Nothing That Meets the Eye (17 page)

She watched Maria seat herself on the porch rail and run her fingers through her long, loose hair. Florence would gladly have dismissed her for the day, but she was not sure of the Spanish, and besides, the woman's presence in the house somehow paralyzed her. Florence hated her. She had haggled forty-five pesos out of Nicky for half-time work, when fifty a month was standard for full-time, she ate their food behind their backs and moreover was lazy and deliberately neglectful of the main thing she had been hired for—to see that there were always three or four buckets of water in the house. And when Florence could get Nicky to speak to her, she would say she hadn't been able to understand a thing that the señora told her to do. Just let a servant behave like that in the States and see what would happen!

Florence's face took on a childlike expression of affront as she gazed at Maria. Her face was round, good-natured, and naive. When she was pleased, it broke out in a small, upcurving, wooden-angel smile, and when she was surprised or hurt, these emotions were recorded, not promptly but accurately, in her face and even in her body. Now there was hardly a trace of lipstick on her thin, soft lips, and the powder she had put on an hour before had vanished. Her nose shone as it generally did with a kind of dead whiteness between splotched pink and white cheeks. She had gained weight from lack of exercise (in California she had played a lot of tennis), and there had grown about her an air of no longer caring, of having been defeated, as anyone might have been, by privation and primitive living. She looked older than thirty-one, and even by San Vicente's informal standards she was dowdy.

She twisted around to see the clock, but it was already too dark in the room. The chair creaked loudly as she moved. It was a sprawling, uncomfortable chair that Nicky had inherited from the hotel where he worked. Florence suspected they had got rid of it because it was full of fleas. The back and seat were made of one piece of leather, and though shaped invitingly, it was hard as a rock to sit on. A month ago, she had torn her last pair of silk stockings from the States on the rough edge of the leather. On that day, too, she remembered, she had waited for Nicky to come home to dinner, an especially good dinner, and he had not come until nearly midnight. She swallowed, as though to thrust back the memory of the miserable evening lest she start weeping and the woman see her. The woman was coming.

“All right, all right!” Florence interrupted.

The torrent of shrill, complaining words stopped abruptly.

Then, because her voice had been harsh, Florence said very courteously, with a smile and gestures toward the door, “Sta beeyen, señora, sta mooey beeyen.”

With a final shrug and an amused little smile that Florence knew was at her bad accent, the woman ambled off.

She felt better as soon as the woman was gone. The house was all hers again. She no longer wanted to fling herself across the bed and weep, and she almost decided not to scold Nicky. She really hated arguments, and she had held her tongue many times so Nicky might not think he had married a nagger. She slanted her Spanish book toward the light and stared at a declension chart of irregular verbs.

“Concha!—Concha!”

It was Maria, calling her daughter in the street. Tomorrow she would tell Nicky she had stayed long overtime, and Nicky would pay her extra, though he would tell Florence that he hadn't. She had once thought Nicky economical, even a little stingy, but these two months had changed her mind. He spent at least seventy pesos a week on beer alone, and as far as she could see let himself be cheated by every tradesman in town.

The cathedral chimes struck, and she got up restlessly. She stood on one foot, debating whether to turn the light on, scratching flea bites on her calf with the laces of her shoe. She listened for Nicky's step, but all she heard were the street sounds that came with startling clarity from just behind the wall, the clatter of a burro's tiny hooves, Mexican men's voices drifting past in pairs and the slap of their sandals on the stones, the whack and slide of the boards the children rode like sleds down the hill, making the cobbles as slick as glass.

The lane beside the house was another thing wrong! It was not only the noisiest, busiest lane in town, but the steepest. She fell on it about twice a week, fell on her face or sat down hard, always amid giggles of children. In the dark, it was risking life and limb to use it unless one went backward on all fours. After dusk, she felt imprisoned in the house. Why they didn't put steps in, she couldn't see. There was enough picturesque about San Vicente without having lanes that broke people's necks.

Every direction her thoughts took led to the same impasses of discomfort. Nicky did not seem to realize how hard it was for her, how lonely it was without her friends, how much more confining it was in a Latin country for a woman than for a man. She had thought he would have a few American friends in the town, but all his friends seemed to be Mexicans. The time he had taken her to the Barreras' had been awful. They had tried to be nice, but neither the husband nor the wife had known any English, and she had sat through the whole evening not understanding a word, keeping a pleasant expression on her face until she felt like a ninny.

She walked slowly through the foyer and onto the porch. The light from the Estrella del Sud's dining room fell on the parking lot behind it. She stared at her car and felt better, though the tears rose in her eyes until the twinkles of the rear bumper looked like stars with long points. Often when she was lonely or depressed, she would look at her car for long moments, while all sorts of things ran in her mind, thoughts of home, the voices of her mother and her brother and sisters saying things she had heard them say and had not known she remembered. She would think of the places she had been to in the car last summer with her sister Clara. Yellowstone Park and the geysers. The Black Hills of South Dakota. The roadstands where they had stopped for hamburgers and Cokes. Good American hamburgers, served in clean paper napkins fastened with a toothpick. . . .

There was a thump on the door, followed by three facetious little raps, and she wiped her eyes and mechanically pushed her hair into place before she went to the door and opened it.

“Hello. I forgot my keys,” Nicky said, smiling as he came in. His small blue eyes blinked affably, but the lids were pink and swollen as they always were after he had been drinking. “Sorry I'm late.”

“Oh, that's all right,” Florence replied in an expressionless voice, for at the last minute she had not been able to decide whether to be angry, cool, or to overlook.

Nicky, assured that she was not vexed with him, opened the door again. “Come on in.”

Alfredo Sigismundo's aristocratic figure descended the two steps into the foyer. Florence smelt the thin, medicinal aroma of tequila as he bent low over her hand and deposited a moist kiss.

“Ha! Ha!” Nicky laughed, as though both he and Alfredo considered this Latin courtesy a great joke. “You don't mind if Alfredo joins us for dinner, do you, Florence?”

“Why, no.”

Alfredo passed a finger over his small black mustache. “Just a moment,” his voice vibrated richly, “till I wash my hands.” He took two careful strides on tiptoe before his hand went out to support him on a doorjamb. One starched white cuff glowed in the half darkness.

“Oh, there isn't any water in there, Mr. Sigismundo,” Florence said, finding her tongue suddenly. She fumbled for the light string in the kitchen, and remembered with sudden pain that the toilet had not been flushed since that morning. “Nicky!” Florence called. She found the light string. Only one bucket of the six held water. The woman had not brought any that day. Florence felt ready to cry. “Here, Nicky!” she whispered, thrusting the full bucket into his hands. “Go flush the toilet!”

“Oh, he understands how things are with the drought on,” Nicky said with elaborate reassurance.

“Go flush it! Hurry!”

“All right,” he whispered back, and went.

Florence, her breath held in shame, walked onto the porch. Then, reminded by the sight of the table, she quickly laid another place and brought a chair from the kitchen. She lighted fires under all the pots, started to put water on for tea, then remembered the water was in the bathroom.

“Don't we have any beer?” Nicky called with his head in the icebox. “Ah, here's some.”

“Nicky!” She came and grasped his arm. “Don't let him use all that water. It's all we have for tea.”

“Oh,” Nicky said, and started off to the bathroom, where Alfredo was singing to himself in a soft baritone.

Florence seized a saucepan and with a hope that never died turned on the faucet. Nothing happened. Not even a wheeze.

“Here it is.” Nicky presented her with the bucket in which less than two inches of water remained.

Florence said nothing. She was too near tears.

When Alfredo came back, Nicky said casually, “I thought I might take the car tomorrow, Florence. Alfredo wants to go to Mexico City, and I've got to go anyway to get somebody's typewriter repaired.”

“Whose typewriter?” Florence asked vaguely.

“A fellow's who's staying at the hotel. He's a writer and he needs it right away.”

“Won't you sit down, Mr. Sigismundo?” Florence gestured toward the table and ducked into the kitchen.

She brought the big china tureen to the table, and Alfredo dragged himself up from his chair. He bowed deeply, an unlighted American cigarette hanging from his lips.

“Oh, please don't get up,” Florence said, flattered and laughing a little in spite of herself.

“All right, Florence?” Nicky asked.

“What?”

“If we take the car tomorrow.”

“Oh.” She looked from him to Mr. Sigismundo, who exhaled a long stream of smoke and stared tiredly into the distance before him. “Well—all right, Nicky. Of course.”

Nicky leaned over and laid a hand on Alfredo's shoulder. “See?”

Florence smiled and nodded awkwardly to Mr. Sigismundo as she sat down, for once more he had stood up and bowed, though without looking at her. She had a frozen smile on her lips and it would remain as long as Mr. Sigismundo was in her house. She felt his eyes fixed seriously on the soup as she ladled it into the bowls. She knew he would not say a word to her during the meal, that afterward he and Nicky would sit on the porch talking Spanish until the beer was gone, and then go down the hill to a cantina.

“I don't know what's happened to the car,” Nicky said, his voice as calm as ever. “Probably nothing's happened to it at all. Alfredo's a very good driver, you know.”

“But—two days ago, you said. Where was he going?”

“I don't know.” Nicky removed his leather jacket slowly. “We were both taking a nap in our hotel room about three o'clock, and Alfredo woke me up and said he was going out to visit a friend near Chapultepec.”

“Where's that?”

“Oh, that's right in Mexico City. You remember Chapultepec Castle. Where Maximilian and Carlotta lived.”

“Didn't you look for the car?”

Nicky opened his hands gently. “There's not much use looking for it in a big city, Florence. I wouldn't worry. He'll probably come in with it today.” He took his shaving articles out of his valise.

“Oh!” Florence gasped, on the edge of tears. “I just can't understand you, Nicky. I can't—Why you even lower yourself to associate with him, I can't understand!”

Nicky blinked at her. “These things just happen in Mexico,” he said soothingly. “Don't forget you're dealing with a different kind of people from Americans.”

“I don't forget it! How can I forget it, when you're getting just as shiftless as they are!”

Nicky trailed her onto the porch. She was looking down on the parking lot, at the gap where her car had stood. “You've no right to say that, Florence. I just meant—”

“Don't talk to me about rights. You had no right to ask for my car and give it to that lowlifer.”

“Why, I wouldn't call Alfredo that.”

“I would. He keeps mistresses. I've heard of his affairs right inside the hotel, and I've heard about his women in Mexico City, too. And now he's probably given my car to one of them!” She bent forward and ran with her hands over her face into the bedroom. She cried for several minutes on the bed. Then, when Nicky came out of the bathroom in a clean shirt, freshly shaven, his thin brown hair slicked down with water, she sat up and wiped the tears out of her eyes. “Would you like some breakfast?”

Nicky looked at his watch. “Lunch is more like it.”

“Will scrambled eggs be all right? It'll be a long time before Maria comes with the groceries.”

“That's fine, Florence.” Nicky ran his thumb under the wrapper of his new Time, stretched out on the bed, and began to read.