New London, the Thames harbor, docks, berthed sailboats, nothing out there today on the choppy grayish waters. The next stop, a short stretch of seascape away, is Mystic. Bert once brought us somewhere around here to see the submarine base, and to the seaport in Mystic to tour some of the old three-masted sailing vessels. I remember standing on the balcony of a motel early in the morning and looking down into the pool where Mamita was swimming laps in a light-blue bathing suit, her hair tucked under a bathing cap, how beautifully and swiftly she swam with her long, graceful crawl through the limpid water. Was that motel around here, in Mystic? Falmouth? Woods Hole? Wait, I think it was Boothbay Harbor.
I was on a quick book tour that I’d come up from Mexico for when Penny turned up by surprise at a reading I was giving at Politics and Prose and took me out for drinks and burgers afterward at the same bar good ol’ Tip O’Neill and some of the Kennedys used to drink at, where she said she remembered the color of the killer rake’s handle as fire-engine red. No, Penny, you’re wrong. It was slurry seal, I said emphatically. Though I wasn’t as sure as I’d sounded. Penny had spent years on the lecture circuit, traveling the country, talking about Guatemala, showing her slides, speaking in church and synagogue basements and public libraries, visiting colleges and universities. She wasn’t making any money but was invited to sit with do-gooder fat cats on the boards of various human rights and foreign policy organizations; then she suddenly enrolled in the Wharton School of Business. Five years later, by 9/11, she’d made an immense fortune in big-time finance. Of course anything Penny turned her obsessive attention to she was going to excel at. That night in the bar, she confided after her third martini that she utterly loved being ruthless in her business dealings but only so long as she believed she was competing against the sorts of bastards who for decades had been dictating all the ways that Guatemala and the other Central American countries were to be fucked over. Not long after, Penny had some kind of breakdown, was diagnosed with severe PTSD and what they called “addiction to perfectionism,” and spent two months in a treatment center in the Berkshires; then she went to live in Bali with her lover for a year; now she uses her wealth to found projects like the scholarship fund for Guatemalan Maya students whose advisory board she invited me to join, and she’s promised a big donation to the “learning sanctuary” for immigrant kids in Bushwick that I volunteer at. Penny’s back again on her relentless lecture circuit, too, paying her own travel expenses, traveling the United States speaking to ever-smaller audiences. She says she doesn’t even care as long as at least a few people show up, and now and then she’s nicely surprised, in California, say, by a college or even high school crowd that includes many students who came from Central America as small children, others born here, kids so eager to learn everything they can about what went on during the war decades in their ancestral countries that their parents fled, the most common complaint being that those same parents often refuse to talk about it. Penny always tells me she’s writing a memoir, I hope she does.
Outside of my aunt and uncle and cousins, I couldn’t deal, back then, with people who didn’t get what was going on or didn’t want to; people, both up here and down there, who weren’t bothered by or were just passive consumers of all the lies endlessly poured over mass murder. The war and its politics made me judgmental in a vehement way I’m likely to roll my eyes at now whenever I encounter it in others, less over the judgments than over the vehemence, sometimes as embarrassing as hearing a recording of my own much younger self. But a fundamental truth of the war in Guatemala was always that those with the most wealth and power to lose were the most indifferent to how many were slaughtered: young mothers, babies, entire villages, whatever, it made no difference to them. To this day they’re sure they were on the correct side of history, even if what they have to show for it are failed narco states with starving populations and everybody trying to get the hell out, and now here comes the next narco president, General Cara de Culo, “a good muchacho,” as the gringo ambassador called him in a newspaper article the other day. Those trips back to New York in those years were always incredibly isolating.
But by the end of the eighties I’d moved back anyway, where I shared an apartment in Brooklyn with Gero Tripp. We still sometimes worked in Central America, even went down together for the Panama invasion. But soon after, I decided I wasn’t going to do that anymore. I was at last finishing my first novel. Gero was on his way to becoming an international war correspondent superstar. Bosnia, the West Bank, and Gaza, with the Pashtuns who fought the Red Army in Afghanistan, the Tamil Tigers, the Polisario Front in Western Sahara. He’s in Iraq right now. I was also venturing into risky territories I’d never been to before. At thirty-three, I started having girlfriends and relationships, one after the other, and that enormous change in my life consumed me. It started the night I went to meet a younger friend, a Harvard law student who’d been an intern reporter in Managua, for drinks in the city, and she turned up at the bar with a friend of hers,
