South of Elfrida (18 page)

The man in the suit finished his burger, pushed the plate away, initialled the bill to his room. “You take care,” he said, nodding to her, the nod an emphasis.

She had to start somewhere. They ordered burgers.

“Everybody lonely. No shame in that. Just two people,” he said. He held his gaze on her, a few seconds of no escape. The waitress slid a burger across the bar in the nick of time.

“Thank you,” Sheryl said.

His burger arrived, and he sent it back. “I don't want no mushrooms on this here burger. What, you crazy or something? Where's my bacon, that's what I'm asking. Just a simple order. Who are you people anyway?”

Sheryl lowered her voice. “They look Polish.”

He said, “They look stupid.”

“They're the new immigrants. The Slavs. The Poles. You know.” She ended with “you know” because she didn't want him to feel she was thinking of slaves,
the
slaves.

She ordered a glass of white wine. He ordered Remy. “Gimme a glass of my Remy.”

“Yeah, and put in lots,” she laughed in the direction of the bartender, narrow-cheeked, severe.

“Way to go.” He bopped her shoulder with his fist, hard enough that she felt the imprint of his knuckles. She bit into her burger.

The bartender brought a tab. The man said, “You trying to hurry me out of here? Look at the price of that dinky drink. What a lousy place. Dinky drink.”

To divert him from the bartender, Sheryl said, “My room has a damp ceiling. Bathroom ceiling.”

“What's your room number?”

“Can't remember.” She held up the wineglass so he would think drinking was the reason.

He laughed. “You come to my room. Just a little touching. You like that, don't you?”

His room, she did not doubt (based on his floral, short-sleeved shirt with embroidery on the pocket), would be as questionable as hers. Sheets worn, recycled air fragrant with eau de mildew, cigarette burns on the arm of a chair. This man would not have a room in the hotel where they were sitting. She caught the eye of the waitress, asked for her burger to be put in a takeout box. She didn't actually know what she would do next. Humidity lay like a wet blanket under the air conditioning.

She said, “It would just change my life if I did that.” She longed to be a woman who made casual choices. His belly under the floral shirt looked soft, but his hands were large, exotic pink on the undersides. Indecisive, she pushed at a boundary, to see if it would budge. Would he shove her onto the bed, unzip his fly? Just two people, he'd said. That's all she ever wanted. Just two people, together. What is the deal with human beings? The urge to merge, the aversion to being alone at night.

A nineteen-yard run had the bar patrons muttering, wound up, a hint of something dangerous in the excitement. Fans in competition with each other.

“I don't discriminate,” he said, eyes on the screen.

“Thank you.” She finished the wine and covered the glass with her hand, intercepting the bartender.

Still watching the game, the man said, “We just have a little fun, a cuddle, some hugging and touching. You like that touching, don't you?”

She glanced shyly at the man with the special eyes, tried to imagine a cuddle. A clothes-on cuddle, his lips on her cheek, his hands rubbing her back, their thighs pressed together. She looked at the slab of half-eaten meat on a bun in a pinkish sauce, a limp lettuce leaf beside it, in the oversized Styrofoam box.

His fist hit the bar. “Bastard! Can you believe that, can you believe he just went and did that?” He turned to the room. “You over there, who you looking at? I don't like people looking where they shouldn't be looking. Hey,” he said. “Hey!”

A woman accepting an invitation to a man's room was an accident waiting to happen, and, arguably, she deserved what she got. She imagined he would take a piss with the bathroom door open. He would grab her by the roots of her hair and she would see his teeth.

Judge Judy would say, “Ma'am, you went to this man's room for a cuddle? You didn't notice his volatile behaviour in the bar? How old are you, ma'am?” Shit, Sheryl thought. She let go of the Styrofoam container. Shit, she thought, and fled.

On the day Maria Sanchez became engaged to Iosif, she told her mother that she knew, at last, why she'd waited to marry; she'd found the man she was destined to love. He'd been persecuted and tortured for his political beliefs, so he said, and lost his wife during that time, which was why he was living in Arizona. He was in his early fifties, divorced, and had no children. She liked to massage his feet. He would sit in the red leather high-back chair in their bedroom with the view of the Catalina Mountains, she facing him on the matching stool. He said she was a foot fetishist. She said she was merely a specialist, a slave to his feet because it gave him pleasure, and pleasure was what she wanted him to have.

The day she turned thirty-four, he sent yellow roses to her office in the resort where she worked in accounting. By that time, they'd been married a year. For dinner he prepared steak au poivre. Three candles in silver holders flickered on the table between them. Cognac and cream coated her lips. She said, “My love, please give us a child.” He set his cutlery down, lowered his gaze. He was balding just at the crown. When he raised his eyes to hers, they swam with tears. He then told her the first lie: “I didn't want to lose you. But—you understand—I can't father children.” The words
imprisonment
and
torture
moved through the ether between them. She shuddered. “I am so sorry to have brought it up.”

Later that week Maria drove to her mother's house in an older, elegant section of Tucson, on a street lined with palm trees. In her mother's living room, which smelled of lavender and anise, Maria stroked the fine lace antimacassars on the arms of a chair, the lace an old-fashioned touch that contrasted nicely with the flat-screen television on the wall, before she made her announcement: “Mama, there will be no grandchildren.” The grandfather clock chimed the quarter-hour.

Theresa Sanchez, who was fair-skinned and patrician, said, “I am not surprised.”

Maria sighed. “Mama, I'm falling into one of the traps you always set for me, but here I go. Why are you not surprised?”

“Iosif is Gestapo.”

“Ay, Mama. He is not Mexican, he will never be Mexican.” Theresa Sanchez did not trust him, she'd told her daughter, and therefore, to her, he was “Gestapo.” Her houses and property would go to her daughter, but not to her daughter's husband.

Her mother's bracelets jangled as she set the small glass of sherry on the mesquite hardwood table beside her. “I always wanted a boy.”

Maria smiled—this gambit, too, was familiar. She came forward, took her mother's soft hands between her two palms, and knelt at her feet. “I also wanted a boy.” In this way Maria maintained the balance between them.

Her mother laughed. “I can't shake you, can I?” She spoke in Spanish, referring to a popular song. She touched her lips to Maria's hands and Maria laughed and went back to where she'd been sitting. Her mother was full of surprises—now, Mexican pop songs. Maria watched the doves fluttering on the patio behind the open blinds. Small birds, tiny yellow verdins and goldfinches, took turns ruffling their feathers in the three-tiered fountain that looked like a wedding cake.

Her mother rolled her eyes heavenward, lifted the cross from her neck, and kissed it. “I apologize. You are my one and only child, and for you I am grateful.”

Maria felt a shiver up her back. “Mama,” she said. “Stop being nice. It's upsetting.”

“You will have a boy, a boy will come to you.”

“Mama, we would need a miracle.”

“Milagros vivos.” Miracles live.

Theresa Sanchez died of a brain aneurysm. Maria inherited the house in Tucson and her mother's properties in Yuma, on the other side of the state. Maria arranged for the funeral mass, held at the Mission San Xavier del Bac—the White Dove of the Desert—on the Tohono O'odham reservation south of Tucson. The restoration of the eighteenth-century mission—an eclectic mix of Moorish, Byzantine, Mexican, and Indian influences—had been Theresa's passion; when she was able, she had volunteered every week. Mission San Xavier del Bac was famous among the religious for the carved figure of Saint Francis Xavier, said to bring answers to prayers, that lay under a yellow cotton coverlet on a platform in an alcove. Notes, cards, photographs, and Milagros, religious charms, were pinned to the fabric—tiny photos of children, Milagros of arms and legs, a horse, a foot, and a heart, things that had been found or healed.

After the mass and the receiving line, Maria stayed to touch the bosom of the saint and pray for intercession for her mother's soul. She reached out her hand and placed it on the saint's chest among the treasures. She could feel tingling as energy from his heart lifted hers. Her mind opened and a light entered—a mysterious and breathtaking light—her mother, blessing her.

Iosif waited outside.

The following Monday Maria found a letter on the hall table. It lay hidden under a copy of the
Arizona Daily Sun
and a
Harper's
. She saw Iosif's name on the front but opened it because the handwriting was childish, the letters rounded. She assumed it was from one of her foster children. Mail back and forth was slow—she'd told “her children” about her wedding, and for an eleven-year-old girl in Africa or Peru to write “Joseph” on the envelope might be childish teasing. She smiled and opened the crumpled note. It read:
I am sick. I have made many mistakes in my life. I need your help Papa. Sephara.

Papa? She thought the office that handled her foster children had made a mistake. She flipped the envelope over. Joseph. It was addressed to Joseph Cizardi. The name spelled differently than she knew it.

She looked at the note again. There was an e-mail address at the bottom.

She drove to the resort and walked across the path, past hummingbirds tissing in the shrubs of desert honeysuckle, and into her office. She shut the door. Iosif had told her practically nothing of his past. “Please,” he would say. “I've had enough—”
Torture
. The word lay always between them. In empathy her heart rose; her love made her quiver. He would detect her vulnerability, her desire, and he would sweep her into bed, undress her, layer by layer until she was shivering with anticipation, and then undress himself. Slow and tantalizing, he would wrap his arms and legs around hers, penetrate her carefully, hold her until they both could hardly stand it and would cry out together.

Iosif was only her third lover. The first was careless and bit her lips, and they occasionally bled. Then she'd let herself become engaged to a man uninterested in sex. He invariably couldn't come, and his hands were clammy. Afterwards, Maria volunteered at the hospital in the maternity ward, adopted foster children in three countries, and had decided sex was overrated until Iosif touched her.

She swirled the chair to the computer screen and typed a simple, truthful response to the note addressed to “Papa.” She signed it: “Maria, Iosif's third wife.”

She pressed Send. Her chair squeaked as she sat back, as it always did. It started to rain, the afternoon monsoon. Maria thought: A second wife is a rebound. A third wife is a stranger.

Iosif read the note. He told Maria that the writer wasn't his biological daughter; she was a stepchild. This was his second lie, Maria would discover. Iosif said the girl had been wild—she'd had mononucleosis more than once, he said, from her careless sleeping around.

“How long have you been her father?”

“I was never her father.”

“How long were you married to Sephara's mother?”

Iosif said, “It is in the past.”

Maria received an e-mail answer, typed at a library in Albuquerque. Sephara was twenty-seven. She hadn't lived a careful life. She had been diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma. She said it was her fault. She asked her father's forgiveness.

Maria wrote: “Hodgkin's lymphoma isn't your fault.”

Around then, Iosif and a colleague from the university, a fellow enthusiast of antique musical instruments, made plans to attend a three-day conference in Phoenix. Maria made her own plans for her first trip to Albuquerque. She stayed at a good hotel downtown. She felt uncertain of herself, as though her spirit was someone else's—someone unpredictable, a woman who would deceive her husband for the truth.

She touched the cross she wore at her throat when the taxi stopped at Sephara's address. The taxi driver had already told her it was a bad neighbourhood. “Pueblo people,” he said, watching her, trusting that Maria, in her business clothes and shoes, was not Native. Maria opened the door, heard rap music, and picked her way around broken beer bottles. The taxi waited while Maria rang the buzzer. A young woman appeared, wearing grey sweatpants and a T-shirt. The young woman was the spitting image of her father, Maria's own Iosif. Behind her tumbled a child.