“I don’t want to pressure you, not now. But I’ll need to know soon what you’re planning.”
“Right.” Why not stand here and hold her, just hold her, his hands in her hair? For all he cared, the store could burst into flames.
“Ricky and I’ll be over at the restaurant tonight after closing, if you want to join us for drinks. Just come to the back and rap on the kitchen door,” she said.
“Thanks.”
“Are you going to be okay?”
Through the speakers, a snare drum paced out a polka beat. She touched his arm again.
“I don’t know,” he said, then he turned and left.
The night Anna Lia told him she loved another man, she smiled radiantly and appeared to think he’d share her joy.
He’d been laid off by the oil company, and Simtex hadn’t hired him yet. He’d spent the day looking for work, unpacking boxes at the record store, collecting unemployment, shopping for dinner.
“It’s good with him, Danny.”
He was browning ground beef for enchiladas in a pan, chopping peppers, garlic, onions. He looked at her and listened, his anger, his panic, swarming like condensation blisters on the windows. Trying to control himself, he kept his movements small, considered, precise.
“I love you, honey, but you know … our troubles in bed. With Roberto, it’s like breathing. I don’t even have to think.” She reached over, plucked a piece of onion off the stove. Grinning, she crunched it between her teeth. She’d made it clear she didn’t want to move out or cut her ties with Danny. “I just need … how do they say it here? A ‘free spirit’? I need to be a free spirit.”
“Free spirit,” Danny repeated dully.
“I need fulfillment with my body.” She touched his cheek. “You want me to be happy, don’t you?”
He tipped the grease from the pan into an old coffee can over the sink, fighting to steady his wrist, to keep from scorching her face. This was so Anna Lia: restless, selfish, naive. At the same time, it was her free spirit — her enthusiasms, her sudden desires — that drew him to her so completely. She acted out what most people only thought. “What about us?” he said. The stove burners glowed a fearsome red.
“We’ll just be us.”
“Is this how they do it in Italy?”
“What do you mean?” She had tied back her hair with a light blue scarf. A few curls bobbed above her eyes. She sat on a bar stool on the other side of the stove while he unwrapped a package of tortillas. He cracked the seal on a brand new bottle of vegetable oil, poured a thin coating into a fresh silver pan. Anna Lia leaned toward him. Her blouse opened loosely, just above the top button: the smooth beginnings of her breasts. “Danny?” She smiled in a way that always charmed him. Slightly crooked. “What do you mean?”
“I mean I’m not a sophisticated guy like your father, all right? Maybe it’s fine with him if your mom goes out and gets laid every night — ”
“Danny — ”
“What do you want me to say? You have my blessing? You’re my wife, goddammit.” He tossed a tortilla into the oil. It sizzled and curled. “Why are you even telling me this shit?”
“It’s the answer to our problem,” she said, wiping her eyes.
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“I’m happy with you, Danny, really, I don’t want to change … Except … except … my body needs — ”
“Fuck you! How do you think that makes me feel? Or don’t you care?”
“I do care. Danny, you can’t … you can’t take care of each things I need, okay? That’s not real.”
“Oh, so you’ll line us all up. That’s real? A man for every day of the week. Like monogrammed underwear.”
“Fuck you!” she screamed. “I love Roberto! I didn’t run looking for this. It wanted. It happened.”
The kitchen smelled tropical and rich: chili powder, cumin, cheese. Danny just stood there until the tortilla in the pan blackened and cracked, and the smoke alarm screeched.
Remembering that night now, he wondered again if she honestly believed — at least at the start of her affair — that she was doing their marriage a favor, taking pressure off their sex life. For all her romantic leanings, she could be coldly pragmatic — and terribly unaware of consequences. In bed, she’d never been comfortable with him, which always made him rush, just to get things over with, and afterwards they’d lie together, empty and tense.
He never understood why the excitement that overcame him, just seeing her, dissolved so quickly as soon as their bodies touched, and he felt he must be doing something wrong. For a couple of months he’d let things drift, hoping her fling would run its course — after all, she was impulsive, impatient. Maybe then they could start over, physically, learn each other’s bodies and tastes. And damn! if the combination of her distance and flirty looks didn’t intrigue him all over again, the way it had when he’d first known her.
As the days passed, and she became Roberto’s shadow, Danny asked Carla and Libbie if he was crazy, sticking it out, letting her get away with this. To make matters worse, his new job with Simtex had him on the road each week, giving Anna Lia plenty of time alone.
Libbie told him what he already knew. “I’m afraid our girl is unpredictable. God love her, she can be a real pain in the ass, can’t she?”
“Yeah. Why do you put up with her?” he’d asked Libbie.
“She’s so lively. And she doesn’t mean any harm … even when she’s causing it,” Libbie answered.
“I’ve never met anyone like her,” he said.
“Too many buttoned-up Texas gals?”
He grinned.
“You’re a good man, Danny.”
Carla was certain Anna Lia would crawl back to him, remorseful and repentant. “She may have left the church, but all that Catholic guilt’s got to be inside her still, just waiting to burn again. Those nuns are no slouches.”
Carla should talk, Danny thought. He’d met her sorry boyfriend.
The space between Anna Lia and Danny only widened; he saw her less and less. More and more, their conversations centered on the store. When she insisted on moving into her own place, Danny paid for it — how the hell else was she going to manage? Technically, she was still his wife, and Danny was no deadbeat, a word he remembered his father using with contempt.
Eventually, of course, Roberto wanted out of the mess, and after that — Jesus — “unpredictable” didn’t begin to tell Anna Lia’s story.
Danny took the freeway exit marked HOBBY AIRPORT, in the direction of the bookstore. Marie’s perfume lingered on his shirt.
He’d always hated this part of the city — salesmen everywhere, just off a bus or a small jet. Spiffy suits and shoes. Often, Danny had exchanged pleasantries with them while waiting for shipments of record albums or boxes of cassette tapes. For them, Houston was just a quick stop in a long pipeline snaking toward payday. On the neighborhood’s fringes, the fly-by-nights, catering to the needs of unattached men on the run. Porno shops, massage parlors, gun stores.
He pictured his father, dragging home from a week on the road, diminished and defeated by a world like this.
The Silencer occupied the center of a commercial strip next to a liquor store and three small pawn shops. Bars blocked the windows. A tinny bell rang when he opened the door, a quaint sound he associated with tailor shops and the yarn stores his mother used to love. The shelves were cluttered and dusty. The Big Book of Ordnance, Self Defense in the Laser Age, So You Want to Be a Mercenary? Beaming from the walls, Jesus, John Wayne, and Ronald Reagan, glossy prints above open displays of Indiana Jones bullwhips. SITUATION TARGETS — $2.00 PER SET: life-sized drawings of burglars, muggers, Vietnamese soldiers crouching in the bush. Combat assault vests (GENUINE G.I., ONE SIZE FITS ALL). A row of silver knives.