“But why? We already had everything, except that. We had what other couples don’t have, what married couples only dream of.”
Mario wanted to tell him that he was arrogant and deluded to pay so much attention to his own feelings and to dismiss Samantha’s wishes as silly. He wanted to tell him that the fact of the breakup proved they didn’t have everything; at least Samantha didn’t. He wanted to tell him how crazy he was to think his jilted girlfriend might now be on “her holiday” just because he was on his. Out loud he said, “For you maybe that’s true. But for her, that is the crowning glory of your life together. It’s like proof that it was all real and will continue to be real. The fear that you’ll never propose and marry her can poison everything.”
“So, do I give in to her fear?”
Mario was no longer amused by Ryan’s naive indignation. “Do you want to be right, or do you want to be happy?”
“I want to be happy. I don’t want to lose Sam if we’re meant to be together. But I don’t want to make a bigger mistake by getting back together if we’re not meant to be.”
“I can’t help you there.” Mario shrugged. “I don’t believe in that “meant to be” shit. Sorry, but “meant to be” is for wimps, crybabies afraid to hurt their little finger. I believe you make a decision, and you act on it. Get back together with Samantha, don’t get back together, either way it will be a good decision because you were man enough to make it and to see where it leads you. What’s the big deal with making the right decision, anyway? More than half the time these right decisions prove to be shit.”
Ryan had meant to be offended but found himself laughing. “I guess there really is only one way to find out.”
“My point exactly.”
“It’s good advice if it works. Does it? Can you really stop yourself from all the second-guessing and the Monday morning quarterbacking?”
“If you put your mind to it, then yes, it works. First, decide what you want. I can tell you that if you want to be right, you might as well stay single. Forget about being right. Is your life better with Samantha or without her? Would you have a better holiday if she were here?”
“Not if I have to take shit for not putting a ring on her finger.” And why do you keep calling her Samantha, as if you’re correcting me, as if you know better?
“Oh god, stop sulking about that already! How long have you two been together?”
“Four years.”
“Four years?! Unless you’re her sugar daddy, she’s about the same age as you, right? Early or mid thirties?”
“She’s thirty-two.”
“So, she’s not going to get more breezy and carefree. There is a biological clock, and it’s not all about having kids. It’s about a need to be taken seriously. A need to show the world that at least one person out there finds you important enough. After four years together she has a right to expect that. Has she been married before? Have you?”
“No, neither of us has.”
“So what are you afraid of? I’m the one who should be afraid of marriage, not you. You don’t have any bad experience with marriage. You don’t have any at all.”
“It’s not about being afraid. I tried to explain to Sam why I don’t want to go the way of marriage. It’s a copout, to me. It’s like I’m signing up to join the army or something. Like I want to measure my life in mortgage payments and anniversaries in Hawaii and visiting the relatives and—”
“Listen, that may be true, but so what?So the fuck what? You either forgive her this charming little weakness, or you insist on everything being logical. There’s nothing logical about marriages and weddings and all the nonsense that goes into putting them together. Still, it’s a vital need for her. She’s not doing it to break you and get her way, not the girl you described to me.” Mario was pleading. He was sorry for the absent girl who by all accounts wanted no more than her due, and he wanted to defend her from Ryan’s pigheaded and merciless rationality.
Ryan met this with a glare. He said nothing, but he wanted to ask, “Whose side are you on?”
“Look, look,” Mario hurried to placate him, “you probably think I take marriage lightly. Maybe I’m no one to talk. I’ll talk anyway, because this tequila you’ve somehow snuck on me won’t let me shut up. Look what you’ve done!” He held up his glass and cackled. “To take marriage lightly is bad, I know. But I think it’s even worse to take it soheavily.How can you possibly know what’s waiting for you two until you go ahead and find out? How can you take life by the throat and shake it until it promises a happy ending? Look, don’t you want to put a ring on her finger just toseehow it lights up her face, her life? Just tosee what kind of holiday you can have after that? You’re a scientist, you should have some curiosity. No? Okay, I’m just a babbling fool then.” He looked at what was left of the tequila in his glass. “You think I give out engagement rings too easily.”
“No, I don’t think that.” Ryan softened. “I just don’t think it would work for me.”
“Just so you know, it worked for me. Just because it ended in divorce, twice, doesn’t mean I’d do it differently. In both of my marriages we loved each other while we did, and it didn’t make me bitter about future relationships. If I’m an idiot, at least I’m a hopeful idiot, ready to be happy again one day.”
“I envy you,” Ryan said quite sincerely.
Mario wanted to tell him to pocket his stupid pride and call his girlfriend, but the same instinct that had pushed him to defend her now stopped him from speaking. It occurred to him that this girl might be better off without Ryan.
They agreed to meet again the next evening to exchange stories about their busy day at the office, ha ha.
The waiter had cleared their glasses and left only the flickering candle. Ryan had biked to town with the duffle bag on his back, looking like a strange gangly turtle with a thick and narrow shell, and Mario was alone at the table. He peered at the dark of the ocean now completely merged with the dark of the sky and thought about his new acquaintance. Ryan was a bit tiresome in his obsessing over the right decision, and rather selfish when he talked about his poor girlfriend who just wanted a simple promise of a simple happy life. Still, there was nothing to really dislike about him. He was your typical Canadian guy. His aversion to mistakes was tempered by a good measure of docility (all that talk about “meant to be”), he was practicing the conventional wisdom of being very guarded, almost paranoid, about love, and while he was dutiful about pursuing a career, his ambition didn’t extend terribly far. He was a technician, not a scientist, and it pleased Mario to joke about it. If you could forget about his nerdy and ever so slightly creepy job (cancer means “creeper”), Ryan would be your beer and baseball cap and four-wheel drive truck kind of dude. Your regular guy next door.
Yes, but next door to what?
In Mexico, anything you think is yours can be claimed and taken by the elements. On the second day of Ryan’s stay in Tulum the sea helped itself to his earring, one that Samantha had given him. A wave crashed into him and loosened the lock; a second wave grabbed the small arc of silver out of his earlobe and worked it into the sand at his feet. The remaining earring—for Samantha had given him a pair, even though as any normal man he had only one pierced ear—was almost swallowed by the decrepit wooden desk drawer in his hotel room; it had got snagged in a crack in the soggy cheap laminated wood. The crack belched up a moldy cigarette butt as Ryan retrieved the earring and put it on, replacing its lost twin. He hadn’t abandoned the habit of taking the second earring with him wherever he went, and now there was only one. And he too was all one, all-one, alone. It was hard not to make symbolic sense out of this. He’d got up that morning with the vague intention of finding an internet cafe and messaging Sam even if there wasn’t a message from her, but losing the earring took away his already shaky resolve. Maybe the sea and sand were trying to tell him something. “Wait. Be patient. Let some time go by before you contact her. Let your feelings settle, and give hers a chance to set
tle.” So he did. Instead of finding an internet cafe, he rode his bike to the beach and did what’s known as taking it easy. The longer he looked at the white sand and jade water, the less desire he felt to be ambitious, active, curious, exploratory; these were false gods, left behind in Vancouver and unworshipped here.
Here, if your body stays still, indolence seeps in and sets up a home. Heaven help you if your soul stops moving too, for it too might rot like everything else here that comes to rest. Death and decay are never so swift or so colourful. Water is everywhere to give life to the living and decay to the dead. In a small puddle at the edge of the jungle the water is honey brown from the blood of dead leaves. Everything here is alive, even in death. And everything is coloured brightly, especially in death. Feliz Dia de los Muertos. Happy Day of the Dead. Happy lives of the dead. And why not? They dress in glad gaudy rags and rattle off tunes on their little guitars and dance to the rattling of their bones, and they’re not shunned by the children or the birds or the iguanas. Arguably they’re having a better time than the living, for Ryan had yet to see a dead person burdened by work of any kind. In the middle of death they are in life. The Day of the Dead is just another day, except for the masquerade in which the living imitate the dead. Perhaps even envy them.
In the evening Ryan met the birds. At the instant when sunset turned into twilight, the town square became host to a pilgrimage of thousands of black birds, whistling and clicking and chattering as they landed like large black snowflakes on the trees. For the next quarter of an hour, until the birds settled to sleep, the universe was filled with whistling and clicking and chattering. The Mayans paid them no mind. Why did the birds want to be here? How could they ignore the bright lights and fall asleep to the din of human voices and music and cars? Or maybe they never slept in the way we think it necessary to sleep and rest. Maybe in their native jungle their nights were beset by far deadlier if softer noises: the grunting of hungry jaguars. Here they had safety and woke up to abundant food.
The city of people was simply better for them.
As the birds settled down for their night, Mario and Ryan ordered beers in a cafe facing the main street of the city of people that was only now coming to life.
“We should go see the big cenote, they say it’s quite something,” Mario suggested. “The best one for swimming, with the clearest water.”
“Confession: I can’t swim. But I don’t mind seeing the cenote.”
Mario started in surprise. “Are you kidding? You can’t swim?”
“Yes, a yuppie redneck like me. I never learned to swim.”
“But why not?”
“My dad scared the shit out of me when I was a kid. Threw me in the swimming pool to toughen me up, no doubt.”
Mario didn’t seem to find this shocking. “Are you close with your dad?” he asked with interest.
“Not particularly. He was always a bit distant. I am with my mom and my sister, though.”
“That’s too bad,” Mario said with more reproach than regret. “My dad wasn’t perfect either, but I’d give anything for him to be alive. He died in a car accident. I was fourteen, my sister was ten.”
“Oh, I’m sorry!”
Mario nodded and looked pensively at something distant, then roused himself. “Do you have kids? You, or Samantha, or both of you together? I’m sort of drunk, but you know what I mean. Oh, look at that.” He studied the bottle in his hand. “Dos Equis. Two Exes. How appropriate, ha ha! Two of these would’ve been enough, but I’ve had, what, four? It’s not a bad beer. It’s actually a very good beer. Mexicans love German culture. German beer. German music that goes with German beer.Boof-ta-ta,boof-ta-ta!”
He’s kind of fun when he’s drunk, Ryan thought.
“We don’t have kids. Either of us,” he said out loud. “You?”
“No! Thank goodness. No kids to put through the drama of divorce. And even if one of the Two Exes had worked out, I still wouldn’t want to bring a child into this madness around us. It’s like the world knows it needs to quit smoking, but not just yet. Not today, maybe next year. Let’s keep fucking up forjust a bit longer, because things aren’t so bad really, are they? We still have plenty of trees, we’re still not suffocating from exhaust fumes. Kids are supposed to be our future, we’re supposed to leave them something to breathe on this miserable planet, but instead we buy SUVs so we can take the future to hockey practice. Sometimes I think it’s wrong to show so many pictures of paradise. We should have more pictures of open-face mines and clear-cuts and oil spills. Someone should make a calendar with those pictures. We Canadians are too damn pleased with ourselves for living in a beautiful country, as if we made the beauty with our hands. Fuck. Why am I going on about this, remind me?”
“Kids. You asked me if Sam or I had kids, then I asked you.”
“Right. And no. No, no, no. Wouldn’t want to pass on my cursed genes.”
“Cursed genes?”
“My mother suffered from bipolar disorder since her early twenties, since before she was married. Gotta love that word:suffered. Sometimes I think she preferred the illness to the treatment. My sister and I suffered way more than she did. The most important person in the world, the centre of your universe, suddenly becomes a stranger and turns against you. I wouldn’t want that for any kids of mine.” Mario shuddered, then sneered at himself in a valiant attempt to downplay his fear. “Sometimes when I’m overworked and my head’s spinning I ask myself if it’s just fatigue or if my turn has come to go mad.”
“But you’d have got it by now. You’re what, thirty, thirty-five?”
“Thirty-seven.”
“If you’d inherited bipolar disorder, you’d know by now. You or your sister would know. You know that boat has sailed, don’t you?” Ryan felt sympathy for a guy who could open up like that, even if it took four beers.
“Knowing is easy. Believing takes a bit more effort. You see, my mom’s troubles started with violent headaches. This morning I had a killer headache the likes of which I’ve never had. On a bloody holiday! And no, don’t tell me, it wasn’t a hangover. I know what a hangover feels like, and this wasn’t it. Come on, you’re a scientist. What does it mean?”
Ryan felt like a schoolboy suddenly called upon to recite a lesson he hadn’t learned.
“Mario, I’m a technician, not a—”
“Oh, come on. Play along, will you? Pretend you’re a scientist. Throw me a bone here. I’m scared, Ryan.”
“Of getting ill like your mother? It’s too late for you, you know that.”
Mario ignored the last sentence. “I’m scared of howfragiletheir happiness was,” he said with a pleading look at Ryan. “How easily it was destroyed! They deserved it, they worked hard for it, but life didn’t care. It took it away.”
Ryan tried to send Mario’s train of thought down a happier track. “They had a good life together, your parents?”
“Oh yes! It was like they were still on their honeymoon, a strange sort of honeymoon that lasted their entire life together. Like they were in no hurry to shape up because they were enjoying the ride, crazy as it was. They loved us to bits, but they didn’t treat us as kids. What I mean is, they didn’t dumb themselves down for us. Didn’t dumb their lives down so they could spoon-feed us G-rated little platitudes. Parents shouldn’t give all of themselves to their kids; mine sure didn’t. Whatever else we missed out on, we were sparedthat little guilt trip. They freely talked about boy and girl body parts in front of us. They freely talked about my mom’s illness and her medication in front of us. It was just another fact of life, nothing to be ashamed of. We were a dysfunctional and happy family. Happily dysfunctional? Dysfunctionally happy? Ha ha! Take your pick. My sister and I had no idea what it took for dad to keep her demons at bay. We found out when he died. Someone who didn’t know him might think he had no spine, that he was weak around her, and she knew how to work that—lucid or mad, she knew how to work that. He waited on her needs, but he was not a spineless rag! And she lov
ed the heck out of him, with whatever part of her still saw the world clearly. Through the soggy, heavy canvass of her illness she was able to reach him and love him. While my father was alive she never slipped up in her treatment. I think it’s because she knew she’d be forgiven if she did. She knew she’d be forgiven, so there was no need to find out. Does that make sense to you?” he demanded of Ryan. And before letting him reply, he said with reproach, “I guess it wouldn’t. You’re not big on family, it seems. It’s not a priority for you.”
Ryan knew better than to be offended by the accusations of a drunken man. “With my dad, it was a case of tough love,” he explained. “I guess I grew up the way he wanted me to. We’re none of us particularly touchy-feely around each other.”
Mario wasn’t touched by this. “You had a dad to teach you how to be a man when you were growing up,” he insisted. “Mine died when he was only thirty-seven. Only thirty-seven! That seemed an impossibly old age to me then, but I’m thirty-seven now, and I still feel like that young fool I was. Now I’m on my own. There was nobody to show me how to live beyond thirty-seven.” Mario nodded and smiled, and Ryan was amazed to see that the smile had become happy. “Imagine visiting your dead, like the folks do around here,” Mario went on. “Do you talk to them? Bring them food, bright them new clothes to wear? Do you go on a picnic, and then maybe dance and play party games? Do you get to tell them how much they’re missed? And if you miss them enough, can they maybe get a day pass, come back among the living, if only for a day?”
After breakfast the next morning they shared a cab to the cenote. There was a dead butterfly on the windshield like a sad and grotesque figurehead, a beautiful blue Morpho Eugenia whose wings fluttered in the wind. So many times Ryan had wished such a butterfly would land and sit on a leaf long enough to admire. Now he could admire it all he wanted, he could even take it with him. The cab driver surely wouldn’t mind that, he seemed not to notice there was a dead butterfly on the windshield. But Ryan didn’t want it. The butterfly was dead, and he’d been cheated. The taxi let them out at the entrance to the cenote. Ryan saw something on the road and they walked up to it. It turned out to be a magnificent black velvet tarantula with red markings, alive but stunned and marked for death under the wheel of the next car that came along, a frightening and helpless creature in a world that didn’t play by its ancient rules. Both Ryan and Mario were reluctant to pick it up and carry it to safety: it could sting out of fear. Ryan told himself it would probably die from the blow it had already suffered; one of its legs was missing. He hoped that being a spider protected it from fear of death.
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