Queen of the Underworld (9 page)

Perhaps this was why I also felt that Lou Norbright had stolen something rightfully mine, even though I had been a sophomore in high school when this story broke. It was as if he had breached the barriers of chronology and usurped prime material with my name written all over it.

“W
HAT STORY
does this picture suggest, Emma?”

At first the personnel director had seemed too wet behind the ears to be a stuffed shirt, so I was grateful for Bisbee’s warning. By the time we got through the Rorschachs (five black-and-white, five in color), I realized that Harry Harmon did not appreciate whimsy or imagination. Better to have stopped with “butterfly” than to have pushed it with “That’s a butterfly looking back at us.”

We sat next to each other at a conference table, close enough for me to smell his Listerine mouthwash and ponder his fingernails, shaped like blunt shovels. Not one smile or glimmer of sexual appreciation had I been able to elicit from him. In my category of types, he rapidly rose to the surface as obstacle or adversary, probably both.

“Well,” I said, “it’s a little boy, about ten, sitting alone in a room with a violin.” Sticking to the obvious.

“No, you have to tell me a story.”

Mistaking the infinitesimal hint of teasing in his voice as a sign he might appreciate a bit of smart sass, I said, “Well, it can go several ways, can’t it? In a minute he’ll tuck the violin under his chin and play a nice first-year tune, or he’ll bedazzle us by being a child prodigy,
or
”—I paused, noting that he was studying me more avidly through his horn-rims—“he’ll put it down and go look out the window and wish he could go out and play baseball . . .
or,
if he’s a bad little boy, he might smash the violin against the wall.”

“What does he do in
your
story?” asked Harry Harmon.

“My story? You mean I have to choose?”

A curt nod.

“Oh, okay. In my story, he’s got promise. He’s destined to be an artist, though maybe not on the violin. He is sitting there dreaming of the greatness that will one day be his.”

“How about this one?” said Harmon without comment, turning over the next picture.

“M
ISS
G
ANT,
some messages for you here.”

Alex de Costa, the young manager of the Julia Tuttle, handed over two pink slips. He looked less preppy today, probably because he was wearing a guayabera like the Cuban men who seemed to have a game of dominoes going around the clock. Of course he
was
a Cuban man, I reminded myself, even though he was closer in type to those languid, baby-faced lads with their feet up on fraternity porch railings back in Chapel Hill. His book, splayed facedown on the marble counter, was Ortega y Gasset’s
Revolt of the Masses.

I stood there, pelvis poked out Bev-style, silently reading my messages on the pink slips, knowing Alex de Costa was looking me over. Both messages were from Tess, the first, phoned in at 2:15 p.m., said that we would have to postpone our dinner because she had to make an emergency trip to the airport for Dr. Rodriguez. The second, phoned in at 4:30, hoped we could still have it, after all, unless I had made other plans in the meantime.

“Everything all right?” asked Alex de Costa.

“Just my aunt Tess canceling and then uncanceling our dinner tonight.”

“Then that’s okay, yes?” He seemed to want me to be pleased that I still had a dinner engagement after all.

“I guess. It’s just that I never expected you could get so tired sitting at a desk all day.”

“It can be
extremely
tiring sitting at a desk all day.” The rolled Spanish
r
reared up like an exotic animal from his American speech.

“I read that last spring,” I said, tapping his facedown Ortega with my fingernail. My frosted-rose manicure was set off well by the black cover. “It was the supplemental reading assignment I chose in my Modern European History Seminar.”

“Did you like it?”

“My professor gave me a C-plus for liking it too much. It kept me off the dean’s list my final semester.”

“For liking it too much?”

“The professor—he was really just this Marxist lecturer—told me I was supposed to ‘engage with its aristocratic propaganda, not capitulate to it.’ I told him I was happy to capitulate to a mind that could put into words a thought I had been groping toward for years.”

Actually, I had cried, and when that hadn’t worked had begged him to let me write another paper. When the lousy stinker said no, I had stormed out of his windowless basement office. But the person I intended to become would have responded as above.

“What was the thought, do you remember?”

“Of course I remember, it ruined my average.”

My combination of attractive surface and interesting mind appeared to be having its effect on Alex de Costa. “Ortega says that a person is a barbarian to the degree that he
can’t take others into account.
And so this barbarian, this
mass person,
has a deadly hatred for all that isn’t himself. Yet at the same time he’s ignorant of how much he doesn’t know. That’s because he lacks the capacity to go out of himself and imagine life from someone else’s point of view. Ortega says the capacity for ‘transmigration into another soul’ is the highest form of civilized sport.”

“Transmigration into another soul,” Alex de Costa repeated thoughtfully, as though storing the concept for future use.

“But you’re still reading it, so I shouldn’t be giving away the plot,” I added on a lighter note so he wouldn’t think I was just a dull blue- stocking.

“I’ve read it once before, in Spanish, but I remember very little. I was sixteen and trying to impress my new stepfather when he was consul in Barcelona. Now I’m reading it for clues to what I’m supposed to be doing here.”

“You mean on this earth?”

“No, in this ho
tel.
” His voice, rising plaintively, gave the word a Spanish intonation. “If Ortega, if
anybody at all,
could enlighten me about what is going to happen in Cuba, maybe I wouldn’t be quite so in the dark about how to serve my guests.”

He glanced up as the female members of the handsome Cuban family clopped through the lobby in beach clogs. The woman and the little girl wore matching dark blue terry-cloth robes over their bathing suits and carried towels over their arms. I still hadn’t tried the pool and was wondering if Paul’s black silk dressing gown, which I had brought home last night folded inside my raincoat, would suffice.

“That is Marisa Ocampo and her daughter,” Alex said after they went through the swinging doors to the pool. “Last week the Ocampos owned a ten-thousand-acre sugar plantation in Oriente. Now Enrique’s not sure what he owns or what his family is going to do next.” He shook his head as if he were clearing it, then added savagely, “My mother had a
benefit
for Fidel in Palm Beach when he needed funds to support his revolution. Her Jesuit cousin taught him in school, they were
friends.
Mother raised eight thousand dollars for Fidel. But now he has turned against his friends and the Julia Tuttle is filling up with them and how do I provide the
ambiente,
the environment they need, when nobody has the least idea what he is going to do tomorrow?”

5.

T
ESS CALLED UP ON
the house phone, breathlessly announcing that she had to make that trip to the airport after all. Hector had been expecting some crates of urgent dental equipment that were supposed to have arrived this evening.

“Then we got word they didn’t make the flight. Now it turns out the crates arrived in Miami yesterday morning. They’ve been sitting out there in the terminal collecting dust! If you can put up with my complicated life just a little longer, Emma, we can still have our dinner, it’s all prepared, if you don’t mind coming to the airport with me first.”

“No, I would like to see the airport. Be right down.”

A
FTER A
brief respite of non-rain, the skies had opened again with a fury, and Tess was talking at the same tempo as the windshield wipers. We drove north for a bit and then west for a bit longer.
Avenues in Miami run south to north; streets, terraces, and lanes east to west,
I coached myself from Bisbee’s luncheon tutorial, though it was hard to keep track in this rain. Tess again drove Hector’s new Cadillac, but she wore off-duty clothes under her yellow slicker: a white scoop-necked blouse with jet beads, silky tan slacks, and thong sandals. She had Bev-perfect feet, though without any nail polish, and their sheer nakedness made me picture them curling as she lay beneath a lover, uttering, as I was sure Tess would, flattering encouragements.

“That horrible man, do you know what he did
today
? But of course you do, you’re right there on the newspaper.”

At first I thought she meant someone at the
Star.

“He had the gall to warn
us
not to interfere in his land grab. He steals lands from thousands of farmers and tobacco growers, not to mention
American
landowners, and then has the nerve to call it his ‘agrarian reform’! He says we’re Goliath and they’re David and that we all know the outcome of
that
story. Then he turns around and warns if our ‘imperialist agents’ so much as set foot on their soil there will be six million Cubans willing to die rather than retreat. Hector says not only is he crazy and power-mad but his warnings aren’t even
logical.
Either David slays the giant or the giant slays the six million Davids, Hector says, but he can’t have it both ways.”

I decided Hector must be her lover. But if the dental equipment was so damned urgent, why couldn’t he go pick it up himself and let Tess have her night off?

“You probably know all this from your correspondents,” Tess went on. “This is old news to you, but Hector only heard it over the shortwave this afternoon.”

“Well, not all of it.”

Tess must think “being on the paper,” even on one’s first day, meant being in on all of tomorrow’s big stories. I’d be crouched over my obits of forgettable people on their forgettable streets, terraces, and lanes, and Lou Norbright would suddenly materialize beside my desk with a wire service dispatch in his hand: “Emma, I think you should know that Castro has warned us to keep our imperialist noses out of his revolution.”

I would have to wait for a later time to see the airport proper, as Tess’s appointment was at a freight terminal. She pulled in beside an oldish-model sedan with its engine running and its lights on, and immediately two men got out and came over. Tess lowered her window and spoke to them in Spanish and they huddled there in the rain in their short-sleeved shirts, getting wet to the bone but seeming not to care. Again it struck me how a person could take on a completely different personality when speaking another language. Her voice was still recognizably that of warm, lovely Tess, but it had an impressive snap of female authority to it.
“Sí, señora Tess,”
they said, nodding rapidly.
“Es lo mismo, señora. De nada, de nada, señora Tess.”

They disappeared into the downpour and returned with an official.

“Here, Officer, let me turn on the light in here so you can see,” Tess sang out, handing him some papers. “You know, this is a real shame,” she murmured after he had stuck his head through the window and taken in her beauty. “Here Doctor’s been waiting desperately for these new drills, and they’ve been out here gathering dust since yesterday!” His face lingered, close enough to kiss her, as he made a display of checking the papers under the interior light Tess had provided. He then apologized for the inconvenience and suggested she back into the terminal so her assistants could load the dental equipment out of the rain. Tess thanked him profusely and backed us out of the downpour.

“They’re such sweet boys,” said Tess, watching the men load through the rearview mirror of the Cadillac. “Julio and Genio are Asunción’s nephews, they’re twins. They’d do anything for Hector.”

The Cadillac began to sink as Julio and Genio loaded the crates.

“Heavy stuff,” I said.

“Oh, the
drills
are light as feathers,” Tess said gaily. “It’s the equipment that has to be fixed into the floor to hold them in place that’s so heavy. Our patients are going to have
so
much less pain when Hector gets this new equipment set up.”

“What kind of drills are they?”

“Oh, I couldn’t tell you the exact
name,
but they’re the very latest, Emma. Right from the manufacturer’s. Remember those old sledgehammers the dentist used to pump with his foot? No, you’re too young for that. But these are like a soft flow of warm, wet air on the tooth. No horrible noises and vibrations. Just a high-pitched little whisper and no pain.” This last was almost crooned.

“Boy, Tess, I’m coming straight to you if I have a toothache,”

“Hector would be honored to have you as a patient, Emma.”

“No, I meant
you, señora
Tess. You’d talk anyone out of their dentist phobias.”

“Well”—she laughed—“it’s my job, after all.”

A
T FIRST
I had thought we’d be going out to a restaurant, because when would Tess have had time to make dinner for me? But then she’d informed me she had. First we dropped off the Cadillac in the open garage of a modest house, transferred into Tess’s seven-year-old Oldsmobile, and were heading down the street again when an approaching car flicked its lights and Tess flicked back.

“Perfect timing!” she cried. “They’ll take the equipment on to Hector’s office.”

“Why couldn’t they have taken care of the whole thing?”

“Well, Emma, they could have managed it perfectly well. But at the moment officials in Miami are being very suspicious of Cubans loading and unloading things. I provided the necessary respectability. And now off we go to have our long-delayed dinner. You must be starved.”

“Was that Hector’s house?”

“Goodness, no. Hector and Asunción have a beautiful home on Alhambra, near the golf course. That was just the little bungalow the boys are renting till they get on their feet. They’ve only just come over from Cuba.”

I had assumed we were now headed for Tess’s Majorca Avenue apartment in Coral Gables, to which Mother had been addressing her letters for the past fifteen years, but instead we ended up at a marina on Biscayne Bay. We boarded the ramp of a houseboat. Tess flicked a switch and the deck lit up with a jungle of overgrown plants in big pots and enough nude male statues to be holding a party of their own. As we stepped into the very opposite of what one would expect of a seagoing interior, Tess explained she was house-sitting for an old friend, who directed summer theater in Connecticut, and that this arrangement allowed her to sublet her Coral Gables apartment for the summer.

“It gives me a bit of extra income for all my extravagances. That red door’s the bathroom, Emma—or ‘the head,’ as we nautical types are supposed to call it. Please don’t be alarmed by all his mirrors. I usually keep my eyes closed when I’m on the john, but some of the other mirrors can be useful if you need a particular close-up of yourself.”

Egads, the mirrors. Virtually every inch of wall was covered with them. Square ones, round ones, heart-shaped, Art Deco, Tiffany, Woolworth’s, framed in seashells, the masks of Comedy and Tragedy, you name it. Yet nowhere could you have an extensive view of yourself. While seated, I did not take Tess’s advice and partook of snippets of my anatomy, none of which, because of the limited views allowed, was either alarming or flattering. Only when I stood up and turned around to flush did the placement of mirrors over the toilet tank seem more encompassing and take on a pattern. Knock, knock, stupid, I thought. This exhibit was hung for men.

The other exhibit in here was Tess’s cosmetics table. Laid out on a cloth of plastic lace was the largest personal collection of expensive potions and lotions I had ever seen. The majority of these bore the Alexandra de Markoff Countess Isserlyn label, and queening it above the assemblage was a twelve-ounce bottle of Joy. These products alone could swallow the entirety of Tess’s summer-rental profits.

“See what I mean?” said Tess, handing me a frozen daiquiri when I emerged and disappearing behind the red door herself.

I sipped—“Mmm, peach!”—and took in more of the decor. Could Tess be comfortable surrounded by all these busy fabrics and props? A marble bust of a Roman soldier wore a lavender feather boa draped coyly around his epaulets, and the walls were practically papered with theater posters, including one I lusted for: Sarah Bernhardt dressed as Hamlet. But of course camping out among all these props provided Tess with the extra income for the necessities she called her extravagances.

The waters of the bay sloshed softly against Tess’s friend’s floating salon. I felt like an actress myself, balanced on the gently rocking stage of my life’s adventure. What would the script have in store for me tonight?

Tess returned, glowing ever handsomer, daubed freshly with “the costliest perfume in the world,” and took our dinner out of the refrigerator, all on one orange Fiestaware platter. It was an appealing assortment of familiar things I had never seen together: chicken thighs in a spicy sauce, a mound of yellow rice with chunks of pineapple and black olives in it, a creamy relish of avocado and tomato and onion to go over the rice, some nice chewy bread, and, of all things, the frozen green Jell-O salad I had loved as a child.

We ate sitting on bar stools, facing each other across the Formica counter.

“I hope you don’t mind,” said Tess. “I did consider clearing the dining table over there, but . . .” She waved her hands helplessly at the crowded table hosting the Roman soldier with his boa, a vase of peacock feathers, some Chinese porcelain, a jade Buddha, and about thirty framed snapshots.

“I’m glad you didn’t. I love sitting up here on the stools, it’s airier. Tess, did you know this is the very same seabreeze salad my grandmother used to make?”

“Of course I did. She made it when I was staying with you all in Mountain City, after everything went to pieces for me in Miami.”

I hadn’t anticipated her swinging into the subject so easily or so soon, but I had already resolved to say nothing about looking her up in the
Star
file. Let her tell her story her way.

“You were all so good to me. You and Nancy took me for walks to that little park across from your church and you asked if you could hold my hand. I felt so honored.”

“You wore a white halter dress that floated as you walked,” I said. “You were like some visiting goddess—”

“Oh, no, dearest, I was a mortal in a state of shock. But, Emma, your glass is empty.”

To my dismay, she chose this moment to slide off her stool and fetch the daiquiri pitcher from the refrigerator. To hide my eagerness for what she might reveal next, I praised the seabreeze salad again as she was refilling our glasses and derailed the whole thing.

“Yes, I was in the kitchen with your grandmother and she was telling me how you toddled over to her in the garden when you’d barely learned to talk, and said to her, ‘You look
loney
all by yourself out here,’ and how the name Loney just stuck. And then she got an ice tray of this creamy lime-green stuff out of the freezer and cut little squares of it and laid them out on lettuce, and put a maraschino cherry on each one and a dab of mayonnaise on the side. ‘That looks so
festive,
’ I said, and your grandmother gave me the kindest smile and said, ‘Well, why shouldn’t we be festive?
You’re
here.’ I’ve never forgotten it. After I went back to Miami, whenever I needed a lift, I would make myself a batch of Loney’s seabreeze salad and say to myself, ‘Well, why shouldn’t we be festive?
You’re
here.’ ”

“That’s wonderful,” I said. “We need these little reminders.”

“I’m so relieved we got Hector’s equipment safely home,” she said. “I feel almost like a heroine, if that doesn’t sound too silly. Everything dovetailing so perfectly, Julio and Genio exactly where they were supposed to be, dead on time, even in all that rain.”

“Right out of a spy novel,” I agreed. “Only the contraband was painless drills.”

“Only painless drills!” She burst out laughing as if I had said something hilarious. It occurred to me she was already tipsy and so was I. But how had it happened so soon?

“Honestly, my
life.
You know, Emma, I’m convinced it all began when I was in the hurricane of ’twenty-six, though please keep that date to yourself. I don’t want everyone knowing I was in a hurricane back when they weren’t even naming hurricanes yet. I was blown three blocks down Collins Avenue and landed on my feet.”

I had heard this story before, both from Tess when she was staying with us, and from my mother later telling friends, “I have this friend who was blown away in a Miami hurricane when she was twelve.” Pause for effect. “But she landed on her feet.”

Tess’s mother had sent her to the hardware store for a rake. They thought the hurricane had passed, but instead they were in the calm eye of it. Tess was suddenly lifted off the sidewalk and
flown
to the hardware store. The hardware store hadn’t fared so well, everything was smashed, but the owner told Tess if she could find a rake in the debris it was on the house. Tess found one and made it back home and they raked the dead crabs and seaweed out of the living room for the rest of the week.