The Tailor of Panama (45 page)

Luxmore cranked his bearded head round until he was facing his subordinate. “That prim Sassenach virgin with large attachments and come-hither eyes who graced our little gathering this evening—”

“Yes, sir?”

“Is she what in my young day we called a cock-teaser, by any chance? Because it seemed to me that if ever I saw a young woman who needed the undivided attention of a seven-foot-tall—Andrew! For the love of God! Who the devil's that at this hour of the night?”

Luxmore's prescription for Fran was never revealed in its entirety. The ring of the front doorbell became a peal, then a blast. Like a scared rodent, Luxmore and his beard retreated to the furthest corner of the armchair.

The trainers had not been mistaken when they praised Osnard's aptitude in the black arts. A few measures of malt whisky in no way impaired his reactions and the prospect of being disagreeable to Fran sharpened them. If she had come to kiss and make up, she had picked the wrong man and a worse moment. Which he now proposed to tell her in words of one Anglo-Saxon syllable. And she could take her foot off his bloody bell while she was about it.

Gratuitously instructing Luxmore to remain where he was, Osnard sidled across the dining room to the hall, closing doors along his way, and squinted through the fish-eye of his front door. The lens was coated with condensation. With a handkerchief from his pocket he wiped it clear on his own side, and made out one misty eye, its sex ambivalent, squinting back at him, while the blast of the doorbell continued like a fire alarm. Then the eye pulled away and he recognised instead Louisa Pendel, wearing horn-rimmed glasses and precious little else, standing on one leg while she took her shoe off as a prelude to beating down the door with it.

Louisa did not remember which particular straw had broken her camel's back. Neither did she care. She had returned from squash to an empty house. The children were visiting with the Rudds and staying over. She rated Ramón one of the Great Unspeakables of Panama and detested letting them anywhere near him. It wasn't that Ramón hated women, it was the way he hinted that he knew
more about Harry than she did, and all of it bad. And the way that, just like Harry, he clammed up when she talked about the rice farm, although it was her money that had bought it.

But none of this accounted for how she felt when she came home from squash, or why she found herself weeping without a reason, when so often in the last ten years she had had a reason but refused to weep. So she supposed that what had happened to her was some kind of accumulation of despair, assisted by a large vodka on the rocks before her shower because she felt like it. Having showered, she examined herself naked, all six feet of her, in the bedroom mirror.

Objectively. Forgetting my height for a moment. Forgetting my beautiful sister, Emily, with her golden tresses and
Playboy
-centrefold ass and tits to kill for and list of conquests longer than the Panama City telephone directory. Would I or would I not, if I was a man, wish to sleep with this woman? She reckoned she might, but on what evidence? She only had Harry to go by.

She phrased her question differently. If I was Harry, would I still want to sleep with me after a dozen years of marriage? And the answer to that was: on recent evidence, not. Too tired. Too late. Too placatory. Too guilty about something. All right, he was always guilty. Guilt was his best thing. But these days he wore it like a placard: I am forfeit, I am untouchable, I am guilty, I don't deserve you, good night.

Brushing away her tears with one hand and clutching her glass in the other, she continued to parade back and forth across the bedroom, studying herself, pushing herself out and in, and thinking how for Emily everything came too easily; whether she was playing tennis or riding a horse or swimming or washing up, she couldn't make an ugly movement if she tried. Even as a woman, you practically had an orgasm watching her. Louisa tried writhing obscenely, the worst whore ever. A frost. Too knobbly. No flow. No hip movement. Too old. Always have been. Too tall. Fed up, she marched back to the kitchen and, still naked, determinedly poured herself another vodka, no ice this time.

And it was a real drink, not “maybe I could do with a drink,” because she had to open a new bottle and find a knife to cut round the seal before she could pour, which is not the sort of thing you do when, just casually, almost by accident, you pour yourself a little something to keep your spirits up while your husband's out screwing his mistress.

“Fuck him,” she said aloud.

The bottle came from Harry's new hospitality store.

Chargeable, he said.

“Chargeable, who to?” she had demanded.

“Tax,” he said.

“Harry, I do not wish my house to be used as a tax-free bar.”

Guilty smirk. Sorry, Lou. Way of the world. Didn't mean to upset you. Won't do it again. Creep, cringe.

“Fuck him,” she repeated, and felt the better for it.

And fuck Emily too, because without Emily to compete with I would never have taken the moral high road, never pretended to disapprove of everything, never kept my virginity so long it became a world record, just to show everyone how pure and serious I was by contrast with my fucking beautiful sister! I would never have fallen in love with every minister under the age of ninety who climbed into the pulpit in Balboa and told us to repent our sins and Emily's specially, never have set myself up as pious Miss Perfect and the arbiter of everyone's bad behaviour when all I really wanted was to be touched and admired and spoiled and fucked like all the other girls on the lot.

And fuck the rice farm too.
My
rice farm that Harry won't take me to anymore because he's put his bloody
chiquilla
in it: Here, darling, keep looking out of the window for me till I come back. Fuck you. Gulp of vodka. Another gulp. Then a great big gulp and feel it hit the parts that really count, oh boy. Thus fortified, she swept back to the bedroom to resume her gyrations with greater abandon—is
this
erotic?—go on, tell me!—is
this
?
—
all right, so get a load of
this
! But no one to tell her. No one to clap or laugh or
get horny with her. No one to drink with her, cook for her, kiss her neck and talk her down. No Harry.

Breasts not bad for forty, all the same. Better than Jo-Ann's when she bares all. Not as good as Emily's, but whose are? Here's to them. Here's to my tits. Tits, stand up, you're being toasted. She sat down abruptly on the bed, chin in hands, watching the phone ring on Harry's side.

“Go fuck yourself,” she advised it.

And to make her point more strongly, she lifted the receiver an inch, yelled “Go fuck yourself,” and put it down again.

But with kids, you always pick up in the end.

“
Yeah? So who is it?
” she yells, when it rings again.

It is Naomi, Panama's minister of misinformation, preparing to share some choice piece of scandal with her. Good. This conversation has been outstanding for too long already.

“Naomi, I am pleased to hear you because I have been meaning to write to you and now you have saved me a stamp. Naomi, I want you out of my fucking life. No, no, listen to me, Naomi. Naomi, if you happen to be passing through the Vasco Nuñez de Balboa Park and see my husband lying on his back enjoying oral intercourse with Barnum's baby elephant, I would be grateful if you would tell your twenty best friends and
never
tell me. Because I don't want to hear your fucking voice again till the Canal freezes over. Good night, Naomi.”

Tumbler in hand, Louisa puts on a red wrapper that Harry recently brought home for her—three big buttons and cleavage according to your mood—fetches a chisel and hammer from the garage and crosses the courtyard to Harry's den, which these days he keeps locked. Great sky. She hasn't seen a beautiful sky for weeks. Stars we used to tell our children about. That's Orion's belt with the dagger, Mark. And those are your Seven Sisters, Hannah, the ones you always dream of having. The new moon, pretty as a foal.

This is where he writes to her, she thought as she approached the door to his kingdom. To my darling
chiquilla,
care of my wife's rice farm. Through the misted window of her bathroom Louisa has watched him for hours on end, silhouetted at his desk, head tilted to one side and tongue out while he writes his love letters though writing never came naturally to Harry; it is one of the things that Arthur Braithwaite, greatest living saint since Laurent, neglected in his foster child's education.

The door is locked, as she has anticipated, but it presents no problem. The door, when you really beat on it with a good heavy hammer, taking the hammer back as far as it will go, then smashing it down on Emily's head, which was what Louisa dreamed of doing all through her adolescence, is a piece of shit, like most things in the world.

Having smashed the door, Louisa homed on her husband's desk and smashed open the top drawer with the hammer and chisel— three good heaves before she realised the drawer wasn't locked in the first place. She ransacked the contents. Bills. Architect's drawings for the Sportsman's Corner. Nobody's lucky first time. Not me anyway. She tried the second drawer. Locked, but surrenders at the first assault. The contents immediately more uplifting. Unfinished essays on the Canal. Learned journals, press cuttings, notes in Harry's flowery tailor's hand summarising the above.

Who is she? Who the fuck is he doing it all for?
Harry, I am speaking to you. Listen to me, please. Who is this woman whom you have installed at
my
rice farm without
my
consent and whom
you
need to impress with your nonexistent erudition? Who owns this dreamy, cowlike smile you have these days—I am chosen, I am blessed, I walk on water. Or the tears—oh shit, Harry, who owns those bloodcurdling tears that form in your eyes and never fall?

Rage and frustration welling in her again, she smashed open another drawer and froze. Holy shit! Money! Serious, real money!
A whole drawer crammed full of fucking money. Hundreds, fifties, twenties. Lying loose in the drawer like old parking tickets. A thousand. Two, three thousand. He's been robbing banks. Who for?

For his woman? She does it for money? For his woman, to take her out to meals without it going through the housekeeping account? To keep her in the style she isn't accustomed to, at
my
rice farm, bought with
my
legacy? Louisa tried shouting his name several times, first to ask him politely, then to order him because he wouldn't answer, then to curse him because he wasn't there.

“Fuck you, Harry Pendel! Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you! Wherever you are. You're a fucking
cheat
!”

It was fuck everything from now on. It was her father's language when he'd had a skinful, and Louisa felt a daughter's pride that, having had a skinful herself or getting that way, she swore like her fucking father.

“
Hey, Lou, sweetheart, come over here. Where's that Titan?
”—he calls his daughter Titan, after the giant German crane in Gamboa harbour—“
Don't an old man deserve a little attention from his daughter? Ain't you got a kiss for your old man? Call that a kiss? Fuck you! Fuck you, hear me? Fuck you!
”

Notes, mostly about Delgado. Distorted versions of things Harry had pumped her about over the dinners he liked to cook her.
My
Delgado.
My
beloved father figure, Ernesto himself, probity on wheels, and
my
husband makes dirty notes about him. Why? Because he's jealous of him. He always was. He thinks I love Ernesto more than I love him. He thinks I want to fuck Ernesto. Headings:
Delgado's Women—
what women? Ernesto doesn't do that stuff!
Delgado and the Pres—
Mr. Osnard's Pres again.
Delgado's Views on Japanese—
Ernesto's scared of them. Thinks they want his Canal. He's right. She exploded again. Aloud this time: “Fuck you, Harry Pendel, I never
said
that, you're making it up! Who for?
Why?
”
A letter, not completed, not addressed. A scrap he must have meant to throw away:

I thought you would like to hear a rather interesting snippet Louisa overheard at work yesterday regarding our Ernie and saw fit to pass on to me—

 

Saw fit?
I didn't
see fit.
I told him a piece of office gossip! Why the fuck does a
wife
have to
see fit
before she tells her
husband
a piece of office gossip in their own home about a benign, upright man who wishes only to do right by Panama and the Canal?
Fuck
fit! Fuck
you—
you who would like to hear what we
see fit
to tell each other in our own home! You're a bitch. A foul-eared bitch who's stolen my husband and my rice farm.

You're
Sabina
!

Louisa had found the bitch's name at last. In trim tailor's capitals, because capitals came easiest to him,
SABINA
written small and loving, with a balloon drawn round her.
SABINA
, followed by
RAD STUD
in brackets. You're Sabina and you're a rad stud and you know about other studs and you work for dollar signs from the U.S.—or think you do, because “works for U.S.” is between inverted commas and you get five hundred bucks a month plus a bonus when you put on a great performance. It was all there, laid out in one of Harry's flow-charts that he'd learned about from Mark. Flow-chart ideas don't have to be linear, Dad. They can float about like gas balloons on strings in any order you like. You can take them singly or together. They're really neat. The string from Sabina's gas balloon led straight as a die to
H,
which was Harry's Napoleonic signature for himself when he was being grandiose. Whereas Alpha's string— because now she had discovered Alpha—led to Beta, then to Marco (Pres), and only then back to
H.
The Bear's string led to
H
too, but the Bear's balloon had tense wavy lines drawn round it as if it were about to explode at any moment.