Mai at the Predators' Ball (3 page)

You know I am no good but love me anyway
, how are you supposed to be worth anything in this world anyhow, Robbie asked, I’m gonna be cute, with long blonde hair over my own, and I’ll dance so good before and after the show that people on the street will stop and shower money on me, ’specially Fridays and Sundays, so how are you supposed to be worth anything in this world when nothing’s worth much anyway, eh Petites Cendres, what do you think his favourite song was, he just loved it, none of us really take up much space at all do we, short orbits, that’s all we have, just like Fatalité, oh I know I’m not worth anything, nothing at all, but while I’m passing through, boy am I gonna cause a splash, ’cause you’ve got a chance at that at least, here’s the Reverend announced Yinn, standing near the edge of the sea, now the Reverend will speak, Reverend Stone, where’d they get him Robbie asked Petites Cendres, Fatalité didn’t even believe in religion, first a reverend then prayers, Christ it’s like being in church or some kind of religious meeting with everybody respectfully gathered round him like that, or maybe we just never realized he had faith in something all along, what do you think eh, Fatalité liked simple things, life, a bit of pot, what else . . . dear friends, intoned Reverend Stone, let us pray for our travelling companion Fatalité who always followed his own road, a fanciful one perhaps, but everyone has theirs, the one that has to be followed, straight or twisting and turning or whatever it may be, but God receive him in his charity just the same, and each of us is welcome into the house of the Lord as Fatalité is, for you know my friends, Fatalité was a believer, a true and fervent believer, and sometimes he said to me the Lord lead me where He wills, for I am but the smallest wave on the ocean, yet we must have some enjoyment on this journey of ours, a journey now over, suspended, the passageway now bricked up, the ocean we hear swell so loud Robbie said to Petites Cendres, and you know when Yinn was young he hid his share of sewing machines just so his mother would no longer ruin her fingers with needle points, but she just had to keep taking them back to the stores and reason with the owners, explaining that he was obsessed with making clothes with the shiny machines standing in the shadows of the rich people’s houses where his mother worked for so long as a servant, and obsessed as he was he would one day be an artist, let it be known by all the shop owners or masters of the houses where she explained he really wasn’t a delinquent at all, no thief, just a marvelling, passionate child, nothing more, and that was how he managed to stay out of corrections halls, though she constantly reproached him for it of course, the same way she complained of his marrying Jason, a reverend among us, that just doesn’t fit Robbie told Petites Cendres, but for all that it was well said just the same, Fatalité’s way was his own, and do you think with all these speeches we’re gonna be in time for the ten o’clock show, I mean a reverend with prayers and all, I just didn’t expect all that coming from Fatalité, Robbie said, God I hope they don’t do all this when my turn comes, like when I’m a hundred, I mean I’m not croaking any time soon, and the rose and orchid petals are floating on the waves, it is late and the cocks are still asleep, time for us to go home too, walking in silence, yup time for the ten o’clock show Robbie said. Papa usually writes for an hour after our weekly visit to the library, so if he takes me for a ride in the car instead I’ll wonder why; must be so he can talk to me, but what about, Mai thought, he
knows everything all the time, certainly whatever Mama’s told
him, but he’s not one of those intruding fathers, no never, but he’ll never say anything, he dared ask me one thing though on that foggy road: this Manuel, you’ve known him for quite a while, haven’t you — no, he didn’t say the business about the Mercedes and you in the car with him, it did happen didn’t it — no, not one of those intruding fathers, you were only eleven then, true he didn’t dare to say that, but here I am next to him in the car and it’s for no good reason, I brashly ask how his book is going and he says it’s not a story but something that really happened, in fact they always are real events he said firmly, it’s Nora’s story he says, completely absorbed in her so I can’t keep his attention on me, I dislike my dad’s heroines because they always take him away from me, and there’s something suspicious about that that he won’t admit to, and why has he taken his writing time to go for a ride with me, maybe it’s so I won’t go out dancing, he doesn’t like that, so I couldn’t compare him to those possessive fathers with daughters in the abstinence clubs, purity clubs, who have a few drinks and watch their little ballerinas dance for them in their huge tutus, then waltz with them, black dragons in tuxes, one waltz for Daddy, smooth music especially for this, and a song rises in the adolescent throats, chanting your love Papa and your faith are my shield, and I will always be your baby, yes Papa, always so small and so confident and willing to sing whatever they’re told, nothing’s too stupid, then the exchange of roses and vows between fathers and tiaraed daughters devoted to total purity for Daddy’s sake, more than a vow, an oath, I will be forever faithful Daddy, your baby girl entwined in an embrace with Daddy as the vain tears well up, always faithful Daddy dearest, this is how the purity balls turn out, so even if my dad isn’t anything like them I’m still suspicious about why he wants me to go for this ride, yes of course, you’ve known Manuel for years, I remember he says distractedly, yes of course, he doesn’t want me to open the door too suddenly, his suspicious reason is that he wants to talk to me, that we both talk, sort of like a vow between us, and he’ll promise not to tell Mama, but he’s still not thinking of me but of Nora, she is his true inspiration, no dogs to walk so we can talk freely, no dogs to muddy up the car seats or lay the weight of their large heads between us or leap on me so happily, and Papa has absolutely no ulterior motive in speaking to me or me to him, you see Mai he now said, Manuel and his father have a pretty bad reputation, like those discotheques of theirs where you and your friends go dancing, bad, really bad he said, coming back to Nora, the muse for his book, maybe with a little more nuance, I’d say deterioration or slow degradation, which of course can happen to anybody, Nora is special, the opposite of Ibsen’s character you understand, you are too hung up on this woman Mai returned, implacable, besides she’s married, I was talking about my book her father replied, then in another tone, it’s dangerous for kids like you, but I’m no longer a child Mai said, and Manuel and his father are pimps, but he did not actually say anything, it is just in your head she thought, you are too hung up on this Nora said Mai again, plus you cut your own hair, and badly too I might add replied her father, smiling so he could interrupt the suspicious conversation while letting him be distracted by Nora, the one he was writing about, at the very moment when he should be at his work table, the fog’s fallen all of a sudden he said, I didn’t realize you’d known one another for so many years, I repeat, sweetheart, this boy has a very bad reputation, I know Papa, I know, you already said that Mai interrupted, but her father returned to it, I didn’t realize it he said without smiling, there are two things I don’t like about you Mai replied, you write books and you play golf like some sort of old man, and at this very moment she wanted more than anything else for her father to be less suspicious, that she be out from under this interrogation, and that he stop searching her out with those charcoal eyes and brows that had been greying for a while now, the fathers of the purity club in turn made their vows after dinner and a waltz, vows that they too would be pure in their lives as men, husbands and fathers owned forever by their little girls, then went out onto the terrace for a smoke, choking on the lies and posturing, and one of them with a cowboy hat recalled that he’d had ten kids by seven different women but now it was time for vows of purity, and he had three daughters in the room, one only ten years old swearing to Dad that she would remain a virgin until marriage, though she didn’t really know what it meant except that tonight she had lived a fairy tale with her father, pretty lies, all of it, and afterwards he’d smoked his cigarette, gone back inside to admire the charming little things, his own and others’, a private flower garden, who would all remember this night when each had offered the treasure of her heart to Daddy, when, Daddy, when are we going to sail to Panama Lou asked her father, in spring Ari replied, when the winds are gentler, now the boat was called
Lou’s Boat,
no longer
Lou’s Camper
, which would have been silly considering she was older now, and it was tied up at the Club Nautique as Ari polished its sides, listening to the sound of the waves while Rosie and Lou played on the bridge with greasy french-fry fingers the way she did at her mother Ingrid’s, brought up so badly he thought, and at times they darted down into the cabin with laughter spilling over, greasy french-fry fingers, and it annoyed him that she didn’t share his vegetarianism, eating their disgusting hot dogs, so make yourselves useful, help me polish the boat at least with all that grease of yours, if we want to make it to Panama she’s got to be watertight he told Rosie, who cast admiring looks at Lou, I’m the one who’s going to pilot just like Ari showed me, she knew by now how much it annoyed him to be called Ari and not Papa anymore, she’d heard it spat out and filled with ominous threat in her mother’s house, I’ll never speak to your father again, and you won’t be seeing him so often either, this
won’t be
,
won’t be
could only rankle coming from his daughter, who surely felt his exasperated stare, it’s Ingrid who talks that way, am I right, and Lou also called her mother by her first name, not Mama, speaking to both parents as though they were strangers, Ari, sad to see his daughter was no longer his or her mother’s, as though insolence were something to be prized now, all you are is old grownups, Ingrid and Ari, two old folks I wish I could do without, but I’m still growing so I’m stuck with you, I’ve just got to put up with it for now, oh yes she told an admiring Rosie, I’m the one who’s piloting us to Panama, because there
won’t be
,
won’t be
anyone in charge but me, Lou’s boat, is it true Rosie said, twice a week a bus comes for you and the other gifted girls, that’s what they call you, and why couldn’t I be one of you Rosie asked with anxious modesty, why, I mean I like drawing too and music, and they say you learn all kinds of things that we don’t in class, yes, well that’s because it’s only for us gifted kids Lou answered, but why not me too Rosie’s nervous little voice queried, not satisfied with the abrupt reply, only gifted, and you aren’t one, you’re still stuck in the middle of your reader, in fact you’re behind like those black kids on Esmeralda, the ones that really drag behind the others in school, and she knew full well this would offend her father as she went on whispering in Rosie’s ear, pulling her hair till she cried you’re pulling my hair out, then Lou calmed down, rejoicing in the sense of power that her exasperated dominance over the younger girl brought her, I mean she had to, didn’t she, lord over these little idiots with her all-knowingness, and besides they can retake the exams during the summer and so can you, thought Lou more kindly all of a sudden, after all you do have to get some people to like you, don’t you, and she felt her father’s gaze settle on her seeming to say be nice with Rosie, though her father wasn’t thinking of her, it was too vague and dreamy for that, Lou was more and more certain her father had another woman in his life, someone in my daddy’s life she thought, so often headed to New York, and he doesn’t want to tell me about her, he’d rather lie, what a sneak, as their gazes connected and wove into one another there in the bright afternoon sun sparkling on the water, Ari wanted to say you know I have sculptor friends in New York and my entire professional life, Lou you know that, and what wouldn’t he have said just to divert her vindictive anger, would he, supposedly a free man, forever be condemned to confronting his daughter and her mother, you’ll see when it comes time for you to hang around boys, you’ll see how men are and one day you’ll understand, oh how Lou longed to tear out Rosie’s hair, every bit of it, one by one from this obedient child’s head who still went to bed at eight every evening, same time as her little brother, Lou’s rage would not leave a single strand in place, and Ari, the man who no longer spoke true, no longer her friend, whose dreamy faraway look now shamefully, oh so shamefully, looked at her unseeing while seemingly polishing the mahogany flanks of his boat,
The Boat
, hers and his, distracted and unfaithful father that he was, she thought of bringing all those other little girls here just so she could pull their hair out like that Rosie’s, this was how much her father’s wandering eye tore into her, the parade of young women, mistresses, that didn’t matter, but for him to be in love with a real person, no that was not going to happen thought Lou, he already had a home and a wife, Ingrid, and a daughter, Marie-Louise — Lou herself — and there were to be no additions to that, no more of those usurping outsiders to take her father and all that from her, as some had already done right beneath her unsuspecting eye, and then here was Rosie looking in stunned admiration at her and the other
gifted
kids with the fastest computers, and why don’t we have those in our school, I mean it hasn’t even been fixed up and the walls are cracked, asked Rosie, because they’re just for us and no one else was Lou’s answer, because the really cool computers are for the important people and you’re not one of those, and we’re the ones education is meant for, oh Lou knew what she said always bordered on insult, and she really
had to nail this Rosie, like everyone who set foot on the boat, and she’d face down her father and bait the trap by offering them fries and hot dogs, then she could pull their hair and make them scream so loud she couldn’t describe the all-powerful