I’M in bed watching the Vanilla Gorilla stick it to the Abilene Christians on some really obscure cable channel when Blanquita comes through the door wearing lavender sweats, and over them a frilly see-through apron. It’s a November Thursday, a chilly fifty-three, but she’s hibachiing butterfly lamb on the balcony.
“Face it, Griff,” Blanquita says, wielding the barbecue fork the way empresses wield scepters.
“Face what?”
“That’s what I mean,” she says. “You’re so insensitive, it’s awesome.”
“Nobody says awesome anymore,” I tease. Blanquita speaks six languages, her best being Tagalog, Spanish, and American.
“Why not?” she says. Back in Manila, she took a crash course in making nice to Americans, before her father sent her over. In her family they called her Baby. “Bite him, Marcos,” she orders her cat. “Spit on him.” But Marcos chooses to stay behind the harpsichord and leggy ficus. Marcos knows I am not a cat person; he’s known me to sneak in a kick. He takes out his hostilities on the ficus. What he does is chew up a pale, new leaf. I get my greenery for free because the office I work in throws out all browning, scraggly plants and trees. I have an arboretum of rejects.
“Let’s start this conversation over,” I plead. I’m tentative at the start of relationships, but this time I’m not throwing it away.
“Let’s,” she says.
“You’re beautiful,” I say.
“Do you mean that?”
I hate it when she goes intense on me. She starts to lift off the Press-On Nails from her thumbs. Her own nails are roundish and ridged, which might be her only imperfection.
“Blanquita the Beautiful.” I shoot it through with melody. If I were a songwriter I’d write her a million lyrics. About frangipani blooms and crescent moons. But what I am is a low-level money manager, a solid, decent guy in white shirt and maroon tie and thinning, sandy hair over which hangs the sword of Damocles. The Dow Jones crowds my chest like an implant. I unlist my telephone every six weeks, and still they find me, the widows and orthodontists into the money-market. I feel the sword’s point every minute. Get me in futures! In Globals, in Aggressive Growth, in bonds! I try to tell them, for every loser there’s a winner, somewhere. Someone’s always profiting, just give me time and I’ll find it, I’ll lock you in it.
Blanquita scoops Marcos off the broadloom and holds him on her hip as she might a baby. “I should never have left Manila,” she says. She does some very heavy, very effective sighing. “Pappy was right. The East is East and the West is West and never the twain shall meet.”
I get these nuggets from Kipling at least once a week. “But, baby,” I object, “you did leave. Atlanta is halfway around the world from the Philippines.”
“Poor Pappy,” Blanquita moons. “Poor Joker.”
She doesn’t give me much on her family other than that Pappy—Joker Rosario—a one-time big-shot publisher tight with the Marcos crew, is stuck in California stocking shelves in a liquor store. Living like a peon, serving winos in some hotbox barrio. Mother runs a beauty shop out of her kitchen in West Hartford, Connecticut. His politics, and those of his daughter, are—to understate it—vile. She’d gotten to America long before his fall, when he still had loot and power and loved to spread it around. She likes to act as though real life began for her at JFK when she got past the customs and immigration on the seventeenth of October, 1980. That’s fine with me. The less I know about growing up in Manila, rich or any other way, the less foreign she feels. Dear old redneck Atlanta is a thing of the past, no need to feel foreign here. Just wheel your shopping cart through aisles of bok choy and twenty kinds of Jamaican spices at the Farmers’ Market, and you’ll see that the US of A is still a pioneer country.
She relaxes, and Marcos leaps off the sexy, shallow shelf of her left hip. “You’re a racist, patronizing jerk if you think I’m beautiful. I’m just different, that’s all.”
“Different from whom?”
“All your others.”
It’s in her interest, somehow, to imagine me as Buckhead’s primo swinger, maybe because—I can’t be sure—she needs the buzz of perpetual jealousy. She needs to feel herself a temp. For all the rotten things she says about the Philippines, or the mistiness she reserves for the Stars and Stripes, she’s kept her old citizenship.
“Baby, Baby, don’t do this to me. Please?”
I crank up the Kraftmatic. My knees, drawn up and tense, push against my forehead. Okay, so maybe what I meant was that she isn’t a looker in the blondhair-smalltits-greatlegs way that Wendi was. Or Emilou, for that matter. But beautiful is how she makes me feel. Wendi was slow-growth. Emilou was strictly Chapter Eleven.
I can’t tell her that. I can’t tell her I’ve been trading on rumor, selling on news, for years. Your smart pinstriper aims for the short-term profit. My track record for pickin ’em is just a little better than blindfold darts. It’s as hard to lose big these days as it is to make a killing. I understand those inside traders—it’s not the money, it’s the rush. I’m hanging in for the balance of the quarter.
But.
If there’s a shot, I’ll take it.
Meantime, the barbecue fork in Blanquita’s hand describes circles of such inner distress that I have to take my eyes off the slaughter of the Abilene Christians.
“You don’t love me, Griff.”
It’s hard to know where she learns her lines. They’re all so tragically sincere. Maybe they go back to the instant-marriage emporiums in Manila. Or the magazines she reads. Or a series of married, misunderstood men that she must have introduced to emotional chaos. Her tastes in everything are, invariably, unspeakable. She rests a kneecap on the twisted Kraftmatic and weeps. Even her kneecaps … well, even the kneecaps get my attention. It’s not fair. Behind her, the Vanilla Gorilla is going man-to-man. Marcos is about to strangle himself with orange wool he’s pawed out of a dusty wicker yarn basket. Wendi was a knitter. Love flees, but we’re stuck with love’s debris.
“I’m not saying you don’t like me, Griff. I’m saying you don’t love me, okay?”
Why do I think she’s said it all before? Why do I hear “sailor” instead of my name? “Don’t spoil what we have.” I am begging.
She believes me. Her face goes radiant. “What do we have, Griff?” Then she backs away from my hug. She believes me not.
All I get to squeeze are hands adorned with the glamor-length Press-On Nails. She could make a fortune as a hands model if she wanted to. That skin of hers is an evolutionary leap. Holding hands on the bed, we listen for a bit to the lamb spit fat. Anyone can suffer a cold shooting spell. I’m thirty-three and a vet of Club Med vacations; I can still ballhandle, but one-on-one is a younger man’s game.
“All right, we’ll drop the subject,” Blanquita says. “I can be a good sport.”
“That’s my girl,” I say. But I can tell from the angle of her chin and the new stiffness of her posture that she’s turning prim and well-brought-up on me. Then she lobs devastation. “I won’t be seeing you this weekend.”
“It’s ciao because I haven’t bought you a ring?”
“No,” she says, haughtily. “The Chief’s asked me out, that’s why. We’re going up to his cabin.”
I don’t believe her. She’s not the Chief’s type. She wants to goad me into confessing that I love her.
“You’re a fast little worker.” The Chief, a jowly fifty-five, is rumored to enjoy exotic tastes. But, Christ, there’s a difference between exotic and foreign, isn’t there? Exotic means you know how to use your foreignness, or you make yourself a little foreign in order to appear exotic. Real foreign is a little scary, believe me. The fact is, the Chief brought Blanquita and me together in his office. That was nearly six months ago. I was there to prep him, and she was hustled in, tools of the trade stuffed into a Lancôme tote sack, to make him look good on TV. Blanquita’s a makeup artist on the way up and up, and Atlanta is Executives City, where every Chief wants to look terrific before he throws himself to the corporate lions. I watched her operate. She pumped him up a dozen ways. And I just sat there, stunned. The Chief still had moves.
“You sound jealous, Griff.” She turns her wicked, bottomless blacks on me and I feel myself squirm.
“Go up to the cabin if you want to. I don’t do jealousy, hon.”
She starts trapping on defense herself now. “You don’t do jealousy! Well, you don’t have the right to be jealous! You don’t have any rights, period! You can’t change the ground rules!”
Maybe Wendi wasn’t all that certifiable a disaster. Come to think of it, Wendi had her moments. She could be a warm, nurturing person. We talked, we did things together. The summer we were breaking up, I built her kid a treehouse, which might be the only unselfish good I’ve accomplished in my life. Blanquita’s a Third World aristocrat, a hothouse orchid you worship but don’t dare touch. I wouldn’t dare ask her to help me knock together a bookcase or scrub the grout around the bathroom tiles. But Wendi, alas, never made me feel this special, this loved.
“I’m serious, Griff.” She closes her eyes and rams her fists in eyelids that are as delicately mauve as her sweatshirt. “You keep me in limbo. I need to know where we stand.”
“I don’t want you to go,” I say. I’m not myself. I’m a romantic in red suspenders.
“What do you want me to do?”
“Whatever you want to do, hon.”
Her body sags inside her oversized sweatshirt. She gets off the mattress, strokes Marcos with the toes of her Reeboks, checks a shredded ficus leaf, tosses the skein of orange wool from the balcony down to the parking lot.
“Hullo,” I say. “Hey, Baby.” I really want to reach her. “Hey, watch him!” Wendi was a big basketball fan, a refugee from Hoosierland, and she was the first and so far the only woman I’ve known who could sit through a Braves or Falcons game. If I could get Miss Bataan to watch the Gorilla stuff it, we’d be okay, but she doesn’t even pretend to watch.
“I’m going to make myself a cup of tea,” she says.
We say nothing while she brews herself a pot of cherry almond. Then she sits on my bed and drinks a slow cup, fiddling with the remote control and putting to flight all ten sweaty goons. F. Lee Bailey comes on and talks up the Bhopal tragedy. I can’t believe it’s been a year. I must have been seeing Emilou on the side when it happened. Yes, in fact Emilou cried, and Wendi had made a fuss about the mascara on my sixty-buck shirt. An auditorium packed with Herbalifers comes on the screen. The Herbalifers are very upbeat and very free enterprise. They perk her up.
“We don’t need that,” I plead.
“You don’t know what you need,” she snaps. “You’re so narcissistic you don’t need anyone. You don’t know how to love.”
Sailor, I think. It thrills me.
“That’s not fair.”
But Blanquita the Beautiful races on to bigger issues. “Not just you, Griff,” she scolds in that eerily well-bred, Asian convent-schooled voice. “You’re all emotional cripples. All you Americans. You just worry about your own measly little relationships. You don’t care how much you hurt the world.”
In changing gears, she’s right up there with Mario Andretti. I envy her her freedom, her Green Card politics. It’s love, not justice, that powers her. Emilou and Wendi would have died if I caught them in an inconsistency.
She jabs at more buttons on the remote control doodad. Herbalifers scuttle into permanent blackness, and a Soweto funeral procession comes on. Big guys in black boots come at pallbearers with whips and clubs. Blanquita lays her teacup on the top sheet. These are serious designer sheets, debris from my months with Emilou. When Joker Rosario went to South Africa back in the long, long ago, he was treated very, very white. He wrote pleasant things about South Africa in his paper. Yesterday’s statesman is today’s purveyor of Muscatel. South Africa is making her morose, and I dare not ask why. I suddenly remember that the neighborhood dry cleaner doesn’t know how to take tea stains off but does a good job with Kahlúa. Blanquita flashes the black inscrutables one more time and says, “I can’t stand it anymore, Griff. It’s got to stop.”
South Africa? I wonder, but dare not hope. I carefully remove her teacup and take hold of her fingertips, which are still warm from holding the cup, and pull them up to my beard. “We have each other,” I say.
“Do we?”
It’s time to take charge, to force the good times to roll. Some nations were built to take charge. It’s okay for a nation of pioneers to bully the rest of the world as long as the cause is just. My heart is pure, my head is clear. I retrieve the doodad from Blanquita’s perfect hand. I want to show her the funtimes of TV-land. I slice through a Mexican variety show on SIN. Any time of the day or night, those Mexicans are in tuxedos. All those blow-dried Mexican emcees in soccer stadiums, looking like Ricardo Montalbans who never made it.
I know she’s a secret fan.
On cue, my trusty nineteen-incher serves up the right stuff. It’s National Cheerleading Contest time. A squad in skimpy skirts, Oceanside High’s cutest, synchronizes cartwheels and handstands, and starts to dust the competition. I feel godly powers surge through my body as Blanquita relaxes. Soon she relaxes enough to laugh.
“Did you ever try out as a cheerleader?” I ask. I can sense the imminence of terrific times.
Blanquita the Beautiful watches the kids on the screen with gratifying intensity. Then she thrusts a hesitant leg in the air. It’s the fault of the French maid’s apron that she’s wearing over her baggy sweats; my saucy exotic’s turned a schoolgirl routine into something alien and absurd. Oh, Blanquita, not so fast!
“I’m too good for you, Griff,” she pants, twirling an invisible baton and high-stepping across the condo’s wall-to-wall. “Pappy would call you illiterate scum.”
“And so I am. But Joker’s selling rotgut through a retractable grate and Mama’s perming Koreans in her living room. Ferdie and Imelda they’re not.” If People Power hadn’t cut them down, if Joker’s own reporters hadn’t locked him out, Blanquita was promised a place in the Miss Universe contest. That’s why she kept her citizenship.
“That’s needlessly cruel.”
“Baby, you’ve got to stop living in the past.”
“Okay.” She stops the twirling and marching. She turns the TV off without the doodad though I’ve begged her not to many times. Without the light from the screen, the condo room seems as dull and impersonal as a room in a Holiday Inn.
Without Blanquita I’d be just another Joe Blow Buckhead yuppie in his Reeboks. It’s she who brings me to bed each night and wakes me up each morning, big as a house and hard as a sidewalk.
“Okay,” she goes again. “Who needs a crummy tropical past?”
We’re out of the woods. I start to relax.
“Two cheers for cable sleaze,” I shout. She plucks Marcos from his hidey hole behind the ficus and babies him. “I’m saying yes to the Chief, Griff. Hip, hip!”
“What?”
“He says I make him look like a million dollars and make him feel like even more.”
“Get it in writing. That’s a low-rent come-on. He wouldn’t dare try it on the office girls.”
“Of course not.”
She’s not been getting my point.
“I have to get on with my life. And anyway, you said you weren’t jealous so what’s to hold me up?”
I check out her pulse rate with my lips. I’m not verbal. Maybe I don’t love Blanquita. Because I don’t know what love is. I’m not ready for one-on-one.
Baby Blanquita is too agitated to smell the charred lamb whooshing off the hibachi, so it’s up to me, the narcissist, to rescue the rescue-worthy. The balcony that holds the smoking hibachi is eighteen floors up. Standing between the high gray sky and the pocket-sized pool, I feel omnipotent. Everything’s in place.
While I poke the ruined meat with the barbecue fork, an uncommonly handsome blond woman in a ponytail and a cherry-red tracksuit comes out of the building’s back door. She hurls a bashed pizza box, like a Frisbee, into the dumpster. Excess energy floats toward me, connecting us. She can’t stand still. She tightens a shoelace. We’re a community of toned, conditioned athletes. Use it or lose it. Hands pressed down on somebody’s Firebird, she does warm-up routines. I’ve seen her run in the Lull water Estate close by, but I’ve never felt connected enough to her to nod. I heave the meat from the rack to a platter. The woman’s still hanging around in that hyper, fidgety way of hers. She’s waiting. She’s waiting for someone. When a man in a matching tracksuit jogs out the back door, I get depressed. She used to run alone.
Blanquita doesn’t say anything about the state of our dinner. It’s already stuffed away conveniently in the past. She’s got the TV going again. The latest news, hot from Mexico City. “They had this news analyst chap on a minute ago,” she says. “They were talking about Vitaly Yurchenko.”
I put the butterfly lamb in the kitchen sink. “Why don’t you watch about Vitaly Yurchenko on an American station?” I ask. Usually, that steams her. Mexican is American! she’ll squeal. But instead she says, “He could have had it all if he’d stayed. What’s so great about Moscow?”
“Sometimes you blow it for love. It can happen.”
She runs to me, lavender arms going like wings. Her face—the skin so tight-pored that in the dark I feel I’m stroking petals—glows with new hope. “What are you saying, Griff? Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”
I know what I would say if I weren’t the solid corporate guy in maroon tie and dark suit. I buy and sell with other people’s money and skim enough to just get by. It’s worked so far.
“Griff?”
Sailor?
“Let’s go for a run, Blanquita.”
The woman of many men’s dreams doesn’t wrench herself free from my kissing hold. I don’t deserve her.
“Just a short run. To clear our heads. Please?”
Before I met her I used to pump iron. I was pumping so hard I could feel a vein nearly pop in the back of my head. I was a candidate for a stroke. Self-love may be too much like self-hate, who knows? Blanquita got me running. We started out real easy, staying inside the Lullwater Estate like that woman in the red tracksuit. We ran the Peachtree I OK. We could run a marathon if we wanted to. Our weightless feet beat perfect time through city streets and wooded ravines. The daily run is the second best thing we do together, I like to think.
“All right,” she says. She gives me one of her demure, convent smiles. “But what’ll we do with dinner?”
I point at the shrivelled, carbonized thing in the stainless steel sink. “We could mail it to Africa.”
“Biafra?” she asks.
“Baby, Baby … Ethiopia, Mozambique. Biafra was gone a long time ago,” I tell her. She’s very selective with her news. Emilou was a news hound, and I took to watching CNN for a solid winter.
Blanquita pins my condo key to her elasticized waistband and goes out the front door ahead of me. The lawyer from 1403 is waiting by the elevator. I am far enough behind Blanquita to catch the quickie gleam in his eyes before he resumes his cool Duke demeanor and holds the elevator for us. In your face, Blue Devil.
That night Blanquita whips up some green nutritive complexion cream in the Cuisinart. She slaps the green sludge on her face with a rubber spatula. Her face is unequivocally mournful. The sludge in the Cuisinart fills the condo with smells I remember from nature trails of my childhood. Woodsy growths. Mosses. Ferns. I tracked game as a kid; I fished creeks. Atlanta wasn’t always this archipelago of developments.
“Better make tonight memorable,” she advises. The mask is starting to stiffen, especially around the lips. She has full, pouty, brownish lips. “It’s our last night.”
How many times has she said that? I’ve never said it, never had to. The women of my life always got the idea in plenty of time, they made it a mutual-consent, too-bad and so-long kind of thing. Wendi was really looking for a stepfather to her kids. Emilou was looking for full-time business advice to manage her settlement.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
The lips make a whistling noise from inside the mask’s cutout. “Anyway,” she says, “it wasn’t all cherry bombs and rockets for me either. Just sparklers.”
Sex, intimacy, love. I can’t keep any of it straight anymore.
“You’re not going to the Chiefs cabin in the north woods, period. He’s Jack the Ripper.”
“You think I can’t handle the situation, right? You think I’m just a dumb, naive foreigner you have to protect, right?”
“Yeah.”
Then she leaps on me, green face, glamor-length nails, Dior robe and all. I don’t know about Baby, but for me those rockets explode.
All day Sunday it rains. The raindrops are of the big, splashy variety, complete with whiffs of wild winds and churned seas. Our winter is starting. I don’t do much; I stay in, play Bach on the earphones and vacuum the broadloom. Marcos seems here to stay because I can’t bring myself to call the ASPCA.
When the hour for the daily run rolls around, I start out as usual in the doctors’ wing of the VA Hospital parking lot, pick my way around Mazdas, Audis, Volvos—they don’t have too many station wagons in this neighborhood—keep pace with fit groups in running shoes for as long as it feels good, then shoot ahead, past the serious runners who don’t look back when they hear you coming, past the dogs with Frisbees in their jaws, past the pros who scorn designer tracksuits and the Emory runners with fraternity gizmos on their shirts, pick up more speed until the Reeboks sheathe feet as light as cotton. Then it’s time to race. Really race. After Emilou and just before Baby I did wind sprints for a spring at the Atlanta Track Club, ran the three-minute half, ran four of them. I can let it out.
Today in the rain and the changing weather, colder tomorrow, I run longer, pushing harder, than any afternoon in my life. Running is here to stay, even if Baby is gone.
Today I run until a vein in the back of my head feels ready to pop. The stopgap remedy is Fiorinal, and so I pop one while I slump in the shower. It feels so good, the exhaustion, the pile of heavy, cold, sweaty clothes, the whole paraphernalia of deliberate self-depletion. At the track club they had a sign from William Butler Yeats: Torture Body to Pleasure Soul. I believe it.
What to do now? The rain is over, the Falcons are dying on the tube, the sun is staging a comeback. Already, my arms and legs are lightening, I’m resurging, I’m pink and healthy as a baby.
The nearby mall is so upscale that even the Vendoland janitor is dressed in a bright red blazer. The mall’s got the requisite atriums, tinted skylights, fountains, and indoor neo-sidewalk cafés. It’s a world-within-the-world; perfect peace and humidity, totally phony, and I love it. The Fiorinal’s done its job. My head is vacant and painless.
It must still be raining on the Chiefs woodsy acres.
I walk into an art framer’s. It’s the only empty store and the woman behind the counter, a Buckhead version of Liv Ullmann, with a wide sympathetic face, doesn’t seem to mind that I don’t look like a serious shopper. I give her my toothiest.
“Just looking,” I apologize.
“Why?”
“That’s a very reasonable question,” I say. She is neatly and expensively dressed; at least, everything looks color coordinated and natural fiberish. She seems many cuts above mall sales assistant.
Besides, Blanquita thinks she’s too good for me.
“Don’t tell me you have something to frame,” she says, laughing. “And I know you wouldn’t buy the junk on these walls.” She’s really a great saleslady. She’s narrowed my choices in about ten seconds. She’s flattered my tastes. Her eyes are the same greenish blue as her paisley sweater vest.
She’s intuitive. It’s closing time and it’s Sunday, and she opens late on Monday. “But you knew that, didn’t you?” she smiles. She helps me out in her amused, laid-back way. Her name is Maura. Thirty-four, divorced, no kids; she gets the statistics out of the way. She’s established an easy groundwork. In an hour or two she’ll ask those leading questions that are part, more and more, of doing love in the eighties. I check automatically for wedding and friendship rings. The flesh on her ring finger isn’t blanched and fluted so I know she’s been divorced a while. That’s a definite plus. The newly single are to be avoided.
Maura came down from Portland, Oregon, three winters ago. “I don’t know why I stay.” We’re having a pitcher of sangría, still in the mall. I like her voice; it’s rueful and teasing. I think I even like her big, sensible hands, so unlike Blanquita’s. I spot slivers, chewed nails, nothing glazed or pasted on. Hands that frame the art of Atlanta, such as it is. “Let’s see, there’s Farmers’ Market and the International Airport. What else?”
“The CDC,” I protest. The doctors and researchers at the Centers for Disease Control may all be aliens but this is no time to diminish the city’s glory. “I’m betting on AIDS to put us on the map.” There, I’ve made it easy, no sweat.
She laughs. I feel witty. I malinger, making small talk. Hard to tell what real time it is, out there in the world, but it must be dark. She suggests we go on to Appleby’s on the other side of the mall. Appleby’s is perfect for what we have going: relaxed fun and zero sentiment. I’ve struck gold.
No, I’ve lost my claim.
We have to drive around to the back of the mall. Her car’s a banged-up blue Subaru. Not her fault, she explains; an Oriental sideswiped her just outside Farmers’ Market on her first week in Atlanta. She kept the dent and let it rust. Her antisunbelt statement.
We order ten-cent oysters for her and Buffalo wings for me and a dollar pitcher. We don’t feed each other forkfuls as we might have in a prevenereal era. Afterwards we have to walk around some in the parking lot before finding our way back to her Subaru. I haven’t oriented myself to her car yet. It’s these little things, first moves, losing the first step, that become so tiring, make me feel I’m slowing down. We’ve had a pleasant time and what I really want is to let her go.
“Want to hear me play the harpsichord?”
She locates her car key inside her pocketbook. “That’s very original,” she says. “Should I believe you?”
“Only one way to find out.” The harpsichord was part of love’s debris. Wendi was musically inclined.
“It’s the best line to date,” Maura says as she unlocks the door on the passenger side for me.
Sunday night eases into the dark, cozy a.m. of Monday. Maura and I are having ourselves perfect times. The world’s a vale of tears only if you keep peering six weeks into the future.
“You’re good for me,” she keeps whispering, and makes me believe it. “Griff and the Farmers’ Market. You’re a whole new reason for me to stay.”
“We make a good team,” I say, knowing I’ve said it before. I’m already slipping back. I never used a line on Baby, and she never got my jokes anyway. Maura’s hair, silvery blond in the condo’s dimness, falls over my face. “Partner.”
“But we shouldn’t talk about it,” she says. “That’s one of my superstitions.”
I feel a small, icy twinge around my heart. I’ve swallowed too many superstitions these past few months.
Then the phone rings. I lift the phone off the night table and shove it under the bed.
“Oh, Christ, I just knew it,” Maura says. “It’s too good to be true, isn’t it?” I can feel her body tremble. It’s the first panic she’s displayed.
“Look, I’m ignoring it.”
“No you’re not.”
The ringing stops, waits a while, and starts up again.
“I don’t have to answer it.” I squeeze her rough hand, then splay the palm flat over my beard. “Give me a smile, pardner.”
“It’s all right with me,” she says in her frank, Northwest way. “You have a life. Your life doesn’t begin and end with me.” She’s already out of bed, already fishing through clothes for the simple things she dropped. “But if you ever need anything framed, do me a big favor, okay?”
The phone keeps up its stop-and-start ringing. It’s the Muzak of Purgatory. Maura’s dressed in an instant.
“There’s no reason why you shouldn’t be involved with someone.”
Because I can’t bear to hear it ring anymore, I shout into the mouthpiece, “What’s with you, anyway? You’re the one who left!”
But Blanquita the Brave, the giver of two cheers for a new life in a new continent, the pineapple of Joker Rosario’s eyes, his Baby, sounds hysterical. I make out phrases. The Chief’s into games. The Chief doesn’t love her. Oh, Blanquita, you’re breaking my heart: don’t you know, didn’t anyone ever tell you about us? Under it all, you still trust us, you still love. She’s calling me from a diner. She’s babbling route numbers, gas stations, how to find her. Can’t I hear the semis? I’m all she’s got.
I hear my voice, loud and insistent. “Amoco?” I’m shouting. “There’s a hundred Amocos between the perimeter and Chattanooga.”
“I don’t want to know,” I hear Maura tell Marcos as I rush the front door, warm-ups pulled over my pajamas. “I don’t want to start anything complicated.”