm into the room. What was done was done, and there was nothing they could do anymore to hurt her. Of course the photos of her corpse were already all over the Internet; I had warned Wendy not to look.

I ran upstairs for my coat and ran down again and asked the desk clerk to call me a taxi. I took it to Raquel’s father’s family’s tiny, ancient church, which turned out to be a five-minute ride from the Isabel. I had a long talk in the dim, plaster-smelling sanctuary office with a very kind but unyielding old priest who spoke fairly good English and asked a lot of questions and nodded his large, wrinkled, totally bald head and, in the end, told me sympathetically but in no uncertain terms that the Catholic Church couldn’t bury her. It wasn’t possible, first of all because she had killed herself, and, second, because of the very public nature of the scandal she’d been embroiled in. He said I was welcome to wait for the official decree from the bishop, but he was trying to save me time and headache: He knew the Church would refuse her.

I took the waiting taxi back to the Isabel, and I tipped the driver so generously he almost levitated with happiness. At the desk, I called Suzie Weinstein back; she picked up before the end of the first ring. She was in a cab on the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge, she told me in a clipped, strident, heartbroken voice, on her way to JFK, and she had a reservation on a flight that would arrive that night, just before midnight. The instant I told her the Catholics wouldn’t bury Raquel, she said, “Hold on a sec,” and put her hand over her mouthpiece; I heard her telling the driver to turn around and take her back to East Seventy-eighth Street. Then she said to me in a rapid-fire stream, “That’s good news. I’m frankly relieved. I’m going to have them fly her back here; that’s what I wanted to do from the start. There’s a plot for her at the family cemetery in New Jersey. She’ll be the fourth generation to go in the plot. Listen. Don’t worry, hon, I’ll handle everything. I’ll take it from here. And you should fly home tonight, sweetheart. Don’t stay there alone. I’ll make some arrangements for you.”

“I have an open return ticket,” I said.

“I’ll book you a seat home tonight. I’ve got connections.”

Gratefully, knowing she just wanted something, anything, to do right then, I gave her my airline information. I felt no hesitation; in fact, I appreciated being told what to do. I appreciated even more the fact that Suzie wanted to handle the repatriation of the body, which I imagined would involve a lot of red tape and hassle, which she sounded perfectly capable of dealing with from thousands of miles away.

I went upstairs, lay on my bed, stared at the ceiling for a while, unable to sleep but completely wrung out. I got up and went downstairs again. The lobby was all abustle with TV news cameras, photographers, reporters, and curious bystanders. I went to the desk, and the clerk called Suzie back for me and handed me the receiver. She picked up immediately. She’d already called the morgue, she announced, and a Mexican funeral home, and the American embassy in Mexico City; everything had been set in motion, and Raquel’s body was practically on its way to New York as we spoke. I could not believe it had been so easy for her to arrange this, when burying Raquel in Mexico had proved to be impossible.

Suzie had also booked me a seat on a flight to JFK, which would leave at 6:05 that evening.

“You’d better get going,” she said. “It’s after three now.”

I went upstairs and looked around at the room. There was Raquel’s brush. There was her coat. There were her clothes. I felt desperate to get home, to get back to Wendy, to sleep in my own bed that night next to my soon-to-be ex-husband. It was excruciating to have to be in the hotel room anymore. As quickly as I could, I packed up my things and Raquel’s.

I squirmed my way past everyone, headed to the front desk, asked the clerk to call me a taxi, and escaped from the Isabel— by some miracle, without attracting any attention.

Suzie Weinstein had upgraded my open ticket to a first-class one, to my eternal gratitude. I made my way to the gate, a bit shaky on my pins. When my flight was announced, I got onto the plane in an addled stupor of disbelief and accepted a glass of champagne, and then guzzled another one, settling back into my wide, comfortable, expensive seat, trying not to think about Raquel, wherever she was now. That isn’t Raquel anymore, I told myself. There was no reason to feel bad about leaving her behind; she’d be on her way to New York soon enough.

The plane took off into dark air so impenetrable with pollution the lights of the city disappeared almost immediately. I realized as we climbed out of the valley that I hadn’t called Felipe. In fact, I hadn’t called any of our new friends, not David, and not Eugenia and Alfredo. I had forgotten all about them, even Felipe; I had barely known any of them, of course. Whatever fledgling feelings Felipe and I had been starting to feel for each other were almost certainly not fibrous or dense enough yet to stand up to this sort of calamity. But I would have to call him first thing the next day.

I fell into a deep sleep for the entire five-hour flight and woke up only when the pilot came on to announce that we were approaching New York City. As the plane circled Kennedy and came down over the familiar flat roofs of Queens, I felt a heavy phantom weight in my lap float away as I returned fully to consciousness, as if Raquel had been resting there, sleeping, too, while I slept. I had never believed in ghosts or spirits; I was as empirically minded as they came, but I felt her presence palpably.

The plane bounced down and hit the runway with Nevada salt flats all-out speed, then immediately slowed and taxied sedately to the gate. I was the first person off the plane. I walked along the empty hallway with my silly corporate vice president’s bag rolling behind me and the bag I’d bought to hold all Raquel’s stuff slung over my shoulder. It was clear sailing through the spooky midnight airport to customs; no one seemed to be there, and all the kiosks were closed. The airport was half-dark. I dealt with the usual slight amount of rigmarole with a very sleepy guy at the customs desk, and then I was free to go home.

I went out to the taxi stand, inhaling the cold New York winter air, which smelled clean and fresh to me for the first time ever in my life. I was first in line. A cab pulled up, and I got in, gave the driver my old address, and sat back to enjoy the ride. We sped through the dark, shallow canyons of the nighttime freeways of Brooklyn.

“Happy New Year,” the Jamaican driver said liltingly, turning to look at me in the backseat.

“What?” I asked.

“It’s twelve o’clock!”

“Yeah?”

“It’s 2008!”

“Holy shit,” I said. “It’s New Year’s.”

I reached over to where I wished Raquel were sitting and took her invisible hand and held it all the way back to West Eighteenth Street. I imagined that I could feel her leaning against me, half-asleep, worn-out. It was the only way I could comfort myself, to feel her with me.

It took almost two hours to get from the airport to my old building, because of all the revelers thronging the streets, the honking, happy traffic crawling across Manhattan. After I’d paid and tipped the driver, I let myself in and climbed the stairs. As I dragged my bag behind me, I dimly recalled buying it a thousand years ago in a spirit of derring-do. And now here I was, back again, and everything and nothing had changed. I took out my keys and let myself in and stood in the tiny foyer, breathing the air. It smelled, of course, of hours-old undercooked spaghetti and a Christmas pine tree slightly past its prime.

As soon as the door shut behind me, I felt the suck of silence in my eardrums, felt the beat of darkness against my eyeballs. Trying not to picture Raquel’s body in its coffin, or wherever it was at that moment, I left the bags in the foyer, crept to the bedroom, quickly undressed, and slid into bed next to Anthony without washing my face or brushing my teeth or even peeing. I was sure I wouldn’t be able to sleep, but the next thing I knew, it was morning, and Anthony was still snoring next to me. I came awake all at once, without any memory of having been asleep. The room was too warm, for a change. Had Anthony fiddled with the radiator while I was gone? His snoring was soft and skeptical, as if he were unconvinced by whatever he was dreaming about. I looked at his profile, his chin slack, his nose jutting. Twenty-four hours earlier, I had woken up next to Felipe.

For the first time since I’d found Raquel’s body, I missed Felipe with a burning, empty, sad feeling in my chest. To quell it, I slid out of bed as cautiously as I’d crept in, as if I had no right to be there anymore, and went into the bathroom. I brushed my teeth until it felt like all the enamel had worn off and then took a long, hot shower and scrubbed my skin until it felt raw. I dressed in clothes I hadn’t seen in a while, black trousers and a sweater that now seemed as if they belonged to someone else, then went past Anthony’s sleeping form to the kitchen. Wendy wasn’t up yet, either. How long had I slept? I looked at the clock. It was only nine on a holiday, but normally Anthony was up by six every day, weekday or weekend, and Wendy had never been much of a late sleeper.