Chapter 14
For several weeks, I succeeded in avoiding her, by which I mean we weren’t in one another’s presence.
In other ways, she continued to insinuate herself, sometimes forcefully.
One occasion in particular recalls itself.
It was a few days after Tom’s return. He had finished work early, and we’d gone together to get Ida, leaving Henry at home with María.
Because we were enjoying one another’s company, rather than wait in the courtyard, we had stopped on the bridge that spans the arroyo, holding hands and chatting.
Some younger boys from Henry’s class, still in their uniforms, were playing unsupervised along the littered banks.
The water was filled at that time with slender red snakes, and the boys were poking sticks into the filthy water in the hopes of impaling one.
Tom and I began musing about the savagery of little boys and the indulgence of Mexican parents; how different it was from our milieu at home, where playing at violence, and especially using a toy weapon of any kind, was not widely permitted.
They were serious topics, but we were being lighthearted, caught up in the ease of being together, the shorthand way we could speak to one another.
Tom had just begun an anecdote meant to illustrate the absurdity of extreme political correctness, something he’d read in the New York Times, when I saw Louise walking toward us on the pedestrian path beside the arroyo that led from the shops and galleries at the Fábrica Aurora.
My first reaction was panic, as though a dark secret of mine were about to come out.
She’s looking for me, I thought, my heart quickening.
Just as quickly, I tried to dissuade myself.
She said she works in a gallery; she’s only heading home from work.
I had instinctively moved behind Tom, reaching my arms around him in a hug from which I peered, tilting my head slightly, still watching Louise.
“Someone’s very cuddly today,” Tom said with a laugh.
It was then I noticed the man in the pale linen suit following her.
He might have created the gentle impression of rumpled dignity but for the fact his fists were clenched and the determined way he stared at the back of Louise’s head, his jaw set in anger.
With a sudden lunging step, he grabbed her arm and roughly jerked it back.
She teetered. Her cane swung up, still gripped in her hand.
For a moment, I stood dumbstruck as she spun to face him.
They were a similar height, so I was unable to see her expression or his, only the back of her head, the sleek silver hair.
In my alarm, I had disengaged from Tom and stepped forward, about to yell.
Somehow no one else seemed to notice or be concerned—women carrying their young children, couples, shopkeepers heading home for comida, even Tom.
I could tell they were arguing now, and the reason for people’s indifference was the familiarity between them.
There was an unmistakable intimacy to the way they fought, grabbing one another’s shoulders, gesticulating.
As if that realization had punctured the deadlock between them, to my astonishment, they began to kiss.
Not the chaste kiss of two old people. Louise clasped his hair in her fist while the man gripped her wrist roughly as if to tug it away or thrust it deeper.
His other hand cupped her ass, pulling her tightly against him.
Adding to my shock, almost at the same moment, one of the boys withdrew his stick with a shriek of triumph, and I saw pierced on the sharp end a slender red snake.
He jerked it at the other boys, who shoved and punched one another in that way boys express both solidarity and ridicule, the delicate creature writhing in anguish.
The bell had finally rung, the usual pandemonium erupting.
The mother of the boy with the snake called to him, “?Fernando! Ven acá.” I was struck by the mildness with which she spoke, showing no care for the animal or her son’s cruelty, repeating her entreaty with the same gentle indifference, “Ven, mi amor.”
The other boys began to clamor at once—“Give it to me!” “No, me!” “Fernando!”—as, with a malicious grin, the boy casually flung the stick, still piercing the snake, into the filthy water.
They weren’t kissing any longer. Louise wore a strange smile, the bracelet catching the light as she lifted her hand to wipe her lips. I didn’t wait for her to spot me, but hurried to the school courtyard and, seeing Ida—alone as always—motioned impatiently for her to come.
“We’re in a hurry,” I called in Spanish to the teacher’s aide whose job it was to wait with them, smiling to mitigate what would surely be perceived as rudeness, saying, “Discúlpeme, perdón.” I’d left Tom on the bridge, and as Ida and I neared, I nodded to him tensely, Let’s go.
“What is it?” he said, scanning my face.
“Nothing. I don’t feel well.”
He made a quizzical face, drawing his eyebrows together. “And this just came on?”
“Obviously.”
“Mommy, walk slower,” Ida said. “My books are heavy.”
“Hand them to me,” I snapped.
“Why are you being like this?” she demanded.
“Like what?” I laughed in an attempt to make light of my impatience.
Yet even in the car, as Tom chatted with her, as we neared our beautiful house where our beautiful meal was waiting, I couldn’t shake my agitation.
My reaction was strange. I didn’t feel embarrassment at the sight of two old people arguing and then kissing passionately on a public path, but repulsion, even rage, as though the whole disgusting spectacle had been orchestrated to ruin my time with Tom.
A memory dislodged itself. I must have been about Henry’s age.
My mother had taken me to a small cabin, somewhere far from our apartment.
A man answered the door, much younger than she was.
He seemed embarrassed by my presence, my small hand touching my mother’s leg, but she offered no acknowledgment of his discomfort or mine.
She didn’t alter the smile she had fixed in the car mirror moments before, fluffing her hair with her fingertips.
“She’s very good at amusing herself,” she told the man as she pushed my hand away, saying, “Look, Sally! There are books over there.” Then I was alone in a room with books with no pictures in them.
My coat still on. A rug covered in cat hair but no cat.
There was a small instrument with metal tines you could pluck with your thumbs.
Loud sounds had begun behind the door, low moans.
Another child that age would have been frightened, but I knew by then what adults did; that even though it sounded as if she was in pain, my mother would be smiling when she opened the door.
And so I sat mutely holding the instrument and occasionally plucking it as the cabin filled with the animal smell of their acts.
In the car, Tom was wondering aloud what María had made for comida. Ida was staring out the window. As we neared the top of the hill, I suddenly laughed. It was an unpleasant sound, unnatural.
“What is it?” Tom said.
“Oh, nothing,” I said. “Just, women are such cunts.”
I had delivered the sentence with forced lightness, as though making a joke. Tom shot me a disapproving look, nodded tersely at Ida, though she was still staring fixedly out the window and appeared not to have heard. “That’s a pretty messed-up thing to say,” he said.
“Oh, and you’re so perfect?” I shot back. “You’re so fucking beyond reproach?”
“Jesus, Sally, do you even hear yourself?”
“I’m sorry,” I said, my voice catching, my throat filling with a kind of horror. It was as if someone had jerked back the veil covering my life.
“Sorry, Tom,” I repeated. And I kept saying it, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” like someone frantically rubbing a pencil back and forth to cover the obscene word they’d written, tearing at the paper beneath.
All the while, in the back of my mind, the belief persisted.
I’d carried it with me as long as I could remember, in my chest, my slender limbs, my fingertips when they caressed my husband: the cuntishness of women.
Not men who kill defenseless animals, who assault women on paths and fuck them in front of their children, but women.
Women who entice, allow; who smile at their power when it’s done.