12

A Married Woman

OUR LIFE TOGETHER is a dream and a nightmare.

Mark takes me to San Francisco, a long weekend—to Aïda at the opera, to Anastasia at the Curran Theater, to the Top of the Mark and the penthouse restaurant at the top of the Sir Francis Drake. In between he expounds—on Maria Callas, Ingmar Bergman, Rosa Parks, the 1957 Civil Rights Act. He’s eloquent, ardent, and I eat it all up, along with the caviar on toast points, the tournedos, the crème brulée. We visit all the gay places, Gordon’s, the Paper Doll, the Black Cat. “That cute one with the curly blond hair, over at the bar, he’s cruising you,” I say to Mark. “There’s a Barbara Stanwyck look-alike in the booth behind you, and she’s sizing you up,” he leans across the table to whisper. He smiles at the cute blond; I turn around and, with my eyes, flirt in the direction of Barbara Stanwyck. But Mark and I go back to our hotel together, slightly tipsy and very contented, holding each other around the waist.

When we’re home, Mark sometimes cooks for us—bouillabaisse, quiche lorraine, osso bucco—succulent dishes I’d never even heard of before; and I’m his awed little sous-chef, chopping, dicing, cracking eggs. Often we go out, to the Ginza where I learn to eat with chopsticks, to La Chic Parisienne where he orders for both of us because only he can read the menu. We have cocktails and wines and liqueurs, and by the time we get home it’s ten o’clock or eleven. That’s when I begin my homework—Latin, trig, physics, advanced comp. I get four or five hours’ sleep most nights, and, though I know they’re lying on their pillows in a corner of the kitchen, sometimes I see Genghis and Khan slinking around the living room as I sit on the white leather couch and study. Sleep deprivation makes me hallucinate, but I don’t care because we had a marvelous evening.

When I take the SAT, early on a Saturday morning after four hours of sleep, I see Genghis and Khan parading up and down the aisles of the auditorium, and I put my pencil down to watch them. “Time!” the monitor calls, and I’m horrified.

 

One Saturday we went back to the Sea Lion. We giggled all the way home about an officious waiter with a red toupee who began every sentence, “Well, my dear sir and madam,” and we stumbled through the front door together, still silly, leaning against each other for strength. Then Mark stood upright and looked at me seriously. “Oh, my dear Lil,” he said. “I’m so happy you’re here,” and we held each other tightly.

“I love you,” I told him.

“I know you do,” Mark said, still holding me, and then after what seemed to be a long time, “but only like your brother, I guess.”

I never had a brother. I wouldn’t know what it felt like. “No,” I answered slowly, my hand on his cheek now. “Like you’re really my husband.” That night we made love.

 

I’m not at all frightened or repelled as I always thought I would be with a man, nor is it as it was with Jan, nor as I’d lived it so intensely in my imagination with Beverly Shaw. No volcanoes erupt. I feel no overwhelming lust in him or for him, but I love to hold him afterward, and I love the smell of his men’s cologne and his shampoo and the feel of his strong back under my hands and his tight, muscled buttocks. When I’m sitting up late with my homework and he’s gone to bed, I’m tantalized by the urge to wrap around him so that we are like two spoons, or to curl my fingers in the lush black hairs of his chest. I never loved a man before, and it feels bizarre. But how could I not love Mark? Mornings when I wake up before he does I study his face—his long, thick lashes, the strong cleft in his chin, the delicate pink of his lips. I touch his cheek, gently, so he won’t awaken. I love his face. This is the face I adore, I tell myself.

But Mark drinks. He can drink and drink and still be fine, just as in the days before the wedding. Then he has the one sip that makes too many, and in a fingersnap “fine” slips into dead drunk. Nowadays he’s not as careful as he used to be to stop short of that one sip.

If we’re in a restaurant, I sometimes have to wrestle him before I can grab the car key from his tight fist and sit on it or drop it down my blouse; but I don’t know how to drive. “Please call a cab!” I beg the waiter by mouthed words and urgent looks, please help me lead my husband out and settle him into the waiting taxi. If the waiter takes his arm, he’ll pretend for a few minutes to be less drunk than he is and make himself stay on his feet. I can’t handle his dead weight by myself. I hate the wobbly-legged, slack-jawed creature that’s taken over Mark.

If that one sip too many comes when we’re at home, it’s worse. From the cupboard Mark grabs each and every wineglass, martini glass, whiskey sour glass—every vessel that will break—and he hurls them one by one against the kitchen wall, possessed, sobbing as though his heart has shattered into shards along with the crystal.

“Stop!” I cry the first time. I try to restrain his pitching hand, and he pulls back and slugs me in the eye by accident. I’m too baffled and scared to try again. When the glass smashing starts, I skitter to the bathroom and lock the door; I sit on the edge of the bathtub, rocking myself, until it’s done. Who is this stranger going crazy outside the door? Then when the noise stops, I dart out and slip soundlessly into bed, but I can’t close my eyes. I stare into the darkness, apprehensive. When I feel his side of the mattress sagging, I turn to the wall.

In the morning the other Mark is back. He sweeps all the bits of crystal into a dustpan and deposits them in the kitchen garbage pail. “Guess I really acted out last night. Sorry,” he says, sheepish, after a while.

“Mark, what happened? Tell me why,” I implore.

Instead of answering, he drives to Beverly Hills to buy more glasses from which we’ll have our wine and cocktails until the next time he has one sip too many and snaps again.

What’s the cause of the terrible anguish that pours out with such violence when he’s drunk? He will not tell me.

 

“I don’t understand,” I said wearily one morning as he swept up shards after another Saturday explosion. Still Mark said nothing.

But later, when I sat with The Aeneid on my lap, straining to concentrate on my translation of Dido’s speech, Mark slouched in the white leather armchair across from me and said, as though continuing a dialogue, “Did I ever tell you when I found out I was adopted? I was eighteen—the day I was leaving for the navy—and that bitch who called herself my mother all my life says to me, ‘I have to tell you that you weren’t born into this family.’ Just like that!” He grabbed a Kent out of the pack on the coffee table, struck a match, inhaled with fury. “Just before I have to go off to fight a war. Can you imagine that?”

“Oh, Mark,” I cried, forcing aside the anger I’d felt all day. I closed Virgil, went to perch on the arm of his chair, to kiss the top of his head and nuzzle him to my chest. He sat, still weighted with outrage. “Do you know anything about your real parents?” I asked, feeling the pain with him now as vividly as if his adoptive mother’s betrayal had happened that morning.

“Only that my mother was a Jew, a whore,” he said, his mouth working as it had the night before when the cocktail shaker hit the wall.

 

I was accepted only at UCLA, with a small scholarship, just enough to pay for books and the $108 tuition. Nothing would be left over, not even for lunches on campus. I was disappointed but not worried yet, because Maury Colwell had told me that Hollywood High would probably give me a good alma mater scholarship since I’d been a public speaking star for two years. June 14, 1958—I sat in white cap and gown, nervous but hopeful, under the hot sun at the Hollywood Bowl, where the school held its graduation ceremony: Before we filed up to the stage to get our diplomas, the vice principal called out the names of one scholarship recipient after another, more than a dozen of them, and each one leapt up to energetic applause as he announced through the microphone what they’d done for the school. Their accomplishments boomed out to the audience of five or six hundred and echoed on the thousands of vacant seats beyond. My name was not called.

“You’re married already. Why do you want to go to college?” Miss Brooks, my advanced composition teacher, had said when I’d told her weeks before that I’d been admitted to UCLA. Was she serious? I could see no trace of teasing on her thin lips.

Angry tears had stung my eyes, as though she’d accused me of wrongdoing. “What does my being married have to do with whether I go to college?” I’d managed to say. Early in the semester she’d given me an A+ on my essay on Jude the Obscure; she said it wasn’t a grade she gave lightly, that I ought to be an English major in college. But probably, when it had been time to decide who’d get the alma mater scholarships, all the teachers thought what Miss Brooks said: I was a married woman now, and married women had no reason to go to college.

It’s okay, I told myself there at the Hollywood Bowl. I’d be a UCLA student in the fall anyway. Though I couldn’t bear to ask Mark for spending money, I wouldn’t have to worry about room and board at least, and I could get a part-time job. It would be fine.

 

We left for Mexico the next week, after we took Genghis and Khan to the Pollacks and most of my clothes and Mark’s books and records and some miscellaneous boxes to my old room at the Fountain Avenue Court Bungalows. (“So far away! She’s never been so far away!” my mother cried to Mark.)

“Why can’t we just leave everything here?” I’d asked him the night before, puzzled when he began wrapping crystal brandy snifters in old newspapers and said we had to store whatever we weren’t taking to Mexico.

“It’s silly to pay rent while we’re gone,” he said. “We’ll find a new place when we get back.”

“But . . . don’t you own this house?” As I pulled glasses from the shelf along with him, I searched my mind, confused now, trying to remember why I’d thought the house belonged to him.

“No, of course not. I’ve been renting.”

“Well . . . but the furniture . . .”

“The place came furnished,” he said a little impatiently, as though I’d missed the obvious.

I never asked about the jade and lapis vases and all the lithographs, or the crystal elephant or the ivory statue; but after we left the house in the Los Feliz Hills that June I never saw them again.

 

It was night when we arrived at the little Mazatlán airport. To a dark, squat man standing beside a taxi Mark spoke in Spanish, giving the address of the apartment he’d rented. Cigarette dangling from his lips, the man piled our suitcases into the trunk and opened the back door for us, never making eye contact with me. Then he sped us down long, bumpy stretches of unlit road in the rattling automobile, passing clusters of dilapidated little houses and stray mongrels who barked at our tires and chased us till we were gone from their village. The heavy, humid air wafted through the open window, its smell foreign and exciting; but it made me feel lonely too. I reached for Mark’s hand in the dark, and he let me hold it.

Then lights loomed up before us and, soon, lively avenues. “Aqui, aqui,” Mark said, directing the driver down a narrow street. The car slowed and then stopped in front of a two-story building with a red, white, and blue BEBE PEPSI sign in the window of a little store on the ground floor.

When I stepped from the taxi my heel squished on something. I looked down. Swarms of huge cockroaches, each the size of a finger—the street was black with them. I shuddered and jumped back into the car.

“It’s okay,” Mark said. “They come out after the night rains.”

“Yuk, disgusting!”

“Oh, Lil, c’mon. They’ll be gone in the morning.” He extended a hand to extract me from the back seat. “You just have to watch where you put your feet,” he said distractedly, paying the driver who’d deposited our luggage on top of the ubiquitous cockroaches.

The apartment smelled of disinfectant and was furnished with only a lumpy bed and a scarred dresser and nightstand in one room, a mismatched couch and chair in another. The kitchen was bare. But the place seemed clean enough, and when we lay down on the bed I could smell the lavender soap with which the sheets had been washed. The sound of voices crooning to guitars drifted up from the street.

“Mariachis. I love them. They play at a restaurant down the street,” Mark whispered from his pillow. “We heard them every night the last time I stayed here.”

I snuggled into him, my lips on his neck, listening to the mellifluous Spanish. Yes, I loved the sound of the mariachis too. I wouldn’t think about anything but being here with Mark, seeing Mexico with him. It would be fine. It would be wonderful. My husband was already asleep, breathing softly and regularly. I tamped down the free-floating anxieties that kept trying to erupt deep inside me. Finally I too relaxed into sleep.

 

The cockroaches were gone in the morning, just as Mark had said, and the beach, where the water was bathtub warm and picture blue, was only a couple of blocks away. At a little café from which you could see the still-empty beach, we had breakfast—rich black coffee and bolillos with pale yellow butter. Then Mark rolled up his white linen trouser legs, and we held our sandals in our hands and strolled down by the water. With my free hand I took his arm, but he kept it hanging limply at his side, so I soon let go. Maybe people didn’t walk arm-in-arm on Mexican beaches.

“Look who’s back!” A hefty redheaded woman in an off-the-shoul-der orange sundress shouted a greeting to Mark from behind the bar when we later walked into O’Brien’s. “It’s Señor Doctor Mark! Where’s Alfredo—and where’s . . . what’s his name?” she asked him.

“And where are the snows of yesteryear?” He grinned. She came around the bar to hug him, but he didn’t introduce me. “That’s Lucille O’Brien, a real busybody,” he whispered to me when she busied herself with another customer. “But she’s a big success, ex-pats love this place.”

“Coco loco”: he told me the name of the new drink—a green coconut with a hole on top, half the milk still in it mixed with ice and tequila. When you finished drinking, you spooned out the soft, sweet meat. We sipped at them on the verandah of O’Brien’s while we gazed at the dark rock formations in the ocean. The water was emerald now. The rocks looked like little volcanoes, jutting out right in front of O’Brien’s, just as Mark had described them months earlier.

Coco loco, an Irish-American woman who ran a bar on the Mazatlán beach, ex-pats, the blue and emerald waters and fantastically shaped rocks: I was swept up in the romance of the moment. What a path I’d traveled from a furnished room in East L.A., I marveled as I sipped.

From the next table, a tanned blond boy in a white T-shirt grinned at us. A big straw sombrero dangled by a cord around his neck and made him look like a kid at Knott’s Berry Farm, waiting to have his picture snapped. “Where you from?” he asked Mark pleasantly. He’d already ordered a second round of coco locos for us and now rose to pull a roll of bills as big as my fist from a back pocket to pay for the drinks the waitress deposited on our table. His arms were knotted with muscles that looked grossly exaggerated on his short frame. “I heard Lucille say you just got here. Welcome.” He saluted us with his raised glass. He said his name was Stefano, from Newark, New Jersey (though I thought his accent sounded more like Dallas, Texas), lived in Mazatlán now, before that Oaxaca, and before that Cuernavaca. “Haven’t been back to the States in seven years,” he drawled.

Later Mark ordered another round of coco locos for all three of us. “Oh, no, no more for me.” I laughed and hopped up. “Can’t we get some lunch?” I’d be quick and clever; I had to keep Mark from the one more sip that made a mess of things.

Stefano walked out with us and led us to a little outdoor market down the beach where, he said, you could sit at a table on the sand and order unpeeled shrimp that had been in the ocean thirty minutes earlier. While we ate, he stopped some strolling mariachis and asked them to play “Bésame Mucho.” He pushed his own plate of shrimp and shells aside and sang along with the mariachis, his arms extended and palms turned upward, as though imploring an imaginary lover to kiss him a lot.

Somehow, much later, we ended up at O’Brien’s again, the three of us sitting on the verandah as the sun dropped slowly into the wine-dark sea and left the sky streaked with orange and red. Mark ordered beers—Dos Equis, he called them. I wasn’t too upset because I’d never seen anyone get drunk on beer. Stefano talked on and on, about traveling all over Mexico on an old burro strapped with ten saddlebags, working for the Mexican government in some capacity he wasn’t at liberty to divulge, winning the bantamweight wrestling championship in Guadalajara over Antonio Cardoza by a dumb-luck knockout. He’d spin a tale, we’d make a few comments, and then there’d be silence for ten or fifteen minutes. In the dim light we’d watch seagulls and pelicans circle round and round the weird rocks, where they’d finally roost for the night. Then Stefano would launch into another tale. He didn’t demand much response, and Mark seemed amused by the theatrics of the stories he spun. With his blond hair bleached white by the sun, a toothy boyish grin, a child’s red pouty lips, he didn’t look much older than I. I rather liked him and thought he was interesting and droll. But finally I wished he’d leave so that Mark and I could walk together on the beach again, in the twilight.

 

Only when the stars twinkled so close above O’Brien’s that it seemed if I held my arm up I’d be touching them, did I notice that Mark had disappeared. In the silence I’d looked over to tell him about the stars, and his chair was empty. Stefano was still sitting there, on the other side of the vacant chair. “Where’d my husband go?” I asked him, laughing at my oblivion.

“Probably to the loo.” Stefano shrugged. “I’ve been watching the stars.”

We both returned to our lonesome pursuit until it felt as if a long time had passed. “Would you mind looking in the men’s room? Maybe he’s ill or something,” I finally asked, feeling a little prick of dread. What would I do if something happened to Mark in this foreign place?

Stefano returned a few minutes later, shaking his head. Mark wasn’t in the men’s room. “He probably just took a little walk,” Stefano drawled, and gave my hand a quick pat. “Nothing to worry about.”

But I couldn’t help it. I had no money with me, and I wasn’t even sure I could find the way back to the new apartment.

“Maybe he felt sick and went home,” Stefano offered. “Would you like me to go with you and see?” His eyes were gentle, but what would I do if Mark wasn’t there?

I hurried with Stefano down brightly lit busy streets, feeling the insistent gaze of men who stood about in little groups. “Looky chiquita,” one leered into my face and moved to touch me. “Vamoos,” Stefano hissed at him, and the man started in surprise, as though he hadn’t noticed that I was with someone. We wandered up and down the maze of strange streets as I tried frantically to remember which way Mark and I had walked that morning, but nothing looked familiar. Suddenly the red, white, and blue BEBE PEPSI sign on the building where we’d slept the night before loomed up miraculously.

Stefano bounded up the stairs behind me. I didn’t even have a key. “Mark,” he shouted as he banged on the locked door.

“Mark, please open up!” I wailed to the silence, and we waited.

“We’ll find him. Just come with me.” Stefan led me firmly by the elbow. I let myself be steered because I didn’t know what else to do. What had happened to my husband? Down in the street again, Stefano cupped his hands and whistled to a passing taxi.

“I don’t have any money,” I cried.

“Nothing to worry about,” Stefano said, opening the taxi door for me with a gallant flourish, then sliding in himself and directing the driver in Spanish. With the fall of night the air had turned heavy, and suddenly rain gushed down in sheets, flooding the street in minutes.

What should I do? I looked over at the stranger sitting beside me now in the dark cab as we rattled and sloshed down muddy roads. I had no idea where he was taking me. “Don’t worry. We’re gonna find him,” Stefano said again. He sat forward in his seat, tense and focused on the adventure of finding a missing husband for a girl who’d just arrived in a country where she didn’t speak the language. What if Mark was dead? No, I was sure he wasn’t, but where had he gone?

The taxi driver bumped down the dark road I recognized from the night before. “A la derecha,” Stefano cried. The driver made a sharp right onto a dirt hill. In the distance you could see light from a lone house. The windshield wipers moved in a mad staccato as the taxi slowed.

“Stay here,” Stefano yelled, barely waiting for the car to stop in front of the house, lifting the sombrero to his head and jumping into the rain. From behind the closed window, I could hear his loud pounding on the door. By the porch light I saw the voluminous blond hairdo and the purple lipstick of the woman who answered, and behind her, other women and a couple of men who came and went in a shadowy room. The woman at the door shook her head at Stefano and laughed, pointing into the distance.

He raced back to the taxi, his T-shirt wet and transparent and the sombrero dripping rain onto the seat. “Not there,” he said breathlessly, and fired off another order to the taxi driver. We sailed into the downpour again.

We must have stopped at six or seven houses at least before the night was over. It didn’t take me long to figure out that Stefano thought Mark had gotten drunk and gone to find a whore. I knew that was impossible; but I didn’t know how to tell Stefano that I understood what those places were that the taxi drove us to and that I’d bet my life that Mark wouldn’t be looking for female prostitutes.

It was almost light again when Stefano told the taxi driver to take us back to the apartment building. Stefano’s tragic-looking eyes, his mouth clamped soberly shut, upset me even more than I was already, but I had to get my mind clear. I knew I had to make a plan in case Mark never returned. First, I’d get Stefano to help me call the police. But what if they couldn’t find him? What if he didn’t want to be found? I’d borrow money from Stefano to call Rae. She’d telegraph enough for a plane ticket. There’d be no way to keep her from seeing what a terrible mess my marriage was and she’d be hysterical, but how else could I get back to safety? I would have to call her.

Stefano sat with me on the steps. “Mark will turn up,” he said, but there was no conviction in his voice, and then he said nothing more. He just kept shaking his head as if the worst had already happened to my husband. It had stopped raining and it wasn’t cold, but my teeth chattered as though I were in mortal terror, and I was exhausted.

At about six in the morning, when the dark streaks had disappeared from the sky and the sun had risen, Mark turned up. He walked nonchalantly up the steps, seeming not even to notice Stefano’s flabbergasted expression or my murderous stare. He opened the apartment door and I fell in, with Stefano behind me, both of us speechless. He’d been riding around in a taxi, he explained. He’d watched the sun rise with the taxi driver, “and then I told him to take me home, but I didn’t have enough money to pay him.” His face looked as innocent as a seven-year-old’s. Idiot! I wanted to scream. My fingers itched for crystal glasses to throw against the wall, to throw at his head. “So I gave the man my watch and my Star of David,” Mark said, shrugging.

I flew at him with open claws. “You miserable son of a bitch! You fucking drunk!” A torrent poured out of me, all the hurt and anger I’d been bottling since the wedding fiasco; I couldn’t stop. “You goddam faggot!” I shrieked. Mark clutched at my flying hands, protecting his face.

“Hey, hey, hey,” Stefano cried, pulling me off my husband, trying to calm us both. “She’s been really worried, man. How could you do something so dumb?” I slammed the bedroom door behind me.

I threw my clothes on the floor and sank into the bed, longing for some kind of magic to transport me to my mother’s bungalow, to my old room. Yet I couldn’t go home, I realized soberly. If I left Mark now I’d be back where I started; I’d never be able to break away from my mother. How could I go to college?

A while later I felt Mark get into bed. I turned away from him, furious still.

“Stefano’s sleeping on the couch,” he said.

“Go to hell,” I muttered. Then I must have fallen asleep.

When I was awakened by a light, caressing hand on my pubes, I fought through a sleepy miasma to make sense of things. It couldn’t be Mark’s hand—his back was turned to me.

Fear seized me. I jumped from under the covers. Stefano was kneeling on the floor by my bed, a compact bundle of pink flesh and muscle, a pleading look on his face.

“Goddam it! Mark!” I screamed, flinging my pillow at the naked, kneeling form, grabbing a butt-filled ashtray to throw. “Help!”

Mark was on his feet in a second, trying to grasp what was going on, then seeing Stefano, who’d risen and covered his genitals with both hands. “You’d better go,” Mark said in a voice I thought maddeningly calm. Stefano looked disoriented, like a kid who’d expected a hug and gotten a slap; then he went, quickly and quietly. I heard him gathering his clothes in the living room, and I clutched the ashtray until the door closed behind him.

“It’s your fault! You called me a faggot in front of him,” Mark sneered. “What did you expect, damn you? He probably thought we both wanted it!” He pulled his pillow off the bed and stormed out of the room. I heard him plop on the couch Stefano had vacated.

I was furious with Mark for days. I couldn’t stop thinking about how he’d left me at O’Brien’s, disappeared without a word, how I’d been sick with worry, not just for myself but for him too. My mind kept going back to it, as to images of a gory accident. But in between those thoughts I remembered the times in Los Angeles when we’d first met. What had happened to the Mark who’d taught me about Rubinstein and the Spanish Civil War? How charming he’d been with my mother and Albert in the beginning. How perfect the first night together in San Diego had been. Didn’t we love each other still? I shouldn’t have called him a faggot . . . and because I did poor Stefano was misled and it all ended so badly. So much was going wrong between Mark and me.

And there was something else, something awful I couldn’t stop thinking about: Where had he been if not with a man? A prostitute probably, a hustler, who’d demanded jewelry because Mark didn’t have enough cash to pay him. I was mired in dark, convoluted feelings—disgust, but rejection also, and jealousy too. Il va sans dire, I’d said so brightly at the beginning when Mark had reminded me that of course we’d be intimate with other people. But that was before he and I had become lovers. Once we’d drifted into that surprising territory, the rules had changed. Or had they? I was jealous that Mark still wanted men, but wasn’t I stirred still by women? Where was my apex of desire? I saw Beverly Shaw’s competent, manicured hand as she held the microphone, the way her skirt had hiked over her shapely, nylon-covered legs when she’d crossed them. The vision ignited in me all over again the fantasy of my lips between her thighs. Mark’s lovemaking had never excited me like that, so why was I bothered that his apex of desire was not me? It was a contradiction I couldn’t make sense of.

We were polite to each other now, but I knew I could never trust him to act with consideration for me, and he’d stopped trusting me too. Something had broken that day for both of us. One morning about a week later, waiting for the waitress to seat us in the café where we’d been getting our breakfasts, we saw Stefano’s white-blond head bent over a cup of coffee at a corner table, and Mark and I quickly backed out. We didn’t say a word to each other, about Stefano or anything else, as we walked through the streets looking for another restaurant, though I knew we were both reliving the whole episode. It was after we were seated in a new café that Mark said, so low I almost didn’t hear him, “The danger of a Jew marrying a non-Jew is that when they get mad at you they call you a kike.”

“That makes no sense. We’re both Jewish,” I said, though I knew what he was alluding to.

“You called me a faggot,” he persisted softly, and tears sprang into his eyes.

I reached for his hand, but he pulled away. “Mark, I’m like a faggot too,” I reminded him.

“Are you?” he snickered.

“Yes,” I said with conviction, “I am.”

 

We never make love anymore. Mark never approaches me that way, and even if I didn’t feel ambivalent about it, I wouldn’t know what to do to seduce him. What am I to him? I don’t know anymore. What place do I have in his life or he in mine? Sometimes I feel that I’m living someone else’s life and I have to leave and find my own. But how?

For now I’m trapped here, and I’m always scared and suspicious. I ask him for some money, to keep in my purse for emergencies, and without comment he gives me a little roll of pesos. I feel like a child, to have to ask for money, and I hate it, but what if he disappears on me again? He’ll get drunk; he’ll find a pretty boy; and I’ll be stranded in the middle of nowhere. Now I’m always watching where he looks.

José, the boy behind the counter at the little store with the bebe pepsi sign, has apple cheeks and café-au-lait skin that makes his green eyes greener and his white teeth whiter. He’s about fifteen or sixteen, and every morning when we go downstairs Mark says to him jovially, “Señor José, como se va? ” The boy is all smiles for Mark.

One day Mark makes a stack of half a dozen shirts that have just come back, starched and neatly folded, from the laundry down the street. “What are you doing?” I ask.

“I’m taking them down to José,” he says casually. “The poor kid dresses in rags.”

 

When I looked out the living room window one morning, on the peaked roof across the street sat two blue-black vultures. They perched, one on each side of the peak, their wings extended, their fingered tips long and hideous. The next time I looked there were four—two on each side. I promised myself I wouldn’t look out that window again. Whenever I passed near it, I averted my eyes, fighting the impulse to look, forcing myself to gaze anywhere but there. But one day I looked: The quickest of glances showed me that now there were six—three on each side, their grotesque beaks pointing precisely in the direction of our building. They had come for me. I was seized by certainty—they were just waiting a couple of weeks, for my eighteenth birthday.

I ran to the bedroom, where Mark was dressing, and threw my arms around him, buried my cheek feverishly in the pelt of his chest. “We’ve got to get out of here!” I cried. I told him how the vultures were multiplying.

For an instant he held my arms as though to peel me off, then seemed to change his mind and patted my back instead, like someone soothing a sick child. “But I’ve paid the rent until July nineteenth,” he said gently.

That would be one day after my birthday. “Please,” I begged, dropping to my knees. I had to convince him. “The nineteenth is too late,” I cried. “We have to leave now. Please, Mark!”

And we did. “Okay,” he’d said, amazingly, and we rushed to throw our clothes into suitcases as if we were heeding a hurricane warning. Then we ran into the street and he waved a taxi down. I didn’t look back to see how many vultures were on the roof now. We caught a bus to Mexico City that very day.

On the bus I was suddenly embarrassed by my “acting out,” as Mark called hysterical scene-making, but he held my hand as we rumbled south. “We’ll be in Mexico City in just a few hours,” he assured me, his voice low and soothing, a kind doctor. “Everything will be all right.”

 

Mark leaves in the midmorning, and most evenings he comes back around eight or nine o’clock, tired out but exhilarated still by his heady day. “Dr. Sanchez says the field is wide open for psychologists in Mexico,” he tells me, or “Dr. Cordova was really funny today. She said they’d erect a monument to me if I help them set up a department of psychology.” He’s in love with his work, with the campus, with his colleagues. To me they’re phantoms; he introduces me to no one, and I never even set foot on the university grounds.

What do I with my days? Mark gives me a little money to wander around Mexico City, and though I still hate to take it from him, I do. I walk and walk, all day long, and when I’m tired I stop in a café and have something to eat and watch the passersby. I feel fine, though a tiny bit shaky still, as though I’ve recuperated from a high fever. Mexico City is beautiful, as I imagine Paris would be, grand old buildings and shop windoows with lovely clothes, perfumes, flowers, jewelry. One day I stop to watch a procession of young men, hundreds of them, winding down a main boulevard, shouting with gusto, waving arms and placards. A trio passes close, the man in the middle grasping a hand-lettered sign that says 5 centavos, the two on either side holding a miniature open coffin, all three bawling great crocodile tears.

“What’s going on?” I ask the balding man beside me who’s been trying to pick me up in Spanish and English. “University of Mexico students, señorita,” he tells me. “They are protesting because the bus fare has been raised from five centavos to seven. Very bad for poor people.” I turn back to watch. I love their faces, so alive with passion and humor.

I’m a wanderer alone in a foreign city, and I don’t dislike it. I have plenty of time to dream and to figure out my life. I can’t be someone’s wife. That would be a false me, no matter what the circumstances were. Everyone is rushing somewhere, to business, to romantic trysts, to change the world, and I love to mill in the crowds, to pretend to rush along with them. Of course I have nowhere to go yet, but I understand how important it is: You absolutely must have somewhere to go in life. That I’ve always known. I just forgot for a while.

 

Dr. Cordova asked him to stay until December, Mark said. He ran a hand through his tangled curls, pouring himself a cup of the hot chocolate he’d made on the hot plate in our little apartment. “It’s a really attractive offer. I’ve decided I don’t want to go back to Children’s Hospital anyway.”

“But I thought we were going back next week.” I took my toast from the toaster and busied myself looking for a plate. Would he try to keep me here? UCLA started in two weeks; Id promised my mother wed be back for the High Holidays.

“Lil, look.” I turned to look at him and our eyes connected, but only for an instant before he looked away. “You go back now. It’s just a few months, and I’ll join you in December.” He looked at me again and smiled sweetly. I smiled back sweetly.

“I’m going to have to ask you a big favor,” Mark said, rinsing his cup, his back to me. “Would you mind taking the bus? It costs a fraction of the plane, and I’m really strapped. They won’t pay me until the session is over. It only takes three or four days.”

He came to the bus station and waited with me, handed my suitcase to the driver, kissed my cheek. “I really love you a lot,” he said. “Do you know that?”

“I love you too,” I told him, my lips touching his stubbly cheek, but I doubt either of us meant it.

 

I’m happy to be on the bus. I wave good-bye to him from my window, and he smiles and waves and smiles. I breathe easier when we pull out of the station. I’m the only one on the bus who isn’t Mexican, and I’m the only female who’s alone, but I know I’ll be all right. I can take care of myself. I don’t want it any other way. I never really truly believed it could be any other way. We ride for long stretches of city, then green, then desert, then small villages and more desert, through places whose names I’d never heard before and would probably never hear again. I look out the window, watching the bus gobble the miles of road. I’m going toward Los Angeles, toward my mother and Rae and UCLA and my future.

The bus makes several stops a day so that the passengers can get food. In a little restaurant, in a town whose name I never learn, the waitress is a young girl who looks like Prince Valiant—smooth black hair that comes down below her ears, long smooth bangs. She wears a boy’s checked shirt and boy’s pants. All the time I’d been in Mexico I hadn’t seen a single female in pants. Her black eyes are handsome and intelligent. I can see how efficient she is, how focused on her tasks, what a hard worker. I wish she could get on the bus with me, that we’d travel in the same direction—to Los Angeles, to UCLA—and we’d both become . . . what? Lawyers? Psychologists maybe. Do I imagine that when she gives me my check our eyes lock? “Thank you very much,” she says in English, with only a trace of an accent. I watch her from my seat at the window until the bus pulls onto the road that will take me back to Los Angeles.