“Willem, in case you haven’t noticed, Cancún is back that way?” She points in the reverse direction. I nod. “The chances of you finding this girl seem unfavorable enough without you going to an entirely different city.”
“It wasn’t going to happen. I could tell.”
“How could you tell?”
“Because you don’t ever find things when you’re looking for them. You find them when you’re not.”
“If that were true, nobody would ever find their keys.”
“Not keys. The bigger things.”
She sighs. “I don’t get it. On one hand, you put all this faith into these accidents of yours, and on the other hand, you write off the chance of one even happening.”
>“That’s just cosmetic. You should’ve seen it before. The muffler was falling out, literally dragging behind the car, sparking. The whole rainforest could’ve gone up in flames because of this baby. No offense. Who’s a pretty girl?” She pats the dashboard and turns to me, whispering. “You have to be nice to her. Or she won’t go.”
I tip an imaginary hat to the car. “My apologies.”
“This is actually a great car. Appearances can be quite deceiving, you know.” She guns the engine.
“Yes, I’ve noticed.”
“Thank God, or I’d be out of a job.”
“Bank robber?”
“Ha! I’m an actor.”
“Really?”
She turns to me. “Why? Are you of the tribe?”
“Not really.”
She raises an eyebrow. “‘Not really’? That’s like being ‘a little’ pregnant. You either are or you’re not.”
“How about I was, not seriously, and now I’m not.”
“Oh, did you need to get a ‘real job’?” she asks sympathetically.
“No. I don’t have one of those, either.”
“So you just travel and eat dangerously?”
“More or less.”
“Nice life.”
“More or less.” The car hits a pothole and my stomach seems to smack against the roof and then just as abruptly, plummet back to the floor. “What kind of acting do you do?” I ask when I’ve regained my equilibrium.
“I’m a cofounder and artistic director of a small theater company in New York called Ruckus. We do productions, but also training and teaching programs.”
“That’s not impressive at all.”
“I know, right? I never meant to be quite so ambitious, but when my friends and I moved to New York, we couldn’t get the kind of roles we wanted, so we started our own company. And it’s just kind of grown. We produce our own plays and we teach, and now we’ve started this overseas initiative. That’s why we’re in Mexico. We’re running a workshop on Shakespeare in Mérida in conjunction with Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán.”
“You’re teaching Shakespeare in Spanish?”
“Well, I’m not, because I don’t speak a lick of Spanish. I’ll work with the English speakers. David, my fiancé, he speaks Spanish. Though the funny thing is, even when we do the Shakespeare in translation, I somehow know where we are in the plays. Maybe because I know them so well. Or because Shakespeare transcends language.”