Spanish Disco (19 page)

25

L
ate that afternoon, long after my shower, after my nap in which I tried to sleep away my regret, I turned on my computer again and ignored seven e-mails from Donald and waited for one from Michael, which never came.

Cassie:

I cannot stop thinking about you. I’ve abandoned the story. I want us to have a fair chance on even ground. Please let me see you again.

Donald

Cassie:

Admit the chemistry between us is there.

Donald

Donald was going to make my post-coital self-loathing even more difficult. Yet another reason to hate him. Each e-mail urged me to consider a relationship when the poor guy didn’t know I had vomited from the thought of him.

I listened to my voice mail. Authors angry over their PR campaigns. Why couldn’t we get them on
Oprah?
Authors angry over editorial changes. Authors upset that their royalty checks were smaller than expected. Returns. Returns. Returns. The way of publishing. A bookstore stocks forty copies, sells twenty, sends back twenty—and we have to pay for that return. It’s all a numbers game like Hollywood accounting. The voice mail demanded return phone calls, and I couldn’t bring myself to speak. Michael did not call.

I went out on the beach and searched for Roland. I found him staring into the surf.

“Are you okay?”

He shrugged. I sat down on the sand next to him. Dusk was descending, and I shivered in the unusual chill. Florida can be like that if the wind comes from the north.

“If it makes you feel any better, I do, in some tiny way, understand. Maybe, in some fucked-up bit of fantasy, it would have been better to have idealized who pulled the trigger. But it was him, Roland. A stupid man with an ‘I’m with Stupid’ T-shirt—quite fitting, I will add. But maybe it’s time to come back to the land of the living. To this island you so adore, despite its lack of a good coffeehouse. To Maria.”

“She won’t have me. Not after seeing me last night…other nights.”

“What do you mean? Seeing you a mess with a bottle of J.D. in your hand? Looking like you’re wearing a fright wig?”

“Remind me to ask Lou if you are always so comforting.”

“You can count on me, Roland.”

“It’s hopeless.”

“No. Look, I am teaching you to dance, and you are winning her heart and then writing the sequel you owe me. There isn’t time for all this wallowing self-pity.”

“But I want to wallow.”

I sighed. “You also toasted sap when I first arrived. You love her so get off your duff and pull it together, Roland. Maxine is gone. Dead. Shot by a loser. You’ve put a face to the phantom, but it hasn’t changed a thing.”

“You’re rather…tough on me, don’t you think? If you’re such an expert on affairs of the heart, what’s going on with you and Michael Pearton?”

“He hung up on me. Because I wouldn’t agree to come to London. Because I’m here and he’s there.”

“Because you wouldn’t let yourself love him.”

“That, too, I suppose.”

“What a pair of idiots we are.”

“Roland…” I watched a child digging in the sand near his mother. “I couldn’t agree with you more.”

“Maybe you could talk to Maria. Feel her out about this.”

“Feel her out? What is this? Seventh-grade? Sister Margaret Catherine finding my best friend’s note to Timothy Hastings, III, in which she was trying to find out if when
he launched a spitball into my hair in Latin class he was really trying to say he loved me.”

Roland chuckled, and then, for the first time since I sat down, he turned his head to really look at me. “My God, you look awful!”

“Thanks. You
do
have a way with the ladies.”

“Good God in heaven, what the hell happened to you?”

“Long story.”

“You’re pale as a ghost. You look splotchy. Splotchy like you’ve been…I don’t know. Just splotchy.”

“Again, my ego thanks you.”

“It’s Michael Pearton, isn’t it?”

“Michael and so much more.”

“Can you go to London?”

“I don’t think so, Roland. I can’t fix my own love life. But I’ll see if I can meddle in yours without fucking up too badly.”

“Thank you.”

“I better go talk to Maria.”

“And later on tonight?”

“Dance lessons. If my feet can stand it.”

“I’ll try to conjure up the spirit of Fred Astaire.”

“I’ll settle for channeling an Arthur Murray instructor. Roland?”

“Hmm?”

“I need to ask you something.”

“Sure.”

“You haven’t by any chance been writing other books all these years, have you? Under a pseudonym?”

He was perfectly still. I looked closely at him, and he didn’t even appear to be breathing. Then, almost imperceptibly, he nodded.

“I won’t even ask how you got started…or why. Remember when Alice fell down the rabbit hole?”

Roland looked up at me quizzically.

“Well, Alice has nothing on my own journey to Wonderland, Roland. You’ve made sure of that.”

“Are you angry?”

“No… But I better go before the Mad Hatter arrives.”

I turned and headed toward the house. I had thought it was the house that
Simple Simon
built. From its magnificent windows fronting the water, to its gardens of jasmine and orchids, to its deck jutting out toward the Gulf. But apparently romance sells. And Roland was, after all, the “queen” of unrequited romance novels. How those books dwelt within the same man who wrote of war’s fury and pathos was a tiny glimpse into just how strange the rabbit hole had become.

26

M
aria was feeding the animals when I trudged into the garden, all too aware of my sore feet and the dull pain in my heart. I also felt self-conscious of my splotches. Maria’s beauty was always flawless.

“Maria?”

“Yes?” She moved efficiently from one cat bowl to another with a big bag of Cat Chow perched on one hip and a measuring cup for a scoop.

“You certainly are very devoted to these cats.”

“They need me. Sometimes Mister Riggs jokes with me that I am feeding all the cats on Sanibel Island. But I know he loves them.”

Sure he does, I thought as I bent over to stroke a striped tabby.

“And you take excellent care of Roland. I saw that last
night. You were…much better than I would have been by myself. I didn’t know what to do.”

“He needs me. After all these years, I just know. It’s a gift.”

“Is that it?”

“What? My gift? What do you mean?” she asked as she scooped up some more chow and cats meowed and purred at her feet.

“I mean, do you stay because he needs you? Or do you like it here? Do you stay for the cats? What? You could find another job, I’m sure. Go someplace else. See a big city. Leave this island.”

“He is my baby. You saw last night…he is like that sometimes. Less now. When I first came, nearly every night. Without me, he would go crazy. I think he would not write anymore. He would just…disappear. And who would cook for him? Who would take care of the gardens? This, I see, is my home. My real home.”

“Wouldn’t you like to not take care of things? To maybe have someone take care of
you
for a change?”

She paused, mid-scoop, her face thoughtful, a tiny furrow appearing between her brows.

“From the time I was a little girl, I worked the fields. My family moved from place to place. I didn’t go to school. I took care of my brothers and sisters. It’s more than what I do. More than getting paid to clean a house or to make food. It is who I am. When I came here, he had no gardens. This was all sand. And bit by bit, I worked to make it a paradise. I talk to the plants and make them understand they will be happy here. This is a little bit of heaven.”

“But what about dating? Making a family and a house of your own?”

“This is my own.” Her eyes opened wide. “Please don’t tell Mister Riggs that. It’s a way I have of pretending that I am the mistress of this house. I was married once. To a fancy man who knew so much more than me or my family. That’s how I met Mister Riggs.”

“Really? I guess I never asked…. Do you want me to help you?”

“No. I like doing it.”

“So tell me how you met.”

“I was here on vacation with my husband. He wanted to go fishing. So we came here from Dallas. See, I have seen a big city. They are not so great.” She took the bag of Cat Chow off her hip and picked up a solid black cat and rubbed its face against her own.

“My husband was…oh…when I met him he bought my family many things. Televisions. And a used car. And he…what do they call it? Pro bono. He was a lawyer, and he made a case for us to be citizens.”

“Did you love him?”

“I thought I did. But I realized later I wanted to love him to be a good daughter to my family. So life would be less hard.” She pulled the cat closer to her. “But life for me was much more harder. He started hitting me. Every time another man looked at me, he said it was my fault. I cannot have any babies, I think. In my stomach he hit me. Very hard. But never my face. That he wanted to be beautiful so when his friends met me he could impress them with his wife.”

“But I thought you said if other men looked at you he got violent.”

She nodded.

“Well, if that isn’t a fucking Catch-22.”

She looked at me in the deepening darkness. “That means you can’t win,” I offered.

“Yes. It’s this Catch-22. That is what it was. No win. No happiness. No babies, though I try. So one night, he was fishing all day long, and came home and he was angry because I had a tan, which meant I was out on the beach in a bathing suit. He raised his fist to me, and usually I do nothing, but I screamed. I don’t know why. It just came out. And then once I started screaming, it was like I cannot stop. Screaming. Screaming. And he getting madder and madder. And Mister Riggs was walking by our…we rented a cottage. And he just came through the door, and he was like a madman. He took one look around and grabbed a chair. He beat my husband with it. Broke his nose and his arm. It was a very big mess. Blood everywhere. And that night I moved in with Mister Riggs and have never left.”

“But what happened to your husband?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did he go to the police?”

“I don’t think so. Or maybe he say he doesn’t know who did it. Maybe he was dead. I don’t know. We left him on the floor.”

“And that was it? You just moved into Roland’s house?”

She nodded. Her eyes were very dark. I couldn’t see if she was crying. Her face was in the shadows.

“I am here because if I did not have Mister Riggs to take care of, then there would be no reason for me to not be able to have a baby—it would be so much worse. Somehow it makes sense for me to be here. As if I…it was like my father working to help our people. If there was not a reason that was bigger than us all then we could not have beared it. We all need a reason for going on. Mister Riggs is mine. He is the reason I suffered. He is my baby. And the cats. And the rabbits. And the garden. Otherwise it would make no sense.”

“It makes no sense anyway, Maria. I hope he was dead on the floor.”

“I never even speak his name. And in this garden, I almost forget. He is just a ghost here, and I chase him away with each flower.”

“I’m so sorry.”

I turned my back on her as she murmured to the cats. Maxine had died in a garden, and Maria lived through one. But as the wind whispered behind me, I was certain the garden had more ghosts than weeds.

27

F
or the next two nights, we practiced, faithfully. To no avail. Roland wasn’t channeling Fred Astaire, and I was weary with the knowledge that this house Roland built with Maria was erected on the shifting sands of a wife beater and the ghosts of babies not to be. That third night, however, I began to feel hopeful that Roland Riggs might actually defy the adage that white men can neither execute a perfect jump shot nor dance. He was no John Travolta, but he was getting the hang of it. Hope glimmered, in fact, that I might return to the world of the living: coffee beaneries and bagel shops, bars that stocked my brand of tequila and cognac. Hope blasted through the speakers of Roland’s stereo system.