The hotel that Don Orlando owned began to offer wedding packages. One night when he and Dooley were drinking together, he offered to marry Dooley and Angela for free. The more Dooley thought about it, the more it seemed like a good idea. A week later, he drank himself into a state of courage and told Angela about the offer.
“Why would we want to get married by a hustler like Don Orlando?” she asked. “It would be like getting married in Las Vegas.”
“That’s true,” Dooley said, hiding his disappointment. “Anyway, Don Orlando was so drunk he wouldn’t remember. It’s not like him to do anything for free.”
He tried not to sulk or act like his feelings were hurt. He never brought up marriage again, but he didn’t forget either how quickly Angela had dismissed the idea.
They lived in this place for five years. Angela forgot about men hired by her father. They moved up the beach into a bigger cabaña, which Angela decorated: a blue glass vase by the door, a ceramic fruit bowl for the table, woven blankets used as curtains for the open windows. Most days, Dooley’s head felt as if it might explode. He and Angela began to argue. She said she was concerned about his headaches and wanted him to see a doctor, but he refused, accused her of plotting to have a doctor tell him to quit drinking. Once, he snapped back at her that she looked pale, maybe she should be seeing a doctor. It wasn’t normal for a person to be as thin as she was, he said; he could see her ribs. She turned away, and later he thought he could hear her crying.
Then one day Dooley found himself sitting on a rock with a bottle of tequila watching Angela dance on the beach at sunset instead of dancing with her, and he realized that they had stopped sleeping together. A few days later Angela told him that she was going away without him. She offered no explanation. He drank himself to sleep that night as usual and woke up alone the next morning. He stayed in his hammock all day and tried not to think about what Angela had told him when they first met—that she didn’t believe in exclusivity, that sex and love were different things. Where was she? he wondered. He imagined that she’d gone inland to a city where there was more action or headed up the coast with a man she’d met on the beach—Bill from Chicago or Gunnar from Sweden. He’d been lucky, he thought, to have her to himself for as long as he had. Who was he to think he could hold on to a woman like Angela forever? He convinced himself that she wasn’t coming back.
But she did, three days later, and she told him that she’d had to go away on her own to think because she was going to be thirty years old on her next birthday. She’d taken a ferry to an island and stayed at a meditation centre and fasted the whole time, thinking about her future. “Thirty!” she said, as though she couldn’t believe that she’d lived this long. Later, they sat on the beach with a pitcher of beer and a plate of tortilla chips on the table between them (Dooley trying to keep his drinking in check), and Angela confessed that she had decided the feud with her father had reached its statute of limitations. She had called him from a payphone and spoken with him. He’d agreed, she said, that he couldn’t force her to return home, but he had reminded her of her approaching birthday, a milestone. He said that she could no longer pretend to be a gypsy child.
“He was only saying what I had already decided myself,” she said.
They sat on the beach until it was dark, the sun dropping into the mangroves behind them, and Angela said she missed watching the red ball sink over the water the way it did on the Pacific side. She thought they should consider returning to the west coast; she wanted to dance the sun into the ocean again.
We should think about it, she’d said. Still using the word “we.”
The decision to leave was made for them when a tropical storm slammed into their beach. Everyone evacuated inland, but when they went back, they found all of Don Orlando’s cabañas destroyed and the beach littered with debris. Angela’s massage table was missing; Eduardo’s boat was gone. All Angela and Dooley had left was what they’d carried inland in their backpacks.
They got on a bus and headed west again.
Angela said, “I’m having a pre-midlife crisis.”
Dooley asked her if she wanted to go back to Canada.
No, she said, but she wanted to settle down, really settle down, not live in another rented hut somewhere. Dooley worried that she might be talking about a house with razor wire and a maid.
That afternoon, they got off the bus in a small city and found a hotel room with a ceiling fan trying to turn the hot air into something breathable. It was a decent hotel, better than many they’d stayed in over the years. Still, Dooley was miserable. He didn’t know what Angela was thinking, where her epiphany would take them. Maybe it wouldn’t take him anywhere, he thought, returning to his old worry that she would leave him. They bought tamales from a street vendor and he bought a bottle of tequila, and they returned to their hotel room. Dooley found two glasses and placed them on the room’s small table, but Angela didn’t drink from hers. A tiny gecko clung to the ceiling and Dooley wondered why it didn’t give up in the heat and let go. Angela lay down on the bed with a crime novel that she’d taken from the book exchange in the hotel lobby, and Dooley left his glass on the table and lay down beside her, and he found himself talking about his headaches, even went as far as saying they were caused by the accident, when he’d crashed into the bridge, and she said, “Tell me about it, Dooley. You’ve never told me the whole story.”
He wanted to, but he couldn’t, because once he started he would tell her everything, about the deer bouncing off the truck’s bumper, the deer that had probably been a man, because how else did the man end up on the side of the very road on which Dooley had been driving so drunk that the centre line had become a long white snake sidewinding in the headlights?
“There’s not much to tell,” he said. “It’s the story you read in the news every day, drunken kid crosses the centre line and drives into a logging truck or some family’s station wagon. If he’s lucky, it’s a bridge and there’s no one in the vehicle but him. He thinks he’s doing the world a favour, but then some well-meaning doctor puts him back together again.”
Angela set down her book and picked up his hand.
“Poor Dooley,” she said. What Dooley heard was that teacher—Dooley, Dooley, Dooley, as though he was a lost cause.
“Don’t say that,” he said, pulling his hand away. Surprising himself and Angela with the anger in his tone. There was a long silence before she said the thing that he knew was true, the thing she had been working up to but he dreaded to hear, especially from her, because it meant that they were not equals, that she was judging, that he was weaker than she was, and was not anymore, if he ever had been, the cock of the walk, you’re like the king or something.
“Maybe you should try to quit drinking,” she said. “Just try. I’ll quit too.”
Dooley stared up at the gecko and imagined its transparent toes giving up their hold, one at a time, until it fell, upside down, like a body falling into a grave.
“The headaches,” she said. “It could be the drinking, and not the accident at all. Maybe the accident is an excuse.”
If only she knew, Dooley thought. All the excuses, going back as far as he could remember. Too many of them ever to explain, even to himself. All banging around like steel drums inside his head. He wasn’t an idiot. He knew why drunk was his preferred state of being and had been since he was a teenager.
Instead of giving himself over to Angela, coming clean, he got up from the bed and retrieved his glass from the table, and even though it made him miserable to do so, he said, “The easiest thing for you to do is tell me to leave. Just say the word.”
Angela said, “I’m not looking for the easy way,” and then she looked away.
She picked up her book. Dooley finished his drink. He looked at the glass he’d poured for Angela, but he left it there and lay down again on the bed.
There was a lot of street noise under their window. They tried to go to sleep but couldn’t, so they turned the light back
on and read in bed until the noise settled down. Dooley had taken a volume of selected Spanish poetry from the book exchange. He could read the poems—he knew the words—but the meanings were elusive. He kept reading, trying to understand the point of poetry, not getting it at all, and he was about to say so—What is the point of poetry, anyway?—when he came to a line that made him stop. He read it again and again until tears welled up in his eyes, and he said the line out loud, in English: “I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.”
Then Angela surprised him by laying her book carefully on the bed and straddling him. She removed her shirt the way she had the day after they’d met, bent and kissed him, slipped her hands down the front of his jeans, and they made love the way they hadn’t for a long time, the way Dooley thought they might not again, and afterward she wrapped her leg around one of his and said, “Dooley, are we just sad hangers-on? Should we be doing . . . I don’t know, more?”
He wasn’t sure what she was asking.
The next morning he woke up when he felt Angela shaking him. She had already been out and bought coffee and pastries for breakfast, and they were on the little table waiting for him.
“I have a plan,” she said. “It’s a good one.”
Dooley got up and bit into a pastry filled with cream and honey.
“Okay. Let’s hear it.”
The plan was Casa del Sol.
Proprietor: Angela Mazlanka.
Handyman and gardener: Dooley Sullivan.
THEY SCOURED THE coast for a town they both liked, and they found one not far from the beach where they had lived originally, but on the mainland. The day Angela turned thirty, she told Dooley the details of her trust fund, which had been set up by her wealthy, since-deceased grandmother. Angela had been living on an allowance, but now that she was thirty, the whole fund was to be released to her. This was how she was going to buy a lot close to the beach and build her casa. She showed Dooley some sketches, her design ideas.
“What do you think?”
The casa contained a suite with a kitchen and bedroom and living room, and two additional rooms on the back, each with a private entrance. These rooms she would offer for rent to artists, or dancers, or writers. A dipping pool in the garden, a courtyard in front, a high wall surrounding it for privacy, but without razor wire because, she said, she trusted Mexican people, unlike the hordes of other foreign owners who were flocking to the coastal towns. Dooley was impressed that she’d designed all this herself.
The difference between his advantaged life and Angela’s became evident when she was able to tackle the project so efficiently, hire an architect (Dooley barely knew what an architect was), arrange permits and work crews, order tile and fixtures and furniture that would withstand salt air and the rainy season. When he told her that he had once worked as a carpenter’s helper, she recruited him to act as a foreman of sorts. It was immensely helpful, she said, to have someone who could speak Spanish as well as he did and knew something about construction. He kept an eye on the various contractors, the cement work, the plumbing and wiring, the installation of tiles and cupboards, and the painting of the casa, blue and white.
And finally, the construction of a casita, a small house within the walls of Casa del Sol, touching distance from the casa’s kitchen window. The casita was Dooley’s idea. He needed his privacy, he said, away from the paying guests. He couldn’t see himself coaching them on Spanish phrases, or making restaurant recommendations, or pointing out whales breaching in the bay. And Angela was a businesswoman now. No hungover, pot-smoking partner at the breakfast table. He didn’t want to be a liability.
When he tried to give her what was left of his money to help pay for the casita, she wouldn’t take it.
“What’s this?” she asked when she saw the roll of Canadian bills.
“My nest egg,” Dooley replied.
“No,” she said. “I’m not taking it. I told you, my grandmother is paying for this.”
So Dooley bought her a gift, a huge blue glass vase to replace the one she’d had in the Yucatán cabaña, and he also bought ceramic tiles with the letters for Casa del Sol to embed in the wall by her gate, and the letters for El Nido, the Nest, which he hung on the casita’s door. Angela put the vase in the corner in her living room and said he could make it his job to keep the vase supplied with flowers.
The guests began to arrive. Angela advertised her casa in Canadian and American arts magazines. A painter came who had just had a show at the Museum of Modern Art. A famous Canadian playwright and his boyfriend stayed at the casa and staged their own wedding by exchanging vows on the beach, just the two of them. A writer booked a room for a month and asked Angela to have a desk installed so she could work on her poetry collection. Dooley found one, and when he carried it to the writer’s room, Angela introduced him as the gardener.
Sometimes Dooley watched Angela through the kitchen window, making tea for the guests at bedtime. Sometimes she stayed overnight at the casita with Dooley. They began dancing again as the sun went down. The red ball dropped into the ocean, and they claimed a spot in front of the spectacular sunset they’d both missed. They thought of it as their spot. Dooley did his jerky interpretation of their old beach ritual, knowing he could never emulate Angela’s lithe movements. She wore a blue bikini now (a pink one with flowers had replaced the yellow one, and the blue one came after that), and she moved her thin body beautifully and fluidly, a private smile on her lips. They were happy again.
Then she left. She told Dooley she had to go home for a while, to Canada, to her parents. She’d heard her mother was sick. “Don’t worry,” she assured him. “I’ll be back.” She hired a woman named Maxine to stay in Casa del Sol and look after the guests while she was gone. When Dooley showed up at the door the day after Angela left, with flowers for the blue vase, Maxine said, “No, gracias,” as though Dooley were any old vendor and not the gardener of Casa del Sol, even though Angela had very clearly introduced him as that before she left, and had told Maxine what she was to pay Dooley for his services.
“Just until I get back,” Angela said. “It makes you official They’ll take you seriously if they pay you.”
A month later, Maxine left and another woman, Ardelle, moved in; she’d been hired by a vacation rental company. Yes, she knew Dooley was the gardener.
“Have you heard from Angela?” he asked her.
“Who?” she replied, which he thought was odd. He wondered if Angela’s father had got her in his clutches and wouldn’t let her go. He wondered if he should go to Vancouver and retrieve her, but something told him not to. Something told him that Angela would not want to see him there.
Dooley was cleaning up leaves and flower petals in the courtyard one day when a woman with a small dog walked by and asked him over the fence in English if he had the time for another gardening job. “You’re an American, right?” she said. “You speak English?”
Sensing that his job at Casa del Sol might be in jeopardy, he said yes, and he ended up working for two American families who owned property in the town. They didn’t seem to care that Dooley wasn’t a real gardener. They wanted someone who spoke English to keep their gardens watered and patios clean, and to do a few handyman tasks for money under the table. He had learned about swimming pools from the man who took care of Casa del Sol’s, and he added pool maintenance to his services. The Americans trusted him because he spoke English, and he wasn’t Mexican. He wondered why they hadn’t just bought their winter property in Florida or Arizona.
Ardelle left Casa del Sol six months later, and then a woman named Lola from Montreal showed up and immediately installed razor wire along the top of the wall. She and her husband had purchased the property, she informed Dooley. This news should have surprised him, but it didn’t. He accepted it as inevitable. He’d always believed Angela would leave him one day, although he still held out hope that she would return. Lola told him how much she wanted him to pay in rent for the casita, and she warned him
that they might be tearing it down before long because they had plans to expand the casa. They never did, though, and in fact Lola spent very little time in the casa and it mostly sat empty. Dooley never saw a person on the premises who looked like he might be a husband. When no money for his gardening services was forthcoming from Lola, he stopped watering the garden and sweeping up the courtyard. The money didn’t matter. He was earning enough to keep himself by working for the Americans, who paid him too much, he thought, for what he did. He quit dancing on the beach. Without Angela there, people just looked at him as though he were either insane or shit-face drunk. Sometimes he was shit-face drunk. Once, one of the people he worked for walked by and saw him, and he worried she might fire him because of it, but she didn’t.
Angela didn’t come back. The Americans seemed happy with his services. When they went away, he maintained their homes and kept them secure. He drank, but never when he was on their property. A Canadian named Roger opened a little bar at the top of the cliff overlooking the bay, and sometimes Dooley went there for French fries and gravy. He thought about Angela every day, wondered why she hadn’t been in touch with him. Had she married someone in Vancouver? He came to believe she had. After three years had gone by, he was able to picture her with a small child. He wondered if she’d gone back to school. He turned forty without her and realized that he’d done all right looking out for himself. Another few years and he almost quit thinking about her. Almost.
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