CHILE

Though she couldn’t see it, Rina felt the cabin door suck open to the Santiago morning. She’d awakened from a spotty sleep on the incredibly uncomfortable flight still in a state of buzzing, jittery excitement which left her feeling weirdly attuned. Dust brown light fought against the yellowish glare of the cabin fluorescents and a dry, spicy, warmth filled her nostrils and replaced the fake air from the plane’s overhead spigots. As she shuffle-stepped her way toward the door and the grinning, nodding stewardesses, she felt she was being sent off into something. Like these ladies were the last of something familiar, and being the last they became strange, too.

Rina was well into the second half of her twenties, yet she hadn’t found a job she liked, she had nothing she would want to refer to as a calling and she wasn’t one of those women who could make a man her project. When friends got married her first thought was always, "so young?" until she realized they were actually quite old for it, even by the more recent women’s magazine’s charts and pie graphs. She didn’t think of herself as particularly noble — you know, the loner, the independent, the way most of her male friends viewed their own continual looseness — but nor was she embarrassed. She saw only what it left her; still a kid.

Wendy on the other hand, was a grownup. Her roommate Wendy dated — real dates, like dinners with men she’d just met, not the sort of we-should-go-see-that-movie dutch-treat half-hearted gatherings Rina performed with her motley assortment of male acquaintances — Wendy bought flatware, Wendy carried a briefcase, Wendy belonged to a health-club. She had dinner-parties, for God’s sake.

Settling into her seat on the plane the night before she’d realized that this was finally what it meant to be a grownup. It was something she’d held almost unconsciously as a condition for it. This: to jump, alone, on a plane to a far away place. Jump on a plane and drink scotch in it’s darkened, pressurized, spot-lit nightcave. Jump on this plane without having planned it out months in advance. Jump on it blithely. Preferably wearing rayon and sunglasses.

It was Andrew, the guy from her "Adult-Ed" spanish class who gave her the ticket to come join him down in Chile for a long weekend. The big investment firm he worked for on Wall Street had sent him there on a "merger" project with the government bank. He’d been assigned a two week stay that was being extended. As a perk, they gave him a brief holiday and a round-trip ticket he could use either way.

When Rina received his invitation on her answering machine at home, she’d jumped around and squealed before falling in a contemplative slump on the edge of her bed. "What the hell," Wendy said, coming in just in time to catch the switch. "What is UP with you?" she asked.

Rina told her about the invitation. "But we’re as-yet-undefined," she said. "You know, I don’t know what this is yet."

"You like him okay, right?" Wendy said, "You trust him, think he’s pretty nice and even almost seems reliable — I’ve heard you say all this so don’t deny it...." Wendy received a nod. "So Rina, this is a good thing," she said, "a good opening to what sounds likely to be a good relationship."

"Ree-LAY-shunship...," Rina said sarcastically, "I don’t do that... I don’t.... I’m like destined to be somebody’s second wife, you know? I’m not good clear big open thing between mature unattached adults material. It’s just not me."

"With you things are more ambiguous and weird?" Wendy asked.

"Well, yeah."

"Then what’s your problem with going down there to something as-yet-undefined?"

"Right! You’re right. It’s just that... It’s just that I haven’t really figured him out yet," she said. "The way he is with me. I’m comfortable when I know what somebody wants. Be it admirable or depraved," she flashed a smile, "it’s just that I can’t really read him," she took the phone Wendy was holding out to her. "But hey, Free Trip!" she said, dialing Santiago.

Feeling only a little bit less glamorous in the flat morning light of the Santiago airport, her rayon pressed into forms its designer never intended, Rina ambled down the shaky aluminum stairway that had pulled up to the jet and then barely kept herself from skipping as she crossed the tarmac toward the glass and concrete airport building. It looked space-age and "Mod" and from about the year she was born. Inside, the customs officials eyed her beneath the imposingly low and shining brims of their hats. The one she approached looked at her so hard she felt it up the sides of her ribcage, and then finally he chalked her bag with a wry smile like he was letting her get away with something, like she’d owe him big time later.

She found Andrew easily since he towered tall and thick over the locals, his white skin seeming to glow in comparison to the more typical Chilean tan.

"Como esta!" Rina yelled in an exaggerated gringosa.

"Hey!" he said, waving. They’d seen each other only two weeks before, in class in New York, but the novelty of this place — the other side of the globe — made them both giddy. Rina spread her arms when she approached him, and Andrew seemed to submit only reluctantly to her hug. His nervousness actually calmed her and gave her confidence.

Andrew took her out to a vast parking lot where they found the car he’d rented for the weekend. His hand hovered near her lower back as they approached the little bubbled-looking thing, and she felt it brush her once. He let her in and as he walked around to the driver’s side, she tossed her small bag into the back. It landed cozily next to his.

"Where’re we going?" Rina asked, as they pulled out onto the highway. She put her sunglasses back on and scrolling up her darkest lipstick, she put it on using the shiny top of the tube as a mirror.

"There’s a place called Zapallar about 150 miles north of here." Andrew said. "And here north is like heading south. It’s warmer in the north, right?"

"Cool," Rina said, "Everything is backwards. Summer is winter."

"Water goes the other way in the drain."

"What, back out?"

"No," Andrew laughed, "counter-clockwise. When it’s spiraling down the drain it goes the other way since the earth is turning the other — Haven’t you ever noticed spiraling in the drain?"

"Yeah, but I always thought if you stirred it the other way it would just start going that way. Like if you reversed the motor on a blender."

"It’s the earth, it goes the other way here."

"How’s your job?"

"Dull, how’s yours?"

"Hate it, nothing’s changed. But you... dull? You’re in another country!" Rina waved an arm out over the dashboard. They were leaving Santiago. Things seemed smaller here; small cars, short signs, squat little houses. "This could be the stuff of high drama," she said. "Besides, I don’t want you maligning them since it was because of that extension that I got this free ticket." She knocked him on the arm.

"Yeah, well this perk stuff only barely makes it worth it," he said glancing at her sideways with a smile. "The thing is, we’re inside the bank all day. I might as well be back in New York."

"But now’s your chance," Rina said.

"Yep, now’s my chance."

The landscape went from strange outer-city to industrial fringe moon-scape. There were mountains of black stuff that looked like coal and flames shooting from more distant smoke stacks. It smelled bad and it was hot. The most disorienting thing, though, was the absence of chain-link fence, orange warning symbols, official signs; things that somehow proved safety back home, the suggestion of legal nets.

"You know anything about this stuff?"

"No."

"Looks like they could film a James Bond movie here," Rina said. She wondered now if they would sleep together. They hadn’t kissed at the airport, but then, they hadn’t kissed ever. They had flirted mildly in class, at least she thought it was flirting. They got along, and in their soft kidding, seemed to know each other more than was really likely. But the late night calls from Chile, from so far away, had brought this feeling of friendly stranger-hood into an odd intimacy. Through the tube of space which carried their voices, low and deep in each other’s ears, they found a certainty and almost sudden trust which seemed to surprised them both. Now that she was here, though, with him, and they were real and separate next to one another, Rina felt compelled to be witty and entertaining. She wondered if he was nervous in the same way she was.

"So that third-world relaxation thing hasn’t hit me yet, has it you?" Rina asked, twitching in her seat to show him.

"Actually, I am sort of relaxed. Am now, anyway. This weekend will be my first chance to see more than the inside of a gen-u-ine Chilean hotel."

They laughed and told each other funny stories. He told of the misunderstandings that went on between every burst of work with the Chilean bankers, she of the stiff, though continually punning geek she worked for in the insurance firm. They had left Santiago behind, and now even the industrial areas were long past. They caught glimpses of the ocean past the rim of highway. "Hey, the sea!" Rina said. She hitched a foot up onto the orange dashboard and pushed her long skirt down in between her legs. Resting her head back on the seat she said, "I am so psyched, Andrew. This is great."

"Bring your camera?" he asked.

"You kidding?"

They stopped in Valparaiso and walked around the manicured gardens of the central plaza. The sky was flat grey. Little bushes spelled out the day of the week, the month, the year.

"What, they replant this every day?" Rina asked. She watched Andrew mouthing the Spanish words and thought about his height, his breadth. Looked closely at his lips and wondered what they’d feel like. They were full, fleshy, but would he drool? It made her nervous thinking about it clinically like this. "I can’t believe it’s February and it’s hot," she said.

"Backwards," Andrew said, nodding.

The view to the water was by way of a curve to the cement and earth of the little plaza. It was, overall, a big wide mound of dusty concrete with chipping paint and careful plantings and it gave the impression of an edge of the world. "It’s like a movie set," Rina said. "You know, sort of abandoned, but not really. It’s a little unreal. Wide open. Ready for action."

"Ready for action," Andrew repeated. He smiled at her. A not altogether uncharming smile, Rina thought.

Rina smiled too — was she blushing? — she turned to face the ocean again. "You know what I mean," she said.

They went to neighboring Vina del Mar for lunch, to a little restaurant among the fishing docks. The place had a low ceiling but the windows, hinged at the sides, were swung open wide giving the feeling of eating among the boats.

"Machas," said Andrew. "is THE thing down here. You can’t get these buggers in New York."

"And thank God there is still SOMEthing you can’t get in New York, eh?" Rina said.

"So what’s been going on back home anyway?" Andrew asked. As he spoke he shook out his napkin in a smooth, whipping motion that reminded Rina of her father. He would always feel the need to introduce a little topic of conversation at a meal. The sign was the napkin gesture. He even did it with paper napkins. It usually tuned into an argument. "Have I missed any new dance crazes? A hot new bistro? New TV series?"

Rina laughed. "It’s only been two weeks — jeez, we just got rid of you, give us a chance to recover before moving on!"

"Your sense of humor is—" Andrew stopped himself, oddly.

"What? I wasn’t even being funny."

"It just reminds me of somebody I knew."

"Old girlfriend?" Rina had meant it to come out casual and like this would have nothing to do with her, but it sounded weirdly defensive to her ears. She wished she could erase it. Take it back.

"Sister," Andrew said.

"What, a sister you broke up with? What do you mean you `knew’?" Rina asked.

"Died. I’ll tell you the story sometime, maybe," he said, "it’s just one of those, you know, stories people have. I’ll tell you sometime, not now."

Machas were some sort of shellfish. Tender like oysters, their shells were long like mussels, but grey and thicker. Their flesh was pink like clams and pointy-ended like little animal tongues.

They ate one plate of them raw and one "a la Parmesana," and then caved in to the waiter’s insistence that Erisos, or Sea Anemone was the real Chilean "thing." It was rather a difficult thing actually. Each one came in it’s own de-spiked purple shell, opened and filled up with raw onion and parsley. The stuff itself was orange and pungent, and Rina wondered if they liked it so much why they smothered it with all that. They smiled wincing smiles at the hovering waiter as they ate, and were rewarded in the end by some sort of sugar encrusted pastry tube with pleasantly sour-ish caramel inside. While they were eating these, Andrew leaned in and gently wiped at Rina’s cheek with his napkin. He did this with such tenderness and such trepidation that she found her body zinging with his touch. Her immediate and unstoppable response to which, being, of course, to come up with some dumb joke about egg on her face to diffuse the thing. Not that she didn’t want it, just that it felt like hanging on some sort of precipice. Readying to jump off into a place of no boundaries, no references, a place where she might just explode into undifferentiated noise and confusion. Watching him rise and turn to the window, she swore to herself she’d let the next one hang.

The rest of the drive that afternoon was beautiful and without blemishes; coastal and winding. They were slowed to a crawl behind rickety overloaded trucks, but each time they finally got to pass, the break and speeding up was exhilarating.

Zapallar was piney and red-earthed and there was sand everywhere. Andrew pulled up to a small cabin tucked into the rocks a short walk from the beach.

"Here it is!" he said. He punctuated this with a sharp pull on the handbreak.

"Whoa," Rina said. She gaped at the place. Quaint, rustic, private — it was too perfect. "WE get this?"

"It belongs to one of the Chilean banker guys we’ve been working with. Allejandro, nice guy." Andrew got out of the car and reached in for their bags. "Come on," he said. "You’re going to love this place."

"You’ve been here?" Rina asked.

"Pictures."

Rina got out slowly and breathed deep the woody, seashore smell of the place. Andrew tried unsuccessfully to suppress a little embarrassed smile and looked at the floor as he showed her around. Rina kept trying to catch his eye since she was speechless and couldn’t come up with an adequate way to say how impressed she was.

The cabin’s central room had a high peaked ceiling, thick with dark wooden beams. A loft bedroom jutted from one side, and the other was a jeweled-looking wall of small old glass window panes looking out toward the water.

"The glass in those windows is from the old family estate in the southern vineyards. It burned down in the early seventies." Andrew said, "I think it was during a time of nationalization or something. Allejandro’s family brought it here. He said something about looking through the warbly glass, I can’t remember what it was now. Oh, and there’s no railing on the loft bedroom up there, so he said to be careful if you tend to get up in the middle of the night."

A small kitchen off the main room gave way to a pretty deck whose view was unmarred by anything human, anything made, giving the feeling of utter isolation in the woods.

"The house has been in his family for years and years. His dad’s a famous judge. Their family somehow survived both Allende and Pinochet — I’m sure there’s all sorts of messy politics behind this, but who are we, right?"

There was an outdoor shower around the side of the house, and a high redwood platform which held a jacuzzi.

"Allejandro said the jacuzzi is brand new, he hasn’t even had a chance to see it yet. He wants us to try it out and give a report." Andrew and Rina stood looking at it silently and then he said, "Let’s go down to the beach."

"Sounds great," Rina barely managed to sigh out the words, and they both laughed at how dreamy and contented it sounded.

It was a warm afternoon, the air had a washed clean feeling, and the wafting scents of the place were touched with eucalyptus. The road slanted downward toward the sea, and their walking was a sort of dropping, hips pivoting and legs swinging as they went. At a clearing of the roadside woods, Andrew stopped and, one arm extending over Rina’s shoulder, pointed out the nearby village. It looked like rough scabbing on a hillside. There were bright flashes from hanging laundry, and small round thatched roof structures that looked like blisters down nearer the beach. Rina leaned into Andrew a little as he pointed things out. The central plaza, the school, the little chapel, and the Santa Maria statue up on the highest hill. He returned the pressure as he spoke, but then abruptly pulled away from her and continued down toward the water.

The beach at Zapallar was a crescent spotted with the thatched umbrellas they had seen in the village. Framing the beach was a low stone wall, above which there was a pension with a bar facing the water. The air was the most pleasant combination of sun-heat and cool sea-gusts and by the time they’d reached the wall they were running. They leapt over it, dropping their towels and clothes as quickly as they could scramble out of them and madly dashing into the water. There were no other foreigners around, and the few Chileans sitting at the bar turned their heads dispassionately to watch the two gringo kids wheel and kick their way into a sunk-in squat several yards out. Rina tossed herself into Andrew’s arms when she caught up with him, and he took her by the rib cage up under her arms and pulled her around in the water, like a Dad does his toddler, while she screamed and squirmed under his ticklish grip. He let go. He did a dolphin dive and swam around her legs under water.

They didn’t speak, just splashed and dove and grabbed and escaped and worked in a barely remembered childhood language of games in the pool, strangely shared, about who wins and what rules apply to bigger and littler kids and when the games stop and the hand-stands begin. Watching Andrew launch into his fifth handstand, Rina just suddenly felt wrong. Disappointed. Let down, or unwanted or something. Just wrong. So she worked her way back to shore, leaving Andrew behind spluttering up from his masterfully long and steady stand. He swam past her and dashed up the beach to beat her to their things, but then walked back down the beach with her towel. She took it with a queen-like gesture of gracious expecting, more play to try and make up for wreaking the game, but then rubbed it hard on her face. "Is it possible to get lateral jet-lag?" she asked.

"Oh, somehow it’s much worse coming down this way," he said. "I have no earth-reasoning for this one, its just from practical experience. You’ll probably sleep like a rock."

They lay on their towels and soaked up the waning orange sunlight. Andrew said, "Why don’t we grab some dinner and then head back so that you can be in the cabin by the time you turn into a pumpkin." He checked his watch, "we should make it if we’re lucky."

"I don’t know," she said, yawning, "the transformation might be starting already." They ordered empanadas at the bar and washed them down with bottles of beer.

Each pulling grunting uphill step on the way back wore Rina further than she’d expected. Andrew slowed to keep with her and mumbled quiet encouragements and promises of a good long sleep once they made it back, but by the time they arrived the place was swimming. The rhythm of the ocean had entered her and the dream-like cabin, this house out of a magazine, in another country in one day and Andrew and his size and his smell mixed with the eucalyptus and sea air and the softness of the sheets in the wide loft bed and telling him she’d change later thanks and the drifting motion of othertime noplace sleep.

Rina awoke sure that it was another day, the next night. She felt she’d been asleep for days, sure she hadn’t moved a single muscle in the heavy sleep that had hit her like a concrete slab. Sand grated inside her suit and her hair stuck greasily to the sides of her face. She tried not to taste the inside of her mouth. The moon was streaming directly through the warbly high glass windows and onto the bed in which she lay alone. The room was bright and the shadows cast were strong. Andrew sat slumped, dark with backlight in an arm chair near the loft’s open ledge.

Taking soap, a towel and a tee-shirt with her, Rina tiptoed outside and in the bright warm twilight peeled off her bathing suit and washed the salt and sand from her. The night made the smells more heady and the blue light and shifting trees made her feel small. When she returned, still stepping carefully, and climbed into the bed, Andrew was awake.

"It was only about 5:30 when you crashed out," he said quietly. "I got a chance to shower, check out the jacuzzi, read half my book..."

Rina laughed softly. "You were right about the jet-lag," she said, "I felt like I’d turned to stone."

"Feel better, now?" he asked.

"Yeah," she said, their hushed voices like lovers’ murmurs. "Want to join me?" she asked.

Andrew said nothing. He sat still in his chair and Rina thought he’d gone to sleep again. He stirred briefly and then sat there longer. Rina was trying to decide whether to say she wouldn’t bite, whether or not that sounded stupid, or whether to say forget it, whether or not that was dishonest, or whether to say please, please, whether or not that gave up an advantage, whether this was about advantage, or whether to go to him, in the chair, whether or not that was too aggressive, whether that would scare him, whether she’d scared him already, or whether to say nothing and roll over and go to sleep, whether she could sleep, now, or whether he just didn’t want her, whether she was insulted, embarrassed, humiliated, whether she should have come down here in the first place when he rose deliberately, slowly walked to the bed and got in under the covers, still fully clothed. Rina wiped her mind of all her wonderings and entered his arms, tilting her face to find his. Instead he stroked her hair back, and then gently turned her around to fit into the curve of his body. Rina was sure he could feel her heart racing with frustration, but his breathing soon evened out and he slept.

Frei Jorge would be a couple of hours from Zapallar if you were on US roads. Through the endless arid and empty Chilean landscape on dirt and winding "highways" crawling behind rubber-band powered and overloaded trucks it was almost twice that. They left early and Rina read their guidebooks out loud while Andrew drove. "Frei Jorge," it said, "is a tiny park area which displays a meteorologic phenomenon as manifested in the odd growth patterns of the vegetation, singular and particular to this spot in this region and nowhere else in the world. Because of cliffs rising more than a thousand feet straight out of the sea, the wind patterns and speed of evaporation are such that an intense pocket of moisture hovers at the precise height of 5 feet 2 inches above ground level at the top of the unusual cliffs. This causes the mini-jungle to grow amid the dryest of deserts."

The park’s entrance through a gate led to moor-like hills peppered with patches of darker green. Rina said, "This looks like Heathcliffe’s roaming ground. A little sunnier, maybe."

"Weirdly displaced," Andrew said adopting an eerie, twilight zone voice, "reappearing on what is almost its polar opposite. It’s a doppelganger...." he laughed, "I think we’ve been driving too long."

They parked in the middle of the moors, and could see a low lying fog several hundred yards farther on. There were some other tourists there already, though it was fairly early in the day. Andrew and Rina wandered around the small jungle, stepping over jumbled vines and twisted bush growth finding odd flowers and strange little caterpillars. The trees bent low to drink in the moisture around their middles. Near the precipice, by an isolated ballet-bar of a railing you could spot the sea what seemed miles down. It was merely a distant glinting through cracks and holes in the mist. Rina stood staring into the milky distance, waiting for each crack to give her a teasing hint of the sea only to cover it up again. "When does the fog lift?" she asked Andrew.

A female voice answered, "It doesn’t. It just keeps promising to." An older woman stood next to her. Rina could see Andrew squatting by a brightly flowered bush several yards away. The woman looked about 50, wore white stretchy clothes, the top of which had a "v" of painted flowers studded with rhinestones. "You’re Americans," the woman stated the obvious, their shared quality. "We’ve been here seventeen times," she said. "My husband is absolutely obsessed with it. He was always into botany as a boy and this stuff just brings out the little scientist in him. It’s alright and everything, but seventeen times...."

Rina smiled an obviously polite smile and leaned back over the railing again. "This is my favorite spot, too," the woman continued, lighting a cigarette as she spoke, "I just keep thinking its going to clear up, that it’s going to lift and it’s all going to go back to normal. It’s something you dread and want at the same time. Like staring down over the edge of a cliff and thinking about jumping. It’s sort of both those things here. While my husband snuffles around the flora and fauna I stand here and think about the disappointment and relief in normalcy. You could vote him the most normal person in the world, give him a parade announcing it and then send him off to some other country to soak it up and he still wouldn’t get it. In fact they DID do that. He doesn’t believe it, but being sent here wasn’t a benediction, it was a good-riddance. But..." she puffed silently for a moment. "You don’t see many gringos down here. It’s not exactly Resorts International, you know?" The woman looked at Rina expectantly.

"Yep, vacation," Rina said, not wanting to explain Andrew’s job to her.

"Ummm-hmmm..." the woman said, turning back to the railing. She seemed suddenly bored. She smoked and occasionally stuck out her tongue and touched it thoughtfully with her heavily shellacked thumb and forefinger. It was an old-movie gesture that looked misplaced on this woman.

Rina turned away and made her way back toward Andrew. He was talking with a man who was taking pictures with a extensive camera collection that hung around his neck taking notes on a grimy little pad. Rina heard the man ask Andrew, "...you and your wife come down here often? It’s a magical, magical place."

"We’re not married," Andrew said, and he paused. "She’s my sister," he said. Rina stopped walking. The man noticed her, then.