“Name your poison.” Tony saw the movie, knew the lines and innuendo that maybe Señor, you and I, esta noche. She said her day wasn’t going so well because Lawrence fell back into the bottle. They’d been together six years. Today was one in a series of days.
“Thanks, Mister,” she said at the end of her drink. “I’m Suey. What’s your game?”
Two nights later, dead drunk, stumbling and mumbling disgust with life and love with her mush crammed full, with grease running down her neck, she cried. She’d thrown Lawrence out. He was alcoholic, on a binge, without hope. She chewed her greaseburger as tears merged with grease. She sobbed; a droplet formed on her chin. She took another bite and garbled that she needed another drink.
Tony was in town a week then, had walked the streets and walked them again, had walked out of town and back in; had drunk no water for seven days and seen many single women, not glamorous women like you see in New York or bathing beauties like you see in California, or sensible women like you see in the Midwest but secret women from middle age. Like Robin Targonik, who sat beside him on the day he met Suey but with more poise than Suey, more grace and flair and much more perfectly blonde hair. “My husband left me,” she said, sliding on, looking off, ready to share the spirit and drinks before sundown. She married her high school sweetheart, she said. It didn’t work out once Rick came along, because, frankly, he swept her off her feet. So they split amicably, she and her husband, and all these years she’d thought of him as her ex-husband. But she saw him again soon after divorcing her next husband, Rick, who she now considered her ex-husband, because her first husband had reverted in a way, come up in stature in a way, as her high school sweetheart. She held her drink in her fingertips and said, “Do you see what I’m getting at? Isn’t it strange? Strange and … wonderful I guess, the way we just … swim up our little streams …” She turned to the man beside her. “… to spawn.” She said they met when he was thirty and she was only twenty-eight; Rick, of course. She’d raised his children.
“They’re your children, too,” Tony said.
“No, no. I have no children, not biologically. Twenty-four years,” she said. The easy math was no accident, nor was it precise. Fifty-two my ass, he thought—you’ll never see sixty again. “He just walks in one night and says to me he’s unthrilled, unchallenged and out of love.” She hooked her drink like it was the antidote.
“Sounds like a straightforward fellow,” Tony said.
“Oh, but he wasn’t. All those years. I didn’t even see it. My friends tell me to take the cure, if you know what I mean. I have men friends but they’re mostly gay. I feel much safer with them because I know they only want me for friendship, and I …” She fluttered up a blushing vulnerability. “I’m just not ready for that. Not now. Not yet. I just don’t think … I mean …”
Tony finished his drink too. She smiled, ready for another; the evening was so young. “I have to use the bathroom,” he said. In the bathroom he took a dump, picked his nose, examined facial pores, plucked a few ear hairs, checked for gray and browsed an old newspaper. When he came out she was gone. So he sat down again.
Then came Suey, his second conversation of the week. She also needed a drink, and on superior presentation of the request, she got one. They became fast friends, but like so many friendships formed in bars, it left a shallow imprint. He recognized her two nights later, but Heidi Heller stood up from the short wall by the greaseburger cart, up to six-one and then some, stretching from her black leather boots to her crazy black hair, stretching like long time, like time for lasting friendship. A woman this free, this tall and thin, shaped this way and covered in black Spandex was an old familiar, a friend for keeps.
He watched her. She glanced his way. Suey didn’t see him, or couldn’t see him, or forgot him already. He ordered up—“I’ll try one of those.” He sat on the short wall. “You make it look so good,” he said, wondering if it was a dog, a goat, a pig or a horny toad. Heidi sat down too in primal communion. He ate, accepting amoebic dysentery, salmonella, ptomaine, typhus, diphtheria, hepatitis, anything for a few words of encouragement.
“You like greaseburgers?” Suey asked. He ate. “He does!” She sat up straighter with a twinkle in her eye, praising greaseburgers, remembering now, feeling much better now, honest, she really did. She didn’t want to be drunk any more, she only needed a beer, just one, then she’d be ready to go home. Heidi shrugged and stood up again in simple magnificence, durable as the mountains. She followed Suey, who paused for the dizzies, grabbed the greaseburger cart abreast of Tony and swayed, eyes closed. Heidi waited, slouching, humoring the sludge in her gut. Suey wobbled until more blood reached her brain, until her eyes opened on a brand new night. “Hello,” she said, offering her hand. He took it, ignoring the grease. “It’s so good to see you again. Can you buy me a drink?”
“It’s good to see you, Suey.”
“This is Heidi. She thinks you’re cute.”
“Cute?” Heidi blushed. “Did she say so?”
“I can tell. I know her pretty good. She’s my best friend. My best friend in the whole world. Right, Heidi?”
Heidi smiled. Tony smiled too, and they owed it all to Suey. “Can I buy you a drink?” he asked between them.
“Come on,” Heidi said. “Tapultapec.”
“How far is that?” he asked, happily on his way to the living end.
Tapultapec is a cantina across from the church. Huge spires and imposing breastworks form the shell of the biggest empty room in a hundred miles—in a thousand miles if you don’t count the churches. A stone’s throw away is a gray weathered door flush with the common facade running the length of the street. It opened to a long corridor with a dance hall at the end, with tables and chairs on two sides, a bar on the third side backed by a thousand bottles and on the fourth side a bandstand. A dozen percussives and half as many guitars played a salsa hat dance that could let a Latino live up to a reputation. A well-traveled man who thought he’d seen what there was to see in town could feel the door open on its secret heart, could feel the beat and want to live up to the same reputation, could want another drink and the music to play forever. He could want life to feel like this, because this is it.
They sat at a long table with four other women, cronies who said hello to Heidi and Suey and eyeballed the new guy. “Tres cervezas y tres tequilas,” he told the waiter. When the drinks came, a woman raised a toast.
“Here’s to women,” she said, her voice affirming her stink eye. “To good … strong … brave …”
“Clean and reverent,” Tony said. “Women. God bless them. Down the hatch.” He knocked it back. A group of adults drinking and dancing didn’t need another workout on cruel nature and the evil ways of men.
“Brave … good, strong …” She insisted, “Women!”
“Here here!” Tony ordered again, a round for the table. A flower girl hovered near. He plucked a bunch of gardenias off the top and paid twelve grand for the bunch and tipped another three. Why not? He pulled the string and dealt gardenias, two or three each to the good, strong women, except for Heidi, who got eight or ten. That melted some ice. The flowers shut them up, got them sniffing front and center and remembering love as a concept. What a bargain, he thought, six women on fifteen grand and a few drinks.
Heidi leaned over. “How long you here for?”
“Tomorrow. I’m leaving tomorrow.”
Her eyes went down in the direction of all things. She told her flowers, “You don’t have to leave.”
“No. I don’t. But I wouldn’t stay unless I had a reason to stay.”
“What kind of a reason?”
“Say, a reason like you.” She looked up, startled as a rabbit sensing a troubadour. She smiled. It arced his way; Tony Drury in the bull’s eye opened his heart for the hot shot, for the tingle he too remembered as a concept. He felt humble, ready for deliverance from a world without love. He felt happy and in love—he loved the night and the hills, the smoke and drin
k and throbbing music. He loved what can happen if you’re lucky, like a thirsty animal loves a watering hole. She looked around the room as if remembering. “I don’t mean … Well, I don’t mean … I mean, I could stay, but I wouldn’t unless I was kept here. You’d have to keep me here.”
“What do you mean I’d have to keep you here?”
“I’d have to stay with you. I mean I don’t usually talk like this, but we don’t have much time, and I don’t know if we’d fall in love—hey, look. Maybe we won’t. Fall in love.” He looked away. She fingered a flower. He looked back. He couldn’t say more and didn’t want to stare, so he finished his drink. Beware strangers with proposals. They shared the hunger of lonely hearts. They knew what could happen in the din and chaos, the liquor and smoke—“But I … sense something. Maybe I’m only horny. Maybe it’s only the liquor …” He drank another, not remembering its arrival. “The night … The burgers … I don’t know.”
She laughed, eased near, dropped her eyes again and smiled. “I’m already in love,” she said.
Veto came between them. Negativity displaced eternity, and the razzle-dazzle band wouldn’t stop its big tin pulse. His head bowed under the weight—they all have boyfriends. He looked with a plea for betrayal and a fling—“Where is he?”
She laughed short, a first scorn for the simpleton so short on faith. “Right in front of me, fool.” It was like the old egg trick, where your friend stands behind you and claps her hands over your head like an egg breaking. Barely touching you, her palms slide down your head, tingling your neck and across your shoulders, oozing down like raw egg. She had him, caught in the matrix of his own treachery. The world and its lovers are soiled as the currency they exchange, sooner or later.
“I got to warn you,” he said. “I’m not drunk, but I had a bunch of drinks.”
“So? What’s to warn?”
“I think I … well, I feel something with you. I’ve never said that. I mean, not to a woman I just met. I mean, it might all be, you know …”
“Yeah. I know. It all ends in tears.”
“I’ve heard that.”
“Everyone hears that, if they drink at La Mexa.”
“People cry at La Mexa?”
“One person cries at La Mexa. Especially when he quotes Kerouac.”
Tony Drury wondered if Jack Kerouac ever sat next to this kind of Spandex. “Do you feel … I mean, do you …” Drinks arrived.
“I know I feel something,” she said, staring, then shaking her head. It was too much, too far, too fast, so they danced it off like the night wouldn’t end. They danced faster to keep the night alive and to get higher, where they longed to be. He rode a white horse. She wore glass slippers. The rats were coachmen; the roaches drove, until eternity cracked once more with daylight.
They don’t exist, neither perfection nor eternity. The love saga between Heidi and Tony boils down to where it began, on an offer of deception disguised as love. One flawed moment led to the rest. They hurried, because they knew about truth and romance and transient nature.
They reached her hacienda by quiet streets, amazed with circumstance and each other. Yet knowing of the half life of magic, she paused at the guest room and said, “This is the guest room.”
“I stay here?”
She shrugged. She asked, “If we become lovers, how many times will we make love?”
“Ever?”
“And ever.”
He looked her over. “I think many. Maybe many many.” She leaned in and kissed his eyes, reeking of beer, greaseburger and nicotine. She walked down the terrace. He also knew by heart the story of strangers who find each other and cling, only to part like they met when they wake up with nothing between them but spent lust. She spared them another round of the joke. Because who needs another shot glass of friction with a snore back at this stage of the game? Heidi Heller had had enough. Tony Drury understood. Waiting would give their love a chance to breathe, to flesh out and gain a footing, would give her a chance to shower down.
In the guestroom he wished he was twenty years younger and not so drunk, wished he didn’t know what he knew and she didn’t smell like a slaughterhouse. He wished he could get a hard-on and she didn’t stink.
He couldn’t sleep, too drunk; she likewise. She came and got him. She’d brushed her teeth and washed her face. She rousted him in the dark and led him down the long terrace, up the dark stairs and down a hall toward the end of that leg of their forced march to nowhere, where they hurried once more to beat the dawn or the reaper.
Too late. Spandex lies worse than desperate lovers do. She showed a bad diet, no exercise, no tone, iffy pallor. Flabby in first light, torching another fag on a two-pack habit, she looked like a naked cowgirl—dirt between her toes—and had the soft touch of a bronco buster for twenty-one seconds flat. What a kick in the ass, he thought, as she eased him down, stripped him naked, and solved the other problem. As he wondered about product liability on Spandex and darkness, he knew he still loved her, recalling the lithesome beauty with nary a wrinkle in starlight. He wanted to go back for what seemed so real, but you can’t, because it wasn’t, because it isn’t.
Just before the little bully blew its top, he said, “Uh …” She looked up as if from another greaseburger. “If you … don’t stop …”
“Can’t you make more?”
He considered more. “In the best of conditions …”
“Relax.” Gazing out the window to wish upon a star, she said, “I dreamed of this.” Taking the bully by the horns, she finished him off like a doggie roper in twenty-one seconds flat, no pussyfooting around. The perfect evening proceeded to a smoke, a drink, a rest for him and a hump for her, for which she seemed indifferent, despite the many women conjured for the occasion.
She smoked before; she smoked after. During, with casual resignation to one more peckerwood who couldn’t ring the bell, she told a story.
He slowed to a trot and then to a canter and finally a walk. She wanted another smoke but held off in deference to romance. She said she knew this guy who worked the stable in Sonora where she rode for awhile. The guy seemed happy enough, but she read in the paper he was found dead in the desert. He tried to hike to America with his family. The desert turned the family back but the guy went on, to make the kind of money you can make in America. He would bring the family up later. The guy hiked two days on the mesa with the coyotes, snakes and buzzards. He made another forty miles. Then he died.
Tony wrapped up his own trek as well and rolled over with a sigh of regret. “Greed’ll get you every time.”
“I keep thinking of him. I’d have driven up and given him a ride. I didn’t know.”
“Sure you knew. You could drive up with a riders wanted sign and get a load any day you want to.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“What did you mean?” She rolled his way, yanked his pillow and rolled back, stacking it under hers. She propped herself up to better mull it over, like this was an angle she hadn’t anticipated. So the evening ended on contemplation of death and the erratic sleep of the toxically drunk. They dreamed of romance and averages.
Waking at noon is worse than a heavy nap. When his eyes cracked open he said, “Nnuh …” Curled in the sheets she struggled to the surface. He didn’t feel like a wish come true; her fantasy was a man of vigor, a man she could eat like no tomorrow, who would make more and ring the bell at random. He only auditioned for the wish. He didn’t get the part; a man can tell. She twitched until he reminded her, “Nngh …”
“Mmhngh,” she agreed, throwing the sheets back, swinging her legs over and staring like a boxer after a knockdown, remembering who, where, how many fingers. “Ohh, …” she complained, “Mm …” She turned to him. Her forehead wrinkled; yes, I brought a guy home. “Coffee?” she asked, standing up, rubbing her eyes, scratching her head and then her ass, then slew footing for the bathroom and a two-minute piss.
“No. It’s Tony.”
“What?”
“Yeah. Coffee.”
“What?”
“I said sure, I could use some coffee.” He sat up, pondering gravity, its complexities and fine points, its first cousins, spin and dizzy. The place was different with sunlight pouring through the arches. The walls were mottled brown and cracked with rooting vines that crawled up and shimmered green in the spilled blood of Jesus, who made no complaint.
A breeze wafted. The fountain babbled. She flushed and slumped in the doorway, stoop-shouldered, electric-haired and baggy-eyed. At odds with rebirth one mo time, she cracked a smile over half a laugh and delivered the news, “You look different in the morning.”
“Not you,” he said. “You’re still the most beautiful woman I ever saw.” She laughed again pushed him back on the bed and straddled him like a kid winning a fight. He loved a woman he could look up to. This one towered, bouncing until the suction glopped his stomach like a sump with no prime. Pounding him giddy she let him know: she was bigger and maybe tougher, and some things you don’t fool around with. He lay passive, like he’d read you’re supposed to do. Let her get this one up, he thought. But no, she only wanted the sheets; they’d shared their love on dirty sheets.
“Your shower’s on the other side of the parlor,” she said, wadding up the sheets for the maid, dragging herself back to the bathroom.
Showered and clothed they met again and toured a few floors, then fell silent. Touching near her self-sculpture in clay was like a first touch. She was lovelier still over coffee, lighter on her feet with cordial delicacy. Lifting her cup, sipping, she asked, “So? You staying?”
He shrugged. “I got a bus this afternoon. Mexico City. My flight is tomorrow. Back to America.”
“So?”
“I don’t have to go, I guess. They might burn me on the ticket. I don’t care, not really.”
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