“And the job?” Karen asks.
“It was … it was wonderful,” Alice says, as she always does, though she’s starting to believe herself less and less. It was interesting, and sounded exotic to people when she spoke of it, and she liked that. She liked that Eloise called the job “worldly” and “sophisticated.” She liked that she could join her mother and her half sister in the experience of living and working abroad; that she wouldn’t be lumped in with her father’s pool, whose sense of geography began in Wicker Park and ended in Sarasota, Florida. But the job itself? The day-to-day of it? It was … fine. The problem, she figures, is that she’d na?vely assumed that an intellectual interest (passion was the word she used most often when describing her attachment to Mexican cinema) would translate into some sort of fulfilling career. If anything, her stint with Banditas made her hate the movies she’d loved just months before. She learned too much about them, and about the artistic sacrifices that were made to get the pictures produced. “It’s like I’m learning how the sausage gets made,” she remembers having told her brother during one of their weekly phone calls. “And it’s disgusting.”
“Of course it’s disgusting,” Paul had replied. “It’s Hollywood.”
“Actually, it’s Mexico City.”
“You know what I mean.”
She realizes now that her mistake had been trying to do something she loved for a living.
Karen twirls a jade necklace around her finger. “The boy? I mean, the man,” she says, apologetically. “Where does he come into the picture?”
“Right,” Alice says. “I’m rambling. I’m sorry.”
Karen says, “You need to stop apologizing.”
“Sorry.”
The redhead smiles.
“A Chilango,” Alice says. “Grew up in D.F., but went to school at Boston College. Not in the industry or anything. A consultant, actually. He worked in McKinsey’s Mexico City office.”
“His name?”
“I’d prefer not to say.”
It was Alejandro. Ten months after Alice arrived from L.A. they met at a bar in La Roma—a small, angular place that served one type of torta and eighty different kinds of mescal. She’d gone there with two coworkers, and first saw him standing next to a cigarette machine. When she went to the bar to get another beer (she hated mescal; she thought it tasted like you were gargling a chimney), a bartender with skulls tattooed on his wrists started hassling her over a tip, and Alejandro swooped in to save her.
“Thanks,” she said. He had dark hair and those sharp green eyes that reminded her of certain Italian actors who were always cast as members of the aristocracy. A young Marcello Mastroianni, maybe.
“You’re American?” He gave the bartender the twenty pesos to get lost.
“Sí,” she responded in Spanish. She was afraid he’d think she was helpless. Just another gringa tourist.
Behind her, someone lit a cigarette. She heard the first flick of a match, smelled the first waft of tobacco.
“Here on vacation?”
“No.” She ran a hand through her hair. “Vivo aqui. En Condesa.”
“We can speak in English, you know.”
She grinned and took a sip of his mescal, resisting the urge to pull a face. He grinned back.
“Okay,” she said. “Si quieres.”
“Sí, lo quiero. I need to practice.”
He didn’t, though. His English was perfect. He’d attended an American school in Lomas de Chapultepec before shipping off to Boston College, and after graduating he’d spent two years with McKinsey in New York before asking to be transferred to the company’s Mexico City office.
“My mother was ill,” he said.
“Is she okay now?”
“Healthy as can be.” Behind them, someone dropped a torta to the floor and cursed. “To be honest, she wasn’t really that sick. I was just tired of winters in the Northeast.”
After an hour, Alice’s coworkers found her and whispered that they were headed home, but encouraged her to stay.
“Oh, don’t worry,” she whispered back en espa?ol, “I am.”
She was enjoying herself, and she could tell that Alejandro was, too. He kept finding ways to lean into her; he’d blame the people standing on the opposite side of him, but when Alice glanced over his shoulder, she’d see that there wasn’t a single person within three feet of them. He convinced her to try three different kinds of mescal. The last one she actually liked, or at the very least tolerated, though she doubted it was the drink itself; by that point, she figured, she was drunk enough that her brain was filtering out the booze’s smokiness, its ash. They talked about the things she missed from the States (“not going to bed nervous that I accidentally used tap water to brush my teeth”), and the things that surprised her about D.F. (“People have shockingly nice shoes. In L.A. all I ever wore were flip-flops”). They discussed the city’s unsettling ethnic and phenotypic divisions; how once you crossed into the wealthy enclave of Polanco, people suddenly became taller, fairer, thinner, and more European looking than their European ancestors could ever have hoped to be. They shared how that particular neighborhood made them uncomfortable, hyperaware of their own privilege. After two more drinks, they sheepishly admitted that because it had the best restaurants, maybe Polanco wasn’t so bad.
“You just have to know what you’re getting yourself into, I guess,” Alice said, sucking on the end of a cocktail straw. She was drunk enough that she wanted to throw a few pesos into the cigarette machine and buy a pack, but not so drunk that she was unworried about what Alejandro thought of smoking.
He said, “Right. I actually live there.”
“I have a lot of friends who do, too.” She set the straw down. “I live closer.”
“Oh?”
“About a ten-minute walk.”
She let him poke around her apartment while she emptied half a bottle of red wine into two water glasses. There wasn’t much to look at, she realized for the first time: a full bed tucked away behind a set of French doors; a living area with a love seat and a matching set of Ikea side tables; a framed poster for Sólo con tu pareja that she’d found while digging through a stack of old movie memorabilia at a flea market in Coyoacán; a pile of scripts covered in Post-its.
“Who’s this?”
He was holding a picture of her, Paul, and Eloise that she kept on one of the side tables. Her father had taken it the last time they had all been together, at Alice’s graduation from UCLA. Half the time she forgot it was even there.
Alice circled around the couch to hand Alejandro his glass and look at the photo. She was still decked out in her cap and gown, and she clutched a bouquet of flowers to her chest. Paul’s eyes were closed, and Eloise’s hair looked perfect.
“That’s my brother,” she said, pointing at Paul with her free hand.
“You two look alike.”
“You think?”
Alejandro squinted. “Sure, same color hair and all that.” He had started to slur his s’s. “And who’s that?”
“My half sister.”