Читать книгу Spanish Disco - Erica Orloff - Страница 12

A bove the surf noise of the Gulf of Mexico rippling toward shore, I heard a bubbling, gurgling sound. Glancing around the garden, I spotted a fish pond filled with koi. Flashes of gold-and-white-speckled fish lazily swam, flicks of their tails catching beams of sun. A cat perched on the stone ledge surrounding the pond. All white, with green eyes, it licked its paws and stared at me.

“Hey cat,” I said, offering it a nod. Then I noticed at least ten other cats sprawled throughout the garden. Orchids hung from tree branches—white and hot pink and purple, all in full bloom and thriving. Other flowers and bushes exploded with a blend of scents—citrus and jasmine. Fruit trees and avocado trees grew, limes and oranges and nectarines ripe for the plucking. Azaleas and gardenias grew—not an easy feat in Florida. Cedar benches and a glider nestled near particularly restful spots. Someone clearly loved gardening. It was a monumental task to coax these flowers to grow in the brutal Florida sun…and the sandy soil. Riggs must have trucked in a farm-full of real soil.

I approached the house, for the first time really noticing its size. Made of glass and stone and wood, it offered views of the water on three sides. A frosted glass-and-wood door, surrounded by hanging orchids, stood atop a narrow slate and rock staircase. I climbed the stairs, rang the bell, and waited.

Finally, the door swung open, and there stood America’s greatest living author. Roland Riggs was white-haired and tall. I’d forgotten no one had seen a picture of him since 1977. He wore round silver spectacles that accentuated his clear, blue eyes. His skin was tanned but wrinkled and he smiled, revealing pure white teeth and a pair of craggy dimples. He looked like a vision of America’s perfect grandfather.

“Cassie Hayes.” He extended a liver-spotted, wrinkly hand and firmly shook mine.

“Yes, sir.”

“Call me Roland…where’s your stuff?” He craned his neck.

“In my car, down by the garden gate.”

“We’ll get it later. How’s lunch sound? Maria has cooked a plate of enchiladas.”

“Terrific.”

“Splendid.” He turned and led me into his house. He had a slight shuffle to his gait, and his shoulders stooped a bit. His white hair stood up on its ends, a bit of an Einstein-do. I couldn’t help but notice he was barefoot. He was wearing a pookah shell necklace. Checkered boxer shorts peeked beneath a pair of crisply ironed tan shorts. The Bee Gees were playing on his stereo. As “Staying Alive” pulsed in the background, I watched him sway back and forth a time or two, involuntarily I think, as people do when lost in a song. He had terrible rhythm. As I followed the man whose words had changed the way America talked about war, I smiled to myself. He wasn’t like any grandfather I’d ever known.

Stepping inside Roland Riggs’s kitchen was like walking into something out of a Creature-Feature show. Plants didn’t just grow in the windowsill, where sunlight streamed in through triple panes of glass. They grew everywhere. In fact, I wondered if a kitchen counter even existed beneath all the plants. It was like The Day of the Trifids. Only no Trifids, just plants.

“What are all these things?”

“Potato bonsai.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Potato bonsai.”

“I’ve never heard of that.”

“Most people haven’t. It’s an art form. When you were a little girl, did you ever try to grow a potato? Stick one in water with the toothpicks and all that?”

I tried to think back to my childhood. My mother would never have touched a food item that needed cooking. Our housekeeper believed the kitchen was her own territory and threatened death to all who did not respect her domain. My father? He helped me write a 130-page paper on misogyny in literature for my fifth-grade end-of-year English project. Growing potatoes and other simple child pleasures were not in his repertoire. But I was meeting the famous Roland Riggs for the first time. So I did what I do so well with all my authors.

“Of course,” I lied.

“Well, Maria takes it one step further. She tends to these little potatoes here until she can make bonsai out of them. And then she tends to those. See, over there?”

Sure enough, little bonsai plants sat on a corner of the counter in beautiful glazed Japanese pots. Of course, most bonsai plants I have ever seen—which admittedly is not many—created little scenes of Japanese men fishing or sitting on a bench. Or perhaps no scene at all, just the bonsai curving gracefully. These bonsai each had a unique scene of tiny troll dolls—nude—sitting on high chairs or hugging each other, with their trademark Don King fright hairdos sticking straight up in an array of colors from green and yellow to a blinding hot pink.

“This is an art form I have never seen before,” I commented. Truthfully.

“She’s quite amazing. And now…” He smiled and led me to a beautiful oak-plank table in the dining room. “You get to partake of her other art form. Cooking. Maria is from Mexico, and she is unparalleled in her cooking skills. More evidence of her artistry,” he said, with a flourish of his hand.

Ten minutes later, I was tasting the enchiladas. My mouth was burning. Maria, his housekeeper, apparently cooked with a bottle of hot sauce in her belt like a Mexican gunslinger. Only she was slinging fire.

“You like them?” Roland asked from across the dining-room table, polished to a sheen. We could have fit sixteen around it.

“Like them?” My eyes watered, and my voice was hoarse with tears. “I need cold liquid. Ice.”

I hadn’t yet seen Maria. I assumed she was cleaning in some other part of the house. Perhaps she was trying to kill me. And Roland Riggs.

Genially, he rose and walked over to the refrigerator, one of those blend-into-the-cabinetry custom-made types. Simple Simon apparently provided quite an income to Riggs.

“Beer? Cold soda? Ice water? Juice?”

The moment of truth. Let on that I was a coffee-slugging, tequila-loving hedonist? Well, there was no way I was going to hide all my bad habits for a month.

“Beer.”

He came over to the table with two Coronas and two lime wedges.

“How’s Lou?”

“Good. He sends his best. I actually need to call him and set up my laptop and e-mail if that’s okay.”

“I never thought the computer would be so big. The Internet…do you know they have over a hundred Web sites devoted to me? That puzzles me.”

“You’re an enigma. You disappeared.”

“Yes, but they post fuzzy photos of me…supposedly me. Someone who vaguely looks like me. One hundred sites…” he shook his head from side to side.

“Anytime someone pulls a disappearing act, seems like people can’t handle it. For God’s sake, how many idiots out there think Elvis is still alive?”

“You mean he’s dead?”

I choked on my enchilada but then spotted a twinkle in his eye.

“You know what I do sometimes?” he asked.

I shook my head.

“I invent a name for myself, and I bash myself on the Web sites.”

“Really?”

“Sure. I make up a chat room name like ‘Simonsucks’ and I visit the Web sites and post how I think Simple Simon is a load of crap.”

“What happens?”

“I get flamed, of course. People send me all kinds of terrible e-mail. No one has ever caught on that it’s me.”

He looked quite pleased with himself. I took in a breath. “God, these enchiladas are hot. Aren’t you having some?”

“Shh. No, I’m not hungry. Maria is a blessing, but this hot food is all she cooks. I can’t cook at all, so I…make do. But Maria makes a fuss when I don’t eat what she puts in front of me. A mother hen kind of thing. So keep a secret and say I ate a few.” With that he went into the kitchen and took a clean plate from the cabinet and started rinsing it under the faucet. “I put it in the drying rack, and she thinks I ate.”

Next he took two enchiladas from the casserole dish they had been baked in and dumped them down the garbage disposal, running it swiftly while looking over his shoulder.

“You know that night a long time ago when you met Lou?”

He nodded and walked back to the table.

“Did it really last a weekend? A three-day bender?”

“Near as I can recall. I do remember thinking Lou was very smart and if I ever wrote a sequel to Simple Simon I’d want to work with him. Of course, I didn’t think it would take me this long.”

“Have you been working on it this whole time?”

“God no. I’m not that pathetic.”

“Can I see it?”

“The manuscript?”

I nodded and washed down another burning bite of food.

“How fast do you work?”

“Very.”

“Well, then I think we should wait. I want you to understand why I wrote the book first. Otherwise you won’t understand it.”

“Post-modern?”

“Uh…not exactly.”

I lifted my fork, about to subject myself to another bite, when two rabbits appeared from behind a living room chair. They hopped toward the table. I put down my fork and squinted. I blinked. I blinked again. One of the rabbits sat up on its haunches and licked its paws. For a moment, I thought I was hallucinating. Roland turned around to see what I was looking at.

“Oh…those two fellows are Pedro and José. They’re Norwegian dwarf bunnies. Siamese. See how they kind of resemble a Siamese cat around their noses?”

I nodded. “And they just hop around the house? Like that? Loose all the time.”

“Don’t worry. They’re not vicious or anything.”

I looked at his face, trying to discern how serious he was. Apparently very. His eyes registered concern about my fear of loose rabbits, so I tried to put him at ease.

“I wasn’t worried that they’re vicious. I…I just never knew anyone who had them just…hopping around like that.”

“Later you might see Cecelia. She’s a white one. More shy. We think she might be pregnant. They’re housebroken, you know.”

“Really?”

“Yes. Most of the time. I occasionally find rabbit poop on the bathroom carpet. I keep telling Maria it’s because the carpet is green and they think it’s grass.”

I stood and slowly approached Pedro, who wisely saw I was not an animal lover and hopped away.

“So you like rabbits?”

“I never thought about it, actually.”

With that, Maria burst through the door carrying an armload of fresh cucumbers from an as-yet-unseen vegetable garden.

“Maria, this is our houseguest, Cassie Hayes.”

“Hello,” she smiled, her black eyes open wide.

“Hi.” I was struck by how beautiful she was. She was probably my age. Her dark eyes were framed by jet-black lashes, and her raven hair trailed halfway down her back in a braid. She didn’t wear a trace of makeup, and her skin was a deep yellow-brown. Wide cheekbones and a classic nose made her look like an Incan sculpture. At the same time, her hands were rough and chapped as they clutched her vegetables, and she wore ripped jeans and a T-shirt. She was chubby by the standards of Vogue. But then again any woman who has actually gone through puberty and grown breasts and hips is fat according to Vogue.

“Maria lives in the guesthouse on the other side of the pool.”

“Did you eat lunch yet, Mr. Riggs?”

“Sí, Maria.”

“You, too?” She looked at me.

“Yes.”

“You like it?”

More lies. “Delicious.” Anxious to change the subject, I asked about Cecilia. “So how many babies do rabbits have at once?”

Maria answered as she started washing and chopping vegetables, “I’m not sure. This is my first bunny birth.”

As she chopped vegetables, she set aside a little pile of cut-up pieces. She saw me look at them.

“For my birds.”

“Birds?”

“Yes. Sweet birds. Sing beautifully.”

I looked at Roland. He silently shook his head. In a moment I knew why. The loudest squawk I ever heard emanated from a sunroom off of the kitchen. It was a cross between a shriek and a banshee howl.

“One minute, Pepito!” Maria glowed. “My babies. Them and Mr. Riggs. Now shoo, I must start cooking dinner. If you liked my lunch, wait until supper. Very hot!”

“Great,” I smiled, completely lacking enthusiasm. A month of this and my ulcer would be the size of a crater.

“Let’s get you settled in.” Roland stood. We went through the gardens to my car and took out my suitcase and bags. Between the two of us, we carried everything in one trip.

Walking back to the house, I forced myself not to stare at him. I was staying with an icon, and part of me remembered when I was a little girl. There were three Christmases I remembered when my mother hadn’t yet left, and my father hadn’t yet broken down and everything was perfect. The tree was decorated like something out of a Fifth Avenue store window; a toy train chugging beneath it. Our apartment smelled of cider and mulling spices. It was a damn Currier and Ives card. And I remember pinching myself to see if it was real. And when I knew for sure it was real, I tried to remember every detail. I stared and absorbed and thought to myself, even then, that perfect doesn’t come along too often. I would remember everything about those Christmases forever. Well, for an editor, Roland Riggs was better than Christmas. He was history, and I was in his house, and when I was old and gray, I wanted to be able to remember everything about my stay. Every painting on the wall. Every word he said. Of course, I needed to remember it all for my nightly reports to Lou. He’d never forgive me if original galleys from Simple Simon sat on the bookshelf, and I didn’t tell him. Of course, neither one of us expected I’d be staying with Dr. Doolittle.

My room was better than the Four Seasons. It had its own private balcony overlooking the Gulf of Mexico and was decorated in French country, painted in a shade of blue to rival the sea’s. I felt almost serene when I stepped inside, though my eyes instinctively darted around, looking for a discreet place to plug in my coffeemaker.

“Over here is a desk…and you can plug in your laptop here.”

“Won’t I tie up your phone line?”

Roland Riggs leaned his head back and laughed loudly like a drunk in a bar whose bartender has just one-upped him in the joke department. I arched one eyebrow.

“Except for Lou, I haven’t called anyone in fifteen years. Maybe my old editor a couple of times. Then he died. But you get the picture.”

“Okay fine. So the computer won’t bother you.”

“No. I surf the Net myself some mornings. Do you get on your computer much before six a.m.?”

“No offense, but I don’t breathe much before six.”

He roared with laughter again. I realized the unseen parrot was merely mimicking its landlord. “Splendid. Well then, I will let you get unpacked. Take a nap if you want. Stroll the beach. I’ll expect you for dinner at six-thirty. Oh…hold on.” He withdrew a small roll of Tums from his pocket. “If you thought lunch was hot, you may want to keep a pack of these in your pocket at all times. I have a six-month supply of these little rolls in the linen closet at the end of the hall, behind the big stack of blue guest towels that I never use because I’ve never had any guests. Until you.”

I couldn’t help myself. “Wouldn’t it be easier to just tell your housekeeper you don’t like the food so hot?”

His eyes snapped wide open as if he’d just experienced a moment of sudden enlightenment. He appeared to think for a moment. Then he just shook his head.

“Well, then, I’ll see you for dinner.” He turned and shut the door behind himself.

I opened the French doors leading to my balcony, and then turned around and raced to the phone. I found my Daytimer, pulled out my calling card and dialed. Lou answered on the first ring.

“Well?”

“Lou, how much money do you think Simple Simon brings in?”

“I don’t know. A lot. It’s required reading in every high school in America. Why?”

“You wouldn’t believe this house, Lou. I was sort of expecting some rundown place inhabited by a hermit. But it’s sunny and beautiful and huge! Right now, I am looking out on my own private balcony. The Gulf of Mexico is rolling in. And he has gardens. Beautiful gardens with orchids and ponds and waterfalls and jasmine. It reminds me of Turkey. The scent of jasmine in the air. And everything is custom-built. The staircase is made of teak. The closet—” I walked over and smelled “—I was right, is cedar. The kitchen—not that I cook—but if I did, I would love it. All restaurant-quality stuff. The stove had eight burners.”

“What is he expecting? An army? The guy doesn’t see anyone. What’s he need eight burners for?”

“What does anybody need excess for? Why do you have seven fishing rods and three sets of custom golf clubs? To have it.”

“Well?”

“Well what?”

“How does he seem after all these years?”

“Nice. Kind of odd. The other half of the story is he’s got more pets and plants than a zoo and botanical garden put together.”

“Pets?”

“Loose rabbits hopping through the house.”

“Just so long as you don’t tell me he has a Push-Me-Pull-You or whatever that thing is called.”

“He has cats. And a parrot. And potato bonsai.”

“Potato what?”

“Don’t ask.”

“Have you seen the book?”

“No.”

“Have you talked about it?” I heard the anxiety in his voice.

“Only to have him say he’d like us to spend a few days getting to know each other first.”

“Jesus Christ!”

“What?”

“No offense, Cassie, but you are hardly the poster child for Miss Congeniality. What if he’s expecting someone different?”

“Well, he’s got me. And except for that prick Jack Holloway, I’ve gotten along with every author I have ever had.”

“What about Gussbaum?”

“Okay. Except for Holloway and Gussbaum—”

“And Daisy Jones…”

“Look, trust me, he’s nice enough. I can get along with Roland Riggs.”

“Let’s hope so.”

“You want to hear something else weird?”

“Of course.”

“His housekeeper is from Mexico. She cooks all this food. I mean for lunch she cooked enough enchiladas to feed Mazatlan. And spicy. Burn your mouth out, eyes water, nose-running spicy. I was afraid my nose was going to drip right in my food, for God’s sake.”

“A little less detail, please.”

“But get this. Roland Riggs hates hot food. He carries Tums with him around the house. Isn’t that weird? Why not tell her to cook something else?”

“Maybe he doesn’t want to hurt her feelings. Remember how your dad used to hate those German dishes what’s-her-name cooked?”

“Mrs. Honish?”

“Yeah. He hated all that shit.”

“Me, too.”

“But she was a good housekeeper except for the food.”

“Yeah. Maybe. She’s beautiful by the way. The housekeeper. She is take-your-breath-away beautiful. Anyway, let me get going. I have to check my e-mail. Anything earth-shattering on your end?”

“Nothing. It’s Saturday. I didn’t even go in to the office.”

“Okay. Well, I’m just going to take in my view here. Make some coffee.”

“Call me tomorrow.”

“Or later if I have something to tell you.”

“Later, kid.”

“Later.”

I hung up and unzipped my huge carry-on bag, pulling out my coffeemaker. I plugged it in and set it on my desk and went about preparing a pot. My chest burned. I unwrapped a Tums and chewed on it. Next I plugged in my laptop and dialed up my e-mail.