Love in Central America

by Clancy Martin

  THIRTY-TWO

  AFTER MIAMI I got Paul out of Mexico City as quickly as I could. We were in bed at the Casas Santa Domingo, just outside Antigua. We’d made love twice that morning, and we were eating warm lobster pupusas in bed. There was coffee spilled on the sheets. Paul had asked for peonies in the room—my wedding bouquet was yellow peonies—and the torn-petaled flowers were everywhere. They’d even put a yellow peony on the silver breakfast tray instead of a rose.

  “Do you remember Honduras?” Paul said.

  I said, “Do you know the most beautiful thing about this flower?”

  “You told me but say it again.”

  “It has so many petals that it can’t open unless ants chew through the casing.”

  We had a movie on. He had to leave to look at a new property in an hour. “I think Honduras was our best vacation ever,” I said.

  In Honduras we’d stayed for a week in the tiny Mayan town of Copan, high in the mountains. After a horse ride through the coffee fields we’d bathed in a hot spring—there were a dozen pools—that ran off a mountain stream. The stream itself was boiling: you couldn’t touch it. Then a group of middle-aged Japanese women joined us in the deep rock pool. They bathed naked and didn’t speak. I had the thought that my dead mother was there, smiling at us, approving. I imagined her thinking: “At last my little lone wolf has figured it out.”

  The sun set. We had no flashlight and we couldn’t find our shoes. I held Paul’s hand as we picked our way slowly down the path and across a swinging wooden bridge. Our hotel, a stone cabin that was part of an old plantation built on the ruins of a temple, was lit by dozens of candles. There was no electricity, the mountain air was cold, and there were piles of blankets at the foot of the bed. We only called to speak with Paul’s sons and I didn’t write or check email. There were no mosquitoes. We had been sober together for a long time and we did not want wine or margaritas. We tanned in the mountains, we were slender. He told me I had never been so beautiful. He had never been so beautiful. I understood, then, that he was the only man I’d ever loved, would ever love.

  In the pictures from that time we are sitting so close together, so wrapped up, we could be one person with two heads and four arms and legs, like a Mayan idol.

  He said, “Along with our honeymoon, it was our most romantic vacation.”

  “It feels like a long time ago. I’m tired, Paul.”

  “Things will get easier soon. I’m opening the new properties. I’ve been working too much. I love you. Everything’s going to be ok. We’ll take another vacation soon. The boys are getting older. We could go to Argentina for a week.”

  “Or Sri Lanka,” I said. “Or Madagascar. Get off the continent altogether.”

  We made love again.

  When Paul got dressed and left to drive to the coast, I called Eduard. “I miss you,” I said. “What are you doing?”

  “I miss you so much I feel sick. I can actually feel it.”

  I was glad. “I know. It’s like someone’s pulling on a wire that’s tied up inside your chest. It hurts. I can talk for almost an hour. How long can you talk?”

  The phone beeped. It was Paul. I ignored it.

  “I can talk,” he said. “Are you guys having fun? How’s the hotel? I’ve always wanted to stay at that place.”

  “I wish you were here. Paul’s happy.”

  “That’s good. He deserves it.”

  “I deserve to be fucking you. And I don’t want to have to wait another week before we are.”

  When Paul came back from his meeting I was asleep. He got in bed beside me and told me about his ideas for the new hotel. He was excited about the bathtubs. “They’ll be carved out of quartz. I didn’t even know that was possible. You’ll be in the bath, outside, watching the sea. I’m so grateful we got away. Let’s go to dinner. I’m going to keep my tie on. I want to be dressed up.”

  He was so happy. I was miserable, and on the way back from the bathroom I ran to the room and drank two bottles of vodka from the minibar.

  I kept having visions of Eduard, and I couldn’t sleep. I was losing weight.

  THIRTY-THREE

  I WAS BACK in Mexico City at the university library working on my new novel. Sitting at the computer, I could feel that I hadn’t been writing in a long time. But I had energy from being sad and being angry. It was coming back fast.

  “That’s your phone ringing,” the librarian said. “Señora? Señora Ramsey? That’s your phone.”

  I jumped up, answered the call and headed for the stacks to talk, thinking it was Eduard.

  It was Paul. He was talking very quickly. He said, “Have you been talking to Eduard? About a new contract? Has Eduard been calling you about business? Is there some deal we’re doing with Eduard that I don’t know about? Is there a problem?” He was reaching for any possibility. “Your cellphone bill is almost six hundred dollars. It’s all calls to Eduard’s number.”

  “I’m coming home.” I hung up.

  When I got there he was at the gate, smoking. He had the phone bill in his hands. It was the first time I had seen him smoking since he quit four years before, when the doctor told him that the boys’ allergies might be caused by secondhand smoke.

  I got out of the car. He threw the phone bill at me. The pages flew up, fell down.

  “Get the fuck out of here.”

  “Paul.”

  “I’m taking the boys to San Salvador while you move out. Then I’m going to divorce you. Then I’m going to kill that greasy motherfucker. Then I’ll put him out of business. Then I’ll destroy his reputation. He’s not the only one with friends in this country. I know what kind of deals he’s doing. ‘Banking.’ Banking my ass. He’s a money launderer. He’s a fucking vacuum cleaner.”

  “Paul.”

  “Do you realize he’s borrowed on every one of his properties from half a dozen different banks? That’s illegal, Brett. It’s called pyramid financing. Do you even know where his money comes from?”

  “I love you, Paul.”

  “He’s a fucking drug dealer. He’s a glorified drug dealer. He cleans drug money for a living.”

  “Paul, it’s not what you think. I don’t care about him. It’s over. It means nothing.”

  “Do you know how many women he fucks? Do you know how many women he’s fucked in the past month? Do you know how many times he’s tried to get me to go to a whorehouse?”

  The fight continued inside. I was glad he let me in. The boys hid from us. It went on for more than two hours the same way. Paul planned to leave in the morning, but he agreed to let me spend the night. I went to sleep on the far side of my side of the bed, but I reached out with a foot to touch his leg. He let it rest there. I thought, This is a hopeful sign.

  I woke to shouting. “Look at this, you slut!”

  “What?” The room was dark and I was still asleep.

  “You whore!” He threw my cellphone, and it shattered on the wall. I climbed out of bed to get it but he beat me there.

  “Just look.”

  “Okay,” I reached out for the phone and he jerked it back. I said, “What does it say?”

  “Look at it! Don’t try to take it!” He held it in his hand and showed me the screen.

  There were four texts. They were between Paul and Eduard, who was listed in my phone as “Supermart Pharmacy.”

  Paul (to Supermart Pharmacy): What r u doin?

  Supermart Pharmacy: Nothing. What are you doing?

  Paul: Fighting with Paul.

  Supermart Pharmacy: Oh, I’m sorry. Be kind to him.

  I tried to take the phone from Paul. I wanted to text Eduard and tell him that he had been texting with Paul, not me. Paul went to the bathroom and dropped my phone into the toilet. He said, “Get out.”

  At three a.m. I checked into The Raphael. The desk clerk was carefully groomed, and she gave me and my torn jeans and thousand-dollar heels a look of sympathy and superiority. The hotel room was white, silent and uncluttered. It was a n
ice hotel room. I thought about the hotel room I’d stayed in the night I left my first husband, years before, in Dallas. I went to the bathroom and saw I’d left our house so quickly I hadn’t rubbed my face cream in all the way. I had a very tiny smear above my cheekbone. I thought, Well, ready for round two.

  PART TWO

  ONE

  “I WANT YOU to try on engagement rings,” Eduard said. “Just for fun.”

  We were in San Salvador. He’d found us a hotel with a beach we could walk on. We woke early and walked along the beach for more than an hour. We climbed a hill covered with vines and on the other side there was a sea cave. We took off our shoes and our clothes and put them on a high rock and swam naked. We were in the water for half an hour and Eduard said, “Look!” and caught his own wallet floating in the water. He found my shoes in the surf. There was no beach left by our cave and we had to swim out beyond and around the rocks with our clothes in our hands to get back to land. I had wanted to make love on the sand in that cave.

  I was hungry but I was hungry in that nice beach way, when you don’t have to eat if you don’t want to.

  He rented a convertible. We’d never driven together in a convertible before and I turned the radio up loud. It was not hot in El Salvador that May. He told me that we should put the top up when we were on the highway but I didn’t want to put it up. We never put the top up on that car once the whole week we were in San Salvador. It never rained.

  “Well, this is the place,” he said. It was a narrow street but the sun came straight down into it. A dog walked up to our car and started to sniff it. The car was expensive enough that no one would mess with it, for fear of who might own it.

  Everywhere you went in Central America, at this time, if you were in a town or a city, you saw serious young brown skinny men with large rifles and submachine guns. I expect it is still the same way today. Two of them stood on each corner of this street. One smoked a cigarette and watched us shyly.

  We went into the jewelry store. It was hidden in a bank building, upstairs, and we walked through several anonymous offices and two locked doors before sitting down in a small wallpapered room. They brought us glasses of champagne. I drank mine without hesitating and asked for another. Eduard frowned.

  We all sat at a small, elegant table. I’d taken off my wedding ring. “She likes emerald cuts and cushion cuts,” Eduard explained to the jeweler. He was a chubby man with slicked-back gray hair in a black suit. He lay a diamond cloth open on the table.

  “One carat? A carat and a half?” He had an Italian accent.

  “Nothing under two,” Eduard said. “She likes fancy colors, if you have a vivid yellow. She also likes pinks.”

  “We don’t have any pink diamonds over half a carat, Señor Carranza.”

  My best friend from college wore a two-carat pink diamond for her wedding ring. She was an attorney in Mexico City, and she handled some business for us. Eduard had met her and he knew I admired her ring.

  “I do have a lovely three-stone ring with quarter-carat pinks on either side. The center stone in a carat-and-a-half round, D Flawless. But of course I can call in a larger stone for you. I have the papers on several pinks from our partner store in Rio de Janeiro.”

  I had a third glass of champagne. Eduard had a second. He looked at a dozen loose diamonds and chose a 2.45 carat cushion cut, F VVS1, $88,500. The jeweler placed it on my the back of my closed fingers and said, “Wear it out into the sunlight.” The security guard started to walk out with us but the salesman brushed him back into the store.

  We stood in the sunlight and looked at the diamond. I said, “It’s not what I had in mind.”

  “It’s beautiful,” Eduard said. He put his hand on my back.

  “I’m not sure.”

  We were playing.

  The salesman said, “She wants a pink. She’s right.” He gave Eduard his card.

  “If I can call you, sir, I’ll arrange several pinks to show you and the lady.” He bent toward me with a smile. “I can have them here by Wednesday.”

  “I’ll call you,” Eduard said. He took the stone off my fingers, looked at me for a moment, and returned it to the man, who took it from him with the diamond cloth and cleaned it before tucking it in his breast pocket. He went back inside after shaking hands. Eduard put his arm around my waist. “Thank you,” he said. “That was fun.”

  TWO

  WE WENT TO a local place he knew near the cathedral and got drunk on the owner’s private collection of Peruvian brandy. I decided to drink as much as I wanted. I wanted to celebrate.

  I looked at Eduard. I said, “I’m free. You don’t know how good it feels.”

  “Are you hungry?” Eduard said.

  “No. Are you?”

  “I’ll order a few things. The food’s good here.”

  When I went to the bathroom I looked in the mirror. My face looked strange. Careful, Brett, I thought. I splashed my face with water, and I went back to the table. I noticed the waiter seemed nervous. I ordered another round, and I thought, That waiter’s afraid of me.

  “That jeweler liked your chain,” I said to Eduard. I had given him a heavy 18kt gold Bulgari chain when we were in Miami. It was the only piece of jewelry I’d ever given a man.

  “He was too busy checking out your cleavage,” he said.

  I took a big swallow of my drink. It was already empty. I took a sip of Eduard’s and waved to the waiter. “Do you take that necklace off?”

  “I never take it off. You know that.”

  “I mean, when you’re fucking Lurisia.”

  He frowned.

  “Does it slap her tits?”

  “What?”

  “You heard me. Does your necklace slap Lurisia’s tits, when you fuck her? Or anybody. When you fuck your whores.”

  I finished his brandy. The waiter came to the table and I ordered two more.

  “Can you make a pisco sour?” I asked him. “Two pisco sours.”

  “Just one, for the lady,” Eduard said. “Brett, what’s up? A minute ago we were having a perfectly pleasant conversation. I think you should eat.”

  “Do they grab it. Your whores. When you eat them out.”

  “For Chrissake, Brett.”

  “I just want to hear about your necklace, Eduard. The one I gave you. Do they wrap it around your cock?”

  He stood up from the table. “Brett, I don’t know what’s come over you. But the way you’re talking to me is not—”

  “Is not what? Now that I’m finally telling the truth. Is not what, Eduard? Tell me. Tell me the truth for once.”

  “Come with me, Brett. Let’s get something to eat in the room.”

  “I’m staying right where I am. You go, then. Get out of here.”

  “I’m going back to the hotel.”

  “I guess it just lays between their tits,” I said. “The chain I mean. Unless you’re about to come. Then it probably slaps them.” The waiter brought me a pisco sour. I said, “You switch it around backwards, between your shoulder blades, the same way you do when you fuck me.”

  “Goodnight, Brett.”

  “I’ll let you know when I make up my mind. Go to sleep. If I want to I’ll wake you up.”

  “We can talk in the morning.”

  THREE

  IT WAS THE first time Eduard had seen me in a blackout. He told me about it the next day. I didn’t quite believe him. I told him I was sorry. But still it was strange because it seemed to me like we’d only been at the bar for half an hour.

  “Listen, I know you don’t want to hear this right now, but I have to have a drink.”

  “Let’s have mimosas. Room service.”

  FOUR

  PAUL HAD STAYED with his parents for two weeks and now he and his sons were back in the house. I had promised Paul that I would be moved out, but I had not packed any more than the first suitcase. I hadn’t even gone home. I had been living at The Raphael and going on vacation with Eduard. I had been shopping. I drank when I sho
pped. I had begun to dress differently, in expensive clothes. I was popular with the salespeople. I wrote a story about a man who kills a Mexican prostitute. Then I wrote one about an effeminate old man who falls in love with a twenty-year-old. I sent them to my agent and she placed them immediately. She wrote, “Whatever it is you’re doing, don’t stop.”

  I had also promised Paul that I wouldn’t see Eduard. Eduard had told Paul that his relationship with me had been a fling and Paul believed him, though he insisted that one of Eduard’s partners take over our business banking. I knew the most important thing I could do was stay in touch with Paul, but I couldn’t make myself call him. I didn’t want to lie to him.

  But Eduard was always trying to make me call him. “If he doesn’t hear from you, he’ll think we’re together,” he said. “How hard is it to lie, Brett? How many lies have you told Paul in your life? How many has he told you?”

  “He doesn’t really lie.”

  “You think he tells you the truth about everything?”

  “This is different. I can’t lie to him. I can’t just say you’re not here. Just lie about everything that’s going on. I’m not like you, Eduard. You’re like a master thief who sees a kid stealing candy and says, ‘See, everybody lies.’ Most people don’t really lie that much. It doesn’t come naturally.”

  Eduard could lie to Lurisia—they still lived together—to his clients, his boss, to me, to friends, all of them, effortlessly. I’d seen him do it. He said that like most highly intelligent people, he was a liar.

  “I’d rather tell him the truth. I’d rather everybody just know the truth,” I said, “Why do you care what I do, or who I tell? You don’t tell anyone. You hide me like a secret. You’re ashamed of me.”

  “What possible difference could it make to Paul whether what you’re telling him is true of false? One difference. Whether or not you’re hurting him. Hurting him and us.”

  I wanted Eduard to be proud of me. I wanted him to reveal the truth about us. I wanted Eduard to tell Lurisia, his parents and his friends: I’m in love with Brett. But you can’t make your lover do that. Once I worked at a magazine and the publisher sent around a folded memo that read: “I demand respect!” Same situation here. You can’t make your lover love you. At least not by direct means.