Maniac Drifter

by Laura Marello

  “How did you know it was me?” I said.

  “Mary was over at the house last night talking to Elaine,” Raphael said. “They mentioned that you worked for Ruth Allen, at the law office. I thought you must be the girl present at the investors’ meeting there, so naturally, when I saw you today I made the connection.”

  “They were talking about me?” I said.

  “I think she’d like to see you,” Raphael said. “Will you be at Paradiso’s benefit Thursday night?” I said I would. “Mary will be working then.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Good luck,” Raphael said, and went back upstairs, his smile exuding the mystical aura he had just acquired.

  ***

  At Cosmo’s restaurant, the front dining room had windows on Commercial Street. You had to pass through the kitchen to get to the rear dining room, which extended out on stilts to the bay, and had windows on the water, facing the coast guard wharf. The walls in the front dining room were cluttered with old photographs of Provincetown and Italy, faded posters for gallery exhibits and shows at the Provincetown Playhouse, wine bottles, boat buoys, pulleys and fishing nets. Some of Cosmo’s seascapes hung in the rear dining room. In both rooms the rafters held up oars, poles, boat masts and sails, rolls of tarp and canvas, and old picture frames.

  When I arrived at the restaurant that night it was booked solid from the first seatings at six until ten, so Gabe had set up the television in the kitchen, where the waiters and waitresses could catch glimpses of the CBS Evening News Temple of the Jaguars Report when they dropped off their orders or picked up their food.

  I listened to the report while I made salads, constructed antipasto plates and filled cannoli. That evening’s report was on the contents of the crates that had been confiscated by the FBI. With all the activities, I had not had a chance to find out much on my own about the skin-suit man, or even to take him out of his hiding place and run my hands over his double skin, so I was anxious to hear the report.

  Blaine walked into the kitchen clutching menus against her chest, and stood transfixed in front of the television. “Would you look at that,” she said, pointing to the screen. “Dominic, Gabe, Kate, it’s a jade mask. Isn’t that jade? Look how smooth.”

  Dominic glanced up from the oven where he was bringing out a pan of cannelloni. He saw the mask and nodded. Gabe leaned back away from the kettle of pasta, and looked at the screen. Then he shook his head and gave out a little one-breath laugh. “It figures,” he said, “that a woman who likes fast cars and minks would like a jade mask, even if it is for the deceased. You put that mask on your mummied uncle, dear. That’s what it’s for.”

  Blaine sighed and gave him a disdainful, superior look, as if he were not capable of appreciating great art. She wandered around the aluminum refrigerator to my side of the kitchen and whispered: “Isn’t it beautiful?”

  By this time customers had crowded in the doorway, so Blaine rushed from the kitchen to seat them. Gabe chuckled to himself while he stirred the pasta, as if he were relishing some private insight. Dominic placed a tray of lasagna into the oven. Then he came over to where I was busy at the prep counter, stood behind me, and watched me arrange an antipasto plate. “Have I ever told you how much the customers admire your antipasto plates?” Dominic said, throwing the towel over his shoulder.

  “Admire?” Gabe said. “They’re supposed to eat them.”

  “Antaeus once said they were architectonic,” Dominic said, patting me on the shoulder.

  “Don’t give her any encouragement,” Gabe said. “She’s vain enough already.”

  “Are you two fighting again?” Dominic said.

  “Fighting!” Gabe said. He picked up the kettle and poured the steaming water out into the sink, so only the pasta was left. “Fighting! We’re not even talking! We don’t see each other anymore.”

  “You saw each other this afternoon at the windsurfing regatta,” Dominic said. “You saw each other last night at the White Sands Costume Ball.”

  “And nothing in between,” Gabe said. “My point exactly.”

  “Looks like you’re in trouble, girl,” Dominic said.

  “But what about you, Dom?” Gabe said. “Still with Blaine?” He winked at Dominic.

  “How did you know about that?” Dominic said. I started laughing.

  “So are you still together?” Gabe said.

  “What do you mean ‘still’?” Dominic said. “We’ve only been together since last night.”

  “That’s about as long as it lasts,” Gabe said. He started a new kettle to boil. He had a serene, self-satisfied look on his face, as if he had just retaliated for the only two things that were bothering him.

  “I thought only Aztecs did that,” Dominic said, pointing to the television.

  “Did what?” Gabe said.

  “Ritual sacrifice. This temple’s supposed to be Mayan.”

  “The Toltec Mayans practiced it,” Gabe said.

  “How do you know?” I said.

  “We studied Pre-Columbian Art at Pratt,” Gabe said.

  “I always forget you used to be a graphic designer,” I said.

  “Don’t feel bad,” Dominic said. “Everyone forgets.”

  “Good,” Gabe said.

  I had finished making all the salads and cannoli the waiters needed for the time being, so I went out to the front dining room to look at the customers. Tuesday was usually a slow night at the restaurant. Not many people came in, and those who did were usually locals or summer residents, who had that night off after the hectic weekend. But tonight, after a week of CBS News Temple of the Jaguar Reports, temple updates, and news reports about the Harper Martin Defense Fund and Benefit Week in Provincetown, the restaurant was packed with summer residents from up-Cape, tourists from Boston, Providence and New York, people who should have gone home Sunday night. Some of them had taken a week’s vacation at the spur of the moment, just to attend the Benefit Week. They carried lists of the Benefit activities along with their maps and ferry schedules, and were trying to decide which events to go see. They talked about the celebrities they might run into in town, and looked around at the other tables in case a famous painter, writer, or television news anchorman might be in the restaurant at that very moment.

  Lance rushed into the kitchen, tore off the order sheet from his pad, clipped it on the metal wheel hanging in the kitchen, and spun it around to face Gabe and Dominic. “One parm, one carbonara, a stuffed flounder and a shrimp adriatico.” He went back around to the doorway of the dining room where I was still standing. “Four salads please, dear,” he said, bowing.

  While I prepared the salads, I listened to Dan Rather describe the contents of another confiscated crate. I was hoping he would get to the one I had opened, and explain what the CBS researchers and Carnegie Institute archaeologists knew about the two-faced woman, the whistling couple, the skeleton man, and especially the skin-suit man. But Dan was showing slides of the laughing figurines from the Nicaraguan Lake District.

  Dominic yelled to Lance that his order was up. Lance hurried in, arranged the plates on a serving tray, and swung the tray up over his shoulder. I worked on the desserts now. Cosmo came over from the hostess station and watched me garnish a ricotta pie. “So what’s with Nichole?” he asked. “Have you seen her?” She had not shown up at the windsurf races, and Cosmo had hoped she would, since he sponsored them at the restaurant.

  “She spends a lot of time working on the house,” I said. I set the pie on the counter. “You’ll find her over there.”

  Cosmo seemed to be absorbed in watching The Temple of the Jaguars Report, but added: “That Frank is probably there.”

  “Nichole is helping Frank work on the house,” I said. Cosmo made it sound as if Frank were over there sunbathing and drinking ice tea.

  “He’s an opportunist,” he said.

  Dominic walked over to the refrigerator and caught my wrist as he went by. When I looked at him, he shook his head. “He works hard,”
I said. “Harder than any of us. So does Nichole.”

  “Well I guess she’s paying him for it,” Cosmo said. “And he’s ruining her life. But she won’t listen — not to me. Not to her own father. I’ve brought people into this town … Dominic … Getz. I’ve made lives for them. But my own daughter quits me and won’t listen to me. She won’t learn. Except the hard way.”

  Dominic had grabbed my arm and was shaking his head vehemently. “You wanted something once,” I said quietly.

  “That’s exactly right,” Cosmo said, turning away from the television to look at me, as if someone jarred him awake. “I wanted something once. But I bit the bullet. I stayed with my wife, I kept the family together, I kept the restaurant afloat, so Nichole and Dominic and people like them, young people, would have something. And then she does this to me.”

  Cosmo had owned a restaurant with Nello once, when they were friends, fellow painters and business partners. The restaurant was called Nello’s and it was located on the east end of town near the Beachcombers and Art Association. The story was that Cosmo was having an affair with Nello’s wife and Nello found out. Nello’s wife left town and Cosmo started his own restaurant on the west end. Nello remarried and kept the east end restaurant. It seemed as if Nello’s wife got the bad deal, run out of town like that. Some people thought Cosmo’s wife had it the worst, publically embarrassed. Nichole thought that she, as Cosmo’s daughter, had suffered the most. The true romantics thought Cosmo had it the worst, because he really loved Nello’s wife and now he had to live without her, and had to stay in town with the mess he’d made, knowing he’d betrayed his wife and his best friend.

  “It’s not like Nichole did it to spite you,” I said. “She fell in love with someone.”

  Cosmo took the knife out of Dominic’s hands and began shelling prawns. “So did I,” he said. He pointed the knife at me. “So did I.”

  Dominic took my hand and said he needed something from the Land Ho. “You can help me carry.” I nodded dumbly and followed him. Gabe winked at me through the steam from the pasta kettles, and Blaine glared at me when we passed the hostess station. When we were inside the Land Ho, Dominic sat me down at the table. “I understand what you’re trying to do,” he said. “But keep in mind that nobody ever talks to Cosmo that way — not his wife, not me, not even the Selectmen. He’s one of the people who run this town.”

  “So why did he let me? Because I’m an outsider? Because I don’t know any better?”

  Dominic shook his head. “Because you’re Nichole’s friend. He must feel pretty bad. I’ve never seen him expose himself like that. Not in 20 years. He wants his daughter back, Kate.”

  “On his own terms,” I said. “And he wants me to help him. I’m no hero, Dom; and Nichole really loves this guy. I can’t tell her what to do. Not that she’d listen.”

  “You can try.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Okay.”

  When we returned to the kitchen, Cosmo was at the hostess station, talking to Blaine. Blaine was on the inside of the station, where the cashier usually sat. She leaned her elbows on the counter and looked up at Cosmo, who was also leaning over, from the outside, so they looked as if they were gossiping or confiding in each other. Blaine made a pout with her lips, then rubbed Cosmo’s arm with her hand, and tugged at the end of his goatee.

  After Cosmo left her to visit the dining rooms, Blaine came into the kitchen and watched me carefully, as if she wanted to learn how to make the desserts herself. Then she turned around to watch the television. “I heard you and Nichole are going to judge the Bocce Tournament tomorrow,” she said.

  “I’m not sure Nichole’s coming,” I said. I put two spumonis and a chocolate mousse on the high counter to be picked up.

  “Why wouldn’t she come?” she said, her voice arcing up into an innocent, youthful whine. She kept her eyes on the television.

  “She just might not come, that’s all.”

  Blaine was staring at the television without really looking at it, the way infants watch the shapes and colors in a mobile. She turned back to me, leaning her elbows conspiratorially on the prep counter. “Maybe you could talk to her,” she said. “I know it would mean a lot to Cosmo.”

  I shrugged and shook my head. “He knows where she lives, you know,” I said.

  “But Frank’s over at the house,” she whispered, leaning over a wedge of ricotta pie.

  “So what?” I said.

  “Please talk to her, please.”

  “I’ll try. I just don’t see why Cosmo can’t go over to her house himself if he wants to talk to her.”

  Blaine stood up and folded her arms across her chest. “Cosmo’s done a lot for this town,” she said. “You probably weren’t here when it started so you don’t remember. He took Dominic in after his dad died, and he brought Getz out here from Rhode Island, and he ran the Art Association. And he’s been through a lot, too. You weren’t here for that either. You just don’t understand.” She burst into tears and rushed through the kitchen toward the rear dining room, where the restrooms were located.

  Now Dan Rather was showing a picture of the skin-suit man. Dan said it was a representation of the cult god Xipe Totec. Dan explained that Xipe Totec was worshipped in the spring. He was the god of fertility, he protected the harvest, and the planting. To invoke the god, a young man was celebrated all year as the god’s representative, and then in the spring the young man was sacrificed and flayed, and his skin was worn by another member of the village. This was supposed to signify replanting, the symbol of the live seed in the dead husk.

  The god was believed to manifest itself in the man who wore the young man’s flayed skin. And this man, by wearing the skin of the other man, was believed to take on godly attributes. During the festival of the gods, this man in the flayed skin walked among the villagers and became a living cult image. So the stone statues and replicas of the god Xipe Totec were not images of a god, but of a man wearing another man’s skin, to invoke the god and make it manifest in him. So it was really a statue of a god impersonator.

  Dan Rather was explaining that the figure on the screen was cut out of lava stone. The man was sitting cross-legged, as the viewers could see, with his wrists resting on his knees. The mask he was wearing was the skin of the flayed young man, tied at the back of the head in elaborate knots like those carved on the caryatids of Tula. The jumpsuit he was wearing was again the skin of the flayed young man, with bows at the shoulders and waist. The rest of the skin appeared to be intact, Dan said, except for the flayed man’s hands, which dangled from the wearer’s hands, and the stitching around an incision on the chest, where the heart had been removed.

  “I guess the Frank Sinatra song, ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin’ takes on new meaning after you see this program,” Lance said.

  I remembered how delighted I had been when I found the crates at Hatches Harbor, since I thought Harper had shipped them all away. I remembered all the dragonflies buzzing and the seagulls crowded around the place. I remembered how carefully I had pried open the crate; it seemed like it took hours. And then I had brushed the straw back very carefully, and lifted each figure out, examined it, and put it back again in the exact same place in the straw — except for the skin-suit man. I had kept him, for good luck maybe — maybe for a wish.

  Gabe finished making pasta marinara and came over to the television. He put his arm around my shoulder. “We studied this,” he said. He pointed to the screen. “I could probably tell you more about it, if you’re interested.” He waved his finger around at the screen.

  “Really?” I said. I looked at him as if he were someone I had never met before.

  “This is just an overview. You know, for a television audience.” He kissed my forehead and went back to work.

  Dan Rather was saying that these people believed that certain clothing symbolized a transformation of the real through magic, and that magic could be compelled through the change of appearances. Dan said they believed that, in ritual
s involving certain skirt forms, hairstyles, jewelry and face paint, they could invoke the gods and compel them to manifest themselves, temporarily, inside the human being wearing the special costume.

  At ten o’clock, I cleaned the prep station, secured plastic wrap over the bowl of cannoli filling, threw the serving knives in the dirty dishes pile and took my apron off. Gabe approached me. “Going to Paradiso’s?” he said.

  “I think I’m going home,” I said.

  “Would you rather wait upstairs? At my place?” He put his arm around me.

  “I think I want to go home.”

  “Well, why don’t you wait thirty minutes, and I’ll go with you?”

  “I think I want to be alone.”

  “Alone!” he said. “You’re never alone. You weren’t alone last night.”

  I thought back to the White Sands Costume Ball the night before, and watching the Temple of the Jaguar report that morning from Getz’s bed. Of course, I could not remember anything in between, so I had to assume I had been with Getz.

  “Kate,” Gabe was saying. “Kate.” I looked up at him. “Remember how you answered my questions a couple weeks ago? Remember your promise?”

  I hoped he was referring to the question he had posed in the daytime, the one I could remember. Gabe had asked me if I would not sleep with anyone but him. “I promised I’d try,” I said.

  “You’re not trying very hard.”

  “Look, you can walk me home if that’ll make you feel better, but I really want to be alone tonight.”

  “Walk you home! I’ve made that mistake once before. No thank you.”

  I looked at him, puzzled. Was that the Sunday night with Joe that everyone was always talking about?

  “So don’t stand there looking coy,” he said. “Go home.”

  I turned and went.

  ***

  Wednesday

  When I woke up Wednesday morning, I found that I was home, and in bed with Harper Martin. He was sitting propped up on the pillows, naked except for his fedora and string tie, reading The Maltese Falcon. When he saw that I was awake, he winked at me. “Hi, doll,” he said. “How was your beauty rest?”