They took the taxi from the runway to a rustic pensión near the church. The room, when Collin opened the door, smelled of the sea and the ancient timbers used to build the place years before. He had gotten a room on the desert side. Its one small window offered a good view of a treeless mountain, almost blue, scarred by jeep tracks that seemed to wander aimlessly across the mountain’s face like scars.
He found a bark scorpion in the shower and killed it with a newspaper. Its amber-colored body scrambled on the tiles to avoid the blows; then suddenly it was dead. As he cleaned up for breakfast he wondered where else they were hiding.
He thought about the German girl while he put his things away. He couldn’t help it. He’d always liked women too much: not just the sex, which he enjoyed, but their company. He loved the company of women. He loved them for being mercurial and taciturn at times, the very things that most men he knew disliked.
He met his friends for breakfast on the pensión’s second floor balcony, under a green market umbrella with a view of the oasis. In the distance the doctor could see the tops of the date palms sway from the weight of the pickers, some shirtless, who were already up in the trees, harvesting the fruit before it got too hot. Everything was done in the town before it got too warm, their waiter told them. Children, he joked, were all conceived at dawn, or after midnight.
After breakfast they’d all gone out to paint. The doctor wanted to work alone; he thought he wasn’t as good a painter as the others. They were professional artists, and he considered himself a rank amateur. He’d stayed out of the oasis, where his friends all wanted to be, or in front of the town’s famous church. It was better if he were alone, he’d told himself, not getting in their way, taking up a valuable position that rightfully belonged to the professionals.
Instead, he’d wandered down a dirt track running by the back of the pensión. The dirt road became very rough and rutted as he walked towards the sea. He carried a cheap backpack that he’d bought in the market at San Angel in Mexico City. It carried his portable easel, paper, his watercolors, and a bottle of iced tea he’d bought in the town.
He walked for a kilometer or so and found nothing of interest. The heat, building suddenly after eleven, pressed down on him almost like a weight. The intense sunlight started to rob the landscape of its hard, clean edges. He was going to give up and go back, because all he’d seen was the strange landscape with its hulking barrel cacti and the odd signs of civilization: a rusted and defiled car and an unfinished building’s foundation sprouting steel rods, oddly surreal in the middle of nowhere. But he kept going, enjoying the walking, the feeling of being completely alone, not wanting to waste the morning.
He stopped finally at an abandoned one-story adobe rancho sitting by itself. Someone’s homestead? He couldn’t tell for sure, but it had that feel. From the look of it, whoever had built it had abandoned it years ago. Its roof had been smashed in; its adobe walls, once whitewashed, were pocked now by the weather, big brown patches of mud showing through the lye. He knew right away that he wanted to paint the place, to render its lonely deserted dignity, the worn face of someone’s dream all gone wrong. He unpacked his things and worked standing in the sun, adding a few shadows, like people standing inside the rancho.
He got a good painting out of it because he worked fast: all impressions, no explanations, no over-thinking or consciously trying. He’d left a lot of white from the paper showing, which gave the rancho’s blistered lye walls a stark quality that excited him. The week before he’d had to tell a patient of his, an engineer, that he was going to die and that there was nothing he could do for him. It had stuck with him, the sadness of it all, because he’d gotten to know the fellow, personally. And now a little of that moment was forever in the painting, too: the rancho vulnerable, deserted, left to face the desert alone, no illusions about failure or hope. He decided it was truly stoic, and painted it that way.
He drank his tea, which had gotten warm, and carefully rolled up the painting by one o’clock. He was slightly sunburnt around his arms and the back of his neck, but he felt satisfied in a new way he couldn’t explain with words. It was as if the act of painting were some kind of catharsis that for a moment had purged him of everything he’d been through lately. He felt good heading back with it to the pensión. It was a small, still-wet victory tucked into his backpack when he walked up the stairs eager to show it, but also afraid to.
At lunch, everyone in the party was impressed with what he’d done. The German girl, Marita, looked but said nothing. She painted in oil, and his was a very small watercolor. He assumed she would dismiss it as sophomoric. Alfredo told him he should abandon his “straight” life and become an artist and stop screwing around with medicine and science, because he had real talent. It was the first time he’d ever said that. He seemed to mean it.
Alfredo had propped up the doctor’s painting in the center of the table without asking him, so they could all see it. They were all intellectuals, and it was intimidating but exciting, too. By then the painting was completely dry and looked pretty damn good. He’d gotten the sky, too, Collin thought—the dry empty-beauty and the blue nothingness in it.
At lunch they talked about Goya and his paintings of the French invasion of Spain. There was a white tablecloth, and the doctor, without wanting to, started looking at the plates and people’s faces, the sweat on the water glasses as the others spoke, making a kind of music as it was in Spanish. The others talked about what was happening in America, which everyone hated now and he was tired of defending, after the awful photos from Iraq. He composed a still life in his head as they inveighed against his country.
They assumed he was against the war because he seemed sensitive and was a doctor. He wasn’t sure anymore what he felt. He’d joined the intelligence service to fight terrorism. They’d sent him to Kuwait, and he’d run pap tests on whores. When he’d complained about it, they’d accused him of not being a team player. His artist friends had no idea he was an intelligence officer and had believed in the war.
Twice he looked at the German girl and wondered what she was thinking, and why she looked so good without obviously trying to. Maybe it was the bright light in her hair when she sat down, or the fact that she was bra-less, or because she was quite intelligent. He just looked at her beauty as he would at a very good painting, a Sargent maybe, and got lost in it.
After lunch they were all a little drunk because they’d drunk wine. They all met at the pool to read and do nothing but lie around the verge and wait for the late afternoon; it was too bright to paint during the heat of the day.
He’d been pretending to read a paperback by the side of the pool, but in fact had been looking at the girl. She was wearing a two-piece orange bathing suit. He watched her boost herself out of the water. Her body glistened wet, the curve of her ass womanly. Her shoulders were very straight. The sun in her short blonde hair sparkled so you could see all the different colors of blonde in it. The doctor had an overwhelming desire to make love to her, a full blast of lust. It was like when he’d seen the island in the Gulf from the plane, and wondered how it might be to go ashore and explore.
The girl had sat next to him in Alfredo’s beat-up Volvo for the drive to the airport. When she’d jumped into the car, she was wearing a peasant blouse and cutoffs. No luggage, just all her stuff in one of those cheap plastic market bags that the poor carry. Everything seemed to be spilling out: her painting stuff, food, a bottle of wine, and mostly her youth. She bought a bathing suit at the airport in Cabo. She’d smelled, because she didn’t have a shower in her studio. She’d smelled like clay and turpentine and woman. He was a little overwhelmed by her, by her goddess-girlness.
He was hopelessly attracted to her physically, and now by the pool, he was suddenly tired of trying to play it cool. He wanted her to notice him in that way men want women to notice them. He was always decisive with women; it worked because he was handsome. He had been lucky in that regard.
He decided, putting the book down, that he was going to flirt with her. Try and get her away from the others, if he could, and take it from there. He had a plan. Like the painting he’d done that morning. He’d had a plan from the moment he’d come across the rancho, not to over-think it, but just to get it down.
He felt the concrete’s heat on his ass immediately when he sat down next to her. The heat seemed to go all the way up his spine and to warm his crotch. The heat of the concrete made his sexual fantasy somehow more tangible. Looking at her while he’d pretended to read, he’d been afraid he’d get an erection and embarrass himself, like he had once in high school.
“How do you live,” he asked her, “without a job, I mean?”
“From day to day,” she said. “My mother sends me a little money. It’s just enough for the studio and tortillas. . . . She’s a judge. In Hamburg.” Like so many Europeans, she spoke English almost perfectly. He thought her accent charming.
She was twenty-five. She lived in Mexico City where she had some kind of studio space which, according to his friend Alfredo, had to be seen to be believed. She was a painter’s painter, Alfredo had told him. “She has all her sheets to the wind,” he’d said. He supposed Alfredo had been her lover at some point.
Apparently it was rough living. No water, a dangerous neighbor-hood. She thrived on it, she told him. The neighborhood toughs were all in love with her, she claimed; he believed it, too. Her small body was so alive-looking.
Alfredo had lent her the money to come painting with them, as she was broke all the time. Collin’s friend Alfredo came from a very rich family and never had to worry about money. Alfredo was kind to her, even after they’d broken up, checked on her to make sure she had food and a little cash. He was old-fashioned that way, a gentleman.
“That must be difficult,” the doctor said to her. “No potable water, I mean.”
“Yes, it’s difficult,” she said. “You can’t wash dishes with tequila.”
She smiled. She was wearing the big sunglasses that had come back into fashion; the doctor remembered them from his child-hood.
She slipped her dark glasses up and took notice of him now, not as a member of the group, but as Collin, the man who was obviously pursuing her. He could see into her eyes. They were like the pensión’s pool; very, very clear and light blue. Her intelligence zigzagged there at the very back of them. She gave him an “Okay, I get it” look.
Later, when she was in bed with him, in that room that smelled like the Gulf of California, he was amazed by just how physically strong she was. She was kind of a beast, really. They’d made the wooden bed move on the tile floor. She asked him to do some-thing he’d never done before and he liked that, the danger of what they did. The adventure of it.
The clinical approach to sex taken in medical school had almost ruined it for him. Sometimes while making love, though, he’d see the old-fashioned medical drawings of coitus from the 19th century texts that med students had passed around for laughs, and those drawings and their stark, lyrical beauty had recaptured the romantic tenderness and intimacy of it all for him.
She seemed hungry for everything, where he was more careful and always had been. She was all about the Right Now, it seemed: the pleasure of painting, the pleasure of legs-in-the-air screwing, drinking at lunch, dope smoking, blowing him in a hammock on the deck overlooking the oasis, where they could be caught by a maid or a passerby.
He watched the tops of the palm trees while she went down on him. He’d struggled against the orgasm like a man who doesn’t want to get off an escalator—going up, the palm trees blurry now in the sun. Then orgasm. The mind and body suddenly pushed together. A wash of sunlight and sweat on his face. A small delirium. Her fatuous smile.
He’d slipped off the verge into the pool.
“You have a job?” she’d asked. She was interested, he could tell. She said she liked the painting he’d done. She said it had a “male quality,” but didn’t explain what she meant by that. He’d decided right then, feeling the cool water around him, that he was going to do everything he could to get her into bed. He watched her wet her knees, dipping water out from the pool. “Alfredo says you’re a doctor, and you work for the U.S. Embassy.”
“Yes. I’m a doctor,” he’d said. She’d broken out laughing and said something in German that he didn’t understand, but that must have been something like “Oh shit!” She jumped into the pool and stood next to him in the water. Sometimes you can feel another person’s body without actually touching it. He’d felt hers then because she stood very close, the unseen tendrils of energy moving around them like the light in the water.
“And I thought you were just another down-and-out American painter,” she’d said. “I meet them all the time at parties at Alfredo’s house. They always want to borrow money!”
He got what he wanted that night, and then some. Love making, tile sounds. The sound of her voice when she came filled the candlelit room. Very good.
Later, she’d told him she couldn’t sell any of her paintings. She wasn’t going to give up, she said, but he’d heard the desperation in her voice. She said he couldn’t understand; he had a straight job and didn’t live like she had to live, like an artist. It stung a little because it was true. He’d been a kind of voyeur, watching his friends be artists. Alfredo kept telling him it was a dangerous occupation, but he hadn’t really understood that until he saw the fear in Marita’s eyes. For some reason he thought of the old pilot and his kind of bravery, the silent get-up-and-do-it kind. He thought maybe the German girl had it, too.
“People like you—straight people—will never understand us,” she’d told him in bed. “Not in a million years.”
He didn’t try to answer her back; it hadn’t seemed right.