Blanquita scoops Marcos off the broadloom and holds him on her hip as she might a baby. “I should never have left Manila,” she says. She does some very heavy, very effective sighing. “Pappy was right. The East is East and the West is West and never the twain shall meet.”
I get these nuggets from Kipling at least once a week. “But, baby,” I object, “you did leave. Atlanta is halfway around the world from the Philippines.”
“Poor Pappy,” Blanquita moons. “Poor Joker.”
She doesn’t give me much on her family other than that Pappy—Joker Rosario—a one-time big-shot publisher tight with the Marcos crew, is stuck in California stocking shelves in a liquor store. Living like a peon, serving winos in some hotbox barrio. Mother runs a beauty shop out of her kitchen in West Hartford, Connecticut. His politics, and those of his daughter, are—to understate it—vile. She’d gotten to America long before his fall, when he still had loot and power and loved to spread it around. She likes to act as though real life began for her at JFK when she got past the customs and immigration on the seventeenth of October, 1980. That’s fine with me. The less I know about growing up in Manila, rich or any other way, the less foreign she feels. Dear old redneck Atlanta is a thing of the past, no need to feel foreign here. Just wheel your shopping cart through aisles of bok choy and twenty kinds of Jamaican spices at the Farmers’ Market, and you’ll see that the US of A is still a pioneer country.
She relaxes, and Marcos leaps off the sexy, shallow shelf of her left hip. “You’re a racist, patronizing jerk if you think I’m beautiful. I’m just different, that’s all.”
“Different from whom?”
“All your others.”
It’s in her interest, somehow, to imagine me as Buckhead’s primo swinger, maybe because—I can’t be sure—she needs the buzz of perpetual jealousy. She needs to feel herself a temp. For all the rotten things she says about the Philippines, or the mistiness she reserves for the Stars and Stripes, she’s kept her old citizenship.
“Baby, Baby, don’t do this to me. Please?”
I crank up the Kraftmatic. My knees, drawn up and tense, push against my forehead. Okay, so maybe what I meant was that she isn’t a looker in the blondhair-smalltits-greatlegs way that Wendi was. Or Emilou, for that matter. But beautiful is how she makes me feel. Wendi was slow-growth. Emilou was strictly Chapter Eleven.
I can’t tell her that. I can’t tell her I’ve been trading on rumor, selling on news, for years. Your smart pinstriper aims for the short-term profit. My track record for pickin ’em is just a little better than blindfold darts. It’s as hard to lose big these days as it is to make a killing. I understand those inside traders—it’s not the money, it’s the rush. I’m hanging in for the balance of the quarter.
But.
If there’s a shot, I’ll take it.
Meantime, the barbecue fork in Blanquita’s hand describes circles of such inner distress that I have to take my eyes off the slaughter of the Abilene Christians.
“You don’t love me, Griff.”
It’s hard to know where she learns her lines. They’re all so tragically sincere. Maybe they go back to the instant-marriage emporiums in Manila. Or the magazines she reads. Or a series of married, misunderstood men that she must have introduced to emotional chaos. Her tastes in everything are, invariably, unspeakable. She rests a kneecap on the twisted Kraftmatic and weeps. Even her kneecaps … well, even the kneecaps get my attention. It’s not fair. Behind her, the Vanilla Gorilla is going man-to-man. Marcos is about to strangle himself with orange wool he’s pawed out of a dusty wicker yarn basket. Wendi was a knitter. Love flees, but we’re stuck with love’s debris.
“I’m not saying you don’t like me, Griff. I’m saying you don’t love me, okay?”
Why do I think she’s said it all before? Why do I hear “sailor” instead of my name? “Don’t spoil what we have.” I am begging.
She believes me. Her face goes radiant. “What do we have, Griff?” Then she backs away from my hug. She believes me not.
All I get to squeeze are hands adorned with the glamor-length Press-On Nails. She could make a fortune as a hands model if she wanted to. That skin of hers is an evolutionary leap. Holding hands on the bed, we listen for a bit to the lamb spit fat. Anyone can suffer a cold shooting spell. I’m thirty-three and a vet of Club Med vacations; I can still ballhandle, but one-on-one is a younger man’s game.
“All right, we’ll drop the subject,” Blanquita says. “I can be a good sport.”
“That’s my girl,” I say. But I can tell from the angle of her chin and the new stiffness of her posture that she’s turning prim and well-brought-up on me. Then she lobs devastation. “I won’t be seeing you this weekend.”
“It’s ciao because I haven’t bought you a ring?”
“No,” she says, haughtily. “The Chief’s asked me out, that’s why. We’re going up to his cabin.”
I don’t believe her. She’s not the Chief’s type. She wants to goad me into confessing that I love her.
“You’re a fast little worker.” The Chief, a jowly fifty-five, is rumored to enjoy exotic tastes. But, Christ, there’s a difference between exotic and foreign, isn’t there? Exotic means you know how to use your foreignness, or you make yourself a little foreign in order to appear exotic. Real foreign is a little scary, believe me. The fact is, the Chief brought Blanquita and me together in his office. That was nearly six months ago. I was there to prep him, and she was hustled in, tools of the trade stuffed into a Lancôme tote sack, to make him look good on TV. Blanquita’s a makeup artist on the way up and up, and Atlanta is Executives City, where every Chief wants to look terrific before he throws himself to the corporate lions. I watched her operate. She pumped him up a dozen ways. And I just sat there, stunned. The Chief still had moves.
“You sound jealous, Griff.” She turns her wicked, bottomless blacks on me and I feel myself squirm.
“Go up to the cabin if you want to. I don’t do jealousy, hon.”
She starts trapping on defense herself now. “You don’t do jealousy! Well, you don’t have the right to be jealous! You don’t have any rights, period! You can’t change the ground rules!”
Maybe Wendi wasn’t all that certifiable a disaster. Come to think of it, Wendi had her moments. She could be a warm, nurturing person. We talked, we did things together. The summer we were breaking up, I built her kid a treehouse, which might be the only unselfish good I’ve accomplished in my life. Blanquita’s a Third World aristocrat, a hothouse orchid you worship but don’t dare touch. I wouldn’t dare ask her to help me knock together a bookcase or scrub the grout around the bathroom tiles. But Wendi, alas, never made me feel this special, this loved.
“I’m serious, Griff.” She closes her eyes and rams her fists in eyelids that are as delicately mauve as her sweatshirt. “You keep me in limbo. I need to know where we stand.”
“I don’t want you to go,” I say. I’m not myself. I’m a romantic in red suspenders.
“What do you want me to do?”
“Whatever you want to do, hon.”
Her body sags inside her oversized sweatshirt. She gets off the mattress, strokes Marcos with the toes of her Reeboks, checks a shredded ficus leaf, tosses the skein of orange wool from the balcony down to the parking lot.
“Hullo,” I say. “Hey, Baby.” I really want to reach her. “Hey, watch him!” Wendi was a big basketball fan, a refugee from Hoosierland, and she was the first and so far the only woman I’ve known who could sit through a Braves or Falcons game. If I could get Miss Bataan to watch the Gorilla stuff it, we’d be okay, but she doesn’t even pretend to watch.
“I’m going to make myself a cup of tea,” she says.
We say nothing while she brews herself a pot of cherry almond. Then she sits on my bed and drinks a slow cup, fiddling with the remote control and putting to flight all ten sweaty goons. F. Lee Bailey comes on and talks up the Bhopal tragedy. I can’t believe it’s been a year. I must
have been seeing Emilou on the side when it happened. Yes, in fact Emilou cried, and Wendi had made a fuss about the mascara on my sixty-buck shirt. An auditorium packed with Herbalifers comes on the screen. The Herbalifers are very upbeat and very free enterprise. They perk her up.
“We don’t need that,” I plead.
“You don’t know what you need,” she snaps. “You’re so narcissistic you don’t need anyone. You don’t know how to love.”
Sailor, I think. It thrills me.
“That’s not fair.”
But Blanquita the Beautiful races on to bigger issues. “Not just you, Griff,” she scolds in that eerily well-bred, Asian convent-schooled voice. “You’re all emotional cripples. All you Americans. You just worry about your own measly little relationships. You don’t care how much you hurt the world.”
In changing gears, she’s right up there with Mario Andretti. I envy her her freedom, her Green Card politics. It’s love, not justice, that powers her. Emilou and Wendi would have died if I caught them in an inconsistency.
She jabs at more buttons on the remote control doodad. Herbalifers scuttle into permanent blackness, and a Soweto funeral procession comes on. Big guys in black boots come at pallbearers with whips and clubs. Blanquita lays her teacup on the top sheet. These are serious designer sheets, debris from my months with Emilou. When Joker Rosario went to South Africa back in the long, long ago, he was treated very, very white. He wrote pleasant things about South Africa in his paper. Yesterday’s statesman is today’s purveyor of Muscatel. South Africa is making her morose, and I dare not ask why. I suddenly remember that the neighborhood dry cleaner doesn’t know how to take tea stains off but does a good job with Kahlúa. Blanquita flashes the black inscrutables one more time and says, “I can’t stand it anymore, Griff. It’s got to stop.”
South Africa? I wonder, but dare not hope. I carefully remove her teacup and take hold of her fingertips, which are still warm from holding the cup, and pull them up to my beard. “We have each other,” I say.
“Do we?”
It’s time to take charge, to force the good times to roll. Some nations were built to take charge. It’s okay for a nation of pioneers to bully the rest of the world as long as the cause is just. My heart is pure, my head is clear. I retrieve the doodad from Blanquita’s perfect hand. I want to show her the funtimes of TV-land. I slice through a Mexican variety show on SIN. Any time of the day or night, those Mexicans are in tuxedos. All those blow-dried Mexican emcees in soccer stadiums, looking like Ricardo Montalbans who never made it.
I know she’s a secret fan.
On cue, my trusty nineteen-incher serves up the right stuff. It’s National Cheerleading Contest time. A squad in skimpy skirts, Oceanside High’s cutest, synchronizes cartwheels and handstands, and starts to dust the competition. I feel godly powers surge through my body as Blanquita relaxes. Soon she relaxes enough to laugh.
“Did you ever try out as a cheerleader?” I ask. I can sense the imminence of terrific times.
Blanquita the Beautiful watches the kids on the screen with gratifying intensity. Then she thrusts a hesitant leg in the air. It’s the fault of the French maid’s apron that she’s wearing over her baggy sweats; my saucy exotic’s turned a schoolgirl routine into something alien and absurd. Oh, Blanquita, not so fast!
“I’m too good for you, Griff,” she pants, twirling an invisible baton and high-stepping across the condo’s wall-to-wall. “Pappy would call you illiterate scum.”
“And so I am. But Joker’s selling rotgut through a retractable grate and Mama’s perming Koreans in her living room. Ferdie and Imelda they’re not.” If People Power hadn’t cut them down, if Joker’s own reporters hadn’t locked him out, Blanquita was promised a place in the Miss Universe contest. That’s why she kept her citizenship.
“That’s needlessly cruel.”
“Baby, you’ve got to stop living in the past.”
“Okay.” She stops the twirling and marching. She turns the TV off without the doodad though I’ve begged her not to many times. Without the light from the screen, the condo room seems as dull and impersonal as a room in a Holiday Inn.
Without Blanquita I’d be just another Joe Blow Buckhead yuppie in his Reeboks. It’s she who brings me to bed each night and wakes me up each morning, big as a house and hard as a sidewalk.
“Okay,” she goes again. “Who needs a crummy tropical past?”
We’re out of the woods. I start to relax.
“Two cheers for cable sleaze,” I shout. She plucks Marcos from his hidey hole behind the ficus and babies him. “I’m saying yes to the Chief, Griff. Hip, hip!”
“What?”
“He says I make him look like a million dollars and make him feel like even more.”
“Get it in writing. That’s a low-rent come-on. He wouldn’t dare try it on the office girls.”
“Of course not.”
She’s not been getting my point.
“I have to get on with my life. And anyway, you said you weren’t jealous so what’s to hold me up?”
I check out her pulse rate with my lips. I’m not verbal. Maybe I don’t love Blanquita. Because I don’t know what love is. I’m not ready for one-on-one.
Baby Blanquita is too agitated to smell the charred lamb whooshing off the hibachi, so it’s up to me, the narcissist, to rescue the rescue-worthy. The balcony that holds the smoking hibachi is eighteen floors up. Standing between the high gray sky and the pocket-sized pool, I feel omnipotent. Everything’s in place.
While I poke the ruined meat with the barbecue fork, an uncommonly handsome blond woman in a ponytail and a cherry-red tracksuit comes out of the building’s back door. She hurls a bashed pizza box, like a Frisbee, into the dumpster. Excess energy floats toward me, connecting us. She can’t stand still. She tightens a shoelace. We’re a community of toned, conditioned athletes. Use it or lose it. Hands pressed down on somebody’s Firebird, she does warm-up routines. I’ve seen her run in the Lull water Estate close by, but I’ve never felt connected enough to her to nod. I heave the meat from the rack to a platter. The woman’s still hanging around in that hyper, fidgety way of hers. She’s waiting. She’s waiting for someone. When a man in a matching tracksuit jogs out the back door, I get depressed. She used to run alone.
Blanquita doesn’t say anything about the state of our dinner. It’s already stuffed away conveniently in the past. She’s got the TV going again. The latest news, hot from Mexico City. “They had this news analyst chap on a minute ago,” she says. “They were talking about Vitaly Yurchenko.”
I put the butterfly lamb in the kitchen sink. “Why don’t you watch about Vitaly Yurchenko on an American station?” I ask. Usually, that steams her. Mexican is American! she’ll squeal. But instead she says, “He could have had it all if he’d stayed. What’s so great about Moscow?”
“Sometimes you blow it for love. It can happen.”
She runs to me, lavender arms going like wings. Her face—the skin so tight-pored that in the dark I feel I’m stroking petals—glows with new hope. “What are you saying, Griff? Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”
I know what I would say if I weren’t the solid corporate guy in maroon tie and dark suit. I buy and sell with other people’s money and skim enough to just get by. It’s worked so far.
“Griff?”
Sailor?
“Let’s go for a run, Blanquita.”
The woman of many men’s dreams doesn’t wrench herself free from my kissing hold. I don’t deserve her.
“Just a short run. To clear our heads. Please?”
Before I met her I used to pump iron. I was pumping so hard I could feel a vein nearly pop in the back of my head. I was a candidate for a stroke. Self-love may be too much like self-hate, who knows? Blanquita got me running. We started out real easy, staying inside the Lullwater Estate like that woman in the red tracksuit. We ran the Peachtree I OK. We could run a marathon if we wanted to. Our weightless feet beat
perfect time through city streets and wooded ravines. The daily run is the second best thing we do together, I like to think.
“All right,” she says. She gives me one of her demure, convent smiles. “But what’ll we do with dinner?”
I point at the shrivelled, carbonized thing in the stainless steel sink. “We could mail it to Africa.”
“Biafra?” she asks.
“Baby, Baby … Ethiopia, Mozambique. Biafra was gone a long time ago,” I tell her. She’s very selective with her news. Emilou was a news hound, and I took to watching CNN for a solid winter.
Blanquita pins my condo key to her elasticized waistband and goes out the front door ahead of me. The lawyer from 1403 is waiting by the elevator. I am far enough behind Blanquita to catch the quickie gleam in his eyes before he resumes his cool Duke demeanor and holds the elevator for us. In your face, Blue Devil.
That night Blanquita whips up some green nutritive complexion cream in the Cuisinart. She slaps the green sludge on her face with a rubber spatula. Her face is unequivocally mournful. The sludge in the Cuisinart fills the condo with smells I remember from nature trails of my childhood. Woodsy growths. Mosses. Ferns. I tracked game as a kid; I fished creeks. Atlanta wasn’t always this archipelago of developments.
“Better make tonight memorable,” she advises. The mask is starting to stiffen, especially around the lips. She has full, pouty, brownish lips. “It’s our last night.”
How many times has she said that? I’ve never said it, never had to. The women of my life always got the idea in plenty of time, they made it a mutual-consent, too-bad and so-long kind of thing. Wendi was really looking for a stepfather to her kids. Emilou was looking for full-time business advice to manage her settlement.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
The lips make a whistling noise from inside the mask’s cutout. “Anyway,” she says, “it wasn’t all cherry bombs and rockets for me either. Just sparklers.”
Sex, intimacy, love. I can’t keep any of it straight anymore.
“You’re not going to the Chiefs cabin in the north woods, period. He’s Jack the Ripper.”
The Middleman and Other Stories Page 8