“You are as intelligent as you are beautiful and funny.”
“Anyway, I’m married to Johnny.”
“And what does the lucky Johnny do?”
“For a living?”
“He looks to me like a plumber, or a housepainter.”
“He’s a businessman and I’m a housewife.”
“What kind of businessman?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never asked him.”
“Ah, you are the perfect wife. Too discreet to even inquire what your husband does for a living. Tell me, how old are you?”
“That’s easy. Thirty-two.”
“ ‘Thirty-two,’ she says without hesitating! ‘Thirty-two,’ she trumpets without fear! I never date females that old. That shows how fearless you are, how special.”
“This isn’t a date.” The smile fell off Betty’s face and she was silent.
“Don’t pout, my pet. I’m just playing. But seriously, let’s talk about amour.”
“There’s a perfume called Amour, I think.”
“My, how intuitive. I’m talking about that delectable perfume of the senses, that sizzle of the groins, that little drip of salacious saliva from the corner of Cupid’s mouth.”
“Who’s Cupid? Where’s Lucy?”
“Cupid, my darling, is an angel with a bow.” He pointed a finger and stabbed it across the table, stopping it in front of Betty’s breasts held up by the halter top. “An angel who lets fly the arrow of love straight to the heart of the matter.”
Betty hiccuped. “I’d like another Banshee, please.”
He snapped his fingers. A waiter ran up and placed another drink in front of Betty.
Betty bent over and put the plastic straw between her lipstick-ready lips.
“I have fought the wars of the heart, in hand-to-hand combat, from continent to continent,” he said, watching Betty suck. “I am a five-star general of the battles of the bedroom. And I have lived to tell the tale.”
Betty sucked harder, inhaling a flow of creamy yellow Banshee through her straw.
“You are either a dead pig,” he said, “or a live frog waiting for a kiss.”
Betty released the straw from her lips and sat up. “Huh? I don’t get it.”
“Would you like to win a kiss?” He leaned toward her. “A kiss from a prince that will transform you into a true princess?”
“Well, I don’t know. I’d have to ask Johnny.”
“You must be wearing sensational lingerie. Any woman who paints her toes like you, it’s a dead giveaway that she’s wearing delicious lingerie.”
“Paints them like what?”
“Candy.”
“Johnny never told me that.”
“Husbands don’t notice the small things. Lovers do.”
The Banshees were making Betty bleary-eyed. She looked at the candle on the table burning between the two of them. Early-evening moths were diving into the flame, bursting in popping sparks.
“The truth is,” Betty slurred, “I’m not wearing any lingerie.”
Back in the Floridita, Johnny PayDay didn’t know why the thought that his wife never wore panties or a bra came into his head. He hadn’t really had enough of her this afternoon; he wanted more. He was irritated and bored, waiting for Lizard to give the go-ahead to bottle up the Hurricane Hurler.
The red spider veins on Lizard’s cheeks had grown larger. He was still talking. In fact, he had never shut up.
“The problem is, some squares get lazy here, and you’ve got to teach a square a lesson. They think this is mañana land and the rules don’t apply, because everything isn’t American tidy. Say a square has a gambling debt, or a casino balloon floating over his head, or a drug habit he’s got to pay off, and he walks away without paying off the float. When that happens, the Right Guys have got to send the lazy square back to school to learn his arithmetic. The square’s got to be taught that Havana is no banana republic, that the casinos are owned lock, stock and barrel by the Right Guys. The rules of Havana are the same as the rules in Reno and Vegas.”
“So when does school start for the Hurricane?”
“As soon as the square leaves, we follow him. When we get the chance we snatch him.”
“What about his American pal?”
“If Armstrong gets in our way, we’ll just have to move him.”
“But what about the consequences?”
“There are no consequences. They make it easy for us down here. They’ve got a little war going on, a family spat. The government has a place where it plants dead bodies it kills by torture and assassination. It’s called the Pineapple Field. You can always dump a body there, no questions asked.”
“I thought you didn’t want me to break anything.”
“Yeah, just teach him a lesson. Put the fear of the Right Guys into him.”
“Got it. And Armstrong, do I shoot him to move him?”
“No. Armstrong’s important to the Right Guys. All their money is down on him to win the Big Race.”
“Armstrong’s on the inside? He’s fixed?”
“Sweeter than that. He’s being used. He’s got things he wants kept on the hush-hush, so he’ll walk the line. Last year he came in second at the Big Race. This year we’ve got a racer who’s going to block the pack so Armstrong can win. That way we haven’t touched the winner. He’s clean and our money is clean.”
“Message received.” PayDay looked over at the bar. Armstrong and Hurricane were paying up. “They’re leaving.”
“Let’s move.”
Across the flame of the candle on the table on the patio of the Hotel Nacional, Betty watched the aristocratic actor sway from side to side, as if he were caught in a heavy wind. He was swaying because she was on her fifth Banana Banshee. She tried to hold him in one place with her eyes, but she wasn’t having any luck, even though he was talking straight at her.
“Now, some rums are young, they haven’t been corked up long in a bottle, so when you let them out to play they’re like frisky puppies, all rough-and-tumble. Then you’ve got your old granddaddy rums, stately and low-down smooth, easygoing, never showing you their true colors, though all the while their sophistication gnaws off your nerve endings, eats away at your inhibitions. Here”—he reached his silver flask out to Betty—“take a lick of the granddaddy.”
Betty hesitated, not because she didn’t want to taste it but because she was starting to see double; there were two silver flasks, and she didn’t know which one to take. She took a chance and grabbed one, the right one, and figured that meant she wasn’t so tipsy after all. She tipped the flask up and took a swallow.
“How do you like old granddad?”
Betty was speechless. The fire of the rum seared her tongue, burning right down into her gut. She didn’t know if she’d ever be able to talk again. All she could do was grin like a mute clown, a clown crying big tears with streaks of purple mascara running down her cheeks.
“Did I ever tell you”—the man leaned close, the fire of his breath was in her crying face—“that I was adopted?”
Betty shook her head in a no. She looked on the table for a glass of water to put out the fire in her belly, but there was none. The waiter placed another Banana Banshee in front of her; she gulped it down.
“It’s true. I was adopted, a little foundling just like Moses in his basket. All the facts about my life were made up by the movie studio, none of them are true. I’m not an English gentleman. I’m an Irish bastard. And I wasn’t raised in British upper-class boarding schools. I went to rattrap public schools in the Siberia of California’s San Fernando Valley. On the weekends I went to the movies. The thing I learned was that if a fellow had a gentrified English accent nobody messed with his porridge, everybody paid him respect and was happy to have him around. And the English gent never had to work, all he needed was a trimmed mustache, a full cocktail glass and a clever sense of humor. People invited him to their parties, let him lounge at their swimming pools, drive their cars, stay i
n their houses, all for free. Being an English gent works with Americans. But you can’t get away with it in Britain, there they know that if you were born a gent with money, have been to the right schools, you’re probably an asshole.”
Betty nodded enthusiastically, even though she didn’t believe a thing. She knew this was being made up to put her at ease. She knew he really was an English gentleman. She hadn’t told him yet, but she had seen him in a musical, and there was no faking the way he moved and talked on the stage, a true-blue English gentleman. The lyrics of something he had sung smoldered up from the fire in her belly, and she sang, “I have often walked down this street before. But the pavement always stayed beneath my feet before. All at once am I several stories hiiiiigh.”
He arched an eyebrow. “Let’s talk about you and artichokes.”
“Artichokes?”
“The vegetable art-e-choke.”
“We don’t have them in Detroit.”
“Bright green, hard and big as a baseball. You boil it, peel the leaves off and eat the soft bottom. At the center there’s a purple heart with spikes around it. I never ate the heart because my adopted father said it was bitter. He would take a knife and cut the spikes away and pop the heart into his mouth like a slimy snail. One day, long after he died, I ordered an artichoke at the Beverly Hills Hotel. I cut off the sharp spikes surrounding the slimy heart and popped it into my mouth. I went out of my mind.”
“You should have listened to your father. He didn’t want you to have a bitter experience.”
“It wasn’t bitter, it was divine, splendor on the tongue. The son of a bitch had lied to me my whole life so he could eat the best part.”
Betty winced. “That’s not nice. But at least he adopted you.”
“Do you know why I’m telling you this story?”
“No.”
“Because it’s about you.”
“I’ve never eaten an art-e-choke.”
“It’s not about the artichoke. It’s about how people pretend to protect you from bad things in life, because in fact they want to keep those bad things all for themselves.”
Betty was completely lost.
“Don’t you see? That’s the lie about marriage. They preach that fidelity is the sweetest part, that you’re being saved from a bitter alternative. When in fact, right there in front of you the whole time is the sweetest part, the heart of the matter … infidelity.”
“Johnny bought me a high-fidelity record player. I’ve got all the big Broadway shows on records.”
The man leaned conspiratorially close. “I don’t mean that kind of fidelity. I mean monogamy is bullshit.”
“There are some good things.”
“Like what? Just give me one good example of why I should not put some sugar in your bowl.”
Betty didn’t hesitate. She sang, “A lady doesn’t wander all over the room and blow on some other guy’s dice. So let’s keep the party polite.”
“Ah, you she-devil. You’re singing from Guys and Dolls! I can match you.” He sang in a booming baritone, “Luck let a gentleman see how nice a dame you can be. Luck be a lady with meeeee.”
“It’s the wrong game with the wrong chips. Tho’ your lips are tempting, they’re the wrong lips.”
“But they’re such tempting lips, that if some night your freeee …”
“It’s all right with meeee!”
“I knew you’d come around! My delicious songbird!” He took Betty’s hand into his.
“Come around to what?”
“You and me, sweet pea. It’s time. Let’s go to my suite at the Capri. It has a mirror next to the bed.”
Betty didn’t say yes or no. The Banshees were running amok in her head, she couldn’t think clearly. “Why would I want to sleep on a mirror?” she asked. But no answer came back. She felt herself being lifted from the chair and whisked away. Everything was wobbling, people were swimming past her in murky water. Was she already in the mirrored lake of a bed?
Betty recognized the bright tiled floors of the Hotel Nacional. Swimming straight for her across the tiles was a redheaded teenager with a fierce sunburn. Even though the teenager was underwater, Betty thought she was going to burst into flame.
The teenager jabbed her finger into the bare chest of the man in the white dinner jacket. “Daddy, why did you keep me waiting so long?”
“Daddy got distracted.”
“Baby has to go potty and she has nothing to tip Señorita Pee-Pee with. It’s the señorita who keeps all the potties clean and shiny for baby’s naked bottom to sit on.”
With her brain in a Banana Banshee buzz, Betty couldn’t follow the conversation. She managed to say, “I’ve got to pee too. Sometimes I let Johnny watch me pee. That’s the best part about being married … you don’t have to close the bathroom door.”
“She’s loaded to the gills,” the teenager said in disgust to the man. “Look at her, she’s old enough to be my mother. What’s wrong with you?”
“Mother.” Betty heard the word through the haze. “Is this your daughter?”
“My daughter?” The man kissed Betty on the cheek. “I knew you were a naughty dolly.”
“Is that it?” the teenager demanded. “Are you screwing this old lady?”
“What old lady?” Betty looked around. Was someone else there?
“Gimme the potty money.” The teenager stamped the heel of her shoe into the man’s foot. “Now!”
He opened his wallet and took out a five-dollar bill.
The teenager grabbed the money, spun around, and marched down the hallway, turning left through the door marked LADIES’ LOUNGE.
Inside the lounge a toilet attendant sat behind an ostentatious imitation Louis XVI desk. She was a dignified woman in a prim dove-gray uniform with a no-nonsense air about her, as if she were a schoolteacher, or the appointment secretary in the outer office of an important international diplomat.
The teenager snapped, “Listen, Señorita Potty-pot, I’m not here for a pee. I want to powder my nose.”
The attendant slipped open the top drawer of the desk and took out a plastic compact.
The teenager threw her five-dollar bill down and snatched the compact. She walked across the room and stood before a mirror above a marble sink. She opened the compact and speared a dab of white powder with a long fingernail. She raised her fingernail and held it beneath her nose. Watching her reflection in the mirror, she snorted the powder, the expression on her face corkscrewing into a grimace as the white bite flew up her nostril. She took five more hits out of the compact, her eyes growing wider and more startled after each snort. Suddenly, reflected in the mirror, she saw the bare-chested man in the white dinner jacket behind her. She shouted angrily, “What are you doing in here? This is for ladies only!”
He grabbed her skinny shoulders and spun her around. “You dumb cow! I told you to wait for me back at the Capri. Why did you show up here and ruin it?”
“I was bored. The only thing on TV is that stupid Lucy show.”
“This is too important to mess up!”
“You’re not my leading man. You can’t tell me what to do. Do you want me to call my mother in Cleveland and tell her what’s really going on?”
“Your mother knows, goddamn it! What do you think I’m paying her for?”
“My own mother,” the teenager howled. “She’s been taking money the whole time and not splitting it with me.”
“You ungrateful bitch.” He smacked her in the face.
The teenager fell back against the marble sink. A trickle of blood smeared her mouth. She looked shocked; her lips trembled. Then she quickly smiled at him. “Kiss me, I’m bleeding.”
“You turn into a hooker when you’re doing blow.”
“You got me started. You like it that way.” She hiked up her skirt, sliding her white bottom up onto the marble counter. She raised her bare legs, scissored them around his waist, and pulled him to her.
Reflected in the mirror behind them, t
he uniformed toilet attendant sat at her desk, her face expressionless.
The man gripped the teenager by her ankles.
The teenager wiggled her naked bottom on the slick marble beneath it. “Come on, Daddy, let’s play house.”
He yanked her legs open and hissed into her face. “Will you shut the Christ up! I told you, the bald-headed husband of that dumpy bleached blonde out there has been following me for weeks. I don’t know why, but I know that in this town anybody following you around is dangerous. I told you to stay out of my way until I could get the truth out of that bimbo; fuck it out of her, or beat it out of her.”
Traveling along the Malecón in his Chrysler Imperial, Lizard kept both hands on the steering wheel as he followed Armstrong’s white Cadillac Eldorado.
The Eldorado’s convertible top was down and the warm evening sea breeze blew through Armstrong’s blond hair. Next to him, the wind skimmed over Hurricane’s buzz cut. The two seemed not to have a care in the world, turning their heads only to glimpse the action caught in the car’s headlights of couples fondling each other as they leaned against the Malecón’s stone seawall.
Lizard barked at PayDay, seated next to him, “Light me a ciggy, would you? They’re in the glove compartment.”
PayDay popped open the glove compartment and took out a pack of Camels. He knocked free a cigarette and lit it up from the glowing tip of the lighter he pulled out of the dashboard. He handed the Camel over to Lizard.
Lizard mashed the cigarette between his fat lips, smoke leaking from the sides of his mouth as he spoke. “Why don’t you have a ciggy yourself?”
“I don’t smoke. I prefer my PayDays.”
“That kiddy shit is going to rot your teeth.”
“I’ve got good teeth. Don’t worry about my teeth.”
“Where do you think these two birds ahead of us are going?”
“I don’t know this town. All the street signs are in Spanish.”
“Yeah, that’s stupid. The Americans are the ones who kicked the Spanish king’s ass out of here. You’d think after that the Cubes would print everything in English. All the hookers here speak English, that’s a big motivator for the whole country to get in line. If you’re gonna fuck a guy you’ve got to at least be able to count in his language.”
King Bongo Page 14