Trouble by Kate Christensen

Author:Kate Christensen
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Contemporary
ISBN: 9780594003267
Publisher: Anchor
Published: 2008-12-31T05:00:00+00:00

e all left Pata Negra together at about 1:30 in the morning—Raquel, David, Chuy, and a crowd of people I had just met, including Miguel, who owned David’s house, and his wife, Luz, and a group of artists named Felipe, Alfredo, and Eugenia, who apparently all lived in Miguel’s apartment building, too. It appeared that we were all headed there together to look at Felipe’s paintings and have a late supper. Also, apparently, Alfredo and Eugenia were having a two-person opening the next night at an art gallery, which we were all going to go to. I gleaned all of this somehow, by making out some of their Spanish and having Raquel turn to me when she remembered to hurriedly translate. The Mexicans didn’t seem to realize I didn’t speak Spanish. Every now and then, one of them turned to me to include me in the conversation. I found that if I smiled at whoever was talking, the person felt as if I were part of things, and was reassured that he or she was doing a good job as host. I didn’t want them all to feel they had to switch to English just for me, assuming they all spoke it.

I could tell a lot about them just from watching their gestures and reading their inflections. I had often thought before about how little our intuitive knowledge of other people has to do with the actual content of their words. David, in a group, was charming but self-controlled. Eugenia evidently had a terrible crush on him; she shot frequent shy looks at him as she talked to make sure he was listening, and seemed to be slightly self-conscious but happy when he looked at her. I guessed that Luz was the alpha female of the group, a plump little woman with short curly hair and a motherly manner and a quiet but commanding voice. She had a full, pendulous lower lip that twisted slightly when she talked in an ugly-sexy way and showed her large square teeth.

The women were mysterious to me. They had none of the affectations or gestures I was used to in New York women. They were softer, more rounded, less edgy, not at all competitive with the men, more sure of their looks; they seemed grounded in a sense of their own entitlement to beauty, no matter what their shape or size. Latinas in New York were a little like that, but here they were quieter, less flaunting of their plumage, more sexually subdued, but no less confident or forthright.

We all hunched and hugged our jackets to us, shivering. We walked quickly through a small park and then turned left and headed down the same tree-lined street Raquel and I had come along earlier. Raquel was in a goofy, punch-drunk mood; she and Chuy were walking together, jabbering away in Spanish, laughing. Their building was one of the Jetson-era chrome ones. Miguel unlocked the front door and led us all through a tile-floored hallway into an entryway, then past a staircase that led to an upper floor.

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