The Travel Writer (14 page)

I stared at her hand, which rested uneasily on her knee. In the old days I would have seized it, but now it was guarded by the mysterious spell that makes people strangers again. But what exactly had changed? Pilar and I were the same people; we had just mislaid the procedure for inspiring affection in each other.

“When I think that I only have this one life, and I’ve only been happy in it once, with you, and then my chance got away from me …” I trailed off—how do you finish such a sentence?—but she refused to rescue me. I listened to the reproachful hum of the refrigerator and wished I knew what she wanted to hear from me.

“You would not long have remained happy with someone who didn’t love you,” she said.

I nodded, encouraged; she wasn’t cruel enough to say such a thing if she meant it.

“Are you still lonely?” I asked. “I am.”

“You made the choice to be unhappy.” She glared at me, with the disdain of someone who’d been shoved into unhappiness.

“Are you really so miserable, Pilar? People pay a grand a night to live where you live, at the Matamoros.”

“But not to work where I work. I hate being trapped in that huge rock with all those obnoxious guests. Some of them fly for two days straight, just to bathe in Inca spring water from the Isla del Sol and have their fortunes told by Indians—Indians who were too poor to afford meat or eggs or hot baths before we took them on. I should have stayed in the States with Guilford, even though I hated that too. I didn’t know what I was getting into. I miss the ocean. I’d like to have my own hotel someday, in a civilized country.”

“Spain?”

“I hardly remember Spain. Maybe in Florida, on the beach.”

“Florida’s not civilized.”

She shrugged. All she knew was Miami and Bolivia. Everywhere else, she had just visited.

“Today I was afraid,” I said, as quietly as I could without whispering, “just like a little kid, all day. And all I wanted to do was to talk to you.” My strategy was to show her the brave
but terrified child inside; concede her utter emotional dominance; batter her defenses with self-deprecation. But maybe it wasn’t a strategy. I was indeed a child, and I would plead like one if I thought it would help my cause.

She gazed at the pile of nail clippings on the coffee table as if they were tea leaves. My fate was about to be decided. She might choose to be charmed; she might decide my effort was insufficient and persist in loathing me. A surge of unexpected pleasure, a giddy thrill of fear, surprised me. Here at last was a moment of significance.

Pilar lifted my hand and gave my knuckles a kiss. It was unmistakably a fuck-kiss, with just enough distance to allow me to refuse her gracefully. When she was done, I held her chin in the palm of my hand and felt her cheek under my fingertips. I had never done that before, to her or any woman; it was a gesture I must have seen in a movie, a way of expressing an indescribable tenderness. Luckily she had seen the same movie, or perhaps she felt the same way—that our emotions were too delicate to bear our clumsy words. She covered my hand with hers. A tear should have rolled down her cheek at that point, of course, but Pilar wasn’t the crying type. I kissed her, partly to give myself an excuse to rub her back under her T-shirt with the hand that wasn’t still holding on to her face.

She pushed me away. “Not here, Jacob.”

“No?” My voice sounded more disappointed than I had expected.

“No one cleans the sofa, and my colleagues have to stay here too.”

She grabbed my hand and led me into the bedroom, without looking back, like a groom leads a horse. The window there was smaller but unveiled. Moonlight, meeting little obstacle in the thin mountain air, filled the room with its chilly glow. The only bad moment came when, in fitting myself into her, I happened to glance at the nightstand behind the bed. There, dog-eared and limp, lay the photo of her parents in the Irish pub. It took all my concentration to get back on track.

Afterward we lay alongside each other. She reached for my hair, but I returned her hand gently to her stomach and released it. “Let’s not touch,” I said. “When you called me at the hotel, I could imagine this moment. Hearing you but not touching or seeing you, in the dark.”

“It’s not dark enough.”

I shut my eyes, but I could still feel the tremors in the bed from her breathing and the warmth of her exhalations above me and just to the side. Perhaps we could do this again, at the Matamoros. Perhaps there I’d be able to persuade her to return to the States. My dream wasn’t yet accomplished, but at least I knew it wasn’t so foolish after all. If we were successful, and found Hilary, Pilar, like me, would be famous, and therefore in demand. Maybe Hilary too. All three of us could do interviews together, get an agent, write a book. Even after the news faded,
Pilar would easily get a job in New York. I wondered how long it had taken Hilary to find her job at Folgers. I could see her father glowering in distaste as she boarded the commuter train for her first interview in Manhattan. The first time she had run.

The thought of Hilary reminded me of something Pilar had said at the airport.

“You played darts with Hilary,” I said.

“She was a very poor player.”

I had only played darts with Pilar once. The lopsided score hadn’t bothered me, but her unconscious little sighs of resignation whenever I missed the number (or worse, the board) dissuaded me from trying ever again. Hilary must have been either more determined or less insecure. “Did you like her?” I asked. “She was the best editor I ever had. At least, she was one of the few I liked.”

“She tried to speak to me in Spanish at first, but her Spanish is worse than yours. She loved to talk. Especially about her family, which I found very interesting. We’re both only children. She talked about her lovers too. She spoke about sex very factually without being vulgar. I liked that.”

“Who wouldn’t? Anything you didn’t like?”

“There was the way she ate peanut butter sandwiches for breakfast, like an eight-year-old. But you have to forgive Americans their tastes, as I forgive yours. She also, like you, said she wanted to be a writer. But she was worried about going freelance. Her parents liked to scare her with stories about young girls with no health insurance bleeding to death in the emergency room of the public clinic. They wanted her to move home and learn to sell cars.”

“And now she might never have the chance,” I said. “Sounds like she always enjoyed her life. She traveled, screwed around. But what if she hated herself? What if she was miserable? She never showed it, not to me, but do you think she was?” We often used to share our personal reflections, after sex. I hoped to revive the custom.

An earthquake in the bed; I opened my eyes. Pilar had sat up.

“Why do you say that? You act like you
want
her to be dead.”

“No. Of course not. I liked her. She was one of us. It terrifies me that she might be dead.”

She squeezed the middle of my thigh, an old gesture. “You’re such a little boy,” she said, almost admiringly. “I could hardly believe it when you told me you lied to me.”

It was foolish to defend myself, but I couldn’t resist. I glanced pointedly at the picture of her parents.

“At the airport you said that was all over, your hanging on to that photo. You see? You lied too.”

“It’s not a lie if it’s none of your business.” She picked the photo up. “I’ve given up on
them anyway. Why should I look after them? They’re not protecting me. I’ve got to start over. Jacob, in your letters you told me that you cast your parents off, when they were still alive. How did you do it?”

“I didn’t cast them off. I just put them aside for a while.”

“Why?”

“I don’t need them like some people do.”

“And you have no time for people you don’t need.”

“I don’t make my parents happy. They’re divorced, but neither of them talked to me for a year after I dropped out of college. I understood. What’s the point in having a son if he gives you nothing to be proud of?”

“Do you ever talk to them now?”

“From time to time. I have lunch with my mom.”

“So you could go back to them. I never can.”

She picked up the photo, gazed at it for a minute, her eyes unfocused, perhaps trying to find her parents outside the picture, in her mind, and then she tore it in two and dropped it in the basket beside her bed.

“There. I’m done with that. Now, you and I—we have a job to do.”

“They loved you,” I said, to remind and reassure her, but really I was uplifted; now she had only me.

“They can’t anymore,” said Pilar. “Listen to me. Hilary’s not dead.”

“Of course,” I said quickly. “I believe you.”

She sucked in a great lungful of air, stoking her engines for the next push. “She was abducted. I have a note from her kidnappers. And a picture. She’s sitting in a room holding a newspaper from ten days ago, the day before I got the note. The newspaper is not a fake; I checked the headline on the Internet.”

“You have a note and a picture? Where are they?”

“They’re hidden in my room at the hotel. There’s another note too. If I had known you would be here, I would have brought them.”

“Why didn’t you tell the police?”

I rolled toward her and felt the quick shock of the wet spot’s chill. I slithered closer to avoid it. She didn’t notice.

“In the note, the kidnappers said they’d kill her, and me too,” she said. “They said it has to be kept secret.”

“Why didn’t you tell me all this from the start, in New York?”

A drop of sweat fell from my nose and pricked her forearm. She gasped softly but didn’t
move. “I was afraid you wouldn’t come. They want me to take the message in secret to her parents. I thought maybe you could do it.”

“Have you spoken to them? The kidnappers.”

I could see
them:
black ski masks, rifles with lasers for aiming, emerging from a high-tech lair deep within the earth, like Batman’s.

“No, but I know they’re there. At the hotel. They—they say they sneak around the grounds, on the horse trails, in the gardens. Sometimes they even get inside. That’s what they say. In the second note.”

In daylight hours, they would dress like normal people: hotel clerks, cabdrivers, little girls selling fetuses. At night they would slip on their masks and carry out their schemes.

“What do you know about Condepa?” I asked. “I think they’re connected.”

“Condepa? The party? What does Condepa have to do with anything?”

“Condepa is a very dangerous and sophisticated organization,” I said. “They’re into cocaine, I think, and they’re everywhere, just like the kidnappers at the hotel. You’re in danger. We have to get you out of Bolivia. Soon.”

“That won’t help. They’ll find me. This is the safest way. Trust me, Jacob. If I can get them what they want, everything will be fine.”

“How do you know? Have you spoken to Hilary? On the phone, I mean.” Didn’t kidnappers usually allow that?

“No. And I don’t know where they took her.”

“So all you have is a picture. That’s not proof she’s still alive. What if somebody’s just playing you for a sucker?”

“You know I’m not a sucker, Jacob,” she said. “It’s time for you to have some faith in me.”

An alarm buzzed. It was five o’clock.

“The van’s picking me up in half an hour to take me to the hotel,” she said. “The driver can’t see you here. Leave. Please.”

She gathered her clothes from the floor, crouching over like an old woman hunting for dropped coins. She responded to my next question with “We’ll talk more at the hotel” and ignored all the following. When I heard the shower start, I left.

Back at the hotel, Kenny was still asleep, his big duck feet flopped over the end of the bed. A bare arm had also escaped the blanket to shoot like a vine up and across the pillow. His wrist dangled off the side of the mattress. This wasn’t the country for him, but which country was? He must be uncomfortable wherever he goes, even in New York, in movie theaters, restaurant booths, crowded subways, buses, and elevators. Neighborhood kids would snicker and
imitate his walk behind him. Girls would gawk and look away when he gawked back. Compared to him, I was born lucky. My night’s encounter would have been for him the greatest romance of his life, and it all took place within one cycle of his dreams.

My bed creaked when I sat on it, and Kenny opened one eye.

“Did you see her?” he mumbled.

“Yeah,” I said. He sighed, rolled over, and went back to sleep.

Checking out after a freebie is always a moment of glory for me, one more triumph over the dreary rules of social stratification. Antonio maintained his chieftain’s bearing atop his hidden pedestal, but his lower lip twitched nervously as he presented me a bill for fifty-two bolivianos, about five dollars (the cost of my meal at the Café París). That I was fuzzy-brained with weariness in no way lessened my customary sense of achievement, which at that point, after my encounter with Pilar, hardly needed inflating. Even Antonio, who’d betrayed me to Condepa, was now just a spiteful child, jealous of my newly won popularity.

“I received the information that you spoke of,” I said, as I signed the name John Hancock on the bill. Nobody notices the difference.

“I spoke in a very amiable manner with some men,” I continued. “Are they friends of yours?”

“I hope that you enjoyed your stay at our hotel,” Antonio said coldly. “And also that you enjoy your visit to the excellent Hotel Matamoros.”

I had stalked and overcome my love prey; I was approaching the secret to the mysterious disappearance; I’d be damned if I let this pip squeak think he could flick his pebbles at me and go unpunished. He leaned back and forth uncomfortably on his invisible platform, a sapling swaying in the breeze.

“You called your friends from Condepa,” I said. “Your boss knows what you did.”

“Pardon me for the inconvenience.”

He was still looking at Kenny, not me, and I couldn’t decide whether he was mocking me, or barely able to control an impulse to strangle me, or just stunned at the prospect of losing his job. He kept swaying, until I feared he would topple over, and then he remembered himself and gripped his desk with both hands.