“Fine. You win. I’ll call him.”
Bella answered. Bella hated me now. “That Brett,” she said, “is on the phone.” She gave the phone to Paul, and I lied to him for twenty minutes. I told him I wasn’t moved out yet, I had been with my mother— she was sick. I could hear him hearing the lies. He understood: I was in love with a Mexican banker.
FIVE
ON A FLIGHT back to Mexico City from visiting Eduard in Panama I upgraded myself to first class at check-in. Waiting for the plane, I had three double margaritas. They seemed like light pours to me, but when I sat down I remember feeling a bit odd. A middle-aged woman sitting across the aisle from me frowned when I ordered a drink before the plane took off. She was probably about my age but she was dressed in St. John. The flight attendant brought me a bottle of red wine and I held it in my lap.
I tried to be friendly with the woman across the aisle, but I could hear myself slurring my words. I was probably repeating myself. The next thing I remember distinctly was when she said, “Would you please watch your language.”
She took an embroidering kit out of her bag and started to needlepoint. “I like the pattern,” I said.
She ignored me.
“Have you been sewing for long? That’s quite a hobby.” I poured myself a glass of wine and drank it. The bottle was full so the flight attendant must have brought me another.
“Is that for your mom? Or for a friend?” She kept on sewing.
“My maid sews. I mean, that’s not an insult. My grandmother sewed. She did embroidery.”
The woman ignored me.
“It used to be a sign of effluence. Aff—affluence. It is still, having the leisure to needlepoint.”
The woman put her work down and turned to face me. She said very distinctly, “Can you stop talking?”
I reached up an arm and pushed the flight attendant call button. When the flight attendant came, I said, “This woman beside me just threatened to stab me with that needle.”
“I’m sorry, ma’am?”
“The woman tried to stab me. Said she was going to take the plane down.”
The needlepoint woman protested.
“Ma’am, is there a problem here?”
“She pointed her needle at me. She said she was going to jab me. The needle needs to go. Or she needs to go in back. I mean, one or the other. You pick. She’s crazy.”
“I don’t know what she’s talking about.” The woman seemed nervous.
“You know, you know. You can’t fool these people. They’re experts.”
“Ma’am, I think you should calm down.”
“I am not safe in this seat. I think she should put that needle away or be taken off the plane. I mean, if you need to land this thing, I understand.” I gave the woman with the needle a look like, See what you just did? No more first class for you, lady.
The flight attendant was looking at my wine. She left. Then a man in a blue shirt and khakis appeared.
“Ma’am, I’m the air marshal on this flight.”
“Finally.”
“Ma’am, I’ll need you to come with me.”
I didn’t know where to put my wine bottle. The latch on the seat-tray beside me wasn’t working. Then my tray wouldn’t latch up.
“I’ll handle that for you, ma’am,” the marshal said, and took my bottle of wine.
I followed him up to the galley.
“Ma’am, I want you to understand this is serious.”
“I unnerstand.”
“The accusations you have made are serious. You do understand that.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Tell me again. What happened?”
“Yes, officer.”
“Tell me.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Ma’am, you’re not answering my question. I’m asking you to tell me what happened between you and the other passenger.”
“The needle. She’s got a needle.”
“Okay.”
“She said she was going to take the plane down.”
“You’re positive? You don’t think you might have misunderstood her, or . . . anything like that?”
“No, sir.”
“The passenger next to you in seat 3C told you that she was going to take the plane down with her sewing needle. That’s what happened?”
“As far as I can tell.”
“Ok ma’am. This is what happens next. So that you are very clear. We are going to have to land the plane. I am going to have to call the Mexican police. They will take each of you to interrogation rooms, and you will both be questioned.”
“Do you think she may have been kidding?”
“Well, I wasn’t there. I am asking you.”
“She looks harmless. She looks like my grandmother.”
“Well ma’am, the charges you made are serious, but I can see you’ve been drinking, and so I’m just going to put you in the back of the plane. But I want you to know this is not a game. You’re on an international flight.”
“I’m sorry if I caused any confusion. You know, she’s just sewing. My grandmother does it too. She’s just sewing. A person should be allowed to sew. On a plane.”
“Let’s get you back to your seat.”
“You can’t sew without a needle. She’s just. You know. Needlepoint.”
“Yes ma’am.”
They moved me out of first class, to the back of the plane. I didn’t protest. I tried to order a whiskey but the flight attendant in economy told me they were out of whiskey. “A vodka? A beer?” He ignored me.
SIX
WHEN WE LANDED I was almost sober. I called Eduard from the taxi to The Raphael. “I almost got myself arrested.”
I told the story, and I was surprised that Eduard laughed the whole way through.
“You got what was coming to you. She won. She had old lady magic. Besides, it sounds like you were hammered.”
He was in his and Lurisia’s apartment. I was getting nearer asking him when he planned to move out. One of you has to move out first, I reminded myself. I was the one to move out first when I left my first husband, too.
“What’s old lady magic?” I said.
“How they cut in lines, all that.”
“She wasn’t even old! She was my age. And I wasn’t that drunk. I wasn’t even drunk enough for anyone to notice.”
“Obviously not,” Eduard said. But he was laughing with me, and it was nice, to laugh with someone about one of my drunk stories. I’d missed that when I was sober.
SEVEN
A MONTH, PERHAPS two months went by. I started asking to come back home. Paul’s family wanted a divorce, the quicker the better. His therapist said that he deserved better.
“People have affairs, Paul. It doesn’t mean the marriage ends. It means we have problems. I’m sorry. I did a horrible thing. But I love you. I love our sons. I want to come home.”
“It’s too much. I can’t do it any more.”
“The first time we are really on the rocks you just divorce me?”
“It’s not the first time, Brett. I put up with your drinking for six years. You tried to kill yourself with my son five feet away from you.” He had never called him, “my son.” He made a point of saying, “our sons,” and even, “your sons.” The suicide attempt was from my novel.
It had happened, but not the way I told it in the book. He was quoting my own fiction back at me.
“You know as well as I do that suicide attempt was ridiculous. I was hanging myself with a sheet, Paul. Our son was asleep. I was trying to get your attention. I was trying to tell you that I’d been secret drinking for three years without having to face the consequences.”
“That’s my point. Three years of lying. Not to mention all the other lies. It’s not worth it. I can never trust you again. You’re a sociopath.” When in years past friends of ours had joked with him about my lies and exaggerations, Paul had always said, “Brett is the most honest person I’ve ever met.” He wasn’t joking. He though
t I didn’t tell the fake social lies that everybody else did. He knew I never pretended to be someone other than who I was. He also genuinely believed that he was the one person I would never lie to.
EIGHT
PAUL AND I met in a film class on Almodovar at the University of Texas at Austin shortly after I left my first husband. During seminar breaks I pretended to smoke so that there was a reason to hang out with him. After seminar one afternoon we went with a friend of his to have beers and play pool at The Showdown on Guadalupe. It’s a bar that people who know Austin know about. He was skinny, his blonde hair brushed his shoulders then. He had small wrists and narrow shoulders, and I liked the way he dressed. He wore these worn out tweed coats—all wrong for the weather, but right on him, and he had a clumsy way of bending over the pool table that I liked. He liked to drink. Everyone who met him immediately told him, if the opportunity presented itself, that he had astonishing eyes. They are enormous, and a color of blue I have not seen anywhere else. Unlike most everyone’s eyes, they are almost always the same color.
NINE
HE WAS IN the film studies grad student study lounge on the third floor of Ryan Hall in a collared windowpane shirt, green crewneck sweater and grey wool slacks. He sat on the sofa with his legs crossed, like a girl, I thought. Later he told me that actually it is a woman who should cross her legs at the ankle, and a man at the knee. He was talking to one of the famous visiting professors. I came into the office and sat down on the other side of the sofa.
“I’m hungry,” I said. “Are you hungry? Do you want to get some lunch?”
TEN
WE SAT OUTSIDE at The Shady Grove. We both had Bloody Marys. I think we had four each. I had a plate of vegetables with a smoked green chili sauce— I was a vegetarian at this time, and had dropped to one hundred and five pounds—and he had a fried chicken sandwich with gravy, which is the best thing there. I had to drive drunk to my seminar.
In the next few days I disentangled myself from relationships with three other men I was dating at this time. After one date with Paul I knew I didn’t want to see other men. Then he asked me out.
When he picked me up for dinner I was in a short, green dress. I was wearing too much eye make-up. I noticed he had bought new pants and a new jacket for the date. He didn’t know that was one of my favorite things about him—nothing he wore was new.
At the restaurant, walking in, I called him “Sam.” Sam was a man I had been dating. Paul missed a step and then continued walking as though he hadn’t noticed. Inside I apologized, and explained that I wasn’t seeing Sam anymore.
After we opened our menus and he chose a bottle of wine I said, “Let’s eat a lot of food.”
For years afterward he repeated that remark back to me, as the first time he knew that he might fall in love with me.
After dinner, Paul came back to my apartment and we sat on the sofa together. It was an enormous sofa. It came with the apartment and looked like it had been made in the late seventies with burlap bags. I’d bought two blankets at Urban Outfitters to try to make it presentable but it didn’t quite work.
I was apologizing for the sofa. I was apologizing for the whole apartment. “Would it be alright if kissed you?” he asked. We kissed on the sofa and he kissed like a hungry tiger might make out with you.
“Hey, slow down,” I said after a minute. “There’s no rush.”
“Are you making fun of the way I kiss?”
“No. You’re a great kisser. I just—there’s no hurry. We can kiss all night.”
He changed his kiss then and we kissed more gently, calmly, and deeply. I was reassured because I saw we would be able to kiss together after all.
If you can’t kiss each other, there’s no point in continuing.
Eventually we moved to the bed, and he had my hand between my legs, and then his face between my legs, but I wouldn’t let him take down my leggings. I was squirming.
“This is ridiculous,” he said at last. “You’re obviously as frustrated as I am. Let’s have sex.”
“No,” I said, and pushed him away. “We can kiss if you want. But we’re not having sex. I don’t know you well enough yet.”
“You know me. Don’t lie. Look at me.” He kissed me again, and we kept our eyes open. I squeezed his hips between my legs. “Tell me you don’t want me to fuck you.”
“No!” I said. I laughed and wriggled away. We wrestled.
“Okay, okay,” he said. “Let’s have a glass of wine.”
Months later, Paul asked me, “Why didn’t you sleep with me that night?”
ELEVEN
CHEATING ON YOUR husband is a lot like doing cocaine. It’s rarely pleasurable, but try quitting.
Eduard left Lurisia and moved into a new place. At night in his condo we often sat on his balcony and listened to Bob Dylan and watched the people in the streets below. We’d take pillows from the bed, I’d be between his legs with his arms around me and I’d turn my head so that we could kiss.
“Next summer we’ll get some of those misting things for out here,” I said. “That way we can come out all summer long. We could sleep out here. With a big mosquito net.”
“Good idea,” he said, and the way he said it, like we would never make it to next summer, made us both quiet for a few minutes.
“Does Paul want you back?” he asked.
“That’s the worst part,” I lied. “He wants it so much. But I can’t go back. I’m in love with you. A week would go by and I would be on a plane to you again.”
That part was true.
TWELVE
I DIDN’T DRINK when I was alone in Mexico City, mostly, but I was always drinking when I was with Eduard. I always drank on the way to see him, and sometimes on the way back.
He didn’t like to drink with me, now, so I’d drink when he wasn’t around.
One night, coming back from a trip Eduard and I took to Peru, I had a black out. I remember buying margaritas for everyone at the airport bar. Eduard and I had taken separate flights home. I was on a layover and I didn’t know what airport I was in. I woke up in the hospital in Mexico City. I had cracked my head on the stone stairs outside the hotel. Eduard said I had called him late that night. “You said you’d been arrested, and then they let you go.”
The next day, Paul came to get me at the hospital. “You’re not stable. You have to get sober, Brett. You can’t live in a hotel.”
I was picking at the staples in my hair with my fingers.
“I want to spend time with the boys,” I said. “I miss them so much. You don’t know how much I love them. Even if you’re not going to talk to me, I have to see the boys.”
He had been dating friends of ours in Mexico City—he’d even been sleeping around—but I knew he hadn’t fallen in love. His parents were spending a lot of time in town. Sadie kept trying to talk me into moving in with her in Galveston.
“The boys miss you,” Paul said. “How about we make a deal. You go back to Minnesota and dry out. You loved it there. Go to Hazelden and I’ll think about things.”
“I was miserable.”
“It worked, Brett. If you’ll spend thirty days there, you can see the boys once a week. Or every other weekend, even, if you get an apartment. They can’t spend the night with you at a hotel.”
THIRTEEN
I’D GO SEVEN days, ten days, two days sober. Then in Puerto Vallarta or some other city I’d take a drink. By this time, I hid it from everybody—even Eduard thought I’d quit.
I was back to my old tricks.
When a normal person walks into a restaurant she looks for the best table, the most cheerful location, a sunny spot or an intimate corner. Or she doesn’t think much about it at all: she lets the hostess or her date decide. A secret drinker maps the restaurant like a bank robber maps a score. She locates the bar, the women’s room, and the (usually, small) group of tables that allow her to pass the bar while on her way to the bathroom without her date being able to see her. Supporting pillars are
good; ideally, she wants a blind spot where he cannot spot her even if he turns his head. A man will watch his woman as she comes and goes in a way that a woman will not watch her man, not because he is suspicious of her, but because he likes to watch her move. The secret drinker looks for restaurants with bars next door: if necessary, she can exit out the back, take a quick drink at the neighboring place, and come back again. On his first drink the secret drinker will tip the bartender at least as much as the cost of the drink, so she’s made a friend. The secret drinker will wait outside the bathroom, motion to her waiter, ask him to bring a drink—“a double vodka, I’ll just drink it right here, and pay for it now”—if there is no way to approach the bar, or no bar in the restaurant. She will casually flirt with the bartender or the waiter to try to make him part of the game. The secret drinker can open a bottle of beer with any hard object: the edge of the lock in the bathroom stall, a counter top, the nut on a pipe, a key in her pocket, in desperation, her thumbnail. The secret drinker always carries cash with her. She cleans out half the bottles in the minibar and refills them with water while her lover is shaving. She is quick to pour her lover a drink if he wants one—though the bottles she’s drunk will be in the back of the refrigerator, where he is unlikely to take one. Above all, the secret drinker keeps her lover drunk. Because a sober lover can tell if you’ve been drinking. He keeps track of time and how often you’ve been to the bathroom. He notices you’ve been gone to the convenience store for half an hour when it should have taken ten minutes. With a drunk lover you can drink all night long.
Love in Central America Page 6