Via Dolorosa (27 page)

Fever-stricken, he spent the next two days in bed. After opening the patio doors and ordering him a light lunch for noon via room service, Emma would leave him alone for most of the day. When she returned close to dusk, her skin was slick and oiled and tan and she looked very young and healthy. The first night she stayed with him in the room. She ordered herbal teas, which she would set out for him on the nightstand in a cup and saucer. Though he never touched it, she would periodically check the tea’s temperature and, if she found it had chilled, would dump it into the bathroom sink and refill his cup. This occurred as ritual, and Nick could almost count down on the alarm clock to the next dump-and-refill session. For that first evening, she had taken up residence in one of the wing-backed chairs across the room, her feet tucked up under her bottom as a child would do while she read her poetry books to herself. At one point, she asked if he would like her to read aloud to him.

“No.”

“It isn’t trouble,” she said back. “You used to love me reading the poems to you.”

“Not now, please,” he said groggily.

When he felt sleep beginning to overtake him that first night, he prayed silently for a dreamless slumber. He knew he had been dreaming recently of Iraq, although he could not remember anything specific about these dreams. It was just the empty, wasted, disemboweled feeling such dreams left behind as their calling card that made him aware they had been capering around inside his head while he slept.

“You talk in your sleep,” Emma told him as she dressed that second morning.

“What did I say?”

“It was funny,” she said. “Maybe I didn’t hear you right.”

“What did I say?”

“Something about a baby,” she said. Standing before the curtained patio doors, she adjusted her blouse while looking at herself in the armoire mirror. “Something about a baby in someone’s belly.” When he did not answer, she said, “Are you still feeling bad?”

“A little.”

“Is there something I can get you?”

“Just open those doors a little more, get some of that air in.”

“It’s lovely out there today,” she said, widening the doors. “It’s too bad you’re sick.”

“I’ll be up soon enough.”

“Would you like me to stay and have lunch with you today?”

“No,” he said. “Go out, enjoy the beach. I’m not hungry, anyway.”

“I already ordered you lunch. You need to eat something, Nick. Don’t cancel the room service like you did yesterday. Promise me.”

He promised. She left.

Alone, he tried to watch television but could not get into it. He took a cigarette out on the patio. It
was
nice out. Down below, he watched the great white swans drift lazily across the surfaces of the three courtyard fountains. Further out, he could see the beach. There were many people on the sand, soaking up the good weather. His eyes fell on all of them, or so it felt that way to him. There were many. He wondered, as he went from person to person, if he would recognize Emma from such a distance. And if not, had he already spotted her and moved on?

When Emma returned around lunchtime, she found him still smoking on the patio. Coming in to change out of her bathing suit and into Capri pants and a fresh halter-top, she did not say anything to him. From the patio he just barely turned his head at the sounds of her dressing in the room. That exact moment happened to signify to the both of them that there was no longer any sickness here, and that there probably hadn’t been for some time now. Yet neither bothered to address it. They ignored it the way people will sometimes think it necessary to ignore a visibly ugly scar. Until she was getting ready to go out again—

“Don’t stay out there too long,” she said coldly. “Breeze might make you sick all over again.”

Fifteen minutes later, showered, groomed, refreshed, he rode the elevator down to the lobby and situated himself at the restaurant bar. Roger was there, quietly going through a checklist of inventory. It took some time before he finally came over.

“Lunch menu?”

“Just a coffee for now.”

“I’ll have to heat some up.”

“I’ll wait.”

Roger went back to his checklist. When Nick looked up again, the bartender had disappeared into the kitchen.

Isabella came through the restaurant wearing very little clothing. Her body was taut and brown. She had her hair pulled back, framing her face. All shoulder and upper chest, red-brown and sleek from the sun, a wraparound pair of red sunglasses covering her eyes, he could not tell if she saw him seated at the bar. Her legs seemed to slide from her abbreviated shorts as she walked and, when she paused in her stride to examine the framed menu on the wall of the bar, her thighs left just the slightest and most perfect wink of space between them.

“Isabella,” he called.

“My Nicholas,” she said, coming over. “You’ve been lost to me.”

“I’ve been sick.”

“Honeymoons will do that to a man.”

“Can I buy you a drink?”

“What are you having?”

“Coffee.”

“I will have the same as you.”

“It’s being brewed now.”

“I will wait with you.” Smiling, she allowed her eyes to drift about the room. “The wife is not here with you?”

“I’m alone.”

“Did she run off with a sailor? That sometimes happens.”

“Not to my knowledge. Anyway, I don’t think she’d tell me if she did.”

“It would be good for you, anyhow,” she said, her tone casual.

“Is that right?”

“Oh, yes.”

“How’s that?”

“Marriage is improbable.”

“Is that what you think?”

“It is what I know.”

“How do you know?”

Tapping a cigarette from a pack she had fished from her purse, not offering him one, she said, quite elementary, “I just know.”

“Have you ever been married?” he asked.

“No,” she said, “but almost.”

“What happened?”

“It was a few years ago, when I was still young and naïve. Now,” she added with a wry smile, “I am just young.”

“This was back in Spain?”

“Yes, in Madrid,” she said. “But he was an American boy, very light-skinned and handsome. I was enthralled and found him completely unique. Which was unique in itself because very rarely, even during my sadly misguided youth, did I find anything to be unique. People most particularly.”

“What was his name?”

“I won’t tell you his name. He was a writer back then and is, I suppose, somewhat of a writer now, too, although his ideals, unfortunately, have changed.” Lips tugging on her cigarette. “Either way, you would recognize the name, so I won’t tell it.”

“So what happened?” he asked, watching the reflection of his own lips move in the lenses of her dark sunglasses.

“Something was lost,” she said, simple enough. “Something in him, something in me. What usually happens?” She removed the cigarette from her mouth and pouted her lower lip, as if to acknowledge her own question with a deep sense of consideration and concern. There was lipstick on the filter. “Do you know what a civet is, Nicholas?”

“A—civet? No…”

“A civet,” Isabella explained, “is best described as a cat-like monkey or a monkey-like cat. In Indonesia, plantation owners feed coffee beans to civets and the civets ingest them, digest them, then—how do you say?—discard the remains in their waste.”

“They
shit
them out,” he said.

Isabella’s smile widened, showing many teeth. She
slid
her sunglasses a half-inch down the bridge of her nose. Fawn-colored, dark eyes settled on him, held him. “Yes,” she said, still holding the smile, “they
shit
them out.
Mierda
.
Shit.”

“
Mierda
,”
he repeated.

“Going through the digestive tract of the civet, the coffee beans are purged of their proteins. The Indonesians then package the beans and sell them for over a thousand dollars a pound.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Oh, yes. Jesus Christ, Nicholas. Over a thousand dollars a pound for
mierda
—
for shit. That,” she went on without pause, “is what happened to my handsome fair-skinned American writer.”

“What?” he asked.

“That somewhere, somehow, in so many ways, the man lost himself. He started as a great and very proud writer. Reading his words, I found myself very proud of him, too, and I am not proud of much. Do you see? But unfortunately there is little money set aside for the great and the proud and the talented, only the commercially successful, and so my handsome fair-skinned American writer came to a crossroads.” She frowned and drew her long, raven eyebrows together. “Crossroads, yes? That is correct?”

“Yes.”

“Yes,” she said. “So—the crossroads. And my handsome fair-skinned American writer, in his moment of weakness, decided to not be so great and so proud and so talented, and he began writing for a bigger publisher for bigger dollars and bigger success. Do you see? He had become like the civet.” She tapped her cigarette out on the bar. “So then, rich but unhappy, he lost himself. And in losing himself, he lost his love for me. And in losing his love for me,” she continued, “I lost my love for him.
Tal
es
la
manera
del
mundo
—
such is the way of the world.” She smoked, grimly frowning, but it still looked handsome on her beautiful face. “I do not drink coffee made of monkey shit,” she stated flatly.

“Yes,” Nick said.

“Yes yes
yes
yes
yes
yes
yes
yes
.”

“That’s a very sad story.”

“For him it is more sad,” she said. “For me, it is not so sad. I am not one to worry about the past. But I still remember him and I know he is very much the man who worries about the past. That, too, I think, is a writer’s thing.”

“It’s a human thing,” he corrected.

“No,” she said coolly, “it is a man’s thing.”

“
Mierda
,”
he said because he did not know what else to say.

Smiling, beaming, beautiful, Isabella said, “You have no idea.”

Changing the subject, he asked her how the portrait had turned out. Isabella made an expression that could have been a smile, could have been a frown. It was difficult to tell with her, he knew only that it was pretty on her. “Curious,” was all she said.

It wasn’t until after they shared a cup of coffee and she ran off to do whatever it was people like Isabella Rosales do, did Nick remember that her note—the one she had pinned to his nylon supplies case and left outside his hotel door—was still in his pocket. He took it out now, looked at it:

Tal
es
la
manera
del
mundo
.