A POLICE OFFICER showed up at our apartment. The officer, Inspector Ramirez, informed her that Barry was accusing her of breaking and entering and of trying to poison him. She was completely calm. “Barry is terribly angry with me,” she said, posing in the doorway, her arms crossed. “I ended our relationship several weeks ago, and he just can’t let go of it. He’s obsessed with me. He even tried to break into this apartment. This is my daughter, Astrid, she can tell you what happened.”
I shrugged. I didn’t like this. It was going way too far.
My mother kept going without missing a comma. “The neighbors even called the police that night. You must have a record of it. And now he’s accusing me of breaking into his house? That poor man, really, he’s not all that attractive, it must be hard for him.”
Her hatred glittered irresistibly. I could see it, the jewel, it was sapphire, it was the cold lakes of Norway. Oh Inspector Ramirez, her eyes said, you’re a good-looking man, how could you understand someone as desperate as Barry Kolker?
After he left, how she laughed.
THE NEXT TIME we saw Barry was at the Rose Bowl Flea Market, where he liked to shop for ugly gag gifts for his friends. My mother wore a hat that dappled her face with light. He saw her and turned away quickly, fear plain as billboards, but then he thought again, turned back, smiled at us.
“A change of tactic,” she whispered. “Here he comes.”
He walked right over to us, a papier-mâché Oscar in his hands. “Congratulations on your performance with Ramirez,” he said, and held it out to her. “Best actress of the year.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” my mother said. She was holding my hand, squeezing it too tight, but her face was smiling and relaxed.
“Sure you do,” he said. He tucked Oscar under his arm. “But that’s not why I came over. I thought we could bury the hatchet. Look, I’ll admit I went too far calling the cops. I know I was an asshole, but for Christ’s sake, you tried to destroy the better part of a year’s work. Of course my agent had a preliminary draft, thank God, but even so. Why don’t we just call it a draw?”
My mother smiled, shifted to the other foot. She was waiting for him to do something, say something.
“It’s not like I don’t respect you as a person,” he said. “And as a writer. We all know you’re a great poet. I’ve even talked you up at some of the magazines. Can’t we move on to the next phase now, and be friends?”
She bit her lip as if she was seriously considering what he was saying, while all the while she poked the center of my palm with her nail until I thought it would go right through my hand. Finally she said in her low rich voice, “Sure we can. Well, why not.”
They shook hands on it. He looked a little suspicious but relieved as he went back to his bargain hunting. And I thought, he still didn’t know her at all.
We showed up at his house that night. He had bars on all the windows now. She stroked his new security door with the pads of her fingers like it was fur. “Taste his fear. It tastes just like champagne. Cold and crisp and absolutely without sweetness.”
She rang the bell. He opened the inner door, gazed at us through the security mesh. Smiled uncertainly. The wind rippled through the silk of her dress, through her moon-pale hair. She held up the bottle of Riesling she’d brought. “Seeing we’re friends and all.”
“Ingrid, I can’t let you in,” he said.
She smiled, slid her finger down one of the tars, flirting. “Now is that any way to treat a friend?”
WE SWAM in the hot aquamarine of the pool late at night, in the clatter of palms and the twinkle of the new-scoured sky. My mother floated on her back, humming to herself. “God, I love this.” She splashed gently with her fingers, letting her body drift in a slow circle. “Isn’t it funny. I’m enjoying my hatred so much more than I ever enjoyed love. Love is temperamental. Tiring. It makes demands. Love uses you. Changes its mind.” Her eyes were closed. Beads of water decorated her face, and her hair spread out from her head like jellyfish tendrils. “But hatred, now. That’s something you can use. Sculpt. Wield. It’s hard or soft, however you need it. Love humiliates you, but hatred cradles you. It’s so soothing. I feel infinitely better now.”
“I’m glad,” I said. I was glad she felt happier, but I didn’t like the kind of happiness it was, I didn’t believe in it, I believed it would crack open sooner or later and terrible things would come flying out.
WE DROVE down to Tijuana. We didn’t stop to buy pinatas or crepe paper flowers or earrings or purses. She kept looking at a scrap of paper in her hand as we wandered around the side streets past the burros painted like zebras and the tiny Indian women begging with their children. I gave them my change until it was all gone, and chewed the stale gum they gave me. She paid no attention. Then she found what she was looking for, a pharmacy, just like a pharmacy in L.A., brightly lit, the pharmacist in a white coat.
“Por favor, tiene usted DMSO?” she asked.
“You have arthritis?” he asked in easy English.
“Yes,” she said. “As a matter of fact. A friend of mine told me you carry it.”
“What size would you like?” He pulled out three bottles, one the size of a bottle of vanilla, one the same as nail polish remover, and the largest like a bottle of vinegar. She chose the big one.
“How much?”
“Eighty dollars, miss.”
“Eighty.” My mother hesitated. Eighty dollars was food money for two weeks, eighty dollars was two months’ worth of gas for the car. What could be worth eighty dollars, that we drove down to Tijuana to buy?
“Let’s go,” I said. “Let’s get in the car and just drive. Let’s go to La Paz.”
She looked at me. I’d caught her by surprise, so I kept talking, thinking maybe I could get us back onto some planet I recognized. “We could take the first ferry in the morning. Can’t we just do that? Drive to Jalisco. San Miguel de Allende. We could close our accounts, have the money wired to the American Express, and just keep going.”
How easy it could be. She knew where all the gas stations were from here to Panama, the cheap grand hotels with high ceilings and carved wooden headboards just off the main plazas. In three days we could put a thousand miles between us and this bottle of disaster. “You always liked it down there. You never wanted to come back to the States.”
For an instant, I had her. I knew she was remembering the years we had spent down there, her lovers, the color of the sea. But it wasn’t a strong enough spell, I wasn’t a word spinner like her, not good enough, and the image faded, returning to the screen of her obsession: Barry and the blond, Barry and the redhead, Barry in a seersucker bathrobe.
“Too late,” she said. She pulled out her wallet, counted four twenties onto the counter.
AT NIGHT she began cooking things in the kitchen, things too strange to mention. She steeped oleander in boiling water, and the roots of a vine with white, trumpet flowers that glowed like faces. She soaked a plant collected in moonlight from the neighbors’ fence, with little heart-shaped flowers. Then she cooked the water down; the whole kitchen smelled like green and rotting leaves. She threw out pounds of the wet spinach-green stuff into somebody else’s dumpster. She wasn’t talking to me anymore. She sat on the roof and talked to the moon.