She loved the courtyard at any time of the day, but she loved it most in late afternoon, the mellow-yellow hour she called it, for the tone of the light. It fell not as sunlight does through a window but more like a mist, sifting down on the fountain, the plants, the floor’s square paving stones. Her house dated to 1796; the year of its construction and the names of the Spaniards who’d built it were chiseled into the keystone arch above the front entrance: Don Francisco y Doña Isabella de Monteczuma, the surname marking Don Francisco as mixed race, a descendant of Aztec royalty.
The place had been a ruin, abandoned for decades, when she bought it for next to nothing. Restoring it to livable condition, converting the sala into a clinic and then equipping it, had cost considerably more than nothing. With her savings almost depleted, she’d been reduced to bartering for tradesmen’s services: free treatment for new wiring; free examinations for new plumbing.
The courtyard being a luxury, its renovation came last. The fountain—a griffin standing on its hind legs in a basin shaped like a seashell—was sandblasted, the broken clay pipes replaced with copper. In the mellow-yellow hour, listening to the splash of water spit from the griffin’s beak, Lisette would sit with a glass of wine and imagine Don Francisco and Doña Isabella joining her for cocktails. Sometimes, after one glass too many, the reins on her imagination slipped, and she conducted make-believe conversations with those ghosts, telling them about the commonplace events of her day, now and then relating a tragedy or comedy for contrast.
She was like a lonely child, inventing playmates to fill her solitude. Was that all Pamela was to her? In her ideal conception of love, Lisette thought, Pamela’s happiness should be her first concern. This pulled her to another, more fundamental question she’d been trying to resolve: Was she in love? She’d approached it like a diagnosis, eliminating possibilities to arrive at the correct answer. She was drawn to Pamela’s glamour and upscale style, but that wasn’t love. Nor was the protectiveness aroused by Pamela’s mania. Meds held it in check, though not always. During one of their weekend trysts in Tucson, she had stayed up all night rearranging her furniture, and woke Lisette at five a.m., crying, “Come look! Look what I’ve done to the place! Don’t you love it! Tell me you love it!” That excitability, that neediness. Lisette wished she could throw herself, self-sacrificially, between Pamela and her neurochemical demons. If that was love, it was the maternal kind. She wondered, now, if probing the heart’s motives was stupid. You knew intuitively when you were in love; if analysis was required, might that be a sign that you weren’t?
“There. There,” Pamela said now. They were in the courtyard, where she was applying finishing touches to a white cardboard poster, propped on a table against one of the pillars supporting the arcade. She stepped aside as if unveiling a portrait or an epic landscape. “Don’t you think that’s way better?”
Lisette agreed. The poster was a big improvement over the one she’d produced weeks earlier. On the left side, under the green-lettered word “Sí!,” vegetables spilled from a cornucopia; on the right, under a red-lettered “No!,” lay a trash pile of soda cans and junk-food wrappers. Pamela had drawn the images with photographic realism. Beneath them, neat columns listed the cornucopia’s bounty—phytonutrients from blue corn, purple carrots, purple potatoes—and the evil fruits of Coke, Fritos, pizza—salt, sugar, trans fats. The poster was to be a visual aid in Lisette’s nutrition classes, held monthly for San Patricio’s housewives and schoolchildren.
“You done good, girl,” she said. “You made the corn and carrots look appetizing and the crap repulsive.”
“First representational stuff I’ve done in years,” Pamela said with a laugh. She sat down, facing the poster, her back to Lisette, and picked up the cigarette in the plate dragooned into service as an ashtray. She was a social smoker, no more than two or three a day. Lisette considered it disgusting but didn’t make an issue of it.
“Thanks for taking the trouble. I hope not to make a sign painter out of you.”
“Hey! Anything for the cause. What is the cause, exactly?”
“Preventive medicine! Mexicans are the número uno consumers of junk food on the planet! Half the people I see have heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, immune systems fucked from the garbage they stuff into their mouths. If they can go back to eating the way they did a hundred years ago—”
Pamela turned and, looking at Lisette with gentle merriment, raised her hands. “Puh-leeze! I was only kidding.”
“About what?”
“Asking what the cause is. You’ve told me.”
Lisette chuckled at herself. “I can’t help it. It’s my grand passion.”
“Not too grand, I hope. Not so grand it doesn’t leave room.”
She’d styled her hair in the way Lisette liked, pinned up with a butterfly clip. It emphasized her classic looks, exposed the full length of her pretty neck, which Lisette now kissed.
“Room aplenty. If the ladies and their kids weren’t coming in half an hour…”
“Tonight,” Pamela said, promise in her voice. She folded her arms across her breasts, tight, athletic, half again as big as baseballs. “Save it for tonight. It feels like it’ll be a cold one.”
“Snow predicted down to two thousand meters. We’re at fifteen hundred. Ever think you’d see snow in Mexico?”
“Nope. But then I never thought I’d spend a morning in a church with a Catholic priest and find that I liked him.”
“Tim’s all right. Not the doctrinaire type.”
“He knows you’re gay, right?”
“Sure. A while back, when rumors started that I was the padre’s secret squeeze, he got nervous about a scandal. No worries, I told him, I don’t like boys. Never did.”
“What did he say?”
“That it would stay between him and me. He warned me that his parishioners were pretty conservative when it came to that, the women especially. If they knew, or even suspected, I could lose them as patients. Their kids, too. No problema, I said. I’d grown up among hellfire evangelicals. I knew how to behave. So how did it go with Tim?”
“All right, I guess. He said there was enough work for a team, but I suppose I could get a start on it.”
“You agreed, then? You’ll come down and do it?” Striving not to sound too hopeful, too avid. Because this was so pleasant; it made her feel complete to sit in her own courtyard, conversing with a woman she cared for.
“I didn’t agree. I didn’t turn him down. I’ll have to think about it.”
“What is there to think about?” She wanted to take the words back as soon as she spoke them. Too sharp, too demanding.
“Are you kidding?” Pamela said, and held up a finger. “One: like I keep telling you and him, it’s been years since I’ve done restorations.” Another finger popped up. “Two: I wouldn’t want it to interfere with my own work.” And another. “Three: I don’t speak Spanish. I can’t even ask where the bathroom is.”
Too much time in resorts where everybody speaks English, Lisette thought as she said, “Dónde está el baño. Give it a try.”
Pamela bristled. “Come on, I know that much.”
“Sorry. Look, I’m not asking you to throw your whole life over. Only to spend a few months down here. We can see how things work out.”
“There’s a couple of other things.” She squinted at Lisette—a pained expression, as if to show how difficult it was to say what she was about to say. “It’s weird down here, and dangerous besides, and I don’t do danger very well. Those two guys who stopped us, the way the one looked at me, it made me feel like he was smearing slime all over me. And then there’s what you said a minute ago. That you know how to behave. Back into the closet?”
“Más o menos. More or less.”
“That’s easy if you’re alone. So what would I have to do? Make off that I’m just your friend or roommate or whatever? God forbid anybody catches us holding hands? I’m not sure I can go back to living that way, even for a little while. Are you saying you can?”
Ah, Lisette thought. Here is the main objection. She had had the same doubts herself, anticipating the strains that came from leading a double life. But they did not trouble her half as much as they seemed to trouble Pamela; for there had always been a hidden side to Lisette, an alter ego who liked being a sexual renegade. This part of her had taken a covert pleasure in shocking her family, and in their rejection of her. It was an anarchic streak that rebelled against any orthodoxy, finding the pieties of the gay rights movement a load of crap and the new tolerance of gays boring, the lukewarm bath of acceptance transforming social outlaws into bourgeois sanctioned to marry and adopt. Hot, once-prohibited kisses cooled into matrimonial pecks. Your turn to drive the kids to soccer practice, dear, I’ve got to mow the lawn. The romantic outrider in her believed that if eros was crushed by too much repression, it was shallowed by too little. Imagine Hester Prynne and Reverend Dimmesdale in a New England that winked at adultery. Yes, she and Pamela would have to sail their love boat under false colors in San Patricio. Fear of discovery would attend them daily; but deception’s thrills would compensate for its anxieties. Not to mention the zip and zing of pent-up desires released in cloistered darkness.
But she wasn’t about to reveal this secret self to Pamela, whose hands she now clasped. “I’m saying that it’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make if that’s what it takes to be with you,” she said, with an earnestness not entirely genuine since it would not be entirely a sacrifice.
Pamela looked to her cigarette, three-quarters ash. She’d been put on the spot, unfairly, childishly. If you’re not willing, then you don’t really care for me.
“It’s a lot to think about,” she said.