by Rona Jaffe
“I’m only teasing you,” he said gently. “What does everybody say; should we get tickets for the Copacabana and the Municipal?”
“You mean it?” Margie asked. “You were the one who wanted to save money.”
Neil laughed. “I say that every year. Until the first ball is over. Let’s go to hell with ourselves and go to all of them.”
“It happens every year,” Margie said.
“I’d love to,” said Bert. “Helen?”
“And can we go into the street one night?” Helen asked, beginning to be carried away by their excitement. “And can we watch the Escola de Samba parade?”
“We’ll do everything,” Neil said.
“I’m going to buy a lança perfuma tomorrow,” said Bert.
“Bert has to get a real costume,” Margie said.
Helen felt warm and happy. These were her friends, and she loved them. And this was her husband, the only man she could ever love. Perhaps she would buy little costumes for the children, and they could have a Carnival party at home before she and Bert left for one of the late-starting balls. She had read in the newspaper that there were some children’s Carnival parties in the afternoons somewhere, where there were no lança perfumas and nothing was served that was stronger than Coke. She would take Julie and Roger. They were all going to be happy at Carnival; it was going to be special for all of them, the whole family.
Neil stopped the car in front of the Sinclairs’ apartment house. “Good night.”
“Good night. Thank you. We’ll phone each other tomorrow.”
Bert put on his shirt and they went into the house. Riding up in the small self-service elevator Helen kissed him. He put his arms around her, and when the elevator doors opened they walked to their apartment with their arms still around each other’s waists, and as soon as they were inside their darkened vestibule they kissed again. “I always like to get home,” he said.
“So do I. It sounds so wonderful when you say that. Say it again.”
“I like to get home?”
“Yes …”
They kissed again and she felt the familiar mixture of excitement and tenderness and love that always surprised her because although it was always the same it was always new. She could never bring it back when he was not there, but whenever he kissed her or touched her she felt it again, even though they had been married for nine years. She didn’t believe people who said love stopped or changed or became reasonable and placid after several years even if it became deeper in a new way. It would always be this way for her and Bert; she knew it.
“Please don’t go away again for a long time,” she whispered, her arms around his neck. “Please don’t leave me. I miss you so terribly.”
“I want you to,” he whispered, smiling at her in the darkness. Her eyes were becoming accustomed to the dark and she could see his face.
“You’re so beautiful,” Helen said.
“Beautiful? Men aren’t beautiful.”
“Oh, I’m sorry—you know what I mean. I love your face.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t say thank you—” She stopped, remembering where she had heard that, and feeling as she had when it was said to her, and for the first time feeling an acute, unwanted pain. She closed her eyes and tried to put the feeling away.
“The first thing I want to do,” Bert said gently, “is something I’ve wanted to do for the past three hours. Take a shower.”
“I don’t even want you to leave me for a minute.”
“You’ll take it with me.”
It was like the old days, Helen thought happily, the old days when she and Bert were alone together with nothing but their love. Running the water in the shower at three o’clock in the morning, not terrified that any little sound might awaken a fretful child, not worried about being too sleepy to get up in the morning. This Carnival night had done something for him too; he seemed different, happier, more giving. They dried each other with thick towels, but not any too carefully, and fell on the cool sheets with their arms wound around each other, still slightly damp, everything cool and warm both. Cool sheets, cool skin, cool air from the opened doors leading to the balcony, warm mouth, warm breath, skin that warmed, the scent of soap and the scent of love. She had never loved or desired him as much as she did at this moment, and this was the man to whom she had almost brought pain. Strangely, knowing she had come so dangerously close to hurting him made Helen love him and want him even more.
CHAPTER 13
Carnival in Rio is a mass explosion, the result of twelve months of frustration, sublimation, hopelessness and hope. At Carnival a beggar can dress as a king. An austere businessman can dress as a clown. A colored girl from the favellas who will have twelve or twenty children and live and die in the favellas can dress as Scarlett O’Hara, and many of them do. A homosexual can walk about in the streets of the city for four days and nights dressed as a woman. You are who you want to be. There is unceasing music for your soul and unceasing dance for your animal spirits, and ether to make your days and nights a waking dream. There is dancing in the ballrooms for the wealthy and dancing in the streets for the poor. But there are no poor at Carnival. There are only the revelers, the transported, the disguised, the dreamers and the orgiastic.
For four days and nights, without sleep, without food, without minds, the dancers jump up and down in a wild, self-hypnotic orgy, together or in a snake dance or alone. At the balls you see old men ready for a coronary attack wetting their handkerchiefs with ether and sniffing at them to get a lift, while holding on with the other hand to the girl in front of them in the snake dance. On the faces of these old men is an expression compounded of ecstasy, agony, exhaustion, and desperation. It is the face of Carnival.
In recent years, of course, as any Carioca will tell you, Carnival has become more commercial. There are television cameras and newsreel cameras and photographers with flashbulbs covering the revelry for magazines. But everything has become more commercial in our day; there are even press agents for wars. The people themselves are the same; the people never change. And the people who say they will not go to another Carnival this year, or that they will only go a little bit, like Sergio Leite Braga, like Margie and Neil Davidow, find themselves involved in the holocaust and happy to be consumed.
On one afternoon of Carnival week Neil Davidow and Mort Baker attired themselves in striped shirts, white trousers, French berets, and face masks, and went to the ball for married men. Actually, as with any of the other balls, it was not restricted to married men and women who wished to meet them; it was merely given the title and held in the afternoon so married men could attend without their wives. Neil had a sense of rising excitement as he walked briskly down the hot street toward the hotel; he was hardly aware of the heat at all. The air was sirupy with heat, and bathers were shrieking on the beach. There were so many people in brightly colored bathing suits that you could hardly see the sand between them. The waves hit the shore wildly, casting up foam like cotton candy ten feet into the air. Neil felt full of energy. He glanced at Mort striding beside him, and although at times he had felt faintly jealous of Mort’s assurance and independence, today he was not jealous at all.
The ballroom of the hotel was filled with the unreality of artificial light in the middle of the day, with the curtains at the high arched windows drawn against the heat and sunlight. The air was heavy with the sickly sweet scent of ether. The band blared the same Carnival music, as if it had been imported entire, functioning and unceasing, from every other ball that had gone before. There were girls gathered about the room, alone and together, dressed in masks and head feathers and brief glittering costumes that showed their beautiful legs.
This room was a world in itself, a world of anonymous, willing, giving girls with red mouths and round breasts and tiny waists and long curving legs. Why did all the Brazilian girls have such tiny waists? Neil had been watching them on the beach for years, and they were all shaped like hourglasses. He had ne
ver seen such feminine women. He suspected that the ones who did not wear bikinis wore some kind of waist pinchers or girdles under their bathing suits, even when they went into the water. Margie had told him once that next to a Brazilian girl an American girl looked like a little boy.
He wasn’t going to think about Margie today. There were long stretches of time during his days away from her when she didn’t exist for him at all. Then when he was doing something as ordinary and unrelated to her as lunching at the American Club with some men from the office, suddenly a woman across the room would remind him of Margie—the color of her hair, the way she held her head up—and Neil would put down his fork and be unable to eat at all. He would feel something happen to his breathing, as if breathing were something you had to will and be aware of all the time or it would stop. Margie always held her head up very high when she walked across a room, her chin slightly tilted up, as if she were a little bit of a snob, but she was too short to look like a snob when she walked that way. She only looked like a small girl trying to appear taller, and there was something touching about it, or at least Neil found it so. Everything about her was touching; an accidental gesture of her hand, the look of fright that came into her eyes, even her complete, absolute, immobile frigidity. He felt like a deformed beast when he touched her, not like a man or a husband or a lover, but like some abomination from a Jean Cocteau movie. The enslaved beast, disguised, with the lonely heart of a man. Neil felt only that he had never been able to give her anything, and that unless he could … But he wasn’t going to think about Margie today. He was at the Married Men’s Ball with four hours to himself and he was going to get slightly drunk, just to have an edge, and then he was going to make love to a woman.
“Every man for himself,” Mort said, looking at him. “All right?”
“We’ll meet here later,” Neil said without conviction. He was being the proper husband with no seriously bad intentions, but he hoped Mort would protest. Mort did.
“Well …” Mort said, and for some strange reason he sounded slightly embarrassed. “I have nothing to do later. Maybe you won’t see me. But I’ll see you at eleven o’clock tonight, in time for the Copacabana. Okay?”
“Sure.” Neil patted him on the back, although the gesture at that moment seemed false. “Te logo.”
Mort held up his hand like an Indian saying “peace” and was gone in the crowd. Neil stood there for a moment listening to the music and watching the girls. Then he looked for the bar.
He bought scrip and then he had three straight whiskys rapidly in a row and then a whisky and water for a chaser. He began to feel relaxed. It was going to be a good party. The people seemed nice, the music was good, the whisky was not bad. He finished the whisky and water, put out his cigarette at the bottom of the paper cup, and went off to dance.
He would dance for a while and then he would repair to the bar for a drink, and if he was dancing with a girl who was attractive he would buy her a drink. He had the feeling that he shouldn’t try to press it, that this afternoon was a very important one shot, and there was a lot of time left today to pick a girl he would really like. Every time he found one who seemed particularly attractive and he was on the verge of asking her if she wanted to leave and find a drink someplace better he would reconsider and decide this girl was not good enough. Her legs were too thin, her mouth too small, or she seemed too silly. He wanted a particularly voluptuous girl, even a rather dirty girl, the kind of girl the guys used to call a “pig” at college. The drinks he had had were making him think in slow motion and it was pleasant. Today was going to be an important afternoon. I want, Neil thought pleasantly, the kind of girl you can drown in, the kind you want to tear apart. A great, round, wild, silky, resilient, fleshy girl, but not fat; with long, long hair and slightly smeared lipstick, the sort of girl who looks slightly messy before I mess her up, a girl who moans, a girl who …
“Neil …?”
The girl standing in front of him at the bar had a timid, slightly thin voice, and she was neither fleshy nor resilient-looking. She was short and slender, and she was wearing a black and white striped tiger costume which covered her from the top of her head to the top of her thighs. It had a cap with two perky ears, and it covered the entire upper half of her face. The costume even had a long tail. She wore black mesh stockings and high-heeled black shoes, and she had the kind of legs you see on an Apple Blossom Queen—nice but not particularly sensual.
“Do I know you?” he asked.
She giggled. The giggle was unexpected. “You don’t know me?”
The voice was completely familiar, and if he had not had so many whiskys Neil was sure he would have recognized it in a moment. She had the slightest of Brazilian accents, almost imperceptible. “Say something else,” he said.
“I have loved you since the moment I saw you.” She put her arm through his, to show she was teasing, and peered into his face.
“Something more.”
“I have loved you for years, and you don’t know I’m alive.”
Neil looked at what was left of his drink, and then swallowed it. “Keep going. This is nice.”
“I would like very much to kiss you. Will you kiss me?”
“My pleasure.”
He put his arms around her small waist and pulled her close to him. Something about the feeling of her body was both familiar and strange and he suddenly felt very much aroused. He kissed her mouth hard and kept holding on to her.
“You’ve had quite a lot to drink,” she said. She did not sound reproachful, only surprised.
“What would you like to drink?”
“Could I have a Coca-Cola?”
“No.”
“I can’t drink,” she said. “I have a bad liver.” She smiled at him. “Don’t you really know who I am?”
“Christ, how should I know who you are?”
“Good.” She kissed him again, lightly, and this time Neil really could not let go of her. He kept his arms around her tightly and forced her lips open with his tongue. She was trying to get away from him now, but subtly, squirming a little. Her movements only made him more excited, and he suddenly hated her. He remembered whom she felt like with that tiny waist and that slim mobile body; she felt like Margie. She turned her head away from him.
“Let’s have a drink,” she breathed. Her voice sounded frightened. Neil wanted to choke her.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he said angrily. He was really drunk, he knew, because her face kept getting blurry and he had never spoken to a woman in this way before. “Damned little cock-teaser! Who do you think you are?”
“Oh …” she said, very softly. “Oh …” Suddenly, surprisingly, he saw that she was crying. “I didn’t mean to make you angry. I thought it was a joke,” she whispered. She reached up and pulled off the tiger cap and mask so that she could wipe her eyes.
When he saw who she was he became almost sober. The mysterious girl with the supple body, dressed as a tigress, his drunken memory-image of Margie, and the prosaicness of who this girl really was—a secretary in his office—all blended into one improbable girl. “For God’s sake, Gilda,” Neil said. He tried to make a joke of it. “As they say in the movies, I didn’t recognize you without your glasses, Miss Jones.”
“And then she’s always Lana Turner,” Gilda said. “She’s not just me.” She wiped her tears away with her fingers and Neil handed her his handkerchief. She smiled. “I think I could use that drink now,” she said. “The hell with my liver.”
“No,” he said. “I wouldn’t dream of it.” He slid some more scrip across the bar to the bartender. “Double whisky and a Coke.”
She was an odd girl; he really didn’t know her very well. She was from an old, rather social, Brazilian family, and she had been educated in the States. In fact, she had even gone to Radcliffe, giving it up after two years and coming back to Rio and getting a job. Office work paid almost nothing for these girls, but Gilda’s parents had money and she lived
with them. Her way of dressing, her speech, her manners, were all more American than Brazilian, and in a way Neil had felt sorry for her around the office because she seemed lost. She wasn’t feudal, or dependent, or unthinkingly passive like other girls from her background, and yet she had to live here in Rio and behave like everyone else. He had sometimes wondered what kind of boys she went out with.
“What are you doing at a party like this?” he asked her.
She straightened the seam of her black mesh stocking. “I don’t know. I was bored. You know, I haven’t been in Rio at Carnival time for six years, and before that I was too young so my parents used to ship me off to my grandparents in the country. This is really my first Carnival. So I thought I’d go to everything.”
“Including parties where married men pick up girls?”
“If you’re worried that I’ll remember, I won’t. You’ll find this ball is as secret as the confessional. A friend of mine was in love with a man who she thought was at the Married Men’s Ball last year, but when she begged everyone she knew to tell her if he was there, they wouldn’t answer. Not that anybody does anything. But not telling adds to the mystery.”
“It does,” Neil said. He was beginning to like her, and his anger had all ebbed away. He felt a little embarrassed. “I’m very drunk,” he said, by way of apology for what had gone before.
“Everybody is.”
“Are you here alone?”
“Entirely.”
“And are you having fun?”
She shrugged. “In a way. I think I’m crazy—you know? I hate Rio and I love it. I hated sitting around the piscina all day drinking orangeade, so I got this job. And do you know I don’t even make enough money to buy myself a new dress? If I bought three dresses a year I wouldn’t have a penny left for anything else. I figured it out. And sometimes when I go to a party where there are a lot of girls I grew up with, who are all married now and have babies, I catch them looking at me as if I’m some sort of a freak. I even think they’re sorry for me. They think I’m an old maid.”