Juliet Was a Surprise (13 page)

But it was a beautiful afternoon. Anna leaned on the boat's side, face into the breeze, which blew her hair back, a whipping bronze flag. She let her eyes close. She was into her own day pack for the mickey of tequila and discreet sips. Disappointed by the silver prices, which were double what she'd expected and meant she probably wouldn't be buying anything, Anna had been quiet most of the day. She was in that mood where something badly startling might emerge.

Dale watched the slow approach of Los Arcos—small islets that arched high from the water. The breeze was a relief. He caught the dad's eye again, stood and pantomimed him coming and taking Dale's seat, and the dad waved, smiled this time, shook his head. He was fine clinging to an iron post, hand to his brow like a pirate.

It was paradise, it truly was. The swelling blue sea, the friendly heat, a quaint old boat that smelled of rust and bait, taking them somewhere they'd never been. Arcing frigate birds, diving pelicans. Chased by something larger beneath, schools of small fish thrashed at the surface where they ran out of water. The view landward was of old Puerto Vallarta, its white
masonry, palm trees, wild green hills up behind, and then the hills above Conchas Chinas, where their villa was. Dale couldn't quite see their place, or their balcony, but he knew there were green and yellow parakeets in those trees. And, apparently, iguanas. What could be better? At one point Anna caught the captain's eye and pointed languidly at something off the bow. The captain slowed, quizzical, then pointed himself and shouted,
“Turta! Turta!”
Dale finally saw it, a turtle's head, maybe thirty yards off, a sleek black fist sticking out of the water, then it was gone. Anna had already ceased looking at it. The boy never did get to see it, and when the engine roared them back to speed again, he was crying.

A few minutes later, when the little guy had calmed down, and after another pull from her bottle, Anna gestured Dale in close and said, “Next time we're here, let's pick door number 3.”

That she was mocking this boat, and his arrangements, was clear. He always despaired when Anna became a wilfully hateful person, because it wasn't her, it really wasn't. And when he pulled back and looked at her, what also became clear was that she mostly mocked the notion of a “next time.” She smiled dramatically and falsely, and her eyes, her beautiful deep-sky hateful eyes, dared him to join her and say something back and take things up a notch.

Now the captain was pointing and shouting,
“Manta, manta!”
They slowed and all of them saw the black fin— identical to a shark's, a big one—cut the surface. And then another fin, ten or twelve feet from the first, the manta ray's second wing tip. A plankton eater, harmless.

“Are there any sharks here?” he asked the captain.

The captain thrust his finger at the gliding wing tips. “No shark. Manta!”

Dale shrugged and pointed all around them. “Sharks? Any sharks? Ever?”

“No way sharks, no way!” he yelled, smiling non-stop, shaking his head, for far too long a time. Dale didn't believe him. He could imagine every captain in town agreeing not to see the sharks they saw every day, keep the tourists coming.

THE THIRD NIGHT,
they were in J's Corruption, a bar they chose for the name alone. Puerto Vallarta had lots of colourful bar names and they figured it was the gay influence. Some buildings, they'd noted, had rainbow flags painted on an outside white wall. J's was nearly full but people sipped at their pink or green margaritas as an afterthought, many heads propped on a hand, elbows on the table. It looked like the end of a long hot day. Dale had learned that, like them, most tourists arrived on a Saturday and left on a Saturday, and so, city-wide, each new batch went through the same rhythms of party and recovery. Anna, for one, had a formidable hangover from the night before. During the cruise back from Los Arcos, her first mickey of the day empty, she'd leapt off the bow at full speed, shouting in Spanish. But tonight she didn't show it. Dale was used to this, how she climbed up through her pain to appear pretty much normal. Because there's no way she wasn't in pain. She masked it well, though she wasn't saying much or meeting his eye. Dale stared at the severe part down
the middle of Anna's head, wondered if that dark freckle had always been there.

He recalled how they'd decided on Mexico three years ago, after a particularly tectonic fight, the one that resulted in them reaffirming never, ever to have a child they were sure to ruin, and then also agreeing never to buy a place together. They were lying in bed after making restorative love and she was being wryly humorous, but in the air hung the dire truth that before long, one of these bouts would end them. At some point she'd said, “Let's at least get to Mexico.” She'd said it twice.

They both had involvements with it, with Mexico, and neither had ever been. Years ago she'd written her MA thesis on
Under the Volcano
and it was her all-time favourite book. That it was deemed inappropriate for her high school English class—owing not to content but to difficulty—depressed her. And, also years ago, Dale loved Castaneda, enchanted by the instructive maybe-not-quite-fiction, the magic that just might be true, and he'd read them all. And so they'd often agreed it was a shame that they'd never made it down, to see the world of their favourite books.

Now that they were finally here, Dale wondered if she remembered having said it.
Let's at least get to Mexico
. Of course she did. All the travel plans had been made, and the bags checked, the flights taken, the bed turned back and the turtle spotted—all with those words chiming in her ears. It was almost grotesque to think about. He eyed her as she took medicinal sips of her margarita. No. What was grotesque was that he couldn't ask her. That they wouldn't talk about these things, their difficulties, was a mark of how far apart they
were. Funny, but it used to be the opposite—it was a mark of how close they were that they didn't have to speak. This had been clear right off the bat—when they started having sex, maybe even at the party where they met, Jonathan's, that birthday—that they saw each other inside out, right to the embarrassing bones, without having to cloud the view with words. It was a starkest intimacy, and they decided to call it love. Yet somewhere along the way—though
they never talked about it
—the involuntary nakedness began to feel more chilling than warm, and under her biting gaze he lacked enough hands to cover himself up.

J's huge dance floor was empty. The music tended to retro, new wave. It was probably ten-thirty. Anna commented on how dead things were, flicking a finger at the seated crowd, distractedly sipping. Dale joked that, like them, everybody was trying to digest several days of tortillas and tequila. When she said nothing, he asked if she wanted to try another place.

“All these heads are knobs,” she said, “waiting to be flowers.” Because they were at tables and the tables were in rows, the heads did look like a pattern of knobs in the dim light.

“Flowers?”

“Why not.” She still didn't bother looking at him.

“What kind of flowers?”

“Crazy come-
hump
-me flowers,
I
don't know.”

“Maybe peonies, dripping pheromones,” he said. He wasn't funny like her but he was trying to go along, add to it, join in. That's all he was doing. “You know peonies? Those big, bulbous lush—”

“I know what peonies are.”

“That have to be opened by ants? They're like weird foreplay machines.”

“I know the peony.”

“Why,” he asked her, brave, or maybe just really tired, “do you hate me right now? Right this second?”

Anna turned away, shaking her head. She didn't hate him, the sadness said. Her look was desolate. He wouldn't be getting any straight answers from her. Maybe there were no straight answers to give, but she wasn't even going to try. The day before, snorkelling at Los Arcos, after they'd anchored and gotten into the mismatched masks and flippers, she'd had him swim with her around to the other side of the first islet where, making sure they hadn't been followed, they found a ledge about four feet deep to stand on. She doffed her bottoms and got him going and got herself going and they managed a fast one, underwater, surrounded by yellow and blue fish and the horrendous squalling of birds roosting on the island ledge twenty feet above their heads. Pelicans, frigates, boobies almost shoulder to shoulder. The smell of bird shit was so ripe that Dale felt its sour acid in his nose and throat once he got to breathing hard. Her seduction was aggressive and more of a dare than anything else: since they were in slapdash Mexico they might as well fuck in public. He truly didn't like it that those two small kids were a few fin-kicks around a corner. And he was still thinking about sharks, and what he'd do if he saw a manta wing tip. But he managed her dare, glad when it was over. She said only “Okey-dokey,” caught her breath, squeezed his biceps, got her bottoms back on and swam away from him. Sex was never a problem for them.
Unless you saw it as the thing that had kept them together too long.

Sitting in J's Destruction, saying
“banyo”
under her breath, Anna stood and walked from their table, snapping her fingers and popping her hips to a Bowie, one of the dancey ones. For two days she'd been surprising Dale with Spanish words like
banyo
. She somehow knew the difference, in Spanish, between mackerel and tuna when she ordered a skewer from a vendor. Without resorting to a word of English, she had haggled over a T-shirt. She knew how to get the good tequila and the darker beer. She told him that
diablo
wasn't the real hot sauce. Had she been studying? When he asked her this she regarded him with cool concern and said, “You don't pay attention, do you?” It was the kind of accusation he no longer pursued.

She didn't go to the
banyo
but made right for the dance floor. It was a bad sign, maybe the worst sign of all, when she danced solo to start off an evening. As if conspiring with her, some staff person in the dark recesses flicked a switch the instant she set foot on the dance floor and it lit up in glaring red and blue squares, popping off and on randomly, hideously. If colour were noise, it would have been deafening.

After gulping all the ice-mush of his margarita so fast he got brain freeze, Dale left the bar. And left Anna.

HE'S BEEN BACK HOME
a year now, and it's been six months since he stopped checking the mailbox compulsively. He has no idea if news would come in a letter in any case. That was just romantic, archaic. If word from her ever comes, it would
be her voice on the phone, a simple “Now what?” Or it might be email, just as flippant, the subject line “Geoffrey Firmin Needs Money.” He hasn't seen her for a year. She might be dead. Though he doubts that. But she might be anything at all.

He sees that he now thinks of her fondly. It helps him with the troubling times, though you'd think it would be the opposite. When he pictures her she's usually swimming in the pool, there in Conchas Chinas, while he watches her from up on their balcony, where he stands slightly frightened, two feet back from the railing, not touching it and leaning forward to peer over. She wasn't a fluid swimmer and the punchiness of her stroke was somehow juvenile, and oddly sexy for it. He was perched three storeys above, so if he called her up for a sandwich or she cajoled him into joining her, they had to shout. The time he remembers most was when Anna, on the poolside lounger reading his Carlos Castaneda book, suddenly dropped it, unfinished and unbookmarked, beside her onto the concrete, done. It looked like she'd read maybe twenty pages. She dropped the book sadly, gently, maybe because she knew she was dropping something dear to him. He witnessed the whole thing. It was the third book in the series. He really should have brought the first one for her, because it did a better job of preparing for the wise insanity that followed. The third book assumed a lot, too much. So maybe it was his fault. In any case she dropped the book and stared off, her sadness continuing, probably deepening, at what she saw to be the naivety of the man she'd married. Then she looked up. He doesn't know if she already knew he was up there watching. But she looked up, saw him, tapped the dropped book with
a finger and shouted, funny and sad both, “Come on.” And then, “Really?”

She knew that he wanted it to be true. She knew that he respected its instructions on how to live, on how to hunt life's hidden purpose. How to
see
. When Anna dropped the book, there was nothing of her feeling superior. Nor was she sad for him. She was sad for them, this much was clear. She hopped up from her lounger then and, without another word, dived in. Whenever she wanted to feel better, Anna jumped into water, went for a fresh walk or uncapped a bottle.

They did try. She'd also brought
Under the Volcano
, for him. He'd been sitting up there on the balcony with it resting on his lap. Heavy as hell and intimidating. Likely because he was trying to read it only for her, he found it impenetrable. And in the end, despite the colourful self-torture of Firmin drinking himself to death, surrounded by spiky Mexican exotica, it was boring. Let's call a spade a spade. In any case, the two books only proved how wrong they had been to think that the two Mexicos they'd imagined might be remotely the same country.

“Why do you hate me right now? Right this second?” was the last thing he'd asked Anna, there in that bar, in J's Corruption. He'd stood watching her dance, by herself, for two songs. Her unabashed style wasn't unlike her swimming. Using her body to get a job done. At the start of the third song, a well-built guy, white shirt so tight that Dale suspected he was Mexican, joined her. No conversation, but their chests stayed pointed at each other through the dance, George Thorogood's “Bad to the Bone,” which made Dale snicker through his nose as he hurried out. He had no evidence that she'd ever
cheated on him, and he didn't want evidence now. On his way out he stopped in the
banyo
. As he peed, something smelled wonderful. He looked up to see vanilla beans—that is, the long black pods—maybe a dozen of them, dangling from the ceiling, just out of jumping reach. He remembers that, angry as he was, he realized right away that the women's
banyo
would have them too, and so he'd wondered, when Anna did visit the
banyo
, what she would think of them. She'd instantly see the contradiction between their look and their smell. She would call them God's little shits, or something like that. Something wittier and better. Satan's dreams.