The Scared Stiff

20

Monday, after lunch, I put on my chauffeur suit and drove Maria to the airport. She sat in back, explaining it. looked better that way, and the fact that she felt the need to offer the explanation took the sting out of it.

But it also confirmed the realization I’d come to after the cool way she’d dealt with Carlos’s show of jealousy at lunch. There was no invitation for me in that woman. She was self-contained to a remarkable degree. She’d brought Carlos into her life, for whatever reason, but she mostly inhabited her world by herself. I needn’t feel I was letting an opportunity slide; there was nothing there.

So as we drove I spent more attention on the beautiful day outside than on the beautiful woman behind me, and when I thought about beautiful women at all, it was mostly Lola. How close we were to being together again.

We were a quarter hour out of Rancio, amid the usual traffic, when Maria said, “You’re very quiet today, Ernesto.”

I looked at her in the rearview mirror, and her ironic smile was aimed at the back of my head. “Well,” I said, “I am a deaf mute.”

“Even for a deaf mute,” she said, “you’re being very quiet. I believe you miss Lola.”

“A whole lot,” I said.

She nodded. “You know, when you first came to stay, I wondered if you were going to be difficult. You understand what I’m saying.”

“Yes,” I said.

“My response was all prepared,” she told me, and met my eyes in the mirror, and smiled again. “I was going to be flattered but distant.”

“And just a little contemptuous,” I said.

The smile became a laugh. “Just a very little,” she agreed. “It would have been amusing for both of us. Poor Ernesto, you’re a faithful husband.”

“I am,” I said.

“There are very few faithful husbands in this part of the world,” she said. “It is not a trait that is particularly valued.”

“I think that’s true everywhere,” I said. “But Lola and me... it isn’t that I’m being faithful to her. It’s that I don’t have any other way to live. To go do something else would be like breaking a bone.”

“Yes, of course,” she said, and switched to look at the back of my head again, speculatively. “It seems like a contradiction, but it isn’t,” she decided. “You aren’t the faithful type, actually, you’re a rogue.”

“Thank you — I think,” I said.

“Oh, I know you like being a rogue,” she assured me. “What the English call a chancer. You’re unfaithful to the entire world, so why are you faithful to your wife?”

“Maybe that’s why,” I said, and met her eyes in the mirror. “Maybe I need one little island in a sea of untrustworthy water. And so does Lola.”

“You’re each other’s island.”

“We are the island,” I said, “and I need to be with her again.”

“Poor Barry,” she said, which was the first time she’d used my former name, and without the usual mockery.

I didn’t think I could stand sympathy. Smiling back at her, I said, “Poor Felicio, in fact.”

That made her laugh and restored our relationship. “You aren’t a man,” she said, “you’re an anthology!”

I was about to say something, I don’t know what, but when I looked in the mirror I saw, beyond her, a red light flashing. “A cop is stopping us,” I said.

“What?” Annoyed, not at all worried, she twisted around to glare out the back window. She said something in Spanish that I doubted was a prayer, then faced front and with great irritation said, “We might as well stop.”

“I thought so too,” I said, pulling over to the weedy verge and touching the brakes. “But what do I do, Maria? He’s going to ask me questions.”

“Leave your window closed,” she told me, “and I’ll open mine. When he comes to the car, I’ll order you not to speak, to let me handle it. So he’ll hear me say it.”

I was now stopped, and the police car was going past to pull onto the shoulder in front of me and switch off its red dome light. It was a big American car, black and white, POLICIA on doors and trunk. A brown-uniformed driver was at the wheel, and two plainclothes men in back.

I said, “Can we get away with that?”

“Of course,” she said, and I realized that in her mind a person with her capacity for imperiousness, in a country like this, should be able to get away with anything. I hoped she was right.

Both rear doors of the police car opened, and the two men got out. Both wore white guayabera shirts and black sunglasses and modified black cowboy hats with gold stars pinned on the front. One wore dark jeans and boots, the other tan cotton slacks and soft tan shoes. Both had black holsters on their belts, on the right side, flaps shut.

The one in jeans leaned against the trunk of his police car, unsnapped his holster flap, then folded his arms and looked at me, without expression. The other one came forward, and I heard Maria’s window lower and felt the sudden moist hot air stroke the left side of my neck. She snapped at me in Spanish to let her handle this, sounding very aggravated, and I sat to attention, staring back at the one staring at me. The other one stopped next to me and tapped my window with a knuckle, and I pretended not to hear him. My hands were on the steering wheel, correctly, at ten and two o’clock.

Maria demanded to know what this fellow wanted, so he gave up on me and moved farther back along the car. He called her Maria, with a little too much familiarity, and hoped Carlos was well, and she told him not to worry about Carlos, and he said but he did worry about Carlos.

It was quite a battle they had, without ever stating the topic, all words and attitude. He used the power of his position, and she used the power of her imperial status. He spoke insinuatingly, as though to say, I could be rough, but I’m choosing not to, and she spoke with condescending grace, as though to say, I could dismiss you like the peon you are, but I’m choosing to give you a moment of my valuable time.

Then he straightened, as though tired of it or having made his point. “You want to be careful on this road,” he said. “And tell Carlos I might come visit him.”

“You won’t,” she said, but he’d already turned away. As he strolled back to his car, making a laughing comment to his deadpan partner, Maria slid her window closed and said, “¡Lechón!”

In the rearview mirror, her face was very angry. She caught my eye and made a brushing-along gesture. “Drive on!”

Now I really was the chauffeur, and she really was her highness. “Yes, ma’am,” I said, but at the moment she was impervious to irony. I put the Buick in gear, and we drove out around them as they got back into their car. In the rearview mirror, I saw them U-turn and recede.

We drove in silence for a few minutes, and then she said, “I’m sorry, Ernesto, that pig had me out of sorts.”

“I got the idea you didn’t like him. Is it okay to ask what it was all about?”

“It was nothing to do with me,” she said. “Carlos had a disagreement with a man a week ago—”

“Sunday before last?”

“Yes. You know about it?”

“I was there.”

“Oh. Well, that man is a friend of this pig, Rafez, and he—”

“Rafez? Rafael Rafez?”

Her expression in the mirror was astonished. “You know him? How on earth do you know him?”

“He groped Lola, the night I died,” I said. “She had to give him a bloody nose before he’d lay off.”

Delighted, she said, “Really? Lola gave him a bloody nose?”

“All over his white linen suit, the bastard.”

“But that’s wonderful,” she said. “Brava for Lola. Oh, now I feel one hundred percent better. Thank you, Ernesto.”

“De nada,” I said.