Looking for Willie George

The cab driver seemed a little shady — it took longer than I’d expected to get into the fashionable Spanish Colonial section of Quito where Isabella and Miguel lived. Just another cost of my morbid curiosity, I reckoned — paying him and walking toward the elegant pink-washed row home where Isabella had landed.

There was so much history here, much of it brutal, but there was also the saving grace of the architecture. The City of Quito was a UN World Heritage site, in large part because of the 16th Century churches and monasteries, but also for calm and grace of these sun-dried brick homes, covered with pastel-washed plaster and stucco.

How could a people capable of such refinement also be capable of such savagery against the Inca Empire and the gentle local mountain tribes that belonged here, that had evolved here as naturally as the brightly colored flowers of the Andes? It was the same story everywhere; just down the Mississippi from La Crosse there was a marker for the Bad Axe Massacre undertaken by U.S. troops against fleeing Sauk families crossing the river.

Brutality was part of World Heritage, too.

Number 146 was not the pink row home, but the salmon and burgundy one next to it. I started toward it, but lost my courage and walked up the block enjoying the sun and flowers, the almost-Moorish Old Spanish Quarter ambiance. I was here in Quito; there was no question I had to speak to Isabella, to force myself to meet her new man, Miguel.

As I rounded the corner back toward their house, I saw Isabella enter the house just after a man who was much bulkier than the sophisticated upper class Ecuadoran I’d pictured in my imagination. But it was my unmistakably my dear Isabella — who’d been my whole world — my great joy for a decade as she had become my grief over the past year.

I suppose many would have judged her to be no great beauty. Isabella was a small woman with uneven teeth — her nose could be a little jarring and prominent from certain angles, as it had presented now, going into her elegant town house. But how I’d loved and desired her! Even if we’d been born of and belonged to two different continents, our marriage had for a time existed in a country of our own making. It was down to earth and real. We had good communication, great sex, much laughter, and a profound and simple happiness in our companionship.

Our love had had both poetry and prose — all it had lacked was a common sense of place where it could be sustained.

I rang the doorbell and Isabella greeted me with a hug! “Edward what an unexpected pleasure!” Her smile was genuine, and here, too, was her precious little body, wrapped up where it belonged in my arms.

“I’m sorry, very sorry. I know I should have called. I did try, last week.”

Holding her, ever so briefly, I felt again the magnitude of what I’d lost. And I knew at last why I’d gone looking for Willie George. I’d been looking not for Willie but for a familiar face to ease my pain; I knew that friendship and love were the only cure for loneliness.

“No, it’s a good thing! It’s time you know the truth, Johnny,” she called to the man in another room, “Edward’s here.”

“Eddie!” In walked a black man with a beard, who looked very much like my old friend Willie George, but for his thicker frame and massive jowls. “Eddie, it so nice to see you again,” said the man embracing me in a massive bear hug.

“Willie?”

“Yes, it’s me old friend,” he said sheepishly. It was almost as though young Willie’s head had been grafted on a much larger man’s neck and jowls.

He’s fat, I thought, almost grotesquely so! I knew this thought was petty and cruel but I relished it! The cruelest thoughts always come from people in pain.

Their story spilled out of them. Willie George was not his real name, but a name he’d used in the U.S. to avoid customs issues. Jonathon Bryant, the real Willie, had slowly worked his way up in international banking and had become a Vice President for South American operations with a large British bank in the last couple of years. He’d been transferred to Quito two years ago.

The story about a Facebook flirtation was true, and Isabella swore there had never been any physical intimacy — the phrase seared my soul — on any of her visits home, although she had seen him the last time and they’d plotted her escape. They were terribly torn about whether or not to tell me, and just when they’d resolved not to, I’d started my ridiculous (they said touching) effort to find him. They were surprised that I’d gone all the way to British Guyana trying to find him. At that point I cut them off.

“Por favor — no más!” My unexpected, American accented Spanish made all three of us laugh—Isabella and me through our tears.

So I added, looking at Willie but not smiling. “The horror! The horror!”

He winced, remembering his Conrad. It meant I was dying.

After a few awkward pleasantries, Isabella drove me back to the airport. She apologized several times. We hugged silently and then I turned back to her. “Willie, I mean Johnny — he’s not a bad guy. He’s very kind and he respects women, or at least he did when I knew him. To be honest, I feel completely humiliated but I’m glad you’re with a man like that.”

“I still love you Ed.”

“Me too, my darling Isabella.” But I understood profoundly at that moment that you had to go forward, not backward, in life.

The flight was on time and the plane slowly rose into the sky. As I looked out over Quito and the mountains beyond, I thought of how lucky Johnny and Isabella were to have each other; and, if I could just overcome the shock of this useless jealousy, of how lucky I could be to have them both once again my friends.

But it’s been two years since that day in Quito and I still don’t answer their e-mails or return their calls.

Jeffrey D. Boldt has published more than 100 short stories, poems, and essays. His work has appeared in The Wallace Stevens Journal, Berkeley Poetry Review, Tikkun, and The Missing Slate, among others. He has a short story forthcoming in The MacGuffin.