“Dorotea, good to see you,” he told the mirror, smiling with the same zest that had first gotten him his break in fotonovelas. “Dora, you look great.”
Tristán had never been good at being alone. That was one quality he admired about Montserrat. She did not seem to have that compulsion to seek others. Tristán, on the other hand, jumped into more than one doomed relationship simply for the sake of hearing someone’s voice in the other room.
Yet despite his need for others, he was consistently terrible at maintaining any relationships. He seldom asked anyone out for lunch or cultivated the usual social niceties, instead expecting people to materialize before his door. In his youth, this had been an easy achievement. At twenty-three, Tristán had not lacked invitations and attention. He had a crowd of adulators practically hounding him. As the years went by and his perfect beauty dimmed a little and his fortunes dipped, that constant court of friends and fans had thinned.
That was why he’d been surprised to hear from Dorotea. She was a big fish now, working as a creative director and churning out teen soap operas. Alcanzar una Estrella had hit it big three years before, and they were trying to find other products that appealed to that same youthful demographic.
He was nervous about the meeting and needed a pep talk, not Montserrat’s agitated recriminations.
“Fuck you, Momo,” he muttered as he closed the tap. He’d picked a brown suede jacket and a dark green shirt, plus his trademark sunglasses, for the lunch meeting. He smiled again, wider this time, and telephoned the cab company.
The Angus in the Zona Rosa wasn’t his kind of joint. Men went to the Angus for the hostesses, who were supposedly from the northern states and supposedly naturally taller, paler, and therefore prettier—there were a staggering number of pale Mexicans and blondes in ads and commercials. Tristán had always felt uncomfortable with all those women and their plastic smiles. It reminded him, in a way, that he himself was all plastic and had been sold as easily as the steak the women brought to the table.
He suspected Dorotea didn’t like the Angus, either, that she simply had acquired the habit of eating there after noticing leering men she wanted to do business with were easily soothed with cuts of meat and beautiful waitresses. Dorotea hadn’t climbed the ranks by being an herbivore; she ate other people up.
Tristán could have told her she shouldn’t have bothered to conjure beautiful girls for someone as lowly as him, but at the same time, being so lowly, he knew suggesting a change of venue was out of the question, and he was too curious to see what Dorotea wanted with him to invent an excuse.
“Dora, good to see you,” he said, smiling, as he approached her table.
“Hello, darling,” she said, standing up and depositing a quick kiss on his right cheek, then the left one in the Spanish fashion. Dorotea was some twelve years older than him and hailed originally from Sevilla. She’d been living in Mexico City since the mid-seventies after marrying her second husband, who had imported both a new wife and several cases of good wine into the country.
“Sit and take off those sunglasses. I want to take a good look at you. How are those little crow’s feet doing?”
Tristán’s smile trembled, threatening to become a grimace, but he removed the sunglasses. “Fine, I think. I hardly look like a Shar-Pei.”
“Are you using right now?”
“Not for a while.”
Tristán kept smiling, not because he was accustomed to Dorotea’s bluntness, but because a waitress was approaching them, and he donned a placid mask in public. He ordered a soda rather than an alcoholic beverage, even though he was tempted to start pounding whiskeys. Montserrat had rattled him. She said Abel sounded depressed, and she was worried about him, and then she kept bugging Tristán about it like he was supposed to do something. What could he do about the old man? Tell him he was sounding nuts? That he was getting stalkerish with all the phone calls? Recommend a therapist? Should he pour the fellow’s booze down the drain?
“No relapses? You’ve had your share of them.”
“It’s cigarettes and booze these days, and I’m cutting down on both of them,” Tristán said once the waitress had stepped away.
It was more a half-hearted attempt at reducing his alcohol and cigarette consumption—and now he felt a twinge, thinking maybe he was a lot like poor old Abel Urueta with his double whiskeys—than a real effort to wean himself off them. But Dorotea did not need to know that.
He could already imagine what Dorotea was going to propose: a bit part in an anthology show. Maybe Mujer, Casos de la Vida Real. He could play a wife beater or a kidnapper—Pinal’s show was a tearjerker that squeezed female misery like a lemon—for half an hour and get a quarter of what he should be paid. Dorotea had dangled parts like those in years past, but even that tripe had not materialized.
He didn’t even know why she bothered with such things anymore. Maybe it was a misplaced sense of guilt. After all, Dorotea had cast him on the last soap he’d ever done, the one where he met Karina. Juventud. The corniest variation of Romeo and Juliet to hit the airwaves, complete with its own cheesy theme song.
“We’re casting a role, and the director thinks you’d be perfect for the part. But due to the nature of the role, I had to ask.”
“What, I get a five-minute guest spot somewhere? I can do five minutes drunk and high, no problem. But don’t worry. There’s no funny business in my life right now.”
“It’s a lead role.”
Tristán’s smile finally shattered, giving way to frank surprise.
* * *
—
“Yes, a lead in a soap. I’ll be Fernando Mondego, Count de Morcerf, the villain in a new take on The Count of Monte Cristo,” he said, holding his glass up with two hands. Otherwise, he’d spill Abel’s bourbon over the carpet.
“I knew it! I knew it would work!” Abel declared, raising his own glass. “I got a call this morning: the Cineteca wants to do a retrospective of my work.”
“That’s fantastic! But we should have toasted to that instead of me!”
“Oh, there will be plenty of toasts to go around from now on. It’s like I said: the spell worked, our luck is changing. We need music!”
Abel quickly walked toward the audio console and began looking at the pile of records next to it. Tristán sat down next to Montserrat, who was toying with an olive she had speared with a toothpick.
“I’m going to have to go on a diet,” Tristán said, looking at Montserrat in wonder. “God, I have to lose at least five kilos.”
“You’re mad,” she said.
“Definitely not. I’ve let myself go lately.”
“Nonsense, my boy. It’s all in the face,” Abel declared as he dropped the needle and Chet Baker’s “So Che Ti Perderò” started playing. “James Dean wouldn’t diet.”
“Mmm, but James is dead,” Tristán declared as he leaned forward and popped the olive Montserrat had been holding into his mouth. He laughed, and she gave him a frown. Yeah, she was still ticked off even if she had agreed to attend Urueta’s get-together. He’d thought it would be a serious conversation where they’d both tell Abel that he needed to cool it off with the phone calls and obsession about spells, but it was turning into a celebration.