Borrowed Hearts

by Rick DeMarinis

  We drove back to town, as if all we’d done was kill another boring summer day. After dropping off the.38 and Hormone X at my house, we went to a matinee. A movie theater was as good a place to lie low as any. Then we went to his house. He asked me to stay for supper. His mother had fixed fried chicken and potato salad. The table was already set, but she put down another plate for me.

  “Well, son,” his father said to me as we took our seats. “How are your parents?”

  “Just fine, sir,” I said. “They’re working tonight, at Convair.”

  He nodded. “Those B-36’s will put the godless Communists back into hellfire where they were spawned.”

  Buddy glanced at me—a new expression on his face: Provisional Approval.

  I was learning.

  Novias

  The man from Mankato keeps neurotic dogs—two lank Borzois he calls Trotsky and Nikita—in his six-foot-by-eight-foot patio, right next to my six-foot-by-eight-foot patio. He’s friendly enough, successful in his time, but has no common sense when it comes to caring for animals. The big animals need to run, but all they can do is slither from one patio wall to the other like tall and silky iguanas.

  He’s sixty-six but thinks he looks like Cary Grant at fifty. He works out, swims, tans himself, dyes his hair patent-leather black. His belly is flat but only if he remembers to hold it in. I don’t look like anybody. I have thinning gray hair, pot belly, crepey neck, round shoulders, bifocals.We live in side-by-side townhomes in a complex locally known as the Divorce Courts, a stop over for people in transition.

  Like me, he is living with a young woman. He calls his girlfriend his novia, which means fiancée. His girlfriend and my girlfriend are from Mexico—mine from Juarez, his from Mexico City. His name is Frank (“Francisco,” his novia sometimes calls him). My name is Aubery. My girlfriend doesn’t like the way my name sounds when she pronounces it (“Ow-Berry”), so she calls me “Berry” for short, with r’s trilled, the b buzzing like v: Verry. Both Frank and I left angry Anglo wives behind. His, in Minnesota. Mine, in West L.A.

  My girlfriend, Ofelia Lozano—I have also begun to call her my novia— despises his girlfriend, Maribel Castillo. Maybe because Maribel is white. A sleek, silvery blonde of aristocratic Iberian blood. She is from Mexico City, a chi-langa. The big-city chilangos are not revered here on the border. I’ve seen this bumper sticker: Haz Patria, Mata a Un Chilango—Do Something For Your Country, Kill a Chilango. Border humor. Ofelia, like many mestizos, has a throwback Mayan profile—the beaky nose, the narrow, sloping forehead, the deepset indecipherable eyes.

  Maribel won’t give the time of day to Ofelia. She has an unrealistic but stubborn sense of her own station in life. She is smart, well educated, and snobbish. She went to school in Switzerland and studied art history in Paris. Her family went broke, or nearly so, in the recent collapse of the peso, and she took a job at Dillard’s, the upscale department store, spraying colognes at shoppers trapped in the premeditated bottleneck between the scent islands. That’s how she met Frank.

  His fibrillations kicked in just as he entered the narrow aisle where smartly dressed young women trigger the seductive aerosols at browsers. The aisle was crowded, the air was dense with musk. Frank leaned on a glass countertop, sucking wind. Maribel sprayed eau de whatever in front of him. He slapped at the sweetened air, opening a passage in it, but then he hunkered protectively over his misfiring heart. Maribel caught his arm and led him to a stool behind the island. She got him a glass of water. He tapped his pacemaker with a mea culpa knuckle, smiled. His heart settled down. “How do,” he said, romance fantasies stiffening his neck hair.

  Frank Milhollan was a sales exec for a midsize pharmaceutical company and has a million in fixed-rate annuities and another million in municipal bonds, plus a generous “golden parachute” retirement plan. He has two cars, an El Dorado (“My Eldo,” he calls it) and a restored 1938 Cord 810 roadster. In his other life he was a Heart Attack Harry, an in-your-face Type-A kind of guy. But he is pacified now in retirement by Prozac, Zantac, and beta-blockers. His dangerous auricular fibrillation is stabilized by a pacemaker. I like him. We’re in the same boat. The main difference between us is he still strains at his oar somewhat; I lean on mine.

  We had Frank and Maribel over for dinner after Frank and I realized, with what seemed good humor at the time, how similar our late midlife situations were. Ofelia didn’t like the idea, but she made red tamales, beef and chicken fajitas, and her specialty, a glow-in-the-dark pico de galio that would make Satan beg for ice water. I’d driven my Cherokee across the border, all the way to Casas Grandes, to get a couple of liters of Indio Juh Sotol, a mellow but very strong cream-of-tequila-like drink that’s cured with rattlesnakes. You can’t get it in El Paso, or even in Juárez. They age it in fifteen-gallon jugs. You can see the pick-led diamondback coiled on the bottom of each jug. I’m sure the venom leaks into the sotol because you get more than just drunk on it. The FDA, DEA, ATF, or whoever, would make it a Schedule I no-no if they knew about it. I enjoy it, but the day after drinking it I leave blood in the toilet.

  The dinner party was a flop. The first thing Maribel said when she looked at Ofelia’s colorful buffet was, “This is Indian food.” She might as well have called it pig slop, judging from her tone. She wouldn’t eat it. I quick-broiled a couple of pork chops for her, microwaved some rice, boiled a package of green beans almondine. Ofelia was furious at me for doing this, but didn’t let it show. She is a short, compact woman with skin the color of a west Texas sunset after a sand storm, eyes like wet obsidian.

  I fell in love with her in a little Greek restaurant on the east side of El Paso. She was there with a man I thought was her husband but who turned out to be her half brother. He left her alone at their table and didn’t come back. She started crying, her sobs coming out in desperate gasps. She wiped her tears with heart-breaking little dabs of her napkin. I went over to her.

  “¿Con permiso?” I said. I made an elegant bow—not a drunk’s bow, although I was a little drunk—but an Old-World courtesy bow. “Puedo ayu-darle. Soy un doctor. ”

  She shrugged. “I am not sick,” she said. “Only sad.”

  “Qué lástima, ” I said. “May I sit down?”

  I don’t really speak Spanish, just a few words and prepackaged phrases, enough to get in and out of trouble. But her English was more than adequate. “Suit yourself,” she said. My hands were shaking. They always shake these days. She noticed but didn’t dwell on my palsy. It was an inauspicious beginning, but things heated up nicely after that.

  Her half brother Lalo, it turned out, had deserted from the Mexican army. They were going to send him to Chiapas to help put down the Indians and he, claiming Zapotec heritage, wanted no part of it. He came across illegally and was heading for Chicago to stay with friends.

  After dinner I poured Frank and myself snifters of the Indio Juh. I filled a pair of elegant long-stemmed glasses with membrillo, a candy-sweet liqueur made from quince, for Maribel and Ofelia. Ofelia would rather have had the sotol, but I was eager to find some common ground for the two women.

  Frank got drunk quickly and began to hallucinate. Or so it seemed to me. He kept jerking his head to one side, as if reacting to a half-visible threat at the edge of his vision. I get happy and loquacious on any booze, but sotol turns me into a smart-ass visionary. I don’t hallucinate, but marginally sensible insights pop into my head, which I feel obliged to voice. I’d come to think of these whipcrack illuminations as my rattlesnake epiphanies. A somewhat loose notion for a defunct neurosurgeon to entertain.

  “It occurs to me,” I began, “that women are basically greedy, while men are basically selfish. That’s why a generous man is a threat to his family, and a woman active in the charities always has a smirking hypocrite or an out-and-out idiot for a husband.”

  There’s a point in your life when you stop worrying about making sense. Relative sobriety has nothing to do with it. You admit to yourself at last that your idea of o
rder, no matter how tidy or self-referentially complete, has always been tied to a runaway horse. I held on too long; I made one mistake over the limit. In neurosurgery the limit is zero.

  Frank started to hum to himself and rock back and forth in his chair. “I don’t think you should drink any more of that, Frank,” Maribel said. She gave me a severe glance, the nostrils of her thin Iberian nose delicately flared. She has the most inexpressive mouth I’ve ever seen on a woman—a thin red line the comers of which neither lift nor droop.

  I poured myself another inch of the snake juice. Frank, who was still relishing his dearly bought freedom, shoved his glass towards me. He’d extracted the fishhooks of propriety and caution from his mid-American soul and wasn’t about to get snagged again. I poured him a third sotol.

  “I can handle this stuff, Maribel,” he said.

  To break the tension, I made everybody sit together on the sofa while I got my camera.

  I make digital pictures. I use a 24-bit color camera, feed the images into my computer, crop and scale them, then print the results with a tabloid-size printer. It’s my hobby. Inspired by the sotol, I took pictures of the group from a dozen angles, then set the camera on a tripod and took a picture of the four of us.

  “The dogs are lonely,” Maribel said. “Listen, they are crying. We should go home now.” The sad warblings of the two Borzois harmonized.

  I took the camera into my study and put the disk into the computer. I brought the image up on the screen. Frank looked jowly and tired: Cary Grant bloated and saggy from cortisone and downers. He looked as if he’d just gotten out of a marathon sales conference. Maribel looked bored and impatient, her skin poreless as wax; Ofelia’s expressionless Indian eyes holding back a tide of passionate indifference.

  Mine was the only smiling face. The skin around my eyes and mouth is scarred from decades of smiles—reassuring smiles that impart confidence to pre-op patients, congratulatory smiles that reward their post-op stoicism. I made a tabloid-size print and brought it out to the living room.

  “There we are, the four compañeros,” I said. My intentions, I believe, were good. But the pictures were depressing. Old white men—end-of-the-road gringos, allied with young Mexican women. A common sight in El Paso. These are usually economic arrangements for the women. The old men are making one last grab at sexual possibility—conquistadors planting their ragged flags on a mortal shore.

  Didn’t someone once say that the last frontier for colonialism is the flesh? If not, someone should have. I heard a guest lecturer at the local university describe how indigenous populations are dehumanized by the colonialist through the mechanism of “othering.” Othering, he said, is a subtle process. If they are other, then they are not you, and therefore they can be yours. Like the animals and savannas and rain forests and mineral deposits, all claimed in the name of God and Fatherland, and Manifest Destiny.

  Some of this makes sense. But I draw the line at “othering.” I have not oth-ered Ofelia. I am not an otherfucker. I am in love with her. I see the smug lecturer smirking: Your love, doctor, is the love of the Lord Protector. The colonized want freedom, but they want security, too. If the Lord Protector can provide security, freedom may be postponed. And freedom postponed is freedom denied.

  I plead innocent to his glib cant, but admit Ofelia and I have nothing in common, nothing of consequence to talk about except what is immediate and pressing—what channel to watch, where to eat, what clothes to wear, who to see and who to avoid. Separated by age and culture, we have no access to a sharable collective memory. Forty years ago, when I was a twenty-four-year-old medical student, I was a Hank Snow fan. She thinks she might have heard of him once. I play my old vinyl disks for her. She listens with respect, but prefers the norteña music she finds easily on the radio. It sounds like North Dakota polkas to me, the Welkian accordions wheezing. Yet I love her.

  “I used to be quick,” Frank said, regarding, sadly, the digital photo. “I was a rather good boxer in my college days. Middleweight. Frank-the-Cat Milhollan. I fought Chuck Davey, back when he fought for Michigan, before he turned pro.”

  Frank stood up. He took a stance and threw short combinations, his head rocking left and right, his blackened Cary Grant hair shifting stiffly in flat panels. The hallucination in the corner of his vision attracted his attention. He dipped a shoulder and crab-stepped sideways to give it a hard target. “Did all right, too,” he said, beginning to suck air. “Davey’s problem was his handlers. They brought him along too quickly. The modest White Hope. Kid Gavilan’s bolo punches brought the rising star down, pronto.”

  “We must go home now,” Maribel said. “Listen to the dogs. They are grieving.”

  “About your dogs,” Ofelia said.

  This was a sore subject. I signaled Ofelia to let it go, but she was still fuming over her unappreciated dinner.

  “They bark at night, when we are trying to sleep.”

  “Dogs bark. They are not cats,” Maribel said, coldly, reasonably.

  “Davey beat me on points,” Frank said, panting dangerously. “He was a classic boxer. Couldn’t punch a hole in wet Kleenex, but he could box.”

  “If they bark again tonight,” Ofelia said, “I will call the management tomorrow. Dogs over twenty pounds aren’t permitted here.”

  That night, after Maribel and Frank went back to their apartment, Ofelia and I sat on our patio, drinking coffee under the desert stars. My brain was still toxic with snake-juice insights. For instance: Romantic love is hormonal and thus fickle, while domestic love is as dependable as the alimentary process. A colonist would not have such thoughts, would he? A colonist would think in terms of optimal usage and future potential. A colonist would know when to cut his losses. His thoughts would be coolly utilitarian and far grander than mine. The thoughts of an old man in love are humble and ecstatic, predictable and corny. Hopeful, but edged with selfdoubt and fear.

  Trotsky and Nikita in the adjacent patio began to keen. We went inside. Frank and Maribel were having a major fight. The walls between our apartments are thin. We heard Maribel’s rapid-fire Spanish, Frank’s feather-smoothing midwestern drawl.

  “The Iberian Princess,” I said.

  Ofelia gave a melancholy shrug.

  “It’s not a compliment, honey,” I said. “I meant it as a joke.”

  “Es verdad, sin embargo. ” True, nonetheless.

  I reached for her hand. “Let’s go to bed, querida.”

  Querida is our code word for bed festivities. I squeezed her hand, for emphasis.

  “Do you think you are ready, Verry?” she said. “It has only been since Sunday. We should wait another two days. You need more time to regain your strength.” I am thus reminded that I turn sixty-five next month.

  She was only being practical, not standoffish. Geriatric sex needs proper spacing.

  “But I feel strong,” I said. “I feel colonial. I feel like el fucking Cortés.”

  She laughed at this. “And you want me to feel like the whore of Mexico, la malinche?”

  “Sí.”

  “This is Indio Juh speaking to me, not Cortés or my sensible chavalo, the splendid doctor.”

  Not so splendid, I think.

  In the dark my years are gone. She is twenty-seven and I am sixty-four, but in the dark we are equals. I don’t care about my wrinkles, or my seborrheic keratoses—the big black molelike growths on my back—or my sprung hemorrhoids, or the gray-haired breasts I seem to be growing. Nor does she. I am proud to have her, and immensely grateful. I will give her all the security she can hold in her brown arms.

  I am a thief in this darkened room, and that is half the excitement. A young man should be here with this girl, but he is not. A usurper is in his place, stealing youth. But Ofelia is willing to give her youth to me. To her I am no thief but an old gringo bearing gifts. Does she love me? Does it matter? I have money. The young man, who is only a hypothesis, does not. I have position—at least I had it once and still wear its invisible mant
le—and the young man does not. My history is all behind me, and the young man has all his ahead of him, and that would be a gamble for Ofelia, a gamble she is unwilling to take. Yes, she wants security. She has never known it.

  Slipping into half dream, I am visited by the woman I maimed. She is young, lovely, plump with recent motherhood, her wonderfully ordinary life ahead of her. She has a chromophobe macro-adenoma, a pituitary tumor big as a damson plum. The op team is going to access it transseptally—through the nose. The ENT surgeon, Dick Freeling, begins our delicate odyssey. He’s packed her nose with a four-percent cocaine solution and injected the mucosa of the nasal septum with lidocaine. With his Knight’s scissors he makes his incisions in the ethmoid bone, opening the way. He uses his V-chisel to remove a maxillary crest spur. When it’s my turn, I insert the bivalve speculum, which provides a stainless steel tunnel to the underside of her brain. I score, then open, the sphenoid floor with my rongeur. “This is where God lives,” Freeling, a religious man, says, meaning the region where the optic nerves cross, where the carotid arteries lift columns of blood to the hungry brain. Here, where the master gland, the pituitary, governs the body’s capabilities and the heart’s desires.

  The bed on the other side of the wall began to rock and roll. Frank and Maribel had made up. Trotsky and Nikita continued to rue their exile, their wretched sobs harmonizing. I thought of Frank’s weakening heart, his pacemaker, the beta-blocker that will not prevent eventual congestive heart failure. I thought of Maribel, colonized under the heavy collapse of Frank’s expended flesh. Colonized now but destined for independence.

  But I can’t be distracted from the woman whose life I ruined. I see her, supine, her head tilted back, unconscious and unsuspecting. She will never see the faces of her children again because of me. Deep in her skull, I punch through the pituitary floor with the backbiting Kerrison rongeur. The tumor is a big bastard, occupying the sella turcica and crowding the optic chiasma. My hand shakes, my gravel-blind eyes blur. “You okay?” Dick asks.