But even though she spoke of death he did not understand her. He smiled all the same.
Did it matter what she said, at all?
“How’d you learn all this? French, English,” he said, grabbing the book again and looking at the cover. It was an edition of no importance, there was nothing to see.
“My father was a translator,” she replied. Her glass was almost empty. Wordless, expertly, Gregory refilled it.
He notices things, she thought. He is attentive.
“He was?”
“Yes. He works for an insurance company now. He’s in Mexico City.”
With his new family. Viridiana wondered if his younger children enjoyed language lessons, if he had them conjugate verbs at the breakfast table and gave them sweets when they could declaim a poem in English. Or if he’d left all of that behind. She knew so little of his life. When they spoke on the phone he was always in a rush. Sometimes she could hear children playing in the background, a dog barking, or his new wife’s voice. She’d taken to calling him at his office, though that didn’t help either. He was still pressed for time. And he always said the same thing, anyway, “Did you get what I sent?” Meaning her Christmas card or the birthday letter with a couple of bills and the same three lines he scrawled each year.
She didn’t even know what he looked like.
“You’ve been there, right?” she asked.
“Mexico City? Yes, for a couple of days. Ambrose went to see his nephew. Daisy and I took a tour while they had lunch.”
“What’s it like?” she asked and she lay back on the bed, staring at the ceiling and resting the glass against her stomach.
“It’s big. Busy. Full of stuff. A bit like New York in that sense. Then again, I got sick as a dog first afternoon we were there. Can’t say I saw much. Moctezuma’s curse at work.”
“You’ve also seen New York, then.”
“Sure. New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, New Orleans. I’ve been everywhere around the States. No Paris, though,” he said. “I’m terrified of the menu. What if I order snails? Or frog legs?”
She smiled. Her hands rested lightly on the sides of the glass, so the liquid would not spill. “I’m sure you’d be fine.”
“You have no idea how stupid I am,” he said. “Hey, you should go with me. You can translate and make sure I don’t eat crap.”
“Sure, I’ll go with you to Paris,” she chuckled and rubbed a finger against the rim of the glass. Her eyes were closed.
“I mean it.”
“Don’t joke.”
“I’m not joking.”
She opened her eyes and turned toward him. He plucked the glass from her hands, placing it on the side table. He also discarded the book and leaned down to plant a sure kiss on her lips.
“What are you doing?” she whispered.
“Drinks, a chat and kisses, we said,” he reminded her.
He kissed her expertly, kissed her for a thousand years or maybe more. It was an odd sensation. Manuel didn’t kiss well at all, and lately, before they’d broken up, all the kisses were accompanied by pleas that they ought to have sex and get married. When she had said no, he whined like a child.
Gregory talked so differently. He was effusive in his praise. It wasn’t only what he said, it was how he said it. The words were low and whispered to her ear, slowly and carefully, each caress punctuated with an absolute certainty she did not experience when Manuel tried to paw her.
“You are the prettiest little thing I’ve ever set my eyes on,” he said. “I could touch you forever.”
That was miles away from Manuel’s clumsy mumblings.
She closed her eyes and thought of the pale remains of sharks upon the sand. The incongruent image rested behind her eyelids, superimposed. Black on white. Her skin was blistering hot, like nitrate film catching on fire.
Gregory’s fingertips raced down her chest, settled on her stomach for a minute, went up to cup a breast, before he changed course and tried to pull down the zipper of her jeans.
She swatted his hand away. Suddenly, this was all very familiar, she had enacted this same play before. Her hand shook as she shoved his fingers away.
“What?” he asked, but he was chuckling. He thought it was a game.
He tried to pull up her shirt, tried to pull it off her, his fingers on the hem, and she tried equally hard to pull it down, to stop him from kissing her exposed midriff.
“Did I tickle you? Are you ticklish?” he asked, smiling against her stomach, his hands busy against the jeans again.
“Stop,” she said, squirming against him. “I don’t want to… I can’t have a baby.”
That doused him cold, his smile was gone. He frowned and sat back, and Viridiana sat up, the headboard digging into her back. The room was hot, and her skin covered in a fine film of sweat. The fan whirred, useless, in its corner.
“You’re not on the pill?” he asked. He sounded more shocked than upset.
“No,” she said, her throat felt dry. “The pharmacist plays dominoes at our house almost every weekend. He’d tell my mother.”
She tugged at her shirt, tried to smooth out its wrinkles with the palm of her hand, tried to smooth back her hair, which must be a mess. He simply stared at her, looking surprised.
“I could buy condoms,” he proposed.
“Then he’ll wonder who you are using them with. You don’t socialize with anyone in town. And I… I live here. They’ll think… and they’ll talk… and my mother, she’d kill me—”
“Christ, it’s practically Victorian.”
What did he expect in a place like this? In the capital, she was sure everyone did as they pleased. The women fucked men every other day and no one raised the alarm. Although maybe, even there, the elusive middle class morality held sway. And when you ventured off the anointed path and walked into the woods, you ended up like Viridiana’s mother: married before her twenty-first birthday, sour-faced, a crease between her brows.
Men could leave. Her father had left. But a woman couldn’t leave. Especially if she had a kid. A woman was chained.
He stared at her in silence. Sharks do not blink, and it seemed to her Gregory had that unblinking quality, that he could stare at her for the entire evening, and if he opened his mouth he’d have rows of razor-sharp teeth.
“Fine,” he raised both of his palms up in surrender. “We said kisses, let’s leave it at that. Maybe next time we can try something different.”
“I told you, I can’t—”
“I don’t know what kind of chats about the birds and the bees you had at home, but you don’t always need to put a penis in a vagina.”
She did not reply.
They had no chats about birds and bees in her house, it was all oblique and allusions. The first time she’d menstruated, staining her jeans red, her mother had diligently taken the clothes away and handed her a sanitary napkin. She had said it would happen each month, she had said Viridiana must know all of this already, poking around as she did in books. Viridiana did know, she did have books, but somehow, she’d expected more than her mother’s silence.
Viridiana thought, sometimes, that this had been the moment of her death. That she was now only half-alive, a living ghost, and they were counting the days left until they entombed her by way of marriage. To Manuel.
There had only ever been Manuel.
“Hey,” Gregory said, grabbing her right hand. “Hey, you think I’m joking about Paris, don’t you?”
“You can’t be serious,” she said. Her left hand rested on a pillow, which she clutched firmly as she spoke.
“Look, I’m tired of being Daisy’s little errand boy. That’s all I am to her. I’ve spent years following Daisy around, doing as she says, bumping with her from city to city. I’m tired of all that. I want to make it on my own, you know? Why not make it in Paris? Or somewhere equally far away.”
“Yes, but I… you barely know me an
d I don’t know you,” she muttered, her grip on the pillow relaxing.
“I know you enough. Listen, I’m twenty-nine. You know what that means?”
“No.”
“That’s almost thirty,” he said very seriously.
“I don’t understand.”
“It means I’m not getting any younger. Or any more charming, or anything at all. It means I need to think about the future. My future. Not somebody else’s future. Come on, by the end of the summer I can do as I please. I can buy two tickets to Paris.”
He rested a hand on her stomach, a finger sliding on the button of her jeans. He did not undo it, nor did he try to undo the zipper, he simply rubbed a finger there. She would have preferred if he tried to touch her some other way. This gesture, it made her shiver.
“Maybe,” he said, “I fell in love with you at first sight, what do you think about that?”
“Since the first moment you saw me, even before you saw me,” she said, paraphrasing Montgomery Clift when he spoke to Elizabeth Taylor. The only place she’d heard people speak like that was in the films.
“That’s right.”
He smiled and kissed her again. Lightly. Sweetly.
“Since you’re a good girl, I’ll be a good boy,” he promised.
He stood up, gathered his glasses and his bottle of rum and went to the door. She followed him, a little confused, a little breathless, and she watched him walk down the hallway and away from her.
Chapter 8
For three days Gregory had ignored her. Viridiana did not expect him to make a big show of affection in front of the others, but he didn’t make a show of anything at all. It was as if the conversation in her room had not happened, like she’d imagined the whole thing.
Three days Gregory and Daisy had gone down to the beach without her. She didn’t think they would invite her to tag along every time they headed for a swim, but there was something about Daisy’s attitude which made her feel she was entirely unwelcome. Perhaps Gregory had talked to Daisy about Viridiana and Daisy decided it wasn’t right to socialize with her anymore.
Was it that? Was Daisy mad because Gregory was not paying enough attention to her? What did they say about her when she wasn’t around? Did they make jokes about the help? Maybe the whole thing had been a joke.
“Come with me to Paris, I’ve fallen in love with you,” certainly sounded like a joke. Like in Now, Voyager, one of those black and white movies they showed late at night, where Bette Davis has a sudden glamourous makeover. It was a favorite of her grandmother.
Viridiana applied herself with vigor to her work, trying not to think about Gregory and Daisy at the beach, taking notes. Ambrose droned on, and the office was warm. She focused her attention on the notepad between her hands. Then Ambrose would say it was enough for the day and Viridiana would look at the clock on the wall and felt deflated because it was too early. There were many hours left to kill and she did not want to kill them worrying about Gregory.
“I need you to take this letter to the post office. It’s ridiculous that there’s no mail delivery at this house,” Ambrose said. “No mail! Who’s heard of that?”
Viridiana did not tell him he was lucky there was a post office at all. Several small communities still depended on the whims of random truck drivers and fayuqueros to get their mail. Their little post office and telegraph station was a blessing, but, of course, Don Julio wasn’t going to drive here for Ambrose. If Ambrose had wanted access to the post office or the telephone he could have stayed at the hotel, but she supposed he hadn’t thought the whole trip through, or he merely wanted to play the part of the recluse.
Nevertheless, she was grateful. The errand would be a welcome distraction.
He handed her a letter. It said, “Mr. S.L. Landry” and had the address of a law firm in Mexico City. Ambrose wrote letters often—she supposed the lack of a telephone necessitated them —but the letters to his nephew he wrote on his own, by hand, instead of dictating them.
“Should I go right now?” Viridiana asked.
“Yes, go now.” Ambrose said. “And I have something else, before I forget. This is for you, so you can deposit it in your bank account.”
He handed her a second envelope, it was unsealed and contained a check. Viridiana wasn’t expecting this, he had paid her in advance for her first few weeks working for them and no more money was due to her yet.
“I’ll probably be heading back to Mexico City. I wanted to give you notice. The money, it’s a bit of a bonus, I suppose. You’ve been a good kid, putting up with me and Daisy.”
“You don’t like it here?” she asked.
“I like it fine. My nephew, Stan, was supposed to be away until October, off in South America. But our lawyer wrote to say he’s cutting his trip short and I’d rather spend my time with the boy. I have no children, only him.”
Viridiana stared at the two envelopes between her hands.
“We might come back later, who knows,” Ambrose said.
“Then it’s decided.”
“I have to see when Stan is back exactly. There’s no sense in a move if he’s not back from Peru. All these papers and things to ship away…”
“But wouldn’t it be better the other way around,” she said. “Maybe your nephew could come here?”
“He’s a city boy, wouldn’t know what to do with himself in this place. It’s so quiet at night. You’d think you could listen to the stars. Kind of frightening. But of course, you must be used to it.”
Stars, silence, who cared? She felt her heart, which had been ticking on merrily, stutter in pain as she pictured this house empty of its inhabitants. Empty of Gregory.
“Don’t look so blue, girl. I’m sure you’ll find another job,” Ambrose said noticing her dejected expression.
“Yes, but I’ll miss you, sir,” she lied.
He laughed. “Not me. Maybe you’ll miss Daisy, maybe Gregory. Not me.”
Viridiana did not dare look at Ambrose, instead glancing sheepishly at the envelopes, opening the one with the check as if to make sure it was still there and had not evaporated. It did no good. Her expression had been too candid.
“Gregory, is it?” Ambrose said, smirking. “He’s a parasite. You’re best off cashing your check. I don’t say that to be cruel, girl. They’re both parasites. God knows I’ve figured that out.”
Ambrose opened a drawer and took out a packet of cigarettes, shaking it. It was empty and he crushed the cardboard box, shaking his head. On his desk there was a glass ashtray full to the brim with stubs.
“Anyway, off you go. I need that in the mail today. Get me more smokes, too, will you? You have petty cash to pay for everything?”
“Yes,” she said, standing up.
“Good. You can take the car if you want.”
“I’ll ride my bicycle.”
“Yes, you always do, don’t you?” Ambrose mused. “It’d be faster to drive.”
“I prefer the bicycle.”
“Maybe you can buy yourself a new one with the money.”
Viridiana did not reply. She grabbed her backpack, her hat, a pair of cheap plastic sunglasses with white frames, and rode to town. She dropped the check at the bank, where the bored teller was reading a copy of Vanidades, and then walked to the post office where Don Julio said no telegram or letters had come for Ambrose.
When Viridiana exited the post office she noticed that Chong’s truck was parked by the church. He was a fayuquero, selling odds and ends from town to town. The first fayuqueros had dragged their merchandise on mules, slicing across the sierra, but now they rolled around in trucks. Fayuqueros were better than a map for giving you directions, could help out if your car lay stalled on the side of the road, and brought in varied types of merchandise. In another place these peddlers might have been of little importance, but in tiny towns they took on mythical proportions.
Everyone knew Chong, and Chong knew everybody. If you wanted som
ething he could get it. Information, goods, you name it. It didn’t matter if you needed American goods or Mexican goods, he was the man for you. More reliable than the telegraph, too, he could send messages to a cousin in San Diego where letters would go astray.
Viridiana crossed the street and approached the truck, which on its side was emblazoned with the name CHONG’S ROYAL ROAD GOODS and pictures of cacti. Chong had a tendency to the dramatic. Most fayuqueros didn’t bother putting such signage on their trucks. Some of them merely tied packages and suitcases to the roofs of their cars with a rope.
“Viridiana,” the man said when she approached him. He had taken out a stool from the back of his truck and was sitting on it, smoking a cigarette, before he unloaded the goods on the sidewalk so people could look at them.
“Hey, Chong,” she said. “Getting ready to work?”
“Getting there. The arthritis is mighty bad this month. Mighty bad,” he said.
Chong was missing two of his front teeth and two fingers on his right hand, so when he pressed the cigarette against his lips he didn’t use the index and middle fingers, like most people did. He held the cigarette between his thumb and ring finger, nodding at her.
Viridiana didn’t know how old Chong was. He’d come to Mexico when the country was hungry for cheap Chinese workers and when the tide turned, and the government started expelling them because they didn’t want them anymore, Chong already had a truck and was rumbling around the peninsula. Let the fuckers catch him, he said. They never did.
“I got a box of books you can look at,” Chong said.
“Do you still have that radio you were carrying around last month?”
“It’s there, rattling in the back. Help an old man take a few boxes out and I’ll give you a discount.”
“How much?”
“How many boxes you gonna help me take out?”
Viridiana smiled and opened the back of the truck. Chong had bundles, boxes, suitcases. Most of them were labeled. Viridiana took out a folding table, set it next to Chong, and then began piling boxes around it. She found the box labelled “electronics” and took out the radio. It was a bright yellow. The box with electronics also contained batteries and she slid two in, then turned it on, twisting the dial until disco music began playing.
Untamed Shore Page 7