The Middleman and Other Stories (11 page)

South Africa? I wonder, but dare not hope. I carefully remove her teacup and take hold of her fingertips, which are still warm from holding the cup, and pull them up to my beard. “We have each other,” I say.

“Do we?”

It's time to take charge, to force the good times to roll. Some nations were built to take charge. It's okay for a nation of pioneers to bully the rest of the world as long as the cause is just. My heart is pure, my head is clear. I retrieve the doodad from Blanquita's perfect hand. I want to show her the funtimes of TV-land. I slice through a Mexican variety show on SIN. Any time of the day or night, those Mexicans are in tuxedos.
All those blow-dried Mexican emcees in soccer stadiums, looking like Ricardo Montalbans who never made it.

I know she's a secret fan.

On cue, my trusty nineteen-incher serves up the right stuff. It's National Cheerleading Contest time. A squad in skimpy skirts, Oceanside High's cutest, synchronizes cartwheels and handstands, and starts to dust the competition. I feel godly powers surge through my body as Blanquita relaxes. Soon she relaxes enough to laugh.

“Did you ever try out as a cheerleader?” I ask. I can sense the imminence of terrific times.

Blanquita the Beautiful watches the kids on the screen with gratifying intensity. Then she thrusts a hesitant leg in the air. It's the fault of the French maid's apron that she's wearing over her baggy sweats; my saucy exotic's turned a schoolgirl routine into something alien and absurd. Oh, Blanquita, not so fast!

“I'm too good for you, Griff,” she pants, twirling an invisible baton and high-stepping across the condo's wall-to-wall. “Pappy would call you illiterate scum.”

“And so I am. But Joker's selling rotgut through a retractable grate and Mama's perming Koreans in her living room. Ferdie and Imelda they're not.” If People Power hadn't cut them down, if Joker's own reporters hadn't locked him out, Blanquita was promised a place in the Miss Universe contest. That's why she kept her citizenship.

“That's needlessly cruel.”

“Baby, you've got to stop living in the past.”

“Okay.” She stops the twirling and marching. She turns the TV off without the doodad though I've begged her not to many times. Without the light from the screen, the condo room seems as dull and impersonal as a room in a Holiday Inn.

Without Blanquita I'd be just another Joe Blow Buckhead yuppie in his Reeboks. It's she who brings me to bed each night and wakes me up each morning, big as a house and hard as a sidewalk.

“Okay,” she goes again. “Who needs a crummy tropical past?”

We're out of the woods. I start to relax.

“Two cheers for cable sleaze,” I shout. She plucks Marcos from his hidey hole behind the ficus and babies him. “I'm saying yes to the Chief, Griff. Hip, hip!”

“What?”

“He says I make him look like a million dollars and make him feel like even more.”

“Get it in writing. That's a low-rent come-on. He wouldn't dare try it on the office girls.”

“Of course not.”

She's not been getting my point.

“I have to get on with my life. And anyway, you said you weren't jealous so what's to hold me up?”

I check out her pulse rate with my lips. I'm not verbal. Maybe I don't love Blanquita. Because I don't know what love is. I'm not ready for one-on-one.

Baby Blanquita is too agitated to smell the charred lamb whooshing off the hibachi, so it's up to me, the narcissist, to rescue the rescue-worthy. The balcony that holds the smoking hibachi is eighteen floors up. Standing between the high gray sky and the pocket-sized pool, I feel omnipotent. Everything's in place.

While I poke the ruined meat with the barbecue fork, an uncommonly handsome blond woman in a ponytail and a cherry-red tracksuit comes out of the building's back door. She hurls a bashed pizza box, like a Frisbee, into the dumpster. Excess energy floats toward me, connecting us. She can't stand still. She tightens a shoelace. We're a community of toned, conditioned athletes. Use it or lose it. Hands pressed down on somebody's Firebird, she does warm-up routines. I've seen her run in the Lull water Estate close by, but I've never felt connected enough to her to nod. I heave the meat from the rack to a platter. The woman's still hanging around in that hyper, fidgety way of hers. She's waiting. She's waiting for someone. When a
man in a matching tracksuit jogs out the back door, I get depressed. She used to run alone.

Blanquita doesn't say anything about the state of our dinner. It's already stuffed away conveniently in the past. She's got the TV going again. The latest news, hot from Mexico City. “They had this news analyst chap on a minute ago,” she says. “They were talking about Vitaly Yurchenko.”

I put the butterfly lamb in the kitchen sink. “Why don't you watch about Vitaly Yurchenko on an American station?” I ask. Usually, that steams her. Mexican
is
American! she'll squeal. But instead she says, “He could have had it all if he'd stayed. What's so great about Moscow?”

“Sometimes you blow it for love. It can happen.”

She runs to me, lavender arms going like wings. Her face—the skin so tight-pored that in the dark I feel I'm stroking petals—glows with new hope. “What are you saying, Griff? Are you saying what I think you're saying?”

I know what I would say if I weren't the solid corporate guy in maroon tie and dark suit. I buy and sell with other people's money and skim enough to just get by. It's worked so far.

“Griff?”

Sailor?

“Let's go for a run, Blanquita.”

The woman of many men's dreams doesn't wrench herself free from my kissing hold. I don't deserve her.

“Just a short run. To clear our heads. Please?”

Before I met her I used to pump iron. I was pumping so hard I could feel a vein nearly pop in the back of my head. I was a candidate for a stroke. Self-love may be too much like self-hate, who knows? Blanquita got me running. We started out real easy, staying inside the Lullwater Estate like that woman in the red tracksuit. We ran the Peachtree
I OK
. We could run a marathon if we wanted to. Our weightless feet beat perfect time through city streets and wooded ravines. The daily run is the second best thing we do together, I like to think.

“All right,” she says. She gives me one of her demure, convent smiles. “But what'll we do with dinner?”

I point at the shrivelled, carbonized thing in the stainless steel sink. “We could mail it to Africa.”

“Biafra?” she asks.

“Baby, Baby … Ethiopia, Mozambique. Biafra was gone a long time ago,” I tell her. She's very selective with her news. Emilou was a news hound, and I took to watching CNN for a solid winter.

Blanquita pins my condo key to her elasticized waistband and goes out the front door ahead of me. The lawyer from 1403 is waiting by the elevator. I am far enough behind Blanquita to catch the quickie gleam in his eyes before he resumes his cool Duke demeanor and holds the elevator for us. In your face, Blue Devil.

That night Blanquita whips up some green nutritive complexion cream in the Cuisinart. She slaps the green sludge on her face with a rubber spatula. Her face is unequivocally mournful. The sludge in the Cuisinart fills the condo with smells I remember from nature trails of my childhood. Woodsy growths. Mosses. Ferns. I tracked game as a kid; I fished creeks. Atlanta wasn't always this archipelago of developments.

“Better make tonight memorable,” she advises. The mask is starting to stiffen, especially around the lips. She has full, pouty, brownish lips. “It's our last night.”

How many times has she said that? I've never said it, never had to. The women of my life always got the idea in plenty of time, they made it a mutual-consent, too-bad and so-long kind of thing. Wendi was really looking for a stepfather to her kids. Emilou was looking for full-time business advice to manage her settlement.

“What's that supposed to mean?”

The lips make a whistling noise from inside the mask's cutout.
“Anyway,” she says, “it wasn't all cherry bombs and rockets for me either. Just sparklers.”

Sex, intimacy, love. I can't keep any of it straight anymore.

“You're not going to the Chiefs cabin in the north woods, period. He's Jack the Ripper.”

“You think I can't handle the situation, right? You think I'm just a dumb, naive foreigner you have to protect, right?”

“Yeah.”

Then she leaps on me, green face, glamor-length nails, Dior robe and all. I don't know about Baby, but for me those rockets explode.

All day Sunday it rains. The raindrops are of the big, splashy variety, complete with whiffs of wild winds and churned seas. Our winter is starting. I don't do much; I stay in, play Bach on the earphones and vacuum the broadloom. Marcos seems here to stay because I can't bring myself to call the ASPCA.

When the hour for the daily run rolls around, I start out as usual in the doctors' wing of the VA Hospital parking lot, pick my way around Mazdas, Audis, Volvos—they don't have too many station wagons in this neighborhood—keep pace with fit groups in running shoes for as long as it feels good, then shoot ahead, past the serious runners who don't look back when they hear you coming, past the dogs with Frisbees in their jaws, past the pros who scorn designer tracksuits and the Emory runners with fraternity gizmos on their shirts, pick up more speed until the Reeboks sheathe feet as light as cotton. Then it's time to race. Really race. After Emilou and just before Baby I did wind sprints for a spring at the Atlanta Track Club, ran the three-minute half, ran four of them. I can let it out.

Today in the rain and the changing weather, colder tomorrow, I run longer, pushing harder, than any afternoon in my life. Running is here to stay, even if Baby is gone.

Today I run until a vein in the back of my head feels ready to pop. The stopgap remedy is Fiorinal, and so I pop one while I slump in the shower. It feels so good, the exhaustion, the pile of
heavy, cold, sweaty clothes, the whole paraphernalia of deliberate self-depletion. At the track club they had a sign from William Butler Yeats: Torture Body to Pleasure Soul. I believe it.

What to do now? The rain is over, the Falcons are dying on the tube, the sun is staging a comeback. Already, my arms and legs are lightening, I'm resurging, I'm pink and healthy as a baby.

The nearby mall is so upscale that even the Vendoland janitor is dressed in a bright red blazer. The mall's got the requisite atriums, tinted skylights, fountains, and indoor neo-sidewalk cafés. It's a world-within-the-world; perfect peace and humidity, totally phony, and I love it. The Fiorinal's done its job. My head is vacant and painless.

It must still be raining on the Chiefs woodsy acres.

I walk into an art framer's. It's the only empty store and the woman behind the counter, a Buckhead version of Liv Ullmann, with a wide sympathetic face, doesn't seem to mind that I don't look like a serious shopper. I give her my toothiest.

“Just looking,” I apologize.

“Why?”

“That's a very reasonable question,” I say. She is neatly and expensively dressed; at least, everything looks color coordinated and natural fiberish. She seems many cuts above mall sales assistant.

Besides, Blanquita thinks she's too good for me.

“Don't tell me you have something to frame,” she says, laughing. “And I know you wouldn't buy the junk on these walls.” She's really a great saleslady. She's narrowed my choices in about ten seconds. She's flattered my tastes. Her eyes are the same greenish blue as her paisley sweater vest.

She's intuitive. It's closing time and it's Sunday, and she opens late on Monday. “But you knew that, didn't you?” she smiles. She helps me out in her amused, laid-back way. Her name is Maura. Thirty-four, divorced, no kids; she gets the
statistics out of the way. She's established an easy groundwork. In an hour or two she'll ask those leading questions that are part, more and more, of doing love in the eighties. I check automatically for wedding and friendship rings. The flesh on her ring finger isn't blanched and fluted so I know she's been divorced a while. That's a definite plus. The newly single are to be avoided.

Maura came down from Portland, Oregon, three winters ago. “I don't know why I stay.” We're having a pitcher of sangría, still in the mall. I like her voice; it's rueful and teasing. I think I even like her big, sensible hands, so unlike Blanquita's. I spot slivers, chewed nails, nothing glazed or pasted on. Hands that frame the art of Atlanta, such as it is. “Let's see, there's Farmers' Market and the International Airport. What else?”

“The CDC,” I protest. The doctors and researchers at the Centers for Disease Control may all be aliens but this is no time to diminish the city's glory. “I'm betting on AIDS to put us on the map.” There, I've made it easy, no sweat.

She laughs. I feel witty. I malinger, making small talk. Hard to tell what real time it is, out there in the world, but it must be dark. She suggests we go on to Appleby's on the other side of the mall. Appleby's is perfect for what we have going: relaxed fun and zero sentiment. I've struck gold.

No, I've lost my claim.

We have to drive around to the back of the mall. Her car's a banged-up blue Subaru. Not her fault, she explains; an Oriental sideswiped her just outside Farmers' Market on her first week in Atlanta. She kept the dent and let it rust. Her antisunbelt statement.

We order ten-cent oysters for her and Buffalo wings for me and a dollar pitcher. We don't feed each other forkfuls as we might have in a prevenereal era. Afterwards we have to walk around some in the parking lot before finding our way back to her Subaru. I haven't oriented myself to her car yet. It's these little things, first moves, losing the first step, that become so
tiring, make me feel I'm slowing down. We've had a pleasant time and what I really want is to let her go.