Interesting Women by Andrea Lee (7 ebook reader txt) 📗

It’s on my list of things that scare me.” She looks at me knowingly. “I was very good at canoeing at camp,” she goes on, with a sibylline smile.

An American East Coast accent. Upper-class. The old traveler’s game of placing a compatriot arranges itself in my thoughts like a fragment of Anglo-Saxon verse: clearly Caucasian, so Jewish or Gentile? A wandering WASP wastrel, or Irish, Italian? Camp? I imagine her at some posh backwoods establishment with secret midnight hazings and awards inscribed on birch bark. But Maine or Blue Ridge? Up close, she’s a funny mix of elegance and uncouthness. Her body has a thoroughbred length of bone, but her limbs look slightly wasted—a tropical bug, perhaps, or simply borderline anorexia. Her armpits and legs are unshaven but her toenails are meticulously manicured, painted a glossy orange-red. She is wearing an Indian nose ring, and bangles around her ankles. Her hair, short and raked back from her face, is orange-red as well, the cheap, untempered henna color one sees in fakirs’ beards; and her sun-weathered face with its short, arrogant nose and hooded gray eyes—no surgical work that I can discern—displays a peculiar expression of rueful good humor that reminds me of a street urchin in a thirties movie. It is amusing to see her studying me at the same time.

“Taos,” she says. And everything is clear. Of course she wasn’t born there, because no one like her is ever born in Taos; people like her are reborn there. A horsey childhood in northern New Jersey and Madrid, where her father owned chewing-gum factories, she tells me. Then twenty years as a banker’s wife in London, where she ran a shop that imported South American textiles. Then the divorce and the move to New Mexico, which she initially discovered when she was “doing a Thelma and Louise” with a friend. “After all those years in England, I realized that I didn’t want to be buried among the Brits. I got to Taos, and knew I could die there.” Now that the kids are grown, she is traveling through the East by herself. Roughing it, mostly—she’s at this pricey hotel, which fits her style but not her present budget, for a few days of R and R. She has just finished moving from ashram to ashram in India, and was at Poona, where the faithful live on in the waning rays of the glory of the Maharishi.

We are sitting on the powdery sand, our legs stretched out into transparent water the temperature of amniotic fluid. There is too much information, I worry, moving between us too fast. But I’m on vacation, and after a while, I let myself go. Sitting there in my black bikini, the water from my hair dripping down my shoulders, I describe the fancy Santa Fe wedding I once attended, where aristocratic Florentines and Milanese, wearing spanking-new cowboy boots, boogied with Texas millionaires. I complain about the rootlessness of my life as an expatriate wife blown by multinational winds from Massachusetts to Birmingham, Warsaw, and now Hong Kong. Shamelessly, I lament the superficiality of the travel articles I write for two quite reputable magazines back in the States. Then I get to the hard stuff. Showing off to this adventurous new acquaintance with chitchat about cities and jungles we both know, I touch scornfully on the inability of men to appreciate canopic jars and shaft tombs, to deal with knavish cabdrivers, to tolerate bedbugs. I observe that women are better travelers than men, and superior beings altogether. And then I drop the word ex-husband—that password that functions as a secret handshake in the freemasonry of interesting women.

It is five in the afternoon, the time when it rains for ten minutes every day at this season. Steel gray thunderheads loom over the bay and, as a long-prowed fishing boat motors hastily by, there is a distant flare of lightning under an arcade of black cloud. Basia has beached her kayak and is chasing crabs on the rocks, circling closer and closer as she eavesdrops on us. By now, we’re engaged in an orgy of divorce talk, slapping away at the mosquitoes that began attacking us once the shore breeze died down. My new friend is telling me in detail exactly how the Filipina maid was bribed to testify against her. And I respond with the well-worn saga of my perfidious lawyer, a woman who, after helping arrange the official dissolution of my brief first marriage, moved in with my ex-husband. Perched above us on the rocks, Basia gives up any pretense of not listening. “You can come and sit beside us, you beautiful girl,” says the woman, whose name I still don’t know. She speaks to my daughter with a tender familiarity that sends a wary prickle down my spine.

I have to be careful what I say, I think, as Basia climbs down and settles near me. But it’s hard. Impromptu confession can be as irresistible as sex. At least I keep my revelations rigorously in the past, and avoid the slightest spilling of guts about my second husband, Basia’s father, Simon. Although at other times I can go on for hours about him and his controlling love, his occasional stupid infidelities, and his still more annoying blind devotion—revealing itself more and more over the years—to a fantasy ideal of a family. Or about my two miscarriages after Basia, and how Simon’s prolonged and noisy grief left nearly no room for mine. Of none of this do I speak as I watch Basia sitting in the warm sea, her arms crossed to protect her twelve-year-old breasts, those impertinent brand-new breasts that already, I note, attract attention from old and not-so-old lechers around the hotel pool.

Basia is as tall as I am, and wears a larger shoe; she is one of the new, giant breed of American children created by overnurturing parents, and she has the precocious social aplomb of most expat kids. She goes to an international school