“Where’s the peach?” Leo said. “I could’ve sworn there was a peach.”
“Do I dare to eat a peach? I shall wear white—something—trousers, and walk upon the beach.”
“Yes!” Leo said. “I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.”
“I do not think that they will sing to me,” Valiant said, as if he’d known the whole poem all along.
Back in her car they flew south through the morning until the sun was high and hot, past Camp Pendleton and more Humvees with boys in camo, going the opposite direction, on their way to day three of the riots—if that’s what in fact it was. Maybe the city had settled, was lying down and licking its wounds. Without a radio they didn’t know and, truth be told, they didn’t care. They were far from the city, further every second.
In the backseat Leo was glowing, she could feel it. Like one of those worms, the ones that spin their silk cocoons and glow as they pupate, happy in their own little world. He was singing his freedom song and he leaned forward, massaging her shoulders.
I’ll be your home, darlin’,
Come back again.
She found she liked the song less now. It wasn’t a wish anymore, nor was it a reverie. Rather, it had become, in the space of a single day, a reality. How would she possibly leave?
He brushed the hair from her forehead. “You’re going to be such a beautiful mother,” he said. “I can’t believe it. The mother of my child. Gwen, I wouldn’t have dared to dream.”
She was silent. Driving. She’d concentrate on that. Moving from lane to lane, passing the slow cars, gliding by them. There was just right now—the three, no, counting the baby inside her and Fifi, the five of them on the 5, traveling through San Diego, traveling south, to Tijuana. She crossed three lanes without hitting the brakes. It felt like dancing.
Leo and Valiant were talking about her future like they were looking in a crystal ball or reading her cards. As if they were in that clear future with her. They were talking, but what she heard was Tony, his voice in her head. Do you even want a baby? How will you write with a baby? And Brett. My fiancé is a writer, a good one, but you have to starve for a while.
She bit the tip of her fingernail and tore it off. The exposed skin was tender, and she ran her tongue over it. She’d get away, soon, find a place to be alone. Decisions and revisions. When would she know? When would she be certain? She heard her father’s voice. What’s the plan, Gwen? You have a plan, don’t you? She hated his brusque clarity, felt it as an affront to spontaneity, to creativity. But now, she wished she’d inherited a portion of it. She gripped the steering wheel tighter.
I am in control, she told herself, and breathed the affirmation in, trying to make it true.
“I want to be the godfather,” Valiant said.
“I don’t think that’s something you choose,” Leo said.
“Why not?”
“I think it’s a fine idea. I’m not saying I don’t; it’s just, it’s something we’ll talk about. Right, Gwen.”
Right, Gwen. It was a statement, not a question.
She said nothing and no one noticed.
Twenty-two
AT THE BORDER the van beside them, in bold red lettering, said S AND M ELECTRIC—WE MAKE YOU S-M-ILE! “No. Not really,” the Count said, and he snapped a photo.
Mexico waved them right in.
They rolled the car windows up. She felt the sweat bead at her temples and slip down her jaw. The heat shimmered off the sidewalk and she saw the town through the waves of hot air as if it were in another dimension from the three of them, sealed in the silver Nissan, as if the people on the streets moved through a substance thicker than mere air and were subject to the push and pull of its tides.
The children with bare feet, their clothes torn and dirty, held cartons of gum in their hands. When the light turned red, they surrounded the car, knocked on the windows. “Wanna buy a Chiclet? Hey, rich American, got a dollar?” More kids washed their windows with rags, filthy soapy water and squeegees. Leo opened Gwen’s purse and cranked the window halfway down. He took out her crocheted change purse and handed the children all the dollars folded inside. It wasn’t much. Twenty bucks or so, but it was blood at a feeding frenzy. More kids came, and men with sunken cheeks and thin arms—one missing a leg—women with children on their backs, their hands thrust toward the windows.
“Para mis niños,” the woman at Gwen’s window said. Her lips were cracked, her dark eyes fixed on her through the glass.
Leo rolled his window up.
“Zero the savior.” Valiant leaned in, breathing on her, slurring his words. “You know he’s never going to have any money, don’t you, kid.”
“You mean I’m not,” she said. “It was my money.” She didn’t tell him it didn’t matter—she had the wad of cash in her front pocket. She reached in and touched it, made sure it was there. It was one of the things she liked best about stripping. The fact of the cash, the untraceable green.
She put her foot on the gas. Barely. Then the brake. They moved through the masses, parted them and rolled on to where the people in the dirt lots beside the dirt road were selling plaster statues—Virgin Mary and Saint Francis and Jesus himself painted in pastels—pinks and greens and blues.
“Mary,” Valiant said, unlocking his door. “Mary! Stop!”
Gwen was pulling to the side of the road when he opened the door and was out of the car, running, his hands flapping behind him. He returned with a two-foot Virgin Mary in his arms. “My whole life I’ve wanted a virgin,” he said, and he held her in his lap. He leaned his forehead on hers and touched her face with his fingertips, her lowered eyes, her lips. Gwen was trying not to look, not to laugh.
“Please,” he said. “Might we have a little privacy?” And he pulled his leather jacket over their heads—his and Mary’s.
They drove the narrow, crowded streets, past a woman with a cart selling fresh cold fruit on a stick—watermelon, pineapple, banana, and mango—past the sombrero shop with the giant, ridiculous sombreros for the gringos, and alongside the meat market with the skinned cows and pigs, with the plucked chickens hanging in the warm open air, with the swarm of flies. The traffic was thick and slow and, though their windows were sealed, the smell of the raw unrefrigerated meat, the smell of death, seeped in; she could taste it in the back of her throat and it made her gag. She coughed, put her nose in her armpit to drown out the smell. She liked her own smell, as a rule, but now she liked it even more. Her smell had changed, she was sweeter. She smelled, a little, of—was it citrus blossoms?
Skinny dogs walked the sidewalks, lay in gutters in the sun. “See, Fifi,” said Leo, holding her up to the window. “It’s another world here. In Mexico, it really is a dog’s life.”
“Sure,” Gwen said. “If you don’t mind life on the street, scrounging for food and water.”
“A life of freedom. Look around. You don’t see a single leash.”
American college boys walked out of a cave of a bar. Their arms around each other’s shoulders, they were singing. She had come here once, during her college days, her college daze, come with a few girls and a few guys—sorority sisters and frat boys, she wouldn’t call them friends—come for those endless shots of tequila, for the Coronas and the cheap margaritas in goblets the size of soup bowls. Who had she been then? It felt like a dream, like she was remembering some character she had played. It wasn’t her. It had never been her. She’d played happy-go-lucky. She’d played the ruddy, round-cheeked sorority girl, pasted smiles on smiles. A convincing actress, she had fooled even herself. She’d thought it so easy to forget who she was, to be like everyone else. She remembered puking in a bathroom, happy to have made it to a toilet. And the sun—she remembered how bright it was when they’d swaggered back into the day, how bald the town had looked, the way it did now.
The day was bleached and shadowless, unrelenting as a migraine—the kind of headache her mother used to get, occasionally, and her grandmother more often, a hea
dache that could last for days. Lotta had said once it was her body’s attempt to forget, to white it all out. She wouldn’t talk about what. Gwen’s mother had told her it was Carlotta’s youth—the thing she wanted to obliterate—something that had happened growing up in that shack in Globe, Arizona. Carlotta had been the oldest, and her mother just kept having children, a dozen in all—more diapers for Carlotta to change, more tortillas for her to make. Gwen remembered her saying she’d learned to hold a book in one hand, flip tortillas with the other. But she wouldn’t talk about the extended family, the uncles and the stepfather, the big, crowded family bed. It was her secret past, what Gwen would never know. But she felt it inside her, in her blood, like a fever; it warmed her skin, quickened her pulse, and made her needful. Her life would be the proof—the proof it was worth it. There was a reason she was here, a reason Carlotta had persisted.
She touched the smooth, oval pendant, rubbed it like a worry stone, or like a tiny bottle with a genie in it. As if the Virgin herself would appear. The Virgin of Guadalupe, protectress of women and children.
Had she hung even then around Carlotta’s neck, over her chest, like a lock, protecting?
Valiant emerged from beneath his jacket drenched in sweat.
“Here!” he said.
They were passing a hotel, if you could call it that. The Hotel Suiza, boasting rooms for only twenty-five dollars. She parked the car in front and they stepped into the blanched glare of the sun. The building was one-level, brick, with peeling dirty white paint. Gwen with her suitcase, Leo with Fifi, and Valiant with the two-foot Virgin statue entered the little office at the front of the hotel, where they all stood sweating. No one seemed to be coming. Valiant spied the metal ringer that looked like a boob and tapped the metal nipple with such enthusiasm, again and again, that when the man appeared from the back room looking—with his messed up hair and his scowl—like they’d woken him from his siesta, he moved the ringer pointedly out of Valiant’s reach. Gwen paid the man cash for the two rooms before they’d even seen them.
“The dingier the better,” the Count declared. And the man and his scowl went back through the door, back, Gwen thought, to his siesta—something she needed, now that her night of little sleep was catching up with her. She felt the small room sway, and the hollow, metallic buzz just under her skin rendered her vulnerable, practically see-through. There was nothing she could possibly hide.
Another man stepped up to the desk, pushed his spectacles up the bridge of his nose, and showed them to their rooms.
The Count had one picture left, so they posed, the three of them, in the hall that looked just like a dimmer version of the outside of the hotel, with its old paint, its metal-framed sliding windows, its brown doors and large blue plastic garbage cans.
It was the last photo she’d put in the scrapbook.
She would remember how Valiant had handed the bespectacled man the camera, saying por favor a little too loudly, and how he had leaned on her and Leo, and they’d steadied him as they’d walked down the hall to where their faces and bodies and Fifi and the Virgin had grown small enough to fit into the frame. Valiant stood between Leo and Gwen, and he must have told them to wave, because in this last photo the three of them are waving.
Hello. See? Here we are.
Were.
That afternoon, they found a restaurant, a Mexican diner. Shirt and shoes were required, and Leo said he didn’t need to eat, but Gwen went into the little market next door and found him a pair of plastic flip-flops and a Cinco de Mayo T-shirt that said TODAY I’M MEXICAN and they sat down in the restaurant and ate like real people. Huevos rancheros and coffee. It was delicious. Even Valiant ate his whole meal.
Beside the diner was a place called the Bar Del Prado and after lunch Valiant wandered in for a drink. There were a few Americans at the bar. An older woman with dyed-black hair, bright stripes of blush, and mascara so heavy her lids were giving in to the weight sat beside a blond loafing boy drinking Corona from the bottle. The room was cool and dark and Valiant slid into a booth against the wall. The red leather of the seats was torn, with the stuffing sticking out, and she could tell he felt at home. Lighting a cigarette, he settled in. A waitress slept on her feet in the corner of the room. After a while she shuffled over and Leo and Valiant ordered their margaritas with rocks and salt and Gwen got an orange juice—reconstituted, not fresh-squeezed. But this was Tijuana, she reminded herself, she should be happy to drink anything that wasn’t alcoholic. The walls of the bar were painted bloodred and were tacked with posters of American girls—G-strings threading their asses, their breasts grapefruit-round, and their long blond hair shiny clean.
Cheesecake, that’s what it was called. These airbrushed photos of semi-clad pinup girls. Like the cake itself, these photos were meant to please the senses, not to satisfy the soul. These posters were not meat and potatoes. They were cheesecake. Creamy, sweet. Good with strawberries and hot fudge and whipped cream. If you ate too much, you’d make yourself sick.
Leo was talking, his hands animated with such excitement she was afraid he might spill his drink. “You know,” he was saying. “We could just keep going. Explore Baja. Go all the way to Cabo San Lucas. What’s to stop us? We’re young, we’re free.”
Valiant raised an eyebrow and looked at Gwen. The ember of his cigarette shone in the gloaming.
She rubbed her thumb across the cash in her front pocket. Hardly enough for a monthlong journey for three across the Baja desert, and Leo was extending the plan, pushing the journey off the continent and onto a boat. “We’ll sail to Argentina. And we’ll need a strong motor once we hit the horse latitudes. Did I ever tell you why it was called that, horse latitudes? When the doldrums hit and the wind died down and it was hot as hell, the sailors sang their prayers, and when they weren’t answered, they threw their horses overboard. Of course, we won’t have any horses.”
“There’s some fine logic for you,” Valiant said. He was looking beyond Gwen at the bar, at the broad shoulders of the boy swiveling on the stool, drinking cerveza. When he saw she had caught him, he grinned.
“Leo,” she said, now that she had her opening. “How exactly do you propose we pay for this trip?”
“That’s my Gwen,” Leo said, shaking his head. “The consummate rationalist.” My Gwen. The possessive irked her. She realized she was scratching her arms and her nails were leaving white streaks. Her skin was dry. She needed lotion. And the razor—once again, she’d forgotten to buy one.
Leo’s eyes lit up. “Your car’s not in bad shape. We could sell it.”
“We?” Gwen said.
“What do you say, Gwen. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime chance.”
Now Valiant was laughing, a real guffaw, and choking on the cigarette smoke. It took a long time for his coughing to cease.
She watched Leo’s hand tighten to a fist. “I’m serious,” he said. “Goddamn it. Is everything a joke to you?”
Valiant downed his margarita like medicine, lifted his empty glass and nodded to the waitress for another. “Sure,” he said, his face drained of humor. “Everything’s funny to a dead man.”
“Will you two listen to me for once?” Leo said, and didn’t wait for an answer. “If we went on foot, traveled by train, we could experience Baja like Mexicans.”
“The poor ones, you mean,” Valiant said. “I have an idea. Why don’t you go into the Chiclet-vending business. You might have better luck selling chewing gum than you’ve had selling your music.”
The Count was getting mean, and this, she knew, went hand in hand with his level of intoxication. The waitress brought his drink, and Gwen watched him suck the yellow-green liquid through a straw as his finger described a small circle in the air, another round. He was on his way to oblivion, and she planned to be gone before he arrived.
Leo leaned toward Gwen. He put an arm around her and pulled her close. “What do you say? You up for a real adventure?”
She pictured Gandhi on the trains, getting to k
now the real India, and the young Che Guevara on his motorcycle, exploring South America. She saw the fire in Leo’s eyes, so bright it seemed to blind him. She thought of the albatross and the griffin, and of how the two didn’t mix. And she thought of the baby inside her, the fact that seemed to Leo already a dim fiction. So much for settling down, getting a job, making a home.
The room was smoky and loud, and Gwen was tired. The woman at the bar was laughing too loud. She had her hand on the boy’s leg and Gwen watched Valiant watching, sneering. “Why don’t you mind your own business,” he hollered to the woman’s back, but nobody turned around.
Gwen polished off her juice as the waitress brought their drinks. “To the riots,” Valiant toasted, rollicking on the upswing of tequila and corn syrup, and he and Leo clinked their salty rims. She told them she’d be at the hotel. She’d see them there, later. Valiant kissed her cheek and Leo took a gulp of his drink and stood, a goofy, inscrutable smile on his face.
“I’ll walk you,” he said.
Twenty-three
OUTSIDE THE BAR Del Prado, night was coming on like a hopeless, drunken come-on, tequila on its breath, red neon signs and, outside the shops, strings of colored Christmas lights hung from the eaves like the sad close-lipped smiles of boys who would lure you in with their loneliness, that melancholia you’d try and try to fix.
Gwen and Leo sauntered. He took her hand in his and their arms were swinging. Singsong, like girlfriends in elementary school. She felt that way sometimes. That they were girlfriends. Maybe someday, like Love’s husband, Leo would get a sex change. Leona, she’d call him.
Amused by the thought, she saw something moving in the corner of her vision, flapping. She turned. They were birds. Or not birds, but bats. So many of them, filling the sky. Their flight quiet, and quieting. On this clamorous street of cars with their horns and their stereos with the bass turned up, playing their booming Mexican songs, on this street of vendors and markets and bars, a hush had fallen.
Further Out Than You Thought Page 18
