“I’ve been watching you. You could use a drink.”
I felt his hand, heavy and strong on my shoulder, and felt instantly calmer. I let him lead me to the bar, holding back the first thought that occurred to me and betraying no surprise that he spoke Spanish.
“What’ll you have?”
“Gin.”
“Gin.”
“And tonic.”
We took the two glasses with their wedges of lime and made our way through the dense, aqueous atmosphere to sit on the striped leather sofas beside the picture window. There was a cold draft, but the trembling of my hand had set in upstairs, in our room.
“I recognize the state you’re in, my boy. That blonde has pushed you to the limit.”
“You have no idea how far.”
“I can imagine. I know when a white guy is on the edge. It’s a talent I have.”
“Huh.”
“You know how it works?”
“No.”
“Your skin turns so pale I can see the darkest currents of your thoughts. To tell the truth, it’s kind of gross.”
“You’re pulling my leg.”
“It’s just a little joke. I’m Jack Mabus.”
He gave me his hand.
“Joan-Marc Miró-Puig. But no one calls me that. They call me anything but: John, Johan, Marcos, Juan…anything other than my name. I don’t know why my parents chose it.”
We let a few minutes go by in silence. They were heavy with manly vibrations, and they soothed me. I started to feel better. I would have happily spent the rest of the night there, with him.
“White women don’t know what they’re saying. They speak the same way they sweat. I never listen to them.”
“Huh.”
“I know from experience. I married one. She took away the thing I loved most.”
“And how’d it turn out?”
“I went to the other end of the world and I took it back.”
The darkness outside increased the feeling of intimacy. The exterior lights gave the slightest impression of a golden, oscillating aura. It seemed to come from a near future.
“What do you do?” he asked me.
“Well, let’s just say I’m adapting to the waning conditions of my finances.”
“And her?”
“Nothing.”
“No good. A person needs to have work.”
“A reason to wake up in the morning, right? I feel the same.”
“No, it’s not about waking up. It’s about staying entertained. The mind is a runaway train, no one knows where it came from and you never know where it’s going to take you. If you want to stay with her, find her a job. It shouldn’t be hard, she looked like a determined girl. She’ll start to get involved with her colleagues, and she’ll come looking for you when she gets scared. Let her come home exhausted.”
“Is it the same with black women?”
“I don’t know. I’ve always married white ones. I like white women. How’s the gin?”
“Excellent.”
The window had become a plate of dark blue, through which only a pale moon was visible. I felt my casing of warm flesh.
“It’s been a terrible day ever since we got here. You know what cheered me up? Seeing your grandson, all that energy. It lifted my heart,” I said.
“Grandson? Oh, no, no, you’ve got it wrong, how funny. He’s my son. And yours, what’s his name?”
“Jackson.”
There was something loose among my thoughts that I couldn’t pin down, and in the sky a blurry band of tenuous blue was growing with cruel slowness.
“His biological parents named him. I’m innocent of that at least, though I could be accused of worse things.”
My pulse pounded behind my eyes. In an hour the sky would be red, gashed open as if with a knife.
“Why did you notice us?” I asked.
“Well, how should I put this, the two of you together stand out in this place. Like me and my boy, I suppose. We were fated to see each other. Didn’t you spot us?”
“I suppose so.”
“I was interested in what I saw. I’ve had a pretty complicated life. You wouldn’t guess how old I am, so many countries, so many outrageous experiences. I’ve never had much time to think, I had to stay on the move. I’ve spent entire years running and hiding. I guess you could call me a man of action, although I earned my living for twenty years by watching and interpreting. I thought every life was singular, unrepeatable, made up of unique experiences. That idea kept me going, it helped me control myself. I’ve loaded crates, I’ve been a boxer, a diplomat, and worse. Now I’m retired and I spend my time observing, my arms resting on the barrier that separates me from the action. And you know what? I’m sad to find so many stories like mine. Without the exotic flourishes, maybe, with skin tones more common in these latitudes, but they’re still there. The same hearts mixed up in the same stuff, one generation after another. It’s incredible.”
He took a long drink, then made a strange noise, as though satiated.
“Another round?”
“I can’t, really. Look how my hand is trembling, I’m scared to death.”
“I understand. But it’s silly to worry. When you go up you’ll probably find her sleeping.”
“No, no, Helen’s not like that, she doesn’t let things pass and settle down, she’s not one to believe in the curative powers of a new day. She’ll be awake, waiting for me, because she knows I’m not going back to Barcelona and I’m not going to sleep next to the pool. I’m sure she’s prepared something special for me, so this will be an unforgettable night.”
I got up, disturbed by the gin and the conversation. I shook Mabus’s hand, and he wished me luck. My words may seem theatrical, but the proof I wasn’t acting was the clot of worry climbing up my throat. That clot and I were old friends. The first time it made its presence known, I was on my way home to Barcelona after attending a meeting in Madrid with the Passgard people. I was checking my suitcase when I heard the beep notifying me of a text message—mobile phones were new then, and Helen had quickly gotten used to having me available at all times. But I didn’t even know where the phone was. I patted down my coat pockets while they printed my boarding pass. I asked about the gate and it chimed again; I liked the idea of storing up several messages to distract me on the plane. When I reached security I took off my watch, my belt, took my keys out of my pocket, and I saw eleven missed calls from Helen, read her messages in reverse order:
WHERE ARE YOU?
WHY DON’T YOU ANSWER?
CAN I CALL YOU?
I called her at home and on her mobile, but she didn’t answer. I wandered past the shops in the terminal. A beam of incandescent light flashed over the enormous windows from one end to the other, tracing the outline of the mountains. I watched as an enormous jet landed, the concentrated heat forming waves in the air.
My concern about Helen’s calls was still only skin-deep, and underneath swam more unpleasant currents: in an hour we would reengage with our day-to-day problems, which could be summed up by saying that Helen was switching off. She didn’t cook, she didn’t do laundry, she didn’t go out to parties with me. We didn’t laugh anymore, she just stayed on the sofa with the TV on. Her interest in working had diminished, and there’d even been a couple of afternoons when I jumped up to take her pulse, to be sure she was still breathing. I know that there are guys who can be satisfied alongside people who sit there and don’t do anything, but I am not one of them.
I let the pregnant women pass me, then two cripples, the children, a bunch of miscreants in ties. I let a band of Peruvians with their malicious little eyes go by (I didn’t trust them even if they had paid for their tickets—we only get the worst specimens here). I let a handful of girls cut from the same vigorexic cloth go past, I let by old men and women who still seemed to me ambassadors from a distant planet, and a Chinese man. I like the Chinese. You’ll never hear me say a hostile word about a Chinaman. And when it was my
turn, I realized my ticket wasn’t numbered, I had to sit near the wing. My ears started hurting before we took off, but at least I got a window.
The attendant reminded us that it was “advisable” to turn off our mobile phones on the plane. A period of nicotine-phobia was bearing down on us then, but I managed to get in a few puffs in the bathroom before the flight. It wasn’t yet night when the plane entered its most absurd phase, when that vast metal machine made to cross the heavens starts moving across the runway on baby-buggy wheels. The plane taxied for a while, and at every turn the windows offered a new perspective on the same paved landscape. When I finally remembered to turn off the phone, I saw I had five new messages:
WHEN ARE YOU COMING HOME, WHEN?
I’M NOT FEELING SO GOOD.
I DON’T.
TELL ME WHAT’S HAPPENING? WHO ARE YOU WITH?
WHY AREN’T YOU ANSWERING?
Her mobile wouldn’t let me leave her a goddamn message, and the home line sounded like someone had pulled out the cables at their roots. But there was no point starting to fret then—the pressure in my ears was telling me that if I looked out the window I’d see how, second by second, the distance between the plane and the ground was widening, everything taking on the dimensions of an animated miniature. The plane made a splendid turn in the air that enveloped its body like a cushion. I saw the airport in perspective, and two roads making their way among fields dotted with pom-poms of vegetation that seemed to be growing there out of pity.
I only started to get really worried when I cast my mind back to one of our Madrid afternoons spent exploring the possibilities of the aroused body. Bicente must have lent us his apartment, I can’t find any other explanation for the fluffy, Bordeaux-colored cushions on which Helen was reclining while her tongue peeked between her lips like a citrus peel balancing on the edge of a glass. She seemed about to start laughing, but instead she gave a kind of sigh, as if to dislodge something caught in her throat. She started to sway forward and back, onto the cushions, faster and faster. I was afraid she’d end up cracking her skull open, but after a while she lay still, like a giant doll, her hair disheveled, savoring the vertigo with her eyes closed.
“I’m crazy.”
“Crazy from love?”
She slid her fingers along my torso, little insect antennae that got tangled in hairs that all too soon would turn gray. And while I felt like a hand was twisting uneasily in my guts, her hand, of flesh and blood, slid down my belly until I felt a pressure on my testicles.
“No, no. No!”
“Crazy from pleasure?”
“Cold.”
“Crazy from happiness?”
“Don’t be a fool, you have one try left.”
It started to hurt a little. I was caressing her throat with my open hand. Helen liked to feel my energy right where, if she’d been a man, her Adam’s apple would have stuck out. I felt the passage of saliva, felt her pulse, so it wasn’t a loose grip. Helen’s eyes were challenging when they opened, her expression shifted from playful to defiant to annoyed at discovering who was the stronger, then to impatience to sensuousness to trust to distrust to tenderness. I’m certain that my own pupils flashing in the aqueous white showed only the jubilation of being in love. She let go of my balls before I started to press in earnest.
“Crazy like an American in Europe?”
“Don’t be an idiot, John. Crazy from being crazy. Scary crazy. Crazy for real.”
I came out of that memory with the feeling I was moving through a tunnel that lasts longer than expected. We left behind a bank of clouds, purplish like cardinals. I prefer to travel at night; I like it when you can see a city’s luminous skeleton among the broad sheets of shadows. I think it does me good when I can reassure myself that all that urban agitation—the racket of people getting on and off buses, the traffic, the array of dreams, plans and goals growing in all those heads—all of it, at a certain distance, gets simplified into a cold radiance.
I let the most impatient passengers rush for the exit. I turned on my mobile, and against all odds the home phone rang: two, five, six rings. I tried again on the steps of the plane, the runway crowded with carts stuffed with suitcases. The bells sounded in the void; any one of them could overcome the distance and connect me to my wife. When I heard the familiar sound of her picking up, I felt for the first time the slimy mass of fear rising in my gullet.
“When are you coming home?”
“Helen…”
“When?”
“Are you all right?”
“No. I’m not. When?”
“I’m going to pick up my suitcase and catch a taxi. I’d say half an hour.”
“Don’t be long, please don’t be long.”
“No, of course not, but—”
“Don’t be long, I don’t feel well, I’m not doing so good. And bring water, there’s no water left. I’m thirsty. Don’t be late.”
I must have brought her up a bottle of water, but instead of giving me an explanation Helen chose to lie down on the sofa and pour herself something stronger. It was enough just to have me near, she didn’t even feel the urge to touch me. She wanted me there just in case, a living air bag. Nothing new, that was the sound track of our lives. I decided to push her that night, not only because she started lurching from one armrest to the other as if she couldn’t hold her head up anymore. The urgency in her messages had bothered me, the pitiful tone of her voice floating in the void through the phone. I didn’t let her twist my arm, I demanded a sensible explanation for her depressed energy, her recent spiritual lassitude. Unfounded crankiness is terrifying, you can’t argue against something inchoate—I needed something solid to confront. It wasn’t meant to be, though. While I was looking for her nightgown she flopped into bed. I kept at it for the next week (I delayed dinner, stamped down the hallway so she couldn’t sleep), until finally her adversary emerged from her mind to enter the real world and name the one responsible for all that mental chaos and indolence.
“You’re a good person, John, you don’t know what evil is like. You haven’t seen it, you don’t know how it smells.”
“That’s why I wanted to meet your parents, John, to know if I could count on you when he reappeared. But your father was good, you mother has grown old, and your sister is a pathetic woman, a fat, sad woman.”
“Now I know you’re not going to save me, that Barcelona isn’t far enough away, that this marriage isn’t going to protect me.”
“Poor John, poor John, my dear John, we’re going to suffer a lot if you don’t leave me. You’re going to suffer.”
“My father, my daddy has come back, and he wants me dead.”
It was one thing to be sick of interrogating her, and quite another for me to swallow that nonsense, which at best promised domestic drama and at worst a bit of criminality. My family was a disaster, agreed, but an honorable one. Skirting adultery, Dad had managed to maintain a fairly civilized arrangement with Mother. I was living with Helen because of a series of random events that in no way made me responsible for the grotesque complications starting to foment in Unfathomable America. I hadn’t married her past! To calm myself down I repeated like a mantra that Helen’s Daddy and mother (whose name I don’t even remember, so you can see how much attention I paid her) were an ocean and several seas away. They couldn’t stick their noses into our lives.
Helen’s grandstanding was all about how, by moving away from her splendid homeland (Fuokville, land of Lewis and Clark) to marry me, she’d abandoned (abandoned!) her family. All the Thrushes were left bottled up (bottled up!) in the past, adrift and at the mercy of the waves. Of course, the standout word of Helen’s private journal (which, when she left the apartment, I read with the justifiable goal of learning more about her) was “special”; when she extrapolated about herself, the girl could pass for an optimist. She was still joined to Daddy Rupert by flesh-and-blood ties, and when those ties took it upon themselves to transmit an electric charge to her, my Helen threw hers
elf into transatlantic conversations that didn’t exactly match his supposed indifference. Not to mention how they cut from my bank account (the phone expenses never went to the joint account we opened, I never knew why) another slice of the inheritance I was counting on. Not to mention the three boxes (“hidden” under our bed) where she kept half a set of baby teeth (a barbaric American custom), her third poem to Daddy (Thank you, daddy/your smile cheers me/your words nurture me/your beard caresses me/Thank you, daddy), three Valentine’s Day cards (from three different admirers), an herbarium of romantic petals, and her first running shoes mended with blue thread. As she “distanced” herself from her parents, Helen was putting space between her senses and the school walls, the country dances, the array of cakes and pastries that would later flow in fatty rivers to settle on her hips, the family nicknames whose existence she acknowledged only when she was drunk, the Christmas dinners with Christmas silverware and Christmas tablecloths, the endless reruns of the same anecdotes about cousins and aunts and neighbors, the cavalcade of births, baptisms, weddings, and funerals whose respective rites comprised the main public entertainment modest people offer one another. Plus the visits to Glacier National Park, the preachers’ sermons on local radio, the chewing gum, the regional baseball leagues, the kids’ covetous way of fornicating after high school graduation, the deep-seated feminine rivalries, the shame with which people received the news of another tourist decapitated by a bear. The chain of reliable ingredients you can never be entirely weaned off and that, if you’re not careful, will end up compacted into a vital paste that is the only dish you spoon into your mouth your whole life long. At the end of the day, only frigid girls and handicapped people choose to stay and live in the town they’re born in.
What Helen told me while she sat there on the sofa with her legs crossed Indian-style; what she said while in her robe in front of the half-open refrigerator door, waiting for her hand to steady so she could finally pour some milk into her cup; what I could make out while she was tossing and turning on the sheets (and my eye captured at every half-turn the brand on the elastic in the area under her buttocks: a furrow in the flesh less than a centimeter deep); what I gleaned and thought I understood all led to the same short conclusion:
Divorce Is in the Air Page 20