No, she was looking ahead, looking to something entirely different.
“I’d like to go out with all of you,” she said, “but perhaps another day.”
She meant it, too. Now…now was not the time to start mending friendships. If she moved away with Gregory, if Paris was indeed their destination, then she would write copious letters to her mother, to her friends, to Manuel.
“Things are a little bit chaotic around here,” she said, crossing her arms and glancing at the house. “You understand, right? Thanks, though. Thanks for asking.”
It wasn’t the answer Manuel had expected. He didn’t look pleased, but he also didn’t ask her again. He nodded and got into his truck. Viridiana waved goodbye.
When he was gone she looked up at the moon, which was round and shining bright. The Kiliwa said Coyote, who came from the place in the south where everything was yellow, made the earth and with the skin of his testicles he made the sky and when he perished he became the moon. The moon was male. Nyiew halah. Black moon, the number zero and death. She didn’t speak Kiliwa, but then, who did? The missionaries came to teach everyone the proper language and the proper religion, and then the missions crumbled and now there wasn’t even that.
Viridiana spoke English and French and Spanish, but these tongues, too, would fade someday. For the here and now, those were the only tools she required. Those were the artifacts that allowed her to be employed each summer, speaking words for people who had never bothered to read a sentence in another language.
She felt empty some nights and that night she was emptier, and sad.
Perhaps that is why she thought of Ambrose, or how Ambrose bought forth the sadness and the loneliness. Back in her room, she prayed a rosary without any beads to aid her, marking each prayer with dots on a piece of paper.
When she was done, she took out the tape recorder and spoke to it. This had been, for a long time now, not only her diary but a method of confession. She felt it more secure than the blessing of the priest, sacrilegious as that might be. It was clean and holy in its own way.
She had not made a full confession to the recorder since she’d arrived in the house, although she had whispered to the tapes her attraction to Gregory. The blow job, his hands in her hair—that she hadn’t dared to speak out loud. Now those were minuscule compared to this sin.
“I’ve lied,” she told the tape. “It’s not as if I wanted to lie, but I don’t have a choice. The cops couldn’t know the truth, because if they had then it would have been a mess so it was for the best. He’s dead and the world is for the living. Isn’t it? Does anyone suspect me?”
She stopped the recording and lay back on her bed. Outside her window, the moon watched her, but it did not judge her. The moon was pure. And she thought of Coyote, who dreamt beautiful yellow dreams and thus created the world. But when she slept she dreamt of a shark with massive jaws, jaws taller than her. The shark’s belly glowed and she ventured inside of it, looking for the source of light, which was the moon, plucked from the sky.
* * *
The week after Ambrose’s funeral the mood at the house was odd. Not sad, just odd. Delfina had always cooked for them on the days when she cleaned the house. She left meals in the refrigerator. Ambrose had also cooked a meal or two a week, because he liked it. Now that he wasn’t around, neither Gregory nor Daisy picked up the slack. Instead, Daisy told Viridiana to whip them dinner.
Viridiana had been very clear since the beginning that she wasn’t there to play maid or cook, but Daisy seemed to have forgotten.
She cooked the meal, anyway, and afterward Daisy was extra nice. Daisy did her toenails and let Viridiana use her nail polish. Daisy painted them a bright red, and they chatted like they were fast friends.
You would have believed Daisy a young girl by the way she smiled and was so excited. It reminded Viridiana of her first day in the house. Maybe things would go back to being nice between them. As Daisy applied the polish to her toenails, Viridiana remembered her broken nail. Daisy had cut them and filed them down to the same length, there was nothing which might differentiate them. But Viridiana still thought about the broken nail. You could lacquer it a dozen times, she’d still be able to identify it.
But who cared about that?
It had been the ring finger.
After their nails were dry, they went down to the beach together. Daisy laid herself out on a towel, sunbathing, while Gregory asked Viridiana more about the sharks. She told him that in Santa Rosalía they still hunted sharks with varillas.
They harpooned it, first the neck and then the back, and then they dragged it onto the boat.
No hooks with bait, no nets, but brute force. The fishermen beat the shark with a baseball bat— nail affixed to it.
Then he asked her about the peninsula, its people, the geography. She told him that the east is calm and full of life, but the west is naked rocks. It is harsh. It is cruel.
She told him about all the creatures you can find in the sea, not only the sharks, but the great sea turtles, the lobsters, and the industries that had vanished many years before. Like the cannery down south which closed down, and the famous pearl divers who dived no more because the pearl beds had sickened and died.
But she did not tell him the stories about the moon and the coyote. She wanted to keep certain things to herself. There are only so many stories you can tell about yourself, about your land, before you grow empty.
“Hear that? We ought to head to Santa Rosalía,” Gregory said to Daisy. “I could take pictures there. Or what was that other place you said?”
“Isla de Cedros,” Viridiana answered. That had been a mining town. They mined for gold. Then, that also ceased. This seemed to be the fate of everything in Baja California: a stillness, which overcame any attempt at movement.
“What’s there?”
“Sea lions,” Viridiana said. “Sardines, shrimp, lobster and snails. People dive for snails.”
“What a bore,” Daisy said, examining her nails.
“She’s not much of a fishing enthusiast,” Gregory said.
“Neither are you. Why can’t you take pictures of the fishermen and their boats and their sharks here?”
“I have pictures from here, and now I want pictures from other places around Baja. I might as well do it since we’re in Mexico.”
“You’re right, we are,” Daisy said, taking off her sun glasses and frowning.
Then they went home and that night Viridiana prayed another rosary for Ambrose while the electric generator hummed outside her window. She even recorded herself saying a Hail Mary. When she played it back she thought her voice sounded odd. Like it wasn’t her.
As if, like the coyote, she had removed her skin. This made her think of sharks and the fishermen making their quick, efficient cuts, tugging at the shark’s hide. A slit down the back, then they scraped all flesh from the skin until it was as neat as a glove.
Brigida used to say she was an odd girl, skeptical about her son’s choice for a girlfriend, although ultimately, she figured Viridiana could be tamed. She could be cut and made into someone new, like the hide of the shark would cease to encase a monstrous fish and become a pair of shoes.
Reconfiguration, transmutation, it was possible. What Viridiana needed, they all agreed in town, was to settle down and stop dreaming. Stop with her books of foreign phrases and her reckless choices.
Viridiana didn’t know, some nights, if she was right in fighting. At the center of her being there was a blank space.
Friday afternoon they went to the post office so Daisy could make a phone call and check her mail. When the woman returned to the car she was furious. She got in and banged the door shut, immediately demanding a cigarette. Gregory handed it to her.
“Light it, for fuck’s sake,” Daisy said, raising her voice and her hands in the air.
Gregory obeyed her. Daisy took a drag.
“Let’s go,” she said.
“What happened?”
“I’ll tell you when we’re back home,” she replied and glanced at Viridiana through the rear-view mirror.
“Tell me now,” Gregory said.
“She’s here.”
“Yes,” Gregory replied blankly.
“Why can’t you—”
“Tell me now. I don’t want to wait.”
“Fine. Start driving.”
Gregory frowned, but he started the car. Daisy adjusted the rear-view mirror, her lips pursed, still looking at Viridiana. Viridiana crossed her arms and glanced down.
“He made a new will,” Daisy said.
“When?” Gregory asked. He was gripping the wheel tight with both hands.
“I don’t know. I spoke to his lawyer and he said there was a new will, that changes had been made.”
“What kind of changes?”
“He wouldn’t tell me. He said someone from the law firm is headed here, to talk about that…and to look at the death certificate.”
“All right.”
“And they froze the bank account,” Daisy said.
“They can’t do that.”
“They did.”
Daisy let out a little laugh as she rolled down the window and tossed out her cigarette. She had hardly taken more than two puffs.
“We should leave,” Gregory said, his voice grave.
“Run away? The only thing you’re good at,” Daisy said, chuckling and she shook a finger in the air. “No, we are not leaving. Not now.”
“Then what?”
“We wait until that stupid man from the law firm gets here and then we see what’s what.”
“Don’t you thi—”
“Shut up,” Daisy said and she flipped on the radio, cranking the volume.
They didn’t speak after that, not until they got home and began climbing the stairs, arguing. Gregory was saying something about money, about savings, and Daisy was furiously rebuffing him.
Viridiana stood, at the bottom of the stairs, her arms still crossed against her chest.
She went to the office and looked at some of the notes she had typed, neatly piled on a desk. Ambrose’s sad attempt at a book, this was what was left of it.
There was nothing for her to do, now. She rested the palm of her hand against the desk. After an hour she ventured upstairs and knocked softly on Gregory’s door.
“Yeah?” he said.
“It’s me,” she replied.
“Come in.”
She’d never been in his room. When she walked in, he sat up. The room was bigger than her own and it had a full-size bed. There was also a walk-in closet, the door half open, and a door leading to what she assumed was a bathroom.
He’d been napping, his hair was tousled and the covers were wrapped around his legs. He’d taken his shirt off to sleep.
Viridiana stood at the foot of the bed, sliding her hands into her jeans’ pockets.
“I wanted to see how you’re doing,” she said.
“Not that great. You heard. Ambrose’s asshole of a nephew has frozen the bank account,” Gregory said with a sigh.
“Do you know why?”
“Because he doesn’t want us to get our fair share. Daisy earned that money by not vomiting every time Ambrose went near her, for Christ’s sake. And now? Now he’s trying to take away our money.”
“Daisy must receive something, as his widow.”
“Something! God knows what scraps that lawyer is going to try and toss to us. It’s worse than New York.”
“What happened in New York?”
“Nothing,” Gregory said.
“Daisy said something about running away.”
He stood up and reached for her, pulling Viridiana towards the bed. There was a wooden ceiling fan, which whirred rather lazily above them.
“Let me show you a magic trick,” he said as he laid her back against the bright yellow bedspread.
“I think I know your tricks already,” she replied. She was naïve, but not entirely stupid. He was trying to distract her. New York must be important.
He smiled, a slightly crooked smile. Endearing. Not really Montgomery Clift because Clift had been too honest-looking for such an expression, but some other film star. Errol Flynn or Pedro Infante dyed blond. All swagger.
“Bet you don’t know this one. I am a professional magician.”
“Rabbits out of hats,” she said. “Guessing the right card. But it’s sleight of hand and not real magic.”
“Sleight of hand, ha! Says who, Viri-diana?” He drew out the syllables as he popped open the button of her jeans. “Quite the name, that.”
She shared a name with a film. Movies, cinema, melodrama and illusions. Her father had liked Buñuel’s surrealism and her grandmother had liked any flick that Televisa transmitted.
“What are you doing?” she asked, because he was tugging at her jeans. “I told you—”
“Don’t worry.”
Which is what every boy said, along with “only the tip,” but it turned out he was telling the truth because he didn’t take off his clothes, content with pulling the jeans down her legs and then kissing her stomach. This was all right, very all right. Then it got weird because he began to kiss her below, kiss her thigh, then between her thighs, then he licked her. It was the oddest sensation, it made her jerk her hips up, and it made him smile. She could feel his smile against her, a Cheshire Cat’s grin.
Since he didn’t use his fingers, maybe it wasn’t sleight of hand. Not that it mattered much, because whatever it was that he’d done, it melted her sinews to jelly, made her hot and fervid, plastered her hair to her face. Until she was shaking and felt as if she was falling, although he had her firmly on the bed.
He laughed then, and she didn’t appreciate that bit. Not that she disliked his laughter per se, but sometimes he laughed low, and it was entirely different to his nice laughter. Too much mockery.
She was overthinking it.
When her tremors subsided, he laid back next to her, casually, and began unzipping his own pants.
“Your turn,” he said.
She didn’t realize she had signed up for another blow job. Perhaps she should have assumed it was implicit in the bargain. Tit for tat. She frowned, but he stared at her. She didn’t want to be a bad sport about it, she didn’t want to ruin it. God knew she was always ruining something with people. If she hadn’t broken up with Manuel, surely he would have called it quits soon.
It had almost been a pre-emptive move.
“Okay,” Viridiana said.
She didn’t like the taste of him, but that was a small matter. And afterwards, when he closed his eyes, content, she curled up next to him.
“I can see you. I can hold you next to me,” she whispered, so low he wouldn’t hear her. The words weren’t for his sake, but for her pleasure. She parroted the lines from an old movie.
Montgomery Clift’s lines, because she had decided she was the plucky boy from the wrong side of the tracks, and Gregory had to be the sophisticated socialite Liz Taylor had played. The movie, reversed.
There had been a murder in that movie, a drowning. Only it might have been an accident.
Suddenly, she didn’t enjoy the analogy of the film and rose from the bed, going to the bathroom.
She looked for mouthwash. There was a tall shelf by the sink, crammed with things. All of that bathroom stuff couldn’t possibly belong to Gregory, some of it must be from the previous tenant. Or had they shipped a full container of stuff from the States? She pushed a stick of deodorant aside and knocked over a plastic tray. Viridiana knelt down quickly to pick everything up.
She hoped she hadn’t broken anything.
On the floor there was a black leather wallet. Two cards had slipped out from it.
Viridiana grabbed them, ready to tuck them back in place.
Until something made her pause.
Both of the cards were dri
ver’s licenses. Both had a picture of Gregory, smile on display.
But the names were different.
One belonged to James Haskins of Nevada and the other to Jerry Nichols of New York.
The date was wrong, too. Gregory had said he was twenty-nine. But James Haskins was twenty-eight and Jerry Nichols was thirty-one.
Viridiana sat on the toilet seat, staring.
She knew Gregory and Daisy. They had talked, had gone to the beach, had meals together. But when she considered it, when she thought carefully about it, Viridiana actually knew little about them. The details of their lives were vague. Ambrose had been very specific. Part of that had been because she’d been taking notes for him and he’d told her about his childhood, his brother who died when he was a teenager and his only sister who died of cancer years ago, his real-estate business…
So, did she really know anything about Gregory? Did Daisy have similar IDs in her room? Viridiana thought about whether she might find out the answer, but she couldn’t right away. If Daisy saw her riffling through her things, she’d be mad as hell.
Of course, she could ask Gregory what the driver licenses were about, but she wasn’t so silly that she thought this could be explained as a harmless misunderstanding.
She opened the wallet again and found more than a hundred dollars in cash, and a card for the Off Road Club, NY. On the back of it he’d scribbled two phone numbers and the name Lucas. She memorized the numbers.
Viridiana promptly placed everything back in the wallet, put all the items in the plastic tray, and set them on the shelf. When she poked her head in Gregory’s room, he looked fast asleep, and she hurried back to her room. She scribbled down the numbers and the name, mostly to make sure she wouldn’t forget them, but also to remind herself that she had seen them. It had not been a dream.
Viridiana prayed no more rosaries and she did not record another message.
Chapter 12
Untamed Shore Page 12