The Middleman and Other Stories (10 page)

But I carry in the platter with the turkey and place it in front of Ro. “I want you to carve,” I say.

He brings out his dagger all over again. Franny is practically licking his fingers. “You mean this is a professional job?”

We stare fascinated as my lover slashes and slices, swiftly, confidently, at the huge, browned, juicy breast. The dagger scoops out flesh.

Now I am the one in a daze. I am seeing Ro's naked body as though for the first time, his nicked, scarred, burned body. In his body, the blemishes seem embedded, more beautiful, like wood. I am seeing character made manifest. I am seeing Brent and Dad for the first time, too. They have their little scars, things they're proud of, football injuries and bowling elbows they brag about. Our scars are so innocent; they are invisible and come to us from rough-housing gone too far. Ro hates to talk about his scars. If I trace the puckered tissue on his left thigh and ask “How, Ro?” he becomes shy, dismissive: a pack of dogs attacked him when he was a boy. The skin on his back is speckled and lumpy from burns, but when I ask he laughs. A crazy villager whacked him with a burning stick for cheekiness, he explains. He's ashamed that he comes from a culture of pain.

The turkey is reduced to a drying, whitened skeleton. On our plates, the slices are symmetrical, elegant. I realize all in a rush how much I love this man with his blemished, tortured body. I will give him citizenship if he asks. Vic was beautiful, but Vic was self-sufficient. Ro's my chance to heal the world.

I shall teach him how to walk like an American, how to dress like Brent but better, how to fill up a room as Dad does instead
of melting and blending but sticking out in the Afghan way. In spite of the funny way he holds himself and the funny way he moves his head from side to side when he wants to say yes, Ro is Clint Eastwood, scarred hero and survivor. Dad and Brent are children. I realize Ro's the only circumcised man I've slept with.

Mom asks, “Why are you grinning like that, Renata?”

 

I'M in bed watching the Vanilla Gorilla stick it to the Abilene Christians on some really obscure cable channel when Blanquita comes through the door wearing lavender sweats, and over them a frilly see-through apron. It's a November Thursday, a chilly fifty-three, but she's hibachiing butterfly lamb on the balcony.

“Face it, Griff,” Blanquita says, wielding the barbecue fork the way empresses wield scepters.

“Face what?”

“That's what I mean,” she says. “You're so insensitive, it's awesome.”

“Nobody says awesome anymore,” I tease. Blanquita speaks six languages, her best being Tagalog, Spanish, and American.

“Why not?” she says. Back in Manila, she took a crash course in making nice to Americans, before her father sent her over. In her family they called her Baby. “Bite him, Marcos,” she orders her cat. “Spit on him.” But Marcos chooses to stay behind the harpsichord and leggy ficus. Marcos knows I am not a cat person; he's known me to sneak in a kick. He takes out his hostilities on the ficus. What he does is chew up a pale, new leaf. I get my greenery for free because the office I work in
throws out all browning, scraggly plants and trees. I have an arboretum of rejects.

“Let's start this conversation over,” I plead. I'm tentative at the start of relationships, but this time I'm not throwing it away.

“Let's,” she says.

“You're beautiful,” I say.

“Do you mean that?”

I hate it when she goes intense on me. She starts to lift off the Press-On Nails from her thumbs. Her own nails are roundish and ridged, which might be her only imperfection.

“Blanquita the Beautiful.” I shoot it through with melody. If I were a songwriter I'd write her a million lyrics. About frangipani blooms and crescent moons. But what I am is a low-level money manager, a solid, decent guy in white shirt and maroon tie and thinning, sandy hair over which hangs the sword of Damocles. The Dow Jones crowds my chest like an implant. I unlist my telephone every six weeks, and still they find me, the widows and orthodontists into the money-market. I feel the sword's point every minute. Get me in futures! In Globals, in Aggressive Growth, in bonds! I try to tell them, for every loser there's a winner, somewhere. Someone's always profiting, just give me time and I'll find it, I'll lock you in it.

Blanquita scoops Marcos off the broadloom and holds him on her hip as she might a baby. “I should never have left Manila,” she says. She does some very heavy, very effective sighing. “Pappy was right. The East is East and the West is West and never the twain shall meet.”

I get these nuggets from Kipling at least once a week. “But, baby,” I object, “you did leave. Atlanta is halfway around the world from the Philippines.”

“Poor Pappy,” Blanquita moons. “Poor Joker.”

She doesn't give me much on her family other than that Pappy—Joker Rosario—a one-time big-shot publisher tight with the Marcos crew, is stuck in California stocking shelves in a liquor store. Living like a peon, serving winos in some hotbox
barrio.
Mother runs a beauty shop out of her kitchen in West Hartford, Connecticut. His politics, and those of his daughter, are—to understate it—vile. She'd gotten to America long before his fall, when he still had loot and power and loved to spread it around. She likes to act as though real life began for her at JFK when she got past the customs and immigration on the seventeenth of October, 1980. That's fine with me. The less I know about growing up in Manila, rich or any other way, the less foreign she feels. Dear old redneck Atlanta is a thing of the past, no need to feel foreign here. Just wheel your shopping cart through aisles of bok choy and twenty kinds of Jamaican spices at the Farmers' Market, and you'll see that the US of A is still a pioneer country.

She relaxes, and Marcos leaps off the sexy, shallow shelf of her left hip. “You're a racist, patronizing jerk if you think I'm beautiful. I'm just different, that's all.”

“Different from whom?”

“All your others.”

It's in her interest, somehow, to imagine me as Buckhead's primo swinger, maybe because—I can't be sure—she needs the buzz of perpetual jealousy. She needs to feel herself a temp. For all the rotten things she says about the Philippines, or the mistiness she reserves for the Stars and Stripes, she's kept her old citizenship.

“Baby, Baby, don't do this to me. Please?”

I crank up the Kraftmatic. My knees, drawn up and tense, push against my forehead. Okay, so maybe what I meant was that she isn't a looker in the blondhair-smalltits-greatlegs way that Wendi was. Or Emilou, for that matter. But beautiful is how she makes me feel. Wendi was slow-growth. Emilou was strictly Chapter Eleven.

I can't tell her that. I can't tell her I've been trading on rumor, selling on news, for years. Your smart pinstriper aims for the short-term profit. My track record for pickin 'em is just a little better than blindfold darts. It's as hard to lose big these days as it is to make a killing. I understand those inside traders—it's not
the money, it's the rush. I'm hanging in for the balance of the quarter.

But.

If there's a shot, I'll take it.

Meantime, the barbecue fork in Blanquita's hand describes circles of such inner distress that I have to take my eyes off the slaughter of the Abilene Christians.

“You don't love me, Griff.”

It's hard to know where she learns her lines. They're all so tragically sincere. Maybe they go back to the instant-marriage emporiums in Manila. Or the magazines she reads. Or a series of married, misunderstood men that she must have introduced to emotional chaos. Her tastes in everything are, invariably, unspeakable. She rests a kneecap on the twisted Kraftmatic and weeps. Even her kneecaps … well, even the kneecaps get my attention. It's not fair. Behind her, the Vanilla Gorilla is going man-to-man. Marcos is about to strangle himself with orange wool he's pawed out of a dusty wicker yarn basket. Wendi was a knitter. Love flees, but we're stuck with love's debris.

“I'm not saying you don't
like
me, Griff. I'm saying you don't love me, okay?”

Why do I think she's said it all before? Why do I hear “sailor” instead of my name? “Don't spoil what we have.” I am begging.

She believes me. Her face goes radiant. “What do we have, Griff?” Then she backs away from my hug. She believes me not.

All I get to squeeze are hands adorned with the glamor-length Press-On Nails. She could make a fortune as a hands model if she wanted to. That skin of hers is an evolutionary leap. Holding hands on the bed, we listen for a bit to the lamb spit fat. Anyone can suffer a cold shooting spell. I'm thirty-three and a vet of Club Med vacations; I can still ballhandle, but one-on-one is a younger man's game.

“All right, we'll drop the subject,” Blanquita says. “I can be a good sport.”

“That's my girl,” I say. But I can tell from the angle of her
chin and the new stiffness of her posture that she's turning prim and well-brought-up on me. Then she lobs devastation. “I won't be seeing you this weekend.”

“It's
ciao
because I haven't bought you a ring?”

“No,” she says, haughtily. “The Chief's asked me out, that's why. We're going up to his cabin.”

I don't believe her. She's not the Chief's type. She wants to goad me into confessing that I love her.

“You're a fast little worker.” The Chief, a jowly fifty-five, is rumored to enjoy exotic tastes. But, Christ, there's a difference between exotic and
foreign
, isn't there? Exotic means you know how to use your foreignness, or you make yourself a little foreign in order to appear exotic. Real foreign is a little scary, believe me. The fact is, the Chief brought Blanquita and me together in his office. That was nearly six months ago. I was there to prep him, and she was hustled in, tools of the trade stuffed into a Lancôme tote sack, to make him look good on TV. Blanquita's a makeup artist on the way up and up, and Atlanta is Executives City, where every Chief wants to look terrific before he throws himself to the corporate lions. I watched her operate. She pumped him up a dozen ways. And I just sat there, stunned. The Chief still had moves.

“You sound jealous, Griff.” She turns her wicked, bottomless blacks on me and I feel myself squirm.

“Go up to the cabin if you want to. I don't do jealousy, hon.”

She starts trapping on defense herself now. “You don't do jealousy! Well, you don't have the right to be jealous! You don't have any rights, period! You can't change the ground rules!”

Maybe Wendi wasn't all that certifiable a disaster. Come to think of it, Wendi had her moments. She could be a warm, nurturing person. We talked, we did things together. The summer we were breaking up, I built her kid a treehouse, which might be the only unselfish good I've accomplished in my life. Blanquita's a Third World aristocrat, a hothouse orchid you worship but don't dare touch. I wouldn't dare ask her to help me knock together a bookcase or scrub the grout around the
bathroom tiles. But Wendi, alas, never made me feel this special, this loved.

“I'm serious, Griff.” She closes her eyes and rams her fists in eyelids that are as delicately mauve as her sweatshirt. “You keep me in limbo. I need to know where we stand.”

“I don't want you to go,” I say. I'm not myself. I'm a romantic in red suspenders.

“What do you want me to do?”

“Whatever you want to do, hon.”

Her body sags inside her oversized sweatshirt. She gets off the mattress, strokes Marcos with the toes of her Reeboks, checks a shredded ficus leaf, tosses the skein of orange wool from the balcony down to the parking lot.

“Hullo,” I say. “Hey, Baby.” I really want to reach her. “Hey, watch him!” Wendi was a big basketball fan, a refugee from Hoosierland, and she was the first and so far the only woman I've known who could sit through a Braves or Falcons game. If I could get Miss Bataan to watch the Gorilla stuff it, we'd be okay, but she doesn't even pretend to watch.

“I'm going to make myself a cup of tea,” she says.

We say nothing while she brews herself a pot of cherry almond. Then she sits on my bed and drinks a slow cup, fiddling with the remote control and putting to flight all ten sweaty goons. F. Lee Bailey comes on and talks up the Bhopal tragedy. I can't believe it's been a year. I must have been seeing Emilou on the side when it happened. Yes, in fact Emilou cried, and Wendi had made a fuss about the mascara on my sixty-buck shirt. An auditorium packed with Herbalifers comes on the screen. The Herbalifers are very upbeat and very free enterprise. They perk her up.

“We don't need that,” I plead.

“You don't know what you need,” she snaps. “You're so narcissistic you don't need anyone. You don't know how to love.”

Sailor
, I think. It thrills me.

“That's not fair.”

But Blanquita the Beautiful races on to bigger issues. “Not just you, Griff,” she scolds in that eerily well-bred, Asian convent-schooled voice. “You're all emotional cripples. All you Americans. You just worry about your own measly little relationships. You don't care how much you hurt the world.”

In changing gears, she's right up there with Mario Andretti. I envy her her freedom, her Green Card politics. It's love, not justice, that powers her. Emilou and Wendi would have died if I caught them in an inconsistency.

She jabs at more buttons on the remote control doodad. Herbalifers scuttle into permanent blackness, and a Soweto funeral procession comes on. Big guys in black boots come at pallbearers with whips and clubs. Blanquita lays her teacup on the top sheet. These are serious designer sheets, debris from my months with Emilou. When Joker Rosario went to South Africa back in the long, long ago, he was treated very, very white. He wrote pleasant things about South Africa in his paper. Yesterday's statesman is today's purveyor of Muscatel. South Africa is making her morose, and I dare not ask why. I suddenly remember that the neighborhood dry cleaner doesn't know how to take tea stains off but does a good job with Kahlúa. Blanquita flashes the black inscrutables one more time and says, “I can't stand it anymore, Griff. It's got to stop.”