DELILAH WAS NOT A PARTICULARLY attractive child, but small and spindly, with fair fine hair through which you could see her scalp, as fresh as a melon. Her ears were too large and when she grew up she would probably try to hide them, just as she would most likely adopt bangs to disguise the tall slant of her forehead. She wore her glasses as a child wears glasses, warily and resignedly. At six years old she already had the look of a child who has learned to be adaptable.
Unlike the young children of my friends in London who sported six earrings in each ear and tee-shirts that said “Save the Rainforest,” Delilah was in a dress and sneakers. She wasn’t wearing any jewelry at all, nor did she have a slogan on her skinny little chest, and you had the feeling that was her idea.
“What happened, honey?” Hamilton asked her. He crouched down to her level and put his brown hands on her small shoulders.
She sighed and scuffed her foot in the dry earth. “Frankie came up and told me that if I’d go with her I’d get some ice cream. She said we’d go off and get ice cream for everybody and come back and surprise Ben and April. I said okay and we started to go off but then Ben saw us and started screaming, so Frankie took off.”
Delilah looked at Ben. “How come Frankie is here in Spain? Did he come to visit us?”
“Yes, Delilah. He came to visit us,” Ben said. She looked exhausted and worried.
“Why did you scream at him?”
“Uhmm, I guess because it looked like you might be going away without telling us where you were going. We didn’t mean to scare him.”
“Maybe she just wanted to see Delilah,” suggested Hamilton. “After all, she’s her father.”
“He sees Delilah regularly in San Francisco. There’s no reason he had to follow us on our vacation.”
I was having some trouble following the pronouns. To Hamilton Frankie was a she, to Ben a he; Delilah used both depending on who she was talking to.
“And just where do you fit in?” April asked me suddenly. She was as intensely attractive as I remembered her. Her eyelids were dusky violet and her lips a natural rose. Crystal pendants and embroidered cloth bags hung around her neck and down into the brown cleavage visible under her silky blue shirt, and she gave off a scent that conjured up rich dark Biblical words like frankincense and myrrh.
“Well, I got a call from Frankie in London where I live saying she… he knew a friend of mine and wanted my help finding her… his ex-husband, Ben, and she’d pay my expenses and a fee for finding him… her. Frankie didn’t say anything about a child. Of course he… she didn’t say she was transsexual.” I gave up on the pronouns. “Frankie said Frankie was married, had been married to a gay man named Ben, who was very wealthy and had just left town. The family needed some papers signed. That’s why Frankie was looking for Ben. I thought Hamilton was Ben actually. You have to admit, Ben’s not exactly a common name for a woman.”
“Short for Bernadette,” she sighed.
“Well, all I can say is I’m sorry if I’ve made more problems for you.”
“You’ve lost your Irish accent,” Hamilton noted with a frown.
“So you were working for Frankie, and he paid you to find me,” said Ben.
“Frankie paid part of my fee,” I allowed, with the sinking feeling that I was probably never going to see the rest of it. “How was I to know? It sounded plausible, at least at the beginning. I never expected anything like this. I never heard of anything like this. Have I been away from the States too long?”
April said, “Hamilton, maybe Delilah would like to take a walk.”
“Yes!” said Delilah.
They set off back down the slope of Max Ernst pillars, Hamilton with a slight avuncular stoop that suggested he was used to children, Delilah skipping in her dress.
I turned to Ben. Up close this woman was even more brawnily daunting. Her biceps bulged, her deltoids distended, her pectorals protruded underneath her sleeveless tee-shirt and vest. I supposed that April, as a masseuse, was attracted to such a display of well-defined musculature. It must be of great physiological interest.
“I don’t know what to do,” she said. “It can’t go on like this. He’s determined to kidnap Delilah, I know he is.”
The three of us sat down on a stone bench, and Ben took April’s round arm into her lap. She seemed unable to keep her hands off her girlfriend.
“Do you know any of the background of all this?” Ben asked. “Did Frankie tell you anything?”
“I’m at a loss,” I admitted. “Are you married to Frankie? Were you married? Is Delilah your child?”
“She’s my child,” said Ben with some ferocity. “That’s the problem. Frankie’s trying to steal her.”
April murmured in a placating tone, “Ben, remember that Frankie sees things differently.”
“I gather you had Delilah… together, then,” I said, searching for the right words. “Before Frankie… umm… changed.”
“We were pals,” Ben said, squeezing April’s arm sadly. “It wasn’t supposed to be like this. We knew each other in college, in the theater department. We dreamed of San Francisco, and we moved there right after graduation—we were going to stick together and make it.”
April tried to remove her arm from Ben’s grasp, but Ben only clung to her more firmly. “Yes, we got married, I got pregnant. What did we know? We were from Iowa. I had Delilah and then I got a job at Federal Express and Frankie started working as a waiter. I come to find out it’s a bar with female impersonators and that he’s been doing impersonation himself.”
“It’s a valid art form, Ben,” April said. “It’s as old as civilization.”
“I’m not naive,” Ben protested. “Okay, so people are different. So why should I be upset when Frankie comes to me and says he’s always felt more like a girl than a boy, that he’s never wanted to be macho. So he was a fag, well, I guess I always knew that. Just like I knew I wasn’t like the girls I knew growing up. But I’m still a goddamned woman!”
“Ben, Ben,” April said, withdrawing her arm firmly. “You said you were going to work on your attitude. Frankie is still a child of the Goddess.”
“Oh honey, don’t be mad. I love you so much. But don’t you understand, I’m not against Delilah having a father. I’m not a separatist or anything. But Frankie is fucking trying to usurp my biological role!”
I tried to get back to the story. “So you and Frankie had a baby and then Frankie had a sex change. You have joint custody of Delilah, right?”
Ben nodded.
“I have her during the week and Frankie has her on the weekends. But on the weekends Frankie works at this club, as a cocktail waitress. He makes Delilah sit in the entertainers’ dressing room for hours. Is that any place for a child?”
I supposed it wasn’t appropriate to say that it sounded more fun than going to bed early Saturday night with your hair in big scratchy rollers, so you could get up at dawn for mass the next morning. That was how I’d spent my childhood.
“We were arguing all the time,” Ben said. “When I complained about his work he said he’d take Delilah during the week, and I could have her on the weekends. I couldn’t agree to that. Finally I just couldn’t stand him anymore. I had to get away for a while. Take a vacation. But now he’s followed us.”
“So what are you going to do?”
Ben fixed me with her blue Iowa eyes. “Can’t you help, Cassandra? I mean, after all, you have some responsibility. You led Frankie to us. Can’t you persuade him that we’re just here for a vacation? It’s so important for April and me to be together right now.”
“You are planning to go back, then?”
“Of course. It’s just a couple of weeks. If Frankie would just go home and relax we could sort it all out then.”
There was no denying that I had helped Frankie locate them, and that I probably did bear some responsibility. However, it wasn’t guilt that made me agree to look for Frankie now and talk to her; it was indignation at having been used. And, I admit, some curiosity.
But finding Frankie might not be the easiest task in the world.
Leaving Ben and April in the Parc Güell, I gave in to the midday heat and took a taxi back to the Ramblas, to the posh hotel where Frankie had told me she was staying.
They said they didn’t have a guest by that name.
I described her first as a curly redhead and then as a brunette with a pageboy. I even tried describing her as a man. The desk clerk gave me a strange look and grew more adamant. No one like that had been a guest in this hotel.
I wondered if Frankie had given me the wrong hotel by mistake. There were several three-star hotels along the Ramblas and I asked at each one, each time with the same results. No redheads, no brunettes and no men by the name of Frankie Stevens had ever checked in or out.
It was about five when I sat down in the xoclateria, the chocolate café off the Plaça del Pi, to consider what to do. I’m too trusting, perhaps, but it irked me to have been so thoroughly misled. Maybe Frankie did want Delilah back, but was that any reason to spin a story about a gay ex-husband and lead me to Barcelona to do her leg work for her? She’d clearly never meant to confront Ben and April directly, but to use me to get to them. And what about Hamilton? Who was he and why were April and Ben staying with him? Why had Frankie gone through Hamilton? She’d met with him yesterday and arranged to meet with him today at lunch. But all she’d wanted was to make sure he wasn’t with April and Ben when she kidnapped Delilah.
And now Frankie had vanished. Maybe I should just let her go; none of this was any of my business, after all. But it pissed me off that she had used me and absconded with my two thousand dollars, the money that was rightfully mine and that was to finance my trip to Bucharest in June.
The more I thought about it, the more steamed I became. I had another cup of thick hot chocolate and felt my veins buzz. How on earth could I ever track Frankie down? Barcelona had literally hundreds of hotels and hostales and pensiones. Even if I had the leisure to check out each one, it would take me weeks. I was far more likely to run into Frankie in a restaurant or a bar. She struck me as a night owl. Here she was in Barcelona, after all. Was she the type to sit in some hotel room and watch Spanish television or play solitaire? I doubted it. Barcelona’s night life was famous all over the world. Frankie must know that. I needed to do some serious bar-hopping tonight, and I needed some help.
Carmen ignored me when I came into the beauty salon. The receptionist said my favorite hairdresser was occupied and asked me to take a seat. But I sidled up to Carmen’s workstand where she was grimly fastening rollers into the dyed black hair of a heavily made-up señora, and whispered:
“I know why you were so upset yesterday.”
“Sí?” Said with brutal dismissiveness.
“At first I thought it was because Frankie was an American….”
“Sí?”
“But now I know it was because she was a he.”
The señora under Carmen’s fingers jumped.
“Sí?” It could be such a curt word sometimes.
“I know your nephew is…” I paused and then skipped the word, transvestite. “And I know you have… feelings about that. But he might be able to give us the names of bars and clubs where we could find Frankie. You see, I’ve lost her. And it’s very important that I find her.”
“Aiee!” screamed the señora. “You’re pulling my hair.”
“Think about it, Carmen,” I said. “I’ll meet you at eight at that bar by the Paral.lel metro stop.”
It was a lovely evening, dark and warm. I arrived at the bar on Avinguda del Paral.lel a little early, found a seat outside and ordered a Campari and soda. Across the street was the Teatro Apollo where impersonator Julio Sabala was playing. A huge sign announced all the entertainers he would mimic: Frank Sinatra, Prince, Julio Iglesias, Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson. No women though. I drank my Campari and watched the parade of people walking by. I wasn’t positive that Carmen would actually show up, so I’d also asked Ana if she wanted to come along.
I didn’t know why Carmen always had to be so proper and outraged. You’d think, in a family where one sister had sex for a living and the other had sex for fun, that nobody would mind if the prostitute’s son was a transvestite. But I suppose they had to draw the line somewhere. The last time I’d visited Barcelona Carmen had been in a complete tizzy about it. Pablo was only nineteen and his mother had caught him dressed up in her underwear and high heels. He’d had on one of her wigs and was putting on make-up. And he’d been so brazen. He said that he’d been doing it for five years, that he often went out at night dressed as a woman.
“What have I done wrong?” Conchita, Carmen’s sister, had wailed. “How could I have raised such a son?” When Carmen had told me about it I had expressed more interest than horror, and wondered aloud why it was that women could wear clothing formerly reserved to men, while it was an incredible, and therefore incredibly exciting, taboo for men to wear women’s clothing. Carmen hadn’t appreciated the subtlety of my argument. “Men should be men,” she’d shouted. “Women should be women.”
“What about you?” I said. “Are you a woman if one of the definitions of woman is only being attracted to men?”
But Carmen didn’t like such bold references, just as her sister had never admitted to anyone she was a prostitute. She only had “amigos,” just as Carmen only had “amigas.”
I assumed from the way Carmen had reacted about Frankie that her feelings about Pablo hadn’t changed, and that Pablo, perhaps, had been ejected from the family fold for not playing fair, that is, not sleeping at home at night.
Then I saw Carmen crossing the street towards me. She was smoking a cigarette, which she almost never did in public, and looking a bit daring with her frosted hair and zebra-printed shirt underneath a blazing red jacket. She was wearing her high high heels and a tight short red skirt.
“I’m only going with you because I’m afraid that something will happen to you by yourself,” she said, sitting down at the table. “Barcelona is a dangerous city. You think it’s not, Cassandra, but I tell you it’s changing.”
“I believe you,” I said. “Is Pablo coming with us?”
“He can’t tonight,” she said. “He works very late at his job. He’s in computers now. We’re very proud of him.”
“But he had some suggestions?”
“Some places. Some streets. Some bars.”
Ana, in a white shirt, jeans and suit jacket with the cuffs turned up, slipped into a seat next to us. She had her long hair bundled under a fedora and was chewing gum. She looked a little like Warren Beatty in Bonnie and Clyde.
“Hola, mujeres,” she kissed us both. “I’m here to keep an eye on you, Carmen.” Her tone was light but Carmen took offense.
“You’d better keep an eye on Cassandra. She is a wild woman but she doesn’t know it.”
I got up from the table with a James Dean swagger and put my hands in my bomber jacket. “Shall we hit the streets, girls? Don’t worry, you’re safe with me.”
Both of them snorted and grabbed my arms, bearing me off to the red-light district.