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MANAGE YOUR SUBSCRIPTIONWide-Eyed In The Gaudy Shop
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A man is not complete until he is married. Then he is finished.
— Zsa Zsa Gabor
Jerez de García Salinas, Zacatecas, Mexico
At a backyard barbecue under the tangled mesquite trees around his run-down but peaceable home, Victor, one of my fellow English-as-a-second-language teachers at the Instituto de Inglés, insists that there is nothing in the States for me, no reason for me to return. I know, I admit, but Mexico is not my country; I can’t go on pretending. Besides, I’m broke, and my visa is up. On the grill Victor cooks pork chops marinated in orange juice, garlic, and beer, alongside anchos and helote: chiles and corn on the cob. His two dogs run in mindless circles around the great shady yard with its crumbling stone walls.
Victor was born here in this Mexican valley town, but he grew up in LA, and as comfortable as he is in this place, he will always be an American at heart: Eric Clapton albums, In-N-Out Burgers, Buffalo Bills football (Thurman Thomas was his man), separation of church and state. I am the only one in his circle of acquaintances who can satisfactorily discuss these areas of knowledge with him. We also talk a lot about his favorite subject: women, our students especially. He’s amused that I like the dark ones, he the light ones. He’s dark (he likes to point out); I’m light. Victor married twice in the U.S. , taught in various LA public high schools, lost two houses in two divorces, then got tired of the traffic jams, the gangs, the drugs, the incivility, the cost of living, the relentless individualism. So he moved back here, where he lives with a local girl he intends to marry. Despite his matrimonial flops, civil-sanctioned union is still one of the three pillars in his triumvirate of happiness, along with fire (he turns a marinated chop on the grill) and a dog.
“You ought to get yourself a wife,” he says to me, as he does every time we talk, and as usual he makes the case for the servile, steady, faithful Mexican woman over her implacable, masculine American counterpart, she of ceaseless acquisition who files for divorce and takes your house.
I can’t begin to explain my situation to Victor, nor to any of the Trumpeting Army of Eternally Optimistic Matchmakers. Though I’ve had my share of romance in my life and dream of picket fences and pudding in the evening as much as anyone, I’ve never understood how two people can stay together. Just going steady as a youngster created mind-boggling anxiety for me. Proms and other serious courting rituals were most often salvaged (and then savaged) by drugs and alcohol. I haven’t found the “right one” in thirty years. Not even close. I’m forty-four, and unless you’re talking about some kind of shuffleboard-and-square-dancing arrangement, I’m long past the usual age of marriageability. Some of my contemporaries already have grandchildren.
I tell Victor, as I tell all my nosy matchmaker friends, that even though I’m not altogether opposed to the possibility of an amorous adventure strolling in while I’m having my grapefruit and coffee, I’m also not so lonely or horny or discontented that I would take a foreign bride. And I doubt that a wife, exotic or otherwise, would have any effect other than to complicate my malaise. I sleep in odd fits and am fiddle-footed, insecure, and inclined to depressions. Even I have lost all patience with me. Often I wish I would die just so I could run down that dark tunnel with the white light at the end and kick God in the balls, and I’ve said this out loud in a variety of perversely imaginative forms. I don’t need a live-in housekeeper or a loyal companion who will become annoyed at the way I chew my potatoes. I’ve been doing my own housework since I moved out of my parents’ home at age seventeen. My once strong and steady sexual appetite has atrophied over the years into a merciful dormancy, and I don’t care to reawaken it for the purposes of satisfying a set of lowbrow, pop-song platitudes. I’ll be single until I die, and I like it that way; at least it gives me more time in the evenings to read.
