Hilgard offered the glowering driver a pair of thousand-peso notes, waved away the change, and they went into the hotel. In the small lobby she said, “Get the key, will you? I’ll ring for the elevator.” Hilgard approached the desk and looked imploringly at the clerk, who said in fluent English, “Good afternoon, Mr. Hilgard. Did you find the pyramids interesting?” and handed him, without being asked, the key to room 177.
This is not happening. Hilgard told himself, thinking of his comfortable room on the seventh floor of the glossy Hotel Presidente. This is a dream. This is a hallucination. He joined the blonde woman in the elevator; she pressed 17 and it began to ascend slowly, pausing dismayingly for a fraction of a second between the tenth and eleventh floors as the power sagged. Room 177 was compact, efficient, with a semicircular double bed and a little bar unit stocked with miniature bottles of liquor, mixers, and such. The woman took a brandy from it and said to him, “Shall I get you a rum, Ted?”
“No. Thank you.” He wandered the room. Feminine things all over the bathroom sink, makeup and lotions and whatnot. Matching his-and-hers luggage in the closet. A man’s jacket and shirts hanging neatly—not his, but the sort of things he might have owned—a book on the night-table, the new Updike novel. He had read it a few months ago, but in some other edition, apparently, for this had a red jacket and he remembered it as blue.
“I’m going to grab a shower,” she said. “Then we go out to get lunch and head over to the museum, okay?”
He looked up. She padded past him to the bathroom, naked; he had a sudden surprising glimpse of small round breasts and dimpled buttocks, and then the door closed. Hilgard waited until he heard the water running, and took her wallet from her open purse. In it he saw the usual credit cards, some travelers’ checks, a thick wad of well-worn Mexican banknotes. And a driver’s license: Celia Hilgard, thirty-six years old, five feet five, blond hair, blue eyes, 124 pounds, married. Married. An address on East 85th Street. A card in the front of the wallet declared that in case of emergency Theodore Hilgard was to be notified, either at the East 85th Street address or at the offices of Hilgard & Hilgard on West 57th Street. Hilgard studied the card as though it were written in Sanskrit. His apartment was on East 62nd Street, his gallery two blocks south of it. He was sure of that. He could see himself quite sharply as he walked down Third every morning, glancing toward Bloomingdale’s, turning east on 60th—
Two Ted Hilgards? With the same face?
“What are you looking for?” Celia asked, stepping from the bathroom and toweling herself dry.
Hilgard’s cheeks reddened. Guiltily he tucked her wallet back in her purse. “Ah—just checking to see how many pesos you have left. I thought we might want to cash some travelers’ checks when the banks open tomorrow.”
“I cashed some on Friday. Don’t you remember?”
“Slipped my mind, I guess.”
“Do you want some of my pesos?”
“I’ve got enough for now,” he said.
They had lunch at the hotel. For Hilgard it was like sitting across the table from a keg of dynamite. He was not yet ready to admit that he had gone insane, but very little that he could say to her was likely to make any sense, and eventually she was bound to challenge him. He felt like someone who had come into a movie in the middle and was trying to figure out what was going on, but this was worse, much worse, because he was not merely watching the movie, he was starring in it. And found himself lunching with a total stranger to whom he had been married, it seemed, for years. But people who have been married for years have little new to say to one another at lunch, usually. He was grateful for the long silences. When she did speak, he answered cautiously and briefly. Once he allowed himself the luxury of calling her by name, just to show that he knew her name; but his “Celia” provoked a quick frown in her that puzzled him. Was he supposed to have used some pet name instead? Or was there a name other than Celia by which everybody called her—Cee, perhaps, or Cele, or Charley? He was altogether lost. Lingering over his coffee, he thought again of that dizzying moment at the Temple of Quetzalcoatl, when everything had swayed and swirled in his head. Was there such a thing as a stroke that affected one’s memory without causing any sort of paralysis of the body? Well, maybe. But he wasn’t suffering merely from amnesia; he had a complete and unblurred set of memories of a life without Celia, as a contented single man running a successful art gallery, living a fulfilling existence, friends, lovers, travel. Arriving in Mexico City three days ago, looking forward to a week of cheerful solitude, warm weather, spicy food, perhaps some interesting new pieces for his collection. How could a stroke build all that into his mind? With such detail, too: the black Ford cab, Chucho the amiable driver, the seventh-floor room at the Hotel Presidente—
“I’ve left something upstairs,” he told Celia. “I’ll just run up for it, and then we can go.”
From the room he dialed the Presidente. “Mr. Hilgard, please.”
“One moment.” A long pause. Then: “Please repeat the name.”
“Hilgard. Theodore Hilgard. I think he’s in room 770.” A longer pause.
“I’m sorry, sir. We have no one by that name.”
“I see,” Hilgard said, not seeing at all, and put the phone down. He stared at himself in the mirror, searching for signs of a stroke, the drooping eyelid, the sagging cheek. Nothing. Nothing. But his face was gray. He looked a thousand years old.
They hailed a cab outside the hotel and went to the Museum of Anthropology. He had been there several times, most recently yesterday afternoon. But from what Celia said it was apparent she had never seen it, which was a new awkwardness for him: he had to pretend he had no familiarity with that very familiar place. As they wandered through it he did his best to feign fresh responses to objects he had known for years, the great Olmec stone heads, the terrifying statue of the goddess Coatlicue, the jade-encrusted masks. Sometimes it was not necessary to feign it. In the Aztec room there was an immense marble stela just to the left of the calendar stone that he could not recall from yesterday’s visit, and there was a case of amazing little Olmec figurines of polished jade absolutely new to him, and the Mayan room seemed arranged in an entirely different way. Hilgard found all that impossible to comprehend. Even the huge umbrella-shaped fountain in the museum courtyard was subtly different, with golden spokes now sprouting from it. The cumulative effect of the day’s little strangenesses was making him feel giddy, almost feverish: Celia several times asked if he was getting ill.
They had dinner that night at an outdoor café a few blocks from their hotel, and strolled for a long time afterward, returning to their room a little before midnight. As they undressed Hilgard felt new dismay. Was she expecting him to make love? The thought horrified him. Not that she was unattractive, far from it. But he had never been able to go to bed with strangers. A prolonged courtship, a feeling of ease with the other person, of closeness, of real love—that was what he preferred, indeed what he required. Aside from all that, how could he pretend with any success to be this woman’s husband? No two men make love quite the same way; in two minutes she’d realize that he was an impostor, or else she’d wonder what he thought he was up to. All the little sexual rituals and adjustments that a couple evolves and permanently establishes were unknown to him. She would be confused or annoyed or possibly frightened if he betrayed complete ignorance of her body’s mechanisms.