This Side of Married

by Rachel Pastan

  Isabel danced with Tom, a tall, stooping, red-faced man in baggy pants and a blue dress shirt. “I hate dancing,” he said, sidestepping the wrong way with his big feet in their worn-out sneakers. “I have trouble with left and right. Did you know even molecules are left- or right-handed? Luckily we don’t get into that much in high school. Sorry.” He hopped back, pulling Isabel off balance.

  “That’s all right.”

  “I’m just here for Jaime. He loves to dance. We’ve been taking lessons. It’s my anniversary present to him, actually.” His feet moved up and down like pistons.

  “How long have you been together?” Isabel asked politely.

  “Five years. And you and Alice?”

  “Oh! No—she’s my sister.”

  He looked surprised. “Really?”

  Isabel was annoyed. She didn’t want to be taken for Alice’s date. It was too close to the picture Alice herself had evoked of the two of them spending the rest of their lives together. “Really.”

  “You don’t look alike.”

  “That’s right,” Isabel said coolly. “Alice is the beautiful one.”

  “That would make you the smart one, then,” Tom said, trying to make a joke out of it.

  No, Isabel thought. Alice was the beautiful one and the smart one and the good one, and Tina had always been the popular one. “I’m the divorced one. Or will be,” she said. It sounded hard and bitter. “How about in your family? Which one are you?”

  “The gay one,” Tom said.

  At first there had been just a keyboard player and a trumpeter up on stage, but gradually more members of the band showed up, until, at the end of half an hour, a great wave of sound rolled through the room. By the time the lesson ended, Isabel and Tom could ride it for a few minutes at a time before Tom missed a step and sent them stumbling. Alice was dancing alternately with Jaime and the dance instructor, the two best dancers in the room, and looking as though she had been dancing salsa all her life.

  Isabel resigned herself to a long evening. Her hands were damp from being clutched in Tom’s, and the gold ring he wore on his left ring finger bit into her skin. She had taken off her own wedding ring and tucked it into a pouch of her suitcase the week before.

  There was a break after the lesson. They sat at the bar and had a drink. Tom drank his beer thirstily, his face dripping with sweat. Jaime was a slender man, a head shorter than his partner. He wore a black silk shirt and expensive shoes, and a big gold watch glinted on his hairy wrist. He put his arm around the larger man and said, “Hey, dancing bear. Next we’re going to teach you to ride a unicycle.”

  “Only true love could make me do this,” Tom said, wiping his face.

  “The price of true love has gone down,” Jaime said. “Once you would have had to slay a dragon to prove it, not just take some salsa lessons.”

  Tom laughed. “Slaying a dragon would be easier, believe me. Ask Isabel.”

  “You did fine,” she said, taking a drink of her margarita. “Anyway, there aren’t many dragons around anymore. All the dragon-slaying of past centuries decimated the population.”

  Tom yawned. “When is this thing going to get started?”

  “Tom goes to bed early,” Jaime said.

  “And Jaime never goes to sleep before midnight. We’re mismatched. Still, we make the best of a bad situation.” They smiled at each other.

  “Of course, we have to stay together for the child.”

  Isabel took this for a joke, but Alice, who had turned back to the bar, asked, “How is Julieta?”

  “She lost three teeth last week,” Jaime said proudly. “She looks terrible.” His tone had softened, and for a moment Isabel could almost see how anyone could stand him.

  Tom said, “She complains that the tooth fairy doesn’t leave her enough money.”

  “Only a dollar!” Jaime said. “The tooth fairy is a cheapskate.”

  “A dollar is a lot of money when you’re six.”

  “He thinks I spoil her,” Jaime said. “When I was a kid, we had nothing. No tooth fairy. No TV. Why shouldn’t she have what she wants? We can afford it.”

  “He walked five miles through the snow to school,” Tom said.

  “In my bare feet!” Jaime added.

  “He doesn’t understand about discipline,” Tom said. “I spend all day with teenagers. I know what can happen.”

  “Julieta always gets her own way,” Jaime said. “Just like her mother.”

  “Just like her father,” Tom said, and Jaime laughed.

  “Julieta’s mother left Jaime with the baby when Julieta was six months old,” Alice explained to Isabel. “She went to Holly-wood.”

  “She plays Marlena on Living Heaven,” Tom bragged.

  “You were married to Lupe Guerrera!” Isabel said, signaling the bartender for another drink. Even she had seen the beautiful Lupe Guerrera.

  Jaime smiled. “Julieta looks just like her,” he said. “She’s going to be a heartbreaker.”

  “If her teeth ever grow back,” Tom said.

  By now the room was full, and the band got back up on stage and began to play. The crowd drifted away from the bar and spread out across the floor. This time Alice danced with Tom and Isabel with Jaime. She moved where he guided her, turning and dipping. It was so profoundly different from dancing with Tom that it seemed ridiculous to call the two activities by the same name. Isabel wondered if someone like Jaime, who had been married and later found a male lover, had thought the same thing about sex.

  “How’s your sister?” Jaime asked, shouting over the music.

  “Recovering. She’s happy tonight. It was a good idea to bring her.”

  “I would do anything for Alice,” he yelled. “She’s an extraordinary person! Half rose, half battle-ax.”

  Isabel laughed. “Exactly.”

  “I would kill that hijo de pendejo with my bare hands! He deserves to have his balls ripped off.”

  A vasectomy, at least, would be an improvement, Isabel thought.

  They switched partners again. Alice and Jaime moved off across the floor, but Tom suggested that he and Isabel cool off outside. Isabel stopped at the bar on the way to get another margarita.

  Sitting on a low wall in the courtyard, Tom stretched his long legs out in front of him and rested his hands on his knees. His shirt cuffs flapped like handkerchiefs of surrender. “I’m just a Methodist boy from Altoona,” he said. “We don’t dance much. The two-step, sometimes, at weddings.”

  “Most people over twenty-five only dance at weddings,” Isabel said. “That’s what weddings are for. They give a boost to the economy, and they get people to dance.” She felt light-headed with the heat and the alcohol, and she was glad to be sitting down.

  “No, weddings are good for the soul,” Tom said seriously. “They remind you what life is about.”

  “Spending money and wearing fancy clothes?”

  He smiled. “You can do those things any day of the week.”

  “But not on such a grand scale.”

  “That’s true. It took us a year to pay off the credit cards after ours. We had caviar, Nova Scotia oysters. An eight-piece mariachi band. I only wish my parents had come.”

  “Why didn’t they?”

  “Oh, they don’t talk to me much. They don’t acknowledge Julieta as their grandchild.” He sounded sad.

  “Sometimes,” Isabel said, “I think all parents do is torment their children.”

  “Yes,” Tom agreed. “And yet, once you’re a parent yourself, you see that they do other things as well.”

  People kept coming in through the courtyard, opening the heavy door to the club and releasing bursts of music. Suddenly one of them stopped in front of Isabel and smiled. It was Marco, although she almost failed to recognize him in his black gabardine pants and white tuxedo shirt, cuff links winking in the courtyard light.

  “Hey,” he said. “I didn’t expect to see you here.”

  “Hello, Marco,” Isabel said, pleased to
see him. “How are you?”

  “I’m fine.” He turned and offered his hand to Tom, introducing himself. “Your wife has been my guardian angel,” he said.

  For a long, surreal moment Isabel couldn’t respond. “Oh—no,” she said at last, for the second time that night. “He’s not my—”

  Marco covered the awkwardness with a laugh but immediately made things worse. “You trust your husband, then,” he teased Isabel. “You don’t mind him in there dancing with other women.”

  “I’m getting divorced,” Isabel blurted out to avoid further confusion.

  Immediately, Marco sat beside her on the wall and put his arm around her. He smelled sharp, vaguely electric, and she could feel the heat of his arm under the sleeve of his pressed shirt. “I’m sorry,” he said. “What a terrible thing.”

  Tears came to Isabel’s eyes. She leaned into him. Her head fit perfectly into the hollow above his pectoral muscle. She could feel the tequila swirling in her head, and when she looked up, the sky seemed to surge with stars.

  “You’re strong, though,” he said, rubbing her arm. “You’ll get through it.”

  “I’m drunk,” Isabel said. “I think.”

  “It’s okay,” Marco said. “My sister Rina got divorced last year. The guy left her for the secretary at the dealership where he worked. Married six years, three kids! When I was home for Christmas, the first thing I did was take her out to get drunk. You need to let go. You need to stop living in the world where it happened to you for a little while.”

  Isabel pressed her hands to her face. “I’m all right,” she said.

  “Of course you are,” Marco said. “You’ll be fine. You don’t need that bastard.”

  “He is a bastard,” Isabel said.

  “You’re better off without him.”

  “That’s right,” Tom said. “Straight men are nothing but trouble.”

  Marco said, “Because you’re a friend of Isabel’s, I’ll ignore that remark.”

  Tom said, “Tell me you never broke anyone’s heart.”

  “Only my mother’s,” Marco said, and the men laughed.

  By the time the door opened again, Isabel felt marginally better. Alice and Jaime came out of the club, borne along on the wave of music spilling from the building. Alice, flushed from dancing, smiled when she saw Marco. “I’ve been calling you,” she said. “You’re never home.”

  He released Isabel with a squeeze of her shoulder and stood up. “I’m working all the time,” he said.

  “Not at nine o’clock at night! It’s dark by then.”

  “I go to sleep early. I have to get up at five, you know.”

  Alice laughed. “You’re young. You don’t need sleep.” She had twisted her hair into a knot, and tendrils of it curled down her cheeks. “I can’t get Rudner on the phone, either. But I’m planning to go out there this week and see what I can do.”

  “That I would love to see,” Marco said. “The bird and the lion.”

  “Yes,” Isabel said. “But most people don’t realize that Alice is the lion.” She wasn’t sure if anybody heard her or not.

  Marco’s eyes were fixed on Alice. The moon, or else the street lamps, made her skin glow with a milky light. “Would you like to go in and dance?” he asked, and Alice took his hand with a smile. They went up the steps into the club. The door closed behind them. It seemed very quiet in the courtyard.

  “Well,” Jaime said wryly, “I’m glad she’s not so broken up that she can’t see the potential in another man.”

  “Don’t be silly!” Isabel said. “Marco is more than ten years younger than she is! He’s my parents’ gardener!”

  Jaime and Tom laughed. “Very D. H. Lawrence,” Jaime said, and put his arms around Tom and kissed him.

  Isabel thought about it. Alice and Marco? The idea was ridiculous. Yet she could see how someone could be attracted to him. Her skin tingled where he had touched her, and the smell of his cologne hung in the air.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  On Monday Alice said she was driving out to Rudner’s nursery, and she asked Isabel if she wanted to come. Isabel thought it might be interesting, and she didn’t have anything better to do.

  “Where’d you get the truck?” she asked when Alice picked her up after lunch.

  “Borrowed it,” Alice replied. “No way that motorcycle would fit in my Civic.”

  “You’re pretty confident, aren’t you?” Isabel said.

  Alice smiled.

  Rudner’s was a good nursery, not huge but with a large selection of fruit trees and native plants and some unusual perennials. Isabel liked it. It was pleasant to spend a Saturday wandering among the rows of blooming rhododendron, deciding between the snow bird and the schlippenbachii.

  They found Rudner himself by the junipers, advising a customer about a hedge. “Yew is what you want,” he was saying. “It grows nice and even. Gives you a nice green wall. Solid. Easy to take care of.”

  The customer, a woman in her thirties in jeans, muddy gardening clogs, and earrings made of mismatched plastic beads, was unconvinced. “I don’t want uniform,” she said. “I was thinking more like a mixed hedgerow. A holly, maybe a mountain laurel. A rose of Sharon.”

  “Could do that.” Rudner nodded. He was a broad man, not very tall, with a broad, flat face and bushy hair that enhanced his resemblance to a vigorous shrub. “But you don’t want all those different specimens growing into each other. It’ll be a mess. Yew is nice, it grows fast but not too fast, if you know what I mean.”

  “Aren’t the berries poisonous?”

  Rudner caught sight of Isabel and smiled his shopkeeper’s smile. “I haven’t seen you in a while,” he said. “Be with you in a minute.”

  “Take your time,” Isabel said.

  The customer looked at her watch. “I’ve got to go.”

  “We have a lot of yew in stock right now, as it happens,” Rudner told her. “You said you have what, a thirty-foot area? One plant every three feet is what I’d recommend.” But she was walking away across the gravel. Rudner turned back to Isabel and Alice. “Some people don’t know what they want,” he said.

  Isabel introduced her sister. “Nice to meet you.” Rudner held out his hand, obviously not recognizing the name.

  Alice shook it. “Mr. Rudner,” she said, “I’m glad to see you’re well. I was afraid you might be ill since you haven’t been returning my phone calls.”

  He looked at her blankly.

  “About Marco Peña?” Alice said.

  Rudner’s face went as red as an autumn leaf. He looked from one sister to the other. “I didn’t make the connection,” he said.

  “No reason you should have,” Alice said.

  He led them through the rows of plants to an office cluttered with invoices, coffee cups, and forty-pound bags of fertilizer. Behind him, a shut door with a darkened window in it led to another room. “Sorry I didn’t have a chance to get back to you yet,” he said. “It’s been a zoo here. As it happens, I was planning on calling you this afternoon.” He had adopted a tone of busy heartiness, smiling and moving papers around on his desk.

  “How nice,” Alice said.

  “I feel bad about Marcos,” Rudner said. “I thought he was a nice kid. Kids make mistakes sometimes. I honestly hope that’s all this was. He gives me back the money, I’m happy to forgive and forget.” He opened his big hands, so encrusted with dirt that the lines of his palms looked like root systems. Through the crosshatched window in the door behind him, Isabel could see the metallic sheen of a rounded, hulking shape.

  “Mr. Peña is twenty-five years old, Mr. Rudner,” Alice said with the hint of steel in her voice Isabel was so familiar with. “I’d hardly characterize him as a kid.”

  Rudner shrugged. “From my vantage point, that’s a kid. No offense.”

  “None taken. Mr. Peña worked for you for how long?”

  “I don’t know. A year? These guys, you know. They’re here, they’re gone. I don’t keep track.” He
smiled.

  Alice waited until he stopped smiling. “What ‘guys’?” she said. “You mean your employees? Surely you have records. Pay stubs and so on. Canceled checks.”

  “Sure. Sure I do. Though at times this is strictly a cash-only business, you understand. These guys, like I said, they come, they go. Carlos, José. Whoever. It’s none of my business. As long as they’re good workers.”

  “And Mr. Peña was a good worker?”

  “Well,” Rudner said cautiously. “So-so.” He kept looking at Alice, caught in the gap between the way she looked in her summer dress and the way she was talking to him. “Like I said, he was a nice kid. I didn’t have anything against him.”

  “Except that you say he stole your money.”

  “Up until that point, I mean.”

  “And how much money was it, exactly?”

  Rudner thought. “Look, I don’t want to be a jerk,” he said. “Not to put too fine a point on it, I’m just as eager to get this thing settled as you are. Let’s call it two hundred bucks, right here, right now, and you can take the piece of junk with you. Otherwise, the price goes up.”

  “The price, Mr. Rudner? You’re not selling anything here, are you?” She paused. “The police report, which I have examined, fails to conclude that any money was missing at all. You were not willing to let the officer look at your books, as I understand it. A cash-only business is one thing. Keeping records for tax purposes is something else. Or for the INS. Now I’m quite sure that before you hired those men you mentioned, you confirmed their immigration status. I’m sure the I-9s are right over there in your filing cabinet. I’m sure you’d show them to me if I asked you to. But I also appreciate that you’re a busy man, and it would be a lot of trouble to dig out all that paperwork, especially for an INS agent with a fine-tooth comb.” She smiled. “On the other hand, if you give us the motorcycle now, I see no reason to involve anyone else.”