EIGHT
You would be proud of me, Roxanna. I followed in your footsteps.
You must have watched her for many days, picked up some of her gestures, studied the way she walked and prayed and smiled—how on earth did you manage to imitate Rose’s smile so perfectly? You couldn’t have managed, I’m sure, if you hadn’t done it yourself, personally, I mean, it couldn’t have been enough to study videos that so-called Ivan or some other muscle boy for Tolgate amassed for your benefit. I am sure you did this up close, nearby, spent hours tailing her, maybe even got to know her at The Sad Dogs, that Irish bar she spends so much time at, maybe even had a drink together like I did, and more than one.
Did you rent a car at the airport and drive to the Clean Earth factory and wait for her to emerge? Maybe you didn’t need to, maybe you live in this city—local talent, right?—maybe Tolgate got you a job inside the plant to be able to stalk her, cozy up. I can’t do that: The managers have met me—I can take my phobia against public appearances just so far, after all—so I couldn’t call Paul St. Martin up, demand that he give a certain Gus Henderson a position in the cafeteria. That’s the name I registered under at an amiable bed and breakfast in the old Chestnut Hill neighborhood where I was born, brought up: Gus Henderson, traveling salesman dealing with surveillance technology, providing homes and offices with bugging devices, hidden microphones, tiny cameras, uplinks to satellites and internet spy-browsers. That’s what I told Mrs. O’Leary at the reception desk: so she wouldn’t question all the equipment that would be carried up to my room, installed there. Everything paid in cash. No tracking me down, Jessica, Tolgate, Sam. Not till I’m good and ready, Granger, you son of a bitch.
She rides a bike, Roxanna. Rose does. You didn’t incorporate that detail into your performance, didn’t even mention it once. You made yourself out to be a walking freak, somebody who covers miles and miles on foot, does not take the bus or the metro unless it is absolutely imperative, would never buy a car even if she could afford it. I should have had my doubts: How did you make it back home so fresh if you’d been hitting the sidewalks that much? I didn’t think of those details—or I may have simply presumed our side-to-side apartments were around the corner from the factory. I was too absorbed in what you choreographed for me, what Tolgate made you dance, to go into the nitty-gritty. Whereas with Rose—it’s all nitty-gritty, all minutiae. I’ve been extra careful, observant, had to. I’m on my own. One mistake and I could have blown it.
Not one mistake.
I took my time, just as you would have recommended, as your character based on Rose would have insisted. The reward will come, you said to your Johnny with your eyes, as you kept on putting off the act of love, forced him to enjoy the everlasting foreplay. My own reward came after several hours in that rented car listening to Bruce Springsteen go on and on about “Born in the USA”: There she was, biking out of the factory, the wind flapping at that dress. The same dress you had worn, Roxanna, when I first saw you, so similar to the blue dress I plundered from Natasha’s body while the hidden cameras rolled.
I’ve become suspicious, Roxanna: You taught me that too. And I wondered at that being the very dress. That special blue. It meant, of course, that the costume designer of the show you and Tolgate and the rest put on for me had been inspired by the real-life Rose, that designer had copied her clothing like you copied her life, the tide of her life. But it could mean something else: It could mean that Rose was in Tolgate’s pay, that he had warned her ahead of time to wear precisely that dress to complete the circle of my seduction. Too much of a coincidence, I thought to myself, under the thrill of watching those legs of Rose’s, which were so distinct from your legs and yet pumping at the bike with such casual abandon, reminding me of the common bonds, the common core that joins you both in spite of the difference. Too much of a coincidence: alarm bells. What if Rose had been part of this conspiracy from the start? Not spied upon but informer. Not watched in secret but debriefed daily, a consultant on the project, critiquing the way you sigh, Roxanna, when you make love. “That’s not how I’d do it; listen to me, imitate me, try to be me when you make love.” I can hear Rose’s voice offering advice. Advice she never gave. She is the real thing, Roxanna, definitely did not participate in your sham, does not know that you took over her existence to cure the owner of her factory.
But at that point I couldn’t be sure, so I mused upon this possibility as I followed her down the slow streets of Philadelphia to a building that reminded me of the one I entered to save you that day you supposedly were committing suicide: similar, but not identical. Like everything else. Rose’s home. Not on the eighth floor, but four stories up. I should know: I’ve been up those stairs so many times. I’ve been to dinner, even to Sunday breakfast/brunch just yesterday. The Monteros showered me with the hospitality that you never offered this guest, Roxanna. But then, on the other hand, this guest never gave you anything in return either, did I? Except trouble.
I made amends for that, made sure the very same evening that I would be a benefactor and not a destroyer. I sent up a bottle of whiskey and a cheesecake and added a basket of gourmet food. Signed the card: An admirer from near and far. Thought that was rather smart of me. Smarter still: The goodies were all things the Monteros cherished. You and your false family, Roxanna, giving me the right information about the true likes, dislikes, of the people you were modeled on. A seduction is always easier when you know everything ahead of time—even if Tolgate prissily disagrees with the word everything—about the object of your affections. I had been, for instance, about to purchase fifty roses and then remembered something in the dossier Sonia retrieved on the screen, something about how Rose’s mother hated flowers—so I didn’t make that mistake. And no caviar. You all hate caviar. I had to suppose that Tolgate had pillaged that fact from the real-life Monteros—and confirmed later, when I was invited to dinner, that they do detest caviar. I brought up the subject. Too pretentious, Marta complained. Too bourgeois, said Eduardo. Too much cholesterol, Rose said.
Though before I sat down to Marta’s home cooking, I had already verified that both families had the same tastes, knew that Rose and her family had been delighted with my present. And intrigued. Because I had waited on the landing outside the fourth-floor corridor, had bribed the delivery boy to give me feedback. A tip larger than a week’s salary and he was in my hands. He came down the stairs with me and passed on every detail. I watched them through his eyes that tarried and lingered and lapped up the puzzled and joyful reactions to my gift.
Not the last gift. Next morning, early, before Roxanna and her father left for work, I sent them a mammoth television set. What they couldn’t know was that I had ordered a surveillance shop to equip the set with a tiny video camera and transmitter so that as soon as they plugged it in, I was able to survey their living room. Not as downbeat and grimy as the apartment your Dr. Tolgate had established for my viewing enjoyment, cleaner, more dignified, but the same air about it. Again, the set designer of your fake apartment, Roxanna, must have canvassed Rose’s residence, assessed it, repeated most of the features, for instance that couch where Jason once slept, where Simon now stretches out his sleeping bag when you banish him from the room you share.
Simon was the most enthusiastic of all with the new television set. You were worried. I watched you through the monitor from my bed-and-breakfast colonial bedroom and saw the furrows on your forehead. You didn’t like this, these presents from that faraway and nearby admirer, you inferred who would have to pay with her body for those attentions. You. I said you. I mean her. I mean Rose. She was worried.
Her mother, Marta, was just as anxious. “We should return it,” she said. “When you’re poor and a gift comes, especially if it’s flowers, it’s always a woman who ends up taking care of the debt.” Marta, by the way, does not have a Puerto Rican food stand or anything of the sort. In fact they’re from Colombia and the food street thing was an invention of Tolgate’s or maybe the actress performing the mother’s role came up with that or perhaps they decided on that idea because it was an easy way to get me to intervene against her, make Silvia an appetizing target. Marta can’t be hurt like that because she still hasn’t found a job: too old, too unqualified, too grumpy. Rose’s brother Eduardo, however, was a gambler just like Ned had been, and he, of course, was on Simon’s side, only they couldn’t agree on what they should see that evening. Eduardo wanted to watch the races on a giant screen, the kid wanted to tune in to the NCAA tournament. But Rose’s father—his name is Santos—thought that it would be better to sell the damn thing. The family needed the money more than it needed another TV set. There was an ensuing confrontation—something about how Santos wanted the money for drink and Marta was not going to let him have it and they were at each other’s throats, just like old times. Playing their aggression out again, again for my pleasure, except that now nobody had written their lines beforehand, now they were playing their real lives, she complaining about some poems he had written her, he reciting one of the poems back at her in Spanish, telling her to lighten up. While Rose breathed deeply and tried to make believe she was somewhere else.
They ended up selling the damn thing. That very evening. So I had only that day to take advantage of it. Not really. There was nobody there. When I was watching your apartment, Roxanna, the production team was always heedful to have somebody around, to entertain me, I guess, in order to drop hints about their behavior, what they wanted, what they feared, always keep the action going. Now I spent ten hours gazing at an empty room, without even one of the Monteros coming home, not because they forgot something, wanted to cook lunch, play a game of cards, bogus pretexts they used to make up to fill my days while I waited for you to float through the door. My TV screen now blank of people. That’s what happens in real life, when nobody is preselecting the juiciest scenes, when there’s not a Dr. Tolgate who wants to make sure his patient is hooked and anxious to get involved. Even the dialogue that morning at breakfast while they discussed the television set’s destiny was chaotic and meandering, full of references to people I didn’t know and incomprehensible inside jokes in dire need of major editing. And impenetrable words in Spanish that only Cervantes himself could have deciphered. Get to the point, I kept on muttering to the screen—until finally they did. Santos banged his hand on the table and said Basta, carajo! Enough of this. I celebrated the finality of the gesture only to be disappointed by what he immediately decreed: the set would be sold that very day. They needed the dough. And no more arguing about this, entendieron?
I did take advantage of the bare and vacant day to figure out how to proceed, again I needed to come up with a game plan. I thought of you, Roxanna, and your patience, the rhythm that you had learned perhaps from Rose or perhaps was part of your own outlook, the patience I needed if I was to succeed. Wasn’t the family’s absence a chance to wire the apartment? I went to the surveillance company’s office and convinced the manager that I was the owner of the apartment. All it took was doubling the fee and we had a deal, they broke in the next day and installed hidden cameras in each room. And by the next night, I was in business, could watch every movement of the family.
I had already made some progress on other fronts. I was, of course, waiting for Rose outside her workplace. This time she didn’t go straight home, but biked to the Sad Dogs for a drink. You didn’t drink alcohol, Roxanna—probably in order to purify your image, make you more saintly, more of a challenge to corrupt. Rose, on the other hand, likes her liquor, likes it strong. She doesn’t smoke, at least that’s something. And she does pray on and off, though less New Age stuff than straight Catholic pleas to God. That evening, listening to her speak to a couple of bar buddies, I heard her explain how her prayers really had an effect—if she prayed for someone, that person did measurably better than if she didn’t. Her friends were skeptical: Get Johnny out of the can, then, Flower Girl, save the factory, wave your magic wand, Bippity-Boppity-Boo—but she stuck to her guns. Stuck to her guns and ordered another Jack Daniel’s.
I stayed as far from her as I could, merely passing as closely as I could from time to time when her back was turned and she was engrossed in conversation. I listened to her with my own back turned in the noisy bar, thought to myself how easy this was going to be, almost too easy.
What could be simpler than to follow her later to the city jail where Johnny is detained? She came out after an hour, looking distraught, dejected. But just like you, Roxanna, she’s a winner. Or so I said to myself: Rose is not going to let herself be beaten. She’ll always bounce back.
With a little help from this friend. That night I made a mental note: explore the Johnny question, secure a lawyer for him, win his case. That’s right, Roxanna. Even if Johnny’s arrest turned out not to be my responsibility, I was going to intervene on his behalf anyway. Undo what I had done or what Tolgate had done or destiny, who cared who had screwed Johnny over—I would fix it once and for all.
The next evening I made my move on Rose. Gratifying as it was to have that view from my bed and breakfast of the comings and goings of the family, that pleasure could be enormously heightened by transforming myself into an active member of the family, go beyond being a mere spectator. What d’you think of that, huh, Tolgate? Is that normally what someone with your famous Syndrome would do? Look at me, infiltrating the Monteros, dropping behind Rose’s line of defense. All without your indulgence, Doctor Tolgate, or tight-assed Sonia’s consent, for that matter. All a man needs is imagination, imagination and a good stash of dollar bills.
I paid off a kid to steal Rose’s bike. Yes, Roxanna, scheming as usual, turning this into a movie, I know, but that’s what I’m good at, even that bastard Hank Granger would have felt a tinge of admiration at my ingenuity. I told the kid just when he had to do it: As she unchained the bike, as she began to tinker with the lock—that’s when. He grabbed it in a dash and then, as agreed, slowed down just enough so I could catch him, drag him back screaming insults, the kid really overdid it, but Rose didn’t seem to notice his ham acting. She was looking at me with gratitude and it turned to something deeper, more compelling, it turned into respect, when I obeyed her entreaties and let the kid go, didn’t take him to the police.
“I don’t believe,” I said to Rose, “in punishment as a way of dealing with people who make mistakes, especially if they’re young.”
“Well, I don’t either. Compassion goes farther.”
“So what do we do with this kid? Maybe he could work in your garden, pay it off that way.”
“I don’t have a garden,” Rose answered with a smile. A sorrowful one. Maybe she wants, just like you did, to go back to her country. Maybe that was her dream, I thought: to spend her life cultivating herbs, sending them out with her prayers. And all she needs is a bit of capital, a helping hand.
“Well, we won’t press charges this time,” I said. “We’ve all done something wrong when we were his age. Didn’t you?”
She looked at me as if I could read her mind, her past.
“Nobody’s perfect,” she said, and smiled at me again, but the sorrow had evaporated.
“Some people are close to perfect,” I answered. And meant it. And… I wasn’t acting, Roxanna. Maybe that’s why it all came out so naturally: Because this is me, this is Graham Blake, the real one, the one you’d be proud of. Who believes that we should be spending all that money on schools, instead of prisons. I said so to her and she nodded and I suggested a drink if she had time and she said yes. There’s always time, she said. We run out of time, but time doesn’t run out on us, not if we treat it with respect.
She liked me. You never gave me a chance, Sonia never gave us a chance, Tolgate erected all those barriers. But Rose cut through every wall as if it were transparent: She has a directness, a… what can I call it? A weight, I guess, that you never had, that maybe you have in your everyday life when you strip yourself of the role you’re performing. By weight I mean something you can touch, that has gravitational force. She’s—real. I didn’t have the impression, not for a moment, that she was a film star. Even though something warned me in my mind, that her straightforward, factual reality would be irresistible and tantalizing for someone like me at this precise moment of what Tolgate kept on calling my ongoing therapy. If she were being paid, I mean. If she were also part of this game Tolgate’s got going, that’s how he’d have programmed her: as irrestibly real. Though she’d have to be a really top-notch performer, better than you were, and you were the best, Roxanna.
Over some whiskey I let her inform me about Johnny. How he’d been framed, they’d hidden a drug shipment in the flowers from Mexico that he delivers. Though she hadn’t witnessed his arrest by the pigs, she said.
“When was that?” I asked, hoping the answer would absolve me.
It did.
“Four months ago,” she said.
One month before I had appeared on the scene! So I wasn’t the one who had done it to him, though his ordeal could still have been commandeered by Tolgate experimenting with the family he would model my therapy on. How long had Tolgate known that I would be his patient? How long had he been spying on me, gathering information on Rose and her buoyant optimism, waiting for me to fall into his clutches?
I sprinkled some real hope into her mix of optimism that evening in the bar. I was well connected, I said, implied that I was a journalist, mentioned a couple of names—all people that Rose would be unable to contact, would never be able to track down to check whether I was lying. I added that this Johnny affair sounded like a major scandal and that it should be investigated. I was willing to help out. At first she was subdued, didn’t react as I’d expected. She’d already tried to call attention, she said, to all of this: she’d been filmed by a TV program, four hours of taping. She’d seen the final tape, and all that they’d left were a few snippets here and there, and she’d been so hopeful and now thought it wouldn’t make any difference, even if somebody saw the damn program, it would be forgotten tomorrow, it would be swallowed up by indifference, it—
I interrupted her, told her that I would personally speak to these friends of mine in the media, she had to believe me that I could help.
And then, yes, a light flared up in her eyes, a sparkle that reminded me of what I had seen in yours, Roxanna, when I rescued you from death—fake death in that case, maybe fake admiration. Hers, in any case, Rose’s I mean, was spontaneous: Nobody had coached her, she hadn’t been asked to cry in front of a casting director, try out lines while Tolgate took notes, made comments to Sonia, perhaps comments to somebody else more powerful, that shadow man interested in weakening my sanity, Granger may have looked at you while you worked on looking me deep in the eyes proclaiming my altruism and grace, Tolgate measured your breasts for sure, your ass, wondered how soon he could get his hands on them, pitied me, that fool Graham Blake who would desire it all from behind his glass partition, the way in which the audience looks up at the blank enormous eye of the screen that fills with women we can only touch in our minds, make love to in our imagination.
But you would be wrong, Roxanna, if you deduced from what I’m telling you that I wanted to fuck Rose. Not at all. I may be fascinated with her, but it is a curiously sexless affair, like discovering a long-lost sister, as if she were some sort of daughter. And the woman’s a bit on the vulgar side, if you know what I mean. Ingested too much garlic in her life. No. It’s you I’d like to ball. Or my Natasha while your image flickers endlessly on a colossal screen above my bed. Rose? I want to save her. And I’m going to save her. When the time is ripe.
We warmed to each other, at any rate, at the Sad Dogs. She downed a bit more than she should have, was leaning against me as I steered her home, pretending that I had no idea where she lived. I steered her, and her bike I steered, trundling down the Philadelphia streets, Gus and Rose and the bike, almost hand in hand.
I helped her up to the apartment, fourth floor, no elevator, introduced myself to the family. They’re nicer than your family, the sham members of your sham family, I mean, Roxanna. Spend more time having fun. They pulled up a chaotic chair, sat me down, shared their dinner with me. With me and two other friends who dropped by, just like that, without asking. Where seven can eat, eight can eat, Santos said. And where eight can eat… Nine, said Simon. And where nine can eat… Ten, they all chirped up, as if in a chorus. That’s another difference, Roxanna: Their bad luck, the fact that Eduardo’s gambled away a major sum of money, the fact that only two of them are working at the moment, the fact that the mortgage is due and they’ll have to refinance and no bank will give them a loan for that—none of it seems to dampen their spirit. If anybody tends to be on the manic depressive side, it’s Rose; she’s the one who feels their pain too deeply. The others… And there are tons of others, by the way. Friends, neighbors, bastketball pals, the cop from his beat, a nosy postman, the union leaders who are organizing a strike soon, bowling partners, yes, all we menfolk went bowling and boozing one night. I do understand why Tolgate decided not to surround your family with all those extras. It would have been distracting. And expensive. He served me up a rather intimate film about a dysfunctional family—based paradoxically on a family that functions quite well and that is not at all intimate. On the contrary. They’re extroverts, the lot of them, more typically Latin American than your family was, Roxanna, though I can only recognize the difference now that I’ve had the chance to visit the real thing, now that I’m free to do whatever I really want with them, the power to make their lives better or worse.
Better, of course, is my plan. But not right away. I don’t want them liking me because I overwhelm them with gifts or because their good luck happens to coincide with the moment when I trickled into their lives. I want them to like me because of me. Santos already does. And I must tell you, Roxanna, that I resent how Sonia and Tolgate invented a child-abusing father out to rape his daughter, all that nonsense, to get me riled up, make me jealous. Santos hasn’t touched that girl. As you can tell, I’m fond of him. Even if I realize that he’s welcomed me because he senses—with the instinct of any immigrant who has crossed a whole continent on foot and survived, who had to run for his life from the town where he married Rose’s mother, but I’m getting away from the main point I was trying to make and that is that Santos is aware that I’m his ticket out of here, that my obvious infatuation with his daughter will end up providing some sort of dividends for the family. But even if it didn’t, I think he’d like me.
Precisely why I’m not about to provide anything too soon, as I said. It’s no sweat to rack up a couple of jobs for Eduardo and Marta, for instance, but that would disturb the delicate equilibrium that now reigns in the household. I prefer Rose to be as vulnerable and needy as when I found her, neither more, nor less.
There are some things, of course, I have already done for her. I called up a prominent lawyer on a pay phone, disguised my voice, suggested a hefty retainer if he represented our Johnny, I needed that young man free within a week or so. He asked me to send him a check and he would look into the matter. An hour later five thousand dollars, in cash, was sitting on his desk, sent by courier. One hour after that I gave him another call. He had agreed, of course, to take the case. “Your friend Johnny,” the lawyer drawled, “is guilty as hell. Like most of the other poor bastards cooling their heels in there. Point is, it doesn’t matter. You either have the money for a lawyer like me, or you don’t. So your guy’s getting off scot-free. In spite of his previous convictions, parole violations, you name it. It’ll take a month, more or less, and he’ll be back delivering flowers stuffed with cocaine.” At that moment a package with another five thousand dollars landed with a thud on his desk. I could hear him opening it, picking up the receiver.
“Is that what I think it is, on your desk?” I asked him.
“Mr. X?” he answered. “It’ll be one week, two at the most. Do we have a deal?”
“I’d shake on it,” I growled, “but it’s probably better if we kept our relationship distant. Oh, and one more thing. When this young man’s fiancée comes to thank you, please do not reveal my existence. Simply say that you’re taking the case on because it’s so clearly a travesty of justice.”
I said that you’d be proud of me, Roxanna. And it’s a more profound therapy than the one I practiced with you. Instead of ordering some nonexistent scout to discover Simon, I’ve been training the kid myself, bought him a couple of basketball magazines, have been taking walks with him around the neighborhood. At times by ourselves, at times with Rose. I arrive early on nights when I’m asked to dinner and help Marta with the meal, get her lazy husband to chop onions. “Only you could have made me do it, Gus,” Santos said. “Look at us,” he added a few hours later, “the lot of us, all the men, washing the dishes, drying them, putting them away. You’re going to make us into wimps, Gus. But for you, mi amigazo…”
I’ve even calmed them down, stopped them from quarreling boisterously all day long. For Rose’s sake. Because you know what I discovered? That capacity of yours to pray while everybody around you was raising a ruckus. Roxanna, that was bull. But it accomplished its goal: to make me, back then, admire you even more. Rose, on the other hand, needs real quiet. That relentless sound has even made her, once in a while, skip the ceremony, not pray at all. You would never have done that, Roxanna, because you weren’t praying for a real patient to get well. You were praying that I would believe you. Right? Did you get a bonus each time I fell for your trick? Do you get paid extra if the guy tries to bribe his guards and reach you? Do you use the prayer stratagem in each session? Or was it only for me?
So many things I’d like to ask you.
But I never will. Maybe I don’t even need to find you anymore. As long as you do me this last service, Roxanna who was mine in my imagination and was really never mine: Listen to my plans, how I will cure myself forever of the demons I had before you came into my life, how I will cure myself of the other demons that came into my life when you left it.
I am going to help Rose escape from this existence she is trapped in, survive whether the factory goes under or doesn’t.
You gave me the idea. Who made that up, you or Tolgate or some hack scriptwriter? That you wanted to go back to your native island, an exotic touch probably meant to enthrall me even further. What’s clear is that this particular tropical dream most definitely did not stem from Rose. Though now she’s considering it, now that I’ve brought it up.
We biked down to the river on Saturday, had a picnic, a lovely long intimate afternoon, just the two of us. Like a brother and a sister telling each other their secret lives. She mused about her own life, how she’d been born, things she had never revealed to anybody and me—I couldn’t really confess who I was, where I came from, but did let her know, let it slip into the conversation, that for years I had thought my mother had taken her life, I came as close to confiding in her as I ever have to anyone else. And at some point, as the sun was setting on the riverbank, I planted the idea of a business future in her head, got her fantasizing about that possibility.
“I had a friend, you know,” she said hesitantly, “from Puerto Rico—and she had that project, she would have been the perfect person for that sort of plan.”
When I asked her what had happened to her friend, maybe we could include her in the project, Rose just shook her head. She’s not around anymore, was all she would say.
“We’ll do it for her, then,” I said, “make her dream come true through you.”
Though I played down the likelihood that the person I knew might really be interested. It was a chance in a thousand, I said, nothing to get our hopes up about. And didn’t mention it again during the rest of the afternoon or at dinner that night, or Sunday either. Let it simmer in her mind, watched her later on the screen discussing it with her mother first, then with her father, her brothers, her friend Georgia. Watched her through my monitor embroider the idea, watched how they made fun of her in a gentle, teasing sort of way.
Today’s the day, though. Monday. Start of the week, start of a new life.
Tonight I’ll tell her that I’ve spoken with a contact at the Clean Earth headquarters and that they’ve been thinking about opening a new line of products: Roxanna’s Dream Herbs. I’m naming them for you, Roxanna, not only because you inspired them. The truth is that that label will sell more than ordinary Rose any day. Over drinks at the Sad Dogs I’ll tell my Rose. Not quite ready to reveal who I am yet. I’ll have her fly to Houston to see the boss himself, the big guy, Graham Blake. And the doors will swing open, just like in the movies, just like in the romance novels you loved to read, maybe only pretended to read, Roxanna, and there I’ll be, my back to the door. I’ll turn around and show my face and not only my face: the product designed, the campaign ready, the contract drawn up, the tickets back to Bogotá for her and for Johnny if he wants to come along and for the rest of the family as well. And her eyes will light up like your eyes once did.
Tonight’s the night.
But now. But now. Now. Now you come in to your apartment, not you, Roxanna, but Rose. She comes in to the room at noon. She’s not supposed to be back at midday, not supposed to return until this afternoon, when I will pick her up outside the factory, the camera is supposed to capture us both later coming into this room.
Something’s wrong. Something is terribly wrong.
She closes the door with a slam, Roxanna, she almost falls rushing through the doorway, slams the door shut as if it were a rat trap clamping on her, screams Sonofabitch, you fucking sonafobitch. Rose who never swears, never hurries, never—She slumps down against the door, crashes into the floor sobbing. She’s been crying, Roxanna. Tears are streaming down her face, crumpling, staining the white nurse’s dress—she’s never worn her nurse-uniform outside work before. And there on the floor, crouched like a fetus, she begins to rock herself back and forth, singing in Spanish, a lullaby, the one you used to sing as well, Roxanna, that you learned from her, stole from Rose: she’s singing it to herself, trying to put herself to sleep, trying to console herself for something or somebody or…
I can’t figure out what’s happening, what to do. If Sonia were here I—if this were a mock crisis, it would be so easy, a matter of pressing a button, ordering a close up, getting a computer reading and print out, asking Ivan to investigate, but now there’s nothing I can do, just watch, pressed to my monitor.
Outside, Mrs. O’Leary is knocking on the door and I ignore her. “It’s urgent, Mr. Henderson,” she says, “Mrs. Owen’s on the phone, Jessica Owen from Houston. She needs to talk to you.” Jessica! She’s tracked me down. The hell with her. The hell with the company. I sidle up to the door, keeping my eye on Rose, that bundle of sorrow and rocking despair that is my Rose. I call out, “I don’t know any Mrs. Owen, Jessica or otherwise. That lady must have the wrong person, Mrs. O’Leary.” I can hear old lady O’Leary trundling down the stairs, complaining about her arthritis, off to give Jessica a piece of her mind.
Now Rose is crawling on all fours, crawling across the living room that I have crossed myself so many times, where I played cards with Eduardo and Simon and Santos and that old fool José and watched late-night wrestling on TV, where Marta and Rose tried to teach me old Colombian songs, I once crossed a living room very much like the one I’m seeing now, crossed it to save you, Roxanna, thought I was saving you, thought you were dying. And I know where she’s going, I know it as if I had scripted it myself: She’s going to the bathroom, yes, she can barely stand up, but she’s—
I use my cellular phone. Use it for the first time since I’ve been here. It’s been turned off. Every time Jessica has tried me, every time Sam Halneck has tried and the office and my secretary and Hector and Dr. Tolgate and even the children, every call has been answered by a flat mechanical voice stating that I am out of reach, not even an answering machine to leave a message. I dial the lawyer who’s taking care of Johnny’s case. It takes less than a minute, but by then Rose has reached the bathroom, she’s closed the bathroom door behind her, I switch to the camera that’s positioned in there and Rose has hoisted herself up onto the toilet seat, slaps herself twice in despair, her face red as if she were being dried up, chewed up by her own hands. She rises, makes a lunge for the medicine cabinet, loses her balance, falls back onto her seat.
The lawyer says hello.
“What’s happened to Johnny?” I ask.
“Nothing’s happened to him,” comes the reply. “He’ll be out this week, like I—“
“Don’t lie to me. They killed him. I know they killed him. Don’t try to cover it up.”
“Hey, easy, easy, take it easy. I just left Johnny, not less than an hour ago. He was in pretty good shape. Playing cards with the warden. Getting ready for his freedom. Something about turning a new leaf, starting off fresh with his girlfriend in Colombia. So if you know something that I don’t know, I’m all ears. But if you’re just blowing words through your ass—”
I hang up on him.
Johnny’s alright. Rose is the one who’s going to die. She’s lifted herself to the sink, clawed at the medicine, now she’s found the pills, she’s gulping them down by the dozen. By the dozen.
I dial 911, tell them where to go, the suicide’s name. I give them my real name, Blake, Graham Blake, hope they’ll recognize it, hope that will hurry them up. Maybe I should have told them that my dad used to play golf at the Merion, maybe I should have—
I rush out the door and find Mrs. O’Leary mounting the stairs with her heavy fat legs.
“Mrs. Owen insists,” she grunts. “She says it’s an emergency. She says you’d better talk to her. Says your real name’s not Henderson.”
“I’ll be back,” I call out, as I bound down the stairs, bang my way out the door. I jump into my car and speed toward Rose’s apartment. It’s easier when everything is coordinated ahead of time, Roxanna. Right? When you have Sonia making believe she’s conspiring, you have that other guy, his name was—what? Benjy?—you have him clearing the way, pretending he’s kissing her, maybe taking advantage of the situation to really give her a good fondle because she can’t complain, she can’t move, Sonia couldn’t give away the game. But they’re not here now. No Tolgate to make sure I get to save you in time, Roxanna. No counterfeit pills down an illusive throat. Real pills, real throat, real vomit, real brain going into real convulsions. Real traffic jam. I won’t ever make it to where she is, Roxanna, where you were waiting for me.
Using my cellular, I track down the ambulance that is already parked outside Rose’s apartment building. They’ve found the woman! They’re bringing her down!
I abandon the car in the middle of the traffic, just leave it there. I can run these last two blocks. Hold on, Rose. I’m on my way.
And reach her, just as the men are carrying her out on a stretcher.
“Who are you?”
“Her husband,” I lie. I grab her hand, hold on to its cold dead fingers, but she’s alive, Roxanna, I’ve saved her again, for the second time, for the second time. I can feel life sifting back into her pulse, a slight tinge of pink in her cheeks, I sing the lullaby to her, the one with the Spanish words, hum them to her, make up the words, holding her head up so she won’t gag, murmuring to her that it will be alright, it will be fine, everything’s going to be alright.
I wait by her side in the hospital corridor, get her checked into the most exclusive suite, plunk my credit card down, superplatinum, spare no expense.
I let her sleep. I’ve given orders that no one else is to disturb us. I don’t want the rest of the family scrambling in. Not before I understand what’s happened. If it’s not Johnny…
“I’m sorry, Gus,” she says, suddenly, in a soft voice, calls me from across the room. I’ve been standing by the window, watching, watching. Not spying on anybody but the birds, not registering anything other than the wind going through the trees, counting the leaves as they fall, the patients down in the afternoon sun strolling, getting better. That’s what I’ve been doing. Maybe praying, maybe that too.
“I am, really. Really, really sorry. I should have told you.” She coughs, I try to stop her from speaking, but she wants to, she feels that she owes me an explanation. When I’m the one who owes her, who needs to explain things. That will come, that’s coming. No need to hurry it up. She’s back, I’m back, at the old pace, the simple gait of time taking its time. “I’ve done this before.”
“What do you mean?”
“I should have told you. I’m sorry. I—I’ve tried to kill myself. More than once. Something just comes over me and I can’t stand it anymore, I can’t keep up a cheerful face, if I have to smile one more time I’ll scream and that’s what I do. I scream. But nobody hears me but me. And then I scream again and not even I hear myself scream and then something, somebody inside tells me what to do.”
“But what happened? Yesterday you were so full of plans, I told you that today I’d have a surprise for you…”
“They never come true, my dreams,” Rose says, and I believe her. The way she says it, I can’t help but believe her.
“So today… ?”
“I lost my job. So did my papá.”
“You lost your job? It can’t be true.”
She smiles, but it is not like any smile I’ve ever seen on her face or on yours, Roxanna. It’s the smile of the defeated, the smile of those who are about to die and know it and can do nothing about it and don’t want to give the enemy the satisfaction of seeing them recognize defeat. A smile without hope, without energy, without Roxanna.
“That’s it. Before we could even go out on strike. We lost. Not one of us has a job now. Not one member in my family. And I—I just gave up. Like—like her.”
“Her?”
“A friend of mine. What does it matter anyway? I’m sorry. God, I’m sorry. But at times it’s just too much.”
I’m the one who’s smiling now, laughing would be a better word. She looks at me in astonishment. How can I be laughing at her disaster?
“What if I were to say”—I stutter the words through my laughter—”what if I were to tell you that I can have you reinstated like this.” And I snap my fingers as if I were a magician.
“I’d say you’re trying to cheer me up. But it’s okay. You don’t need to. I won’t try to kill myself again. Because of this, I mean. I can’t promise about other things, tomorrow, day after tomorrow. But I’m over this. Got it out of my system.”
She’s back to her old patient trudging ways, as slow, as patient, as ever. Except that now I know that underneath that surface there sleeps someone else, another Rose Montero who can monstruously rise up out of her deepest waters and destroy her. Unless that person inside is put to rest, kept at bay.
“You don’t think I can get you your job back?”
“I’m not in the mood for jokes, Gus. You saved me and I’m grateful and all that, but—”
“What if I can swing it? What then?”
“I’m too tired to play games. Or argue. Swing it, Gus. Be my guest. Adelante.”
I pull out my cellular phone. I pull out my electronic directory. I look at her, to gauge her reaction. There is none. She’s staring up at the empty ceiling.
I call the manager of the factory. He’s in a meeting.
“Well, tell him to get his butt out of there.”
Still no reaction from Rose. She must think I’m making believe, calling the delicatessen or my mother or some friend who’s in on the joke. She still thinks I’m trying to cheer her up.
“Who shall I say is calling?” The secretary on the other end of the line is icy.
“Tell him Graham Blake.”
I watch to see what Rose thinks. Rose manages a wan smile. This is cheering her up. I’m pretending I’m the biggest boss of them all. She didn’t think I had the nerve.
Rose can’t hear what the secretary is saying on the other end. “Mr. Blake, we’ve been looking for you for the last week and a half. Your wife’s been—This is Mr. Blake, right?”
“Look, do I sound like the Easter Bunny? Get your boss on the line. Now.”
Rose’s grin grows wider. I wink at her. She manages to wink back.
There is a pause, then Paul St. Martin comes on.
“Paul?”
“Graham, my God, where have you been? Your kids are… Jessica’s been worried sick. I think she tracked you down today. Are you really in Philadelphia?”
“I’m definitely here in Philadelphia. Now you tell me. What in the hell’s happening at my factory? I’ve been informed that you got rid of two employees today. Santos Montero. Rose Montero.”
“Not just those two. We’re giving the pink slips to a third of the personnel. Before they can call a strike. Non-essentials first. By next week the rest will be gone. We’re closing down the plant.”
“What do you mean, closing down the plant?”
“Moving it to Thailand, it seems. Jessica’s been trying to get you. Talk to her.”
“I don’t want to talk to her. I want Rose Montero put back on the job. Is that understood? And her father, Santos. Santos as well. In fact I want him promoted to head of security.”
“I’m afraid I can’t do that, Graham. I’m taking orders directly from Jessica and the board of directors. They told me you might call and that I was to route any complaints back to them.”
“I want you to listen and I want you to listen carefully. I’m going to be at the factory tomorrow, and you’d better have that door wide open, because I’m coming in and I’m talking to all the workers, including the Monteros, Rose and Santos. Have everybody meet me in the cafeteria—at seven-thirty in the morning. We’ll get both shifts then.”
I hang up on Paul.
Rose is sitting up in bed. My conversation has energized her. “That’s the way to tell them, Gus. You are the most incredible man. What a trickster! What sheer—what’s the word—chutzpah!”
I try to concentrate on her adorable Latino accent saying that Jewish word. I try not to think about what I’m about to do…. Then I plunge in, Roxanna. Just as I did with you. The truth. It’s not the way I expected to reveal my identity, but here goes:
“I’m not Gus. Gus Henderson’s not really my name.”
There’s an edge to my voice, a steeliness that signals to her that I’m not joking, this is not a new level of banter and fantasy.
“I’m Graham Blake. The chief executive officer of Clean Earth. I own your factory, Rose.”
She still doesn’t believe me. But she’s getting there. She needs just one little push to be convinced.
I grab the phone again and dial Houston headquarters, the ultra-private number, the one only I know.
Jessica answers.
“Jessica? This is Graham.”
“Graham! I’ve been—”
“How dare you close down the factory here in Philadelphia without my approval.”
“It’s that or lose the Company, Graham. The Board is ready to dump you. Your latest conduct has persuaded them that you’re… you’re unreliable. Granger’s made a hostile bid and he may have the votes, unless we—How dare you simply walk out on us during the two most crucial weeks we’ve ever been through?”
“Well, I’m back now. And you’re not closing down anything, here or anywhere else. Understood?”
“Graham, if you’d answered your phone—”
“Clean Earth is not closing my dad’s factory down. Tell Granger to go fuck himself. I’ll see you tomorrow in Philadelphia. Tomorrow at seven-thirty. In the cafeteria.”
And I hang up on her as well.
I turn to Rose. She is looking at me in a way I have never seen before—and it is not the look of admiration that I saw on your face, Roxanna, not the look of desire I had hoped for on yours or hers. It is—how to describe it, Roxanna, you who have tried on all the faces, rehearsed so many alternatives in your multiple roles. Except perhaps this one. Tolgate must have forbidden you this one. You’d never be allowed to wear a face of such unadulterated, pure hatred. That’s what Rose is feeling toward her savior: a rancor that threatens to twist her face beyond recognition.
I don’t think she hears me, she’s not even listening, I think.
I explain everything anyway. All of it. From the start. I explain my insomnia, my headaches, my wish to create a better world, all the wonderful inventions of Clean Earth, the crisis. I explain you to her, Roxanna, the Corporate Life Therapy Institute in Houston, the clinic here in Philadelphia, everything, how I screwed you over, Roxanna, and then rescued you. How I was cured and how something worse began to take over my life. How I discovered her. What I did, what I’ve been doing. How I spied on her. How I saved her. How I’m going to save Johnny.
She still says nothing.
“You’re going to get your job back, Rose,” I say. “Not that you really need it. I intend to set up a new division at Clean Earth.” I tell her about Roxanna’s Dream Herbs, my plans for her to return to Colombia, open up the Latino market.
She finally breaks her silence. With one word.
“Why?”
Why? Why, Roxanna? Why am I doing this, did this? What can I answer? Not the truth: not that I insanely need her to tell me I am good, that the smile in her mouth and the fire in her eyes and the words on her tongue should all cradle me like a child lost and then found again. I can’t. I can’t tell her that, because then I could never be sure that if it comes, it would be spontaneous and true. So I let go with an enigmatically obscure phrase: “That’s something you’re going to have to figure out for yourself.”
She rolls out of the bed with alacrity, almost as if she weren’t ill, hadn’t been knocked out by twenty pills less than four hours ago.
And she insults me, Roxanna. Insults me as you would have insulted me, would have kicked me, if you had been a real woman and not a paid performer eager to get a good bonus from Tolgate once I declared my satisfaction. I don’t want to repeat what she said, the words you never said to me. She told me to get the fuck out of that room and the fuck out of her life and the fuck off this planet. She said I was off my rocker, a pervert, a voyeur, a heartless monster. She said my greed had almost destroyed her family, had caused her more pain than I could ever imagine. I was the shadow figure who had been behind years of bad luck, I was the one who had driven her to suicide so many times, taken her best friend away from her, the face that would haunt her forever. “I’d have to wash for twenty years, soak for twenty years, submerge myself in water for twenty years, rub myself for a million years, and I still wouldn’t be rid of your stench, the smell of your lies. It clings to me, fills me, fills me. And the worst thing is you think you’re Mother Teresa. You think I need a Mother Teresa?”
I let her pour scorn on me. Let her slap my face. Let her spit on me. I let her spend her spite on me.
She was acting her rage out and yours as well. I could feel you egging her on from somewhere, Roxanna, the performance you would have loved to give. If you hadn’t been handed a script full of redemption and softy-feely goody-goodiness.
I kept my calm because I craved that punishment, I liked it, I deserved it. It was cleansing me, her maternal rage, making me pure again. I kept my calm because I knew that I would have the last say, I knew that tomorrow I would be the one in charge. Tomorrow I would prove her wrong about who I was.
When she tumbled back on the bed, breathless, still angry, without energy and still without having extracted even one word from me in my own defense, that’s when I said to her:
“You owe me one favor. For saving your life. One favor. Will you do that for me?”
“Get out!”
“I want you to come tomorrow to the meeting with the workers at the factory. You and your father. And bring your whole family along. Can you do that?”
She didn’t answer, but I knew she’d be there, I knew she would come to hear me in that cafeteria where I had first seen her through the lens of a camera, where I had myself discovered as a child the ways in which my charms made me invulnerable and invincible.
I slept well during the night. Surprised myself. Awakening only once just before dawn, gently coming out of my dreams to find the question there, staring me in the face stark and naked, almost like the body of a woman next to me in the darkness. Was Tolgate behind all of this? That question.
Tolgate must have been hatching a plan, preparing a scenario for my therapy well before I had come to see him, probably before Sam Halneck had even mentioned the Corporate Life Therapy Institute to me, maybe even before I was aware that a crisis was looming, Tolgate must have been waiting for a long time for Graham Blake, CEO, to cross his threshold, one of a long list of potential patients he kept his eyes on. He could not have organized all that infrastructure, those actors at their perfect pitch, that carefully designed apartment, without a protracted pre-production schedule. The research alone must have taken him months. Had he decided, early on, that a suicide, your fake suicide, Roxanna, would transform and climax our relationship? Marshaled everything, pushed this button and that button, so that I wound up watching you in that bathroom, so that I would inevitably try to rescue you? Did he probe my family history, come upon my mother’s illness, decide that to have another woman die in front of my eyes was the one sure way to jolt me into action? And did he rummage about for a woman to model you on, Roxanna, seek someone who had, in her own life, a history of attempted suicide? Someone who, when I searched her out as I eventually must, would repeat your gesture, Roxanna? Would try to take her life, orchestrating me to reveal myself to her and crazily promise her I would keep the factory even if it meant losing Clean Earth?
And inside the spiral of my thoughts inside thoughts, Roxanna, this one at the very bottom of the mud of my swirling identity: Had he chosen Rose because she was suicidal, had my doctor conveniently discovered how sick she was when he stumbled upon her existence, or had he, on the contrary, fabricated her, had his eye on her as he had kept his eye on me for many years, cornered her slowly with a series of actions and manipulations that had led her to the sort of despair I had witnessed yesterday? Had he cut his costs, used her and her family in other corporate treatments, used her to cure people like Hank Granger, Sam Halneck, who knows how many others? Worked on her, scripted her, the way he had worked on me? Was it that invisible shadow of Tolgate that had driven her in the past to try to take her own life?
There was no way of ever knowing the answer to these questions.
There was only my decision, tomorrow, which would make them irrelevant, which would set Rose free, put her finally beyond the grasp of people like Tolgate. Beyond the grasp of people like Graham Blake.
Tomorrow is today, Roxanna. It is now.
Now that I stand in front of a packed auditorium at seven-thirty in the morning. At the very back of the cafeteria is Rose. She has on her blue dress, your blue dress, Natasha’s. Fitting that she’s wearing it now, on the last day of this adventure.
Lurking in a corner unobtrusively is Paul St. Martin, pale and drawn. When he greeted me at the gate, he handed me a message from Jessica: “Board meeting this afternoon at four P.M. in Houston to make final decision. Be there.” I crumpled it, felt like throwing it in the air and swatting it like a tennis ball into the nearest trash can, but inserted it in my pocket instead. I can feel it now, scratching at my thigh through the lining, reminding me that after I speak here, I will have to board a plane and speak somewhere else, have to sustain what I am about to promise here.
What I say is really quite simple. I’m not good at speeches.
I explain to the assembly of workers that the decision to close the factory was made behind my back, the board taking advantage of the fact that I have been away. Where I have been, in fact, is among them. I have gone back to the age-old way in which men in power discover how to redress injustice: by disguising themselves and living among the people whose fate they must determine. So that my decision should be reached not as if it affected others, faraway others, images on a screen, but as if it affected my own life. As if I were the one to be thrown out of a job without training for a new one. As if I were the one who would come home to tell my wife that we have to skimp on the sugar. As if I were the one who had to walk to the park with my eldest daughter and let her know she can’t go to college. As if I were the one who watches the woman I love try to kill herself because she can’t take it anymore.
I tell them I’m going back to Houston and I’m going to defend this factory. I’m going to keep it open, just as my father would have expected me to. As my mother would have wanted me to. No moving it to Mexico or Thailand, Turkey or Brazil. Here in the U.S. And if that means that I lose everything else, well, I’ll come back here to work with them. Even if this is the only factory left to me. I’ll start from zero. We’ll lick this thing together.
They are silent at the end. In a way the best reaction, the best homage. Not the easy applause. Each one comes up afterward, thanks me, shakes my hand. Including my family. One by one. They understand why I infiltrated their lives. So I could defend those very lives. They still love me, approve of what I’m doing.
Rose is the last one.
I had kept my eye on her during the whole speech, watched her gaze changing, foretold that a smile would dawn as it did, cajoled out of her with my words the admiration I need. The look you gave me, Roxanna: I wanted that look again, one more time, telling me I am a wonderful man, a good man. Telling me that I can sleep at night because I am doing what I believe is right, no matter what the consequences.
Rose and not Roxanna saying this to me. The real woman, not the actress. My script and not his, not Tolgate’s. My life.
We walk out together to my car.
“I’ve been thinking about your offer,” she says. The first thing she said since she demanded that I get the hell out of her hospital room yesterday afternoon. “I’ve decided to reject it, going back to Colombia and all that.”
I wait.
“You can’t just save me, Gus,” she said. “Just my family. I couldn’t. Leave all of them behind, these people. Cure them every day, pray for them every night, and then one morning just up and leave because you happened to take a fancy to me. I couldn’t.”
“Even if it means not living out your dreams?”
“I am living out my dreams,” she says.
“And your nightmares.”
“And my nightmares,” she agrees. “That’s the way it is. This is my country now.”
I get in the car. “Roxanna’s Dream Herbs. You don’t want to miss out on that, have somebody else in charge. I’ll be waiting for you.”
“You can’t just save me, Gus,” she says, and gives me that look for one last final time, that look I need to get me on my way, that look I keep warm and clean inside me as I drive off to the most important meeting of my life.
You would be proud of me, Roxanna.