Without the need to care for me, or earn, Annie buzzed with her own discontents. Increasingly, they centered on Mexico.
The Fall of the Herreras had occurred when Annie’s grandfather, a federal minister in post-World War II Mexico City, was ousted by scandal, the family holdings confiscated. “It was jealousy, you can bet,” Annie said. “Too popular, worshipped by the poor, the old story.” He’d lived another twenty years, selling shoes in Leon.
His son, Annie’s father, had smuggled her family across the border. They lived under a bridge. Annie’s first memory was of clutching a junked sofa leg as the river swept away their living room. Now the Herreras were forbidden to mention that time, or even to speak Spanish. Her father, owner of a resort, was more American than Johnny Carson, Annie said.
“He betrays his kind,” she said, shrugging. When two years earlier he had confessed the affair, his wife had a stroke. “You should have seen Mama.” Annie’s head slewed limply.
I suggested Annie take Spanish. Spring semester she enrolled in Level I at the community college. Our belongings acquired neatly typed labels—la silla, el espejo, el refrigerador—as if our house had sprouted yellow leaves. She called herself Ana.
She bought a flowered Mexican clothes hook in the border town. Bark tapestries unrolled down our walls, we drank water from hand-blown Tlaquepaque glass. Annie let her hair grow out curly, fastening it with Taxco silver combs. Our tostadas and enchiladas suizas were bathed in homemade salsa. Annie ate intently, guacamole overflowing the tortilla onto her fingers. She gained weight in her hips, belly, and chin. Then twenty-two pounds crashed in a water-only diet.
Jumping a semester to intermediate, she continued Spanish in summer school and volunteered at a clinic for illegal aliens.
In July an invitation to the Herreras’ twenty-fifth anniversary provoked our first serious fight.
“I’ve never met them,” I insisted.
“It would humiliate me for you to see him.”
“I’ll go by myself.”
Annie’s arms shot out and the table went over. “I can’t do that to them.” She fell into a chair.
I’d never liked my family either, I said, soothing her. Forever nicking himself, my father applied Band-Aids that perfectly matched his skin; he was the only flesh-colored person I’ve known. My mother applied herself to perkiness and crossword puzzles. Both brothers quit school for the service; my sister eloped at sixteen.
Mr. Herrera was sleek and compact, hair still black, but with silver handlebar mustaches. His silk shirt was the violent primary colors of jujubes, open over his hairless chest. He had that edge of embittered self-congratulation typical of showbiz personalities—“My Way,” “Made It Through the Rain.” But he could begin a story “At our anniversary fete last night the Governor contributed a fountain of Dom Perignon ten feet high” and end “This morning already I’m unfaithful. For two hours I embraced the toilet bowl, kissing the seat.”
“Is he bluffing?” Annie hissed in my ear. “Does he think we don’t know?” Mrs. Herrera’s mouth still drooped at the corner, vestige of the stroke.
Handing me a drink, Mr. Herrera propelled me up the lookout mountain, which he also owned. As we seated ourselves on a cement bench carved with Winged Victories, colored beams whipped across the Parthenon’s Doric columns.
“Self-activates at dusk,” Mr. Herrera said. “And a hell of a security system, too. Criminals think they’ve died and gone to heaven up here. Annie tells me you’re a businessman.”
I deprecated my backyard nursery.
“Where do you think everyone begins? Look, I must tell you, you’re not the first man for Annie, because such are these times. She has made unfortunate attachments. But she is a constant girl. Months go by, she sees no one if a man is unsuitable. So already I’m impressed with you.”
After dinner, as the manservant cleared the table, Annie complimented the meal in Spanish. Nobody responded.
“Verdad, Ana, y el vino también,” I said finally.
“Americans speak English,” Mr. Herrera said.
“Yes,” Annie said, “you and Ronald Reagan, you and La Migra, you and the CIA in Nicaragua, you and the Justice Department that sends refugees, Latinos like yourself, home to be killed.”
Mr. Herrera reddened. Two of Annie’s sisters, on the far end of the marble dining hall, elaborately flung their napkins onto the floor. “Leave this table,” Mrs. Herrera said.
As Annie snatched up her shawl, Mr. Herrera attempted a wink in my direction, but he was so agitated that his eyelid wouldn’t close. He looked as if lemon had squirted his eye. “Wait,” he whispered, commanding with a strong hand on my arm. “If you were my son-in-law, I would have a family stake investing in your business. You need capital to expand. What are you going to do, put up a circus tent in your backyard?” Smiling with astonishment, I waved around the table and followed Annie to the car, where she sat with chin jutted.
“Of course he’s despicable,” I said. “But he loves you so much he’s in danger. You have the power to shame his life away.” A surprising love for him tugged at me. Like me he was made over, too new, scrubbed pink like surgically reconstructed skin.
“If I found my grandfather’s house in Mexico City,” Annie was saying, “I would creep on my knees like pilgrims at the Basilica. I’d photograph every square foot and make postcards, and send one to my father each day saying, ‘This is your home.’”
At the end of summer school we crossed the border to recover Annie’s grandfather, at least his reputation. The violation of my parole gave us both insomnia. Mexico City was a Hollywood disaster movie, a postnuclear epic. In a pall of charred smog we traipsed from government agency to library to newspaper archive. Her grandfather, we learned, had been purged as a Nazi collaborator. The ancestral Herrera home was located in the suburb Pedregal de San Angel, an enclave of multimillion-dollar villas surrounded by massive lava walls. Shanties leaned against them. Old women bent double under loads of bound sticks. Babies slept in boxes. Within, the current occupants toasted us with cocktails and stuffed us with hors d’oeuvres.
Outside, Annie burst into sobs as I held her. Then, shaking free, she raised her arms, slowly, high overhead, and let them slap to her sides.
On the train north she was composed, seductive, peeling fresh mango and popping it in my mouth. Home, she registered at the university. Within two years she had completed an abandoned degree program, student teaching, and certification. She was assigned a fourth grade.
We married. Negotiations surrounded the ceremony. I had not entered a church in a decade and a half, but Mrs. Herrera wanted a religious service; a priest married us in our backyard. Annie demanded a Mexican extravaganza reception. The priest, in a white linen cassock, rope-belted, seemed as alien as a guest lead from Star Trek. He was middle-aged handsome, with sharp chin and graying hair, and surprised me with a whistle when Annie and I kissed, closing our vows. It was a beautiful September day, breezes rippling the shadows of leaves over us.
For the reception, the rented ballroom was decked with streamers and paper flowers. While mariachis played on stage, Annie and I drank champagne from the bottle. The dancing began, el Baile del Dolar. Mr. Herrera first partnered Annie, who, pliant as a shop dummy, looked woodenly past him. My own family not attending, I engaged Mrs. Herrera, Celia, instead of my mother. Though hippy, she was an effortless bundle, strands of her gray hair flying across my face. At the song’s conclusion she knotted a C-note in my bowtie. The next partner, an aunt, tucked a more modest five into my belt. The band repeated “Volver Volver,” dance after dance.
Sprigs of legal tender wound into my hair, protruding from my shoes, pinned into a tail behind me, I blundered into Annie and Mrs. Herrera huddling against the stage.
“I have forgiven him,” Mrs. Herrera was saying, forefinger punching her own chest. “How is it your business to go on punishing him?” I drifted away in the arms of a perfumed fourteen-year-old cousin.
And so M
r. Herrera promenaded Annie into the center again, he nimble on small feet, she festooned with gray-green currency bows. His cheeks were split wide with smiling. The last trumpet quaver, she patted his shoulder and kissed his cheek, stood while he hugged her.
True to his word, Mr. Herrera presented me with a choice parcel of B-2, now DesertScapes. Annie and I bought a house.
At her request Annie was transferred to a barrio school. Nightly she treated me to the latest marvels of border Spanglish: “Oye, K-mart tiene el gran half-price sale de Voltron y los Gobots, esta noche hasta los diez, check it out…” She bought me season basketball tickets and rubbed linament in my joints, stretched my back and neck. Her facial angularity subsided, lines rounding. Even her movements softened. She settled into furniture like a release of air.
My parole expired. I discontinued therapy. We were complete, my job finished.
Annie’s version of the Memorial Day crash: “We hit so hard it knocked the lights out for a second.” The car is totalled, crushed.
In a dream I take my child to the junkies’ restaurant.
“Coming along great, Tony,” the waiter fawns. He, like all the employees and clientele, like me, is unremarkable except for the left arm, shrunken and chalky. In the dream it’s understood this is the mainlining arm (though I never have shot dope and indeed will not take even aspirin now). The baby is healthy-sized except for its left arm, also withered.
Recoiling from myself, I recede faster from Annie. Weeks pass without a caress, much less sex.
“O.K.,” Annie says. “I will take the diaphragm out of the drawer. I will put it in.”
I wave her off.
Summer, and women approach DesertScapes uncovered. Triangular cloth bits hold in their breasts. Their cutoffs ride low on the hips, frayed denim crotches scarcely wider than the perineum. Their apricot-gold flesh circulates, liquid, among islands of stark, grotesque desert forms. Today a woman’s pinky nail traces for me the color modulations in one prickly pear pad. Casually her hand loops the needles. My finger wants to follow the line of her crouched thigh and calf. Her fluffy blonde hair is pinned behind her ear. I even half-step toward her, then kneel quickly, tying my shoe. She is maybe nineteen.
Her next visit she asks if I truly sat on the barrel cactus, on TV.
“For reals. No special effects at DesertScapes,” I say.
She winces. “I have to tell you, I find the whole series kind of contemptuous toward the plants,” she says.
“Flippancy is just the surface of despair.”
“For what?”
“I don’t know why I said that. It must be your naked ear.”
In the greenhouse where I keep my rarest exotics, I pull her to me by the small of her back. Her arms band around me. I reach inside her cutoffs and flow into her through my hands. I become her dry, compact buttocks, long nipples stabbing my chest, legs pressed against me. A groan reverberates through me.
“I can’t be doing this,” I say. “My wife and I are making a baby.”
“All right.” She steps back lightly, shedding the experience. “Good luck.”
But she, Lou, returns. “What a nice sunburned man,” she says when we undress in her apartment. There is nothing we will not do for each other. During what I tell Annie is a procuring trip to Baja California, I don’t leave Lou’s apartment for seventy-two hours. Finally, after days of coupling, a fantasm of ourselves separates from us. Bluish, it hovers and bumps along the ceiling, pure dim light like those fish at the ocean bottom.
Annie changes her hairstyle, a flip, a perm. She wears peekaboo negligees to bed and brings home X-rated videos. I find a push-up bra in the laundry, though she is full-breasted. She buys a health spa membership.
“What is it?” she says. She is discernible but hard to identify, as if we’re looking at each other through the windows of parallel trains traveling at high speed.
I agree to resume with my therapist, but I don’t keep the appointments. Annie summons Mr. Herrera, whose latest hobby, a helicopter, lands in our backyard, blades thundering, winds blasting choking storms of dust.
“It’s not so bad, having a child,” he says, as we sip beers against the carport. “They only cut their heads open, break their hearts, kill themselves with drugs and grow up to hate you. Why worry?”
But I’m not smiling. His image suffers from the same opacity as his daughter’s.
“Isn’t she pretty to you any more?”
“It’s not that, Mike.”
Lowering his voice, though Annie is inside, he says, “Distractions can occur.” His eyes shift. We haven’t acknowledged his infidelity.
“There’s no big deal,” I say. “Some kind of phase. It’ll pass.”
Though Annie and I see each other daily, her face is a spent bulb. Daily workouts have given her the kite-shaped torso of a weightlifter. Her back is rows of glowering muscle.
The phone wakes Annie and me late at night. I grope for it, say hello. No one speaks, a half minute, more.
The light flashes on. Annie’s face is pale, grim.
Arching my eyebrows, I hand her the receiver, my stomach knotting, heart pounding. But for her it’s the same. Silence funnels into the room.
Annie’s expression wavers, her mouth relaxing while the frown deepens. Her glance flicks at me, hides.
Over the next days she alternates between flat hostility and remorseful tenderness.
Lou explains the phone call. “I wanted to hear where you live. Another way of making love.”
Lou and I invent Hot Massage, holding our palms over a candle flame until the heat sears, then pressing quickly into each other’s flesh. A rubber band around the scrotum, we discover, delays climax for hours. I ejaculate blood spots. When the topic turns to snuff films we fall silent, contemplating the image of our joined bodies, golden in cheap incandescent light, jolted, rising slow motion out of the frame.
Shopping, we guide our cart among customers pinched or rushed or dreamily intent, who give us no particular attention. Parking against the freezer, selecting orange juice, black-eyed peas, we could be a couple like any other, in another supermarket, in another life. Home, we smear each other’s bodies into paste.
Edging onto Broadway from Lou’s street, I see Annie’s Nissan and merge two cars behind. Stopped in a rush-hour jam, she glances compulsively in the rearview mirror, fussing at her eyebrows, and I’m certain she’ll notice me in the elevated pickup cab. Her head nods, and I identify the new sound as Top 40, then a Mexican ballad, jazz, classical, country. Nothing fits—I know the feeling. I tense for her. The light changing, she taps her horn repeatedly.
She pulls off at the health club, and I park around the corner, delaying before I enter. Through the steamy partition between sauna and Nautilus I watch her legs scissoring, a delicate winglike bar dipping behind her shoulders. The violent effort compresses her face.
At the convenience mart she buys milk and cartons I can’t identify from the lot across the street. It’s getting dark.
Her final stop is the drugstore, where I hide from aisle to aisle. She selects only one item, the shaving soap I’ve needed but forgotten over a week. On line she goes still, gaze fixed in the distance. She is somewhere else, a beautiful stranger.
Then she tosses, runs a hand through her wet hair, and I’m transported back to the touchingly goony barmaid of the E-Z Lounge feasting on a cigarette.
The sudden weight of the years almost brings me to my knees. The drugstore expands, white posts growing farther apart, until the building is so large I can’t walk out.
I have never left Annie’s shoebox house, I realize. For me the black still writhes outside, Annie and I fucking against it, tiny bright points like our knees’ reflection on the windshield of the car before I drove it off the road.
And all the while, unknown to me, we were building around this house another one, solid, spacious. The materials are Annie’s balance and happiness, her barrio kids reading out loud. Even my acres of sensible, water-co
nserving native plants. Annie’s father dancing her around the reception hall. The Herreras circling, wishing and blessing a child for us. The long planks of this Good House, as I immediately call it, arch overhead into firm joints, a spine of beams.
I feel myself gathering weight, density. Cautiously, I allow myself to inhabit this Good House, which surprisingly fits like my own body.
Annie is through the cashier.
Dinner, setting down her fork, Annie says, “I give you credit, bringing me to this life I have. If you’re going to destroy it I have to decide which way I’m going to go on.” I embrace her and we fall into a stately lovemaking unlike us, or me. We fuck like two cool mansions.
When I break off, Lou says, “O.K.”
It’s time for quiet, for Annie and me to sit side by side on the couch, talking a bit, or to take walks.
Though yet only “trying,” we visit a natural childbirth clinic. Wednesday night class is a room of oval women in colorful, frilly getup, balanced like Easter eggs on cushions. Their minimal, angular males are strokes and serifs, letters of the alphabet on the verge of making sense.
A very young couple stars in the birthing movie. At first I mistrust the boy’s open-faced charm—my integrity shot, I suspect everyone—but as the film progresses I understand his grin is a rictus of terror and helplessness. Still he never leaves the girl’s side, or lets go of her hand, or forgets to coach her breathing patterns, even when her screams erase him. The pregnant women begin crying. The baby’s emerging head tears the vagina. “Oh my God,” I say, but the audience takes this in stride. The baby is out; the boy’s smile hasn’t changed; tears run down his face. The girl’s piping is unearthly—“Where is she? Is everything there? Honey, count her fingers. Honey?”
After a picnic, Annie and I bask in an arroyo. Inches from my nose, a lizard poises against the rock. The animal has the same astringent, arid smell as the stone, the sand, the air, as us, and I begin with Annie. The sand grits against us as we roll. I squeeze flesh and handfuls of sand as if they were the same. Smooth, steady, we build into a hum, the common music of the place.
All My Relations Page 15
