Trouble (11 page)

She leaned back in her chair and lit a cigarette.

“Give me one of those,” I said. “It doesn’t count when you smoke on vacation; everyone knows that.”

“Let’s kill ourselves,” she said, and handed me the pack and a lighter.

“What did you order?” I asked her.

“Tequila with sangrita, and some food. You’ll like it.”

“You’re not supposed to eat any raw vegetables and fruits down here, right?” I asked anxiously.

She laughed. “Bullshit. They wash everything in purified water now. They’re not stupid. They don’t want all the gringos to be too sick to eat and drink. You can eat anything in restaurants. Just be careful of street food, because sometimes they have no place to wash their hands after they shit. But if they can, they do. And if you get sick, there’s an antibiotic you can buy over the counter at the drugstore. Tourists don’t know about it; it’s sort of a Mexican secret.”

The waiter returned with four tall shot glasses on a tray, two filled with amber tequila, two filled with tomato juice. He set them down ceremoniously along with a dish of roasted, salted peanuts, then went off again with a little flourish of his empty tray.

Raquel picked up her tequila glass. “To our fucked-up lives,” she said.

“To our totally fucked-up lives,” I replied. We clacked our tequila glasses, sipped, then sipped the other stuff. “Yum!” I said. “What is this?”

“Tomato juice, chili powder, cayenne, lime juice, other fruit juices, whatever they feel like throwing in. I know, it’s good, right?”

Her eyes were filled with tears.

“Raquel,” I said.

In the hotel lobby, on our way out, she had stopped so she could feed a ten-peso coin into one of the computers (she hadn’t bothered to bring her laptop, since the hotel had no Wi-Fi). She had made me sit down and go online to check a couple of gossip sites to see what they were saying about her. I had had to read aloud to her their mean, unsavory speculations concerning her whereabouts, but since she hadn’t been able to look at the screen herself, I was spared having to witness her reaction to the shockingly unflattering photos of her they’d managed to find. Surely they’d been altered on Photoshop, there was no way Raquel had ever looked so gaunt and wrinkled. No way.

“I am a wreck,” she said. “I can’t sleep. All I can do is smoke and drink. I feel better now that you’re here.” She smeared a tear across her cheek. “Thanks for coming,” she said.

“Raquel,” I said again. “It’s only feelings.” This was something we had started saying to each other back in college when one of us was heartbroken, furious at someone, or otherwise emotionally wrought up. By now, saying this had become a ritual so familiar, the words had all but lost their original meaning. She didn’t react, possibly because I couldn’t muster much conviction; I had been shaken by the vitriol of these Hollywood gossip columnists, these cyber-Heddas. It was as if Raquel had stepped into a nest of adders and was being repeatedly, venomously fanged; why was she drawing so much poison? She was right: Jimmy Black was getting off without even a slap on the wrist, and she was being vilified. “And you’re a rock star. Relax.”

“I’m a washed-up former rock star whose last album came out years ago.”

This was technically true, but she was still famous. “You’re still famous.”

“Anyway,” she said, waving the topic of herself away. “How about you? What happened with Anthony after you told him you were leaving?”

“I rented a one-bedroom apartment on West Twenty-fourth Street,” I said.

“Wow,” she said. “You work fast.”

“It’s basically the physical embodiment of the phrase ‘expensive dump.’ Wendy and Anthony are all alone now. I’m so sad, I can’t believe it, but it’s what I have to do.”

“Yeah,” she said. “I know, baby. But you’re going to be okay.”

“We’re both going to be okay,” I replied.

“I might be okay again someday,” she said, “but for now, it’s just bad. It just is what it is. You know what? I was really in love with him. Can you believe it?” She laughed shakily. She was still crying. “I was a fool. I want to hate him now, but I haven’t been able to force myself to, so my heart is broken now, along with everything else. That kid. He has everyone in the world rooting for him, and I’m the evil seductress. They’re all so hard on women in Hollywood.”

“So move to New York,” I said. “What are you doing in L.A.? You’re a musician. What do you need to be there for?”

“I’m a California girl,” she said. “I hate winter. I grew up in L.A. My dad lives there. If I move to New York, I’m afraid I’ll turn into a horrible JAP like my mother. Also, it’s just as puritanical as Hollywood, let’s face it. On the plus side, some great musicians live there. Maybe I could get Jim White as my drummer.”

“Who’s he?” I asked.

“To your health,” she said.

We sipped our tequilas. I was starting to feel a slight buzz; oxygen deprivation and airplane travel had made me a lightweight. The waiter came with fragrant bowls of thick green soup with golden squash blossoms floating on top. We ate the soup, drank more tequila, and then ate salads, beautiful and huge and fresh. After the waiter had cleared away all the dishes, we smoked another cigarette each and ordered a third round of tequila. I was feeling a little drunk. Raquel was cheering up now that I was asking her about the new album, which she hadn’t let anyone hear yet.

“It’s basically old-school rock,” she said. “Not as jazz-influenced as my earlier albums. Kind of like if Mick Jagger and Chrissie Hynde gave birth to PJ Harvey.”

The big blond Northern Europeans at the next table began loudly consulting each other about the menu in some goofy Scandinavian language. Raquel’s eyes went very wide at me, and I grinned at her.

“Let’s get the check and go pay our respects to Jesus,” she said.

When the bill came, I let Raquel pay it; I would get the next one. We wandered off, more slowly now that we had eaten and drunk, and made our way around the other side of the cathedral through a crowd of people crouching on the concrete on blankets piled with stuff. “Oyster shells,” she said. “They grind them up to make face lotion—right there, look.” She nudged me and pointed to boxes of gleaming pure white creams. A kid of about ten was feeding shells into a grinder. “Jehovah’s Witnesses are like flies here,” she said to me then, waving off a smiling fresh-faced man who approached us with a pamphlet. “Oh, look, fermented pineapple juice. Want some?” She bought two plastic bags heavy-bellied with yellow-brown liquid, straws poking out of their tied-off tops. She handed me one and I took a sip of the tart, odd stuff; I hadn’t realized how thirsty I was, and this was surprisingly quenching.

We wandered out onto the Zócalo and watched the Indian dancers while we drank our pineapple juice. They hopped and twirled and bounced in unison to heavy beats that reminded me of the hippies drumming in Tompkins Square Park, that same insistent, resonant pounding that got into your head. “Now let us pray,” said Raquel. We threw our empty nectar sacs away and went through the wrought-iron gates, across the cathedral’s courtyard to a massive stone sill that led through doors that were like the giant wooden portals to a medieval castle. Inside the cathedral, it was chilly and suddenly dark and quiet. It was like being inside a massive, lustrous, magical cavern in a fairy tale, with shafts of light shooting down through empty air, golden beams that struck the stone floor, stained glass glowing jewel-like in windows. Glassed-in coffins in side chapels held lifelike replicas of saints in various poses of suffering and supplication. Some of them were reliquaries, with parts of the actual saints’ bodies set into little boxes in their chests, bits of hair and bone. Banks of thin white tapers burned with bright, hard tips of fire in front of them.

“I went to confession the other day,” said Raquel. “I told the priest in that little booth everything. Saying it in Spanish made it all seem both more sinful and more human, somehow.”

“You did?” I said.

“Yeah,” she replied. “I was crying afterward. It felt really good.”

“That’s because you weren’t raised with it. There’s nothing traumatic attached to it for you.”

“Probably,” she said.

“Lucky you.”

Raquel and I walked together to the middle of the cathedral to an open chapel where a Mass was being said. The priest with the censer was in full swing, releasing spicy clouds of incense smoke. We both genuflected automatically and slid into a pew and sat there listening to the ritual in Spanish. I was seized with a sudden need to sneeze, which I stifled. Once as a little kid, taking Communion, I had sneezed the wafer straight out of my mouth, and I never got over the horror of ejecting the body of Christ so violently in front of everyone. Although I was no longer a believer of any kind, and there was no injunction against sneezing during Mass that I knew of, I reflexively squeezed my eyes shut until the urge passed. Being in a church was complicated for me. I felt right at home in a chafing, itchy, but weirdly comforting way.

When the Mass had finished, I walked with Raquel over to a cordoned-off area behind red velvet ropes. What looked like a fairy-tale giant’s plumb bob hung from a long cable from the cathedral’s ceiling; its point had traced a pattern in the sandbox it hung over, a sort of record of the cathedral’s shifting movement. “The cathedral is falling down,” said Raquel. “The ground is sinking underneath. They just finished a massive renovation to shore it up, and it’s still shifting.” She pointed to the far-off rear wall, which looked lopsided and off-true. “Someday it’ll all tumble down,” she said. “You ready to go?”

We emerged into daylight, blinking. The Mexican flag on a pole over the Zócalo snapped and fluttered. The skaters were thick on the ice.

“Now what?” said Raquel. “Should we go and take our siestas? It’s four-thirty.”

The idea of a nap made me yawn fiercely. “Okay,” I said. “Then we can stay up late tonight.”

“Maybe we’ll take a taxi to Roma and hear some music,” said Raquel.

As we came out of the cathedral’s courtyard, I saw the one-armed man I’d tried to watch earlier, when Raquel was hurrying me along.

“I want to see what that guy is doing,” I said.

We went over to where the one-armed artist sat in his folding chair under a big umbrella. He was working on a small frame, making a replica of a steep mountainous landscape with a farmer pushing a plow behind two oxen, making furrows in a plot of earth on the extreme slope. Next to the weaver were piles of short colored straws. With his one hand, he pushed a green one deftly through a grid of string. He ignored us, as I imagined he ignored everyone who stopped just to ogle the cripple and not to buy his work.

“¿Es Chiapas?”
Raquel asked the top of his bent head.

“Si,”
came the curt answer.

“I want to buy it,” I said, not caring that I sounded like a stupid tourist. “It’s beautiful. Ask him when it’ll be done.”

“Come back in twenty minutes,” he replied in perfect American-accented English. “These don’t take that long.”

“You’re American?” I asked.

He looked up at us finally. He had a thin, very dark face with high cheekbones and thick eyebrows. His eyes were black. He looked about thirty, but you could never tell. “Do I look North American to you?” he asked, unsmiling.

“Who knows?” I said. “What does a North American look like?”

One side of his mouth lifted in a ghostly echo of a smile, but the rest of his face remained impassive. “Not like me,” he said.

“How much do you want for it?” I asked.

“For you,” he said, squinting at me, “one hundred pesos.”

That was about ten bucks, which seemed cheap enough to me, but I had read in a guidebook that if you didn’t try to talk vendors down, you looked like a gullible rube.

“Do you bargain, or is that fixed?” I asked.

“What do you think a couple hours of my time is worth?” he asked. “I’m curious.”

“We’ll think about that,” said Raquel firmly. “Come on, Jo.”

She set off along the pavement, and without another word to the weaver, I followed her. “Did I do something wrong?” I asked her when we were out of earshot.

“No, you didn’t,” she said. “But his work isn’t all that good. I’ve seen better. I bet he does great business because he lost his arm. I don’t mean to be a bitch; it’s just how it goes.”

I had a feeling she was showing off for me, demonstrating her knowledge of the local artisans. “I could use a bathroom,” I said.

“Should we go to El Café Popular? The hotel is about fifteen minutes from here. Or, wait, I know, we can go to the Gran Hotel. I haven’t been there in years. Come on, it’s just right over here, and the lobby is full of birdcages. It’s cool.”

We crossed the avenue that encircled the Zócalo and walked along the sidewalk past rows of jewelry stores, then took an abrupt right and headed off down a side street. Raquel led me up a set of red-carpeted steps and into the hotel lobby. At the top of the stairs, we were stopped by two guards in uniform and a red velvet rope. She jibber-jabbered in Spanish with them for a while; she seemed to be arguing with them, and they appeared to win.

Raquel turned to me and said, “You can’t just go in anymore to look at the birds; you have to have a drink in their restaurant. We’ll get a coffee. Come on.” The guards, who obviously didn’t recognize Raquel, who didn’t seem to mind, escorted us across the lobby—which was loud with high chirping birdsong, and painted with murals under a Tiffany glass ceiling—and left us at the entrance to the restaurant. I ducked into the bathroom, then joined Raquel at one of the tables. The place was fancy in an upscale Denny’s sort of way, with booths and white cloth-draped tables. It was completely empty. Glancing through the plate-glass window, we could see people walking along the sidewalk across from the Zócalo, where we had just been.

A waitress materialized from somewhere; she was stout and middle-aged and wore a yellow nylon dress with a white apron, thick panty hose, and black heeled shoes. She gave us big thick menus, which we ignored. Raquel ordered, and the woman nodded in resignation and went away.

After we’d finished our Nescafé, Raquel paid and then we went out to the lobby and duly admired the two big bamboo cages filled with small yellow birds. The lobby was as
gran
and ornate and balconied as the hotel’s name suggested, with an old-fashioned wooden, glass-windowed elevator rising straight up through the soaring courtyard, but I would have liked it much more if we hadn’t been shanghaied into paying to see it.