I looked in the room today, picked up the little music box Christina gave her, turned it on. The music made me run.
Had the day off today and slept. In my dreams the street sounds mingle with my fantasies. Had this nightmare where an old man with a rectangular head talked to me in a strange language I understood. He said, I can bring her home.
He stepped aside to show me an ambulance with siren wailing and lights flashing. We drove north along deserted highways and stopped near an abandoned lot between red brick buildings with windows that had no glass, only tattered yellow drapes that flapped in the cold wind. I stepped out onto pieces of coal and shattered glass, but my feet didn’t cut. A woman wearing a white veil emerged from one of the buildings, wheeling a baby carriage. I ran to her. Through the gauze that masked the woman’s face I could see she was familiar, though I know I’d never seen her before.
In the carriage was a baby dressed in the little Jemima Puddle-Duck suit my mother gave Jenny. The baby had her hands and feet and hair. The face was not hers. It was a light, opaque and shimmering, as if someone had thrown a powerful lamp against the rear of a movie screen.
Farrell let it slip from his hands onto the bed cover. The swelling had returned and he could not make it recede. In his pain, he recalled how in Mexico he had found escape. The morning after seeing her on the veranda, he found Maria and Gabriel having breakfast at a table under a tree on the lawn. A calm breeze filtered through the branches.
“You should have been here just five minutes earlier,” Maria said, shielding her eyes from the sun. “A troop of dolphin passed fifty meters from the dock. It’s unusual to see them this close to shore.”
“Why’s that?” Farrell asked, searching for some sign of the remoteness he’d sensed in her the evening before.
“The tuna fishermen have killed most of them with gill nets,” Gabriel said. “It’s very sad, but the people here have to make a living.”
Maria turned back to the sea. Farrell followed her gaze to a thin aluminum dock that stretched from the bottom of the grassy knoll into the tiny cove. A silver powerboat was tied at the far end.
“We’ll go out later,” Gabriel said. “She’s got twin 455 Oldsmobile engines in her. But first I want to show you some plans for an import-export project in Guatemala.”
They spent the morning in the cool of Gabriel’s office hashing out the financial aspects of the deal. It was straightforward. Gabriel and a Guatemalan businessman connected to one of that country’s powerful families would work together. Gabriel would bring electronics south from Japanese contacts he had and the Guatemalan would ensure the gear got through customs.
“I think my bank will go for the project,” Farrell said once it had been explained and he’d seen the numbers Gabriel said would be generated. “This is pretty safe stuff.”
“I had hoped so, my friend,” Gabriel said. “Now let’s eat something before we go out on the boat.”
Maria served empanadas—garlicky ground pork fried in cassava dough—pickled eggs, black olives, cherry tomatoes, black radishes, and red wine for lunch. Gabriel opened a second bottle in the sun and the stories began. A lovely blond hooker in Rome introduced Gabriel to love when he was fourteen. After the initial lesson, he spent all his money on a week-long crash course. Farrell said a speed skater had taken his virginity in the back seat of a beat-up Datsun on a chilly November night in New England. Maria was coy: she said a lady never speaks of love in the presence of other men.
Gabriel said at dawn on the windy road west of Marseille, he crashed his motorcycle trying to race back from a midnight liaison to the villa his father had rented.
“I was almost there, leaning in and out of the curves.” He paused to take a gulp of the wine. “A bicyclist, a very enchanting young woman with marvelous thighs, pulled out into the road. I laid the motorcycle down rather than risk her thighs.”
Maria stuck her tongue out at him. He laughed.
Farrell told them he was stuck once in a border town in West Africa between a Muslim society and a pagan nation. He sat at a table on the Islamic side of the river waiting for the frontier to open. A friend and Farrell spoke to a boy who knew some English as they ate by lantern light, listening to the drums beating in the background like great hearts. People danced with scarecrows in the shadows. The boy’s eyes widened. “Medecin traditionel!” he said. Farrell’s friend’s jaw hung open. Farrell had turned to find three black scorpions running across the forehead and chin of the man sitting next to him. The man plucked the poisonous arachnid from his chin, smiled, then snapped its belly with his finger.
The boy said the man was a sorcerer. He had talisman rings that would guard Farrell against the scorpion’s sting. The sorcerer said if Farrell put the ring on and let the scorpions walk and they did not strike, Farrell could keep the ring.
“Do it,” Farrell’s friend had said. “You’ll forget the pain of the bite, but never the memory that you didn’t take the chance!”
The two scorpions moved through the hair on his forearm. One tried to enter the sleeve of his shirt toward his armpit. He shook them off at last, face flushed and bilious. The animist had laughed. He asked if Farrell wished to see his cobra. At that moment, a border guard placed his hand on the man’s shoulder. Before the guard’s gun barrel, the man danced in spirals across the bridge. The lights suspended over the center of the bridge cast his shadows in two directions, one ebony shape toward each shore of the river.
“Jack Farrell,” Gabriel said after Farrell had finished his story. “You should have been born in a different time. You were meant to explore, to be an adventurer.”
He poured Farrell more wine from the bottle. “I sense you don’t know what to do about it.”
“My job is enough. I travel,” Farrell said uncertainly.
“Hotels, planes, and hurried meals in restaurants where the decor is different from your own kitchen,” Gabriel scoffed. “Enough?”
“I’m happy,” Farrell replied, and he wondered if he was.
“So you don’t long for any kind of change?” Gabriel said.
“I hadn’t thought of it,” Farrell said. “The bank is good to me.”
“This is a growing area of interest to me, the southwest border of your country,” Gabriel said. “I know of a bank in San Diego that needs someone like you, experienced in big-time banking, yet young enough to have your own ideas.”
“Domestic banking is so pedestrian,” Farrell said. “I’ve told you I like the travel, the different cultures.”
“That’s the point,” Gabriel said. “The bank wants to expand its work here and in Central America.”
Farrell almost told him he wasn’t interested, then he thought of the cold apartment in Chicago. “I’ll keep an open mind.”
Gabriel leaned forward as if he wanted to press Farrell for an answer when Maria broke in: “Enough business, I thought the afternoon belonged to the boat.”
Gabriel gave her a sidelong glance, then made a dash for the keys. Maria was quicker and passed through the doors first. He followed her back onto the veranda with a third bottle of red wine.
“You may not get the chance to enjoy the pleasure of me driving my boat,” he said, his lips drawn back in a joyous smile, “but at least we will have the thrill of another bottle of this tremendous wine!”
“More wine in the sun?” Farrell asked.
“What would the great Marquez have you do in this scene?” Gabriel roared.
Farrell had to laugh. “He’d have me drink.”
The boat’s engines were strong. Farrell stood in the well of the bow, gripping a nylon rope for balance as they shot out into the ensenada. Gabriel stood behind him, holding a second rope in one hand, the bottle of wine in the other. The sky was pure and blue, the sun intense with the kind of penetrating heat the body prays for during a Chicago winter. In the light chop, the boat reeled and vibrated. Inland to the north, a peninsula of chocolate mountains jogged against milk clouds.
�
�Have you ever seen light like this?” Gabriel roared above the throb of the engines. “It breaks all around us like we are rocks and it is a river.”
“You’re drunk,” Farrell said.
Gabriel gazed at him in dead seriousness. “A light like this can change a man.”
Farrell decided to humor him. “I’ve seen this light before. On boozy afternoons.”
“Do you know Joaquin Sorolla?” Gabriel asked, handing Farrell the bottle. The boat surged off the wake of a passing boat from the resort and Farrell spilled some wine on his shirt.
“No,” he coughed.
“A painter, Spanish, at the turn of the century. A genius and a man who made love to light. He was seduced by the play of it, the way it bends our perceptions. There is one painting I’m thinking of: two boys hang from the bow rope of a boat, just as we are. But they are in the water. The strokes of his brush are so clear and touched with love that it dazzles. Dazzles and changes the angle and shape of their bodies.”
“I can’t see it,” Farrell said.
“I must show you then,” Gabriel said. “Give me the wine.”
He drank from the bottle, then handed it back. As the boat surged on a swell, just before a trough, he braced himself to the gunnel with the rope and calmly threw himself into the sea. His body bounced once on the water, which swallowed him on the next skip.
Maria screamed. Farrell panicked. He stumbled toward the stern, tripped, and slammed into the rail when Maria down-throttled and returned the boat to the spot where Gabriel had gone overboard. On his feet again, Farrell could see Gabriel treading water, spitting water from his mouth like a fountain and waving.
“What in Jesus’s name were you thinking of?” Maria demanded as she steered the boat along side him.
“Sorolla,” Gabriel said, grinning maniacally. “Bring the bow about. I must show Jack his genius.”
Maria shot Farrell a wicked glare.
“I had no idea!” Farrell said. “Believe me!”
She sat in the driver’s chair and pouted. Seeing that she had no intention of helping him explain Sorolla’s art, Gabriel worked his way to the front of the boat. Farrell leaned over the edge and handed him the nylon line. Gabriel hoisted himself out of the water until his torso was free to his pelvic bone. His legs dangled under the water.
“You see?”
The sun skidded on the sea around Gabriel, then broke and bent as if it had been shone through crushed ice or a shattered prism. Below the surface, Gabriel’s buttocks and legs diluted into a series of large splashes of viscous aqua and eggshell, shimmering and mutating with every lap of the choppy water.
“He got that in a painting?” Farrell asked.
“A genius, I told you,” Gabriel said. “He took such risks with the brush that the canvas itself seems to move with the weight and the volume of water. It is as if light and water gave the painting its soul.”
Farrell reached down and pulled Gabriel over the gunnels. He crashed to the floor, soaked and missing one of his boat shoes.
“Macho idiot,” Maria said. “You could have hurt yourself.”
“I jumped clear of the boat,” Gabriel said, with a dismissive wave of his hand. “You must try it, Jack.”
The idea of flying like a piece of bait in the tropical sun felt right.
“No!” Maria said. “We do not even know his wife. If you are hurt here, she’d never forgive me.”
Gabriel shrugged. “Too bad, next time you come then, Jack.”
When Maria had the boat running again, Gabriel passed Farrell the wine and whispered: “Drink. Then leap after we pass that buoy.”
At the same moment Maria righted the wheel after rounding the channel marker, Farrell stepped onto the cushions. He heard her curse in Spanish, and she thrust the throttle arm forward, almost killing the engine. Which had the unwanted effect of tossing Farrell at a harsh angle away from the boat through two disconcerting rolls across the water. The landing seared his skin like a fall on smooth cement. He surfaced and gagged from the saltwater that the impact had driven up his nose.
“Magnificent!” Gabriel cried. He dragged Farrell aboard.
“Had to do it,” Farrell gasped to Maria. “What a rush! Going from zero to fifty miles an hour in an instant.”
The two-mile trip back to the dock took almost an hour as each man made a dozen leaps off the speeding boat. At the dock, Cazador greeted them with barks that made the men’s heads ring. They endured Maria’s silence while they tied the boat to the dock. She strode ahead of them up the lawn toward the house. On the grass, Gabriel stripped and walked nude behind her until she sensed him, turned, and broke into uncontrolled giggles. Farrell flopped soaking wet onto the bed. He enjoyed the way the room spun slowly, rekindling the wonderful sensation he felt flying from the boat. He passed out to the sounds of the peahens scratching outside his window.
The sun was setting when Farrell woke, sore from the falls he’d taken, hungover from the wine. He put on some dry clothes and walked into the main room of the house. In an eerie déja vu, Maria stood alone on the veranda.
Cool and sweet, the evening breeze brushed at his throbbing temples. Maria leaned over the white-washed restraining wall. Morning glories, which had curled tightly to their vines, framed her lovely face.
“I’m sorry if we upset you today,” he said.
She started. “I didn’t hear you come out.”
Holding on to one of the oak standards, she looked out at the sea and said: “My mother would sit here every day watching the sun die. Her face would turn copper in the last light. Near the end of her life, her skin was pale, except at dusk. The light—what does my husband call it, Sorolla’s light?—well, it made her full and strong again. I miss her very much.”
“You have no father?” Farrell asked.
“He left when I was very young,” Maria said. “He was an American who my mother married on a lark. She was from a wealthy family and it was a scandal, but her parents stood by her. After she had me, I guess my father realized he didn’t want to be a stranger in a strange land all his life. So he went home. So she went home.”
“You’ve never seen him?”
“Once,” she sighed. “It was in New York City. I couldn’t bring myself to go and talk to him. I suppose I was afraid he wouldn’t be the person my mother remembered. I decided nostalgia was better.”
Out on the ocean, the sun hovered over the water. Above, the clouds melted into hues of purple and black and orange. Maria’s skin began to burnish, then melt into a rich melange of wine and sand. Farrell watched for the mythical moment when tropical sunsets flash a crisp green. Maria broke his concentration. “Do you take lovers on your travels?”
“I, I don’t understand,” Farrell stammered. “I’m married.”
“So it does matter to some men,” Maria said. “I’m sorry if I upset you.”
Sitting in his room in the ski lodge, Farrell was sure that her voice had barely carried beyond the three feet that separated them. She looked at him, then out at the dying sun. “I just want to know how men pass time away from their wives.”
“I read,” Farrell said, studying her neck and shoulders. “I must entertain clients at times. I walk through museums. I try to study Spanish and stay fit. I’m not one of those men who takes solace in the arms of strangers, though late at night, when sleep comes, the thought crosses my mind.”
The fact that he confessed this to someone who was really a stranger bewildered Farrell. He asked himself if he could have said the same in front of his own wife.
“Who do you think of, women in the streets, women you’ve seen before or known?” she asked.
“I’ve never really thought about it,” he said. “I guess all three … at one time or another.”
Maria frowned. “I’ve embarrassed you again. I just find it hard to figure out the minds of men.”
Farrell rubbed his palm over the fabric of his trousers. “I think that’s an affliction that strikes all women. But you
shouldn’t feel bad. We’re mysteries to ourselves.”
The sun sank over the horizon, leaving only the rose tints on the clouds far out on the Pacific. Cazador padded toward them over the tiles. An exotic smell Farrell could not name peppered his nose. He briefly considered that this must be the scent of all Mexican sunsets.
“Gabriel got in a rage the day before you came and he shot one of my peacocks,” she said, hugging herself. “I feel sometimes when I hold him in my arms at night that I know only half of him.”
At the same time, they heard the creak of a door inside the house. Cazador jumped up, wriggled, and ran into the house. Gabriel emerged bleary-eyed. “Why didn’t you wake me?” he asked Maria in a grumpy tone. “It’s impolite for me not to entertain our guest.”
“You looked at peace,” she said. In an abrupt move, she brushed by him back through the house toward the kitchen.
Gabriel slumped in one of the chairs, lit a cigarette, and smiled at Farrell. “I guess I’ll never learn, Jack.”
“What, not to shoot peahens?”
He looked up at him, his eyes wide. “She told you that? Well, what could I do? I had insomnia for two days and it sat outside my window calling A-hole just as I was falling asleep. Two days. I shot it.”
He waved the cigarette quickly through the night air, leaving a tracer of orange light that faded instantly. “Peacocks I can deal with; you just don’t think about it when you kill them,” he said. “The things I always manage to screw up are art history and wine.”
Gabriel leaned back his head to croak a short, racous laugh that Farrell found impossible not to join.
Farrell laughed bitterly to himself in the room at the lodge, wondering what Lena had written about during his weekend in Mexico.
March 5
Told myself I’d live in the nursery at night while Jack is gone. Force myself to surround myself with her, to see her. As if this is the only way I can look at it.
I’m making an inventory: piles of unused diapers, ten onesies, eight pairs of socks, a barrel of disposable wipes, her crib, the bumpers decorated with lambs, the balloon mobile hanging from her dressing table. The pads, the blankets, the dresser, the sweaters, the cross my mom and dad sent, the framed picture of the lake from Peg.
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