He’d never forgive them that.
He’d known, too, they had a child somewhere, living with the grandmother in Cuba, known the child wouldn’t be a problem for him. Laura wasn’t anybody’s mother. Not like Marjorie, clamping her jaw shut, buttoning up Ellen’s jacket, saying, “I don’t want my child within a thousand miles of that Spanish bitch!” And that hadn’t been much of a problem either. He felt in his pocket suddenly. Where the hell had he put Ellen’s letter? He always answered her letters. Laura didn’t know that. He usually managed to get to the mail before she did, but he’d slipped up this time. He’d send the girl a postcard from Rabat. He might even speak to Peter privately about helping her get a job in publishing. He supposed she had ambitions – silly illusions about literature – an ordinary lawyer’s office not being up to Marjorie’s expectations for “my child!” Desmond said aloud, “Damned right!”
“I’m sorry, what did you say?” Clara had come over to him and was looking distractedly at the ice bucket, the bottles.
“Oh, you know …” Desmond said thickly, “the ice … they never bring enough of it … damned hotels.”
Clara poured some scotch into her glass. “I don’t care about ice.”
“That’s right.”
“Your ship must be getting all wet in this rain – the decks, the portholes blurred. When it rains like this, I get the feeling that travel is an illusion. Do you know what I mean?”
“Oh, now …”
“It’s hard to imagine there’s a place where it isn’t raining, do you see?”
I am the only sensible person in this place, he thought, and frowned at her, as though to bring her to her senses. What was she looking so apologetic about? Then, abruptly, Clara left him. Had he told her to shut up? He’d thought it, but God! had he said it?
The cartoon Clara had gone to look for had disappeared from the bedside table. Had Laura chewed it up and swallowed it? If it had been there, she could have remarked upon it and so begun a new conversation with her mother, one that would release her, for the moment, from the mortification of her lie about the dress. Her squalid lie; the peculiar look of prophecy on her mother’s face, what was she to make of it?
Her dress was hot against her skin. Peter Rice glanced at her; an impersonal smile touched his lips. She felt she was about to faint, to fall, not from drink or from the warmth of the room, but from a powerful recollection that swept over her so that she seemed to feel the flesh, the limbs, of her lover, Harry Dana, pressing her down, holding her down, the hateful dress abandoned in the corner where she’d dropped it.
She was suddenly aware of a curious odor. It was, she recalled, that hair treatment her mother used, a kind of tar to rid herself of some minor scalp trouble. She had not realized until that instant that she must have been moving closer and closer to Laura. What an awful haircut she’d gotten herself! Clara sniffed discreetly. There it was again, a black, marshy smell, a touch of petroleum, an ancient ooze, the true elements of that Spanish blood, sangre pura, not a scalp treatment at all! Pure blood! The Spaniards had consumed whole populations of Indians, of Arabs, of black Moors, of Jews. God, how she would like to have been present when her father had said to Laura, “You know, of course, that you’re Sephardic, my queen, don’t you?” At least, so he had told Clara, swearing he’d said it. And he’d shown Clara a little tintype he had stolen from Laura, a photograph of Laura’s father, her own grandfather long dead before she’d been born, a handsome, swarthy, small man dressed in gypsy costume for the sitting, a swaggering, sporty little cock in a rakish caballero hat. “From Cadiz,” Ed had said, “never to be mentioned in front of your Uncle Eugenio!”
As if she would have mentioned anything to Uncle Eugenio, his own father or his own shoelaces! For there was a man whom “pure blood” had driven crazy, who carried, rolled up in his pocket, photocopies of pages of coats of arms he’d found in genealogical encyclopedias in the library. It was said that Eugenio never touched anyone’s hand – fear of contamination, perhaps. Once, when he’d stayed at Alma’s old apartment, sleeping on the studio couch among the rattletrap furnishings of the living room, Clara had heard him scream in the middle of the night like a horse pitched onto barbed wire. And once he had kicked a hole in the plaster of the wall, waking to find his foot covered with blood. Alma had pasted over the hole a picture of an ape she had found in a copy of Life magazine.
“For God’s sake! The dresses are falling again! Put them away, will you, Laura?” Desmond said irritably. Laura made a comic face and grinned. Her good humor was holding, Clara assured herself as Laura hung the dresses in a closet. Each passing moment was bringing them all closer to the safety of the restaurant. As Laura had remarked about herself, she didn’t misbehave in public the way she used to in the old days.
“What are you doing, Clara? Did I hear you mention public relations?” Peter inquired.
“That shit!” exploded Desmond. Then, his eyes on his wife, he said, as though in apology, “Well, everybody knows it’s– ”
Laura covered her eyes with the palms of her hands. “What everybody knows,” she intoned dramatically, “is that my husband is tipsy, having provided himself with a few little extras over there in his corner.” Her hands flew away; her eyes sparkled; her amiability distracted them from the steaming expletive, the intrusive pure ugliness of it. Saved – although from what, Clara couldn’t think – they looked at her expectantly. “Tell us about it, Clara,” Laura said.
She told them what she thought would amuse them, but kept herself out of it. She feared, without knowing why, that the weight of one word of personal feeling would sink them all. And her throat tightened at Carlos’s faint sigh, when she saw her mother gazing fixedly at her own hands and Peter Rice staring blankly at a telephone directory. She described the agency code system for client meetings where account executives alerted each other to unconscious personal habits by one or two or three discreet raps on the conference table. “We have a scratcher in the office,” she said. “But when he hears three raps, he jumps like a stung rabbit and folds his hands.”
They did laugh then, all except Desmond. He didn’t care what they were going on about now. Had he made that reservation at the restaurant? It was one thing he prided himself on, his efficiency in making arrangements. He looked at Laura; she was very handsome, sitting there on the bed. Handsome, heavy, wanton, he thought half-dreaming – like some large animal bogged down in its own heat and weight.
“‘Time is ever fleeting,’” sang Peter Rice. “What on earth? Where did that come from? Clara, you’ve described your agency perfectly. Appalling. Are you interested in publishing? It’s not much better but its style is somewhat more– ” and he shrugged and lit a cigarette.
Like a large animal, crooned Desmond to himself, in a fen, its hide muddied, matted, beshitted, the rank smell of dead leaves –
“Desmond?” his name, so softly spoken, nearly a whisper. He felt a sharp pain in his bowels. Laura could not possibly know what he’d been thinking, yet it came to him that she knew something about him, this minute, which, if she chose to reveal it, would mortify him. He knew that flat-eyed look of hers, that whisper! He poured a large drink into his glass and held it up so she could damn well see it. He deserved better after Marjorie, after those years with her and that child, Ellen, Ellen Clapper, writing him stupid letters – Laura saw how stupid. Then he understood! All that Laura knew was that he had, perhaps, taken a bit too much to drink.
“Desmond. What time is the reservation for?”
“Seven-thirty,”
