A few weeks later I was out shopping with Jane when we ran into a clean-cut, redheaded guy who turned out to be Roger. He apologized again for the color screw-up. I liked him.
Now, several years later, I wanted to invite him to our party but had long since lost his number and had no idea how to reach him. Neither did Jane. But Michael seemed to remember Roger mentioning that his wife worked at the desk of the Puerto Real Inn.
We stopped by the next afternoon, but it was her day off. We asked the guy on duty to have her call us. She didn’t call, so we stopped by again a couple of days later only to learn that the fellow at the desk had lost our number. All he’d told her was that two guys had stopped by looking for her, which had made her uneasy.
“We just want to invite you and Roger to a party,” we assured her.
“Oh my God,” she said with visible relief. “That sounds great.”
Bingo.
One down.
Fifty to go.
☼ ☼ ☼
It rained the day of our party.
The entire week before had been sun-drenched. Sun-blasted. It had been so sunny our sunglasses had begged for mercy. And now it was raining.
The day of our party!
I couldn’t help taking it personally.
Michael advised patience. Normally I would have taken his advice and played a few hands of Solitaire (known originally, and perhaps not coincidentally, as Patience) to while away the moist hours.
Unfortunately my concentration was shot.
“As you know,” Michael reminded me helpfully, “three different weather fronts could move through before six-thirty.”
And of course he was right. But I still felt panicky. Yes, I knew I wouldn’t expire if it was raining at party time. The planet would keep on spinning. Teenagers around the world would still say “like” (or their native tongue’s equivalent) at least once every thirty seconds.
And yet, all things considered, I would have preferred a gorgeous orb of light gliding slowly across the horizon and dipping regally into the ocean around eight o’clock.
So much more picturesque.
So much more festive.
We had hired a caterer for the party (complete with waiters, or servers as we were instructed to call them, and a bartender). So there wasn’t a great deal for me to do, except worry extravagantly and run a dust cloth over the bookshelves. Actually, even the dusting part was moot, since Lydia had come in the day before and scrubbed the house from stem to stern.
So that just left worrying.
I was up for the challenge.
And yet at some point around three o’clock, as the skies opened up wider than ever and the rains came tumbling down, I stopped fretting.
Our great room could easily hold thirty or forty, and the wrap-around balcony could absorb the rest. I’d always heard that cramped quarters make for good parties. This was a great chance to test that particular theory.
And of course the instant I made my peace with Mother Nature, she backed off. The rain stopped as if someone had turned off a tap—a familiar-enough phenomenon in Vieques.
The sun popped out from behind a bank of clouds and bombarded everything below with ultraviolet glee, clearly intent on making up for lost time.
Ahhh.
The caterer was due in an hour. At around four-thirty I showered and dressed (Michael was in town running last-minute errands) and went for a quick wander around the house before the masses descended. My mood trembled on the edge of nostalgia—we had, after all, been through a lot, including the trauma of Steve’s death—and yet as I moved from room to room I felt more celebratory than somber.
It was party time.
Forty-Seven
Martini & Bossy
Patty, the harassed-looking caterer, arrived punctually at five o’clock with a car load of food—and no staff.
“They’ll be here soon,” she said brightly, darting a glance at her watch. “I’m absolutely sure.”
Her use of the word absolutely made me absolutely sure they’d be late.
“What time are they due?” I asked.
“About five minutes ago.”
I helped her bring the food inside. It looked delicious, though a little skimpy.
“We’re expecting about fifty people, you know,” I said, pulling back the tidy foil coverings. “And they’ll eat a lot,” I rambled on. “People always eat a lot at my parties. I’m not sure why. I always serve lousy food.”
She seemed unfazed.
“There’s plenty. And anyway, people on Vieques drink a lot more than they eat.”
Drink. Did she say drink?
“Oh my God,” I gasped. “Where’s the booze?”
Her face assumed the same dodgy expression.
“The bartender’s bringing it.”
Deep breath.
So I was expecting a throng of thirsty guests in less than ninety minutes and there was no alcohol in the house–except for my usual stash of a case or two of vodka, but that was beside the point.
“And when is the bartender coming?” I asked.
She consulted her watch again.
“About ten minutes ago.”
I was tempted to grab her by the shoulders and shake hard.
“Call him!” I barked. “Now.”
I hardly knew myself anymore.
She peered at me tremulously from under her henna-dyed bangs and reached for her cellphone.
Short pause.
“Marcus, you bastard, where are you?” she growled.
Another pause.
“I see. And how about the party? Mr. Patrick is really counting on you.”
So true. Mr. Patrick really was.
“No? Then go to hell!”
She ended the call with a sharp tap of her brightly-lacquered index finger.
“He’s not coming,” she murmured to no one in particular.
“Could you repeat that?”
For the first time Patty began showing signs of discomfort.
“His mother’s sick?” she hazarded, backing away just beyond my reach.
“Really?”
“He’s not super dependable, I admit.”
She appeared to be on the verge of tears, or at least she was pretending to be.
“So who’s your back-up?”
She swallowed hard.
“Sorry?”
“Who’s your back-up bartender? I assume you have someone on call in case Marcus’ mother stubs her toe.”
She all but whimpered.
“Not really.”
I let this sink in.
“Then get in your car and drive to the store as fast as you can. When you get there, buy every drop of alcohol they have, rubbing and otherwise, and get back here pronto.”
I shoved my credit card towards her.
“And, by the way, you’re the new bartender.”
☼ ☼ ☼
When Michael got home fifteen minutes later I was staring in disbelief at the trays of hors d’oeuvres lined up on the counter.
“Yummy, smells good.”
“Don’t even start.”
“What’s wrong?”
His face registered immediate concern, which pulled me up short. Clearly I was overreacting. I sketched a brief smile.
“I’m being a little dramatic, I guess. I’m sure everything will be fine.”
“What will be fine?”
“The fact that we’ve got no alcohol and no one to serve the food.”
“Good God.”
For some reason I was beginning to feel bad again.
“Where is everybody?” he asked, looking around the room.
“The servers are late.” I looked at my watch. “Very late. The bartender’s not coming. The alcohol’s in his car, I assume, which means it’s not coming either.”
“Where’s the caterer?”
“At the supermarket buying booze.”
He assessed the situation in his usual business-like way.
“Ho
w does the food look?”
“Good, though maybe a little sparse.”
He thought for a moment. “Doesn’t matter. Booze is the important thing on this island.”
“That’s what Patty said.”
“At least she got one thing right.”
Michael sat down.
“If we had any vodka I’d ask you to make me a drink.”
I stared at him with pity.
“We have a situation on our hands, Michael, not a nuclear standoff. Belvedere or Grey Goose?”
By the time Patty got back we were slightly more relaxed.
“I ran into Marcus at the grocery store. He’s on his way!” she said.
First I had to process the fact that she’d run into our truant bartender skipping carelessly along the aisles of the local market while I was having a nervous breakdown.
“I thought his mother was on the brink of death.”
“Actually, she died.”
“Oh my God.”
“Years ago. I just told you that so you wouldn’t hit me.”
I should have slugged you anyway, I thought.
“The truth is, Marcus has a massive drug problem.”
“That’s comforting.”
“Which he’s fighting valiantly. I admire him a lot. And I forgive him for blowing us off.”
“You called him a bastard an hour ago.”
“Actually, he is, but he makes the best martini in the Caribbean.”
“Then I forgive him too.”
The servers drifted in at six-thirty. Patty greeted them like BFFs. This struck me as slightly peculiar, but perhaps in her world showing up nearly two hours late for work constituted exemplary behavior.
When the first guests arrived at six-forty, drug-addicted but fabulous Marcus had not yet graced us with his presence. I steered Patty to the bar and told her to get busy.
At seven o’clock, Marcus finally blew in. His excuse? He just couldn’t resist stopping to admire the sunset near his house in Esperanza.
Late or not, I have to admit he was worth the wait.
Sunset in Esperanza
Darkly handsome with an almost comically swaggering manner, he sidled up to me.
“I make you martini to die for,” he drooled.
Snaps to Patty for telling him which butt to smooch first.
I gazed into his almond-shaped eyes and, instead of bawling him out, mumbled, “Great.”
And the martini was sensational.
☼ ☼ ☼
The party gave every sign of being a rip-roaring success.
Marcus was moving guests through the bar area with admirable efficiency, very few people seemed to be pigging out on the food, and I was allowing myself to exhale for the first time in twenty-four hours.
Meanwhile, Michael had apparently decided to give tours of the house. All well and good, but from the few snippets of conversation I was able to catch as he shepherded his tour groups past, it sounded suspiciously like he was taking credit for lots of my ideas.
“Thanks, I do think a striped throw pillow here and there livens things up.”
This from a man who normally considers throw pillows the home accessory equivalent of Satan worship.
Then, just when the party was kicking into high gear, a couple of uninvited guests showed up. And when I say uninvited guests, I’m not talking garden variety hangers-on who’ll go anywhere for a free drink and a plate of canapés.
I’m talking Daniel and Charlie.
Yes, the very same Daniel who had painted our house the wrong color and then fired us for having the audacity to bring it up. In he sailed, pudgy and self-satisfied as ever, and trailing behind him was Charlie, the guy from the coffee house who had so thoroughly trash-talked Daniel behind his back a couple of years earlier.
I was chatting with Roger the Painter when this unsavory pair rolled in. In fact, we were discussing the wall color and how everything had turned out perfectly well in the end.
When Daniel spotted me he trotted right over.
“Well, I see you didn’t change the color after all.”
My first impulse was to give him a punch in his smug little snout.
“I tried,” I said, “but it kept coming back. Like Lady Macbeth’s stain.”
He stared at me blankly, then began giggling like a school girl. I was pretty sure he’d never read a word of Shakespeare and thought I’d made some sort of obscure gynecological joke.
So I tried to help him out (I was feeling somewhat magnanimous tonight).
“You know, ‘Out, out, damned spot.’”
This sent him into further gales of laughter.
Oh, why bother.
“And I see you haven’t upgraded your furniture either,” he sputtered between giggles.
“Actually, they had a sale at the Shoddy Furniture Warehouse in San Juan. We bought them out.”
This was Michael, who had appeared out of nowhere at exactly the right moment.
“Oh my,” Daniel said, struck speechless at the very thought.
But soon he sufficiently recovered himself.
“Roger darling, would you lead me to the bar? I need a drink.”
To his eternal credit, Roger looked mortified. But as a businessman who undoubtedly got plenty of work from Daniel, he obeyed.
And off they went.
Forty-Eight
Agent Down!
We weren’t thrilled to have our housewarming celebration crashed by one of our least favorite people in Vieques.
“I feel like I need a shower,” Michael said as Daniel headed for the bar.
“I know. It’s like we’re at The Decameron party and the Black Death just walked in.”
I was definitely on a roll with the literary references tonight. Michael gave me an odd look.
“Who brought him anyway?” he asked.
“Charlie,” I said, cocking my head in the general direction of the door.
“Who’s Charlie?”
“The grouchy guy from the coffee house. The one who told us how much he loathed and despised Daniel.”
“And who invited him?”
“Not me.”
He glanced at Daniel’s retreating back.
“Let’s cordon them off and declare a disaster area.”
“I’ll get the police tape.”
The minute Daniel and Roger drifted away from the bar, I moved in.
“Make me the smoothest martini of your career,” I told Marcus.
He batted his very long eyelashes and gave his shaker a tremendous workout.
“By the way,” I remarked as he handed over my delectable-looking drink. “See that roly-poly guy over there?”
“The one with Roger?”
“That’s the one. What’s he drinking?”
“Absolut and tonic.”
“Make the rest of his drinks triples. Every one of them.”
“No problem.”
The martini was heaven. Marcus was a truly talented man. But just as the fruits of his labors were beginning to take effect, a far worse fate than gatecrashers befell our little get-together.
I was standing at the far end of the balcony, just above the driveway, when I heard a garbled cry from below. Although the sun had set, the floodlight over the driveway illuminated the scene at my feet. Even so, it was a little hard to tell exactly what was going on. At first blush, it appeared to be a man and woman on their knees, embracing rather wildly.
Get a room, I thought.
But at second glance it became clear that they weren’t hugging. They were fighting.
“You little bastard!” the woman hissed. “You’ve stolen your last listing from me.”
“For God’s sake, Clara, let me go,” the man responded in an exasperated voice. “You’re crazy.”
Clara! What was she doing here? And who was she assaulting?
I squinted through the evening light.
It was Armando, our realtor.
“This was my listing,” she went on, p
ummeling his chest with her tiny fists. “You stole it!”
“I didn’t steal anything,” he said, backing away. “You tried to sell it for a whole year and couldn’t. You failed.”
“That’s a lie!” she screamed, charging at him.
Taken by surprise, he toppled over haplessly onto the driveway. Clara leapt on top of him and, securing him in what appeared to be a half nelson (her yoga training was obviously serving her well here), reached down and grabbed his testicles, giving them a powerful squeeze.
“Arrghhh!” he screamed, bucking upward with almost superhuman strength from the pavement.
The ferocity of his gesture threw Clara clean off him, causing her to fall backward onto the low garden wall with a squishy thud. There followed a brief, dramatic pause as Armando stood up and shook himself off. Then silence.
I sprinted down to the other end of the terrace to get a closer look, only to have my worst suspicions confirmed.
Clara lay at Armando’s feet, out cold.
My first thought, I’m embarrassed to admit, was for myself. I didn’t want our party ruined by the fact that one of my male guests had just knocked an uninvited female interloper unconscious.
Yes, I know. I’m a Bad Person. So sue me.
I glanced around quickly to see if anyone else had witnessed the altercation. Luckily everyone seemed so well-lubricated they wouldn’t have noticed if a neutron bomb had detonated under our breadfruit tree. That is, with the exception of Jane, who was staring directly at me from the other end of the balcony, a look of unbridled horror on her face.
I tried to move but couldn’t. Jane, with her usual purposefulness, strode down the veranda, grabbed my arm and shepherded me gently towards the staircase.
“Oh my God,” she murmured. “I hope she’s not dead. You’ve got good insurance, but not that good.”
“Thanks,” I said, my teeth chattering with dread as we made our way down the staircase. I swung open the carport gate. Armando was patting Clara’s thin cheeks.
“Wake up, bitch, wake up,” he muttered mechanically
When he noticed us standing above him he looked almost relieved.
“She fell,” he said.
The Coconut Chronicles: Two Guys, One Caribbean Dream House Page 29