The Havana Room

by Colin Harrison

  I gently handed her the cane, and she stood to rise. The car was waiting for her outside. As she gathered her purse, a look passed into her face, and despite her advanced age, I glimpsed a shrewd businesswoman. "Pretty good, Mr. Wyeth," she allowed, "pretty good."

  "Don't expect my cooperation, Martha."

  "I won't. But you"— she put both of her wrinkled old hands on the cane and dared to lean forward, right into my face, so close I could see her stumpy teeth, the little hairs on her chin—"you should not expect Mr. Marceno to remain patient with you."

  "With me?"

  "With you."

  She stood back, quite confident of her position. I suddenly understood that Martha Hallock had been ahead of me at each step. "You told Marceno that I knew what was there?"

  She didn't quite answer. But it was answer enough.

  "And you told him Jay didn't know?"

  Now she nodded.

  "And if I find out and tell Jay?"

  "Oh, Mr. Wyeth," she said, taking her first step toward the door, "I wouldn't do that."

  * * *

  The window said STEINWAY, and that evening I walked past milling parents and nervous children to confront a circular performance space, centered with an enormous grand piano and rows of chairs. Families of well-to-do people. I floated toward the rear, which receded very elegantly into a hallway that opened upon room after room of beautiful pianos, mahogany, ebony, cherry, some new, others reconditioned, each costing tens of thousands of dollars. I heard a round of applause and walked back to the performance space. A woman with ambitious hair stood before the group thanking the Steinway Company for lending them the space for the concert, and if any of the parents were interested in a piano, then a sales representative was there to assist them. The parents looked tired and determined, glad to be seeing their children perform, steeled against the effort of another event. And then I saw Jay, far off to one side, in a chair, holding a program. He was dressed, as at the basketball game, in a good suit, and appeared to be just another big, well-fed Wall Street trader or banker or corporate executive whiling away an hour, with whatever aloofness in his expression attributable to pressing worries over matters large and high-dollared.

  Sally Cowles was the eleventh child to perform. Her interpretation of Beethoven's "Für Elise" was neither very good nor very bad— adequate, a bit of pedal work, the chords done well. But her determination was clear and she glared into her sheet music and then back at her hands, and the notes arrived more or less on time. Not that it mattered— she was sweet and spirited and were I her father I would tell myself that kid has no musical ability whatsoever but she's happy, she's going to be fine, she's one of life's winners.

  I took this opportunity to check on Jay, and could see him in half profile staring at Sally Cowles. He sat dead still, hunched over like a diamond cutter, careful in his scrutiny, blinking from time to time. His face was filled with pain. Yes, it was pain on his face, a kind of uncomprehending suffering. When the girl had finished her performance she sprang up and gave a formal, nervous bow, charming in its artlessness. She hurried back to her seat and sat down with heavy relief next to a woman in her early thirties holding a baby boy on her lap. This was the woman I'd seen while looking through Allison's window. The girl shrugged at her stepmother's comment and giggled with a friend sitting next to her and then returned her attention to the next performance, which was being given by a fat little boy with red curls, and who was much better.

  Jay looked down, as if to gather himself, and then back at Sally Cowles, who had no inkling of his interest. She was now giggling behind her program with her friend, rather rudely, in fact, and had slipped down on her seat. Her stepmother bent closely and said something sharp to her and the girl sat up obligatorily but returned to her secret communications with her friend. The fat little boy, meanwhile, sweetly filled the hall with Mozart. Sally Cowles was quite pretty but seemed still mostly unaware of it. Later, no doubt, it would complicate her life. Beauty always does.

  I took a step back from the crowd then, and watched as Jay stood up during the enthusiastic applause over the boy and made his way through the audience, toward the row behind the girl. He smiled polite excuses as he moved past the clapping mothers and fathers and kids until he lingered behind Sally Cowles's head, staring down at the perfect part of her hair. He let his fingers linger on the back of her seat, perhaps incidentally touching her shoulder or long hair. Then he lifted his hand next to her head, as if to gently smooth his palm along her head. I felt suddenly alarmed. Did he mean her harm? Sally's stepmother noticed him and looked back in curiosity. Jay eased onward, crinkling his eyes and nodding and saying all the right things as he reached the end of the row and fled toward the entrance. I was ready for this and followed him from behind, but when I stepped out onto Fifty-seventh Street, I could see his wide back already down the block.

  I ran and caught up. "Jay," I said. "Stop."

  I took him by the arm.

  "Bill? Hey. What a coincidence."

  "It's nothing like that."

  He smiled in false confusion and I had to remind myself that this was the same man I'd seen earlier sucking on adrenaline, smashing baseballs at the batting cage, a man who sat in an oxygen chamber penning unsent letters to Sally Cowles's father. I kept my arm on the sleeve of his coat. "You talk to me now, Jay, right now."

  "What's the problem?"

  It was a good try on his part, and if I hadn't known better I might have believed I'd made a terrible mistake. "You're good, Jay. You fooled Allison, and you fooled me for a while and who knows who else you've fooled, but—"

  He shook my arm away. "You're out of your mind, Bill."

  He stood there, squared off, daring me, and in some manner probably curious to see what I actually knew.

  "The girl who just played the piano was Sally Cowles, Jay." I spoke slowly, trying to calm myself. "As you know, Sally Cowles is the daughter of David Cowles, your tenant on the fourth floor of the building on Reade Street. She was on the bench at the girls' basketball game a few nights ago. You wanted the building where Cowles worked. That building, that specific building, and no other. Marceno told me that, thought you were nuts. You negotiated a trade for the land. They looked into it and saw you were offering a fantastic deal. So they made it. And then there's Allison's apartment. This isn't all coincidence. I don't get all the connections, Jay, but what I do get is very weird, very sick."

  Rainey considered me coldly, mouth a slit, like he might punch me in the face.

  "And then there're your lungs."

  He said nothing, but seemed to soften, even crumple before me.

  "From the herbicide."

  He blinked. "You found out?"

  "Martha Hallock."

  "She would know."

  * * *

  He'd talk to me, Jay claimed, but he wanted to go back to Brooklyn to do it. At first this made no sense to me, as there were any number of bars and restaurants in Manhattan where we could have stopped, but then I realized he probably needed either medicine or oxygen.

  "I'm not leaving you until I know the whole story," I said.

  "Right." His head was bowed and I sensed he was already far from me.

  "There are people looking for you, Jay, and they're making my life a fucking misery."

  "Right, right."

  "No, not 'Right, right'! You're making it better, for me, tonight, Jay. You are going to tell me what I need to know to escape whatever fucked-up situation you're caught in."

  We were quiet during the long cab ride, and who knows what the driver thought when he dropped off two grown men in front of a dark garage in the bowels of Brooklyn. Jay took out his keys as we climbed the steps. In the streetlight I could see the streaks on the risers from the oxygen tanks going up and down. "Somebody broke into my place yesterday," he said. "Didn't steal anything."

  We stepped inside and he sat immediately on his small bed.

  "Let me just do this," Jay said. He took what I thought
was a clear plastic device off the table, fitted the mouthpiece between his lips, and blew hard. A red indicator jumped. He coughed mightily and spat a glob of mucus into the wastebasket. Then he studied the red indicator and leaned over to a chart and wrote it down. The device, I suspected, was a peak-flow meter, used to measure lung capacity.

  "What was it?" I asked.

  He didn't answer, so I picked up the device and looked at where the red indicator had stopped along the measuring line.

  "Two hundred and thirty?" From the charts in the library, I remembered that a man of Rainey's size and age would have a lung capacity of well over six hundred milliliters. I did the math. His FEV was about 35— terrible. I was surprised he could stand.

  Now he picked up an aerosol canister off the table, shook it, fitted it into the inhaler, and pressed it. I could hear the quick burst of medication go into his throat. He closed his eyes and held his breath. Finally he let it out. He was opening up the airway. Then he fit an oxygen mask over his face, punched a square red button, and breathed deeply. The oxygen machine hummed. His motions had the smooth unconsciousness of habit. Then he clicked on another machine that showed several readouts: pulse, blood pressure, respiration per minute, and percent oxygenation. They all read zero. Jay picked up a wire with a loop and a red light on the end, fit it over his finger, and the oxygenation number beeped on. It was eighty-nine percent.

  "Even I know that's low."

  He nodded. Lifted the mask. "I can go for a few hours with it low but no more."

  "That night we drove back into the city?"

  "I was close to passing out."

  "You got some kind of oxygen tank in the back of your truck?"

  "Yeah." He looked at the monitor. It had reached ninety-one. He poked through some pills on a dish, picked up several, and swallowed them dry. I realized that he lived on a cycle of medications, up and down, through the day, and from what I'd seen, he was a different man in each of the phases of the cycle: high and charismatic and exuberant when the steroids kicked in, despondent and nearly catatonic at the low.

  "You just took a steroid?"

  "Yes. Man, I'm sorry I got you into all this, Bill. I never expected it, okay? It wasn't the plan, I was just trying to get back… I've been, I've been way out, man. I'm feeling the oxygen."

  He lay slack on the bed, eyes closed, a smile on his lips, and I felt like I was losing him.

  "Who was your father?" I asked, for this is often a way into who a man is.

  "My father? He was a bastard, a real hard-ass. He's the reason… he was just a bad farmer. Never should have been a farmer, but my mother loved the land, see. Potato farming was in his family, but potato farming on Long Island started to die in the sixties. He was frustrated. I accept that. A frustrated, bitter man. I don't think my mother was easy, either. They fought like hell. She once threw a pot of coffee at him. I loved her, though, I always did."

  "You worked on the farm?"

  "Sure, sure, I could drive a potato truck by the time I was eleven. Tractor, too."

  "Your dad kept farming?"

  "Even though there was no money in it, yeah. He broke even some years. We put some ornamental trees in, sold them to landscapers, that kind of thing."

  "Who was the girl from England?"

  Jay wasn't expecting my question, and his face fell into the same haunted melancholy I'd seen the first night I knew him, when he'd hugged Allison after the deal to buy the property on Reade Street.

  "Her name was Eliza Carmody," he said. "Beautiful girl. Sassy as hell. It was June after my sophomore year in college. I was going to— I'd been—" He sighed, unable to say it.

  I pointed at the yellow clipping on the wall. "The Yankees?"

  He nodded and pressed his lips together and closed his eyes.

  "Would you've made it?"

  "Who knows? Maybe. They had a great farm system. I'd played well for two seasons in college."

  "You had a shot."

  "Yeah."

  "You were a big kid from a farming town way out on Long Island, your family had no real money, your parents argued a lot, and you had a shot. You would've given it your everything," I thought aloud. "Is that fair to say?"

  "Fair to say, yes," he agreed. "At this late date."

  "So," I pressed him. "Eliza Carmody?"

  "Yeah, it was the summer, I was working for my father. I'd had a bunch of girlfriends in college that year, you know, the usual sort of thing, no one special, nothing really serious, basically doing more fucking than studying, playing ball and drinking beer, then I got signed, and they told me, Play out your season at college, finish the college playoffs, then we'll work you into the double A team in July. I had two or three weeks to kill, so I went home, worked out, threw the ball every day. I was just waiting for things to get started."

  In that time he did a little work for his father, Jay said, delivering a truckload of privet hedges to a big shingled place on the water a few miles away, he and a couple of other sweaty, sunburned boys working for seven dollars an hour, more than the Mexicans got, simply because of the color of their skin, and they pulled the green farm truck up in the driveway and started unloading the bushes, each with a heavy ball of earth wrapped in burlap. That was when he saw a tall young woman of about twenty hitting a tennis ball against a backboard. She wore a pleated tennis dress that just reached her fanny and the boys on the crew watched her with hunger, watched not only her tanned thighs and shoulders but the way she drilled the ball with aggression, again and again, grunting each time she hit it.

  "I just had to talk to her," Rainey said, adjusting his oxygen. "She was spectacular. I didn't care that I was some poor kid from a potato farm. Worse that could happen was she'd tell me to go to hell."

  He threw down his shovel, he said, and stepped onto the court, suddenly awkward and out of place within the crisp white lines.

  "Hello," she'd called, "those are not exactly tennis togs."

  He'd looked at his work boots. "No."

  She came over to him. "Can I help you with something?"

  Was she amused by his presence? Her accent was British, he realized. He liked it. "No. Not really."

  "You're not planning to serve it to me?"

  "Excuse me?"

  "Not planning to bang it at me?"

  "No."

  "Do you play tennis?"

  "Not really."

  "What good are you then?" She was standing quite close to him, considering they didn't know each other's names. "You have another sport?" she asked, squinting up into the sun.

  "Baseball." He watched her eyes move from his face to his throat to his chest and then back again.

  "I see," she said.

  "You're British?" he ventured.

  "Yes."

  "I was watching you hit the ball."

  "Yes, that was apparent."

  She was a year or two older, he could tell, and decades more knowledgeable about the world. "You're visiting?"

  "I'm just on holiday for a week with my mum and then it's back to London."

  "You live there?"

  "I do. You live here?"

  "Jamesport."

  "Where is that?"

  "Here on the North Fork. Just a small town."

  "So you may be accurately described as a small-town boy?"

  He wasn't sure if she was teasing him or belittling him. But he also knew they'd be having sex soon, perhaps within the day.

  "I guess."

  "But a big small-town boy."

  "I guess, yeah."

  "You must play sports?"

  "Baseball."

  "Oh yes, you said that. Are you quite good?"

  "Yes."

  "You are?" She smiled to herself. "How good?"

  It was his one piece of currency, he knew then and remembered now, his only one, and he had never used it before, at least not in this way, with someone from well outside his world, and he didn't know if she would find it valuable or even know what it meant.

 
"Well," he began, "I got signed by the Yankees."

  "The New York City Yankees?"

  "Yes, the New York Yankees is the name. Their farm system, I mean."

  "The baseball team."

  "Yeah," he said, a little frustrated, "the Yankees."