Her own musk also changes now and then. This makes for aromatic permutations that multiply the ways in which sex stinks or doesn’t. Sometimes she wants to be the one who smells. Sometimes both of us; sometimes neither one of us. Mostly she comes fresh from the shower and wants me to be the one who stinks.
Ah, Schuyler. Ever the raunchy sensualist.
She must have fallen asleep. Around two a.m., she needs a sip of water and stumbles groggily to the bathroom. Ariana is climbing back into bed when she notices that Schuyler has materialized in the night. She sits on the edge of the mattress for a few minutes, clearing her head, listening to the deep rasp of his breathing. A little after dawn, she feels him stirring. He presses his leg between hers, and she lets him go on. His breath stinks. No doubt hers does too, but that seems almost part of the animal joy Schuyler gets from sex. Afterwards, Schuyler drifts back to sleep and, alone with her thoughts, Ariana remembers waiting up for him. She wonders what kept him out so late, then thinks better of asking. She doesn’t want to give him the satisfaction.
“So that’s love for you two — el amor? How do you do hate?” — Enrique speaking, and he is on to something; he just has it backwards. Ariana languishes on a hotel bed as Enrique dresses. Typically, their trysts are in the bright light of mid-morning — the better, at that mundane hour, to keep them secret.
Ariana is an early riser and routinely leaves the house before Schuyler gets up. For no particular reason, she has been talking about her marriage more than she usually does with Enrique, how it is between her and Schuyler, their cult of independence, the openness of a marriage that, by some measures, has become a prison. And it can get rough between us, she concedes — emotionally rough, not physically rough. Their relationship, she says, might qualify as abusive. She accepts that. But it is psychological abuse, she says, never physical.
“Which is only worse,” Enrique interjects. He is not an educated man, but he is smart and thoughtful. He is at home with ideas. His English is heavily accented but more serviceable than Ariana’s Spanish. Words and phrases from both languages are mixed into their conversations, but mostly they are in English. There is a small sink in the room. He stands before it, shirtless, perfecting his mustache with a few snips of the scissors he has produced from his satchel. From the bed, Ariana studies the way his torso flares toward his shoulders like a scallop shell. The hinge is the small of his back, his small tight buttocks.
This is the thing Enrique gets so wrong that he almost gets it right, Ariana thinks to herself: The harder she and Schuyler are on each other is a measure of how completely they are in each other’s grip. Love? Obsession? What’s in a word? Here’s what matters to her: she needs Schuyler to know that he is completely free of any obligation to be monogamous, because she needs that same sense of freedom in order to love him as fully as she wants to think she does. That means also loving other people, and she is gone on Enrique.
Freedom is not just another word for nothing left to lose, she thinks to herself. For her and Schuyler it has been a transcendent experience and powerfully erotic. It has never been enough for Schuyler to know he is free. She has needed him to act on that knowledge, to test it — as she did and still does. She needed him to betray her and then come back, god willing. When she was younger, the few women friends in on her romantic habits dismissed these games as soap opera. But they weren’t. Or, if they were, it did not lack for dramatic intensity. It worked.
She watches as Enrique, done with barbering his mustache, combs his hair. It soon resembles a black lacquer that flows straight back from his brow. She thinks of pulling him back onto the bed with her, coaxing him to roam the landscape of her body an hour longer, exploring the hillocks and crevices. But there are things she needs to get done. She slips into a loose bathrobe and settles down in front of the small dressing table. She is penciling a line across the bottom of one eyelid when she feels Enrique looming over her. He finds her breasts in the folds of the robe, bends over her and lifts them to his lips, first one and then the other. She sinks back into the curve of his torso, but only for a moment. It is understood that they will leave separately. He brokers agricultural produce, or something like that, buys locally, ships to the big corporations up north. He says he needs to make a few calls. Ariana leaves in a day for Miami. Twenty minutes later, she goes out into the street alone, pausing on one of the Plaza’s pew-like stone benches around the circular reflecting pool. In the center of the pool is the towering statue of Don Vasco de Quiroga, the Spanish cleric revered for having stood between conquistadors and the Purépecha chieftains they tortured — burning their feet was a preferred technique — in a misbegotten search for gold that didn’t exist. She feels the warmth of the Mexican sun on her back and savors a quick cup of coffee-to-go that she picked up in the hotel restaurant as she left the Iturbe.
She watches the school kids in matching uniforms plaid skirts and knee socks and blue blazers for the girls; blue slacks and white shirts for the boys. They gather in packs of a dozen or more on the plaza’s south side. They tumble onto the benches, thigh-to-thigh, hop back up onto their feet to high-five or hug a fresh arrival, settle back down in randomly scrambled configurations or stroll around the plaza arm in arm or with one hand gripping an amigo’s neck or shoulder. Young girls accept a boost up onto the low wall surrounding Don Vasco’s reflecting pool and wrap their legs around the waists of the swains who have put them there and now want a kiss. Parents push babies across the plaza or carry them against their chests, like marsupials. The ancient woman in Ariana’s photograph sits in a heap on the sidewalk, one hand extended as in the photograph, eyes closed, saying nothing: mute testament to the transience of beauty and vigor, no matter that she has peopled the town with more than a dozen of her indifferent whelp.
It’s all here, the whole spectrum of life, Ariana thinks to herself — from the dependence and joy of childhood to the promise of youth, the frustrations and compromises of middle age and then the unmitigated disaster that is old age and that will one day make beggars of us all.
A crazy man approaches her, unshaven, strands of his hair — what’s left of it — wild on his head. She finds some pesos in the small change purse she keeps for these occasions. She gives him the coins and he strolls away, talking to himself.
Every so often, a shadow orbits this Elysium: a dark black truck marked Policia Estatal or Policia Federal or Fuerza Ciudadana. Its cargo: three or four men, in black uniforms and matching black ski masks. They stand in the back, assault rifles in one hand. With the other they grip the chest-high rail that runs down the center of the truck bed, front to back. The masks are startling but their meaning is ambiguous. You wonder, are they are meant to hide the cops’ identities from the cartel goombahs they are supposed to be hunting? Or are the cops concealing their identities from their easier and more frequent prey: the cabbies and market vendors from whom — only a little less efficiently than the cartels — they extort bribes large and small. The trucks, never more than one or two at a time, circle the plaza in silence without stopping. and then they disappear.
a week later
Mexicans speak of la llamada — the call. It comes in different flavors. Typically, it’s fake: clumsy extortionists trying to scare up a little cash. They rattle off a credit card number before you can check it against your own. Or they tell you they’ve hacked into your email and know how to drain your bank account before you have time to cancel it. You’re in Mexico. You’re defenseless. There is nowhere to turn. The police are as corrupt as officials in the mayor’s office, the town presidencia. You’re told a courier will arrive at your door. You are to have a few thousand pesos ready in an envelope. Hand it over. Keep your mouth shut or expect trouble. Question: Does compliance earn you a reprieve, or announce your vulnerability to repeat visits and continuing extortion? More serious versions of la llamada contain details that quicken the pulse. Ariana’s friend Maureen picked up the phone to be told that her daughter had been seized a few miles from the
airport in Morelia, kidnapped. She had been flying in from Mexico City that afternoon, which meant the caller had tracked her, knew how to come up with a persuasive detail. He had put more effort into it than just randomly dialing numbers and demanding money. (Maureen hung tough. She hung up. She called her daughter. She was, indeed, a few miles from the Morelia airport — but in a cab, free. They never heard from the extortionist again.) Then there’s the real thing.
The call that turns Ariana’s world upside down comes on Tuesday, an ordinary Tuesday in mid-October. She is at a distance from Patzcuaro, driving back from Zihuatenejo, a popular resort town on the Pacific Coast. Her cell rings. Cousins from Cincinnati had contacted her ten days prior — her cousins, not Schuyler’s. They would be passing through Patzcuaro. Could they drop in, stay the night? Ariana’s trip to Miami was already scheduled and she was not going to miss the chance to catch up with an old friend from Nairobi, back in the States for just a few days to visit with a dying aunt. Schuyler agreed to entertain the cousins for the two days until she got back. To have some time with them herself, she offered to drive them down to the coast, to Zihuatenejo. They left Schuyler to his own pursuits back in Patzcuaro.
The four-hour drive gives them time to talk, and rather than turn right around, Ariana stays another night at Zihua. Now she is alone at the wheel, heading up the sierra toward Patzcuaro.
The man on the cell speaks English, but his accent is heavy and Ariana can barely understand him.
“We have your husband. You need to get money. We have your husband. That makes him safe. For now.”
For a split second she wonders if the man is speaking in verse or if his message is somehow encrypted: the repetition of the first few words, the redundant metrics of the two sentences. But then she realizes this is just a Mexican’s way with a second language, spoken with a strong accent.
“You get money. You tell no one.”
“Let me speak to him.”
“You tell no one. You tell the polices, the polices will tell us and we kill your husband.”
“Let me speak to him.”
She repeats herself, pointlessly raising her voice:
“Let me speak to him.”
The man also repeats himself, but calmly, the same tone of voice that worked the first time.
“You get money. You tell no one. We will find you.”
“He is alive,” the man says. The phone goes dead. She redials, but of course no one answers.
Ariana speeds up. She slows down. She is a hundred miles from Patzcuaro and Patzcuaro is two thousand miles from the world she knows well. She has no idea what to do.
Her imagination runs ahead of any certainty about what has happened to Schuyler. She can envision the moment of his abduction as though she is watching it unfold. She imagines him turning down rides as he escapes the chatty hubbub by the door after the AA meeting breaks up. He is a hundred yards down the hill when Margaret Aldrich, lowers the window of the Land Rover in which Mario drives her to this and that. Is he sure she can’t give him a lift? He waves her on. He wants a breath of fresh air before bed. “Do people come to AA to quit drinking or as an excuse to keep smoking,” he quips. He heads down Paseo Don Vasco toward the Plaza Grande, a tall, vigorous man walking energetically, wisps of gray hair flapping on the sides of his increasingly bald head.
A car pulls alongside him as he strides past the portals that frame the Plaza Grande, a perfect study in vanishing-point perspective, like Magritte’s eerie painting of a colonnade. The clop of his smart leather boots echoes against the stonework of the empty plaza. In Ariana’s imagination, the car is white — a Ford SUV. The cartels have a penchant for white SUVs, white SUVs with windows tinted black or indigo. The window slides down on the front passenger side and someone — a woman? — asks Schuyler for directions. Donde está … el restaurante Lupita. Schuyler is shrewd and streetwise, but the ploy is well-chosen. Every gringo knows Lupita’s, and Schuyler would not want it thought that he is having trouble with the woman’s Spanish, especially after she repeats herself, this time in bad English. Schuyler answers in Spanish. He is friendly, eager to offer assistance — quick to bridge any social or cultural divide. Though the conversation could be carried on just fine across the few yards that separate them, he steps into the street and leans in the window, helpfully. The rear doors swing open and two men step out. One pins the American’s arms and the other stuffs a gag in his mouth and, with a ripping sound, runs duct tape around his head to secure it before Schuyler can think to shout for help. In seconds — fifteen seconds — he has been plucked off the streets of Patzcuaro and shoved into the SUV’s rear seat. The men jump in on either side of him, the doors thud shut and the vehicle smoothly exits the plaza. From any distance, it might seem that Schuyler has run into some friends who offered him a ride.
Ariana will soon discover that as feats of imagination go, hers is unreliable, however vividly etched in her mind. She has no doubt, though, that Schuyler’s abductors are dead serious about their demand that she keep the kidnapping secret. Shut up and pay up. She is terrified. She tromps on the gas pedal; she grips the wheel so tight her knuckles turn white. Cartels are known to kill a victim who turns out to be more trouble than he’s worth, and he’s not worth much at all if a panicky spouse brings down the federales on them, or, worse yet, the Americans with their fucking narcs, the DEA.
She reaches Patzcuaro in the early evening, beside herself, uncertain where to turn, what to do. Calling the police is a temptation easily resisted. She has no doubt they are infiltrated by cartel informants as much as the cartels are infiltrated by the federal police. Her thoughts turn to the States, the world she has left behind. In New York she knows people who know people. She could pick up the phone and get someone to intervene with an influential congressman. Back in the day, she could make contact with the DEA, an agent, not just a DEA press officer. She pulls out her laptop and begins to type an email message to a friend in Washington, then pauses, empties the screen, closes the computer. What reason is there to think the cartel doesn’t have informants in the local Telmex branch, the phone company that also provides the village with its internet service. Maybe, with a gun to his head, Schuyler gave his abductors her sign-on and password along with the cell number they punched in to reach her on the highway up from Zihuatenejo. But if they had researched his habits closely enough to intercept him on a walk back from an AA meeting, can they also monitor emails?
She throws her overnight bag on the sofa, peels off her jacket, pulls out the mezcal bottle, puts it away, pours herself a glass of water from the garrafon, the five-gallon bottle on its little stand. Staring into the big mirror over the sideboard, she turns her hands into claws and rakes them up onto her hair. She wants to scream. She is desperate to talk to someone, anyone: to their friend Jorge Carter, with his cynical view of a world in which panic is pointless, or to Margaret Aldrich, a woman whose money makes her rich but also vulnerable and wise to the ways of the cartel. Or to Enrique? Oh, God, she wants to be with him now, the solace he could provide, or at least the distraction. But as they parted five days ago, he explained that he might not be back for three weeks.
She paces. She fidgets. She pulls out some paperwork she has been ignoring for a month — the application form for getting official status as a “residente permanente.” She smooths the form out on the kitchen table, then goes upstairs. She changes her blouse and spends some time staring into a dressing-table mirror. Back in the kitchen she makes coffee and smokes one of the two cigarettes she allows herself in a day, then another and then three more. She puts on eye makeup. On a pass by Schuyler’s desk, she reaches for the typed-out list of their friends and the tradesmen they rely on for plumbing and electrical problems, the number for their cleaning lady. She feels an anticipatory sigh of relief at the prospect of talking — to anybody, just not about the kidnapping. Keeping quiet about la llamada doesn’t mean I’ve taken a vow of total silence, she says to herself. And right now she needs to hear a h
uman voice. She begins to dial Maureen and Harry. But wait. She cuts off the call, puts her cell back on the table. The line needs to stay open. What if the kidnappers are trying to call? Suppose Schuyler himself manages to get to a phone. She leafs distractedly through a months-old copy of the New Yorker. And then it occurs to her — her only sensible option at seven o’clock on a Tuesday evening, a few hours after being told that her husband has been kidnapped: what she’s got to do is look like she’s doing nothing at all. If the cartel lacks the sophistication to monitor her electronically, they will be sure to have eyes on the block or down in the plaza, alert to her comings and goings. She sets her mind to a single goal. She must maintain an aura of normalcy. She must appear obedient to the warning that she not run for help. If nothing else, maintaining the appearance of doing nothing gives her something to do, a project, a way to focus her anxiety, to conceal emotions she needs to hide — perhaps even from herself.
She pulls herself up short: “Wait,” she says half aloud. “My husband has been kidnapped, and I’m going to act like nothing’s happened? Do nothing?” She calms herself: “I can rethink this tomorrow. I can contact the embassy. I can borrow a friend’s phone in case ours is tapped. But for now, she thinks to herself, what’s routine provides cover.
She grabs a leather jacket, drapes it around her shoulders, loops the sleeves loosely across her chest. She is halfway down the escalera to the Plaza Grande when it occurs to her that her masquerade is imperfect. It will not be enough to be seen. She will have to dream up a credible cover story to explain Schuyler’s absence. She will need to conceal her anxiety. She will need to get into what Schuyler calls her life-of-the-party mode —a manic ebullience in which she does not walk into a club or restaurant or a friend’s cocktail party . She grandly sweeps in, dispensing hugs and kisses and quippy little jokes. She greets friends as though they are long lost, even though she may have spoken with them hours earlier. Patter like that takes more ebullience than wit, but ebullience can always be faked, like a flight attendant’s smile, or a TV talking head’s chuckle.
We Have Taken Your Husband Page 2
