When they got in, the taxi driver was effusive, wearing a colorful scarf and a dangly earring. He spoke a sentence that Steadman could not comprehend.
“He says the rain is good luck,” Ava said. “He’s so pleased we are here. He has a friend in New York. Male friend, of course.”
Steadman thought how rainstorms made strange cities familiar, exaggerated and simplified their contours. Yet here the rain did not drain away but puddled and flooded and held up traffic. This sudden downpour enclosed them, blurred the city, gave it a look of homely exoticism, made them need each other again. Now it was just the two of them. The sun might have separated them, but the bad weather brought them close.
Steadman said, “I’m starting to worry about this trip. If I don’t hook up with this guy Nestor I’m screwed. I’m depending on him to get me into the jungle. He’s supposed to be an ethnobotanist. If he doesn’t show, there’s no story.”
Ava sat back in the taxi, drawing away from him, and said, “Oh, so you’re a writer.”
At first Steadman almost laughed and said, What are you saying? Of course I am! But he hesitated, because she was blank-faced, waiting for an answer while the taxi splashed through the flooded gutters, sending up gouts of water. That was the other thing about rain in such a country. It came down mud-colored.
Steadman said, “Yes, I am. And what do you do?”
“I’m a doctor.” She smiled as only a stranger smiles at another stranger, holding the expression in check and yet hopeful.
The taxi driver took an interest. He said, “Quisiera mostrarles cosas fantásticas.”
“He wants to show us some amazing things.”
Steadman whispered, “He’s a sodomite.”
Ava smiled again. She said, “Like me.”
“What’s your name?”
She said, “I’ll tell you upstairs.”
The taxi’s seats were covered in torn leather. Hanks of straw showed through, and the pungency of the straw and the leather stirred him as much as her teasing words.
In the hotel lobby, Ava said, “I’m in three-one-oh-two. Give me a few minutes.” She did not touch him. She turned and was gone.
Steadman liked this change of mood and the way she had given him this information, telling him what he already knew — so brisk and businesslike, as though she were an accomplished sneak, having rehearsed it many times. But he thought, That’s what fantasies are — fantasies are rehearsals.
Liking the taste of the delay, he gave her more time than she had asked for and then went upstairs. She answered the door wearing a hotel robe, but slipped it off when he entered. She was naked. Steadman locked and bolted the door, and when he turned to Ava again she was blindfolded — the sleep mask from the plane — and held another blindfold in her hand.
“Wait.” Steadman was kicking his shoes off, stripping off his shirt. She knew what he was doing. She said, “I don’t care what you wear, as long as you wear this,” and handed him the other blindfold.
In the stumbling game that followed, Ava slipped away from him and then called to him from across the room. Fearful of hurting himself, Steadman got down on all fours and crept toward the sound of her voice, though she went on teasing him. Over here, she said. No, over here. Until he cornered her and took hold of her and kissed her and pressed his face against her softness, sensing her vividly as an odor and a warmth in the darkness of his blindfold. As they kissed, this darkness lifted and became smoldering light. But the act itself came much later, for they struggled, choking in a hallucination of desire, teasing, delaying, relenting, beginning again, two strangers becoming acquaintances, uttering the desperate half-laugh of lust.
The act was not about possessing her but about letting go, each of them doing so in the most private way, as though practicing this release. And they took turns, each one both a suggestion and a dare, as if in using only their lips and their tongues they were saying with mute eloquence, This is what I want.
Later, Steadman was the first to wake, but taking off his blindfold made little difference, for night had fallen. He saw a slash of meager brightness, the dim lights of the city through the curtain. Ava lay asleep, still blindfolded, sprawled between two chairs, embracing herself for warmth. She looked tossed there, her lips parted, her tongue showing, like a cat that has been hit by a car.
He too was lying naked on the floor. There was also a crack of corridor light showing in the threshold, enough light so that Steadman saw that a folded paper, probably a note, had been thrust under the door.
4
BEING WOKEN before dawn was like an intimation of sickness, a set of symptoms: the tremulous fragility of early morning in the high distant city, sniffing the thin, sharpened air in the dim fluorescence of the uncertain light, the rank dust, the muffled voices and humming stillness, his clamped head and crusted eyes. He was reminded that he had said something like this in Trespassing about this very place.
Steadman hated early starts, and downstairs he was jarred by Nestor’s heartiness.
“Ready to rumble?”
When people like this knew American catch phrases, Steadman suspected them of trying to hustle him. Why else would a stranger take such trouble to ingratiate himself? Besides, their knowing such inanities proved that they had habitually associated with shallow boisterous Americans and knew no better.
Ava, used to a doctor’s emergencies, was already up and dressed and lucid.
Nestor was a big confident man, no more than forty, with a beaky face and a mustache and deep-set dark eyes. He wore a heavy leather jacket, which Steadman remarked on. Nestor instantly seemed to know what Steadman was intimating and said, “You won’t need it where we are going.”
Instead of being reassured by Nestor’s excellent English, Steadman was suspicious of his presumption. The man was clearly experienced, but he was impulsive in his movements, even in the way he walked — lunging — and so confident as to be carelessly clumsy.
Five other shadow-shrouded people sat in the back of the van, faceless in the darkness, hunched over in the chill of the early morning. A cassette of Andean flute and panpipe music was whistling in the van’s tape player. They said nothing when Steadman and Ava got into the forward seat. They remained silent — Steadman guessed that they resented having to pick up him and Ava last, giving them more time to sleep. Waiting for them in the porte-cochere of the luxury hotel perhaps annoyed them, too.
“Six hours to Papallacta,” Nestor said. “And then Lago Agrio. We stay in Lago tonight. We will be on the river in the morning. Tomorrow afternoon in the jungle. Anyone mind if I smoke a cigarette?”
“We mind,” came a voice from a back seat, a woman’s voice, like bolt cutters snapping through iron.
Nestor shrugged and unwrapped some chewing gum. He sat next to the driver, whom he announced as Hernán. Hernán was a capable driver, but Steadman disliked being driven except by Ava, who was efficient at the wheel, using her bossy doctor’s manner in traffic, but she drove with caution, never speeded. The other passengers in the van were seated in silence, their heads down. Steadman had assumed, based on the high price they had paid up front, that he and Ava would be alone. But this was like a group trip for budget travelers.
Steadman reminded himself that he would not have been able to accomplish this drug tour single-handedly. They needed Nestor, and Hernán too, probably, for though he had been in Ecuador before, this was different. Even if Steadman had managed to find the village in the jungle, he would not have been able to negotiate the drug ceremony with the Secoya. He needed Nestor as a guide and go-between, but he also resented needing him.