I wanted to say, wanted to insist, that I was a good man. I was three drinks drunk on a mix of strong white wine and pineapple ice cream, at a dive bar off the yellow line. They called the drink a terremoto—an “earthquake,” for how unsteady the ground felt after you had a couple. I had yet to try to stand.
My then-girlfriend, later-fiancée, now-nothing was at home with her old DVDs of Sex and the City. She was also drunk, quite verbally so, but on something thoroughly North American. Whiskey, I think, mixed with Coca Cola she bought at the botillería around the corner. Lately she’d become impossible, and she said the same of me. We’d been in Chile for three months by then and the culture shock had chewed us all to hell. The language, the different social mores, the lack of air conditioning. She’d reached the point where she didn’t want to go out anymore; she said she couldn’t go to one more restaurant where she had to keep her purse on her lap or else someone would steal it. I’d started stockpiling takeout menus from nearby restaurants, organized by which ones were most patient with nonnative speakers when you called. We were everywhere baffled, even at home, and when the opportunity arose we tore into each other.
I’d left in a huff after a fight about nothing and now across from me was a chilena named Meryl, after the North American actress. She looked about my age, mid- to late-twenties. She wore black jeans and had her legs crossed with her ankle on her knee, like a man. I had mistakenly tried to confide in her, and she was now telling me that all men were dogs, worse than dogs. She said she felt sorry for my woman, but not for me. She felt sorry for all women everywhere. Men were impossible, always impossible. Then she told me this story.
When Meryl was younger, she had worked as a street prostitute. From age eighteen she’d spent her weekend evenings in Parque Forestal or on Vikuña Mackenna, finding clients then walking to one of the nearby hoteles de amor that charged hourly.
My god, I said in Spanish. I am so sorry.
I am not one of those men, I added.
She said to shut up and listen.
One day a woman approached Meryl in Parque Forestal. She had blonde hair, clearly a gringa. It was winter, but you could see her bangs poking out from beneath her hat. Get out of here, Meryl told her. I don’t do women.
In broken Spanish the woman said it wasn’t for her but for her boyfriend. Her fiancé. She started to cry.
They were standing next to a stone sculpture of a horse, rearing up on its hind legs. There were two other women standing not far off from Meryl, also waiting for customers, but when the gringa started to cry they moved deeper into the park, to another well-lit place untainted by the sound of this woman’s sobs. I am weak, the gringa was saying. Why has God made me so weak?
Meryl stayed out of stubbornness, not willing to give up her usual spot, wanting to insist that it be the gringa who left instead. In her start-and-stop Spanish shot through with tears, the gringa started telling Meryl about how her boyfriend had just proposed. He’d bought a cheap ring off the street, promising to buy her a real ring next time they were in the States.
That’s where we’re from, the States, the woman said. You have to understand, he did not want to, how do you say, be cheated here. We know there is always a special price for gringos.
The gringa tried to laugh. She wiped at her eyes.
All this time Meryl was watching the periphery, scanning for potential customers. She was afraid the woman’s blonde hair, even mostly covered, would draw attention away from her.
Congratulations, Meryl said, unsure what else the woman might be looking for, hoping this might be the end of it.
No, listen, the gringa said, stepping closer. I am weak. I don’t believe him when he tells me things, when he buys me things. I think, what might he be hiding?
Despite herself, Meryl stopped watching the edges of the park and glanced at the woman. She was now very close, close enough to kiss. Her words were hard to follow, jumbled as they were with tears and emotion and misconjugations. But Meryl got the general idea, and soon she was genuinely intrigued.
The woman wanted Meryl to seduce her potential husband. Or rather, in an ideal world—which I must now interject this world surely is not—to attempt to seduce him. To confirm that even if women threw themselves at him, he would turn them away. That the gringa was all he wanted.
I want you to be the opposite of me, the gringa said. Men like women helpless, no? I am not helpless. Do you speak English?
A little.
Do not speak any English.
The gringa had stopped crying. She asked Meryl for a cigarette, and as Meryl leaned in to light it for her she saw an indignant fury in the gringa’s eyes under the reflected flame. The gringa took a long full puff and started to cough.
Be helpless, the gringa said again.
Meryl met the man at a new hipster bar in Lastarria. It had high walls covered in reproductions of ironic art. The waiters wore black aprons and T-shirts of American sports teams. She sat down beside the fiancé at the bar. She’d been shown his picture, and was told he’d be there around nine. He gave English classes down the street, and always stopped for a glass of wine after. He was a plain-looking man with an early gray streak at his temples, but he spoke Spanish well. Almost no accent. Better than the gringa’s.
Meryl had learned to act many different ways in front of men. In front of women she could only be herself, but in front of men this was impossible. She was too used to reading their desire and acting accordingly. So it was easy for her to tell the man, blush rising to her cheeks, that she had left her wallet at her office. She was a receptionist there, and the doors were now locked.
I don’t know what I’m going to do, she said. I don’t have my metro card, I have no way to go home. Would you buy me a glass of wine? It helps me think.
The man bought her a glass of wine. He even offered her his metro card. It only cost a couple thousand pesos. He could always get another. The man was very generous.
Meryl told him her name was Marcela, and said he spoke Spanish well, though too formally to be Chilean. She asked him to tell her about himself. After that he wouldn’t shut up. He told her all his big gringo plans. He wanted to start a shelter for the stray dogs on the Santiago streets. He wanted to volunteer teach next summer in the poorer regions of Patagonia. Meryl nodded along generously with all his ideas, as if she understood why someone would care so much for the neighborhood dogs, many of which were fat on the scraps people left for them. As if a couple English classes would solve the problems of the poverty-stricken in Patagonia. As he talked he crumpled and uncrumpled the cocktail napkin that had come with his drink. He said he wanted to write a book in English about the aftershocks of the Pinochet regime, to share the voices of the missing and the dead. He was no writer, he said, but there were stories that needed to be told.
They shared several glasses of wine. He asked about the place she said she worked, a copper mining company with locations up and down Chile, but he seemed at a loss for ways to pursue this line of conversation. He did better discussing himself. He waved his hand dismissively when Meryl said thank you, a thousand thank-yous for the wine. Meryl had a high tolerance for wine. Men liked to watch her drink it, liked to buy it for her, and she knew how to act tipsy, or “happy” as they say in Chile.
After a while the man said he had to get home. Still he made no mention of any fiancée, and Meryl thought that this was a bad sign. She’d begun to root for her gringita, for the idea that two people could belong to each other in a way that wasn’t sordid. She wanted this man to politely rebuff her advances, not offer to walk her to the metro, which was what he was now doing.
Outside the metro stop, Meryl leaned against the railing next to the stairs leading down to the train. Above her was a glowing red M for metro. Give me a minute, she said. She touched two fingers to her temple. I think I’m drunk, she said.
I’ll put you in a cab, the man said. The metro will close soon.
Meryl shook her head. The man touched her shoulder and asked was she sure. She leaned in and kissed him gently, playfully, on the lips. He said something and started to back away. She gave him another kiss, acting hungrier now, tugging gently at the hair on the back of his head. The man kissed back, just for a moment. Then he pulled away.
For the first time now his Spanish was less sure. He was visibly aroused and stuttered a bit and said he couldn’t, he was engaged. He offered again to give her cab money.
Meryl laughed. I don’t want your money, weón, I want you. The man turned red and walked away, hands in his pockets.
In a grimy bar many years later, I smiled happily over my drink, though I knew from Meryl’s initial comments that the story was not over. There was some spin she would give it, the way a bowler applies spin to his ball so halfway down the lane it veers off at a new angle, toward some less obvious destination. Maybe the point Meryl had extracted from all this was the way the gringa’s doubts lingered, the impossibility of ever trusting anyone else. Or that the gringo had a hard-on and in that moment kissed her back, his body betraying him at a biological level, showing its thirst for more than his fiancée.
I was sure that somehow Meryl had missed her own point: that people can be true to each other. I thought of my then-girlfriend, back at our apartment. I wanted to go home and bury myself in the crook of her neck, the hem of her dress, and cry for all the moments we’d ever spent apart, in doubt.
You see, I said, there are good people out there.
She gave me a look of deep disgust. Oye, weón, she said, the story is not finished. I saw that woman again, months later, walking rapidly at night through Parque Forestal. I yelled after her, angrily, and chased her. The gringa tried to run but couldn’t run fast enough.
Meryl explained the deal had been that the gringa would pay half up front and half after she did or did not fuck the husband-to-be, a high sum because in all things there is always a higher price for gringos. But the gringa had never returned. Meryl had imagined the gringa had forgot all about the other half of the money when her fiancé had arrived home unsoiled. Perhaps a guilt-filled roll in the sack had wiped her mind and conscience clean. Or perhaps she was so shamed by her doubt that she couldn’t bring herself to return to Meryl with the money. Whatever the reason, Meryl was now annoyed. So she grabbed the gringa’s sleeve, and the gringa started to cry. Dios mío, she thought, the tears with this one.
But this time the tears wouldn’t stop. The gringa sat down on the sidewalk, still crying, looking around like she was unaware how to stand back up. Cars passed on the street. A couple male voices shouted come-ons from half-cracked windows zooming past. Meryl started to back away, to leave the woman there, and now the woman grabbed her arm with both hands. Don’t leave, she said, please don’t leave me. I’m sorry I didn’t return. It was too painful.
She explained that when the fiancé arrived home, he said nothing about Meryl or her alias, Marcela. For a while after work he’d sent texts explaining he was at the bar, was going to stay for one more drink, it had been a long day. No mention of anyone else. Then he went silent for some time, almost an hour, before a final text that read simply Omw. The gringa’s mind swelled with all the possibilities, all the things that might transpire in a lost hour.
When he got home she asked where he had been. Drinking, he said simply. Cell phone reception was weak in the bar. He asked her what was wrong. She locked herself in the bedroom.
The gringa assumed the worse. Why else would he lie? Why that night of all nights would he stay so long at the bar, ignoring her texts? A silence came to sit between them, a silence that began as an ache at the back of her throat and as days passed grew to fill their entire apartment. One night he leaned in to kiss her and she turned away, unable to unimagine his lips intertwined with Meryl’s. The gringo exploded. He yelled he did not know what was wrong with her lately. He demanded an explanation and she told him, yelling and pointing a finger into his chest, that she’d sent that chilena there to test him. That he’d failed, obviously, and now he thought things could go on as they had before.
She continued to thump her finger into his chest and the man shoved her, sent her sprawling back. Pain crackled through her tailbone and hands where they impacted the floor. Water rushed to her eyes but she willed herself not to cry. She looked up at him, looming. There was a menace to his posture she’d never seen before, his whole body taut like a cord about to snap. She was afraid to move. The way he clenched his fists frightened her. I never fucked that chilena, he said. From her space on the floor she watched him gather a few changes of clothes, and when she finally found her voice she hated herself for begging him to stay.
When I got back home, my then-girlfriend was asleep on the couch. Her face was awash in blue light. On the TV, the episode selection menu hummed the Sex and the City theme song. I woke her up and as I did so I told myself it was for her, not for me. That she would want to know I was home, that she would want me to move her into the bedroom to sleep. She didn’t ask me where I’d been. She was either afraid what I would say or trusted me or didn’t give a shit anymore anyway. In bed I told her I had missed her, and she started to snore.
When she woke up in the morning, I tried to be better. I tried to open up, let a little light in, tell her what I was feeling instead of sectioning off my little corner of the world apart from her. Sometimes I succeeded and it felt good. But I didn’t tell her Meryl’s story. I was afraid she’d see through me. I was afraid she’d wonder which one was I, the one who would accept the advances or shun them then hurt her later, more cruelly. We all have rough edges to press into each other. Meryl’s story would unmake us, I feared, one way or another.
But I wanted to tell the story to someone. Now I guess I have. Three last lines occur to me. I know they can’t all be true.
One. Secrets between people are like infected wounds, needing to be lanced.
Two. It’s the truths we withhold that make love possible.
Three. The worst violence in this story is the one I commit here now, in making it about myself.
Bruce Johnson holds a PhD in Creative Writing & Literature from the University of Southern California, as well as an MFA in Fiction from the University of Nevada-Las Vegas. His bilingual (English/Spanish) fiction chapbook Snapshots was published in 2019 by Cactus Pink Press, and his stories have appeared in Joyland, the Cincinnati Review MiCRO Series, the Adroit Journal, and Sycamore Review, among other publications. He lives with his wife and son in Santiago, Chile, and can be found at brucejohnsonfiction.com.