“Of course not. It's a good thing this happened here. We can get everything delivered. If we were in Westchester, now, forget about it. Where are you living, Diane?”
“Nowhere.”
“I have a great idea, Diane,” Dorothy shouted. “Stay with me!”
“Dorothy, you know I don't leave until after the late show.”
“I'm up all night! We can watch The Late Show together! I wouldn't be doing you a favor—you'd be doing me a favor!” Trying not to cringe, Diane turned the invitation down with a lie about another sublet. After a half an hour of meandering chat about the gala, she emerged into piercing sunlight and massive heat that lay thick over the pavement.
Javier was standing in front of the building, kicking things into the gutter.
“They took their ball and left!”
“Oh, Javier”—she laughed and gave him a hug—“I saw.”
“I just want to play! Why do they leave?”
“I'll play with you,” she promised him.
“Yes, but when? When you will play with me, Diane?”
She put her arm around his waist and walked with him. He fell into step with her nicely, and put his arm around her shoulder.
“How would you like some snazzy new shoes for your birthday?”
“Shoes? I like shoes.”
They strode west together as if they were a couple. Eventually, the wall of heat they were walking into slowed them down. They separated. He was taller than his father, she noticed.
The birthday dinner was in an overpriced, overloud steak house in Midtown packed with large groups of shouting men in shirtsleeves. How could this possibly be fun for Javier? What was going through Vladimir's mind? He was a complete cipher to her since he'd begun his retreat. It occurred to her now that the process of withdrawal had started with the phone call to María—possibly sooner. Perhaps Vladimir hadn't been running away from her from the start, but he certainly hadn't been running toward her.
Small Change (François Truffaut, 1976) always drew a respectable crowd, so she had Floyd save seats in the back ahead of time. As Truffaut once said, “All films about children are period films, because they send us back to short pants, school days, and the blackboard, summer vacations, our beginnings.” As always, she was swept away by the sweetness of the childhood crushes and the direct portrayal of the antisocial behavior of the abused boy whose sad story is discovered in a medical exam at school. The French habit of presenting the full range of human emotions beat the American habit of whitewashing and tear-jerking every time.
Both Javier and Vladimir were rooted in their seats at the end of the film. As the crowd filtered out, they sat in silence, not looking at each other. She was reminded that she'd never had access to anything important to Vladimir. He turned to Javier and embraced him suddenly. This lasted longer than she would have expected. They broke apart, both of them wiping their eyes and laughing with embarrassment. They stood up, patting each other on the shoulders.
Well, that was something.
And then they left. She watched them push open the glass doors, two slim, dark, curly-headed men in khaki pants walking away from her.
The ticket holders trickled in for the late show. Storm worked through the line at the concession stand. Cindy closed the ticket booth and left for the evening. Diane stood in the empty lobby, feeling completely deserted.
She walked east on abandoned streets: anyone with a watering hole to go to had gone to it. This moment—leaving the theater, no one to share the film with and nothing to look forward to—made drug addiction look reasonable. Rachel had offered to let her stay again. Diane decided she'd rather take an iffy room in an unknown hotel than be weird, pathetic Aunt Diane again.
She checked into the busy bed-and-breakfast she used to pass daily in her old neighborhood. Her room was next to a pack of soused Australians screaming fight songs. At midnight, she took the coffin-style elevator downstairs to demand that the night clerk tell the Aussie horde to shut up. The clerk dialed, and asked them— rather too politely, she thought—to keep their voices down. She took the coffin back upstairs. As she feared, the maneuver backfired: they were riled up and spiteful now. She hesitated in front of their door; the fumes of alcohol and all-male yelling intimidated her, in spite of her rage. She packed her shopping bag and checked out, ripping up the credit card bill instead of signing it.
She took a taxi to the theater, let herself in with her key and opened her office door. When she turned on the lights, she saw a dark gray thing on the sofa move suddenly and then tear across the room.
It was a cat. It was the fattest cat she'd ever seen.
“You!” she shouted, and the animal curled into a ball and hissed at her. She dropped her shopping bag on the floor. The cat sprang to the top of the filing cabinet.
More tasks she lacked the skills for: three-dimensional fighting, animal management.
“Get out of here!”
The cat wasn't moving. It looked like this might be a very long night.
“I'm too tired for this. I'm sleeping here. I won't bother you, don't you bother me,” she told the cat, and sat down on the couch, which had a gaping wound on one side, with the innards spilling out in wedges of yellow sponge. She was getting settled, if not comfortable, when the cat sprang to the floor, scattering all the DVDs from the top of the cabinet in every direction. The cat hesitated by the door, then came straight at her, scratching her face and hand.
Diane screamed and stood up. The cat bounded out of the room.
She ran to slam the door. With her heart knocking in her throat, she cleaned her face and hands with an antibacterial wipe, returned to the torn couch, and laid her head on the green sweater. At the very least, one daily mystery had been solved.
Back at the apartment, Vladimir turned on the computer and discovered that Fidel Castro—infuriating, infallible and heretofore immortal—had provisionally delegated his duties to his brother, Raúl, while he was undergoing intestinal surgery.
Vladimir sat back on his chair, processing this astounding bit of news.
“Javier, this is a historic moment,” he said quietly, surprised that he could be surprised that an elderly man in frail health who kept a crazy schedule could have medical issues. In spite of the rumor of Parkinson's disease, the rumor that he slept only four hours a night and the rumor that he was constantly moved from residence to residence by the secret police, Vladimir was still surprised. He honestly believed that the dictator would outlive everyone.
Javier read the information and sat back on his haunches. “Do you know I haven't thought about him once since I've been here, unless someone else brought him up?”
“He could be dead.”
“You think?”
“Remember when he fell, and he had the knee surgery without anesthesia, because he was ‘taking care of the important business of the State’ during the operation? He didn't delegate then, why should he now?”
The phone rang: it was Bebo.
“Brother, I'm sorry to call so late, but we have an agreement!”
They talked until one-thirty and Vladimir was up till four a.m. monitoring the situation on the Internet. It was all speculation.
At eight o'clock, Vladimir dragged himself out of bed to take a shower. A death now would be a Pyrrhic victory: he wanted the despot on trial, he wanted the psychotic dictator to apologize and repent. He began to shave. By the time he was done, he was sweating again. He took a second shower in cold water. Death was too easy for him! He'd be a martyr, a hero. When Vladimir left the apartment, he was hit with a blast of heat so dense and overwhelming that he had to go back inside the lobby to cool off.
He needed to finish the construction documents for a new office renovation and file them by the end of the day. He was meeting Chris and Magnus for lunch at twelve-thirty to discuss the new project, and the Department of Buildings closed at five; he would have to hustle. At the studio, he made a pot of espresso. Periodically, he checked on the status of
the dictator's health, but there was no news. The temperature had hit 101 degrees before noon.
He was in a full-body sweat when he got to the café Chris had chosen; an employee at the counter greeted him. He nodded at her and stood in front of the air conditioner, and rotated so that the cold air hit him in various places. After a few minutes of this, he decided he really should sit down, although he wasn't hungry. This space was so poorly designed and put together that even a paint job couldn't help it. He was nauseated and still sweating. He drank two glasses of water straight down and put the remaining ice on his face, his neck.
Chris arrived. “You heard the news?” He was too tired to speak, or even nod. “Hey, partner, you don't look so good!”
“I can't speak,” he said, and he felt his knees give way beneath him.
In a blue air -conditioned cubicle at the back of the Emergency Room, Chris sat in the corner while Vladimir was given a thorough questioning by a nurse in green surgical scrubs. The nurse, who had a classic Irish face, perked up when Vladimir responded, “Married. No, wait: divorced.”
“Are you married or are you divorced?”
“Finally. Yes, divorced.”
She exchanged a look with a nurse dressed in bubblegum pink surgical scrubs who was bustling around.
“And you are … ?” the green nurse asked Chris.
“I'm his partner.”
“Business partner,” Vladimir specified. He looked pale, sweaty and weak.
Vladimir began shivering, and the pink nurse nipped out and returned with a sheet to drape over him. “Okay? Want a blanket?”
“This is fine,” Vladimir said.
He really did look dreadful. The moment when the blood drained from his face and he dropped to the floor had been one of the most frightening things Chris had ever seen. It was lucky that he'd opened his eyes a minute later, and that the ambulance came right away and the traffic wasn't too bad and the hospital had air-conditioning.
There was another long wait and then a round of tests (blood, urine, blood pressure, electrocardiogram). Vladimir was in no mood to talk, and Chris was glad he had brought the newspaper. To calm down after the scary drama, he was reading about strokes, deaths, fights, power outages and other assorted ills of the heat wave.
Diane and Javier arrived, out of breath and sweating. Javier took his father's hand in a very sweet way. Diane waved hello to Vladimir and he nodded to her without energy.
She came over to the corner where Chris was sitting and greeted him warmly. Of course, he'd had nightly updates about Diane's absurd real estate saga from Paul, but he hadn't seen her in quite a while, or spoken with her in at least a month. She looked tired, disheveled and harassed. Vladimir hadn't mentioned her again, so Chris had assumed that they were both behaving like professionals.
“He didn't sleep last night,” Javier told Chris in an aside. “He was up all night monitoring the Developments.”
“What developments?” a sleek, dark-haired woman in a white coat asked as she entered the room with authority.
“The situation in Cuba,” Javier said gravely.
“Ah, Cuban!” the doctor said with interest, and checked Vladimir's pulse. “What do you think will happen to the Revolution if Castro isn't around?”
“Stop calling that a revolution,” Vladimir said as the doctor placed her stethoscope in her ears. “Who did he pass the reins to?”
“His brother?”
“Exactly. So it's a monarchy after all.”
“Oh, ho, ho!” the doctor said. “Hold your breath.”
Vladimir held his breath, looking at Javier, who was playing an electronic game.
“Okay, release,” said the doctor.
“You're ruining your eyes and learning nothing from that,” Vladimir said.
“I'm improving my eye-hand coordination and my mental reflexes,” Javier said.
“He makes a point!” the doctor said, and ordered an intravenous drip for Vladimir.
“And you gave it to me,” Javier said.
“I didn't think you were going to become addicted to it.”
The pink nurse organized the equipment and attached the tube to Vladimir's left hand. Javier grimaced as if he himself had been pricked.
“So listen,” the doctor said, sitting down on the bed. “The heat is terrible, but what else is going on? Are you under stress?”
“The usual amount. I was up all last night.”
“Have you been drinking a lot of coffee?”
“Yes, I had a lot of coffee this morning. Four or five cups.”
“Caffeine can dehydrate you. Even if you're drinking water.”
Paul arrived. “What happened? Your hero is admitted to Havana General, and you have a sympathetic response?”
Vladimir grinned and said softly, “I think he's dead.”
Paul looked at Vladimir as if he had performed an astounding magic trick.
“He's dead already, and they're buying time? That's good! I hadn't even thought about that.”
“Already dead, or they're using this as a test run, to see what happens when he does die. Who comes up out of the woodwork.”
The doctor was reading Vladimir's chart.
“Interesting theory,” Paul said. “What do you think about Raúl?”
“Murderous bastard. But he can't hold it together.”
The green nurse paused in her ministrations, and the doctor looked up from the clipboard. “You think there'll be an uprising?” the doctor asked.
“Things will change without an uprising. It's too hot down there to be brave.”
“It's too hot up here to be anything,” the green nurse said, as she finished taking his temperature.
“If he is dead, or goes eventually, are all the Cubans here going to go back?” Paul asked.
“Of course not. More likely, you'll see people down there coming here. After almost half a century, they want to live their lives. What's left of their lives.”
“I saw in the paper,” Paul continued, “the Cuban people are praying for Castro's speedy recovery.”
“They're praying for the man who criminalized religion,” Vladimir said, raising his voice. “What does that tell you about the Cuban people?”
“Do you think that everyone who had the gumption to protest has already left?” Paul asked, and Vladimir sat bolt upright and nearly knocked over the IV.
“Let's not upset Vladimir,” Chris said, ostensibly to the room at large. “I think he's had enough stress on his system for one day.”
Vladimir lay back with an impatient expression on his drained face. “It is impossible to explain fear to Americans. You can't even imagine a life without cable TV, so how could you imagine a crowd pelting your home with rocks and chanting slogans against you twenty-four hours a day while the police supervise?”
Javier looked up from his toy. “There was an act of repudiation in our block last year,” he said. “We had to throw rotten tomatoes at their house and play music all night into their windows so they can't sleep.”
“You had to?” Paul asked; he was too far away for Chris to lean on him to stop talking.
“My grandfather organizes this. I had to be there. I left when he wasn't looking. Afterwards, he find me and hits me for going away.”
Paul looked like he might ask another follow-up question; Chris cast a look of dire warning at him.
The doctor said, “You really do need to avoid stress of any kind. Perhaps your friends can wait for you outside?”
Chris escorted Paul out to the hall as the pink nurse walked back into the room. Paul pulled his cellphone off his belt and began to make calls. Javier and Diane stayed in the cubicle.
“Did you know you can lose a gallon of water in an hour?” the pink nurse said, placing a pitcher of water and a styrofoam cup on the rolling table in front of Vladimir. “So you have your work cut out for you. Drink.”
Chris, watching from the hall, was suddenly aware of Diane. She didn't appear annoyed, impatient, jeal
ous, wistful, or any of the obvious things one expected from a recent ex. She looked on with calm interest as Vladimir was taken care of by the female medical professionals who surrounded him. Chris was once again amazed at Vladimir's ability to rivet attention, to spark the imagination and inspire fond wishes from even those who found him problematic.
“Who will you play chess against if he dies?” Diane asked.
Vladimir inclined his head, as if considering the question, but didn't answer.
Javier poured a cup of water for Vladimir. “Did you really fall on the floor in the restaurant?” he asked.
“Passed out cold!” Vladimir said with relish. “I think we cleared the place out. And let me tell you, if I were that restaurant, I would be thrilled to have me pass out there. I bet they all got to go home for lunch.”
Before and after the English class, most of the students still chatted in Russian, Chinese, Hebrew or Spanish. What was the point, Javier wondered. Each time the woman who usually sat next to him, a Guatemalan, spoke to him in Spanish, he responded in English. She rolled her eyes and made the effort in English, only to revert, a sentence or two later, to Spanish. Everyone was older than he was by at least ten years, and there were no female students of interest to him. Still, it was better than the English classes he'd had at school: Tom is a boy. Mary is a girl. He decided to focus on learning slang and idiomatic expressions.
Since the heat wave, the skateboarders had moved indoors to the arcade for much of the day. Javier spent almost three hours one day hanging out with them, hoping to see Zoë, and perhaps ask her to a movie. When she arrived at the jump, she was vague and difficult to engage in talk; she looked beyond his head while speaking to him, and perked up when a wiry twenty-something guy with frizzy red hair and enormous gold medallions walked by. She followed the guy around the fence to the bleachers by the baseball field. A different crowd—tougher, older white kids dressed like rappers—hung out over there, even in the heat, apparently.
A week after the trip to the Emergency Room, with things largely back to normal although still unbelievably hot, even for one raised on a tropical island, Javier went to a deliciously air-conditioned palace of provisions, the Gourmet Garage, where he browsed in a happy trance among foods that were forbidden, unknown or impossible to find in Cuba. He loved this place; he loved that it was indoors, fully stocked with fancy foods and climate controlled. He loved that there was good, if old, music playing on the stereo. Unfortunately, the store was also shockingly expensive; he bought the vegetables, meat and dessert here, and went to a supermarket closer to home for more ordinary supplies.
Don't Make a Scene Page 27