Chapter 15
After my lapse in the car, I redoubled my efforts to be a perfect wife and mother.
I asked María to prepare all Tom’s favorite meals: enchiladas suizas, chicken with mole sauce.
Every evening, I read stories to the children, talking with them about what we read without impatience.
I made sure they were tucked in bed on time so that Tom and I could share a drink on the couch watching soccer, or on the terrace while I listened attentively to his concerns about the project, reassuring him.
I still had an amorphous desire to create something—especially now we were no longer exchanging daily emails—but I kept it to myself.
I didn’t explore that desire with Tom, as I would have when we were first together, when we would stay up all night discovering one another, when sharing ideas and aspirations was an act of seduction, a prelude to sex.
Instead, I offered an emptied version of myself, as marriage and then motherhood had taught me to do.
I made myself a well into which he tossed the coins of his own thoughts and desires, first tentatively and then more confidently, hearing the echo of his voice as I receded, smiling my encouragement while silently resenting him.
Still, I wanted to feel close to him. One day, when Tom had been back a little over two weeks, I convinced him to skip work to have a special date with me while the children were at school.
He was resistant at first. In his overly methodical mind, dates were things that occurred in the evening; plus, we only had a few hours before Henry finished school, and with María milling about, there were constraints on our intimacy at home.
But I was determined to make it special.
I had gotten it into my head to take him to the hidden café Louise had shown me.
Surely I’d be able to find it if we went by foot from the Jardín.
Then we would stumble upon it as if by chance.
As soon as I returned from dropping the children, I ran downstairs and carefully did my makeup, my hair, put on perfume. I chose a dress I knew Tom liked—a vintage wrap in a green-and-white print—even though the morning was much too cold for it.
“You look pretty,” he said when I appeared in the living room.
“Really?” I said, smiling with feigned surprise, greedy for him to say more. I was stunning; I was fascinating. Instead, after a longish pause, he said:
“You know what would look great with that dress? The silver bracelet.”
“Which bracelet?” I said, pretending not to understand.
“The one we got at the market. I love that bracelet. Haven’t seen you wear it in a while.”
“Oh, that. You’ll never believe it, but I misplaced it somehow, and now I have no idea where it is.”
“When?” he said, a look of concern knitting up his eyebrows.
“I don’t know, a week ago maybe?” I let my eyes trail away as if I was trying to remember.
“But you’ve looked for it,” he said, adding in an undertone, “You don’t think Antonio…?”
“God, Tom—no!” Antonio was María’s brother. Twice a month, he served as gardener to the many potted plants scattered around our courtyard. “How could you think that?”
“You’re right, you’re right,” he said, chastened. I had crossed the room, my back to him. As I stood surveying the town, first south and then, like a slow panning shot, to the north toward Montes de Loreto, I suddenly heard myself say:
“I met someone interesting when you were gone.” In the window’s reflection, I saw Tom glance up sharply.
“A woman,” I added, as if to diminish any significance the person might have in my life now or in the future—it’s only a woman.
Sensing him relax, I added, “She’s a bit older than us, around sixty. ”
“A bit!” He laughed. “And you met her how?”
“Just sitting in the main plaza. I’d noticed her before, though, at the school.”
“She’s Mexican, then?”
“No, American. You may have seen her, too, I think. She’s tall, with swept-back silver hair, and she wears these oversized men’s oxford shirts.” He shook his head. For some reason, I became defensive. “She’s super beautiful, actually. She looks like that Italian actress.”
He creased his face into an ugly mask of bafflement. “Who? Doesn’t sound like anyone I remember seeing?”
“Well, she remembers you. She said we seemed in love.”
“What a weird thing to say.”
“Only if it weren’t true.”
“And she’s lived here how long?”
“A few months. But she lived here before, I guess, when she was younger, with her husband.”
“And you say she just approached you in the Jardín? Seems odd.”
“Everything’s odd to you, Tom. It’s frankly a little boring.”
“Yeah, but why did she just come up to you out of the blue?” he persisted, ignoring my insult.
“It could be a million things,” I said, finally losing patience altogether. “She liked the look of me, I don’t know! She thought we could be friends. Tell me, Tom, enlighten me, why did you first talk to me?”
He smiled at me tolerantly. He always did that, became ever calmer as I lost control, which was its own form of punishment. “Speaking of which…” He glanced exaggeratedly at his watch.
Stepping from the house a few moments later, I thought furiously that this was how he engaged with the world, with niggling questions and facts, steadily wringing all the mystery out of life.
Of course, by the time we reached the square, it was too late to find the secret café.
So we made do with El Rincón, the large restaurant on the north corner that Louise had said was only for tourists.
The same waiter was there, in his shiny pointed shoes.
We sat outside overlooking the Jardín, everything exactly as it had been the morning I met Louise: the shoeshine man, the newspaperman.
Seeing the scrawny kids with their box of Chiclets surround a woman toting groceries, I laughed.
“What?”
“No, nothing.”
Tom looked at me expectantly, but I didn’t elaborate. “Well,” he finally said, “it’s nice to be back.”
“I know; the children are so happy.”
It was nasty of me, an invitation to fight.
True to our pattern, he maintained his good manners, and I took it as a slight: He was instructing me, with paternalistic detachment, in the proper way to behave.
We exchanged a few more remarks. How quickly the day was warming, the things we needed to buy in the market.
Mostly we ate the mediocre food in silence, biding our time before leaving to pick up Henry.
The whole while I kept looking expectantly across the street at the park bench, thinking I might see Louise there.