Spanish Disco (12 page)

Cassie:

You took my highlighted copy of
Indian Summer Moon.
While I suppose I might like to pretend you did this because you want to see me again and this makes a fine excuse, the view of your lovely and pert derriere as you left the restaurant perhaps tells
me otherwise. Please call me at my hotel, though, because I really need my copy back. And please consider my offer to back off the story if Roland Riggs will agree to an interview. He is Maria Martin. I feel it in my bones.

Donald

P. S. I don’t think I have ever been so angry and so amused by a woman in many years. Not since Patty Maloney tried to stab me with safety scissors in third grade and then told me she loved me.

In retrospect, perhaps mooning Donald Seale was not the best exit I could have chosen.

Donald:

I will call you soon to return your book. You are clearly mistaken…he is most definitely not Maria Martin. You, however, deserve to be stabbed with safety scissors. Apparently Patty Maloney didn’t teach you much.

Cassie

My next e-mail was from Lou. Lou is a notoriously horrible typist. He has an excellent assistant who edits all his letters, but his e-mails are full of errors.

Cassie:

What the hell is up with the bok. You promisd me you were going to call as soon as yu looked at it. Areyu trying to kill me or something?

Lou

Dear Lou:

I am not ready to talk about the book with you yet because I am not done reading it. Let me say, though, that it is more imperative than ever that you keep your mouth shut about Roland Riggs because I am not sure if this is as marketable as
Simple Simon
. Will call soonish. Promise.

Cass

Next e-mail…more hell from Kathleen, my author with photo envy.

Cassie:

I understand I am now getting a full back cover photo. But now I really am having second thoughts about my head shot. I think it maybe makes my face look a tad puffy. I am going to have them reshot. Please put the back cover on hold for just a few days.

Kathy

Kathleen:

I think you would be crazy to reshoot the pictures. Everyone thinks you look like a young Kathleen Turner…from her
Body Heat
days. There is no way you could take a better photo. Honest. Don’t delay the book. The head shot is beyond perfect. All the men in the office are drooling over it.

Cassie

Actually, I have seen better pictures of Kathleen. However, she is such an annoying pain in the ass, I rather liked the idea of puffy pictures.

Of course, I had an e-mail from Michael. I stood and walked around my room, delaying the agony of opening it. I wasn’t sure where he and I were headed. I felt my heart skip a beat for a fraction of a second every time I had mail from him. But if my first marriage didn’t teach me anything about how absolutely horrible I am in a relationship, then I deserved to be stabbed with safety scissors. I ate two Tums and then opened the e-mail.

Cassie:

No silliness. No drowning in my cups today. I am just, quite simply, thinking of you. I have this picture of you from a magazine. Lou tells me it’s a terrible picture. You’re not even facing the camera. But you are laughing with Lou and two authors, and I am filled with both desire and envy. I should be making you laugh. I should be making you cry. I should be making you feel the rhythms and cadences of this dance of life.

I am not sure how this all got so serious, Cassie. But we’ve talked more than I have ever talked to any woman. All our late nights and dawns and discussions, and e-mails. I’ve said so much to you, but not the important things. I’ve avoided telling you about my secrets until now they threaten to get in the way. I am muddling along, trying to decide if being honest is worth risking all the lightness we have and all our talk of your perfect breasts and my 14-inch cock and all our racy late-night musings. Will I throw it all away if the secrets spill out and you won’t have me? Because when I see you laughing in the magazine, Cassie, I know I don’t have you now anyway. I am willing, I think, to chance it. Let me make you laugh and cry. I promise I will do
both. I guarantee it. I’m a stupid ass really, sometimes. I do make women cry. And yet I have even been learning how to make coffee. I bought this silly machine at a Starbucks—they’ve arrived in London as part of their plan for global domination, you know. And I don’t even know if what I have made in this new pot is rot because I don’t drink it. It seems to have the consistency and color of black oil or mud. But I am trying.

Should go…it’s late and my editor is going to have my bottom if I don’t finish this next chapter. She’s a real slave driver. But she’s brilliant. And I adore her,

Michael

In the quiet of my room, with the scent of jasmine floating up from the garden, mixing with the salt air and fire and sauce of Maria’s kitchen, I felt tears—foreign and unwelcome—forming. I couldn’t write back. Not yet. Donald Seale, a bad epic poem, Lou O’Connor’s financial troubles, my mother’s death watch…this ulcer I was developing…and a brilliant man in London were all conspiring to drive me stark raving mad.

13

I
confess to you in a velvet box

hushed
fallen
claim my host
tongue pressed forward
claiming you
for me
for all eternity.

Last rites now
anguish
oiled crosses
speaking death
whispering velvet
useless crosses
unfulfilled promises
on the wall.

After death it is
tomatoes, I recall
your own Gethsemane
a garden for us
an Eden now
a wasteland
bloodstained soil
caked in death
ashes to your
ashes
dust to your
dust.

A child now
dancing in my kitchen
amidst potato bonsai
can I learn to
eat vine ripe tomatoes
grow greens
again?

Teach me, Mother Confessor
Teach me, hear me
touch me
let me
go
out of Eden
hell
fallen angel
rage and hate
intermingled with
nothingness
not love
just
life.

I sat reading Roland’s poem. No. Lou and I would most definitely not be retiring on its sales. There was a point when, at disastrous moments like this one, I would have visited my father. We shared a passion for writers and books. From the time I was a little girl, I remember books filling every nook of our immense apartment. Galleys spilled off his worn oak desk and tumbled into his chair. When the chair was full, the pages filled the corner of his office. And if not galleys, then crossword puzzles.

“What’s a six-letter word beginning with ‘a’ for a ‘large South American rodent’?” I asked, mouth half-full of Cheerios, as I sat doing the
NY Times
Sunday edition. A requirement every Sunday since I turned ten.

“Agouti,” he said, absentmindedly, not even having to look up from the manuscript he pored over. His brilliance overwhelmed others. He never forgot a name or a face. He remembered the birthdays not only of his assistants and the mail boys and our housekeeper and the doorman, but also all the birthdays of their children and spouses and
grandmothers. He knew the birthday, I reasoned, exponentially, of every person in the 212 area code.

Where had that mind gone? I remember I had just returned from a trip with Lou to California. Dad called me. He had lost his keys and needed to change all his locks. Age, we both said. And then he couldn’t find his way home from Oggi’s, his favorite Italian restaurant. And then he forgot Tony the doorman’s birthday. And then Tony’s wife’s name. And then, one day, my name.

“I’m sick, Cass,” he looked up at me, his face stricken as he both recalled my name and realized something was profoundly wrong in the same instant.

“I know,” I whispered. And I became his Mother Confessor. Roland’s poem wasn’t far off from my own life.

I moved to Florida because Lou wouldn’t have it any other way. New York was too full of Helen’s memories wafting through their brownstone like a ghost. I went because he asked and also because we all knew someday I would need to find a place for my father. A beautiful, quiet place with gentle people who would remind him where his room was if he needed reminding. And so we came to a pink little dot on the map, the land of beach bunnies and buffed bods, and my father went to Stratford Oaks. And he began to tell me everything he could remember, to tell me it all before it was lost forever.

My first lost tooth. My first bra (relived with great humor). His legendary Christmas parties back when he and my mother were a couple. His lunches at The Four Seasons and Le Cirque. The time he fought with E. L.
Doctorow. His feud with the editor of
Harper’s.
His secret three-day fling with Ava Gardner. His days at Yale. How he wanted me to have all his books and all his possessions. How he wanted to die before he got too bad. I listened to his confessions. The time he almost considered remarrying to Lois Wharton, but he didn’t because she never let me mess her hair when I hugged her.

And I would go home after each confessional and collapse. With each story, I felt my insides slipping away with the tide outside my balcony. Slipping away until I was so steeled against the pain, I wasn’t sure anything was left. Suddenly, there on Roland Riggs’s island, I desperately needed to hear my father’s voice.

“Stratford Oaks.”

“Please ring Jack Hayes for me.”

Four rings, and then his tired voice. “Hello?” So feeble.

“Daddy? It’s Cassie,” I said slowly, deliberately, loudly.

“Cassie…” I could picture him thinking, trying to place the name, my face. I heard the confusion. And then, thankfully, “Cassie. My daughter. Cassie. Yes, Cassie.”

“Daddy, I just want you to know I love you. I’m sorry I haven’t been to see you this week, but I’m away. I wasn’t sure if you remembered that.”

“You haven’t been to see me?”

“No, Dad. I’ve been away.”

“Away where?”

“On business, Dad. About a book. A bad book. Not bad, really, just not anything I can publish. Dad?”

“Yes, Cassie?”

“Do you remember the way you used to edit my English papers? And you always made me do them over…but once I did you always gave me an ‘A.’”

“I did?”

“Yes, you did. Thank you, Dad. That’s all. I better let you go.”

“Cassie?” His voice was stronger.

“Hmm?”

“Some books are only meant to speak to the author.”

“What do you mean?”

“The author’s working something through in his head. And the editor’s just an innocent bystander.”

“So what do you do?”

“About what?”

“Nothing, Daddy. Nothing. I love you.”

“I love you, too, sweetheart.”

I hung up the phone. What was Riggs spewing on his pages? And who was Roland Riggs’s confessor? Maxine? Maria? Or me? A bystander in a mess of epic proportions.

14

M
ore memories.

“Do you, Cassandra Hayes, take this man to be your lawfully wedded husband?”

Elvis stared at me expectantly. I noticed large sweat stains in the armpit of his sequined jumpsuit. His sideburns dripped with hair dye and Vaseline. I stared at my husband-to-be, the man whom the state of Nevada, city of Las Vegas was less than sixty seconds away from declaring my husband.

“Sure.”

Elvis shrugged.

“And do you—” he stumbled over the name “—do you…Johnny Acid take this woman to be your lawfully wedded wife?”