The Travel Writer

by Jeff Soloway

  “There’s food at the gate,” I said. “We’ll eat there.” Our flight wasn’t for another four hours, but I wanted to put Hilary, and more airport security, behind us.

  At the gate, we agreed to stay alert and maintain a strict anti-napping policy until airborne, just in case. We bought empanadas and coffee.

  “What was she doing with Ray?” Kenny said. “That dumb-ass. And what was your girl doing? Pilar.” He was poking at the innards of the empanada. I realized he was picking out the olives.

  “Lying to me.”

  “Hilary never lied to me. No one ever lies to me. So fuck me.” Kenny inserted a tiny piece of his empanada into his mouth and chewed slowly, ready to spit if it offended. Finally he swallowed, with a little nod to help him toss the morsel down. “But I found her,” he said. “That’s what I said I’d do, and I did it. So what if she never loved me.”

  “You don’t know that,” I said. “Maybe she loved you for a moment, when she kissed you that time. Just because she changed her mind doesn’t mean she never loved you.”

  Kenny rubbed his fork and knife together fretfully. “It’s like she’s dead.”

  “But she’s not.”

  “No. Pilar’s dead. It’s not right. I don’t care if she lied. I liked her. We should do something.” He was pleading. “Call the police. Shut down that hotel.”

  “What good would it do? Dionisius is dead, and so’s Pilar. That’s everyone I care about.”

  Kenny stopped rubbing and went back to scrutinizing his food for olives.

  * * *

  During the flight I was too espresso-wound to sleep. Hilary sat far behind us, dozing or pretending to doze. I shut my eyes and interrogated myself. What was I going to do next? Once home, I’d have to line up another guidebook gig, but how could I go on writing guidebooks? People who’ve suffered as I had need to change their lives; otherwise, suffering would be unbearably pointless. But how could I go on paying rent and buying groceries if I didn’t write travel guides? Could I make it just on magazine work? I hadn’t been able to yet. I should have taken a job at a website while I had the chance. They would have laid me off by now, but maybe I’d have had the foresight to sell my stock options early. I knew I wouldn’t have been that smart. I decided I had to do something better with my life. I could become a schoolteacher in East Harlem. Unlike the other white teachers, I’d know when the kids were mouthing off in Spanish. I’d mouth right back at them, and the rest of the kids would cheer or woof or whatever kids did these days for the cool new teacher. Yeah, right. Those kids would eat me alive.

  Since our first night together in the Ecuadorian jungle, and even after she dumped me by email, not a day had gone by when I hadn’t thought of Pilar at least once. When would I break the streak? What if it took years, or even the rest of my life? My regret would last many years longer than our romance. I should try to hate her, to hurry the pain to the grave, to molder there with Pilar’s body. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t even resent that she hadn’t loved me in the end. After all, I had failed her first. I was only sorry that her pride had robbed both of us of our best chance at contentment. She had been happy with me. I repeated the statement, and found it settled easily into my mind. Everyone is entitled to at least one article of blind faith.

  I opened my eyes. Kenny was sleeping, his head slung against the airplane window, his mouth gaping in permanent surprise. Thank God he was going home.

  Chapter 27

  At the Miami airport, I said farewell to Kenny, but we arranged to beer ourselves up again at Siberia later in the week. We shook hands, and he gave me the urban half hug he must have picked up from watching guys on the subway. “Phew,” he said when we released. “You stink.” I watched him watching Hilary, at a respectful but not excessive distance, as he drifted toward the gate for the flight to New York.

  I went to the counter to postpone the last leg of my flight. I had met Pilar’s aunt once before. Pilar and I had stopped over for the afternoon in Miami so we could take her out to lunch. At the time, I had hoped this was an official family introduction, and perhaps it was. Her aunt squinted at me suspiciously as I moved in to kiss her on the cheeks. She had immigrated from Spain via Puerto Rico many years before, but never lost her Spanish snobbery. We went to a real Spanish restaurant, one that served an authentic cocido madrileño, a thick chickpea stew that no other culture ever thought to specialize in. I tried to ingratiate myself by asking her about Spain, but she was more interested in complaining about the waitresses at the diner where she worked—stupid Cubans, all of them, and fat. She wouldn’t be at the diner now; a month after that lunch Pilar had told me she’d been fired for being too slow. But I thought I could find her.

  I could think of no one else who might know, or could help me to figure out, Pilar’s last secret. At the hotel, Hilary had told me that something had happened to Pilar in the last few months, something that rendered her “ready to move on”—which meant, evidently, ready to betray her employer, to lie to me and the rest of the world, and to risk the anger of Condepa. What had made her so bold or so desperate? It could have been something as mundane as being passed up for a promotion or hitting the max on her credit cards. It could have been something far more interesting—something involving a new love, or an old one. Perhaps even me. Far more likely she had fallen in love with someone better than me, a man whose only fault was an urgent need for money to escape his country, his job, the police, narcotraffickers. No, maybe love had nothing to do with it—Pilar had seen an ad for a little inn by the beach on Sanibel Island, and now the only thing standing between her and the life she wanted was cash to meet the asking price. Whatever had changed Pilar, the woman who had raised her, who had talked to her every week, who Pilar till the end had supported—she would know what it was. First I’d have to tell her what had happened.

  A directory chained to a phone booth provided her number and address. I thought about calling ahead, but the romance of showing up in person, like the uniformed U.S. soldiers, to break the terrible news appealed to me. I’d take my chances. Where else would an old woman be but at home? The clerk at Budget rent-a-car patiently traced the directions on a photocopied map. While I waited for the car to be processed, I bought a few minutes at an Internet-connected computer and sent a query to the only person I knew at The New York Times Magazine, asking her to send it as far up the masthead as she could. At least it wasn’t a travel guide gig.

  On the road, I rolled up the car windows and set the air conditioner to Arctic Gale to prevent sweat from further stinking up my body. I tried to anticipate how Pilar’s aunt would react. She might break down and sob. Perhaps that would give me an excuse to shed a few manly tears with her. I hadn’t cried since I was a child, and all it had done then was leave me tired and thirsty, but crying would be cheaper and less exhausting than a whiskey bender or some other manly way of treating my grief.

  I cruised into her neighborhood, passing an aqua-blue McDonald’s, an auto-body shop that apparently specialized in eighties Buicks, a gang of old men outside on folding chairs playing dominoes, a Seventh-Day Adventist church. Pilar’s aunt was an old woman; maybe she’d want to pray. If she asked me, maybe even if she didn’t, I’d tell her I too believed Pilar was in Heaven, embracing her parents. The lie would be my gift to her and to Pilar.

  It was a semidetached stucco house, with chipped pink siding that swirled and clumped like badly spread frosting. I knocked, and a woman’s voice called in Spanish: “Who is it?”

  “Mrs. Salamanca?” I said. “I’m a friend of Pilar’s.”

  How would I start? I hoped she’d offer me coffee, so I could sit down and compose myself before casting off into my story. I’d never had to break bad news before. I hoped I was good at it.

  “Mrs. Salamanca?” the voice echoed. The door opened a few inches, revealing a swath of skin that belonged to a woman much younger than Pilar’s aunt.

  “Oh! I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m looking for Mrs. Salamanca. Does she l
ive here? I have news about her niece.”

  The door opened a few more inches, until its chain was stretched taut, just in front of the woman’s forehead, a thin golden crown.

  “You mean the old woman who used to live here?” she asked.

  “She’s not here? Do you know where she is?”

  “She passed away.”

  The woman didn’t know how much sympathy to express to me; with my accent and pale skin, I surely wasn’t a relative.

  “The landlord said she was very sweet,” she added. “I never met her.”

  “She died?”

  “A few months ago. We just moved in.”

  Something large roared by on the street behind me, a bus or a garbage truck, and I felt its dragon breath on my back. Already I was oozing sweat everywhere. I hated Florida.

  A few months ago must have been just before Pilar concocted or agreed to the scheme. Pilar had told Hilary that she was now free. Free from her aunt, who had loved her and hadn’t lied to her. After her aunt’s death, there was no one left to care if Pilar disgraced herself, or got fired, or killed. No one who mattered. I thanked the woman and turned back to the car.

  I twisted my body in the car seat as I groped in my pockets for the key. So that was all the truth I would ever get. What did I expect? I had been listening for a voice from the dead. But hadn’t Pilar herself whispered secrets to a photo of her dead parents? They used to speak in my dreams, she had said. Perhaps I would hear Pilar in my dreams, now, before her memory faded. Perhaps my subconscious believed in the afterlife. I would find out next time I fell asleep.

  What would she say? Perhaps she’d creep into my arms, weeping and laughing at the same time, and apologize for all that mortal silliness. Unlikely. Perhaps the dream would be a nightmare; she would grow fangs and chase me screaming through an underground labyrinth, until I could feel her claws on my back. I’d take it. I knew I’d never hear her voice, but I wanted just for a moment to believe she was alive, in however weird a manner.

  As I started the car, I wondered whether I should change my ticket yet again and try to snag a night at the Delano in South Beach, or at least the Richmond. I had written up both several times. The rooms at both were quiet and bright. I’d lay my notebook on the writing desk in my suite and start planning the rest of my life. And I’d sleep better at a good hotel, I thought, as I eased out into traffic.

  After I surrendered my car to the valet parkers, I saw a message on my cellphone. It was from the editor in chief of The New York Times Magazine. “If you really found Hilary Pearson,” he said, “we want the story. Give me a call.”

  I called.

  About the Author

  Formerly an editor and writer for travel guides, JEFF SOLOWAY is now a book editor in New York City. In 2014 he won the Robert L. Fish Memorial Award from the Mystery Writers of America.

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