Down at the Cabanita
by Joshua Weber
We flew out of Mexico on the same plane we'd taken in the day before. Char folded her hands neatly in her lap while I sat in the next seat, about a million miles away, rummaging through the dog-eared Arizona Republic I'd read on the way down. The thing with Char and me was, we were special. We knew what was up. We watched other people and laughed at their foolishness.
The Dickersons, for instance. They moved in across the street not long after we bought our house. I had just been promoted to junior project manager with Empire Phoenix Construction. They did our subdivision, and they did it nicely. My boss talked to the people in finance and they cut us a deal on the property. Then along come the Dickersons. Clearly in over their head. Nice young guy; wife looked like a teen underwear model. Some shark caught them on the way to return their prom costumes and convinced the poor kids that they were up to the task of real life, here in Desert Shadows at that.
"I just can't believe it," Char would say, as I'd hack at a leg of lamb with the carving knife, "I think that Leanne Dickerson hasn't even washed her windows, not once, since they moved in here." Our windows were washed bi-weekly, Tuesdays and Fridays, which might have explained why we could see what was going on more clearly than the dusty-paned Dickersons.
Char always had dinner ready when I got home, and I always knew what it would be because she posted a weekly menu in the bathroom, where I could study it in the morning while I was puttering around. I think its purpose was to remind me where home was. When the clock strikes five, head for the roasted leg of lamb with sage, the glazed organic carrots with basmati rice, and the lowfat chocolate mousse. Char was great about stuff like that. 1985, people like the Dickersons didn't even know the word organic, but that's the kind of carrots she was serving, and with basmati rice. Who the hell outside of our house could even pronounce basmati back then?
Char would go on with her rant: "And she tells me today that they're trying to have kids."
From the beginning we were not going to have kids. Char had her house in order, and her abdomen too, and she didn't need either disturbed. And I always said I liked having discretionary income instead of paying doctor bills. When we turned thirty, a little after Dickerson lost his job in the recession of the early Nineties and they moved their strep-throated, window-smudging brood back in with his parents, I started to think twice. But Char assured me that with the world the way it was, bringing kids into it would only be doing them a disservice. We could see that clear as day, through the big, squeegeed picture window in the living room that looked out over downtown Phoenix.
"And you want to send them out into that?" she said, thumbing the town. "Come over here." She tugged at my shirtsleeve from the couch. At thirty, right on schedule, she had rediscovered her libido. "Let's think about something else."
Something else was exactly what I was thinking about when we booked our trip to Mexico in December. We both turned thirty-nine last year, the libido had cooled back off, and I was thinking about Coronas on the beach, that maybe Mexico would be the thing to put some warmth back between the sheets. I wasn't thinking about the fact that spring break hits colleges across America the same week as our anniversary. Hotel Cabanita looked good on the Internet, and they filled up fast, so we booked the last bed available in the city of Acapulco during the second week of March.
The Cabanita had been a hell of a place, especially back when Sinatra was staying there and when they shot Bond films in the lounge. They carefully preserved the look. The only difference, during spring break season, was that they played electronic samples instead of actual music, and they set up big speakers throughout the lobby and lounge to announce water balloon fights, drink specials, and toga parties. Char didn't like it too much. She took one look at the mass of teenage bodies in bathing suits and said, through clenched teeth, "Get me to the room." I could see her looking at all the young girls in their bikinis. She was jealous that way.
She used to worry about Leanne Dickerson, when they first moved in. Char was slim, and worked out like a maniac, but she would obviously never have Leanne's body, no matter what she did. Leanne just had it. Char watched me carefully when, out of some sense of civic duty, we invited the Dickersons to cross the street and stand in our vacuumed, polished living room and sip gin and tonics while we roasted a porterhouse on the grill. Leanne wore this halter-top that pissed Char off like nothing.
"Not a single pool on this block, but she has to wear that top, her boobs hanging out like that," she said.
There wasn't much I could say. We did put in a pool a year or two later, but that's beside the point. Things change. When I became a senior project manager, and then regional manager, I spent more time in the office downtown and less time on jobs out in Apache Junction or down in Tucson. That meant I didn't have to get up at four to be at work by seven. I could rise at six and read the paper in the john instead of chanting the evening's menu like a mantra to keep me moving through the predawn morning. I could relax a bit and stop off at the George and Dragon for a quick pint or two and still be on time to open the chilled chardonnay with herb encrusted wild rainbow trout.
You have to understand that Char wasn't seeing so clearly either. Sure, the menu was always written in spectacularly neat and legible hand, and the brass door handles that I put in throughout the house back in '94 still shined like mirrors, but Char didn't quite have the same edge, that originality that gave the house she made a clairvoyance that nobody else enjoyed. She picked up a part-time job at the Cholla Vista branch of the Phoenix library about five years ago, and that was great for her. Endless opportunities for organization. In the summer lots of kids came in and that could be a bit of a headache, but just before we left for the Cabanita they offered her full-time work, and she was seriously thinking about it. I didn't know why, really, as little as they paid, but she didn't seem to think that it was a waste of her time.
Physically, Char changed very little, and I was always grateful for that. By now I shouldn't have to tell you that she wore wide brimmed straw hats in the sun and put a mask on every night and went to aerobics then pilates then yoga four times a week. Her breasts were small, and at thirty-nine they still looked the same overall, even if her little freckles had grown into light age spots. Her skin lost some elasticity, but it looked good draped over lean calf muscles. What changed with Char was, now her concept of being original was buying her four-dollar sugar-free hazelnut soy latte at Café Medea instead of Starbucks. I buy coffee at the Circle-K. The thirty-two ouncer is a buck-twenty five, and it's fresh. When I mentioned it she launched into some speech about this espresso machine operator, Barista, she calls him, who explains to her the difference between natural processed coffee and Arabica beans and the whole deal. It's not like we couldn't afford it, so I laid off the questions, and we decided to take a trip for the big one-nine, rather than the big two-oh, as we had planned. Some time to rediscover ourselves. I think that's the exact words Char said, "We need to rediscover ourselves, Jeffery, find out who we are again."
I know who I am. I am the Regional manager for Empire Phoenix, and two and a half million dollars a month flow out through my desk and three and a quarter million flow back in on the first and the fifteenth, through the mailroom. She is Char, who still writes up the menus in the house that we bought for sixty-two thousand dollars in 1984, the year we married, and she sees to it that the windows sparkle in a way that no Latina maid could ever do. I see this clearly. What I don't see clearly, is who she thinks she is. So I booked two tickets to Mexico and a weekend at a hotel on the strip, so that I could find this out.
So when we arrived down at the Cabanita, we pushed through the flailing bodies, and fled to our room as quickly as we could, only to see a Coca-cola bottle filled with blue dye zip past our balcony. We rushed to the edge and looked down. The flagstone courtyard shined brilliant blue, seven stories below, and like worker ants the staff had mops ready, almost before the bomb landed.
Char closed the door and the drapes to shut out the whooping of the fraternity boys.
"Take a nap," I told her. "It was a long flight and you got up early."
She flipped back the covers on the bed and scanned for cockroaches. It was clear, so she sat and reached for the phone. "I'm finding another place."
"How about if I go get drinks?" I said.
I took her silence for yes, and let myself out, securing the lock. The place just made you want to suck in your gut. I work in an office but I take pride in doing all of the labor around my house. I mow the quarter acre lot with a push mower, I weed the flower beds on the weekends, and after we got the pool put in I refused the maintenance contract and I've faithfully cleaned it four times a week ever since. So I'm not in bad shape. A thirty-six is not a great waist, but it could be worse. I dress right, and I look stout, not droopy. Here though, you saw the definition of hardbody, and it just made you suck it in.
Elevators. At each floor a flock of co-eds waited squeeze aboard. They all looked like Leanne Dickerson in her halter-top. The doors opened and closed like flipping through pages in a Fredrick's catalogue. I pretended to be confused and took the elevator going up and rode it all the way to the top floor and then down to the ground level to get drinks. The staff handed out bottles of Corona the size of coffee tins, so I showed them my guest bracelet and got two, and a rum and Coke for Char. A loudspeaker boomed instructions for a pushup contest out by the pool. I walked over to a high table that stood against a bed of tropical flowers and put my drinks down. The flowerbed formed the only barrier between the lounge and the pool deck, so I opened the first Corona and leaned forward to watch the straining muscles and bulging veins while oversampled R.E.M. blasted through the hotel.
"S'this for me, Daddy?" a girl at my shoulder said. She already had her hand around Char's Rum and Coke. She wore her blonde hair in two long braids and her nose was lightly dappled with young freckles. She pulled up a tall stool and sat beside me.
I turned back to the pool. Beyond the deck stretched the beach, littered with thatched cabanas and umbrellas.
"Sure is."
She drank off half of the rum & Coke and crossed her legs, high on the stool so that even without looking I could see up her short wrap skirt to her string bikini. Must have been a hell of a bikini wax, to wear that suit. On the other side of the pool, hotel officials rounded up a flock of sorority sisters for a wet t-shirt contest following the pushups.
"So what's a big guy like you doing here?" she said. She had a lot of alcohol in her voice.
I had been planning to jump out of the taxi and herd Char straight up to the room and make love to her. Crazy, wild, Acapulco style love. Crazy enough to maybe break through this thing, this smoky window that was separating us. That's what I was doing there, only it wasn't working.
I looked Blondie up and down. I didn't even hide it that I was looking right up her skirt. "I'm here to screw my wife."
She jumped off of the chair and grabbed me. Seriously. Bam! Like you get sued for back in my office. Then, before she let go, she planted a big red kiss on my neck, and I could feel my skin between her teeth. "Go get her, Daddy," she shouted, as she stumbled off into the pushup crowd, waving Char's drink.
I wandered through the lounge finishing my first jug of beer and rubbing at the lipstick on my neck. The entire bottom floor of the hotel was a breezy granite labyrinth dotted with concessions offering complimentary Corona jugs and rum. Kids, literally, these were kids, whom I could have fathered if Char and I had started procreating when we got together right after high school. These kids are streaming through the place, a river of drunken homecoming queens and linebackers, looking at me like an intruding parent. Before the elevator I ducked into a men's room to finish off the lipstick, and found it was worse than I'd thought. I'd gotten the lipstick, but no matter how I scrubbed that son-of-a-bitch, Blondie's suction mark wasn't going anywhere.
Char was sitting on the bed in a yoga pose when I returned, her eyes closed, her back unnaturally straight, and all of her limbs carefully arranged. I don't know much about yoga except that I sent her instructor a check for three hundred-fourteen dollars every month. I'd come to recognize this particular pose, though. She used it when she had a particularly stressful day down at the library. Usually she snapped out of it when I finished my shower, and while I dressed she'd tell me that it had been field trip day at the Coronado elementary school, and that she's been dealing with impossible nine-year-olds all afternoon. In the hotel room in Acapulco she left her meditation immediately.
"There is not another room available in this city." Her voice was low and calm, how it got when she was really pissed. Like the night the Dickersons were over. "I saw your eyes," she said that night, "as though that damn top was not coming off by itself." That's how low her voice was there in the Hotel Cabanita, just like that night.
"The airline doesn't have a flight out of here until noon tomorrow," she went on, clutching the rum and Coke that I had picked up at a concession to replace the one Blondie took. "But we are first on their list to get on that plane." She drank the first half in a gulping way that reminded me of Blondie.
I busted open my second jug and took a drink, standing so that my left side, the side Blondie locked onto, faced away. I knew I couldn't do that forever, but I was thinking furiously and I just needed to buy time. Char stood and opened the heavy drapes. We had a decent view out on the deck. All of the old city: big buildings from colonial times built in the style of our Hacienda Ranch projects. I wondered for a second if this was a city like Phoenix, where all you had to do was throw some money at dirt out in the desert, and you were guaranteed a return you could build an empire on. It had been for someone, I thought. Some Spanish governor parlayed this grungy bit of Indian land by the ocean into a sprawling villa over there in Spain, full of crystal and glass and maids to clean it.
"I'm not blaming you," Char said, swirling her ice cubes, "not for this fiasco."
I drank more beer, not sure what to make of her generosity. The last month had been a rough one for us. She had been pretty upset since we had this episode in her coffee shop, somewhere around the end of January. I just popped in for a cup of coffee, and she took it as an invasion of her secret place, as though I had torn open the lock on her diary.
"And I suppose we might as well try to find something to enjoy until tomorrow afternoon." She turned and looked at me. That's when she noticed the zinger on my neck.
She moved around to my left side. I stood still, like a horse at an auction, feeling her eyes on my neck. Had Blondie been punishing me for crashing her co-ed party? Was there some sign around my genitals, too? Something that only other women could scent? This man has recently been groped and handled by Blondie. I knew that if anyone could get a clear read on it, Char could. She always knew what was up.
Of course Char never said anything indelicate. It went against the grain of a long, well-regulated childhood and years of adult propriety. That's why she was so great at parties. I just flowed around the room in her upright wake, listening to her say the most correct things, while my colleagues fluttered around trying to control the damage caused by the rummy tongues of their aging, fattening old ladies. When there was nothing decent to say, Char just refused to speak.
So she stood there, staring at me from two feet away, with her crystal blue eyes glassing over with tears.
"Look Char," I said. The exact truth, of course, would not do. I had no excuse for allowing Blondie the drink, unless I brought up the coffee shop scene, back in Phoenix, when I stumbled into her fantasy life. This kid - Barista, it turns out, is not his name, it's his job title - this barista was talking to Char when I came into the shop. He had her in the corner where she was practically draped on a floor stand loaded with blocks of vacuum-packed coffee. He was holding her elbow and she'd worked her hand up to his skinny little bicep. She's sipping away on an organic decaf sugar free hazelnut soy latte and he's holding this flaming little ceramic cup in his other hand, with his finger, I kid you not, his little pinkie finger sticking out like a flagpole.
But it's the way she's looking at him that gets me. She's looking up at him with her see-through eyes that miss nothing and he's looking right back through them, right into her brain like I used to do before her eyes started to get glassy. This is penetration. This is betrayal, I wanted to tell her.
When I arrived home that evening, dinner wasn't ready. Instead she accused me of spying on her, and said that if I thought she was sleeping with a scrawny, pimple-faced coffee barista who could be her son, I might as well come out and say it. And of course I didn't, because I knew better than to think that Char would ever be unfaithful like that. I knew that better than I knew that through the smog outside my clean dining room window, there was a city of skyscrapers and palm trees that I could see on a clear day, and fools running around, believing they had figured out what was up.
I turn red when I feel guilty, and Char could always see it. Always had. So I stood there in the hotel room in Mexico red as a beet, and she waited until the tears started to form in her watery eyes and then she shut herself into the bathroom.
"Char, I didn't do anything," I told the bathroom door. "There's a whole hotel packed with little boys and girls, all drunk, and I just got hit." I was only defending the big spot on my neck. I knew that if somehow she could see the slender blonde fingerprints on my crotch my case was hopeless, so I didn't bother.
"It's what they do. They're young and drunk, and I stood out, and my hands were full," I said. "Full with drinks."
I knocked, I pleaded, and finally I told the door that I would be back soon, and I slipped out into the elevator again to go fetch dinner, because in the end, Char was always practical. I loaded up a couple of plates at the buffet line, stuffed two more jugs of Corona into the pockets of my Bermudas, and picked up a pint of rum and a bottle of Coke. Standing in the elevator, balancing my load, I could feel the eyes of the kids on me. It struck me that it was not impossible that the Dickerson's oldest son could be in the crowd. Not likely, because Dickerson could hardly manage to feed his kids, let alone put away a college fund. But maybe some recessive gene blessed the boy and he was now a pushup contest winner, and he was standing right behind me in the back of the elevator working his hands into the straps of a halter-top bikini, asking his buddies, "See that old guy with all the food? Works hard to keep his figure." Not likely, I admit, but the odds were higher that he had a son there than I did.
I scratched on the bathroom door and told Char that I was leaving food there for her. And I poured her a stiff rum and coke. I mean very stiff. Like fifty-fifty. I went back to the bed and sat down to eat. By the time I finished she had slid the glass back out empty, so I made her another and tapped. The sun was setting behind the headlands that guard the city from the sea, so I watched it through the glass slider on the balcony. I polished the fingerprint smudges around the door handle with my t-shirt as the lights slowly sparkled to life in the old city. Ranks and files of city blocks, all constructed the old fashioned way with heavy stones and wooden beams. I thought how I could construct all of those buildings with modern materials for a fraction of the cost. If they gave me the job, a tide of new, clean buildings would surge across town. How many millions would it take to rebuild each block? Not many, not in Mexico. I visualized eating up the town, and the profits pouring in, and lives being improved. Generations would follow, gazing through picture windows at the beach and the rocky headlands that guarded the bay and set the sun.
Char came out halfway through her third drink. She was pretty drunk already, but she insisted I top her off, and then we made love.
Of course I was still offering explanations for my neck, but she waved away my words. "I'm not going to discuss it," she said. "I've decided to forgive you."
Typically, all of our fights ended that way. It's almost hard to call what we did fighting because those were the only words she would say through the whole thing: "I'm not going to discuss it; I've decided to forgive you."
So we didn't make wild, Acapulco style love, but regular Charlene style. She pulls me over and places one of my hands on her breast, to signal she's willing, and then I slide my hands up to her neck and kiss her forehead. That's always how it starts. It's our mating ritual, like frogs or birds in the nature shows on KPBX: "I've chosen you to fertilize my eggs," she says; "I accept the task," I answer.
Then the clothes come off. Char never once in eighteen years did it with a shred of clothing on. I think she believed that wearing clothing during sex made it cheap and whorish.
Then birth control. When we started, Char insisted on two levels of defense. At thirty-nine we were down to condoms only because the pill made her moody. Finally, I switched off the lamp. That was my ritual because of the way I went red in the face when I thought about sliding Leanne Dickerson's halter top off her shoulders. I knew my face went red when those straps slid down and all that fresh white skin was exposed, right down to the large pink nipples, but with no light, I didn't believe Char could tell.
That night, I thought first of sliding my hand up Blondie's little skirt, then I pulled those straps off of Leanne Dickerson. I don't know how many times I did that, pawing at Leanne's clothes. In the early years, I might have slid her top off a hundred times. I remember the night I first did that - it was the night she actually wore the thing over to our house for gin and steak - but anymore I don't remember how it happened. Did I pull it off of her with my eyes the moment I opened the front door and saw her? That's what Char claimed, and believed, since I stood there in the living room with a red burning face when she accused me of it, as soon as Leanne was across the street and out of earshot.
Or did I do it with my hands, the first time, out back near the grill when we were all liquored up and her husband started to have a reaction to the quinine, and vomited on our front door as he bolted for home? Char was instantly searching for cleaning supplies, of course, and that left Leanne and me on the back porch alone, and she was looking up at me with gin-dilated eyes, and the straps and that soft, fertile body moved toward me, begging to be touched.
Or was it only after Char accused me of it? Maybe she put the idea into my head. Later that night she said, "I'm not going to discuss it; I've decided to forgive you," and we started making love, and that was the first time I ever took that top off. I can't really see it clearly anymore. All I know is that afterwards I slid it down over Leanne's shoulders hundreds of times, and sometimes the shoulders were pale as Leanne's, sometimes they were olive, and once they were even black; down at the Cabanita they were tanned and each was graced with a blonde braid. But always they were fertile shoulders, childbearing shoulders, if there is such a thing, and when I saw them I came into a condom and slid off to the side and rested on my pillow.
After Char had cleaned herself and tidied the room, we took a walk on the beach. Most of the kids were out at the clubs, dancing madly between crumbling stone walls and dangerously rotting timbers, so the hotel and the beach were deserted. I felt like the parents, left at home while the kids ran around town. We passed through the granite lounge and Char picked up a fresh rum. I had already finished four of those liter Coronas and felt a little dehydrated, so I took a bottle of water instead. The air was cool, and so was the foamy water, but the sand still felt warm on bare feet. Char sat on the sand in a gap of darkness between our hotel and the next, and I walked down to splash my toes in a retreating wave.
"I can't believe how clear it is down here," Char said, behind me.
She was right. Across the bay lights twinkled at us like they were only across a street.
"The buildings, though," I said, without turning, "OSHA would have a field day in this place."
Another wave slid up on the sand, more powerful, and I backpedaled half a step as it washed around my ankles.
I could hardly see Char in the shadows, drinking rum, except the reflection of the ice cubes in her glass, and a flash of her ring.
"I guess I'm going to take that position," Char said.
I had told her not to bother back when she first got on at the library. They paid her seven and a quarter an hour, two-ninety, three hundred a week. A joke, really. But she said she needed to do more with her life than make menus, and now she was going to do it full time.
"If you had a baby now, you'd be almost sixty when it graduated," Char said. That was the closest I think she ever came to saying something indelicate, except for once, later on, when I thought I heard her whisper to her lawyer that I had been looking for breeding stock down in Acapulco. A divorce, even an uncontested one, is a lot of pressure to be under though, so I never really held that slip against her.