by Ronald Malfi
The café was situated in a well-lit parlor with skylights, black and pounded by rain at the moment, and had a counter against one wall and small, circular iron tables arranged functionally about the parlor floor. Typically speared through the center with parasols surrounded by chairs cushioned in intricate floral patterns, they were the type of tables one might find gathered around the patio of some midtown metropolitan bistro. Many of these tables were occupied this morning. Nick stood briefly, surveyed the room. Emma stood from one of the tables and waved at him. He raised a hand in return to acknowledge he saw her but did not go directly to the table. Instead, he went to the counter and ordered a Jamaican espresso. While waiting, he turned and could see Emma facing him as she sat at one of the iron tables. She was with another woman—young, bright, tannin-hued, brunette—and they seemed to be involved deeply in conversation. The espresso came and he paid for it then went to the table.
“Hello,” he said, standing.
“Sweetheart,” Emma said…and their eyes lingered on each other too long; there had been something cold and dry in her voice when she’d spoken. But it passed and neither of them decided to make an issue of it.
“Sit with us,” Emma said.
Nick pulled out a chair and sat.
“Please…before any introductions, I want to congratulate you on your recent marriage,” the brunette said, smiling. She was attractive in a smart, serious, severe way, and looked just slightly older than Emma. Handsome for a woman. Darkly Spanish. Her skin was molten like oil, her eyebrows two thin, raven-colored half-moons above deeply-set eyes. “We have been talking about you behind your back like rascals. I hope you don’t mind.”
“Like rascals,” said Emma.
“Not at all,” Nick said. “I just hope I’m not interrupting…”
“Of course not,” said the woman. She spoke, too, with an accent that made it sound as if she were concentrating very hard on her English. She was European, Nick could tell. He had never been to Europe, but he could tell.
“This is Isabella Rosales,” Emma said. “She’s a…a what? What did you call yourself, Isabella?”
“A diagnostician of the human condition.” She said the word slowly—diagnostician. The whole phrase rhymed like a lyric.
“Yes,” Emma said, “a diagnostician. Isn’t that smart?”
“Smart,” Nick said.
“I am a photographer,” Isabella clarified.
“She takes pictures,” said Emma. “She’s been taking pictures all over the world.”
“It’s good to meet you,” he said.
“Are you hungry, dear?” Emma said. “Isabella and I already ate.”
“I’m okay for now.”
“You should eat something,” Emma continued.
“Maybe later. I just woke up.”
“Just don’t let the morning go by without eating something, Nick.”
Now you’re overreaching for sure, darling, Nick thought, and he found that, unlike moments previous, he could not settle his eyes on her for any extended length of time.
“Is this your first time visiting the island?” Isabella Rosales said.
“It is,” he said.
“It is a wonderful place for a honeymoon. It’s fun and there are a lot of things to do, but it’s also very quaint and romantic, too.”
“Yes,” he agreed.
“Also,” Isabella said, “there is the beach.”
“Nick loves the beach,” Emma said.
“Oh, it is such a beautiful beach,” Isabella said excitedly.
“It’s a great beach,” he agreed without expression.
“Your wife confessed that you are the genius behind that wonderful drawing off the main lobby.”
“I’m working while we’re here, yes,” he said.
“It is a very brilliant drawing. When will you start to paint it?”
“Today,” he said. “After breakfast.”
“It is such an amazing drawing,” Isabella Rosales seemed to say to no one in particular. It was in the way she spoke and looked at no one that made her comments universal. She appeared as someone chronically uninterested in specifications, finding simple pleasure in the statement of her own opinions as fact. She had a nice figure but her clothes seemed too plain, too simple, and almost forcefully so. She wore no makeup on her face. Her fingers, long and brown, looked somehow strategic, too, and were adorned with clusters of tarnished silver rings, each studded with turquoise stones. Despite her obvious Spanish heritage, there prevailed an almost Native American air about her. Nick, for just a moment, considered what it might be like to love Isabella, or someone like her. Loving her (it occurred to him as he sipped his Jamaican espresso and sat casually beside his new wife) would be easy and free and would not come with anything that came, he knew, with loving his wife. Loving Isabella would be like loving rain, loving summer, loving sky.
“Amazing drawing,” Isabella said again. She sounded very genuine and her eyes finally settled on him, weighing her words with sudden importance and sincerity.
“So you’re a photographer,” Nick said, not wanting to discuss the mural. “Are you here working, too?”
“I am doing a shoot, yes. You’ve heard of the Goat-Man?”
“The what?”
“Sounds scary,” Emma commented.
Isabella fashioned her head back slightly on her neck, leaving her neck unlined and creaseless, smooth and vulnerable, and laughed just once—sharp, simply. Her eyes never left Nick’s own, however, as if she distrusted leaving him, even for a split second, out of her line of sight.
“Right,” she said. “Russell ‘Goat-Man’ Claxton.”
“Uh…” Nick managed.
“He’s a virtuoso,” Isabella said. “A veritable genius. The man, he is some American legend, and he is so young and handsome. You do not know him? He is a jazz saxophonist. I saw him blow once in New York City, at Mandy’s. It was after he released his first album, Gingerbread Man. You do not know? He sustained a single note for three whole minutes on stage, and this is no exaggeration. It was the most goddamn impressive thing I think I have ever seen anyone do.”
“Sounds impressive.”
“Also, he plays polytonally.”
“I’m not sure I know what that means…”
“Do you follow jazz at all, Nicholas?”
It sounded strange to hear her say his name fully like that. “You mean the music? Uh—ha.”
Isabella Rosales offered up an archipelago of white, even teeth. “I’m compiling some images of Goat-Man for a book.”
“So is he called the Goat-Man because he has a horn?”
“But the saxophone is only one horn,” Isabella said. “By that logic, that would make him the Narwhal-Man.”
“Or the Unicorn-Man,” Nick suggested.
“Ah, yes. The Unicorn-Man. Yes, Nicholas, I like that. But no—it has nothing to do with his saxophone.”
“Well,” he said, “it was just a guess. Anyway, it was only a matter of time before the conversation turned to sax.”
“You,” Isabella said, “you, you, you are funny.” She turned to Emma. “Your husband is funny. I adore him.” Turning back to Nick, she said, “I do mostly freelance work. I have been working on a few different projects for some time now, and this is where it has brought me. I have been getting some wonderful shots of the beach, too. Until the storm came, anyway.”
“Isn’t it terrible?” Emma said, no doubt seeing her moment to interject. She was sitting forward in her chair and she suddenly looked very young—too young, Nick thought—and nothing at all like a wife.
“It is terrible,” Isabella said, “but it is beautiful, too. I guess I will just have to keep myself busy here in the hotel until the storm passes.”
“Well,” Nick said, “maybe you’ll find something inside the hotel to photograph.”
Isabella smiled again. She was very pretty. “There are always interesting things to photograph,” she told him. “There is never a short
age of such interesting things.”
“Well, I hear the storm should pass soon enough,” Nick said.
“That is good,” Isabella said. “Muy bueno.”
“Isabella lives in Greenwich Village,” Emma said suddenly, turning and looking at her husband. “Isn’t it a small world? I was telling her how we’d looked for a place in the city before you left for Iraq, but that we couldn’t afford anything.” To Isabella, she said, “Anyway, they shipped him off sooner than we’d hoped. Not that, you know, not that we hoped he would be shipped off. But I guess some things, they’re inevitable. Anyway, it was all very sudden. He wanted a place in the city, a little studio in the city where he could paint, but, well, it was all very sudden.”
“We didn’t look very hard, really,” Nick stated. “We could have probably found a place.”
“But we went on a great trip before Nick was shipped overseas. We spent a week in the city, stayed at the Edison in Times Square, and it was spectacular. I’d never been to New York and Nick had been only once, when he was very young, so it was like we were learning about the city together. It was much bigger than I’d expected, too, but I was confident I could live there, even when Nick was away. I’d promised him that I’d get into a routine and work him into it once he came back.”
“It just didn’t work out,” he said. “We didn’t have enough time before I had to leave.”
“It was very sudden,” Emma said again. It was a point she seemed intent on making.
“But you’re not from New York originally,” Nick said.
“No, no,” said Isabella. “Madrid, Spain. I came here as a child, though, and traveled with my father. My mother, she died when I was very young, and my father and I did much traveling together.”
“Do you go back often?” he said. “To Spain?”
“I have been back only once.”
“To see your father?”
“Sadly, no. He is dead now.”
“Oh,” he said, and could not think of anything else to say.
“So you find New York City to be a good place to paint?” Isabella asked, and she was watching Nick now like someone suddenly curious, fondling him with her eyes. “Personally, I find it very inspirational.”
“I suppose,” he said. In truth, he had not been inspired by anything in the city after returning from overseas and, really, he no longer entertained any desire to live in the city, or to move anywhere outside the small Pennsylvania town where he and Emma occupied the narrow, drafty, two-bedroom townhouse left to him by his father. He found, rather quickly and with some vexation, that he felt incapable of any amount of inspiration, regardless of location, since his return from Iraq.
“I find Boston to be that way, too,” Isabella said. “I love shooting in Boston.”
“Oh, we’ve been meaning to go to Boston, too,” Emma said, now quite visibly excited that she had, at least in the bowels of her own privileged superstitions, unwittingly found herself in the center of some inexplicable choreography of fate. “I have relatives there and Nick and I were planning to go visit some day. We wanted to go in the winter when it wouldn’t be so crowded in the city.”
“It is cold,” Isabella said.
“But not so crowded,” said Emma.
“So, Nicholas, you were in Iraq,” Isabella said.
“Yes.”
“How long were you there?”
“Just under a year. Eleven months.”
“Did you see any real fighting?”
Something in him found the question insulting. “Some,” he said. And it occurred to him that perhaps it wasn’t the question he’d found insulting but, rather, the way Isabella Rosales had intended it. There was something about her nature that provoked him, although he could not tell for certain if it was deliberate or not.
“I would love to shoot out in Iraq.” Then, smiling, Isabella Rosales added, “Photos, I mean. Not guns.”
“Don’t worry. There are enough guns out there already,” Nick assured her.
“I would take pictures of the children,” she said. “I would take pictures of their bodies being piled into the back of pickup trucks. I would take pictures of their raw skin and the blood and how their heads turn funny on their necks when they are lifted from the streets.”
Nick did not say anything. Emma, too, was silent; she could only stare at Isabella and could not find a single word to say.
“Well,” Nick said, feeling his eyebrows rise.
“Do you have any pictures from when you were there? I would love to see them if you have them.”
“No,” he said. “No pictures. No one I was with took any pictures.”
“That is too bad,” Isabella said. “People here, on this side of the world, they do not really know what it is like to be over there. People here don’t know what it’s like to be where you were, and to see the things you saw. They don’t know what it is like to be you.”
“I guess not,” Nick said, and thought, Who the hell knows anything about anything? Do you think a few photographs would make all the difference? Do you think a few black and white glossies could do it all any justice? No one knows. I was there and sometimes I think I don’t know, either. And maybe we’re not supposed to know. Maybe that’s the way it’s supposed to be. And as for pictures, taking pictures, maybe it truly is too bad that no one I was with took any pictures, but we were all too busy carrying our gear and our rifles and an extra pair of socks while we hunkered, in an attempt to stay cool, in the shade of a nearby Abrams MBT, its guns still hot and smoking and grease-smelling, and all of us with our prized personal possessions tucked away in the creased and hidden pockets of our fatigues. We worry about ambushes and we worry about turning the wrong corner and we worry about the hot desert dust jamming our M-4s and M-16s and not being able to use them properly or at all, but we do not worry about photographs, taking photographs. What’s a photograph?
“Will they be sending you back?” Isabella asked him.
“No.”
“That’s good, staying in the U.S.”
“Nick was injured,” Emma spoke up. “Show her your hand, Nick.”
“She doesn’t want to see that,” he said, amiable as possible. He lifted his espresso and hid behind it as best he could.
“It’s okay, Nick,” Emma continued.
“Come on,” he said. “Come on, Emma.”
Thankfully, Isabella was perceptive to his discomfort. She waved one hand, so casually and in control, and said, as if nothing in the world could possibly matter to her at that moment, “It’s all right. I was just curious to know if you would be going back, Nicholas. I was going to wish you luck if you were.”
“He’s not,” Emma said. “Once we leave here, we’ll be in Pennsylvania for good.”
Isabella Rosales smiled. “That is terrific for you.”
Nick finished his espresso and stood. “Excuse me,” he said, “but I need to get some work done. It was nice meeting you, Isabella.”
“Oh, yes, Nicholas. And I’m sure we will see each other again.”
“All right,” he said, and turned to Emma, his wife. “I can meet you for a late lunch, if you want.”
“That would be nice.”
“I’ll come by the room.”
“I can order in,” Emma said. “Do you know what you’ll want?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Make it a surprise.”
—Chapter IV—
He enlisted the services of a young, sturdy-looking bellhop to assist him in carrying his supplies trunk down into the lobby. It was heavy and the bellhop disappeared once before they even bothered to lift the trunk, and returned with a dolly. They hoisted the trunk onto the dolly together, Nick favoring his good hand, only to discover one of the casters was inoperable and refused to roll with such a weight pressing down on it, and so the bellhop disappeared a second time and returned with a new dolly with fully functioning casters.
“You have lead weights in here or something?” the bellhop said as
they maneuvered the dolly onto the elevator.
“Painting supplies.”
“Hey, you’re not the guy they hired to paint that wall down in the lobby, are you?”
“In the tired flesh.”
“Really? Excellent. You know, I was looking at the drawing—the outline—the—what do you call it?—last night after I got off work. Some friends came by to pick me up and we were all just staring at it. You’re pretty damn good.”
“Thanks.”
“So you do this a lot?”
“What? Paint?”
“Paint murals in hotels and whatever.”
“No,” Nick said. “This is my first one.”
“No kidding? How much they pay you for something like that?”
“They pay enough,” Nick said.
“Yeah? Pretty good, man. Must be nice,” the bellhop said, “to have a talent like that, where you can squat at a hotel and paint all day and whatever. And get paid. Good deal. Know what I mean?”
“Sure. Good deal.”
“How long will it take to finish?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“They let you stay here for free while you work?”
“Yes.”
“Good deal,” the bellhop said again. “Listen, there’s a storage closet just off the main hallway where you’re painting the mural. I can see if I can grab a key from my boss so you can keep this trunk in the closet. It’ll be easier than lugging it back to your room at the end of each day, especially since your—” and the bellhop was about to say something about Nick’s hand, but happened to think better of it at the last minute.
Instead, he said, “Especially since it’s so heavy. Sound good?”
“Good deal,” Nick said, and the bellhop grinned and nodded. “Thank you. Is your boss Mr. Granger, the bell captain?”
“Yeah. You know Granger?”
“Just a little,” Nick said. He did not tell the bellhop that he had fought in Iraq with Myles Granger, the bell captain’s son. “Only in passing, really.”
“He’s not a bad guy. Son was killed overseas, I heard. In Iraq. He drinks too much now, sometimes forgets things and whatnot, but I guess that’s okay, you know? After, you know, having your kid killed like that and all. Not a bad guy, though. Hey, you smoke dope?”