Carlos Fuentes - The Crystal Frontier

“Or enthusiasts,” ruminated the skinny woman. “I can’t stand enthusiastic lovemaking. It takes all the sincerity out of it. But I can’t stand sincerity either. I can only put up with men who lie to me. Lies are the only mystery in love.”

She yawned and said they should postpone their sexual encounter.

“Why?”

“Because the only important thing about sex for me is being able to erase all trace of my sexual partner. All this is very tiring.”

Dionisio reached his hand out to touch the skinny woman’s. She pulled hers back with repugnance and laughed a cabaret laugh.

“How do you act in private, when no one’s watching?” asked the Mexican. She showed her teeth, drank a teaspoon of Diet Coke, and disappeared.

The shrimp cocktail also disappeared. For an instant, Dionisio wondered if he’d eaten it while he’d chatted with the anorexic New Yorker. (She had to be from New York; it was too pat, vulgar, predictable for her to be from California. At least boredom and fatigue in New York have literary foundations and don’t result from the climate.) Or, thinking he was eating a shrimp cocktail, had he eaten the gringa who had so carefully avoided looking him in the eye? (Was she trying to avoid being discovered or even guessed at?) He couldn’t bear the curiosity of knowing if he’d eaten with her or eaten her or if everything might end up — he trembled with pleasure — in a mutual culinary sacrifice …

He heard the charro’s shot, the waiter placed the vichyssoise on the table, and opposite him, eating the same thing, appeared a woman, fortyish, but obviously and avidly enamored of her childhood, with a Laura Ashley dress and a red chignon crowning her Shirley Temple curls. These odd accessories could not distract Dionisio from the repertoire of grimaces accompanying the words and noisy soup slurping of this old Shirley counterfeit, who between slurps and grimaces managed to express only excitement and shock: how exciting to be sitting there eating with him, how shocking to know a man so romantic, so sophisticated, so, so, so … foreign. Only foreigners excited her — it seemed unbelievable to her that a foreigner would notice her, she who lived only on dreams, dreaming about impossible, shocking, exciting romances, all her life dreaming of being in the arms of Ronald Colman, Clark Gable, Rudolf Valentino …

“Do you ever dream about Mel Gibson?”

“Who?”

“Tom Cruise?

“Who’s he?”

No, she had no complaints about life, she went on, making her faces, rolling her eyes, shaking her curls like a luxury floor mop, raising her eyebrows to her topknot, nodding her head like a porcelain doll — and also hissing like a snake, clucking like a hen, howling like a she-wolf before confessing that when she went to bed she sang lullabies and recited Mother Goose, though through her mind (everything was shocking, exciting, unheard of) passed horrible catastrophes, air and sea disasters, highway mayhem, terrorist acts, mutilated bodies, so the lullabies and pretty verses were to exorcise the horrors — did he, an obviously foreign, exciting, sophisticated, wonderful, wonderful, wonderful gentleman understand?

As she spoke the word wonderful, this Alice in Blunderland, blond and pink, faded into a haze. The soup, too, had disappeared. Dionisio gazed at the empty bowl, disconsolate. Again the charro’ shot rang out, the waiter served the steak, and an extremely beautiful and elegant woman appeared, in a black tailored suit, with pearls at her neck and bracelets on her wrists, perfectly coiffed and made-up and showing a considerable amount of cleavage. She stared at him in silence.

Dionisio cut his meat without saying a word and raised a bloody morsel (he’d requested medium) to his mouth. At that precise instant she began to speak. But not to him. She spoke into a cellular telephone which she held in one hand while she touched the divide between her breasts with the gesture of a woman perfuming that crevice of pleasure before going out to dinner.

“I’m making an exception and eating sitting down, you understand? I never have time to sit down; I eat standing up. This seems abnormal to me.”

“But what’s so strange—” interrupted Dionisio, before realizing that the woman was talking not to him but to her telephone.

“Miss? You think I miss you?”

“No, I never said—” Dionisio decided to make a mistake. Damnation.

“Listen,” said the beautiful woman in the black tailored suit showing a considerable amount of cleavage, her breasts barely hidden by the (appropriately) double-breasted jacket. “I get my faxes at one number. I don’t have a name or address. I don’t need secretaries. My computer is with me wherever I am. I have no place. No, I don’t have time either. I’m proving it to you, stupid. What does it matter to me that in Holland it’s midnight if it’s three p.m. in California and we’re here working …?”

“On a snatch, I mean, a snack.” Dionisio corrected himself but the beauty ignored him, just barely touching herself behind an ear, again as if she were putting on perfume, as if her fingers were a bottle of Chanel.

“Just think, I don’t even need a doctor anymore. You know my bracelet? Well, let me tell you, it’s not just some frivolous piece of jewelry. It’s my portable hospital. Anywhere I happen to be, it can do a cardiogram, check my blood pressure, and even tell me my cholesterol without wasting time.”

Dionisio wondered if this beautiful woman was really a nurse in disguise. A hospital would have rewarded her efficiency, but it was haste, not efficiency, that mattered most to this divine creature. Dionisio began to doubt she was speaking to someone in Holland, but there was certainly no way in hell she was speaking to him. Was she talking to herself?

“So listen, with no time, no address, no name, no place, no office, no vacation, no kitchen, what am I left with?”

Her voice broke; she was going to cry. Dionisio panicked. He wished he could hug her or at least stroke her hand. She was becoming more hysterical by the minute. For the first time, she looked at him, telling him she was Sally Booth, thirty-six years old, a native of Portland, Oregon, voted in high school most likely to succeed, three husbands, three divorces, no children, occasional lovers, farther and farther away, love by telephone, long-distance orgasms, love with security, without problems, no body fluids, safe. I won’t go to a hospital, I’m going to die at home …

Abruptly interrupting her emotional flow, her instant biography, she squeezed Dionisio’s hand and said, “What is money good for? To buy people. We all need accomplices.”

And on that note, she disappeared like the first two, and Dionisio sat there staring at an empty plate where only the juicy traces of a rare steak survived (even though he had explicitly ordered medium).

“You could have been more cruel and less beautiful,” said the Symbolist poet whom Dionisio, to his sorrow although also for his intermittent pleasure, carried within him.

But this time his portable Baudelaire never left the suitcase; the little charro’s pistol went off again, and the blond waiter unexpectedly set down before him a lemon sherbet that Baco identified as the trou normand of French cuisine, the “Norman hole” that cleanses the palate of the main courses and prepares it for new tastes. He was astounded that the American Grill in a commercial center on the outskirts of San Diego would know anything about such subtleties, but he was even more taken aback to find, when he looked up, a woman before him. Without being beautiful, she was radiant — that he saw instantly. Her face, devoid of makeup, both needed and didn’t need cosmetics — they were irrelevant. Everything in her immaculate face had meaning. Her eyebrows, with their blond pallor, were like the meeting place of sand and sea; her lips, appropriately thin, were appropriately furrowed by an insinuation of imminent maturity she didn’t deign to disguise; her hair was pulled back and gathered in a bun, her first gray hairs of no importance to her, floating like lost clouds over a field of honey; her eyes, her eyes of a deep gray, the gray of good cashmere, of morning rain, as gray as an unexpected encounter, intelligent, slate and chalk, announced her special nature — they were eyes that changed color with the rain. They looked past Dionisio’s shoulder toward the television screen.