The Infinite Plan (33 page)

“Did he have time to think of God?” his mother wanted to know.

“He was with the chaplain.”

“Did he suffer much?” Pedro Morales asked.

“I don't know; it was over so fast. . . .”

“Was he afraid? Did everything seem black? Was he crying out?”

“No; they told me he was calm.”

“At least you're back, thanks be to God,” said Inmaculada, and for a wonderful moment Gregory felt absolved of all guilt, redeemed from anguish, saved from his worst memories, as a wave of gratitude swept over him. That night the Moraleses would not allow him to go to a hotel; they insisted he stay with them and made up Juan José's bachelor bed for him. In the night table Gregory found poems his friend had written in pencil in a lined notebook. They were love poems.

Before he flew back, Gregory visited Olga. She was showing her years; little remained of her former brilliant plumage, she had become a tangle-haired old witch, although her vigor for healing and fortune-telling had not diminished. By this time in her life she was thoroughly convinced of human stupidity; she had more faith in her sorcery than in her medicinal herbs, because sorcery appealed more directly to her clients' boundless credulity. It's all in the mind, she maintained; the imagination works miracles. Her home, too, showed the wear and tear of time; it looked like a medicine man's bazaar, crammed with the dusty items of her magic, with more disorder and less color than he remembered. Dried twigs, barks, and roots still hung from the ceiling, the shelves holding flasks and small boxes had multiplied; the old aroma of incense from the Pakistani shops had disappeared, swallowed by more powerful odors. Many pots still bore labels suggesting their contents: Forget-Me-Not, Business Blossoms, Invincible Conquerer, Secret Vengeance, Savage Pleasure, Removes All Cares. With an eye trained to discover the invisible, Olga immediately noted the changes in Gregory, the impenetrable wall around him, the hard eyes, the harsh, joyless laugh, the dry voice, and the new twist to the mouth that on thinner lips would have been scornful but on his was mocking. He radiated the power of a rabid animal, but beneath the armor she perceived pieces of a shattered soul. She knew instinctively it was not the moment to offer her broad experience as a counselor, because his mind was closed, and so she spoke of herself.

“I have many enemies, Gregory,” she confessed. “You try to do good, but you're repaid with envy and resentment. Now there are people saying I'm in league with the devil.”

“Fatal for business, I should think. . . .”

“Don't you believe it; as long as there are frightened people, people in pain, my skill never drops in value,” Olga replied with a crafty wink. “And incidentally, is there anything I can do for you?”

“I don't think so, Olga. What's wrong with me can't be cured with incantations.”

The Moraleses gave Gregory Carmen's address. He had thought she was still in Europe and could scarcely believe they were living only the length of a bridge apart. Their Monday telephone calls had been deferred, and mail was erratic in Vietnam, so his last contact had been a postcard from Barcelona telling him of the Japanese lover. It seemed an extraordinary coincidence that Carmen had moved into Joan and Susan's house; reality sometimes is as improbable as the absurd soap operas Inmaculada followed so faithfully.

All through his eventful life, especially when he was particularly lonely after becoming involved with a new woman and finding that she still was not the one he sought, Gregory Reeves often asked himself why it had not worked out for Carmen and him. By the time he dared ask her that question, she replied that in those days he was closed to the only kind of love worthy of sharing, protected by a mantle of cynicism that benefited him very little in the long run, since with the least breeze he was once again exposed to the elements—but that cynicism had been enough to fence off his heart.

“At that time you were obsessive about money and sex. We can blame the war, if you like, although I think there were other reasons: you were still carrying a lot from your childhood,” Carmen told him many years later, when both had traveled their separate labyrinths and met as they emerged. “The strange thing is that you barely had to scratch the surface to see that beneath those defenses you were crying out for help. But I wasn't ready for a meaningful relationship either; I hadn't matured and couldn't give you the unbounded love you needed.”

After his visit to the Moraleses, Gregory postponed his reunion with Carmen, finding a spate of new excuses. He was intimidated by the idea of seeing her; he was afraid they would have changed and not know each other or, worse still, not like each other. Finally it became impossible to invent new excuses, and two weeks later he looked her up. He wanted to surprise her, so he appeared at the restaurant without warning, only to find that she had left her job a few days before. Joan and Susan welcomed him enthusiastically, checked him over from head to toe to confirm that he was in one piece, stuffed him with vegetarian lasagne and pistachio and honey pastries, and finally told him where he could find Carmen. He noticed the transformation in the way his friends looked: they were wearing earrings visible at ten paces, they had cut their hair, and judging by the unwarranted flush on her cheeks, Joan was wearing rouge. They explained, laughing, that they had abandoned Indian braids and grandmotherly buns because their Tamar earrings demanded something more dashing; there was nothing wrong with that, as they had discovered, rather tardily, it was true, and so they were going to make up for lost time. We can be feminists with these doodads in our ears and a little makeup; don't worry, man, we've not renounced any of our principles, we promise you. Gregory wanted to know who Tamar was, and was told that Carmen had changed her name with a view to devoting herself full time to making jewelry, adopting both a new style and a new name because she didn't think her own was very exotic. She went every morning to the street where hippies could be found selling their merchandise on trays set on folding legs. Positions were drawn in a daily lottery, a system that avoided the squabbles of previous years when street merchants fought over their favorite spots. To get a good location you have to get up early, but Carmen is very disciplined, Joan and Susan said, and so you're sure to find her on the first corner; that's the most popular location because it's near the university, where you can use the bathrooms.

Both sidewalks were lined with vendors and artisans who earned their daily bread from the day's sales and survived on metaphysical dreams, political ingenuousness, and drugs. A few lunatics rambled among them, attracted by who knows what mysterious forces. The government had slashed funds for medical services, leaving already economically troubled psychiatric hospitals without resources and forcing them to release their patients. These outcasts got by on charity during the summer months and then were collected in the winter to avoid the embarrassment of numb bodies littering the public streets. The police ignored these poor maniacs unless they became troublesome; their neighbors knew them, had lost their fear of them, and had no objection to feeding them when they began to grow faint with hunger. Often they could not be distinguished from drugged-out hippies, but some were unmistakable, even famous, like a dancer who wore transparent tights and the flaming cape of a fallen archangel and floated silently about on point, startling inattentive pedestrians. Among the most familiar was a hapless visionary who read fortunes with cards of his own invention and wandered around moaning about the horrors of the world. One day, despairing at such evil and greed, he reached the breaking point and gouged out his eyes with a tablespoon. He was taken away in an ambulance and shortly afterward was back again, silent, and smiling because now he did not have to view cruelty. Someone pricked holes in his cards so he could tell them apart, and he continued to read fortunes for passersby, with greater success now that he had become a legend. This was the scene of Gregory's search for Carmen. He fought his way through the confusion and noise of the street, looking for her but not finding her; it was the Christmas season, and the sidewalks were filled with a welter of shoppers intent upon completing their purchases. When he did see Carmen, it took him several seconds to adapt this image to the one in his memory. She was sitting on a small bench behind a portable table on which her work was displayed in glittering rows; her hair tumbled over her shoulders, she was wearing an odalisque's embroidered jacket, her arms were deep in bracelets, and her strange dark cotton dress was bound like a tunic at the waist by a chain of silver and copper coins. She was attending a tourist couple who undoubtedly had made the trip from their farm in the Midwest to see at first hand the horrors of Berkeley they had glimpsed on television. Carmen did not notice Gregory, and he stood apart, watching her, screened by the streams of people. During those minutes, he remembered how much he had shared with her, the tender dreams of adolescence, the hopes she had inspired, and he knew he must have loved her since the long-ago night they slept together in the same bed on the day his father died. She had changed; her movements were assured and graceful, her Latin heritage was more pronounced: her eyes were blacker and her gestures broader, her laugh was bolder. Travel had sharpened his friend's intuition and made her more astute; thence the change of name and style. By then the word “ethnic” had been coined to designate styles from places no one could locate on the map, and Carmen had capitalized on it because she knew that in her part of the world no one would value jewelry made by a humble Chicana. On her table was a placard announcing
TAMAR, ETHNIC JEWELRY
. From where he stood, Gregory listened to her chatting with her customers; she told them she was a gypsy, and they recoiled slightly, fearing they would be cheated. She spoke with a slight accent she had acquired since he last saw her. Gregory knew she was not capable of affectation, but she well might have adopted the accent for the sport of it, just as she had invented a mysterious past, more for the pleasure of the game than from any conscious lie. If anyone had reminded Carmen that she was the daughter of illegal immigrants from Zacatecas, she herself would have been surprised. In her letters she had written the extravagant autobiography she was creating by chapters like a television serial, and he had warned her more than once to be careful, because if she kept repeating her fantasies she would end up believing them. Now, seeing her only a few yards away, he understood that Carmen had become the protagonist of her own novel, and that the name Tamar better suited this colorful merchant of beautiful baubles. At that moment, she looked up and saw him.

They hugged each other like a couple of lost children and then sought each other's lips and kissed with all the passion nurtured through years of secret fantasies. Carmen quickly put away her wares and folded her table, and they left pushing a small shopping cart containing the small boxes with her jewelry, staring at one another hungrily, looking for a place where they could make love. Their urgency was so great that they could not take time to talk; they needed to touch each other, explore, verify that each was as the other had imagined. Carmen did not want to share Gregory with Joan and Susan; she was afraid that if they went to her room they would inevitably run into their friends, and however discreet the two women might be, it would be difficult to avoid their company. Gregory had the same thought and, without consulting Carmen, drove to a run-down motel whose only virtue was being near at hand. There they stripped off their clothes and fell onto the bed, giddy in their eagerness, their hunger. Their first breathless embrace was intense and violent; they attacked without preamble, in a tumult of sheets; they took their pleasure of one another and then fell briefly into a stupefied slumber. Carmen waked first and sat up to observe the man she had grown up with, now a stranger. She had dreamed about him more times than she could count, and now he was lying naked before her, as close as her kisses. He had been honed by the war; he was thinner, more muscular, his tendons stood out like rope beneath his skin, and one leg had prominent blue veins, the legacy of his accident while delivering the refrigerator. Even asleep he was tense. She kissed him, sadly; she had imagined a very different coming together, not this kind of mutual violation, this all-out warfare; they had not made love but done something that left the taste of sin in her mouth. She felt as if Gregory had not been altogether present, that his mind was somewhere else, that he had embraced not her but someone else, some unidentified ghost from his past or his nightmares; he had not been tender or sharing or good-humored, he had not whispered her name or looked into her eyes. She herself had not been her most giving, but she did not know at what point she had failed; Gregory had set the tempo, and everything happened with such desperation that she had lost her way in a dark jungle from which she emerged hot, moist, a little sore, and sad. Her failed love affairs had not diminished her capacity for tenderness. Opening herself, however, she had encountered unexpected resistance from this friend she had been waiting for since girlhood; she attributed it to the privations of war and still hoped to find a chink in his armor through which she could slip into his heart. She leaned over to kiss him again, and he was instantly awake, on the defensive, but when he recognized her he smiled and for the first time seemed to relax. He took her shoulders and pulled her to him.

“You're a loner, Greg, ready for a fight, like a movie cowboy.”

“I've never ridden a horse in my life, Carmen.”

He did not realize how much on target Carmen's analysis was, or how prophetic. Loneliness and strife had determined his destiny. Memories he had tried to hold at bay came flooding back, bringing with them a deep bitterness impossible to share with anyone, not even Carmen in that moment of intimacy. Like the weeds in the front yard of his house, he had grown without water or care, surrounded by the metaphysical madness of his father, the stony silences of his mother, the tenacious animosity of his sister, and the violence of the barrio, suffering because of the color of his skin and his bizarre family, divided always between the call of a sentimental heart and that combative fever, that savage energy, that made his blood boil and his judgment evaporate. One part of him inclined toward compassion and the other toward recklessness. He lived trapped in continual indecision between opposing forces that split him into two irreconcilable halves, a raw wound that tore him up inside and isolated him from others. He felt condemned to being alone. Just accept it, Gregory, and then forget it; we're born, we live, and we die alone, Cyrus had lectured him. Life is confusion and suffering and, more than anything, solitude. There are philosophical explanations, but if you prefer the story of the Garden of Eden, consider it a punishment upon the human race for having bitten into the fruit of knowledge. That idea merely exacerbated Reeves's rebelliousness; he had not given up his childhood dream that the anguish of living would disappear by magic. During the years he used to hide in the shed behind his house, overcome by irrational fear, he had imagined that one day he would awake liberated forever from that dull ache in the center of his being—it was only a question of adjusting to the principles and rules of decency. But it had not worked out that way. He had fulfilled the rites of passage and the successive steps along the road to manhood; he had made himself a man, silently enduring repeated bumps and knocks along the way, faithful to the national myth of the independent, proud, and free individual. He considered himself a good citizen willing to pay his taxes and defend his country, but somewhere he had fallen into an insidious trap, and instead of living the expected reward he was still slogging through a swamp. It was not enough to do your share and do it again; life was like an insatiable sweetheart, always demanding more strength, more courage. In Vietnam he had learned that to survive you had to break many rules. The world belonged to the bold, not the meek; in real life the villain fared better than the hero. There was no moral resolution to the war, nor were there victors; they were all part of the same unholy debacle, and now in civilian life it seemed it was the same, but he was determined to escape the curse. I'm going to get to the top, even if it means climbing over my own mother, he said every day to the image in the bathroom mirror, hoping the repeated exhortation would overcome the depression that weighed him down each morning. He was not ready to talk about these things with anyone, not even Carmen. He felt the whisper of her hair on his mouth, breathed in her musky scent, and again abandoned himself to the clamor of desire. He saw her body swaying against the shadows of the curtains, heard her laughter and her moans, felt the trembling of her breasts on the palms of his hands, and for one too brief instant believed himself redeemed from the anathema of loneliness, but immediately the throbbing in his groin and the chaotic drumming of his heart blotted out that chimera and he sank deeper and deeper into the absolute abyss of pleasure, that ultimate and most profound of isolations.