Evening in Paradise

by Lucia Berlin

  The “Doña” was in the shower. The maid brought me an aguita in a demitasse. I sat politely but it seemed as if this Ingeborg was never coming so I got up and looked around. A blue Chinese vase, a harpsichord. An antique wooden desk. On top of it was a photograph of an old couple in black, both with black canes. Snow against bare trees. A faded framed snapshot of a blond child with a borzoi. There was a large color photograph of my father in a silver frame. In his Oaxacan poncho, a big hat. He was wearing an open shirt, a rose-colored shirt that I had never seen before. He was smiling. Laughing. Behind him were ruins, the Andes, clear blue sky. I sat back down in the chair. The little demitasse spoon clattered.

  Ingeborg came in wearing a white robe, loose, showing long tan legs. Her blond hair was in a single braid down her back. A waft of what I now know to be L’Interdit. She was lovely.

  “God, I’m glad your plane was late, never could have made it. I guess I still didn’t, did I? But I’ll feed you a nice lunch anyway and pay for a cab back. You don’t look at all like him. Do you resemble your mother?”

  “Yes.”

  “She’s pretty? She’s sick?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you hungry? Lunch will be on time at least. Forgive me for not driving you to the airport. But most of all Eduardo (Eduardo? My father, Ed?) wanted me to feed you and to see that you weren’t lonely. But I don’t think you are a lonely type. That is a wonderful suit. The way he spoke about you I expected a little girl, a child who would want to color, or tease my birds.”

  I laughed. “I expected an old woman. With cats and National Geographics. Are you Swedish?”

  “German. You know nothing about me? But that is typical of him. I hate cats. I think there is a National Geographic around here somewhere. You only need one, they’re all exactly the same.”

  “When was that picture taken? The one on the desk?” My voice sounded stern, judgmental, just like his.

  She squinted, looking at it. “Oh, years ago, at Machu Picchu. Divine day. Doesn’t he look … happy?”

  “Yes.”

  Lunch was on a terrace above the garden. Ceviche. Sorrel soup, a purple clematis in the center. Empanadas and chayote. She only had the soup, drank gin and tonic while I ate, asking me questions. Do you have a novio? What does Eduardo do on Saturdays? Are those Italian shoes? That’s the worst about Lima … no decent shoes and no sunshine. What will you study? What do your parents talk about together? Coffee?

  She buzzed for the maid to go get me a cab. The phone rang. She said ¿Bueno? and then put her hand over the mouthpiece.

  “If you want to maquillarte the bath is down the hall.”

  “Sorry, love,” she said to the phone. The doorbell rang, the cab was there. She put her hand over the phone again and to me she said, “Sorry, dear, but I have to talk to this person. Come give me a kiss. Good luck! Ciao!”

  * * *

  On the plane from Lima to Panama I sat next to a Jesuit priest. The type of choice I often make. One that appears safe and sensible. He had had a nervous breakdown after working in the wilds for three years. The steward finally took me back to sit in his little kitchen.

  Mrs. Kirby met me in Panama. Her husband was vice president of Moore Shipping, the boats that my father’s company used to ship copper, tin, and silver. I could tell that she didn’t want to do this at all. I didn’t either. We shook gloved hands. It was hot. We were driving, in a Rolls, in the Canal Zone, in a faded photograph. Everything was off-white, the houses, the clothes, the people. The lawns were manicured, beige grass. Long shadows. An occasional palm tree. Hot. I asked her if it was summer or winter. She got on the tube to her chauffeur and asked him. He said he thought it was spring.

  “So what would you care to see?” she asked me. I said I’d enjoy seeing Panama City. In minutes the silent car had passed a magic invisible barrier and we were in Panama. It was as if the sound had been turned on. ¡Mambo! ¡Que rico el mambo! Car radios blared; music came from every shop. Street vendors sold food, parrots, toys, bright fabrics. Black women laughed in flowered dresses. Flowers everywhere. Beggars, children, dogs, cripples, bicycles. “This has been an adequate tour,” she said to the tube and we slid quickly back into the pale silence of the American sector.

  Mrs. Kirby and a lady called Miss Tuttle and I played canasta all day. Maybe just all afternoon, until teatime, finally. They scarcely spoke to me. Inquired after my poor mother’s health. Did my father just travel around telling people how sick my mother was? Was she sick? Maybe he had told her she was sick, so she was. Mr. Kirby arrived, in Bermuda shorts, a damp guayabera. He had been playing golf.

  “So you’re old Ed’s daughter. Apple of his eye, I expect.” A black servant brought mint juleps. We were on a veranda now, looking out on the ecru grass, drooping birds-of-paradise.

  “So Ed thinks shipping ore on Chilean tankers will placate them, eh? That his game?”

  “John!” Mrs. Kirby whispered. I saw that he was drunk.

  “If the Reds nationalize the mines only way we’ll keep our control is to boycott shipping. He’s playing right into their hands. Biting off the hand that feeds him, for sure. Pigheaded man, your father.”

  “John!” she whispered again. “Mercy. How are we doing for time?”

  I insisted that they not come to the airport, that I needed to study for an entrance exam. Turned out there really was such an exam and I should have studied for it.

  The best part about the Panama stopover was talking to the chauffeur on the tube. The airport was a low, ramshackle building, hidden by banana trees, fragrant vines, hibiscus. Another old man mopping the floor with a rag and a stick. Night fell. Blue runway lights. Black jungle ticking with insects and birds. What had Mr. Kirby meant about Chilean tankers? Was my father pigheaded?

  * * *

  In Miami it was morning and winter. In the airport women wore fur coats and their dogs wore fur coats. I was terrified by so many dogs. Little dogs with hair dyed peach to match the women’s hair. Painted toenails. Plaid bootees. Rhinestone or maybe diamond collars. The whole airport was yapping. No towels in the bathroom but a machine you pressed for hot air. I waited at the Panagra desk for my aunt Martha. I dreaded her too, hadn’t seen her since I was five. My mother said she was a hick. My parents fought about the money my father sent her and Grandma Proctor, my great-grandmother, who was ninety-nine. She and Aunt Martha lived in a tract house in Miami.

  I cringed when I saw her, with all the snobbishness of a vain teenager. She was grotesquely fat, with a goiter, an immense goiter on her neck almost like another Siamese head. Doctors must have found a cure for goiters. When I was little there were hundreds of people running around with goiters. Aunt Martha had blue permanented hair and big round rouge spots on her cheeks. She wore a red flowered muumuu and she crushed me to her, rocking me, hugging me. I was enfolded into the vast poinsettias on her breasts. In spite of myself I clung to her, sank into her and her smell of Jergens lotion, Johnson’s baby powder. I stifled a sob.

  “You sweet darling! I’m so glad to see you! Poor thing, you must be worn to a frazzle. Going off to college … your folks must be just busting with pride!” She swept up my bag. “No, no, you let me take care of you for a little while. Thought we’d have some lunch. Grandma and I, we come here a lot, to watch the planes. Good hot turkey sandwiches too.”

  We sat in a booth by the tinted plate glass overlooking the runways. Lay really, as she sort of lounged and I found myself lying into her, like on a chaise. We ate hot turkey sandwiches and then cherry pie à la mode. I was sleepy, leaned into her and listened, like to bedtime stories, while she told me about how my grandmother got TB so they moved to Texas from Maine. Then both my grandmother and grandfather died and Grandma Proctor came to care for Martha and Eddie, my father.

  “So poor Eddie had to go out and work when he was twelve years old … picking cotton and cantaloupe. He’d be so tired he used to fall asleep eating dinner late at night, barely get off to school in the morning. Bu
t he’s been working and providing for us ever since. He worked in the mines then, at Madrid and Silver City, put himself through Texas School of Mines. That’s where he met your mother.”

  How was it that I had not known any of this?

  “He bought us our place in Miami. Course it was hard for us to leave Marfa, our friends and all, but he said it would be for the best. Land sakes, I’ve been talking on and on. Best we be getting to the boarding gate.”

  She gave me a basket that had MIAMI BEACH embroidered on it. Inside was a little satin diary with a lock and key. Brownies wrapped in wax paper. She hugged me again.

  “Eat well, now. Always eat breakfast and get plenty of sleep.” I clung to her, didn’t want to leave her.

  * * *

  A long flight from Miami to Albuquerque. I was blasé now about oxygen masks and life preservers. I didn’t get off the plane in Houston. I was trying to think. What did my parents talk about? My father and Ingeborg. It’s hard for anybody to imagine their parents making love. It wasn’t that. I couldn’t imagine him wearing a rose-colored shirt. Laughing that way.

  It was sunset as we circled Albuquerque. The Sandias and the miles of rocky desert were a deep coral pink. I felt old. Not grown up, but the way I do now. That there was so much I did not see or understand, and now it is too late. The air was clean and cold in New Mexico. No one met me.

  LEAD STREET, ALBUQUERQUE

  “I get it … you look at it one way and it’s two people kissing, another way and it’s an urn.”

  Rex grinned down at my husband, Bernie. Bernie just stood there, grinning too. They were looking at a large black-and-white acrylic that Bernie had worked on for months, part of his Master’s Exhibit. That night we were having a preview and party at our apartment on Lead Street.

  There was a keg of beer and everybody was pretty high. I wanted to say something to Rex about that crack. He was so blasted arrogant and cruel. And I wanted to kill Bernie for just smirking. But I just stood there, letting Rex stroke my behind while he insulted my husband.

  I freshened up the onion dips and chips and guacamole and went out on the steps. No one else was outside, and I was too depressed to call anybody to come see the unbelievable sunset. Is there a word opposite of déjà vu? Or a word to describe how I saw my whole future flash before my eyes? I saw that I’d stay at the Albuquerque National Bank and Bernie would get his doctorate and keep on painting bad paintings and making muddy pottery and would get tenure. We would have two daughters and one would be a dentist and the other a cocaine addict. Well, of course I didn’t know all that, but I saw how things would be hard. And I knew that years and years from then Bernie would probably leave me for one of his students and I’d be devastated but then would go back to school and when I was fifty I’d finally do things I wanted to do, but I would be tired.

  I went back inside. Marjorie waved to me. She and Ralph lived upstairs. He was an art student too. Our place on Lead Street was in an old, old brick building, with high ceilings and windows, wood floors and fireplaces. Just a few blocks from the Art Department, on a huge lot with wild sunflowers and purple weeds. Ralph and Bernie are still good friends. Marjorie and I got along okay. She was good, simple. She was a bagger at Piggly Wiggly, cooked things like Beenie-Weenie Wonder. Came over one morning ecstatic because she figured out that she could just lie in bed and pull all the sheets and blankets tight, then just slide out carefully and tuck everything in. A real time-saver! She saved butter wrappers to oil cake pans with. Why am I being so petty? I loved her.

  “Guess what, Shirley! Rex is moving in to the vacant apartment! And he’s getting married!”

  “Damn. Well, that will pep things up around here.”

  It was exciting news. He was an exciting man. Young, only twenty-two, but his talent and skill were incredible even then. We all accepted the fact that he was destined for fame. He is pretty famous now, here and in Europe. He works in bronze and marble, simple classic pieces, not at all the wild stuff he was doing in Albuquerque. His sculpture is pure, the conception of it filled with respect and care. It catches your breath.

  He wasn’t handsome. Big. Red-haired with sort of buckteeth and a weak chin, a jutting brow over piercing beady eyes. Thick glasses, potbelly, beautiful hands. He was the sexiest man I ever knew. Women fell for him in a second; he’d slept with the entire Art Department. It was power and energy and vision. Not like a forward-looking vision, although he had that too. He saw everything. Details, light on a bottle. He loved seeing things, looking. And he made you look, made you go see a painting, read a book. Made you touch the eggplant, warm in the sun. Well, of course I had a wild crush on him too, who didn’t?

  “So who is she? Who could it be?” I sat beside Marjorie on our sagging sofa bed.

  “She’s seventeen. American, but grew up in South America, acts foreign, shy. English major. Maria is her name. That’s the scoop so far.”

  The men were talking about the Korean War, as usual. Everybody was afraid of the draft, as school was no longer a deferment. Rex was talking.

  “You have to have a baby. It came out last week. Fathers are now exempt from service. Can you think of any other reason for me to get married, for chrissake?”

  That’s how it started. I mean I don’t think we all just went to bed that night and conceived babies. But maybe we did, since exactly nine and a half months later Maria, Marjorie, and I all gave birth, and our husbands didn’t get drafted. Not the same day. Maria had Ben, a week later I had Andrea, and a week after that Marjorie had Steven.

  Rex and Maria were married by a justice of the peace and then they moved in. But not like other people. You know, you clean the place up, borrow a pickup truck, put up bookshelves, drink beer, unpack and collapse. They painted for weeks. Everything was white and beige and black, except the kitchen was a burnt ochre. Rex built most of the furniture. It was stark and modern, set off by his huge black metal and stained-glass sculptures, black-and-white prints. A fine Acoma pot. The only other color was on the ruby throats of the Javanese temple birds in a hanging white cage. It was impressive, straight from Architectural Digest.

  He even redid her. We went over, with stuff to eat, while they were unpacking. She was sweet and fresh. Lovely, with curly brown hair and blue eyes, wearing jeans and a pink T-shirt. But after they moved in her hair got dyed black and actually ironed straight. She wore black makeup and only black and white clothes. No lipstick. Wild heavy jewelry that he had made. She stopped smoking.

  She talked more when he wasn’t around, was funny in a Lucille Ball way. She joked about the makeover, told us that the first time he had seen her naked he had said, “You are asymmetrical!” He made her sleep on her stomach, nose flat against the pillow; her turned-up nose was a slight imperfection. He was always arranging her, the way she sat, stood. He moved her arms around as if they were clay, tilted her head. He photographed her endlessly. As she grew more and more pregnant he drew charcoal after charcoal study. One of the finest things he ever did is a bronze of a pregnant woman. It’s on the grounds in front of General Motors, in Detroit.

  We couldn’t tell how he felt about her though. Whether he had just married her for the baby. She must have had some money; he bought a rare MG-TD the day after the wedding. I can understand him marrying her just for the way she looked. He wasn’t affectionate. He mocked her and ordered her around, but maybe he just couldn’t show how he felt.

  Maria worshipped Rex. She deferred to him in everything, was almost speechless around him, although with us she joked and chatted. It was scary, or pitiful, however you want to look at it. Every night she went to the studio with him. “I can’t say anything, but he lets me watch him. It is so magnificent to watch him at work!”

  Little things. One winter morning I went to borrow some coffee and she was actually ironing his jockey shorts so they would be warm when he got out of the shower.

  It wasn’t just that she was young. She had moved around all her life. Her father was a mining engineer; her
mother had been ill, or crazy. She didn’t speak about them, except to say they had disowned her when she got married, wouldn’t answer her letters. You got the feeling no one had ever told her or shown her about growing up, about being part of a family or being a wife. That one reason she was so quiet was that she was watching, to see how it was all done.

  Unfortunately she studied Marjorie’s cooking. I was there one night when Rex got home. She proudly presented him a casserole made out of hamburger and Frito chips. He dumped it in her lap. Hot. “How tacky can you get?” But she learned. Next thing I knew I saw her with Alice B. Toklas, making Shrimp Aurore.

  Every day she changed the bottom of the birdcage. The New Yorker just fit. She deliberated for hours about what picture to put. No, Rex hates those Steuben glass ads! She hated the birds and would ask me to clip their nails for them, or take their dishes out to clean them.

  Maria was scared to death about having a baby. Not the physical part. But what do you do with it?

  “What will I teach it? How will I keep it from harm?” she asked.

  Those months were happy, with the three of us pregnant. We all learned to knit. Marjorie made everything pink, which was too bad, because it came out Steven. I made everything yellow. I’m practical. Of course, under Rex’s direction, Maria made clothes and blankets in reds and blacks and umber. A khaki baby sweater! We spent hours at Sears and Penney’s buying receiving blankets and nightgowns and shirts. We’d pack everything carefully away in plastic and then take turns going to each other’s houses and taking out every single item. We drank iced tea and ate Wheat Thins and grape jelly while we read to each other from Dr. Spock. Maria always had to reread the part about rinsing out the diaper in the toilet. She liked how he reminded you to take out the diaper before you flushed the toilet.