Suddenly a pretty woman is approaching. She might be Mexican, but Eli can’t tell. She’s got long, dark hair, but she’s tall and her skin is fair, and she’s dressed in couture (it may be imitation) like a woman in a magazine, as if she’s striding toward them with a photographer following her, though she’s too old to be a model, thirty-five, maybe thirty-nine. There is such a purpose in her stride that it never occurs to Eli she is not headed for their table. Mary, of course, is oblivious to her. Soon enough, though, the knockout leans over, kisses Daniel on the cheek twice, Spanish-style, and sits down at the table’s fourth chair, beaming. Eli feels almost dizzy. What’s with all these gorgeous women? As if his luck in having a lover half his age weren’t enough, there’s Gabriella waiting on him at the castle and now this, sitting here at his table, cleavage beckoning. Who the hell is she?
“This might be awkward,” Daniel begins, standing up for some reason as though giving a wedding toast. “Or maybe not. This is Esther. She’s a wonderful artist. We’ve been together for seven years. She lives here, in San Miguel. We have a five-year-old son—actually, he’s Esther’s sister’s baby, but her sister was unable to care for him, so Esther adopted him. We’re raising him together—you’ll meet him later today.”
Eli chokes on a long swig of margarita. The sour properties of the drink suddenly seem overwhelming and burn his throat in a mad tickle. He coughs maniacally. Mary, sensitive to fits of coughing given her asthma, pounds him on the back.
“I’m so happy to meet you,” Esther says, looking at Mary as though Eli is invisible. The accent, yes, is Spanish. “I’ve been telling Daniel for years to write to you! He never does what I say. I’m so happy that for once, he listens!”
Eli does not know what to make of the look on Mary’s face. Her hand drops from his back with a clunk. She gazes at Daniel, and something about the devastation of her expression . . . he is speaking before he knows it.
“I don’t mean to be offensive,” he blurts out, like somebody about to say something offensive, “but does Gabriella know about this?”
“Gabriella and I are not married,” Daniel says smoothly. “We’re all free agents.”
Eli snorts so loudly that Mary must think he is coughing again, and she turns to pound him on the back. He shrugs her off. His own agitation surprises him, but there it is; he’s on a roll. “Look—” He gestures clumsily at Esther, nearly knocking over his margarita. “You seem like a nice person. I realize I’m acting like a prick. But for Christ’s sake, Daniel, why would you bring your daughter to meet your . . . whatever the hell she is? Haven’t you ever heard of discretion?”
Esther draws herself up tall in her seat, flipping her curtain of dark hair over her shoulder. “I do not dignify this with response,” she says. And to Daniel, “Who is this man? You tell me your daughter is visiting, and I come with an open heart. You did not say she brings an old man with her who will yell at us about things that are not his business. He is, what, her other father?”
Eli stands. His (apparently old) face burns. “This is bullshit. I’m out of here.”
To his surprise, Mary stands, too. He is not sure what she’s doing. He’s made a complete asshole of himself, and even if Daniel and Esther don’t know him for the utter hypocrite he is, Mary certainly does. Maybe she’s standing for a better angle from which to toss her margarita in his face? But shockingly she puts her hand on his wrist, exerts the mildest of pressures to pull him backward, away from the table. She turns to Daniel and says apologetically, “You’re right, you’re absolutely correct, if you and Gabriella aren’t married—even if you were—what goes on between you is your own concern. Eli and I are in no position to judge anyone. But it makes us uncomfortable, after Gabriella brought us into her home and has been waiting on us hand and foot, to be party to something that may be being kept from her, that could be hurtful to her. We would rather you not have involved us. This isn’t personal against you, Esther. We don’t know you. I would like to meet your son and see your artwork. But not like this. I’m sorry.”
The corners of Daniel’s mouth twitch with bemusement. If Eli knew how to hit him over the head in a way that would knock him unconscious without killing him, he would do it, even if it landed his own philandering ass in a Mexican jail. Daniel puts his hand on Mary’s, so that they form a near circle: Daniel, Mary, Eli, all holding hands. Other patrons stare.
“Look,” Daniel says, “you two have the wrong idea. Gabriella knows! She’s well aware. How do you think I spend almost half my time in San Miguel with Esther and my son? Do you think she’s blind and retarded and doesn’t notice I’m gone? I pay her the respect of not talking about Esther at length in her presence—did you expect me to tell anecdotes about my other family over dinner with Gabriella sitting right there? You’ve made a mountain out of a molehill! We have a situation that works for everybody, including both Gabriella’s and Esther’s families, whom, incidentally, I support. If you two want to sit here and vilify me, knock yourselves out, but you’re just showing how American you both are, and how little you understand of the complexities of human relationships. Now, I’d like you to stay, but not if you’re going to insult Esther and treat her like my concubine or something. Esther is a successful artist—she’s an educated woman! She’s made her own choices that work for her and I won’t sit here and have her demeaned.”
Two months later, when Daniel tells this story to his artist friends in San Miguel, he will transpose the facts so that it was Eli who called Esther Daniel’s concubine, and Esther, standing by, flushed with wine, will not contradict him as everyone laughs. Six years later, when Mary tells the story to Sandor over an Indonesian rijsttafel, she will say that it occurred to her only later that maybe Daniel was lying and Gabriella was completely in the dark—there was no way, after all, that either she or Eli would go up to her and ask or ever mention Esther’s name. Thirty years later, when Diane is at last succumbing to an epic, two-decade battle with cancer and Eli is unburdening his soul, he will tell the story in such a way that it was his own guilt talking—that Gabriella, beautiful, loyal, and kind Gabriella, had reminded him of Diane, and that he realized in that moment of Daniel’s smug, self-entitled treachery what a fool he himself had been and how he needed to make it up to his wife for his lies. He will not mention that in the five years following the end of his affair with Mary, he had two other lovers, one a seventeen-year-old student, before developing prostate troubles that changed his body’s virility, and that finally at fifty, extramarital sex began to seem like more trouble than it was worth. When Esther, that night on the phone, tells the story to her twenty-year-old sister, her son’s birth mother, in Spain, she will say only, “It was horrible. They never considered that maybe I was the wronged party! That witch Gabriella, who has never worked a day in her life, gets the big house, and everyone considers her his wife. They stood up to defend her territory as though I were a common whore!”
In the moment, though, Eli and Mary are cowed like children following a tantrum. Without looking at each other, they sit back in their seats. Eli immediately downs the last of his margarita, comforted by the dizzy spin of the terrace brought on by tequila mixed with an hour of inhaled bus exhaust fumes. He says, “Hey. Let’s start over! We just got off on the wrong foot. Esther, you should show us your work—we love art!” He is aware that making art sound like a homogeneous thing one can love in an indiscriminate, all-encompassing way makes him sound even more of an unsophisticated American buffoon, but he has given up, settled into his role as the inappropriate jester of the day. He searches for the waitress so he can order another drink.
IT IS NEARLY 10 p.m. by the time they get back to Querétaro. Eli is already hungover from the earlier onslaught of alcohol, and Mary is coughing furiously and seems to be running a low-grade fever, though she denies it, like all young people who think they’re invincible. Eli’s starting to feel acutely homesick, though it’s sure as hell not Columbus he wants but his wife, and his sons wrestling each
other, and his quietly moody daughter practicing her guitar with her door closed. He wants family, in all its normal imperfections, and not this swinger’s melodrama from a fricking Updike novel!
Daniel, on the other hand, seems none the worse for wear, and spent the bus ride chatting boisterously about his budding side career as a shaman. At first Eli thought he’d heard him wrong—Daniel and Mary were sitting next to each other, and Eli was behind them—but no, there he was, regaling Mary with how he and Esther were considering opening their own healing center in San Miguel, where, according to Daniel, people were coming from all over the world to “detoxify.” Eli could not see the expression on Mary’s face as he listened to her father detailing how he first realized he was a “channeler” for “voices of the other world” while at Esther’s art studio, watching her work on a series of paintings of her dead relatives. “They just started talking to me,” he said. “I was able to give her a message her aunt had for her mother, something she’d never said in life that finally gave the family peace.” Eli felt his mouth gape and wanted to kick the back of Mary’s chair. He heard only her coughing in response.
Now, at the bus station, he whispers to her, “A shaman! The guy’s a crackpot! Here we were, worked up over the fact that he was lying to a nice dame like Gabriella, when the truth is he’s out of his fucking mind!” But Mary’s feverish hand only holds his wanly, with the air of someone who does not care anymore.
“You should see a doctor,” Eli says in the cab, loudly enough for Daniel to hear. “You don’t sound well. We have to leave day after tomorrow—you don’t want to travel sick.” He jabs Daniel in the shoulder, since Daniel is sitting in the taxi’s front seat. “Hey, there must be a doctor in this town, right?”
“Tomorrow’s Sunday,” Daniel says indifferently. “Nothing’s open.”
“It’s all right,” Mary says in an exhausted voice. “I have some antibiotics with me. I’ll start them as soon as I get home.”
“Great,” Daniel says, but Eli narrows his eyes.
“Why are you carrying antibiotics around?” he asks. “Where’d you get them?”
Mary sighs. “They’re not three-year-old black market antibiotics from Africa or something, Eli—I got them from my doctor. I get lung infections sometimes, because of my asthma. I never travel without antibiotics.”
“Oh,” Eli says, cowed again.
The street is dark when they reach Hidalgo. Daniel fumbles in his pockets for a key. He swings back the giant door to reveal the dungeon-like foyer and the majesty of the courtyard, all dark, too, and they step inside. Their voices bounce off the plastic ceiling forty feet above; the closing door echoes in Eli’s chest like a punch. From the house’s rooftop you can count churches in every direction. He’s wanted to take Mary up there and bend her over the edge, to slam into her doggie-style while her wild hair blows over the side of the building into the nothingness, but they haven’t managed it yet. Getting to the roof involves opening a small door near the back of the house and creeping up an impossibly narrow, spiral stone staircase. At the top of the stairs, just before the door they must push open to enter the roof, is a small pile of cat shit. Gabriella has three cats, all of whom seem to be named Mami. Gabriella is afraid of heights, so she never goes on the roof or up the stairs to clean away the shit. Daniel claims to like to sit on the roof and read, but obviously he does not mind stepping over fossilizing feces to do so.
All the lights in the house seem to be snapping on at once. Eli hears Gabriella cry, “They’re back!” Caught in the cavernous courtyard, Eli, Mary, and Daniel look up. Gabriella rushes from the direction of the kitchen, a man—obviously American and about Daniel’s age—following. Maybe Daniel has a gay lover, too, whom they are about to meet? Eli chortles a little under his breath at the thought. Then Mary cries out, “Dad!”
DANIEL THINKS HE may have a heart attack. Already the whole way home he’s been having palpitations, panicking that this joker Eli, who is at least twenty years older than Daniel’s daughter, might tell Gabriella about Esther, just for the malicious hell of it. Now, here in the courtyard is this white-bread, middle-aged man rushing down the wide stairway with Gabriella. Daniel knows he’s in for it for sure. His daughter is shouting, “Dad!” with such a clear relief that it sounds like she’s just been sprung from prison.
And suddenly Daniel just wants out of this whole comedy of errors. Fuck Esther; he should never have written the letter. He can’t have a heart attack now, though. It’s late Saturday night, and as he told his daughter, no good doctors ever work on Sundays.
“I’m sorry to just show up this way,” the interloper tells him. “Your wife was kind enough to let me in. I don’t speak any Spanish, I’m afraid, but we were able to communicate just fine. Her English is great!”
Like anybody asked you, farmer.
“Daddy,” Mary whines like a six-year-old. “I told Mom not to let you come!”
“I know, honey, I know,” says Mary’s dad—Dad II, Dad Squared, Daniel thinks, and he almost laughs, despite the stabbing in his chest. “But this is such a valuable opportunity. Mom and I, we never expected a chance like this.” He looks at Daniel then, as though beseeching validation. “A health history,” he says simply, “might mean a lot.”
“It doesn’t,” Mary says between clenched teeth that spring from nowhere, “mean anything.”
“You don’t know that, sweetheart.”
“Yes,” she hisses. “Yes, I do.”
Dad puts his hands up in mock surrender. His every gesture is full of a folksy hokiness. This? Daniel thinks. He and Rebecca gave up their daughter, their flesh and blood, to this? “I knew she’d say that,” Dad says to Daniel, like one good old boy to another, over the head of the little woman. “That’s why, you see—why I had to come.”
It’s around this time that Daniel notices Eli is trying to disappear right into the floor. Yeah, how do you like it when the shoe’s on the other foot, asshole? Who’s the big, bad sexual perpetrator now, old man?
“Uh,” Daniel says, forcing himself to stop gripping his chest like a grandma and striding over to shake Dad’s hand. “It’s great that you’ve come. One big happy family, right?” Then, at the alarm on Dad’s face, he amends, “I mean, it’s good to see that my . . . that Mary’s been cared for, that her father loves her and is concerned about her. That’s what anyone who has to give up a baby hopes for. For your child to be loved.” And then, ready to shoot himself in the head, he adds simply, “Welcome.” He darts a desperate look at Gabriella, whose smile is frozen on her face in the way it gets when she’s not following everything being said. Where, for fuck’s sake, is the cognac when you need it? Why didn’t Gabriella lubricate Dad with some good booze?
“I, um, don’t want to interrupt any reunions,” Dad says. “I can stay at a hotel, I just—do you think we could sit down somewhere?” He glances around the courtyard as though mystified. “And have a nice talk before I’m on my way?”
No, Daniel’s heart will not have the good grace to give out on him just now. Instead he’s going to have to sit down and answer questions asked by Mary’s good cop and Dad’s bad, just like in his old radical-junkie interrogation-room days. He gestures with his head at Gabriella, who somehow miraculously seems to understand that this is a plea for alcohol and scurries away toward the kitchen. It’s then that he sees Eli backing slowly away.
Daniel throws his arms open, does a half-mad dance around the courtyard while Mary and Dad stand stupefied, and finally arrives at his target—Eli—and clamps his hand on his arm, patting him with naked, jocular aggression on the back. “Absolutely!” he booms. “Let’s all go for a good chat, shall we? Gabriella will bring us some drinks. Let’s go to the sitting room.” He smiles widely at Dad, a smile he hopes doesn’t come off as a smirk. “It’s right next to the chapel!”
IT’S LIKE ROCKET science, getting everyone in one room at the same time. First, Mary rushes off to take her antibiotics, which seems to alarm Dad, who rushes
off after her but returns—solo—a couple of minutes later. Then Gabriella appears with small, heavy cognac glasses on a tray, only to be told, “I’m not much of a drinker, but I wouldn’t say no to a beer,” by Dad, and she glides from the room again. Finally Mary returns, downing her cognac in a single sip, Daniel notices. And eventually Gabriella, who may wisely have paused to pop a Valium on the way, produces Dad’s beer and stands next to the loveseat where Daniel is sitting, until Eli, who has been dragged to the seat by Daniel like a hostage in a robbery, hops up and moves as far away from Daniel as possible, allowing Gabriella to take his place. And then things get off to the best possible start, all stars aligning in Daniel’s favor. Dad looks at Eli square in the face and says, all folksiness gone from his preacher’s voice, “So who exactly are you?”
“This is Eli.” Mary’s words are rushed. “We work together in Columbus.”
“I see,” Dad says, not even glancing at Mary. “Ohio’s a long way from here.”
“I . . . uh . . .” Eli seems to be weighing his words carefully. “I didn’t think Mary should come alone.”
“Oh, you didn’t, did you?” Dad says, his voice flat, innocuously menacing. “You two dating, are you?”
“Um,” Mary says, “Dad. Yes. Sort of.”
“Oh!” Dad cries, with a glance at Daniel, who obligingly raises an eyebrow. “Sort of !” Dad spreads his paws wide in exaggerated confusion. “You’ll have to enlighten me—I’m just a simple, old-fashioned man. Back when I was dating, we didn’t have a kind called ‘sort of.’ ”
Sure you did, Daniel thinks. You just didn’t get out enough.
“Dad,” Mary says again, warning. “There’s no need to be rude. Eli and I aren’t seriously involved, is what I meant. We’re friends. We sometimes date. He came to help me. He didn’t think I should come alone, that’s all.”
A Life in Men: A Novel Page 18
