The Gift of Women (15 page)

I sit down to relieve my back, which is beginning to hurt. Elizita has taken Terry's face in both her hands. “Remember, Terry, you used to brush his chest with your hand when you talked to him at the pool. Like it was polished, like you'd found little bits of dust on it.”

Terry nods. “Lord, it was tight, but fine as silk. Supple, wouldn't you say?” I put down the camera only to jerk it back up again in case I have set it in water. I haven't looked to see.

“Just like the skin on his cock,” Elizita says loud enough to see if it cuts me through my confusion with my precious camera.

“Ham, that's the name of the American, puts his hand in to lay it on Cecil's chest. ‘There's something there, why not let it show?' says he. Why not? I'm turned on about Cecil's chest, but getting a headache, and getting quite nasty. I look at Ham's crotch and I ask, ‘You like buttons down there?'

“‘Some things are just too good to rush,' says he, screwing Cecil and me with his sales pitch, and Cecil is digging it more than I am. This Ham is screwing everybody with his eyes. He's supposed to be testing the taste of the local market, but know what this Ham was doing? Like most Americans, he was creating the taste, whetting the eyes of all and sundry.

“He winked and pushed Cecil's clasps back together, one by one. Everybody was looking at Ham, and the look he gave them back was like he'd just been to bed with all of them, but was about to leave without asking any of them for their hand in marriage.”

Elizita puts her finger in her mouth to wet it with saliva and smooth each of Terry's eyebrows in turn until she's satisfied. “I still love your eyebrows, Terry. They always look as if they've been lacquered,” she adds.

“Cecil's glossy tits and my eyebrows. Real – what is it – turn-ons?”

They talk idly now, as they did when they were younger, as if on this morning they have all the time in the world.

Or is it for a purpose? To perhaps see if what they share will make me edgy. Word by languid word am I expected to shrink from sight, get lost in the camera or the composition of my commentary on something else, go and film the town of McNair, the Death and Amargosa Valleys, the water diviners, the geologists, out chipping away at those rocks that grow about like stone cacti in the middle of nowhere?

“We went to Acapulco,” says Terry, “on a last-minuter for £800. To a hotel, the Caleta. There was this diver by the hotel on the rocks. Just light cotton trunks. The trunks tied so's his thing was crooked at you, like a finger, inviting you to come on over.”

Terry puts her arm round Elizita's neck. “So, was that the last of Ham?”

I look round, needing to relieve my eyes. Staring into an uninhibited conversation causes vertigo. An identical dizziness to when we stopped on the road to McNair. I leaned out over the wall to see into a canyon and follow two eagles that could have been buzzards, spiralling down and away. I leaned out farther and farther to catch a last glimpse of the birds and almost fell in behind my camera. Terry was worried for me, but not now.

The women spiral and spiral, and I attribute it to something deranged about the light and the sun here. I begin to ponder it melodramatically to distract myself, but the thoughts only turn in a circle with the women. It is neither winter, nor summer light, nor spring, nor autumn's – it is warm, it goes on brazenly making Terry and Elizita expose themselves in a way that the summers would make them do at home, but in a hard way, a barren way, as if the naked honesty of the stone all around here has put on the women's skin and wants to touch everything in the most intimate place, to gauge the depth of flesh, the extent of feeling.

“We drove Ham round to the Royal Avenue Hotel from Speckworthy's. What would we like as a thank-you? Stand-up or a sit-down drink at the bar or in his room? It's late and the barman is somewhere, looking to replace a bottle. Cecil needs to pee and I'm left with Ham. Ham takes his hands and lifts up my dress. I pull my knickers down to my knees. I drop them, step over them, give them to him. He puts them in the pocket of his sportcoat like they're my calling card.

“Americans say
sportcoat
, remember.”

Terry bats her eyelashes together in mock ditziness. “I'm gushing with nostalgia for the old Royal Avenue Hotel,” she says. “We always wanted to stay there on RAG night after the RAG ball at Queen's.”

“My problem is I want my whole life like RAG nights after the RAG ball,” says Elizita. “I like it wild, but I like it organized.”

“Like America,” I say, but am not listened to.

“We used to watch you,” says Terry, “the times you actually used the changing boxes at the pool. Those were great peek-a-boo doors that covered you from shoulder to knee. We'd see your pants go up, then come back down again when you put on your skirt. You kept them in your school bag, didn't you, on those days?”

“Didn't we keep all the important stuff in our school bags?” Elizita asks, and she and Terry slap the surface of the water with the flat of their hands.

“Lord, that night my lips stuck to Cecil's tits like limpets,” Elizita says sadly, and looking down at her body, which is soaked from the splashing; without another word, she begins to swim laps, leaving Terry to watch, then follow her.

Have they been waiting for someone other than me, the waiter who they see coming along the side of the pool, to stop their reminiscing? They swim away dismissing me, leaving me beside the waiter, who nods and watches them swimming together. He waits patiently, looking at the camera as I drop it wearily to my side.

Seeing them so solidly together in their bodies and their conversation, I am as confused as I used to be at the pool-side back home. Is their duet in the water to let me watch their legs and arms, instead of listening to them? I remember how they used to stand, wiping the sweat from their stomachs after lying on the wooden planks that served as seats on the bleachers, then dive into the ridiculous milkiness of the pool.

They would take a breath before diving in. A small prayer in the intake before the heart-jolting switch from hot to cold. When they came up, they swam in another element, another existence that was made entirely of light, air, water and limbs.

When they swam back to the side wall, it was to look up out of the water at me standing on the bank. My toes would curl over the concrete edge as I looked into the cleft between their breasts and I would get vertigo.

Elizita taps my foot with her painted fingernail. She shakes her head at the waiter and he leaves. Her nipples in the silver racing slip stand out, but the full contours of her breasts are pressed down by it. They look elastic and young. Terry has stopped behind her; she comes up, puts her hands through Elizita's arms and onto each breast.

“Diddies groped,” she lets out one of their ritual vulgarities.

“Grope Gavin's, he has them too,” Elizita says to my face. “A bit heavy now, and soft.” Her eyes query me for confirmation. “Drooping at the nipples?”

“How do you like your nipples?” Terry prolongs the litany into the order of tits.

“Big and ripe. Cold, too – my dear, like strawberries on a sundae.” Elizita has her order of nipples ready on the instant.

“When I first came to America, I loved sundaes. Ham was always eating them. He wanted Cecil over in Salt Lake City after we got married. To see the land Levi's come from. Ham wasn't Mormon, but he liked the idea of the Mormons. He used to say if he could only get them to give up the dark suits and go round the world preaching in denim for Levi's, they'd make a fortune for the company. Then, he imagined them doing it for this other outfit called Vaquero's.

“Ham set me up in the railway repair yard, but…” she looks up into my bared face, where the camera was a moment before, “Gordie got me started.”

We remember Gordie. He was gruff and worked for the Belfast County Down Railway, part of Ulster Transport, as it was called then. He had a degree, but you'd have thought he'd learned everything with his hands and a spanner. He wanted to have a factory of his own, any kind of factory. Didn't matter if it manufactured candies or brass rings.

Now, this is how I begin imagining this Ham she tells us about. We nod, Terry and I, with agreement over a puzzlement Terry shares with me, and some alarm that Terry has not anticipated. The mention of Gordie has broken the unison in the female mischief and reminiscing.

“Gordie liked you, Terry… Gordie,” Elizita repeats his name, pushes it at Terry, then, leaves it hanging. Terry turns to me to let me see her unpreparedness regarding Gordie. But I am doubly sure this is the way she imagines Ham, in the way we remember Gordie, working with his toolbox, a screwdriver or spirit level sticking out of a breast pocket in his overalls for show, his face butted forward, eyeing you like
you
were where he would put his oil can next.

“Gruff Gordie?” Terry and I say it together.

“Lord luv yuh. Gruff made me feel at home. Trouble up mill, man in charge of works, getting sommut fixed,” says Elizita. “On the ten o'clock train between the Holywood and Helen's Bay stop, Gordie fixed me. I was thirteen and I thought I was mad. He was only twenty-four, you know. It feels like no difference now. Then, it felt like I was fucking my father and couldn't wait for the train to get out of Helen's Bay station to have more before it stopped in Carnalea.”

“Always wore a brown Harris tweed sports coat, after work. Grey worsted pants,” I say, as he comes to mind better…

“Did you go out on that bike of his after work?” Elizita asks me.

I did. I remember how he had checked me automatically, getting off, to see what his Triumph Bonneville had worked up, if it was properly tuned.

“Never put on a helmet in his life. Always managed to do the ton for me,” Elizita sighs.

“Is this railroad, repair yard thing to do with Gordie?” I ask.

“Only coincidentally. It's what Ham wanted me to run to begin with, a museum to hold old rolling stock, passenger cars and some locomotives. Maybe rent them later like they do at one of those places in Reno, but a lot of gambling went on in them instead, and a little bit of t'other too.”

“Did Gordie ever take off his sports coat?” I ask.

“He did,” says Elizita, “but his arms and legs were hairy. Made of the same Harris tweed as his coat.” El pulls herself out of the water. “Remember, Terry, the peeler stopping us for being three up on Gordie's bike?” Elizita turns to help Terry up out of the water by her elbows, turning her with them, like a doll, putting her arms round her from behind to talk into her ear.

“Cold?” she asks.

“I can feel my goosebumps turning into nipples,” Terry says over her shoulder to Elizita.

Elizita whispers something, a few details about the repair yard being an hour or half-hour's drive away. Then, she grins, drops her hands to Terry's hips to grip them, riding an invisible pillion with her, jerking as if she changes gear, bumping Terry's rear end, driving her toward me.

“Is Cecil still in Salt Lake City?” Terry asks over her shoulder when their two faces come close-up to the camera.

Elizita laughs. “He could be, for all I hear from him. I told you he thought his being nice turned me on, saved my life, but it was an accident and I took it for fate bringing me the right man at the right time. For a while I told him all about my agonies, about how Gordie damaged me, but not how Gordie also made me permanently horny. If the first time you fuck it's for fuck's sake, love gets separated, lost in a different slot. Then, Ham comes right in and hauls Cecil by the crotch of his Levi's to Salt Lake City. And how can I tell Cecil it's the same for him as for me? Recruited by the crotch.”

“Let me get this properly.” I want El to repeat it clearly after me. “If I am correct, you came to Salt Lake City on a honeymoon business trip. I know you did marry Cecil. In Salt Lake, while visiting Levi's, this Ham offers Cecil a job running a Vaquero's operation. Is that the word they use – operation?”

“Of course. Weren't you listening?” Terry scolds me.

I am squinting through the sun in the direction of El' s hands winding my wife into her wrap. The waiter appears out of the sun for her, a movement from one of Elizita's hands, or the putting on of the wrap itself must have summoned him.

“Time for some orange juice, or how would Buck's Fizz hit you – to celebrate?”

“Pitcher of Buck's Fizz with a squeeze of lime, Bryan,” she says to the waiter without waiting for an answer.

“Yes, Ms. L,” he says.

That's all the waiter says.

“For business and all transactions I'm L. Easier to be L over here. Elizita is just a bit too Mexican, although it's not bad if they think that. A Mexican with a
Burming'um
accent.”

Owning one letter of the alphabet that everybody here knows is hers – not just a few friends like us, who said
El
like a single
L
for the snob sound of it – naturalizes Elizita, makes her American. We might mock it, but admire her instead, all the more for it.

“Do you live in this museum for old rolling stock and locomotives?” I ask. “L's, is it?”

“I'm L, but the place is E-L's. Sure is,” Elizita clarifies. “The business name, EL's, really starts with Vaquero's World here in the U.S.
,
Mundo Vaquero in Latin America. After Cecil learns the ropes for the Vaquero franchises. This is in '72 or '73, round about there. Ham puts him forward as the person to set up a test outlet, a boutique in Mexico City. Ham will pass the outfitting of the store and the training of the Mexican who owns the franchise on to Ces, then Ces can do the same in the other cities.

“
Ces
is what Ham always calls Cecil because he insists on being called as he always was, Cess-ill, and not See-sill. Ham cuts that one to Ces, puts Ces on a plane permanently and humps me till his heart's content.