Dancing with the Tiger Page 4

  Anna didn’t care about her children. She cared about David. A sordid daydream was forming.

  Her father read her mind. “I’d like to see David’s face at the next curators’ meeting when he hears the news. I don’t think he fully appreciates what we do.”

  Anna would like to see that face, too.

  Her father coughed again. He was in no shape to travel. His knees were bad. His Spanish was never great. He forgot to fill the bird feeder, pay bills. He was a weak man with large passions or a large man with weak passions. She should have forgiven him by now. She was trying.

  “This is the last mask.” His voice barely reached her. “The last mask will save the rest. Your mother deserves this.”

  “Give me a minute. I’m still reading.”

  But she wasn’t reading. She’d drifted into her father’s bedroom. On the bureau, she found a bank envelope filled with crisp hundred-dollar bills. She pocketed it, removed her mother’s urn and journal from the closet. The urn was Mexican talavera, blue and white, sealed with a cork. She brought the urn, journal, and envelope into the kitchen, set them on the breakfast table. Now what?

  Her father was still talking, his voice subdued, almost contrite. “I won’t do it, if you’re really opposed. I don’t want to fight about it. Tell me what you think. I trust your opinion.”

  That hurt. It hurt because he meant it. He was relying on her judgment now. This natural transference should have pleased Anna, but instead it filled her with a strange loneliness. She went to the sink, got herself a glass of water. Her eyes were dry. Her stomach hurt. Her mother had washed dishes in this sink. She’d worn rubber gloves. She propped avocado seeds on toothpicks, waited for roots to grow.

  “Dad, where are your masks?”

  “In the basement. The Met shipped them back. Forty-two boxes.”

  She heard the pain in his voice. Her father had been so strong since he quit drinking, but how much disappointment could he take?

  Anna squeezed the bridge of her nose. She wanted to feel lucky, a woman capable of finding love and treasure, but it was February and the trees had no leaves and her father wanted to go back to Mexico, where her mother had died, and maybe he didn’t care if he died there, too. He loved her but considered documenting Mexican art a higher purpose, his calling, and maybe it was. She was too old to play the needy child, but it was hard to argue away this hollow feeling.

  “What are you doing in there?” he called out.

  “Making you lunch.” She had another thought. “Did this twigger find an urn with the mask? Or was it sitting there all by itself?”

  “I heard nothing about an urn.”

  Anna peeled off bacon and dropped it in a frying pan. The heavy smell of grease made her woozy with nostalgia. She and David cooked bacon every Sunday and made love and read the paper as the morning light grew stronger.

  She wiped her father’s counters with a warm sponge. Outside, three crows flew across the pallid sky. An omen of death. A loaf of white bread lay open on the counter. Another omen of death. Everything was an omen of death, if you thought about it long enough. Expiration dates. The freezer. The broom. The dustpan. The recyclables. Save the date.

  Only plastic lived forever. Plastic was happy.

  When the bacon was crispy, she made a sandwich, piled on mini carrots, a multivitamin garnish, set the plate on her father’s side table.

  “Forget about Mexico,” Anna said, not meeting his eyes. “The death mask is just another lie.”

  She left before he could argue, muttering that she had to run out. And she did run out, with the journal, the urn, and the envelope.

  five THE GARDENER

  It was nearly midnight and Hugo knelt in his flowerbed planting dahlias, thinking of the papershop girl. Lightning bugs circled the yard. Cryptic warnings. Across the valley, fireworks exploded, light but no noise. Dogs howled with longing. Every tuber he planted was her. Over and over, he covered her round hips with dirt and patted her behind with his trowel so she would stay put, grow, flower before him, as she did every afternoon.

  It was easy to love two women, but impossible to leave one for another.

  He and Soledad had built their lives together. Each object in their home had a story, a familiar weight. They had boiled beans in the bean pot, drawn the curtains to make love, washed their feet in a bucket.

  “¿Tú vienes?” Soledad appeared in the doorway, a shadow in a robe. Her hair hung loose around her shoulders.

  “Soon,” he called back. “I have another row to plant.”

  “You are excessive in everything . . .”

  Hugo banged his lover’s rump, blew the dirt for luck. “I am the man you married.”

  “What was I thinking?”

  He shook his trowel at the stars. “You should have married Him.”

  “Who?”

  “God. Imagine the house. A villa in Huatulco.”

  Soledad smiled wryly. “God lives in Cancún.”

  “With all the tourists?”

  “God would banish the tourists and have the warm water all to Himself.”

  “Then why hasn’t He done it?”

  “He is waiting for me.”

  Hugo threw a pebble at the screen door.

  Soledad jumped. “You’re in a bad mood.”

  “It’s my mood. Let me have it.”

  A minute of quiet, then an accusation: “You are just pretending to plant dahlias.”

  Hugo dropped his trowel, impressed. “Pretending?”

  “You say you are planting dahlias, but that is not what you are really doing.”

  “What am I really doing?”

  “I don’t know, but if I knew, I would make you stop.”

  “Stop trying to be clever.” His wife was not a beautiful woman—her younger sister Sonia was lovelier but forever dissatisfied—still, in this light, she glowed with warmth and comfort, a gift of the moon.

  “Come to bed,” she told him. “You have work tomorrow.”

  “I am working hard now, extra jobs.”

  Hugo did not tell his wife that the drug lord Óscar Reyes Carrillo had offered him a hundred times his normal pay to make a pick-up in Tepito. He and Pedro, together. If the job was done right, more work would follow. Hugo knew that Reyes sought him out because he worked for Thomas Malone, and someday Reyes would exploit this connection, but Hugo planned to be long gone before that day arrived.

  “We are close,” he said. “Are you ready?”

  “I’ve been practicing English.”

  “We are going to ditch the gringo de mierda.”

  Soledad hurried across the yard, glancing behind at the chapel. The red light was on, as it always was late at night. “Shhhhhhhh.”

  Hugo shooed her worries with his trowel. “He can’t hear.”

  Soledad pulled him. “Come to bed. Ya basta.”

  “Leave me alone, woman!”

  “You are shivering.”

  She ran inside, returned with a blanket, draped it over his shoulders. Though he was grateful, he did not thank her. His fingers were stiff. His calf muscles ached. He was burying his lover. His wife did not appreciate this sacrifice. He dared not point it out.

  “What color will the flowers be?” Soledad was crouching, whispering into his neck. Her breath smelled like chamomile and honey.

  “Yellow.”

  “Yellow and what?”

  “All yellow.”

  She flinched, then wrapped her arms around him, the way a mother wraps a naked child in a towel after a bath. He let himself be held. When she spoke, she chose her words with care. “If all the flowers are yellow, our garden will be the most beautiful in Oaxaca. Tell me again how close we are.”

  He pulled her into his lap, listened to the frogs sing about rain. “Halfway. Maybe more. We can stay with my cousin in Tex
as.” The sureness of this one fact made all the suppositions surrounding it seem possible. “We will leave on a warm night, ride the bus with a picnic of tortas and fruit, cross the river on a raft. Jaime will fix us a mattress on his floor. We will sleep without worries on borrowed white sheets. In the morning, I will earn our first dollar. We will press it in a book and give it to our children when they go to university and become doctors and lawyers who take their families on vacation in Cancún, where God has a time share.”

  He tugged her waist. “The Virgin will watch over us.”

  The same fairy tale was told all over the valley. Hugo tilted his head, watched the stars, but could not imagine God, or even God’s mother, looking down on him with anything like love. Somewhere, the papershop girl was curled in her sheets, one pretty foot curved into the arc of the other, lace gloves paired on her desk. His wife’s hair pressed against his throat. All he could see was darkness.

  six THE HOUSEKEEPER

  “Santísima Virgen, mother of us all, it’s Soledad again. I know it’s late, but I cannot sleep. Hugo says we will leave soon for el otro lado. I am scared, Virgencita. I should be happy, but I don’t want to live with Hugo’s cousin in Texas. Jaime snorts all day, with his clogged sinuses, and Alicia lets cats eat from her plate. These relatives do not love us. They do not want us to sleep on their floor. I tell Hugo I want to go with him so he will not leave me behind. Men who go to the North by themselves are seduced by American sluts who lift weights in gyms with their boy bodies, and when the men return home they don’t love their wives or their country anymore. I am learning English. Hallo. How are you? My name iz Soledad. Are the days nicer in the United States? They say so. I hate Sam’s Club, Virgencita. There is one in Oaxaca, as you know. Towers of cereals and jam and televisions touch the ceiling. I am ready to live in a box and eat from a box and drive in a box and shop in a box, but how will I get pregnant without Señora Magda’s rose water? The last time there was so much blood I thought I was dying. Even chubby Leticia is pregnant again. After we make love, I lie in bed and imagine my womb is a garden. Sometimes I want to stand naked in a field and shout at God. Shake my fist. How do you get His attention? I worry Hugo keeps another woman. He doesn’t smell right and he looks guilty when I hold him. Make me strong, blessed Virgin. You see how confused I am. My thoughts are dirty laundry in a basket. Sometimes I listen outside Señor Thomas’s chapel. Maybe the sounds I hear are nothing, a movie or a dream, but the big house vibrates with bad feeling. I pray none of its sickness touches us.”

  seven ANNA

  Anna drove past barren fields, pole barns, and warehouses. February outside. February inside. The trees were skeletons against the dun sky.

  She could drive back to David.

  She could drive back to her dad.

  She could drive west until she reached the desert and lie under a tree.

  Instead, she forced down a sick cocktail and ranted to the radio. I travel the world and the seven seas. Everybody’s looking for something. Outside Norwalk, she stopped at a discount cigarette shack. They only sold cartons. She bought 199 more cigarettes than she needed.

  Driving, smoking, she inventoried all the ways she hated David. She hated his face. His intense blue eyes, wide forehead, the way his thin lips conveyed simpering confidence. How he pushed food around his plate when it wasn’t up to snuff. She hated his elite art friends with their judgments of worth and good taste. His inability to relax—always fidgeting a crossword or a German dictionary, his ambition brooding like bad weather. How dare he assume his own handsomeness with such smug regard? She hated his bulletproof résumé. He’d never scooped an ice cream cone. Never bagged groceries. His first internship in high school was at the Guggenheim. Paid.

  But she had fallen in love with him. It was true. She could pinpoint the moment. He had been leaning against a wall at a party, holding a beer by its neck, eyeing her, glib. Was that the word? Charming? Consuming her. Talking Warhol. “He said he didn’t have to explain his art. It was all right there. On the surface.”

  Could hate replace love in an instant? No, it could not. Hate had not replaced love. She now loved him and hated him. F. Scott Fitzgerald said the ability to hold two opposing emotions while still functioning was a sign of intelligence. That made her a fucking genius. Except she wasn’t functioning. She was drinking Cuervo. She was ripping her thumbs, wiping the blood on her boots.

  —

  By evening, she was back in Brooklyn. Harmonica was spending the weekend at an ashram in Vegas. The Post-it on the fridge read: Center. Stretch. Olive Leaf Extract 2X a day. xoxoxo. Anna filled the tub, propped the urn next to the herbal shampoo. Wineglass in hand, she sank low in the water, tried to picture her mother’s face, the shape of her fingers on the piano, her knees. Her parents had met at an auction. Her mother had kept the books for an architectural salvage shop, pricing corbels and Tiffany lamps. It wasn’t much of a stretch to move from antiques to masks, to fall in love with a man who collected. Would her mother have chased a death mask? Of course she would have. She had. She had risked her life to help Anna’s father, and that was why she was dead.

  When the bath water cooled, Anna got out and dried herself, put on a dress, no underwear, set the urn next to her computer. Photographs of the Warhol opening had been posted online. David posing with the director of the Met. David posing with a woman posing as Edie Sedgwick. David posing with Clarissa. Clarissa was younger than Anna, shorter, perky, enormous teeth. David looked happy, relieved.

  Maybe she had never been right for him. David with his Ivy League degrees, Nantucket summers, his imported peppered crackers. Her previous boyfriend had given her a sweater for her birthday. David gave her a nineteenth-century etching of Aphrodite. Yes, he came from money, but he worked hard, appraising, appreciating, in a way that made Anna go limp when he was admiring her. She was happy to be swept out of her mediocrity, to join the art world of the little black dress. True, her father was an art collector. But without an art degree or museum pedigree, Daniel Ramsey was a scrappy amateur, acting from the gut, which Anna both admired and distrusted.

  She took down their book from Harmonica’s shelf, slumped on the couch. The masks were as familiar as friends: the glaring Moor, the lewd negrito from Tabasco, the chivo mask with real horns. Anna’s favorite was the plainest: a concave slab of wood painted pine green, beak for a nose, two square eyes about the size of Scrabble tiles, and a ragged slash of a mouth, frozen in a worried intake of breath. What this bird or person, this bird person, wanted most of all, it seemed, was to fly away.

  Grief rose inside her. Now she was combing through her mother’s ashes, sifting the gravel as if she might find something precious inside. A last note. Her mother’s voice. Anna opened her journal, found the diary entry she’d read many times, a series of Juan Rulfo passages that her mother had copied down in Spanish. Back in high school, Anna had snuck a translation of them inside the journal for safekeeping. She liked to read the Spanish for the sound, the English for meaning.

  “I’ve finished Pedro Páramo, the Juan Rulfo novel. Beautiful but spooky. The narrator’s dying mother makes him promise to visit Comala, the village where she was born. ‘There you’ll find the place I love most in the world. The place where I grew thin from dreaming. My village, rising from the plain. Shaded with trees and leaves like a piggy bank filled with memories. You’ll see why a person would want to live there forever.’ But when the son goes back to Comala, he finds nothing but ghosts! I want to be buried in Oaxaca. There is so much color here, so much life. The dead don’t die. They linger.”

  Her mother’s ashes had sat in a closet for two decades, but for the first time, Anna acknowledged a sad truth: If she didn’t bring her mother to Oaxaca, no one else would.

  The apartment was dark, except for a strip of light shining under the bathroom door. Timeline. Tightrope. Arrow. Anna studied it until she made up her mind.

  She opened her fa
ther’s e-mail and copied the rendezvous address into Google Maps—15 Jardineros was in Tepito, one of the worst neighborhoods in Mexico City. Switching to Images, Anna skimmed through photographs of market stalls, police in riot gear, tough men with tattoos scrawled on their foreheads, like graffiti drawn with a Sharpie.

  She’d fly to Oaxaca, then take an overnight bus to Mexico City, though the State Department discouraged night travel of any kind. The following items are recommended for extended road trips: cellular telephone with charger; maps and a GPS; a spare tire; first aid kit; fire extinguisher; jumper cables; flares/reflectors; and an emergency tool kit. The list made Anna laugh. As if objects could protect you from people. As if precaution could protect you from tragedy.

  Feeling light, almost gleeful, she set out enough clothes for a week, combat boots, red lipstick, her little black dress. She packed a pocket Spanish–English dictionary, a headlamp, and earplugs. She packed a Swiss Army knife. She packed Tums. The worse the trip sounded, the better she felt. She was proving something, but wasn’t sure what. Who needs a honeymoon when you could go to Tepito?

  She was betting on her father. She was betting on herself.

  She would buy Montezuma’s death mask, the last mask that would save the rest.

  And David? Forever after, the Ramsey Collection would live on in the Met’s permanent collection, while in three months, David’s precious Warhol show would be shipped off to Pittsburgh or Tampa, then disassembled, scattered, forgotten. At the Met, every so often, he’d have to walk through the Ramsey gallery, be forced to remember what he’d thrown away. Who he’d thrown away. Her.

  Tepito. Wikipedia claimed the barrio got its name because nervous policemen would tell their buddies, If there’s danger, I’ll whistle.