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  CHAPTER NINE

  Okay, please don’t laugh, but I swear meeting Nathalie was like being hit by a force of nature. It was as if all the challenges and ups and downs in my life had existed only to strengthen and improve me, to try and make me worthy of the moment I’d meet her. I know, it sounds so fucking corny. Total gag reflex material, right? But I swear on my father’s ashes, I swear to you it’s true.

  Nathalie. Gorgeous, addictively engaging, ballsy, and, devil help us all, she had the stare. Those eyes. Those golden brown spark eyes. The sort of eyes my father had tried to warn me about. Sweet mercy. Nathalie had Nahui’s stare.

  So: as if. As if I could have done anything but be floored when our lives collided. Cautious for one brief second the night we first met at a bizarre and otherwise terrible post-Thanksgiving you-survived-dinner-with-your-family-of-origin or celebrate-with-your-family-of-choice bullshit cocktail party, there was a moment when I thought Nathalie might be crazy. Like, seriously, clinically demented.

  At said party, I stood in a small cluster of people listening to Mr. Party Host, a fashion photographer, talk about how he’d just been hired to art direct the next ad campaign for Diesel Jeans and how, blah blah blah, he wanted to do something high concept about the bullshit of domesticity and family, something with an ironic country kitchen twist. His inspiration, he said, was his mother.

  “She’s a chronic liar. Covered in gingham. Entirely pathological.”

  Naïve me, I felt a sudden bond with him.

  “I totally know what you mean,” I said. “My mother’s a Pilgrim.”

  “You mean she’s a Puritan,” he corrected me with a snooty sneer.

  My neck and face burned.

  “No, I mean she’s a Pilgrim,” I said. “Square white starched collar, clunky buckle shoes … the whole Plymouth Rock gig.”

  Of course I hadn’t been speaking literally.

  And then, the most incredible scratchy-voiced creature standing next to me said: “What a coincidence, my mother’s a Pilgrim too. Jewish, but she’s a Pilgrim.”

  I turned to face this saving grace girl. And, damn, one look and I knew. It was her. She was the One. As I stood there staring and wondering how I could get her to be mine forever and ever and then some, she laughed the most wonderfully insane laugh and socked Mr. Party Host in the arm—hard, too hard—as if he were in on the joke. I smelled her breath as she laughed. Bergamot and peppermint and just a hint of expensive vodka. She had on this wrinkled vintage Ginger Rogers copper-orange ballroom gown, teetering faux–leopard fur open-toe platform heels, and a rust-colored rabbit fur jacket—an outfit that would have looked like costumed ridiculousness on anybody else, but on her was just right. Her flyaway auburn hair was a tangled mess of a Vargas girl updo. Her perfume was incredibly sweet, almost too sweet, like rice milk about to turn. Sorry for the hokey factor, but seriously, that was it; I was done for.

  And from that moment forward, everyone else at the party hated us because it was obvious that we were so goddamned perfect—at least together. So they despised us. But they stayed near us. To watch. And listen.

  Once her laugh eventually wound down, my wicked little angel retrieved one of the hand-rolled cigarettes she kept tucked behind her powdered ears like some glammed-up rockabilly moll. Her ears were small and perfectly shaped, but for some reason they reminded me of mothers scolding their kids to put a washcloth and a bar of Ivory to work.

  “Cigarette?” she asked me.

  That glimmer in her eye. Her boldness. God she was hot. At absolute worst, I figured a quick fuck in some dark corner outside wouldn’t hurt any. No strings attached, easy exit if things turned slack, just two kids getting off in an alley. Who could argue with that? She took a small box of wooden matches from her dirty fur jacket.

  “Cigarette?” she asked again. I thought I’d already answered.

  “No. Thank you.”

  “Because you don’t smoke, because you don’t like unfiltered, or because you don’t want to be obliged?”

  Everyone stood silently and listened like we were some radio play performing for their benefit.

  “I don’t smoke,” I said.

  “What a good boy you are.” She tapped the tip of my nose with a bitten-down crimson-polished fingertip.

  I didn’t want the conversation to end.

  “But …” I stalled, and prayed the gods would have mercy on my stunned brain, “given the right occasion, I might smoke.”

  Didn’t matter if it was true or not. The game was on.

  Eyebrow raised, cigarette hanging from her lips, Nathalie stopped mid-strike of a match.

  “What exactly would the right occasion entail?”

  I shrugged.

  She pressed the match against her cigarette, thinking, staring at me. And then she tucked the cigarette, still unlit, back behind her ear.

  “Don’t want one after all?” I asked.

  “Just waiting for the right occasion,” she said with a devious smile.

  Heart be still. Dear motherfucking Jesus Christ, please just kill me now.

  “My name is Nathalie,” she said.

  “Frank.”

  Thank God succinctness could pass as tough and cool. I no longer seemed to possess the ability to speak more than a single syllable without gasping outright.

  “It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance, Frank.”

  “Same.”

  “Goodnight, darlings,” she said to everyone still watching us, and wiggled her fingers at them in the most perfect sexy evil-bitch wave. “Come on,” she pulled me out the door. Once we were downstairs and outside the building, she said: “Take me to your place, handsome.”

  For real? Yes, for real. I half-expected the director to call, “Cut!” But nobody did. So I continued on. And we were off on our thrilling madcap adventure! Well, sort of. It wasn’t like the soundtrack’s tempo pumped loud and everything turned quick camera shifts and accelerated speed. In fact, Nathalie was slow. I thought she was trying to torture me with expectation. She walked the entire way to my apartment like an old man on a Sunday drive—long full stops at intersections, deliberately looking both ways before crossing. Granted, I imagine walking fast in her stiltlike shoes wouldn’t be the easiest trick in the world, but I later learned she always walked slowly. No matter the situation. Even when barefoot. Still, that night she was extra slow and careful. She was thinking things through. As it turned out, she was map planning, deciding our entire future. I knew this because once we finally made it to my apartment, she claimed the right side of my bed as her own. For keeps.

  Look, we were young. Things happen fast. Without hesitation. Or too much foresight.

  So, yes, duh, it made little sense that she basically moved in the night we met, but logic to hell, being together felt more right than anything either of us had ever known. And so, happy brick by brick, we built a fantasy fort to live in together. Our fort had invisible walls. We were absolutely everything in our fort. We needed nothing else.

  A week after she’d moved in, Nathalie woke up one morning and walked over to the windowsill. She picked up the retablo of Nahui, still the only photo in the apartment.

  “I’ve been meaning to ask, where’d you get this?”

  “It belonged to my father’s mother.”

  I went to the closet and retrieved the briefcase from the top shelf. I got Nahui’s book and handed it to Nathalie.

  “That portrait is from the same year this was published.”

  “Cool,” she said, carefully turning a few of the book’s pages before handing it back to me. She watched as I returned the book to the briefcase. “What’s all that other stuff?” she asked, pointing toward the briefcase.

  “Just some things I took from my dad’s house when he died.”

  “Oh.”

  And that was that. I put the closed briefcase up on the shelf and joined Nathalie back in bed for a lazy morning.

  CHAPTER TEN

  21 February 1996.

&nbs
p; Nathalie came home from what I thought was just another day of work and declared: “Tonight, we repent.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “It’s Ash Wednesday. We’re going to play a game,” she said.

  “Gin rummy? Scrabble?”

  Mischievous smile, she replied: “I get to be Nahui.”

  Did she say … And repent? … What … ?

  “Wait, I don’t get it.”

  “I know every fact about Nahui Olin. I’ve seen every photograph of her. I’ve studied her paintings, her poems, everything.”

  I’d never even heard her say Nahui’s name before, and now she was an expert?

  “Nahui Olin? Her?” Incredulous, I pointed to the cardboard retablo still propped up on what had become its dusty and permanent spot on the windowsill. Best I could figure, Nathalie had convinced herself that she somehow knew Nahui just by looking at her portrait. I couldn’t blame her, I mean the eyes and—

  “Frank, I unequivocally know everything about her that there is to know. Everything.”

  Damn, the implications. Was this about my father’s mother? What? And then it occurred to me to ask: “Nat, how do you know about her?”

  “A dix ans sur mon pupitre and interlibrary loan. Duh.”

  Duh was right. Why hadn’t I thought of that?

  “Frank, did you realize she wrote four books?”

  No, I hadn’t realized.

  “Anyway,” she continued, “the library had only this one biography someone published in Mexico a few years ago. But I swear, some of the stories about her are so totally scandalous—”

  Wait …

  “Was the biography in Spanish?” I interrupted, preoccupied by my confusion.

  “Yeah, so?”

  “And you read Spanish?”

  “Spanish, French, German, and a smidgen of Portuguese.”

  “You never told me that.”

  “Darling, you never asked.”

  Nathalie could have told me she was a secret operative for the CIA, and I would have believed her. I mean, I could tell she wasn’t bullshitting. She was being absolutely serious and honest. I’ll be the first to admit how totally turned on I was by the sudden disclosures. I mean, really, here was the woman I’d adored for months, drop-dead gorgeous in her vintage dress with her foxy little pin-up girl face, but, and I’m embarrassed to admit this, I’d never really thought of her as a brain. (Not that I thought of myself as one either, mind you.) I mean, from day one when we met, Nathalie was witty as all hell; she had a sharp and quick tongue, we could blather on and on about movies and music and random stuff, but I’d never seen her read anything other than glossy magazines and maybe the Fashion and Style section of the Sunday paper. And now to learn suddenly the true range of her nerd abilities? Holy crap. She was perfect. I just sat there with this stupid puppy-got-a-squirrel grin.

  “Go get ready,” she said very sternly.

  Get ready? To melt outright from the thrill of her proximity? What? How exactly could I prepare for that?

  “Shower. Dress extra nice. Go. Now,” she commanded.

  And I obeyed.

  I went to the closet and, sending a silent thanks to my father for his classy taste in clothes, carefully gathered a few choice items. Behind a closed and locked bathroom door, I undressed and showered. Hot water turned the room a soapy fog. Once I was thoroughly scrubbed clean, I dried off, wrapped a towel around my waist, and stood at the sink. Way more toothpaste on the brush than usual, I brushed my teeth. Twice. I wiped mist off the sink mirror and combed my hair as tidily as my scraggly cut allowed. And then I dressed in the clothes I’d let steam in the bathroom with me—my father’s best suit: natty dark brown fine wool tweed slacks and jacket, matching silk tie and pocket square, a brown straw fedora, the one with the black band. The suit was sort of slouchy around the ankles and a little short on the arms, but it mostly fit okay. As I put on the fedora, I noticed the inside shone from years of oily pomade rubbed in. A little of my dad’s warm skin clean scent could be detected in the damp air around me.

  I tipped the fedora just so, straightened my tie, and refolded the pocket square. But, try as I did, my true self showed through. The good-luck Pogues T-shirt I’d put on as an undershirt—the Peace and Love tour shirt, the one with the crumbling silkscreen of a boxer dude on it—remained slightly visible under my father’s best white dress shirt. And even though I was wearing my least thrashed pair of shoes, they were still Vans (granted, the super-sweet charcoal suede slip-ons). I couldn’t pull the look together totally perfectly, but when I checked myself out in the full-length mirror on the bathroom door, I was passably dandy, in a punk sort of way. Finally, ready as best I knew how to be, I opened the bathroom door to join Nathalie again.

  Burnt-sienna organza silk cocktail dress gracing fishnet calves, gold platform heels cleaned of their usual mud, hair pinned in a twist—Nathalie sat at the kitchen table. She’d lit a tall glass cheapie Virgin Mary candle from the corner bodega. The Holy One looked superhero on that votive label, laser beams shooting out from her downward-turned palms. And Nathalie, for her part, had laser beams too. Fully aware that anticipation is half the fun, she ignored me and continued to stare through the candle flame at the kitchen wall, intently burning pinholes through bricks, drywall, and studs. I sat next to her. And even then she didn’t look at me. I waited.

  The kitchen chair’s back was too short and it angled too far backward. Its seat edge hit my leg mid-thigh and cut off circulation. My lower back cramped. Five minutes, maybe seven minutes passed, my entire spine ached, and I couldn’t wait any longer.

  On your marks. Get set. We had our roles. Go.

  “Nahui?”

  “Buenas noches, amor,” Nathalie said, and turned to look me square in the eye. Her voice turned extra gravel deep. And those eyes. Nahui’s stare was looking directly at me.

  She told her life to me:

  Nahui Olin. Poet. Artist. Genius thinker. Wonder star of the Mexican 1920s avant-garde. Favorite muse of boys and girls alike.

  (No wonder my father’s mother had blushed as she did.)

  Nahui Olin. Name meaning: Earthquake Sun—the final epoch on the Aztec calendar wheel, the destroyer of all human existence. Four Suns—Jaguar, Wind, Rain, and Floods—preceded Nahui Olin. We live in Nahui Olin. But according to ancient wisdom, nothing, absolutely nothing, will remain in her wake.

  Earthquake. Sun. Nahui. Olin.

  Born Carmen Mondragón on 8 July 1893, the daughter of a famous general, her daddy invented a cannon that won the revolution. And when Huerta made her father Secretary of War, her already good life turned golden Mexico City and Paris extravagance. Private school nuns taught her to paint, to write, to think big thoughts. Star young student, under the proud supervision of the sisters, she wrote what would eventually become A dix ans sur mon pupitre.

  Ten years later, at twenty years of age, she fell hard for a cadet. Manuel Rodríguez Lozano, a handsome boy of good upbringing. Daddy approved. Her nuptial ceremonies were the event of the year. The wedding portrait showed her seriouseyed and Manuel so pretty. It wasn’t long until she learned that Manuel admired the male form as passionately as she did herself. They continued on together, but Manuel soon found opportunity to escape. Nahui’s parents wouldn’t allow a divorce, but she proceeded as if one had been granted.

  She took lovers. Many lovers. One, an artist big shot, Dr. Atl—“Doctor Water,” his slumming-it-bohemian Aztec chosen name—was the grandfather of modern Mexican muralism. It was he who suggested she take the Aztec name of Nahui Olin. Proud blasphemous creatures, Nahui and Atl lived together out of wedlock … in el ex Convento de la Merced—Dr. Atl had converted the capital city’s former Mercy Convent, located just blocks from the central zócolo, into their sprawling home. Nuns covered their eyes and gripped their rosaries when they passed by on the street. The ungodly feuds of their household were legendary.

  Once Nahui was reading on the rooftop patio when she caught sight of Dr. Atl talking to a
pretty blonde on the sidewalk below.

  “Beware, the sky is falling!” Nahui screamed, as she threw well-aimed roof tiles at the flirting pair.

  The blonde ran for cover, but Dr. Atl only laughed in response.

  “You are making a fool of yourself, Carmen Mondragón!” he called up to the rooftop. And then, smiling, the play on words occurred to him. He said quietly to himself: “Mondragón—mon dragon, indeed.”

  The pun-turned-lover-pet-name stuck.

  Devoted admirer of Nahui’s spitfire tantrums, it was Dr. Atl who convinced her to make public the precocious poetic musings she had written as an adolescent. At age thirtyone, the year 1924, Nahui assembled and published A dix ans sur mon pupitre (From My Desk, at Age Ten) to the delight of her artist friends. Soon thereafter, she published two collections of poems, Óptica cerebral, poemas dinámicos (Cerebral Perspective, Dynamic Poems) and Calinement je suis dedans (I Am Tender Inside).

  And the parties Dr. Atl and Nahui gave in honor of those books … damn, the parties they threw. Sweet mercy, the winks and smiles and kisses and big talk about politics and art and grand strikes and leftist global overthrow, clusters of costumed revelers wandering off to tangle tongues and fists and opinions in the halls, everyone drinking one cognac sidecar after another. No matter how many cocktails they drank, there wasn’t ever sugar rim enough in the world to snuff the Molotov burn of those parties. Blue haze smoke air and mariachis kept them alive to well past sunrise as they brought the world to its pretty little knees and made it their begging love. Comrades to the end, they promised upon their lives to disavow wealth and privilege for the cause. But pledges the flimsy contracts they were, it was always Nahui who owned the party.