Love in Central America

by Clancy Martin

“You’re drunk,” I said.

  For an hour or so, I had been worried because I thought, if he is flirting with me, I’m enjoying it. But now I decided it was alright. He was flirting with both of us, but it was innocent.

  “Let’s go, let’s go,” Sadie said. It was pouring rain. We walked up the cobble-stoned street, swaying and laughing, getting soaked. “Pizza man!” Sadie shouted. “Pizza man! Hey put that dog on a leash!”

  A woman and man walking under a giant umbrella turned to look at us, startled. Sadie pointed across the street to an old, distinguished looking man in a yellow raincoat and wide-brimmed hat, and his wet, carefully-groomed white poodle. The dog was walking beside him and they both seemed not to notice the rain. Three tough-looking guys on the corner stood under a tattered awning, watching us. They had beers in their hands. Sadie slipped on a heel and Eduard caught her and almost fell, pulling me down as well. The three men laughed, and I saw it was okay.

  But the restaurant at the hotel was closed, and so was the little place across the street with bars on the windows. All of the garage doors were pulled down across the businesses, the streets were empty except for us and the billboards for concrete companies and auto part stores, and I thought, “Maybe they will go home together. How am I going to get a car?”

  Eduard said. “What about your hotel? Or mine? You’re at the Ritz-Carleton, right? It must have a restaurant. You’re the hotel expert.”

  “It’s half an hour from here,” I said. “If we can find a cab.”

  “I’ve got my car,” Eduard said.

  “She’s got the Presidential suite!” Sadie said. “I’m staying there too. But her room is like a palace. And it’s got this oversize minibar too, so you can eat all you want. You can eat anything! Plus, free booze!”

  “Sound good?” Eduard asked me.

  I thought, well, they’ll eat, and then they’ll go to bed.

  EIGHT

  EDUARD AND I were sitting on the red leather sofa and Sadie was in the chair next to the minibar. They had finished their steaks and were picking at their salads. I was exhausted. Sadie didn’t want to leave, and Eduard was still talking and drinking. They both had booze energy. The party’s over, I thought. I went to the bathroom and saw that Paul had called six times. He does not have a cell phone—he hates technology—and so I didn’t return his call: I didn’t like to imagine our home phones waking up his boys, and particularly Paul’s father, who, when he had been drinking, would crawl into Paul’s bed in his pajamas.

  When I sat down Sadie opened the minibar again. She reached across Eduard’s lap to refill his drink, allowing her shirt to fall open. She looked up at him and dropped her hand onto his leg. Eduard stood suddenly and went to the bathroom.

  Sadie sat upright. She said, “I think I’ll go down to my room.”

  “Please,” I said, “it’s late. Just stay here in my place tonight.” She gave me an angry look.

  “Sadie,” I said, “this is ridiculous. There’s three bedrooms in this suite, I think. Or just sleep in bed with me.”

  At that point I still meant everything I was saying. At least, I’m pretty sure I did.

  She was already walking to the door. She stopped, turned, and looked at me for a moment when I said that, and I realized she was furious. I let her go. I sat and watched the ice melting in Eduard’s whiskey and Sadie’s vodka and almost picked one of them up to finish it. Then I realized, that’s how tired you are. It had been two years, almost to the day, since I’d had a drink.

  Eduard came out of the bathroom. “Sadie left?”

  “Yes. Jesus Christ. I’m sorry. I didn’t expect her to get so drunk. We didn’t get to talk. You’re flying out tomorrow?”

  “I think so,” he said. “Who knows.” He put more ice in his drink and gestured at the window. The rain was going sideways. Up the beach in the lights from another resort you could see the palm trees bending almost to the ground. “Don’t you want one?” he asked.

  “One what?” I knew what he meant.

  “A drink. I don’t care if you have one. Have one.” His smile was unexpected. He knew about my alcoholism. He said he’d read my novel, and even if he hadn’t, in the old days Paul had loved to complain to his friends about my drinking. I hesitated.

  “Don’t ever offer me a drink,” I said. “I mean, I can’t.”

  “I just thought, you know, one. It doesn’t do any harm.”

  “Yeah,” I said. I didn’t say anything else about that.

  He took a couple sips of his drink and asked, “Do you want to watch a movie?”

  He got up and walked into the bedroom, where the TV was. From there he said, “It’s cold in here. Let’s get under the covers.”

  You always want a man to say that to you but they never do. When I’d stopped drinking I stopped behaving this way and I thought it was behind me. As I got into bed with him, I was still thinking, this is not the kind of thing that I do. He took the back of my head with one hand, and my throat and the base of my chin with the other. He kissed me.

  When we stopped kissing, a long time later, I said, “Eduard, I’m happily married.”

  “I know,” he said.

  We had sex until dawn. The storm had blown south and the sun was over the sea. We had sex at least seven times. An hour or so into it he told me that his girlfriend didn’t like sex, and I was determined to make an impression.

  NINE

  “IT’S ONLY THREE nights, Brett. He’s our lifeline. We need him.”

  “No, that’s not what I’m saying. I want to meet him. I’m glad he’s coming. I understand. It’s just that I am barely back from Cancun. And now you’ve invited a friend to stay. Not a friend. Your banker.”

  “Brett, it’s not like I called him up. He has an appointment in town with Sergio.”

  Sergio was one of Eduard’s partners, and he handled all of our personal banking. He actually looked like I remembered Eduard looking.

  “It’s business. I don’t want him to stay in a hotel. It’d be different if we had a property here. It’s only polite.”

  “Right.”

  “Can I ask you, what is your problem with Eduard?”

  “I don’t have any problem, it just seems a bit odd to have him staying in our home. Did he ask to stay with us?”

  Eduard and I had been talking on the phone almost every night. He texted me during the day. We wrote long emails.

  It had snuck up on me. He’d come down to our hotel in Tulum after the weekend with Sadie in Cancun.

  It should have been a one-night thing, but we had both become fanatical at the same time. I was amazed at my own weakness.

  “I told you. I invited him to stay here.”

  “A week?”

  “I couldn’t exactly tell him how long he’s allowed to stay.”

  “Your dad’s going to be in town at the same time. It’s not going to be very nice for him. He wants all of us to spend time together.”

  “My dad can’t expect us to drop everything every time he comes to town. He doesn’t expect us to.”

  “Whatever. I’m just asking for a bit of help.”

  “You’re asking for a bit of help.”

  “I don’t like your tone, Paul.”

  “I’ve had the kids all by myself for weeks, and you don’t like my tone.”

  I didn’t remind him that the whole time I’d been gone, I was checking on our hotels. I didn’t say he’d had Bella, his mom and his eldest son helping him, but I thought it. The more in the wrong I was, the easier it was for me to feel indignant. But I knew I was not in a position of leverage.

  And of course I wanted Eduard to stay at our house.

  “You’re supposed to be off work for at least a few days. It’s Christmas. I don’t know why he has to come during the holiday. It’s just not considerate.”

  “I don’t set his schedule, Brett. Jesus. You know the position we’re in. This is all part of expanding our properties. I mean, we’re a bit stretched, honestly. The last t
hing we need to do right now is piss off the money guys.”

  We had bought several hotels in resort locations a year before—some in excellent condition, some a mess—and we were still deep in renovations on a big place in Guatemala and a beachfront place in Panama. Paul’s family had lots of money, but Paul had to make his own living, naturally.

  “We have plenty of money,” I said. “We can live on the income from your trusts if we just turn over Los Imperealos. Just sell it as is. Or let’s have a party and bring some private people in. That’s what your mom did. She always says private investors are the only good investors. Let’s find a few angels.”

  “I’m not ready for this fight again,” Paul said. “I promise while he’s in town I will make time to be home. I wish he weren’t coming. Nobody wishes that more than I do. And Bella can take care of all the meals—or we’ll go out.”

  “No,” I said, “have it your way, Paul. If he’s coming, he’s coming. We’ll do it properly.”

  TEN

  I’D LIVED IN Mexico for twelve years, but I had never made love to a Mexican man before. Most of the other ex-pats of a certain age had affairs with young Mexican men and I thought it was obvious and humiliating. “Toreador,” Viola called hers; Becky’s nickname for her current was “Rabbit.” I tried “The Goat” on Eduard but it never stuck. His name was always Eduard. His features were masculine: he had rough skin around his cheeks, his shoulders were wide but round, and he was not muscled but he was beautifully shaped and he was tall. He had been a boxer when he was in high school and college, and sometimes he’d stand on the bed and use my arms from behind to show me how to throw punches. He was awkward though and I knew many of my friends would be surprised if they knew. On the outside there was something about the two of us, if you looked at us, that didn’t quite fit. But he would stop in windows and hold me and say: “Now that’s a beautiful couple” or “Look at the young lovers” and kiss me. He could hold me by the back of the neck and toss me like a puppy. When he wore one of his suits and it was the cocktail hour and he took his first drink, my stomach turned, even after I knew him a year.

  We could talk on the phone for five hours. One morning we started talking at just after eight and didn’t get off the phone until he had to go home at six my time. He asked unexpected questions that made me see everything from a perspective that I had not imagined before. It sounds insincere, but he worried about Paul and the boys. One night, on the phone with him, in the car on the way back from the grocery store, I broke down crying and said, “I’m a terrible wife. I’m not a good person. I’m as bad as everyone says.” He said, “Don’t flatter yourself. You’re no better and no worse than anyone else.”

  Sometimes, after we’d had an argument, he’d leave the hotel room and come back with a cut cheek, bruised ribs or a split lip. He was a grown man but he’d go get in a street brawl, in his suit and tie. I was never physically afraid of him. He was the most intimate lover I’ve ever had. “I listen to you,” he’d tell me, when I asked him how he knew to do the things he did.

  ELEVEN

  HE DIDN’T BELIEVE me when I told him I had a past.

  “Well, I won’t let you read my new book,” I said. It was a book I had been working on for five years, and would never finish. “You’ll think I slept with half of New York, and every able-bodied cowboy in Texas. Of course those were my drinking days. Most of that was before I met Paul. I mean it was all before Paul. Or before Paul and I were serious. There was one guy, a lawyer. I forget his name. This was a decade ago. He was a friend of Paul’s. We were out at lunch, and when Paul left the table, I told him we should have a French affair. I suggested we meet in the afternoons for sex.”

  “Sounds like a good deal for him.” Eduard didn’t like to hear about my former lovers. But I didn’t care. It wasn’t a casual affair and I wanted him to know me.

  “He wanted to meet at his apartment. He was too cheap to pay for a hotel. I stood outside of his building for nearly an hour, sweating in the sun, wearing a new dress and these stupid Chanel sunglasses—”

  “I love those sunglasses.”

  “Well, I finally called him. He didn’t answer. Then I got a text message. It said, ‘I forgot this is my laundry day. I only get one day a week to do laundry. Maybe next week?’”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “That was the text. Word for word.”

  “Did you meet with him the next week?” I bit him on the shoulder.

  “You honestly think I would meet with him after that?”

  “I don’t even know why I’m asking. I don’t want to know.”

  “He was astonishing. He had a whole toolbox. It was better than a porn movie.” I said it with a straight face. The truth was I’d introduced that guy to YouPorn and RedTube. It took me a while to convince Eduard I was joking.

  I said, “All women over twenty-seven are whores.” Of course I might have just been talking about myself.

  TWELVE

  I WAS CHUBBY as a kid. My mother told me, “Don’t worry, your time will come.” Once, on an airplane, flying to Copenhagen where my grandmother is from, a handsome man sitting beside me spread a blanket across my legs and his own. My mom was asleep right next to me. Everyone had their chairs all the way back. I had closed my eyes. The man slipped his hand under the blanket onto my knee, and then slowly worked up to my thigh. I was wearing jeans and after fifteen minutes or so with his hand between my legs, he unbuttoned them.

  “Did you come?” Eduard asked me. “How old were you? How old was he?”

  “Oh this was just like, maybe ten years ago,” I said. I knew he had pictured me as fifteen or sixteen in the story. “He was about your age, I’d guess. He had a beard and a nice tan. He had wrinkles at the corners of his eyes.”

  “Did he ask for your number? Did he say anything? He must have known you were awake.”

  “No, he just pretended like nothing had happened. I watched him get off the plane. I waited for him to look back.”

  “Why wouldn’t he?”

  “He didn’t,” I said. “Of course.”

  I did not tell him about the time I was in London on my first book tour. I had been drinking and I was unhappy. It was after the dinner and after the event following the dinner, and I had expected the guy I’d talked to all night to try to take me home, and he didn’t, and I wanted to say, ‘Let’s just go back to your place,’ because I think he was too shy to ask. So I went to a bar afterward and when some guys started acting weird, aggressive, I walked to a different bar. But I met a man on the street. He was American. He came up to me and said, “I’ll give you fifty pounds to suck my cock.” He had been drinking too. He was handsome and I went to my knees. He couldn’t come, and I started to give up. Then he took me by my hair and one arm and pulled me into an alleyway. He pushed me over a trashcan, pushed up my dress and pulled down my panties.

  “I didn’t say you could fuck me,” I said. “You shouldn’t be doing it like this.”

  He said, “You’re right,” and raped me in the ass.

  There are a lot of stories like that. Once I begin, I want to tell them all. Sitting here in a small, borrowed room in Galveston, I want to forget the whole history of Brett and Eduard and tell each and every one of my other love stories and sex stories and lies. But there are things I can never tell anybody.

  THIRTEEN

  “I HAVE MOST of what we need,” I said. I was making dinner for Eduard, who had arrived that morning. It was a warm day. I had the windows in the kitchen open and you could smell the flowers from the courtyard, the wet flagstones and our big cypress trees.

  “But what don’t you have?” Paul asked. He took a handful of grapes, and Eduard stood in the doorway to the kitchen. He wore a T-shirt and a pair of dark jeans.

  “Some onions and carrots, a leek, two bottles of red wine, and something for everyone to drink. Some limes for your dad? Gatorade if they have some, and maybe tonic water.”

  Paul and Eduard went to the gro
cery store. I hadn’t been able to look straight at Eduard yet. If I could drink it would be easier. I broke down and went up to the medicine cabinet for some of Paul’s father’s Klonopins. I took three, which might have been too many. When Paul came back half an hour later, I was relaxed. He put the bags on the counter and put his arms around me and kissed the nape of my neck. I said, “Where’s Eduard?”

  “He’s in the car,” he said. “I remembered egg noodles and thyme.”

  “Why doesn’t he come in?”

  “I invited him to the races. Also I think he picked up on your feelings about his visit. He said he would switch to a hotel.”

  “That’s crazy. Should I go out and get him?”

  “No, let’s just leave him alone.” I didn’t know whether or not Paul had any suspicions about me and Eduard but I complained about him as often as I could.

  “He is high maintenance. No more weeklong visits for Eduard.”

  “He just got here, for crying out loud.”

  “You haven’t been cooking the past five hours.”

  “I’m sorry. It’s just because he doesn’t have kids. He’s practically a kid himself. He has to be entertained all the time. Speaking of. I’m late.”

  “You forgot the wine.”

  “Shit. I did. Do you need me to go out again and get it?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “Okay, it’s just that we’ll be late.”

  “I don’t want to interrupt the boys’ games with the ingredients for their dinner. I don’t want to have to pack them up and drag them out with me.”

  He kissed my forehead. “I’ll go.”

  I knew that I could get the wine while his dad watched the kids. Or his dad could get it. Or the kids and I could get it. But for some reason I felt indignant.

  I didn’t think, Well, after all, I’m making dinner for my lover, who is staying in our home. Or, if I did think that, I thought as quickly, “There is no way for Paul to know that.”