In the Country (10 page)

I smiled as he returned to our table. “Don't quit your day job.”

“Your turn,” he said.

I shook my head. “I take a good picture—that's it.”

“I don't believe you. What if you didn't take a good picture? What would you do?”

My mind went blank, and hummed like feedback from a microphone. “What would
you
do if you couldn't take pictures?”

“Me? Oh man, what wouldn't I do?” Jorge stretched his arms and laced his fingers behind his head. Looking down at his stomach, he said, “Someday this'll be a keg and not a six-pack. You know? I would love to act.”

“No cliché there,” I said. In the last few years Sabine had thought about acting, and even landed a few walk-on parts here and there. She would rehearse scenes with me even though I was no good at reading aloud. One scene involved a woman who couldn't work because of a traffic accident and sued the driver for loss of earnings. I looked at “loss of earnings” too quickly and said “loss of earrings.” The misreading stuck. Every time we practiced I'd say “earrings” and then “sorry, earnings.” I thought, wouldn't it be nice to be able to sue someone for loss of earrings? And get back all the missing earrings you had left in bars or beds or clubs or cabs? “You're kind of an idiot, Alice,” Sabine had said, but there was laughter and forgiveness in it.

A fat woman got onstage and started on that song from
Titanic.
Jorge was gazing very intently at the karaoke screen, with its beaches and mountain ranges and lovers walking hand in hand above the neon lyrics. A shadow of stubble had begun on his jaw. “You know, you'd get so much work in New York,” I said to him suddenly. For a second I imagined him sharing the apartment with me, taking up the room I had denied the Czech and Argentine and Senegalese girls. “Did you ever think about living there? In my agency the ethnic boys are huge.”

“Why would I?” Jorge looked amused. “All the hot American girls come here,” he said—and smiled, hotly.

Day three they shot us in a studio. “What happened here?” asked Carmen, frowning up at me. There was a bruised ridge, the size of a baby carrot, in the middle of my forehead, where I'd knocked into the jeepney. She called the photographer over.

I prayed I was less trouble for them to keep than to replace. It was not completely true that flexibility was my only skill, or that I could do nothing but model. During lean months in New York, I used to go out with some other young pretty people who knew how to dress and laugh. Cafés and bars had us sit near the windows, on their slowest nights, and act like we were having the time of our lives. Some of these places paid us; others let us eat and drink for free; others said they would pay us, then not only
didn't
pay us but even charged us for the food and drinks. I had also worked as a shot girl, cinched into a dirndl or a corset or a sailor dress, depending on the liquor company. I circulated dance floors to peddle sticky-sweet drinks in test tubes or dosage cups. College boys became theatrical when drunk, said things like “You are so hot it
hurts
me,” and tipped extra for a body shot or a little pawing—though we were supposed to say no to that. One night a girl saw her boyfriend suck the salt off my neck before downing his tequila. It was true his mouth lingered on me too long. His tongue was oddly cold, and furry in texture, and I said, “Are you checking for a pulse, or what?” I had taken his money and turned away by the time his girlfriend announced herself. She lunged at me from behind, knocking a rainbow of test-tube flavors out of my arms and clawing my neck. The next morning my booker called about a go-see. Sabine helped me sponge foundation over the evidence: a hickey from the drunken kid and fingernail tracks from his jealous girlfriend. “Most action I've had all month,” I told Sabine. But that was a bad night. Other nights were better, and the gum of spit and sweat and alcohol washed off easily in the shower.

“She'll be in the background anyway,” said the photographer, squinting up at me. “As long as we don't take her profile…”

Carmen was annoyed. “If I needed a rhino,” she said, “I would've held a go-see at the zoo.” Her words buzzed at my forehead and at my stomach, which was flatter today, at least. The photographer directed me to the porch of a fake grass hut on stilts. The studio was lit to look like dawn. I wore a cotton eyelet bedsheet that I gathered at my chest, my hair deliberately tousled.

Jorge stood a few feet in front of the hut. “I'd do this,” he told me, picking up last night's conversation as if no time had passed. He gazed at our backdrop.

“Make studio sets?” I said.

He looked insulted. “Live off the land.”

The “land” was a Technicolor vista of rice terraces and sky. The photographer shouted to me about Marilyn curves and a time in America when butter was golden. The directions sounded strange to me. Where I came from, everyone was over people like me; they were always looking for the Next Big Thing, and It Girls came in brown and onyx-black. “Peaches and cream,” said Carmen, and I loathed them all for loving something so commonplace—even if that commonplace thing was me.

After work, Jorge sped me into his car, which had that cooped-up airplane smell inside. He didn't say where we were going. I recognized the place slowly. Balete Drive reminded me a little of the French Quarter in New Orleans: tall, sturdy-looking trees, large old houses set far back from the traffic, scrollwork on the gates and shutters on the windows. Some of them were walled in. Vines hung down from the trees and brushed over Jorge's windshield as we drove. We stopped at one of the iron gates, which was unlocked. Jorge parked the car next to a motorcycle in the driveway.

I followed him inside to yet another huddle of brown limbs and laughter and chatter. Some men sat at a low table with cigarettes and beer bottles, playing bingo.
“Hoy!”
they shouted when they saw Jorge, and one man—dressed in Jorge's usual work ensemble of jeans and no shirt—jumped to his feet and half-hugged Jorge, half-shook his hand. “Alice, this is my friend Will,” said Jorge. Will welcomed me and kissed my hand, then turned and ruffled Jorge's hair. A young woman was curled up on the sofa, bottle-feeding a baby. Jorge murmured something to her, kissing her cheek and stroking the baby's bald head. “Alice, this is Will's sister Rose,” he said. Rose just smiled and looked at her baby, swaying with it. I couldn't tell the baby's sex until Jorge took it from her, bringing it up close to me. Two ruby studs glinted in the tiny earlobes. “I'd have a kid. And raise it well,” he whispered to me. “I'd do that in a heartbeat.” To the room, he announced: “Alice has heard stories about Balete Drive.”

Will laughed. “Don't worry. This is my grandmother's place—too shitty for anyone to haunt,” he said.

“No, it's great.” I didn't know what else to say. Two women materialized from a set of stairs near the back of the living room. They started clearing a round table where it seemed a feast had taken place, balled napkins and broken crab shells on the dishes. Everywhere I turned, expensive-looking objects mingled with crap, reminding me of a fashion editorial I once shot (“How to Mix Low & Luxe”), dressed in three-thousand-dollar coats and Payless shoes. Silk tapestries hung on the wall above dusty orange shag couches. A curio cabinet was empty except for a jade horse and branches of red coral. Jorge's and Will's friends were mismatched, too. Three of them looked young and put-together. I recognized at least one designer shirt. Two others seemed greasy, aging, toothless. We sat on the gritty, unclean floor. The coffee table, when I touched it, had the heft and coldness of real marble.

A friend of Will's—one of the greasy, toothless guys—introduced himself as Piper. The reason for his nickname was a high melodic whistle, which he demonstrated. A gray mouse scurried out from under the curio cabinet to the middle of the floor. The mouse stood on its hind legs while rubbing its front paws together, as if to warm them. Then it returned to all fours and disappeared again under the cabinet. Everyone laughed, and I pretended to—even though I hated rodents, and the evil speed at which they darted out and disappeared.

It was a rodent that got me back to work, one day when I had started a new listen-delete-sleep cycle with my voice mail. “Why don't you come into the office, Alice,” my booker was saying. “We need to talk about your career. Are you still in this, or are you out?” I was thinking maybe if I slept long enough, the decision would be made for me, when a mouse darted out from under my bed and disappeared between the white take-out cartons. I was up from the floor and standing on the windowsill faster than you could say “evil.” The next voice mail was about my credit card; I caught the main points, which were “past due,” and “collection agency.” I called my booker back. “In,” I said, when he picked up.

The games we played on Balete Drive passed like a dream, without any fixed rules or reason. We used buttons and shells as playing chips. A glass aquarium sat on the table, filled with coins—they kept calling it the betting pool, but no one kept track really of what went in or out. Sometimes coins were taken from the pool to use as bingo chips as well. One by one, the guests went home and the women went upstairs, until only Will, Jorge, and I remained in the living room.

“It's a long drive back,” Jorge said. “Alice and I are pretty tired.” That was all he needed to say to his old friend. Will gave us some mothball-scented T-shirts to sleep in. At the kitchen sink Jorge and I cleaned our teeth with red toothpaste and our fingers. Rats had made a nest in a vent along the top of the kitchen wall, and I could hear them shrieking. “It's an old house,” Jorge said quietly, as if defending it. He spat into the sink and splashed his face with water.

The lights went out.

“Brownout,” said Jorge. “Fuck.”

Without thinking I kissed him, my eyes not quite adjusted to the dark, not finding his mouth right away. Our tongues were sweet from the red toothpaste.

In an upstairs room, we took off our clothes slowly. Trying to keep quiet elongated everything. “I have a really long torso,” I said, and felt my body lengthening to prove it.

“Your torso's fine,” he said.

I started babbling—“George. Can I call you George?”—not wanting to be silly but not wanting, either, to match his intensity or his seriousness. He shushed me with a thumb above my lip—the place where the scar would fall, on him.

I said, “It's just that
whore-hey,
in English, sounds—”

He shushed me again, laughing a little. “I know what it sounds like.” We lay down, and he raised my legs up so my toes touched the wall.

In the middle of the night I woke to the whir of a ceiling fan. Electricity had come back to Balete Drive. I got up, found a bathroom at the end of the corridor, and reached for the string hanging from its naked bulb. In the light, I saw the bathroom had no boundaries. A faucet came out of the wall, with a plastic pail, cracked at the rim, under the spout. There was no sink or shower, only a drain in the floor. Two mirrors hung opposite one another: a square one above the toilet tank, and a round one on the back of the bathroom door. I bent down to lift the lid of the toilet seat.

I couldn't sit on a toilet, in a double-mirrored bathroom, without remembering. The night Sabine died, we had gone to a party on Mercer Street, in a fancy apartment whose owner we didn't know. It was a triplex, with spiral staircases and a white grand piano in the living room. Someone called me into a bathroom that had mirrored walls, a mirrored ceiling, and a mirrored floor, on which Sabine lay, unconscious. A fun-house bathroom. As I knelt to her, at least four other versions of me did the same. People assumed—and I did too, at first—that she had overdosed on something. That would have been typical, if a little eighties, of a model. But it was nothing so dramatic as that. I picked her up—how many times had one of us done that, when the other was drunk or sick or sad or just horsing around?—but this felt different, her skin already growing cold, her weight a stranger's weight.

A burst aneurysm, the doctor told me, in the brain. Did I notice the warning signs, they asked: had she complained of blurry vision, feeling weak or numb? “No,” I told the doctor truthfully. I didn't say we'd both set out that night to get as sloppy as we could, and even if I were to notice that her pupils had dilated or her speech was slurring, I'd have taken it as a sign that we were right on track. I didn't mention that I'd been sitting in a ghost chair, laughing at a joke told by some guy I was considering sleeping with. Was she a regular cocaine user? Not unless we had money, I said, which wasn't “regular.”

Essentially she'd had a stroke, which struck me so much as a thing that happened to old people that I thought, at her hospital bedside,
Are we old?
But it was possible, the doctor said, that she'd been born with this—an inch at most, a weakness on the wall of one of her brain arteries, a thin balloon that after years of growing happened to rupture that night.

It stunned me to lose the person I had known and lived with for a decade to something that was a secret from both of us. We had seen each other through colds and fevers, cleanses and crash diets, STD and pregnancy scares, bad drug trips of the kind some people thought killed her, the mole on her ankle that turned out to be nothing, once she bothered to have it checked out, a lump in my armpit that did have to be excised, as a precaution. She knew that more than one tequila shot made me miserable the next day; I knew that tap water and any less than five hours of sleep made her skin break out like a teenager's. We'd seen more of each other's bodies than of any body we had ever fucked, no question.

Not to mention we
discussed
our bodies, day in and night out: every bone and muscle, every gland and errant hair, was fair game. It's possible that most girls bring these things up now and then with their close friends. But girls who live or die by their metabolisms, whose reactions to caffeine, herbs, or laxatives can mean the difference between shot-girl double shifts and a thousand dollars an hour just to sit there? We were scientific and exhaustive about it. Sabine would not have been amused that her body kept this information from her, after a lifetime spent studying it. But she wasn't around to learn the news. I was the one blindsided. It made me wonder what secrets
my
body was hiding from me, when and where my own flesh would betray me after the years I'd spent getting to know it.