False River, page 6
‘I don’t know. I just got here a few hours ago.’ Delia gave me a look that was somewhere between contempt and pity. You don’t know anything, the look seemed to say.
That afternoon I met Patrick three times — introduced by Alex, then by Lisa, then by Alex’s mother, who was on her second muumuu and fifth drink. Her husband wasn’t with her, because his right foot had been crushed by a golf cart the day before. She said that after the glowing way Lisa had described me, she’d expected someone taller and more striking somehow, but now she realised that I was just perfect for Patrick.
Patrick was more tanned and less smiley than Alex — more ordinary, I guess, and without Alex’s bouncy boyish charm. He had fair hair and big teeth, and there were blobs of something that looked like concrete all over his Top-Siders.
‘We have to migrate south, like birds,’ Alex’s mother said, smoothing the sequinned folds of her muumuu, ‘but Pat gets to live here in the sun all year round!’
‘It rains a lot,’ Patrick told me. ‘In the afternoons.’
‘Aren’t you going to take Monty around the house? It’s such a beautiful place.’
‘It’s a big mess,’ he said, but he invited me to take a tour on Saturday, when the wedding craziness was over.
A slew of cousins from Louisville arrived, including the sensitive-and-strange boy who’d just graduated from Brown. His family called him Tommy, but he introduced himself as Thomas. The only strange thing about him that I could make out was the fact that he was wearing a suit instead of shorts and loafers, like all the other men. Also, whenever I turned around, he seemed to be there. His hair was black, darker than Lisa’s, and the only concession he made to the humidity was rolling up his shirt sleeves.
At dinner that night Thomas pulled his chair around from the other side of the table so he could sit next to me. There wasn’t room for him there, so he had to sit a few feet back, getting in the way of the waiters. Lisa tried to send him back to his assigned place, but he ignored her.
‘I’d like to show you around Louisville sometime,’ he told me, leaning forward so I could hear him, his breath prickling my neck.
‘Tommy, she doesn’t want to go to Louisville,’ Lisa said, and took my hand. ‘I’m so sorry about my family. They’re too much. Alex and I should just have eloped.’
‘And maybe in New York we could go to the opera,’ Thomas whispered in my ear.
‘All I know about opera is the names of female singers,’ I told him, not turning around.
‘Please,’ Lisa said, glaring at him. ‘She’s old enough to be your much older sister.’
Thomas stopped whispering to me after that, but he didn’t move his chair away. After dinner he walked me back to Una Paloma Blanca and seemed annoyed when some of the Louisville contingent caught us up at the elevator. When I got out on the eighth floor, and said goodnight to them all, he bowed.
I just remember pieces of the wedding. Lisa cried all through the ceremony so her mascara clogged, and I had to fix her lashes with a Kleenex before the photos were taken. Alex looked all pale pink and nervous and scrubbed, like a shell rubbed clean with sand. He read something by Neruda that nobody could hear, because there was a pool full of balloons and candles between us and the wedding party.
At some point, later on, it started to rain, and some of the men stripped down to their underwear and dived into the pool from the second-storey balcony. At dinner, I was seated next to Alex’s father, who had been continuously drunk since he’d arrived in Mexico. His face and arms were livid with sunburn, which he tried to soothe by rolling a cold bottle of beer over his skin. Whenever I saw Delia, she was smoking by an electric fan, deep in conversation with other smokers.
All the toasts referred to the baby’s imminent arrival, which made Lisa’s father flinch, like he was being hit over and over in the face with a pair of gloves. Lisa’s mother looked really pretty that night, wearing a long lacy dress, swishing around all the tables like a benign ghost. Patrick was the DJ, headphones clasped to one ear, frowning whenever anyone staggered up with a request. Thomas asked me to dance three or four times, but I said no, and he eventually left me alone. He was much in demand, I saw, with the younger women.
‘That Tommy is a big hit with my nieces,’ Alex’s father said to me. Even his breath smelled sunburned: it was like talking to a dragon.
When the reception began to peter out, Delia and I shared a taxi back to the hotel.
‘So, Patrick. Yes or no?’ She was clutching her seatbelt, because it wouldn’t fasten properly.
‘Maybe. He barely spoke a word to me tonight.’
‘He was busy. And that mother of his — well. Probably one look from her and his dick wilts. You’re staying Saturday night? If I were you, I’d sleep with him and never see him again. Really, if I were you, I wouldn’t see Lisa again either. But you’re a nicer person than I am. Too nice.’
‘Not really,’ I told her. I don’t think there was anything wrong with her seatbelt; I think she was too drunk to click it in. ‘Anyway, he’s invited me to see that house he’s building. Late tomorrow afternoon or something.’
‘That’s where it’ll happen!’ Delia smacked the slashed vinyl of the seat. ‘He’ll show off that big house to you, and then he’ll take you in the hot tub.’
‘I don’t think they have bathroom fixtures in yet,’ I said, and Delia howled with laughter, so eerily dog-like that the taxi driver turned around. Then she looked so serious, I was worried that she was about to be sick.
‘This baby,’ she said. ‘We’re sure that it’s Alex’s baby, right?’
I was about to say that I didn’t know, but Delia belched and started laughing again.
The morning after the wedding it started raining in earnest. I lay on a beach chair under a straw umbrella, reading and dozing, and stayed there while the rain dampened the sand around me. When it was time to meet Patrick, to see the house he was building, I walked to the lobby to wait for him. Delia was propped up against the reception desk, disputing every line of her bill.
‘Don’t buy the silver bracelets from those guys on the beach,’ she instructed me. ‘They’ll turn your arms green. And call me when you get back to New York.’
Lisa and Alex were in the lobby as well, engaged in protracted farewells. Lisa was especially weepy with Alex’s family, even though she’d only met most of them that weekend. She shouted plaintive goodbyes as their taxis lurched away, and clung to Alex. I wondered if she’d been like this the first time around, with Brian of Louisville’s family. For a moment, when Patrick arrived and waved me over to his car, Lisa was confused and thought this meant I was leaving.
‘Please promise you’ll come to LA as soon as you can,’ she said, squeezing the breath out of me. ‘This can’t be the last time I see you.’
‘I’ll probably see you tonight at dinner,’ I told her.
It was still raining when we reached the building site on the hill, and the floor of the entranceway was smutted with muddy footsteps. Patrick introduced me to the foreman, who leered and then scuttled away.
‘They have to work on Saturdays,’ he told me, walking me through the shell of the house in a brisk and proprietary way, barking out occasional instructions in Spanish to workmen who scattered whenever we approached. ‘We’re behind schedule. This country drives you insane.’
Even in its damp, dusty, half-built state, the house was impressive. It was fan-shaped, narrow from the road but opening up onto a long pool and a terrace that overlooked the bay. The pool was still a grey concrete shell, its aquamarine tiles stacked on a pallet. Patrick explained that the pool, when filled, would appear to overflow over the edge of the terrace and down the side of the hill.
‘Won’t people feel as though they’re being washed out to sea?’ I asked him, and he said that was exactly how he wanted them to feel.
Patrick was unhappy because the owners had nixed plans for a fajita grill and because they wanted to put a billiard table in the dining room. He grew red and almost cross-eyed just telling me about it. The room with the best view in the house, he said, was going to be wasted on an indoor pursuit. Listening to Patrick, it sounded as though the whole house was going to be wasted on these people, who only planned to come here for weekends during three months of the year. They just wanted somewhere safe to swim, somewhere they could drink cocktails and watch hummingbirds, and whenever they’d had enough of Mexico they could come inside and loll on banquettes and get all the Denver television stations via satellite.
Patrick was most proud of the bathrooms, each tiled in a different colour. I climbed into one of the bathtubs, an emerald green square that seemed to hang suspended over the hillside. Through the glassless window lay the town, curled along the beach as far as the next peninsula. The entire curve of the bay was visible, and beyond it, in the soggy afternoon light, the ocean was the subdued colour of a dirty pearl.
While I lay in the tub, gazing out the hole in the wall, Patrick stood there looking awkward, and he glanced at me in an odd way when I stood up and dusted myself down. It was as though he hadn’t noticed that I was there until that very moment, as if he had just arrived at the house and found, to his astonishment, a woman lying in a bath. I remembered Delia’s prediction — that he would ‘take me’ in the hot tub — and it was all I could do not to laugh out loud.
Afterwards we went to dinner in town. Because it was out of season, we walked to three different places before finding somewhere open. We ate and Patrick talked about how he couldn’t wait to get out of Mexico, but didn’t know where to go next.
‘Not New York,’ he said, avoiding my eye. ‘I would never want to work there.’
We had drinks at two different places — or rather, I had drinks, and he talked — and then we stopped by his apartment on the way back to the hotel on some pretext, like picking up a magazine he wanted to lend to Alex.
There was nothing especially exciting about Patrick, but I’d pretty much decided to sleep with him that night if the opportunity came up. At our dinner at the Gramercy Tavern, Lisa told me she slept with Chris because she was drunk and lonely — ‘stupid with loneliness,’ she said — and I’d decided that’s what I was, just drunk enough, and stupid with loneliness. First we had to kiss, of course, and once we were inside his apartment, our footsteps echoing on the terracotta tiles, I was waiting for it to happen.
There were a number of places we could have kissed that evening, of course. I would have preferred the bandstand, I think, all upright and colonial, like Patrick himself. There were numerous places along the waterfront, with its wrought-iron benches facing out to sea, or even in the bar where we ended up at a dark corner table. There was his car, low-slung and pine-scented, or the courtyard outside his apartment, the cobbles slick with rain. When the kiss finally came, it was in his apartment and less than half-hearted: I’d say a quarter-hearted, but that would be overselling it. He kissed me like his mother had bribed him with five dollars when he really needed fifty.
Patrick told me that, if I wanted, I could stay the night, but he didn’t sound too enthused.
‘It’s OK,’ I said. As it turned out, I wasn’t that drunk and stupid after all. I just felt shivery, and my insides were cold and concrete. ‘I have a pretty early flight back.’
‘I’m sorry. I’m kind of out of practice with all this. I’ve been living here by myself for too long.’
‘It’s not your fault,’ I told him. ‘I shouldn’t have come.’
‘We should have gone straight back to the hotel,’ he said, though that wasn’t what I meant. I meant I shouldn’t have come to Mexico. ‘Let’s go.’
Patrick jingled his car keys, the way you’d alert a dog to an upcoming ride, and I saw he was as eager as I was for the evening to be over.
Back at the hotel, I ducked past a gaggle from Louisville slouched all over the lobby bar, and headed for the path that wended between the beach and the pool. All the chair cushions were stacked under an awning. A security guard patrolling the high-water line nodded to me. The night felt so sticky it was hard to breathe.
I guess I’d been hoping to feel something that night, something like lust or desperation. Anything but the numbness, deep in my gut, that petrified everything I felt. Though I hadn’t admitted it to Delia, I’d hoped she was right, and that Patrick and I would be gripped by some grand passion. We could have driven back up to the half-built house on the hill: I’d have liked to have seen it all skeletal and scuffed and lit up by stars. We could have made love amid the debris on the pool’s dusty floor, or on the bare brick banquettes in the open living room. We could have made love hidden in the emerald-tiled bathtub that stared out over the town and its lights, and the sea and its blackness, and the wet mountains squeezing the city along the sands.
Instead we had a quarter-hearted kiss and a limp proposition, too easy to turn down. And even if we had driven back up the hill, the tiles of the bath would have been uncomfortable, I guess, against my back. Everywhere in that half-built house would have involved concrete and dust, and possibly rats. We would have needed a flashlight, and a lot more to drink.
Rain was falling again, so I quickened my step, aware of footsteps behind me. In the lobby of Una Paloma Blanca, I ran for the elevator, but before the doors could close, Thomas scuttled in. He stood next to me and didn’t press the button for his floor.
‘You’re Caroline, right?’ he asked. The back of his hand brushed mine, but I didn’t pull away. ‘Your real name.’
‘Yes,’ I said, though only my husband ever called me Caroline. My family, and people I worked with, called me Carrie.
‘Do you like being called Monty?’
‘Not particularly,’ I said. ‘Not anymore.’
Thomas said nothing. His sleeve brushed my bare arm and my skin prickled, the way it had the other night, when I felt his breath against my neck.
The elevator reached the eighth floor and dinged. The doors opened and we stood there, watching the hallway gape at us, watching the doors close. Thomas hit the button for the eleventh floor.
‘Come to my room,’ he said. ‘For a birthday drink.’
‘It’s your birthday?’
‘Soon,’ he said. He looked at me and smiled. ‘Some day.’
When the doors opened again, he grasped my hand and led me down the corridor. I stumbled a little on my way out of the elevator, maybe so later I could say I was drunk and stupid. Not that anybody would ever find out about this, and even if they did, it wouldn’t matter. I already knew that after I flew back to New York, I would never see any of these people again.
The Third Snow
This was not a holiday, although Martin Liepa had flown to Italy for the weekend to meet up with his wife. He’d arrived late on Friday, Leonora waiting for him in the dark at the top of the Piazza del Popolo metro stairs. He held her tight, inhaling the familiar musk of her hair, and tried to ignore the man demonstrating a glow-in-the-dark yo-yo, and the man trying to tuck a rose stem beneath the shoulder strap of Leonora’s bag. He didn’t want anything but her — not a FaceTime apparition this time, but the real thing.
They walked up the Via del Corso, Martin dragging his bumping wheelie bag and encircling Leonora’s waist with his free arm. She was three long weeks into a month-long gig here, teaching art history at the American University on a course abandoned by its lecturer. Family emergency, they’d been told. Great opportunity. Usually she earned nothing in the summer, and the money was good. The best part of all was the free accommodation, with Craig Thompson, who knew Leonora from Goldsmiths and had offered her the position. He and his wife Terri had a spare room in their splendid place on the Via del Corso. Who said ‘splendid’ these days? Martin wondered.
‘They’re at some do on the coast tonight,’ she told Martin. ‘Terri texted me. They’re too drunk to come home. So we can pretend the place is ours. Sometimes I pretend we live in Rome all the time.’
Martin did not particularly want to live in Rome, or in Brussels, where he’d spent his week in meetings. He would rather be home in their narrow terraced house in High Wycombe, watching the Tour de France highlights, his feet up on the sofa. He’d spent twenty of the last thirty days in Brussels, making or listening to presentations, mumbling the usual about safety levels and pigment purity, wearing a tie every day. He was tired of hotels, of conversation — inane, xenophobic or both — with colleagues over expensive beer at the end of another frustrating day. A weekend at home, with Leonora padding about the place, things to uproot in the garden, a meal he could cook himself, Sunday papers: that’s what he wanted.
They stopped at an imposing entranceway with black doors more than twice Martin’s height. Leonora pressed numbers into a brass keypad, and one of the heavy doors clicked open. The lobby could be called splendid, he supposed — marble floor, arched ceiling, sweeping staircase — though it was impersonal and shadowy, like a Fascist-era bank.
The Thompsons’ apartment, three flights up, was large and cool and white, sparsely furnished. Leonora led him out to the long terrace, fizzy with pleasure at showing him the place. Even at night he could see it was lurid with colour — orange trees in pots, thickets of purple bougainvillea. This is where the Thompsons spent most of their evenings, opening bottle after bottle of rosé.
They didn’t own the place; they hadn’t chosen the misty abstracts on the living-room wall or the Andrea Bocelli CDs in the kitchen bookcase. They rented it every summer when Craig was here to teach summer courses, and Terri, as far as Leonora could make out, was here to do absolutely nothing apart from occasional shoe-shopping. Family money, one of them had told her, and she wasn’t sure if this was ironic. It was hard to tell with the Thompsons, she said. What was ironic, what was true; what was banter and what was bickering.
‘I warn you,’ she said. ‘They can be a little much. Somerset Maugham novella, maybe.’
‘Will they expect to have dinner with us tomorrow?’ he asked, and Leonora said they would.
