Indecision (2 page)

The guy frowned noddingly. “I guess Colombia is kind of . . . yeah. Good country to invest in, though. People want jobs. No problems with the unions.”

“That’s nice.” I was so nice then too! “How come?”

He made a gesture signifying a little of this, a little of that. “Good luck to you,” he said as he got up to retrieve his briefcase from the overhead bin. I noticed how he opened it carefully, prudently. Because it’s true what they say about the contents—they can shift during flight.

Soon the emptied seats had filled up with passengers going on to Quito, and the flight attendants were reciting their spiel again, first in English, then español. I’d never learned to habla español even a poquito. I guess I’d studied French instead because it seemed like the thing I would do. In about an hour I was going to be completely at the mercy of Spanish-speaking Natasha.

Or the Joker, as we’d also called her back in the day. She had this incredible smile, a deep cartoon crescent in the parentheses of dimples, and somebody—actually, okay, it was me—once thought to call her the Joker. The name stuck, and we, the guys, would sometimes call her this affectionately and to her face. She accepted the nickname with grinning equanimity, just like she seemed to everything else.

But now as I buckled the seatbelt low and tight across my waist, and made sure the tray table before me was in a secure and upright position, I felt kind of bad about having coined the Joker. After all it was only me who’d stayed close to Natasha, if close could ever be the word there. And I was sure that when I showed up at our ten-year reunion my recent visit to Natasha van der Weyden would flash from me like some badge of pure prestige. At least I’d have
that
to show off to fellow Formmates with their professional accomplishments and spousal acquisitions which I knew all about as if they’d been tattooed on my brain in your-name-on-a-grain-of-rice-sized writing because it was my job, as Form Agent, to send in to the alumni magazine quarterly batches of these and similar boastings.

Whereas I was recently jobless and had not much to be proud of beyond not having gone bald. True, my hairline might have receded some, but at one point looking into the mirror I drew a kind of line in the sand, and past that point it stayed firmly put. Arguably much more of a problem was the insane (if blond) hairiness of my neck, back, chest, legs, buttocks, and arms. Somehow the women who saw and even handled me naked never seemed to mind my being covered all over with a light downy pelt. As the jet lifted off from the Bogotá runway, I wondered again why they didn’t mind. Maybe I seemed to them like a missing link?

Suddenly, back in the air, it occurred to me what a coup it would be if I were to
go to the reunion with Natasha.
If I could persuade or even seduce her into doing it, what pride I would feel—as Form Agent and as man. This was great: now it was like I had come to South America for a reason! Also I hoped that after ten days with her I’d have something new to say on the whole Natasha subject. Maybe I could say to Stratton or Bill T., as I nodded toward her in the distance, where she would stand on the lawn in a sundress, “Man we were so clueless calling her the Joker, because actually the thing about Natash, and it’s not elusive at all, is—” And here I’d slip in what I’d learned. Meanwhile everything I’d just thought about Natasha was something I already knew. It was like when I’d taken a trip to some foreign land and everyone asked me about it when I got back: my accounts would grow similar, focusing on this impression, that cool place, a certain funny anecdote, until there was just the one account, which then substituted for my memory. Remembering this tendency, I felt an honest fear. It was the familiar fear, made honest through sudden intensity, that once all the sensation had evaporated from my life the residue would be a cliché. I’d die, St. Peter would be like, “So how was it?” and I’d say, “Great place. I liked the food. I was sick for part of it. But all the people were really nice.” And that would be it.

I looked out the window to the perfect star-free blackness. And I resolved to say something new about my visit each time anybody asked, not repeating myself once, much less twice or three times. And if there were unpleasant things to say, I would consider saying those too—because the world could be a painful place, the nation of Colombia very much included, as I’d learned since becoming unemployed a few days earlier and having found time to read the paper. Unfortunately my roommates and I had recently abetted Colombia’s long-running civil war by buying and snorting cocaine. I wasn’t very psyched to tell Natasha this. Yet because I hardly knew her I would need her to tell me everything, and in fairness I’d have to spill my own guts too. I just hoped she wouldn’t ask me who in my opinion ought to win the Colombian civil war. Weren’t there terrorists on both sides? Then again maybe it was getting to be about time to stand up for terrorists of the better sort!

Soon the plane landed without incident. Two for two. So that felt good. And as we taxied toward our gate all the babies started to stop crying. Have you noticed how they never do this without a few little grunts of totally babyish reluctance, forcing out a few last sobs before they let the new mood in? It’s like they won’t admit that whatever was upsetting them might not be that bad, even in war-torn Colombia.

But this wasn’t
Colombia,
I reminded myself as I walked down the aluminum stairs, and stepped out onto the tarmac. This was
Ecuador,
a terra incognito I knew nothing about. I’d looked at those
Let’s Leave!
and
Tough Planet
guides they have, but unable to choose, didn’t buy one. My only real knowledge was that the air here—always amazing to be
here,
no matter the place—was cool and smelled like wood smoke. Maybe with a faint tang of sewage too? I wondered if I was distinguished in life by a sensitive nose and for my next job should take up wine criticism, drinking for a living and insuring my nose for a fantastic sum. Then maybe I could fake a smell-debilitating brain injury, and become very rich.

It felt so shameful and exciting, not knowing what to do with myself.

As I watched the carousel for my bag I noticed I was trembling: the DTs. DT she’d also been called, for Dutch Treat, which meant that anyone at St. Jerome’s who had a crush on Natasha was said to have
the DTs.

So had I maybe been in love with her all these years? Only she had never before shown any return interest? And now that she had gone so far as inviting me to Quito I could finally admit things to myself? Sometimes in spelunking the psyche your little headlamp goes dim. Anyway I was trembling. After all here was a new place, therefore a new life, and hence an occasion for some quaking at the prospect of your freedom to do right away, if you want to, and can make up your mind, a wide variety of things in this world.

I hoisted my backpack onto my shoulders and stepped out through the gate into the sala de esperanza. Naturally a tall blond woman stood out among so many heads of glossy black hair. Even if she wasn’t as tall as I remembered. Or very blond. At all. Yet a positive identification of me was vivid in her eyes as I maneuvered toward her calling “Hola! El Joker!” However the answering smile I got wasn’t the one I recognized, and immediately I became horrified, not by the nature of her change—she still looked pretty fine to me—but the extremely drastic extent of it. When from her surgically-altered face she said, in a low lovely voice issuing from collagen-swollen lips, “Hello, Dwight,” it was all I could do to smile through my intimation that a long strange trip was about to begin.

“Natasha has gone to the toilet,” the woman said, and my relief at the news that this stranger was a stranger—not Natasha at all!—caused me to hug her tightly to me, saying, “My God, so good to see you!”

The woman and I were still laughing when Natasha arrived. “Look! Already fast friends!” She sounded more Dutch than I’d expected, or remembered. She was still Natasha, but it’s true, a little different. She looked weird, anxious—kind of like how I felt. Then she flashed the famous smile. “You see, Brigid, Dwight is like I told you. Right away he belongs to everybody.”

Part One

ONE

A week before Quito I was sitting up in bed in New York, the edges of my awareness lapped at by traffic. I was sitting there with one hand holding open the book I was reading, and the other hand placed above the head of sleeping Vaneetha. There I was, pinned in space and time like a specimen in a box.

Vaneetha had turned away and slid down the bed so that nothing of her was visible except for the dark disheveled Vaneethian hair from which the lamplight was extracting all these twisting strings of a greenish iridescence. I wouldn’t have figured that even the darkest hair could react to light in this way, and the discovery blinked in my mind as just the smallest, quietest symbol of the multiple discoveries that could still be made between us if we—unless it was mostly me—weren’t so ambivalent about making them.

Once a week had become more like two times, and on our nights together I was usually awake like this for an hour or so while Vaneetha slept and breathed beside me. Sometimes she’d twitch like a dreaming dog, and in part due to my intense feeling for dogs, shared by my entire family, this would induce a shiver of tenderness in me. Yet exactly because I experienced this tenderness I wondered if I shouldn’t stop showing it when we were both awake. It could lead to us feeling, harmfully, that we were together. And as our relationship was predicated on not wanting to be in a relationship yet, that seemed unlike the best idea. We were both in agreement that contemporary courtship was far too accelerated these days. That was how Vaneetha explained why she’d had so few partners, and how I explained why I’d had seventeen or more. Nevertheless it eventually became up-in-the-air and unspoken whether we were sleeping together brother-sister style and mostly refraining from outright sex except when drunk because a) we weren’t courting each other or b) we were, only slowly, just as these things should be done and never are.

In any case it often seemed at night that I would make a better dog owner than boyfriend. It wasn’t apparent to me how best to treat Vaneetha, each woman being so different. Whereas every dog, in spite of the really incredible variety of the species, required more or less the same regimen of food and water, walks and affectionate pats on the head. However in the city it actually exacted a lot less responsibility to have a girlfriend than a dog. And I really wanted one or the other, since like any person, or dog, I too craved affection. Hmn.

It was almost a type of peace to arrive each night at the same mental impasse. Plus I felt at home in the quiet, like a local. I was sensitive and weirdly sympathetic to that moment when the refrigerator kicked in and began to hum. Then the groans of a garbage truck would as much confirm as interrupt the hush. And there was the bonus sensation of authority I got as the last one up, the presiding mind.

So I would return to certain issues like hands to a notch on the clock. It would always dawn on me, late at night, that life is made of days—and your life isn’t likely to pick up whatever your days pass by. Granted, this was really a postmortem analysis of the given day, carried out when it was already yesterday or tomorrow, depending on point of view. If it was one of the nights that Ford (roommate one) and his girlfriend Kat were spending downtown with us, they would have finished giving one another the business to the accompaniment of frightened bedsprings. And if it was past two then Sanchez (roommate two) would have gotten up out of his humid sleep to shut off the TV he’d equipped with a hot cable box transmitting pirated pay-per-view sporting events, feature films, and porn in an endless jostling stream. And Dan (roommate three) might or might not be around, since more and more he moved very quietly through the world, subsisting on snacks and growing thin and spiritual and haunted-looking, and only occasionally briefing us between classes and lab at NYU med school on what he was learning there. Lately he’d expressed the opinion that general uremia must be the least painful way to go in the end, and had assured me and Sanch that there was little to no scientific evidence linking coffee, even my six cups daily, with cancer.

Sanch said, “Yeah man fucking Hugo Chávez drinks
sixteen
espressos a day. And that’s after his staff weaned him down from twenty-four.”

“Amazing!” I was really impressed with this man. “Who is Hugo Chávez?”

“He’s, like, a revolutionary.”

“Sounds like it,” I said.

Sometimes Dan could be found in his room poring over a textbook while listening through his headphones to terrifying music by Austro-Hungarian composers. But his whereabouts were erratic, or I couldn’t do the algorithm, and anyway he stayed with us only due to low rent. It wouldn’t have been so low if the walls to our rooms had gone all the way up to the ceiling. Instead we lived in pasteboard cubicles and weird dorm-style intimacy—which kind of enforced an obscurish connection between my home life and my days at Pfizer, where the cubicle was also the unit.

Anyway Ford, Sanch, Dan, me—that was Chambers St., and was going to be for five more weeks, until our lease ran out. Other friends lived scattered around the city in ones and twos, and this had allowed us four to provide, in the welcoming squalor of our living room, a kind of community center for the school-days diasporae. Poker was played, friends were entertained, TV got watched and color-commentated. Out of everybody we knew our immaturity was best-preserved, we dressed worst and succeeded least professionally—and at times I could get into feeling that for the old crowd to set foot on the scarred linoleum of our kitchen must be like entering this circling, slow eddy in the otherwise one-way flow of time. Outside was the streaming traffic, the money bazaar, the trash-distributing winds with their careerist velocities. And here inside Chambers St. was this cozy set of underachievers. We even had a fireplace, though it didn’t work, and housed the stereo instead. At times I gained control of the remote, and the drowned-sounding post-human electronica that was our usual aural wallpaper, making me feel like words might not apply to our condition, and freaking me out if I got stoned, was replaced by the bright fine stylings of the Grateful Dead, just as if Jerry’d never died.