Naked in the Promised Land (31 page)

I never asked about the jade and lapis vases and all the lithographs, or the crystal elephant or the ivory statue; but after we left the house in the Los Feliz Hills that June I never saw them again.

It was night when we arrived at the little Mazatlán airport. To a dark, squat man standing beside a taxi Mark spoke in Spanish, giving the address of the apartment he'd rented. Cigarette dangling from his lips, the
man piled our suitcases into the trunk and opened the back door for us, never making eye contact with me. Then he sped us down long, bumpy stretches of unlit road in the rattling automobile, passing clusters of dilapidated little houses and stray mongrels who barked at our tires and chased us till we were gone from their village. The heavy, humid air wafted through the open window, its smell foreign and exciting; but it made me feel lonely too. I reached for Mark's hand in the dark, and he let me hold it.

Then lights loomed up before us and, soon, lively avenues. "
Aqui, aqui,
" Mark said, directing the driver down a narrow street. The car slowed and then stopped in front of a two-story building with a red, white, and blue
BEBE PEPSI
sign in the window of a little store on the ground floor.

When I stepped from the taxi my heel squished on something. I looked down. Swarms of huge cockroaches, each the size of a finger—the street was black with them. I shuddered and jumped back into the car.

"It's okay," Mark said. "They come out after the night rains."

"Yuk, disgusting!"

"Oh, Lil, c'mon. They'll be gone in the morning." He extended a hand to extract me from the back seat. "You just have to watch where you put your feet," he said distractedly, paying the driver who'd deposited our luggage on top of the ubiquitous cockroaches.

The apartment smelled of disinfectant and was furnished with only a lumpy bed and a scarred dresser and nightstand in one room, a mismatched couch and chair in another. The kitchen was bare. But the place seemed clean enough, and when we lay down on the bed I could smell the lavender soap with which the sheets had been washed. The sound of voices crooning to guitars drifted up from the street.

"Mariachis. I love them. They play at a restaurant down the street," Mark whispered from his pillow. "We heard them every night the last time I stayed here."

I snuggled into him, my lips on his neck, listening to the mellifluous Spanish. Yes, I loved the sound of the mariachis too. I wouldn't think about anything but being here with Mark, seeing Mexico with him. It would be fine. It would be wonderful. My husband was already asleep,
breathing softly and regularly. I tamped down the free-floating anxieties that kept trying to erupt deep inside me. Finally I too relaxed into sleep.

The cockroaches were gone in the morning, just as Mark had said, and the beach, where the water was bathtub warm and picture blue, was only a couple of blocks away. At a little café from which you could see the still-empty beach, we had breakfast—rich black coffee and bolillos with pale yellow butter. Then Mark rolled up his white linen trouser legs, and we held our sandals in our hands and strolled down by the water. With my free hand I took his arm, but he kept it hanging limply at his side, so I soon let go. Maybe people didn't walk arm-in-arm on Mexican beaches.

"Look who's back!" A hefty redheaded woman in an off-the-shoul-der orange sundress shouted a greeting to Mark from behind the bar when we later walked into O'Brien's. "It's Señor Doctor Mark! Where's Alfredo—and where's ... what's his name?" she asked him.

"And where are the snows of yesteryear?" He grinned. She came around the bar to hug him, but he didn't introduce me. "That's Lucille O'Brien, a real busybody," he whispered to me when she busied herself with another customer. "But she's a big success, ex-pats love this place."

"Coco loco": he told me the name of the new drink—a green coconut with a hole on top, half the milk still in it mixed with ice and tequila. When you finished drinking, you spooned out the soft, sweet meat. We sipped at them on the verandah of O'Brien's while we gazed at the dark rock formations in the ocean. The water was emerald now. The rocks looked like little volcanoes, jutting out right in front of O'Brien's, just as Mark had described them months earlier.

Coco loco, an Irish-American woman who ran a bar on the Mazatlán beach, ex-pats, the blue and emerald waters and fantastically shaped rocks: I was swept up in the romance of the moment.
What a path I'd traveled from a furnished room in East L.A.,
I marveled as I sipped.

From the next table, a tanned blond boy in a white T-shirt grinned at us. A big straw sombrero dangled by a cord around his neck and made him look like a kid at Knott's Berry Farm, waiting to have his picture snapped. "Where you from?" he asked Mark pleasantly. He'd already ordered a second round of coco locos for us and now rose to pull a roll
of bills as big as my fist from a back pocket to pay for the drinks the waitress deposited on our table. His arms were knotted with muscles that looked grossly exaggerated on his short frame. "I heard Lucille say you just got here. Welcome." He saluted us with his raised glass. He said his name was Stefano, from Newark, New Jersey (though I thought his accent sounded more like Dallas, Texas), lived in Mazatlán now, before that Oaxaca, and before that Cuernavaca. "Haven't been back to the States in seven years," he drawled.

Later Mark ordered another round of coco locos for all three of us. "Oh, no, no more for me." I laughed and hopped up. "Can't we get some lunch?" I'd be quick and clever; I had to keep Mark from the one more sip that made a mess of things.

Stefano walked out with us and led us to a little outdoor market down the beach where, he said, you could sit at a table on the sand and order unpeeled shrimp that had been in the ocean thirty minutes earlier. While we ate, he stopped some strolling mariachis and asked them to play "Bésame Mucho." He pushed his own plate of shrimp and shells aside and sang along with the mariachis, his arms extended and palms turned upward, as though imploring an imaginary lover to kiss him a lot.

Somehow, much later, we ended up at O'Brien's again, the three of us sitting on the verandah as the sun dropped slowly into the wine-dark sea and left the sky streaked with orange and red. Mark ordered beers—Dos Equis, he called them. I wasn't too upset because I'd never seen anyone get drunk on beer. Stefano talked on and on, about traveling all over Mexico on an old burro strapped with ten saddlebags, working for the Mexican government in some capacity he wasn't at liberty to divulge, winning the bantamweight wrestling championship in Guadalajara over Antonio Cardoza by a dumb-luck knockout. He'd spin a tale, we'd make a few comments, and then there'd be silence for ten or fifteen minutes. In the dim light we'd watch seagulls and pelicans circle round and round the weird rocks, where they'd finally roost for the night. Then Stefano would launch into another tale. He didn't demand much response, and Mark seemed amused by the theatrics of the stories he spun. With his blond hair bleached white by the sun, a toothy boyish grin, a child's red pouty lips, he didn't look much older than I. I rather
liked him and thought he was interesting and droll. But finally I wished he'd leave so that Mark and I could walk together on the beach again, in the twilight.

Only when the stars twinkled so close above O'Brien's that it seemed if I held my arm up I'd be touching them, did I notice that Mark had disappeared. In the silence I'd looked over to tell him about the stars, and his chair was empty. Stefano was still sitting there, on the other side of the vacant chair. "Where'd my husband go?" I asked him, laughing at my oblivion.

"Probably to the loo." Stefano shrugged. "I've been watching the stars."

We both returned to our lonesome pursuit until it felt as if a long time had passed. "Would you mind looking in the men's room? Maybe he's ill or something," I finally asked, feeling a little prick of dread. What would I do if something happened to Mark in this foreign place?

Stefano returned a few minutes later, shaking his head. Mark wasn't in the men's room. "He probably just took a little walk," Stefano drawled, and gave my hand a quick pat. "Nothing to worry about."

But I couldn't help it. I had no money with me, and I wasn't even sure I could find the way back to the new apartment.

"Maybe he felt sick and went home," Stefano offered. "Would you like me to go with you and see?" His eyes were gentle, but what would I do if Mark wasn't there?

I hurried with Stefano down brightly lit busy streets, feeling the insistent gaze of men who stood about in little groups. "Looky
chiquita,
" one leered into my face and moved to touch me. "Vamoos," Stefano hissed at him, and the man started in surprise, as though he hadn't noticed that I was with someone. We wandered up and down the maze of strange streets as I tried frantically to remember which way Mark and I had walked that morning, but nothing looked familiar. Suddenly the red, white, and blue
BEBE PEPSI
sign on the building where we'd slept the night before loomed up miraculously.

Stefano bounded up the stairs behind me. I didn't even have a key. "Mark," he shouted as he banged on the locked door.

"Mark, please open up!" I wailed to the silence, and we waited.

"We'll find him. Just come with me." Stefan led me firmly by the elbow. I let myself be steered because I didn't know what else to do. What had happened to my husband? Down in the street again, Stefano cupped his hands and whistled to a passing taxi.

"I don't have any money," I cried.

"Nothing to worry about," Stefano said, opening the taxi door for me with a gallant flourish, then sliding in himself and directing the driver in Spanish. With the fall of night the air had turned heavy, and suddenly rain gushed down in sheets, flooding the street in minutes.

What should I do? I looked over at the stranger sitting beside me now in the dark cab as we rattled and sloshed down muddy roads. I had no idea where he was taking me. "Don't worry. We're gonna find him," Stefano said again. He sat forward in his seat, tense and focused on the adventure of finding a missing husband for a girl who'd just arrived in a country where she didn't speak the language. What if Mark was dead? No, I was sure he wasn't, but where had he gone?

The taxi driver bumped down the dark road I recognized from the night before. "
A la derecha,
" Stefano cried. The driver made a sharp right onto a dirt hill. In the distance you could see light from a lone house. The windshield wipers moved in a mad staccato as the taxi slowed.

"Stay here," Stefano yelled, barely waiting for the car to stop in front of the house, lifting the sombrero to his head and jumping into the rain. From behind the closed window, I could hear his loud pounding on the door. By the porch light I saw the voluminous blond hairdo and the purple lipstick of the woman who answered, and behind her, other women and a couple of men who came and went in a shadowy room. The woman at the door shook her head at Stefano and laughed, pointing into the distance.

He raced back to the taxi, his T-shirt wet and transparent and the sombrero dripping rain onto the seat. "Not there," he said breathlessly, and fired off another order to the taxi driver. We sailed into the downpour again.

We must have stopped at six or seven houses at least before the night was over. It didn't take me long to figure out that Stefano thought
Mark had gotten drunk and gone to find a whore. I knew that was impossible; but I didn't know how to tell Stefano that I understood what those places were that the taxi drove us to and that I'd bet my life that Mark wouldn't be looking for female prostitutes.

It was almost light again when Stefano told the taxi driver to take us back to the apartment building. Stefano's tragic-looking eyes, his mouth clamped soberly shut, upset me even more than I was already, but I had to get my mind clear. I knew I had to make a plan in case Mark never returned. First, I'd get Stefano to help me call the police. But what if they couldn't find him? What if he didn't want to be found? I'd borrow money from Stefano to call Rae. She'd telegraph enough for a plane ticket. There'd be no way to keep her from seeing what a terrible mess my marriage was and she'd be hysterical, but how else could I get back to safety? I would have to call her.

Stefano sat with me on the steps. "Mark will turn up," he said, but there was no conviction in his voice, and then he said nothing more. He just kept shaking his head as if the worst had already happened to my husband. It had stopped raining and it wasn't cold, but my teeth chattered as though I were in mortal terror, and I was exhausted.

At about six in the morning, when the dark streaks had disappeared from the sky and the sun had risen, Mark turned up. He walked nonchalantly up the steps, seeming not even to notice Stefano's flabbergasted expression or my murderous stare. He opened the apartment door and I fell in, with Stefano behind me, both of us speechless. He'd been riding around in a taxi, he explained. He'd watched the sun rise with the taxi driver, "and then I told him to take me home, but I didn't have enough money to pay him." His face looked as innocent as a seven-year-old's.
Idiot!
I wanted to scream. My fingers itched for crystal glasses to throw against the wall, to throw at his head. "So I gave the man my watch and my Star of David," Mark said, shrugging.

I flew at him with open claws. "You miserable son of a bitch! You fucking drunk!" A torrent poured out of me, all the hurt and anger I'd been bottling since the wedding fiasco; I couldn't stop. "You goddam faggot!" I shrieked. Mark clutched at my flying hands, protecting his face.

"Hey, hey, hey," Stefano cried, pulling me off my husband, trying to
calm us both. "She's been really worried, man. How could you do something so dumb?" I slammed the bedroom door behind me.

I threw my clothes on the floor and sank into the bed, longing for some kind of magic to transport me to my mother's bungalow, to my old room. Yet I couldn't go home, I realized soberly. If I left Mark now I'd be back where I started; I'd never be able to break away from my mother. How could I go to college?