Private House (24 page)

Lorraine said, “But what do you like?”

He didn't hesitate. “Pineapple.”

And she asked, “What was Murray's?”

“With me, he always had three
bolas
, all different.”

Lorraine was about to object, but Mathilde interrupted, “I am caramel.”

Adamaris laughed. “I am not afraid to say, I like strawberry the best.”

Now the waitress, the same quiet girl who'd shown them in, was hovering.

“We could just order drinks,” said Mathilde, looking at Lorraine.

Lorraine checked her watch; it was barely eight. But she said, “I don't think he's coming.”

It was Mathilde whose glance flickered to Almado; and then she said, “That would be too bad.”

Lorraine said, “I think it was only to be expected.”

Yet there wasn't even a moment's silence as they all took a last look at their menus. Adamaris said, “You know that Oprah was here?”

“I wonder what she had?” Bailey said.

“I believe pork. I have a friend. . . . And Jimmy Carter was here as well but I don't know what he has ordered.”

A possibility, almost a likelihood in this strange place, occurred to Lorraine. “Were they here together?”

“No!” said Mathilde, with a laugh.

Lorraine imagined the scene, Jimmy's great white teeth gleaming across from the glorious whites of Oprah's dark eyes—it was perhaps too much, but she felt her mood turn. Didn't it suit? Wasn't this place that macabre? She looked around the table. A gentle black man, who had hijacked a plane and killed a man, and a young Frenchwoman happily fornicating with him. A lesbian witch. A good Christian lady. A gay thief or—but she didn't say the word, just let her eyes pass on. The pictures gleamed, the statues shone, Marilyn laughed, Christ and the Saints were blessing everywhere. And it all stood for something else. In Cuba, even the flavours of ice cream stood for something else. She thought, If I am a pathetic fallacy, then all of Cuba is. The young waitress had come around to her, her pencil at the ready. Only one choice seemed possible. “Is this good? The tuna with the sugar cane?”

“Sí, señora.”

It was a delicious meal. Mathilde, discreetly but firmly, took charge of the wine, choosing, as the white, a bottle of Louis Latour Chassagne-Montrachet—Lorraine knocked back a quick glass, scarcely tasting it, but allowing it to relax her. She could no longer think of anything else to do. Hugo hadn't come, and her worst imaginings had been set loose in this room, and now leered back at her, death and evil, omens and charms. Without declaring the conclusion she'd reached about Almado, it now became an assumption. And he was sitting beside her. He could not have been closer. His elbow brushed hers from time to time. Yet, just because of this position, he was difficult to follow and watch. He had respectable manners; he didn't drink too much. Murray would have required
that—he was, in certain respects, both fastidious and abstemious. She wondered if Almado was especially observing her. She didn't think so. Did he feel under suspicion? Apparently not. She had another glass of wine, her third; after a moment, she felt her mind slipping off on its own. Now the reality, if not exactly an image, of Murray and Almado, their coupling, imposed itself upon her mind—I pitch, but I don't catch, Murray had told her once, with a smile to show how much this expression was expected to shock her. Member to orifice, orifice to member, perhaps the chain extended as far as Hugo, as she had thought last night at Bailey's. She flicked a glance sideways. And she thought, I am the secretive one. Covertly, she tried to watch him, but his face was constantly shifting in the flickering candlelight, the candles on the table and three more set on a cabinet to one side—three sunflowers in a glass vase, a china saucer, a bell, candlesticks dripping red and yellow wax, and the Virgin de la Caridad del Cobre, with her supplicants in their storm-racked boat, forming yet another altar within the larger. These lights all flickered. His image moved in and out. Yet she tried to fix him. Murray was queer. This was the word he always used of himself. So, then, was Almado. But what exactly did that make him? What kind of being was he? The room, so full of meanings, pressed the question, which nonetheless she had to clarify in her mind, sorting it out from all sorts of qualifications, ideological and moral. Of course he was a person. Of course there was nothing “wrong” with him. There was no doubt that he should be treated like anyone else, but there was equally no doubt that he was different. Say he was a dwarf. Or even a black, like Bailey—a difference that made no difference, but was a difference all the same. All at once, the word that filled her mind was pervert. Which was inadmissible, of course—and, in any case, surely wrong. It certainly contained a moral judgment—the connection to perverse. Perhaps that was why deviant had been invented, as being more simply descriptive. Yet it missed something, did it not? Now she happened to look up, chewing a delicious morsel of her tuna—which was freshened, rather than sweetened, by the sugar cane—and found she was looking at Adamaris. She was sitting back in her chair, absorbed in contemplation of Mathilde, so that Lorraine could look directly at her. She stared, in fact. The Cuban woman's face in repose was extraordinary, so strangely beautiful. But what struck Lorraine now was its symmetry, the way it contained a perfect mirroring of Adamaris herself: the two great eyes separated by the lovely nose, itself a perfect line sloping identically to either side, and defined further by the lashes, blinking separately but exactly together, these surmounted by the eyebrows, each inscribing the same line: and all this underscored by the perfect, luscious lips, their separate arcs melded in a finger-press of indentation, while the full lower sweep turned this symmetry into the horizontal plane. Her eyes, her lips, her breasts, her thighs, her buttocks: she was the creation of her own reflection—and for a second, with all the wine, Lorraine was overwhelmed by her perfection. And it seemed to complete her thought about Almado, for what pervert caught and deviant missed was exactly this self-referral, the reflexive, the endless exchange that always led back to the self, was turned entirely away from the world. So she looked at him and thought: Yes, you're a pervert. He caught her glance and smiled, “You seem to be enjoying that very much, Mrs. Stowe.”

Lorraine said, “It's very good. And you?”

He put down his knife and fork. “It's so rare for us, red meat.”

His teeth glittered in the candlelight. His teeth were perfect, regular, and white, quite unlike President Carter's, or Phil's, on the
landing below Hugo's room. Lorraine said, “You're not dyeing your hair?”

He touched it, self-consciously; and at once this brought back a gesture of Hugo's, and she remembered—it seemed the kind of memory your mind would throw up in this place—someone telling her that all such gestures, patting the hair, stroking a tie, were masturbation, sublimated. She smiled at him; what fun it must be, if you were Freudian. “Murray liked it blond,” he said.

Lorraine thought of the picture in the wicker frame on his bureau. She said, “You and Hugo are so alike.”

He smiled. “But Hugo is one year older!”

Coffee came. Bailey said, “I'm going to go whole hog,” and had a brandy. Adamaris smoked another cigarette. At her elbow, confidentially, Almado murmured, “Tomorrow, I'm going to my mother, in Matanzas.”

She mumbled, “Your mother . . .”

He leaned toward her. “What is that?”

“Nothing. Your mother—” It seemed bizarre—his mother!

“Yes. But we could meet on Monday . . . about our business?”

“My plane leaves at three.”

“I'll call you in the morning, then.”

They descended the great staircase, feeling their way down by the light of the single bulb, and then stepped into the full dark night. Almado shook hands all around. “It is too bad—very bad—Hugo didn't come. I'll walk over there and see. Perhaps he is in his room.”

Adamaris, astonishingly, took his arm. “I am walking too. We can go together. You will be my . . . escort?”

Almado laughed agreement.

Lorraine thought, I have had too much wine.

Bailey found a cab.

3

It was inconvenient, the way taxis couldn't quite come up to the hotel, and Lorraine had insisted on walking by herself to the door. Mathilde felt guilty, not going with her.

She sat back and Bailey's arm slipped around her. It was very dark; the whole city, like the entrance to La Guarida, seemed illumined by a single bulb. Lorraine disappeared, and Bailey's arm cupped her shoulder now, squeezing lightly: the sensation transferred itself, a wave, a crest, a wave, another crest, from her breast to her sex and she felt herself swell there. She closed her eyes. She felt heavy, sleepy, weighed down with desire. All evening, in the restaurant, she'd felt this building. She'd felt it as a kind of pride; after all, the only man was hers; and in that bizarre room, he was like a black prince come in the night; and then, too, Adamaris had watched her all night long with desiring eyes, and like a river's tributary her desire had flowed into her own, increasing its current, raising its levels, until it seemed only a matter of time before it spilled over its banks. She knew that if Bailey were to touch her now between her legs, she would come. He said, “I think you should go with her.”

Mathilde stuck out her tongue. “You are a bastard. I knew you were going to say that.”

“Something's going on. She's very upset,
real
upset.”

“She'll be all right.”

“I don't like thinking about her on her own. I don't want to worry about it. I don't want you to worry about it—and don't say you're not. It's almost like she's afraid.”

“She
is
afraid.” She thought, She's afraid Almado has killed Hugo. But she said, “She doesn't want to give him the money, really. Almado.”

“A real creep,” said Bailey. He looked at his watch. “It's five of eleven. I'll stay here until fifteen after. Twenty after. If she goes up to bed—maybe she's already gone—just come back here. Otherwise I'll go home. We still have tomorrow.”

“
Merde
. You know what that means?” She didn't wait for an answer. “Get out of the car,” she said.

She opened the door and got out herself, and Bailey followed. Mathilde turned her back, leaning against the car. The hotel rose above the smaller nearby buildings like the hull of a ship looming above the shed of a dockyard. She said, “I want a kiss at least.”

He kissed her. In a way, it was the opposite of romantic; complete, but easy and almost casual: not like a “last kiss,” but as though he could kiss her anytime he wanted to. When he let her go, her knees were weak. She managed to say, “In a few minutes, I hope.”

She walked right past him, having to make her legs work with her mind and not daring to look back. San Ignacio and Armagura made a crossroads; during the day, people were always passing, this way and that. Now only a lone policeman stood guard and the street was dark except for a spill of light through somebody's doorway, a television flickering inside. She went into the hotel. It too was dim: but there was light from the bar and the television, Spanish CNN, was babbling away. Lorraine had not gone up. She was sitting at a table, the bar's only customer; the barman was building her a drink. He looked up as Mathilde came in but Lorraine didn't notice her until she slipped into the other chair at the table. Before Lorraine could say anything, Mathilde said, “Bailey was worried.”

Lorraine was about to say something but then seemed to change her mind. “He is a very nice man.”

“Yes.”

“You should be with him.”

Mathilde smiled, but left her fervent agreement there. She said, “You're worried about Hugo, aren't you?”

But then the waiter came with a daiquiri for Lorraine. “I like this kind,” she said, “with the ice.”

Mathilde resigned herself: Bailey would be going home alone. She might as well have something frozen herself. “Please bring me one,” she told the barman. When he went away, Mathilde looked at Lorraine, who kept moving her eyes away.

Lorraine said, “This is terrible. But I think that Almado has killed Hugo . . . murdered him, I mean.”

“Because he didn't come?”

“I didn't tell you. Yesterday morning, I went to where he's staying . . . I walked there from the gallery. I left him a note. He knew how important it was to come.” And then she said, “He probably didn't get it. He was probably already dead.”

“All the same . . . What did Almado say in the restaurant? You didn't seem to talk to him much. Did he press you about the money?”

Lorraine leaned forward to reach the short straw sticking out of the icy drink, and shook her head, then sipped. She let the straw go. “Not really,” she said. “But that's not important.” She looked at Mathilde directly. “It's the passport he wants—I suppose the visa too—and I think he's already got it. He killed Hugo to get it. You have to understand, they look so much alike. The money would just be icing on the cake.”

“Are you sure, Lorraine? They can't be that much alike.”

“Oh yes they are. Almado even knows about makeup. He dyes his hair. He was a blond but he's letting it grow out—”

“I noticed that.”

“Well, you see, Hugo's dark—dark hair. His passport picture will show that. Almado even had eyebrow makeup on, I'm sure. He looks like Hugo, and he can make himself look even
more
like Hugo.”

Mathilde sat back. She'd guessed this, but now it was out in the open. She knew how hard it must have been for Lorraine to admit this to herself, let alone confess it to someone else. And her fears couldn't be dismissed. In the restaurant, for a single moment, she had caught Almado giving her a look of appraisal, sizing her up: he'd already taken her camera—what more could he get? It had been a predatory look and it was clear he would take everything he could, that there were no limits. That was it—no limits. They didn't exist for him. She looked at Lorraine. “I can't tell you that you're wrong. You know, Bailey said to me the one thing he had in common with other Cubans is that he would kill for a passport, a way to get out.”