“What happened between you all?” Lore asks. “You and Rosana?”
Andres doesn’t look surprised by her question. He leans an elbow on the bar, absently tearing a wet cocktail napkin. “You don’t mind talking about this?”
“If I did, I wouldn’t be asking.”
He nods. “I told you we married young, twenty-four, and we had Penelope the following year. I was still new to DF, I was getting my maestría, I felt like there was so much life still to be lived and like I had . . . given it up. That’s how I saw it. That marriage and kids were a sacrifice, instead of a gift.”
Lore swallows, shame slick at the back of her throat.
“I was not a good husband,” he continues, tapping the edge of his glass on the bar. “I used every excuse not to be home: I was studying, I was working. Then I started going out with friends from the UNAM. We went to the oldest, shittiest, most wonderful cantinas, drinking tequila with the viejos from afternoon until close, all of us trying to escape something—wives, kids, boredom, memories. We went to speakeasies hidden in basements and behind restaurant freezers. We went to clubs and danced until the sun came up. And all the while, Rosana was home with Penelope. The baby would be crying when I left and crying when I got home. The pitch of that damn cry, it made me want to scream.”
Lore winces.
“I know.” Andres’s jaw is clenched. “On top of it, Rosana was struggling with breastfeeding, and Penelope wouldn’t take the bottle. So Penelope was hungry and miserable, losing weight, and there’s Rosana, no sleep, recovering from a C-section. Then one day, I get home, and they’re not there. It turns out Rosana had been in the hospital for half a day already. Mastitis. The infection had gotten so bad she was in there for a week, on heavy-duty antibiotics. And I’d never even noticed.”
“Oh, God,” Lore says, feeling for Rosana. She thinks of how dutifully Fabian woke up with her for those early nighttime feedings, how he always helped position the boys at her breasts, and how, once she was settled with pillows beneath both arms, he’d make her warm buttered tortillas to keep her energy up. When her nipples cracked and bled, he pressed Vaseline into them with the tip of his pinkie finger. They were both so tired, but she remembers those first few weeks with a blurred warmth, the sense memory of skin on skin. This was before Lore’s anxiety set in, all the terrible fantasies of loss. Before the power of watching her give birth had faded from Fabian’s memory. Before the cruel banality of motherhood set in.
“I know,” Andres says. “Her father told me it was time to step up. But I didn’t know how to do that.” He takes the final sips of watery Scotch. “It took two years for me to finally come to my senses. By then it was too late. Rosana never saw me the same way again.”
“But—how long were you married after that?”
Andres smiles wryly. “Ten years.”
“And in all that time . . . ?”
“We were good to each other.” Behind them, a sudden burst of laughter. Andres waits for the group to settle down before continuing. “But there was never that intimacy again, even when she became pregnant with Carlitos. I thought a new baby could be our chance. By then she didn’t need my help. You have never seen a more capable mother,” he says, with unmistakable pride, and for the first time, Lore feels a dart of jealousy, right to the heart.
“So why did it finally end?” she asks.
“She found someone she could see with fresh eyes.”
Lore forces herself to look at him, instead of the olives in her empty glass. “She had an affair?”
“Looking back, I’m surprised it didn’t happen sooner.” Andres waves the bartender over, and they order another round. “I don’t blame her anymore. But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t hate her for a while. I’d spent so many years atoning, and for what?”
Lore feels a slow crumble in her chest. He deserves better than what she is doing. If they continue, she is going to hurt him. She is going to hurt everyone. She feels this, the way a dormant volcano must sense its own potential for destruction. Though right now, the heat is a smolder, contained. She can control it. She will control it.
Andres laughs awkwardly. “Well, if you didn’t think I was a catch before . . .”
Lore slides a hand to the back of his head, and before she can think, before she’s even decided, she’s drawing his mouth to hers. His lips part as he rests a hand below her hips, where she wills it to touch, to squeeze, to drag her closer. After a few moments, he lifts that hand to stroke the hidden nape of her neck instead, a touch so intimate it makes her shiver. There’s a dull roar in her ears, and something falls away, some piece of her, right as a different piece is revealed.
“Mmm.” Andres sighs, smiling, as they pull away. “I’ve been thinking about that for three months.”
“Me too.” Lore reaches, shaking, for her martini, not noticing when it had been replaced. She blinks hard against the rise of tears, forcing them to recede.
“And what about you?” he asks, as softly as the noise of the bar will allow. “When was your last relationship?”
Lore freezes. She hasn’t yet told him an outright lie, other than the one about her home phone line having issues receiving calls, and she doesn’t want to start. Once she does, she sees how the lies will build, brick after brick into a fortress designed to protect, but protection means separation, means they will never be as close as he thinks or she wants, and one mistake, one misremembered detail, will be enough to take down the whole thing, burying them both beneath its rubble.
“Last year,” she says, thinking it’s true, after all; she and Fabian were together last year, just as they have been every year since she was seventeen.
“How long?”
“We were high school sweethearts.” Lore hates herself for talking about Fabian in the past tense, for talking about him at all. He doesn’t belong here, with this version of her. She touches her locket, a silent apology. Dangerous to be wearing it, but important, too, keeping this piece of Fabian and the cuates close. Her wedding ring is zipped into the inner compartment of her purse.
Andres raises his eyebrows. “So, you were together for as long as Rosana and me.”
Lore nods.
“What happened?”
When Lore thinks back on this question many years later, she will understand it wasn’t the recession or loneliness that brought her here. It wasn’t that she no longer loved Fabian or wanted their marriage to end. It was a different kind of yearning. A nameless suspicion that there was more to herself than she’d ever accessed, and only by falling in love could she discover it, for only then do we become new to ourselves again.
“I’m not really sure.” Lore traces a fingertip along the rim of her glass, trying not to imagine Fabian right now, tossing and turning in Joseph Guerra’s guest room. “Maybe we just grew away from each other.”
“Grew apart, you mean?” Andres asks, and after a moment, Lore nods, though this wasn’t actually what she meant.
They stay at La Opera Bar for one more round, until Andres takes Lore by the hand and they bump, laughing, through the midnight crowd so he can point out a hole in the plastered ceiling, a souvenir, supposedly, from one of Pancho Villa’s bullets. By the time they’re wandering the Zócalo hand in hand, Lore is kinetic with martini-soaked happiness. At some point, despite Andres’s laughing objections, Lore removes her patent leather heels and stuffs them in her purse, choosing the grit of the street over the swelling blisters.
“Did you bring your bike?” Lore asks finally, glancing up at him. In bare feet, her head falls right at his shoulder. The moonlight softens his features, though his profile maintains an aristocratic seriousness.
“Yes, but I’m not sure you’re in a state to ride,” he says, nudging her playfully.