All My Relations (16 page)

“Chacho must be miserable. He'd do anything to see you before it happens.”

“I think I'm going to put my head in your lap,” Deirdre said. She lay on her back, knees huddled against the seat. Curtis fingered her hair and stroked her cheek.

After a few miles, she unhooked her bra and put Curtis's hand inside her blouse. The weight of his hand made her feel the motion of her breast, vibrating with the hum of the engine. She felt the car decelerate and stop, the engine dieseling. She opened her blouse to Curtis and looked at him. He gazed at her without blinking. He was barely smiling, but the corners of his black-rimmed eyes turned down and his forehead was deeply lined. Covering her breasts with his hands, he bent to kiss her.

Deirdre averted her face. “None of that,” she said. “Go ahead. A gift.” Muscle knotted her jaw. Her teeth were clenched. She unfastened the buttons of her jeans and arched her back to strip herself. She heard part of Curtis bang against the steering wheel as he lowered himself onto her. It wasn't their bodies touching, Deirdre thought, but only a bridge from her to him.

Curtis's boots scuffed against the door. Occasional passing headlights swept across the interior of the car. Deirdre tried to hear Chacho's voice speaking of the sexual juices' ascent up the spine, their opening like a flower in the head, tried to see his hands illustrating the expansion of energy. But instead all she could see was a woman, not herself, yet leaving her body, racing into the glare of traffic. Holding her long, white, ugly breasts in her hands, the woman thrust them into the headlights, against windows of the passing cars. Metal grazed her. Headlights bore down on her. She lunged and dodged among the cars while the traffic broadened, a half dozen lanes wide, a dozen, a river of yellow lights. Now she was struck, broken on a hood, tossed to
a roof, thudding from fender to door to bumper to windshield, flung from lane to lane. Deirdre's heart slammed against her chest and her breath tore in her lungs.

“It's O.K.,” Curtis was saying. She was lying on the floor. His arms were under her, lifting her towards him. “Take it easy. You jerked right off the seat, that's all. We were already done. I got out in time.”

Deirdre's naked body felt gray and dead in a film of moisture. To herself she smelled like the clots of dust in a vacuum cleaner.

“You look so wonderful,” Curtis said. His face was smooth, lines at last relaxed. He kissed her breasts and draped her clothing over her. She allowed him to kiss her lips.

Driving home, Curtis said, “I have a vision of the Philippines.” He described a long sweep of beach, ocean a blinding blue, thatched huts, and hundreds of brown people making love. Like bundles of driftwood, they were strewn along the sand, receding into the distance until they were only dots.

Deirdre's mind was blank, and so she saw only Curtis's couples, arranged symmetrically like a pattern for giftwrap, rolling by on an endless sheet.

Curtis walked her to the porch, pressing her hand. As she opened the door, a streak, a yellow ribbon of clashing noise and light, entered with her, but it faded. The living room was dark. Looking toward her father's chair, she saw that he had slipped to the floor. Suddenly she wanted everything to be different, that he would be healthy again, that she could even remember him healthy. But her memory of that time was always vacant. She lifted him by his armpits and set his stiff back into the hollow left by his years of sitting. He batted at her weakly.

In her room, Deirdre concentrated on the image of Curtis's wondering face, a new emblem. She couldn't lie down. Instead she found she must sit upright, knees drawn to her chest, while the yellow river of noise and light roared around her bed until morning.

“Mouth gaping! Eyes bulging! Out of the water, burned, eaten up.” Boehm spread the foil and jabbed the crisp skin of the snapper with a fork. “That's how I feel when I look at you.”

Olivia, shucking corn, said nothing. Hunched, her small breasts in her bikini top drooping with a weight Boehm could almost feel in his palm, she ripped the fine blonde tassels that reminded Boehm of her own hair, and dropped them into a hole in the sand. Her concentration, teeth nibbling the curve of her underlip, made Boehm nervous. She would be thinking of her bare new apartment, her choices in decor, of the last truckload of boxes stacked in their living room.

Boehm clenched his eyes shut as if in pain, mushing the snapper with his fork, whipping the flesh like meringue. The fish's elegant shape was destroyed.

Keeping the smashed pulpy section for himself, Boehm served the fish. He reclined his beach chair and swigged from the mezcal bottle. Olivia had stopped drinking hours before because soon she would be taking her sleeping pills for bed. They were stupefyingly potent, illegal, and since her announcement that she was leaving Boehm she'd been unable to sleep without them.

“Even with that corn you've got a system,” Boehm said. “You
do three ears in the time it would take me to do one. You're so intelligent. It's never bothered me that you're more intelligent than I am. I've learned from you.”

“I don't accept that from you. You're a bright man, Steve.” Olivia squatted, her back to Boehm, setting corn in the coals.

Bahia Umichehueve was blue, curved like a lens. Two islands, bristling with huge, weird cardon cacti and glazed with pelican guano, lay at the exact center. From time to time the surface of the water was broken by flying fish. Boehm was reminded of a map in a childhood favorite,
The Golden Book of Great Explorers
, showing the cobalt blue ocean surrounded by crudely drawn lumps for mountains, and in the foreground, gamboling fish with human faces.

The beach, which Boehm remembered five or six years before teeming with drunken, near-naked American students and slow-walking, embarrassed American fatties, was virtually empty. A cleaning detail of village children was at work. Beside Boehm a family from Guadalajara, the only other guests at the hotel, read newspapers and magazines. The parents and their three children were dressed in enveloping bathing attire made of a nubbed, rubbery material. The children had insisted on taking their yearly vacation in Las Playas, the man had explained, though the area was ruined. The climate was fine and the water a delightful warm temperature, like mineral baths. Boehm had nodded, as if understanding that the area was ruined, and why.

The children dashed into the mild surf. Watching them spin and collide on their red and yellow plastic rafts, Olivia said, “They have such beautiful, perfect little bodies.” Squinting into the setting sun, parted lips exposing her chipped front tooth, she wore what Boehm called her bruised, sensuous look. The sunset colored her deep rose. Boehm drank from the bottle and kissed her, letting the mezcal flow from his mouth into hers. The slow kiss, mezcal dribbling down their chins, was like “two loving amoebas ingesting each other,” he told Olivia.

“What an alarmingly rapacious image,” she said, drawing back.

“For days,” Boehm said, “I've felt as if a root boll were expanding in my head, bursting through my skull.”

“
Please
, Steve,” Olivia said. She trotted into the water.

In front of the thatched beachside restaurants the local children were raking the sand. They wore baggy white pants and T-shirts stamped in black letters SANEAMIENTO—sanitation—across the back, or no shirts at all. Floppy hats shadowed their faces. Listlessly they walked backward, dragging the rakes one-armed in straight paths that left as much trash as they gathered. The neat rows of bottles, wadded paper, squashed cups, and fruit rinds looked like a cultivated crop. The children scooped heaps of garbage in their arms and, without aiming, hurled the debris at a rusted oil drum, where it rattled down the outside and lay in a ring around the base.

“The place does have an odd feel this year,” Boehm said to the man from Guadalajara.

“Yes, with only the children left behind.”

“Where are the others?”

Las Playas had gone elsewhere to find work that summer, the man said. The oil accident—an American tanker bound for Long Beach—had destroyed most of the shrimp harvest in the spring. The fish catch was nonexistent. “And your tourism—I understand. Our inflation and your recession. The hotel people are unhappy. And now, of course, it's too hot for Americans.” He clasped his hands and stretched, sighing.

One of the Guadalajara children was gravely offering Olivia his raft. Boehm watched as Olivia, not a swimmer, paddled laboriously in wide circles, straddling the raft with her slim, blonde legs.

Boehm sat up in the night, heart racing, the rush of adrenaline making him see weak white flashes in the dark. Beside him Olivia's breathing was deep and measured, the intervals between
breaths interminably long. He pulled on his clothes and let himself into the hall. The hotel lobby was brightly lit. A tiny woman in an electric blue dress, elaborately coiffed hair rising a foot above her head and three artificial moles on her cheek, sat playing solitaire.

“Hey, tall-y. Tall man. Help me win.”

As Boehm approached her she recrossed her legs and he saw she wasn't wearing underpants.

“Christ help me find the three of clubs,” she said in a high, tinny voice.

Boehm stood behind her, looking at the cards. They were laid out in an unfamiliar pattern like the whorls of a shell.

“Lonely?” she said. Her upturned face was soft, unlined, the bones miniature. Boehm realized she was not yet a teenager.

“Come to my room,” he said, not knowing why, except his heart had calmed, and the buzzing, burning sensation of his nerves had subsided. He led her down the hall. In the hotel room he switched on the dim lamp and drew down the sheet. Olivia lay on her stomach, one knee bent, cheek resting on her outstretched arm. Stray wisps of hair fluttered with her breath. Her body was amber and white.

“My wife,” Boehm said. “Isn't she beautiful?”

The whore scratched her ear. She gave him a hard, direct look, devoid of shrewdness or coquetry. Boehm handed her a ten from his wallet.

“Good night,” he said. He undressed and lay on the bed, listening to the lapping of the water.

The far wall glowed a hot, featureless white in the morning sun. Boehm didn't feel well rested. He came back from the bathroom and stood over Olivia's side of the bed.

She hadn't wanted the trip to Mexico. The reservations were months old and now the idea was grotesque, she had said, “a honeymoon for divorce.” Finally she said she would do it for the guilt. Her affairs, Boehm interpreted. She claimed several,
although at least one was bogus. The particular man had visited Boehm in Phoenix the night he supposedly spent with Olivia in San Francisco.

Already yesterday morning, their first, Boehm and Olivia had argued.

“Pelicano,”
she had said. “Look.” The wheeling bird plummeted straight into the water, creating no perceptible splash, and disappeared except for the tips of its wings and tail. It bobbed up gulping a fish, crop quivering.

“Pelicano,”
Boehm said. “I never heard that cognate. I wonder if it's border Spanish.”

“It's not border Spanish. It's the standard word.”

“The word I learned was
alcatraz”

“That's the prison,” she said, “the island.”

“It doesn't matter. They're probably both standard.”

“Stand
up
for yourself, Steve. You think it's fairness but you're just being slippery.” Abruptly she'd bundled her beach gear and returned to the hotel, where she'd read most of the day.

Boehm watched her sleep. “I feel like a buffalo tortured by mosquitoes,” he whispered. “My head shaking, hooves pawing the dirt. Clouds of them. Their whine penetrates to every part of my body.”

Boehm was a zookeeper, and had loved his animals, feeding and watering them, singing to them, snatching away the sugared junk thrown in their cages, bathing them. He had enjoyed watching the elephant shudder with pleasure under the hose. When unobserved he had tried to hug the animals, particularly those considered most aloof or dangerous. Though the animals nipped and kicked him, he had succeeded in hugging all but the carnivores. Some animals had injured themselves, struggling. Anticipating Olivia's absence, however, Boehm no longer cared about the animals. By the end of his shift, their cages, less well tended, would take on a tinge of rankness.

Boehm paraded naked before Olivia, daringly, knowing if she
woke she would think him fat. After her first affair he'd begun to eat very well, steaks, Belgian waffles, sundaes, fine liquor. He planted his heels with exaggerated firmness so that his bearded face quivered. Arms over his head he pirouetted, bourreed, feeling the jiggling of his thighs, chest, belly.

Olivia was obsessed with fresh vitamins, he reminded himself, and decided to buy her fruit for breakfast. The day before, a vendor had muscled his cart through the sand on the hour. Boehm put on his trunks and went down to the beach.

Low tide exposed brown blobs of rock. A veil of stranded seaweed, infested with flies, stretched to the highwater mark. The village children,
Los Saneamienteros
, as Boehm thought of them, were playing softball. They performed as if suffering from a neurological or muscular disorder. After an elaborate windup, the pitcher fell on his side during his delivery. Runners stumbled over the bases and veered into the outfield. Boehm moved closer, into the shadow of a thatched cabana. Without apparent cause, the first baseman toppled backward. A looping fly caromed off the third baseman's glove. He sank to his knees. Cursing, the pitcher charged him. The third baseman crawled after the ball, whirled, and flung it at the pitcher's head. It traveled slowly, like a balloon, struck the boy's cheek and fell to his feet. The pitcher's nose began to bleed.