I give in. We spend the next few days touring vineyards and the next few nights getting drunk on Malbec. (The key, I’ve discovered, is to drink so much that thinking about anything becomes virtually impossible.) We meet locals and dance until the vine-loving sun comes up and we can start all over again. Consulting Dan’s list, we indulge in a spa day at a luxury American hotel where all the products are made from grapes. We eat more than we need, sleep longer than we should, and stay two days longer than intended. By Tuesday, we are plump, polished, and dangerously close to never leaving. I am doing such a good job of forgetting what it is I came all this way to forget that when it comes back to me, it comes back so hard it nearly knocks me to the ground.
Jamie is ordering clams in white-wine sauce in very poor Spanish when a table is seated behind us on the sidewalk. They are a young raucous bunch, and if my language skills were better, I would be glad to listen in on what sounds like a fun conversation. As it is, I pick up only snippets, such as “They’re too hungover to come out tonight again” and “I don’t want too much cheese on mine.” While Jamie goes to survey the salad bar, I piece a silly conversation together in my head, filling in the gaps between their jumbled words.
Do you think the octopus is good here?
Well, I haven’t seen it sing, but I hear the dance number is spectacular.
Good. I’m bored of beef.
Yes, he really should have retired years ago.
I am thus amusing myself when several of them look up and exclaim, “Mateo!”
I swear, my heart stops for a second. It’s not him, of course. Turning around slowly, I see a short young man with long shaggy hair approach the table. I shake my head and laugh at myself. What did I think? That he found out I had run off and flew across the country to track me down?
I don’t want to think about it, but the table makes that difficult. The next few minutes of their conversation go something like this: Blah blah blah Mateo blah blah blah blah Mateo blah blah Mateo blah. The memory of him standing in his doorway that night, so angry and cold, floods my mind. You shut out everything and everyone that isn’t on some spreadsheet. It isn’t true, is it? I don’t shut people out. I tried to be his friend, didn’t I? I wanted to let him in. Just because I take control of my life doesn’t mean I have control issues. I’m a strong woman, and I guess Mateo doesn’t know how to deal with that. If he’d rather hide away in his house, lock up his feelings, who’s stopping him?
“Oh, Mateo!” a pretty young woman with long dark hair squeals, throwing her arms around her shaggy-haired friend. “Te quiero,” she coos.
“Te quiero,” he says back with a big smile. He takes a thin gold chain out of a small box in her hand, and she lifts up her hair while he threads it around her neck. They lean in and kiss. Their friends clap enthusiastically.
Jamie returns with an empty plate. “I was about to get a massive salad when I saw this woman chowing down on a huge plate of pasta,” she says. “Suddenly, it’s all I can think about.”
“Must be nice,” I mumble.
“What?”
“I need to go somewhere else.” I stand up, looking around for my cardigan. I need to get away from here. Really, really far away.
“Okay, I think I saw another nice-looking restaurant at the end of the block.”
“No, I mean I think we should leave tomorrow.”
She looks at me for a moment. I don’t blink. “All right,” she says, grabbing a piece of bread from our table and tossing down a couple of pesos. “There’s only so much fun one person can stand, anyway.”
The next morning we rise early for the first time in days. I rent us a Jeep and buy a detailed map book of the region that’s as thick as an atlas. Later, Jamie will have a good laugh at the fact that there’s only one road all the way from here to there. Still, we manage to get lost. Twice.
The first time we end up in a town that, except for a modern bank and a billboard advertising a new Wal-Mart being built in Mendoza, looks like part of a Hollywood set for an old Mexican town. As I think this, a man rides by on a cart pulled by a real, live donkey. “We’re straddling two centuries here,” I say to Jamie, who’s captivated by the tiled sidewalk.
“Do they tile everything in this country?” she asks rhetorically. She’s traded a pair of rubber flip-flops for a gas station attendant’s straw cowboy hat. It sits low on the back of her head, poised to fall off. Out here near the desert, we’re easing comfortably into our Thelma and Louise personas.
“Only if it’s standing still.”
“Then let’s keep moving.”
Half an hour later, we meet a withering old man with no front teeth who tells us in thick Chilean Spanish that we have missed our exit by twenty kilometers. After assuring us that we haven’t landed in Chile, he offers to rent us the floor of his kitchen for the night. There’s also the snake that tries to hitch a ride when we stop for lunch at a nearby roadside diner. We decline both proposals as politely as possible.
“Drive that way until you hit sand,” advises a tall Englishman who tells us he’s been living in Argentina since the mid-1970s. He waits at an imaginary bus stop outside the second town—if you can call a diner, gas station, and church a town—in blistering heat, wearing a Peruvian poncho and a pair of red bell-bottoms. “Can’t miss it.”
“Bet he wishes he could say the same for the past two decades,” Jamie whispers as we drive away, waving over our shoulders.
Our British guide was right about the desert, though. When we find it, it makes itself obvious. Brown earth abruptly gives way to nothing but white. A line drawn with sand.
We stop in the middle of the road, wordless, understanding that some things need no saying.
Before long, sand is everywhere. Here, there, behind you, beside you, in your hair, between your toes, under your tongue. It coats the world like a dusting of sugar. The whiteness is stunning. Stunning and breathtaking and startlingly quiet.
I didn’t plan on so much quiet. And I didn’t plan on how disquieting quiet could be. No longer drowned out by winery guides or raucous partyers or the din of restaurants, that last conversation with Mateo, running on a loop in the back of my mind, grows louder and louder, demanding to be heard. I talk endlessly to Jamie about the desert’s beauty, read aloud from the guidebook about the different rock formations in the distance and the impossible alien plants that speckle the white plains. Inside, I am saying to Mateo and Jeff and anyone else who’s ever doubted me, Look at me doing something wild and unplanned and uncontrolled. Look at me living my life without fear.
As the sun dips, the air cools sharply. Our romantic vision of sleeping under a desert sky gets revised. We spend our night at a motel that looks constructed from cardboard.
After a meal of barbecued mystery meat at the only restaurant in town, we sit poolside, sweaters tugged around our torsos, sipping cold sodas. Our sneakered feet hang over the edge. There’s no water, only drifts of sand at the bottom. I am crafting a catalog of the pleasures of the desert: sand, dryness, lack of wetness, sand . . .
“What are we doing here?” Jamie interrupts.
“We’re drinking sodas?”
“What are you doing here?” Jamie cocks her hat to the side and looks at me squarely. She’s trying to hone her cowboy look, but it’s the look of psychic mothers and seasoned high school principals.
“I don’t know, Thelma. Seeing the desert, realigning my aura. What do you think I’m doing here?”
“I think you’re running away.” The eyebrow again. As silly as it looks arching up like that under the straw hat, that damn eyebrow sees right down through me.
“From what, exactly?”
“You tell me.”
“Nothing to tell.”
“Bullshit.”
“You know, you should really work on your bedside manner.”
“Avoiding,” she says.
“Annoying,” I sing.
“Suit yourself.” She throws her head back and sucks down the re
st of her Coke. “I’m going to bed.”
At night the desert is so quiet it’s deafening. Bundled under the extra blankets brought by the small dark silent woman who runs the motel, Jamie falls asleep almost immediately: I can tell from the snore that’s become so familiar on this short trip, a soft puh-puh-puh as though she’s stuttering in her sleep. What might she be trying to say? I wonder. Possibilities? Persephone? Peanut butter?
I wish I could sleep that easy, but my head is buzzing with questions. What am I doing here? Am I running away? Of course I am. But from what? Mateo’s harsh comments? Dan’s unwanted affection? An in-box devoid of job offers? All of the above? And what has this accomplished? How will things be any different when I go back? This debris of failure that seems to coat everything I touch now will still be waiting for me.
Why did Mateo’s words cut so deeply? It was nothing I haven’t heard before. And his opinion is inconsequential, isn’t it? I mean, who is he to me? He doesn’t know me or understand me at all, has no idea who I am or why I’ve made the choices I have. So what if he’s gorgeous and smart and talented and funny? A lot of good all that does him, hiding away in that house. Where does he get off making judgments about how other people live their lives? Following a life plan isn’t giving up. It’s just good sense. It keeps me from making bad decisions, like falling for emotionally unavailable foreign men. So what if I sometimes have a tight feeling in my chest when he’s around? That doesn’t mean anything. That’s just physical attraction, right? So what if I always look for him in the neighborhood, if I feel slightly disappointed when we go to El Taller and he isn’t working, if I get a little excited when I hear a squeaky hinge in Andrea’s house because that means he might be by to fix it soon. That’s a little crush, isn’t it? And so what if I wish he were here right now, talking me down off this mental ledge, wrapping his long arms around me, kissing the back of my neck, whispering my name in my ear, rocking me to sleep so I can dream about things as harmless as peanut butter. That’s just, that’s just . . .
“Jamie?” I whisper. Then louder: “Jamie.”
She throws an arm violently over her chest. It makes a smacking sound
“Jamie?”
She shifts and snorts. “Hmph?”
“Jamie, are you awake?” I feel bad, but I can’t stop now.
“I am now.”
“Sorry.”
“What’s up?”
“I am running away from something.” Funny how it’s so much easier to say things in the dark. It’s almost like I’m not saying them at all, like tomorrow they won’t have been said. “I’m running away from Mateo.”
“Why?”
“We sort of had a fight before I left.”
“Must have been some fight.”
I flick on the bedside lamp and reach down to the floor for my backpack. I retrieve the folded newspaper clipping from inside my passport and hand it to her. She rubs one eye and squints into the bright light.
“Hey, that’s your website!”
“Yeah.”
“What is this?” She unfolds the page. “The Clarín? You’re in the Clarín. Holy shit. That’s great.”
“I know.”
“But what does this have to do with Mateo?”
I bring her up to speed. She listens without adding a single psychotherapy sound bite.
“So what do you think? Any way to recover from this one, or should I give up?”
Jamie looks at the clipping intently and hands it back to me. She shifts onto her back again, shielding her eyes from the light. I watch her carefully but can’t decipher the body language. I think I like the quips and wisecracks better.
“Give up, right?” I say. “That’s what you’re saying. Right, you’re right. He probably hates me now.”
“Did you notice that article is from October?” she says.
“No. Why?”
“I don’t know. I thought it might interest you that he’s kept the thing so long, that’s all.”
“Oh. Oh . . .” He kept the article. Why did he keep the article? It was pinned to something behind his door, a bulletin board, I assume. Does that mean anything? Or perhaps the right question is, did it mean anything?
I turn off the light and lean back against the hard foam pillow.
“Cassie?”
“Yeah.”
“You do realize that you love this guy?”
I cross my arms over my chest, as if this will protect me from what’s coming next. “Oh, fuck, Jamie. I do, don’t I? I love him.”
The words explode inside me, sting my stomach, ears, eyes. Saying those words is everything good and bad and scary and wonderful and awful. Really awful. Saying them is no good to anyone. I’m not just veering off The Plan here, I’m leaping off a cliff into the crashing waves and sharp rocks below. I want to suck those words back inside, but it’s too late. They won’t come back. It’s true. I love Mateo. I do. I love him. Love everything about him, from the bounce in his curly black hair to the devilish curl of his lips when he’s teasing me. Even that horrible fight, standing in the doorway of his house, each word between us was a stinging barb, but still I hated to end it, so thrilled was I to be near him. Even now, thousands of miles away, I ache. I’ve never felt like this before, never hurt, hoped, wanted like this before. I can’t love him, but I do. Four weeks before I go home, and look what I’ve gone and done. I can’t seem to get anything right anymore.
I shake my head, a vain gesture in the desert dark. “I fucking love him, Jamie. Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Everything seems different. The city is alight with the coming Christmas season, colored bulbs and plastic holly strung over doorways, under awnings, around trees and lampposts. The days are longer and hotter than ever. Coal briquettes in the asados seem redundant at this point. And I am in love with Mateo.
An impossible, irresponsible, unrelenting love. I’m tangled in it. It stops sleep and clouds waking. It seeps into my conversations, and I lose track of what I mean to say. I lose track of where I am. I stare into space. I alternately stalk and avoid all places where Mateo might be, skulking around corners and ducking behind shrubbery every time I see a mass of curly black hair.
Two days into my cloak-and-dagger routine, I discover it’s all in vain. Jamie says Mateo hasn’t been at El Taller all week—a waiter said he’s on vacation—so I can start coming to club nights anytime. Andrea hasn’t said a word, but it must be true. I stalk the pink and blue house much of Tuesday and part of Wednesday but see only the cats lolling about in the sun.
Angry, I log on to Buenosairesbrokenheartsclub.com under a pseudonym and interrupt someone’s lament on her failed relationship: “Why are we all sitting around our computers complaining about some guy or girl who treated us bad and whining about how we wish we had some new guy or girl who would treat us just as badly? What’s so great about love, anyway?”
My comment gets twenty-two responses in two hours, most of them gushing sentimental schlock that I could have picked up in a card shop. But one reply gets to me a little. “The great thing about love,” writes [email protected], “is that it makes you feel like you can do anything.”
I stop reading the comments after that.
I am not thinking about it.
There are nineteen days left until I go home.
I am not thinking about that, either.
Which is difficult, as my mother calls constantly to arrange the plans for my homecoming. My childhood bedroom has recently been taken over by her stair climber and craft station, so she’s making space for me in the downstairs guest room. She wants to know if I prefer a firm mattress, how many dresser drawers I’ll need, whether I’ll mind if the dog sleeps in there with me—he thinks of it as his room.
“It doesn’t matter,” I always say, not to be difficult, but simply because it doesn’t.
I have sent e-mails to almost every person I know in Seattle in hopes of unearthing a job lead. So far, two people have inv
ited me to join their pyramid scheme, and a guy I dated briefly in college has offered me a gig as his personal assistant, nudity optional. “Gee, thanks,” I write back, “but didn’t I already have that job? I seem to recall late hours and subpar benefits.”
I try to muster a tad more excitement for C.J., who is thrilled that after launching our new personal ad service on the website, we already have eighteen ads bought and paid for. At five dollars an ad per month, divided between the two of us, it’s not quite enough to retire on, but I could buy myself a nice umbrella when I get back to Seattle. I’m surprised to find I’m disappointed. What did I expect? That my site could be the next Idealmatch.com? It wasn’t about the money, I remind myself. I wanted to help people fall in love. And there’s always hope that [email protected] will find the “chronic cuddler” he’s looking for. Good thing I didn’t add multimedia empire to the plan. I don’t need another thing on there to remind me of how little I’ve managed to get right.
“Give it some time to catch on,” C.J. writes over MSN. I tell him not to quit his day job. It’s bad enough that Sam and Trish’s latest trend newsletter is touting Buenosairesbrokenheartsclub.com as “a new organic approach to online dating” and “a Web trend to watch.” Letting myself down may be getting to be old hat, but letting my friends down is not something I want to get used to.
It’s all very depressing, in a daytime-talk-show sort of way. I throw myself into anything that will offer the relief of distraction. I return to El Taller with gusto, the life of the party again with exaggerated tales of Jamie’s and my adventures in the wild Argentine desert. I make detailed lists of souvenirs left to buy. I help Andrea get ready for Martin’s holiday homecoming. I bake my famous shortbread cookies. I bathe the dogs, soaking myself in the process, much to Jorge’s delight. I loop the banister with garlands and string greeting cards above the fireplace—something Andrea learned from Mateo’s tales of Christmas in Chicago, she tells me cautiously. “My family did that, too,” I say merrily and change the subject to popcorn garlands. When I’m not helping around the house, I go for long walks with my digital camera and take pictures of absolutely everything.
The Buenos Aires Broken Hearts Club Page 26
