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?”—and 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?