We Have Taken Your Husband

by Angel Sanchez

  As quickly as they can, Ariana and Schuyler ride out the emotional decompression that follows trauma and try to revive the old routines of their life together, the more mundane the more satisfying. They outgrow a lingering anxiety — and this Ariana has shared with Schuyler — that the cartel, or its rivals, will come back for more.

  Schuyler is writing again. He says he is depressed, but that’s to be expected — isn’t it? — after what he has been through?

  They keep to themselves for the most part, as they try to figure out what might come next. Ariana has asked the few people she told about Schuyler — Margaret, Jorge, Efraim — to keep the whole thing a secret. For his sake. There is humiliation associated with a kidnapping, especially for a man unaccustomed to being the tool, if not a toy, of men he hates. And they see no reason to tell anyone else, at least not yet. Schuyler and Ariana revive their custom of venturing down to the plaza after supper for an ice cream and a stroll. They buy the small, 21-peso cups of helado from one or another of the rival neverias, the rolling ice cream stands with homemade flavors scooped from cylindrical tins packed in shaved ice: chocolate, zarzamora, vanilla, rompope.

  People who know them stop to ask Schuyler about his sister. But it is clear that the story is being questioned, that the community senses something else was going on — marital problems and a temporary separation from Ariana? a health crisis of his own? The more imaginative gossips have convinced themselves that Schuyler Schermerhorn is the American who was held hostage by the band of sicarios recently in the news. Inevitably, rumor gains the force of myth and then displaces the lie — the alibi — completely.

  An old friend intercepts them as they stroll about the plaza with their ice cream: “Oh, Schuyler. My god, it’s good to see you.”

  There seems no point in denying whatever version of the story passes in this woman’s mind for the truth about his recent absence. Instead Ariana comes back with a line she’s used once or twice before. It nicely cuts short this kind of conversation:

  “Friends mean so much to us, Sally. We’re still decompressing from the whole thing.”

  … Which could apply equally to a sick sister or a recent release from sequestration — whatever Sally Allen needs it to mean.

  The ambivalence of Ariana’s answer only quickens the prairie fire of speculation and false rumors. Schuyler greets all such inquiries with a confident smile. He has gotten good at playing the sphinx.

  Quite suddenly, Schuyler Schermerhorn must begin to think of himself as poor. Well, not truly poor, not poor by Mexican standards or even U.S. standards, but definitely not well-to-do, not any more. He spent decades living on unvetted assumptions about his family’s “legendary” — good word for it — wealth. He took comfort in the assumption that old money somehow is ineradicable. Like class or race. Perhaps that will turn out to be true. After all, three hundred thousand is not three million, a truly devastating loss. The change in his net worth is a matter of silicon digits, ink on paper, nothing of substance, the wink of a computer in faraway New York as the market taketh and also giveth back. .

  And yet for Schermerhorn it is an existential change, a change in his sense of who he is, a change almost as profound as fatherhood. There is more to this loss than the sick feeling in his gut, the vague sense of vulnerability that has come over him. He has lost the illusion that he can always buy his way out of trouble, real or feared. (A paradox: Money couldn’t prevent his misfortune, the kidnapping itself. Indeed, money — the assumption that he had some — appears to have cued the misfortune it was powerless to avert.)

  The soft padding that for decades softened Schuyler Schermerhorn’s every interaction with the world and with other people is gone. Vaporized. He is no longer from “old money;” he is from “not so much” money. He tries to anticipate the points of impact ahead: restrictions on the travel plans that have always figured in their shared vision of retirement; getting stuck in the Medicare cattle car if circumstance — i.e. failing health — forces them to return to the States; eventual confinement in a grim nursing home, instead of the “assisted living” his father had arranged for himself — and then died before he needed. Cat food canapés washed down with … well, with what? He won’t even have rotgut booze in his life, if he maintains his vow to stay sober.

  But now he remembers something else and clings to it: how even fairly big changes in his income over the years — both up and down — never seemed to change life very much at all. At half the salary, he spent and saved roughly the same amounts as before. Somehow through all that, he never dipped very far into the stocks and bonds he had inherited, never dined on his seed corn. Maybe American taxes are truly progressive, he would say to friends with a twinkle in his eye because it was so perversely untrue. Maybe they really did equalize available income no matter how much you made. To shed light on this mystery, a shrewder money manager than he is would have jotted down a written record of his expenses and his income at every salary level he experienced in a checkered career. But it had seemed best to avoid a level of precision that obsessive. He was almost superstitious about it. Make mammon your idol and it would melt in the laser of one’s gaze. Money — having it and not having it — had always struck Schuyler as an article of faith, a state of mind,. Not, for someone like him, a tangible reality that could be measured and monitored.

  These thoughts are good for morale, but now and then Schuyler’s cocky nonchalance about money crumbles. On a Tuesday evening, now a week and a day since his release, he finds the stub of a joint in the ashtray Ariana keeps stashed on top of the living room bookshelf. She has gone out for a drink with Jorge and Margaret, a friendship that was annealed in the crisis they lived through together. Schuyler may still be on the wagon as far as drinking goes, but pot is a lingering temptation. The cannabis turns pensiveness into paranoia, a full-blown anxiety attack. And now Schuyler desperately needs the snort of tequila he has poured into a small glass.

  day thirty-seven

  Morning. Ariana stands in the kitchen looking out at the courtyard. A wisp of smoke rises from a chimney two blocks down the hill. At close range, a colibri — a hummingbird — works the bougainvillea that wraps around the columns along the courtyard. The bird darts here and there as though panicked by some uncanny awareness that winter is drawing near. Ariana thinks of a third cup of coffee, then thinks better of getting that buzzed. Instead she walks back up to the bedroom, empty-handed. Schuyler’s deep breathing signals that he is still lost to the world. Ariana settles herself on the edge of the bed. There is a catch in Schuyler’s breathing. Perhaps he feels the mattress shift slightly. Ariana puts a hand in the small of his back and sits like that, motionless for what seems like several minutes.

  Again she imagines coming clean about Enrique. The enormous sense of relief that would come with that, the train wheels roaring past, her options closed off.

  She imagines Schuyler’s response: “Is your life with me so empty, so meaningless, that you would fall for somebody like that? A fucking mobster. An extortionist?”

  He would roll over and stare up at her, awake, unintimidated, accusing.

  “Why did he do it, anyway?”

  “It was enough that you had money, Schuyler. I really don’t take it seriously, your favorite drug counselor’s fantasy that he was doing it for her. That’s all it was, a fantasy.”

  And then Ariana would bid for a little sympathy for herself. “You’ve been through hell, Schuyler. But it’s not as if I’m just back from a walk in the park. Is that what you think?”

  She would continue: “One of the more amazing men I’ve ever known was just shot to death. Were we lovers? Did we fuck, Schuyler? Yes, we were lovers. Days ago — not many days at all — his cock was inside me. Now he’s dead.”

  As she sits there, playing out this unheard and deeply unpleasant conversation, the revolver she bought in Mexico City flashes to mind. It’s right there, in the drawer of her bedside table, not two feet from where she is sitting. She plays with
the fantasy in all its particulars, figuring this is the best way to be done with it, to get unhealthy ideas out of her system: How easy it would be to slide open the drawer and pull out the loaded weapon, to stroke Schuyler’s spine once or twice soothingly before pressing the gun against his temple and firing one quick shot angled into the center of his still sleeping brain.

  Mexican law is Napoleonic, isn’t it? A wife’s vengeance on an unfaithful husband might come to trial, but there would be no conviction. It would be judged a crime of passion, wouldn’t it? And a crime of passion is a forgivable offense, especially when the “other woman” is no longer around to complicate the proceedings. Or, more in keeping with Anglo-Saxon law, would Ariana be wise to hedge her bet, stage the murder as a suicide, wrap Schuyler’s fingers around the gun stock. Her fingerprints would be there, along with his, but so what? It’s her gun. Only a woman with something to hide would have tried to wipe it clean before pressing a dead man’s fingers to the metal.

  Ariana begins crying softly, overwhelmed by the wickedness of her own fantasies. Maybe the suicide should be my own, she says to herself.

  Now Schuyler stirs. He rolls onto his side and looks up at her, sees her tears, then pulls her within reach and buries his face in her blouse. She strokes his cheek, then gets up from the bed without a word.

  As she s leaves the room, Ariana plucks a jacket from the back of her desk chair, the one she puts on when she’s up late with her photographs and the night is chilly. She walks down the tiled staircase and steps into the street. She doesn’t slam the door, but she makes no effort to shut it carefully. It clatters shut, a sound that says she’s done with convalescence, with tip-toeing around the house like a day nurse looking after a sick child.

  She needs to talk to someone — anyone. Jorge will be at home if he isn’t at the Surtidora. The café tables are full, and Jorge is not among the customers. His doorbell goes unanswered. In frustration, Ariana takes a sidewalk seat at one of the dives along the Plaza Chica. She tells the mesero that she wants an espresso. She leafs through the copy of La Jornada someone has left behind.

  The lower corner of the tabloid’s cover follows up on the Templario raid and shootout without offering much more than speculation about a possible link to the recent abduction of “un Americano.” Ariana pages through to the editorial section and sees that one of the regulars has made the connection. In it the columnist broods darkly that, as usual, it has taken the alleged kidnapping of a foreigner — un extranjero — to stir the forces of Mexican law and order to action, however inept that action turned out to be. Ariana is a sip away from finishing the espresso when she sees Jorge pile out of a combi and cross the plaza. A young man trails him by a few paces. He stands by awkwardly as Jorge drops into the other chair at Ariana’s table. He mentions an errand that took him to one of the pueblitos around the lake and, by good fortune, an encounter with Santiago.

  “Sientese,” he says to the boy, extending his right arm to the adjacent table and pulling over another chair.

  “I need to talk to you, Jorge.” Ariana glances toward Santiago by way of signaling that the talk might better be private.

  “So talk,” Jorge says. “His English is non-existent.”

  Santiago stares patiently out over the plaza, as if to confirm this assessment of his language skills. “I’m crazy about him,” Jorge mutters. “Three beautiful kids and he’s not yet out of his teens. I pay him, but I swear he’d sleep with me for free if I let him.”

  “Look, Jorge …” she begins.

  “How’s Schuyler doing?”

  “Still a little shaky, I’d have to say. But so am I, frankly. In fact, I’m going out of my effing mind.”

  Jorge holds up a finger by way of telling Ariana to wait a minute. In Spanish he suggests that Santiago go on ahead and presses a key into his hand. Santiago slips away and Jorge settles back in his chair, looking Ariana in the face, waiting for her to speak.

  “I want you to know something and you’re the only person on earth that I would tell this to. A man I was seeing was involved in Schuyler’s abduction.”

  “And you had no idea?”

  “No idea.”

  “Did he know who you were?”

  “Well, what do you think? That he came after Schuyler by coincidence?”

  “Jesus, Ariana. So was he just out to knock off an inconvenient husband or had you tipped him to those Schermerhorn millions. And by the way, where’s the money now. How much ransom did they get out of you?”

  His voice trails off and Ariana does not quickly break the silence. They sit looking at each other, their minds flying low over the terrain of betrayal and deceit that Ariana has mapped out: a ransom extorted from a well-to-do retiree by his wife’s secret lover.

  Jorge breaks the silence with a stab at whimsy:

  “Well, Ariana, Schuyler always was a tight son of a bitch. How else were you two going to get a chunk of his change.

  “Jesus, Jorge, you have a degraded view of heterosexual marriage.”

  “No, just of heterosexuals.”

  They both chuckle over the quip. Ariana drops some ten-peso coins into the small tray with the check for their coffees and gets up from the table. Jorge walks with her down Avenida Bocanegra and peels off at the side street that leads to his place. She walks on, yo-yoing between bitterness and not very successful attempts to transcend it.

  day thirty-nine

  Ariana pulls down a notebook at random, a recent one. She riffles the pages and lands on a series of quick takes, vignettes, apercus, a departure from the longer entries Schuyler usually comes up with:

  Suicide is hard to argue with. It says a life had become unbearable and maybe always was. Murder, by contrast, allows for the possibility that the life was a happy one, right up to the sudden end. The tragedy of a murder is the life unlived; the suicide’s tragedy is life itself.

  She reads on into the next installment, lower on that same page, a snippet from Schuyler’s memoir:

  He left college in the early 1970s in thrall to drugs and sex, and political nihilism. He mistook self-destruction for revolutionary fervor. He had somehow convinced himself that by remaining in this state of free fall, he and a whole generation of young and privileged whites would defy gravity and, in a few years, float back to the top of the heap in a world better aligned with their politics. No doubt their diplomas from fancy colleges helped sustain that fantastic illusion. By their middle years, a different reckoning was unavoidable. Wasted youth had led to merely ordinary outcomes. Amerika was still Amerika, and their lives were studies in mediocrity: troubled marriages, frustrated dreams. And isn’t middle age always like that?

  One more. It ran from the bottom of the page to the top of the next:

  I must be getting older. Time seems to be accelerating. Something that happened fairly recently — a month ago — seems like it happened decades back. And vice versa. Years have come to seem like months to me, and a month lasts little more than a few days. An epiphany: The reason days, months and years fly by is because they are, as life lengthens, increasingly inconsequential pieces of it. A month is a full one percent in the life of an eight-year-old. (Even longer if it’s that excruciating month leading up to a birthday or Christmas!) For someone over 60, a month is 1/720th of the life already lived — the blink of an eye. Of course you can also look through the other end of the telescope. From that perspective, a month regains its gravitas. If, at 60, you’ve only got another ten years to go, that month is again closer to one percent of the time that remains to you. (But of course deep down inside we all believe we’re going to live forever.)

  day forty

  They are in the plaza, another evening stroll, when Schuyler says something that may already have been lurking in Ariana’s thoughts:

  “You need to know something, Ariana.”

  “And what is that?”

  “There were moments when I wanted to just jump the fence. Blow Fatima’s mind, Armando’s mind, offer to share everyth
ing I have with them. Offer to join them in their outlaw fantasies. They could have whatever I have if only they would have me.”

  “Going all the way native,” Ariana suggests drily.

  “I suppose that would have been part of it.”

  “And what would have become of your poor old wife, Schuyler? What would have become of me?”

  “I guess it would have been the final betrayal. The one that couldn’t be overcome. The one I couldn’t take back. It would be like a death. There would have been no begging for forgiveness. No crazy, grateful, atoning fuck.”

  Here again was Ariana’s chance. Another opportunity to make a clean breast of her affair with Enrique. Her chance to knock Schuyler down a few pegs — to remind him that his brief dalliance with Fatima wasn’t the only backdrop to the kidnapping. He’d be as stunned as she had been to discover that Quiróz was her lover.

  The words trembled on the tip of her tongue. She would brace herself for Schuyler’s return fire, his accusation that she probably opened Quiróz’s eyes to the opportunity he proceeded to exploit. “You fool, Ariana! You laid out our assets like a smorgasbord for this fucking thief to ladle onto his plate.

  She would have to remind Schuyler that, like him, she didn’t know that the man on the other end of the ransom demands was the man she visited regularly in the Iturbe Hotel, that Rogelio was merely his proxy.

  And so she held her tongue, kept her secret. Did not use Schuyler’s confession — his brave honesty — as an occasion to get this whole thing off her chest and move on.

  The conversation continues intermittently for days. They eat, they talk, they argue and fight bitterly, until finally exhausted they make love and begin the cycle all over again. The next installment occurs in the bedroom. Ariana has emerged from the shower, wrapped in a towel. She is brushing her hair. Schuyler settles on the bed, gathering his thoughts before plunging back into the next round of their endless sparring match. Ariana strikes preemptively, before he gets a word out: