Red Jungle (19 page)

He suddenly felt the heat and the country in the room.
No rain,
his mind said. He’d been covering the drought that week in the Petén. He closed his eyes and saw the empty roadway in the jungle, the broken corn withered and blown down.

“Oh god, fuck.”
He said it without thinking. She began to move his hips with her hands. The word
lost
came to him, with the vision of the road in the jungle as he watched Beatrice’s face. She stopped, looked up at him, and smiled. There was something so extremely intimate about the way she was looking at him. He was embarrassed. It was as if she weren’t the woman he thought she was. She was losing herself too, he realized. She was losing herself in the sex and the fear of what they were doing.

“Are you frightened?” she asked again. She had a look, happy, excited too. He was sweating now. He could feel the sweat trickling down his armpits. (He’d forgotten to have the bellboy turn on the air conditioning.) The men outside in the corridor started to move away from the door. He heard a cell phone ring and someone out there answer. Who were they?

“Are
you?” she asked. He couldn’t speak. “I love to see you like this,” she said. “I do, but I could stop if you’re afraid.” She was teasing him, he realized.

“No,” he managed to say. He tried not to sound stupid. But it sounded stupid, as if he were a high school boy. He was too excited to joke. He just wanted her to keep doing it, and he wanted to watch her do it.

“No what?” she said, her voice garbled.

“No…I’m not frightened,” he said, desperate for her to go on. They both started to laugh. She began again. He wondered what the hell he’d gotten himself into, but he couldn’t stop or think. Nothing about her let him think straight, nothing. The way she made love, the way she looked, the way she moved. She had a regal, efficient, animal quality. The way she spoke English. The way she called him and the way she sounded on the phone when she called him. It felt as if his erection started all the way back in the middle of his head.

He looked down at her. Female, crystalline pure, somehow all pure blonde power refined down to this girl/woman thing giving him a blowjob on the floor of this hotel room at three in the afternoon in an antique city.

He wanted to come now, but didn’t want to come. Each time they met he was lost in a slightly new way. He’d never been lost psychologically like this, unbalanced, and it was getting worse.
God I want to come
. He was unable to see things the way they should be seen, he knew that. He was on this boat moving away from the dock of rationality, and he was glad of it.
I’ve always been in control. I’d come to Guatemala to lose myself in that detached way, but I’d stayed in control all the while. Until now. I was the most in-control person you could imagine
.
I want to come
. But she’d made him
cede
control.

Even today. He’d left work. He’d driven to Antigua when he knew he shouldn’t have. He’d called her cell phone to see if she’d arrived at the hotel. He’d spoken to her on the tennis court. All these things he knew he shouldn’t do, but did anyway. Then he was leaning against the wall on the two lane jungle/sex road, trying to hold back from giving longer thrusts in the warm room. Her mouth warm. She stopped and stroked him.

“I’m going to come,” he said.
Please
. Did she ask him if he was afraid again? He started to shudder, the climax starting from the middle of his head going down his throat, down to his navel, his hips. He heard himself cry out. Her blue eyes looked up at him, bemused. The sudden silence of the darkened room in the aftermath of sexual gratification, their hands clutching each other. He didn’t even realize he’d been holding her hand so tightly until he finally let it go. He’d gone somewhere very far away and come back. She had possessed him completely. She owned him. She wiped her face, grinning at him.

“He may kill us both,” she said. “We can’t really be safe. That’s what I’ve decided. We can’t be. He knows too many people. Where could we really go? I don’t care—”

She was right, of course. Carlos would find out. How could he not find out? “Make love to me,” she said. And he
would
kill them, he decided, falling down beside her. He had never felt so free as at that moment, holding her, feeling her body as he laid her down on the carpet and moved her legs apart, pulling her panties down, kissing her there, feeling the sun between her legs.

“I didn’t care, darling,” she said. “I don’t care anymore. I don’t care.” She picked up her hips and pushed.

He’d told the desk clerk that he would bring his passport down later. Of course he couldn’t, he thought, picking up his tie. Why should he cooperate with any of the systems? He felt outside all systems now. He had to protect them.

They were getting dressed. Beatrice was in the bathroom, the door open. He felt strangely alive, as if he could walk through walls. She’d given him a kind of bizarre strength. He decided, walking to the mirror, that he would find the Red Jaguar and take her away from Carlos. He could do it. He would find the Red Jaguar if it killed him. He had to, now. He had to have money to get her away from this place.

“He bought it for me,” she said, stepping out of the bathroom. “I own it. The club.” Her hair was wet. It had turned honey-colored again.

He wanted to know. He wanted to know why her husband would let her carry on the way she did, so he’d asked her.

“Yes, but I still don’t understand. Doesn’t he mind you being there?”

“Why do you have to understand?” she said. “It’s between him and me.” She said it in that very proper-sounding English manner/tone she could muster, which could freeze boiling water. She was just in her bra. She leaned forward and pulled on her panties, moving her hips.

He reached out and touched her. She was warm to the touch. The warm shower he thought. It was a lovely feeling, her skin warm and clean and red from the tennis-lesson sun. Did she know what she’d done to him? She’d collapsed any will he had to stay away from her.

He watched her dress as he stood, tying his tie standing in front of a big mirror. He saw behind her the trees outside, gathering themselves in the patio and letting themselves go in the breeze, the way she had when they made love. A hungry, not-much-time lovemaking at first. Afterwards, they’d ordered room service, eaten, then they’d started out again. This time she was desperately slow. She told him she wanted to see how long they could make love before they had a climax. They would stop and talk, or just stare at each other. It was harder for him; he had to let her talk him away from that moment, and she had. Until finally—in a twisting of sheets and strange music from the little clock radio—he’d reached a place he’d never ever been. And it had changed him. He wasn’t afraid of anything or anyone now.

“I wanted to disappear,” she said, looking at him as he came.

He started to wonder about her. She suddenly had a strange angry vacant pathetic look in her beautiful eyes. She’s a sex fiend, he thought.
That’s it. The woman I’m in love with is a sex fiend
.
Okay. Fine.
He remembered the Hemingway character who said there wasn’t an answer for everything. There was no answer for Beatrice. There was no answer for most things, he thought, when you really got down to it.

“I want to be like this forever. No London. No Guatemala. No anything. No anything but this. Right now. Nothing,” she said. “Just making love.”

He could see her in the mirror. Her back was still wet. She’d come and put her arms around him as he tied his tie.

“Are you in love with him?” he asked

“Why?” she said. She let go of him.

He had replayed the lovemaking. He wanted to pin her down. He wanted to get to who she was. Mother? Lover? Sex fiend? Oxford graduate? Stripper? Who the fuck was she? He wanted to stop the manic driving passion that had gripped him since the moment he’d met her, even slow it down for a minute. He realized she’d been pushing him back from really knowing her. Every time he was on the verge of getting a glimpse, she would push him back from the door. Only when they were making love did she stop defending.

Beatrice, that country, there behind the blue eyes, the country that was youthful, but distant. He wanted in. Like Cortez, he wanted to steal it all, take everything she had. Sex only the tool of his colonization.

“Because. I don’t know. Maybe I’m just trying to get my bearings. You know… in this Beatrice country I’ve parachuted into. I haven’t much to go on. You are good in bed. You are a beautiful woman. You’re from England. You went to Oxford on a scholarship. You stripped for a living because you didn’t want to become an investment banker. You married this big shot. You came here to the jungle. Now you’re fucking my brains out in this hotel room. I’m trying to catch up, that’s all,” he said.

“You have me. You have this afternoon to go on,” she said. “You can start there.”

“Does that mean I’m a fuck toy? Is that the answer? I don’t mind. I just want to know, as I believe I’m risking my life.”

She looked at him. He hadn’t meant to joke like that; it had slipped out. But they both knew it was true. They were risking their lives. “Besides, isn’t that what someone does who’s in love, get to know the beloved?” he added quickly. “I want to know
you
. Why won’t you talk to me about yourself without getting angry?”

“You don’t like Carlos. I can tell. You should like him. He’s a good man,” she said, ignoring his questions, turning away from him. She went and picked up her Nikes by the bathroom door. “And he loves me.” She sat on the bed and put on her shoes, looking like a teenager. Moving her hands quickly. Her shoes looked brand new.

“I was frightened by what you did on Saturday, at the lake. And now today, when you called me at the office,” he said. “It was so . . . I don’t know, I didn’t know what to make of it. I don’t know what to make of
you
.”

She’d ignored what she’d done at the lake. She hadn’t spoken of it again.

“You made rules and then you proceeded to break them right away. You broke them again today, this morning, when you called me at work from your house. We were supposed to meet at my apartment on Friday. That’s how we’d left it, remember?”

“The rules won’t save us,” she said. “Nothing will keep us safe. Do you understand? This is doomed. It’s a small country. You have to accept that. Anyway, I don’t care if we’re caught. I need you.” She hadn’t gotten up off the bed.

“The fact is we barely know each other,” he said.

“You know that’s not true.” Her eyes searched his. “Not true. You. . . . We know each other, people like us. The moment we saw each other, you know that’s the truth. . . . The moment I saw you with that book. I knew we were alike.”

He thought for a moment about what Katherine had said about
Nineteen Eighty-Four,
and about Orwell. They had discussed Orwell on the way down from the city that day. Were
they—
he and Beatrice—Winston and Julia from
1984?
Was Guatemala’s New World Order—its
maquiladora,
its uncontrolled diesel spew, its secret policemen—the future? Was
that
waiting for everyone now? Hadn’t Winston, in fact, been a journalist? Was he, Russell, now part of the memory hole and the newspeak? Of course not, he told himself. How could he be? He was fighting
for
something now. It was why he’d agreed to support De La Madrid. And he was also going to steal a treasure, which might not be morally right. What was he exactly? Adventurer? Journalist? Fuck toy?

He was all those things. How could anyone be only
one
thing in life?

“I want you to leave Carlos,” he said. He’d finished combing his hair, and he went to the chair in the other room and picked up his cell phone.

“I can’t,” she said.

He left a few minutes later. On the way back to the city, he knew he was being followed. It was a white Toyota with two men in it. He was sure of it.

SEVENTEEN

He’d agreed to meet Katherine at a tapas bar in the
zona viva.
She’d called him several times since she’d come back from Chicago; seeing her number, he hadn’t picked up. He’d been avoiding her. She’d called him that morning at work and he’d answered without looking to see who it was.

“I have to see you,” she’d said. “Please.”

“All right,” he’d said.

The few tables on the front porch of the restaurant/bar in the
zona viva
were packed, but Russell knew the owner and had called ahead for a table. Not seeing Katherine, he sat at a table in the corner near the entrance and ordered a glass of wine. Right away young boys—glue sniffers—descended on him, selling roses. The children leaned over the low railing of the restaurant’s deck, the kids’ pale faces disturbing. Russell bought some flowers and laid them on the table. He doubted the boys would ever learn to read, but they would hear about Harry Potter and dream of other children’s lives.