Trouble (22 page)

“Ready,” she said dreamily, apparently riding a fresh wave of heroin, or maybe it was the hard warmth of the tequila, or both.

I shook her shoulder gently so she’d focus on my eyes. “Raquel. I can’t be your shrink; I’m too close to you. You need to go and check yourself into a private, secure place where the idiots can’t find you and get some psychological help, somewhere where you can be taken care of twenty-four hours a day.”

“I need to go to a
loony
bin?”

“A hospital,” I said. “Otherwise, you’re going to let yourself slide back into using again, and you will die of an overdose. I know you will. You will because you want to. This is my opinion as your friend and also as a shrink. You’re suicidal, and you’re begging me for help, and so I’m telling you what to do to save yourself, and I’m going to keep saying it until you do it.”

“No way,” she said. “I’ve already been to therapy. She filleted me and wrapped me in Saran Wrap and sent me home. I went through the whole litany: ‘I worshipped my father, who was an indifferent parent and who probably cared more about the illegal immigrants he helped than he did about me. My mother was a needy narcissist who was incapable of maternal feelings, but nonetheless, she loved me and did the best she could.’ Ecch! Fuck all that.
Fuck
all that.”

“Retard,” I said. We both laughed.

“Let’s get out of here,” she said. “Let’s go see a concert or a movie or something distracting. A Hollywood blockbuster maybe. Or some fucking chamber music.”

Outside, she took my arm. It was dark and very cold. We hurried along the street back toward the Isabel. We ducked into the lobby. Raquel dug out a ten-peso coin and handed it to me.

“I’m not going to torture you with this online gossip bullshit anymore,” I said. “That’s another rule.”

“You’re no fun anymore, Jo,” she said half-gratefully.

The desk clerk handed us our room key. We climbed the two long flights in silence. In our room, we both flopped onto our beds and stared up at the ceiling, side by side.

“So my plan is that I have to go home sooner or later,” said Raquel. “My self-pitying moment of weakness is over. No shrinks. No hospital. I will survive. I’ll make another album.”

“I bet this new one is much better than you think it is.”

“Actually not,” she said. “God, I am so sick of myself. I can’t believe I let myself fall apart in front of you like that. It was the smack talking.”

“It was you talking,” I said.

“Well, maybe. I feel fine now, but I am going to come down so hard tomorrow and feel even worse than I felt this morning.”

“You’ll get through it,” I said. “And someday you’ll fall in love again, cliché though it may be. Hope springs eternal in the human breast, and all that.”

“The human beast,” she said. “Look in the paper and see what’s playing at the movie theaters.”

“You look,” I said. “I walked all day. You just sat there nodding and blissing out.”

She laughed and got up and found the paper and walked around the room, shuffling through it to find the movie section. Then she threw it onto the armchair and flopped back down onto her bed.

“All I can say,” said Raquel, “is that it is not fun to be a woman and to fuck up. The man is just being a guy, whatever. Good for him; he got some sex. But that was not my pregnant girlfriend; it was
his
. I didn’t owe that poor little pregnant girl a damn thing.
He
did. But somehow it works out mathematically that I’m the villain.”

“Maybe women are expected to behave better than men,” I said, “because we are better than men. The world without women is
Lord of the Flies
. The world without men is
Little Women”

Raquel laughed. “Tell that to Indrani.”

“Poor Indrani,” I said. “Here we are, down here in Mexico without her.”

“Serves her right,” said Raquel. “What did she say about me, again? How could I get myself into such a mess? What about her, letting that sleazy gigolo move in with her and fuck his little girlfriends in her own bed while she supported him?”

“Yeah,” I said. “She was as in love with Vince as you were with Jimmy Black.”

“So she shouldn’t have judged me, then.”

“You’re right,” I said. “Then there’s me and whatever I’m doing with Felipe, which I know she’d have an opinion about, for sure.”

“Whatever,” said Raquel. “Knock yourself out with Felipe, that’s what I say. He’s hot. What kind of movie do you want to see?”

“A romantic comedy,” I said. “Just kidding. Something bleak and violent. That Cormac McCarthy thing maybe.”

“Hey, we didn’t go to Mass today.”

“Instead, we went to the slutty dancers’ cantina.”

Raquel plumped her two thin pillows and rearranged them under her head. “If I really believed in this album, I wouldn’t care. If I knew it was going to set everyone on fire, I wouldn’t give a shit. I think I’m especially vulnerable right now just because I know it’s bad. I’m choking on it. That stuff I did with Chuy the other night was what I wish this album was.”

“So go into the studio with Chuy for two or three weeks and record songs like those, and release them. How hard would that be?”

She was quiet for a while, tapping her teeth with her fingernails.

“Why not?” I said, pressing my advantage. “I bet he’d do it. It’s time you guys actually collaborated, instead of you just playing on his stuff.”

“Maybe,” she said. She got up and picked up the paper from the chair and sat back down on her bed. “
No
Country for Old Men”
she said, looking at the movie listings. “A pulp B-movie all gussied up as great art. Just the ticket. What time is it right now?”

“Six-thirty,” I said.

“But doing an album with Chuy … He’s opinionated. He’s tough. He does things his own way. I’m more flexible and easily influenced. He might railroad me, or something, make me feel like he wouldn’t let me have enough of a say. But on the other hand, man, we could do some great stuff. Wait, six-thirty? Here’s a showing at nine. We could get a drink first.”

“I feel like I could drink forever,” I said.

“’Cause you’re alive again,” said Raquel. “The only way to live fully is to kiss the grape.”

“‘Kiss the grape’?” I repeated, laughing.

“Dionysus has to beat Apollo; otherwise, you might as well be dead,” she said.

“I could kiss a few grapes right now,” I said. “Tequila grapes.”

“Should we go down to the hotel bar or go out somewhere?”

“I hate the sangrita downstairs; it’s that fake stuff.”

“So let’s get a cab to Roma. Come on. We can see a later showing of the movie.” She leapt up and put on her coat.

Just outside the hotel, as we were getting into a taxi, I heard someone shout, “You guys, it’s her!” and five thousand flashbulbs went off in our faces.

 
omething happened to Raquel in the explosion of cameras. All her years of performing came to her rescue; she didn’t panic or fall apart. She was very quiet and regal; she ignored them and took my arm and calmly got into the taxi.

As we pulled away from the hotel, they piled into taxis of their own to follow us. Somehow, at Raquel’s urging, our driver, a stout middle-aged man who seemed completely sober and rational, managed to shake the other drivers. We went to Roma, back to Pata Negra, and spent the night at the table where we’d sat when Chuy and Raquel had performed. We drank several rounds of very good mescal, but we didn’t get drunk. We ate small plates of grilled squid, antipasta, salad, and potato tortillas. Shortly before midnight, Alfredo and Eugenia came in and saw us. They greeted us as if we were old friends, kissing us on both cheeks and asking if we minded if they joined us. I wondered whether this was a big night out for them without the kids and they were secretly disappointed to have to talk to us instead of getting to have a romantic date, but they sat right down at our table as if there were nowhere else they’d rather be.

“We sold two more pieces,” said Eugenia. Her watchful, earnest, intense angularity was softened by success. Her eyes were bright and huge. “The reviews have been very good.”

Alfredo smiled at her and took her hand. He was a large baby-faced man, bland-looking, innocuous-seeming, but there was a slow, sweet slyness to his smile that suggested there might be more to him than met the naked and casual eye. I had wondered, the other night, about his wife’s obvious crush on David. How did Alfredo deal with that? I had watched them to see whether or not her behavior toward David changed when Alfredo was watching and had determined that it did not change at all, and that, in fact, Alfredo appeared to be totally unbothered by his wife’s drooling admiration of another man. He was extremely oblivious, or extremely confident, or both. I knew from my own experience that this could be a sign of trouble. Who knew what lurked in anyone’s heart?

Eugenia and Alfredo went off into the night about an hour after they’d arrived, trailing a chorus of
“Buenas noches”
and kisses.

“Are you scared to go back to the hotel?” I asked Raquel. “We could get a reservation somewhere around here for the night, if you would rather.”

“We’re staying put; it’s the only way to get through this: Just let them get what they came for and not fight it.”

“They’re like bloodhounds to a fox,” I said.

“If we get them on our side, we can make them work for us. That’s the plan I came up with in the taxi. I’m not gonna cry about this. I thought I would when they found me, but it kind of got my blood up.”

“Me, too,” I said.

“Let’s make them our bitches,” said Raquel with a grin.

“Okay,” I said. “But if you change your mind, it’s okay. It’s all right not to want your picture everywhere tomorrow morning. You know they’re at the Isabel now, waiting for us.”

“Well, then, it’s show time,” she said. “Let’s get out of here.”

We took a taxi back to the Isabel. And there they were again, waiting for us in the lobby. As they leapt up and aimed their cameras at us, I felt a momentary tremor of fright, and I imagined Raquel did, too, but she actually vamped a little for them while the flashes popped; I managed to stand my ground and tried not to look like an idiot. When Raquel evidently felt they had stolen enough of our souls for one round, she bid them a breezy good night and took my arm and led me out of the lobby. We went upstairs and brushed our teeth with bottled water, put on our pajamas, fell into our separate beds, and turned out the light. I was bone-weary all of a sudden.

“I’m feeling my age right now,” said Raquel. “Tomorrow, I’m gonna feel ten times older, I know it.”

“I am freezing,” I said.

“Can I come over in your bed?” she asked like a little kid.

“Okay,” I said like another little kid.

So we slept snuggled like birds in a nest.

The next day was as cold as the one before had been. Raquel said she felt like a wreck when she woke up, and she looked a little puffy and wan, but she was able to get up and shower and dress. We ate breakfast in the hotel restaurant, reading the newspapers I had fetched from Sanborn’s. There was nothing much new in the world. It was almost reassuring to see that all the corruption, bloodshed, greed, and persecution of the innocent were continuing exactly in the same way they always had; nothing had blown up or come irrevocably apart in the last couple of days, and no one had solved the world’s problems. Our fellow tourists at nearby tables were bitching about the weather again in various accents and languages, and there was a comforting regularity in that, too.

I insisted over breakfast that Raquel go with me to the bullfight. I refused to leave her alone, and I wanted to see Felipe and the bullfight, so that was the only possible solution to this logic puzzle. Since they were going to tag along aggressively anyway wherever we went, we figured we might as well have the photographer boys as our enlisted allies, rather than as unwanted antagonists and tormentors, so we decided to ask them to go with us, as well. The idea was that they would take pictures of Raquel enjoying herself very much without Jimmy Black and without any apparent guilt about the pregnant girlfriend; this would show all the assholes, Raquel said, that she wasn’t hiding out in shame and sorrow, that she had already forgotten about it all and was having an exotic and adventurous vacation with her best friend, or, as Raquel put it, “my MILF-type best friend.”

I laughed. “That’s a compliment, right?”

“Indeed, memsahib,” she said.

After breakfast, we went out into the lobby and waved at the paparazzi, a word I could not believe I was now applying to people who existed in my own social sphere. They were sitting around, reading magazines and waiting for us.

“How’s it going, guys?” said Raquel as they photographed us both.

“Didn’t sleep too well,” said a snaggletoothed but appealing guy with a dirty-blond shag haircut. He wore a khaki jacket with many pockets. “The beds are hard here.”

“They’re
auténtico,”
said Raquel slyly, half-mocking, half-proud of her determined lack of diva preciousness.

“How are you doing, Raquel?” asked a portly, swarthy, balding piratelike guy with long black sideburns.

“Oh, I’m ducky,” said Raquel. She sat down on the couch across from them and tucked her legs up under her. “This is my friend Josie,” she said.

They were a group of four guys, all in their late twenties and early thirties. They seemed very friendly but potentially dangerous. Their guard relaxed, like the bloodhounds I’d compared them to, once they realized the fox wasn’t going to run and there was no reason to hunt her anymore.

While Raquel sat there charming them into falling madly in love with her, I went over to the computer, went online, and found the pictures of us that they’d all taken the night before. We were smiling, and we looked composed and halfway decent, both of us.

I checked my E-mail, assuming Wendy would have pounced on this right away, since, no doubt, she was spending most of her time on the computer now that I was safely in another country. Sure enough, she had written me. “Dear Mom, I cannot believe you’re on Mina Boriqua and all those other ones, too!!! You look kind of cute!!! Call me if you have a minute in the midst of your famous life!! Love, Wendy.”

“Hey,” I called over to Raquel and our new pals. “Here we all are. Come and look.”

They all traipsed over, except Raquel, who stayed put with an air of complete indifference, possibly for their benefit and admiration.

“I took that,” said the quiet one of the bunch, a skinny kid with sticking-up hair and sticking-out ears.

The paparazzi accepted our invitation to the bullfight gladly, since they had nothing better to do and their flights home weren’t until late the next afternoon, and it was just the sort of thing that naturally appealed to them. Also, “candid” snaps of “Rock-Hell” at a bullfight were exactly what they’d been paid to come down there for.

I went over to the hotel phone and had the clerk place a call to Wendy’s cell phone. She answered on the first ring.

“Hi!” she yelled. Then she said to someone excitedly, “It’s my mom!”

This had never once happened before with Wendy.

“Wendy,” I said. “How are you doing? I miss you!”

“Mom,” she said earnestly in a quiet voice into the phone, “I swear I didn’t rat you out. I swear I kept the secret. I swear. It must have been someone at your hotel. God, that picture of you and Raquel is so cool!”

I heard girlish high voices in the background, the twittering of the teens.

“Where are you?” I asked.

“At Auburn’s house. We’re all here. I can’t believe you’re famous now!”

Who was Auburn? “Well,” I said dryly, “I’m hardly famous.”

“Well, I know, but you’re on Mina Boriqua! My friends are, like, dying. Tamika said you look kind of hot. Are they gonna take more pictures of you guys? We’re checking, like, every five minutes. I mean, Tamika’s checking on her iPhone.”

Who, for that matter, was Tamika? I laughed. “Well, you’ll all, no doubt, be very excited to know that we’re sitting in the hotel lobby with those very photographers, and we’re all going to the bullfight later, me and Raquel and all four of them, so, yes, there will be more photographs. Probably just of Raquel. Don’t count on seeing me anymore; I’m nobody interesting.”

“Oh my God, Mom,” said my daughter in tones of hushed awe. “This is just so awesomely cool. I so so so wish I could go to the bullfight, too. Please call me later and tell me everything?”

“How are you, Wendy?”

“I’m great! Really, Daddy and I are both just totally great! Stay down there as long as you want! I love you, Mom!”

After Wendy and I hung up, I called Felipe to let him know our date had been hijacked. When I explained why, he laughed and was very nice about it, although he was clearly disappointed, which flattered me.

“Can we at least have dinner alone afterward?” he asked.

“We can,” I said.

“I am happy I get to see you soon,” he told me in a low voice. “I missed you.”

“Well, that was your choice,” I said. “You didn’t have to be so heroic the other night. I know you thought you had to save me from myself, but if you had taken advantage of me, I never would have held it against you.”

“Don’t tell me that,” he said. We laughed. “I’ll see you in front of the stadium at three-thirty,” said Felipe, and we said good-bye. My heart was warm and gay and light for the first time in so long, I couldn’t remember the last time I had felt like this. All seemed right with the world.

“Should we have the desk clerk get us a couple of taxis now?” asked the guy with thick gingery hair and a gap between his front teeth.

“We’re taking the subway,” said Raquel. “It’s the fastest way to get there, trust me.”

I gave her a look; sometimes she took all that “daughter of a Marxist, one of the
gente”
shit too far. But I didn’t say anything. This was her show; I would let her run it.

“What?” she said to me, reading my feelings in my expression. “It is the fastest way. I take taxis all the time when it’s more convenient. Come on, you’ll see.”

The six of us, Raquel and me and our new entourage, whom I’d privately dubbed “Ginger,” “Pirate,” “Ears,” and “Khaki,” but whose real names were actually Malcolm, Max, Wayne, and Chuck, traipsed to the subway. Together, in a clump, we underwent the journey underground to the bullfight stadium, which was called the Plaza México and which, according to the Lonely Planet guide, seated 40,000 people and was the largest in the world. Raquel and I sat side by side on the quiet, swaying train, reading about the history and ritual of the bullfight in our shared book, while our camera-hung pals stood grouped around us like a protective scrim or shower curtain, occasionally snapping a photo of us. I was getting used to the attention. In fact I found, to my own amusement, that I felt, unconsciously, a little miffed if too much time went by without our being photographed; I started to worry somewhere in a deep part of my insecure brain that we weren’t being interesting or sexy enough. I could see, even at my advanced age and stage of life, how this might become a way of life very quickly, how one’s private stock in one’s own viability and worthiness could rise and fall according to the attention or lack of it.