The day after I saw the man in the gray raincoat outside of the nightclub, I embarked on my plan and went to see Victoria in the evening. I hadn’t slept; I’d lain awake all night imagining the police breaking down the door of the apartment. My appetite was gone, and when I passed a mirror in the lobby of Victoria’s building I was surprised by my own white face.
Victoria seemed fresh and at ease. She was happy to see me. She sat on her cherry-red love seat, smoking, her hair so newly pressed that I could still see the creases from the hot rollers. A Brazilian rock band played on the radio. School papers were strewn across the floor.
“Román told me you were leaving town,” I said.
“Tomorrow. We have a friend who’s a pilot,” she said. “We chartered a ranch plane from an airstrip out in the country. It’s safer that way, if we don’t have to go through Ezeiza Airport. They might be watching us.”
She wouldn’t look at me, and then she wouldn’t look away, smiling like a moll trying to distract a cop. “It’s not safe here, you know that,” she said. “Not for people like us.”
“Like—us?” I said.
“Me and Román,” she said.
I remembered the party again, the scuffle by the bathroom door. She always seemed to be both insinuating and withholding, the two held in tension in a way that baffled and angered me and made me feel stupid. She was looking at me now as if she were also remembering the party, and at the same time as if I were a stranger who had wandered too close to her on a subway platform.
“It’s not safe for me either,” I said.
She scoffed. “You’re fine. You’re Canadian.”
“I can’t get a visa. A group of French students were arrested last week for subversion, did you see that in the paper? It’s not safe to be foreign here now.”
She looked at a stack of paperbacks on the floor in front of her. Several crumbling editions of Erich Fromm. “It’s a complicated time.”
“I have to leave Buenos Aires,” I said. “I want to come with you to Ushuaia.”
She looked shocked. She laughed and shook her head. “Absolutely not. Absolutely not, it’s not possible.”
I was making no effort to hide my desperation, because I thought it would move her, but she didn’t care. From Ushuaia I could find a tanker that would take me through the Strait of Magellan and around to the Chilean side of the Andes. It was the only way I could get out of Argentina without showing papers.
“You have to let me,” I said.
“This is ridiculous. God, everything . . .” She waved her hand at the living room. “I hardly know you. You don’t know what you’re asking.”
“Why have you flirted with me all this time?” I said. I didn’t mean to say it, it burst out, and then I was ashamed. I sat down abruptly in a chair. “You were playing some stupid game. Do you think I’m a child?” My face was burning. “Try your tricks on someone else.”
She sat up straight in surprise, her cigarette drifting close to her Lustre-Creme-scented hair, all innocence. I doubted myself again, it was so persuasive.
“I’ve only tried to be your friend,” she said.
“Then be my friend, carajo,” I said. “Let me on that fucking plane. Or I’ll tell Román you made a pass at me.”
She turned white. Her gaze was flat and miserable.
“You don’t understand,” she said, and her eyes welled up with tears. She got up and came over to me, crouched on the floor beside my chair, and gripped both my elbows. Her touch felt hot and sticky, as if it might leave a residue on my skin. I pulled away.
“That would be a mistake,” she said. “That would be for nothing. I can’t let you come with us. Please don’t tell Román. But I can’t let you come. I’m sorry if it’s dangerous for you here, I am, I really am. I want you to be safe. But this thing you’re asking for, I can’t do.” She stood up. “Román is coming. He’ll be here in a few minutes. You have to go. I’m so sorry, so sorry. Please don’t be angry.” She hunched over me, stroking my hair. I ducked away. “Please, please,” she said. “You have to go. There’s no choice.”
Out on the street I had to collect myself, breathing deeply and pretending to search for something in my purse. It was a cold night despite the distant approach of spring. A mist in the air was becoming rain. I had no choice either. I would have to get on the plane. It would mean a scene; it would mean, perhaps, digging Nico’s pistol up out of its hiding place. I stood in a bus shelter, my hands and feet slowly going numb. The bus didn’t come. I walked back to the apartment on Calle Riobamba.
In the hall outside the door I stopped and listened to the warm crackle of Billie Holiday. James had a lot of jazz records I didn’t like much, jostling abstractions that I suspected him of not liking very much himself. He would put them on and sit frowning on the sofa with a glass of whiskey, as if he were receiving bad news. But the Billie Holiday records I liked, and Sarah Vaughan, and the libidinous Etta James, which I sometimes put on myself when he was out. I liked the way she scratched and pushed. James was usually in a good mood if those records were playing. And I could smell seared beef. He would be cooking and drinking wine. He had a bachelor’s self-sufficiency.
I pulled a mirrored compact out of my purse and stood under the hall light. My eyes were red, my skin pale from fear in a way that made me look yellow; I brushed on rouge and combed and re-pinned my hair. You are tired but feeling well. You have been shopping on Rivadavia for a new raincoat all afternoon but you couldn’t find anything you liked.
He had left the door unlocked for me. I stepped inside, hung up my coat and hat, strode into the kitchen.
“Steaks?” I said.
“They were cheap today,” he said.
I went into the living room and sat down. I tried to pet the cat but she darted away. I sat for a moment with my hands on my knees and looked out through the uncurtained windows. We were so visible in here. James said he wasn’t embarrassed by anything, and anyway he didn’t know how or where to buy curtains, how to cut them to measure, how to stitch the hems. So interesting that a person could live that way. That both his needs and his skills could be so different from mine. I watched him through the doorway of the kitchen. He was humming to himself.
The thing that was wrong with me was that the intimacy and safety of this apartment felt real to me even though it was false. I was duping and manipulating him, and still somehow I felt I deserved his tokens of affection, his small gestures of protection and care, this steak he was cooking now to my specifications, more well-done than he liked his own. I was so easily taken in by my own illusion, so quick to accept the generosity I tricked out of others. If he found out who I really was and how I had lied he would be shocked and betrayed and he would be right. And yet I would be startled and put out, if it came to that. Because it felt all right to me, all of this. It felt nice.
From the street outside I must look very small, I thought. The ceilings were high. There was so much wall behind me.
He was in a talkative mood. He had gotten another letter from home. He could do a funny impersonation of his father, who had a Mexican accent broadened and slowed by his decades in Texas, and he quoted bits of the letter in this accent. His father wanted him to come home, always. James was burdened by this. He hated leather. He hated Houston. He had never had an ambition for himself that hadn’t been chosen by someone else. He wanted to know who he might be if he were left alone.
“Does your mother get at you to come home?” he said.
“No,” I said. I laughed. “No, she doesn’t.”
“Do you hear from her?”
“Not often.”
He was looking at me curiously, but I didn’t look back. “She doesn’t approve of you?” he said.
“No.” My mother with her long beaked nose and delicate hair. Tall and broad across the shoulders, impressive in her best suits in a way that unnerved people, that unnerved me, a woman like a tree, resisting any effort to scale her down, even in my imagination.
“Every girl I’ve ever been with thought her mother was a monster.”
I didn’t like it when he acted knowing like that. I was probably not meant to like it. “My mother had me put in jail when I was seventeen.”
Billie Holiday filled up the short silence that ensued. I thought my anger might be spent with that, but no, there was some left. “Not everyone has an empire to go home to,” I said, and then it was all gone and I deflated in my chair.
He was generous. He let it go by. “Why did she do it?” he said finally.
“She beat the hell out of me and I ran away in her car. She had me arrested for stealing it.”
“You look sad.”
“I’m just tired,” I said.
“A long day?”
“I was looking for a new raincoat on Rivadavia,” I murmured, “but I didn’t find anything I liked.”