by Po Bronson
“Is that so?”
“You wrote that,” he said.
“Did I?” Calista looked alarmed by this news. It didn’t occur to Jake that the alarm might have some other source. She touched her jacket pocket where Jake had seen her put her phone. “Do you remember everything I write?” she asked.
Jake shook his head. “Only what I reread twenty times.” He meant it as a compliment, a joke, a way of breaking the tension between them. But she looked further taken aback, not flattered. She was more inaccessible than her e-mails had made her seem, more abrupt, harder edged. He saw that he’d had definite, if unuttered, expectations for the evening and for her, expectations that did not include the actual woman walking beside him. Maybe if he’d lingered in the bar of the Camino Real, Xavier could have taken his place.
“So everything I send you is on the record?”
“I guess,” Jake said, not liking the way she made it sound. They resumed walking. A woman in a shawl pleaded with them in a high, plaintive voice, her hand outstretched.
“Is it okay to use American money?” Calista asked.
Jake smiled, glad for this soft spot in the carapace of her sophistication. He took some change from his pocket and placed it in the woman’s palm. “Juárez runs on dollars,” he said.
A mufflerless truck rattled past, an immense pile of flattened cardboard boxes swaying on its bed. “I like what you write,” Jake said. “That’s why I reread.”
Calista looked at him curiously, her face unreadable. She wasn’t afraid of eye contact. “I like yours, too,” she said. “They’re guileless. Like you sit down and write exactly what comes to mind.”
In fact, Jake slaved over his missives, a dictionary and thesaurus at hand. He would reread a string of Calista’s, warming up to their exchanges and attempting to don the same air of cosmopolitan offhandedness he so loved in her writing. “My parents always said I was simple,” he said. Her smile slightly eased his disappointment.
Calista’s phone rang, the tune of beeps the theme song to the Lone Ranger. Jake tried not to interpret it as another slight.
“Work,” she said, and then stepped away from him to talk. Jake leaned against the bridge railing with his thumbs hooked in his pockets. She wasn’t attractive exactly, at least not in the way he was used to measuring such things. But with her that seemed only a portion of an equation he didn’t understand how to work. It was a blind date with insanely high expectations, he admitted. And without the refuge of small talk to explore: music, food, and astrological signs had already been well trod in the course of their electronic exchanges.
Once she’d ended her call they passed through the turnstiles and onto Juárez Avenue. A few cabdrivers called out to them in English. “You’ll like Martino’s,” Jake said. “It’s really good French food.”
“French cuisine in Juárez,” Calista said. She touched her jacket pocket.
“Watch your step,” Jake said, as he shepherded her past a deep, unmarked pit that had been dug in the sidewalk. A water main showed a few feet down. “More scenery,” he added.
Martino’s, though, was a big hit with Calista. From the moment one of the old waiters, courtly and grave in his black jacket, mixed a martini for her tableside, she began to enjoy herself. And Calista was a wonderful drunk. She drank with the enthusiasm of someone playing a sport she enjoyed. The alcohol seemed to smooth the harder and more unforgiving angles of her personality. She smiled more, and her sarcasm was less disdainful than mischievous.
“Do you really clean up roadkill?” she asked as their food arrived.
Jake grinned at the reference. It was a joke she often alluded to in her e-mails. “It’s good eating,” he said indignantly. “Better even than this.” He pointed his fork at his steak. In truth, picking up roadkill was an occasional duty at the New Mexico Department of Transportation. Recently killed deer and the like was put in cold storage for the wolves at the Alamogordo Zoo. “Mainly, though,” he continued, “we whistle at chicks.” He’d joined her in drinking martinis, and though he didn’t like their taste, three had suffused him with a warmth and confidence he longed to share. He motioned for the waiter and ordered a bottle of Pouilly-Fuissé, badly mangling the French.
“Let’s hear your whistle,” Calista said. Jake laughed, hearing in this the flirtatious confidence he so liked in her e-mails.
“Okay,” Jake said, “but you’ll have to lean in close. It’s not very loud.”
Calista slid closer to Jake in the crescent-shaped booth, brushing a stray lock of her hair behind her ear, the universal gesture of a woman who knows she’s being admired.
A street photographer with a Polaroid camera approached their table. “Quieren un photo?” he asked, his voice sadly hopeful.
Calista put her arm around Jake’s neck. “Evidence,” she said. The camera flashed. As they waited for the image to sharpen, Calista’s phone rang again. Jake paid for the photo, annoyed. Calista talked while he drank a glass of wine. She apologized when she finished, fiddling with the buttons before replacing it in her jacket. “It won’t ring now,” she explained. She lifted her glass and sipped at the wine. “So,” she said, attempting to pick up the rhythm of the conversation, “if I walked by where you were working would you whistle at me?”
“I would,” Jake said, pretty sure he’d lied. It was true, though, that talking with her like this and hearing in their conversation the resonance of their past e-mail made it easier to overlook the fact that she didn’t match the contours of his imagined date.
“Maybe I’d whistle back,” she said. The noise of the restaurant flowed into the pocket of silence at their table as they considered the lies that had brought them together for this night of pleasurable disappointment.
For Jake, the exchange marked the complex tone of the evening, a moment somehow better even than the return trip to the bridge when he held Calista’s hand, the delicate bird weight of it making him feel fiercely protective as they unsteadily headed to the pedestrian border check.
The intimacy of handholding, though, was interrupted as they passed through the heavy, translucent plastic curtains that marked the entrance to the air-conditioned chill of U.S. Customs. There, the two of them were questioned and asked to empty their pockets. One of the guards sorted through Calista’s purse. They were polite about it, but that didn’t do much to offset the awkwardness. Jake had to place his wallet and the twin squares of foil-wrapped Trojans, extra thin for sensitivity, on the Bakelite table beside Calista’s phone and mace canister. Her phone was set to vibrate and a call came in, which made it skitter about like an angry sex toy. Jake wondered if the mace was for protection from him, realizing that this was what she’d been touching for reassurance when her hand had brushed her jacket pocket over the course of the evening.
What really caught his attention, though, was the photo of a young boy in her datebook, just opposite her sheathed credit cards. His face bore a striking resemblance to hers. She’d never mentioned children or nephews. Did she have a husband? An ex? Her ring finger was bare, but what did that prove? It seemed like he ought to know who the kid was, and as he thought on this he wondered what else remained unseen behind the illusory image of Calista’s life that e-mail had provided him. The sight of the condoms beside the mysterious photo then set him thinking in another way: Did a kid mean stretch marks? C-section scars? He didn’t even know what those would look like. And had she not told him for fear that a child would scare him away? What did that imply about what she wanted? Was there a whole part of her life he knew nothing about? It felt like a betrayal, though he knew it shouldn’t, and at that moment their epistolary history felt like nothing so much as strands to a web that both bound them together and impeded their freedom of motion.
At the Camino Real, Xavier sat watching a local football game. Jake was relieved to see him; he felt he needed a break from Calista, especially after the awkwardness of the border check. They’d hardly said a word for the remainder of the walk.
&n
bsp; “No wonder he runs home to check his mail every night,” Xavier said by way of introduction. He placed his hands on Calista’s shoulders, as if to hold her steady so that he might memorize her face. His dark eyes glittered with sexual appetite. “He won’t even go out for drinks after work until after he’s checked to see if you wrote.” They all settled at a low table ringed with armchairs.
“You’ll have to excuse me a moment,” Calista said, bringing out her phone, which was vibrating again. She walked away from them, searching for better reception.
“She ain’t bad,” Xavier said.
“Pretty hot,” Jake said, though he didn’t know if he believed it. There was an insistent, nagging feeling that he was impelled to act this way simply because of their history, and not out of genuine attraction. He wondered who’d called her. It seemed too late for work.
“Hot,” Xavier said. “At least say it like you mean it.”
“Maybe I’m just sobering up,” Jake said.
Xavier fixed him with a look of unalloyed contempt. “That’s your damn problem, pendejo. You always got to find something wrong. Me? Like, take Teresa: sure, she’s got a fat ass, but that pussy feels good.” Teresa was Xavier’s sometime girlfriend.
“I don’t even know what that’s supposed to mean,” Jake said. He’d thought about Teresa’s pussy, though.
“You need tequila,” Xavier counseled.
“She’s, like, forty,” Jake said.
“What are you, some fucking belladonna?”
“Prima donna,” Jake said.
“She ain’t forty,” Xavier said. He opened her purse and pulled out her organizer to find her license.
“Put that away,” Jake hissed, looking over his shoulder for Calista. She had her back to them, the phone to her ear.
“Tranquilo,” Xavier said, flipping through it. Then he slipped it back. “She ain’t no older than you,” he announced.
Jake didn’t believe him but wasn’t about to look for himself. “Whatever,” he said. He felt tired, too tired to try to explain to either himself or Xavier why it was that he wanted to leave.
Xavier leaned in and slapped him, hard enough that it stung even through the numbness of the booze.
“What the fuck?” Jake said, rubbing his cheek. A few people had looked over at the sound.
“Pay attention,” Xavier said. He’d done the same thing to Jake a few times at work. Jake got spacey, as if what was going on around him didn’t matter. Such distraction incensed Xavier, who often said that Jake’s problem was that he never seemed to have a stake in his own life. Or, in Xavier’s words: “You fuck around too much. You have to know what you want and take it.”
He rubbed at his cheek, debating the merits of hitting back. He knew Xavier hadn’t slapped him out of malice. The first time this had happened he’d punched Xavier and had understood then, as he did now, that their friendship was compelling partly because neither could explain it. The undercurrent of rivalry flecked with abuse should have made it untenable, but instead made it singular.
A year past, Jake and Xavier had driven down to El Paso because the Miss America pageant was in town and Xavier wanted to “fuck Miss Wisconsin.” The contestants had been staying at this very hotel, and Xavier had strode in, absurd in his feed cap and too-tight Wrangler jeans in the middle of so much milling formal wear, looking like an underdressed matador. Jake had been keenly aware of the way those women looked at his friend as he tried to chat them up. He had lingered back at the bar, marveling at Xavier’s imperviousness to their brittle smiles and the fact that they would turn away even when he was in midsentence. It wasn’t so much that Xavier didn’t notice such slights, but that he didn’t care, not as long as he got what he was after—which was, in this case, to get laid. In the end, Xavier’s stalwart persistence had paid off: he had spent the night with one of the staff, a beautifully curvaceous woman whose weight gave her face a sexy pout. Jake, in an adjacent room, had had to listen in disbelief to the muted thump of their lovemaking through most of the night.
“She isn’t Miss Wisconsin,” Jake warned before walking to the bathroom. He needed a moment to collect himself. He avoided eye contact with Calista on his way around the bar, in part because he was feeling guilty, suspecting that they had been searched because he was wearing undershot Mexican heels on his cowboy boots, a style generally considered suspicious on an Anglo. He wondered if she’d seen Xavier strike him.
Preoccupied, he’d lined up at the urinal before noticing the other man in the bathroom. He was talking on his cell phone and at first Jake thought he was zipping up at the sinks, hearing as he did the clink of belt buckle. As he committed to his pissing, though, he realized that the little guy was jacking off.
“What about for lunch,” the guy said. “Where’d you go?” The conversation continued along this line, the man laconic, distracted, and insistent. Jake didn’t understand how the description of what was clearly someone’s day was worthy of masturbation, much less in a public bathroom. As he walked out he had the urge to tell the guy to use a stall. In the mirror he saw the man’s face: a pockmarked face with sad parentheses etched on either side of a thin mouth that was, for the moment, fixed in a beatific smile. His eyes were closed. “And then?” he asked. Unsure of why, Jake made an effort to leave silently.
“Don’t take it that way,” Xavier said. “He gets like that with everyone. It don’t mean nothing.” Jake had circled the bar to approach Xavier and Calista from behind, vaguely paranoid and wanting to hear what Xavier was saying. He felt bad for this when he realized that Xavier was trying to get him laid, talking him up to this woman he didn’t think he wanted to be with. And that Xavier was doing so said something else: that Jake wasn’t necessarily what she’d hoped for, either. He lingered behind the high-backed armchairs, feeling grateful and depressed.
The bar was closing as they finished their drinks. Xavier looked around at the departing couples, sighting a single woman still planted on her bar stool. “It’s the hour for action,” Xavier said, rising. He reached out to shake Calista’s hand, pulling her up and hugging her instead. He winked at Jake over her shoulder. Jake gave him the finger. After he had departed Jake and Calista regarded each other. Jake crunched a piece of ice. “So,” he said. But she leaned forward and touched a finger to his lips, stilling his words. She tapped her fingernail once against his teeth and he felt his breath catch. Then she took his hand.
Jake glanced back, to where Xavier leaned against the bar. Their eyes met and Xavier grabbed his crotch and made a pumping motion with his arm.
In her room they kissed and gradually removed each other’s clothes. She wore silken red panties and no bra. “Those don’t look like company issue,” Jake said. Her skin was very smooth and felt impossibly warm.
Calista’s phone began to vibrate on the bedside table. She reached for it and pressed a button. The luminescent face went black.
“I thought it might have been something else,” Jake joked, trying to hide his annoyance. He took the phone from her and rose from the bed. His erection tented the fabric of his boxers. He left the phone on the bathroom counter and closed the door. “Who keeps calling?” he asked.
“Let’s keep those condoms from wearing a hole in your pocket,” Calista said. She kissed his ear, tracing it with her tongue. He shivered and closed his eyes. He realized he didn’t know her name and smiled in the dark: Xavier could tell him in the morning.
“You smell like smoke,” Calista said. “I thought you didn’t smoke.”
“I don’t,” Jake said, thinking back to Prince Machiavelli’s. He wished he’d had time to shower.
“Do you really keep a photo of me above your bed?”
Jake laughed. “Xavier said that?”
“He said a lot of things.”
She reached down to grasp him. They moved together in the indeterminate dark, naked and free, for the moment, of the concerns and doubts that would reassert themselves with first light. Sex was as awkward and pleasu
rable as the first time with someone new invariably is, and this was good, reassuring for both of them. In this, at least, there was not the pretense of familiarity that had marred much of the evening.
After sex Calista handed him the photo from Martino’s. “Xavier said the one you keep in your wallet makes me look orange.”
Jake shook his head. He could tell by her voice that she was flattered. He wondered when, in the past months, Xavier had gone through his wallet and found it, and what combination of truth and lies Xavier had told her. Jake stroked her hair, now free of the chopsticks. It was thick and luxurious. Gradually they relaxed into sleep.
Come morning, the desert light slanted through the parted curtains, harshly beautiful, candescent white where it touched the bedsheets. Calista lay breathing silently. Jake stood watching her. Her face showed the abrasion of age in its fine wrinkles. He leaned in to kiss her chastely on the forehead, not wanting to wake her. As he did she opened her eyes. They were the soft gray of flannel and filled with what he thought was a heartbreaking vulnerability and equanimity. They regarded each other and the silence magnified. Jake leaned in again to kiss her on the lips, filled with an unexpected and genuine love, and as he did Calista offered her cheek and a wan smile.
Xavier swerved toward a rattlesnake on the road’s shoulder, just missing it. The truck’s hood was a blinding panel of reflected light beyond which the desert air warped under the weight of the midday heat. They were an hour into the drive back to Cornucopia, each hungover and thoughtful.
Jake handed Xavier the photo. “That’s us in Juárez,” he said.
“She was hot,” Xavier said. “Especially for forty-one.”
Jake paused. “Thanks for that update. You think maybe you can tell me her name, too? I mean, now that she’s gone and it won’t do me any good?”
“Nah,” Xavier said with a grin. He made to hand the photo back.
Jake shook his head, smiling in spite of himself. “It’s yours,” he said to his friend.