Spanish Disco (5 page)

I followed the directions, winding my way to the water, finally arriving at an immense wrought-iron gate. I couldn’t even make out a house. Grasses and dune-like mounds of sand blocked my view. Climbing out of my car, I approached an intercom mounted on the gate. I pressed a button and waited. I pressed again.

“Hello?” A female voice answered.

“Hello. This is Cassie Hayes. Is this the home of Roland Riggs?”

“
Sí.
Hold on.”

The gate buzzed and swung open. I got back in my car and drove through. The driveway—if you could call it
that—was gravel and sand and meandered its way to an immense house that stood on top of a dune but was perched on stilts like a heron.

I parked at another iron-filigree gate that led into a garden. Leaving everything in my car, I pushed on the gate, surprised at how nervous I felt. I was coming face-to-face with one of the literary giants of the century. Barbara Walters would have coldcocked Katie Couric and Diane Sawyer for this moment.

5

A
bove the surf noise of the Gulf of Mexico rippling toward shore, I heard a bubbling, gurgling sound. Glancing around the garden, I spotted a fish pond filled with koi. Flashes of gold-and-white-speckled fish lazily swam, flicks of their tails catching beams of sun. A cat perched on the stone ledge surrounding the pond. All white, with green eyes, it licked its paws and stared at me.

“Hey cat,” I said, offering it a nod. Then I noticed at least ten other cats sprawled throughout the garden. Orchids hung from tree branches—white and hot pink and purple, all in full bloom and thriving. Other flowers and bushes exploded with a blend of scents—citrus and jasmine. Fruit trees and avocado trees grew, limes and oranges and nectarines ripe for the plucking. Azaleas and gardenias grew—not an easy feat in Florida. Cedar benches and a glider
nestled near particularly restful spots. Someone clearly loved gardening. It was a monumental task to coax these flowers to grow in the brutal Florida sun…and the sandy soil. Riggs must have trucked in a farm-full of real soil.

I approached the house, for the first time really noticing its size. Made of glass and stone and wood, it offered views of the water on three sides. A frosted glass-and-wood door, surrounded by hanging orchids, stood atop a narrow slate and rock staircase. I climbed the stairs, rang the bell, and waited.

Finally, the door swung open, and there stood America’s greatest living author. Roland Riggs was white-haired and tall. I’d forgotten no one had seen a picture of him since 1977. He wore round silver spectacles that accentuated his clear, blue eyes. His skin was tanned but wrinkled and he smiled, revealing pure white teeth and a pair of craggy dimples. He looked like a vision of America’s perfect grandfather.

“Cassie Hayes.” He extended a liver-spotted, wrinkly hand and firmly shook mine.

“Yes, sir.”

“Call me Roland…where’s your stuff?” He craned his neck.

“In my car, down by the garden gate.”

“We’ll get it later. How’s lunch sound? Maria has cooked a plate of enchiladas.”

“Terrific.”

“Splendid.” He turned and led me into his house. He had a slight shuffle to his gait, and his shoulders stooped a
bit. His white hair stood up on its ends, a bit of an Einstein-do. I couldn’t help but notice he was barefoot. He was wearing a pookah shell necklace. Checkered boxer shorts peeked beneath a pair of crisply ironed tan shorts. The Bee Gees were playing on his stereo. As “Staying Alive” pulsed in the background, I watched him sway back and forth a time or two, involuntarily I think, as people do when lost in a song. He had terrible rhythm. As I followed the man whose words had changed the way America talked about war, I smiled to myself. He wasn’t like any grandfather I’d ever known.

Stepping inside Roland Riggs’s kitchen was like walking into something out of a Creature-Feature show. Plants didn’t just grow in the windowsill, where sunlight streamed in through triple panes of glass. They grew everywhere. In fact, I wondered if a kitchen counter even existed beneath all the plants. It was like
The Day of the Trifids.
Only no Trifids, just plants.

“What
are
all these things?”

“Potato bonsai.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Potato bonsai.”

“I’ve never heard of that.”

“Most people haven’t. It’s an art form. When you were a little girl, did you ever try to grow a potato? Stick one in water with the toothpicks and all that?”

I tried to think back to my childhood. My mother would never have touched a food item that needed cooking. Our housekeeper believed the kitchen was her own
territory and threatened death to all who did not respect her domain. My father? He helped me write a 130-page paper on misogyny in literature for my fifth-grade end-of-year English project. Growing potatoes and other simple child pleasures were not in his repertoire. But I was meeting the famous Roland Riggs for the first time. So I did what I do so well with all my authors.

“Of course,” I lied.

“Well, Maria takes it one step further. She tends to these little potatoes here until she can make bonsai out of them. And then she tends to those. See, over there?”

Sure enough, little bonsai plants sat on a corner of the counter in beautiful glazed Japanese pots. Of course, most bonsai plants I have ever seen—which admittedly is not many—created little scenes of Japanese men fishing or sitting on a bench. Or perhaps no scene at all, just the bonsai curving gracefully. These bonsai each had a unique scene of tiny troll dolls—nude—sitting on high chairs or hugging each other, with their trademark Don King fright hairdos sticking straight up in an array of colors from green and yellow to a blinding hot pink.

“This is an art form I have never seen before,” I commented. Truthfully.

“She’s quite amazing. And now…” He smiled and led me to a beautiful oak-plank table in the dining room. “You get to partake of her other art form. Cooking. Maria is from Mexico, and she is unparalleled in her cooking skills. More evidence of her artistry,” he said, with a flourish of his hand.

Ten minutes later, I was tasting the enchiladas. My mouth was burning. Maria, his housekeeper, apparently cooked with a bottle of hot sauce in her belt like a Mexican gunslinger. Only she was slinging fire.

“You like them?” Roland asked from across the dining-room table, polished to a sheen. We could have fit sixteen around it.

“Like them?” My eyes watered, and my voice was hoarse with tears. “I need cold liquid. Ice.”

I hadn’t yet seen Maria. I assumed she was cleaning in some other part of the house. Perhaps she was trying to kill me. And Roland Riggs.

Genially, he rose and walked over to the refrigerator, one of those blend-into-the-cabinetry custom-made types.
Simple Simon
apparently provided quite an income to Riggs.

“Beer? Cold soda? Ice water? Juice?”

The moment of truth. Let on that I was a coffee-slugging, tequila-loving hedonist? Well, there was no way I was going to hide all my bad habits for a month.

“Beer.”

He came over to the table with two Coronas and two lime wedges.

“How’s Lou?”

“Good. He sends his best. I actually need to call him and set up my laptop and e-mail if that’s okay.”

“I never thought the computer would be so big. The Internet…do you know they have over a hundred Web sites devoted to me? That puzzles me.”

“You’re an enigma. You disappeared.”

“Yes, but they post fuzzy photos of me…supposedly me. Someone who vaguely looks like me. One hundred sites…” he shook his head from side to side.

“Anytime someone pulls a disappearing act, seems like people can’t handle it. For God’s sake, how many idiots out there think Elvis is still alive?”

“You mean he’s dead?”

I choked on my enchilada but then spotted a twinkle in his eye.

“You know what I do sometimes?” he asked.

I shook my head.

“I invent a name for myself, and I bash myself on the Web sites.”

“Really?”

“Sure. I make up a chat room name like ‘Simonsucks’ and I visit the Web sites and post how I think
Simple Simon
is a load of crap.”

“What happens?”

“I get flamed, of course. People send me all kinds of terrible e-mail. No one has ever caught on that it’s me.”

He looked quite pleased with himself. I took in a breath. “God, these enchiladas are hot. Aren’t you having some?”

“Shh. No, I’m not hungry. Maria is a blessing, but this hot food is all she cooks. I can’t cook at all, so I…make do. But Maria makes a fuss when I don’t eat what she puts in front of me. A mother hen kind of thing. So keep a secret and say I ate a few.” With that he went into the kitchen and took a clean plate from the cabinet and started rins
ing it under the faucet. “I put it in the drying rack, and she thinks I ate.”

Next he took two enchiladas from the casserole dish they had been baked in and dumped them down the garbage disposal, running it swiftly while looking over his shoulder.

“You know that night a long time ago when you met Lou?”

He nodded and walked back to the table.

“Did it really last a weekend? A three-day bender?”

“Near as I can recall. I do remember thinking Lou was very smart and if I ever wrote a sequel to
Simple Simon
I’d want to work with him. Of course, I didn’t think it would take me this long.”

“Have you been working on it this whole time?”

“God no. I’m not that pathetic.”

“Can I see it?”

“The manuscript?”

I nodded and washed down another burning bite of food.

“How fast do you work?”

“Very.”

“Well, then I think we should wait. I want you to understand why I wrote the book first. Otherwise you won’t understand it.”

“Post-modern?”

“Uh…not exactly.”

I lifted my fork, about to subject myself to another bite, when two rabbits appeared from behind a living room
chair. They hopped toward the table. I put down my fork and squinted. I blinked. I blinked again. One of the rabbits sat up on its haunches and licked its paws. For a moment, I thought I was hallucinating. Roland turned around to see what I was looking at.

“Oh…those two fellows are Pedro and José. They’re Norwegian dwarf bunnies. Siamese. See how they kind of resemble a Siamese cat around their noses?”

I nodded. “And they just hop around the house? Like that? Loose all the time.”

“Don’t worry. They’re not vicious or anything.”

I looked at his face, trying to discern how serious he was. Apparently very. His eyes registered concern about my fear of loose rabbits, so I tried to put him at ease.

“I wasn’t worried that they’re vicious. I…I just never knew anyone who had them just…hopping around like that.”

“Later you might see Cecelia. She’s a white one. More shy. We think she might be pregnant. They’re housebroken, you know.”

“Really?”

“Yes. Most of the time. I occasionally find rabbit poop on the bathroom carpet. I keep telling Maria it’s because the carpet is green and they think it’s grass.”

I stood and slowly approached Pedro, who wisely saw I was not an animal lover and hopped away.

“So you like rabbits?”

“I never thought about it, actually.”

With that, Maria burst through the door carrying an
armload of fresh cucumbers from an as-yet-unseen vegetable garden.

“Maria, this is our houseguest, Cassie Hayes.”

“Hello,” she smiled, her black eyes open wide.

“Hi.” I was struck by how beautiful she was. She was probably my age. Her dark eyes were framed by jet-black lashes, and her raven hair trailed halfway down her back in a braid. She didn’t wear a trace of makeup, and her skin was a deep yellow-brown. Wide cheekbones and a classic nose made her look like an Incan sculpture. At the same time, her hands were rough and chapped as they clutched her vegetables, and she wore ripped jeans and a T-shirt. She was chubby by the standards of
Vogue.
But then again any woman who has actually gone through puberty and grown breasts and hips is fat according to
Vogue.

“Maria lives in the guesthouse on the other side of the pool.”

“Did you eat lunch yet, Mr. Riggs?”

“
Sí,
Maria.”

“You, too?” She looked at me.

“Yes.”

“You like it?”

More lies. “Delicious.” Anxious to change the subject, I asked about Cecilia. “So how many babies do rabbits have at once?”

Maria answered as she started washing and chopping vegetables, “I’m not sure. This is my first bunny birth.”

As she chopped vegetables, she set aside a little pile of cut-up pieces. She saw me look at them.

“For my birds.”

“Birds?”

“Yes. Sweet birds. Sing beautifully.”

I looked at Roland. He silently shook his head. In a moment I knew why. The loudest squawk I ever heard emanated from a sunroom off of the kitchen. It was a cross between a shriek and a banshee howl.

“One minute, Pepito!” Maria glowed. “My babies. Them and Mr. Riggs. Now shoo, I must start cooking dinner. If you liked my lunch, wait until supper. Very hot!”