Atticus (18 page)

We introduced ourselves and we talked for five or ten minutes, no more. Reinhardt told me he was from Germany, but his English was the highly schooled kind that you hear all over Europe now and I figured that Germany was his geography of convenience, the origin of a passport he got by
on. Even then I guessed he was lying, just another guy in Mexico on the lam; there was that wise-guy shiftiness, that hustle of flattery and fearing offense, of sizing you up for the squeeze while trying too hard to be friends. You saw his kind in all the American bars—hard-drinking, no-luck, full-time liars fleeing some trouble that was not at all glamorous, financial reversals in the restaurant business or one too many wives, but who forced themselves to confide that they were in Mexico on an inheritance, here to write a novel that four or five editors were definitely interested in, or hiding out in a witness protection program, for Chrissake don't tell anybody. You heard them out if only to know what topics not to bring up again and the true story became a whiff of unpleasantness underneath all that perfume.

I have few other recollections of our first meeting but that he pronounced
have
like
haff
and
situation
without the
chu
sound of American English. Reinhardt told me if I needed a haircut—and his squinnying look said I did—he was the guy for me; he'd handled the heads of fabulously wealthy women in Hawaii—he hinted at a flair for other things, too—before he lost his work permit and took a galley job on Mick Jagger's yacht—a great guy, by the way—and happened onto a fabulously wealthy surgeon and his wife who needed Reinhardt to crew for them. A half year he was with them, sailing, playing backgammon, attending to their needs. Everything blew up a few weeks ago in Cuba—hot sex, discovery, gunplay—and he'd hightailed it here on the proceeds of the wife's Piaget watch, which he'd hocked for just such an emergency.

Well, he probably knew about the American expatriate's tolerance for bullshit and I, of course, have a further tolerance for madness, so I forgave his fabrications and when, hardly five hours later, Reinhardt bumped into me at The Scorpion (“Oh, hi!” he said. “Are you following me?”), we talked like friends in the making. I was fully medicated with gin and tonics by then and fell into a fraught stream of consciousness about Renata, an hour or more of she-done-me-wrong in forty variations, and Reinhardt took it all in oh-so-sympathetically, but fishing a little, too: Was she pretty? Did I have a picture of her? How often did I see her? Was she dating other men? Did she have a private income? And where did she live? I have forgotten my answers; I have not forgotten that I finally felt party to one of those
Strangers on a Train
routines; I half expected some unholy pact to follow when he halted his questions long enough to order a shot of José Cuervo and quaff it fast and peer resolutely into The Scorpion's mirror. But he just looked at me dully and said, “I have no money to pay for the tequila. Would you let me cut your hair?”

And so it was that Reinhardt arrived at my house one noon in the first week of January with his things in a kind of European saddlebag slung over his left shoulder. And I sat on a kitchen stool, a skirt of fabric under my chin, his silence behind me only increasing as his hands firmly held my hair and his scissors flashed, and I felt his tension for the first time and inferred that he was homosexual and hesitating over an invitation. But just as I was about to talk about what I fancied was not being said, Reinhardt filibustered about his
jail time in Honolulu for hashish smuggling. A brutal year, but he made friends with a guy inside who got him a hairdresser's job with Universal Television. I forget all the ways in which he altered his first version of his life, forget even how he ended up with a film unit manager's job on four music videos, but a friend at Tri-Star liked his work so much that he was sent to Mexico to scout locations for a famous actress's next picture (“You haff heard of her, belief me”) and then his boss went over to Paramount and the picture was put into turnaround and Reinhardt was left here high and dry. Which is why he carried a camera with him; he was always framing shots. Alan Pakula called him here just a few days ago and told him to sit tight, he was in preproduction on a film that would have a four-day shoot in Cancún and he wanted Reinhardt on his team. “And so I wait.”

I was famished for English at the time and fairly indifferent to those florid tall tales, so I offered him feeble amens through all the foregoing (“Wow.” “Too bad.” “Amazing.” “No!”), but as he put a gel on my hair, he turned his attention to me. Was I here on an inheritance? Was my father rich? Were my paintings selling well enough to afford a house like this? Oh, was I renting? Were the owners here often? Were the house and its contents fully insured? Reinhardt had seen a friend lose everything; he was just fantastically worried about me, he didn't know why. Well, he did. Don't be offended, but I seemed a wunderkind, even at forty. Which is why I ought to have worldly people to watch over my affairs. “You are so honest and trusting and others, I can tell you, are so… I have not the word:
schlau?
”

“Sly?”

“Yes! Sly. You do not realize. I have no talent myself, but I have
skills.
You know? You maybe need help with the finances? Business affairs? Finding things at the cheapest price? I have contacts. And abilities. Arranging things is my gift.”

“Here. Hold my wallet for me,” I said.

Reinhardt smiled and flicked off the hair dryer. “Excuse me?”

His scheming was so obvious, so insultingly free of finesse and bunco, that I fell into silence. And then he held a mirror up and held his face close to mine so that both of us were in the frame. “Great haircut,” I said. And it was true; just like his.

“Look at us,” he said. “We could be brothers.”

“I have one already.”

Reinhardt casually turned to put the mirror on the kitchen countertop. “Oh? And what is his name?”

“Frank.”

“And is he living in Colorado?”

But I was heading upstairs by then. I got thirty dollars in pesos and heard him fool with the Sinatra CD on the dining room player until he found “Witchcraft.” And when I got downstairs he was hunting through the full rack of discs.

“Are you casing the joint?”

Reinhardt smiled uneasily. “What does it mean, ‘casing'?”

I handed him the pesos and he stuffed them in his front
pocket with only a furtive count. “Was it expensive,” he asked, “this stereo system?”

Weeks hence, I feared, I'd return from my night work in the jungle and everything in that house would be gone, presto chango, and Reinhardt would be showing his kindness to some other wunderkind. “I have something I'd like to give you,” I said.

“Oh?” he asked, and there was a child's Christmas glimmer in his eyes as I went to the hallway closet and hauled out a fair painting I'd fired off of a hillside and rainstorm skies and the seething gray waters just below my studio. I was frankly surprised by the honest respect he offered that sketch, the fascination and honor and joy Reinhardt took in holding it up and fully appraising it. You'd have thought it was a Corot. “This is fantastic!” he said. “This is great!” And there was a faint gloss of tears in his eyes as he fetchingly grinned at me. “We Europeans take friendship seriously. I'll have to do something for you.”

Eight years ago at an East Village party I locked on to a psychologist who was researching a book on “thereness,” as she called it, the high feeling some people have after going to a geography far from home and finding a
here is where I was meant to be
that they'd never felt before, as if the function of their lives was the bringing them to that place. I felt that way when I first got to Resurrección, but initially thought it was just because Renata was there. But she was lost to me then, I knew that. I would telephone Stuart's villa and Stuart would be the first one to it, a husk in his voice as
he asked, just to annoy me, “And whom shall I say is calling?” Envy and rivalry for Renata's affections were turning our meetings into skirmishes and our retreats into siegecraft and intrigues. Stuart told me once, “You'll be the ruin of her,” as if I were a hooligan trampling the flower of Renata's reputation, and Stuart treated me in other ways like a frat boy and lout, like a fired employee. He pitied me openly at parties, he put up with me as one does a chronic pain, he once cleared our places after a dinner and pitched my cutlery into the trash.

Elated when Renata was with me, sick with despair and emptiness when she was away, I was powerless in the relationship, and she played with that just as I probably would have in the same position. Renata slept with me for old time's sake or out of inchoate spite for Stuart or in the hell-with-it spirit of a high school girl grown tired of the heavy struggles in the car. We did not do ourselves proud, Renata and I, and she came to the house one afternoon looking sleepless and forlorn and cried-out, and she told me, “I just can't do this anymore.”

But she did do that anymore. We were both completely dependable in our irresponsibility. Whenever Stuart was away, I hurried over to the villa in order to sit in palapa shade with Renata and piña coladas, our knees just touching, holding my stare on a bead of sweat as it trickled down her side and I thought
Oh, lucky droplet!,
and being gradually destroyed by the soft caress of her voice. Each sentence burnished and fathomable. The hour or two would have to end for some reason having to do with Stuart and we'd kiss and
hold each other's misery to ourselves and my hands would find the old familiar places until she pushed me away.

Hardly a week before I went up to Colorado for the holidays I called her, my stomach flipping and my throat tightening with worry, wrapping myself inside the phone cord like a sitcom simpleton, and I tried to fix where I was in our emotional geography, fully unbuttoning my chest and informing Renata I felt like an inflamed teenager just born into the world of romance,
No one has ever loved like this,
and I was frustrated that there was no other way of putting it but to say again that I really really really loved her, had always loved her, as she knew, and the only future with any solace or purity or meaning for me was one with Renata in it: Would she fly up to Colorado with me? And then could we get married?

Renata sighed like the slow drag of a razor blade and said, “Ohhh, Scott …,” four beats at least to that phrase, four hammer blows to the spike I'd held to my fluttering heart. She told me she didn't trust herself with commitment, she felt too much turbulence just then, she didn't know if she was right for me, why didn't I try to find somebody else?

I was boyish with embarrassment. Awkward as a box full of shoes. Half-afraid I'd choke up or my shaky voice would crack, I hurriedly put up the fences and told her, “Well, there's no pressure. I just wanted some clarity, to find out what was real.”

She said, “I think this is the reality we've heard so much about.”

“Well, that's why I needed to say it. Everything gets to be Las Vegas after a while.”

She told me prettily, “Don't feel rejected.”

“If you say so.” The phone seemed to weigh a hundred pounds. Silt seemed to be funneling from my head to my feet.

“We can stay friends, can't we?”

We'd both gone to high school, apparently. “Oh sure,” I said. “Hell yes. I'd hate not seeing you at all.”

“Stuart's here,” she then whispered, and hung up.

On good days I painted in the jungle, faking it mostly, far too much hard-won technique and far too little imagination. Otherwise I hung out at the hotels, half-baked on hashish or the hard drugs I could score off college kids on their getaway flings, as goofy as that, cruising the
playa
in jams and sunglasses and a teal satin shirt, like the playboy of the Caribbean, hunting babes who were already high and inviting them home for an up-all-night, and then coming to in that
Oh, Jesus
chaos of emptied bottles and passed-out strangers and somebody softly sobbing upstairs. Anything to stay buzzed, to forget my obsession: self-prescribing Dexedrine, Percodan, Ritalin, and Valium at the
farmacia
and trying out fancy chemistry projects until I felt the attack of the thousand spiders. I was halfway through an imitation of Malcolm Lowry in Cuernavaca: fit and tanned in the afternoon, grinning for the camera in white shorts and huaraches, with Ovid's
Metamorphoses
in one hand and a full bottle of gin in the other; and far far gone by
nighttime—feckless, sulking, furious, unshaved, in a fuddle of shame and neediness, failure becoming his full-time job.

But as skin-your-nose low as I was, there were a hundred others just like me down there, the formerly talented, the formerly with-it, hulking over shot glasses in the frown of drunkenness, not talking because we couldn't form words, having no company but fear, and pitifully tilting down for a taste because our hands weren't working quite right. You could find us haunting the
centro
at five
A.M
., walking car wrecks and homicides, waiting for the cantinas to open again and looking away from each other because we hated seeing that face in the mirror. You heard all kinds of reasons for being in the tropics: for their arthritis, their pensions, the fishing, the tranquil and easygoing ways, but the fact was a lot of us stayed because Mexico treated us like children, indulging our laziness, shrugging at our foolishness, and generally offering the silence and tolerance of a good butler helping the blotto Lord What-a-waste to his room. In high school my brother knowingly told me, as a kind of dire warning, “There are people who do on a regular basis things you have never even imagined!” I was now one of those people. Eventually it had become fairly ordinary for me to lose the handle and black out so far from home it might as well have been Cleveland, sitting there in a foul doorway in the
barrio,
fairly sure I'd had sex but not knowing with whom, blood on my shirt front, puke on my shoes, kids stealing the change from my pockets, and so little idea where my Volkswagen was that I used up an afternoon in a taxi just prowling the streets until I found it. And
then, of course, there was a celebration and I fell into a wander again.