In the Mexico City airport, in the upstairs bar adjacent to the waiting room for planes to various Mexican cities—Oaxaca, Ixtapa, Mérida—three highly conspicuous Americans are having a drink together, attracting considerable attention from other, mostly Mexican travellers. They are a young man and a somewhat older married couple; in some indefinable way the couple look long married, which they are. The young man, who is actually in early middle age, still appreciably younger than the other two—this man is the most conventionally dressed of the three: khaki pants, navy blazer, white shirt. Sheer physical beauty is what draws so many looks to him, especially in Mexico, among dark people: his sleek flat blond hair shines, even in this ill-lit room; his narrow eyes are intensely blue, his teeth of a dazzling whiteness. He is a tennis instructor at a small college in Southern California, and he is going from Oaxaca, where all three of these people just have been, on to Ixtapa, where there is to be a tournament at the Club Med. His name is Hugh Cornelisen.
Of the older two, who are headed for Mérida, the man is the more flamboyant, as to costume. Tall, excessively thin, with thinning, grayish hair and a reddish face, he is wearing a pink linen suit, an ascot of darker pink silk. His gestures are slightly overanimated. Behind heavy horn-rimmed glasses his dark eyes blink a lot. His face is deeply furrowed; deep lines run down his cheeks and across his forehead—perhaps from a lifetime of serious thought, deep contemplation, and possibly more than his share of conflicts, sharp torments of the heart. He is Allen Rodgers, a lawyer, from New Haven.
His wife, Alexandra, is a woman of considerable size—a wonderful size, actually; her height and her general massiveness convey strength and power. She is unaware, though, of the impression she makes—she wishes she were smaller. She has great dark, golden eyes, and black, gray-streaked hair pulled into a knot. A long time ago, in the forties, she was studying Greek literature at Yale; she and Allen met at various New Haven parties—an older (ten years) man, a tall, uneasy girl. And actually she looks better now than she did as a very young woman; then she was awkward with her size, shy, and overeager in her mania for knowledge, her greed for love. Now, especially in her brown, loosely woven dress, with her big purple beads, big gold earrings, Alexandra looks majestic—but at this moment she is thinking that she would give everything she has if she could be young again, even for just a couple of days; then, just possibly, she would be going off to Ixtapa with Hugh, instead of to Mérida with Allen. At this moment she does not see how she can bear the rest of her life with Hugh’s face absent from it.
On second thought, though, she does not really wish that she could go to Ixtapa with Hugh—complications, embarrassments. She would only like him to kiss her, preferably in the dark, where she is invisible.
Alexandra’s quest for love did not end after her marriage to Allen, although she had hoped (they both hoped) that she would change. At first there were just a few excited flurries, kitchen kisses, some passionate gropings in cars, after summer parties in Vermont, where they and many of their friends had lakeside cottages. Then there was a serious, real affair with a younger colleague of Allen’s, cautiously, rather guardedly begun as a summer romance but continued with frenzied meetings in New York hotels, in motels along the turnpike. This left everyone involved raw and shaken (Alexandra had been forced or felt herself forced to tell Allen almost all about it). After that she “drifted into,” as she put it to herself, a couple of not very serious dalliances; she found the very contrast between these connections and the high seriousness of her first affair depressing, and she resolved not to do that again. But then she did. All of which was at least suspected by Allen, if unclearly.
Her Greek studies have more or less lapsed, although she still tries an occasional translation; some of her translated poems have been published in literary journals.
In what Allen describes as his own “declining years” he has experienced a series of critically painful “crushes” on young women, usually students, always beautiful. Analysis of these feelings has been a source of further pain, a scalpel applied to a wound, but he has achieved a certain understanding of his feelings: he has come to understand that all he wants of these young women is sometimes to see them, but “want” is an imprecise word for his wild craving, his need.
The most recent object of this “surely most unwanted affection,” as Allen might say, were he able to talk about it—the most recent “crush” has been on a tall, pale red-haired girl, Mona, from Colorado. Mona, with milk-white, unfreckled skin, wide light-blue eyes, and endless legs, which she carelessly, restlessly crossed and recrossed, all summer long, in her white tennis shorts. Mona was in New Haven visiting the daughter of friends, making everything worse, more “social.” A feminist, she planned to go to law school, and she liked to talk to Allen about law. “I think she has a sort of crush on you,” Alexandra imperceptively remarked, at the start of summer. “Well, feminists get crushes too,” he limply countered.
Later, seeming to catch some hint of his actual feelings, Alexandra stopped mentioning Mona altogether.
Alexandra and Allen met Hugh because they were all staying in the same hotel in Oaxaca—a beautiful converted convent, with open courtyards full of flowers, lovely long cloisters, and everywhere birds. Arriving there on an early-morning plane from Mexico City, registering at the desk, as they were led toward their room, Alexandra and Allen exchanged smiles of pure pleasure at the beauty of it all, the sweet freshness of the air, such a contrast to Mexico City or New Haven. They liked their room, which was white-plastered, very clean, with a low slant ceiling, a window looking out to an ancient well, of soft gray stone. As they stood there just within the doorway, taking everything in, a young blond American in khaki walking shorts passed by; he looked in, smiled quickly in their direction.
After a little unpacking Alexandra and Allen walked up to the neighboring church, whose annex was a museum of costumes and artifacts, and there was the blond young man again, before a display of ferocious armaments, feathered headdresses. Seeing them, he gave another smile; they all smiled, acknowledging the coincidence.
At lunch, in the sunny, vine-hung courtyard, a haven for butterflies and hummingbirds, there he was again, but at a table some distance from theirs. More smiles.
And late in the afternoon, after more walking about, a little shopping, sightseeing, the blond young man was just across the pool, sunning himself, as he glanced through a magazine. He waved in their direction; they returned the gesture.
“Odd that he’s alone,” Alexandra murmured. “He’s really quite beau.”
“Oh, he’s probably saving himself for something. He looks athletic.”
“I wonder what.”
Allen speculated. “Well, something graceful. Something not, as the kids say, gross. Golf? Maybe tennis?”
That night, after a fairly long siesta—though they were both troubled sleepers, often restless—Alexandra and Allen came into the bar rather late to find almost all the tables occupied, and there he was, standing up at the sight of them, saying, “Well, we seem to be on the same schedule, don’t we? Won’t you folks join me for a drink?”
Close up, even in that darkish bar, Hugh turned out to be somewhat less young than they at first had thought; still, he was considerably younger than they were, and his general air was boyish—to Alexandra, privately, he remained “the young blond.” As they exchanged names and certain identifying facts—home bases, previous trips to Mexico, next destinations—professions were brought out last, and Hugh seemed impressed by theirs: a lawyer and a scholar, of Greek! He was very pleased at Allen’s guess as to tennis for himself.
“Allen’s terrifically intuitive,” explained Alexandra.
“Oh, I believe you!” A flash of teeth.
“Mostly I’m very observant.” Dry Allen.
They passed a pleasant, noncommittal evening together, going off early to their separate rooms.
And, the next morning, there was Hugh, arriving for breakfast at the exact moment of their arrival.
Unlike either Allen or Alexandra, Hugh was an intensely physical person, a man much at home in his body, exuding animal energy. He even looked at things in a total, physical way, as animals do, all his muscles at attention, along with his depthless, clear blue eyes. On their one planned excursion together, in a rented car, out to the ruins at Monte Albán, the ancient pyramids, instead of looking at the stones Alexandra mostly watched Hugh, as he paced and bent and stopped to look, turned and bent down again. (And Allen watched Alexandra, watching.)
And their odd synchroneity continued. Even when Allen and Alexandra slept somewhat late and were late coming in to breakfast, there would be Hugh, saying ruefully that he had overslept. They laughed about it, this coincidence of inner timing, but even as they did so Alexandra felt a tiny chill of fear: suppose they should come into a room, as they surely would, sooner or later, and not find Hugh? Coming into the bar and finding him there at night, smiling and standing up at the sight of them, saying, “This is my first Margarita, honest”—coming on Hugh in that way became for Alexandra like finding a sudden brilliant light, in anticipated darkness.
Now they are drinking what are probably their last Margaitas, in this huge, dingy, crowded area, among their own and other people’s piles of luggage, these somewhat unlikely, not quite friends (although not unlikely to the mostly shabby Mexicans who are with them in the waiting room, who stare and find it perfectly reasonable that these three Hollywood-looking Americans should be together).
In a summing-up way Hugh says, “Well, it certainly was lucky for me, running into you folks down there.”
“Oh, lucky for us!” Allen responds very quickly, with a lively smile.
“Oh, lucky!” Alexandra echoes, her own smile a little uncertain.
Hugh’s face is bright as, having covered that topic, he moves on to more urgent matters. “I guess planes are always late getting out of here?” he questions. “No counting on schedules?”
Allen answers, “Probably not. Schedules are, uh, almost irrelevant.”
Hugh’s plane for Ixtapa was originally scheduled to leave an hour after that of Allen and Alexandra for Mérida; however, both schedules have continuously changed, so that now the question of who leaves when is quite “up in the air,” as Allen has put it, to a dutiful smile from Alexandra, a brief but appreciative chuckle from Hugh.
Now, though, as they regard the shifting numbers on the elevated blackboard, it appears that Hugh will leave first. Alexandra has all along known that this would be the case.
And, finally, his plane is announced. Boarding time.
In a suddenly awkward cluster the three of them stand up, not quite facing each other.
Allen, as he always uncontrollably does when ill at ease, begins to talk. “Well, I hope your tournament—this short flight—not too late,” he says, almost unheard in the general mounting confusion of people moving toward a just forming, straggling line, Spanish voices raised in prolonged farewells, bodies momentarily clutched in parting embraces.
Hugh grasps Allen’s hand, and presses it for an instant. What he indistinctly says is “Swell.”
Turning to Alexandra, so large and helpless, Hugh seems to see or simply to feel some nuance that moves him, somehow. Quickly bending toward her, he kisses her lightly on each cheek (a most un-Hugh-like gesture, Allen thinks) as he says, “Like the French! Well, Alexandra, so long!” and he turns and walks quickly, jauntily, into the crowd, toward the now moving line, in the huge and dingy, barely illuminated room.
Leaving them there.