“No,” Meche says. “I’m not letting any ash or particulate mix in and screw up the color.”
“Any more than you’ve screwed it up already?” It earns me a scowl, and I put the grit back in its pack.
After another fifteen minutes of adding different shades from bronze to butterscotch, Meche finally unbends and adds the mauve I suggested. And even though she’s mucked it up with all the other pigments, the color does its job and moves it closer to Nadia’s skin tone.
“Two grains of the lightest blue, and half a grain of white should do it,” I say after I study what’s on the plate.
After they’re added in, Meche pours the catalyst and a measure of water into the now-fully-pigmented compound. She mixes it gently, with a light, flexible palette knife. It bubbles up then turns thick and glossy.
“So keep completely still now,” Meche says, grabbing the old woman’s wrist firmly, palette knife poised just above it. “It may sting a little. Like an astringent you might use on your face. You tell me right away if it’s any worse than that, okay?”
The old woman nods.
Meche may not be the most accomplished colorist but I’d put her impasto skills up there with the best. She spreads the paste evenly on the skin, then scrapes it down within a hair of translucence. But it’s not translucent, it’s opaque, and the tattoo’s gone.
“Now we just have to wait for the skin to set up, so the texture’s right,” she says, pushing her hair behind her ears. “Should take about 20 minutes. You’ve got to just sit until then, Nadia. No jarring movements and don’t touch anything, okay? After that we’ll test it, and hopefully you can get dressed and we’ll be on our way.”
Meche gives me a look when she passes me on her way to the front door. I follow her out of the house.
“You some kind of artist?” she asks, resting her forearms on the railing of the porch.
“A painter. Color’s my thing.”
She nods. “No wonder Finn insisted on bringing you in.”
“So, is this going to work?”
“Well, old skin is very thin,” she says. “It might look a little off. And pray she doesn’t have an allergic reaction.”
I light the delayed cigarette and lean on the railing next to her.
“Worse than bad for you,” Meche says after a moment, waving away the smoke. “Terrible for you. I’ve never understood why people feel the need.”
“It’s relaxing. And you make me nervous.”
“Wow. Honest.”
“No reason for me to lie. I’m sure you already know you have that effect on men.”
“It’s artificial you know.”
“What? It’s all instaskin, and beneath it you’re really ugly, stupid, and incompetent?”
She laughs. “It’s just adrenaline you’re feeling. The rush of being on an adventure with someone you think is a bit dicey and amoral. It’ll wear off soon, and unless your adrenals are completely shot from the smoking, you’ll be right back to normal.”
“Good God, do you reduce everything to its chemical impulse?”
“Hazard of the vocation. More or less like people who can’t keep their hands off other people’s pigments.”
“And here I thought I was going to get a thank-you for my effort.”
She grins at me. “Yeah, me too.”
The instaskin doesn’t look as perfect on Nadia’s wrist as it does on Meche’s, but it passes muster at the roadblock we hit on our way out of town. It helps that it’s late and that the patrol is shorthanded. We don’t even have to get out of the truck. Nadia falls asleep resting her head on Meche’s shoulder. The Cuban woman looks down at her every so often, and each time she does, her face goes soft.
When we get to Holy Innocents, I pull the truck up behind the church. The rectory is dark, but as soon as I knock, Father Tom opens the door and ushers us in. He points Meche and me to the kitchen, where he has a freshly brewed pot of coffee, then shows Nadia to the room he’s set aside for her until one of her daughters can come to get her.
“What a trip,” Meche says between sips of her coffee. She’s standing against the counter, cup held between both hands.
“I’m disappointed it was so much more exciting on the way in than the way out,” I say, dropping into one of the chairs facing her.
“I’m not. Most people try to avoid chasing disaster, you know.”
“Says the woman who runs a completely illegal peña.”
“Yeah, but everything there is under my control.”
“Until it isn’t. Anyway, we did good. Nadia seems happy to be back.”
“She’s got family and friends here,” Meche says.
I stare into my coffee cup. “You didn’t really mean what you said out there, about nobody waiting for your return?”
“Father Tom and Finn, because of the work we do together, but nobody else.”
“I find that hard to believe.”
“Do you? You think you know me well enough to say that?” She smiles a little.
There’s a quality about her I’d love to try to capture in paint. She’s golden and hard, like a knight’s armor or an archangel’s splendor. But beneath it is something else. Something darkly complicated, carrying the trace of many living things at once.
“You aren’t really what you seem, are you?” I say.
“I suppose that depends on what I seem.”
“You seem perfect. Remote. Like a goddess.”
She laughs, but I don’t think she’s amused. “That must explain it then. The way mortals run when I show up.”
“I didn’t run.”
She sips her coffee, looks away.
“1521 Lombard in the Bardstown section of the city,” she says after a few minutes.
“Huh?”
“The Cuban peña.” She sets the mug on the counter and picks up her handbag.
“Are you offering me a job blending pigments?”
“No, not exactly,” she says, then ducks down and kisses me quickly on the lips.
“Tell Father Tom I’ll talk to him tomorrow,” she tosses the words over her shoulder on her way out.
She leaves a flurry of tiny golden bees in her wake.
“Mercy. What a night,” Father Tom says, coming into the kitchen and straight through the golden cloud.
Okay then. I’m seeing things.
He heads for the coffeemaker. “Caffeine. My downfall.”
He sits opposite me, looks at me over the rim of his cup. “Tired?”
“Perplexed.”
He nods. “Most of us are these days. And I think it’s going to get worse before it gets better again. You just have to hang on to your faith.”
“I don’t have any.”
“Sure you do,” he says. “You believe in something or you wouldn’t be here. In this particular place, at this particular time, on this particular journey.”
I shake my head. “I was brought to Hastings kicking and screaming and against my will.”
He laughs. “But that’s almost always the way, son.”
I wonder if he knows that, like Finn, I’m a son who’s lost his father. And like my brother-in-law, I’m always waiting to hear my father’s voice again. Or an echo of it.
I stay longer than planned. When I get home the apartment is empty, but there’s a note from Cassie about deciding to spend the night at her mother’s place. I crawl into bed and fall asleep immediately. My cell phone wakes me at 2 a.m. It’s Francine, my mother-in-law, and moments later I’m peeling out of my parking spot and leaving rubber trails down the street.
I get to the hospital moments before the aide wheels Cassie back to the ER cubicle from wherever a technician has been performing the ultrasound.
“Hey,” I kiss her forehead. “You had me worried.”
“I’m fine,” she says. Her eyes are all water. “They couldn’t find the fetal sac.”
“I know. The nurse told me.”
“It’s probably on Mom’s car seat, among the blood. A
long with my cell phone and who knows what other things I managed to lose on the way.” The tears drip from the slope of her nose, down the channel above her mouth, all the way into her ears.
My eyes well up too. “We can try again. We’ll end up with a beautiful mini Cassandra or a spoiled little Delevan. Hell, maybe even both at once, and wouldn’t that make your mother happy?”
She tries laughing – a messy, mucousy effort – then half-sits on the examining table to fit herself in my arms. She’s so exhausted she falls asleep there, and after a while I shift to lay her back down.
The hair around her face is limp and dark with sweat. I brush it away and notice her face now has the wintry precision of an Andrew Wyeth painting: all sharp angles, dark hollows and frozen lines. A glacier’s beauty.
It is a landscape carved by an uncaring universe that thinks nothing of severing the piece from the source; of sending its erratics out, without care for where they’ll end up.
No matter what the priest says, there is no faith to be found in any of this.
3.
The brownstone looks like any other, except for a discreet representation of Our Lady of Charity on the doorjamb. I wouldn’t actually know who the little plaque depicted if Meche hadn’t told me that the Cuban version of Mary is always shown hovering over the ocean where she appeared to three fishermen storm-tossed in their boat.
I don’t think about religion much, but it strikes me, as I stand in front of the door wavering about whether to knock, that turning to Mary is all about unexpected rescue. About getting on your knees and asking a woman to take pity and intercede.
I almost turn around then. But a young couple – she an attractive brunette in a bright cocktail dress, he light-haired and tall – join me on the stoop.
“Have you knocked yet?” he asks.
I shake my head.
The woman does the honors.
I expect Meche when the door opens, but it is an older man with scant hair and aquiline features. He glances at our wrists. None of us has a tattoo.
“Cuba libre?” he asks.
“Mentiritas,” the couple next to me say in unison.
The doorman waves the couple in, then turns to appraise me.
“Can I help you with something?” he asks in perfect English.
“Meche gave me the address.”
He cocks an eyebrow. For an instant I’m struck by the unfairness of whatever would give him scant head hair but such profuse eyebrows.
“I see. Wait here,” he says, then closes the door in my face.
I sit on the steps, back to the door, staring out at the quiet street. It’s not late, but there’s no one around. It’s clearly a high-end neighborhood – the houses are restored down to the last dentil. And even the trees, enclosed in mesh cages to keep the dogs off them, look groomed.
I hear the door open behind me, and the doorman motions for me to follow him.
“She said she’ll find you as soon as she’s freed up,” he says when I’m in the foyer. Through the glass of the second door, I see a group of people, dressed up, drinks in hand. It looks like a cocktail party.
“Second floor’s off limits unless she tells me otherwise,” the man says, opening the inner door I’ve been gazing through. “Bar’s in the living room, all the way through to the end. Meche asked me to give you the employee password – oriente – so you don’t have to pay for your drinks.”
“That password never changes. The ones to get in change every hour. Most everyone here is registered to get them via RSS feed,” he says.
“Efficient,” I say.
He smiles.
The front room I enter has sideboards and buffet servers shoved against the walls, laden with chafing dishes. Twenty or thirty people congregate in the center of the room, chatting with each other in Spanish. Every so often one peels off and goes to get food. An attendant fills a plate with whichever dish the guest indicates, and then quickly – so quickly it takes me several times to be certain it’s happening – the guest pays the attendant.
After the front room, I pass a room closed off by pocket doors; to judge from the clanking emanating from within it is almost certainly the kitchen. The living room on the end has four sofas in the center and they’re full, even the sofa arms and the low table in the center serve as seating. The far wall is so crowded with people standing I immediately know the bar is there, though I can’t see it through the press of bodies. On the same wall but opposite corner is a door with an iron grate, leading outside.
The wall on the right is lined with bookshelves. An old man sits in a hard side chair there, looking at the tips of his buffed shoes while a young woman stands behind waving a thick wad of money. She’s talking to a pleasant looking man, roughly her age. After a few minutes he pulls out a wallet and retrieves what looks like a condom packet. After he counts the bills, he hands the packet to her and walks away. Her hand drops on the old man’s shoulder.
Without my having noticed, Meche’s at my elbow.
“You’re here,” she says. “But, you have nothing to drink.”
“Hadn’t gotten that far.”
She links her arm through mine, parts the crowd around the bar and directs a rapid stream of Spanish at the bartender. Then she guides me to the grated door.
“Let’s sit outside.”
“What drink did you order for me?” I ask her as we sit at a table at the edge of the deck that overlooks the backyard.
“If you think you’re getting anything but rum at a Cuban peña, you’re sadly deluded,” she says. “We don’t sell anything else.”
“Well, food. And something else that comes in little packets that look like condoms.”
“Instaskin. The pricey version,” she says. “And we do actually sell a couple of other items, but none you need to know about.”
“Illegal stuff.”
“Every last thing at the peña is illegal, remember?”
“It’s not exactly what I expected,” I say, looking inside through the window. “The peña Finn described to me was, well, rowdier. More street festival than cocktail party.”
Meche nods. The light coming through the windows falls on her in such a way that she’s turned molten.
“The peñas that move from week to week are that way. Hectic and abuzz with the energy of what will never be the same twice,” she says. “It’s an intoxicating mix. Still, people like that it’s much safer here. No gang members running things, just my own staff. And we don’t allow guns. Except the ones we sell, of course, and those you don’t get until you’re already out the door.”
The man with the eyebrows comes through the door with our drinks.
“Silvio manages the peña for me,” she introduces him as he places the drinks on the table. “And, Silvio, Del doesn’t ever need a password to get in.”
The eyebrows shoot up again, but he nods and returns inside.
“What am I drinking?” I stare down at a fizzy, clear drink with a green leaf floating in it.
“Mojito,” she says. “Rum, lime juice, club soda, sugar and mint.” She laughs when I make a face.
“Want mine? Rum and coke. Cuba Libre,” she pushes it toward me. “Free Cuba. Or as some of us call them, mentiritas. Little lies.”
“Don’t you drink anything without sugar in it?”
“No.” She looks amused. “My grandparents made their fortune in cane and its derivatives.”
I take a sip of hers, keep the mojito.
“So now we won’t have any secrets from each other,” she says, reclaiming her drink.
“What?”
“If you drink from the same glass, you share each other’s secrets,” she says. Then, “maybe it’s an ink thing.”
“Don’t you ever just think of yourself as American?”
“Hello? How was it we met?” she says. “I’ll think of myself American again when I don’t have to wear an i.d. bracelet printed on my skin.”
I stare into the window. “I thought there were
lots of black Cubans.”
“Sure,” she says. “Just not so many in the first wave of the exile community or their kids. The upper crust in pre-revolutionary Cuba was mostly white. And the upper crust always has a better chance of escaping and getting their families to the new homeland. That’s my clientele. But you didn’t come to the peña to talk about Cuban politics, did you?”
I stay silent for a while. “Would you do it?”
“What?”
“Leave everything you know and go somewhere foreign for the rest of your life?”
“Sure. If I was as scared as my grandparents were. Or if I thought I couldn’t take care of my loved ones otherwise.”
“But that’s not exactly what you’re asking, is it?” she adds after a moment.
I look down at her garden. The scrawny arborvitaes are strung with white Christmas lights that make them look frosty even on this warm night.
“I don’t know what I’m asking,” I say after I return my eyes to her.
“You’re asking if you should stop being a stranger in a strange land and go back home,” she says.
I don’t know if it’s the mojito or the hour, but my eyes are damp, and I have to bite the inside of my cheek to keep the icy lump in my chest from cracking into sharp little pieces.
“Cassie is here and shouldn’t the people we love define home for us?” I say once I know my voice won’t give me away.
She leans in to study me. “That’s one view. The other is that home defines who we love.”
After a few seconds she leans back in her chair again. “Of course, since the second view is the excuse for why I’m marked with an identity tattoo, I’m not partial to it. But, it’s also why my peña is such a comfort to the people who frequent it, so who can say it’s wholly wrong?”
She picks up her drink, but doesn’t put it to her lips. “Exile is a strange and cruel state, Del. But the sense of being in exile isn’t precipitated by the land you inhabit.”
“There’s no land in Hastings.”
She exhales loudly. “How is it you can draw on magic and still be so literal?”
I give a short, startled laugh. “What I do with the colors of my paintings – or your instaskin – isn’t magic.”
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