“You may be right. The kind of life we lead is certainly a good argument for separation.”
“You’re away so much. What can I believe?”
“It’s my work. You ought to respect it.”
“I’m sorry, Felix. It’s just that I’m afraid.”
Ruth put her arms around him, and Felix’s heart turned over. He was about to ask her, do you know something, do you understand what’s going on. But she spoke first, to dispel the doubt. “Felix, I know what role I’ve played in your life.”
“I love you, Ruth. You must know that.”
“Wait. Please. I mean why you chose me over Sara and Mary.”
“You sound as if you think they were better than you.”
“The truth is, they were. I’m not as intelligent as Sara or as good-looking as Mary. I’ve spent the day thinking about it. You always put Sara on a pedestal. You went to bed with Mary. But for you either a pure, even intellectual, love or pure sex without love doesn’t work. You need a woman like me to solve your practical problems, to handle the details of your career and your social life, and as long as our everyday affairs go smoothly, you happily love and screw the same woman, one woman, me. I’m your untouchable ideal at times, and sometimes your whore, but always the woman who has your breakfast ready and your suits pressed and your bags packed — everything, the dinners for your bosses, everything. Am I right?”
“It’s all too complicated. But I’ve been listening all day to things about myself that seem to refer to someone I don’t know.”
“No, Felix. It’s perfectly simple. I was never your pure ideal, like Sara, or your piece of ass, like Mary. I’m both of them but only half of each. That’s the problem, don’t you see?”
“Ruth, it’s not important that Sara Klein will be at the Rossettis’. I haven’t seen her for centuries. What is important is to go there with you, for them to see us together, and happy, Ruth.”
“In me you have what Sara Klein and Mary Benjamin each gave you.”
“Of course, of course, that’s why I preferred you. Don’t keep harping on it.”
“You love me ideally, like your Sara, and physically, like Mary.”
“Do you have any complaints? What’s bad about that?”
“Nothing, except that now you’re idealizing both of them, both are becoming what Sara Klein once was; you’re idolizing them from afar, the equilibrium is about to be broken. My intuition tells me, Felix, if you see Sara tonight you won’t be able to resist the temptation. She’ll be back on her pedestal. And you’ll take my place from me.”
“Which place, Ruth, your ideal or your sexual security? Please explain, since you seem to know more about it than I do.”
“I don’t know. It depends. Did you go to bed with Mary today?”
“Ruth, I haven’t seen Mary today.”
“She called me herself to ask if I was ill, why I didn’t come with you to their anniversary party at the Arroyo.”
“What time did she call you?”
“About six this evening.”
“But you were angry when I first called you this morning.”
“Because of Sara Klein. I’d forgotten about Mary. Mary made me remember them both. But I’m not angry now. I feel as if you’d split me down the middle, Felix. What I wanted to give you in me, united in me, you’d rather have from two women. It’s as if you wanted to go back, to be young again.”
“That fucking Mary,” Felix muttered.
Ruth looked at her husband, and frowned. “Don’t do it, Felix. You’re still young.”
“Do you know you’re talking to me the way a Jewish mother talks to her son?”
“Don’t make fun of me. Just believe that we can live together and grow old together and die together.”
Felix grabbed Ruth by the arms and shook her. “Don’t play the Jewish mother with me, I can’t stand it. I can’t take your wise Jewish mamma warnings. I’m going to the Rossettis’ because Mauricio is the Director General’s private secretary, and that’s that. Sara Klein has nothing to do with it. I think your theories are totally idiotic.”
“Please don’t go, Felix. Stay here with me. I’m not playing games now, I’m asking you sincerely. Please stay. Don’t jeopardize yourself.”
10
RUTH’S FACE haunted him all the way from Polanco, along the throughway, and out to San Angel. She’d never before looked at him just that way, her eyes filled with tears and tenderness, slowly shaking her head, her brows knit, warning him, as if this one time she knew the truth but didn’t want to offend him by speaking it. As he drove, he wondered whether her words masked the truth, whether she was lying to let him know, without hurting his feelings, that she suspected the gravity of everything that had happened during the day.
Felix had never played off Sara and Mary against Ruth. Ruth realized that the mere fact of her presence gave her the advantage over any aspect of Felix’s past, Felix said to himself, accustoming himself to speak of himself in the third person; Ruth is Felix’s wife, he thought as he searched for a parking place near the narrow Callejón del Santísimo. Ruth has freckles she tries to cover with makeup, the way Chayo tries to disguise her red moles. When Ruth perspires, the sweat gathers on the tip of her nose. Maldonado’s wife is a pretty Jewish girl, charming, active, a Hebraic geisha, Madame Butterfly with the Ten Commandments from Mount Sinai cradled in her arms instead of a son, Madame Cio-Cio-Stein, an empty basket in the bulrushes. Ridiculing her, he worked himself up to detesting her as he entered the Rossettis’ white colonial house. It’s true, Ruth does keep my shirts ironed, she does put my cuff links in for me.
Standing in the exact center of a white rug, a glass in her hand, Sara Klein seemed to be waiting for him. The light of the open fire formed a halo around her; an enormous painting by Ricardo Martínez served as a backdrop. After twelve years, Sara Klein was suspended within a luminous drop in the center of his world.
He feared to burst the golden bubble. He closed his eyes and reviewed faces from the past.
When he was studying economics at Columbia University, he’d seen all the films at the Museum of Modern Art. He had escaped at lunchtime, sometimes going without eating in order to see the old films on Fifty-third Street. For Felix Maldonado, the cinema became the counterpoint and nemesis of economics. Economics is an abstract science, sadly and finally innocuous when its true nature is revealed: the science of economics is personal opinion converted into dogma, the only opinion that makes use of numbers to justify itself. Film is a concrete art, happily and ultimately deceptive when it proves itself to be everything except art: a simple catalogue of faces and gestures: uniquely individual, never generic.
He concentrated on these memories as if trying to prolong coitus, trying not to come too soon. Not yet. He denied himself the pleasure of looking again at Sara; as yet, he didn’t want to go to her. Ruth had implored him, don’t go to that party. Like Mary Astor in the final scene of The Maltese Falcon, incredulous, prepared to transform the lie of her love into the truth of her life if Humphrey Bogart would save her from the electric chair. Except that poor Ruth hadn’t been pleading for her own life but, in some obscure way, for his. And now, and here, Sara before him, as enigmatic as Louise Brooks in Pandora’s Box. So like her, her hair black as a raven’s wing, worn in bangs and a pageboy, icy diamonds in her gaze, fatal availability in her body. But as interpreted by Louise Brooks, Lulu was a clear warning — a warning with no possibility of misunderstanding — of all the misery that lies in store for a man who loves a promiscuous woman. Sara Klein was Felix’s ideal, his untouched woman.