by Ron Hansen
“Here. Hold my wallet for me,” I said.
Reinhardt smiled and flicked off the hair dryer. “Excuse me?”
His scheming was so obvious, so insultingly free of finesse and bunco, that I fell into silence. And then he held a mirror up and held his face close to mine so that both of us were in the frame. “Great haircut,” I said. And it was true; just like his.
“Look at us,” he said. “We could be brothers.”
“I have one already.”
Reinhardt casually turned to put the mirror on the kitchen countertop. “Oh? And what is his name?”
“Frank.”
“And is he living in Colorado?”
But I was heading upstairs by then. I got thirty dollars in pesos and heard him fool with the Sinatra CD on the dining room player until he found “Witchcraft.” And when I got downstairs he was hunting through the full rack of discs.
“Are you casing the joint?”
Reinhardt smiled uneasily. “What does it mean, ‘casing’?”
I handed him the pesos and he stuffed them in his front pocket with only a furtive count. “Was it expensive,” he asked, “this stereo system?”
Weeks hence, I feared, I’d return from my night work in the jungle and everything in that house would be gone, presto chango, and Reinhardt would be showing his kindness to some other wunderkind. “I have something I’d like to give you,” I said.
“Oh?” he asked, and there was a child’s Christmas glimmer in his eyes as I went to the hallway closet and hauled out a fair painting I’d fired off of a hillside and rainstorm skies and the seething gray waters just below my studio. I was frankly surprised by the honest respect he offered that sketch, the fascination and honor and joy Reinhardt took in holding it up and fully appraising it. You’d have thought it was a Corot. “This is fantastic!” he said. “This is great!” And there was a faint gloss of tears in his eyes as he fetchingly grinned at me. “We Europeans take friendship seriously. I’ll have to do something for you.”
Eight years ago at an East Village party I locked on to a psychologist who was researching a book on “thereness,” as she called it, the high feeling some people have after going to a geography far from home and finding a here is where I was meant to be that they’d never felt before, as if the function of their lives was the bringing them to that place. I felt that way when I first got to Resurrección, but initially thought it was just because Renata was there. But she was lost to me then, I knew that. I would telephone Stuart’s villa and Stuart would be the first one to it, a husk in his voice as he asked, just to annoy me, “And whom shall I say is calling?” Envy and rivalry for Renata’s affections were turning our meetings into skirmishes and our retreats into siegecraft and intrigues. Stuart told me once, “You’ll be the ruin of her,” as if I were a hooligan trampling the flower of Renata’s reputation, and Stuart treated me in other ways like a frat boy and lout, like a fired employee. He pitied me openly at parties, he put up with me as one does a chronic pain, he once cleared our places after a dinner and pitched my cutlery into the trash.
Elated when Renata was with me, sick with despair and emptiness when she was away, I was powerless in the relationship, and she played with that just as I probably would have in the same position. Renata slept with me for old time’s sake or out of inchoate spite for Stuart or in the hell-with-it spirit of a high school girl grown tired of the heavy struggles in the car. We did not do ourselves proud, Renata and I, and she came to the house one afternoon looking sleepless and forlorn and cried-out, and she told me, “I just can’t do this anymore.”
But she did do that anymore. We were both completely dependable in our irresponsibility. Whenever Stuart was away, I hurried over to the villa in order to sit in palapa shade with Renata and piña coladas, our knees just touching, holding my stare on a bead of sweat as it trickled down her side and I thought Oh, lucky droplet!, and being gradually destroyed by the soft caress of her voice. Each sentence burnished and fathomable. The hour or two would have to end for some reason having to do with Stuart and we’d kiss and hold each other’s misery to ourselves and my hands would find the old familiar places until she pushed me away.
Hardly a week before I went up to Colorado for the holidays I called her, my stomach flipping and my throat tightening with worry, wrapping myself inside the phone cord like a sitcom simpleton, and I tried to fix where I was in our emotional geography, fully unbuttoning my chest and informing Renata I felt like an inflamed teenager just born into the world of romance, No one has ever loved like this, and I was frustrated that there was no other way of putting it but to say again that I really really really loved her, had always loved her, as she knew, and the only future with any solace or purity or meaning for me was one with Renata in it: Would she fly up to Colorado with me? And then could we get married?
Renata sighed like the slow drag of a razor blade and said, “Ohhh, Scott …,” four beats at least to that phrase, four hammer blows to the spike I’d held to my fluttering heart. She told me she didn’t trust herself with commitment, she felt too much turbulence just then, she didn’t know if she was right for me, why didn’t I try to find somebody else?
I was boyish with embarrassment. Awkward as a box full of shoes. Half-afraid I’d choke up or my shaky voice would crack, I hurriedly put up the fences and told her, “Well, there’s no pressure. I just wanted some clarity, to find out what was real.”
She said, “I think this is the reality we’ve heard so much about.”
“Well, that’s why I needed to say it. Everything gets to be Las Vegas after a while.”
She told me prettily, “Don’t feel rejected.”
“If you say so.” The phone seemed to weigh a hundred pounds. Silt seemed to be funneling from my head to my feet.
“We can stay friends, can’t we?”
We’d both gone to high school, apparently. “Oh sure,” I said. “Hell yes. I’d hate not seeing you at all.”
“Stuart’s here,” she then whispered, and hung up.
On good days I painted in the jungle, faking it mostly, far too much hard-won technique and far too little imagination. Otherwise I hung out at the hotels, half-baked on hashish or the hard drugs I could score off college kids on their getaway flings, as goofy as that, cruising the playa in jams and sunglasses and a teal satin shirt, like the playboy of the Caribbean, hunting babes who were already high and inviting them home for an up-all-night, and then coming to in that Oh, Jesus chaos of emptied bottles and passed-out strangers and somebody softly sobbing upstairs. Anything to stay buzzed, to forget my obsession: self-prescribing Dexedrine, Percodan, Ritalin, and Valium at the farmacia and trying out fancy chemistry projects until I felt the attack of the thousand spiders. I was halfway through an imitation of Malcolm Lowry in Cuernavaca: fit and tanned in the afternoon, grinning for the camera in white shorts and huaraches, with Ovid’s Metamorphoses in one hand and a full bottle of gin in the other; and far far gone by nighttime—feckless, sulking, furious, unshaved, in a fuddle of shame and neediness, failure becoming his full-time job.
But as skin-your-nose low as I was, there were a hundred others just like me down there, the formerly talented, the formerly with-it, hulking over shot glasses in the frown of drunkenness, not talking because we couldn’t form words, having no company but fear, and pitifully tilting down for a taste because our hands weren’t working quite right. You could find us haunting the centro at five A.M., walking car wrecks and homicides, waiting for the cantinas to open again and looking away from each other because we hated seeing that face in the mirror. You heard all kinds of reasons for being in the tropics: for their arthritis, their pensions, the fishing, the tranquil and easygoing ways, but the fact was a lot of us stayed because Mexico treated us like children, indulging our laziness, shrugging at our foolishness, and generally offering the silence and tolerance of a good butler helping the blotto Lord What-a-waste to his room. In high school my brother knowingly told me, as a kind of dire warning,
“There are people who do on a regular basis things you have never even imagined!” I was now one of those people. Eventually it had become fairly ordinary for me to lose the handle and black out so far from home it might as well have been Cleveland, sitting there in a foul doorway in the barrio, fairly sure I’d had sex but not knowing with whom, blood on my shirt front, puke on my shoes, kids stealing the change from my pockets, and so little idea where my Volkswagen was that I used up an afternoon in a taxi just prowling the streets until I found it. And then, of course, there was a celebration and I fell into a wander again.
I have trouble putting a date to that particular spree, but it was late January, four months since I’d got off lithium, and for days I’d been floorboarding it into what Renata used to call “a heightened state of mental fragility.” Whether it was insanity or the aftereffects of pharmacy, I felt brilliant, ebullient, invulnerable, full of gaiety and false good health and a giddy, Wow, isn’t this freaky? excitement. Well-being for me, though, is often like the aura that precedes the seizures of epilepsy, and I was headed for doom even while I was heartily being in my prime, Captain Electric, happy-go-lucky Scott. Stuart tried abiding me at Printers Inc and found himself not up to the task, and when I showed up at his villa (“Hi, honey; I’m home!”) Renata gave me that Oh, you poor puppy look. We finally went out to inflict ourselves upon Mexico and found our way onto a bus tour of Resurrección, one of those You are here jaunts put on by the grand resort hotels to lure their elderly out of their rooms. And by then I was falling into a funk of aloneness and loss and desolation, hunkered down inside those old, old feelings of lunacy and finding familiar faces in all the Americans on that air-conditioned tour bus (“We know each other!”), as if I were part of some cosmic class reunion, déjà vu to the max—that old guy daubing sunblock fifteen on his nose and the hunchbacked woman holding her purse with both hands were as friendly to me as regulars at the truck stop cafe in Antelope, and wasn’t that Aunt Claire? Were I still full of optimism and hail-fellow-well-met I would have been tempted to shout hellos and harass the old people with my frantic happiness, but my fluky head chemistry was forcing me into a bleak house of paranoia, restlessness, even terror, and I was trying to hold back, quiet the hectic tattoo of my heartbeat, put the watchdog out on his chain in case things got too weird.
Which they did. We’d motored through the centro, found photo opportunities with the fishing boats and the fruit sellers, heard the chamber of commerce pitch about a sky’s-the-limit real estate future, and halted in front of the Church of the Resurrection. We were going on a walking tour, the girl in charge said. She said we would “find inside the parroquia many furnishing from Espain that the padres are bringing to Mexico in the eighteen century.”
I have no idea if it was intuition or if some psychic floodwaters were opened and feeding me insights into the past, but I felt superior to whatever that girl’s presentation would be. I felt like a former inhabitant, like I knew that place when the paint was still fresh, as if the hallways, the hidden doors, the shellacked pictures on the walls were as familiar to me as my father’s house, and I’d forsaken the right or possibility of going inside again. Call it superstition or just a bad trip, but it felt as heavy as shot-in-the-night reality, like I was a kid on the first porch step of a haunted house, and my first remedy of choice was to hide my head underneath the sheets. I have a hard time making these events obey anything but the horrible logic of nightmare. I just know that as the old people herded off the bus I was shaded by the wings of madness and just sat there in my place, heartsick, holes for eyes, frail as an invalid, and shaking like it was forty below.
I heard Renata ask, “Are you spooked?” And I realized that she and I were the only passengers still on the bus, and that the frustrated driver was fixing a hard squint on us in his rearview mirror.
I just said, “I’m not ready for this.”
“You don’t have to go in,” she said.
“Are you sure?”
“I’ll see if you can stay.” Renata gallantly went forward to help out the crazy person.
I heard Spanish and hours seemed to pass as I hunched forward, my face hidden in my hands, and inhaled, exhaled, as if that would be my only job from then on. Then I heard Renata say it was not possible, it was break time and the bus was being shut down, I’d fry inside with the air off. She took hold of my wrist and led me like a child to the door and ever so tenderly onto the sidewalk.
You’d have thought I was a head-on collision the way the Americans lurked on the sidewalk, talking about me, retreating, Don’t get anything on me in their looks as I was hurried across the street, my feeble shoes shuffling a sandpaper rasp from the cobbled paving, and was settled like an ill-wrapped package on a park bench in the jardín. She said, “You know, I’m not that healthy myself. We can’t take care of each other.” If I looked at Renata then it was fleetingly, but I followed her with a toys-in-the-attic stare as she waded back into that hushed crowd, and I fended off self-doubt by thinking that this helplessness and despair was her scene, not mine, I was fine until she took my hand. I have to go now, I thought. I have to wash. I’ll eat my food with a fork.
A full day later in my house and I was fine again, honest, no fooling. Waking up and holding my hands out in front of my face in that how-many-fingers final exam of full consciousness and perspective. But one frightening leer from Mr. Hyde in the bathroom mirror told me that I ought to get out of town for a while. And so I hurried into a bleached shirt and chinos and hiking boots, filled a box with food, block-lettered a note for María, and headed out to Eduardo’s to hie the lunatic into the hills.
We shared a past, Eduardo and I, that made his friends consider my visits to his shanty in the jungle a kind of jubilee of wild invention, so within the next few days all the families in the area found their way to his place to hear the holy fool. My first night there fourteen men and boys settled on their haunches around a fire, inhaling huge handmade cigars until they were wholly intoxicated, and fascinatedly watched the zoo animal in his own private Weltschmerz. Eduardo finally squatted next to me and whispered in Spanish, “We wait for a speech.”
I gave it some thought and recited in English a high school lesson of the first paragraph from Moby Dick: “‘Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet, and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then I account it high time to get to the sea as soon as I can.’”
I have no idea what my English sounded like to them, but when I finished, a few softly applauded me in their flat-palmed way and one at a time they got up and finally left, fully entertained.
Hectic that life was not. We fetched water from the hole and used posts to tamp kernels of corn in a field that was still hot with soot and ash, but otherwise the hours passed at half-speed in a whine of insects, Eduardo instructing his heedless wives in their work while the heat soaked the black-and-blues away. Each night Eduardo’s oldest wife, Koh, offered me a hideous brew of balche and chewed roots and seed pods that I took in perfect obedience. And I’d sleep hard, hammered, until high noon, hearing nothing but pigs and chickens and the chinking noise of machetes hacking down great trees in the jungle, feeling nothing but the infrequent, faint, floating touch of children’s hands on my face and hair.
And then Saturday afternoon Eduardo and three of his friends invited me fishing, and we hiked through the forest to a harbor where a high-sided skiff was lolling on the swells as a teenaged boy in a racing suit fiddled with a fifty-horsepower outboard motor terribly hitched to its transom. I looked north and found far off the shell gray of the pollution that tarnished Resurrección, but the shoreline was otherwise foreign to me.
We got naked and thrashed out to th
e skiff with our clothes held high overhead, and I heard only highly accented Mayan as they pulled themselves up over the gunwale and joshed about something having to do with the gringo. I played the fifth wheel, Oh don’t mind me, and faced them stonily from the forward sailing thwart as the kid in the racing suit got the motor going and we surged a half-mile farther out to a barrier reef where the water was as tepid and clear as Perrier but from a distance had the turquoise color of kitchens in the fifties.
The kid killed the motor and hurled overboard three concrete blocks that were tied to the painter line. An old face mask half eaten with salt and fairly good fins were handed to me, and then a four-foot spear just like they had. Winking, I gave them the old thumbs-up—what a good sport, what a trouper. The first to jump over the side was me, and then I heard hoots and the four crashing in, handling the seawater without face masks or fins and twisting like otters around the white elkhorn coral and infant sponges as they hunted brilliant wrasse and groupers and rainbow parrotfish. I went up for air a full minute before one of them did—they held their breath like turtles—but finally they all did flutter up for air with a boxfish that trailed shreds of blood, and I skimmed down past colonies of intricate lavender and red coral through a school of glorious blue tang that shuddered and broke apart at my presence and then rejoined into one mind again, and then I stroked farther past a terrace of black brain coral and sea anemone to a floor of sand. And there I found a stingray almost fully hidden in the sand, its fake-seeming yellow eyes flashing uninteresting news until irritation or fright finally registered and with a fluff of its gorgeous iron gray wings the sand floated away like smoke and the stingray was suddenly in a flight that was fluent as ointment. The first surge took it twenty feet from me, and then in its sovereignty it glided into a stall and oh so gently rippled its wings until the floor settled over it again.