Pucho had written Javier a nasty letter of his own.
Never mind: one day after school, instead of going straight to his books, he turned on the TV and discovered the sex channel. People were doing it right there at four in the afternoon on TV! He turned it off quickly, embarrassed. He turned the set back on, with the sound down very low, so none of the neighbors could hear. It was a torment: he didn't know which he wanted to watch more—the sex channel or the food channel.
He was a long way from Cuba.
Vladimir was obsessed with the news. Javier figured that if Fidel Castro died, he'd hear about it one way or the other; being the first to know wouldn't make that much of a difference. Whenever Cuba came up with his father—which was constantly—Javier changed the subject to something he had learned that day, in or out of school. He'd conducted two more experiments with yeast, but the bread had come out chewy and tasteless the first time, and hard and dry the next. He would persist until he got it right.
Diane had a guitar, and she was encouraging him to play; it was possible that he might even get guitar lessons. In front of their apartment building, steam was emerging through a dirty white duct behind some barriers in a scene of municipal repair. When he asked Diane if the city was so charged with energy that the authorities had to break the crust in some places to let steam escape as a precautionary measure, she closed her eyes and gave him a wordless smile that felt like a standing ovation.
On the way to their nightly date at the cinema, Javier saw mounds of yellow leaves beneath a massive yellow-leafed tree. The sky was a bright salmon glow behind the branches and buildings as evening fell over the city. A piano student played scales in the brick building next door. White steam from the center of the earth escaped in a steady plume through the duct. A push of wind scattered yellow leaves across the pavement and the new cars cruised by slowly, almost as if on parade. He was on his way to see a classic samurai movie with a woman who taught him amazing, unexpected new things every day. There was something heartbreakingly beautiful about this scene, even if it was getting cold. He slipped into the theater just as the lights went down. She hooked her arm in his as they waited for the drama to unfold in the dark.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My husband, Alexis Romay, plays many roles in my life: ideal reader, motivation coach, muse, copyeditor and all-around go-to guy. For this book, he gave me invaluable background material, fact checking and proofreading on demand. I thank him for his patience, pos-itivity generosity and sense of humor. He is as fine a partner as any writer could ever wish for.
I'm indebted to Oxana Alvarez, Elizabeth Cerejido, Veronica Cervera, Eida Del Risco, Enrique Del Risco, Nestor Díaz de Ville-gas, Carlos Galvizu, Orlando Justo, Alexis Romay, Victoria Romay, Jaquelyn Verdecia and Maria Werlau, who kindly shared their stories of Cuba and exile. I am grateful to architects Stella Betts and David Leven of LevenBetts Studio, NYC, for sharing an inside look into a working studio and an architect's education. I thank Alix Biel for a vital idea that led to many others. I thank Alexis Romay, Barbara Block, James Block and Sally Higginson for reading early drafts with diplomacy. I thank Peter Block, Emanuelle Block and Sally Higgin-son for encouragement in general.
I'm very lucky to have Nancy Miller as an editor: her good judgment and high standards have made me a better writer. I am grateful to my agent, Gail Hochman, for her loyalty, enthusiasm and bright ideas. I'd also like to thank Brian McLendon and Patricia Park of Ballantine Books, and Marianne Merola and Joanna Brown-stein of Brandt and Hochman.
I had a good forty-seven years to write this book and have it be fresh and evergreen. As luck would have it, while I was congratulating myself for finishing the third draft, a health crisis caused Fidel Castro to cede control of Cuba to his brother—an event that would change my characters, an event that was not possible to ignore. I scrambled to include this episode and its fallout, knowing that this would fix all aspects of my “timeless” story to a specific period. Wherever possible, I tried to respect history. When a date was incompatible with the needs of the novel, I chose fiction over fact, and hope the reader can forgive me.
I discovered compelling details on the history, hearsay and divine trash of the cinema in a variety of sources, including: Three Phases of Eve, by Eve Arden; The Movie of the Week, by Peter Bogdanovich; Lucille, the Life of Lucille Ball, by Kathleen Brady; The Memory of All That, Betsy Blair; What's It All About? by Michael Caine; Mommie Dearest, by Christina Crawford; Bette: The Life of Bette Davis, by Charles Higham; The Directors: Take Three, by Robert J. Emery; Fellini on Fellini, by Federico Fellini; An Empire of Their Own, by Neal Gabler; Life: The Movie, by Neal Gabler; Goldwyn, a Biography, by A. Scott Berg; Haunted Idol, the Story of the Real Cary Grant, by Geoffrey Wansell; Judy, by Gerold Frank; Me, by Katharine Hepburn; Hitchcock, by François Truffaut; 5001 Nights at the Movies, by Pauline Kael; A Kind of Autobiography, by Akira Kurosawa; I'd Hate Myself in the Morning, by Ring Lardner, Jr.; Screwball: The Life of Carole Lombard, by Larry Swindell; American Movie Critics: An Anthology from the Silents Until Now, edited by Phillip Lopate; Making Movies, by Sidney Lumet; You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again, by Julia Phillips; Intimate Strangers and The Men Who Made the Movies, by Richard Schickel; All the Way: A Biography of Frank Sinatra, by Michael Freedland; Screwball: Hollywood's Madcap Romantic Comedies, by Ed Sikov; Elizabeth Taylor: The Last Star, by Kitty Kelly; François Truffaut, by Annette Insdorf; The Films of My Life, by François Truf-faut; and Conversations with Wilder, by Cameron Crowe. Among the many films consulted, but not named in the text, I'd like to single out American Masters: Sam Goldwyn (Peter Jones, 2005).
I found many sources helpful in my research on Cuba, Cubans and exile, especially Before Night Falls, by Reinaldo Arenas, translated by Dolores Koch; View of Dawn in the Tropics, by Guillermo Cabrera Infante, translated by Suzanne Jill Levine; Cuba on My Mind, by Roman de la Campa; A Girl Like Che, by Teresa de la Caridad Doval; The Cuba Reader, Aviva Chomsky, Barry Carr and Pamela Maria Smorkaloff, editors; North of Hell, by Miguel Correa Mujica, translated by Alexis Romay; Waiting for Snow in Havana, by Carlos Eire; Waiting for Fidel, by Chris Hunt; Havana and the Night, Pico Iyer;Jour-ney into the Heart of Cuba, by Carlos Alberto Montaner; Selected Writings of José Martí, edited and translated by Esther Allen; Finding Mañana, by Mirta Ojito; Life on the Hyphen, by Gustavo Perez Firmat; Flight to Freedom, by Ana Veciana-Suarez; Bridge in Darkness, by Carlos Victoria, translated by David Landau. Other books I found useful were SOROS, by Michael Friedman, and The Private Life of Rome, by Paul Veyne.
There are many great movies about contemporary Cuba, notably Improper Conduct (Néstor Almendros, 1984); Hacerse el Sueco (Daniel Díaz Torres, 2001); Strawberry and Chocolate (Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, 1994); Guantanamera (Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, 1995); Bitter Sugar (Leon Ichaso, 1996); Calle 54 (Fernando Trueba, 2000); The Buena Vista Social Club (Wim Wenders, 1999); and Havana Blues (Benito Zambrano, 2005).
Long-lost movies can be unearthed at Facets Multi-Media in Chicago, which has the old, obscure and foreign on tap in its wonderful Videotheque. I have found enlightenment in the dark in many places, but I'd like to mention just two, Film Forum and the Walter Reade Theater—both very special cinemas, both in New York City.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
VALERIE BLOCK is the author of the novels Was it Something I Said? and None of Your Business. She lives and works near New York City.
She can be reached at her website,
www.valerieblock.com
Don't Make a Scene is a work of fiction. Names, characters,
places, and incidents are the products of the author's imagination
or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales,
or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright (c) 2007 by Valerie Block
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.,
New York.
BALLANTINE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
eISBN 978-0-307-48393-5
www.ballantinebooks.com
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