Private House (6 page)

“I will call tomorrow, if that is all right.”

“I'm promising nothing, you know. Surely, you've done quite well.”

“Would one time be better than another?”

“Well, I'm going out . . . but that isn't settled.”

“You will be seeing someone . . . ? Perhaps I could help.”

The pain was jabbing at her again, but she managed to smile. “Look, Adamaris, I have my secrets too.”

She had no response to this. She simply rose in one motion and moved away. Mathilde turned . . . and for an instant saw her again, a silhouette in the bright oblong of the hotel entrance. Then she was gone.

Mathilde relaxed on the sofa. She wondered about Adamaris. Apparently she had felt nothing at all; but then, did the rabbit exist for the fox? Mathilde closed her eyes. The pain was pinching her again. In her belly? But definitely not. Was it her uterus? But she forced her mind to return to Adamaris, for now something had occurred to her. She, Mathilde, was everything that Adamaris most desired to be. A journalist. Free. Wealthy. I am her fantasy of herself, Mathilde thought, I am herself, fulfilled. Yet there was a corollary to this, for it made Adamaris her
doppelgänger
, or at least her shadow. She remembered now the
need
in her face as she'd sucked her Coca-Cola. Does that mean that I have such a need, too? But before she could answer this question, the pain came again. She frowned. Her period? But she'd finished a few days before she left Paris. A last spurt? She pressed her legs together . . . and felt no catastrophe there. It was nothing, she thought. She needed to lie down for a while. She was about to get up, to go over to the elevator, when a woman came past her. Mathilde had seen her before. She was an “old hand,” like herself; she'd been here for several days, while everyone else only seemed to come for a night. Rather Anglo-Saxon. A blond, her hair streaked with grey. Tall. She wore loose lemony trousers and sandals: brave on these streets. Her bag was too big, though. And she looked a little hot, as if she'd had quite a day, and was carrying her straw hat in her hand.

She recognized Mathilde with a smile, and Mathilde smiled back; but Mathilde let her go up in the elevator by herself.

T
UESDAY
, M
AY 3, 2005

1

Lorraine looked around the breakfast room. Was she too late? She couldn't be; the mahogany windows, ten feet high, were all turned open, and in the street children in their red shorts and skirts and bright white shirts were marching along to school.

“What is going on?”

Lorraine turned. She hadn't noticed the woman come up, though she was the only other familiar face in the hotel: they had arrived the same day. She'd spoken in English, but Lorraine knew at once she was French,
what is going on?
translated at the very last moment from
qu'est-ce qu'il se passe?
And she wanted to reply—it was on the tip of her tongue—
je ne sais pas
, but what came out was, “I don't know. We can't be
early
.”

The round mahogany table, usually piled high with sweet Cuban rolls and breads, was empty, and the long buffet, normally a mountain
of glittering ice with colourful slopes of melon, orange, pineapple, banana, guava, and other fruits too exotic for names but always delicious, was bare.

“Not even coffee!” murmured the woman, glancing toward the spot where the urn usually sat.

Lorraine leaned toward her. “I don't mind so much,” she said. “I think it's a lot better if you ask the young man to make it fresh at the bar.”

“Ah. But I never thought of that.”

Just then a young Cuban woman in a starched white cap pushed through a door at the back of the room, presumably the kitchen, and caught sight of them: she went right back, the way she had come. “Isn't she the one who does the eggs?”

There was normally a griddle at the end of the buffet. “I've been too guilty to ask,” said the French woman. “You know, for their ration, a person has only eight eggs each month.”

Lorraine, in fact, hadn't known this. She said, apologetically, “Well, I only had one.”

Now a young man came through the doors. There were usually several young men in the breakfast room. One always checked Lorraine's room key, insisting on seeing it even though he clearly remembered her face—that was his job. But this was the young man who was always so nice about her coffee. He smiled as he came over. “Ladies, the hotel has less than twenty-five guests, so we don't have the buffet. Just ask what you want. Orange juice? Coffee? Sit here.”

He was assuming they would sit together and it would have been awkward to do otherwise; besides, it was plainly what both women wanted. As he went off, they introduced themselves, and exchanged the usual particulars.
Mathilde
: Lorraine thought it sounded a rather old-fashioned name. And Mathilde was thinking that
Lorraine
surely
must come from the French, but on this woman, with her blond hair and pale skin, it sounded so Anglo-Saxon: windswept, chilled. Well, she was Canadian, after all.

Mathilde said, “That looks so light and cool.”

She had meant Lorraine's long, full, cotton skirt with the big buttons up the front, but Lorraine plucked at her top, loose with a big scoop neck. “It looks like linen but it's really hemp . . . with something else, of course, so it doesn't wrinkle. You're so lucky, tanning like that. White is always so perfect.”

“Well, it's easy.”

“I have to be careful, or I simply go pink in the sun. I looked at myself in the mirror after my shower, and I was all pink here—my neck—my wrists—the backs of my legs . . . I looked like a farm girl.”

Mathilde smiled; she would never, under any circumstances, have applied such a description to herself.

After the young man brought their juice—and coffee superior to the usual provender at the urn—Lorraine glanced around the room and said, “You know, I don't believe ‘less than twenty-five.' I think we are the only ones here.”

“Have you noticed? No one seems to stay more than one night. They come in from the beach—Veradero—on their way home. The next morning, they take the plane.”

“Or the other way around, I suppose. I'd like to go to the beach,” said Lorraine, sipping orange juice. “Playa, I mean . . . But I'm not sure I'll have time.”

Mathilde said, “You are busy, then?”

“Well, I don't know about that. I'm looking for someone.”

“Really?”

“The trouble is, he's disappeared—at least
I
can't find him. A Cuban. His name is Almado.” Mathilde said nothing; she knew silence is often
the best leading question. And after a moment, Lorraine went on, “I'm the executor of a will—the
executrix
—and he's supposed to receive some money under it.”

Mathilde was trying not to sound nosy—and trying all the harder because, really, she was. This Canadian woman, alone, in this city, was suddenly an object of interest, for a reason she couldn't account for, not quite. But that was it:
not quite
. She was about what you expected, but
not quite
. Now Mathilde prompted, “The will . . . it's not your husband's?”

Lorraine shook her head. “No, no. My husband died three years ago. And then we had a lawyer.” Mathilde thought she should probably say something, but really there was nothing to say that wasn't banal. She waited. Lorraine finished her orange juice, and set down the glass. “But you're right, he was a friend of my husband's and mine. We were all at school together. University.”

“Ah, that's interesting. It's usual in France, you know, people keep in touch. But I didn't think it was so common—” Mathilde had been going to say “in the United States,” but she caught herself—“in North America.”

“I suppose it isn't, really. Well, maybe it is, who knows . . .” The young man had slipped plates of fruit onto their table, and now Lorraine bit into a slice of watermelon, perfectly ripe. “Murray was studying geography—he became a town planner—and my husband was in economics—he worked for the Department of Finance most of his life, in the government—but we all loved poetry, which is what I was studying.”

“So you were the link?”

“Well, not exactly. T. S. Eliot. He was our passion—although you're right, I was the one studying him. But as well, Murray and my husband were both Anglican. We were all religious. I suppose that set
us apart, then. The sixties. Well, not so much—not so much as people thought. I was more plebeian, an ordinary Protestant, but they converted me. The joke was, I was Tom's disciple—meaning Tom Eliot's, you see. But really I was theirs. My husband's and Murray's.” As she finished saying this, she put down the rind of the melon.

Mathilde was astonished. Religion played no part in her life. It seemed extraordinary that she could be having a reasonable conversation with someone for whom it was important. And Lorraine instantly sensed this. She laughed. “You're surprised, aren't you?”

“Yes, I am. I admit it.”

“Well, I don't think you have to
admit
it.”

Mathilde laughed too. “No. I didn't mean it like that.” Then she added, “I just don't believe.” Lorraine, hearing this, found herself thinking, She's
out of touch
with belief. But she didn't say this; she had no evangelical talent, and was glad of it. Instead she said, “Sometimes it was the religion of the poetry, sometimes it was the poetry of the religion, we were never sure.” Lorraine knew this was a silly thing to say, but she also knew it would help Mathilde through an embarrassing moment. She liked Mathilde. She was young, and she was beautiful. She had beautiful golden shoulders, as round as Priam's apple, and a lovely, dark, impish face, except her nose was too big, though it was her nose that made her beautiful. And she was sympathetic. Intelligent, too: after considering a moment, Mathilde said, “English and French poetry are very different.”

“That's true. But Eliot's was very French. He even wrote some poems in French.”

“But, you know, what you say makes me think of Graham Greene—”

“
All
religion, very little poetry . . . although this is his city, isn't it?”

“And I'm wrong. He was a Catholic . . . which is different?”

“Oh, yes. We sometimes call ourselves
Anglo
-Catholics, Eliot usually did as a matter of fact. But it
is
different. No pope, and the priests can marry. Our priests can even be women!”

“Are there nuns?”

She laughed. “Yes, though I don't know where they come from nowadays. But you mustn't mistake me. That was never a choice for me. I was young once too, you know.”

“Don't worry! You don't strike me as old.”

Lorraine didn't, if it came to that, think she was old herself; in fact, she was sixty. She went on, “I'm sure Murray considered becoming a priest. He might have been happier if he had.”

But she stopped there; to explain more would have required revealing that Murray was gay and that becoming a priest would have been impossible just because it represented a certain kind of solution to that problem: one that he refused, because it tended to define his whole life around it. That's what he'd never wanted; she knew he'd once considered celibacy—“The Catholics have it easier, in a way,” he'd once said—but even if he could have practised it, he would have found it impossible for just that reason: “All I would be is not-queer”—
queer
being the word Murray had always used. But having balked here, Lorraine now found herself confused because it had seemed the natural place to bring out this fact, and now it would grow to have an awkward importance. But in fact, as Lorraine had been talking, something had occurred to Mathilde. It came into her mind unannounced, but perfectly clearly.
Adamaris was gay
. It was obvious, once you saw it. There was no doubt in her mind. Yes, you could never be sure about that sort of thing, but she
was
sure. Adamaris was gay, and she was wondering whether I was, too . . . there'd been a moment, looking at the
quinces
girl . . . For a second, Mathilde was entirely absorbed by this revelation: and only then did she try to account for it, why it had occurred to her at precisely that moment.
But then she saw that, too. It had been the detail of the
money
: the money that Murray was leaving to . . .

“Almado? That's this man's name?”

“Yes.”

“And he was . . . Murray's lover?”

Lorraine blushed; not at the suggestion, but at her own reticence—which hadn't been necessary. She felt caught out. “Yes. I'm sorry. I didn't know how to say it. But yes . . . It was very conventional, a handsome young man, an older, well-off norteamericano . . . you know. I think Murray's sex life largely happened on his holidays. He once said that to me, ‘Sex should be a holiday.'”

“But it wasn't just sex . . . would you say? Because he left him the money—he must have loved him.”

“Well, he once told me, ‘Almado represents everything I
do
love, but I'm not sure I love
him
.' I must say, I'd feel a lot better—running around like this—if I could be sure.” But these revelations, though they left her content, had also exhausted her, and now Lorraine decisively changed the subject. “You're letting me do all the talking. I somehow doubt that you're in Havana for a holiday.”

Mathilde accepted this gracefully, and smiled. “You're right about that. I'm a journalist. I'm a freelance but I have a contract with a magazine to do a story on Cuba as Castro fades away. It's to be done through the eyes of a Black Panther . . . you must remember them?”

“Of course.” She smiled. “I remember, but I'd completely forgotten. They hijacked planes and came here. It seemed to happen every night on the news. Huey Newton.”