“I’ll carry your gear.”
“That will look much better.”
They rode the trolley south to San Ysidro, Rita getting the window seat. She gazed at the blackness of the Pacific beyond the stretch of beachfront lights. She leaned her head to the glass and he watched the reflection of her face, her eyebrows slanted, melancholic, her rounded lips still as a single piano note. Sometimes she could catch sight of the waves, white and featherlike across the black shore. He wondered where she was, where she was going. He was surprised to hear his name.
“Aaron,” she said, still gazing through the window. “You didn’t call those people up north. You didn’t do anything. Again. You didn’t do anything. What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to travel Mexico. Then Prague with my uncle. See what I find. Write something.”
“We’re too old for those kinds of answers. We’re already too old for what we do now.”
“Having second thoughts?” he asked.
“Only for you. I like my plan. I leave for Manzanillo next week. Day after we finish here.”
Klinsman was surprised, a wave suddenly lifting higher as it neared, doubling itself. “You’ve moved it up.”
“Yeah.” She rolled her forehead against the glass, closed her eyes. “I keep moving it up.”
“You should’ve told me.”
“I just did tell you. You’re the first one I’ve told. Chingadero. Chingadero taking me to some motel on the border.”
After the Palm City stop, the tracks bowed away from the sea and the trolley filled up more with Mexicans getting back across after very long work days. Most of them looked too tired to stare at anything, certainly not anything as complex as Rita, with her hair gaining more and more freedom from its ponytail, her brow mourning, her lips holding stoic and full.
Klinsman wished she hadn’t mentioned Edwige Fenech back at Café Cinema because here the trolley was soaring above the land of his youth, where the old ranches and horse farms were now buried under the orange sodium lights of cheap subdivisions and strip malls with dollar stores in them. In his youth he’d read books in his room by the light of a TV, almost always set to Channel 12, almost always after 2 A.M., when he would wake for good and then wrestle insomnia until dawn. There were the Santo movies. And then there were the Italian giallos, dubbed twice-removed into Spanish, so out of sync that the voices seemed to float between the actors like noise clouds, sometimes drifting so far as to put women’s voices over men’s lips. But whenever Edwige Fenech appeared on screen, Aaron would thumb his place in whatever book he was reading. He would hear her voice or her music or catch the startling dark-pale contrast of her and sense that he should look up. Some of the giallos were haphazardly edited for television, but many passed through unconcerned Mexican censors. Who would watch Canal Doce at 2 A.M.? Back then, Aaron felt he was the only one.
So he saw Edwige Fenech, all of her, when he probably shouldn’t have seen her. It took a long time, well after he quit watching Channel 12 and all television for good, for him to realize that women did not look like her. Even through college, when he had moved just out of range of border television, her image had cursed him with a kind of relationship trip switch, a prompt inside him: Time to end this. Time to draw back. There is something more out there for you.
That more went well beyond Fenech and her mascara beauty, high raven hair, pale thighs, and rocketship breasts. Her characters were always so worldly, above all men, apart from all other women, but troubled with secrets as dark as her eyes. After he matured enough to cringe at his own superficiality, she still remained a shadowy impression, a promise at the door.
While doing a story on border radio and TV for the Review, he had been shown the storage room for the Channel 12 broadcast station in Baja. There he’d found an old cardboard vodka box containing the giallos. They were on old reel-to-reel videotape and had disintegrated well past salvage. He had dipped his hands into the broken and tangled strands of tape, twirled them about his fingers as though they were a lover’s cool hair.
5.
Rita suddenly leaned upright and alert on the trolley seat beside him. She was lifting her chin and frowning in disdain at two mozos riding by the door. They were eyeing her and holding the pole suggestively between them, saying things just above a whisper. Passengers could catch some words, the right words.
Even if Margarita Valdez hadn’t had some beers and whatever the Luchadors were serving in those little green glasses, even if she weren’t in the last week of a job she loved, even if she weren’t about to leave the country and go work for an expat paper in Manzanillo and take photos of things and people that really mattered, still she would have let the mozos have it. Klinsman could not keep up with her Spanish, could only jump to snippets here and there.
Her opening was perfect, winning the car first. “Fucking mozitos. You think these people need to hear your little-boy thoughts? Watch you jerk each other off on that pole between you? You think that’s what they want? After a hard day’s work? It’s already tomorrow. They gotta go right back to work. Today. You think they want to see your liver tongues in these few minutes they have? Cocksuckers.”
Somewhere in her scolding, Klinsman saw her glance briefly at another young man, a Latino, too, but dressed in a white shirt and thin black tie. He was watching her in a different way. Looking at her shoulders, part concerned, part measuring. And somewhere in her scolding she glanced again at the young man, just a splinter off her hard glare at the mozos, and called him something, too. Something odd. To Klinsman and his slow ears, it sounded like Ojos ausentes salamandro.
Rita kept jabbing at the mozos with her words, the passengers’ eyes and smiles with her all the way to the next stop. There, at Iris Street, the mozos got off, probably not their stop, seeing as they looked dressed and awake for a longer night in the Tijuana clubs now that the American side was shutting down. The guy in the tie left, too, but not before looking back at Rita openly, thoughtfully adjusting his collar as though he were stepping out into a cold East Coast night.
Rita looked at Klinsman apologetically as the trolley picked up again, gliding them toward the border, over the lights of Otay, Nestor, and San Ysidro. Most of her hair had now sprung loose from her ponytail, a full lock of it draped down one side of her face and neck. Other strands wavered over her head, willowing down, brushing the tip of her nose. She blew at them.
Klinsman made a circling motion with his finger, moving his look from her hair to her eyes. “You want me to …?” He made the little circling motion again.
She turned her head away and offered him her hair and neck. He gently gathered and clutched as much as he could hold in one hand and then removed the clasp. Before putting the clasp into the corner of his mouth like a cigarette, he eyed it carefully in the fluorescent trolley light. It was amber, like a bend of whiskey. It felt pearly against his lips.
With his fingers he combed and gathered more of her hair, pulling it to him. She relaxed her neck, letting his calm tugs loll her head. She closed her eyes, eased her lips out of their disdainful bend, almost opened them. So they were at their fullest. He watched the side of her face as he pushed his fingers up her nape and carefully raked the heaviest mass of hair, felt the bumps of her skull. His hand was buried up to his wrist in black coils.
“You’re good at this,” she said, eyes closed.
“I grew up with four older sisters.”
“I hope you didn’t do this with them.”
“I watched them do each other’s hair. When I was a boy. I believed I was getting a glimpse into another world, the one they really lived in, dreamed of. Their secret girls’ world. I grew my hair long, too, but it wasn’t the same.”
“I’m