We talked to the prostitutes in the heat of the day. I looked in their eyes while I translated for Gray. Metallic blue eyelids and spidery lashes reached for the black angles of their shaved and penciled brows. He asked me to ask them to marry him. They told us that they were already married. I imagined them getting ready for work while their husbands watched them put on the too small, light blue latex mini-dress and the three-inch wedge heels. The same dress day after day. It was indelicate to compare the dresses to hotel comforters, but I slept in so many hotels that it was hard to keep the likeness at bay. Alone at night, I processed comparisons: Gray’s genius inside his clumsy body, prostitute dresses over daughter-of-God souls, comforters and the discomfort of their histories, a cellphone that made the distance more obvious instead of less. Zero missed calls. No new messages.
The walls were thin at La Chinesca, the hotel named for where it was, Chinatown in Mexicali. Like most of the hotels two blocks south of the border, some rooms at La Chinesca hid northbound emigrants. Herded by coyotes, they sat atop a single mattress on a cinderblock bed and waited for dark. Exhausted from translating and driving sunup to sundown in the 115 degree heat, I passed a room with an open door. A dozen or more men in cowboy boots and sneakers crowded inside. Relieved that it was a night when I didn’t have to interview them or make a run for it with them, I went to my room and showered.
After the shower, I soaked fresh garments in cold water, put them on wet, picked up my book and lay back on the comforter. It was too hot to care about its stories. Gray’s voice came mumbling through the nothing wall. I hardly heard the woman, but I understood that Gray brought one of our girls to his room after a late-night prowl.
If love was the international language, pidgin was spoken after dark on busy border streets. The smell of sweat and roasted meat turned aphrodisiacal once the blistering sun went down and everyone had a last burst of energy. Enough for one more dance, one more cigarette, one more walk up the stairs with the room key in hand. Gray painted portraits of the girls. He took their pictures for his book. He recorded them singing illegal corridos. They needed the money. He, the company.
Some nights, I went to bed afraid. Not of Gray’s doings next door or the human traffic down the hall. It was leftover fear from being blindfolded in the back of a car or the night I left my passport and a description of myself in my hotel room in case we didn’t return. The post-apocalyptic imagery in the book I was reading mingled with those memories, a combination so visceral that for minutes at a time I put the book face down on my chest and tuned in to what was happening next door, timing my breath to Gray’s voice until fear faded.
I fell asleep that way and dreamed of the girls. Descending the plank staircase to resume their positions in doorways, the prostitutes spoke in euphemisms. They “split the pilot,” “made good use of the archives,” “studied revolution.” It was nonsense. It was a dream about people speaking a language on top of the one I translated, the second more foreign than the first because I had no frame of reference for the work the girls did.
Always, Gray had to come clean the next morning as if the breakfast counter on the corner was a confessional and I, the grad school celibate, could absolve his profligacy. We ate refried beans and tortillas. He drank coffee, and I drank warm chocolate until the day I asked the cook why it was so good. He pulled out a bag of espresso.
I reminded Gray that the walls were thin. He shifted. It bothered his most gentlemanly instincts to know that I knew before he told me. It came too close to the line he drew for himself. On our first morning as a working team, Gray invited me into his room. He saw my hesitation and promised that, to me, he would never do anything untoward.
He never did. No one did.
That afternoon, the girls told me it would cost 400 pesos for Gray to take a picture of them outside the Hotel Nuevo Pacífico. In the end, only the most inexperienced prostitute agreed to be photographed. Her short, blue-black hair was tied up in two girlish pigtails. They didn’t hide the age in her eyes. If her eyes told the truth, she’d been alive since the first Chinese left their boats and began sewing cotton into the earth that was fertile before America siphoned off all but the last of the Colorado River.
She stood awkwardly in the arched doorway while Gray set up his big accordion camera and put his head under the curtain. He was legally blind. The viewfinder like a windowpane did the work his eyes could not. A seasoned prostitute, one who refused to have her picture taken for less than 600, tugged at the pigtails. She adjusted the girl’s dress and showed her how to stand provocatively. It didn’t come naturally. I stood there in my sweaty gauchos and said, “No se mueve. This will just take a minute.” In ten it was over. Gray gave the girl sixty dollars, making sure the better prostitute saw what he paid.
“Do you notice, Terrie, that there is something hard about prostitutes?” Gray asked as we carried the big camera through the cement arcade and back to the car. His back was so wet with sweat that his shirt looked two-toned. “They don’t start out that way, but it doesn’t take long for their eyes to go hard.” “Of course, Gray,” I said. I wondered at him. Was it true that even the most intelligent of men were Adamic at their cores? They did not want to know that Eve ate the fruit because it was necessary, not because it tasted good.
Having translated something for Gray the next morning, I knocked on his door. He answered in a towel, and I was surprised by the smooth, golden skin on his chest. His face carried a hundred years of stories and woe. His chest was what might have been if his sister had never drowned, freeing him from saving street girls as penance. My heart throbbed and my face flushed. It was not attraction; I loved Gray too much for that. It was hope born from seeing that part of him was still a clean slate.
That night, I had a missed call from Tyler, my Olympian. He was not a clean slate. He invited me to spend a night in LA so that I could drive him to the airport for a competition in Mexico. In the hotel room his sponsor got for him, I sat at the table reading The Times while he stretched. The tattoo on his shoulder rose and fell like the cycle of a pale, full moon. We laughed at a commercial on TV, and I wondered how our voices, one baritone and one barely discernable, sounded to the girl reading alone next door. I fell asleep on his bed.
After dropping him at LAX the next morning, I drove back south and thought about the singular experience of waking up from an apocalypse dream and seeing the outline of his shoulder. I watched the slow, rhythmic movement of the tattooed eagle and mountain riding the up and down of his sleep. I trusted Tyler more than I trusted any man who found himself in a hotel room with an exhausted woman who spent her days with prostitutes and her nights alone. With my glasses off, the darkness swirled. To clear the bad dream, I made shapes and scenes with the designs on his back just like the heady Greeks who lay in the growth on an Athenian hilltop and turned the stars into the maps of their minds, naming constellations for the Gods and heroes of their world.
At the Bar Tres Negros, the constellations morphed. They were made by the ashy orange cigarette ends that trembled and fell like shooting stars in the pitch blackness. Despite the high noon heat and the bald-eyed sun, the bar was dark except for small red lights that traced the outline of the dance floor and the glow that punctuated the faces of the men who smoked while they watched the dancing. Three sun-damaged men paid ten pesos to hug women tightly and two-step around the dance floor. The shortest man wore a white t-shirt and no cowboy hat. He kissed his dancing girl twice on the lips. She looked sympathetic, but she quickly backed away when he tried for more. Ten pesos bought a dance and a peck, anything else cost more money and was perhaps not her line of work at all. He’d have to cross the street like we did, not staying in any one place too long.
We left Chinatown to find the date palm and grapefruit ranch we visited the year before. The old caretaker remembered us. He pulled sundried dates from the trees and gave them to us to eat. They were sweet and chewy. The world surprised me. These were the dates that weren’t attractive enough for the harvesters. They dried out before rotting, and for months they hung from the trees like passed-over candy. He also gave us a box of citrus. We said goodbye and drove and stopped and interviewed and drove and stopped all afternoon. In a field where adults and children harvested cauliflower, a man pulled a machete from the leather belt on his waist. He took the fruit from our box and sliced each sphere in half. We stood there under a sun so hot that its radiant heat, not its rays, burned the skin. We ate the halved grapefruits and navel and blood oranges not caring that the juice ran down our faces. Together we ate and were satisfied that among all the dirt and desert of Baja, we found a patch of green and blue.
We stopped at a bar on the outskirts of the city that evening. It didn’t feel like the Tres Negros. There were more people and live music. There was light. We sat down at a table, and two women immediately came up and asked if Gray and I were husband and wife. When we said that we worked together, they flanked Gray. The waiter came. We understood the game. We ordered drink after drink for the women and ourselves. If we stopped buying, the women would get up. If they got up, we would be wise to leave even if Gray hadn’t finished his interviews.
Gray drank Tecate. The women followed his lead. I had a Coke, and then another and another. It wasn’t a problem. The heat was so systemic that we drank all day and never peed. One of the women watched me. I was making her angry, but I didn’t know why. She got in my face and asked me why I was not drinking beer. I told her that I was religious. She cried. She said she would like to have a life like mine, but she had five children to feed and no husband. Jesus dined with women like her because of moments like those, moments when mortality’s brutal grip relaxed long enough for a child of God to emerge and draw breath. I told her to flag down the white shirt and tie guys the next time they biked through her neighborhood.
In Monterrey, the Olympian got off the flight I drove him to catch. He checked into the hotel, and the girl at the counter was pretty. She was muy bonita. He won the competition and almost set the American record. They got drunk together at a club. She was small and warm and danced for him with her salsa hips and Tequila tongue. She was all the things I wouldn’t. After three days, the Olympian came home. When he got in my car, he confessed that he’d been with the hotel clerk. “This has to stop,” I said. His face was sympathetic, like the woman on the dance floor at the Tres Negros.
Back south, I walked beside Gray, too tired to tell him about the split. He could no more save me from my own salvation than I could pardon his sins. Alongside us, the prostitutes multiplied as the sun set, everyone poised for that moment when darkness took the burn out of the day. I nodded to the girls in the doorways. They nodded back. Comparisons converged. I went up to my room at La Chinesca. They went up to the rooms at the Nuevo Pacífico. All hotels told the same story.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints teaches its members to be “in the world but not of it.” I remember a Venn diagram to that effect and the sensation that the interstice in which I was supposed to live was suffocatingly tight. So it was that after a mission to Northern Spain I came home and put my Spanish to good use translating in the brothels and backstreets of Mexican border cities. At the same time, I dated an Olympian who was, like me, a Christian but not, like me, a Mormon. “Hotels” is a pastiche of those experiences, crossing and uncrossing borders while pushing outward against the walls of the interstice.
Terrie Petree & Hollands is a writer of fiction, nonfiction and essays. She lives in Pacific Beach, California, with her husband and three children. Petree is working with Susan Golomb at Writers House to bring out her debut novel, The Loca of San Blas Pier. (womendontwaltz.blog)