Carioca Fletch

Thirty-six

“What are you doing here?”

Joan Collins Stanwyk, dressed in shorts which were too big and a T-shirt which had some slogan on it in Portuguese, stood across the rough restaurant table from Fletch.

“Eating.”

“But how do you come to be here?”

“I was hungry.” He continued eating.

“Really,” she said. “How did you find me?”

Her eyes were round in amazement.

“Brazilian police apparently are not always as casual as they like to appear.”

The restaurant was a patio with a roof over it on the beach.

“Can you join me?” Fletch asked. “Or aren’t the help allowed to sit with the customers.”

“I can buy you a cup of coffee,” she said.

In sandals, she went across the restaurant to the serving tables.

He had enjoyed the drive through Rio’s suburbs, through the Brazilian countryside down the coast. He enjoyed sucking in good air and seeing the real things of the countryside, real rocks and trees, real cows and goats. Good roads had been laid out against the day Brazil’s past would catch up with her future. As he drove farther, most of the traffic he passed was on foot.

It had not taken him long to tour the village of Botelho. A short dock poked into a long ocean. The fish warehouse was no more than a shed. In the tiny church was a powerful, crude crucifixion. Less than a dozen fisherfolk bungalows facing the sea dozed in the shade of their own groves.

At the entrance to the open-air seafood restaurant he spotted Joan. Standing with her back to him in the kitchen area, Joan Collins Stanwyk, Mrs Alan Stanwyk, was placing plates and glasses in a vat of steaming water. He watched her dry her hands and begin shelving clean plates.

It was early for dinner. The only other customers in the restaurant were five fishermen at one table chatting over chopinhos. A young waiter gave Fletch a menu and understood as Fletch pointed to a soup and a fish entrée.

Brown paper sack on the bench beside him, Fletch gazed out over the beach to the ocean. Sooner or later, Joan Collins Stanwyk would turn, look through the serving apparatus, see him. He left her the option of ignoring his presence. He would go away again without speaking, if that was what she wanted.

The fish chowder was the best he’d ever had.

He was halfway through his fish entrée when Joan crossed the restaurant and spoke to him.

Now she sat across from him at the long, rough table. She had placed a cup of coffee before each of them.

“I’m glad you’re all right,” he said, still eating.

“Have an accident?”

“No, thanks. Just had one.”

They both laughed nervously.

“You look like someone really beat on you.” Especially did her eyes fasten on the small scar on his throat.

“I ran into an enraged nanny goat.” Her face put on patience. “That is the story I have decided to tell, to say is the past.”

Joan’s face looked better than when he saw her Saturday morning. There was good color in her skin and her eyes were clear. So far, she had not lit a cigarette, which was unusual for her. She was wearing no makeup at all. It was also obvious her hair had received little attention in the previous four days.

“It really was good of you to seek me out,” Joan said. “Have I been much trouble?”

“I was worried about you. I’ve been stood up for dinner before, often, but seldom for breakfast.”

“Not very nice of me.”

“It’s okay. I had breakfast anyway.”

“Well.” She looked into her coffee cup.

“The food here is very good.”

“Isn’t it? I love it.”

“Very good indeed. You wash dishes in this establishment?”

“Yes.”

“Didn’t think you knew how.”

“It’s not one of the more artful skills.” She showed him her hands. “Aren’t they beautiful?” They were red and wrinkled.

“They look honest.”

She fluttered her hands and put them in her lap. “I feel like a schoolgirl who’s been caught playing hookey.”

“It’s just nice to know you’re alive.”

“Any questions I might have had about you and Alan’s death …” She looked into Fletch’s face, then at the scar on his neck, then into her own lap. “… I don’t have now. The money—”

“I’m willing to do my best to try to explain.”

In truth, Fletch wondered if Joan, in her extreme competence, was making some sort of a bargain with him.

“Not necessary,” she said. “I know as much as I want to know. I pursued you to Brazil out of some sense of duty.” Numbly, she repeated, “Some sense of duty.”

He pushed his empty plate away. He realized Joan Collins Stanwyk was expected to wash it.

He sat silently, gazing out to sea. He waited until she understood that he was not questioning her.

She was sitting on her bench, her back straight, leaning on nothing. “I walked away from you that morning, Saturday morning, away from your hotel, to walk to my own hotel. You had said some things I had never heard before. I became angry in a way I had never been angry before.

“Suddenly I realized that here I was, a grown woman, stumbling along in the morning sunlight in tears because someone had stolen my little pins. My pinky rings! Little plastic cards with my name on them!”

Fletch said, “Also irreplaceable photographs of your husband, Alan, and your daughter, Julie.”

“Yes. That profoundly bothers me. But I realized what a spoiled brat I was. I am. Skinny little beggar children were dancing all around me as I walked along, their hands out, whispering at me. I waved my arm at them, and through tight jaws shouted, Oh, go away! Couldn’t they understand that I had lost a few of my diamonds, my credit cards, to me a negligible amount of cash? How dare they bother me at seven o’clock in the morning for money for food?

“I became truly angry at myself. What a superficial, supercilious bitch. What a hollow person. I had spent the night whining at the poor assistant manager at the hotel. I rushed to you at first light, to whine to you. And here I was virtually swinging at hungry kids.”

She said, “Joanie Collins had lost a few pins.”

Fletch sipped his coffee.

“Then I had a second thought, based on what you had said.” Her index finger was feeling along a short crack in the table. “In a most peculiar way, I was free. I had been relieved of my identity. My credit cards had been stolen, my passport. It almost meant nothing that I was Joan Collins Stanwyk. At least, I couldn’t prove it immediately to anybody. I couldn’t go up to anybody, in a store or something, and say, ‘I’m Joan Collins Stanwyk,’ and make it mean anything. As you said, I was just arms and legs: one more person walking naked in the world.

“I liked that thought. Suddenly I liked the idea of being without all that baggage.”

From behind the serving apparatus, a tall, slim man was peering out at them. He was looking from Joan to Fletch to Joan again with apparent concern.

Fletch said, “You’re still Joan Collins Stanwyk.”

“Oh, I know. But, for the first time in my life, it didn’t seem to mean much. I saw that it didn’t have to mean much.”

Again Fletch permitted his question to remain tacit.

“When I got to The Hotel Jangada, a tour bus was waiting. I didn’t know where it was going. I joined the people, the women in their short silk dresses, the men in their plaid shorts, and got on it. No one asked me for a ticket, or money. Obviously I belonged to a group from The Hotel Jangada. I belonged with these people. I stole a bus ride here.”

Fletch smiled. “Thievery is infectious.”

“The bus stopped here for lunch. I didn’t have lunch. I couldn’t pay for it. What a new fact! What a new feeling! I wandered around the beach. I let the bus leave without me.

“I wondered who I was. Really was. Really am. I wondered if I could survive a full day without cash, without credit cards, without my identity. I wondered what life would be like, for just a few moments, if I couldn’t pull something out of my purse and say, ‘Here I am, now do as I ask, please; give me …’” She smiled at herself. “It was getting dark. So I came here and had dinner. I sat over there.” She indicated a bench near the door. “I felt as guilty as hell.” She put her elbows on the table in a most unrefined way, her chin on her hands. “Then I went and washed dishes for them.”

“Is it fun for you?”

“It’s harder than tennis. I daydream about having a proper massage. God, last night I wanted a martini so badly.” She shrugged. “I can’t understand a word of the language. It’s so soft, so sibilant.”

The tall man, wiping his hands on an apron, finally was approaching them.

Joan’s face was happy. She said, “This noon, a well-dressed couple arrived for lunch. German, I think. In a Mercedes, behind a uniformed driver. I found myself looking at her over my pile of dirty dishes. Somehow it made me angry that she only picked at her lunch. Of course I understood. She has to keep her figure….”

The man stood behind Joan, looking at Fletch. He put his hand on her shoulder.

She put her hand on his.

“Fletch, this is Claudio.”

“Bom dia, Claudio.”

Fletch half rose, and they shook hands.

“Claudio owns this place, I think,” Joan said. “At least he acts as if he owns the place. He acts as if he owns the world. It may just be Brazilian masculinity.”

Assured she was all right, and apparently without conversation in English, Claudio left the back of his hand against Joan’s cheek for a moment, then went back to the kitchen.

“Are you here forever?” Fletch asked. “Have you decided upon dish-washing as a career?”

“Oh, no. Of course not. I love Julie. I love my father. I must get back. I have responsibilities. To Collins Aviation. I’m the best fund-raiser Symphony has.”

Fletch put the brown paper sack on the table.

“Just leave me here for a while,” Joan said quietly. “Let me play truant from life for a short while, from being mother, daughter, from being Joan Collins Stanwyk. Leave me be.”

“Sure.” He pushed the paper bag across the table at her.

“What’s that?” she asked.

“The money I was bringing you Saturday—enhanced by poker earnings. For when you decide to get back.” She looked into the bag. “Surely enough to get you back to Rio, pay a hotel bill for a few nights, pay for Telexes.”

“How very nice.”

“Poverty is easier to slip into,” Fletch said, “than to climb out of.”

She reached across the table and took his hand. “How do you know so much?”

“Just the wisdom of the masses. Also,” he said, “you must still have the key to your suite at The Hotel Jangada.”

“I must have. It must be in a pocket of that pants suit I was wearing.”

“Get it for me. I’ll check you out of the hotel. I’ll leave your luggage with the concierge, for when you want it.”

“I will want it,” she said. “I’m sure I will.”

While Fletch paid the waiter, Joan told him about bathing in the warm ocean, how hot the sun was at midday, how much she liked the smell of fish, it was so real, the sounds of something she thought might be tree-frogs at night.

“You sound like you’re at summer camp,” he said.

“No. At summer camp someone else washed the dishes. And,” she smiled, “there were only girls.”

Fletch waited by his car while she got the key to her suite at The Hotel Jangada. It was still daylight. Customers were beginning to arrive for dinner.

As Joan crossed the small parking lot to him, some of the customers stared after her, perplexed.

“Do me one other favor, will you?” she asked.

“Sure.” Fletch had known there would be a second part to the bargain. There are always two parts to a bargain.

“When you go back to the States, to California, back to your own reality, don’t ever tell anyone that this crazy thing happened to me, that I did this crazy thing. That you found me washing dishes in a fish joint in some nameless little town in Southern Brazil.”

“The town has a name.”

She laughed. “You know, I don’t know what it is?”

“Botelho.”

“Will you promise me that?”

“Sure.”

“I mean, everyone needs a vacation from life. Don’t you agree?”

“A vacation from reality.”

She handed him the key. “I’m paying for a suite at The Hotel Jangada, and sleeping more or less on the beach in Botelho.”

Fletch said: “Topsy-turvy.”