Читать книгу Subtraction - Mary Robison - Страница 9

OH SURE, THEY, OVER there in the city, had rain to behold. From out my third-story window I could see to Boston and over to the Fenway. There the sky was so low and black; if I had been there the rain would have torn at my hair, and ruffled my clothes, soaked me in cool lashings of rain. But over where I was, not so far west—a six-minute trolley ride!—nothing but fringe winds and hot breezes that dog-bone July day, although the four floor fans I had running were mixing up a nice brisk area on my damp back, which was wet from the ice-water shower I’d just suffered. I made myself do that every hour to cool off: five minutes of a paralyzing cold shower, but then fifty-five minutes of relief; of shivering even at first.

A telephone bill that arrived early in July showed Raf’s tracks. It showed all the long-distance calls he had charged to our Brookline number. He’d been to D.C.; gone on to Charlottesville; then Birmingham; Oxford, Mississippi; Thibodaux, Louisiana. New Orleans was last listed, and from there Raf made three Houston calls.

Now I had a chair in the only corner of the room not scorching with light, and I sat, wearing a towel sarong, hair streaming from my hourly shower, and dialed, and watched starlings out the window, and waited for someone in Houston to answer his phone.

The man who said hello was named Raymond Hollander.

He said, “Raf’s here in town, I believe, but not here here. Not with me, or with us, anymore. And where he’ll be tomorrow I wouldn’t know. Or, hell, where he’ll be tonight. I could make some guesses about him but nothing you’d wanna put a peso down on.”

I called Herb, a former student of mine.

“I’ll go ‘on line,’ ” Herb said. And, “Hold.”

His voice returned. “Window seat; flight’s this evening; they can do vegetarian; a motel suite; a week’s worth of rental car, but car isn’t accurate. I splurged on that part.”

“You should market these skills, Herb,” I said. “You go public, you could buy food.”

“They’re not skills, they’re crimes. And not winky-dink ones either. They’re felonies. So think prison, hard time, the gulag . . .”

Herb went on like that. I hung up and dialed again for Raymond Hollander.

Raymond said we could meet tomorrow, after he got off work, at something he called an ice house.

“Cab there,” he said. “ ’Cause directions is tricky and this is in a dumb place, nowhere you wanna be circlin’ lost. We’ll hook up there, then we’ll see.”

I studied the road atlas and its blowup of Houston, picturing horses, cacti, oil derricks, astronauts.

Once earlier after Raf vanished for a week, he mentioned an artist had put him up. I realized Raf was talking about my dad.

“You mean Mario?”

“In fact,” Raf said.

“You stayed with my dad and didn’t say anything?”

Raf shrugged his bony shoulders. His face had a stillness that seemed almost shy. I figured that over the years I’d heard plenty of stories, without his being named, of Raymond Hollander.

Houston wasn’t desert and cacti. Houston was magnolia and swamp, jungle heat and jungle humid, and Raymond’s ice house was in a neighborhood of shotgun shacks.

I had left my rental car—a low, quick, red Firecat—at my hotel and cabbed here.

The place, called the Cielito Lindo, was a stucco garage converted to an outdoor bar.

There was a slab of patio in front where people ordered drinks from a counter, as from a Yankee Dairy Queen, and then the idea was to stand around in the green shade of the corrugated fiberglass roof’s overhang.

This was Raf’s type of territory—of the spirit and mind—and I was heartened on first view. But the heat ticked like a windup clock; dangerous heat. The patio section emptied.

I moved inside and sat in the attached lounge. It was a wine-smelling cinderblock box with plywood boards banged over its windows. My glasses kept fogging and the frames slid down my wet nose.

I was sinking from the six-hour plane ride, the heat, my second Chihuahua beer.

I thought about the Gauguin show—240 pieces on exhibit at the National in Washington. I could’ve flown there instead, could’ve been standing in a cool quiet gallery wing right now, studying “Yellow Christ.”

I was afraid Raymond Hollander was like Raf; that he would mean to show, but . . .

Mexican music blew from a radio: fast roiling music so that when I closed my eyes I saw dizzying orange skirts swirling off brown legs. When I opened my eyes I saw boxing posters and tangled strings of Christmas bulbs. I saw I was the only woman left in the dark bar and that there were ten or twelve men. None was talking. All were pounding away at drink.

The door made its noise and shapes of light crossed the near wall. Somebody said, “Ray.”

He was early-forties, tanned, dressed in rough clothes, their colors worked and washed out by salt, soap, sun bleach. He looked like a desert item, part mirage through my fogged lenses. He looked exactly the sort who might run with Raf.

He came straight over and climbed into the booth seat opposite. He planted a hand on the table deck for a hello.

“Thanks for coming,” I said. “He’s not out in your car is he?”

Raymond said no, four times, four ways. He called me Mrs. Deveaux.

“I’m just Paige.”

“Well, you’re not just anything,” he said and smiled. His smile was good—white, genuine, a smile you had to repay with one of your own.

I did, but switched instantly to staring at the tabletop. Its wood looked oily and warm and handled: oily from a century’s worth of touch in this cantina.

Raymond said, “It’s going to be a leetle trickier than what you mighta thought.”

Nodding, I must’ve appeared so heartsick and tired that Raymond did another smile.

I took off the glasses. I said, “You’re either the guy who worked with Raf in Baltimore, or you were on the tramp steamer, or you could be the one with the smart dog. . . . I’m sorry, I get his friends confused.”

“So does he,” Raymond said. “I’m smart dog—that one.”

He shook a pack of Camels. “He was with me for almost three weeks.”

“Prevailing on your good will,” I said, and Raymond pointed a cigarette in my direction. “No thank you. I meant Raf.”

“Now that boy rilly prevailed,” Raymond said.

I asked, “Could you quit smiling so much?”

Looking me over, he said, “Umm,” as if he’d got my height, weight, and bra size.

“You’re as tall as I thought you’d be. I never saw Raf with a woman wasn’t one of your stretch jobs.”

“Stretch jobs,” I said, and there was a cry, as if on my behalf, from the street. I couldn’t tell if the shriek was made by a kid or a drunk or from joy or terror.

“I’m not saying like rubber band,” Raymond said. Above him on the white plaster wall, hand-painted purple roses cavorted. They seemed friends, these flowers, as in a cartoon.

“How many women have you seen Raf with?” I asked.

“Umm. However many there are. You’re the only one I know of he’s married. How long’s that been?”

“Five and something years,” I said. “So. He crashed your car, drank your liquor, ate your food.” Raymond was nodding yes, yes. “Jumped your wife? Borrowed money? Cooked your parakeet?”

“Some of those. Yep. Yes, ma’am.”

The Cielito Lindo’s matchpack was soggy from the tabletop or from just the day, but Raymond got his cigarette lighted and sighed smoke and appeared to relax. He ordered another Chihuahua for me, an iced tea for himself. He ordered by yelling at the boy behind the bar.

“I’m sorry for all he did, Raymond. I wish you had him tied up out in your car, or someplace under guard. I need to find him, fast like.”

Raymond winced and drove a hand through his hair, which was actually golden, thatchy and thick.

“There are several likely places to look for Raf, though if he’s not in them, any of ’em, you’re fucked.”

“Because that means he’s left town?”

“Yeah, and ’cause, you know, he’s not too good on forwarding addresses.”

I would say to myself that Raf kept me strung so tight I sometimes believed I felt the earth turning under my shoe soles. This is no gift that he brings, I would say, and remember how he came at me in bed—with such heat—as if each chance were our last on the very last night of the world. Every time with Raf, I would think—before he chased the thought away—“This is so scary!”

He had begun to disappear that spring just as the landscape was softening after the violence of Boston winter; just as green and gold and a little warmth were coming through the window screens. He’d be gone a week, ten days. Then he’d be back, and he’d have new scars, new stories, no excuses.

As Raymond got his car together, the Cielito’s glimmering side wall kept me upright. I was dropping, though. I felt brain-cooked.

My thoughts landed on: “This is just a place.”

The year before I had spent summer break in Cameroon. My dad, Mario, took me. He was a sculptor and he wanted to see Bamileke and Zambeze art and what architecture remained. Cameroon was hotter than Houston, and wetter, but I came to regard it as just a place. Houston was just a place.

Raymond pulled up now in his convertible, a broad old top down, the clear-green color of a frog pond. All over the sides were furry spray-painted scribbles and scrawls: “JURA!” and “LOS NINOS,” and twice in script, “LUISA.”

“It’s a beaner-mobile,” Raymond said. “I use it to drive to work. Nobody’s gonna steal it. I work construction. Doors are broke so when I say ‘Hop in . . .’ ”

Riding along, head lolling back, my eyes caught the rim of the sun there, visibly beaming red hydrogen light.

We drove up Bienvenida Boulevard. There were pudgy short palm trees with fronds bowing from their tops.

We passed a baked-clay building marked EL ESTUDIO ESCUELOS CANTOS; next a fence of three hundred hubcaps; now Southwest Texas College’s Beam Particles Laboratory, all buff and square.

Ahead, huge cloud forms were piled up and the sky shone the same bluejay blue as the Houston squad car riding with us, driver’s side.

“I really appreciate this!” I shouted at Raymond.

He glanced at me, jimmied the gear stick to neutral. We idled at a railroad crossing while a Union Pacific switcher shunted some fifty tanker cars past.

“It’s fun, riding in a convertible,” I said.

“This day should be over, though,” Raymond said.

My head bobbed yes, but I was a little hurt he thought that.

Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us?

That was Nietzsche, quoted in a kind of goodbye note that Raf left.

“I thought of a place,” Raymond said. “We’ll be lucky or we won’t.”

We jounced over the train tracks after the guard gate’s arm lifted. We passed a Fiesta, a food market with brass noise coming from loudspeakers over its entry doors. We went by scrap-metal yards, and a building titled O.K. CREDIT USED CARS AND TRUCKS.

Raymond’s engine was missing bad. He fought the stick for each gear shift. His suspension was blown.

We banged along beside a broad cement ditch—Buffalo Bayou.

“All right, darlin’,” he said. “This is gonna be rancid.”

“I’m ready.”

He looked over. “Maybe,” he said.

There was a marquee with pink and emerald bulbs and tall letters that read: THE NEW TEXAS MOTEL—WE HAVE HOURLY RATES—XXX-PLUS MOVIES!

Raymond whipped on a pair of dictator-style dark glasses.

He wheeled into the central court for the motel, where parking slots surrounded a circle of chicken-wire fencing. Inside the fence, a couple lean boys reclined, sunbathing on lounge chairs.

Attached to the motel was a shack called The Anzac Club. In a box of shadows from the overhang of its tin roof three Mexican women swayed. They were all three stout women, all rocking to the cowboy music issuing from the club. A newborn baby gestured in the arms of the stoutest.

Raymond got out and went over to her.

I stayed in the green car.

He ambled back to me eventually, swinging a room key. “You wanna come with?” he asked.

“I guess I do,” I said.

“Be sure now. You’re not counting on anything.”

I boosted off the mushy seat and stepped out of the convertible.

We entered the motel room through a rusted pummeled door that looked as though it’d been wrenched from its hinges and smashed in before.

Inside, a pinging air-conditioning unit kept the temperature icy and mixed up smells of people and disinfectant and a fruity incense.

The walls had new wood-tone paneling.

Mostly there was a bed—a swollen featherbed under a black velvet throw.

“Well, no husband,” Raymond said. He turned to me. “Maybe you’re glad.”

“But he was here? Here here?”

“Afraid so. My Spanish is leaky but I believe she said last night, and they didn’t none of them see him leave. But he’s left,” Raymond said.

He dropped onto the carpeting and got cross-legged. He popped on the TV.

The screen showed nude men with a slender woman, very busy.

“Good, the BBC,” I said.

“Sorry. I just thought you oughta get the whole landscape.”

“Oh,” I said, “I know the landscape.”

The show wasn’t a movie, it was a video, and the moans and gasps that went with it sounded contained and local, as if coming from the next room.

“Well, look at that,” I said.

“I don’t wanna,” said Raymond.

“She’s made different from me.”

“You better hope she is,” he said. He put out the picture and his shoulders sagged.

I didn’t move. My knees were crooked over the high edge of the bed and my bottom seemed to be sinking through the mattress, but I didn’t get up, didn’t let my gaze wander from the gray iridescence of the blank TV screen.

“Well,” Raymond said. “We need us a telephone before we can go any fuh-thuh.”

Back in the green convertible we drove an access road that paralleled the Gulf Freeway. We passed a furniture warehouse, industrial plants, a Flintkote factory that was sided with glazed tiles.

My motel room was at the Park Inn, a pricey building built during the boom.

The room had a low ceiling, and off the front balcony was a great palm that sent barbed shadows through the picture window and made pointy areas of darkness and chill.

Raymond docked his car next to my rental, the red Firecat.

“Don’t think we’re quitting yet,” he said, as he stopped his engine from screaming.

Now instead we had the happy ratcheting of a zillion cicadas.

“There’s still several of Raf’s people I can ask. Who might’ve caught his act someplace or other.”

In my room were pieces of blond rattan furniture. The quilted bedspread and cushions and carpeting were gray-green colors. Tropical-Confederate was the motif here, I supposed.

Raymond yanked off his heavy boots and kicked them that-away, dropped backward onto the bed, stacked both pillows behind his shoulders to prop himself up.

Over the dressing-room counter, I slit cellophane from a throw-away drinking tumbler but could draw only warm water.

Raymond steadied the gray desk phone on the lap of his jeans. He was all business, readying to make calls.

I went out for a bucket of ice.

On the room’s far back wall were glass doors that could be jerked open to a catwalk and for a view of the court below. The court had a patio, web-and-metal lounge chairs, an Olympic pool, all-out landscaping.

I went with my tumbler of ice water through the sliding glass doors.

It was evening now, and a hundred artificial lights glowed on the court below. Down there were Black Southern Baptist goings-on.

The Park Inn was hosting a couple of conventions this week—the Baptists, who posed in maillots and swim trunks of sherbet colors on the pool’s concrete patio, and a gathering of foreign scholars, bearded men and pale women in dresses.

In the water at the pool’s shallow end, the children of both groups spanked up fans of splash.

There were spotlights on the spears and spikes of junglery overhead. Shadows made jagged stabbing lines across the patio chairs and table umbrellas.

“Well, fuck it,” Raymond said after a call. “Now you see him, now you don’t. There’s still several people I can talk to, though.”

I said, “They’re getting up a water-polo game down in the pool. You want a drink? There’s a bottle of Hennessy in my things somewhere.”

“Just soda pop,” Raymond said. “I’m recovered, they call it.”

“How long?”

“Three years.” He clawed at his hair.

“Then what you especially didn’t need was a visit from my husband, Jack Daniels.”

“Hell, I like the guy,” Raymond said.

“I know,” I said and I did. “You gotta like Raf.”

Raymond brought a swimsuit from the trunk of the green convertible.

“Would you get tossed outa here if I was to put myself in that pool? I would dearly love to,” he said.

“No, of course you should. You deserve at least that for all your trouble.”

“I been enjoying myself, actually,” he said.

“Is Luisa your wife? I noticed her name painted on the car.”

Raymond made his smile. He said, “Two years now. Which was all of the original bargain. I married her on an arrangement, see. Her family’s rich. They wanted her in the States. We got a little daughter, Maria, now though. So I’m feeling pretty lucky.”

The roar from the Gulf Freeway was like thunderstorm wind and with it came blasts of cheetering night birds. These were tiny birds that zipped; flitting birds.

I had grabbed the last empty chaise. Raymond was in the water. Above, a breeze moved the mighty palms and they hissed like shaken pom-poms.

I fixed on a conversation the foreign scholars were having at a nearby table.

“Today, I’m happy. Things look a little better.”

“The weather?” someone asked.

“No, I mean in my country. The military removed the state of emergency, so who can tell? Perhaps they fear the October elections.”

A man with a Czech accent said, “It’s better for us as well, but we don’t forget what happened after Dubcek.”

The roar from the Gulf Freeway hadn’t quit—a hushing noise, like a river flowing over a low dam.

“I watched your new film, Bolo,” said an American with a comic’s quick delivery. “Are you crazy? I didn’t understand one thing.”

“Nothing you liked?”

Someone said: “Most ideas we have aren’t ours. We just think we thought of them.”

“Is that your idea or someone else’s?” asked the American.

“Wait, wait, wait,” the man named Bolo began.

“Uh oh,” the American said. “Echolalia.”

“So obvious,” the Czech said and I heard his bored sigh.

“Example?” someone asked.

Raymond was swimming a careful sidestroke the length of the pool.

“Jiri,” the Czech said, “that is not your firsthand knowledge.”

“Letters from my father, the papers, yes. Reliable origins, I’m sure,” a voice said.

Bolo said, “Various texts, but they congeal. If I were filming this, I’d include Amida’s frock, her little radio playing Vivaldi. . . .”

“Scarlatti,” the Czech said.

“We men, sitting a certain way, competing for her attentions . . .”

“Selection, no?” someone said. “What it means to be an artist.”

“That is again, Jiri, not your idea but a received one,” said the Czech.

I elbowed up and, dragging my chair behind me, moved away from the scholars. They were reminding me too much of Cambridge.

Raymond sharked the pool from edge to edge now, wriggling along the basin submerged. He did well in the water, although there seemed not enough of it for him.

He vaulted out, switched around so he was seated with his shins dangling over the cement ledge, his burnished back to me. “I’m ten years younger,” he said without turning.

He knew I was watching him, though.

Raymond pulled his Levi’s on over his soaked trunks and made three more calls.

“Jesu Christay,” he said, banging the receiver. “We just can’t get this old truck painted.”

“Raf,” I said.

“I mean, damn! He could be in Saskatchewan or in the next room,” Raymond said. He braced his back on the headboard, finally squinting at me in my poolside outfit: a tank top and jeans hacked off high on the thigh. “Are you real skinny? Or am I just used to different?”

“My weight could be down.”

“No, maybe that’s how you all’re supposed to look these days. Maybe Luisa should tighten it up a button or two.”

“I’m probably too thin . . . haven’t been eating much the last few weeks,” I said.

“Hunger strike? Or’d the cook run off with Raf?”

“Raf is the cook, in fact,” I said.

“Don’t get scratchy with me, darlin’. I know marriage is sacred, even if yours has gone screwy. But I’ll tell you true, I’m glad I’m not married to Raf. Was he embellishing or you really teach at Harvard?”

“I do but it’s nothing hard,” I said. “A lot of the time it’s like being a camp counselor.”

“Raf was bragging on you,” Raymond said.

He lit a cigarette, still studying me. His hair was towel dried, tousled. “So, what’s your uh—what do you teach?”

“Poetry. Writing it. Reading it some.”

“Brr,” Raymond said.

“Poetry forms especially,” I said. “Fixed forms are my area and what I try to write.”

“Publish any of it?”

“Four books.” I nodded. “And I’m halfway through another. Well, maybe not halfway. Haven’t got much done since Raf left, though I’m supposed to be writing full-time. I have a year’s leave from teaching. June to next June. I got an arts grant bigger than my Harvard salary.”

Raymond said, “The more I see you, the more I think it’s a good skinny you are.”

“What do we do now? I mean, about Raf,” I asked.

“Oh, there’s still some brick walls we can beat our heads against,” said Raymond.

Before he left, he said, “ ‘How is the gold become dim,’ Lamentations: four, one.”

He said tomorrow I should try an address near Viet Nam Plaza, close to the downtown. “No, wait on that until I can take you,” he said. “Or pack a rod, I most strongly advise.”

And on, “ ‘I am the man that hath known affliction. . . . It was I whom he led . . . where no light is,’ Lamentations: three, verse—don’t remember.” He left.

The Firecat had cream-colored seats, a radio-cassette and c.d. deck, smoked windows, burglar alarms, willful air conditioning.

But I was late getting started, having put off awakening till noon and then spent an hour with the street map just trying to figure a route to Viet Nam Plaza.

As I drove along the South Loop now in dusk’s glow, the banking sun and rising moon were comically big, vermilion.

I exited where my map was marked with Lumolighter; piloted down a ramp, passed the Phan Dai Butcher Shop, and entered a hopeless ghetto.

The downtown buildings—banks and towers from before the crash—with their height and cool angles and slick panes, loomed close but unreal as Oz beside these junkyard streets.

Like a little bit of Saigon, this village was—Hau Dac Ti Place: bombed-out restaurants, shelled shops. The houses were lean-tos, and there wasn’t one lawn.

My fingernail creased the street map balanced on my thigh. I needed to find Astro Ave.

The address Raymond had given me was for a converted filling station: a windowless building with CATFISH DEN painted along its forehead. Another sign read, BILLIARDS, WINE SET UPS, AIR COOLED! Razzle-dazzle lights spangled on a third sign out in the gravel parking lot. Most of the letters were bashed out on that sign. I couldn’t guess what it said—L T QU STL Y HA.

The temperature was a hundred and seven. The air smelled of crude oil. It felt wet but there would be no rain, not here or anywhere else according to the headline of the Chronicle.

Actually, the address was for the place upstairs, which was a natural-wood box on stilts. The area beneath the box was filled with candy-colored car seats, parts of cars, two refrigerators, a Danish Modern couch.

The only way up was an unrailed flight of steps. But up there, life! In three windows buzzed noisy fans.

The woman who answered my knock said, “You’re from Raymond?”

“I’m Paige. Mrs. Deveaux.”

“Right, then I’m Jewels,” the woman said. She was light-skinned, green-eyed, blonde, with the face shape and features of a Scandinavian. She wore a flowered kimono.

Her place smelled like a dinner party—as if she’d made canapés—and of the hot shortening and flour for pastry foods.

A television vibrated with a man singing “La Tremenda.”

The window fans made everything that was loose swing or flutter.

“Grab a beer,” Jewels said. Her accent was all Texas and her voice had rust in its depths.

“We gotta yell over the fans but I never did believe in air conditioning. You know? I think sweating’s good for your pores—sweat awl the time and stay youthful. You wanna have dinner with me, sweets?”

“No thanks,” I said, but accepted the lo-cal beer she passed to me.

I watched her fill a brown-freckled tortilla with beans and rice and green chili picante.

“Raymond didn’t really explain why I was supposed to come here,” I said. “I’m hunting for my husband. Maybe you know that already.”

“How do you smoke and keep your skin so smooth?” she asked.

Over her head hung a door-sized Fuelex poster that showed a growling wolf, “HI OCTANE 93,” the poster said.

She said, “You belong to Raf, I know.”

Now she lay back on a couch the color of papaya.

On an end table, rows of giant novena candles squatted in glass containers big as thermos jugs. One black holder had a cobra on its side. Another was printed with “Iglesia Bisettra!” and the letters dripped blood. Others were painted with little portraits or figures of saints.

Jewels’s bathroom door wore a wood cemetery cross that was wired around with fabric flowers, white and hot pink.

She swirled beer in her cheeks as if using mouthwash. She swallowed and said, “Raymond has gotten so damned keerful. I miss the old Raymond, isn’t that terrible? When he drank? But I do. I almost wish he’d have a slip. These are strange times.”

“What’s Raymond being careful about?” I asked. “Do you know where my husband is?”

“I sorta do. He’s with Julio. Julio’s mine. He’s a wonderful man.”

“But do you know where Julio is either?”

“I sorta do,” Jewels said. “He’s with my sister. Raf and him’re both with my sister Reba. Me and Reba are hairdressers for Nicole Roccio? You know Nicole’s. They’re all over town.”

“I just got here,” I said.

“We do that and help out our daddy some. Our daddy owns that bar downstairs you probably seen.”

She said, “You look like you’re gonna scream, Mrs. Deveaux.”

“Paige,” I said. “I need to find Raf. And this reminds me of those nightmares when you’re moving in slow motion. Please go on. You were saying about Reba? Your husband, Julio?”

Jewels smiled and waved off the smoke from my cigarette, which was unnecessary. Her fans were pushing such a current her blond hair blew on end.

She said, “All right, it’s like this. When Raymond threw Raf out, Raf called up Reba . . .”

“Of course, naturally.”

“Well,” Jewels said. “Raf doesn’t have a lot of money.”

“But he sure has friends.”

“Hey, sweets, don’t climb on me. I’m not in this. I got a set situation with Julio. You mind if I ask about something, though? I can’t quite feature you with Raf.”

I bit on that, gave Jewels an assenting nod. Finally I said, “We’re a lot alike, have a lot in common. . . .”

“Yeah, I can see that. You’re much too straight for the Raf I know.”

“I meant underneath,” I said. I really didn’t want to try for words on what was between Raf and me.

“Sex?” Jewels said.

“That and everything. We need each other. Otherwise we can’t feed or dress ourselves. We don’t know what to think next.”

“Oh,” Jewels said, gesturing acceptance with her raised eyebrows.

Outside a tomcat squealed.

“So Raf came over and he collected Julio, and then as soon as Reba got off work, they all three went to The Anzac Club and the New Texas Motel.”

“I’ve seen it.”

“Don’t it give you the sicks, that place? They were there awhile though, and then at Reba’s, and today they’re either coming here or going to Facinita or over the border.”

“I hope you didn’t mean that last.”

“Wish I didn’t,” Jewels said.

With her kimono she wore slacks and padded white shoes, like nurses’ shoes.

“Did you just get off work? When did you last talk to any of them?” I asked.

“Few hours ago. . . . I gotta take a bath,” she said. “You’re more’n welcome to wait here. They might come, who knows? Or you could try Facinita. It’s a dance place for Hispanics? But you know what? I think you could pass. You’re brown as toast. You’d get hit on but they got security, no big deal. You should wear a bra if you go.”

“What if they decide on Mexico?”

Jewels shrugged and moved through the door with the flowered cemetery cross.

I heard a torrent of bathwater.

She came back and undressed while she chattered at me. I thought this could be an act of competition, that she felt close to Raf and wanted to show me what I was up against. Or maybe she was like a kid, treating me as a sister, never imagining a same-sex erotic context. Or she was ready for anybody, anytime.

“Raymond quote the Bible to you? That shit drives me lupo. He never used to, I’ll tell you that,” she was saying.

Anyway, she didn’t make a bad show. The room was hot and she had the sheen of perspiration she wanted. Tattooed around her ankle was a fine-link chain in indigo ink. I couldn’t guess her age—eighteen or thirty-five—either way.

I finished my beer and it felt like nothing.

“Raymond used to be the best non-Latino man I ever knew,” Jewels said. “That’s when he was drinking. Now between Luisa, and the church, and AA . . . They’ve made him a robot. What’s the point of him even living?”

She vanished again, and suddenly I didn’t mind being here. I cracked a second beer.

Jewels had lit a few of the novena candles, and the winds from the wagging fans played with the candle flames, sending them sideways every five seconds.

I unbagged a pen and my poetry notebook. Just words, I listed at first, but then I got a start on a tercet. This tercet, if a student had submitted it to me, would’ve earned a low C.

I reeled over and whomped cheerily on the bathroom door. “Jewels! How’s the water?”

She said, “I’m glad you waited. I can go to Facinita with you. I won’t need no ride home and you’ll feel better if you’re with someone.”

I wanted to go alone, though. I wanted to get drunker, go alone, and the hell with a bra.

“What’ll we do, leave a note for Raf and them?”

“Good thinking,” Jewels called. “In case they decide to crash-land.”

“Do you have any more of that beer?” I asked her.

“Sí,” she said. “In the kitchen in the fridge compartment. Then how ’bout soaping my back for me?”

“Not this month, Jewels. Sorry.”

“Texans are very friendly. You oughta get more friendly, Paige.”

“Do I still get the beer?” I asked.

She didn’t answer. I heard the squeak of her bottom as she realigned herself in the tub.

“Jewels?”

“Just help your ole fuckin’ self,” she said.

Facinita had probably been a bowling alley. It was a long, low unmarked building behind an acre of parking lot lighted bright as noon by security floods. A strip of stubby palms like giant pineapples lined up along the base of the façade. Shiny loud cars were patrolling.

Jewels had come in a dress right for an afternoon bride—pastry white, crisp, lacy. Her lips and eyelids were painted purple. “Muerte—very sensual,” she told me.

The dance crowd here was excited, extravagantly sharped up.

Inside, little lights flashed through cellophane red gel. The music was salsa; the floor bouncing full.

Jewels spoke quick, liquid Spanish, pretty to my ears. She knew everyone. She hooked a tall boy who wore a suit that glinted like minnows.

When he talked, I overheard the sound “Huh-reeba”—Jewels’s sister.

“Well, goddamn. Bingo,” Jewels shouted. “They’re here somewhere!”

“Where are the bars?” I asked.

She winked; nodded left.

I saw Raf.

He was bent over, his nose and mouth in the dark mane of a girl twenty years younger than he. Whatever he was saying made the young woman smile, shake her head no, smile again.

His shirt collar was open by three buttons and the V of his chest was tan. He did look handsome in his way, in his loose black suit, although there was a badge-sized bruise on his left cheekbone below his glass eye, and he seemed far along in his drunk. Just moving back and forth along the bar he stumbled twice.

His good eye finally caught me watching, and after a beat came his smile.

I moved by slow inches through the crowd.

“Paige . . . Buensima. Someone said you might be in town.”

I nodded once, yes; afraid to say anything, what my voice might give away.

“You must want a drink. This is . . . somebody,” he said, and the girl with the dark mane looked as though her arm were being bent out of socket.

“And this is uh . . . an old friend of mine, Julio,” Raf said.

Julio had on a cowboy hat, and he held a thin umber cigar in his fingers. He pursed his lips at me, kissed three times.

“So, Paige,” Raf said. “A drink?”

“Not now, thanks. Could we . . . ?”

“I must decamp,” he told the dark-haired girl.

“Did our tanker come in? Is this our car?” he asked me. We had walked out into Facinita’s yellow parking lot.

“It’s just a rental,” I said. “Raf?”

“A rental,” he said and spat on the car.

I asked, “How bad off are you?”

He gripped my shoulders, backed me up against the door. I had one hand full of keys, the other opened on his chest, ready to shove him.

“Can you say how you are exactly?” I said.

He pressed into me, kissing my throat, my collarbone.

“I’m O.K.,” he said. “Me? I’m . . . you know.”

I drove on shut-down streets.

Raf liked the car’s stereo and liked stamping the control tabs for the radio. He was doing this now with the toe of his shoe as he sipped bourbon from a silver flask.

I recognized a bridge that spanned Bray’s Bayou and pulled off into what I thought was a public park. It was a cemetery.

“Uh oh,” Raf said.

“Mind if we do without the radio for a minute?” I asked him.

“Here’s where I get mine,” he said.

“What happened to your face?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Keep falling down. You know, I read there’s a once-in-a-millennium order of the sun and moon and all the planets of our . . . um . . . solar thing going on. Which could account for my imbalances, some of ’em.”

We were under high trees that were bearded with ashen moss. Raf lit a cigarette, shutting his good eye to the burst of flame. The hot night was talking—crickets or frogs or sighing snakes—I didn’t know.

“You’re too thin,” he said.

“Umm,” I said.

His head dropped back on the car seat and he closed his eyes and smoked.

I studied his profile.

“Who’s Jewels?” I asked, just to keep him conscious.

“Nobody.”

“A friend? A toss?”

“Neither of those. Or not so’s I committed to memory.”

We were by a grove of banyans, yucca, drooping St. Agnes bushes.

Cozying up to the cemetery was a business line of gravestones with mirrory marble surfaces.

Raf pointed the glowing end of his cigarette at them. “Soon,” he said. “My face and numbers, going right there.”

“No. You’ve been having one long party, is all,” I said.

“I missed you,” he said. “Genuinely did. You know, someplace, not too many cities back . . . Somewhere I was at a zoo.”

I said, “Then what happened? They let you out?”

“Just listen. I’m serious. They had a . . . Not a cage, but a glass room . . . tiny. For this cheetah. She was sleeping in there with this rawhide bone—great big, femur-sized. Laid out, sleeping on the cement floor with her paws up under her chin. Finest thing I’ve ever seen. I can’t stop thinking about it. My mind just goes there and stays.”

I took a swallow from Raf’s silver flask and got hot straight bourbon, an eye crosser.

“You wanted to get inside the room and play with the cat?”

“No, no, just watching her sleep. She was twitching, her eyes moving, like she was having a dream. Feet flexing. Dreaming of hunting probably. You should’ve seen it.”

“How do you like Houston, Raf?”

He backhanded his jaw, making a brushing sound on his rough cheek. He took a second to think. He said, “Well, Paige, I don’t like Houston.”

“Because I have to go,” I said. “Have to leave day after tomorrow. I was hoping you’d go back with me.”

He pounded his clenched fist a couple times on the dash. “Well, probably should, but . . . you know me, how it goes with me. I’ll get back up, be better ’n ever.”

“I know,” I said. “But I have to go. This’s the last train out, I’m saying.”

Now he bashed his palm on the dash. “I can’t fuckin’ think,” he said.

A bandy-legged Asian groundskeeper was doing night work of some kind, laboring over by the roses near the main gates. He wore a platterlike hat. I watched him instead of looking at Raf, who was saying, “I am too old for the constant fuckin’. . . . One uncomplicated dream is all I ask. How could I think about going back with you? That seems so blessedly long ago I lived in the motherfucking East.”

“So, no?”

He sighed. “Gimme a little time. Christ fuck, Paige, give me a night before I decide.”

I thought of the Countess in The Marriage of Figaro, when she sings, “I am kinder: I will say yes,” and lets her husband off for so much everything that the chorus blasts, “Then let us all be happy!”

“I’ve got a motel room,” I told Raf. “Olympic pool, room service, all that shit.”

As we were merging into traffic on the Loop, Raf said, “You probably don’t wanna go back and gather up some of my friends. I’m just axin’.”

I said I wouldn’t mind going to fetch Raymond Hollander.

“Oh, you met Raymond, huh?”

“I’ll say I did.”

“There’s a bad story there. I’ll tell it to you sometime. I’m not the hero of the piece.”

We were into the stream of cars now.

“Such a surprise,” I said.

In blackness, the instant the room door clicked shut, I heard Raf open his zipper.

“What do I know, but you seem too messed up.” I snapped on a lamp with a pleated shade.

“Yeah, I’m wrecked,” he said. “And yet, it’s funny. I look down and I’ve got this potato pointing at you. If that’s not funny, well then, I’ve been reading all the wrong philosophers.”

He collapsed against the wall in a corner of the room and was sliding. When he reached the sculpted floor carpeting, he said, “Aw, hell.”

“We should get some solid food for you, Raf. And I have B vitamins that you ought to take, so you can think.”

“You got it all wrong. I can’t fuckin’ stop thinking. The horror show runs all the time now.”

“I know. That’s what I mean. So you can think well and clear again.”

“I got clear thoughts on you,” he said.

“Aw, thanks,” I said. “You can show me sometime when you’re really here. When it’s really Raf I’m talking to.”

He stopped me with a look, fierce and sudden and serious, his glass eye sending furious points of light. “You’re talking to me, Paige.”

“And who might you be these days?”

“Another dying animal,” he said with a shrug.

“Back on the death thing, huh?” I said, but his eyes dropped.

And there he was in the corner, his dark figure stretched out, his face stilled, sleeping.

The bureau lamp’s pleated shade made harsh darting light shapes so I angled it to shine on an empty niche, and switched on the soft track lights bordering the wall high above the bed.

I padded around barefoot, in and out of the shower, emerging at last with a skimpy motel towel safety-pinned like a mini sarong.

All I wanted was Raf conscious, but I didn’t try waking him. I thought about lying beside him on the floor.

Instead I flumped onto the jumbo bed and pulled magazines from my rope tote bag—Granta, an American Poetry Review, an issue of Zoom.

“Don’t ask me about Raymond Hollander,” Raf said from the corner.

“No, I wasn’t going to. I left you for dead over there, old son.”

“I Lazarused. That’s been happening lately, just when I’m really enjoying being dead.”

“Oh, stay on the fucking floor,” I said.

“Too late,” Raf said.

I glanced around my magazine.

He was having great difficulty scaling the bed. He was hauling himself by his arms and hands, as if climbing from a diving pool.

He lost hold and fell out of sight.

“Come on, up and over,” I said. “You can do it.”

He stripped off his jacket and T-shirt, and lunged onto the mattress, landing beside my legs.

“Well, that was almost,” I said.

Raf said, “This is the moment all those grueling months of training were for.”

“That’s right.”

“The hours on the practice mattress . . . The work on technique . . . All that is over. Right now, right here, it’s just a question of pride and character; a question of will.”

It was one of Raf’s better nights. He was ambitious and strong, which surprised me, and it surprised me that he could carry through.