Judson Carmichael - The Scared Stiff

“No, that didn’t seem to fit,” I admitted. “Nothing seems to fit. If it’s a riddle, I give up. Tell me the answer.”

“Sweetheart,” she said, which I knew was horribly condescending, but there was no way out of it, “he’s my art dealer.”

“Your art dealer.” She was buying art?

She shook her head at me, still broadly smiling. “The sculptures on the walls? You’ve noticed them?”

Oh, so that’s what she’s buying. “Yes,” I said, “they’re very striking, very interesting, I remember think—”

“They’re mine! I make them! Later on, I’ll show you my studio; it’s at that end of the house down there.”

“You’re an artist!” I said. I was feeling stupid and abashed, and she was right to condescend to me.

But then she softened, saying, “I thought Carlos would have told you. Or Arturo. Yes, I am an artist, and my dealer sells me very well in Europe and in South America, but not at all in the United States. He has no contacts there, and I’m feeling a frenzy, because legitimacy comes from magazine articles, and the important magazines are in the United States, and they know nothing about me.”

“Ah,” I said.

“I need to get into Soho,” she declared. “Not LA; that just ghettoizes me as another Hispanic. I need to get into Soho, and Friedrich isn’t getting me there, and I will go to someone else unless he can come up with something.”

“Friedrich,” I said, “is your art dealer in Caracas.”

“Yes.” Then she smiled at me again and said, “I’m sorry I laughed, I was wrong. You couldn’t know, and you’re very sweet.”

Which was more condescension, I realized, but that was all right. Speaking sincerely, I said, “I’ll have to go back and look at those pieces again, now that I know something about the mind that produced them.”

“You’re going to understand me,” she said, openly mocking.

“I doubt that,” I said.

Which pleased her. “Good,” she said. “Will you forgive me for laughing?”

“Of course,” I said. “Will you forgive my ignorance?”

“We forgive each other,” she decided, “and now we are friends. Would you like to swim? Esilda will get you a suit.”

“Later,” I said. “It’s too soon after breakfast for me.”

“Well, I need to swim now,” Maria told me, and she got smoothly to her feet, strode to the edge of the pool, and dove in.

I sat there and watched her swim laps, with strong unhurried strokes. I was thinking that Lola was about to go away for weeks, for who knew how many weeks. I was thinking that this woman could be something of a torment, and that Luz could be something of a temptation, and I certainly hoped the time spent waiting for the insurance company didn’t drag out very long.

Tuesday she would leave, flying home to New York, while I stayed here. Between now and then, we had to get together, somehow, somewhere. That was definite. I sat in the chaise, under the white-and-blue awning, in the warm air, and watched Maria swim her steady laps, and schemed how to get together one more time with Lola.

Carlos appeared around five-thirty in the afternoon. By then I’d swum, in the bathing suit Esilda had brought me, boxer-style, very colorful, with matadors waving capes fore and aft. I’d also dealt with lunch, and dozed a bit in one of the chaises, and was feeling very comfortable and at home, pleased to be around Maria.

In midafternoon, she’d showed me her studio, a bare concrete room at the opposite end of the house from my guest room and about twice its size. It looked mostly like an auto repair shop, with its acetylene torches and stacks of pipe and all the tools scattered around, including an array of hacksaws on the wall over the workbench. I looked at it all and said, “You should be covered with scars.”

She laughed. “For the first few months, I was, but that was years ago.”

I looked at what was apparently a work-in-progress, a two-foot-high twist of metal clamped in a vise at the end of the workbench. It was a kind of spiral that bent in on itself, as though in pain. I don’t know why it seemed so strong, but it was hard not to go on looking at it. I said, “I now realize you don’t do your work justice, hanging it in a row on the wall out there. One at a time, it’s more powerful.”

“That isn’t display,” she said, dismissing the work on the wall with a careless wave of the hand, “that’s storage. I send photos to Friedrich, and then sometimes he asks me to ship this one or that one.”

“He can tell from pictures?”

“Now he can. And the dealers in Europe.”

I looked at the bending spiral again. “I’ve never understood abstraction,” I said. “I don’t mean to look at, I mean to make. How do you know when it’s right?”

“The emotion,” she said, and shrugged. She wasn’t really interested in talking about her art, just I guess in doing it. “Come back out in the sunlight,” she said.

So I did, and was still there in my matador trunks when Carlos came home.

I hadn’t really been thinking about Carlos all day, not in the aura of this strong woman, but now I looked at them together and I just didn’t get it. I know it’s a common thing for couples to look completely mismatched, so that only they themselves know why they’re a team, but Maria and Carlos took that notion to extremes. Here was this dramatic sophisticated woman, this artist, and over here in this corner we have a slob in a torn white T-shirt whose belly is so fat it lies on his belt buckle. He came out to the patio, nodded at us seated there on adjoining chaises, and said, “You met.”

“Ernesto is very amusing,” Maria told him. “He thought I was in Caracas to see my drug dealer.”

Carlos hid his amusement very well. “Huh,” he said.

“Come for a swim, darling,” she said.

“I got to shower,” he said, and nodded at me. “Tell Esilda we want drinks.”

“Beer?” I asked, as I stood up from the chaise.

“She knows what we want. You tell her what you want.”

“Okay.”

Maria swam again, arms rhythmically moving, legs slowly scissoring, black-sheathed body thrusting smoothly through the clear water. Carlos went into the house, and I walked over to the kitchen entrance and inside, to find Esilda seated weeping in front of a small TV set that stood in the corner of the counter. It was a Spanish-language soap opera, fiercer and more passionate than American ones. The three people raging around what looked like a Holiday Inn motel room with the drapes drawn shut seemed somehow to have hurt one another deeply. They were discussing it.

Esilda wiped her eyes and looked at me. I was sorry to tear her away from her fun, but I was on a mission, so I told her Carlos and Maria wanted drinks, then pointed at myself: “Cerveza.”

She nodded, got to her feet, and abandoned the trio in the motel room without a backward glance. Over at the counter, she poured white wine into a graceful long-stemmed glass, then combined half light rum and half Coca-Cola in a heavier cut-glass tumbler. Seeing me still standing there, she made a shooing gesture that I should get out of her kitchen, so I did.

Outside, Maria was still swimming laps. I considered joining her but felt too lazy, so I sat instead. Every once in a while, a grungy motorboat would go slowly by, out there on the river, and one did now, so I watched it until it was out of sight.

Then I looked for a while at Colombia, which was the land on the other side of the river. Some of the riverside over there had been cleared for grazing, and scrawny cattle moved around picturesquely against a background of mountainous jungle. Where the land hadn’t been cleared, the jungle petered out as it approached the river, becoming a kind of messy savanna. Bird calls electrified the air from time to time, but which side of the river the birds were on I couldn’t tell.