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  “But to disappear! In Mexico! Maybe he was robbed and killed by a street gang—”

  Mickey sighed. “Oh yes, maybe,” he said sarcastically. “But these kids—they have so much spunk, and they have all our arrogance. They think they have invented idealism. They want to be the conscience of the country. They want to wake the rest of us up. They know nothing of history, of fate. I ask them: ‘So you throw out the best system in Latin America. Then what? What will you have?’ I ask them that, and they smile at me as though it will all have to be explained to me one day. They want too much.”

  “All the young are greedy.” Abilene was surprised to hear herself say that; where had she heard it; from someone else? “I’m surprised at your lack of sympathy, Mickey. You’ve always talked like a bitter man.”

  “Bitter? Yes, I’m bitter. Did I say I didn’t agree with my friends? I spend many nights with them, fighting new battles for independence, all with words. When none of us has a woman, we talk all night.” He winced at this admission. Abilene wondered how he could fail to see how fortunate he was, despite his concrete floor and cold water. He had mobility, access. He had an education, two languages. He even had his son now; his Texas wife had abandoned the child for a hippie commune. Mickey’s parents kept the child. Tonio paid school tuition.

  “It will blow over,” Mickey said, stretching and yawning. “If they talk too much they’ll breathe too much dirty air and fall down sick.” He made a face. It was nothing to him. He saw the students as Tonio saw him: impertinent.

  She asked him an easy question. “Are you hungry?” She knew he could go hungry for days before he would offer to get food. Two long jaunts with him had taught her his strategies. Kindly she considered: he puts away nuts for winter. He’s a squirrel, like me. She touched the gold bracelet on her arm like a talisman. It had been a gift from Tonio.

  She fried eggs and tortillas. Mickey stood in the doorway and watched her work. As she was turning the eggs, he said, “Tonio is seeing Anne Lise in Mexico.”

  “I’m not surprised.” She handed Mickey his plate and followed him to the table. In truth she was shocked to the bones. It didn’t help that she had seen it coming. She remembered how hangdog Mickey had been at the tienta, watching Tonio wipe the very cushion on which Anne Lise sat. Mickey had found no comfort in Abilene, who had gone numb, and then to Sage’s bed. She remembered it as an old woman looking back on something very long ago. She hadn’t expected Sage’s ardor, or his contrition.

  “She’s beautiful,” she said coolly, using her fork to burst the yolks of her eggs. She didn’t know if she could eat. “Like Tonio,” she said.

  Mickey ate heartily, despite his proclamations of anguish. “She’s not a movie star. Or a stewardess, or an American student on vacation. She’s first class.”

  How like a child Mickey was! He saw only himself, hurt because his plan to show off to Tonio had backfired. He hadn’t even considered what it meant to Abilene. And what did it mean? Maybe it was the perfect thing to happen, to take choice out of the game, as always. Like the death of your parents, the loss of a lover was a catapult.

  “Tonio is nearly forty years old,” she said. “He’s tired of movie stars.”

  “He’s never gone with a girl like Anne Lise.”

  “How is that?” Despite her intention to remain friendly—when Mickey left she would be alone again—she was rising to his insult. In his own way he was as rude as Tacho.

  “She doesn’t put out,” he said.

  Her face burned at the edges, a ragged face torn from a picture. “How colloquial your English still is,” she said.

  “Some do, some don’t,” he persisted, but he blushed.

  “Put the plates in the sink.” She pushed her plate across to Mickey. He was astonished. “Go on!” she snapped. He took the dishes but didn’t rinse them. He knew a maid would come in the morning. Poor Mickey knew all about maids.

  “Every year you get touchier,” he said when he sat back down. “I’d think you would treat me better, all things considered.”

  She leaned under the light to glare at him. “Whatever you had coming to you, you’ve been paid twice over.” She knew what made him mad, what would make him mad forever, was that she had abandoned him twice in Acapulco. The second time she had walked out while he was in the shower. She had reached the bottom of the hill before he figured it out. She had heard him screaming from the walk outside their room, above her, stark naked, disbelieving.

  “He’s gone to Morelia to a house party,” he said casually. Cool, green, colonial Morelia. “Anne Lise and her mother will be in Morelia, too.”

  “He told me he was going out of town,” she lied. “Did Anne Lise tell you her plans?”

  “I read it in the paper. She’s a diplomat’s daughter. It’s minor news but good gossip. She isn’t Tonio’s usual bitch.” He glared at her. One of these days, Abilene thought, he and I will have to punch it out with one another.

  She stood. He stood, “I saw Isabel. She said she would come by,” he said, in a voice to soothe her. She went into the bedroom and slammed the door hard. Mickey jiggled the handle and called to her a few times. Then she heard him let himself out. She leaned against the door, facing the window, and through it, the blackness of a city night. She talked to herself in a small singsong voice. If she spoke aloud, she did not have to think too much.

  Why should I care what Tonio does? I wouldn’t want him to see me like this. I don’t care about Anne Lise. She’s one of those girls who grew up without ever hearing a four-letter word, and he thinks it is fun to play games with her. He wants to break her down. Sorority girls take longer. If I let that bother me, where would I ever be? Who would ever have me?

  I miss the ranch as much as Tonio. Before I left I saw how dark it is, the dark places I never looked at before. The thicket with its path grown over. The vines in the tennis court. And the birds.

  Tonio said that some men went down in the pit of swallows. How would that be, to fall and fall? At the bottom, is it dark and wet? Would you sink and disappear? I know you would die, but would you disappear?

  Would you?

  “Cheer up,” Isabel said. “Soon Reyles will peel your scab and I will take you out. I promised my sister Ceci and her friends we’d go dancing.”

  “I dreamed I was on a train. I looked up and my mother was on a seat facing me, two or three rows ahead. She was in her waitress uniform, with her legs stuck straight out in front of her like a dead chicken’s. She was sleeping. I tried to talk to her, but she wouldn’t open her eyes.”

  “Bah.” Isabel would have none of it. “I don’t know about dreams. If I wake up feeling bad, I smoke a little, or drink a bit of vodka or rum, and then I go back to sleep. I don’t know about the past either. What did I do as a child? Who did what to me? I don’t remember, I tell you! My mother remembers everything. She told me just yesterday at dinner. There was a woman who lived in a house on her street when she was a child. The woman grew an avocado plant so tall and strong it went to the ceiling and broke the skylight. My mother tells me this very solemnly; it has meaning for her, you see. But not for me! I collect my money from the vendors, I go to parties and am a good sport so they will all ask me back. I look for Ceci, because my parents can’t see to the other side of the windows on the street. Who has time for the past? For dreams?”

  The table was strewn with the remains of lunch. Isabel had brought roast chicken, mangoes and lime, flowery Guerrero grass.

  “Michael Sage says he’s in love with me.” Abilene belched softly.

  “So he’s the one!”

  Abilene nodded.

  “Tonio can’t have liked that!”

  “He doesn’t know. Or doesn’t say.”

  Isabel rolled a neat joint and they passed it back and forth. “You can bet he knows,” she said. “He knows everything. And Sage! Tonio hates him.”

 
; “Tonio leases to him.”

  “He’s a good rancher. But such a big man!” Isabel giggled. “Tonio minds his size, don’t you see?”

  Suddenly it was terribly funny. Abilene nearly choked telling Isabel about Sage at the tienta. “We made love while Tonio was down at the ring.”

  “He knows.”

  “I don’t think so. Wouldn’t he say?”

  “Not until he wants to. Then you’ll see.”

  “Oh what, Isabel? Tell me what he’ll do!”

  Isabel had known Tonio a long time, ten years or so. Felix, too. She met them at a party where all the men wore togas, and wreaths on their heads. “It’ll be Sage he’ll get,” she said. Abilene was shivering. “Tonio can do terrible things,” Isabel went on. “Once he hung a trespasser and got away with it.”

  “I know all those stories. So what? He can’t hang Sage!” Abilene felt her stomach rumble. “Anyway I’m too stoned to worry. I’m glad you came.”

  “If I was you, girl, I’d be thinking what next.”

  “Don’t, Isabel. It’s been awful, all these days in Felix’s apartment.”

  “Maybe Tonio forgives you, because you caped that little cow. I thought she was going to gore you, for sure.”

  “But Tonio stepped in and saved me! He caped the little cow away. So see?”

  Isabel was quite merry. “You had one leg propped up on the other, like a stork. What would it have looked like if he’d let you get hurt, in front of all those people? Oh, you’ll hear more about your rancher lover, chiquita. Tonio will pick his time.”

  “Don’t frighten me!”

  “I’ve got to go.”

  “No. Oh, but it’s time to go to Reyles’.”

  “I’ll drop you. Then you can come and smoke a little more and sleep like a baby.” Isabel touched Abilene’s face. “Don’t you wonder,” she said very softly, “what it looks like inside, after what they did?”

  Abilene burst into tears.

  “What is it you want?” Sage had asked in April. They were lying in her bed while down in the bar and along the trellised walkway, Tonio’s tienta guests drank rum punch and made jokes about the bulls. Some of the women would be at the ring, watching Tonio ride.

  She answered easily, without thinking first. “To change what happened between us.”

  “You know I’m sorry.”

  “Not just that. Not that you beat me like a thief.” He shifted away from her on the bed. He was sober, almost grim; she was drowsy and happy, in her way. She was glad to have a chance to tell him how much he hurt her, but she knew it was mean. In two years, she had forgotten. Why remember things that make you unhappy?

  “I’d change all of it,” she said. “I’d pick it up and put it down someplace else. Away from the hotel, away from Tonio’s land. I’d put it someplace where you would be serious—”

  “If I hadn’t been serious I would never have been so angry—”

  She sat up and hugged her knees and stared at the funny print on the wall: Christ at the Last Supper, forever gazing down on women coming undone in bed. She didn’t know how to make Sage understand that what she really wanted was to start her own life over, to be a teenager again, to understand that she could say yes, she could say no. She could choose her life instead of letting it happen to her.

  She didn’t see how she could do that anymore. How she could start so late. “I’m going to go out in the morning and cape one of the brave calves,” she said. The business of the tienta was over; now the guests could have a good time playing torero. Every tienta someone had his pants torn. It was never very serious; Tonio only let the bad calves in with the amateurs.

  “You’re crazy. Tonio won’t let you.”

  “You don’t know him! He’ll love it. He’ll think I’m being ballsy. He’ll like watching to see if I get hurt, playing around, he’ll like waiting to decide when to step in.”

  “You could get hurt!”

  “Don’t I know that!”

  “What about us, Abby?”

  “There’s no such thing.” Yet an hour ago she had let him sigh and weep over her, and bring his contrition to climax. He thought that was the same as being forgiven.

  “I love you. I’ve thought about it for nearly two years, Abby. We’re two of a kind. I don’t think we’re such great people, but we’re of a kind. I’d be better with you. And you don’t belong with Tonio. He can’t ever know you.”

  “He doesn’t have to.” She went into the shower. “He doesn’t have to!” she shouted from under the water. “He owns me,” she said, but only to herself. “The way he owns everything.”

  Like Sage’s leased land. His leased life. What a fool she would have to be to think it could be that easy! To start over with a man who hated Tonio? And even if Tonio loved someone else, he wouldn’t let her go. Not to Sage.

  They would have to start over on the moon.

  She walked home from Reyles’ office soaked to the skin. She liked the awfulness of the rain, the stripping to the skin inside the apartment, her hair clinging to her neck and face. The rain was so hard it washed her fears out of her, they ran down the streets.

  The rain had been hard but warm. There was no reason for her to be cold, but her teeth were chattering. She put on layers of clothes and made tea. She cradled the cup in her hands and took it to bed.

  Warm again, she told herself that she was only now reacting to what had happened to her. To be sick in a foreign city, not just sick, but stripped, emptied, swollen, marked? She had been foolish not to see how hard it would be to convalesce. But when had she ever looked ahead at anything? When she tried to do that, it was like her dream, she was on that train, and everything outside was speeding by. She could never see anything until it was past. If she tried to look, the past became sharp. She saw the sun like a white ball of heat over the sandhills. Shabby trailers circled like a wagon train. Her brother with rabbits he’d shot, one in each hand, dripping blood.

  She got back up and turned on all the lights and sat at the table to write letters. The cold goaded her. First she wrote her sister-in-law in Austin.

  It was great to hear from you and get the picture of the new baby. I suppose you get teased now about having the perfect family, a boy and a girl, but I’m glad about the girl because maybe she’ll be someone you can feel really close to. And Kermit finished school! Now he’s a pharmacist! I hope that means you can stay home with the baby. Is your mother there? Has my mother come? She hasn’t written me in a long time. I don’t worry. I know you’d tell me if anything was wrong. I’m sorry I took so long to answer.

  She hated what she had written. She wondered if Sherry ever thought of that day they raced around Lubbock, looking for her father’s girlfriend. Had Sherry felt like Abilene did about it, like they’d been friends that day? They had been on the edge of discovering something nobody else knew.

  She sat for a long time, and smoked a little of the grass Isabel had brought, and tried to think of what to write to Sage. The corners of the room were moving toward her, into the light; she realized it was almost dawn.

  I told you I would write you when I had thought about what you said at the tienta. I’ve thought about it every day since. But I was sick and I’ve been in Mexico almost a month. Can you understand how hard it is to think of there when I am here? To think of you at all? I mean, in any real way. I know what you say. You did say that. That we both love the Huasteca. You’re right about that, but why is it we never have talked about it? Do we love the same things? Is it the beauty of the land, where it is beautiful, or the dry hard spaces where it isn’t? Is it the isolation? Or the cat in the brush? Is it that neither of us could get along someplace else? A long time after Tonio came back from Europe that spring, I realized that you and I had never gone the quarter mile from your house to the beautiful grotto where the river is born. I went there with tourists from the hotel, bu
t never with you. Where did you take me? To a cave filled with vampire bats!

  Do we have enough to give one another? I don’t know if there’s very much inside me. Maybe Tonio suits me because he wants so little from me. And which of us would tell him? What would he say? What would he do? He could hurt you!

  Maybe Tonio will marry the diplomat’s daughter and I will come to you because I have no other place to go except the real world. Would you settle for that? Would it be enough? For how long?

  I don’t know what to do. I feel like I’m outside a cave in the heart of the city. A city built on an ancient lake-bed. Who knows? Maybe the cave will fall in around me. Maybe the city will fall in. All the rich people and the bureaucrats, right along with the desperate peasants from the country, and me.

  Something might happen to all of us, and it wouldn’t matter who I loved.

  She read the letter carefully. The next day she mailed it to Sage, in care of the Arcadia Hotel.

  A few days later she received a letter from Claude, the Arcadia manager. When she saw his name at the return address, she was shocked. Had he written because of Sage’s letter? Had he read it? Oh, he would dare to do something like that, for all his talk about discretion! He had tried to make her read Camus and Rousseau and Sartre; he thought Sage was ignorant, like her. She clutched the letter in a moment of panic, and then she relaxed. There hadn’t been enough time for her letter to reach the hotel. The letters had crossed in the mail. Claude had written her at Tonio’s office.