A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain (36 page)

“Yes,” Eileen said. “You know about him?”

“Sí, señora. I like good music. I lived in your country three years, in Los Angeles. That’s how I speak English like you. I listened to the radio all the time and I liked the good music.” The driver raised his hand like a conductor and sang, “Da da da dum,” the opening to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, the Daily Double Audio Clue only last week on “Jeopardy.” “But don’t worry,” the driver added quickly. “I’m just a regular Joe. I liked the bad music, too, in Los Angeles.”

“Who else lives in Gringo Gulch?” Eileen asked, afraid, I suspect, that if our driver strayed too far, the men would reclaim the conversation. Not that I would have minded that, really. I wanted to hear them connecting to each other, though it was even very interesting to me just observing this shared silence between them. They were both looking out windows and I’m sure each man was conscious of the other.

The driver said, “There was some lord and lady from England. The Queen even came in her yacht and visited them. And also living in Puerto Vallarta is a very important American I bet you don’t know.” The cabbie paused for a moment, like we were supposed to guess.

“I bet it ain’t Westmoreland,” Frank said.

“Any clue?” Eileen said.

The cabbie made an exaggerated nod. “I will tell you his name and it will still be hard for you. Milton Gunzburg.”

Frank hooted at this. “The famous Milton Gunzburg is living in Puerto Vallarta? Hell, you remember him, don’t you, Vinh? He’s the guy who landed his chopper in the middle of Tu Do Street, got him about four bargirls, and took off again for Vung Tau and some Air Cav Rand R.”

Vinh grunted, Frank laughed, and the driver said, “That must be another Milton Gunzburg.”

Eileen leaned forward. “Don’t you pay any attention to him, señor,” and she dug her knuckle into Frank’s shoulder. He flicked at her hand but without any anger, just a casual little flick like a mosquito had buzzed him.

I started feeling disloyal to Eileen. I’d been happy just to sit back and watch all this, but she needed some help. So I asked the driver, “Who is this Milton Gunzburg of Puerto Vallarta?”

The driver turned his face way around to look at Eileen and me. “The inventor of 3-D movies.”

I pointed to the street in front of the driver, just to remind him that this was all in 3-D, too. He took my hint and looked to the front just in time to curve around a slow-moving pickup truck full of collapsed and bundled cardboard boxes. He didn’t even flinch.

“This was a very important invention,” he said. “My favorite movie is ‘The House of Wax.’ You know the movie?”

“Yes,” I said, “but I’ve never seen it in 3-D.”

“When I lived in L.A. I saw it there in a theater. Also ‘Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone.’ These are my favorites in 3-D. I hope Peter Strauss someday will move to Puerto Vallarta. He starred in ‘Spacehunter.’ I would like to drive him wherever he wants to go. He is my favorite actor. Did you see him in ‘Rich Man, Poor Man’? It was a wonderful thing from American television. Even without 3-D. But Peter Strauss is even better in 3-D.”

Vinh’s voice was suddenly in my ear, pitched low. “Do we have to go by the house? Isn’t the movie set enough?”

I glanced at him and he was looking at me with his head a little bit dipped, like he had glasses on and was peeking over them. This was the position he assumed when he was asking something that he knew he shouldn’t.

“It’s okay,” Eileen said, putting her hand on my arm. “Let’s skip it.”

I glowered at Vinh and he shrugged. “No, no,” he said. “I’m sorry. It’s just that we should have plenty of sunlight for the trip to the movie set.”

“It’s barely noon,” I said, not letting him wriggle away.

“Noon,” Frank said. “There’s a place to eat at this beach, isn’t there?”

“Good food at the beach,” the driver said. “They sell whole fish roasted on a stick.”

“Oh man,” Frank said, like he’d just heard about a plane crash. Eileen leaned forward and said to the driver, “You can skip the Burton-Taylor house.”

“No, don’t do that, driver,” Vinh said.

“I’m Esteban,” the driver said.

“You guys hate your C rations as much as we hated ours?” This was Frank broadcasting from another part of the world.

“You can call me Esteban.”

“I don’t mean to drag you around,” Eileen said, leaning a little bit across me to address Vinh.

“It was rude of me to try to overrule your wishes.” Vinh spoke with a combination of gentleness and firmness that I have always admired in him.

“It’s very dose now,” Esteban said.

I wanted this for myself, too. I made my voice firm for the driver. “Fine. Drive us past.”

“Of course we hated our C rations,” Vinh said.

“It figures,” Frank said.

“But not as much as we’d hate a fish on a stick,” Vinh said, and I wished I had the privilege of digging my knuckle into his arm, even if it was to provoke only a casual flick in response.

Frank laughed. “Roger that.”

I was sorry I was sitting in the center in the backseat. I wanted to just put my head out the window and watch the street go by like there was nobody else around. But as it was, I looked across Eileen and watched the shaggy fields and the men talked some more about Army food and we passed a low, whitewashed arena with big cutout signs on top, the silhouettes of bulls. A place for bullfights, I supposed. And then there were palm and coconut trees and then a run of shops and I just kept my mind out the window, as Esteban had finally let himself be shut up by the husbands.

Then we took a curve and there was a statue of a seahorse and we were running along the beach and we passed an artist on the street with his work propped up on display, and the paintings were of tigers and Jesus Christ and Elvis Presley on black velvet, and I hoped Vinh didn’t see this, but it all made me smile. Am I somehow perverse this way? Not that I would buy a black-velvet Elvis Presley, much less hang it on a wall in my home. But there is something that makes me smile about it. I have seen Elvis Presley many times as they sell his face and his voice on late-night television—The King, The One and Only, The Idol of Millions, The Loved and the Mourned, just a phone call and a credit-card number away. Why does this make me feel comfortable? Even safe?

The car was on a cobbled street now and we were jiggling and rattling about and the men’s voices were cracking and they stopped speaking. And soon we turned into a narrow lane and Esteban said, “Up ahead is where the lovers lived in 1963.”

We bounced along and there was a stone wall on one side and an undetached run of houses on the right and Esteban said, “It is where you see the bridge over the street.”

A stone pedestrian bridge rose from a roof covered in rosebushes and arched over the cobblestones and landed on the second floor of the house across the way. Esteban stopped the car. “Would you like to get out and take pictures?”

I felt Eileen turn my way, though it was probably Vinh that she looked at. “No,” she said. “This is fine.”

“There were really two houses,” Esteban said. “The one on the left was Elizabeth Taylor’s and the one on the right was Richard Burton’s, and the whole world watched that bridge for months to see them go back and forth.”

I’m sure that Eileen and I were quite a Sight to further irritate our husbands—we both leaned forward and strained to look at the two houses. The bridge was tan and had a waist-high rail with a row of little pot-bellied balusters. I’d learned that word, “balusters,” some-where—I don’t remember where-and if it ever appears on a quiz show, I will probably be the only one to get it right. Why do I go off on this little detail now? Because my mind snagged on it even then, even though I obviously was very interested in the houses before me. And why was I distracted by that detail? Sometimes I can read myself pretty well. It was because the bridge between the two houses made me feel bad. It seemed so empty. It arched there against the blue sky and it cried out for some lover to come across and take his woman in his arms, But it was empty. The rosebushes, which were full of blooms, nodded faintly in a breeze and the bridge stayed empty.

“You like to buy this house?” Esteban said. “It is for sale. Richard Burton bought it for Liz Taylor as a birthday present many years ago and do you know how much he paid?”

“What year?” This was Vinh, whose sense of business was suddenly stimulated.

“I don’t know. Maybe 1964 Sometime about then.”

“Seventy-five thousand,” Vinh said without a pause, and all I could see was that empty bridge. The man who’d crept over it at night so that the world would not notice, he was dead.

“Very close, senor. Sixty thousand dollars American.”

Vinh leaned forward next to me and I sat back. He said, “And what are they asking for the house now?”

“One million.”

“Ha!” Vinh declared, and I’m not sure what business conclusion this represented. But when Esteban said that the house had been for sale for nearly five years, and no one had bought it yet, Vinh nodded like he wasn’t surprised.

It was now that a little voice chirped into the car. We all turned our heads and a young girl was at the back window, right next to Vinh, and she had a basket slung over her shoulder. She lifted a yellow flower that was really very beautiful, with large blossoms and a white center. “You buy?” she said. “Copa de oro.”

Esteban turned around in his seat. “‘Copa de oro,’ you know what that is?”

“A cup of gold,” Eileen said.

“Right, senora. From the movie.”

“Yes,” Eileen said. “Richard Burton buys it for Sue Lyon at the beginning of ‘The Night of the Iguana.’”

I was impressed. This was a detail that I myself had forgotten. I wanted to reach across Vinh and take the flower. I almost did. I had told my arm to rise and move through my husband’s space and pluck this beautiful flower from the little girl’s hand. I remembered the scene now. Burton, the defrocked and alcoholic priest who could not restrain his desire for the women who reminded him that he was alive, buys this flower, the cup of gold, for the sexy young girl on the bus tour that breaks down here in Puerto Vallarta. Even this ravaged and failed man knew that a woman would love a flower such as this, the copa de oro. I was prepared now to lift my arm, to take action, even as Esteban said, “Would you like to buy a flower?”

But Vinh and Frank in chorus said, “No,” and Frank said, “We’ve got this movie set to get to,” and there was nothing more to be done.

Esteban stuck his head out the window and said something to the girl—there was clearly some connection between them, at least a working arrangement for when he brought tourists to this spot. I’m sure Vinh noticed it and I figured he felt smug about it, so as the taxi began to move, I leaned near him and said, “I loved that flower.”

I don’t say something like this very often, so it must have had a sharp effect, because Vinh turned his face to me and he looked very sad for a moment. It was clearly sadness, to my eye. His mouth sagged and his eyes softened, and I wondered what he would do. But we were going faster now and I turned away to look at the bridge growing larger and then we passed beneath it, the shadow rushing over the car, and Vinh did not say, Wait, let’s go back and get a flower. He did not even say, Oh, I’m sorry, Gabrielle; perhaps another time. He said nothing at all, though he may have continued to wear his sad face. I don’t know. I didn’t look at him.

The taxi was climbing in the hills now, the roads twisting and turning. At first beneath us were the stacked shacks of the poor people, with the baked red mission-tile roofs, and then we were among the villas, the immaculate high walls and the stippled stucco, and then we were rising even above the rich and I watched the ocean and it was very beautiful, very romantic, and I liked being near Vinh, even if he was hardened against all of this.

The roads were very bad, even here, and we had to slow almost to a stop for the big potholes, again and again, but all along the ride there were new hotels going up. We could not go more than half a mile without seeing another hotel with the men barebacked and languorous on the open floors, just the frames of the rooms constructed and the ocean visible through them, and the men were carrying a bucket or smoothing a wall with a trowel or just standing around, happy to be in the shade of a room with its walls open to the sea.

Finally I saw a landmark that the guidebooks had told me about, three huge rocks hunched into the water not far offshore, and one of them had a great arch through it, like a pair of hip boots standing out there with no man in them. Mismaloya was nearby. Then we passed a large hotel, a finished hotel, and we descended a little hill and the road that cut down to the beach ran along a concrete wall that contained the site of still another hotel under construction and the road was rutted and scruffy and instinctively I said to Vinh, “They’re still building.” It was an apology for the weeds and the ruts and the dog peeing against the wall, and then we stopped at the back edge of the beach.

“Here you are,” Esteban said, and he sprang from the cab and circled the car, opening our doors, and even before we could step out, the vendors were swarming around and Esteban was talking to them, waving them away, but not too far. The vendors in white clothes were draped in rugs and silver jewelry and a man was motioning us to a stack of inner tubes for rent. A dog drifted by with skin sores and I concentrated on the beach, the waves coming up, but to our left was another little river running down the mountains, and the surf at this beach, too, was smeared with brown.

I looked around and thought that this had been a big mistake, that I would lose face, as the Chinese say, with Vinh. Of course he was right. This place was not ready for the kind of pleasures that even I had come to expect. Not that if it had all been perfectly beautiful—immaculate—Vinh would have thought any better of it. Then it would have been just like television, slick and irritating to him in a different way. And as I thought these things, a ruckus of men’s voices started behind me. I turned and Vinh was holding his hand out as if to brush Frank away. In Vinh’s other hand was his wallet and he said, “I’ll handle this one.”