The Scared Stiff (8 page)

"Good," Maria said. "She'll take care of you."

"I can see that. My real name, you know—"

"Oh, don't be silly," she said. "I know your real name. I was at your wedding."

"You were? I'm sorry, I don't—"

"Grooms aren't supposed to remember the other people at their wedding," she assured me. "You were very handsome, and Lola was very beautiful, and you both looked as though you couldn't wait to get away from everybody and fuck yourselves silly."

Being around Lola's family and friends, I've noticed that people never treat dirty words in their second language as seriously as those words in their primary tongue. The taboo words you grew up with keep their strength, whether you use them as a grown-up or not, but other languages' taboo words are never more than merely funny. Still, it is always startling — and it was now — to have an elegant woman say
fuck
early in a first conversation.

Trying to stay in the spirit of our chat, I said, "As I remember, we succeeded."

She smiled. "Congratulations."

"Still," I said, "I think it was wrong of me not to remember you."

"That's very gallant of you, Ernesto," she said. "Thank you."

"Ernesto." I tasted the name, since I was hearing it addressed to me for the first time by a new person, and I didn't much like it, not for me. "Ah, well," I said, "I'm a deaf mute, so I don't actually have to get used to answering to that name. And it's only for a little while, anyway."

"Carlos says you might be here a month."

"Oh, less than that, I think," I said, then hastily added, "Not that this isn't a great place. It's just that — to be without Lola. You know."

"Of course." She smiled in sympathy. "But I'll be pleased for you to stay," she told me. "It can get a little boring in Rancio."

"You preferred Ecuador?"

"Not particularly," she said. "It's all the same to me. Every place can get boring sometimes. But after that ridiculous business about the embezzling, of course, Carlos couldn't stay in Ecuador any longer, and he does like to be near his family, so here we are."

Embezzling. She'd said that casually, as though, being a member of the family, I would know all about it. I didn't know all about it, but I couldn't think of a way to ask, so I'd find out from Lola when I saw her again. In the meantime, I had another question, even more urgent. Trying to sound as casual as she had, I said, "The last time I was here, I missed you, I'm sorry to say. Carlos said you were in Caracas to see your dealer."

"To have scenes with my dealer, in fact," she told me. "To threaten I would go elsewhere. I may have to eventually."

This didn't help much. I said, "Has he been your dealer long?"

"Twelve years," she said. "And really, he throws wonderful parties, you can meet the most astonishing people, but after a while you want more than that. You want a real
hit."

Increasingly befuddled, I said, "You go to him for parties?"

She looked confused, then amused, and said, "Ernesto, don't you know what we're talking about?"

"Well, no," I said.

She went off into arias of laughter, rocking on the chaise, looking very alluring but also very self-contained. "Oh, Ernesto," she said, when she could speak again, "that's wonderful. What kind of dealer did you think? Did you think it was my
drugs
dealer?"

"No, that didn't seem to fit," I admitted. "Nothing seems to fit. If it's a riddle, I give up. Tell me the answer."

"Sweetheart," she said, which I knew was horribly condescending, but there was no way out of it, "he's my
art
dealer."

"Your art dealer." She was buying art?

She shook her head at me, still broadly smiling. "The sculptures on the walls? You've noticed them?"

Oh, so that's what she's buying. "Yes," I said, "they're very striking, very interesting, I remember think—"

"They're
mine!
I make them! Later on, I'll show you my studio; it's at that end of the house down there."

"You're an artist!" I said. I was feeling stupid and abashed, and she was right to condescend to me.

But then she softened, saying, "I thought Carlos would have told you. Or Arturo. Yes, I am an artist, and my dealer sells me very well in Europe and in South America, but not at all in the United States. He has no contacts there, and I'm feeling a frenzy, because legitimacy comes from magazine articles, and the important magazines are in the United States, and they know
nothing
about me."

"Ah," I said.

"I
need
to get into Soho," she declared. "Not LA; that just ghettoizes me as another Hispanic. I need to get into Soho, and Friedrich isn't getting me there, and I
will
go to someone else unless he can come up with something."

"Friedrich," I said, "is your art dealer in Caracas."

"Yes." Then she smiled at me again and said, "I'm sorry I laughed, I was wrong. You couldn't know, and you're very sweet."

Which was more condescension, I realized, but that was all right. Speaking sincerely, I said, "I'll have to go back and look at those pieces again, now that I know something about the mind that produced them."

"You're going to understand me," she said, openly mocking.

"I doubt that," I said.

Which pleased her. "Good," she said. "Will you forgive me for laughing?"

"Of course," I said. "Will you forgive my ignorance?"

"We forgive each other," she decided, "and now we are friends. Would you like to swim? Esilda will get you a suit."

"Later," I said. "It's too soon after breakfast for me."

"Well, I need to swim now," Maria told me, and she got smoothly to her feet, strode to the edge of the pool, and dove in.

I sat there and watched her swim laps, with strong unhurried strokes. I was thinking that Lola was about to go away for weeks, for who knew how many weeks. I was thinking that this woman could be something of a torment, and that Luz could be something of a temptation, and I certainly hoped the time spent waiting for the insurance company didn't drag out very long.

Tuesday she would leave, flying home to New York, while I stayed here. Between now and then, we had to get together, somehow, somewhere. That was definite. I sat in the chaise, under the white-and-blue awning, in the warm air, and watched Maria swim her steady laps, and schemed how to get together one more time with Lola.

Carlos appeared around five-thirty in the afternoon. By then I'd swum, in the bathing suit Esilda had brought me, boxer-style, very colorful, with matadors waving capes fore and aft. I'd also dealt with lunch, and dozed a bit in one of the chaises, and was feeling very comfortable and at home, pleased to be around Maria.

In midafternoon, she'd showed me her studio, a bare concrete room at the opposite end of the house from my guest room and about twice its size. It looked mostly like an auto repair shop, with its acetylene torches and stacks of pipe and all the tools scattered around, including an array of hacksaws on the wall over the workbench. I looked at it all and said, "You should be covered with scars."

She laughed. "For the first few months, I was, but that was years ago."

I looked at what was apparently a work-in-progress, a two-foot-high twist of metal clamped in a vise at the end of the workbench. It was a kind of spiral that bent in on itself, as though in pain. I don't know why it seemed so strong, but it was hard not to go on looking at it. I said, "I now realize you don't do your work justice, hanging it in a row on the wall out there. One at a time, it's more powerful."

"That isn't display," she said, dismissing the work on the wall with a careless wave of the hand, "that's storage. I send photos to Friedrich, and then sometimes he asks me to ship this one or that one."

"He can tell from pictures?"

"Now he can. And the dealers in Europe."

I looked at the bending spiral again. "I've never understood abstraction," I said. "I don't mean to look at, I mean to make. How do you know when it's right?"

"The emotion," she said, and shrugged. She wasn't really interested in talking about her art, just I guess in doing it. "Come back out in the sunlight," she said.

So I did, and was still there in my matador trunks when Carlos came home.

I hadn't really been thinking about Carlos all day, not in the aura of this strong woman, but now I looked at them together and I just didn't get it. I know it's a common thing for couples to look completely mismatched, so that only they themselves know why they're a team, but Maria and Carlos took that notion to extremes. Here was this dramatic sophisticated woman, this artist, and over here in this corner we have a slob in a torn white T-shirt whose belly is so fat it lies on his belt buckle. He came out to the patio, nodded at us seated there on adjoining chaises, and said, "You met."

"Ernesto is very amusing," Maria told him. "He thought I was in Caracas to see my drug dealer."

Carlos hid his amusement very well. "Huh," he said.

"Come for a swim, darling," she said.

"I got to shower," he said, and nodded at me. "Tell Esilda we want drinks."

"Beer?" I asked, as I stood up from the chaise.

"She knows what we want. You tell her what you want."

"Okay."

Maria swam again, arms rhythmically moving, legs slowly scissoring, black-sheathed body thrusting smoothly through the clear water. Carlos went into the house, and I walked over to the kitchen entrance and inside, to find Esilda seated weeping in front of a small TV set that stood in the corner of the counter. It was a Spanish-language soap opera, fiercer and more passionate than American ones. The three people raging around what looked like a Holiday Inn motel room with the drapes drawn shut seemed somehow to have hurt one another deeply. They were discussing it.

Esilda wiped her eyes and looked at me. I was sorry to tear her away from her fun, but I was on a mission, so I told her Carlos and Maria wanted drinks, then pointed at myself:
"Cerveza.
"

She nodded, got to her feet, and abandoned the trio in the motel room without a backward glance. Over at the counter, she poured white wine into a graceful long-stemmed glass, then combined half light rum and half Coca-Cola in a heavier cut-glass tumbler. Seeing me still standing there, she made a shooing gesture that I should get out of her kitchen, so I did.

Outside, Maria was still swimming laps. I considered joining her but felt too lazy, so I sat instead. Every once in a while, a grungy motorboat would go slowly by, out there on the river, and one did now, so I watched it until it was out of sight.

Then I looked for a while at Colombia, which was the land on the other side of the river. Some of the riverside over there had been cleared for grazing, and scrawny cattle moved around picturesquely against a background of mountainous jungle. Where the land hadn't been cleared, the jungle petered out as it approached the river, becoming a kind of messy savanna. Bird calls electrified the air from time to time, but which side of the river the birds were on I couldn't tell.

Esilda came out with a silver tray. Because it was the cocktail hour, I suppose, she had poured my beer into a frosty glass stein with a handle. She turned the tray so I could take it, and I said,
"Gracias.
" She smiled, put the tray on the round white table near the chaises, and went back into the kitchen.

Maria, seeing the drinks arrive, got out of the pool, wrapped herself in a golden towel that made her look like a creature who would have been worshiped in this part of the world a few thousand years ago — and who's to say they would have been wrong? — and came over to pick up the wineglass. I'd known the wine was hers. She raised the glass to me:
"Salud.
"

"Prosit," I said, and she laughed, and we sipped from our glasses, and Carlos joined us.

Well, he'd shaved, and his flattened hair suggested he'd showered, but he was now wearing only red bikini swimming trunks, so I can't say he'd made an overall improvement. In fact, at first I thought he wasn't wearing anything at all, because his belly hid the trunks in front, and it was only when he turned away that you could see that crimson globe behind.

Arriving, he said nothing to me at all but went over to kiss Maria lightly on the lips — I hadn't expected that — then picked up his drink and held it toward her and growled,
"Salud."

"Cheers," she said, smiling fondly at him, and they clinked their glasses together.

He downed about half his drink, put the glass down, nodded at me, and went over to hurl himself into the pool with a huge splash. He did walrus and whale imitations for a while in there, while Maria lay back on the chaise beside me and seemed to go to sleep. I spent the time sipping my beer and wondering if Carlos would be able to get word to Arturo that I needed to spend some time with Lola before Tuesday. I'll ask him when he comes out of the pool, I decided.

But when he came out, wrapping himself in another of the golden towels and now looking like the Sun King, picking up his drink on the way by and then sitting on the edge of the chaise on my other side, he had things he wanted to say to me, so he went first. "Tomorrow we gotta go to church," he said. "It's expected. Ten o'clock. You'll meet people. You know how to do that."

"Sure."

"You want to go to the funeral?"

For just a second, I couldn't think what funeral he was talking about. Then I remembered: mine, of course. I said, "How could I? I don't dare go back to Sabanon."

"I got a chauffeur suit," he said. "You wear it, with the hat, you stay in the car. You don't go in the church, but you see it all from outside. And the procession, and in the graveyard."

A chauffeur in the funeral procession. I would get to go to my own funeral. "You're on," I said.

Sunday morning. Was I already used to this new doppelgänger existence? It seemed only natural to put on Ernesto's best (not that good) clothes and meet Carlos and Maria in the living room to go to mass together. Both were dressed well, she in a pearl-gray high-neck long-sleeve blouse, long black skirt, and dangling earrings in crimson and gold, he in a black suit, as well-tailored as a suit could be on that body, with a pale blue shirt and a black string tie. He was actually presentable.