Dancing with the Tiger by Lili Wright

have a card? I’m going to Mexico City, but I might need a guide after.”
    â€œI usually work with professional tour companies.”
    â€œYou just said . . .”
    â€œTry Dolores on the square. She’s cheap.”
    â€œMaybe I don’t want cheap.” Anna understood his ploy: Now that he’d convinced her she needed his services, he would have the pleasure of denying them.
    â€œReally? Where is your hotel?” He touched his temples, a soothsayer summoning mystics. “Let me guess. The Puesta del Sol?”
    Anna folded her arms. “It’s a lovely establishment.”
    â€œMy aunt is the
dueña
.”
    Anna didn’t know what to say. To confirm the hotel’s shabbiness would be to denigrate his aunt. To defend its merits would prove her foolishness. The painter laughed at her predicament. “Don’t worry. I know it’s ugly.
Pobrecita.
That hotel is all she has.”
    Pushing back his chair, he spoke in the punctuated Spanish of Chapter One.
“Buena suerte con tus aventuras.”
    Good luck with your adventures. Anna caught the double meaning.
    She threw down her last card. “Tepito should be an adventure.”
    He stopped. “Tepito? In Mexico City? Don’t go there. It’s not safe.”
    â€œThat’s why I’m going.”
    He met her eyes. She had scored a point in whatever game they were playing. But then his phone rang and she lost him.
    â€œDígame, cariño.”
Tell me, loved one.
    Coddling the phone, Salvador waved a distracted good-bye and made his way out to the street. His motorcycle hacked a smoker’s cough before disappearing around the bandstand; then, oddly, he circled back. A victory lap. Or maybe he’d forgotten something. And then, definitively, he was gone.
    Anna considered the empty chair. Loneliness blew through her. She was furious with herself and with him. Of course, she knew a danced mask was more valuable than a tourist mask for the same reason an English armoire was more valuable than a coat rack from IKEA, for the same reason old love was more valuable—and rare—than new.
    She knew the back side of a mask was as important as its face: serious collectors sought a rich patina, wear marks built up from dirtand dancers’ sweat. She could have lamented the persnickety powderpost beetle (a critter that drilled pinholes into masks) and discussed methods for fumigation. She could have talked about the African mask’s influence on Picasso. Or discussed the James Ensor painting
Masks Confronting Death
and recited the artist’s observation:
“The mask means to me: freshness of color, sumptuous decoration, wild unexpected gestures, very shrill expressions, exquisite turbulence.”
She could have explained that her life was an exquisite turbulence she never managed to still. She could have told him she had come to Mexico to bury her mother and resurrect her father. She knew the fucking verbs to say this in Spanish, if he’d stopped speaking English long enough to listen.
    She lit her 199th cigarette, scoped the patio for eligible men, but the place was filled with tourists fiddling visors and fanny packs. Screw it. He thought she was an idiot, and she was, for letting him think so.
    A text rang into her phone. David. We need to talk. Drink @ Charleys @ 6 .
    Anna dropped her phone into her bag headfirst. On the corner, a shopkeeper hung stuffed toys from his awning. Bug-eyed Bart Simpson dangled from a hook. Yes, that was how she would leave David, twisting in the wind.
    She flagged the waiter.
“Señor, otra margarita, por favor.”
    A second margarita was a mistake, of course. The kind of mistake Anna was used to making. Her signature mistake. The one that always called her name.

twelve THE HOUSEKEEPER
    â€œ
Madre María
, mother of us all, it’s Soledad. I have news. Señor Thomas sent me down to the English library this morning to check on