Beneath a Panamanian Moon (14 page)

“We're bored,” she said. She slid to the end of the bench and said, “Come here, and sit next to me.”

“What are you playing?”

“A Ben Folds song.”

“Ah,” I said.

“You don't know who Ben Folds is, do you?”

I admitted I didn't.

“He had a big hit a few years ago.”

“Ah,” I said again.

“Okay, so I know you don't listen to the radio. Who do you listen to?”

I shrugged and idly played chords that fit under her melody. “James P. Johnson, Bill Evans, Art Tatum, Oscar Peterson, you know. The usual.”

She shook her head. “More like the unusual. Have you ever heard of Jimmy Eat World?”

I laughed. “No. And you made that up.”

She crossed her heart. “I didn't.” She watched my hands. “You have such a nice touch. Will you play something?”

“Sure.” I moved to the center of the bench and began to play one of my favorites.

“That's pretty. What's it called?”

“‘Our Love Is Here to Stay.'” I particularly like the lyrics. I sang a line for her.

“Nice,” she said, “but you don't really believe that stuff.”

“I do,” I said. “I believe in love so right that it lasts a lifetime. I believe that each one of us is only half to a whole and that it's our mission on earth to recognize our other half when we meet them.”

“You're joking.”

“I'm not. And if I didn't believe that, I'd walk into the ocean right now.”

“A Star Is Born,”
she said.

“A classic,” I said. “The James Mason version is my favorite. You like movies?”

“I love movies.” Kris perked up and said, “Hey, there's an art house in the city.” She looked at her watch. “If we hurry, we might be able to catch something good. Last week it was
Double Indemnity
.”

“You forgot your hat,” I said, repeating a line that Barbara Stanwyck uses on Fred MacMurray.

Kris clapped her hands. “God! That was such a great scene, and she's standing there in the doorway and you can see she doesn't have his hat.”

“And he says, ‘Just put it on the chair.'”

“Yes! That was so good! So sexy.” She laughed, and the way her hair moved in the moonlight made my heart stop. “So, you up for a movie?”

“I don't know. I was just going into town to get something to eat.”

“You missed the last bus,” she said. “But I have a car. We can see a movie and get a bite together, what do you say? Come on, I haven't been away from here since before Christmas.”

“What about your father?”

“He's off picking up more guests.”

“Don't these people do anything but lie in the sun all day?”

Kris shrugged. “They go to the casinos at night, but they're just waiting for the big blowout on New Year's Eve. That's what they're all waiting for.” She played a C-major chord, followed by a G. “Are you all right? You look a bit flushed.”

“Yeah,” I said, “I'm fine.”

“Good. I saw you on the beach today with that girl.”

I laughed. “I saw you, too. Everybody saw you. I thought the guests were going to drool all over their
Financial Times
.”

“I hope you got some good pictures.” Before I could dissect her tone, timing, posture, and expression for any ominous undertone, she said, “I know this terrific place for sushi. I just have to get my keys.”

I let her lead me up the stairs to the second floor. She opened the door to a suite of rooms, all with a beautiful view of the courtyard and the water beyond.

“So, you live here with your father?”

“Yeah.”

“How long are you staying?”

“I have to go back to school in a few days.”

“That's the most depressing news I've heard since I got here.”

She said, casually, “You looked like you were having a pretty good time with that girl.”

“Sometimes you have to make your own fun.”

She did me the huge favor of laughing, and it made me want to make her laugh again. Her skin glowed and I watched as she moved around the room, plunging into and out of the shadows.

“I can't find the fucking keys,” she said. “Shit.”

She disappeared into an adjoining room and I idly looked around the place. Her suite was so different from my third-floor monk's cell. The ceilings were fourteen feet above cool tile and the windows opened onto a wide balcony. The air hummed with air conditioned air.

I moved about the room, but like most hotel rooms, there weren't many personal items that might tell me more about her. I spotted a photo and a book on an end table. The child in the photo sat in the lap of a weary but attractive woman in her thirties. The child looked like Kris. The woman looked tired. But she had managed a tight-lipped smile for the photographer.

I turned the book over and read the title:
A Peace to End All Peace
.

I heard the jingle of keys and looked up. “I found 'em,” Kris said. “Let's go.”

I held up the book. “Is this yours?”

“Daddy's, but I just started reading it.”

“You know your father hates me.”

Kris rolled her eyes. “I'm sure he doesn't. He's a little aloof, that's all.” She grasped my hand and pulled me toward the door. “Now let's go or we'll miss the beginning of the movie.”

I followed her out to the parking lot. Kris owned a VW Beetle, an old convertible, its top held together by duct tape, its body held together by rust. The paint had faded into a dusty blue and the seats were a goat buffet.

The guard stopped us at the gate.

“Hi, Meat,” Kris said. “If Daddy's looking for me, tell him I went to a movie.”

Meat stared at me the way a Persian-rug collector might eye an incontinent dog. “With him?” Meat's lip curled back from bright white canines.

“Yeah, with him,” she said. “You got a problem with that?”

Meat's shoulders bunched and I could see the muscles in his jaw work. “No, Kris, no problem.” And we all knew that there was a big problem and for some reason I figured it would be my problem as soon as Meat and I were alone.

Kris drove through the city like Bonnie Parker outrunning the law. She made quick, unannounced turns and fast sprints between lights. We pulled up across the street from El Leo, a magnificent old theater built in a time when theaters were rightfully called palaces. The marquee was ringed in neon, its name a proud shout into the street in six-foot-high, electrified letters. The movie playing was
Casablanca
.

Kris bought my ticket. “You're my date, remember?” She let me buy the popcorn.

I liked
Casablanca
but I sympathized more with Sam, a piano player caught between two unreasonable people, than I did Bogart. I loved Sam's opening number, “
Shine
,” but the lyrics were politically incorrect and I was far too white to sing them anywhere but in the shower.

This was my first time seeing
Casablanca
on the big screen, dubbed from English into Spanish with English subtitles. The actor who dubbed Bogart's voice tried to sound like Bogey, but succeeded in sounding more like the older Bacall. Ingrid Bergman's voice was a Latina Betty Boop, high on helium. But still, when Rick gave up the girl, I looked at Kris and saw the reflected black-and-white flickering across her eyes and in her face I saw the loss, the sacrifice, and the heartbreak laid bare, completely stripped of my generation's new-century cynicism.

Watching Kris's face in that flickering theater made me feel, for the first time, the sadness and nobility of that moment when the plane engines cough, the propellers begin to spin, and Bogart puts Ingrid Bergman on that plane with her husband, Paul Henreid.

The lights came up and Kris dabbed her eyes with her sleeve and I fell in love. It wasn't intentional.

After the movie, we climbed back into the VW and zipped across town, racing the
chiva
buses and taxicabs from one intersection to the next. The city speed was forty-five and everyone ignored it, especially Kris, and the traffic rushed along, bumper-to-bumper, at sixty.

“I'm taking you to this place that makes screwdrivers with fresh-squeezed orange juice,” she hollered. “They've also got the best raw bar in Central America.”

“I'm completely in your hands,” I said.

She flashed a smile as she ran a yellow light and said, “You wish.” Then we shot up a wide boulevard, dodging buses and scattering pedestrians like geese.

Kris took me to a dark bar in a fine hotel where the bartender spoke English, Japanese, French, German, and Italian. “The Chinese are very interested in Panama,” he said, “so I've been working on my Mandarin, just in case.” I made a note of it.

Kris sat close to me, her thigh pressing against mine. Her hair smelled like honeysuckle and popcorn and her breath was fragrant with fresh orange.

We talked about movies and music and mothers. We had lost our mothers, both of us, when we were young.

“I was fourteen,” Kris said. “There was an accident.”

“I was twelve.”

Kris tied her swizzle stick into a knot. “Other people don't get it, do they?”

“No,” I said. “I don't think they do.”

“How lost you feel.”

“And how guilty.”

“Right, like it wouldn't have happened if you'd been smarter or prettier.”

“Or someone else.”

We ordered another drink and the multilingual bartender ran the oranges, each one as big as a softball, through the juicer.

Kris told me about the University of Richmond, where she was a senior, and said, “This is the fifth school I've attended. I keep changing my major. And I probably won't graduate from there, either.”

“Why not? How many credits can you have left?”

“Just six, but, I don't know…” Kris wrapped her hands around her drink and said, “I don't really fit in there. A lot of rich kids with expensive cars. They think it's cool that I've lived all over the world.”

“And you don't?”

“You should know; army posts are the opposite of cool.”

The bartender announced last call, in English. We had one more and then walked back to the car. The streets were nearly empty and the smell of garbage and low tide carried on the breeze. I held the driver's door open for Kris and she slipped behind the wheel. “I like you,” she said.

“I like you, too,” I said, carefully stepping around the emotional land mine.

“You're like this weirdly hip choirboy. You give off the strangest vibes, like you have this big secret you can't ever tell anyone.”

I laughed and looked at the clouds skimming high above the halo of city light.

“Well, do you?”

“Do I what?”

“Have a secret you can't tell?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Can you tell me?”

I looked at her face. It was open and trusting, eager for me to reveal something about myself that others could never know. “A musician never reveals his secrets.”

Her eyes narrowed. “That's a magician.”

“We belong to the same union.”

“Here I thought we were having a moment.” She turned to start the car and I stopped her and I kissed her, and her lips parted and she kissed me back. When we broke, she said, “You're still an asshole.”

“I've been told that before.”

She shook her head. “It's okay. The fact that you have secrets, I mean. It's kind of sexy,” she said. “Like a man of mystery.”

“Oh, yeah, that's me.”

We listened to a Panamanian station play Latin music all the way home. The nine
P.M.
rains had swept through, leaving a clear sky, and as we got away from the city, the Milky Way appeared directly above us, a white streak stretched across the universe. When we pulled up to the gate, Meat had apparently gone to bed to dream of stomping me into the mud and Hamster waved us through.

I walked Kris to her door and we kissed good night, and she promised to see me tomorrow and I said it was tomorrow already and she laughed and started to ease the door closed on a whispered good-bye.

The door stopped before it latched. When it opened again, Mr. Kelly was standing behind his daughter, his hand squeezing her forearm. His grasp was so tight that his fingertips were white.

“Do you know what time it is, Mr. Harper?”

“Yes, sir, I do.”

He said to Kris, disgust like a fungus fuzzing his words, “Get to bed.” He let her go and I could see tears in Kris's eyes, whether from pain or embarrassment I didn't know.

Kelly stepped out and closed the door. We were alone. He loomed over me, his jaw clenched as if he were trying to crack a nut between his molars. “Did anyone give you permission to leave the hotel with my daughter?”

“No, sir.” The alcohol I'd had, and the way he'd handled Kris made me careless. I stepped into him, my face in his, and said, “But I thought my virtue was safe accepting her invitation.”

Kelly stiffened, not expecting me to stand up to him there, trapped in the hallway. “I don't ever want you speaking to my daughter again. Do you understand me?”

“I think she can choose her own friends,” I said. I'm stupid that way because, of course, he hit me. I should have seen it coming, but I was standing so close, and the old man's hands were so quick, that his fist was on its way before I could even blink. Then I was on the floor, looking up at him through a bright light of pain.

“Get out of my sight,” Kelly growled, and I did. On all fours, more humiliated than hurt.

I tossed and turned on my single bed. Finally, the adrenaline and shame of being knocked down made me get up, take apart my sunglasses, retrieve my picks, and do what I should have done the night before. I broke into Kelly's office.