CHAPTER 6
“Husband? Boyfriend? Your Spitfire fighter pilot? Is this who your we is? If your flyboy is shooting down Germans, he’s sure as hell not doing it from Lisbon,” says an unreasonably jealous Harry Antonelli.
“Peter Owen, your friend, is he suitable company you should be keeping?”
“I ask a reasonable question and this is how you answer. Whether Peter’s a friend or an acquaintance, that’s the sixty-four dollar question, is it? And what’s he got to do with the price of tea in China?”
“Driver, please slow down,” Dorothy says, leaning forward.
They are lurching, slowing and speeding, slowing and speeding, in a taxi that is seemingly wider than some of the streets, miraculously avoiding pedestrians and harder objects such as lampposts and buildings. Headlight pods mounted on the fenders are misaimed, cockeyed, loose and cross-eyed, essentially useless. That downtown Lisbon is lively day and night provides illumination that has saved the lives of many taxicab passengers.
“Do you think this cabdriver speaks English, Harry? I know he heard me.”
“If he does, he’s pretending not to. Everybody in the world speaks a foreign language but us bloody Yanks, as my missing English friend or acquaintance, Peter Owen, calls us. Our missing mutual friend or acquaintance. This is a good time to talk about him.”
“Is he genuinely missing?”
“Don’t play dumb, Dorothy.”
“Harry, that’s absurd.”
“The past four hours have been absurd.”
“There, on our left. That man with the cart we almost sideswiped and killed, what’s he roasting?”
“Chestnuts. Hey, you told the driver the Hotel Metropole,” Harry says. “Did I hear you right?”
“You did.”
“Okay, well, he is headed in that direction. You have a room there?”
“We do.”
Harry whistles. He had drank at the outside Metropole bar, under an umbrella, nursing a beer that was too rich for his blood, let alone a room. Old and swank, on Rossio Square, every room has a view worth seeing, from the square itself to the high-and-mighty Castelo de São Jorge.
“Dorothy, people are double-bunked in cubbyholes in slums, and you have a room at one of the swellest hotels in town.”
“We do.”
The cab stops in front of the hotel, hard, by the Column of Don Pedro IV, the first emperor of Brazil, who is balanced atop it on horseback, centering the Rossio (pronounced row-see-oh). Street lighting casts the profile of the nineteenth century hero onto them.
Harry says, “The Metropole is crawling with Germans, you know. They’re like cockroaches in this joint.”
“So we’ve heard. You can come up for a nightcap if you’d like, Harry.”
“Yeah, I’d like, but isn’t three a crowd? You and me and this secret we of yours.”
“My mysterious third party hasn’t arrived yet, so I’ll be alone until tomorrow.”
“Yeah?” Harry says, paying the driver.
“Don’t get any ideas, buster.”
“I wouldn’t dream of getting out of line,” Harry lies as a uniformed doorman rushes to open their front doors.
Hotel staffers greet Dorothy warmly and give Harry the evil eye, something he’s accustomed to.
“Half the hired help is on Berlin’s payroll too. All they’re missing is swastika armbands,” Harry mutters as they go from a marble lobby up marble stairs to the third floor. Dorothy unlocks the door of not a room but a suite.
“Holy cow,” Harry says, gawking.
It has to cost 250 escudos a night ̶ $10! More than most Portuguese earn in a month. The average worker in Lisbon makes 70¢ a day.
“It’s been a long, long day,” Dorothy says by way of explanation, tossing her purse on a table and giving him a peck of the cheek. “Help yourself to a nightcap for me too.”
Harry shakes out a Camel and sticks it in his mouth.
“Please don’t smoke. They’re stinky and they bother my sinuses.”
“What bothered sinuses? Haven’t you seen the advertising in the magazines? This is the brand more doctors smoke than any other cigarette. Next thing you’ll say, they’re bad for you.”
“You’re an adult, Harry. In years. You decide about your health. But not in this room. Oh, before I forget, here. I know how much you like the funny papers, the world-beater heroic ones the best. Here’s a brand-new strip you may not have seen before.”
“You make it sound like I’m a kid who didn’t grow up. I don’t buy comic books. I just read the funnies to relax.”
“I’m not debating that subject or any other with you. It’s yet another debate nobody can win.”
She hands him a folded page from her purse. With that she goes into a bedroom, closes the door, and, goddamn, latches it.
He’d been rehearsing to tell Dorothy that he’d stopped writing her for her own good, so she’d feel free to find a good man, marry, have children, a dog and a cat, and marigolds in their back yard. Inside their white picket fence. It’s only a partial lie.
Whoever the lucky guy is, the limey flyboy son of a bitch, Harry is green with jealousy, but not enough to drop on one knee and offer her a ring.
He has decided to discard the plan and say nothing. She’d see right through him. And gotten steamed in the process.
He takes a closer look around. The sitting room is right out of a Victorian novel, the decor sickeningly overdone. Turkish carpets, flocked wallpaper, spindly chairs and tables with curlicue legs. And to top it off, a framed picture of Brits on horseback, chasing some pitiful fox that’s never done them an ounce of harm.
The room reminds him sourly of the era he had to study preparatory to his history degree, two five-credit classes worth of misery. In the textbooks, everybody in those times behaved themselves with the opposite sex, but Harry knows better. The hoop skirts and knickers must’ve been a challenge, but people were people. Guys always found a way.
He unfolds her gift to him, a full-color Sunday comics page. It is new to him. Wonder Woman, a hot dame wearing patriotic tights of blue with white stars. Her top is red, not much left to the imagination.
Reading along, he sees that she’s as tough and talented as any male superhero, Captain Marvel or any of them except maybe Superman. Wonder Woman has bracelets that deflect bullets, a good kind of jewelry to have, and an invisible airplane at her disposal. It looks faster that a Messerschmitt or Spitfire or anything else in the air.
A magic lasso too. When she ropes you and pulls you in close and questions you, you’ve got no choice but to tell the truth. Her and I and that polygraph lariat, Harry thinks, we’d never hit it off.
HISTORICAL NOTE: Wonder Woman wasn’t introduced until December 1941, but Dorothy has ignored the chronological anomaly, feeling that Harry needs to welcome a sexual fetish into his fantasy world. Buck Rogers’ Wilma Deering and Flash Gordon’s Dale Arden are already spoken for and she suspects that the sexual preference of Dick Tracy’s Tess Trueheart is unclear, too complex or lurid for the comic pages.
Wonder Woman doesn’t have a favorite fella; her relationship with Colonel Steve Trevor is platonic, although he wishes it weren’t. Harry likes nothing more than a great figure and a challenge.
After two or three readings,. Harry sets it aside, thinking that Dorothy has that magical power over him without a lasso. Wonder Woman is giving him uncomfortable urges, a sick fantasy of getting into her make-believe, star-spangled britches.
He recalls Mr. Harrison, his ninth-grade boys’ health teacher. Mr. Harrison talked about stuff that wasn’t in the textbooks, like what coaches told you not to do on the eve of a game. What they’d say made you go blind and grow hair on the palms of your hands. Mr. Harrison said that was bunk. Mary FiveFingers was your best gal. Mary was there for you whenever you needed her and she never cheated on you or said that she had a headache or that she wasn’t that kind of girl.
Mr. Harrison didn’t return at the start of his sophomore year, and wasn’t seen or heard from again. One rumor was that he’d been canned for how he talked in class. Another was him and the vice-principal’s wife. The rumor Harry believed was his breath. Mr. Harrison chewed Doublemint all day long, despite gum-chewing being against the rules for the kids. Harry knew that Mr. Harrison chewed Doublemint to hide the smell of his breakfast whiskey, but all it did was make his breath smell like a mint julep.
In an effort to take his mind off sweet Mary merging with Wonder Woman, he uses his super-power observation skills to find inside a small icebox a good supply beer and wine.
Super Bock in hand, he looks out the window at the plaza, still abuzz at the late hour, but he quickly closes the drapes. All the Krauts in and around the Metropole, who knows who’s looking back at him?
Harry goes through more beer and wine. Thinking that the other half of the we couldn’t be a he, her dashing RAF ace or anyone else, or he sure as hell wouldn’t have been invited into the room. Some solace there, he thought, staring at her locked door that might as well be a bank vault.
Maybe a teacher friend from Dorothy’s school. If so, Harry wonders what she looks like. Wonders if she’d be any friendlier than Dorothy.
Dying for a smoke and exhausted, ready to turn in, he tries the other bedroom door. Also locked.
The sofa with its flowery padding and ornamental wood is built for a maiden aunt and her poodle. It’s the choice of that or a wooden floor and throw rugs.
Harry curls up on the sofa, hoping the alcohol will allow him to blot out the day’s events, all the trouble he’s in on top of the trouble he’s already been in, and let him sleep tight.
It doesn’t.
Where’s Peter?
Who is we?
Harry wonders if he can find a Wonder Woman costume Dorothy’s size and persuade her to wear it.
He eventually gets to sleep and has a cavalcade of nightmares. In the worst, Dorothy is hovering in midair over him like a dragonfly while he’s being carried off the football field, Coach is in his ear next to the stretcher saying that someday they’d make helmets that are stronger than leather, like out of aluminum or stainless steel.
Crazy.