The Mexican Year

“Stay another night, Nick. Please. I insist.”

The words interrupt my pleasant daydream about opal surf curling into endless gray sandy beaches, and a creaky driftwood cabana shaded by towering palms, and inside Nooshin dozing naked beneath a gauze of mosquito netting, and — and I snap back into the moment like a rubber band. I’m standing in a living room decorated mostly with cardboard fruit boxes and stacks of papers, staring out a barred picture window at Tecate sprawling up the hillside like a dirty cancer, an unopened can of Budweiser turning warm in my hand.

“Nick?” Juan says next to me, prodding with tireless Mexican hospitality.

“I can’t thank you enough, but we really need to hit the road. The sooner Nooshin starts digitizing this part of the archive, the sooner she’ll finish.”

“It’s already getting late. You don’t want to be driving back at night. It’s going to take the rest of the afternoon just to load these boxes into your truck.”

I consider the archive, debating how best to pack it into my rustbucket Ford Explorer. The boxes of torn or water-stained cardboard will have to be transported in the cargo compartment. Mental note to self — fold down the back seat first. The boxes of intact cardboard can be carried on the roof rack. Anything left over can go on Nooshin’s lap. I’ll probably have to creep back to Tijuana, annoying every faster vehicle on the autopista, but what the hell.

“What about the rest of the archive?” Juan calls from the kitchen, where he’s fetching another beer. “How soon will you need it?”

“Good question. Nooshin is pretty fast with the scanner. She digitized the test box in a couple days. It might only take a month to do these 41 boxes.” I glance over at the Budweiser distributor, curious how much of his own product he consumes in a day. An alcoholic quantity, I suspect. “Can you give the family a call and let them know we might be down as early as February?”

“Consider it done.” He circles the boxes on the living room, arriving back at my side. “Have you ever been to Chirbampo?”

“Hell no. Have you?”

“No. But I know the distributor for that area. He says it’s a pleasant place in summer.” Juan chuckles grimly. “He also says he loses a truck a year, going off those mountain roads. So you’ll have to drive more like an American and less like one of us.”

My shudder is a flatlander’s reflex. Growing up in Iowa I didn’t get much driving experience on hills, let alone mountains. I quickly change the subject. “When are you finally going back to Chihuahua?”

“Next week, if I’m lucky. All the acquisitions should close next week. Should.” The businessman makes a face, wincing at the capricious wheels of Mexican bureaucracy. “You know how it goes.”

“You better not still be here when we drive back through,” I say, half-teasing, half-serious.

“Dios mio,” he mutters, gazing heavenward in a brief prayer, and crosses himself.

“Betcha never saw THAT coming!” shrieks a female voice.

Both of us turn toward the couch, where Juan’s teenage nephew Tommy and Nooshin are seated next to each other. They rock forward with video game controllers in their hands, locked in virtual combat on the flatscreen TV. Tommy’s character is some kind of gigantic steroid-abusing ninja demon. Nooshin’s character is a woman warrior who puts the breast back in breastplate. They circle and flip and clash in a dizzying kaleidoscope of action, while health bars track their fate. Tommy’s health is dropping into the red danger zone.

After a while Juan says, “I thought she was living in San Diego. At her sister’s place, wasn’t it?”

“Change of plan.” I try to make my shrug casual. “She had a falling out with her family and needed a place to stay.”

He nods into space pleasantly.

A few more blows from Nooshin’s girly paladin and the bodybuilding demon is just a pulpy smear. Tommy slumps in defeat, shaking his head in disbelief. Meanwhile Nooshin is leaping to her feet and jumping around in celebration, almost hitting her head on the low ceiling. “Yaayyy! I won! Whoo hoo!” Then she launches into a fist-pumping booty shake, chanting “Go me, go me, go me!” Finally she grins adorably at me, her caramel face glowing with victory. “Nick! Did you see that? I won!”

“Finally won, you mean. How many games did it take you to beat him? 20?”

She sticks her tongue out at me happily, then turns to Tommy. “Rematch?”

“Quit while you’re ahead,” he pouts, soured on a taste of his own taunting. But his fingers move on the controller and another game begins.

Juan switches to Spanish, a language that insulates our conversation from Tommy and Nooshin. “I can tell she’s more than just your research assistant,” he confides, giving me the chance to talk about it if I want.

I don’t. I pop the top on my beer and take a swig. The only thing I hate more than Budweiser is warm Budweiser.

He chuckles a little, then needles me. “What is it about her? She’s…how do I say this? Not like Lupe.”

For a while he was trying to set me up with his cousin Lupe. A girl who stepped out of Latina Style magazine. Beautiful in that boring way. She spoke limited and limiting English, not that it mattered. I was fluent in Spanish by then. Our conversations were time on the cross, endless fumbling back-and-forths about her day in Chihuahua City and my day at UCLA and blah blah fucking blah. No connection whatsoever, not even a spark. Nothing like the electricity I feel through a phoneline with Nooshin.

“What happened to Lupe, anyway?” I ask curiously. “Did she get married?”

Juan slaps me on the back, hard enough to make beer spill onto my hand. “You missed your chance, amigo. She married an English banker who worked in Mexico City for a while. Now they live in London. One kid already, another on the way.”

It used to sound like a prison sentence, that kind of life. Marriage and breeding and anniversaries that unfurl into the grave. And if it ever stopped sounding like a prison sentence, all I had to do was consider my embittered and hateful parents, poster children for the so-called happily ever after. Who the fuck wants to end up like them, pinned to a death spiral?

But looking at Nooshin looking at me — crookedly, with that right eye wandering away — somehow my visceral fear of love and trust and partnering isn’t so visceral anymore, and maybe for the first time in my life I can feel, not rationally understand but actually feel, why people bind themselves together in hopes of making their happiness last.

Tuesday morning and the toll highway that cuts east toward Tecate is lit with cold breezy sunshine. It’s only 50 degrees Fahrenheit and however much in Celsius, which is why I’m nothing but goosebumps beneath my zip-front hoodie and long-sleeved t-shirt. Maybe I shouldn’t have worn a denim miniskirt and my new strappy sandals with the fat wedge heels, but this afternoon it’s supposed to be 75 degrees.

In the meantime Nick is making heat blast out of the Explorer’s vents. When that doesn’t silence my chattering teeth, he reaches across the cab, sliding a warm palm briskly across my bare thighs. Eventually I stop shivering, but he doesn’t take his hand away. It slides further, to the inside of my left thigh. The touch is sexy and possessive and reassuring, all at once. I feel very happily his. Saman never…well, that’s a long list.

“You know, I don’t think I was having very good sex in my marriage. It was nothing like, um…” I blush a little and lower my voice. “Making love with you. It feels so wonderful I don’t want to stop. I just want to keep going, forever and ever.” Even now my body is still fizzling and pleasantly sore.

Nick grins into the windshield. “We had to stop. We used up all the condoms again.”

“That whole box you got?”

“Yep.”

“Wow.” I remember how the box was blue-and-white with the Trojan logo on it. A slogan from sex ed pops into my head — you sleep with everyone your partner has slept with.

Nick seems like the kind of man who’s had lots of sex partners. How handsome he is, that effortless confidence, all the girls who seem to rain from his sky — especially here in Mexico. I don’t know much about how people hook up, but I’m guessing he could’ve been with 50 or even a hundred girls if he wanted. Or…ugh, hundreds plural!

I try to make my question casual. “Just out of curiosity, how many girls have you been with?”

“Intercourse, right? Not just fooling around?”

“Um, right. Intercourse.”

“Six,” he says.

“Six,” I echo in limp surprise.

“My high school girlfriend, four chicks when I was an undergrad, and Phoebe in grad school.” He glances over at me and gives my thigh a gentle squeeze. “You’re my lucky number seven.”

“I sorta thought that you’d…” My voice trails off. Maybe it’s insulting to tell a guy you expected him to have been with lots of girls. I study Nick’s sunburned profile, feeling curious and a little perturbed. He reminds me of one of those Escher prints, the optical illusion kind that changes while staying the same, depending on how you look at it. And there’s always the off chance that he’s lying to me. I’d need a polygraph to tell.

Around us the twin ribbons of concrete are rising higher into the mountains. The highway is almost deserted. We see shiny-new pickup trucks and the occasional luxury sedan, but that’s about it. Nick explains that the autopista de cuota — toll highway — is the perfect metaphor for the “new” Mexico. Most Mexicans can’t afford to pay the tolls, so they’re forced to use the old decrepit free highways. The new transportation infrastructure is reserved for the privileged and wealthy, corporations willing to pay for their trucks to travel more quickly, and tourists like us.

“Are those hiking trails?” I ask, noticing all the spidery footpaths that wind into the hilly underbrush.

“Kinda. But we wouldn’t want to try them,” he laughs. “Those are made by mojados looking for an easier place to cross the border than Tijuana. So they walk out here, sometimes by themselves, sometimes guided by a coyote, a smuggler. Lots of bad shit goes down in these hills.”

“The border fence in our neighborhood doesn’t seem very intimidating,” I point out. “It’s all rusty and peeled-back in places. There’s even holes in the chainlink underneath.”

“The trick isn’t getting past the border fence. The trick is getting past La Migra behind the border fence. You’ve seen what it’s like in our neighborhood. There’s giant light towers and humvees roaring around and searchlight helicopters with infrared detectors. I’m surprised anybody makes it.”

I’m thinking of all the dirt-poor Mexicans who filter through our street and alley at dusk, pooling against the border fence, their lives carried in plastic bags. “Maybe it’s impossible for them to make it across, but they still try.”

“You’d try too, if you came from the places they do. You’ll understand when you see more of Mexico.” He squeezes my thigh again. “Speaking of which, it looks like we’re here.”

The town of Tecate fills a modest boulder-strewn valley. Cinderblock homes crawl up the sides like they’re trying to escape. The red steel smokestacks of the famous Tecate brewery lie at the bottom, filling up the valley with a yellowish haze. Off the highway, the main drag is a dusty mile of struggling businesses with dirt-streaked facades. I watch a procession of parked vehicles stream past my window, many with Tecate brewery stickers on their back windows and bumpers. Wan and unsmiling faces flash on the sidewalk.

“Could be worse,” Nick sighs, as if he was groping for something positive to say. And failed.

I don’t know what I’m expecting our destination to be, but the tiny ranch on top of the hill isn’t it. The house is two stories of aluminum siding, with a big satellite dish set in the concrete of an adjoining patio. A new black Suburban is parked on the far side. Further back, a few horses roam in a wire-fenced field dotted with rocks.

A friendly-looking mutt comes bouncing up, filling the cool air with barks. Nick unwraps his hand from my thigh and slides out his door. He kneels down to pet the dog, simultaneously calling out, “Yo! Estamos aqui!”

“Dude!” someone exclaims in perfect English.

I get out of the truck and discover Nick doing some kind of street handshake with a teenager. He’s tall — although not as tall as me in these sandals — and wears a San Antonio Spurs sweatshirt over baggy jeans and Nikes.

“Are you — ?” I start to say, extending my hand in confusion.

“Nah, I’m Tommy. His nephew.” The kid turns our handshake into a slap of palms. “Juan’s out back.”

Out back means a corner of the patio I couldn’t see at first. Juan Angel Santelana rises from a lounge chair and tucks his cellular phone into the back pocket of his chinos. He’s a trim light-skinned Mexican with an unremarkable face. No scars, no distinguishing features — not even his mustache, which is just like countless other mexicanos wear. With that smooth skin he could be anywhere between 30 and 50 years of age. He welcomes Nick like a prodigal son, embracing him warmly.

I wait patiently while Nick makes introductory smalltalk in Spanish with him. It’s obvious they go way back, and I hear Tecate griped about a lot. Finally Nick steps back with a wave of his hand and switches to English. “And this is Nooshin, the research assistant I was telling you about. She’s the one who’s actually digitizing the archive. Nooshin, this is Juan.”

“A pleasure,” he says with a slight accent, and we shake hands. He runs plain brown eyes up my towering height and smiles. “I don’t think I’ve ever met such a tall woman before.”

I aim a look at Nick. A look that screams these stupid wedgie sandals add four inches to my height! But he just grins in that cocky teasing way of his.

Juan is staring at my crooked wandering eye, which is probably looking at the horse corral instead of him. I toss my hair, a practiced movement that screens the right side of my face behind a veil of bangs. The gesture stirs him into politeness. “I don’t have much to offer in the way of hospitality, but I do have Bud. In cans, not bottles.”

Nick drapes an arm around his shoulders and laughs. “This is what I get for befriending the best goddamn Budweiser distributor in Mexico? El Rey de las Cervezas in cans! Jesus fucking Christ.”

I play with the dog until they emerge from the house with cans of beer. Four of them. The math baffles me — until Juan sticks fingers in his mouth and whistles, summoning Tommy from wherever he disappeared. He tosses his nephew a can of beer overhand like a football quarterback. I’m noticing the early elevation of the sun, which is barely a hazy disc in all this smog. It’s only 10:07 according to the oversized digits on my runner’s watch.

Juan is shaking his head as Tommy runs back inside the house. “My brother sent Tomas — Tommy — to stay with me. I’m supposed to be teaching him some business skills, how to conduct himself.” He sighs, the tip of a vast frustration. “He grew up in San Antonio and he doesn’t even speak Spanish. Can you believe it?”

Nick hands me a can of beer. “A friend once told me you’re born with the skin, not the Spanish.”

Juan looks doubtful about that. “All Tommy wants to do is play, uh… That box thing. The video game.”

“Xbox?” Nick asks cheerfully.

Together the three of us stand at the patio railing and look down on Tecate, spilling away from us in a gritty vista. Juan cracks open his Bud and downs about half of it in a single gulp. “Tell me Nooshin, what do you think of this place? Do you like Tecate?”

“I think the plaza is nice,” I say, fixating on the emerald square in a valley of asphalt and concrete blocks and boulders larger than houses.

“What about you, Nick?”

Predictably, he can’t be pinned down with a fork. “Oh, I don’t know. It’s like small towns anywhere, I suppose.”

Juan’s profile is grim. “As Mencken put it, the small town is why small and petty are synonyms. Even in Spanish.”

“When the hell did you start reading Mencken?” asks Nick, chuckling in surprise. I notice he hasn’t opened his can of beer.

“Mencken was required reading at UNAM back when I was an undergraduate. I learned more about the United States from reading Mencken than I did from living in El Paso.” Juan turns his bland face back to me. “How did you start working for this loco?”

“Well…” I murmur, feeling gravity pull my gaze downward. The Budweiser can in my hands is unfamiliar. Not just because I don’t really drink. The design and logo are the same, but all the wording is in Spanish.

“We met on Avenida Revolucion,” Nick jumps in. “She was doing the turismo thing, walking around and gawking at shit. I gave her a ride back to her sister’s place in San Diego. And now she’s working for me.”

Standing next to his hip, I smile faintly in remembrance. Meeting him seems like yesterday. Meeting him seems like a century ago.

“La Revo,” Juan nods, using the local nickname for Avenida Revolucion. Then irritation ripples across his plain features. “That’s a terrible market for us. All you Americans want is Corona when you cross the border.”

Nick raises his arms, don’t-shoot-me style. “I was drinking Bud the day I met her.”

“Verdad?” — for real? — he bursts out laughing, and slaps Nick on the back.

At first I think the gesture is congratulatory, but then I realize he’s being sympathetic. Suddenly one aspect of their friendship makes sense — Juan gulping the beer he can’t stand to taste, Nick not even bothering to open his can, their introductory banter in Spanish about Tecate the beer, not the town, as I’d mistakenly surmised. Neither of them like Bud. Not even the Budweiser distributor.

“Seriously dude,” Nick is saying to him, “what’s your family’s strategy here? Why are you guys buying property way out here?”

Juan waves his half-empty can in the direction of Tijuana. “It’s my grandfather’s idea. He wants to own land near the border crossings, preferably cheap land zoned for redevelopment. That’s why we bought Korea Textile and a couple other small maquiladoras.”

“That part makes sense. Tijuana will keep booming until the apocalypse. I’m asking about Tecate. Why buy anything here?”

“It’s a long-term play. The way Tijuana is growing, the city will reach here eventually. Then Tecate will become a suburb and the third border crossing with San Diego. Land prices will go through the roof. So we’re buying some parcels out by the rail line.” He drains the rest of his can and flings it into the bushes. “Some working vacation this is turning out to be. I just want to close on these properties and get the hell back to Chihuahua.”

Nick’s breath is a hot whisper in my ear. “Juan’s family is from Chihuahua City, the capital of the state of Chihuahua.” Then he taps his unopened can against my stomach until I take it, leaving me with two beers I won’t drink. His smile is the brightest thing I’ve seen in Tecate. “Who’s ready to take a look at the soon-to-be-world-famous Juan Angel Santelana Archive?”

I met Juan Angel Santelana during the worst smog alert in Mexico City’s history, a humid burning July when the sky congealed with pollution, trapping 25 million people beneath a lid of misery. It was like something out of Revelations, dark all night and all day, as if the sun had been snuffed out by a vengeful god. The haze was so impenetrable that the airport was forced to close, and vehicles waded through the toxic soup with headlights stabbing weakly, and you couldn’t even see to the end of the block. People ventured outside with respirator masks or handkerchiefs tied around their faces. Every factory with a smokestack was shut down, all diesel trucks were ordered off the roads, any kind of burning was prohibited. Churches were swollen with masses begging for two things — heavenly relief and fresh air — and ambulances wailed with victims who only got the former.

It was my first time in Mexico, which had seemed like an okay country until I crested the mountains rimming the Vallee de Mexico and causing the atmospheric thermocline trapping Mexico City. I almost turned the Explorer around and took my Iowa license plates home, but I didn’t drive 3,000 miles to wuss out. Not even when I was staring across the lip of a gigantic witches’ cauldron, black and boiling over. I hit the gas and followed the highway, dropping down into darkness like a satanic thrill ride.

A couple days of defiant sightseeing later, I was a wreck. My eyes were red-rimmed and watery, my lungs felt like I was breathing baking soda, my skin was a carpet of rash. I resolved to blow a wad on the Holiday Inn near Chapultepec Park, an overpriced touristy joint with one redeeming feature — air filtration. But when I hustled in from the parking lot, I discovered the place was booked solid with a convention of some kind. Story of my fucking trip.

Standing in the palm-draped lobby, wearing a white t-shirt stained almost gray by the day’s pollution, sucking in lungfuls of that sweet filtered air, I began to wonder if suicide would be more pleasant than going back outside. Not the kind of internal debate you want to have with yourself in a foreign country. So I decided to linger the only way I could — I headed into the hotel bar for a beer or dozen.

The posh oak-paneled bar was overrun by Mexican businessmen, all cloned from the same basic blandness — dark hair and eyes and skin, neatly trimmed mustaches, neutral-colored suits with power ties. And they were all SMOKING.

Just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, it did. The bartender was a thick-necked bull of a man engrossed in a soccer match, waving me off like a pesky fly when I tried to order a Dos Equis…then a Negra Modelo…then just a goddamn Corona. Finally he rumbled that the bar only had Bud and Bud Lite. Bottles or tap, my pick.

“What the fu–?” I started to groan, then stopped myself. The hotel bar had probably run out of good beers, and replenishment would have to wait until the smog emergency was over and diesel trucks were allowed back on the roads. “God, I hate Budweiser.”

“I’d keep it down if I were you, amigo,” said a smooth voice in barely-accented English. “This is a Budweiser distributor convention. That’s all they stock when we’re here.”

I glanced over and discovered a blank-faced Mexican parked at the bar, a man of indeterminate age and sexuality. His oily hair was slicked back in a Valentino helmet. A bushy mustache hovered above his upper lip. His suit matched the sky outside, only with pinstripes.

“Is that why you’re drinking tequila?” I shot back.

His flat gaze fell to the shotglass in his hand, then returned to me. And changed. Deepening. Warming a little, even. I could tell he appreciated my quick observation. “Me llamo Juan Angel Santelana,” he introduced himself, testing my Spanish. “Como se llama usted?”

“Me llamo Nick Roberts. Mucho gusto.” His handshake was firm but comfortable, the mark of a self-confident man. I took the barstool next to him and shrugged apologetically. “That’s about as far as my Spanish takes me. This is my first time in Mexico.”

“Really? I couldn’t tell.” Juan swallowed his shot with a grimace and motioned for two more, one for each of us. The same bull-necked bartender who’d been such a dilatory asshole to me was suddenly all action and solicitousness. “So Nick, are you here for business or pleasure?”

“Pleasure, I guess. I needed something to do this summer, so I decided to drive down for a visit. And I gotta say, I’m loving your country. Well, except for the smog here.” The tequila turned into a trail of fire when I gulped it. The last thing I needed was more body parts burning in irritation.

“Drive down?” He was paused with his shotglass held in front of him. “Drive down from where?”

“You probably haven’t even heard of the American state. It’s way up by Canada.” A defensive answer. The Mexicans I’d met knew as much about American geography as I knew about Mexican geography.

“Try me,” Juan said, tipping the shotglass against his mouth.

“Iowa.”

“Iowa? You drove here from Iowa?” He chortled in sympathetic disbelief. “I’ve flown up to Missouri a few times, to the world headquarters in St. Louis. I thought that was a long trip!”

We fell into easy smalltalk, a conversation that meandered a little more with every round of tequila shots. I learned that he was from Chihuahua City, the state capital of Chihuahua, a glorified cowtown I’d visited on my way down. He learned that I’d stopped in his hometown to visit the Pancho Villa museum and gape at the legendary bandito’s bullet-riddled Dodge, because I’d been taking a class about the Mexican Revolution at Iowa State. I learned that he’d gone to college at UNAM — Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, the best public university in Mexico — and gained his MBA and English at the University of Texas-El Paso, where he scandalized his family by dating an African-American woman. He learned that I’d had a black girlfriend during my sophomore year of college, although my family was more scandalized by the fact that she was Baptist. And so on.

Eventually the conversation was fragmented to death by interruptions from his fellow distributors, slurring goodnights on their way upstairs. I was feeling no pain by that point, not even my legs as I lurched into mysterious time-delayed motion. I fanned at my ass, trying to get a hand into the back pocket of my jeans to fish out my wallet.

Juan beat me to it, tossing a wad of multicolored Mexican money on the bar. He rose unsteadily to his cowboy boots. “Where are you staying?”

Maybe that was a pickup line, maybe it wasn’t. I really didn’t give a fuck. I was too preoccupied with the alarming tilt of the room. “Uh, in the back of my truck…”

“You stay with me. In my room. No no no, I insist!” A fastidious man, he noticed his pantscuff was askew. He bent down to fix it — and lost his balance, almost headbutting the bar. “Mierda!” — shit! — he groaned, straightening back up again.

Somehow we managed to stumble to the elevator, a glassy ride up the open interior of the hotel. Both of us turned away from the rushing view before we got sick. The hallway carpeting was so plush it felt like we were wading. Past a decorative table topped with a spray of fabric flowers was his room. He fumbled with the cardkey for a million years — upside down? backwards? is the lock turning green yet? — before ushering me into a surprisingly small suite.

Surprisingly small, because there was only a single queen-sized bed.

I stood there a little dumbfounded, about as sharp as a bagel, buzzing with a tourism hangover and smog poisoning and god knows how many shots of tequila. My gaze swam around the room, searching for a pull-out sleeper loveseat, or some kind of fold-up cot, or just spare blankets I could spread on the floor. Meanwhile Juan was stripping down to his tighty whities and sliding into bed, taking one side, his hairy back turned toward the middle. “Buenas noches,” he mumbled, and started snoring like a jet taking off.

I gingerly settled myself on the absolute edge of the other side, mirroring his sleeping position. The future was collapsing into a bleak coin toss — either I’d wake up with a dick in my ass, or I’d choke on smoggy alcoholic vomit and never wake up at all. I was trying to decide which was worse when I passed out.

But neither of those things happened, and when I left for Chiapas the next afternoon I was carrying the business card of Juan Angel Santelana, Budweiser distributor for District #173 in south-central Chihuahua. He told me to stop in Chihuahua City on my way home and look him up, and after a hellish month in the Zapatista highlands of southern Mexico that’s what I did.

When my eyelids flutter open I feel the secret joy of a new world, even though it isn’t really. I’m just waking into the same life from a different perspective — Nick’s bed. My side of his bed. Maybe even our bed, because documents from the Korea Textile maquiladora archive are spread all over my bedroom. The office, I’m going to start calling it today. Because if I start calling it the office, then maybe he’ll start calling it the office too, and then maybe it’ll be for real. Maybe this will become the only bedroom, and my place will always be here with him.

Wherever he is.

I slide out of his queen-sized bed and pad barefoot across the cement and discover him in my bedroom — oops, the office. Dawn is flooding through the barred window and painting Nick in pink striped light. He’s contemplating the documents with a face like a storm front. The contents of the cardboard fruit box have been sorted into messy piles of paper on my twin bed, which I’m guessing are indexation categories.

“If this first box of documents is any indication, it’s going to take a year just to organize the goddamn archive.” He looks at the bed instead of me, arms folded implacably across his chest. “I tried to sort them into categories, but…”

Nick doesn’t have to finish the sentence. I know what a mishmash the documents are. I’m the one who scanned them, after all. My Spanish is still a long ways from fluent, but even I could pick out the headings like Operaciones — Operations — and Recursos Humanos — Human Resources, all jumbled together.

“Hey,” I say, hanging in the doorway. “You want some breakfast? I can make whatever you want.”

“Liar. We’re out of everything.” He softens and turns his stubbled chin my direction. “I’m not hungry right now. Maybe later, okay?”

“Okay.” I wait a while, then say it again. “Okay…” This is how it always felt with Saman, staring across these horrible interpersonal chasms that I can’t broach with my words or cooking or even my body. “Well, I’m going to take a shower.”

In the bathroom I strip off my only article of clothing — my sleepshirt. Normally I wear panties underneath, but not lately. They just get in the way. Draping the fabric over the edge of the sink, I’m suddenly curious why Nick hasn’t tried to replace it with something sexier, the way he’s been upgrading my clothes and footwear. Maybe because my sleepshirt never stays on for long anymore.

I’m running water in the shower, testing it for rust and temperature, when I hear the door creak open and shut behind me. The bathroom fills with his presence. I glance over my shoulder and find him stripping off his boxers. My gaze descends his naked torso — from the sculpted curves of his upper body, to the washboard taper of his cute waist, and then…and then I avert my eyes, because I’m embarrassed to want him like this.

Nick laughs and grabs me by the wrist and pulls me into the spray. His embrace is sexy and smothering. Even though I can open my eyes and stare evenly into our kisses, he still seems to tower over me, around me. The only water cooling my skin is a fine mist deflecting from his shoulders.

We paw at each other, gasping. His strong fingers are doing blissful things to my womanhood and I brace a foot against the tiled wall, trying to open myself to him even more. Through half-lidded eyes I realize my toenails need painting again.

Suddenly I’m impaled on his hardness. The ecstasy makes us both cry out. “Jesus fucking Christ,” Nick moans, thrusting slowly. “You’re the perfect height for stand-up sex.”

I should angle my hips away and let him slide out of me, but I don’t. The sensation is too exquisite. “Go get a condom,” I finally whisper, and immediately wince. “Sorry, I forgot we’re out again.”

He leans his face into the spray, still moving inside me. “I’ll get more condoms today.”

“I could just go back on the pill.” The words pop out before I can even think about them.

“Don’t. Nooshin. Just…” Nick shakes his head, thrashing water everywhere. “Just don’t, okay?”

There’s a painful elongation of time inside me, like all my heartbeats are being stretched into slow thuds. Even in intimacy he wants to distance me. Any girl, I suppose.

“Nick. I didn’t mean it. Not the way you’re thinking.” I stare down past our dangerous union to the legs beneath, his pale and matted with streaming water, mine brown and smooth. “Don’t you like doing it without a condom?”

“God, yeah.” His voice is tortured with pleasure. “It’s been so long I forgot how good it feels.”

“Then don’t stop. You can pull out when you come.”

“No, that’s too risky — ”

I pull Nick against me, grinding my hips into him. His hand slides up my neck and tightens into a fistful of damp hair. The silky friction between us intensifies into wet slurping thrusts. I can feel my orgasm coming — and just like that, it’s here. My legs turn to jelly, including the one still braced against the tile. The foot and its chipped pink toenails vanish, slipping on the slimy tile. Suddenly I’m an avalanche within his cradling arms, losing my balance, falling down. He’s trying to pull out and catch me at the same time. I’m not sure which wins.

“You alright?” he asks, hauling me back to my feet. When I nod, he strokes himself a few times and stiffens violently and groans. “Shit, that was close. This is the last time we ever run out of condoms. I’m going to get a couple hundred at the government clinic today.”

Cooling down in the spray, I watch his buttflash disappear behind the shower curtain. Nick always seems to be retreating, no matter how close you get to him. His family can’t hurt him from 1,500 miles away. Friends can’t piss him off if they’re only acquaintances. And girlfriends can’t break his heart through a condom.

Waking up feels like the total Christmas of my adult life. My present is within arm’s reach — Nooshin, a nearby warmth, naked and lying on her side, hair fanned across the pillows like a cloud of octopus ink. The covers puddle around her waist, revealing the bumpy march of vertebrae, the delicate ridges of her ribcage. A thin arm is extended toward the TV and holding the remote. She’s flipping through the wasteland of Mexican morning television. TV Azteca is giving airtime to a tonsured friar, Canal Once is showing an insipid kid’s sitcom with adult actors, and Telemundo is broadcasting American-style news about tortilla price-gouging and drug cartel shoot-outs. Her voice is a whisper repeating the Spanish she hears, working on her pronunciation.

The first thought that pops into my head — we’re out of condoms again.

Granted, I only bought a six-pack. I figured we could make it last until I visit the government clinic, where they hand out free condoms by the string. That might sound like the prophylactic equivalent of dumpster diving, but condoms are more expensive than tequila in Mexico. Especially when you go through them this fast. 12 hours later and there’s no foil packages left. Damn we’re horndogs.

The second thought that pops into my head — she’s on “her” side of the bed.

I’ve never lived with a girlfriend before, only had them pass intermittently through my bed, so I’m not used to thinking in terms of bedroom territoriality. The whole expanse is mine. Who cares if they sleep on this side or that side? I’m just sharing until they go back home to their own lives, that’s all.

But Nooshin wants to have a side of the bed. The right side, which she appropriated for her very own. She returns to it every time — after we untangle our sweaty limbs, after we lay down for a siesta, after we rent movies to watch on this so-called couch. Yesterday I deliberately tested her by sliding over to the right side while she was in the bathroom. When she returned her face was a quiet agony of dismay. “Hey. That’s my side,” she said softly. Hopefully.

Up to that point I assumed it was reflex. She spent five years sharing a bed with Saman, after all. She probably can’t conceive of beds without sides. But her flash of insecurity tore my heart out. Having a side means having a place — in my bed, in my life. She’s so afraid I’ll reject her, the same way her family and in-laws have rejected her.

The third thought that pops into my head — it’s easy to understand why she claimed the right side of the bed.

That way I glance over and only see her left side. Her “good” side as she calls it. The side without the crooked eye. Thing is, I wish I was facing her “bad” side. I could stare into her eyes forever, especially that perfect straying twin. I’m captivated by its telling independence. How it tends to be restful, barely drifting, when she’s relaxed — or conversely, how it jerks with increasing violence as she becomes tense, alarmed, frightened.

But how do I tell her that? Her life has been episodes of staring, teasing and cruelty — and bonus, now she’s in Mexico and finds herself the human incarnation of el ojo malo, the evil eye. She’s already defensive about her eye. Anything I say would just come out wrong. I don’t want her to think that she’s my favorite circus sideshow.

I roll onto an elbow. “Nooshin. I had the weirdest dream.”

“You finally awake again?” She goes supine amidst the sheets, smiling with shy happiness.

Uh-oh. All the blood sluggishly drifting to my brain suddenly reverses direction. The world is narrowing to a single vista of overwhelming desire — her bare and board-flat chest. I nuzzle into her lazily. “God I love your boobs.”

“Nick!” she half-giggles, half-shrieks. “I don’t even have boobs! I have…bumps.”

“God I love your bumps,” I say, kissing a fat chewy nipple. Then I stop, because she’s murmuring into my bald spot, trying to tell me something.

“How? How can you like my chest? I’m not even an AA cup. I’m nothing.”

I break away and stare at her angrily. “You’re you. That’s the sexiest thing in the world to me.”

Her dark eyes moisten. “I don’t get it.”

“I love your bumps, and your skinny little ass, and your eye, your crooked…eye.” My voice dies into regretful silence. I knew better. I fucking knew better.

Nooshin is already turning away in a flinch of pain. Pasting a smile onto her face. Hiding her sad disbelief — and all that bare skin, suddenly vanishing behind a handful of sheets. “So what about this dream?”

“Uh, I dreamed you were talking on the phone about me, except it was a language I’d never heard before, and…what?”

“That wasn’t a dream! That really happened. Nasrin called this morning, after…” She pauses, maybe remembering how we had each other for breakfast. “And we got in this fight, and you know how her English goes bad and she switches to Farsi, and then I always switch too, so that’s what happened.”

“Fight about what?” Beneath the covers I rest a palm on her hip. “Was she guilt-tripping you about the divorce again? Or about that bride-price thing that your family is supposed to repay?”

“The mahr? No, that wasn’t it.” She sags into her pillow. “I told her about us. In an email I sent last night.”

“You…what?” I withdraw my hand from her hip and use it to massage my scalp, which is suddenly bunching itself into a migraine. “Why the hell did you do that?”

“I had to tell someone. I was so happy.” Past tense. I swim through the sheets, wrapping Nooshin in my embrace. She twists miserably, trying to escape. “No! Nick, stop. Oh god…”

My erection withers into a bag of slush. “Are you okay?” I ask after a while.

“No I’m not okay. I’m cheating on my husband!” Hands rise to claw at her face. “I’m everything my family said I was. I’m daeyous, a faithless adulterer. That’s what Nasrin called me. Daeyous!” Her laugh is a desperate muffled sound. “I never thought I was the kind of girl who cheats on her husband.”

“Hey. Listen to me.” Both of her delicate wrists fit in my palm. I yank them away, revealing her guilt-stricken beauty. “You already divorced Saman. You divorced him when you pawned your wedding ring and took a bus back to San Diego.”

“But that’s not the way it works — ”

“Not legally. And maybe not where the families are concerned. But who the fuck cares about that? This is a decision you made for yourself. You finally left Saman for good. You left him so you could get divorced and begin a new life, right?”

A thoughtful quiet descends over us. Nooshin plays with her bangs, shifting them to cover her crooked eye. “Do you think I’m a good person?”

“Of course I think you’re a good person!” I grope for whatever comes next. “You’re the best person I know. And you’re, uh…” My voice trails off.

Nooshin married a stranger after she graduated from high school. She spent five years as a dutiful wife, contorting herself into a fucked-up traditionalistic ideal. When she finally found the courage to be more American than Iranian, the hostility was so overwhelming that she wound up with a broken nose and not much else. Now she lives in a foreign country where she barely speaks the language, and tries to make this cinderblock house a home, and risks her heart with the living embodiment of white and Christian and whatever the hell else I symbolize to her sister and parents. And Nooshin won’t pretend away her emotions anymore. In fact she advertises them. I’m happy now.

I don’t find that kind of bravery in many people. I’m not even sure I can find that kind of bravery in myself.