Spanish Disco (17 page)

I looked down at the sand and found myself imitating him…picking up clumpfuls and letting them fall through my fingers. The sands of time.

“So she escaped. She married the first man who asked. A bastard in every sense of the word. He wasn’t poor. He wasn’t Mexican.

“She would have been better off in the fields, if her husband had been a good man. But, no, she married a lawyer who was trying to help her become legal. Gain her citizenship.”

Roland leaned back in the sand and closed his eyes. “Can you picture what he thought as he first laid eyes on her?”

I shut my eyes to the Gulf breezes and pictured a young and beautiful Maria entering a lawyer’s office. My opinion of lawyers was just a step above my opinion of tabloid reporters so my mind filled in the blanks.

“He must have gone crazy,” Roland whispered, “seeing
this young woman. Vulnerable. Not able to read. But beautiful. So stunning and Latin and mysterious. And he married her.”

“Just like that?”

“Pretty much. But he kept her a prisoner. He wouldn’t let her see her family. He wouldn’t let her attend her father’s funeral. He berated her for her English. For everything about her that wasn’t American. And he hit her.”

“You know, men like that? I’d like to chop off their testicles and stick them in one of Maria’s omelets.”

“I like you more and more each day, Miss Hayes.”

He picked up a broken shell and looked at it a moment before hurling it down toward the surf.

“There’s more, of course. But I’m tired. Suffice it to say, Cassandra Hayes, that there are enough ghosts in that house of mine to haunt this entire island.”

“I think you’re mistaken, Roland. I think you’d find if you let go, Maria might, too. But you do what you want. Watch the show…don’t watch it. Just don’t forget we’re having a dance lesson tonight. ’Cause if you think you’re getting out of writing me that book, you’re fucking with the wrong editor, pal.”

“Miss Hayes,” Roland looked at me, eyes moist, “I most certainly think I found the right editor. Even if she is a difficult pain in my ass.”

I stood up.

“See you tonight, Roland. And just so you know, I’m watching the show.”

21

I
f I was hoping for a sympathetic character, it was like hanging my hope on Jesus. Despite raw knees from leaning on wooden kneelers, I never got a miracle when I was six and my mother left. And Orville Hobart was no primed-for-TV winner. Orville, thin and ill-looking, with a scruffy beard and a few missing teeth, wore an “I’m with Stupid” T-shirt on national television. The fact that no one sat next to him just pointed out that the shirt’s arrow should have aimed straight up at his own head.

“Yup. I jes’ want to make things right. I lived with the vision o’ that poor woman lyin’ there all these years.”

“But how come you’ve never come forward until now, Mr. Hobart,” the perfectly coiffed female host asked.

Orville shrugged and took out a grubby handkerchief.

“I figured I’d go t’ jail. Only now I gots to meet my
Maker. I tried to find Mr. Riggs to make things right somehow, but he’s some kinda hermit or somethin’ so I didn’t have any luck. Which is why I called y’all.”

“So if you had to say something to Roland Riggs, what would it be?”

The camera panned in for a close-up of Orville, who, close up, was truly repugnant looking.

“Mr. Riggs, I am very sorry. It was an accident. I was following a buck with six points, and it darted right toward your backyard, and I didn’t see Mrs. Riggs standing there until it was too late and she was all…dead.”

Right. As opposed to
sort of
dead.

“And I just want you to know that if it makes you feel any better, I’ve led a miserable life and been unhappy all these years.”

Then Orville began crying on national television. Then back to the studio. Two plastic anchors smiling.

“Well, Barbara, that’s certainly some story. After all these years to want to make his peace with the famous Roland Riggs. There’s not a person in America who didn’t read
Simple Simon
in school.”

“Or the
Cliffs Notes.
” Jenny smiled plastically.
Yeah. I’m sure Jenny read the Cliffs Notes version.

“Yes, John.” Jenny kept smiling. “But where is Roland Riggs? America’s most famous and reclusive author hasn’t given an interview in thirty years. Will he hear Orville’s plea for forgiveness? We’ll keep you posted on all the latest developments as they occur.”

What fucking developments? Orville was going to die without dispensation from Roland, that was for sure.

I walked downstairs where Maria was loading up ten cat bowls with food. She placed the bowls throughout the garden each night and morning. She was crying. The small kitchen set was turned to the Orville Channel. All Orville all the time, as they kept airing commercials about the interview showing again at eleven o’clock that night.

“You saw?”

She nodded. “I feel so bad for Mister Riggs.”

“I do, too.”

“He and I are alike. I lost everyone, too. Now just the cats and the rabbits.”

“And the birds.”

She nodded. “And Mister Riggs. Now I cannot ever leave him. Now especially.”

She stacked all the bowls on a tray and went out the door to the garden. For a house so near the water, so alive with sea air, Riggs was right. Death hung around like a bad bonsai.

22

T
wo left feet is a cliché for people who step on others’ toes on the dance floor. Roland Riggs was such a lummox that I daresay he didn’t have feet. He was like an ancient two-toed sloth on the dance floor. The way our first lesson went, I presumed I would in fact be older than he was before I got a workable manuscript out of him.

We had designated our dance lesson to begin at 10:00 on the living room floor. We rearranged furniture, sweating and shooing the odd rabbit or so out of the way. Anyone on the staff at West Side who is jealous of the way I come and go, and perhaps believes I don’t deserve the salary I make, should see me moving enormous leather couches while rabbits sniffle at my ankles.

“I selected ‘Stayin’ Alive,’” Roland said as he placed the CD in the player on the teak bookshelf and pushed at but
tons until the song immortalized in
Saturday Night Fever
came on.

“Any particular reason?”

“Because I have utter faith in you that you can transform me into John Travolta.”

At that point I hadn’t yet seen him dance. “Sure thing, Roland.”

I remember being part of the tail end of the disco age. New York City children of privilege waiting in line outside Studio 54, my friends and I dressed outrageously, hoping to be let past the velvet rope. One time, dressed in hot pants, with my hair teased so high it hit the roof of the cab as I climbed out, Steve Rubell himself waved me forward, the crowd parting for me and my girlfriends, appreciative whistles and cat calls following us into the club. Anna and Jennifer snorted coke with transsexuals in the unisex bathroom while I drank enough vodka to drown a Russian sailor. I listened to the Bee Gees in Roland’s living room and allowed the music to take me back.

“Okay, Roland, let’s work on the Hustle.”

I took both his hands in mine. They were cool and dry, old hands covered in age spots, but not yet marred by the swelling of arthritis, those gnarled knuckles of the truly ancient. Shaking my hips from left to right, I urged him to feel the bass in the music.

“That’s it.” I smiled. “I’m a woman’s man, no time to talk…” Barry Gibbs’s falsetto wailed in the background as the parrot squawked and rabbits ran for cover beneath the dining room table.

“Okay.” I moved closer to him, trying to show him how the Hustle is all about reading your partner, like an old waltz, but simplified. The fancy twirls and stuff we could save for later. Then Roland stepped on my right foot. Hard.

“Ouch!” I screamed along with Robin, Barry, and Maurice.

“Sorry, Cassie. Let me try again.”

“Okay, left hip shake, right hip shake, move together with both our hands joined, and OUCH!” My left foot throbbed where his foot had landed on it with the force of a jackhammer.

“Sorry. Sorry. I really don’t have a knack for this.”

“Didn’t you and Maxine ever go dancing?”

“No. We didn’t even have a proper wedding, so I was somehow let off the hook.”

“Well, let’s try again. Come on.”

He tried. He really did, with all the grace of a whale floundering in shallow water. Of a walrus blubbering on a cliffside. And I tried to smile and act as if I wasn’t frightened half to death that my feet wouldn’t fit in any of my shoes the next day.

“Let’s try a slower song. Perhaps we’re rushing things.” I went over to the CD player and switched the track to “How Deep Is Your Love.”

“Cassie?”

“Yes, Roland?”

“You’d tell me if I was hopeless wouldn’t you?”

I stared at Roland Riggs. The first day I arrived…in fact
in my entire life B. R. (Before Riggs), I would have told him. Mercilessly. I would have said, “Roland, you are an unbearable, clumsy ox, and this is the stupidest idea you have certainly ever entertained. Now go bang your housekeeper, get it out of your system and then write me a damn book I can use.”

But my life was now A. R. And After Riggs, I could only think of how I was pushing Michael away and how Roland and Maria needed each other, and how maybe I even needed to believe two people could be happy living with potato bonsai and bunnies, even if there was no decent coffeehouse on this tiny speck of an island.

“Sure I’d tell you if you were hopeless. You’re just a little to the left of rusty. We’ll get you up and dancing Le Freak in no time.”

So I danced with Roland until my insteps were so swollen I couldn’t put my feet down without grimacing. Four “How Deep Is Your Love,” two “Stayin’ Alive,” and one Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” later, and I was ready for bed.

“Roland…I think that’s enough for one night. How about you take the
Saturday Night Fever
CD up to your bedroom and practice? You know, just practice getting into the groove.”

“Hokey dokey.” He smiled. “I didn’t do too badly, did I?”

“No,” I whispered through the pain.

“Well, you go on up to bed, Cassie. I’ll move the furniture back.”

I went to the kitchen and whispered loudly, “I’m just grabbing a soda.”

I reached into the fridge for a can of Coke, then I quietly opened the freezer and took out two bags of frozen peas. I tucked them under my shirt, shuddering from the cold, and hobbled to the staircase. Roland was huffing and puffing over the furniture.

Safely ensconced in my room, I placed a bag of peas over each of my massacred feet. I put the can of Coke to my head. I thought of the sequel to
Simple Simon.
It would make Lou and me very rich. I thought of how West Side would be wooed by Hollywood for film rights. I thought of all that as the throbbing in my feet continued. It was as if they had a heartbeat. I told myself it was all for the sequel. But in truth, I thought of Maria dancing alone every night in a frenzy, moving and sweating the ghosts of the fields away. It wasn’t all for the sequel. The frozen peas started melting and going soft. I wondered if I had also.