Chapter 17
On Friday, after I’d gotten the children to bed, I showered and carefully dried my hair.
I tried on various outfits, a dress, jeans.
I put my hair up, took it down, messed it with my fingers so that it wouldn’t look like I was trying too hard.
When I finally went upstairs, Tom, seeing me dressed, said, “What’s all this? ”
“It’s just, there’s this party tonight. A woman from school invited me. I thought I might go. I don’t know.”
“No, you should,” he said definitively, refocusing his attention on the television, where the last minutes of a soccer game were playing out.
“I wish I’d remembered earlier and we’d gotten a babysitter so you could come, too.”
“No, I think it’s great you’re making friends,” he said.
I was strangely nervous as I pulled up, seeing the cars parked on the verge, the house illuminated.
For several minutes, I stood on the stoop beneath the dome of stars, filling my lungs with cold air and considering turning back.
I could hear the sounds of voices, music, raucous laughter.
At last, I knocked. The door opened. She was standing before me.
“You made it!”
“Yes. Hello.”
“But look at you.” She held me at arm’s length, assessing me. A small gray dog was yelping and circling around us. “I just adore what you’re wearing.”
“Oh, come on!” I said, smiling. I had on jeans and one of Tom’s oxford shirts with the sleeves rolled up, the buttons opened low to reveal several thin gold chains of varying lengths, one with a charm of a crown that I’d found it in a junk shop in Back Bay the last time I visited my father, but always said had belonged to my grandmother.
Louise lifted it in her fingers and let it fall back. “You’re perfect. My perfect Mia.”
I made a show of my confusion at the name, like someone who has longed to be proposed to performing her surprise when it comes to pass.
“Suits you so much better, don’t you think? Come then, my lovely Mia—come meet everyone.”
As we made our way into the room, progressing slowly because of her cane, I had that feeling of making a good entrance.
I was aware of people turning to see me, smiling.
Flamenco music played from the turntable, a woman’s voice singing roughly.
The dog was still frenetically yipping at our feet, and Louise kept commanding it to be still, to hush, which had no effect whatsoever.
I noticed a small, motionless form on the bed-cum-sofa.
Adriana, sleeping peacefully in that way only children can, briefly inured to the commotion around them.
It took me a moment to locate Fabiola. She was huddled in a corner of the dining area, caught in a tense exchange with a beautiful woman.
“A lovers’ spat,” said Louise. She had begun introducing me around in Spanish.
Hector, her boss; Hector’s son, Pedro; a painter with a sullen look and bangs that hung over her eyes.
“Pleased to meet you,” I said in Spanish over and over, sounding demure and faintly apologetic, as I always did when speaking a foreign language.
I kept lifting and lowering my eyes, laughing at hearing myself called Mia.
Louise asked Pedro if he could take my coat and he came behind me and drew it slowly from my shoulders, letting his hand trail clear down to my wrists.
He looked to be about my age, maybe a little younger.
Handsome in a sort of grizzled way, very different from Tom.
The beautiful woman had come over, inducing a fresh round of barks and circles from the dog, as Louise introduced us in English: “Carmen, this is Mia. Mia knows Fabiola from school.”
My gaze darted to Fabiola, smoking on the bald patio where Henry had fallen. “Yes, she was kind enough to give us a ride one morning when we were running late.”
Carmen stared at me frostily. “Oh?”
“Wine?” Louise asked. “Red, white?”
“Red, please.”
As she hobbled away, I bent down to pet the little dog.
Its fur was inexpertly cut, pink skin showing through in patches.
I stroked its small head, aware of not wanting to do anything to ruin the good impression I’d made, taking refuge in the little animal the way I often did in my children or the telegraphing of attraction between Tom and me.
At the periphery of my vision, I could see Pedro smiling as he stared.
I offered my hand for the dog to lick, trying to coax it closer, observing myself as if I were someone else: the leanness of my arm and wrist, the flowery scent of my perfume.
“?Este perro!” Carmen said.
“?Es tuyo?” I asked. Is it yours?
“Please!” she said, switching back to English. “I hate dogs, they’re filthy. It’s Louise’s.” She cast her a black look. Louise was arriving with the wine, an enormous bowl-shaped goblet filled nearly to the rim.
“I didn’t know you had a dog,” I said, taking a sip to keep from spilling it.
“I only found him this morning, shivering in the field across the street. He must have been clipped by a car, his hair was all matted and covered in blood, look.” She pointed to a red line on his side, about two inches long.
“But isn’t he handsome after the haircut I gave him?
And the best thing, he fits into my bag. It’s how I carried him home.”
“Su bolsa, my God,” Carmen exclaimed in a scandalized voice. “Mexican dogs are filthy, you know this! They live on the streets como las ratas.”
“But rats are utterly marvelous,” Louise said, launching into a meandering story about a society of rats that lived in the walls of the gallery she once owned in Italy.
When the walls had to be opened to repair some old wiring, they had discovered a trove of jewelry.
It was the rats’, amassed during the previous decade when the space was a pawnshop.
“Mind you, this wasn’t just some haphazard jumble but a curated collection.
” Louise lifted her fine chin, glancing slowly from me to Carmen.
“They were terribly discerning, these rats. They had an eye for the best pieces.”
I stared at her. I couldn’t tell if she was joking. Pedro had stepped beside me, making the rounds with the bottles, one in each hand. “More wine?” I reached out my glass.
Louise was still extolling the Italian rats; somehow the tale had become a disquisition on fascism and socialism, Louise favorably comparing the societies of rats to humans.
But my attention kept wandering to Hector.
I found him terribly attractive, even more than his son.
His intensity drew me, and the calm way he returned my gaze.
Suddenly noticing we were looking at one another, Louise interrupted herself, saying to Hector, “She’s not just beautiful, you know. ”
“Oh?” He smiled at me expectantly, stepping closer, as Louise related my remarks about Allen’s paintings, how I’d spoken about them with so much eloquence and insight, she’d actually cried.
She pulled her face into a cartoon of sorrow now, bawled exaggeratedly so that everyone near us laughed, after which she said, “She really should do the notes for our next show, though. Simply marvelous writer.”
“Truly—a writer?” Hector shot me another expectant look, stirring me with a sudden anxiety.
But just then Louise called out gaily, Fabiola was going to sing.
I turned to see Fabiola standing inside the patio, her thick hair a bit disheveled.
“No, please, I can’t,” she said, frowning and tilting her head in a show of modesty.
Louise began to clap, the slow heavy claps that are meant to coax people, everyone joining her.
“All right, all right,” Fabiola finally relented.
I felt a preemptive embarrassment for her, watching her step to the far wall.
Pedro had gone to turn off the record player as Fabiola turned to us, closing her eyes in preparation.
There was an excruciating moment of silence.
Then, at last, she began a meandering melody that, after my initial tense fear, I realized was rendered with real artistry, throatily and with a kind of private passion, as though we were watching someone undress without self-consciousness.
It was arresting and painfully beautiful, and everyone seemed to find it so; all of us listened beyond mere politeness, with the rapt attention of people being given something vitally important.
When she finished, we erupted in wild applause.
Instinctively I looked to Adriana, worried that the noise might have awakened her.
But she remained heavily asleep, ignorant of her mother’s triumph.
“That was amazing,” I said to Hector. “I hadn’t ever heard her sing.”
“Yes, she sings with great honesty, y con pasión.” He smiled to himself. “It’s been said artists are people with burning questions of the world. So tell me, Mia, what are yours?”
The question was so pretentious, I almost laughed.
And I had the sudden impulse to puncture the lie I’d been caught within; tell him my name wasn’t Mia, that this was all a joke Louise had concocted.
But to my surprise, I began telling him a story about an American girl on vacation in Mexico and the daughter of the gardener where she stays.
Alone in the walled garden, surrounded by drab everyday poverty, each night, the girls share their deepest secrets and fall in love.
The story arrived without effort, stark sentences stacking easily, one on top of another.
I drew from my own life, Louise and Nuria, the Navarro prints when I described a scene in which the girls sneak past a row of Federales standing with rifles at the edge of a field, and later kiss, hidden among the tall grass.
In the climactic scene, the Mexican girl whispers into the dark whorl of the other’s ear the words she has unknowingly longed for: Forget where you came from.
Love is two people telling each other a story.
By the time I’d finished, I was flushed, hot with joy.
Somehow I had managed to become quite drunk.
Across the room, Louise was speaking with Pedro and Carmen about the building site, “some crass US developer erecting another monument to capitalism. Meanwhile, every night, local couples go there to find something of true value, these poor Catholics stealing a hasty fuck. I’ve named it the Ardor Sanctuary. ”
I looked at Hector conspiratorially—Louise, what a character! He nodded and took my hand with formality, saying he’d very much like to see my story; would I send him a copy? I muttered something about it being in its infancy. “Whenever you’re ready. I know a great many publishers.”
“Oh,” I said stupidly. “I mean, thank you, that’s so kind. Would you excuse me?”
I hurried upstairs. In the bathroom, I rummaged through the cabinet, opening a lipstick and dabbing some onto my lips with my finger, liking the color.
I looked at the brand. It was only a cheap drugstore brand, which somehow made it better.
I found my coat in a heap on top of Louise’s bed.
For a few minutes, I lay on top of it and closed my eyes, hearing the swells of laughter from downstairs, thinking vaguely that I should go home.
“You can’t leave,” Louise loudly asserted when I came downstairs in my coat.
A staggered chorus went up, echoing that I should stay; they were gathering blankets and flashlights, about to go across the street to the “Ardor Sanctuary.” A palpably different energy had come into the room, one of reckless interrogation, as if they were about to thrust a torch into the deep recesses of a forgotten cave.
Only Carmen seemed to have remained cool.
“By all means, come,” she said, sealing her mouth into a tight, thin line.
Putting his arm around me, Pedro said, “Shall we share a blanket?”
“Stop harassing her,” Fabiola said, laughing hoarsely, shooing him away. Bending to my ear, she whispered, “So, you’re Mia now? It suits you. I saw that photo of you, you know. It was amazing.” She drew away, smiling and bunching her lips together. “Very, very sexy.”
I laughed sloppily. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. It wasn’t me.”
“Yes, you, definitely. Your mother showed it to me.”
My mother? I was too stunned to respond—or was it the shock of being confronted with my own complicity, my longing?
In the moment, I merely stared at her, her mouth from which the song had emanated, allowing awareness to overtake me slowly in a strange mixture of horror and pleasure: They all think that; they take me for Louise’s daughter.
When Fabiola turned away, saying something in rapid Spanish to which everyone erupted in laughter, I slipped out the door.