“Ever since I had my baby I can’t stop eating,” she said. “I think I am afraid she won’t be nourished enough.”
“She looks pretty happy,” I said. In fact the baby’s head was lolling out of the sling, heavy-lidded and drowsing, silvery strands of drool gathering at the corners of her mouth and fluttering gently as she breathed.
“Yes,” Irina said, and belched. A few strands of her brown hair were stuck to her cheeks with sweat. “You know, when I was a little girl, I never knew there were things like this in the world, like cheeseburgers and burritos. No one ever told me that these things existed. But I think that somehow I knew. Because how else could I have come here, on a sunny day in June, to be sitting with you and eating such a wonderful lunch?”
I laughed. “That’s a good question.”
“I think so. Thank you for the food.”
I told her she was welcome, and asked how she’d gotten to Albuquerque in the first place. I’d assumed she was a student, but then she told me her entire life story, slowly, while sipping her first Coke and then another. She’d grown up in Germany, then France, then Ireland. Her father was a doctor and her mother an artist, and they’d fled Prague in 1968, swearing they’d never go back. Which they didn’t; but neither did they settle anywhere else, and instead they kept shuttling their growing family — Irina was the youngest by far of six and, she suspected, an accident — from country to country, language to language. They turned whatever city they were inhabiting into a little country of their own devising, speaking their own private language, with layers of jokes and family references that grew over the years into a kind of insular dialect. Irina’s older siblings eventually rebelled. One married an Irish woman and settled in Dublin, refusing to speak even a word of Czech; his children were named Patrick and Siobhan. Another brother went back to the Czech Republic and swore that it was the only place he could ever live, though he’d never lived there before.
When Irina was eighteen, she planned on studying accounting at a local university. But one day she was sitting with her parents in London, where they now lived, and watching the BBC, a nature special called Deserts of the World.
The camera traveled to Africa, then to Asia, and finally to the American Southwest. It flew over the Chiricahua Mountains of Arizona like a bird. It blew, seemingly on the wind, to White Sands, New Mexico, over miles of glistening white dunes, shifting and forming, the sunset pink and explosive. “What. . is. . this. . place?” Irina said to herself — and she whispered it to me across the table, slow and sibilant, hissing like a fanatic sharing a secret code. “And so I came here,” she said.
“Because of something you saw on TV.”
“Because I fell in love.”
“With a place,” I said, though I meant it as a question, whose answer might encompass her baby. But she just nodded, smiling widely. Her expression was exactly that of a freshly married woman who’d just described how she met her husband. It seemed both ridiculous and plausible to me that she could have moved across the world for the reasons she’d given. All these people — these friends of Wylie’s, and Wylie himself — were motivated by such strange, off-kilter passions. They seemed to do things — leave home, draw plumbing diagrams, move to Albuquerque, New Mexico — just to feel the sway of those passions on their bodies, for the sake of surrendering to them. Irina’s face was flushed, her smile generous. And then the baby woke up.
Psyche scrunched her face up and howled until we left the coffee shop and strolled through the streets, empty and hushed in the afternoon heat. I realized that we were heading in the general direction of Wylie’s place. My take-charge mood apparently had been left behind at the library, and instead of barging in and asking everybody where Wylie was or how I could find him, I decided to stick with Irina for a while and see if I couldn’t figure it out myself. She bent her head and sang a delicate little song to her baby in what I imagined was Czech. In the resplendent sunshine, with her falling hair and radiant cheeks, she looked like a sacred painting. I thought about the picture of Eva Kent in my pocket, her rigid posture and massive belly and burning cigarette — a motherhood that seemed totally unrelated to this one. I wondered how my father had ever come across her or her paintings in the first place, and what had happened to her baby.
Irina had a key. Inside, the shades were drawn and the air was still and close but actually fairly cool. In the kitchen, above the sink, was strung a little clothesline, with cloth diapers, cloth kitchen towels, and plastic bags washed and hung up to dry. It was seriously advanced recycling. Sledge, the skinny brown dog, was curled up in a corner, snoring.
“Thank you so much for my lunch,” Irina said. “I think, if it is not too rude, I may go lie down a little while with the baby now. You can wait here for him if you would like.”
“Wylie’s coming here?”
“I mean Angus.”
“I’m not waiting for him,” I said quickly, and blushed horribly. Irina smiled and went into the back room off the kitchen as I stood there feeling stupid in every way.
There wasn’t any furniture, so I sat on the floor. The apartment was very quiet. I could hear my own breathing, along with the dog’s. Then he made a deep sighing noise that wasn’t a sigh; a horrid stench overtook the room, and I hurried outside onto the landing, looking at the street full of falling-down student housing, lawns of sheer dirt, trash on porches, tape on windows. Lacking a cigarette or a magazine or anything to help pass the time, I pulled the photograph out of my pocket and examined Eva Kent’s scalpy part and thick fingers. She wasn’t wearing a wedding ring.
Then I heard whistling and someone calling my name. Angus came sauntering down the street, his red hair sticking up, his back straight, his shoulders broad and muscular, his grin showing all his teeth. He was wearing yet another decomposing shirt. The instant I saw him, I knew that we’d be sleeping together again; it was a foregone conclusion. “A woman has needs” was actually the very first thought that went through my mind. I sighed. It was getting to be a very weird summer.
He stopped at the base of the landing and squinted up at me. He was still grinning, and it seemed to be genuine. “I’m so happy to see you,” he said. “I think you have my hat.”
Six
After I told Angus that Irina was sleeping, he crouched down beside me and asked if I’d been drinking my water.
“I know enough to drink water,” I said. My voice sounded surly to my own ears. “That was just a one-time thing.”
“All right.”
“It could happen to anybody.”
“It happened to you,” he pointed out, raising his red eyebrows. I frowned at him, and he shrugged.
Across the street, a couple of young guys came out from one of the dilapidated houses, one sitting down on their porch, the other leaning back into the shade cast by a large pine tree. They opened cans of beer and lit cigarettes, and the smell of smoke wafted across the street to where we were sitting. It seemed like pretty early in the day to be drinking, though I was hardly one to talk.
“And now I find you sitting out here,” Angus said, “baking in the sun once again, without any sign of water, or even the protection that you yourself pointed out to me is so important. By which I mean a hat.”
“First of all, I’m sitting in the shade. Second of all, the inside of that apartment reeks from your disgusting pet. And third of all, it’s really none of your business.”