After the Plague: And Other Stories Read online

  I did the only thing I could. When he got to the part where the son, tears streaming into his chocolate mousse, asks him why, why, Dad, why, I stood up, right there, right in the middle of the front row, all those eyes drilling into me. I tore my hand away from Victoria’s, stared down the biographer and Dr. Delpino and all the rest of them, and stalked straight out the nearest exit even as my father’s amplified voice wavered, faltered, and then came back strong again, nothing wrong, nothing the matter, nothing a little literature wouldn’t cure.

  I don’t know what happened between him and Victoria at the muted and minimally celebratory dinner later that night, but I don’t suspect it was much, if anything. That wasn’t the problem, and both of us—she and I, that is—knew it. I spent the night hiding out in the twenty-four-hour laundromat wedged between Brewskies Pub and Taco Bell, and in the morning I ate breakfast in a greasy spoon only the townies frequented and then caught up on some of Hollywood’s distinguished product at the local cineplex for as long as I could stand it. By then, I was sure the great man would have gone on to his many other great appointments, all his public posturing aside. And that was just what happened: he cancelled his first flight and hung around till he could hang around no longer, flying out at four-fifteen with his biographer and all the sympathy of the deeply yearning and heartbroken campus. And me? I was nobody again. Or so I thought.

  I too dropped out of Dr. Delpino’s class—I couldn’t stand the thought of that glazed blue look of accusation in her eyes—and though I occasionally spotted Victoria’s hair riding the currents around campus, I avoided her. She knew where to find me if she wanted me, but all that was over, I could see that—I wasn’t his son after all. A few weeks later I noticed her in the company of this senior who played keyboards in one of the local bands, and I felt something, I don’t know what it was, but it wasn’t jealousy. And then, at the end of a lonely semester in a lonely town in the lonely hind end of nowhere, the air began to soften and a few blades of yellow grass poked up through the rotting snow and my roommate took me downtown to Brewskies to celebrate.

  The girl’s name was Marlene, but she didn’t pronounce it like the old German actress who was probably dead before she was born, but Mar-lenna, the second syllable banged out till it sounded as if she was calling herself Lenny. I liked the way her smile showed off the gold caps on her molars. The band I didn’t want to mention earlier was playing through the big speakers over the bar, and there was a whole undercurrent of noise and excitement mixed with the smells of tap beer, Polish sausage and salt-and-vinegar chips. “I know you,” she said. “You’re, um, Tom McNeil’s son, right?”

  I never looked away from her, never blinked. All that was old news now, dead and buried, like some battle in the Civil War.

  “That’s right,” I said. “How did you guess?”

  Mexico

  He didn’t know much about Mexico, not really, if you discount the odd margarita and a determined crawl through the pages of Under the Volcano in an alcoholic haze twenty years ago, but here he was, emerging pale and heavy from the sleek envelope of the airliner and into the fecund embrace of Puerto Escondido. All this—the scorching blacktop, the distant arc of the beach, the heat, the scent of the flowers and the jet fuel, and the faint lingering memory of yesterday’s fish—was an accident. A happy accident. A charity thing at work—give five bucks to benefit the Battered Women’s Shelter and win a free trip for two to the jewel of Oaxaca. Well, he’d won. And to save face and forestall questions he’d told everybody he was bringing his girlfriend along, for two weeks of R. and R.—Romance and Relaxation. He even invented a name for her—Yolanda—and yes, she was Mexican on her mother’s side, gray eyes from her father, skin like burnished copper, and was she ever something in bed… .

  There were no formalities at the airport—they’d taken care of all that in Mexico City with a series of impatient gestures and incomprehensible commands—and he went through the heavy glass doors with his carry-on bag and ducked into the first cab he saw. The driver greeted him in English, swivelling round to wipe an imaginary speck of dust from the seat with a faded pink handkerchief. He gave a little speech Lester couldn’t follow, tossing each word up in the air as if it were a tight-stitched ball that had to be driven high over the fence, then shrank back into himself and said, “Where to?” in a diminished voice. Lester gave the name of his hotel—the best one in town—and sat back to let the ripe breeze wash over his face.

  He was sweating. Sweating because he was in some steaming thick tropical place and because he was overweight, grossly overweight, carrying fifty pounds too many and all of it concentrated in his gut. He was going to do something about that when he got back to San Francisco—join a club, start jogging, whatever—but right now he was just a big sweating overweight man with bare pale legs set like stanchions on the floor of the cab and a belly that soaked right through the front of his cotton-rayon open-necked shirt with the blue and yellow parrots cavorting all over it. And there was the beach, scalloped and white, chasing along beside the car, with palm trees and a hint of maritime cool, and before ten minutes had ticked off his watch he was at the hotel, paying the driver from a wad of worn velvety bills that didn’t seem quite real. The driver had no problem with them—the bills, that is—and he accepted a fat velvety tip too, and seven and a half minutes after that Lester was sitting in the middle of a shady tiled dining room open to the sea on one side and the pool on the other, a room key in his pocket and his first Mexican cocktail clenched in his sweaty fist.

  He’d negotiated the cocktail with the faintest glimmer of half-remembered high-school Spanish—jooze naranja, soda cloob and vodka, tall, with ice, hielo, yes, hielo—and a whole repertoire of mimicry he didn’t know he possessed. What he’d really wanted was a Greyhound, but he didn’t know the Spanish word for grapefruit, so he’d fallen back on the orange juice and vodka, though there’d been some confusion over the meaning of the venerable Russian term for clear distilled spirits until he hit on the inspiration of naming the brand, Smirnoff. The waitress, grinning and nodding while holding herself perfectly erect in her starched white peasant dress, repeated the brand name in a creaking singsong voice and went off to fetch his drink. Of course, by the time she set it down, he’d already drunk the better half of it and he immediately ordered another and then another, until for the first twenty minutes or so he had the waitress and bartender working in perfect synchronization to combat his thirst and any real or imagined pangs he might have suffered on the long trip down.

  After the fifth drink he began to feel settled, any anxiety over travelling dissolved in the sweet flow of alcohol and juice. He was pleased with himself. Here he was, in a foreign country, ordering cocktails like a native and contemplating a bite to eat—guacamole and nachos, maybe—and then a stroll on the beach and a nap before dinner. He wasn’t sweating anymore. The waitress was his favorite person in the world, and the bartender came next.

  He’d just drained his glass and turned to flag down the waitress—one more, he was thinking, and then maybe the nachos—when he noticed that the table at the far end of the veranda was occupied. A woman had slipped in while he was gazing out to sea, and she was seated facing him, bare-legged, in a rust-colored bikini and a loose black robe. She looked to be about thirty, slim, muscular, with a high tight chest and feathered hair that showed off her bloodshot eyes and the puffed bow of her mouth. There was a plate of something steaming at her elbow—fish, it looked like, the specialty of the house, breaded, grilled, stuffed, baked, fried, or sautéed with peppers, onion, and cilantro—and she was drinking a Margarita rocks. He watched in fascination—semi-drunken fascination—for a minute, until she looked up, chewing, and he turned away to stare out over the water as if he were just taking in the sights like any other calm and dignified tourist.

  He was momentarily flustered when the waitress appeared to ask if he wanted another drink, but he let the alcohol sing in his veins and said, “Why not?”—“¿Por qué no?”—an
d the waitress giggled and walked off with her increasingly admirable rump moving at the center of that long white gown. When he stole another glance at the woman in the corner, she was still looking his way. He smiled. She smiled back. He turned away again and bided his time, but when his drink came he tossed some money on the table, rose massively from the chair, and tottered across the room.

  “Hi,” he said, looming over the chewing woman, the drink rigid in his hand, his teeth clenched round a defrosted smile. “I mean, Buenos tardes. Or noches.”

  He watched her face for a reaction, but she just stared at him.

  “Uh, ¿Cómo está Usted? Or tú. ¿Cómo estás tú?”

  “Sit down, why don’t you,” she said in a voice that was as American as Hillary Clinton’s. “Take a load off.”

  Suddenly he felt dizzy. The drink in his hand had somehow concentrated itself till it was as dense as a meteorite. He pulled out a chair and sat heavily. “I thought … I thought you were—?”

  “I’m Italian,” she said. “From Buffalo, originally. All four of my grandparents came from Tuscany. That’s where I get my exotic Latin looks.” She let out a short bark of a laugh, forked up a slab of fish, and began chewing vigorously, all the while studying him out of eyes that were like scalpels.

  He finished his drink in a gulp and looked over his shoulder for the waitress. “You want another one?” he asked, though he saw she hadn’t half finished her first.

  Still chewing, she smiled up at him. “Sure.”

  When the transaction was complete and the waitress had presented them with two fresh drinks, he thought to ask her name, but the silence had gone on too long, and when they both began to speak at the same time he deferred to her. “So what do you do for a living?” she asked.

  “Biotech. I work for a company in the East Bay—Oakland, that is.”

  Her eyebrows lifted. “Really? Is that like making potatoes that walk around the kitchen and peel themselves? Cloning sheep? Two-headed dogs?”

  Lester laughed. He was feeling good. Better than good. “Not exactly.”

  “My name’s Gina,” she said, reaching out her hand, “but you might know me as the Puma. Gina (the Puma) Caramella.”

  He took her hand, which was dry and small and nearly lost in his own. He was drunk, gloriously drunk, and so far he hadn’t been ripped off by the Federales or assailed by the screaming shits or leached dry by malarial mosquitoes and vampire bats or any of the other myriad horrors he’d been warned against, and that made him feel pretty near invulnerable. “What do you mean? You’re an actress?”

  She gave a little laugh. “I wish.” Ducking her head, she chased the remnants of the fish around the plate with her fork and the plane of her left index finger. “No,” she said. “I’m a boxer.”

  The alcohol percolated through him. He wanted to laugh, but he fought down the urge. “A boxer? You don’t mean like boxing, do you? Fisticuffs? Pugilism?”

  “Twenty-three, two, and one,” she said. She took a sip of her drink. Her eyes were bright. “What I’m doing right now is agonizing over my defeat two weeks ago at the Shrine by one of the queen bitches in the game, DeeDee DeCarlo, and my manager thought it would be nice for me to just get away for a bit, you know what I mean?”

  He was electrified. He’d never met a female boxer before—didn’t even know there was such a thing. Mud-wrestling he could see—in fact, since his wife had died, he’d become a big fan, Tuesday nights and sometimes on Fridays—but boxing? That wasn’t a woman’s sport. Drunkenly, he scrutinized her face, and it was a good face, a pretty face, but for the bridge of her nose, a telltale depression there, just the faintest misalignment—and sure, sure, how had he missed it? “But doesn’t it hurt? I mean, when you get punched in the … body punches, I mean?”

  “In the tits?”

  He just nodded.

  “Sure it hurts, what do you think? But I wear a padded bra, wrap ’em up, pull ’em flat across the ribcage so my opponent won’t have a clear target, but really, it’s the abdominal blows that take it out of you,” and she was demonstrating with her hands now, the naked slope of her belly and the slit of her navel, abs of steel, but nothing like those freakish female bodybuilders they threw at you on ESPN, nice abs, nice navel, nice, nice, nice.

  “You doing anything for dinner tonight?” he heard himself say.

  She looked down at the denuded plate before her, nothing left but lettuce, don’t eat the lettuce, never eat the lettuce, not in Mexico. She shrugged. “I guess I could. I guess in a couple hours.”

  He lifted the slab of his arm and consulted his watch with a frown of concentration. “Nine o’clock?”

  She shrugged again. “Sure.”

  “By the way,” he said. “I’m Lester.”

  April had been dead two years now. She’d been struck and killed by a car a block from their apartment, and though the driver was a teenage kid frozen behind the wheel of his father’s Suburban, it wasn’t entirely his fault. For one thing, April had stepped out in front of him, twenty feet from the crosswalk, and, as if that wasn’t bad enough, she was blindfolded at the time. Blindfolded and feeling her way with one of those flexible fiberglass sticks the blind use to register the world at their feet. It was for a psychology course she was taking at San Francisco State—“Strategies of the Physically Challenged.” The professor had asked for two volunteers to remain blindfolded for an entire week, even at night, even in bed, no cheating, and April had been the first to raise her hand. She and Lester had been married for two years at the time—his first, her second—and now she was two years dead.

  Lester had always been a drinker, but after April’s death he seemed to enjoy drinking less and need it more. He knew it, and he fought it. Still, when he got back to his room, sailing on the high of his chance meeting with Gina—Gina the Puma—he couldn’t help digging out the bottle of Herradura he’d bought in the duty-free and taking a good long cleansing hit.

  There was no TV in the room, but the air conditioner worked just fine, and he stood in front of it a while before stripping off his sodden shirt and stepping into the shower. The water was tepid, but it did him good. He shaved, brushed his teeth, and repositioned himself in front of the air conditioner. When he saw the bottle standing there on the night table, he thought he’d have just one more hit—just one—because he didn’t want to be utterly wasted when he took Gina the Puma out for dinner. But then he looked at his watch and saw that it was only seven-twenty, and figured what the hell, two drinks, three, he just wanted to have a good time. Too wired to sleep, he flung himself down on the bed like a big wet dripping fish and began poking through the yellowed paperback copy of Under the Volcano he’d brought along because he couldn’t resist the symmetry of it. What else was he going to read in Mexico—Proust?

  “No se puede vivir sin amar,” he read, “You can’t live without love,” and he saw April stepping out into the street with her puny fiberglass stick and the black velvet sleep mask pulled tight over her eyes. But he didn’t like that picture, not at all, so he took another drink and thought of Gina. He hadn’t had a date in six months, and he was ready. And who knew? Anything could happen. Especially on vacation. Especially down here. He tipped back the bottle, and then he flipped to the end of the book, where the Consul, cored and gutted and beyond all hope, tumbles dead down the ravine and they throw the bloated corpse of a dog down after him.

  The first time Lester had read it, he’d thought it was funny, in a grim sort of way. But now he wasn’t so sure.

  Gina was waiting for him at the bar when he came down at quarter to nine. The place was lit with paper lanterns strung from the thatched ceiling, there was the hint of a breeze off the ocean, the sound of the surf, a smell of citrus and jasmine. All the tables were full, people leaning into the candlelight over their fish and Margaritas and murmuring to each other in Spanish, French, German. It was good. It was perfect. But as Lester ascended the ten steps from the patio and crossed the room to the bar, his legs felt
dead, as if they’d been shot out from under him and then magically re-attached, all in the space of an instant. Food. He needed food. Just a bite, that was all. For equilibrium.

  “Hey,” he said, nudging Gina with his shoulder.

  “Hey,” she said, flashing a smile. She was wearing shorts and heels and a blue halter top glistening with tiny blue beads.

  He was amazed at how small she was—she couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred pounds. April’s size. April’s size exactly.

  He ordered a Herradura and tonic, his forearms laid out like bricks on the bar. “You weren’t kidding before,” he said, turning to her, “about boxing, I mean? Don’t take offense, but you’re so—well, small. I was just wondering, you know?”

  She looked at him a long moment, as if debating with herself. “I’m a flyweight, Les,” she said finally. “I fight other flyweights, just like in the men’s division, you know? This is how big God made me, but you come watch me some night and you’ll see it’s plenty big enough.”

  She wasn’t smiling, and somewhere on the free-floating periphery of his mind he realized he’d made a blunder. “Yeah,” he said, “of course. Of course you are. Listen, I didn’t mean to—but why boxing? Of all the things a woman could do.”

  “What? You think men have a patent on aggression? Or excellence?” She let her eyes sail out over the room, hard eyes, angry eyes, and then she came back to him. “Look, you hungry or what?”

  Lester swirled the ice in his drink. It was time to defuse the situation, but quick. “Hey,” he said, smiling for all he was worth, “I’d like to tell you I’m on a diet, but I like eating too much for that—and plus, I haven’t had a thing since that crap they gave us on the plane, dehydrated chicken and rice that tasted like some sort of by-product of the vulcanizing process. So yeah, let’s go for it.”