The Eye of the Beholder Page 4

  “I know, and I doubt we’d have found any of it, except perhaps this candy store, on our own.”

  “I definitely want to get more coconut chili this week.”

  “And that ceviche.”

  “Oh, damn, yes!”

  We wandered along the street one up from the Malecon, where shiny yellow and white cabs bounced along the cobbles between middling decrepit blue buses, all sporting different destinations on the signs over their windows and a list of stops in white along the side of the windscreen. We moved around groups of people stopped at designated bus stops, and peered in shop windows. Steve popped into one of the drug stores and got us bottles of cold water, and we ambled on the shady side of the street, moving back toward the river at a leisurely pace. The Sergio Bustamante gallery was suddenly in front of us, with whimsical faces for door pulls. We decided to see what else his brilliant imagination had thought up and went inside.

  A professional young woman was talking with a young man at a desk to the side. She smiled and welcomed us, inviting us to look around. I went immediately to a small version of my ladder ladies in the middle of the store. They were so charming with their nun-like wimples and headpieces, and cartoonish faces. Steve found them dotted on a silk scarf, and on several pieces of jewellery, too, forever climbing up their winding ladders.

  There were also silver suns with happy faces beaming from jewellery for both women and men, and moon faces sliding out from bracelets, but the larger work for hanging on walls or making a statement in an alcove were really the scene stealers. Bustamante blended the delight of a children’s illustrator with the brooding power of more primitive sculptures. I was smitten.

  While one of his sculptures would have been amazing to own, they all cost approximately double what my parents had gifted us, and the cost of shipping would likely send that price up another few notches. Still, I couldn’t help smiling at the whimsical nuns.

  Steve signaled to the young woman, who glided over to unlock a display case, and the next thing I knew I was leaving the store wearing a moon bracelet and some happy sun earrings, with a ladder nun scarf tucked in my bag. Steve was calling them wedding presents. As if all this wasn’t enough.

  “But what can I get you?” I hadn’t thought that we should be giving each other gifts. I figured the pile of crystal and small appliances we’d been given by friends and family was enough. Steve smiled.

  “Well, I have my eye on a set of golf clubs back home.”

  “Golf? Are we turning into our parents?”

  “Iain has said he’ll coach me a bit, but that it’s a good way to move up in the organization.”

  “This sounds like some throwback to the 1950s. This whole marriage venture has tossed us back in time!”

  “There was a lot to be said for the fifties. The fashion, for one thing. You look great in pencil skirts and boat neck tops and I think I rock a double-breasted suit.”

  “Do you ever. But there was more than fashion happening. The fifties had the Cold War, and civil rights issues, and women’s liberation fulminating, with the glass ceiling at work and anti-depressants at home. Not that we’ve made much progress on any of that, except perhaps for not prescribing Valium to everyone.” We had been walking along as we talked, and I looked around to get my bearings. “I’m perfectly happy in the here and now, husband dear, if only I knew where here and now actually was.”

  “The bridge is just around that corner ahead,” Steve pointed along past the market vendors smiling and motioning to their wares along the block ahead.

  Sure enough, as we turned the corner, we saw the bridge ahead. “And there’s a nice place to have a refreshing beverage.”

  He was right again. The restaurant, with a bizarre, pale white marble statue of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton that seemed to have been carved in lard, was tucked into the side of the bridge, and we sprinted across to avoid a lumbering truck and two yellow taxis.

  The waiter motioned for us to choose any table, and we made our way to one in the shade by the river. He was soon by with menus and a small bowl of salsa and chips. Steve ordered another Negro Modelo, which apparently had become his go-to beer, and I had a Victoria, another beer I’d never heard of at home. I really couldn’t eat anything more, but Steve decided to check the menu anyhow and ordered some guacamole and chips.

  “I am not going to fit into the winter weight clothes I wore down here if I keep this up,” I said, dipping a chip into the complimentary salsa.

  “But think about all the walking and swimming we’re doing. And don’t forget, according to my exercise tracker, lovemaking burns forty-five calories per half hour.”

  “So, by the end of this week, we should have each worked off the equivalent of two margaritas? Not that I’m complaining. And as for the other activities, technically, we’re ambling and floating. I’m not sure those qualify as aerobic workouts.”

  “This is not really what we need to be discussing. What we should be figuring out is where we intend to have supper tonight.”

  I laughed so loudly that the two solitary drinkers by the bar looked over.

  Steve smiled, but I don’t think he was actually kidding.

  A man came into the restaurant and headed to the electric piano set up in the corner. He began to play beautiful music I didn’t recognize, but which sounded romantic and wistful. We had no place to be and all day to get there, so we ordered two more beers, this time trying a different one each—Steve had a Dos Equis Ambar and I had a Bohemia. The man continued to play, and we watched a white ibis standing in the river. The sun sparkled on the water, and the heat wrapped around us like a warm massage towel.

  More people had entered the restaurant, and by the time we left it was half-full. I was glad, because I wanted the musician to be fairly recompensed. We popped a couple of bills into his jar, hoping to promote the other patrons to pony up as well. He smiled and nodded as he continued to play a clever variation on “Cielito Lindo.” It was funny. Either it was because I was married, or because it was Mexico, but I felt as if men were looking at me more appraisingly and approvingly. Maybe they always had and I had never noticed it before, but I didn’t think so. Of course, I normally didn’t walk around drinking at noon in the hot sun, so that might have been part of it. Perhaps it was just happiness they were noticing, somehow honing in on our newlywed aura. Or perhaps smiling at women was the Latin American male default position. It wasn’t exactly ogling, but it wasn’t exactly innocent, either.

  It made me even happier to be walking hand in hand with my beautiful husband, and we strolled across the bridge we’d been sitting next to, aiming in the general direction of our hotel. We passed the coconut man, and I made a mental note of how to get back there for more of his chili coconut meat. Steve was entranced with the huarache factory on the corner, and we spent the better part of half an hour trying on sandals, surrounded by the smell of warm leather. I felt as if I was in my Uncle Don’s tack shop.

  Finally, Steve chose a pair of traditional sandals with soles crafted from old tires, while one of the younger fellows teased him for the size of his feet by calling him “Sasquatch.” When he admitted he was from northern Canada, they all laughed even harder.

  I found a beautiful pair of red leather sandals that fit my foot, but pinched my little toes a bit. The older cobbler noticed, and put his finger right where the pinch was and raised his eyebrows in a question and I nodded. He pulled my shoe off, like I’d imagined one of the Prince’s courtiers would have done to a stepsister in a fairytale, poured some rubbing alcohol into the leather in that spot and slid the shoe onto a wooden foot-shaped stretcher. He did the same with the other one, and then brought them back to me to try on. This time I wiggled my toes, the shoes feeling perfect. We paid for our footwear and shook hands all around before heading on our way.

  The pool on the roof of our hotel beckoned and we spent the rest of the afternoon
lazing in and out of the water, reading our books and re-slathering each other with sunscreen. Steve disappeared for a few minutes down to the lobby, and returned with cold water bottles and the news that he had snared us a reservation at Ah Caramba for eight o’clock. And despite my moaning about overeating earlier in the afternoon, the thought of sitting above the town in one of Puerto Vallarta’s most panoramic restaurants sounded like an absolutely perfect way to end a perfect day in paradise.

  We left the pool at seven, noticing that it looked much different with the lamps lit around the patio, and went down to our room to change for dinner. Steve assured me that it would be casual but I opted for my best sundress. Men in Mexico seemed to get away with white trousers and a clean guayabera to look dressy, one of those shirts with the small pleats and vertical embroidery that Latin men wore so elegantly. Steve looked fine in his light linen jacket, coral T-shirt and brown trousers, with his new huaraches on his feet.

  We popped into a cab at the end of our street, and though Steve was ready to offer him the address our concierge had written out for us, the driver knew exactly where we were headed and pointed his cab back into the downtown area, and then up a hill, along a winding road.

  Ah Caramba was crowded, but we were seated right at the far end of the restaurant, looking over the lights of the town and the sea beyond. A young man with a cart offering fresh guacamole came by and made the glorious avocado salsa right before our eyes, while I took photos and Steve pushed pesos into his tip jar. He rolled his cart off to another table and I was just as happy to focus completely on my husband, who was perusing the drinks menu and trying to decide between a banana daiquiri and a passion fruit mojito. I had already decided on a strawberry margarita, because I had seen one delivered to the table beside us.

  We both ordered the shrimp and fish special and ate till we groaned. The food was divine and to think that we were eating in a restaurant tucked up the hill from Gringo Gulch, where Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor had owned connected villas which hadn’t changed that much in the interim, was the icing on the evening. It made you wonder just what would have happened to this little village if the gossip magazines hadn’t followed Liz and Dick down here during the filming of The Night of the Iguana. Would it have become the tourist mecca it was today? Would the Mexican government have determined it should become another Acapulco, catering to nationals and international tourists, without that push? Would we be sitting somewhere else entirely on our honeymoon without all that twisting path of history?

  I couldn’t see us honeymooning in the States, given the political upheaval and unrest occurring there. So California or Hawaii would have been out.

  We might have chosen a trip to New Zealand. I knew we both wanted to visit the Antipodes, but it would have been impossible to fit in a trip of that length during Reading Week. We’d have spent the bulk of our honeymoon on planes.

  I raised my glass in a toast, and Steve obliged.

  “To Elizabeth Taylor, whose love and passion made all of this possible.”

  “To Elizabeth Taylor, and to working off that margarita.”

  “I’ll certainly drink to that.”

  7

  The next morning, we were up and packed for the beach early. Steve suggested we eat at Fredy’s Tucan again before catching the bus, but I opted for coffee and a bowl of oatmeal at the charming Café de Olla instead. He grumbled a bit, but succumbed when he took a sip of their amazing cinnamon brewed coffee.

  Even with the time it took to eat, we were on one of the first buses out to Mismaloya, equipped with cold water and a bag of fruit a little girl and her mother were selling next to the bus line-up. The orange buses pulled out as they filled, and soon we were bumping our way past Millionaire Row, and along the southern coast road. It stopped two or three places to drop off uniformed men and women for their shifts at fancy hotels, and we got off at the corner stop for Mismaloya, with the bus driver pointing the road down the hill to us. Very few people and no tourists got off with us, so we weren’t entirely sure we were going the right direction, but as we wound our way down the hill past a parking area for the huge fancy hotel we were circumnavigating to get to the beach, we both sighed with delight at the same time.

  Mismaloya Beach, where Huston had actually filmed the Tennessee Williams epic, was bisected by a small waterway, easily forded by a bright orange bridge. To the right, where we had been, was hotel beach. To the left, where we were headed, were palapas maintained by two or three beach restaurants, and then several massage places, skirting the beach all the way to a pathway leading to the old movie set disintegrating behind a discreet chain link fence.

  After walking the entire beach, we negotiated with a nice young man from the second restaurant, and set up camp under a palm frond umbrella at two lounge chairs with a tiny plastic table wedged between us. For the price of a drink every now and then, and lunch eventually, the chairs were ours for the day.

  We swam in the clear water, already sun-warmed, and lazed on our towel-covered chairs. A family originally from Kentucky—two brothers, their wives and young children—set up next to us, and generously included us in an order of grilled shrimp that their children took against. They were staying together in a villa up the hillside, and had been coming to this spot for their family reunions for several years. We chatted happily with them, and I played cards with the two little girls while their moms and dads took a swim together at one point in the afternoon.

  “Do you wish we’d started this life together earlier?” Steve asked, as we trudged up the hill to the bus later in the afternoon, after saying goodbye to our newfound friends. “You were awfully good with those little girls.”

  “For an hour or so for one afternoon, but probably not for life. I honestly don’t think I am the mothering sort. I think I would be very impatient, waiting for the time when a child would get interesting enough to actually talk to.”

  Steve laughed and pulled me close to him, making me realize I might have got a tad too much sun on my shoulders. The bus came shortly after we reached the stop, and we bumped our way happily back to town, my head on Steve’s shoulder, which seemed to have escaped a burn.

  To make up for eating our way across Vallarta the day before, we opted for a plate of fruit sent up to our room, and went to bed early. Steve slathered aloe lotion all over my shoulders and made me drink two bottles of water and take some aspirin before going to bed. I carefully lay down on my back, pushing my hair above my head on the pillow, to avoid irritating or rolling onto the sensitive areas. Heat throbbed along my shoulders and up my neck until the pills took hold, offering me some relief from the burn.

  I slept like the dead.

  8

  Monday morning I woke up with the realization that we were on the downward slide of the vacation, with fewer hours left before we headed home than we had spent. Time truly is relative, in case anyone was wanting a solid second opinion before accepting Albert Einstein’s theory. In my experience, the first half of any set time or event always seems to be fluid and expansive, and the time stretches out before you like a billowing duvet being shaken onto a king-sized bed.

  Then, when you hit the midway point, even though you have exactly the same amount of time left, the clocks seem to speed up, and before you know it the entire sequence is just a set of memories. This is fine when you are having a tooth extracted or getting through a degree-granting program, but when it comes to holidays and honeymoons, or even summertime in Alberta, time’s slippery tendencies can be a bit irritating.

  We had two and a half more days in Vallarta. I still wanted to fit in the Rhythms of the Night tour, and Steve wanted to find a snorkeling adventure. A woman by the pool had raved about a tour that took people out to see petroglyphs, a country bakery, the botanical gardens, and the requisite visit to a tequila factory, which also sounded nice. Steve and I decided we needed to check out Vallarta Adventures, the tour company that ran m
ost of these planned outings, to see if we could fit in one or more before we had to return to reality.

  Meanwhile, one of the things I wanted to do right after breakfast was to find the ArtVallarta gallery, because I had seen a poster for an exhibit in the restaurant bathroom the night before last. Apparently, local artists had responded to Frida Kahlo’s art with their own, and they were displaying it under the title “Fearless Fridas.” It sounded great.

  Steve, while not quite as fixated on Frida Kahlo as I had always been, harboured a movie crush on Salma Hayak, so I’d been able to interest him in the movie she had produced and starred in. It was Frida, though, who had always fascinated me. I had been blessed with a social studies teacher who had expanded our unit on Animal Farm to include Trotsky’s fleeing to Mexico, though Mr. Nelson hadn’t elaborated on Frida’s affair with the Russian exile. I had been wonderfully impressed with Kahlo, her thick, uncompromising eyebrows and her fierce adoption of native dress in a time when the whole world seemed hell bent on assimilating.

  We set out with our small tourist map, and the picture of the poster I had snapped the night before, and turned left up the hill on Olas Altas instead of right back into the town when we got to our regular corner. I wasn’t certain whether I was leading us on a wild goose chase because the road seemed to peter out uphill after three blocks, but as we reached the crest of the road, we noticed that the street sign to the right said one thing, while a small sign pointing left into what looked like a cul-de-sac was the street we were looking for. A few steps down that lane, and I spotted the sign that said ArtVallarta above an open doorway that looked as if it was leading into a private home.

  We looked at each other quizzically, shrugged and went in.

  A woman was signing up for art classes at a front desk, while two elderly people walked past beyond into a studio. We were waved upstairs to the gallery, and left to our own devices.