Gaudi Afternoon (12 page)

“Can you feel anything is wrong with my organs?” I asked.

She smiled at me. “This is a massage, not a diagnosis. We're just sending a little message from your feet to those organs: if there
is
anything wrong then they need to get a move on healing themselves. We're just opening up the pathways.”

The wires must be crossed though, because the main message that was getting through was going directly to a place between my legs.

I tried to keep my mind on the subject of Frankie. “The sense I got from Frankie was that she wouldn't have bothered to fly to Barcelona to see Delilah if she hadn't been frantic with worry about losing her. She really loves the kid and wants her in her life.”

“It's so hard to know what's right,” April murmured. “In the best of all possible worlds, every child would have parents who loved and nurtured her and/or him.”

“It sounds to me like Delilah does have two parents,” I said. “And you too, of course.” I wondered if there was some rivalry between April and Frankie, if that was the reason April had persuaded Ben to bring Delilah to Barcelona.

April didn't respond to that; in fact she seemed hardly to have heard what I said. She had a firm hold of my right foot and was grinding her thumb gently into my organs, I mean my reflex points, with controlled abandon. “Just breathe naturally,” she said, with a seductive look under her violet lids. “You sound a little congested. I'll work a little on your bronchial tubes.”

It's true that my breath was coming in little gasps, but it wasn't from blocked bronchial tubes. “Don't stop,” I said. “That one place you were just touching… it was very good… the way you were touching it….”

“Here?” she inquired in a low voice, and fit the heel of my foot more firmly into her lap as she pressed out those pesky little calcifications from the ball of my foot in steady, rhythmic movements. I moaned aloud.

“That's good,” April said, “Don't keep it inside, let your voice out.”

I moaned again. Louder. And again.

The feet are highly underrated, I thought.

“Hi everybody!” said Hamilton, coming into the room. We hadn't heard him open the front door.

“Hi,” said April, shifting my foot unobtrusively from her lap. Her cheeks were slightly flushed. “Cassandra came by to talk about Frankie. I was just giving her a foot massage.” April slapped my foot with brisk professionalism.

“That's right,” I said. “My organs have gotten a message and I think it's a good one.”

Hamilton stood there in his blue leather ostrich boots and looked at me without any particular friendliness. I had the sense that he hadn't forgiven me for pretending to be Brigid yesterday.

“Do you want some tea, Hamilton?” April said, a little nervously.

He didn't answer her. “Where's Delilah? Is she all right?”

“Of course,” April said. “I put her to sleep after Ben left, around seven. She was exhausted, poor thing.”

“I'll just check in on her,” Hamilton said.

April sighed, and when he'd left, she whispered, “He's hopelessly in love with Delilah, you know. It's bringing out all his paternal instincts.”

“Just who is he, anyway?” I started to ask, but then Hamilton was back. He sank into a leather chair slung low to the ground. His blue eyes regarded me suspiciously.

“What line of work are you in, Cassandra? Unless you really are a journalist.”

I didn't think Hamilton was naturally aggressive, but he lacked humor and those without humor never appreciate having jokes played on them.

“I'm a translator. As a matter of fact I'm in the process of translating
La Grande y su hija.
Gregory Rabassa was too busy, so they thought of me.”

In spite of himself he was impressed. “That's quite a coup, isn't it, Cassandra?”

“To tell you the truth, at this point I think I prefer non-fiction.”

He nodded. “But surely fiction must be more demanding,” he said. “I mean, non-fiction tells us about the world we live in, but fiction gives us our dreams and visions.”

“Some fiction perhaps. Some, Hamilton, does not. To be blunt.”

“I have to say that I was totally engrossed by
La Grande y su hija.
I thought there were echoes of Garcia Márquez and Allende, as well as Valenzuela and Donoso, but that de los Angeles had forged her own unique style. If anyone she reminds me a little of Nélida Piñon, the Brazilian. The same sort of fabulist, the same sort of prodigious imagination.”

“Hamilton has a Ph. D. in Spanish and Latin American studies from Columbia,” April said, a little hardness coming into her inky black eyes. I wondered if she was warning me not to make fun of him.

“Where did you study, Cassandra?” Hamilton asked.

“Oh, I've picked up a little here, a little there.”

“But where did you get your degree?”

“
La experiencia es la escuela de la vida.
Or you might say I studied intensively at the School of Hard Knocks.”

“I never did anything with my degrees.” Hamilton seemed sad. “I would have rather just played music, but my parents….”

This time there was no mistaking the warning light in April's eyes. Only this time it was directed at Hamilton. Why?

But all she said was, “What's this
Grande
novel about, Cassandra?”

“You mean the plot?” I said. “Do you have two hours?”

Hamilton laughed. Perhaps there was a little hope for him after all. “It's really complicated, April, it can't be summed up easily.” But he tried to give her some of the highlights: jungle, love, river, revolution, motherhood. Then Hamilton turned to me. “I saw
La Grande
as a political allegory as well as the riveting search for one's past. I understand that feminists have really responded to it.”

“They have,” I said gloomily. “I believe they see the obsessive search of María for her mother as a paradigm of the condition of contemporary woman.”

“Oh, that's probably true, Cassandra, I hadn't thought of that.” He sat back in his chair and gave me a look of respect.

But I was running out of literary clichés, so it was a relief when the front door opened with an unmistakable thump and muscular Ben in Levis, black boots and a motorcycle jacket marched into the living room and threw herself onto one of the gorgeously upholstered settees.

“Well, Frankie didn't show,” she said. “I don't know if I'm surprised or not.”

“What!” I said. “She was so eager to talk to you.”

“You don't know Frankie as well as I do,” Ben said. She ran her thick fingers through her brush cut so that it stood up angrily. “That's the whole history of my relationship with Frankie. I wait. She doesn't show. That's why this joint custody thing didn't work and will never work.”

“Maybe something came up,” I said.

“The only person she knows in Barcelona is you, so how could anything come up?”

“Did you call her?”

“I don't know where she's staying.”

With a start I realized I didn't either. I'd forgotten to ask once again.

Ben eyed me suspiciously. “Just what did you talk about today?”

“Oh, I don't know, the usual. Gender. Motherhood. Architecture. Surely you're not accusing me of being the reason Frankie didn't show up?”

“All I know,” Hamilton jumped in, forgetting the respectful gaze of a few moments back, “is that there's something odd about you being involved in all this.”

I was stung. “I'm an innocent bystander, what do you mean? I could be at home translating an important work of South American literature.”

“You've accepted money from Frankie,” Hamilton said.

“She offered to pay me to find her husband, who then became her ex-husband, who then became her ex-wife. I found Ben, why shouldn't I be paid? I'm only still involved out of the goodness of my heart.” And feet.

“What about you?” I counterattacked. “You've met with Frankie on your own. What did
you
talk about? And why does the
portero
downstairs think you're all Bulgarians and Hungarians? And where's your saxophone anyway, Hamilton?”

There was a pause and I saw Hamilton and April look at each other. At that moment, from somewhere in the apartment, came the sound of a door closing.

I
T WASN'T THE FRONT DOOR
, by the elevator, but the back door, by Delilah's room.

“Delilah,” Ben shouted and rushed down the corridor with all of us following.

But Delilah lay in a deep sleep in her little bed, defenseless in pajamas and still clutching her stuffed rabbit.

On the floor next to her, however, was a silver lighter that all of us recognized.

“He's been here, he's tried to get her again,” Ben said, and dashed for the back door.

It led to the staircase I'd huffed up with the other tourists a few days earlier.

“I'll go down to the street,” April said. “You can check the roof.” She obviously was no more fond of climbing steps than I was, even in an emergency.

Hamilton hesitated. “I'll go with you, April.”

Ben and I were already rushing up the staircase to the roof, but I still had time to wonder which one of the two didn't trust the other.

Ben's muscular legs took her up two steps at a time. Even so, I wasn't disgracefully far behind her, though my lungs complained violently, when we pelted through the arched corridor of attic space and up to the roof.

It was spectacular and I wished I had time to really look at it. The sculpted chimneys and airshafts formed even more fantastic shapes under the gauzy night sky. There was a slender moon, its light fragmented behind frequent clouds.

“I see someone,” whispered Ben.

I saw nothing. The roof was less like the top of a building than a landscape of dream figures, shifting and dancing. The klieg lights didn't reach into the corners; the illumination from the street served only to make the shadows of the chimneys and vents darker and more twisted.

“You go left, I'll go right,” Ben directed with a hand wave.

Back in Michigan when I was growing up we used to play a game called “Ditchum” in the humid, mosquito-laden summer nights down by the lake. It was a more tortuous form of Hide 'n' Seek, in which you ran for blocks and stayed put for hours. There wasn't just one person looking for you, but a whole team of children, methodically combing the backyards, the wood-piles, the garages, the undersides of docks. I had been better at hiding than at seeking. Midway through the hunt I'd get bored, go off and look at the moon, sit on a bench and wonder how many days it would take to fly to outer space. Eventually one of my teammates or even one of the hidden children would find me sitting there. “Cathie! [I was Catherine Frances Reilly then.] You're
supposed
to be
looking.”

I crept stealthily up and down the broad shallow steps that undulated over the roof. There were lots of places to hide here, behind chimneys, in corners… Was that a movement? No.

I couldn't even see Ben; she was over on the far side, around the second courtyard.

I prowled further. What was it about Hamilton that bothered me? There had been absolutely no musical equipment in the apartment at all. Not even a boom box. How did April know him? Why had she been so evasive about him?

Out from behind one of the chimneys a figure stepped slowly and softly. She was wearing a big sweater and she had curly hair. Frankie. I paused with my heart in my throat. If she didn't see me, if she came this way—I desperately tried to remember some karate moves. At least I could trip her, I could sit on her….

She saw me and vanished again. Hell. I stopped prowling and rushed headlong after her. Rounding a corner at top speed I careened into Ben, who was also running. We knocked each other over in a good imitation of a Keystone Cops routine. But she was younger and more resilient.

“I saw her. Did you see her?” She stood up and pointed in the direction I'd come.

I nodded weakly, still winded.

Ben took off in that direction, while I contemplated my adventurous life and the moon. There was nothing like a nighttime run for getting the blood going.

From somewhere to the right I heard the sounds of a struggle, and shouting.

“Where do you think you're going?” That was Ben.

“Get your hands off me!”

“Not till you tell me what you were doing in our apartment with Delilah.”

Grunts and groans.

I approached cautiously.

Ben had Frankie in a modified half Nelson. I guessed you got pretty strong working for Federal Express. All those packages.

“Cassandra, over here,” Ben said.

But just at that moment Frankie broke away and dashed in the direction of the stairs.

“Never mind,” said Ben. “Hamilton and April will be waiting for him.”

But when we got down to the foyer there was no sign of any of them. The
portero
had gone off duty and the small door at the side of the iron gate was wide open.

“If they let him get away…” Ben muttered.

We went through the door and out onto the brightly lit street. Behind us La Pedrera reared up on its elephantine pillars.

I'd forgotten how early it was, probably only about nine o'clock in the evening. The streets were crowded and traffic poured up and down the Passeig de Gràcia.

“Maybe they're all having an espresso in the bar,” I said. “Maybe they're over at the music store buying saxophone tapes.”

Ben glared at me. “This isn't funny, Cassandra.”

We wandered around the street for a little bit and looked in the windows of the bar. Finally we saw April crossing the street toward us. She looked worried.

“Where's Frankie? Is Hamilton chasing him?” Ben demanded.

“I think so,” said April. “We were each supposed to be at one of the doors. I was standing at the main door and nothing was happening, so I went over to the Provença door, but Hamilton wasn't there anymore. I guess Frankie came out that way and Hamilton went after her. She wasn't up on the roof?”