The restaurant was sparsely attended and I assumed this was due to the fact that in late July its habitués were far, far away from New York or in the Hamptons. Ben was talking to a waiter.
“Hi, Ben,” I said.
Ben looked up from the menu. “Hi, Santiago. Please sit down.” Then he turned to the waiter. “I told you already,” he said in the rotund tone of a pissed-off monarch, “bring me a bottle of what you personally think is the best champagne in the house.”
The waiter’s face reddened. “But sir …”
Ben crossed his hands, palms open, and pushed them toward the waiter’s face. “I told you what I want. Now leave me alone.” Flustered, the waiter headed for the bar, looking as if he couldn’t make up his mind whether to curse aloud or kill Ben.
“Goodness gracious, Ben. What’s going on?” I said.
“Santiago, my friend,” Ben said smiling, as if he had just noticed me. He put his hand on my shoulder. “You certainly look dapper today. How are you?”
“Fine. But …” I was dying to find out why there was so much tension in the air, but now that I had a chance to see him in his full glory, my breath was taken away. He wore a magnificent white suit and a gold-leafed tie. Although he was a couple of years younger than I, recently his hair and his beard had grayed. Now he might have been mistaken for a sultan incognito, somebody who had been conceived in a womb of gold.
“Why is everyone acting so weird?” I asked.
Ben’s eyes narrowed, his lips pursed and with hatred in his voice he growled as he looked toward the bar, “I’m about to sue this place for fifty thousand dollars.”
“Why?”
Ben put a finger to his lips. The terrified waiter approached us with the champagne.
“Let me see what you have there,” Ben said.
The waiter pulled out of the bucket a bottle of Dom Perignon.
“Dom Perignon!” Ben exclaimed. “Americans think that’s the only champagne in the world.”
“Sir, you told me I should choose the champagne,” the deeply mortified waiter complained.
I was becoming embarrassed by the way Ben was bullying the waiter.
With the air of a grand lord who’s grown up surrounded by servants at his beck and call, Ben said, “Well, what are you waiting for? The least you can do is open the bottle.”
The waiter complied with Ben’s wishes and we toasted to each other’s health.
When we were left alone, Ben said, “Chico, I’m suing these people because the last time I was here they lost my umbrella, which was also my cane.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said, full of sympathy, knowing that Ben had only the best of everything. “But there’s no need to take it out on the poor waiter. Did he personally lose the umbrella?”
“But it was made in Paris,” Ben said, with the total indifference of rich South Americans toward their inferiors. “It was especially designed for me. The knob was solid gold. It was unique. I haven’t been able to replace it yet.”
A few years ago, Ben had had a malignant tumor removed from one of his legs. The operation had been so severe that he ended up with a limp and thus needed a cane to get around.
“And you know how Americans are,” he went on. “They don’t take you seriously unless you threaten to sue them. As soon as my lawyer called the management they started listening to me. Anyway, they’ve promised to have the cane replaced. Exactly like the one I lost. They’re having it made in Paris. But to mellow me, they invited me to a dinner, with three guests, everything on the house, including the drinks. I swear to you, Santiago, if anything goes wrong tonight, I’ll put them out of business.”
“I’m sure everything is going to be perfect,” I said, feeling like I was going to break into a sweat, a knot forming in the pit of my stomach. I opened the menu and studied the appetizers and main courses and desserts. “Everything sounds delicious.”
“I recommend the wild boar,” Ben said. “The rabbit breast and the broiled snapper are good too.”
The waiter approached us. We ordered the appetizers and main courses, and Ben asked the waiter to recommend the wine. Alone again, I said, “Where is Scheherazade?”
“She stayed in Chile. I just don’t know about women anymore. I give them everything, take them everywhere, and there isn’t one who understands what makes me happy. I went to a singles bar the other night just to try something different. So there is this beautiful woman sitting next to me—perfect-looking in that horrid Cher style—not exactly my type. Anyway, suddenly she turns to me and says, ‘If you don’t stop looking at me, I’ll stub my cigarette in your eyeball.’ “
“But Ben, you shouldn’t go to those places. I’m sure there are plenty of women who’d give anything to make you happy.”
Ben patted my hand. “That’s the most romantic thing anybody has ever said to me. I wish there was a woman who talked to me the way you do.”
“I had no idea you were in Chile,” I said, to change this line of dialogue. “Why did you go there? I thought you hated Pinochet and had sworn never to return until Pinochet was shot.”
Ben’s rubicund face saddened. “Chico, one day I was walking down the beach in Macuto with Scheherazade and suddenly, Santiago, something in the air, a smell, you know, like Proust’s madeleine … it hit me so strong and took possession of me. And I remembered the great meat empanadas I used to eat in Santiago when I was a child and my father was ambassador. I don’t know what came over me. Before I knew it, I was landing at the airport in Santiago.” He fell silent, wolfed down a glass of champagne and looked devastated.
The suspense was so unbearable, I had forgotten to breathe. “So what happened?”
“Oh, Santiago. I have never been so disappointed in my life. The restaurant was still there, and they still made meat empanadas, but the old cook had died, and the new empanadas tasted plastic, like McDonald’s food.” Ben took out his pipe, filled it and lit it, creating a huge cloud of aromatic smoke. I sipped my champagne in silence. I didn’t want to talk; I didn’t want to spoil his moment of perfect dejection. Finally, he said, “Chico, I had traveled thousands of miles to recapture the empanadas of my childhood, and they had become plastic, like everything else.” He finished, his voice quivering with grief. “They had become a fraud. I had a fit. The police were called and I was arrested and taken away. Fortunately, Scheherazade called the Venezuelan ambassador, who called the President and threatened to cut off all oil supplies to Chile unless I was released on the spot,” Ben was saying as the artichokes arrived.
A gleaming white limousine was waiting for Ben when we got out of the restaurant. The air was so muggy and swamplike that I gladly accepted his offer to give me a lift home.
Although Ben Ami had found fault with the waiter’s choice of wine, and had found the artichokes tough, the wild boar bitter, the rabbit overcooked, and the desserts mediocre, the dinner had been a success—the lawsuit had been averted, at least for tonight. I was pleased with my mediating role; for a moment I considered offering my services to Rupert’s to placate their irate, displeased rich South American customers. I was feeling great—riding a limo on a night like this beats taking the grimy subway back home. And since I did not have Ben Ami’s excruciatingly high gourmand’s standard, the meal for me had been excellent, if not sublime.
We were seated comfortably, Ben puffing on his pipe, I smoking a Newport Light, when Ben said, “I’d rather be a clochard in Paris than a rich man in New York. You have to move out of this city, Santiago. You can stay at my place in Paris anytime.”
“I’d love to,” I said, wishing he would extend the open invitation to his empty place at the Museum Tower. I remembered Paris fondly yet vaguely. Ben had flown me there for a weekend expressly to show me Gerard de Nerval’s grave. “But what would I do there? Here I can make a living, kind of. Besides, I’d feel more displaced there than here. By now, I feel kind of a New Yorker, you know.”
“Marry my cousin Edna,” he ordered me. “She�
�s just as rich as I am. And she doesn’t have parents or brothers or sisters. It’s all her money. Plus she’s a fag hag.”
“Ben, you make it sound like I’m a fortune hunter.” I had met Edna, a doctoral candidate for a degree in Divinity. I had found her nice, quiet, thoughtful, scholarly, and a lady to boot. She worshiped Ben, and I knew she would have married me just to please him.
“Anyway,” I added, “if I haven’t married a woman it’s not for a lack of candidates. There’s always Claudia. Come to think of it,” I said, picturing close-ups of Claudia and Edna in my mind’s eye, “I’d much rather marry Edna.”
The limo had stopped at a red light on Forty-second Street and Eighth. “And to think I used to love Times Square,” Ben said, denigrating his old neighborhood. “I don’t know how you can stand living here with all that,” he said, waving his hand in the direction of the porno palaces, the junkies and criminals outside the window. “Chico, that’s the Reagan–Bush legacy. If you don’t make $100,000 a year, and you haven’t sold your soul to a multinational, you don’t belong in Manhattan. You’re supposed to live here in Times Square or move to the South Bronx and fuck yourself into extinction smoking crack.”
“Gee, Ben,” I said, “money has really made you wise. Do all rich people have your political savvy?”
“All rich people are assholes. I’m different because I’m an artist; I have the soul of a poet. With the right woman in Paris, I wouldn’t mind being poor,” he sighed.
I wondered if God, in his infinite inventiveness, had ever conceived of such a creature. The limo stopped in front of O’Donnell’s bar. “Ah, the abode of my bohemian youth,” Ben waxed philosophic, his voice tinged with nostalgia. I knew that deep down Ben yearned to turn the high places where he lived into the gutter.
I gave him a hug. He smiled and nodded but sat very still. As I opened the door to let myself out, I saw, standing in front of my door, Hot Sauce’s tiny figure. I waved at her, but she was so busy trying to lure customers that she didn’t see me. Out of the blue, a brilliant idea came over me. This is indeed providential, I thought. “Ben, I think I have the answer to all your prayers.” I turned toward the street. “Hot Sauce,” I called out, “come here. There’s somebody I want you to meet.”
She recognized me. “Hi, Santiago,” she said as she slithered toward the limo exuding carnality and lust. “How’re you doing, you latino hunk?”
Sitting in the limo, with my feet on the pavement, my eyes met her eyes. “I want you to meet an old friend,” I said.
Suspiciously, she checked the figure of Ben Ami nesting in the deep recesses of the limo. “He ain’t a weirdo, is he?”
“Come on, Hot Sauce,” I protested. “Would I introduce you to a freak?”
“Hot Sauce,” Ben exclaimed, his eyes dancing with excitement. “Would you care to join me for dinner?”
“Delighted,” she screeched.
I got out, helped her in and closed the door behind her. Ben and Hot Sauce took off into the mysteries of the scorching summer night.
Mr. O’Donnell was glued to his spot in front of the refrigerator. It was early for his midnight snack, but usually he’d start begging for it hours earlier. Tonight, however, he was oblivious to food, to me, and to the heat that usually knocked him out.
“You silly cat; you’re gonna give yourself a heart attack waiting for that mouse to show up,” I said. His tail wagged, as if to brush off my concern, but he did not even bother to cast a glance in my direction.
“Either that or you’re gonna die a crazy cat,” I went on as the phone rang. There was no message. Picking up the receiver I said, “Hello, hello.” A click was the only response, and I was left there standing like a fool holding a dead telephone to my ear. Suddenly, I heard a deafening, abrupt noise as if a truck had crashed on the roof. The building did not crumble, though; the ceiling did not cave in. It occurred to me that maybe the refrigerator had fallen on top of Mr. O’Donnell. I burst into the kitchen screaming, “Kitty, are you okay?” Mr. O’Donnell repaid my concern by giving me a quizzical look as if to say, “What’s the matter with you?” A flash of effulgence lit the kitchen, and looking up at the window that overlooks the alley, I saw lightning paint platinum slivers in the obsidian sky. Raging thunder made the glass of the windowpanes rattle. My eyes wandered down from the sky to the building across the alley. The flasher was standing by his window, dancing for me. I noticed he had shorts on and wasn’t playing with himself. He was crisscrossing his arms to call my attention. I stood there, transfixed. He leaned out of the window holding a large piece of cardboard that read PHONE #. “No way, José,” I replied, giving him the finger, and was about to turn away from the window when he started shaking the cardboard frantically, and his desperation—he seemed about to fall out of the window—held me enthralled. Something was amiss, I thought. Or maybe he’s just very horny, a voice said in my head; everyone is oversexed in the summer. But what if he was trying to tell me something else? And if he just wants sex, what would I do? Nothing ventured, nothing gained. With my fingers, I gave him the phone number. He signed it back to me and I nodded in confirmation and disappeared from the window. I ran to my telephone to turn off the machine. The phone rang and I picked up.
“Is that you?” a voice with an European accent said.
“Your neighbor across the alley,” I said, choosing my words carefully, in case he was recording me.
“Listen, I want you to know,” he said in an accent I couldn’t quite pin down, “about a couple of hours ago, I caught two men trying to break into your apartment from the fire escape.”
“What?”
“Yes, I saw them trying to break in. They had tools and were beginning to remove the screens on the window, so I started screaming, saying I was going to call the cops. One of them pointed a gun at me, but I ducked and continued screaming until they left.”
“Did you recognize them? Are they crack people from downstairs?”
There was a pause. “Hum, let me think. No. Actually, they look more like you: slightly Oriental.”
“I’m not Oriental,” I remonstrated. “I’m Colombian.”
“Oh, so I see. I knew you were a foreigner too because of the way you signed your phone number.”
I didn’t know whether to hang up, grab Mr. O’Donnell and run away from the apartment, or to call the police. In any case, it felt good to be talking to someone. I realized although I didn’t even know his name, I felt almost close to this man; I knew more about his deepest sexual secrets than I knew about most of my friends.
“I’m German,” he informed me. This did not surprise me at all. “What’s your name?” he asked.
I told him, absentmindedly, aware that I was talking to him but was totally freaked out about the prospect of the Colombians breaking into my apartment.
“My name is Reinhardt,” he said.
It occurred to me that the polite thing was to thank him for driving the burglars away. “Thank you so much, Reinhardt. I’m really grateful to you for what you’ve done. My cat could have escaped, and he’s a sick cat. It would have been tragic.”
“Now you know,” he said. “It’s better to be prepared.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know: leave the radio and the lights on when you go out. Stuff like that.”
“That’s right. Thank you for reminding me.”
“I wouldn’t want anything to happen to you, handsome—or to your cat … maybe we can get together sometime.”
A part of me wanted to say, “Sure. Why not.” Instead, I mumbled, “Oh, oh, well, I …”
He interrupted me. “I don’t mean sex,” he said. “It’s too dangerous nowadays. But we can go see a film.”
“Sure,” I said. “I go to the movies all the time.”
“Well, then give me a call, Santiago. My phone number is …” I took it down, thinking it might come in handy sometime. And, who knows, maybe some night … The truth was that I was extremely attracted to this tall
slender blond Nibelung. And now that I knew he was Nordic I felt doubly turned on.
“Bye, Reinhardt,” I said by way of conclusion. “Thanks a lot again.”
“Don’t mention it. Sweet dreams.”
Sweet dreams? I shook my head. Rebecca was probably still awake, but what was the point of upsetting her? After all, the Colombians were out to get me, not her. It was my apartment they wanted to break into. Nevertheless, she should be aware of the danger. What if I got killed? Rebecca could help the police in tracking down my murderers. What did I care if justice was served when I was dead? Nothing was going to bring me back! At times like this, when I was afraid, restless, cracking up all over the place, I’d pick up Mr. O’Donnell and bury my face in his fur and smother him with kisses until the contact with a living thing calmed me down. Yet tonight something told me that if I distracted him from his ridiculous hunting, I was going to get badly scratched.
“I’ll fight back; I’m not going down like a wimp,” I said through clenched teeth. Feeling like Gary Cooper in High Noon, I removed the gun from the tank of the toilet and wrapped it in a towel to dry. I wondered if the bullets would still go off after having the gun soaked in water for two days. The Colombians did not know that, though. I was sure they would be scared shitless if I met them by the window aiming a gun at their balls. I decided to sleep on the couch by the window. If they returned, I would hear them coming up the creaky fire escape. Now that I was ready for a showdown with my persecutors, I stopped to reflect whom they might be. If they were indeed Gene’s employers, should I call the police, the FBI, the CIA? Why couldn’t they just be crack people trying to break in to steal anything valuable they could turn into quick cash? No. All they had to do was peek through the window to see that everything I owned was rubbish. Obviously, they were Colombian mafiosi who knew I had in my possession the coke Gene had stolen.
Even though it was only eleven o’clock, it was too late to call my mother’s house. Tomorrow, I’ll get in touch with Gene, I thought. You cannot afford to freak out, Santiago. Put away the bazooka; it’s only a mosquito. You must muster all your wherewithal and clarity to control the situation. Tomorrow you can have an alarm system installed. I could borrow the money from Ben Ami. He’d always said he’d come to my rescue if I really needed him. Well, the time had finally come. Or should I take the money and move to Paris with Mr. O’Donnell until all this passed? I felt crazier than a shit-house rat. Perhaps the heat wave had done permanent damage to my brain.
Latin Moon in Manhattan: A Novel Page 14