Louisa Meets Bear (29 page)

She'd met Ben four years later, during her last semester of college. When he'd interrogated her about her past involvements, she'd been able to say, Nothing, there's really been nothing, some brief adventures in Paris, never mentioning Anouar since Ben would be tormented if he knew she'd slept with an Arab man.

Their marriage lasted thirteen months, the end arriving on a Friday night when Marnie went to light the Shabbat candles that Ben took as a given and halted in the doorway with matches in hand and the sudden awareness that this, the chicken roasting in the oven, the two sets of dishes, were for her like acting in a play she'd never even wanted to see. Her mother too had lived on someone else's stage set, moving to suburban Rapahu, where she'd valiantly tried to make a home, but always with a sense of alienation from the very land itself (the mowed lawns, the manicured hedges, the black tar driveways)—the beloved Manhattan to which she'd fled from St. Louis and had then fashioned into a place for herself with a railroad flat in Hell's Kitchen and a job under old Mr. Klopfer in the Meso-American collection left behind. The candles unlit, Marnie and Ben sat up most of the night, both of them crying at the realization that there was no solution to Marnie's lack of faith: she could no more make herself take the practices that were so meaningful to Ben into her heart than he could give up his belief that as his wife she should.

A decade later, when she told Ben about Andrew, they both cried again, Ben's face buried between her breasts, her hands stroking his thick black hair as she held him tight and told him that she would always love him but that since their divorce she'd been in a kind of prolonged sleep and as she began to stir she could see that she had been misguided in thinking that writing books for children required her to forswear being a parent (as though having to socialize a child into the world would erode her ability to see through a child's eyes). That now, at night, as she lay in bed, she imagined her ovaries shriveling and that before they turned into fossils, she wanted one of the eggs she'd been shedding month after month for nearly a quarter of a century to grow into a baby. There were women who could do it on their own, maybe Sam, who claimed that the connection of love and procreation was a false idea created by capitalism's need for the family to rear and then feed and shelter labor, but Marnie wanted her baby to have a father, and now—she paused, tears streaming down her cheeks—she had met someone with whom she thought a good life might be made,
but how will I know
—and Ben, though his face was crumpled in grief, nodded in agreement—
if I keep sleeping with you?

*   *   *

Once inside the bathroom, Marnie vomits: saltines, apple juice, the breakfast sandwich from the plane. Afterward, she sits on the toilet seat with her knees pulled up to her chest and her forehead resting on her kneecaps.

The room reverberates with the sounds of sinks turning on and off and the racket of the hand dryer. A few stalls down, a woman is talking to a child. “No, sweetie, let Mommy finish before you open the door.”

“I want to go out,” the child whines.

“Stop it,” the woman hisses. The child starts to cry (has the woman slapped her hand?) and Marnie hears her own mother's voice the night they learned about Alan, Raya bellowing over Marnie's screams of,
Liar, Liar
, bellowing from the chest that Marnie pummeled, from lips blue with shock:
Stop it, you're acting crazy. Stop it, Marnie, stop.

There's vomit on the sleeve of her sweater and she wonders if she's going to be sick again. She stands, leaning over the toilet bowl, but her stomach is hard and still.

She waits for the woman and child to leave before exiting the stall. At the sink area, she dabs at her sleeve with a wet paper towel and then picks off the specks of paper that stick to the fabric. In the mirror, her skin looks pale and blotchy. She takes a travel toothbrush from her tote and brushes her teeth.

Back in the corridor, she feels panicked, as though knowing about the murdered man—what had Andrew called him? a
gusano
?—has placed her, her and her baby, in danger. She imagines making a dash to the terminal exit, hailing a cab, having the cab take her to the train station, taking a train to wherever it is that trains go in Texas. Hiding in a motel. Waiting there until her child is born.

A parade of people roll their luggage toward the gates. She looks at her watch. It's been twenty minutes since she left the bar. She wonders if Andrew seized the opportunity to order a third drink or if he is scowling (even worse, standing) at the entrance to the bar, his mouth filled with barbs for her return.

*   *   *

Marnie listens to the long passage of a song by an Irish heavy metal band Matt follows that constitutes the greeting on Sam and Matt's answering machine. She's in the middle of an attempt to leave a cheerful message, “Hi, it's your sister, I'm calling from Dallas, just wanted to say hello…” when Sam picks up.

“What the hell are you doing in Dallas?”

“We're on a layover to Oakland.”

“You sound funny. Is something the matter?”

Marnie wells up with tears. She's afraid that if she talks, she'll begin to sob.

“Marnie, are you okay? What's the matter?”

Sam sounds frantic and Marnie feels guilty about burdening her sister. Since their mother's death, they've been increasingly reliant on each other and yet also more cautious, as though so many deaths have left them more aware of each other's fragility.

“Marnie,
tell me
—what happened?”

Marnie shudders. Her neck is clammy and her mouth tastes like she's been sucking on a copper spool.

“Is it the baby? Is there something wrong with the baby?”

“No, no,” she says, and then she begins to cry: rivulets of tears that run down her face, long gulping heaves.

Sam coos into the phone:
All right, shhh, just take a deep breath
.

Marnie fishes in her bag for a tissue. She wipes her eyes. “It's Andrew. He told me something that freaked me out.”

Marnie struggles to tell Sam the story the way Andrew had, correcting herself every sentence or so to say, no, those weren't his words, I think what he said was … When she gets to the part where Andrew said that of course they killed the man who had ratted, she tells Sam about Andrew hearing the man's screams and the gunshot, and then she pauses, ashamed to tell even Sam about Andrew's smirk.

“I thought I was going to be sick. I got up and went to a bathroom on a floor below so he wouldn't follow me.”

Again Marnie feels queasy. She holds on to the metal shelf under the pay phone. On the other end of the line, she can hear her sister lighting a cigarette and then exhaling the first satisfying mouthful of smoke.

“Look,” Sam says. “Let's back up here. What do you think Andrew should have done?”

Marnie leans against the back wall of the cubicle. “I don't know. He could have tried to convince them not to kill the man. He could have run after them to try to stop them. He could have reported it to the police or the embassy or something.”

“It doesn't sound like a sit-down-and-talk-it-over kind of situation. As far as running after them, I don't know.”

Sam pauses. Marnie pictures her sister drawing her slender wrist to her mouth, the cigarette glowing red at the tip. “I'm not defending Andrew, but just try to imagine it. What would have happened if he'd run after them? A remote village without paved roads or lights, a group of drunken men with machetes and a gun. It's hard to know what Andrew was thinking then—if he was just too stunned to know what to do or if he was scared shitless that they'd turn around and butcher him too.”

“What would you have done?”

“At twenty-two, like Andrew was then? Six months after a Peace Corps volunteer had been shot? I honestly can't say. I hope I'd have run after them and pleaded with them to stop. But you know, these villages have their own rules. It's not like Andrew could have argued with them not to take the law into their own hands, to go to the police and have the man arrested. The guy who ratted was probably in cahoots with the police.”

“But couldn't he have at least reported what he'd witnessed?”

“Who to? If he'd gone back to Guatemala City and reported it to the American embassy, they would have written down everything and then turned the file over to either the province police for that area or the military. And
then
what? Who else would have been killed?”

Listening to Sam, Marnie feels like she's chewing and chewing on something that won't go down. Although she can recognize the reasonableness of what Sam is saying, her sister's words seem oddly peripheral, as though Marnie were telling her that her chest hurts and Sam were inspecting her feet.

Marnie digs through her tote for another tissue. It's not what Andrew did or didn't do, she thinks, it's the way he seemed to enjoy the story, as though it were an action movie where everyone looks forward to the moment when the villain is felled in a flurry of gunfire.

She blows her nose. “He laughed. Why did he laugh when he told me?”

Sam sighs as though running out of steam. “I don't know,” she says. “Maybe he was nervous telling you the story?”

*   *   *

At the bar, the waitress hands Marnie a note from Andrew:
Where have you been? If you don't get your butt in gear, we're going to miss the flight. Meet me at the gate.

On the plane, Marnie holds her limbs close to her body, careful not to touch Andrew's arm or leg. The video with the safety instructions begins. Andrew watches attentively. She leans her head against the window and looks out at the Dallas lights.

When Marnie wakes, the card with the life jacket diagrams is on Andrew's tray table, next to a cup of coffee. Andrew is reading a copy of
The Dallas Morning News
. She peers over his shoulder at the article he is looking at: weak polling results for local boy George H. W. Bush—the war hero, she's read, who at twenty parachuted from the burning plane he'd piloted over the Pacific without confirmation that his two crewmen, whose bodies were never found, had heard his command to jump.

She wiggles her shoulders and her legs and imagines her baby doing the same.
Baby, you've been to Texas now
, she says, silently talking to the little amphibian swimming inside her.

Lowering the newspaper, Andrew looks shyly at her. He hands her the plastic bag of saltines she'd left behind in the bar, then slowly, cautiously, places the flat of his hand over her belly.

 

2001

 

Conchita

“Conchita, Conchita, princesita,” PK, her father, would sing as he opened the door. Then, we were living in Dorado, twenty miles west of San Juan in a villa with a cook and a maid and a gardener-chauffeur who tended the beach roses, gardenias, and impatiens, polished PK's leased black Mercedes, and drove PK to the construction site where he and his two partners were putting up what was to be the grandest hotel on the island with what I thought must be the shadiest money south of Miami. I was thirty-four, with dirty-blond hair that once touched my ass and that my best friend Louisa had massacred four years before cutting out the knots on the morning of my first daughter Lily's funeral.

“
Ven, salsa rubia, mi rubia
,” come, blond salsa, my blondie, PK had whispered when he first saw me outside the San Juan airport, me laden with backpack and duffel, trying to arrange a taxi to the language school where I had enrolled for a three-week immersion course, Louisa and my brother having convinced me that I had to do something other than braiding the pink and orange and purple mops of Lily's trolls. With his kinked black hair and narrow hips and perfect Spanish (I didn't know that afternoon that PK's excessively rolled
r
's were his “tell”: no Puerto Rican man would loll them around on his tongue), I assumed he was a local. “My driver will take you, we go right by the Calle Fortaleza,” he said, the address gleaned by leaning over my shoulder to read the piece of paper in my hand, the street name inflected with the slightest of sneers as though it were the location of a nursery school or a children's camp. All I knew was he felt like a drug, the promise of mystery and adventure in his voice and his eyes and the way his pelvis jutted forward, and if I couldn't be curled up in Lily's bed where I could still smell her breath, all I wanted was to be transported a zillion miles outside my own skin.

“
Ven, Ven
,” come, come, he said, and I came.

*   *   *

When, fifteen years later, Conchita sinks a cake knife into my arm, two inches on an angle until the tip scrapes bone, a wind comes up from my lungs, bottlenecking near my breastbone and then at the base of my throat. “Bitch, you little bitch,” I scream as fingernails go for her neck so that I see, with my arm raised, blood streaming down my elbow, a river of bruised love between my second daughter and me.

By the time the paramedics arrive with a red flashing ambulette, lots of noise in the stairwell and banging on the door, there is blood mottled on my hands, spotted on my shoes, streaked on the floor. Conchita sits at the kitchen table next to the poppy-seed cake with orange icing I'd brought home from the bakery Louisa and I now own together, smoking a cigarette, her lower lip pushed out, her look that says,
You're not the boss of me, you failed, husbandless woman, I'll do what I want.
Still, when the paramedics ask what happened, what I say before they descend with bandages and morphine is, “An accident. The cake. My daughter turned suddenly from cutting.”

*   *   *

PK, I would learn once Jorge, whom he'd introduced as his personal assistant, had loaded my duffel inside PK's leased Mercedes, was Peter Kantor. The rest took months to piece together. Yes, he could speak Spanish like a local, but he couldn't spell a goddamned sentence correctly start to finish. Yes, he could pick out nearly any song on a piano, but he couldn't read a note of music. Maybe his father was a New York real estate developer. Maybe his mother was the niece of a Roman contessa. It did seem, at the very least, that she was Italian and had given him his Latin looks. Unlikely that he'd once sung backup vocals for Joni Mitchell at a gig she did with Herbie Hancock, and highly improbable that he'd slept with her as he hinted. As for growing up in a ten-room apartment on Park Avenue and summering in Newport, Tom—Louisa's cousin Jay's college roommate, who'd known PK when they'd both attended the Horace Mann School—snorted when Jay repeated this story. And PK had most definitely
not
gone to Cornell, Tom reported—maybe somewhere upstate, but wherever it had been, he'd been kicked out after his first year for brokering term papers for sale.