The Return: A Novel (18 page)

The daughter was currently mobilizing the traditional Spanish colonial response to absurd orders from the crown: I obey but do not comply. The suitor had been put off, tangled up in rivalry, manipulated, told to be patient. She was only seventeen, after all: perhaps next year.

Marder’s heart lifted when he learned this. He knew some poetry. His mother had doted on Yeats, had dropped stanzas into his little ear throughout his tender years; he had earned cookies at the price of memorization: swaths of Yeats, of Poe, of Tennyson resided in his love-addled brain. And when she approached him with the morning coffee, and having learned that she understood English well enough, he gave forth a few lines appropriate to a fine morning, to a dull morning, to a particularly succulent dish, to her smile, her eyes, her form. She would blush and nod and smile, showing her small white teeth and that charming tiny gap between the two front ones. So, gradually, over the weeks (and Marder thanked God that it was the off-season and dirt cheap to stay in his tiny room), they formed a connection, consisting of brief conversation at breakfast and occasionally in the evenings, when they happened accidentally, purposefully, to pass in the dim walkways of the patio.

There was a bookcase in the hotel sitting room, a glass-fronted mahogany item, perhaps a relic of the old
estancia,
with a number of moldering leather-backed volumes in it, and here he located a thin volume of the poetry of Ramón López Velarde. Marder had never heard of this person, but he was clearly a Mexican poet of some standing, and so, as a way of generating a subject for mutual discussion with Chole, he undertook to read and understand some of the poems. But what began as a half-witted and desperate ploy became something else when he fell under the spell of the poetry and discovered that Velarde, whoever he was, had gone through
precisely
the emotional scarification with his honey that young Marder now endured with respect to Señorita d’Ariés. “She is so reticent yet welcoming,” wrote Velarde, “when she comes out to face my panegyrics, the way she says my name, mocking and mimicking, makes gentle fun, yet she’s aware that my unspoken drama is really of the heart.”

He breathed these lines to her one evening in the garden of the hotel patio, just a wing shot as she passed by with a load of towels. He saw her pause—did she tremble a little as she asked, “Do you know Velarde?”

Did he ever! He recited, “May you be blessed, modest, magnificent, you have possessed the highest summit of my heart.”

“Meet me on the beach in one hour,” she said. The air smelled of orange blossom, or maybe that was her skin, or his brain.

*   *   *

Marder drifted off and awoke, almost expecting to see the cat-head crack in the ceiling, but it was only blank, dead cream. There was a knock on the door, and he told whoever it was to come in.

It was Lourdes, her perfect face marred with inexpertly troweled-on makeup, wearing a sleeveless black blouse with the top buttons open enough to show the gold crucifix and the tops of the breasts it nestled between and a white skirt big enough to drape a large doll. White plastic wedge sandals completed the outfit.

She regarded him with her usual expression of sulky indifference.

“My aunt said you wanted to talk to me.”

“I do. Pull up a chair.”

Instead, she sat at the foot of the bed and relaxed against a throw pillow propped on the brass pipes of the bed frame, cocking her leg up in a manner that afforded him a view, had he desired it, of her crotch.

“So, Lourdes,” he said, “what are your plans?”

She stared suspiciously. “What do you mean?”

“I mean how do you want your life to work out? The reason I ask is that I’m observing the way you’re going and it’s possible that you’re following a plan, which is to fuck a bunch of guys and get pregnant, then get pregnant again, until your beauty’s a little faded, and then again, and then you’re thirty with three or four kids, working as a servant. Or a whore. If this is what you want, it’s fine with me. You’re well on your way. But not in my house, please.”

“I’m not a whore!”

“Then stop acting like one. Or, if that’s your choice, I would be happy to introduce you to someone who’ll teach you how to be a high-class whore. Diamonds, champagne, trips on jets and yachts, a little retirement fund when you get too old. How does that sound?”

“I’m not a whore,” she repeated.

“I’m glad to hear it. Then what are you? I’m interested to know what you want. In your deepest desire, how would you be if everything worked out perfectly for you?”

Another suspicious look. “You’ll laugh at me.”

“I won’t.”

“I want to be in telenovelas. Like Thalia. Or Natalia. Or Pepa Espinoza, but she doesn’t do them anymore. Or, I love Belinda—”

“Okay, a good plan. So how do you start?”

“What do you mean, start?”

“I mean you don’t get to be a telenovela actress by watching telenovelas and reading fan magazines and fooling around in the bushes with guys ten years older than you. You have to work. Natalia was studying drama when she was eight. By the time she was your age, she’d been in a couple of dozen TV commercials. It’s work, Lourdes; it’s not all about going to parties and being famous. If you’re serious about this, I can help you out. I know lots of people in Spanish-language media. I can get you lessons, auditions, whatever you need. I can fly you up to Defe, take you shopping at Mundo E, buy the clothes you have to have to make an impression, introduce you to people.…”

“Why would you do that? You don’t even know me.”

“I do it in honor of my late wife. She was only a few years older than you when I met her. I stole her away from the life she should have had, so perhaps by giving you the life you want, I can balance the books in heaven. That’s one reason. Another reason is that I can’t stand to be in the same house as a sulky, disobedient teenager. It makes my blood boil. So you have to stop acting like a slut, you have to be nice to your aunt, you have to stop being a
ni-ni
. Because it’s my house and I won’t have it.”

“When will we go to Defe?” She had a stunned look now; she’d expected another lecture, but not this.

“When I see some changes. When you’re back in school and doing well. When you learn how to act around men old enough to be your grandfather. You can begin by sitting properly—I’ve seen one of those before.”

The girl moved as if shocked by a cattle prod, dropped her feet to the floor, and closed her thighs.

“And when I see you’re showing proper respect to the people who care about you, we can talk about getting your career started. Are we clear?”

“Yes, clear.” A long pause. “Thank you, Señor Marder.”

“It’s nothing. Now, scram.”

Lourdes left but not before giving Marder a large kiss on the cheek.

*   *   *

He was in the bathroom, smiling at the scarlet lipstick blotch on his cheek, when the door to his bedroom crashed open and his daughter barged in. He turned around and gaped at her.

“What are you
doing
?” she yelled at him. “Have you gone
insane
? Disappearing without a word to your family and … and … having sex with
teenagers
!”

“I am not having sex with teenagers.”

“Oh, thank you, Bill Clinton! I just saw your
chica
sashaying out of your bedroom, and she left half her mouth all over your face.”

Marder sighed, and said with studied mildness, “And hello, Carmel. What a nice surprise! I thought you were in Cambridge.”

“I
was
in Cambridge. And then you disappeared off the face of the earth. I called your cell and some Mexican kid answered. What was I supposed to do, sit in a lab and design machines? Oh, my father’s vanished but, hey, he’ll turn up, it’s sort of like when the remote falls down behind the couch. You have no
idea
how you screwed up my life with this trick.”

“Darling, pipe down and stop treating me like an Alzheimer’s patient who wandered away from Shady Acres. I needed a change, I came down here. Do you inform me every time you go off someplace with one of your numerous boyfriends?”

“Oh, you
are
down here with a girlfriend, then.”

“For God’s sake, Carmel, have some sense! What the devil does it matter to you if I decide to change my life? I’m lucky if you call once a month.”

“Oh, now it’s my fault? I’m a neglectful daughter, so you had to come down to Mexico for the teenaged prostitutes?”

“What teenaged prostitutes?” said Skelly, appearing in the doorway. “Am I missing something? Hey, Statch! I thought I heard your voice. Come here and give your uncle Pat a big hug.”

“Oh, you’re involved in this too?” she said, making no move to hug him at all. “Maybe you can tell me what’s going on with him.”

Skelly stepped into the room and threw his arm around Marder’s shoulders. “We’re gay, and we’re finally out of the closet,” he said. “Richard bought me a lovely trousseau. And a ring.”

A moment of stunned silence here, as Statch looked from one man to the other, until Marder shook off the other man’s arm with a curse.

Skelly roared with laughter. “I had you for a second, didn’t I? Not that there’d be anything
wrong
with it, of course.”

“Oh, shut up, Skelly! Something’s going on here, and I’d like to find out what it is so I can go back to my life. All you have to say is two old farts are having a midlife crisis and I’m out of here.”

Marder slipped into his sandals, picked up his wallet, and said, “Two old farts are having a midlife crisis. I hope you’ll stay for dinner. We could catch up. Meanwhile, I think I’ll go out and get drunk.”

“I’ll come,” said Skelly.

“Alone, if you don’t mind. You can stay and explain to my daughter what sexual hijinks I’ve been up to without her permission.”

“But take a gun,” said Skelly, changing his tone down to grim.

Marder ignored him, leaving to the sound of Statch’s voice: “Wait, why does he need a gun?
Why the fuck won’t anyone tell me what’s going on?
”

*   *   *

Marder took his truck out of the garage and drove off down the narrow causeway. As he turned toward the town, he saw a ragged boy squatting by the side of the road with a handful of browning bananas and a few papayas. He hadn’t been there yesterday, and Marder briefly wondered if this was a gangster lookout reporting on his movements.

He didn’t care. He was thinking about his daughter and how to ease her away from him without making her suspicious or, indeed, hurting her in any way, for though he loved Carmel more than anyone in his life, he did not ever want her to be in charge of him. That was the whole purpose of the trip. He felt a wave of self-contempt. A man tries to quietly slip away from his complex, fraught life and finds himself in a life even more complex and fraught than the previous one. Although there was still the real, the hidden purpose; he shouldn’t forget that. Fraught was okay for whatever time remained to him, if he were able to bring it off.

The rough road caused something heavy to clunk in the driver’s door caddy. He reached in and found his father’s .45, which had rested forgotten there since the start of his now futile efforts to escape his life.

He drove aimlessly around the little town for a while, back and forth, on a few of the six
avenidas,
up and down a few of the thirty or so
calles,
past the two-story
palacio municipal
with its cop cars, its tiny jail, around the park, with its statue of Cárdenas shining gold against the foliage, past the hotels and dive and surf shops, the tourist traps, the six decent hotels and the fourteen lesser ones, and then down toward the beach. He would have a drink at the town’s only real luxury hotel, the Hotel Diamante. Or three. He had to think, and he had to be away from his beautiful refuge to get some peace. What a joke!

As he approached the hotel, he noticed a dark-green SUV with smoked windows parked opposite the entrance. Two men were leaning against it. They had neat haircuts and wore dark suits, open-necked white shirts, and large gold crucifixes hanging from neck chains. Despite these signs, their faces did not indicate that they were on an evangelical mission. Both of them were big men, but one was big and snaky, with a long neck and a small head, and the other was big and fleshy, like a football lineman. This one looked at Marder as he slowed down, raising his sunglasses to do so. He had a pronounced squint, the eyes almost hidden but not hidden enough to conceal the malevolence of the look. Marder tapped the gas and swung into the hotel driveway. When he got out, he gave the valet kid a hundred-peso bill and told him to leave the car on the drive, with the key in it.

There was a bar off the lobby with a shady terrace out front. Marder took a seat with a view of the street below. One of the thugs with the SUV answered a cell-phone call. The other stared at the hotel entrance, as if he were waiting for a hot date to show. Marder ordered a tequila and a beer. When it came, he downed the shot, ordered another, and sipped the cold beer. The waiter brought chips and salsa and he ate some of that, although it was typical expensive-hotel crap, bland and watery. He looked around the bar. A trio of sunburned tourists speaking noisy German, a couple of Mexican business types, and, in a corner, behind a potted palm, a laptop on a table and someone—a woman, by her hands—tapping upon its keys.

A cell phone rang, sounding the first bar of a
ranchera
song he knew, “El Caballero,” by José Alfredo Jiménez. The woman with the laptop answered it, spoke for a minute or so, then packed up her laptop and strode out of the bar, carrying her laptop case and a pale leather overnighter. She was wearing a rose-colored suit now, but Marder could see it was the TV reporter, the one from the torso incident.

He watched her walk out of the bar, as did the two Mexican operators, who froze and looked up from their important papers. Marder wondered idly how sick you had to get before you stopped watching the sway of a woman’s ass. Then it clicked: the woman, the reporter, was who those guys were waiting for outside. He stuck a wad of pesos on the table and rushed out. She was down at the foot of the drive, looking both ways, as if expecting a car to pick her up. Marder went to his truck, reached in, and secured the .45, jacking a round in as he walked toward the street.