The Film Club (6 page)

It happened on our third night there. That afternoon I'd taken Jesse to the Museum of the Revolution, looked at the boat that Castro and his sixteen revolutionaries snuck back to Cuba in, saw a photo of dead Che Guevara; had a boozy dinner on the balcony of a private residence overlooking the Prado; stumbled down Calle Obispo for a Mojito nightcap, the three of us, a band flailing and wailing in the boxy, fly-specked room; and then, my eyes closing from the heat and the booze, we returned to the hotel. It was nearly three in the morning. Maggie went to her room. Jesse and I watched television for a while. Then it was snoozy time.

“Can I keep the TV on with the sound down?” he asked.

“Why don't you read something instead,” I said.

We turned out the light; I could feel him lying there, awake, restless. Finally I turned the light on. “Jesse!”

He couldn't sleep. He was too excited. Could he go out and have a cigarette? Right over there, just across the street, that bench on the edge of the park? You can see it from here, Dad. Finally I agreed.

He dressed quickly and hurried out. I lay there for a few moments; turned off the light, then turned it on. Got up and went over to the window and opened it. The air conditioning stopped. The room went silent. Suddenly you could hear everything very clearly, cicadas, a few voices in Spanish, a car slowly cruising. A trolley passed by in the hallway outside the door, cups rattling.

I stood by the window, looking out over the dark park. Figures moved in the shadows. Hookers walking slowly through the trees; having a cigarette by the statue. Just beyond was the dome of the Museum of the Revolution.

Jesse stepped into my view on the sidewalk below, baggy pants, turned-around baseball hat. He lit a cigarette as if he was in a movie, looked this way and that (I caught a glance of his mirror face) and then started across the street to the park bench. I was just about to yell down to be careful when a dark-skinned man in a yellow shirt came out of the darkness. He made straight for Jesse, his hand extended. I waited to see if Jesse would shake it. He did. Mistake. Two other Cubans materialized, smiling, nodding, standing too close. Pointing up the street. Incredibly (I could hardly believe my eyes), they headed off with Jesse in between them, diagonally, across the park.

I put on my clothes and took the elevator down to the lobby. Big, high-ceilinged room, marble floors, chilly as a skating rink; canned music; a couple of security guys in grey suits and hand-held radios by the front door. They gave me a salute and buzzed open the door for me. The hot air hit me outside.

I crossed the street and stepped into the park. A hooker picked up on me. She rose like smoke from a park bench and drifted across to me. I said no thank you, and went through the park, looking here and there, for Jesse. He must have headed down some side street with his new pals. But which one?

I was moving down the east side of the park, near the taxis and three-wheel
cocos
, when I noticed, through the vegetation, a street heading alongside the city's grand theatre. A bright light at the end. I followed it down till I came to the front of an open-air bar. The place was empty, except for Jesse having a beer, the three hustlers sitting close to him at the same table. He had a sort of worried look on his face as if it was starting to occur to him that maybe something wasn't quite right here. I went over. “Can I speak to you for a second?”

The hustler in the yellow shirt said, “You his daddy?”

“Yes.”

I said to Jesse, “I have to speak to you.”

“Yeah, sure,” he said and scrambled to his feet. Yellow Shirt followed him out into the street, hovered nearby trying to hear. I said, “These guys aren't your friends.”

“I'm just having a beer.”

I said, “You're going to end up paying for a whole lot more than a beer. You buy these guys anything?”

“Not yet.”

The owner came out from the bar, a squat guy, very calm. Not surprised by any of this. He came over to Jesse and took him by the shirt sleeve.

I said, “What are you doing?”

The guy didn't answer. He just kept walking back to the bar, holding on to Jesse's shirt. I could feel my heart starting to thump unhealthily. Here we go. Fuck, here we go.

I said to him in Spanish, “How much does he owe you?”

He had Jesse back in the bar now. He said, “Ten dollars.”

I said, “That's pretty expensive for a beer.”

“That's the price.”

“Here,” I said, and put an American five on the table. “Let's go.”

But the owner said, “He ordered a rum. I've already made it.”

I said, “You mean you've already
poured
it?”

“Same thing.”

I said to Jesse, “You touch that drink?”

Jesse shook his head, scared now.

I said, “Follow me,” and we started up the street. The hustlers came out after us. One of them came around and stood in front of me. He said, “He ordered a drink. Now he has to pay.”

I tried to step around him but he stepped in front of me.

I said, “I'm going to call the cops.”

The hustler said, “Okay fine.” But he stepped back.

We kept walking, the hustler bobbing around, pulling at my sleeve, his friends following behind, me saying to Jesse, “No matter what happens, keep walking.” We went across the park, almost running now, Jesse sticking very close to me and then, when we could see the hotel doors, I said, “Run.”

We ran across the street and under the facade and in through the night door. But they came in after us, into the lobby. Still moving, I said to the guy in the yellow shirt, “You better get the fuck out of here.” But he wasn't afraid of anything. The elevator door opened; he tried to squeeze in with me and Jesse, his pals hanging back in the lobby.

The security guys came out of nowhere. There was a commotion in Spanish, the doors shut. We went up three floors, Jesse saying nothing. Throwing me little worried glances. Looking at himself in the mirror, making that face again. He thought I was pissed off at him, which I was, abstractly, but what he didn't know was that I was experiencing a kind of elation. I had, corny as it sounds, got on my horse and ridden out to save him. Served him well, protected him, done my job. I was, in fact, privately happy at how things turned out. After a certain age you don't get to do that much for your children; you've got all that juice and not enough to do with it.

We were too jacked up to go to bed or to watch television. To be honest, I was dying for a drink. “Maybe we should go see if we can get a beer,” I said.

We waited ten or fifteen minutes and peeked out the hotel door; no sign of Yellow Shirt. We hurried along the near edge of the park, past the shopping plaza to the Calle Obispo, and headed down the narrow street toward the ocean. The old city hung in a silent ball of heat. “That's where Ernest Hemingway used to drink,” I said as we passed the darkened El Floridita. “It's a tourist trap now, ten bucks a beer, but back in the '50s, it was supposed to be the best bar in town.”

We passed a couple of caged-up cafés, places that had been screeching with life and strumming guitars and cigar smoke a few hours earlier. Then an old-fashioned drugstore, dark wood, row upon row of clay jars along the back wall.

Soon we were standing outside Hemingway's old hotel, the Ambos Mundos, at the foot of the street. “He wrote some of his worst stuff up there on the fifth floor,” I said.

“Is he worth reading?” Jesse asked.

“What the
hell
were you thinking back there, Jesse?” I said. “Going off with those hustlers like that?”

He didn't answer. You could see he was racing around inside his head, ripping open doors and cupboards, looking for the right thing to say.

“Tell me,” I said gently.

“I thought I was having an adventure. Smoking a cigarette and drinking rum in a foreign city. You know?”

“Didn't you feel like there was something off, those guys being so friendly at three in the morning?”

“I didn't want to hurt their feelings,” he said. (How young he still is, I thought. That tall body, that good vocabulary. It can fool you.)

“Those guys are used to making people feel guilty. They do it all day long. It's their job.”

We walked a while longer down the street. Yellow lamps overhead; balconies looking down; laundry hanging motionless, like people waiting. “If you're going to read Hemingway,” I said, “read
The Sun Also Rises.
A few of his short stories too. The rest gets a bit nutty.” I looked around. You could smell the odour of decaying masonry; hear the ocean smashing against the seawall on the other side of the Avenida del Puerto. But no bar. “They say you can get anything anytime in Havana,” I said, “but apparently not.”

Inside the Hotel Ambos Mundos, you could see the night clerk talking to a pretty girl.

We followed a narrow cobblestone street east, the crumbling pastel apartment buildings rising on both sides; thick vines trailing down, a bright full moon shone overhead; no stars, just this single bright coin in the middle of a black sky. Night was at its peak. We came out into a square, a dirty-brown cathedral squatting at one end, a lighted café on the other; three or four tables sitting near the middle of the square. We sat down. A white-jacketed waiter disengaged himself from the brightly lit interior and came over.

“Señores?”

“Dos cervezas, por favor.”

Out they came, two ice-cold beers at four o'clock in the morning.

“I'm sorry about that business back at the hotel,” Jesse said.

“There are a couple of inviolate principles in the universe,” I said, suddenly chatty (I was delighted to be where we were). “One is that you never get
anything worth getting
from an asshole. Two is when a stranger comes toward you with his hand extended, he doesn't want to be your friend. Are you with me?”

As if a thirsty genie had joined us, the beers vanished in their bottles. “Maybe we should go again?” I said. I held up two fingers for the waiter and swirled them around in the soupy air. He came over.

“How do you keep them so cold?” I asked. I was having a good time.

“Qué?”

“It's okay,
no importa
.”

A bird twittered in a nearby tree.

“First one of the day,” I said. I looked over at Jesse. “Everything okay with Claire Brinkman?” He sat forward, his face darkened. “None of my business,” I said mildly. “Just chatting.”

“Why?”

“She looked a little distraught when we were leaving, that's all.”

He took an aggressive plug of his beer. For a second I saw in that gesture how he drank when he drank with his friends. “Can I talk to you frankly, Dad?”

“Within reason. Nothing gross.”

“Claire's a little bit on the weird side.” Something cold, something not so nice crept into his face like a rat in a new house.

“You want to go a little gently with Claire. She hasn't had an easy time of it.” Her father, a sculptor I'd known in high school, had hanged himself with a clothesline a few years before. He was a drunk, a bullshitter, an asshole, to boot. Just the kind of guy who would off himself without the slightest thought for his kids, how they were going to take it.

“I know that story,” Jesse said.

“Then tread softly.”

Another bird started up, this one behind the cathedral.

“I just don't like her that much. I should but I don't.”

“Are you guilty about something, Jesse? You look like you just stole your grandmother's necklace.”

“No.”

“It's not fair to be mad at Claire because you don't like her more. Although I understand the temptation.”

“Have you ever felt it?”

“It's disappointment.”

I thought it might end there but it was as if there was a thin wire extending from him at that moment, that it needed a tug so the rest—whatever it was—could come out. Which silence seemed to serve.

By now the sky had turned a dark, rich blue, a red bar running across the horizon. Such extraordinary beauty, I thought, all over the world. Is it, you had to wonder, because there was a God or was it simply how millions and millions and millions of years of absolute randomness looked? Or is this simply the stuff you think about when you're happy at four o'clock in the morning?

I called over the waiter. “Do you have any cigars?”

“Sí, señor.”
His voice echoed in the empty square. He produced a pair from a jar on the counter and brought them over. Ten bucks each. But where else would you get a cigar at this time of the morning?

“I've been phoning another girl,” Jesse said.

“Oh.” I bit off the end of a cigar and handed it to him. “Who?”

He said a name I didn't recognize. He looks furtive, dishonest, I thought.

“Just a couple of times,” he said.

“Huh-huh.”

Puff, puff. Face averted. “I'm too young to settle on one person, don't you think?”

“That's not really the point, is it?”

A moment later we heard a soft strumming. A young man sat slumped over a guitar on the cathedral steps, slowly running his fingers over the strings. In the blue morning light he reminded me of a Picasso painting.

“Do you believe that?” Jesse said. “Have you ever seen anything so . . .” he looked for the word “. . . so perfect.”

We smoked our cigars in silence for a moment, the chords hanging in the soft summer air.

“Dad?” he said suddenly.

“Yes.”

“It's Rebecca I've been phoning.”

“I see.” Pause. Puff. Chirp. “Not that other person you mentioned.”

“I didn't want you to think I was a loser. That I was obsessed with Rebecca Ng.”

The sky softened to a lighter blue; the moon fading; strum, strum. “
Am
I obsessed by Rebecca?” he asked.