Читать книгу Manila Gambit - John Zeugner - Страница 16

“Can you believe it?” Pam shouts when we are back in our room. “My daddy should see those books. Books from everywhere. Maybe the biggest chess library in the world. Maybe bigger than the Library of Congress holdings. He says so anyway. And that’s only part of it. There’s more in Baltimore.”

“There’s always more in Baltimore.”

“And he knows every game ever played. Every one, every, every one! He let me open a book and start reading off the moves and then would go ahead and recite the rest for me. And he was always right. Always.”

“I suppose he cooks, too.”

Pam thinks a moment or two—an infuriatingly serious deliberation about my comment. “I don’t know. Maybe he does. I’m sure he could, if he put his mind to it. He just knows everything there is to know about chess.”

“Maybe we could get him to do the column.”

“He says he doesn’t like to write. Only to play chess.”

“You seem to have gotten along with him splendidly.”

“I like him a lot. And I want daddy to meet him. He’s very natural and kind of special.”

“Ahhh.”

“Oh, I see. You are, you actually are, jealous. Oh, that makes me feel very good. Very warm for you. Go on. Be a little more jealous, will you?”

“He has acne.”

“Yes, and it’s beautiful acne, sculptured acne. I bet his back has the most beautiful pock marks.”

“Very good, Pam.”

“He’s just a boy, Paul. You really shouldn’t think about him at all. You know that, don’t you? Don’t you? You ought to. You really ought to. I like what you think you are feeling. I do like that, but it’s not really very true at all. Nothing. Just nothing,” she says with a contrition and maternal solicitude that is all but unendurable.

We adjourn to a kitchenette dinner of minute steaks and salad with Ken’s Blue Cheese dressing purchased from the Korean-run market on 14th street. I plan a special dessert of Wattie’s canned plumbs. But before I serve it, I go back to matters at hand.

“How can he stand living with his mother?” I ask.

“She knows a lot about chess. That’s what’s important to him. And he is just a child.”

“I thought he was almost eighteen.”

“He is, but he’s much younger than that. He’s like a big eighth grader. Such a silly sense of humor. All those puns and scatology.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Oh, I can’t remember, but there was a lot of talk about farting. He really likes to talk about that.”

“You must have gotten along famously.”

“I think he’d like to see other people, but doesn’t know how. He pretends to be totally absorbed in chess, but I bet you could interest him in other people, if he had half a chance. If he could see half a chance, I know he would. Do you think he really will come to Florida?”

“If Waldo will spring for a place for him to stay—mother and son.”

“He could stay at our place on the bay.”

“I see.”

“Daddy and mama are at the ranch most of the time in the winter anyway. So there’s a whole house empty and ready for him.”

“And meals?”

“Well, I think he’d like to learn to cook, and there’s Marisela if he doesn’t. She’s there through the winter.”

“And you’d like to teach him.”

“I don’t cook. You know that,” she points to our dinner plates. “Besides, there are good Morrisons, lots of places to eat.”

A siren moans along Rhode Island Avenue. I get up from the table and go over to the Venetian blinds over the window. Cracking a little metallic space I watch a police cruiser soar up the road, litter flying behind it, siren triple blasting as the approach to 14th Street comes up. The back of the cruiser has a caged section. I catch just a glimpse of that as the car twists out of sight on Logan Circle. “I had a friend who lived for a while in New York City. The noise got too him after a while. He told me he’d hear gun shots and screaming late at night or early in the morning around three or four, and after a while he’d hear cries for help. And moaning and he’d wonder what he was supposed to do about it. After a couple of months there, he said he began to resent the disturbance of his sleep. And then, once, when it happened again, and he heard screams and moaning from the street, he opened the window and shouted, ‘For chrissakes finish her off, will ya!’ Anything so he could get back to sleep.” I continue staring up Rhode Island wondering myself why the story is worth repeating. “He said that’s when knew he’d have to leave New York. He was becoming a zombie. I wonder what it would be like to be raised in such a place, or in some other city—Baltimore, for example.”

I turn back to Pam, but she has pushed aside the plates and put her head down on the table. Wisps of her hair actually have fallen into the residue of steak blood and blue cheese dressing on the plates.

“Are you out?” I ask. But there is no answer. For a brief moment I think she might be dead, and weirdly that prospect has for me a mix of disappointment and liberation. How balance those emotions?

I go back to the table and ease her head away from the plates. She is breathing all right. “Do you want the plums” I ask softly, hesitant to disturb this interesting condition: suspended, vulnerable animation. But there is no answer, and I put the open can back in the refrigerator. I shift Pam to the bed. Her breathing is natural and very regular, apparently she is exhausted. True repose, then? Absolute trust in me? Relaxed with me, then? More likely, simply burned out from the heady encounter with the splendid Mikey Spendip.

I move the phone into the kitchenette, slide the canvas door across the archway and call Waldo. His hello has a four G & T grogginess to it.

“Some progress to report,” I begin, wondering what he has in his hand at the other end of the line—a cognac snifter? A Redbook Magazine? His yachting hat?

“Some progress?” he rejoins weakly.

“Yes, we’ve met the redoubtable Spendip and mother and they are ours.”

“Yours?”

“Yes, if you buy the tickets, we get to bring them to Florida and put them up at Pam’s house on the bay—“

“Ah, attractive quarters,” Waldo says, perking up, “waterfront is so expensive nowadays.”

“Spendip will give a simultaneous exhibition some place in Hane and we can sponsor it.”

“Sounds as if you’ve done well.”

“You’ll buy the tickets?”

“I’ll tell Arnold to get right on it,” Waldo laughs. “I think you can pick them up, up there. At the Capitol Hilton. You know it?”

“Yes.”

“Is there something else?” Waldo says.

So I tell Waldo of my nascent jealousy. There is a thoughtful silence at the other end. Finally Waldo says, rousing himself a bit, I suspect. “Paully, I had a Syrian friend once.”

Oh God, not another parable, I think.

“I don’t see him much now, haven’t seen him in twenty years. Maybe more. I’d have to figure it out. But once when he and I were buddies, I told him I was thinking of marrying a woman a whole lot younger than me. And he said to me, rather casually, but looking right at me, he said, ‘Well, you know the young ones want to run and play.’ And I thought about that a good deal and decided I’d wait a bit. But I regret that.”

There is a silence filled with Waldo’s breathing and apparent adjustments—slipping out of his tasseled shoes? Motioning someone to bring another G & T?

“Waldo, Pam’s older.”

“I know. I know. But that’s the point. It’s the same thing, if they’re older and richer.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying two things, two definite things. First, keep your eyes on goals, not diversions and dalliances. You understand? And second, and far more important, if you’re going into this with conventional emotions, you’ve missed everything I’ve been saying to you. I mean you should, if you’re really serious, suggest Pam and this fellow— how old is he anyway?”

“Almost eighteen.”

“You suggest that Pam and this 18-year-old go off for a nice long weekend in the Smokey Mountains or up in Gatlinburg or down to Gatlinburg from where you are, and if you’re really serious and understand what I’ve been saying, you’ll be dead serious about the suggestion. And you’ll feel good about it.”

“I see.”

“Gin will help,” Waldo laughs. “The trouble, Snelly, is that you’ve still got all kinds of romantic notions about your dream love-life. Just vapor, Snelly. Just vapor. So why not get beyond it, into something that matters? Something that will last, is solid, irreplaceable.”

“Maybe I should become a Christian Scientist.”

“You are already,” Waldo says triumphantly, “that’s my point. Do you see it?”

“Hell no.”

“Well, you will. And when you do, you’ll get free of it. People spend hundreds of dollars an hour for what I’m telling you, incidentally.”

“I feel blessed.”

“You are, Snelly. You are. So is Pam. And so is young Spendip. What’s his mother like?”

“Like you, Waldo. Just like you.”

“So we understand each other then?”

“Apparently.”

“Good. Then I look forward to a fun week. Simultaneous pleasure. Is that it? Is that the headline? Double your pleasure, simultaneously. Get to watch and get to participate, or get participate and to watch. You got it?”

“Goodnight, Waldo.”

“Goodnight, Paul. Sleep tight.”

There is a coke machine in the basement, near the metal door to the garage. After I cover Pam with the bedspread, I decide to take the elevator down. Perhaps just boozy advice, whiskey talk from old Waldo, but I am interested in his unforgiving logic.

Mounted in the center of the garage door there is a small thick plate of glass about four inches wide and ten inches high, a little viewer into the parking area. It takes a special key to open or close the metal door. Just before I put my coins in the coke machine a flash of reflected light comes through the glass in the door. I stop and move to the viewer. Through chicken wire reinforcement I can see a bit of the garage. Cars are cramped on each other. I hear, or think I hear, a scratching sound somewhere to the lower right. I press up against the glass and squint. Yes, one, two, three juveniles in scuffed satin jackets are moving quickly around a Mercedes. Black kids in sneakers and each one carrying a bent coat-hanger. A kind of contest, then? Who gets in first wins the prize? What is the prize? The getting in? How can they drive the car anywhere, since you need another special key to open the overhead door to the outside.

Laughter and scratching on glass. A kind of whirling dance, as they try first one window, then another, circling the car as if it were a predator. Then one of them gets the back passenger door open. Instantly they are all inside, hunched over in the front seat. The engine coughs to life. They rev the accelerator. It takes three efforts, but finally they get the great vehicle backed out and turned into the tiny passage toward the electric overhead door. Will they simply drive through the flimsy aluminum, is that the solution? But no. They ease the car right alongside my door, then move forward until the driver’s window is even with the key box to the overhead door. The window comes down and the driver produces the sacred key. Of course! It was probably hanging from the gear shift or in the glove compartment. There’d be no reason to take it inside the building. How simple!

The car eases by my viewing window. The kid next to the driver suddenly sees my face, takes a very quick reading and decides that I am no threat. Merely a puzzled and amused spectator through the glass. As if acknowledging my intentions and capabilities the kid nods and tosses me a bird. I watch his insolent third finger glide past my chicken-coop lens. The overhead door winds up very slowly and then the Mercedes goes screeching up the cement entryway, out of sight. The door slowly comes down. I get my can of cold coke and go back up to the fourth floor. Pam is still asleep. I decide she looks uglier in repose than awake, somehow less vulnerable, attentive, or concerned.