“No, I don’t have a girlfriend.”
“How did I know you were going to say exactly that?” She stifles a little giggle, biting her lower lip.
“Could we talk about this later?” I suggest quietly.
“When?” she says.
“When we’re not on vacation. When we’re not riding down the Yucatán Peninsula with our children directly behind us.”
“You do, don’t you?” She smiles slowly at me with a look of supreme recognition then turns away toward the flying jungle. We pass a broken-down rock corral with ribby horses nosing through dust and their own manure. Blue patches of bottle flies blanket their eyes.
“Does this mean we’re going to be silent and sour the whole rest of the trip?” I ask the back of her neck.
“We can be any way you want,” she says without turning.
“Where in the world did this idea come from, anyway?”
“What idea?” she says.
“The idea that I have a girlfriend.”
“It came from your cell phone, actually.”
“My cell phone?”
“Yeah, that’s right.”
“My cell phone?”
“Are you going to just keep repeating yourself?”
“I’m repeating you.”
“Yes, goddamnit, it came from your cell phone!” she bursts out. Both kids shift and grumble but never open their eyes.
“Could we talk about this later?” I say.
“That’s something you said before too.”
“I’m serious.”
“I don’t want to talk about it at all, actually. It’s ridiculous. There’s nothing to talk about anyway,” she says with finality.
“So, you’re just going to go ahead and believe in some crazy fantasy, some half-baked notion that popped into your head? Is that it?”
“It didn’t ‘pop’ into my head, it came over your cell phone.”
“What did?”
“A woman’s voice.”
“Oh—well, did you ask who it was? It could’ve been someone at the office.”
“It wasn’t ‘someone at the office.’ I’m familiar with everyone at the office and this wasn’t one of them.”
“It could’ve been anyone.”
“Oh, please—”
“Well, it could’ve.”
“All right, sure—yeah—right—it could’ve been anyone in the whole wide world, but it wasn’t.”
“I’m just saying—”
“Oh, shut up!” she suddenly shrieks. Our son wakes up with a jolt and snatches hold of the roll bar, waking his sister.
“What’s wrong?” he pants, with his eyes popped out toward the road.
“Nothing,” I say, “nothing. Just go back to sleep.”
“What were you yelling about, Mom?” our daughter asks.
“I was yelling at your father.”
“How come?”
“Because he’s trying to deny he has a girlfriend and I’ve found out he has a girlfriend. Now go back to sleep.”
“Great. That’s really great,” I say to my wife. “Congratulations.”
“You’re welcome,” she says, and turns her entire back to me now.
Silence, except for the droning of the Jeep’s oversize tires and the relentless jungle wind bashing the canvas top. The kids have burrowed back down into the luggage and returned to sleep. Her back is perfectly expressing expulsion. Exiled in the Yucatán.
“I might just as well have come down here all by myself,” I say to her spine. No answer. We roar past Playa. Miles of fiesta-colored hammocks hanging in the heat; giant ochre pottery in the shapes of Mayan demons and once-sacred jungle creatures; jaguars, serpents, eagles, frogs. Everything’s for sale on the carretera: rugs, serapes, Day-Glo wall hangings with lurid Aztec macho scenes; feathered warriors valiantly protecting young maidens from jade-eyed panthers. Huge billboards welcome us to the “Mayan Riviera” in English, as though Mexico were embarrassed to be Mexican. “I realize what it is now,” I say out loud to myself but hoping she’ll somehow respond. She doesn’t. Her back remains a rigid blockade. The verdant jungle keeps rushing past. Now and then, a gap in the dense foliage. Daylight cracks through the tangle of vines and Chichin. Fleeting glimpse of an old man with his burro laden down with plastic milk containers filled from some secret cenote. Old sense of parallel lives. Separate. Haunted. I stumble on, just going on desperation now more than anything: “I think I realize now, what it is about the Zenax; how come I get so friendly on it.” (I’m talking entirely to myself. The kids are snoring loudly.) “It’s like with jazz musicians,” I continue. “I remember all those guys down at the Five Spot in the sixties. They were all using smack back then. That was the drug of choice. I asked a drummer once why he was using it, and you know what he said?” (I don’t know why I’m making a question out of this. Nobody’s home. I soldier on.) “He told me he used it because it stopped all the inner chatter in his head. Isn’t that amazing? It created a silence and then he could play.”
For miles nothing happens. The mind goes on doing cartwheels; shuffling through its files, rewriting the past then tripping on some little tidbit of what it calls reason: “What were you doing answering my cell phone, anyway? I don’t answer your cell phone, do I?”
“Because it was ringing,” she says out of nowhere.
“I thought you were asleep.”
“I’m not.”
“I thought you were pretending to be asleep.”
“I’m not pretending anything,” she says, still offering only her flat back.
“So, my cell phone was ringing and you picked it up—”
“It was ringing its fool head off; doing that dumb riff from ‘Purple Rain’ or whatever it is, jumping around on the bed. I only picked it up to stop the stupid ringing and jumping.”
“And who answered?”
“You’re asking me?” she says. Like an apparition, an old barefoot Indian woman with a stack of firewood stands hunched over by the side of the road, waiting to cross six lanes of menacing traffic. Trucks shriek past her in both directions. It looks like she’s been waiting there for hours. Dusk is descending through the bands of heat and all the great-tailed grackles are gathering in the locust trees.
• • • • •
By the time we reach the tiny resort in the pitch-black night I’m convinced that my life has now been capsized completely. I am worse than alone. I am a man traveling with bitter enemies who happen to be his most intimate family. It’s become Greek or something worse. A roly-poly concierge emerges from an archway of bougainvillea, pushing a wheelbarrow and clenching a flashlight between his teeth. He’s very glad to see us he says, once he’s spit the flashlight out; his warm smile landing on our sorry faces. He informs us that the owners have gone to bed. They had stayed up, waiting for us, but it got too late. He has the key, though, and will show us to our room. He stacks our luggage on the wheelbarrow, bites down on the flashlight again, and we all follow him down the twisting stone path. Tall wind generators on metal poles are humming and flapping like exotic birds. The constant wind off the Caribbean is tearing at the palms, forcing them into a savage dance. I have this strange wish as we follow the bobbing beam of the flashlight, that we were all different people; strangers just happening to come together in the night. How much happier we might be if we didn’t know each other at all. No history. No remorse.
• • • • •
Daybreak. The wind has calmed and the sea is flat and smooth clear to the horizon. The giant red sun presses up against the distant arc of the earth. How far away is the rest of the world? I’m the first one awake and happy to be alone on the beach. Tiny white crabs skitter into their holes at my approach. A string of sandpipers hurries ahead of me, darting in and out of the quiet surf. Above, the frigate bird soars. Turning back in the direction of the ancient Mayan ruins I see the couple from St. Paul, staring out silently at the rising sun; the woman holding her vigil behind the wheelchair exactly as
she had at the airport. The man, in dark glasses, sits erect with his hat in his lap, both hands holding the brim. As the monster sun mounts the couple turns rosy red then slowly bright orange, as though they might suddenly burst into flame then crumble in ash to the sand. Neither of them moves an inch; frozen in the burning light. They have finally arrived.
My daughter slips up beside me, still half asleep, in sweatpants and a T-shirt with Bob Marley’s face screaming across her chest. “Hi, Dad. I’ve never seen the sun so red as that, have you?”
“Only down here. I guess we must be closer to it or something. The Equator. Is that it?”
“Yeah, I guess. Did you have breakfast yet?”
“Nope. I don’t even know if the kitchen’s open yet.”
“I thought I heard plates clanking up there.”
“That’s always a good sign,” I say, giving her a kiss on the forehead. A slight talcum powder smell I remember from her as a baby goes dashing through me. Pure sweetness in the midst of this heartbreak. She takes my arm and we head off through the white sand toward the dining room. I take a short look back over my shoulder but the couple from St. Paul has vanished. I stop and turn around to scan the beach for them.
“What’s the matter, Dad?”
“I don’t know, I just saw those people down on the beach and now they’re gone.”
“What people?”
“That couple that was standing in line with us back at the airport. You probably didn’t notice them.”
“I was sleeping.”
“Yeah. They just disappeared. How could that be?”
“I don’t know. I’m hungry, aren’t you?”
• • • • •
The tables in the dining room are all set with pink napkins and bright sprigs of bougainvillea propped in skinny glass vases. A Mayan waiter is pouring ice water from a metal pitcher. We sit by the window across from a pair of women dressed exactly alike in white starched shirts, red ties, and boyish haircuts. They hold hands across the table and stare out at the crashing surf. New Wave computer music is playing in hypnotic repetition like massage parlor background atmosphere. It gives the room a gloomy apocalyptic air. Nobody’s smiling. The spectacular view of the white beach stretches clear down the narrow peninsula evaporating into billowy sea foam. Two dark soldiers emerge, strolling casually along the surf line, their hawklike Indian faces set hard against camouflage uniforms, black machine guns strapped to their backs. A fleet of white pelicans sails past them then dips low to the water. One of them plunges headlong into the green tide and comes up spewing mullet. “I just want you to know something, Emma,” I say to my daughter as I smooth the pink napkin on my knee. “Your mother has no idea what she’s talking about.”
“What do you mean?” she says.
“Yesterday, in the car.”
“What’d she say?”
“About—Didn’t you hear what she was telling you?”
“Oh, about the girlfriend, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“What about it?”
“Well—it’s not true. It’s a complete fabrication. I mean—my cell phone happened to be ringing and she picked it up and—”
“I really don’t want to hear about it, Dad,” she says, squeezing a wedge of lime onto her melon. “That’s between you and her.”
“Who? Me and who?”
“Mom. Who else?”
“Well, there’s just no truth to it at all, is what I’m trying to say.”
“It doesn’t matter. It’s got nothing to do with me.”
“Well, it does, Emma. You’re part of this family. I just don’t want there to be some weird misunderstanding going on.”
“There’s no misunderstanding,” she says and smiles across the table to the pair of women, still holding hands.
“I just don’t know where she comes up with this stuff, tell you the truth. I mean, out of nowhere she makes this wild accusation. It’s just—”
“Can we talk about something else, Dad? I mean, we’re on vacation.”
“Sure,” I say and stare down into the swirling cloud of cream in my coffee.
A man with a goatee and Leicas strapped around his neck enters the dining room with two statuesque models. They stand aloof, meeting nobody’s eyes; scanning the tables for a strategic location. The man raises his index finger to the waiter and points to a corner table, away from the direct sun. The waiter nods and offers a little half-bow. The models glide with a studied cadence as though every gesture were being played out for a spellbound audience.
“Are you getting excited about college?” I ask my daughter after a long pause.
“Yes,” she says. “I am.”
“Have you thought about what you’re going to take?”
“Environmental studies, I think. There’s also a class on women in the Civil War.”
“That ought to be interesting. Which women? Do you mean famous women or—”
“Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mary Todd Lincoln. Women like that.”
“Right,” I say. “Mary Todd went nuts, didn’t she?”
“Did she?”
“I think she did. After the assassination. Went into seclusion. Talked to herself—”
“Really?” my daughter says.
“I think so.”
“Is that a sign of insanity?”
“What?”
“Talking to yourself?”
“Well—”
“Because I talk to myself all the time.”
“You do?” I say.
“Well—not all the time.”
“Sure. I mean, no—we all talk to ourselves some of the time.”
“Do you talk to yourself?” she asks.
“Sure. I mean—now and then.”
“What do you talk about? With yourself.”
“Well—nothing, really.”
“Nothing?”
“No—just little questions. Little—”
“Like what?” she says.
“Like—where did you leave your glasses, now? Or—”
“Oh, yeah, but that’s just asking yourself something out loud. Everybody does that. But, I mean do you carry on long dialogues and have arguments with yourself? Stuff like that?”
“Arguments?” I say.
“Yes.”
“No, do you?”
“Not really.”
“Good. I’m glad to hear that. You had me worried there for a second.” My daughter smiles and plops a chunk of pineapple into her mouth. “Well, that all sounds really interesting, Emma. Mary Todd Lincoln and Harriet Beecher Stowe.”
“Right. She’s the one who Lincoln called ‘the little lady who started this big war.’”
The tallest model at the corner table starts giggling maniacally and slapping her long ebony thighs as though she’s just heard the funniest punch line on earth. The photographer and the other model look on poker-faced as their cohort convulses into a choking fit. Now her colleague stands and starts pounding her between the shoulder blades while the photographer just sits there doing nothing. The first woman leaps out of her chair, spitting and gagging, while the second woman keeps bashing her in the back. Then the two of them go running hysterically across the foyer and into the bathroom. The man in the goatee is left alone at the table. He pulls out a French newspaper, flaps it open, takes a sip of ice water, and starts reading about the bad state of the world.
“What was that?” my daughter says.
“Something got caught in her pipes, I guess.” My wife and son appear in the yellow archway of the dining room and spot the two of us at the table.
“Morning,” she says as they approach the table.
“Morning,” I say. “Did the wind keep you up last night? You were tossing and turning.”
“It wasn’t the wind,” she says, pulling her chair out from the table.
• • • • •
The rest of our days down there were spent mostly strolling the white beach, reading Graham Greene novels, bodysurfi
ng with my son; running into the little broken-down town for dinner some nights, walking the dirt backstreets, my wife taking photographs of hairless dogs staring down from barbed-wire-trimmed rooftops. Now and then we’d run into some friend or acquaintance from previous trips and sit with them in a café, sharing a beer. One blazing afternoon we visited the ruins and climbed the temple stairs where the dark blood of sacrificial hearts still stained the ancient stone. The issue about the “girlfriend” was dropped completely although some undeniable lurking enmity would pop up in weird moments; an argument over the use of the word buscando—a little flare-up about whether to leave the overhead fan running all night, squandering precious solar power. But, for the most part, we behaved decently toward each other and even held hands once or twice on our sunset walks, remembering the days we were seldom out of each other’s sight and had no reason to doubt we would be forever in love.
• • • • •
On the return flight we sat four abreast with the aisle cut between us. Our daughter and I sat as a pair. Directly behind us was the couple from St. Paul again. The man had the window seat and made a cluster of soft guttural moans then went silent against the glass. Somewhere high above the Mississippi the woman let out a short anguished cry and leapt up to assist her husband. I unbuckled my safety belt and went back to see if I could help. The woman lay across the man’s lap clutching her white handkerchief and trying to contain the horrible rush of brown fluid pouring down his chest. She was weeping and kissing his forehead which had turned as white as the handkerchief. His whole body seemed completely deflated and lay crushed against the glass as the sky raced by. She turned to me and her face was broken with grief. All the sorrow she’d been so heroically containing came flooding out. She moved aside and I took the man by the shoulders to pull him out into the aisle. As soon as I took hold of him I knew he was dead. I laid him down flat in the aisle, on his back. Another passenger who said he was a doctor knelt beside him and unbuttoned the man’s shirt then began pressing and releasing his chest with both hands laid one on top of the other. I noticed a dark ruby ring on the doctor’s finger with the emblem of a snake coiled around a cross. The woman kept hovering over the dead man’s wide open eyes, speaking to him softly through her sobs. Flight attendants drew the curtains across the first-class section and spread blankets with the airline’s logo over the dead man’s legs and torso. The doctor switched to mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, using a small plastic device inserted in the dead man’s mouth. When the doctor paused to take a break the woman implored him not to stop. The pilot announced over the sound system that we would be making an emergency landing in St. Louis and everyone was to bring their seats to an upright position and fasten their safety belts. The plane descended and circled the city. The doctor’s face now had a grim set to it although the woman kept pleading for him to continue his efforts. As we landed I could make out emergency life-support vehicles lining the runway with their yellow and red lights blinking. Young paramedics in blue jumpsuits entered the plane and strapped the dead man to a gurney. The wife and doctor followed them out. From the window of the plane I could see the dead man’s body jerking spasmodically as they plugged it into the electric defibrillator. The arms flapped helplessly on the black tarmac. They covered the dead man’s face with the blankets. The doctor put his arm around the widow’s shoulders. They took a step back from the body.
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