Dick and Florence honeymoon in Mexico

July 1928

He has not touched her since Flagstaff and when they change trains in Albuquerque in the morning, he does not even look behind him to see if she is following him down the platform.  He loves her all right and she is good fun and he has known her since she was a girl, but he is married to her now and this is a hard idea to get on top of, because now he is supposed to be not just Dickie but also her husband.  It is not that he has become something else entirely, but that he has become something else in addition to being only himself.  He is still drunk in the morning and there is an hour’s wait.  “You want something,” he asks.

“No.”

“I might have something.”

“You go ahead,” she says.

He says, “I might have little hair of the dog.”

“Oh, let me just die in peace, would you.”

A hot wind enters through the bright doors of the station.  A taxi sounds its horn in the New Mexico morning.

“Some coffee, actually,” she calls after him.

He brings it to her.  Then he sits before her, blinking.  There is a heavylidded effect to this and with the grasshopper’s head the overall impression is a little otherworldly.  He is leathery after half a summer in Arizona.

He sits and drinks.

She says, “You just ran out, didn’t you.  You didn’t tell anyone.”

“Maybe I don’t want to go back.”

It is meant to get a rise out of her but it goes in without a splash.  It occurs to him that he can do what he likes.  She has ceded him this right.  She looks interestingly hard-used in the unbroken morning light and her powder has caked in an area at the side of her nose and he notes that rather than repelling him this makes him, against his will, tender.  They have badly mistreated their families by marrying out here like this and neither wants to admit it yet.  He puts his cup into its saucer and says, “Aw, what do I need them for, anyway.”

When the train comes they get on it, banging down the corridor to their empty compartment.  This train takes them south across New Mexico toward the border.  The country is high and stark and very empty.  The compartment is hot in the sun and a film of white dust has settled on the window glass, both inside and out.  She is sitting opposite him considering him as a husband, and he knows that it is best to keep quiet for the time being.  He cannot trust what he will say otherwise.  Last night when he watched Alan kissing her something opened deep in his abdomen and it still seems to be there, a strange upside-down open form within him, and with this he also feels that in some fashion he is still watching the whole business happen and not rising to stop it.  It did not seem beyond his capacity to get up and shout at them but something had stayed him, some curiosity, also some relish, possibly, in seeing such a wrong committed against him.  Possibly this was also what had drawn him onto the train when he had not exactly decided that he was really going to get on, what had kept him in the compartment as the whistles blew and the car jolted forward and Florrie had watched him, her eyes widening in frank surprise.  Slipher had shaken his hand warmly and congratulated him on his marriage and had not seemed at all to mind that he had been away an extra day, and yet here he is having run off without a word.

Well, it is the sort of man he is, it appears.

He sits on the green leather seat warmed by the sun and runs through all this, worrying it with pleasure as he might a sore in his mouth, and is about to offer it all to Florrie as a sort of why-isn’t-this-a-puzzle, possibly in revenge, when he sees that she is sleeping.  So he stands and pulls the parchment shade and gets down the passports, then reaches forward and with a fingernail plucks away the spot of powder from her face that has been bothering him.  Her face in the sepia light is golden and unmarked but for the brown freckles across the bridge of her nose.

She is a very pretty creature.

No, he will not come out with it now.  He has a hand but is not sure how to play it.  It needs playing but correctly.

They do not have plans exactly.  Neither of them expected to be on a honeymoon.  But she has brought swimming togs for both of them so they are able to swim in a little cove in San Hidalgo, in the mild Gulf surf.  He is shy at first of his paper-white shoulders but nobody is watching and he quickly ceases to care.  The sand is hot underfoot and the sun roasts him painfully red by afternoon.  He takes to the water for refuge.  It is mild and bitter, a play ocean whose other side, the Baja Peninsula, he imagines he can almost see across the blue expanse.  The water is mostly warm with cool eddies in it and in places tastes of chemical salts as though he is swimming in a giant tray of developer.

Florence bathes in her plaid suit with black socks pulled up to below the knee and the sight of all her flesh in the open stirs his blood.  He feels a general attention manifesting in the southern regions though nothing entirely comes of it.  Overhead the sky is a uniform blue filled with white seabirds and the little crumbled town sits behind them on its green slope.  When they are done swimming they sit on the sand roasting some more.  After a while they attract a few passersby who lean on a pipe railing set into the cement wall above the beach.  Boys and girls made brave by Dick’s wave of greeting come flatfooted down the blazing cement steps to stand in a curious semicircle a few yards from their pile of towel and sunglasses and bathing oil and the month-old magazines Florence has brought from Cambridge, now thumbed all over with greasy prints.  A single glance at the aristocratic lines and regal appointments of the new Cadillac must of necessity determine at once all question of social supremacy in motoring hereafter.

“Here, dears,” Florence calls, and holds out a Harper’s Bazaar.  The bravest of the brown girls comes forward and takes it without a word.

“What on earth they’ll make of it,” she remarks.  “It’s a fashion magazine,” she calls after them, twisting.

The retreating girl grins and with the magazine in one hand puts thumb and forefinger to her left eye and comically stretches open the lids.  It seems a playful but corrective gesture and when it is delivered the brood of children continues moving off.  Dickie notes that he is on the side of the children in this small interaction.  She deserves the mockery.  He suspects this is a cowardly thing to think.  Yes, he is collecting evidence about himself still, as any young man does.

Three days later they board a train for Mazatlan but halfway down the coast the train seems to seize up and after waiting an hour in the baking heat they climb off and making two trips of five hundred yards with luggage banging against their knees they make it to the next town where they find a room in an orange, windy beachfront hotel.  The town is called either Altamura or Navolato, they are told different things.  The second-floor room with its white wood floor and whitewashed walls is airy and clean.  Under their window and across the sandy road the quiet surf of the Gulf of California rolls and recedes.  There is the luxury of an attached bathroom and now and then, from the dusty road, the sound of an American automobile blasting along without a second glance, the car full of broad-hatted turistas on their way to the coastal city a hundred miles farther south.  Dickie is happy to have the place to themselves.  A fat mother and hairy son appear to run the hotel and the restaurant downstairs.

It is here that Florrie reaches into the bottom of her traveling bag and lifts out a wrapped box.  “Happy wedding day, I guess,” she says.

Florence has brought him a camera.  A present for Dickie, now a wedding present, lthough now that they are married these distinctions seem to carry less weight; also more, he considers, as they hand things back and forth as currency in this new economy of feeling, whatever it is, between them.  The camera is the newest thing, a Rolleiflex Twin-Lens Reflex, a German-made number that sits black and heavy in its case giving off a smell of metal and something like ink.  It has black steel sides and chrome fittings and the film is wound using a little crank on the side.  He is a sucker for gadgets and the new stuff and he inhales with appreciation.

“Say,” he remarks.

With a confident hand he turns it over, upside down, setting aside the little bound manual.

“There’s film.”  In her kimono she is digging in her suitcase.  “Somewhere, ah.”  She finds the package and hands it across.  Then she goes into the bathroom to wash.

He pulls the lever that sends the rear panel springing open.  With his teeth and one hand he rips a roll of film out of its foil-paper envelope then picks the sticky label away and loads the film into the deadblack interior, feeding the celluloid notches to the studded carry wheel.  When he is satisfied he snaps the panel shut again and ratchets a few frames through, snapping at nothing.

The white breezy room seems empty without Florence.  There is splashing from the bathroom.

He sets the camera aside and picks up the manual.  It is all in German but there are pictures.  He eats it up: the serious print and deadpan drawings and the lines that whisker out from lensplitzen and meisenhaupt. It is the earnestness and painstaking correctness that speak to him.  He would like to be this way, somehow.  He observes that the goddamn krauts can still do a thing or two.  When he is done with the manual Florence is out of the bathroom again.  He peers down into the viewfinder.  Past the tiny image of the billowing window and the table with its blue-striped vase and leaning heap of pink flowers, he finds Florence naked in the brown armchair, opening a new pack and lighting a Fronterizo.

He takes a picture of her.

“Dickie,” she scolds, and crosses an arm over her breasts.

He takes another.  He has a sudden thumping hardon.  It is seeing her there in the tiny mirrored square, like an image from a stag movie.  “Come on,” he croaks.

She is not sure about this, but she has been feeling sort of sick with herself; she has not treated Dickie very well.  The cigarette tastes strange to her.  The coffee however is very good.  In the saucer she puts out the cigarette, folding it over, and takes her arm off her breasts.

Dickie stands and comes creeping forward with the camera.  She does not know what to do.  What he would like to see.

But Dickie is transfixed.  For a minute it is enough to watch her.  Then: “Show me,” he says.

This is vague enough but she sits back and puts her hands under her breasts and lifts them.  He snaps, winds.  Snaps, winds.  There is a considerable bulge in his pants she sees and at the sight of this something sliding and otherly comes into her.

“Show me, you slut,” he forces out.  He unbuttons his pants with one hand and keeps coming forward.

What does this begin to fix between them?  It is hard to say.  The room in the orange hotel has tall white walls and a square white ceiling and the floor is painted white.  The bed is low and painted gray and by the second day he notices there are scrapes on the floor where the bed has jogged back and forth.  For the four days that the spell lasts between them he does not drink at all.  When they emerge for dinner and to walk on the beach the stars are tremendous above the ocean and now he begins to feel their old gross majesty again, and Mars, red in the foreground, stares down with silent mad intent.  Without liquor he seems to fill with decision and understanding.  He holds his secret knowledge in his breast.  It has taken on a shape, like a new organ, tender there behind his sternum and painful.  She has abused him, Dickie feels this definitely, and if she feels for Alan at all, she should not have agreed to be married.  Twice he sits in silence across a white-clothed table from her as they wait for their dinner and feels the words, I saw you two, pressing against the back of his throat.  It is the betrayal that grinds at him.

Still he senses that it is better to wait.  He waits.  He has taken two hundred photographs of her naked and abject and he holds them as a surety, dark and thrilling and wrapped on their unexposed rolls in the bottom now of his suitcase.

They are eight weeks in Mexico.  All of August, half of September.  This is long enough that Dickie goes through a sort of epic of evolving emotion,  a symphony of changing themes and pacing that retains throughout its basic melody of wounded, secret hostility.  They leave the orange hotel and after two restless nights in Mazatlan amid the boisterous Americans they board the train south again and stop off at the little rivermouth town of Valencias-Capitan.  They spend a week here in a rented cottage with a maid, a cook, and a rotund gardener who stands for an hour pressing his boot meditatively on ants as they cross the brick walkway.   Here Dick hires a guide to take him deep sea fishing.  Florence shudders at the idea so he goes alone.  Feeling virtuous he boards with nothing but two jugs of water and his sunglasses on a loop around his neck.  The guide makes sweeping gestures of dismissive amusement when Dick speaks English and from his perch at the wheel cranes over his shoulder to watch Dick gripping the chrome handles beside the fold-down seat.

“How long?” Dick calls.

The guide sends him a gaping smile.  It is another twenty minutes of queasy pitching over a dark sea before the guide kills the engine and sets him up.  After five minutes the cork handle shivers in his hands and a long sharp silvery flash leaps above the waves.  Dickie reels it in, a fearsome monster with terrible needle-sharp teeth.  The guide nets it and while it writhes he strikes its head with his fist.

“Barracuda” the guide tells him.

Afterward he pays the guide with dollars and once ashore he hands the fish gutted and wrapped in newspaper to the cook who sets before them that night a white plate of barracuda steaks.  These are so good he sits looking at Florence to see if she feels the same.

“Oh Dickie,” she says and lays down her fork.

“How about that.”

“Oh,” she repeats.

Her pleasure is gratifying and Dick tots this as a point in his favor.  But two weeks later when they are in Puerto Vallarta they see Jim Hibbins and his wife Mattie in the Estancia Hotel and Florence is all over them.  At their table drinking gin she seems to put down a guard, suddenly, becoming a happy relaxed Florrie that he has not seen since they left Arizona.  Possibly it is the relief of speaking English but her relief has a desperate air, as though she is a captive taken for a walk by her keeper.  Jim is there on oil business: he has got wind of a field ready to give up and he is there with geologists in tow to see if it is worth what they claim.  “If it is it’ll make me,” he admits under his eyebrows.

“But you’re made already!” Florrie cries.

“Not like this,” he answers.

“Well I think that’s wonderful!”  She addresses Mattie.  “You’re his good luck charm!”

“Luck!  Ha!”  Mattie is loud and wide-faced in a way that is almost pretty with short light blonde hair that looks gray and cheeks red as slabs of beef.  “Why couldn’t it have been in Pennsylvania or Texas like everyone else!  I mean don’t you sort of loathe Mexico.”

“There are some smells,” she agrees.

Mattie throws her head back, “Jim sat in a pool of something we don’t even know what it was it was a terrible foul oooh — !”

Jim says, “Someone’d been awfully sick.”

“And he sat in it!  Oh you should have seen his face he was — !”  She scrunched her face together.  “He wanted to go home then and there.”

“That’s my good luck charm for you.”

“Well but what an interesting choice for a honeymoon.”  Mattie stares at her, mouth just ajar, waiting for the punch line.  “At least it was close!”

“Oh, it’s been wonderful,” Florrie answers.  She pats Dick’s knee.  “It’s been very peaceful and quiet.”

She is so convincing in her affection that he feels the black disgust coming over him again.  For the two weeks they are here and until they are aboard the train home the second week of September the disgust is still there, like a stomach complaint.  The train will take them back up the coast then northeast to El Paso, from there slowly back to Boston with a planned stop in New Orleans to see one of Florrie’s cousins.  The Mexican train is slow going north as though pushing uphill and they hire a sleeping compartment for the first time.  Locked away behind its door that evening they become self-conscious.  They are making a long trip of it – they will not be back in Boston until October — but now that they have begun the trip home, certain questions become almost physical properties of the air.  In particular the question of Alan rises up between them.  They both sense it.

He leaves it there.  He will bat last.  Let her take first crack at it.

“Well,” she says, when they are all settled.

Dick says, “You’ll want to be going  back.”

She nods quickly.  “I think so.  I like it.  I miss the girls.”

“You wouldn’t have to.  No one would look twice.”

“Well what will you do, Dickie?”

“Oh – “  He gestures.  “I’ll make my apologies.  He won’t throw me out.  They don’t think much of that operation to begin with.”

She nods.

“Planetary atmospheres,” he shakes his head.  “I mean.”

They are sitting on opposite benches before the window.  There is a long minute of silence.

The train labors, labors along.  Under a burning streelight a rusted heap of automobile parts slides past as though in a dream.

“Be nice to see everyone,” she brings out.

“Sure.”

“Wonder what old Charlie’s been up to,” she suggests.

“Charlie,” he acknowledges.

Then a change comes over her: her eyebrows rise, her voice goes tremulous and false-casual, pretend-inquiring, and she casts her eye out the window.  “Alan, too!” she manages.

He gives her nothing.

“You know what he did!” she says, “Dickie, he named an ephemerid after me.”

He blinks.  He has never considered anything remotely like this and for a moment it is as though the compartment, the train, the wind outside, the lights, are all disarranged, upside down and cockeyed.  Then with a rush it all makes sense.  Her flinging herself at him; his cool-eyed approach that night; his preening satisfaction.

But he cannot bear this.  It is unbearable.  At this moment right now it is simply not bearable.  “He was joking,” he suggests.

“No.”  She is strained, serious.  Then, she cannot help it.  She smiles.

And the smile is too much.  He reaches across and before he can think he hits her, his hand not quite a fist.  “You goddamned fucking cow,” he hisses.

She is scowling.  She licks her lips once, looking away.  “I didn’t ask him to, Dickie.  He did it without asking me anything about it.”

“The hell he did.”

“Well it’s true.”  She is working her mouth now feeling the results of his blow.  “Goddamn it, Dick, you’ve got some nerve.”

“You are my wife.”

“Well what exactly would you have had me do.“  She meets his eye.  The tender freckles have given way to a deep flattering tan and in this late light her skin is darker than her blond eyebrows.  She is stiff with the shame of having been struck.  “You were working with him all summer, you think you’d have at least half an idea of what’s going through his mind!”

This is not fair: she cannot pass this across to him.  “I saw you two.  On the rock.  What do you think, I saw you.”

She faces him.  She is ferocious, caught out.  “Well I don’t know what you think you saw.”

“I saw you.”

“You don’t know what you saw.  You were drunk.”

“I saw you.”  He is dizzy with the effort to speak.

“Well here I am,” she counters, “with you.”

“You had better be.”

She says nothing.  This itself is a bold enough statement that he stands and without a word pushes out into the corridor, slamming the door behind him.  It is their first married fight and it is a big one.  Worse that they are traveling together and confined.  He walks as far forward as he can go, to the dining car, which is dark with the rubber curtain rucked down, the door locked.  He knocks and stands there longingly as though at the door of a speakeasy; but no one is there.

He knocks again.

Ollie-ollie-in-come-free.

The fucking nerve.  The nerve of it.

He whirls and turns back the way he has come.  In the coach cars there are little islands of activity among the sleeping many.  A dark boy is dealing out solemn cards to himself.  Two grandmothers are conferring, holding hands, dressed alike in black crepe.  A tough in white shirtsleeves is smoking with his hat on.  A smell of unwashed bodies and cheap perfume.  A personal feeling as they all go jim-jimmering along.  Then back in the sleeper cars, where full of scorn and rage he passes his own compartment: the light is low.

But there is nowhere to go.  He goes back as far as he can until he stands in the rocking, clattering vestibule behind the last sleeper and lights a Banderillo, ducking away from the wind and tossing the match at the greasy mechanical tumult beneath his feet.  Overhead a gleaming half-moon.  Above the smell of the engine and the cars there is the giant dry desert smell of northern Chihuahua.  They will be at El Paso in the morning.

His hands are shaking.  He has been made a fool.

In his state he has the crazy urge to jump just to get the hell off the train but figures it would be fatal.  Give them satisfaction.  Flashes of perhaps cactus and the wayside is gravel and stone.  So instead he stands there and smokes and steps aside when the occasional passenger swings a door open to step between cars.  Ordinarily he would clear his throat or cough to suggest that he is not lying in wait for anyone but now he doesn’t give a damn.  No one stops to ask him any questions.  They are all Mexicans, these people, going about whatever mysterious business a Mexican goes about in the middle of the night on a train to Brownsville.  He has no idea.  He wants a drink very badly but there is none to be had.  He thinks of his nose instead and then of his teeth.  They are intact and he runs his tongue over them.  The fronts are stained yellow with tobacco and he guesses whiskey or what passes for it these days.  Coffee, too.  On a sudden disgusted done-with-it-all impulse he chucks the pack of cigarettes with ten or twelve left in it into the wind.  It is stupid but he wants very badly not to smoke another one right now.  In a moment too he throws the matches.

The vestibule door slaps open and a boy lurks out with his hat low over his eyes.  It is the boy with the cards.  He says something in Spanish.

Dick says, “Don’t speak the lingo.”

“Cigarette.”

“Ha ha, well, just tossed em.”  He makes the motion.  “Bad fucking luck there, pal-o.”

The boy unfurls another mild ribbon of commentary.  Then spits over the side.

“Well,” Dickie says.

The boy makes what seems a demand.  Then tips his hat back to show Dick his dark eyes.

“Look.”  Dick flips open his jacket to show his pockets.  He pats the lining, repeats his gesture.  “Nada.  Gone-o.  Throwa offa da train-o.”

The boy confirms this with his own sneer of disgust, makes another remark, then grabs his crotch and yanks once before going back the way he came.

“Fuck off, then,” Dick remarks to the air.

It is an affront.  As such it is bracing and leaves him suddenly more himself.  God damned Barber.  What he has coming.  He waits another minute or two then with nothing better to do he heads back to his compartment.  Florence has taken down her bunk and is asleep or feigning it.  The little chrome lamp is burning and by its light Dick strips naked, heaping the clothes on the lower bunk.  He steps into the washroom and shaves.  The soapy water sways in the basin.  He dries himself with the last clean towel and when this is done he sprays cologne over his torso until he is as clean and sweet-smelling as he can get.

He steps back into the dim compartment and dresses.  The hangers knock in the steamer trunk and his belt jingles.  But Florrie doesn’t stir.  He snaps on a collar and buttons new cuffs around his wrists and puts himself aright in the mirror.  He puts the heel of his hand to his forehead to amend his hairdo.  The hair is always unsatisfactory thanks to the lobing of his skull: it is the Morrow Head.  Other than this he is a handsome American fellow at the moment.

For all the fucking good it does him, anyhow.

He is not sure what he means to do next but he wants to be dressed to do it.  He bundles his old shirt and trousers and things into the laundry bag where it hangs on its chrome hook like a swaddled country ham.

He does not want Florrie to leave him, at least.  If this is to happen, it will be Dick’s doing, not hers.  He has decided this much when he falls asleep sitting upright fully dressed like a mannequin.

He is still asleep when they arrive  at the U.S. border, an hour after dawn.  The train pulls to a siding and up to a platform marked Examinations/Customs.  The conductors lope down the aisles and bang on doors. Those with U.S. passports are given a white tag stamped CITIZEN and a marker is hung in the frame on the compartment door while others with other claims to their time across the border are assigned other indicators.  Dick hands their passports out and receives them back again before returning to his seat at the window.  His mouth is foul with tobacco and he wants a cigarette.  He watches one and then another, finally seven all told, Mexicans as they are expelled onto the dusty platform with their luggage.  It is not a hard thing to get across the border and likely these are legitimate travelers who have only misplaced their papers; or they are unusually lazy even for Mexicans, he thinks, without even the imagination to walk across where no one is looking.  They do not look surprised.  He has found that Mexicans do not look anything in particular, as a rule.

The train starts up again and Florence stirs in her bunk.  “What was that?” she inquires, over the edge of the bed.

“The border,” he replies.

She grunts and rolls back into the white bedclothes.  She kicks them down to her ankles and emits a long whimpering groan as she stretches to her full length.

She rolls again and squints down at him.  “What’re you all dressed for already?”

He has no answer for her.  His jacket, his cuffs, his collar, his tie: all evidence of his captured fury.  She sees it.  She sits up.  Her nose has peeled and the white raccoon effect around her eyes is more pronounced.  Her blond hair is bushy and she reaches up to test its volume.

“Well,” she remarks, “you decided to stay.”

He has no answer for this, either.   He stares at her for a long moment.  By god he is still all riled up.  It is a hell of a feeling.  Fine.  The pits.  Both of these.