FOURTEEN
AT TIMES WHEN I was very drunk Eduard would record what I had said the night before. “No post mortems” had been a rule, but we were past that. It started when he went to the bathroom and saw I had peed on the floor. He mentioned it to me when he got back into bed—he woke me up to tell me. And he turned on his phone so that I would have to hear it.
“I doan see what the big deal is.”
“Brett. You were too drunk to find the toilet.”
“Did you fuck me while I was passed out?”
“Let’s go back to sleep.”
“Did we have sex? Is your come inside me?”
“Brett. Can you hear yourself.”
“How many times did you fuck me when I was out?”
“I can’t believe the things you’re saying.”
“For me, Eduard, sex and emotion are all bound up together. Most of the—95 percent of the sexual experience I had, was when I was—you know what? You were right before, we’re not right for each other. I’m not right for you.”
Silence.
“It’s fine. Really, it’s all fine. It’s lucky we found out when we did. I’m just glad we’re finally telling the truth.”
“Brett, go to sleep. Everything is alright.”
“Yup. You did. It’s for the best. I’m just glad we finally got it out into the open.”
“Brett, I never said that.”
“You don’t love me. You just took the first woman who came along. You bastard.”
“Shh.”
“No matter how hard I try, it’s never good enough for you. Nobody can say—nobody can say I didn’t try.”
“Brett.”
“Don’t say, ‘Brett.’ You’re ashamed of me. When I’m the one who should be ashamed.”
“I’m going. I’m going to get a different room in the hotel.”
“Everyone knows about your sluts. Your whores. Paul told me. He’s told everyone. It’s like a joke. All your friends know. A man can be a slut too. Look at yourself in the mirror.”
Insights of this kind by the blacked-out me.
FIFTEEN
I TOLD HIM I had a secret fortune that I would be awarded by my dead grandparents when I turned forty. “Hundreds of millions, neither one of us will ever work again.” I told him about imaginary stories and novels I had written or published. I told him about famous men in pursuit of me, men I spurned for his sake. I promised suicide.
It is hard, even for a practiced drunk, to take responsibility for things she says or does during a blackout. When you have no recollection of doing something, it’s as though it’s been done by an evil stranger who hates you, and who has decided to possess your body in order to destroy everything that you love. As a way of murdering you.
“You’re like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” Eduard said.
“I’ve never heard that one before.”
“This isn’t a joke. Why won’t you just admit it when you’re drunk? You need professional help, Brett.”
“I’m not drunk half as often as you think I am.”
“If that’s true, you’re in even worse shape than I thought. Alcoholism I can understand. This other person you become, when you’re in one of your fugues”—that’s what he called my drunk moods, when I was at my worst—“is dangerous. You don’t know what you’re doing. You could get hurt, Brett. You could be raped. There’s no telling what could happen.”
“My psychiatrist says I’m fine as long as I stay sober. And I’m telling you, I’ve quit drinking. Give me a chance. Let’s go to Cancun, where we first met. We’ll spend a few days there and then drive down the coast. I’ll show you. Anyway, I want to see that new place in Valladolid. Those people are making a name for themselves.”
“What place? I don’t know about it.”
“Some couple Paul told me about. He says they’re knocking him off. It will be fun to look. We’ll be like spies.”
I don’t know what might have happened next if Eduard hadn’t agreed.
SIXTEEN
IN CANCUN I knew I was going to stay sober. Since Paul had tossed me out I realized how much I needed to see my boys. I wanted Eduard to believe in us. I didn’t want to wake up to the forensics of ghastly fights I didn’t even remember.
His flight came in to Mexico City and I bought him a whiskey at the bar.
“I don’t have to drink,” he said. “Honestly, I don’t want to.”
“It won’t work that way,” I said. “I have to be sober for myself. And if you stop drinking just for me you’ll resent me. Or you’ll only drink when we’re not together and you’ll want a drink when we are. Or you’ll have more fun when you’re drinking with your friends and I’ll seem dull because you never get to have a drink.” This last certainty was the one I feared the most.
“I don’t think any of those statements are correct. I’m happy to stop drinking. It’s not that big of a deal for me.”
“It isn’t now,” I said. “But that’s because you’re free to drink. If you feel like you can’t, it’s going to come between us. Just trust me on this one.”
“Did it come between you and Paul?”
He had me there. Once I was properly sober, the time Paul and I had together when we weren’t drinking was perhaps the best time of our marriage.
“Am I with Paul now? And what’s the first thing he did when we split up? Started drinking again.”
It was true. Paul was drinking with his dad. I spent hours lying in bed in my hotel room, imagining the things they were saying about me. Or that, worst still, they were drunk together and I never came up.
“Fine, fine, I’ll drink the whiskey. Hell, I could use it. You look great. I’ve got to go to the bathroom, I’ll be right back.”
I knew he was lying about how I looked. And I knew he was texting Lurisia in the men’s room.
SEVENTEEN
THE HOTEL IN Cancun was new and extravagant, but too big. Eduard knew the owner and I was relieved when he told me that we didn’t have to go out with him. We were on the beach. The room was made of blue marble—Italian rather than Mexican—pale yellow silk, and glass.
“Let’s change hotels,” I said.
“This is the best hotel in Cancun. They just built the damn thing. It’s gorgeous.”
“It’s great,” I said. “Thank you. But I don’t feel like we’re safe here. Do you know what I mean? Let’s find a little place. I don’t even care if we’re on the beach. I want to feel like I have you all to myself.”
“You’re crazy,” he said. “Whatever Brett wants, Brett gets.” He made love to me on the bed, and then he got on the phone while I took a bath and found us a different place.
EIGHTEEN
IT WAS ONE of those vacation places where no one minds if a couple is falling all over each other. Our new hotel room had windows on three walls. One was above the bed, and another overlooked a stairwell. Through both windows we could see palm fronds and bougainvillea in pink, red and orange, and many other tropical flowers I didn’t know. We could hear the birds screaming in the trees and smell the sea. I hadn’t been drinking for almost a week now and my sex drive was back. I insisted that we keep the windows open and the curtains back when we had sex. We were noisy in bed.
“At least let me shut them,” he said. “If I can’t pull the curtains.”
Eduard had my arms behind my back, my legs between his, and he was fucking me as hard as he could from behind while I groaned. I saw a man who looked Cuban position himself behind a post on the stairs. He was five feet from our bed. He peered around the post every few seconds and caught my eye. He smiled at me.
“I can never predict what you’re going to be prudish about,” I said, after we finished.
“I’m Catholic. I’m shy,” he said, smiling. “Plus, I mean this is not exactly prudish. We are being exhibitionists.”
“I don’t see what there is to be ashamed of.”
But I couldn’t hide my expression and he knew I enjoyed it.
NINETEEN
<
br /> OUR HOTEL DIDN’T have a pool, and later we went to the pool at a property Madonna owned or had owned and I ordered Eduard a drink so that we had a right to swim. A couple who had rented a cabana told us we could lay in their deck chairs. I was tan all this year—it was almost exactly a year, now, since Eduard and I had started—but I needed some sun on my skin. My upper lip had broken out in tiny pimples like a moustache. Eduard drank his mojito, I drank my Coke Light. I did not want a drink. We watched the fat burned white people and ripped Asian boys and skinny haughty boys in sunglasses. One girl with shoulder-length glossy black hair that hadn’t been wet yet stared at Eduard through her aviators. She was standing in the water at the end of the pool with the sun showing on her tight body. Her swimsuit was expensive, red with an orange stripe, and snug. She was drinking cognac from a snifter.
“Do you want to get in the water?” Eduard asked.
“Sure.”
I watched him perform in the pool for this young woman. He went underwater and tossed his head back when he came to the surface. He swam laps then stretched his arms and back. He did a backflip off the diving board. I might have done something similar if a beautiful young man were admiring me. Still I was irritated. I stood on a small fountain in the middle of the pool. I was out of the water to about my knees, and I saw that, in the white bikini shorts I had bought, you could see everything.
“Honey,” Eduard said. “Come back into the pool. Let me hold you in the water.”
“I will,” I said. I thought, How do you like it?
He swam to the side and put his sunglasses on. Everyone looks ridiculous when they wear their sunglasses in a swimming pool. But Eduard was wearing his sunglasses in Madonna’s swimming pool.
“Maybe we should have bought black shorts for you,” Eduard said. He swam back out toward me.
“Or colored ones. The white ones are a little transparent now that they’re wet.”
I glanced down. “They’re fine. You are so paranoid. Besides, you’re the one who’s showing off.”
“Hey, I’m missing you down here,” Eduard said. Miss Asian Perfect Body was still watching him. Other people had noticed me. I saw women talking quietly to each other and motioning with their chins the way they do.
I got back into the water. Eduard carried me around the pool.
“You’re being silly,” I said.
I went and got his mojito from our pool table. Now most of the people there noticed my transparent shorts.
“Pool drinks,” I said when I got back to Eduard. It was a joke that Paul used to make.
When we got out of the pool, the couple had taken their deck chairs back.
“Sorry,” the man said. The woman regarded me without an expression. Eduard wrapped me in a towel, then put one around himself.
The beautiful young Asian woman hadn’t moved from her spot. But now she was eyeing someone else’s man.
She’ll learn, I thought.
Then I thought, No. As long as there’s a market for it, people will always be looking at each other, and enjoying being watched. In the god realm, the Mayans said, they make love by exchanging glances.
Paul’s mother told me once, “The worst thing about growing old is that you become invisible.” Only a beautiful woman could know something that awful.
TWENTY
I SAID, “I want to take you out tonight. You’re always paying. Let me buy tonight.”
“You could buy drinks before dinner. How about that?”
“You choose a place.”
He chose the Ritz, which was a good sign. We had made love very gently and for a long time before we went out, and we were happy. We walked along the edge of the sea in the dark. He carried my heels and we held hands. There was no moon, and the water was quiet. From the beach the Ritz-Carleton looked like the nicest hotel in Cancun, but the bar was empty except for three discouraged middle-aged women. They looked like businesspeople or corporate saleswomen of some kind, but there is no business in Cancun.
The pools of the hotel were illuminated and the lights shone across the bar and gave the air an underwater feeling. The women could have been holding their breath, or their gills might have opened, or they could be drowned, I thought. They looked at Eduard with frank appreciation.
It is exhausting dating a sexual man. Every time you walk into a bar or restaurant there they are, all the predators who want to take him from you.
“I want a whiskey,” Eduard told the bartender. “With just one cube of ice. She’ll have a Coke Light.”
The bartender poured him four fingers of whiskey in the glass. I saw him look at the bartender—she was a tiny thing, my size or smaller, she couldn’t have weighed ninety pounds—and she moved on down the bar.
It was one of those half-inside-half-outside bars they have at resorts in the tropics.
Eduard took two long sips of his whiskey. He was wearing a linen suit that he knew I loved. I wiped off my lipstick with a cocktail napkin and kissed him.
“I love you,” he said. “I really want us to be together.”
They were playing old American country music. Eduard finished his drink in three big swallows and ordered another. The bartender poured it the same. He drank it down, and ordered a third.
“What’s gotten into you?”
“Let’s get in the pool. Come into the pool with me,” he said. He got a fourth to carry with him.
“I’ll watch you.”
“You’re no fun,” he said.
He took off his shoes, rolled up his trousers to the knee, and walked between the bar pool and the larger infinity pool. The two pools were connected by a shallow, underwater ledge. Walking along it, the water reached Eduard’s calves. He took his pants off. He wore yellow silk boxers with elephants printed on them. Both pools were illuminated and the blue light shone up on him from below. He took his shirt off and dipped in the water. The women had perked up. I took pictures with my phone. Eduard took his underwear off, and threw them towards me in a ball. They landed in the pool and floated conspicuously. A husband had arrived and he gave me a questioning look. Even the bartender raised his eyebrows at me.
Eduard was singing in Spanish, in his strong soprano, with his penis flapping around, but he wasn’t slurring his words. It was a love song he was singing to the night.
I picked up my Coke Light and moved to a table closer to the pool. It had been raining earlier and I brushed off the cushions before sitting. The cushion soaked the ass of my dress.
“Come on, come out here!” Eduard shouted. I smiled and waved. Just a week ago this would have been the time to drink half of his whiskey, I thought. But I didn’t want it.
It may have been stubbornness. No alcoholic, no matter how practiced, whether she’s had twenty relapses or never had one in twenty years, can explain why she doesn’t take a drink.
He was dancing a tango with himself. I didn’t know what I would do if he fell the wrong way. Presumably one of the hotel staff would rescue him. I’d never seen him truly drunk before. He seemed larger. At last he came back to sit with me. He put his clothes back on carefully. He looked around for his underwear, which had at last sunk into the pool. Without getting up, I looked around for his shoes. He walked around barefoot. Then he sat, and quickly stood up again. He wobbled, held the arms of the chair, and sat back down.
“This chair. Got my pants wet.” He took a sip of his whiskey. “Did you like my song?”
I showed him the pictures. He laughed. He looked handsome. Drunk and bold and blue in the pool lights and silly. I showed them to him again the next day, performing a post-mortem of my own, and he still loved them.
“Hey, Julio Iglesias,” I said, “who’s the exhibitionist now?” And he laughed and said, “What’s good for the goose.”
We borrowed a convertible from the Mercedes dealer in town—he was a friend of Eduard’s—and drove to a house at the end of the peninsula. That night there was a storm and when we woke the ocean and the seaside had been swept clean. T
he house was down on the sand, and the glass doors of our bedroom opened to the beach and the sea not even fifty yards away.
“Let’s get in the ocean,” he said.
“Okay, in a minute.” No one was up yet. Further down people lived on the beach in little straw huts, and cooked fish, rice and plantains. You could walk across a channel into the grassy jungles of Belize.
Before Cancun, I had told him that everything would be alright with me, again, if I could swim in the ocean with him and see the sun on his skin. When I was sober, this seemed both impossible and true. If I had three drinks I saw it wasn’t a dream at all, it was simply going to happen that way, it would all work out, if we were patient, if we could both be kind.
TWENTY-ONE
WHEN WE SWAM the water was too salty and we didn’t stay out long. “You’re supposed to dive into the waves,” he told me.
“I know. I like to swim over them.”
When I was a kid in Florida my mom said she liked to watch me go into the surf. I clenched my fists like I wanted to conquer the ocean. I still prefer to stand in the waves and try to jump over them.
The way Eduard swam it was like he was trying to go somewhere.
Like a surfer swims in the ocean, but he wasn’t headed for a break.
He held me in his arms, rolling up and down with the forming waves, cradling me and trying to get me to laugh, but it was like we were doing it because we had agreed we would, and it didn’t work.
TWENTY-TWO
WE NEVER TOOK a boat down to Honduras like we’d planned. We were happy where we were. I did not drink that whole week. But I drank alone, on the flight back to Mexico City. I drank five of those little bottles of wine. The flight attendants are only supposed to give you three, but I charmed mine. When I got off the plane I was elated. I had difficulty with my carry-on bag. In the cab, on the way to my new room at Suenos Realizados, I played Notorious B.I.G. on my iPhone, and discussed the racist lyrics with my driver, who was Jamaican and, for some reason, did not seem to mind. In fact, he liked me.
Love in Central America Page 7
