Colin Harrison - The Havana Room

"Bill," came Jay's watery cellular voice in my ear again, "I really need a guy to go out to Long Island with me and help with something. It's like three or four hours… I might need a guy to help hold stuff, a pair of hands, is what it is."

I'd yanked an extra quarter million bucks from the universe for him only hours before and now he needed me to be a farmworker? But I was polite. "A pair of hands?"

"Yeah, Poppy's are no good."

I saw the door to the Havana Room closing. "Give me the number, I'll call you back."

I walked the nine or ten steps across the foyer. The door was shut now. I tried the old porcelain handle. Nothing. The yellow card had been removed from the brass plate.

"Closed," announced the maitre d'.

I felt cheated. "Hey, but it was open a second ago."

"Yes," he said, not looking up from his reservation book. "It was."

I tried the handle, shook the door. It was surprisingly firm, with no vibration to it, as if the handle were merely bolted to a wall.

"Sir!" he called sharply.

"I was just in there, I have food on the table!"

"I'm sorry," he said, with no sympathy.

"I was taken in there by Allison Sparks," I said.

"Yes," he responded, "but you left. And the door is closed."

"I don't get it," I protested.

"I must ask you to move away from the door," he said.

"It's not busy, it's not-"

"Please, sir," he said, his voice ominous.

Now the woman in the fur coat had the pay phone in both hands.

I retrieved my coat and stepped outside into the cold, irritated and disappointed, watching the snow fall. Allison had said she'd be there in three minutes, but it was longer, more like ten. I noticed several potatoes in the gutter. The winter wind off Sixth Avenue slaps you around, sticks a cold finger down your collar, wakes you up. But it doesn't remind you that you are fallible and foolish. Finally a green sport utility truck pulled to the curb, flashing its lights, wipers pushing away the swirling snow. Allison jumped out wearing a big hooded coat and ran up to me in the snowy light outside the door. Her hair was not quite combed, her makeup smudged and forgotten, cheeks flushed.

"I don't get this guy sometimes, I really don't."

I glanced at Jay's shadow behind the snowy window of the truck cab. "I thought the evening was going so well, the real estate deal and everything."

"It was. We were having a great time. He was fine ten minutes ago, fine."

She didn't seem as drunk as she'd been on the phone and I wondered if it had been an advertisement of happiness. "What happened?"

Allison leaned close to me, hunched in her coat. "Your phone call, Bill."

"Did he say what the problem was?"

"No, but he got upset after you called. I could see it."

A blast of snow cut down the street and we huddled closer. "He wants me to drive out to the East End of Long Island with him."

"Will you help him?" she asked. "I'm worried about him driving alone."

"I was hoping you'd get me back into the Havana Room, see the circus trick or whatever goes on."

She blinked at the snow in her eyes. "Who says it's a circus trick?"

"What happens? Ha and the black woman do something?"

Allison frowned in disgust. "It's real kinky, Bill, yeah." She checked her watch. "They must have started without me. Ha must have gone first."

"I want to go back in."

"If you've missed Ha's first part, then it won't be any good."

"I don't understand."

She nodded. "I'll get you back in, don't worry."

"When?"

"Another night. Soon." She glanced back at Jay's truck, its hazard lights blinking, as if waiting for me. "He says he's driving out there no matter what."

She was appealing to me to help Jay for the second time that evening, and I could not help but hope that this commended me to her. I looked into Allison's face with frustration and unexpectedly sensed her own. The whole evening was a piece of unfinished sexual business to her. With the snow pattering softly on her hood, there she was, lungs and lips, eyes and breasts, and she wanted, she wanted very badly, she wanted him or me or it or everything, and that desire made me want her, too. "Please, Bill?" she whispered. "Will you help him?"

"I should go home to bed. I'm tired."

She studied me a moment. "You don't look tired."

"I am. Tired and old."

"Girls have been known to like old men," Allison said. "They find their wrinkles interesting."

I thought of Judith and Wilson Doan, his strange eyes, standing in a black coat at his son's funeral. I thought of this and it reminded me of other things and I found myself thinking of Timothy in a Tuscan villa, kicking a soccer ball against an old stone wall by himself. I hoped that his stepfather was good to him, loved him, wasn't too caught up in how to spend three quarters of a billion dollars. I needed not to think about this, however, anything but this, and the prospect of a late night errand to Long Island had new diversionary value.

"Okay," I muttered. "I'll do it."

"Thank you."

"But you'll get me back into the Havana Room?"

"Promise."

"I really want to see what-"

"I know, yes. I promise, Bill."

"Then it's a deal."

"Please drive safely," she said. "For both of you." She leaned up and kissed me on the cheek. "You'll come by tomorrow?"

"Sure," I said.

"Good. I'd like that."

And then Allison was gone, swirling through the door, the snow following her.

There was still time for me to open the truck's door and make awkward apologies to Jay, but I didn't. Instead I just stood there under the steakhouse's awning feeling the wind slap my cheeks. I've had reason since then to wonder why I resisted the correcting action, the prudent retreat. I was tired, and I should have gone to bed. Certainly I'd responded to Allison, sensed something genuine in her voice, some muted distress call perhaps. But the reason I walked through the gathering snow to Jay's truck is more than that, and it doesn't reflect well on me: I sensed animal weakness in Jay, and I wanted to find out what it was. To be more precise, I sensed a problem, and not necessarily the one that was worrying Poppy. I sensed edges and change and conflict. A real problem wanting a solution. A solution requires a stratagem, and a stratagem means a game. I'd once been good with problems and stratagems, as I'd proven earlier in the night, and something in me welcomed another challenge.

In this I was a fool. I'd forgotten that any true game is played versus an opponent, or even two simultaneously, against the indifferent backdrop of chance. Who has won and who has lost is often difficult to know, or undecided, or, at the last, reversible. As Wilson Doan Sr. himself had learned, for one. Yes, I'd forgotten all this, and so I walked around to the passenger side of the truck and opened the door. Jay had on the same good coat and suit he'd been wearing a few hours earlier. He looked up at me, his eyes a little dull, I thought, his hands hanging on the steering wheel.

"Really appreciate this," he breathed.

I settled in, and noticed a baseball on the dash. I picked it up. A baseball always feels good in the hands. "Not what I expected to be doing tonight."

"That makes both of us."

The box of cash was behind his seat. "Sounded like you were having kind of a great drive with Allison. Sorry I interrupted."

Most men would have smiled in reply, either in embarrassment or pride. But Jay blinked at the thought of it, lips closed. I had the distinct impression that Allison was not the kind of woman he preferred. He pointed to the glove compartment. "There's a little thing of pills in there. Would you hand it to me?"

I opened the compartment, found an unmarked container.

"Thanks." He shook out three pills and swallowed them. Then he slipped the container into his breast pocket.