“That’s a lie,” he says.
“Yeah,” she says after a pause. “It’s a fairly huge deal. All right. But what I’m trying to say is, if it doesn’t work out, I’ll cry and be depressed and hit things. My heart may even break. But it won’t kill me. I heal up good.”
The rain beats in against the window, spraying under the glass, drenching the ledge, spattering on the floor, yet Marley doesn’t bother to close it. She sits up and, with a supple movement, shucks her t-shirt. The shape of a bikini top is etched upon her skin and in the half-light her high, smallish breasts, tipped by engorged nipples, are shockingly pale in contrast to her tan. It strikes Cliff as exotic, a solar tattoo, and he imagines designs of pale and dark all over her body, some so tiny, they can only be detected by peering close, others needing a magnifying glass to read the erotic message that they, in sum, comprise. She lies down again, an arm across her tight, rounded stomach. Sheets of rain wash over the window, transforming it into a smeary lens of dull green and silvered gray, seeming to show a world still in process of becoming.
“So,” Marley says. “You going into work today?”
“Probably not,” he says.
Chapter Seven
Before going into work the following day, Cliff stops by the cottage. It’s a sunny, breezy afternoon and all should be right with the world, but the stillness of the place unnerves him. He peels police tape off the doors, hurriedly packs a few changes of clothes and, an afterthought, tosses his copy of Sword Of The Black Demon into his bag. If things get uncomfortable at Marley’s, he’ll move to a motel, but he has determined that he’s not going to spend another night in the cottage until the situation is resolved, until he can be assured that there’ll be no reoccurrence of blue witches and flashing lights and two-hundred-foot tall swordsmen.
He pulls into Ridgewood Motors shortly before two and, from that point on, he’s so busy that he scarcely has a chance to glance at the Celeste. Jerry’s in a foul mood because Stacey Gerone has run off and left him shorthanded.
“She’s been screwing some rich old fart from Miami,” Jerry says. “I guess she blew him so good, he finally popped the question. That bitch can suck dick like a two-dollar whore in a hurricane.”
Dressed in his trademark madras suit and white loafers, Jerry cocks an eye at Cliff, doubtless hoping to be asked how he knows about Stacey’s proclivities; he’s brimming over with eagerness to divulge his conquest.
Jerry’s pudgy, built along the lines of Papa Smurf, with a tanning-machine tan like brownish orange paint and a ridiculous toupee—he cultivates this clownish image to distract from his nasty disposition. Thanks to this and an endless supply of dirty jokes, ranging from the mildly pornographic to X-tra Blue, he’s in demand as a speaker at Rotary Club and Chamber of Commerce dinners and has acquired a reputation for being crusty yet loveable. He acknowledges Cliff as a near-equal, someone who has the worldliness to understand him, someone in whom he can confide to an extent, and thus Cliff, knowing that Jerry will vent his temper on the other salesmen if he doesn’t listen to him brag, is forced to endure a richly embroidered tale of Jerry’s liaisons with Stacey, culminating with an act of sodomy described in such graphic detail, he’s almost persuaded that it might have happened, although it’s more likely that the verisimilitude is due to Jerry’s belief that it happened, that through repetition his fantasy has become real.
This is the first Cliff has heard of the “rich old fart,” but he’s aware that Stacey played her cards close to the vest and there was much he did not know about her. He tries to nudge the conversation in that direction, hoping to learn more; but Jerry, made grumpy by his questions, orders him out onto the lot to sell some fucking cars.
A little after five o’clock, he’s about to close with a young couple who’ve been sniffing around a two-year-old Bronco since the previous Friday, when Shalin Palaniappan strolls onto the lot. She walks up to Cliff, ignoring another salesman’s attempt to intercept her, and says, “Hi.”
Cliff excuses himself, steers Shalin away from the couple, and says, “I’m in the middle of something. Let me get somebody else to help you.”
“I want you,” Shalin says pertly.
“You’re going to have to wait, then.”
“I’ve waited this long. What’s a few minutes more?”
With her baggy shorts and a pale yellow T-shirt, her shiny black eyes, her shiny black hair in a ponytail, her copper-and-roses complexion, she looks her age, fifteen or sixteen, a healthy, happy Malaysian teenager; but he senses something wrong about her, something also signaled by her enigmatic comment about waiting, an undercurrent that doesn’t shine, that doesn’t match her fresh exterior, like that spanking new Escalade with the bent frame they had in a few weeks before. He leaves her leaning against a Nissan 350-Z and goes back to the couple who, given the time to huddle up, have decided in his absence that they’re not happy with the numbers and want more value on the toad they offered as a trade-in. Cliff feels Shalin’s eyes applying a brand to the back of his neck and grows flustered. He grows even more so when he notices a young salesman approach her and begin chatting her up, bracing with one hand on the Nissan, leaning close, displaying something other than the genial manner that is form behavior for someone who pushes iron—then, abruptly, the salesman scurries off as if his tender bits have been scorched. Most teenage girls, in Cliff’s experience, don’t have the social skills to deal efficiently with the two-legged flies that come buzzing around, yet he allows that Shalin may be an exception. The couple becomes restive; now they’re not sure about the Bronco. Cliff, aware that he’s blowing it, passes them off to John Sacks, a decent closer, and goes over to Shalin.
“How can I help you?” he asks, and is startled by the harshness, the outright antipathy in his voice.
Shalin, looking up at him, shields her eyes against the westering sun, but says nothing.
“What are you looking to spend?” he asks.
“How much is this one?” She pats the Nissan’s hood.
He names a figure and she shakes her head, a no.
“Do you have a car?” he asks. “We can be pretty generous on a trade-in.”
“That’s right. You always take it out in trade, don’t you?”
Her snide tone is typical of teenagers, but her self-assurance is not, and her entire attitude, one of arrogance and bemusement, causes him to think that there’s another purpose to her visit.
“I’m busy,” he says. “If you’re not looking for a car, I have other customers.”
“Did you know I’m adopted? I am. But Bazit treats me like his very own daughter. He caters to my every whim.” She reaches into a pocket, extracts a platinum Visa card and waggles it in his face. “Why don’t we look around? If I see something I like, you can go into your song-and-dance.”
He’s tempted to blow her off, but he’s curious about her. They walk along the aisles of gleaming cars, past salesmen talking with prospective buyers, pennons snapping in the breeze. She displays no interest in any of the cars, continuing to talk about herself, saying that she never knew her parents, she was raised by an aunt, but she’s always thought of her as a mother, and when the aunt died—she was nine, then—Bazit stepped in. Not long afterward, they moved to America and bought the Celeste.
“There!” She stops and points at a silver Jag, an XK coupe. “I like that one.
Can I take a test drive?”
“That’s a sixty-thousand dollar car,” says Cliff. “You want a test drive, I’ll have to clear sixty thousand on your credit card.”
“Do it.”
He goes into the office and runs the card—it’s approved. What, he asks himself, is a sixteen-year-old doing with that much credit? He knocks on Jerry’s door and tells him that he has a teenage girl who wants to test-drive the SK.
“Fuck her,” says Jerry without glancing up. “I’ve got a dealer who’ll take it off our hands.”
“Her card cleared.”
“No shit? A rich lit
tle cunt, huh?” Jerry clasps his hands behind his head and rocks back in his swivel chair. “Naw. I don’t want a kid driving that car.”
“It’s the girl from the Celeste.”
“Shalin?” Jerry’s expression goes through some extreme changes—shock, concern, bewilderment—that are then paved over by his customary. “What the hell. He throws a lot of business our way.”
Cliff doubts that a man who rents motel rooms for twenty-nine bucks a night could be boosting Jerry’s profits to any consequential degree, and he wonders what shook him up…if, indeed, he was shaken, if he wasn’t having a flare-up of his heartburn.
Shalin, it turns out, knows her way around a stick shift and drives like a pro, whipping the SK around sharp corners, downshifting smoothly, purring along the little oak-lined back streets west of Ridgewood Avenue, and Cliff’s anxiety ebbs. He points out various features of the car, none of which appear to impress Shalin. It’s clear that she enjoys being behind the wheel and, when she asks if she can check out what the SK is like on the highway, he says, “Yeah, but keep it under sixty-five.”
Soon they’re speeding south on Highway 1 toward New Smyrna, passing through a salt marsh that puts Cliff in mind of an African place—meanders of blue water and wide stretches of grass bronzed by the late sun, broken here and there by mounded islands topped with palms; birds wheeling under a cloudless sky; a few human structures, dilapidated cabins, peeling billboards, but not enough to shatter the illusion that they’re entering a vast preserve.
After a minute or two, Shalin says, “My mother and I…I mean, my aunt. We shared an unique connection. We resembled each other physically. Many people mistook us for mother and daughter. But the resemblance went deeper than that. We had a kind of telepathy. She told me stories about her life, and I saw images relating to the stories. When I described them to her, she’d say things like, ‘Yes, that’s it! That’s it exactly!’ or ‘It sounds like the compound I stayed at on Lake Yogyarta.’ I came to have the feeling that as she died—she was sick the whole time I was with her, in dreadful pain—she was transferring her substance to me. We were becoming the same person. And perhaps we were.” She darts a glance toward Cliff. “Do you believe that’s possible? That someone can possess another body, that they can express their being into another flesh? I do. I can remember being someone else, though I can’t identify who that person was. My head’s too full of my aunt’s memories. It certainly would explain why I’m so mature. Everyone says that about me, that I’m mature for my age. Don’t you agree?”
Scarily mature, Cliff says to himself. He doesn’t like the direction of the conversation and tells her they’d better be heading back to the lot.
“Certainly. As soon as I see a turn-off.”
She gooses the accelerator, and the SK surges forward, pushing Cliff back into the passenger seat. The digital readout on the speedometer hits eighty, eighty-five, then declines to sixty-five. She’s putting on a little show, he thinks; reminding him who’s in control.
“Aunt Isabel spoke frequently about the man who made her ill,” Shalin goes on. “He was handsome and she loved him, of course. Otherwise she wouldn’t have risked getting pregnant. He said he couldn’t feel her as well when he wore a condom, and since this was at a time when protection wasn’t considered important—nobody in Southeast Asia knew about AIDS—she allowed him to have his way.”
A queasy coldness builds in Cliff’s belly. “Isabel. Was she an actress?”
“You remember! That makes it so much easier. Isabel Yahya. You cracked jokes about her last name. You said you were getting your ya-yas out when you were with her. She didn’t understand that, but I do.”
She swings the SK in a sharp left onto a dirt road, a reckless maneuver; then she brakes, throws it into reverse, backs onto the highway, raising a dust, and goes fishtailing toward Daytona.
“Take it easy! Okay?” Cliff grips the dashboard. “I didn’t give her anything. She gave it to me. And it obviously wasn’t AIDS, or I’d be dead.”
“No, you’re right. It wasn’t AIDS, but you definitely gave it to her.”
“The hell I did!”
“Before you became involved with Isabel, you slept with other women in Manila, didn’t you?”
“Sure I did, but she’s the one…”
“You were her first lover in more than a year!”
Shalin settles into cruising speed and Cliff, sobered by what she’s told him, says, “Even if that’s true…”
“It’s true.”
“…she could have seen a doctor.”
“She did,” says Shalin. “If you hadn’t gotten her fired, perhaps she could have seen the doctor who attended you.”
“What are you talking about? I didn’t get her fired! She vanished off the set. I didn’t know what had happened to her”
Shalin makes a dismissive noise. “As it was, Aunt Isabel went to a bomoh. A shaman. I can’t blame you for that. She was a country girl and still put her trust in such men. But when he failed her, she wrote you letters, begging for help, for money to engage a western doctor. You never replied.”
“I never got any letters.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“She didn’t have my address. How could she have written me?”
“She mailed them in care of your agent.”
“That’s like dropping them into a black hole. Mark…my agent. He’s not the most together guy. He probably filed them somewhere and forgot to send them along.”
They flash past a ramshackle fishing camp at the edge of the marsh, wooden cabins and a pier with a couple of small boats moored at its nether end. Their speed is creeping up and Cliff tells her to back it down.
“It’s an astonishing coincidence that we bought the Celeste and you started working for Uncle Jerry,” she says. “It almost seems some karmic agency is playing a part in all this.”
Cliff doesn’t know what troubles him more, the idea that the coincidence is not a coincidence, a thought suggested by her sly tone, or the implication that an intimate relationship exists between Jerry Muntz and the Palaniappans. Now that he thinks about it, he’s seen Jerry, more than once, stop at the motel for a few minutes before heading home. He has no reason to assign the relationship a sinister character, yet Jerry wouldn’t befriend people like the Palaniappans unless he had a compelling reason.
“All of what?” he asks.
“Aunt Isabel was a woman of power,” says Shalin. “By nature, she was trusting and impractical, not at all suited for life in Manila or Jakarta. She ended up in Jakarta, you know. In a section known as East Cipinang, a slum on the edge of a dump. We survived by scavenging. I’d take the things we found and sell them in the streets to tourists. We had enough to eat most days. Tourists bought from me not because they wanted the things we found, but because I was very pretty little girl.” Her lips thin, as if she’s biting back anger. “Isabel could only work a few hours a day, and sometimes not that. Her insides were rotting. She received medicine from a clinic, but the disease had progressed too far for the doctors to do other than ease her pain. She’d lost her beauty. In the last years before she died, she looked like an old, shriveled hag.”
“I’m sorry,” Cliff says. “I wish I had known.”
“Yes, you would have flown to her side, I’m sure. She often spoke of your generosity.”
“Look, I didn’t know. I can’t be held responsible for something I didn’t know was happening.”
“Is that what it is to you? A matter of whether or not you can be held responsible? Are you afraid I’m going to sue you?”
“No, that’s not…”
“Rest assured, I’m not going to sue you.”
Her voice is so thick with menace, Cliff is momentarily alarmed. They’re within the city limits now, driving in rush hour traffic past fruit stands and motels and souvenir shops, not far from the lot—he can’t wait to get out of the car.
“Isabel, as I told you, was a woman of power,” says Shalin.
“In another time, another place, she would have been respected and revered. But ill, buried in the slums, power of the sort she possessed could do her no good.”
“What the hell are you getting at?” he asks.
She flashes a sunny smile and goes on with her narrative. “Isabel loved you until the end. I know she hated you a little, too, but she maintained that you weren’t evil, just profligate and vain. And slight. She said there wasn’t much to you. You were terribly immature, but she had hopes you’d grow out of that, even though you were in your thirties when she knew you. She was basically a decent soul and power was something she used judiciously, only in cases where she could produce a good effect. It was among the last things she transferred to me.” She sighs forlornly. “Taking control of me was the one selfish act she committed in her life. You can’t blame her. The streets had left me damaged beyond repair and she was terrified of death. Of course these transfers are a bit like reincarnation, so it’s not exactly Isabel who’s alive. I mean, she is alive, but she’s a different person now. There are things that are left behind during a transfer, and things added that belonged to the soul who once inhabited this body.”
“You’re out of your tree.” He says this without much conviction. “All you’re doing is screwing with me.”
“Right on both counts.”
She slows and eases into the turning lane across from the lot, waiting for a break in the traffic.
“Now,” she says, “I use my power to get the things I want, to make my family secure. Sometimes I use it on a whim. You might say I use it profligately.”
She edges forward, but brakes when she realizes she can’t make the turn yet. A semi roars past, followed by a string of cars.
“One thing Isabel didn’t transfer to me was her love for you,” she says. “I imagine she wanted to keep that for herself, to warm her final moments. She was almost empty. All that was left was a shell, a few memories. Or maybe she didn’t want me to love you. You know, in case I ever saw you again. Do you suppose that’s it? She wanted me to hate you?”
Winter 2007 Page 9