When he returned to the apartment he was in decent spirits. Tristán, despite his multiple failings, was an optimist. He told himself each new day could bring a fresh beginning. He’d learned this from his mother, who always hummed a tune as she cooked; who always smiled despite his father’s meager paycheck and their modest apartment. His mom adored opera, she loved the great dramas and the beautiful arias, and she could reliably conjure good cheer despite her interest in the sorrows of the great heroines created by Verdi.
He’d have to give mom and dad a call that Saturday. He’d also take Montserrat and Araceli for ice cream or another treat. Yes, he told himself, it was going to be a fine day and an even better weekend. Optimism! That was the trick.
The phone was ringing when he walked in. He was surprised when the person on the other end of the line said she was a writer for De Telenovela. No one cared to interview him anymore except when it was to ask tawdry, exploitative questions, but the writer quickly said she was writing a story on actors who were doing dubbing for TV shows and his name had come up as someone she should talk to.
“Would you have a few minutes?”
“Oh, sure,” Tristán said, feeling delighted someone was paying attention to his voice work. “What would you like to know?”
The writer asked about his role as Lancelot on the Japanese show Tristán had been working on, then they discussed how he’d transitioned to voice work—to be frank, he owed a lot of it to Montserrat, who had been the first one to suggest it—and the basics of the job.
“Do you mind if we talk about your soap opera roles? It’ll help contextualize the shift to audio,” the reporter said.
Tristán, who had been more used to puff pieces than serious interviews in his youth, immediately agreed. He wondered how many pages this interview might yield. It could all end up being nothing more than a paragraph, but he was praying for something meatier.
“Your last soap, it was Juventud. You were the romantic lead and worked with Karina Junco.”
His voice was cool as he spoke, mostly because he’d learned to sound cool when he talked about his girlfriend. “That was a long time ago,” he said, hoping to parry the question, hoping they’d move to talking about another co-star or another soap.
“What was she like?”
Wild, he thought. He’d been attracted to her from the moment he walked on set. She was TV royalty. Her father was a producer, her mother a former movie star. She’d grown up two paces from the limelight, which had made her spoiled, but she was also charming enough that you could ignore her flaws. Tristán hadn’t been an innocent by the time he worked on that soap; he’d climbed his way to the summit and learned the ropes, and he could recognize a self-destructive personality when he saw one, but he also savored that type and so was mesmerized.
He twisted the cord between his hands. He tried to say her name and couldn’t. “She…she was sweet. Energetic,” he said, choosing politeness and euphemisms instead of blunt honesty.
“You had a long-term relationship.”
“We were together for over a year,” he said. Fifteen months and twenty-two days. He had not forgotten that number. They’d broken up three times during those fifteen months and each breakup hadn’t lasted more than a handful of days. Patterns. Tristán did love his patterns.
“There was talk, back then, that Karina was doing drugs. That you were doing drugs, too. That you were, in fact, doing drugs the night of the accident. There was a lot of talk about you. About your special parties.”
Yes, he knew that tale. Tristán, the pill pusher who had stuffed Karina Junco full of chemical substances. This was a great exaggeration. For one, back in those days, Tristán didn’t do any hard drugs. It was only after the accident that he’d gotten hooked on painkillers. Karina was the one who liked to put whatever illegal substance she could find inside her system. In the early eighties, he was still worried about showing up to work looking a mess. Tristán had never attended an orgy either, nor given Karina herpes, as one bullshit story had claimed. He slept around as much as might be expected of a good-looking young man who graced the covers of magazines, but he was careful about STDs.
He was also bisexual, and he’d been sternly advised by the top brass at Televisa to be discreet about it. A few of the directors and casting agents and other actors frowned, aware they were working with a fellow who went both ways, but Tristán had been devastatingly, almost impossibly handsome, sexy enough to send chills down a viewer’s spine, and extremely sellable. So they ignored that aspect of his life, just as they’d turned their blind eye to other stars from decades past who dabbled in decidedly un-Catholic activities.
Then, when the accident happened, the salacious rumors about his sex life began to circulate, and he was labeled a pervert. But not openly, no. No one ever admitted stars like Enrique ?lvarez Félix were gay and nobody ever would. Nobody printed the names of Tristán’s ex-boyfriends in magazines. It was all innuendo and coded phrases, but it did the same damage.
It had been Karina’s father who—despite retiring from producing, he still maintained his connections—had spearheaded that smear campaign; it was Karina’s father who had loaded the ammo and taken a shot at the young actor. Tristán couldn’t prove it, but he knew it, just as he knew his career was over. God forbid a leading man make the mistake of looking the least bit queer.
The rumors ballooned, and Tristán’s father yelled at him, saying he had shamed his whole family. Eventually, people lost interest in him. The bruises from the accident faded, but so too did Tristán’s name from gossip columns. Nevertheless, Tristán had to wade with caution when it came to his family. His father was still going on about how he had been corrupted by deviant producers and directors, even though he hadn’t minded those “deviants” when the dough started rolling in and Tristán shared his wealth with his family. The less said to his brothers about his romantic life, the better. His mother simply worried people would be mean to him if they learned he dated both men and women.
There was a lot of talk about you, back in the day. About your special parties, yeah. Such a snide little remark with such huge implications.
“I did not organize a party the night of the accident,” Tristán said tersely.
“I thought—”
“I did not. Check stories from that day, you’ll see it wasn’t my party.”
“People said you were cheating on Karina,” the reporter said, quickly pivoting, perhaps unwilling to admit a mistake.
“Who have you been talking to?” he asked, his cool slipping, the nonchalant, smooth tone he cultivated turning coarse. This was bullshit. But so much had been whispered about him. “Forget about it, I’m hanging up.”
“Were you driving the night of the accident?” the reporter asked. “Did you in fact kill Karina Junco?”
Tristán set the receiver back in its cradle and went into his bedroom. He found his wallet and took out the snapshot he’d been ignoring for the past few weeks and stared into Karina’s face. He imagined the photo De Telenovela would run of Karina. She might even get the cover, looking sweet, with ribbons in her hair, as she had looked in the promotional images for Juventud.