Joshua Then and Now (41 page)

Juanito, his manner abrupt, said, “Tell her in English that I think she is beautiful.”

“Juanito recommends the area around Santa Eulalia.”

“How would one get there?”

Joshua told her where the bus stopped.

“Does she like me?” Juanito asked.

“She says you could do with a bath and a shave.”

Juanito spat on the floor.

“I take it your friend is one of the local peasants. They don’t speak proper Spanish, don’t you know. It’s a dialect.”

“Juanito’s a fine fellow.”

“Ask her, nicely, if she has ever been on board a fishing boat.”

“Man, it stinks below decks on your boats. You want her to be ill?”

Juanito, fixing her with his most enchanting smile, looked as if he might leap out of his trousers and mount her right there.

“Is he tiddly?” Peggy asked.

“Ask her, you bastard, if she would like to see the secret passage through the wall of the old town.”

“Juanito suggests that there are some fine views to be seen from the old town.”

“I would love to paint him.”

“She paints. She would like to know if you would pose for her.”

“I’m not a homosexual. Tell her I am in love with her.”

“Go to hell, Juanito.”

Peggy, lapsing into Spanish, smiled sweetly and said, “Mi
alegro de esta aquí.”

“Oh,” Juanito responded, hugely encouraged, and he promptly ordered another round of drinks and shifted his chair tighter to Peggy.

“Oh, dear,” she said, appealing to Joshua with her big blue eyes.

“You go now,” Juanito said. “Good night.”

“You’re frightening her.”

“You know nothing. Go now.”

“Are we in for a sticky time?” Peggy asked.

Joshua eased his chair back a little from the table.

“You’re not thinking of leaving me alone with him, are you?”

“No,” he said, changing his mind, and appealing to Juanito once more to contain himself.

“You are not my friend. You are a son of a whore.”

“What was that he said?”

“He finds you pleasing to look at.”

“Cheek.”

“Tell her I know a beach where we can swim now.”

“She’s scared of you.”

“Say I will bring her freshly caught inkfish for breakfast.”

“Tell her yourself,” Joshua replied hotly.

Now it was a somewhat flustered Peggy who pushed back her chair, rising. “Would it be too much to ask you to take me back to my hotel?”

“Of course not.”

As Joshua got up, Juanito cursed him. “Don’t come round to my bar any more. You have no friends on Ibiza.”

Taking Peggy’s plump freckled arm, Joshua escorted her back to
her hotel. He was eager to return to Juanito, to explain himself, but she suggested a nightcap. The bar was closed. However, as she still seemed distressed, he agreed to join her for a smoke on the dark and seemingly abandoned terrace. “It’s going to be as bad as Italy here,” she said, “all those perfectly frightful little men trying to pinch your bottom wherever you go.”

There was a stirring in the darkest corner of the bar. Somebody broke wind. Peering, Joshua made out Peggy’s aunt, her mouth agape, a nearly empty bottle of Fundador on the table before her. Peggy snatched his hand impatiently. “Take me for a walk,” she said.

Damn it, Juanito would be seething, convinced they were now romping in bed together. He led Peggy to a secluded spot on the hotel grounds and they sat together on a rock looking out to sea. Peggy rested her chin, doubling just a little, on her apple-pie knees and gathered her white cashmere sweater around her.

“Chilly?” Joshua asked.

“Mmmn.”

“Maybe you ought to go to bed?”

“Me, and my cuddly Mr. Pooh Bear,” she said all twinkly. “What fun.”

Joshua smiled.

“You can’t imagine how difficult it is for two respectable women to travel alone on the Continent. They all want to get their filthy hands into your knickers. On the beach at San Remo, the Italian men stroll about in the briefest of shorts. When they sit down,” she said, pressing his arm, “you can actually see their extraordinaries.”

“You can?”

“They have filthy, waxy ears,” she said with immense feeling. “Not like mine,” she added, tilting her face for his benefit, “all soft and nibbly.”

There was a long pause and then Peggy bounded to her feet. “Well then,” she said.

“Will your aunt be all right?” Joshua asked, as they passed her again.

“Oh, let her be. I don’t share with her, you know. We have separate rooms.”

They were now standing in the dark at the foot of the staircase inside the hotel.

“I suppose,” Peggy said, “I had better move a chair against the door before getting ready for bed. Or, God knows, somebody might barge in and find me standing there. Starkers,” she added, giggly.

“That will hardly be necessary,” Joshua replied in his most reassuring voice.

“Mmmn. Quite.” Extending her hand, her manner unaccountably sharp once more, she said, “I would like to thank you for being so wonderfully gallant and rescuing me from God knows what.”

“I will expect you and your aunt for tea tomorrow.”

“Now that’s
something
to look forward to,” she said, and she started up the stairs at last, enabling him to hurry back to the bar and explain himself to Juanito.

Drunk and belligerent, Juanito was astonished to see him. “You mean that after all that you didn’t even fuck her?”

Joshua told him yet again that Peggy was a well-bred young lady, utterly respectable, and furthermore, he pointed out, in civilized countries it was possible to escort a frightened young lady home without taking it as license to leap into bed with her. There were other rules of social conduct, he added, than those that applied at Casa Rosita.

“You know nothing,” Juanito said. “You’re still a kid.”

Peggy and her aunt failed to turn up for tea the next afternoon, which baffled Joshua, but she greeted him warmly when he discovered her at work two days later in the bay of San Antonio. Seated on a canvas stool, her easel set out before her, a broad-brimmed straw hat shading her oval face, but her reddening freckled shoulders bare, she was seemingly indifferent to the onlookers she had
attracted: some of the local children, the village carpenter, and two army officers. One of the officers, the tall, bronzed Jose González, was familiar to Joshua. An accomplished horseman, he was a native of Cadiz. Occasionally they drank together, González practicing his English.

“I’m sorry about the other afternoon,” Peggy said gaily, “but my aunt wasn’t up to scratch, as you can well imagine, and I had no way of getting in touch with you.”

“Would you like to have a drink when you’re done here?”

“I’d love to, but fools walk in. I’ve already accepted Captain González’s invitation.” Peggy crinkled her peeling nose. “Do you think I’m in for another spot of trouble?”

“Why, Jose is a gentleman of the old school.”

González and Peggy became inseparable. They were seen together strolling hand in hand on the beaches after dark, cuddling in Don Pedro’s Bodega, Peggy chewing on his ear, or embracing ardently on the waterfront. They were seen everywhere, in fact, except in the bar of Peggy’s hotel, a sanctuary her bilious aunt never quit, disgusted busboys heaving her onto her bed each night. More than once, González, understandably unfamiliar with English slang, sought Joshua’s advice privately. “Is not ‘to come’ a regular verb, as if you invite, I come to your house?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“Then what does it mean, please, ‘Come, baby. Come now.’ If you are already there?”

Another time it was, “Are ‘extraordinaries’ a measure of the unusual or the street word for the male organs?”

Infuriated with himself, deeply embarrassed by his innocence, Joshua avoided Juanito for a couple of weeks rather than risk his ridicule. When they got together again, however, Juanito did not tease him. He did not taunt him with Peggy and González; instead he gratuitously told him a story about some foolishness he had committed when
he
had only been twenty-one years old.

Juanito, my friend.

If I ever have a son, Joshua vowed, I will try to be just as understanding. Then he laughed aloud, it seemed such an outrageous notion. Imagine, he thought. Me, a son.

F
ALSE SPRING. AFTER A BENIGN EVENING OF MELTING
snows, the temperature suddenly took a dive, the streets freezing again, but Joshua wasn’t the only one out there. Pinsky and his Russian wolfhound blocked his path. “Did you catch the National?” he asked. “Your friend Lévesque was shitting on us again. He said the Jews were edgy. They’re bums, every one of them. A bunch of know-nothing pricks. A Jew in their mind is a stereotype.”

“Why don’t you leave, Pinsky?”

“Where would I go? Tahiti?”

“That’s the stuff.”

“With Gilda?
What would she do without a phone?”

“Why not Toronto?”

The worst thing Joshua could have said, as it turned out.

“Don’t quote me on this, you bastard, but I was in Toronto last Tuesday with a bunch of the boys.” By “the boys” Pinsky meant pillars of the community.
UJA
heavies, synagogue presidents, Jewish Congress apparatchiks. “We flew in for a secret meeting with our counterparts there. The Toronto
chevra
. We had come to spell it out. The day was dawning when we might all have to leave Quebec. In our innocence we expected our brothers, remembering the Holocaust, to greet us with open arms. A little love. Fat chance. ‘Don’t be hasty,’
they said. ‘We’d love to have you here, you’re family, but it wouldn’t look good for the Jews to run, and to tell you the truth, things aren’t so hot here.’ Sons of bitches. Forest Hill
dreck
. What they meant to say is, they don’t want to cut up the pie. Except for the bunch that was into real estate. They wanted us to move right now, the more the better. They practically came in their pants at the thought of the action. How’s your wife?”

“Improving.”

“You never should have taken Jonathan Cole off the case.”

“Oh, really, and would that be your considered opinion?”

“Not mine. His.”

“He discussed Pauline with you?”

“We jog together.”

The next morning, a Monday, a fine, powdery snow began to fall on streets already encrusted with a scalp of ice. It was still snowing on Thursday, the morning Alex, who had just acquired his driving license, borrowed the car to return some records to a friend in N.D.G. An hour later the phone rang. It was Alex; he had been in an accident. “Are you hurt?” Joshua asked.

“No.”

“Was anybody hurt?”

“No.”

“O.K. Relax. And tell me what happened.”

Descending Clarke, a steep hill at the best of times but uncommonly treacherous in winter, he had geared down for a red light at Sherbrooke Street and then obviously braked too hard, only to find himself sliding helplessly past the light and into the oncoming traffic. He bounced off not one, not two, but three cars. He was now parked round the corner, being questioned by the cops, one of whom wanted to speak to him. “Don’t worry about a thing,” Joshua said. “I’ll grab a taxi and be right over, but put him on.”

“Clickety-click, clickety-click. I told the kid not to disturb the master at work, but he insisted on calling you.”

“He did the right thing. He told me nobody was hurt.”

“Right. But one of the cars he barely dented belongs to a real meatball. One of your more excitable co-religionists. A Mr. Henigman. I think he’s going to claim psychological damage. I figure he’ll also claim the collision rendered him impotent, but if you’re lucky he’ll only sue for five million. This has been a bad year for men’s suits, and most of those bastards are in trouble with the tax inspectors. Or don’t you read the
Gazette?”

“He’s in men’s suits?”

“He gave me his card already, yet. Oy vey. He says, I drop into his factory I’ll walk out dressed like a prince. So if the meatball sues, we’ll get him on attempted bribery of a police officer.”

“I’ll be right over, Stu. Hold on.”

Alex, his cheeks burnt red by the wind, was waiting in the snow. So was McMaster.

“Some day,” Joshua said.

“Cold as a witch’s tit,” McMaster said.

Taking Alex by the arm, Joshua pulled him aside. “You O.K.?”

“Yeah. The brakes grabbed. There’s something wrong with your brakes.”

“There’s nothing wrong with the brakes, the car just came out of the garage.”

“Well you just better have them checked out again, Daddy.”

Joshua shook his head impatiently.

“O.K. What do I know?”

“I didn’t say that. Were they rough on you?”

“Oh, no. But whenever I tried to say anything they just said, ‘Now you shettup, kid.’ Then the usual happened,” he added hotly.

“What do you mean?”

“They looked at my name, established I was your son, and suddenly I smelled roses.”

The morning Alex was born, Joshua had wept in the hospital men’s room. A son, a son.

“McMaster is crazy. Hey,” Joshua said, grinning, “don’t look so long in the face. It doesn’t matter. One day get me to tell you about
my
first accident.”

“Yeah, you probably hit four cars, and this was nothing.”

Joshua embraced him, took the car keys, said he would handle things now, and sent him off to classes. He was late, surely, but there was no determination in his gait. Probably he was headed elsewhere.

“You shouldn’t kiss your kid in the street like that,” McMaster said. “It must be embarrassing for him.”

“He never protested,” Joshua said, startled.

“How could he?”

Joshua allowed McMaster to lead him across the street to the drugstore and they sipped coffee together at the counter.

“Have you read my manuscript yet?”

“Yes, I have. Stu, what you really ought to do is write your autobiography. Memoirs of an honest cop.”

“Geez. Yeah. I’ve got tons of material. If only you could give me a hand with the writing of it.”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Isn’t there anything I could say,” he asked, “that might change your mind?”

“Sorry, no.”