Indecision (14 page)

She set me up on her couch, then left to join Brigid in the bedroom, whether because they were cousins, lesbian lovers, enlightened Europeans, or just two women in a place with one bed, who knew? Alone in the clean cold kitchen, I poured myself a glass of water—hopefully potable—to wash down the pills I was taking. The Larium was an antimalarial and the Abulinix, of course, was an anti-abulial. I gulped and swallowed the pills, and went and lay down on the couch.

Everyone always moves so insouciantly into the future, one foot in front of the next, that it seems as if they’ve already been there and liked it enough to go back for more. Only their total confidence permits me to follow without undue terror. Yet sometimes—such as when you read in the
Times
of certain weird and bad events, like the guy who heard a noise outside his sister’s house, ran out the door to inspect, and then plunged into an old abandoned chalk quarry, just caved in, from which his body has never yet been recovered—you realize how the future is a place where no one has been, and from which you don’t come back.

Plus the idea that I might not return here was somehow made more credible by the emptiness of the apartment. There was none of the clutter of living, zero in the way of personal effects, no furniture beyond the basics, and nothing on the walls but a few rectangles, pale as scars, where maps or posters must have hung. Natasha had apparently moved in so recently that it looked like moving out. It troubled me that two conditions so opposed could appear so basically identical. But I told myself not to get too overly freaked out—I knew that one side effect of Abulinix could be some mild initial paranoia as the patient’s mind began assembling its new conditions of awareness.

TEN

“Morning, Natash!” I called out to the voice murmuring a tune in the kitchen. Sleep is so nice, I thought. Otherwise things would just add up.

“We go to meet Natasha at eleven. This sounds good to you?”

Because she sounded maybe more German than Dutch I said, “Ja.” I had studied some German in college—they made me.

Brigid came out to the living room in a white tee shirt and these shimmery red-green harem pants. She sat down on the arm of the couch. She had drawn two braided plaits of her hair—which was rich and glossy like freshly turned black soil—back from above the temples to where they met in a broad barrette and fell with the rest to her shoulders, something possibly done to fit with her somehow equally old-fashioned face, with the forceful and diminutive nose, the beautifully high and wide-set cheekbones, and the skin so nice it was like the little patch of acne strewn across one cheek had been put there to point up the flawlessness of the rest. She was smiling as she extended a plate of toast. “With jam of tomate de árbol. What you would call a tree tomato.”

“Thank you.” I ate some bites. “Hmm . . . Delicious. Not that it tastes very tomatoey.”

“More like a pomegranate,” she accurately observed, her voice a precise, quick instrument, whereas the look in her eyes was vague and sweetly stunned like that of a girl who’s just taken off her glasses.

“Does it at least grow on trees?” I asked regarding the fruit.

“Yes,” she laughed. “So it is not altogether a lie. You slept a long time. Did you have some good dreams?”

“No dreams.”

“I am the same when I travel. A new country is enough of a dream, don’t you think? So there is no need for dreaming when you sleep.”

I chewed my toast, considering this, and between glances at Brigid looked all around the room with equal attentiveness, just so it wouldn’t seem like I was particularly fixated on her face (so sharp-boned and precise, but with a pleasant suggestion of former plumpness everywhere smudging it faintly with voluptuous life) and happily analogous body. Certainly she would make a welcome addition to any threesome.

“Is there a mosquito?” she asked. “Or what are you looking at everywhere?”

Soon the two of us had walked down the hill and were scampering across the street, then waiting in some strange paved-over median—“The tram was to go here, but the government has lacked enough money”—then making the dash again. It was like some 3-D version of that early-period video game where the frog tries to hop across all these increasingly murderous lanes of traffic until he loses his life—or one of three lives.

“That felt dangerous,” I said, safe in my one life on the other side.

Next we were riding the tram where it did go and hanging from the straps like you still sometimes do on the subway in New York. We were on our way to where Natasha worked as a volunteer in this Catholic home for underresourced children whose mothers had been thrown in jail.

“Really? She never even told me. Natasha’s so modest. I guess that’s part of being so moral.”

Brigid said that often the moms had been locked up for stealing food to feed the same kids, whereas the dads might be working off the books somewhere in Spain or America.

“Yeah, so what’s the scene here, like economically?”

“I would say it is underdevelopment with also an aspect of—what would you say?—
pillage.
” And as Brigid explained (I’ve got it down now, though it was total Greek at the time) how the oil companies spirited the crude out of Ecuador, leaving behind just a few dollars for pipeline builders and low-level managers; how the IMF made its new loans conditional on a screamingly high general sales tax; how local industry had hardly been allowed to develop, dooming the country to the mere export of unfinished goods while
a sedentary comprador class squatted atop their rentier wealth in place of even so much as a minuscule national bourgeoisie
—during this furious primer on underdevelopment, delivered like it was for fun, I noticed, glancing accidentally down the brief tunnel of her tee shirt sleeve as she swayed with the turns of the tram, that Brigid didn’t shave her armpits, a beautiful negligence in my opinion, and echt Germanic.

At the same moment that in spite of her somewhat dusky appearance I asked Brigid whether she might be German, she said, “So you are a philosopher?”

I laughed and said no, and she frowned and said, “How could you think so? Mostly I am from Belgium.”

“Belgium!” When you have the good fortune of meeting a nice Belgian girl it really becomes necessary to confront her as a complex and unique being unlike any other in the world, because at least in my case you have
no
national stereotypes to understand her by. Or was Belgium sort of like Canada to America’s France, so that an indefinable air of comedy clung to its existence and its residents were noted mainly as bland and amenable drinkers of beer? “Sorry. I’m not an ace with the accents.”

“But do you like Germans?”

“Well, you know, their philosophers more than for example . . . the
Nazis.
”

Her dubious expression, as we stepped off the tram, caused me to explain that I didn’t like Nazis at all. “I don’t even like George Bush very much.”

She looked at me with hard, mirthful eyes, and smiled as she shook her head.

The streets were nearly deserted except for some scurrying stray dogs, the ventral sides of the lady dogs lined with swollen teats. We passed through an empty square flanked by palm trees, a surprise to me at whatever high altitude we were at—and looking up into the air I also saw this enormous winged statue crowning a steep green hill like a hood ornament atop some ferocious engine’s grille. “What is that?” I asked. “An angel I guess?”

“Mary.” And this was another surprise, because in being dragged as a kid through all these European cultural museums, to the point where eventually I’d really had enough of the Holy Family, and was even somewhat tired of my own, I had also naturally encountered plenty of paintings of the Annunciation—but here for the first time it seemed like the announcing angel and the Virgin had got confounded into one. Probably it was some Ecuadori heresy they had.

We turned up a narrow street running between signless bread-colored buildings. Burdened women were moving slowly by, and as we maneuvered through the solemn bustling crowd the air was thick with smells of smoke, fuel, waste, and meat. Before long a nun in her wimple had let us in through a metal door set in a wall of scarred plaster bearing the graffito
¡No al Plan Colombia!
and immediately she and Brigid began discoursing in Spanish in this rapid worried way.

I just stood there like a cigar-store Indian until Brigid said, “Let me introduce you to the children.”

“Cool. Where’s Natasha?”

She ignored the question, shouting to the kids something in Spanish which included my name, and right away I became this virtual Santa Claus: all these beautiful Andean children, with their enormous smiles, a tooth or two short, suspended between high cheekbones, ran up to me, buffeting me with hugs as I waded through their ranks. Two brave little girls climbed up either arm to kiss me on the cheeks, one calling me
guapo,
evidently a term of praise. “Mucho gusto,” was all I could think to say, an inadequate-sounding phrase when it seems you have hit by accident the basic human jackpot of love. I was really, really happy and wished I had candy or pens to distribute. Instead I just sat on a wooden bench giving and receiving hugs, and handing out from my wallet, as my only gifts, two quarters, three dimes, eight pennies, a nickel, a library card, several ticket stubs, and the business cards of acquaintances, friends, a drug dealer, and two unaffordable shrinks. I smiled with beatific incomprehension at all remarks made to me while the surrounding kids pointed, commented and laughed like I was some exotic friendly animal introduced into their midst. My delight in their response, and the fear that soon I would become boring to them, because simpering and unable to speak, competed so poignantly in my heart that I had one of my more emotional experiences since graduating from Eureka Valley and marching around to “Pomp and Circumstance,” and felt I might cry.

I wondered if right then at the back of my mind I was deciding to one day have children—many, many children. With Natasha!

Brigid canceled my reverie: “Natasha has vanished.” For some reason this absurd news caused me to stand up and smile apologetically at the nun, as if disappearing was something people like Natasha and me were likely to do. My awful immediate fear was that in crossing the street she had lost a game of human Frogger, and was now in the hospital—or the worse morgue.

I shook the kids off, and turned from them waving goodbye.

Brigid had handed me an envelope with my name written across it in a script I recognized from notes slid under my door long ago at St. Jerome’s.

“She wrote to the sisters also. And there is one for me as well.”

But how would I ever get to know her after her suicide? Suicide—such an extravagant thing to do! Yet at the same time so discreet! I could barely unfold the letter for my shaking hands:

My Very Dear Dwight,

I’m afraid you will think I have played an awful trick on you. You’ll think I am not the friend you knew if I have lured you to Quito and then abandoned you
[If you WHAT?].
Abandonment isn’t really the word, but still I am extremely sorry. Let me try to explain.

When I said you should come I assumed you were busy in New York and never imagined you would actually jump on a plane. So it wasn’t really a question of my wanting you to or not. It was only that I was having a bad time here and wanted to convince myself otherwise, as if to say, “Come visit me in my wonderful life.” And you have a very calming benevolent presence
[Not me! You!]
so perhaps I also simply liked to
imagine
your visiting.

I may even have become afraid of your visit because you are so well adjusted to everything
[No!],
and I was afraid I would envy you, and maybe be angry at you for that. Things would have been hard, obviously through no fault of your own. Until yesterday I thought I might be okay. That’s my excuse for not warning you. In fact I am writing this letter only
in case
. You arrive tonight. But I have a flight scheduled—I may or may not cancel
[She’s worse than me! We should be together!]
—and if you are reading this I am on it.

I turned to Brigid. “This isn’t happening.”

She looked guiltily useless. And not all that distressed. And not like Natasha! Not like Natasha at all!

Brigid is great and it’s good that you two should meet.
[Thanks.]
I have sung your praises to her.
[Thanks a lot, you fucking jilter—]
Hopefully you
[—you Joker—]
want to travel with her
[—you deserter, you Dutch treat, you—].
If not and you go directly back
please please
let me pay for your ticket.
[—you casual crusher of long-standing hopes!]
I have plenty of money, because I am going home to my parents (no rent), and nothing here has cost very much. Ecuador is a very affordable country, as well as beautiful.

“Are you a very slow reader?” Brigid asked.

When I see you again I want to be your old Natasha.

and she’d signed the thing with just her initial.

I looked up. “How long to the airport?”

“But this too is a free country. What can we say? ‘Please suffer your crisis here with us’?”

“That’s right. We’ll offer some thoughtful advice. Clearly this was a very dash rescission.” I meant a rash decision. “We have to go to the airport now!” I was being so decisive—I must finally know what I want—and just as it, just as
she,
was leaving . . .

Brigid seemed to be deciding something herself. Then calmly she said, “It is not even legal here.”