The Infinite Plan

  On her trips Carmen had also learned that the world is not white and never will be, and she proudly flaunted her brown skin and Latin features. Her arrogant bearing was deceptive; she gave the impression of being taller and younger than she was and presented herself with such aplomb, enveloped in her gypsy attire and tinkling bracelets, that no one took note of her heavy breasts and guitar-shaped body, or of her first wrinkles and gray hair. At school recess, Dai won a competition among his classmates for having the most beautiful mother.

  “Aren’t you ever going to marry, Mama?” he asked her.

  “Yes; when you grow up I’m going to marry you.”

  “When I grow up you will be very old,” Dai patiently explained; for him, numbers could not be refuted.

  “Then I’ll have to look for a husband as decrepit as I am.” Carmen laughed and in a flash of memory saw the face of Leo Galupi, just as she had remembered him through the years and as she had first seen him, half hidden behind a fading bouquet, waiting for her in the Saigon airport. Now she wondered whether he remembered her, and she determined that one day she would have to find out, because Dai was rapidly growing up and soon might not need her. She was also weary of brief affairs; she chose younger men because she needed harmony and beauty about her, but she was beginning to feel the emotional void.

  While her friend Gregory was living like a wealthy man, accumulating debts and headaches, Carmen was living like a worker, amassing money and praise. Soon the name of Tamar had become a symbol of originality and impeccable quality. Without intending it, she found herself directing style shows and giving lectures like an expert—always aware that her “expertise” was a joke. Someday they’ll catch on that I don’t know anything about anything. I manage to fool the world with pure blather, she told Gregory when she was featured in women’s and art magazines, or in business journals as an example of a rapidly developing enterprise. A few years later, when she had Tamar branches in several capitals and almost two hundred people working for her—not including salesmen on several continents offering her merchandise to the most luxurious shops—and when her accounting department occupied an entire floor of her factory, she was still traveling on muleback through jungles and on camelback across deserts, shopping for materials and living modestly with her son, not because she was tightfisted but because she did not know there was an easier life.

  • • •

  King Benedict wanted nothing in this world so much as an electric train to set up in his mother’s living room. He had already built to scale a statión, a town of small wooden houses, pasteboard trees, and a landscape of hills and tunnels that stretched from wall to wall, making it difficult to walk through the room. All he needed was the train; Bel had promised him that when they received the money from the insurance settlement, the train would be their first purchase. He felt disabled and clung to that woman with the long neck and yellow eyes who said she was his mother, and who was his compass in a storm of uncertainty. Since his accident, his memory was nothing but fog—forty years erased in the instant his head struck the ground. He remembered his mother as being young and beautiful; how had she become that old woman worn down by hard work and time? Who is this Bel anyway? I wish she would buy me the train. He understood that he was really too old for children’s toys, but he was not interested in things that obsessed grown men. He spent hours, semicomatose, before the television set, a fantastic invention that was completely new to him, and as he watched passionate love scenes felt a vague anxiety, something throbbing in the pit of his belly, which fortunately did not last long. The catalog of electric trains was much more interesting to him than the magazine with naked women the man at the corner newspaper stand tried to offer him. Sometimes he saw himself from afar, as if he were at the movies, watching his own face in a relentless drama. He did not recognize himself. His mother had explained the accident, and his amnesia, and he was not stupid; he knew that he was not fourteen years old. He stared at himself in the mirror, unable to recognize the grandfatherly figure looking back at him; he enumerated all the changes he saw and wondered exactly when they had occurred, why he showed so many signs of wear and tear. He did not know how he had lost his hair, or when he gained weight, where the wrinkles came from, where two of his teeth had gone, why his bones ached when he threw a ball, why he was short of breath when he tried to run up stairs, and why he could not read without glasses. He did not remember buying those glasses. Now he found himself at a large table in an office filled with plants and books, sitting between two men who peppered him with questions sometimes impossible to answer, while a secretary recorded each word on a machine. Who was President in the year you were married? His mother made him go every day to the library to read old newspapers, to learn what had happened in the world during the forty years he had lost. Abstract dates became more comprehensible than articles of everyday use, like the microwave oven and other fascinating and mysterious mechanisms. King was familiar with the names of the Presidents, who won the World Series, moon shots, wars, the assassinations of John Kennedy and Martin Luther King, but he hadn’t the least idea where he was when those events took place, and could have sworn he had never married. His mother instructed him every evening, telling him facts about his own life to see whether constant repetition would sweep away the mists of oblivion, but King found those obligatory exercises of memory an interminable and boring calvary. He could not believe that his life had been so insignificant, that he had done nothing important, that he had realized none of his youthful goals. He was tortured by the time he had wasted on that string of meaningless routines but by the same token grateful for a second chance in this world. His future was not a black hole behind him, as his mother told him, but a blank book before him. He could fill it with whatever he wanted to, replay the years already lived. He could have adventures, find treasures, perform heroic deeds, go to Africa in search of his roots, and never marry or grow old. If only he could remember his mistakes and successes. . . . He had always wanted an electric train; it was not a caprice of the moment but his oldest desire, a childhood dream. When he told Reeves about it, Reeves had smiled with his blue eyes and confessed that a train had also been his greatest wish but he had never owned one. He’s lying; if he can pay for this office with gold letters on the windows, he can buy a train—two if he wanted, King Benedict grumbled to himself, but to be polite, he did not say so. And what caused his mother to choose a white lawyer anyway? Hadn’t she herself told him many times to distrust whites on principle? Now the other man was placing rows of photographs on the table, and he was supposed to recognize them, but he didn’t know a single one except the beautiful woman sitting in an open window with half her face in the light and the other half in shadow: his mother, of course, although very different from the old woman she was now. Then they showed him pictures from magazines and asked him to identify cities and places, almost all of them strange to him. What about these? What was that cotton plantation, and that truck? He couldn’t quite remember, but he was sure he had been in a place similar to it. Where is it, Mama? but before he could get the words out, pain was stabbing his temples, and he felt dizzy. He put his arms over his head and tried to stand, but fell to the floor on his knees.

  “Mr. Benedict! Do you feel all right, Mr. Benedict?” The voice came to him from a great distance. Then he felt his mother’s hand on his forehead and turned toward her to put his arms around her waist and bury his head in her bosom, tortured by the pounding in his brain and the wave of nausea that filled his mouth with saliva and made him tremble all over.

  It was a year before Gregory Reeves accepted the fact that there was no reason to go on fighting for a marriage that was never going to work out, and another before he decided to separate: he hated to leave David, and it pained him to admit a second failure.

  “The problem isn’t Shannon; it’s you,” Carmen diagnosed. “No woman can solve your problems for you, Greg. You still don’t know what it is you’re looking for. If you can’t love yourself, ho
w can you love someone else?”

  “Is this the voice of experience?” Gregory joked.

  “At least I haven’t been married twice!”

  “This will cost a fortune,” Mike Tong lamented when he learned that his boss was planning a second divorce.

  Reeves moved in temporarily with Timothy Duane. After a rip-roaring scene in which they shouted insults at each other and Shannon threw a bottle at his head, Gregory packed two suitcases and left, swearing that this time he would not be back. He reached his friend’s apartment as Duane was in the midst of a formal dinner with other doctors and their wives. Gregory burst into the dining room and with a dramatic gesture dropped his luggage to the floor.

  “This is all that remains of Gregory Reeves,” he announced.

  “We’re having mushroom soup,” Timothy replied imperturbably. Later, when they were alone, he offered Gregory the guest room and commented that it was about time he left that accursed woman. “Besides, I was needing someone to party with,” he added.

  “Don’t count on me; I don’t have any luck with women.”

  “That’s crazy, Greg. We’re living in paradise. Not only are the women beautiful here; we don’t have any competition. You and I must be the last heterosexual bachelors in San Francisco.”

  “That’s a statistic that hasn’t done much for me up till now. . . .”

  Shannon was given custody of their son and soon moved into a house on a hill overlooking the bay. Gregory returned to his house, now without furniture but with the wine barrels of roses. He did not bother to replace what he had lost, because as things deteriorated his indignation at being betrayed grew, and the empty rooms seemed an appropriate setting for his state of mind. When resentment against his wife turned into a desire for revenge, he tried to find consolation in lovers, as he had done before, but discovered that instead of alleviating his problem, his “solution” complicated his schedule and fed his rage. He buried himself in work and, lacking either time or inclination, limited housework to keeping his plants alive.

  Shannon was not much better; the movers unloaded everything into the living room of the new house, and there it sat: she had barely enough energy to set up beds and unpack a few cooking utensils, while the disarray and confusion mounted around her. She was not up to coping with David, a job that demanded superhuman strength; more than a nursemaid, he needed a wild-animal trainer. He had been born hyperactive and lived like a savage. When they tried to enroll him in various nursery schools for a few hours a day, the schools refused to keep him. His behavior was so barbaric that Shannon had to be constantly alert; a moment’s carelessness could end in catastrophe. Early on, the child learned to get attention by holding his breath, and perfected the technique: his eyes rolled back in his head and he frothed at the mouth and collapsed in convulsions anytime he was denied some whim. He refused to brush his teeth, comb his hair, or eat with a spoon; he ate on the floor, licking up his food. He could not be left with other children because he bit them, nor with adults because he had a shrill scream that ground down the nerves of the hardiest among them. Shannon had admitted her defeat about the time David began to crawl—a period coinciding with her worst fights with her husband—and sought relief in gin. While his father worked himself into a stupor, traveling much of the time, and his mother drowned herself in liquor and frivolity, each grimly waging the war of irreconcilable enmity, David was storing up the mute rage of forgotten children. The divorce at least relieved the atrocity of daily pitched battles that left the entire family numb, including the Mexican maid who came every day to clean and look after the boy and who finally preferred the hazards of the street to that insane asylum. Shannon was more devastated by her departure than by her husband’s. She felt forsaken and gave up any attempt at order, letting her home and her life gather dust and chaos; dirty clothing and plates, unpaid bills, broken appliances, and debts she tried to ignore piled higher and higher. She began her life as a divorcée in that same state of disrepair and gave up any pretense of looking after her child or her house. She was defeated before she began, with barely enough spirit to save herself from going down with the ship, escaping first for stolen moments, then for hours, and finally forever.

  Reeves stayed in his empty house, with the boat rotting at the dock and rosebushes languishing in the wine barrels. It was not a practical solution for a single man, as everyone pointed out, but he felt like a prisoner in an apartment; he needed room to stretch and let off steam. He worked sixteen hours a day, slept less than five hours a night, and drank a bottle of wine at each meal. At least you don’t smoke, so you’re not going to die of lung cancer, Timothy Duane consoled him. The office gave the appearance of being a money-making factory, but in fact its existence hung in the balance as the Chinese accountant worked miracles to pay the most pressing bills. In vain, Mike Tong tried to lay out the basic principles of fiscal responsibility to his employer; he wanted him to see for himself the bleeding debit columns, see how his bookkeeper was dancing blindfolded on a tightrope. Don’t worry, my friend, it will all work out, Reeves would say soothingly. This isn’t China: we always come out ahead here; this is the land of the bold, not the prudent. Reeves could look around him and see that he was not the only one in his predicament; the entire nation was on a spending binge, deep in a bacchanal of conspicuous consumption and noisy patriotism directed at recovering the pride lost in the humiliating defeat of Vietnam. Gregory was marching to the drum of his epoch, but to do so he had to silence the voices of Cyrus, with his intellectual’s mane and his clandestine encyclopedias, his father with his tame boa, soldiers bathed in blood and terror, and a host of questioning spirits. The world hasn’t seen such selfishness, corruption, and arrogance since the fall of the Roman Empire, Timothy Duane often said. When Carmen warned Gregory about the pitfalls of greed, he reminded her that it was she who had taught him his first lesson in capitalism, when they were young and she led him outside the barrio to make money in the bourgeois world. Thanks to you, I crossed the street and discovered the advantages of being on the other side. It’s much better to be rich, but if I can’t be rich I’m at least going to live as if I were, he said. She could not reconcile this bravado with the other aspects of her friend’s life that he unintentionally revealed in their long Monday telephone conversations, such as his growing tendency to defend only the poorest of the poor, never businesses or insurance companies, where he would have made substantial profits without nearly the risk.