Here and there we stopped on a bench too, and once Isabel even got me to sit on the grass with her. But it was already cold and dewy, and after a few minutes I could feel it through my pants. Despite Isabel’s protests that she didn’t feel a thing, I pulled her up by the hand, and we continued walking.
We joked, we laughed. Not in bursts, but with enough verve to feel the woodenness of our earlier interactions being chipped away, peeled off like chunks of bark.
More reminiscences, more refills of the whiskey. Less and less sense of time.
I remembered our last and most important summer together, when she was seventeen and I was sixteen. Again she’d returned with an above-it-all air and an array of tales that made me feel like I had none at all. One was about the week she’d spent in an NYU dorm—her father and his idiot girlfriend had messed up the dates when Isabel and Nerea were visiting and planned a trip to the Caribbean that overlapped with the girls’ stay. Rather than cancel his vacation, their father used his connections to secure his daughters a room on campus while he was away. “You don’t know the freedom we had,” Isabel said, regaling me with stories of the parties she and Nerea had gone to down the hall, and dropping hints that they hadn’t slept every night in the room they shared. “And marijuana—you don’t have a clue how much fun marijuana is, Tomás.”
She was still laughing over an anecdote when she started crying. I got only an inch or two closer on the couch—just enough to stretch my arm across her back. Her head nestled of its own volition onto my shoulder. It was late afternoon, nap time, and not even Nerea was around.
“It’s so fucking stupid,” Isabel said through her sniffles. “So meaningless. I don’t even know what I’m missing.”
“You don’t have to,” I said. I’m not sure I’ve ever been wiser.
Isabel kissed me then. Briefly, her lips landing lightly on mine without lingering. I could tell it was in thanks, but I was thankful myself all the same.
It shouldn’t have been the start of a sexual relationship. But late the next night she appeared in my room, climbed onto me while I was in bed, and woke me with a longer, different kind of kiss. “Shh,” she whispered when, despite my ecstatic comprehension of what was transpiring, I couldn’t resist asking what she was doing. “You’re dreaming, Tomás. Keep dreaming.”
If it had been the one occasion it happened, I might have concluded I was, since she left before morning and the whole thing had seemed miraculous. I’d put my hand under her pajama top on my own initiative, but she was the one who slipped my fingers under the waistline of her bottoms and rolled us over to give me a better angle. I’d touched other girls like that by then, but those experiences always had the inverse dynamic, with me leading the charge and them acquiescing. Delicacy had ruled, permission. But here was a smoothness and openness that was new to me, that made it all feel natural and free and aligned the moment perfectly with the dancing spray of those Pinamar waves.
It didn’t happen every night—Isabel invoked our mothers and Nerea, exaggerating the risk involved. I figured she liked the excitement, and I was content to drift off knowing she’d soon slip away, tiptoeing back to her and Nerea’s room as if the secret could actually be kept.
It’s as if that summer existed for me only at night, and only in my room. Even the moments we returned to our old confessional ways, sharing our anxieties and sorrows, tend to be set across pillows in my memories, the sheets thrown off but our rumpled clothes still on. We were never entirely naked then, and we never had actual intercourse. But to me it has always felt as if we were and we had.
“Are you single?” I asked Isabel now, catching her eye as we crossed from one lantern-lit lawn to another.
“Very,” Isabel said. Though I’d told her at the outset I was married, I raised my cup to hers as if I were too. The styrofoam bumped together like cushions. She still somehow seemed sober, but despite having eaten all the empanadas myself, I definitely wasn’t.
“Lonely?” I asked.
“Like Dracula,” she said, and I felt another punch of youthful, free-flowing intoxication. I had drunk for such different reasons back when I used to get drunk that this felt almost like the first time.
Eventually we came to a large statue on a raised platform. It was a man in nineteenth-century military garb on a horse, with either a lean musket or a sword extending from under one arm—in the darkness it was hard to tell. The horse was as regal as its rider—head raised high, thick tail pluming out behind him. Conquest, more than heroism or sacrifice, seemed to define their stance. Victory.
“Who was he?” Isabel asked.
I tried to recall my Argentine history. It couldn’t have been Belgrano or San Martín, since they had whole plazas as their namesakes, and the rest of the figures were forgotten in a grade-school muddle.
“A general, probably,” I said. “Who knows?”
We stared at the statue. Then Isabel reached for the grocery bag in my hand. Pulled the styrofoam cups free. They came in packs of twenty or so, and we had used only two.
She took one out and threw it in the statue’s direction. The wind caught it and tossed it harmlessly aside like a feather.
She threw another cup.
Another and another, and I didn’t say a word. Not one reached the statue. Instead they lay scattered across the ground in front of us like the leftovers of a large picnic or patches of snow that had been melting for days.
“Should have gotten glasses,” Isabel said.
I reached into the grocery bag. Drew out the bottle of Old Smuggler and handed it to her. She smiled gratefully. Clasped the bottle by the neck and, despite the thinness of her arms and the off-balance way she wound up, hurled it perfectly. It shattered against the horse, and we could hear the sprinkle of shards as they rained down.
We started laughing again.
What roller coaster were we on? And was it any different from the one Isabel always rode, from flirtatious rebel to insecure lover to whoever she became next?
This aspect was no different either: I felt flat by comparison. I’d become stable as a rock, Claire told me once, before correcting herself: No. A slab of stone. A floor.
Make me swing, Isabel, I thought.
“Isa,” I said, taking her hand. It was frigid and jarringly bony. “Will you come back with me to my hotel? Please?”
I watched her ponder. Was it really so wrong to think the universe owed me this? Owed us? After all the years and mistakes. If I can have this, I thought, I’ll give back anything. Everything.
I didn’t wonder if I could make her swing—if she could even “swing” at all. Her eyes were on the ground, the trail of cups that began at her feet. With the ratty end of her shoe, she gave one a gentle shove into another.
“Only because you said please,” she told me.
* * *
We left the park. Waiting at the curb, my hand outstretched for another taxi, I thought momentarily of Claire. I felt little guilt about what I was about to do. More, curiously, about how much I hadn’t told her. That in my piecemeal truthfulness with her, I’d discussed only the more obvious injuries, those tied to the horrors of the regime—kidnapping, torture, death. I never told her my more ordinary torments, like my unrealized love or jealousy, or the way they played into those larger horrors. I never traced the intricacies, plotted Isabel’s place in all that misery. If I had, she might have understood. Been glad, even, to make some sense of me. But Isabel was just another name to Claire, one more victim on a list so long the names blurred together.
Isabel and I didn’t touch in the cab or even in the hotel elevator. Only after I’d fumblingly unlocked the door to my room and held it open for her did I place a hand on the small of her back. I could feel the knobs in her spine.
She stopped near the bed, stood still. Before I even approached, she started taking off her shirt.
There was someth
ing mechanical about it. Little sense of allure, of need—it was like she wanted to get it over with quickly. And though I might have hoped for more, if this was all I’d get, I found myself willing to comply, to be mechanical about it too.
I removed my clothes also. Only when we were both naked did we finally kiss. Her lips were dry, cracked. Her tongue careful, slow-moving, without my sloppiness; it felt like it was reading mine and reacting rather than seeking it out. My fingers brushed up her arms, her neck, into her coarse hair. There was still no discernible smell, and among the many out-of-place, drunken thoughts that flew through my brain was the realization that I couldn’t recall what Isabel had smelled like in the first place.
Another, vanishingly swift: I knew every scent of Claire’s, down to her particular brand of nail polish remover and the distinct sweat of her armpits and her neck. In bringing myself to anger at the news of her cheating—an older, presumably less damaged lawyer at her firm—I’d pictured the man kissing away a bead from her clavicle, as if the salty taste should have been reserved for me alone.
But that didn’t matter now—none of these observations or fleeting distractions did. Whatever its condition, this was Isabel’s body before me, back in my grasp.
She lay down on the bed, and I lay on top of her.
* * *
When it turned out to be bad, I blamed myself. Not strictly because of my performance. More because of its apparent irrelevance; Isabel stared at the ceiling through most of it, as if a clock she could count down were mounted there. I wasn’t much better, focusing almost as intently on the slice of pillow by her ear to avoid the spins.
The problem wasn’t solely physical. Worse was the insecurity, the comparisons with Gustavo and the paths my mind wandered while I thrust. At one point, I wondered what to do with the fact that my poor sex life with Claire had one less justification now that the shadow Isabel had cast over it was gone. At another, what that shadow had been doing there in the first place. My physical explorations with Isabel always had more in common with our emotional ones than I liked to admit. Touching remained about comfort, affirmation. The first time Isabel ever took me in her hand and felt my hardness, she laughed in surprise. And when I came in her grasp moments later, she laughed again, as if sensuality had never been as much the point as reassurance and curiosity, amusement at these bodies we existed in.
This was different. Probably because there was no solace in it now.
I apologized; Isabel told me it wasn’t my fault. We reclined next to each other, with enough space between us that it felt like we were the married couple: both on our backs, both of us staring at the ceiling. Sweatless—cold, even. I had to resist the urge to pull up the sheets. The room had stopped spinning and settled, and I wished it hadn’t.
“I’m sorry,” I said again when the silence got unbearable. “I imagine sex is . . . complicated for you now.”
“That’s one way of putting it,” Isabel said, laughing mirthlessly.
“How would you put it?”
“Fireless. Bloodless.”
“That’s somewhat ironic, no?”
“No,” Isabel said sharply, and I wanted to slap myself for being such an idiot.
She got up, went naked to the window. Pulled the curtain a few inches aside to peer out, making herself a reddish silhouette in the soft city light. It should have been beautiful. But the skinniness of her limbs was thrown into relief as well. She seemed so small, suddenly.
“Hotels,” she said.
“What about them?”
“It’s like the whole world is nothing but a fucking hotel.”
Her back was still turned, so she couldn’t see my eyebrows rise. “You’ve gotten philosophical in your old age,” I said. It seemed better than saying she’d gotten cliché.
“My old age,” Isabel repeated. That same resigned, hollow laugh followed.
“You sound skeptical.”
“Let’s just say I don’t see such a thing in my future.”
I felt no shock, or even alarm, necessarily. It was all too predictable, too Isabel. I remembered one of our pillow talks from that pivotal summer when she teared up talking about her father and the pain he caused her—its smallness and the smallness it made her feel in turn. “I want to care about bigger things,” she’d said. “Not this meaningless shit.”
“Don’t we all?” I had asked.
“No. We don’t,” she’d stated confidently. “It chases you down, doesn’t it? Meaningless shit. There’s no way to escape, is there? Except death.”
I couldn’t recall the argument I’d given in response, or if I’d given any at all. Only that I curled her closer and she breathed appreciatively into my arm, and I believed we’d always keep each other safe.
“Do you think about that, Isa?” I asked her now.
“What?”
“Suicide.”
That mirthless laugh again. “No. Not the way you mean it.”
How many ways could one mean suicide? I wondered.
“I don’t anymore either,” I said.
It wasn’t a lie, practically speaking. But it felt like one at that moment, such a bumbling, obvious attempt at finding common ground, shareable sorrow. I waited for her to ask the story, prepping the details in my mind—another hotel room, my moist temple, voices of I don’t know how many phantasms arguing with one another over whether I should—but she never did. She didn’t even turn around.
“Do you want to sleep?” I asked.
“You go ahead. I can’t sleep.”
“What can you do?”
“Not a lot,” Isabel said. “What a disappointment I must be to you.”
“You were never exactly the most chipper person I knew.” I must have been hoping for the kind of response I sporadically earned in the Bosques, amid all that whiskey and nostalgia. Or else I’d simply grown tired and stopped thinking my words through. “It’s nice to know in some ways you haven’t changed.”
“In some ways I have,” Isabel said. She didn’t explain, and the meaning of the whole exchange started to become muddled, sleep-fogged. What ways were we even talking about? What had she said about hotels, and why did it feel like we’d been speaking in a code I’d never learned to translate?
“What?” I asked, and she turned around. Smiled like I was a sweet, sleepy boy and she was my mother. I didn’t want Isabel to look at me that way.
“Go to sleep, Tomás,” she said. “Have some dreams. I’d love it if you would.”
“It’s not like I don’t have my own nightmares, Isa,” I said. But it was as if I’d caught the drift of some old conversation we were no longer having, and the statement seemed out of place, clunky and unwelcome.
“Well,” she said, “don’t have any tonight for me, please?”
I had another impulse to echo her, to say something like, “Only because you said please.” But I didn’t. Soon enough waves of fatigue were rolling me back under, and I fell asleep before she came back to bed.
* * *
When I woke in the morning, she was gone. She’d left no number or note or any other trace, not even next to me in the sheets. It was as if she’d never lain down with me.
I can’t say it was a surprise—this was our routine from Pinamar, after all. But I can say it hurt. More than one might think, given that for a decade I’d believed her gone. I even, for the first time in almost that long, found myself starting to cry.
FOUR
There was a dreaminess to it the next day, a whiff of the surreal. I remembered the night’s events vividly but felt as if I’d blacked out, opened gaps in my recollection. Again, like a dream, a nightmare you have only the sensation of in the morning, the apprehension.
Claire was part of it. As justified as I’d felt hailing that cab, I wasn’t prepared for the sense of rupture I woke to, the panicky feeling of writing on the wall and whe
els set irreversibly in motion.
My hangover didn’t help; it’d been years since I suffered one so severe. When the phone in my hotel room rang—I was still in bed, my face buried between pillows to block out the glare—it sounded shrill as a baby screeching in my ear. I picked up in a clumsy rush and heard my voice: hoarse and so sluggish I seemed drugged.
It was Cecilia’s husband, calling to tell me Pichuca had passed away around dawn. I ineptly offered my condolences, and he promised to pass them on.
“Is Isa there?” I asked. She seemed a balm to me still, indeed maybe a drug. Something to keep reality at bay.
“Isa?” the man said. His confusion was audible. More than confusion—blankness.
“Yes, Isabel,” I said. Maybe she never came around when they were there, I thought. Maybe they didn’t know she was alive, the way they hadn’t known I was. “Isabel, Pichuca’s daughter.”
“Hold on a second, Tomás, I’m sorry.” It sounded somehow like he was sorry for me. That he didn’t realize I was in—whatever state he thought me in. Broken by grief? Simply broken?
“Tomás?” Cecilia said, coming on the line. “Are you okay?”
I was embarrassed. That was what I told myself: I’d misunderstood something, and I was embarrassed. That was all.
“Pichuca mentioned Isabel on the phone to me, and I . . . I wondered if she—”
“She mentioned a lot of things at the end, Tomás,” Cecilia said. “I wouldn’t make too much of it.”
“I’m not. I just”—I stammered, correcting course—“I just want to know what else she said about me.”
Hades, Argentina Page 3
