Friday, September 27, 2019

from Night Life, an American Gospel Story


A taxi pulled up beside us.
“Sean!” Teresa waved one fleshy brown arm out the back window of the taxi.  “Hop in!”  Sean got in the car while I paid for the coffee and tipped the waiter. 
When I got in Teresa had one arm wrapped around her new boy.  She was an American but often mistaken for a local with her mother’s big, dark, Spanish eyes and her father’s Haitian skin and large lips.  She was big all around and you knew that someday she would be very fat.  I don’t know why Mike still kept her around.
She had met Sean two years ago at a Catholic orphanage in Guatemala when he first arrived there as a volunteer.  A few months later she left the missionary life but kept up a correspondence with Sean.  She met me in a club a few weeks after my arrival in town.  She was already with Mike by then, so I never knew her, as did Sean, in her previous incarnation.
I introduced Sean to Mike, who grunted a salutation in reply.  Mike had a black goatee to go with the white T-shirt and rippling arm muscles that perfected his ex-con look.
At a restaurant named “Dos Hermanos” we ordered sea food.  Teresa ordered her favorite.
“Shrimp!” She licked her lips after she said it. “We know what that’s good for, right?” She laughed her evil laugh.
Sean glanced at each of us.  “What?”
“Makes me frisky.” Teresa said, raising and lowering her eyebrows rapidly.
“Oh.”
After we ordered, Sean asked Teresa how the painting was going.
“What?”
“Painting.” Sean smiled. “You’re an artist, remember?”
Teresa laughed her fake laugh. “Right.  I’ve done a few.  It’s not as easy or cheap to get art materials here as I thought.”  She looked around the room as she spoke.
“The night life here is distracting.” Mike interjected.
“Can’t wait to go dancing!” Teresa said, turning suddenly back to us, hair flying.  She smiled and moved her torso as if already at the club.
“Where’s a good place to write in this town?” Sean asked me.
I told him about my favorite air-conditioned café and about the library at the cultural center.
“Not the University?”
“There are too many distractions there.”
“His conquests.” Teresa said, giggling.
“Your conquests?” Sean asked.
“I’ve gotten involved with a few students.”
I changed the subject to college experiences, something Teresa, Sean and I all had in common.  Obviously, Teresa had not been honest with the boy about our lifestyles.  She had invited a vegetarian to a carnivore’s fiesta.  I guess I should have known, since he had been a missionary just days before.  But Teresa had come from the same place and I assumed she had invited a kindred spirit out of repression.
“What are you doing here, Mike?” Sean suddenly asked.  I wanted to scream at Teresa for letting him come so ignorant.
“You ask a lot of questions.” Mike replied.
“Mike is independently wealthy.” Teresa volunteered, stroking Mike’s shoulder.
“Oh.”
Just then the food arrived.
“Poor little bugs.” Teresa said, bringing a spoonful of rice and shrimp to her lips. “So many must die so that I may be satisfied.”
“I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately.” Sean announced.
“About satisfying Teresa?” I asked.  Mike coughed. Teresa smiled, chewing with her mouth closed and those lips working.  Sean’s simple Irish face turned red.
“No, about death.  The end of things.  You know.  Look at this little thing.” He impaled a shrimp with his fork and raised it to eye level between all of us. “We’re on the other side of him now.  We used to live in the same world, but we’re on opposite sides of a line now.  He’s in the past, we’re in the present.”
“You’re not turning into a vegetarian, are you?” I asked.
“No.” He placed the shrimp in his mouth and began to chew, as if to demonstrate his dedication to carnivorousness.   “I’ve just been thinking about what it will be like to be on the other side of that line, to be in the past, to be dead, to not remember any of this.”
“Ugh.” Mike commented, gnashing shrimp corpses vigorously in his partially open mouth.
“Don’t you believe in Heaven?” I probed.
“I do.  I really do.” Sean replied. “But I don’t really want to go there. I like life.”
Teresa gave him a high five across the table. “I like to hear you talk like that!”
Sean smiled. “It’s always been hard for me to understand those stories of saints that welcomed death and begged for it as a release.  No image of paradise has ever attracted me more than my own life.  No amount of suffering has ever made me want to die.”
“Maybe it’s because you never suffered.” Mike offered.
“Maybe so.” Sean replied.
“But you worked at that orphanage.” I said. “Teresa told me about how awful it was.”
“That’s not suffering!” Mike laughed.  Teresa ate. “That’s watching suffering.  That’s TV!”
“You’re right.” Sean admitted.  “But I was never under the illusion that I was suffering there.”
There was a lull in the conversation and for a few minutes we all ate intently.  Finally, Teresa asked Sean about his poetry.  She expressed admiration for the poems he had mailed her and asked if he had published any.
“Quite a few, actually.”
That bitch had known the answer to that question, I’m sure.  He must have tooted his horn in the letters he sent her.  But she knew that I had not published anything besides tourist journalism.
“I’ve written one of my old professors about putting together a collection through the University Press.” He added.
“You think you’ll ever go back and get an MFA?” She continued, staring into his eyes across the table.
“After a while, maybe.  If I put out a collection I could probably get a position as an instructor in the intro classes to help cover tuition.”
Less than half an hour later we were all done.  Mike tossed a bunch of currency onto the table.  “Let’s go dancing.”
We headed to Club Pasion. Like all clubs, Club Pasion made conversation impossible.  We were reduced to speaking with the facial expressions that are the real root of human language.  Millions of years ago our hairier, thick-skulled ancestors furrowed brows to inquire, smiled with delight, rolled eyes in disbelief.  So did we, using sequences and permutations of sequences to ask and answer questions or simply express some feeling.
I drank a lot that night.  It’s hard for me to remember much.  I do remember the pulsing music, the strobe lights, hundreds of young people writhing against one another, slick with sweat, eyes closed, not smiling.  I remember Mike disappearing for a while.  I remember Teresa dancing with Sean, always very closely.  I watched his face, saw the unbelievable opportunity rise into eyes that widened somewhat while retaining, if not increasing, their focus.
Then they were gone, too.  Mike reappeared and took me home.  Outside my apartment, as I stepped out of the taxi, he grabbed me. “No,” I mumbled, breaking free, and went inside.

This complete story is found in American Gospel, a collection of fiction about the American Dream and its end.

No comments:

Post a Comment