Spanish Disco (16 page)

“Hello?” he said hesitantly. “Just a moment…” He held out the receiver to me.

The rats were abating, and I found my voice.

“Hello?”

“Cassie, don’t hang up.”

I recognized the voice of Donald Seale.

“How did you get this number?”

“I’m a tabloid reporter.”

“Sorry, I forgot I was dealing with pond scum.”

“Listen, I need to see you. I need to see you today. Now. Pronto. There’s a new glitch on the Roland Riggs horizon, and if you care about the old guy, I suggest you come to my hotel room. Number 872. Really. I mean it.”

I hung up the phone and looked at Roland. Even my eyeballs hurt. “I have to meet someone. Long story. I need to shower…I don’t suppose you have another one of these in the fridge.”

With genuine concern, Roland pulled another can out and handed it to me. I held my half-drunk one in my right hand and with the left pressed the new can against my temple. I stumbled back upstairs and into the shower. Ordinarily, I am a fan of hot, steamy hour-long showers, but I turned the faucet to cold and suffered.
Wake up, Cassie.

Remembering that last time I met Donald Seale face-to-face I was hungover, I decided he had something to do with my plight, which made me hate him more. I also recalled that last time I mooned him. Protecting myself against such a moment of insanity, I donned cream-colored satin bikini underpants and dressed in a pair of khaki shorts and a brand-new Ann Taylor T-shirt, strapped on a pair of sandals, brushed my teeth three times, trying to banish the last of the rat hair, and headed out into the heat of the day. My eyes watered from the light, and I quickly put
on my Ray-Bans, trying to shield myself from daylight like a creature of the night.

I pulled my banana-mobile out and, Coke can in one hand, CD playing
softly,
I headed toward Donald Seale’s hotel. I found his room with no problem and knocked on the door.

“Cassie…” he smiled his mega-watt smile. “Come on in.”

I avoided smiling and took a seat on the bed.

“Listen…I shouldn’t tell you this, but I like you.”

I rolled my eyes, which he could not see behind my Ray-Bans. So I lowered my glasses and rolled my eyes again.

“I do. I really do. So I am doing you a favor. Listen…my paper is owned by Gordon Roth. He also owns the TV production company that produces
Hollywood Now.
”

“I don’t watch TV. I take it that’s a sleazy show?”

“You might call it that, but it’s one of the most popular shows in syndication. They do stories on movie stars, music acts…and authors, if they’re big enough or have a scandal attached to themselves.”

“I see,” I said cautiously.

“Well…they’re going to air a show tonight. About Roland. Or, more precisely, about his wife.”

“His wife is dead.”

“Yes…but she was very glamorous in her heyday, and Roland is a mystery. And they have someone…an old guy dying of pancreatic cancer, who says he’s the hunter who shot her. He’s going to cry and beg for forgiveness on national TV. He wants to speak to Roland before he dies.”

“Have you people no shame?” I was still clutching the Coke can, which I again leaned against my temple. From the Florida heat on the drive over, it had warmed; it wasn’t cold enough to help me any.

“I don’t work for the show.” He looked at me, trying to judge my reaction. He was again impeccably dressed, and I noticed he had his initials embroidered on the pocket of his shirt.

“So what do you want, Donald?”

“I think the show is going to upset Mr. Riggs—”

“I think that’s a fucking
understatement.
And who even knows if this asshole is telling the truth. I am, Donald, quite fucking sick of you and your sleazoid tactics.”

“All I’m asking for is an interview. I asked you to come here so maybe you could brace the old guy so it isn’t such a shock to him. I asked you to meet me here in all sincerity to do you a favor.”

“So long as I do one back.”

“You’re so beautiful, Cassie. And you never smile.”

“I do. Just not for you.”

He kneeled down on the floor in front of me.

“If it makes you feel any better, I don’t want to upset him any more than you do. I wish this hunter never turned up…that he’d died with his secret. But then I started thinking that maybe it would help Roland. Maybe it would give him…I don’t know…closure. But I want you to know that I read
Simple Simon
fifty times. A hundred times. I wouldn’t want to hurt him.”

“Have you ever stopped to think that this man…this
man is just an ordinary man who wrote a book? Maybe he was expressing things in his heart. Maybe he had nothing better to do. But he wrote a book, and since then…thirty years ago…everyone and their brother thinks they know him, that they have a right to intrude on him, to find out what the book means on a deeper level. Well, he doesn’t owe you that. He doesn’t owe anyone that.”

“Look, I just wanted you to know about the show.” With that, Donald leaned up to me and kissed me. After a few seconds of shock, I kissed him back. I thought of dead rat hair in my mouth. Then I thought of how beautiful Donald was. How his skin was the color of coffee the way my father used to take it. I felt my heartbeat quicken. He was here. Michael was there. Michael wasn’t even speaking to me, judging by our last conversation. I kissed Donald harder. And then the residual effects of tequila passed through me. They cleared out of my brain, and I remembered just who it was I was kissing. I pulled back. Then I pushed Donald backward and stood up.

“This is crazy.”

“You’ll never know what it’s like to question what it is you’re doing, Cassie Hayes. You could have done anything you wanted with your father’s connections. You, who used to dine with literary royalty. I do my job. I hope I can get to the top…strike a book deal or two…get out of this business. But you—”

“You haven’t the slightest idea of what I question, Donald. You can’t imagine what I question every day,” I said, as thoughts of my father flashed through my mind. It was
Lou who talked me into placing him in a facility rather than caring for him at home. Lou told me if I tried to change bedpans and hoist him in and out of bed as he forgot me little by little each day, I would crack. I would lose all semblance of balance in my life. Me…balanced. As if that was a real risk.

“I liked kissing you. I’ve wanted to do that since we met.”

“If I fucked you, would you pull back on the story?”

“What?”

“You heard me.”

“This isn’t about a deal between you and me…”

“Yes it is. That kiss was. Everything is. You came to this island looking for a deal, and you thought I was your broker. Well, you can do whatever the hell you want with your stories, but you won’t get any cooperation from me. Or Roland.”

“Fine. That doesn’t change the fact that I kissed you and want to do it again.”

“I’d moon you if I was wearing a dress,” I said as I walked toward the door.

“And I’d enjoy it.”

I opened the door. “I’d like to think that even if I was born into nothing that I would never become a parasite.”

“You’d like to think that, but you’ll never know.”

“And you’ll never know what it’s like to earn my respect. So perhaps we’re even.” I shut his door.

Driving back to Roland’s in my banana boat, I thought of the kiss. I replayed it in my mind. His tongue against
mine, his hand on my thigh. But thoughts of Michael intruded. And then thoughts of my father…of the first time he failed to recognize me. Thoughts of Roland. Thoughts of disco balls. Lou and the money he’d already sunk into a 792-page poem or whatever the hell it was. Donald Seale was very wrong. Now, more than ever, I knew what it was like to question my every move.

20

“D
on’t you want to watch?”

“No.”

I had found Roland on his pre-
Wheel of Fortune
beach walk, and I told him about the television interview.

“But it could give you closure.” I was shocked to hear such psychobabble leave my lips.

“I don’t want closure.”

“But this man has lived with this all these years and now he wants to—”

“What? Say he’s sorry?” Roland’s voice held no anger, just a weariness I had never heard before. He faced into the wind again. As the sea air whipped his long gray hair around his face, he reminded me of a Norse king, his eyes the color of the Gulf.

“Not sorry. But just to say what happened. What really
happened that day. Don’t you think it’s important to know? Then maybe you could really go on. Move on.”

“Have you ever thought that perhaps I don’t want to?”

“Yes. But there’s the whole disco thing. If you didn’t want to move on, why’d you ask me here? Why do you watch Maria every night? If not to move on?”

He stood, proudly erect. And then he crumbled, almost in slow motion. He dropped to his knees as ripples of water curled around him.

“If I move on, then Maxine is really dead.”

I was silent for a minute, then whispered, “But you’ve known that, Roland. You’ve known that a long, long time.”

My head no longer pounded from my hangover, but I felt as tired as Roland. Editors are really unlicensed psychologists. I plopped down in the sand next to him and let the warm Gulf water lick my thighs.

“We had no children. And I think about her constantly. Talk to her. If I stop doing that, stop wondering what happened and who did it…then she’ll fade away as if she never existed.”

“Is that why you wrote it?”

“What?”

“The poem. Your magnum opus. To say to the world, ‘She was here.’”

Roland took a shell and tossed it into the water.

“She was here,” he whispered. “She was here.”

“But if you know what happened…if you could even find it in yourself to confront this guy…she would still have been here. Forgiving him won’t make Maxine go away.”

Roland stared at me with his piercing blue eyes, crinkling them into a squint. “Might I say that if that isn’t the proverbial pot calling the proverbial old coot black…”

“What?”

“Forgiveness? Wasn’t it you who said you’d like to do your own mother in?”

“Yes. But she’s not on a deathbed asking for forgiveness. She’s globe-trotting with husband number five and waiting for my father to kick the bucket so she can come into part of his estate. Not exactly forgivable behavior. Definitely not an accident.”

“Cassie…I can’t forgive. Neither can Maria. It’s as if we live in that house over there and death keeps us company. Even with the birds and rabbits, and bonsai…”

“…and orchids, koi, twenty-three cats at last count, though Lord knows I’m not even sure. I just count ’em in the morning for something to do.”

“Yes. Even with all that, we can’t shake death from our feet, and that’s what binds us.”

“How? What is Maria’s dark ghost?”

“Can I trust you, Cassandra Hayes?”

“Roland…trust is just so much bullshit. If they tortured me, I’d give up your secrets, but short of that, your story’s safe with me.”

He dug his hand into the sand of the Gulf of Mexico, pulled up a clump, and allowed it to trickle through his fingers.

“Maria’s family worked migrant farms. They were ille
gals here. And like illegal immigrants everywhere, they were exploited.”

He looked at me, perhaps gauging my sympathy.

“The work was brutal. Backbreaking. Blistering. Making fingers bleed and lips crack from thirst. And children as young as five and six were picking fruit you and I buy in the grocery store every day. We don’t even think about it. Fruit. Peppers.

“And then along came Chavez. He worked for the rights of the migrants. He toiled for them, and Maria’s father joined in the fight—as an organizer, as a leader.”

“A daughter of a fighter. I like that.” I smiled.

“You’re a fighter.”

I nodded.

“But this was different. Chavez and her father worked side by side. They were arrested together. They were beaten together. But the sacrifice, the bulk of that sacrifice, was made by Maria’s mother and her siblings—all eight of them—as they still worked the fields and tried to make up for their father’s absence as he protested and fought and talked to people who could support their cause. They needed the money. Pure and simple. Uncle Sam’s capitalist dollars.”

The last of the sand had trickled through his fingers, and he picked up another handful.

“If they asked their father not to leave the family, they would toil forever, never breaking free. If he stayed with them, they toil forever anyway. What’s the choice? Protest or perish.”

“The Prisoner’s Dilemma, as they say in philosophy. She…is very beautiful. You can’t picture her living in the fields. At least I can’t. Not when you see what she’s created in that house.”

“She’s made it a sanctuary for me. She didn’t tell me about her family, her childhood, for a couple of years. But I see it now. How it haunts her. It’s part of her.”

I thought of how my father remained a part of me, how a part of my heart was lost to that heartache.

“Eventually, Chavez won some concessions from the large corporations. He changed things. But by then Maria’s father was dying of lung cancer.”