NIGHTS IN THE GARDENS OF BROOKLYN (44 page)

But the taxi stopped jokingly. I looked up, annoyed. From the shadows of a darkened store front there stepped forward a big sullen-faced girl with wet hair half plastered to her skull, a terrible complexion and a man’s zipper jacket flung carelessly over her
shoulders. She opened the door of the cab without being invited, as though she had been expecting us.

Isabel introduced her to me as Gertrudis or something equally ugly—any name would have seemed ugly—but it made no difference, since her lack of interest in me bordered on the absolute. Wedging her wet bulk firmly into the back seat, she launched at once into a lengthy speech none of which I could understand, partly because of that Central American way of speaking as though Spanish consisted of nothing but a run-together series of liquid vowels. Although she salivated as she spoke, and gesticulated broadly with her mannish, reddened hands, she did not betray any genuine animation in speech or gesture. All that mattered anyway was that Isabel was far more excited by her than by me.

We had gone no more than a dozen blocks when the driver brought us to a halt before an all-night milk bar. The girls scrambled out and hurried on inside, their heads bent against the raindrops, leaving me to deal with the cab driver, who had already slumped over into a fetal position, chin against his chest and hands pressed between his upraised thighs.

“Cuánto cobra usted
—” I began, but the driver interrupted without even troubling to open his eyes.

“I wait.”

I glanced through the dripping window at the milk bar. Isabel, laughing and chattering, was urging her friend to eat. It was becoming painfully clear that the whole scene had taken place before. Well, I was damned if I was going to give up now. I clenched my teeth and went on in.

Isabel patted the leatherette stool at her left. “Toby, you better eat too. Is late.”

“You’re telling me?”

I had a soft drink while I waited and watched. Isabel was sipping at a milkshake in this oasis of light in a darkened city and hanging on her friend’s words—uttered between huge gulps of bread and cheese—as though each one was precious. Gertrudis was a big eater—a second sandwich soon went the way of the first—but she seemed to derive no more satisfaction from this than from her talking, which made Isabel’s eyes sparkle and from
time to time doubled her up with laughter. I might just as well not have been there. At least, not until it was time to pay the
cuenta
.

Isabel looked away with a new-found delicacy as I fumbled through my pockets. The bill was less than I had expected, though, and I managed a smile as she thanked me. Her friend, the boillike blemishes standing out garishly on her sullen countenance in the lavender light of the fluorescent tubes, did not bother to acknowledge me, but simply shrugged the zipper jacket over her meaty shoulders. Before she slouched on out to the taxi, she threw a farewell remark at the counterman, who mumbled something casual around his dry, dangling cigarette butt as he cleared away our little debris. Apparently they were all buddies.

When I re-entered the cab, though, grimly ready to outlast my new antagonist, Isabel snuggled into the crook of my arm and pressed tightly against me as we drove off.

“Now we go to hotel.”

“I don’t want to rush you,” I said. “It’s only four A.M.”

“You funny.” She murmured to Gertrudis,
“Está burlesco.”

Her friend didn’t crack a smile. It had been clear enough since she had come into my cab from out of the rain that she didn’t like men. I released myself from Isabel.

“The rain has stopped,” I said. “Isn’t it about time that we dropped off your friend?”

“We get out first,” she replied equably. “Then her.”

While I was thinking this over, I had a chance to survey the slick, silent streets, which seemed to be getting a little familiar.

“How does this guy know where to go,” I asked Isabel after a while, “if nobody tells him?”

“He knows,” she said simply. “I already tol’ him.”

“Well,” I said, “you better tell him to go the old-fashioned way. We’ve already passed this plaza twice. Once more and I’ll own the cab.”

She leaned forward and spoke sharply to the hackie, who gave no indication of discomfiture, but continued to drive us sedately through the night while the blotchy-faced girl droned on in her unpleasant way. Even though Isabel was leaning against me as she listened, I was growing sleepy.

At last we pulled up before a squat, freshly stuccoed building which, save for its vertical neon HOTEL SUPERBA, might have been a veterinary clinic. Blithe as if we were off to a Sunday picnic, Isabel hopped out, leaving me for the moment with Gertrudis, who was smoking a little brown cigarette and spitting tobacco shreds onto the floor mat.

“I go in first,” Isabel called to me. “You pay him, yes?”

I paid him, all right, after a miserable effort to argue. When I put back my wallet it was practically empty, but it was worth all of it, I thought, to see the last of that rude and sulky young woman, who said nothing as I hastened eagerly after Isabel.

I found her in the lobby, shaking the night clerk, who was trying obstinately to stay asleep in his tilted chair, with the immutable stubbornness of the stoically enduring. He had no protection, and no equipment beyond a freshly sawed table desk sitting on opaque glass blocks. Behind his nodding head hung a raw, unfinished rack for depositing mail and room keys. The dark cubbyholes gaped emptily. It was like staring into the vacant sockets of a jaw from which every tooth has been extracted. Isabel and I, it was plain, were alone with the desperately sleeping Indian in a building that might have been put up just for this one night.

I yanked his chair upright by its left leg.

“Numero once,”
he groaned, scratching his bare brown belly with one hand—his embroidered white shirt hung unbuttoned to the navel—and with the other extending a key hooked to a hard rubber ball so huge that you couldn’t stuff it into a pocket even if you wanted to. Someone had painted the number 11 on it in white.

“Hold on.” I was very conscious of exactly how much I had left in my wallet.
“Cuánto?”

He spread the fat fingers of one hand and displayed them.
“Cinco.”

I looked at Isabel. She had helped a lot of people to my money: not only her boss but also the cabbie, her peculiar girl friend, the counterman at the milk bar, and now the hotel clerk. From each, from all, no doubt, she took her cut.

But then, she had earned it. And I had stuck it out. What mattered, after all, was that she really and truly liked me. At least
that was what she seemed to be saying to me as she stood blinking a little in the bare light, her fine legs apart and her bare arms akimbo, daring me not to like her, not to admire her for her dash and her nerve, not to pay. I drew a deep breath and, turning back to the clerk, exchanged money for key.

“Por dónde?”
I demanded, my voice echoing through the empty hall.

He pointed his dirt-caked thumb dead ahead and then let the arm fall back against his belly, the fingers working their way into the folds of his flesh, like piglets searching for the teats of their recumbent mother.

“Come, Isabel,” I said, leading her down the bleak uncarpeted corridor which, relieved only by grilled doors at regular intervals, had the clanking monotony of a cell block. Six, eight, seven, nine—we had the last room on the floor. I unlocked it and let her in.

With incomparable grace, Isabel held out her arms to me in the quiet of our ultimate sanctuary. A familiar gesture, but she endowed it with a rich and wonderful mystery. Our bodies close, we whispered, not because we had to but because it did not seem right to rupture the before-dawn silence. At last, I thought, at last, I’ve won! And I kissed her slowly, savoringly, deeply.

Isabel pushed at my arms, and as I lowered them my jacket fell to the chair at the side of the bed. She tugged gently at my loosened tie until she had it in her hand, then unbuttoned my wrinkled shirt and slipped it off too. I stood naked to the waist. As I stepped out of my loafers to more nearly equalize our heights, I began to fumble with the buttons of Isabel’s white blouse.

She laughed a little, helping me. “You got big fingers.
Sin arte
.”

“That’s because I’m nervous,” I muttered. By the subdued light of the bed lamp I stared at her newly exposed throat and soft upper bosom, bronze-gold above the lace of her slip. “I’m dazzled. Isabel, Isabel, Isabel.”

“Toby, you nice boy,” she chuckled. “You do me one more favor.”

I drew back in order to look at her, but did not answer.

“We get a room for my friend. She have no place to stay.”

“Now you ask me? Why now?”

“I promise to. Gertrudis can’t ask you herself.
Tímida.”

“She looks it.”

“What you say?” Isabel demanded, with just a touch of impatience. “I got to tell her, she’s waiting with the taxi driver.”

“She’d better stick with him—he’s got the last of my dough.”

Isabel was gazing at me sorrowfully. I unbuttoned my hip pocket, pulled out my wallet and spread it apart with my fingers. “You’re looking at my train ticket and my last dollar bill. If you sandbagged me you wouldn’t find anything more.”

Even as I spoke, Isabel was buttoning her blouse. She tied the little bow at her throat and picked up her purse. “I go tell her,” she said.

“You do that.”

“You lie down, you look tired. Okay, Toby?”

“Okay.”

After she had slipped out I lay down dizzily and waited, staring up at the frieze of cobwebbed cracks running along the upper wall of the plastered cell, hardly finished but already falling into disrepair. I might have been lying in the bare bedroom of a bleak new garden apartment in Bayside, Long Island. But not alone. Not all alone.

The time passed very slowly. I said to myself, She knew I didn’t like that girl. Who would? The fact that I had no money left, for her or for anyone else, was more than just fate. It was her responsibility as much as mine.

But I could not go on talking to myself. I got up in my stockinged feet and padded out into the hallway. It was empty. I could see clear down to the sleeping clerk with no obstruction, human or otherwise. I started to run.

Without pausing at the clerk’s desk I went right on to the door, which I struck with my shoulder, skidding to a halt on the slippery sidewalk beyond it. I peered first this way, then that. For as far as I could see, the length of the street in both directions was absolutely bare, and drying out here and there where it was touched by the first flush of dawn.

I walked back slowly into the Hotel Superba, my socks soaked through and plastered to the soles of my feet. I took hold of the snoring clerk and shook him awake ruthlessly.

“Did my girl friend go out?” I demanded. “Did she go away in the taxi?”

“No home,” he mumbled. “No home.”

I released my hold on his shirt. He fell back to sleep at once and I proceeded on down the blank corridor to its end, my wet socks leaving footprints on the unwashed plaster dust of the still unfinished tile flooring. Inside my room I stripped off the socks and, drawing the blind against the early dawn that was already seeping through the window, I threw myself down on the bed once more. Unslaked, my lust turned—like a glass of milk left undrunk—to a sour, hateful curd. I lay for a long while, burning and seething, frustrated, shamed, humiliated. It was only after seemingly endless hours that exhaustion overcame me, and I fell asleep.

But when I awoke, bewildered for an instant, alone in the strange room, I was finally able to laugh at myself.

That, in essence, is the story I have told others not once but many times in the years that have passed since it—or something like it—first happened to me. Presumably I tell it on myself when I want to show what a sucker, what a fool, a young man can be.

And when people press me—as some do—about what happened afterward, I tell them truthfully that I ate a cheap and greasy breakfast, caught the lurching train back to Panama City, and confessed laughingly to Tommy, once he had admitted that Luisa had outraced him on her bicycle, that I had wound up not with Isabel but with the morning paper.

But observe, as I do now, what a charming self-portrait I have succeeded in painting, what a wholesome person emerges from this “true” recital: good-natured, sporting, able to laugh at himself, and above all charitable. The only thing I have suppressed is the brief epilogue which I must now relate.

Some days after that fruitless evening, Tommy was ordered to the other end of the Isthmus, to Cristobal, for several days’ work. The minute that I heard this, I began to think of Isabel, whose very name I had put out of my mind. All of my shame and resentment at being victimized came rushing back, and I was taken by a rage for revenge.

With great casualness I said to Tommy, “I want you to look up Isabel in Colón. You remember, the tease.”

“If I get the chance,” he said. “But you know, I can’t afford that stuff.”

“Who can? That’s why I want to scare her out of pulling the same trick on anyone else. Tell her I’m good and angry.
Furioso. Frenético
. Wait!” I swiveled about in my chair and jammed a letterhead sheet into my typewriter. Rapidly I typed out, in Spanish: “Señorita: I have not forgotten. You shall pay for your treason.” Then I yanked it out and scrawled an indecipherable signature beneath.

“There, that looks official. Tell her I’m negotiating with the proper parties to have her taken care of. Physically.”

“My Spanish isn’t that good.”

“Hers is. You won’t have to draw a picture.”

Tommy was a good fellow, if a little dull, but I couldn’t predict whether he would go through with it. So it wasn’t until his return the following week that I learned what had happened. Part of it I could see on his face as he pushed through the swinging doors of the Pacifico, where I was having the usual, Myers rum and Coke, before dinner. He wore a dubious expression, as if he weren’t quite sure what to say to me (as if, I thought before casting the notion aside, he were reluctant even to greet me); and the freckles on his forehead had darkened and grown blotchy.