When he finally carried me into the bedroom, that’s exactly what I did. My repertoire wasn’t as broad as his, but I did my best. When he was close he rolled me onto my back, but he still wasn’t finished with me. Supporting himself with one arm he used his other hand to make me come again while he was on top of me, and this time it went on and on.
Perhaps that was why I didn’t have the strength to stop him when he came inside me. It was a stupid thing to do, but I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t drag myself away from him and neither could he. I looked into his eyes as he came and it was the most intimate moment of my entire life, and frankly, I was shocked.
Chapter 24
It was still dark when I woke. For a moment I didn’t remember where I was, then I rolled over and found him sprawled beside me. The sheets were bunched on the floor.
I put my head on his chest and listened to the slow rhythm of his heart. Papi had said to me once that you never really knew anyone until you heard their heartbeat.
I couldn’t sleep. I went out onto the deck, naked. There was a cool breeze and I leaned onto the rail and looked down into the valley. The city shifted black and massive, its rhythms rolling like the sea. I could hear music coming from somewhere, and I saw lights through the trees.
It was still too dark to see where the sky ended and the horizon began. A coyote whined somewhere in the hills and I heard the cry of an owl hunting for field mice close by.
I had never imagined any of this when I was growing up in Havana. Papi had never expected me to make my own way in the world. He thought I would marry a good boy with a good family and a father in business, have children and grandchildren and supervise the house and the servants. It was the life my mother had before the sickness took her away from us.
Instead I had the chance to be rich and famous in my own right, if I had buena suerte.
Fidel was the worst thing that had ever happened to me and he was also the best. There were so many things I might never have known if not for the revolucion. I may never have discovered what I had missing all along with Angel. Reyes was a revelation; I had never had a man pay me so much attention in and out of bed. Bed? The whole house was wrecked. In the moonshadow, the living room looked as if it had been the scene of a brawl. There were puddles of water everywhere, wet towels all over the floor, shards of china from a vase we had knocked off a coffee table. There were even bloodstains from where he had hit his head. Another night of love with Reyes Garcia and I’d have to make a will.
When I came back to bed he was still asleep, his arm sprawled across the bed. I knelt down and pushed a comma of hair from his face. Suddenly I felt terrified. This tenderness, this need, this was perhaps how love felt when it started. What if it was still here when it ended and he was gone?
He stirred, pushed the hair out of his eyes and sat up. “What time is it?” he mumbled.
“I don’t know. Late.”
“You okay?”
“Just restless. I feel like I’ve been ravaged by a regiment of marines.”
“Yeah? I’ve never been ravaged by a regiment of marines. Is that a good thing?”
“Actually, it feels okay.” He lay down again and closed his eyes. I gave his shoulder a playful shove. “Wake up.”
“Sorry, guess I’m still exhausted after the flight.”
“You guys are all the same, there’s always some excuse.” I got back into bed and put my head on his chest. There it was again, that heartbeat. “Damn, you’re good.”
“I bet you say that to all the boys.”
“There’s only ever been one before you.”
“A girl as beautiful as you, I find that hard to believe.”
“When I was in Havana - well you know the story. When I came to Miami, I was too busy looking after Papi to think about boys. When I came to LA I met you again, and after that I just wasn’t interested in anyone else.”
He rolled onto his belly. “So if you’ve only had two lovers, how do you know I’m any good?”
“Good point. I’ll have to keep checking around.”
He laughed.
“That thing you do with your tongue drives me crazy, I could get addicted.”
“Then maybe I should charge.”
“And I’d pay. By the way, I think we broke one of your chairs.”
“You broke it, I told you to keep still.”
“How am I going to keep still when you’re doing that to me?”
“It was my favourite chair, too.”
“That’s not such a big deal when you only have two.” I wrapped my leg across his thigh. “It’s a nice house.”
“Thanks. Remember those two suitcases I threw on the back of the plane that night in Havana?”
“Did it pay for this?”
“And the furniture as well.”
“And the Roadster?”
“I had to assassinate the president of a small African nation to get that.” When I didn’t say anything, he added. “That was a joke.”
“How am I supposed to know the difference?”
“I don’t kill people, princess. Well, not unless they try to kill me first.”
“I’ll have to take your word for it. You like being mysterious, don’t you?”
“I don’t feel anything about it either way. It’s just sound business strategy.”
“Is that why you don’t have any photographs?”
“Is that important?”
“It tells people where you’re from.”
“Like I said, I don’t want people to know where I’m from.”
“But this is different, this is your home. You keep business separate from your personal life, right?”
“What are you, Perry Mason?”
“There must be something from the past you want to remember.”
“My childhood wasn’t quite like yours, princess. We couldn’t afford a camera, and there weren’t that many happy memories that I feel the need to treasure.”
“What about when you were growing up?”
“I guess there were a few mug shots but the police wouldn’t let us keep them.”
“Was that a joke, too?”
“Not really.”
I ran my fingers through the tight curly hairs on his chest. “The thing I miss the most is our photograph albums--more than the money or the car or even the house. Fidel can have them. But I wish I’d remembered to take the photograph albums.”
“They mean that much to you?”
“They mean everything to me. It’s like a part of me is missing. I’ve lost my history. There are days I can’t even remember my mother’s face.”
“I wonder if Maria salvaged them before she left,” he said.
“Perhaps she did, but I have no idea where she is or how to contact her. Even if she doesn’t have the albums, I’d like to know she’s all right. She was always very good to me.”
He didn’t say anything to that. I thought perhaps he had gone back to sleep. I ran my fingers down his belly. “Wake up, mi cielito. We’ve waited four years for this, we have a lot of time to make up for.”
“I don’t think I can.”
“It feels like you can. You may be tired but he’s not.”
He groaned in mock despair. Or perhaps the despair was genuine but I didn’t care. We had a lot of time to make up for. If I’d known that sex could be like this, I would have taken it up a long time ago.
Chapter 25
We were driving down to the valley, it was early morning and the sun was just rising over the hills. Reyes wanted to get breakfast down on the Strip.
“I want to play a game,” I said.
“What sort of game, princess?”
“The game where you pretend to be a gun-runner being chased by the CIA.”
“The CIA wouldn’t chase me for being a gun-runner. They’d be chasing after me to give me the guns to run.”
“The FBI then.”
“Yeah, that’s possible.”
“So let’s just suppose. B
ecause that could never happen, right?”
“Never. I’m not that sort of guy. I wouldn’t get involved in shady dealings.”
“Right.”
“Right.”
“So let’s suppose someone was following us right now, what would you do?”
“I’d pull over and tell them you were Fidel Castro’s niece and you were in the country on a spying mission. And they’d arrest you and I’d go to the airport, go to one of the lockers and pick up a carpet bag full of hand grenades and fly to Cuba.”
“Seriously.”
“Seriously, if we were being followed by the FBI, I’d give you up. You haven’t seen me at my ruthless best.”
“Let’s say I wasn’t in the car. What would you do?”
“Well, first thing I’d check to see if they really were following me.” There was a filter lane off to the right at the stop sign and he pulled in to it. He checked the mirror and then pulled out into the left lane again and accelerated through the lights just as the lights turned red.
“Neat,” I said.
“If they follow me through the red light when they were stopped behind me, then I’d know they were following me.”
“How would you lose them?”
“Well, this is just a game right because it couldn’t really happen, right?”
“Correct.”
“Well then I’d get into heavy traffic and I’d weave through it. Like this.” I screamed as he squeezed between a bus and a Cadillac. The driver leaned on his horn as he cut in front of him again. “I’d try that a few times and if that didn’t work I’d pull into that gas station over there.”
“Why?”
“Because then they have to find somewhere to park, or else drive in right behind me. If they drive past, I reverse out and go the other way, and if they pull in behind me I go up to them and shoot them.”
“Joking, right?”
“Sure. And if I lose them and I’m still being followed, then I pull into another gas station.”
“And shoot whoever’s parked at the pump behind you?”
“No, then I check to see if they’ve smashed a taillight.”
“Vandalism?”
“At night they can follow your car through heavy traffic because you only have one taillight and that makes you stand out. They can tag team you all night. So if they’ve already smashed my taillight, I leave the car and steal another one. But I’d never do that because I’d never find myself running from the FBI or any other police agency. Right?”
“Right,” I said.
He grinned at me. I grinned back. I realized that for the first time in a very long time I was happy. Now how did that happen?
It was my first day filming Wings of Eagles. I still hadn’t met Steve McQueen. But I had my own trailer, at least, out back of the lot, and it had air conditioning, even though it didn’t work that well.
Still, I felt that I’d arrived.
The television was on: the news anchor said that a US spy plane had discovered Russian missiles on Cuba, and that they were close enough to attack America. Rosie, the make-up girl, had finished the pancake and was adding the finishing touches to my mascara and lipstick. I was possibly the first Austrian novice to wear lipstick, but this was the movies, and this was done for the camera, not for historical accuracy.
An assistant knocked on the door; “Three minutes, Miss Montes.”
I looked in the mirror at the woman in the black and white habit, clutching the silver crucifix at her throat. Finally I was a nun. I thought about the irony of it; Papi had threatened me with the convent once when he found out I had gone to the Shanghai with Angel.
“How’s that?” Rosie asked me.
I nodded. I was too nervous to speak. I just wanted to be left alone for a while so I could prepare.
After she had gone, I took some deep breaths and admired my roses in their vase. They were from Reyes. Not the two dozen long stemmed roses Marilyn had had, but then Reyes wasn’t the President of the United States.
I flicked through the script to the last page, where Steve has survived everything that Herman Goerring and the Luftwaffe has thrown at him and asked Kim Novak to marry him. It’s what everyone wants, isn’t it? I thought, On both sides of the screen - a happily ever after ending.
Would I have a happy ending with Reyes?
How could that possibly happen with a man who disappeared for months at a time, who ran bars and guns, who could never tell you where he was going and when he was coming back? Sometimes I heard him talking on the telephone in another room, I caught scraps of conversation: Saigon, Castro and someone called Rattakone. Once I got to his house in the Canyon and found him talking out on the deck with one of the men he had been with that day at the Fontainebleau. When they saw me come out they stopped talking and didn’t start up again until I went back inside.
I had no idea what they were discussing, but it wasn’t baseball.
Last night Reyes had made love to me in the pool, again on a lounger, and finally, at midnight, in the front seat of the Roadster in a secluded lookout with a view over the lights of the city.
In a few moments I would be wearing a nun’s habit and trying not to surrender to a carnal and unexpressed longing for Steve McQueen.
No wonder I was confused about what I really wanted.
I lay face down and naked on Reyes” bed, staring at the television screen, the volume turned off. It was midnight and we had just been for a swim in the saltwater pool. The breeze rustled the fronds of the palm trees outside the window and I could feel the salt crusting on my bare skin. Reyes lay beside me, nursing a Bacardi and lime. He rubbed the condensation off the outside of the glass and touched it to my shoulder. Then he put his finger to his lips. “Rum with salt and lime. I could make you into a cocktail.”
“You can do whatever you want with me.”
He laughed, deep in his chest. “I plan to, later.”
The flickering black and white images on the TV were from somewhere in Asia; there were bodies lying in a rice paddy, American helicopters flying foreign soldiers over the jungle.
“Reyes, where the hell is Vietnam?”
“It’s in Indochina.”
“You mean it’s a part of China?”
“No, it’s further south. They share a border. Laos and Cambodia are to the west. It was called French Indochina for about fifty years, then the communists threw them out. That’s when Eisenhower stepped in.”
“I guess you got an “A” in geography, huh?”
He smiled. “Guess I did.”
“Have you been there?”
“I don’t know. You’ll have to check my file at the CIA.” He dropped an ice cube on my back to distract me. “Talking about state secrets, I hear you met the President’s brother-in-law at one of Ted’s parties while I was away.”
“Peter Lawford, yes. Do you mind?”
“Why should I mind? As long as you didn’t sleep with Jack.”
“Why would you say that?”
“You know Lawford pimps for him.”
“He’s the President, and he’s married.”
“Being married has never stopped a Kennedy doing what he wants. They’re royalty, and royalty live by different rules than everyone else. Especially our chief executive, they say Jack gets a migraine if he doesn’t get a strange piece of ass every day.”
“I think he’s charming.”
“Well charming is how it starts. What did you think of Bobby?”
“He reminds me of Crusader Rabbit. He’s passionate about everything.”
“What I can never figure is how Bobby squares things away in his own mind. On the one hand he’s waging a war against the mafia, but it’s these same mob guys that got his brother into the White House, the same ones who are helping him to try to assassinate Castro.”
“He strikes me as a very smart guy.”
“Yeah, he’s smart and he’ll have to get a lot smarter if he’s going to keep his brother out of trouble. Yo
u can’t play those double games with the guys I know, even if you’re ruler of the Free World. The Crooked World is a lot damned bigger and a lot more powerful.”
I thought nothing about what he said at the time. How could anyone be bigger than the President of the United States?
He ran a hand along my spine and it made me shiver. “You’re getting to be a celebrity and you haven’t even starred in a picture yet. Enjoy it; this is the best part, everything’s still in front of you. This time next year you’re going to have something flash every time you smile. You think you can handle it?”
“I hope so.”
“But this is what you want, right?”
“I know what I don’t want: I don’t ever want to be poor again.”
“So is that it? Just the money?”
“No, it’s not just money, Reyes. But you’ve got to be used to having money to even say “just the money” like that. It’s still too raw for me, that dread you get in the pit of your stomach, wondering how you’re going to pay the rent, watching your own father die by inches and knowing if you had money you could get him a better bed in the hospital, a better doctor. What will happen to me if I don’t think about money, Reyes? I’ve no family, no inheritance. All I have are my looks, and who looks at an actress in this town when she’s past thirty? So you bet I think about money. Money is the most important thing in the whole world. I’m not going to eat last night’s stale bread for breakfast again, I’m going to put a headstone on my father’s grave, a proper one, and no one, no one, is ever going to look at me like I’m nothing again.”
“But do you think when you’re rich and famous you’re going to be happy?”
“No, I’m just not going to be afraid anymore. Seems to me happiness is just another luxury rich people have.”
“You think happiness is a luxury?”
“Sure it is. But what good’s happiness if you don’t have enough to eat and somewhere dry and safe to sleep at night? What’s so funny?”
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