Queen of the Underworld (18 page)

“ ‘Henry Sprat, Forty-six Forty-four Ingraham Highway, Coconut Grove,’ ” Bisbee read aloud from my notes. “Where’d you get this, Emma?”

“At Jackson, last night. I met Mr. Sprat going into the ER; he was the first person I interviewed. But then you put me on the Ginevra Brown watch and, to tell the truth, I forgot all about him.” I felt it wise, after my sarcasm, to strike a humble note. Bisbee was, after all, my boss for the interim.

“Who is Lola, as in ‘Whatever Lola wants’?”

“That’s the Lab. Maybe Mr. Rance could shoot a reconciliation scene between man and dog. At least readers will be able to see the dog.”

11.

H
AVING MADE
H
ENRY
S
PRAT
an extremely happy old man, we roared off again to the
Star
in Jake Rance’s low-to-the-ground red Karmann Ghia reeking of pipe tobacco. Rance drove with his chin thrust forward, pipe clenched between his teeth, making an intense to-do about shifting gears, as though he were in a driving contest. The car was loud and we exchanged the minimum of words on the trip out and back. I was trapped in a small, noisy capsule with someone completely uninterested in my proximity. Though, as soon as Bisbee had suggested we go together to Mr. Sprat’s house in Coconut Grove, I realized it was in the best interests of my career to be nice to the sullen Pulitzer Prize–winning photographer.

And watching him in action, lunging about on his uneven polio legs, chanting “Beautiful, beautiful . . . oh, that’s a knockout, you two!” as he snapped away at the small man with bandaged head and his large dog repeatedly charging into each other’s embrace, I did feel an ebbing of hostility. He was so totally absorbed in his work. And when, at the last, he catered to the old widower’s timid request for “a portrait of Lola and me” posed in front of a framed photograph of the late Mrs. Sprat, I decided Jake Rance had human qualities after all.

Back at the
Star,
I typed up my specified “four-graf” story, which Bisbee pronounced my “best crowd-pleaser so far,” though he immediately went on to spoil it by wondering if Joelle Cutter-Crane’s “spirit” had seeped into me since I’d been working at her desk.

When Jake Rance brought the prints out to Bisbee, they were so endearingly packed with man-and-dog love that I found myself gushing, “They’re perfect, how did you do it?”

“What is it you always tell them, Rance? Get your frame and then shoot the hell out of it?” Bisbee answered for the photographer.

“Something like that,” said Jake Rance, not acknowledging my outburst. “Then shoot a few extra rolls, just in case.”

“Well,” I said, stung by his ungraciousness, “I’d better get cracking on how many Miamians made long-distance calls about the tornado.”

As I stepped into the elevator at the end of my workday, there was Jake Rance, his cameras slung over his chest.

“Hello, again,” he said.

“Going out on another assignment?” I kept my tone cordial but indifferent.

“I’m going home. Want a lift?”

Assuming I had misheard him, I didn’t answer.

“It’s raining,” he said.

“Oh no, not
again.
”

“Be glad to run you to wherever you’re going.”

“Oh, I live . . . my hotel is in walking distance.”

“Suit yourself.” He looked put out.

“Well, if it’s not
too
much out of your way.”

“It can’t be
too
much out of my way if it’s in walking distance.” I could swear he was mimicking me. He fished his pipe out of his crumpled fatigue jacket, jammed it between his teeth, and began that infuriating process of putting everything on hold while he lit up. We descended to the underground parking area in silence.

“What’s your hotel?” he asked as we rumbled out into the driving rain.

“The Julia Tuttle. You turn right on Miami Avenue and—”

“I know where it is.” Deep draw on the pipe. “Why are you staying there?”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“Nothing’s wrong with it, but it’s for Cubans.”

“My aunt here knows the manager and he gave me a good monthly rate.”

“You speak Spanish?” Glimmer of respect shaded with envy.

“I understand it better than I speak it. There were Cubans at my school in North Carolina. In fact, there’s a woman staying at the Julia Tuttle who graduated from my school; her husband just lost his sugar plantation to Castro. She’s somewhat older than me.”

A sarcastic twitch of his cheek. “And you must be all of what?”

“As of today I’m twenty-two. Today’s my birthday.”

Why had I played that card?

“Do you drink yet?”

“Pardon me?”

“Partake of alcohol.”

“Oh, sure. Wine with dinner. The occasional Beefeater martini.”

“Can I buy you a martini on your birthday?”

“Thank you, but I don’t think the Julia Tuttle has a cocktail lounge.”

“If that’s a no, you need to be more specific.”

Did this man simply refuse to play the manners game?

I was about to say I was tired of being specific after a day of taking down boring post-tornado data and be rid of Jake Rance then and there, but the mention of a Beefeater had reminded me of Paul and the fact that he was not going to be calling up to my room on the house phone tonight.

“No, it’s not a no,” I said.

He gave a strange eruption, which I subsequently realized was a laugh. “We’ll go over to the Araby on the Venetian Causeway. They’re liberal with their cocktail snacks.”

T
HIS MORNING
there had been Alex at Howard Johnson’s, running his fingers worshipfully along the bottom of my photo in the raincoat, using words like
“guapa”
and
“aplomo”
(“handsome . . . with aplomb”) and telling me I was “amazing” to have three “appearances” in today’s newspaper.

And now here was Jake Rance at the Araby, spearing a hot sausage with a toothpick and saying he hadn’t thought much of me up on the roof when I’d been modeling the raincoat. “When Marge said you were the new reporter, I thought, What are they doing now, recruiting sorority girls? Or does her father know someone on the masthead?”

“It might interest you to know I was too poor to be in a sorority and my father was killed on the way to the hospital on the day of my birth.”

“If you’d let me finish, I was going to say I’ve changed my mind after seeing you in action with old Sprat and then reading your copy.”

How to respond? Oh, thank you, kind sir—which could lead into a sarcastic round of fencing and possibly set the tone of all our future exchanges. Or shame him with punctilious cordiality and at the same time “draw him out.” As I was beginning to suspect that Jake Rance was just naturally rude the way some dogs are just naturally spotted, I decided I might as well hone my skills as an interviewer.

“What does it feel like to win a Pulitzer?” I asked, helping myself to more crabmeat dip on a cracker.

“You know you’ve got a meal ticket for the rest of your working life.”

“Oh, come on, don’t be so cynical. I mean, when you picked up the phone and somebody said—”

“Didn’t happen like that. I was in the darkroom and my managing editor yelled it through the door.”

“Were you utterly surprised or had you been secretly hoping?”

He winced. “I don’t go in for utterlys and secretlys, even in the best of times. And it was a bad time for me. I’d only been back in Detroit for a couple of months and my head was still full of pictures I wanted to forget, including the ones that won the prize. As I recall, I went out to a bar that night and tied one on.”

“What were the pictures of?”

“You can look them up in the morgue. The
Star
did a spread when I joined the staff here.”

I contemplated the winking sign over the bar. A fat little neon sheik riding cross-legged on his magic carpet:

THE ARABY—FOR A “POTENT-DATE”!

Sheik = potentate. It took me a minute to work out the pun. The silence felt good, as my cordiality reserves were depleted. This was anything but a potent date. I helped myself to a sausage. Might as well fill up on snacks. Maybe Alex would get back in time to take me out for another of those
medianoches.

“Two million lives lost in three years,” Jake Rance was muttering between pipe puffs as he drove me to the Julia Tuttle. “And the thirty-eighth parallel didn’t move a goddamned inch. Any day now, we should be invading Cuba. If we went around the world to fight Communists in Korea, what’s stopping us from going ninety miles south?”

“
Señorita
Gant, you hab mail!” handsome Mr. Ocampo announced happily, pushing two packages, some cards, and two pink message slips across the desk. “
Espera,
is more!”

He ducked around a corner and returned bearing a long florist’s box. Meanwhile I had read the messages, both from Alex, a 3:10 p.m. one saying “Delayed until tomorrow” and a 5:30 p.m. one saying “Return with mother tonight. Will call if not too late.”

“
Perdón, señorita,
but you need
un florero
for the flowers?” Mr. Ocampo’s hands made sweeping undulations, pantomiming the thing he lacked the word for. “If not, we search you one.”

“You mean a vase?”

“
Sí,
base! Thank you.”

“No, I don’t have a vase.”

“
Pronto,
I have send to your room.”

“Well, if it’s not too much trouble.”

“No trouble,
señorita.
Our pleasure.”

On my upward elevator journey, I transmigrated briefly into Mr. Ocampo’s soul. A very short time ago he had been riding around on his sugar plantation giving orders and greetings in his native language. I pictured him symbolically on horseback, though with ten thousand acres to cover, it was more likely he would bop around in his own little airplane, dropping down to consult with his overseers and bestowing señorial encouragement in his upper-class Spanish on the tired but smiling peons leaning against their machetes. And now here he was making Spanglish hash, a part-time desk clerk in a foreign hotel. If, overnight, I were to be deprived of the fluency I took for granted, the rug would be pulled out from under whatever
aplomo
others thought I possessed. My familiar consonants would mutate into God knew what mush, and even my posture would suffer from all that obsequious bobbing and flailing to make myself understood.

I opened the flower box first. A dozen roses in many colors, each stem immersed in its little ampule of water.

Happy Birthday, darling.

It was the precious illegible scrawl, but the message was uncompromising enough to have been penned by anyone. It was the first time he had written the word “darling” and the first time he had left off the “Paul.” This card could be on exhibition to anyone who came into the room. Whom did he imagine coming to my room? I felt a double wrench of love for my secret man. He had made arrangements for these flowers before he left Miami so he could write the card himself. And what he had written not only conveyed his love but made room for me to have a life without him.

Mother’s package included my Spanish-English dictionary—this was Mother at her best, anticipating my needs—and the white silk head scarf I had hinted that I wanted. As always, she had made her card, this time a watercolor of a Chinese mother and daughter jointly flying a striped kite, and inside, only “Love, Mother.” Enclosed in the same envelope, to save postage, was a tiny second painting, not as well executed, of three Chinese children waving from a hilltop, with the signatures, such as they were, of the little ones.

Loney had sent me some lavender bubble bath and the present I knew I was getting: a white Ship ’n Shore drip-dry blouse with my initials embroidered on the breast pocket. I had picked out the cursive script I wanted from a book of designs, made a stencil of the
EG,
and chosen the colors (carmine letters edged in royal blue, ornamented with arabesques and foliations in jonquil yellow and verdant green), and Loney’s exquisite needlework had done the rest. My escutcheon, at last.

Loney’s love could transform a store-bought card (this had a simple spray of violets on the front) into a message for you alone. Often I had watched her perform this magic in the drugstore, picking up one card after another, sniffing at the pictures as she always sniffed at milk, rejecting one verse after another until suddenly a connection would be made with a particular card, which she would proclaim to be “just right” for the receiver. The invisible-ink message inside this card assured me not only that I was the dearest person in Loney’s world, but that I was altogether pretty exceptional.

A knock at the door: Enrique Ocampo himself delivering a chipped cabbage-colored plaster vase that had never been a beauty.

“
No es hermoso,
this base,
señorita,
but is the only one we meet.” His gaze danced approvingly on the display of roses tumbling out of their florist box on my bed. “But soon you will disappear it with your . . .” He mimed someone arranging flowers. “Your . . .
composición! ¡Felicidades, señorita!
”

The door swung shut on his retreating figure before I could thank him properly. Shouldn’t I have tipped him?

Then it occurred to me that this might be the very awkwardness he was fleeing from.

There was one more card to get out of the way before I turned to the sacred task of “composing” Paul’s flowers. (Some of Mr. Ocampo’s hit-or-miss translations were downright inspiring; I loved the idea of meeting a vase.)

Any missive from my stepfather, even a commercial birthday card, could be counted on to pack a wallop of encroachment and insinuation. How did he do it? In his own way, Earl was as effective as Loney when it came to sending his spirit through the mail.

This one came with
layers
of intrusion. Somehow Earl had managed to locate (it looked a little shopworn) a birthday card of a Vargas Girl, with hair exactly my color, looking provocatively over her shoulder at the viewer. She sported a fishing rod and wading boots and a man’s denim jacket, which, along with her let-down hair, barely covered her naked butt. Now, to be fair, I liked Vargas Girls—even though Earl had introduced them to me. He had allowed me to cut them out of his old GI calendar to paste in my scrapbooks, along with my Jon Whitcomb magazine girls with their tip-tilted profiles and off-the-shoulder gowns. But, right off, here was Earl shoving his way in with a shared memory. The greeting alone (“To a very special Miss on her birthday”) could have been for a girl turning twelve, were it not for the bosomy Miss on the front. Likewise, the message inside (“To tell you on this special day that you’re specially nice to know”) was harmless in itself, but not with the pinup. This card was probably designed for a
Playboy
subscriber to send to his paramour.