The last attempt in April 2003, when the hijackers ran out of fuel and had to dock the ferry at a Cuban port. Officials stormed the boat and arrested all three hijackers. At a summary trial, all three received death sentences, and eight days after they were caught, a firing squad shot them against a wall, in the Revolutionary style.
On some level, hadn't the Revolution won? It was all he thought about.
He walked into his empty apartment with relief. Perhaps if he didn't see Diane every day, he might have built up something like a need for her. But there she was. Although she hadn't pressed him for definitions, every time he saw her, he feared that she might. If the situation had been reversed, he would have wanted some kind of explanation. But more than anything, he didn't want a scene. He didn't want to talk about anything. The business about not needing to get married hadn't fooled him.
He checked on the health of the Grand Bearded Diva. Alive, the son of a bitch. A message from his sister, Nadia, was in his in-box. He almost deleted it, but a perverse need to know overrode the impulse. He opened it.
“Vladimir,
“I will do the paperwork and let you know what you need to do to formally end our marriage. Your soon-to-be former wife, María.”
He stared at this. He leaned back.
There were kids playing on the baseball field and the sun was still shining.
Now what?
Diane waded through stationary cars in the midst of tunnel traffic on Seventh Avenue South, looking at passing pedestrians, wondering where her next date was coming from. She felt an odd vibration on her hip: her mobile phone was ringing. It was Jan Mattias: the Bedford Street Cinema had been nominated for a Best Repertory Cinema Award from the National Film Critics Guild. Would she mind if he accepted the award if they won, as his work behind the scenes had led to the nomination?
Each time she spoke to Jan, she remembered You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again. “Men brought up in California are different from all other American men,” Julia Phillips had written. “For one thing, they are better-looking and in better shape. They also tend to be weak in ways that are very subtle.”
“By all means, go,” she said, wondering what Jan got out of the Florentine maneuvers. She hadn't even known there was a National Film Critics Guild.
Three people had mentioned the same online dating service in two days. She supposed that a computer match or even a random selection of men on the street couldn't be worse than the dates that had been sent her way by people who theoretically knew her well. Still, the Internet was not her medium.
She felt the odd vibration again. Her phone. It was Daniel Du-brovnik, calling to tell her that Jan Mattias would be calling her.
“He just called. He asked to accept an award and I told him yes.”
“No! I should be the one who accepts the award for Bedford Street. I'm a member of the National Film Critics Guild.”
“Daniel, let it go,” she shouted over rush hour noise. “This rivalry, or anger, it's just not good for you. Stop trying to involve me. You know I can't get involved.”
She hung up before he could get further wound up or ask her out again.
There were those who believed you could “make a go of it” with anybody. Each time Joan Crawford married, for example, she changed the name of her Brentwood estate and installed all-new toilet seats. Of course, marriage in those days was different, a conduit to sex, even in Hollywood. Doris Day shocked everyone in the 1980s when she announced that she believed in both premarital sex and cohabitation: had she lived with any of the fellows she'd dated, she never would have married them, and could have saved herself a lot of heartache.
Her hip was vibrating again. It was Vladimir. He suggested dinner.
It was Friday night at six-thirty. She looked around at the standstill traffic, which felt symbolic of everything that wasn't working the way it was supposed to.
She met him at a restaurant near his studio. The place was loud, the food was greasy. They ate too much, said very little and returned to her room-with-kitchenette. Physical contact ensued and it was brief, impersonal and uninspiring. He left for his apartment where, he said, he wasn't bothered by neon or noise, and where he had the Internet. If nothing else was clear, it was plain that he didn't want her to join him.
She sat cross-legged on the bed in the red neon glow, flipping channels. She'd been switching gears, ready to move on. She had been ready to move back to being single again. How had this happened? And what did it mean?
The following afternoon, a vibrant Saturday with the feeling of real spring suddenly pulsing all around, Diane went to a hairstylist, taking with her various magazine photos. She watched passively as two feet of hair dropped to the floor.
“It was time,” she said, shocked and amazed.
“Do you want to keep this?” the woman asked. “We could donate it.”
“Donate it. If I'm not going to wear it, I have no place to put it.”
She walked out of the salon, determined not to look at her hair in every store window. She barely recognized herself in the mirror of a shop display. She looked older. She looked like an anchor-woman on her day off.
On Monday morning, after making sympathetic noises to Dorothy Vail, who had health insurance headaches she needed to complain about in an extended phone chat, Diane called a distributor whose copy of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woof? (Mike Nichols, 1966) hadn't materialized. The intense bickering in the film was widely reputed to have turned into a real-life habit that drove Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton to their first divorce.
“I have it in writing,” she told the distributor, “and it's on my calendar. So make it appear by tomorrow, as agreed.”
Rachel arrived at her desk. “Look at you! I never thought I'd see the day! Oh, Diane, it's stunning. Do you love it? I love it! Why didn't you tell me?”
Diane tried to smile; she had complicated feelings about her hair.
She took Rachel to look at the construction zone.
“Oh my God! That's Bobby Wald” Rachel gasped, peering through an opening in the plastic sheeting at the former heartthrob methodically cutting wood on a table saw. “I had such a crush on him. He waited for me after the seventh-grade play and gave me a lily.”
“He did?” That was the spring that eleventh-grade Bobby Wald had touched Diane's ninth-grade knee in the bleachers. “Well, here's your chance, Rachel.”
“You mean here's your chance, Diane.”
“Not my type.”
“Where is Vladimir? It's bizarre that you haven't introduced him to us.”
“He's not here. We're in the midst of a re-think.”
Before Rachel could interrogate her, Vladimir arrived, looking like an unwashed student on the last day of finals. Rachel was clearly unimpressed, but Diane felt her throat constricting.
At that moment, Cindy arrived in the construction area with a phone and Diane was able to excuse herself. The distributor apologized. Would she settle for Cleopatra (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1963) instead? Rachel was engaged in conversation with Vladimir, leaning toward him, twirling her hair, smiling; Vladimir had an expression of long-suffering on his face. Cleopatra was the movie that brought Burton and Taylor together for the first time, ended both of their marriages to other people and nearly bankrupted Twentieth Century–Fox in the process. Cleopatra was fine, but it didn't feature Elizabeth Taylor shrieking like a banshee and swinging her rear end to “rock 'n’ roll,” which Diane was in the mood to watch, for some reason. She hung up.
“What can I do for everyone? Vladimir first. Business is business.”
“I just need you for one minute,” he said.
“Really?” Rachel flirted mindlessly. “Surely you need more than that.”
“He actually means that,” Diane said, following her architect through the plastic sheeting, annoyed to be playing Eve Arden again.
As the three of them walked into the construction zone, Bobby Wald greeted Rachel like a Saint Bernard. “Well, of course y
ou're married with children!” he told her, and they were off and running. Diane again felt the burden of her status like a heavy, ugly, pointy sculpture that she wanted to just abandon by the side of the road, but had to carry around with her, for some reason that was never named.
“Let's talk about the screen,” Vladimir said.
As always, she wished he were more interested in her. He hadn't mentioned the hair, hadn't even looked at the hair. Which possibility was worse: that he noticed it and didn't like it, or that he just didn't see her?
“Do you approve this angle for the proscenium?” he asked with his eyes fixed on the floor.
What had this been about with Vladimir? Certainly, he was nice to look at, intriguing, talented. She missed the calm of his apartment. But did she miss him? She tried to pinpoint a lighthearted episode, but could remember only a general feeling of standing around, waiting for him to look up from his computer—a fairly representative moment, come to think of it. And, he hated movies. Perhaps Vladimir's potential had been more interesting than he himself had been.
“Sure. Anything else?”
He squatted to spray a line of fluorescent orange paint onto the floor to mark the angle. He rose, his mind clearly elsewhere. “I'll keep you posted.”
And he was off.
“So listen,” Rachel said in a deal-making tone. She invited Diane to dinner with Dennis and a colleague of his from Los Angeles who was in town on business.
“Say yes,” she insisted, and Diane said yes before even thinking about it.
“Great,” Rachel said. “After all, you have nothing to lose.”
Diane spent the afternoon sorting piles of new releases on DVD, while listening to Daniel Dubrovnik rant on the speakerphone about Jan Mattias, and waiting for the plumber to come fix a faucet in the men's room. By the time she arrived at the restaurant all she wanted was a shower and a bowl of Cream of Wheat. Dennis gave her a grateful kiss on the cheek.
The fellow had a loud voice, and he ended most sentences with a forward thrust of his head, and the phrase “Know what I mean?”
“Yes, I do know what you mean,” she said each time, looking at Rachel, who avoided her gaze. The meal flew by with all the buoyancy of major dental work. Dennis's colleague had the distinction of being involved in the Industry, on the insurance-litigation end, and dropped some names, including MGM. Diane mentioned her favorite pair of starlets, Dorothy and Estelle, and the bond they'd forged on the lot at MGM.
“Are those people still alive?”
“Alive and hoofing.”
“Your end of the biz is really the end of the line! Know what I mean?”
“No, I don't know what you mean.” She turned to face him directly. She sensed her sister and brother-in-law solidly behind her, for a change.
“You're a good sport,” Dennis said as he put her into a taxi afterwards.
“Yes. And you owe me. Know what I mean?”
When she arrived at the Commodore Club at ten p.m., the place was blocked off by yellow crime-scene tape and lit up by a herd of police cars with flashing lights. All she wanted was a shower and a large dose of bad TV. There were purposeful people in suits and latex gloves. She shivered in a trench coat: the temperature had dropped at least 20 degrees.
“There was a shoot-out,” the doorman said, but it had been nothing fatal. A drug ring operating out of the fourteenth floor had been caught in a sting operation. The police weren't letting anyone back into the building for the foreseeable future.
She deflated completely. She could have called Rachel, her parents, Lara, or even Dorothy, who had repeatedly offered to put her up. She could have used the crime scene as an excuse to force the issue with Vladimir. But if she had learned anything from him, it was that there was no asking him questions he didn't want to answer.
The hell with Vladimir. She should just move on.
Bobby Wald greeted her in plaid pajama pants and an undershirt. “Come on in,” he said, and gestured to a spot on a leather couch in front of an enormous TV.
“I hope you like wrestling,” he said, and offered her a beer.
She wondered why he wasn't wondering why she had called him. She sank down into the sofa, exhausted.
“Look!” He handed her a cold, wet brown bottle and sat down on the other end of the couch. “The number one pro wrestler in the world, Diane!”
“Really,” she said, taking a swig of beer, completely numb, feeling her systems switching down, switching off. “Could I use the ladies’ room?”
Perhaps she needed to give up some idea in order to move forward. She wondered what it was. The idea of a leading man leading her off? She'd thrown that one overboard ten years ago. She was down to ONE HANDBAG, watching pro wrestling on TV, making conversation with a man she'd rather avoid. What else could she give up? Another day, a different problem in the theater, another preliminary conversation with an unfamiliar man, another endless phone call with Dorothy, a different uncomfortable sleeping arrangement. This life seemed like a rehearsal for a show that wasn't going to go on.
She slept on the sofa, Bobby slept in the bedroom. The next morning, she thanked him and went back to the Commodore Club for a shower. When she opened the bathroom door, she saw an enormous black water bug lounging on the sink. It was her fortieth birthday. If her life were a movie, she wasn't sure she would want to watch it.
MAY
IN ONE MIRACULOUS WEEK, Javier managed to avoid getting caught smoking, urinating, or talking back. He had enough white space on his conduct card to merit a weekend home. Standing in the back of a truck, halfway to Miramar on Friday night, he realized he had no interest in being home for the weekend.
He hadn't bothered to make friends at El Cotorro, and since he often had a cloud of punishment hanging over him, most of the camilitos avoided him. However, he'd met a twelfth-grader named Sofía, with whom he was studying. Sofía had caramel skin, hair and eyes. No chest, it appeared. That was all right; she laughed at everything he said. It looked promising.
If he kept going on this truck, he could surprise Sofía at home, assuming she was there. What he would do after that, he had no idea. He skipped Miramar altogether, went through Vedado and got off on Calle Neptuno in Centro Habana. He walked toward her address, making sure that his shirt was tucked in and his fly was not undone. His hair was growing in. At her building, the Vigilance stopped him. She'd never heard of Sofía, or seen anyone of her description. He asked at a few nearby buildings, in case he had the number wrong. No luck.
Had she given him a false address? This made no sense. He started walking toward Néstor's apartment. A block later, he felt a hand on his shoulder. He turned around.
“Javier!” Milady said.
He hadn't seen her in a couple of years, since the School in the Fields, where he had succeeded in making out with her behind the toolshed on several occasions, getting thus far and no further, the story of his life.
“I've been missing you!” she said, kissing his face in various places.
“Really?”
“Yes,” she said, sidling up and pulling him toward the wall, where she pressed herself up against him and kissed him flush on the mouth. He had his back against the wall and his front against the lushness of her body.
This was nice. This was weird. This was—wait—out of nowhere.
“What if I had walked on Concordia instead of Neptuno?”
“Then you would have missed me,” she said, putting his hand on her left breast.
His mind went blank.
“Milady, what are you doing?” he asked, and someone dumped a pot of water out a window. It landed four feet away and a drop hit his upper lip. What? Was that directed at them? For kissing? He hoped it was water.
“Come here,” she said, and led him into a courtyard, through a narrow passageway, up two flights of spiral stairs, across a shaded balcony, up another flight of stairs, through a black door, and onto a tiny roof deck.
It was a nice view. It had no railing.
To the left, there was a red bucket of stagnant water, an old rolled-up rug, dead plants in pots and a broken wooden chair. To the right, there were two long aluminum-and-plastic chairs for sunbathing. Milady was stretched out on one, holding her arms out.
“There's no railing,” he said. “This is dangerous. Someone could fall off the roof.”
She smiled at him but didn't say anything. What was this place? Breathing slowly, he lowered himself on top of her and began to kiss her.
Was this her apartment building? Darkness had only just started to fall: could anyone see them? At this point, she had pulled off his shirt and her own, and was unbuckling his belt. Would she stop him, as she had at the School in the Fields, by saying that her parents insisted she be a señorita, and had ways of finding out if she had done something. Who had thrown the water, and why? Had Sofía given him the wrong address on purpose?
Milady had his pants off now, and had rolled up her skirt. She began clawing at his underwear. He pulled away. He was in his underpants, half-standing, half-sitting on an open roof without a railing in the middle of Centro Habana with a massive erection.
“What if someone comes up here?”
“I locked it from the outside,” she said, and pointed to the door.
She had been here before. He looked around, checking out the sight lines from other balconies and windows. It was unlikely, if they stayed down on the chaise, that anyone could see them, or anyhow, see all of them.
Would she have come up here with anyone passing by?
He couldn't afford to think this way. When would he be in this position again? He readdressed himself to Milady, who was clearly not a señorita anymore.
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