Colin Harrison - The Havana Room

Now that he was dying, he had to dispose of his properties before his family started to argue over them, which would lead to the erosion of their value. Equally important, he had fathered four children by three women outside his marriage. His wife didn't know of any of the women, and none of the women knew of each other. One of these liaisons, he confessed between coughs, "back when I was youngyou know, guapo — with good hair," had been with a Rockette showgirl thirty years prior who had since been married and divorced twice and was living in a tiny apartment in Brooklyn. "Oh, man," he smiled, eyes suddenly bright with the memory, "could that girl fuck. She practically broke my penises." Another woman had involved a longer relationship. Their child had been born with a heart problem and had to avoid strenuous activity. She'd uncomplainingly taken care of him for fifteen years, my client said. Then he started to cry. "He never threw a ball, never swam at the beach." He'd arranged, he said, for a cousin of his to marry the woman and be a father for the boy. Surprisingly, it had worked out. "That was the best thing I ever do in my life," he said. He wanted to sell off his properties to provide for his love children. The properties, he thought, might total ten or twelve million dollars. I sat there, a smug twenty-five-year-old who still thought law was what they taught you in law school, and said I'd look into it. Which I did. The properties were worth nineteen million dollars, and my client died two weeks after the papers were finished. He signed them while on a respirator and between morphine doses.

Or there was the case of the billionaire real estate developer who bought one of the fancy old hotels near the Public Library and spent $116 million rehabilitating it so that he could wheel his mother inside and tell her that it belonged to him. His whole career, successful as it was, had been to prove himself to his mother. All this was conveyed to me by his statuesque wife, on a party boat cruising Long Island Sound. Her breasts were perfect nose-cones of flesh yet suspiciously real-looking, too. She was his third wife, and she knew she had a couple of years to go before she was traded in. I saw in her a good but weak person whose beauty had been debilitating, for it had attracted only men who wished to conquer her. Finishing her drink, she suddenly tossed her ice and lime wedge into the ocean, then the glass too, and turned to me, face beautiful, eyes bitter, and said, "All because of his mother, whom he hates!" I'd just nodded. "Why doesn't he want some children?" she asked. "That's all I want." She was removed and replaced within a year, and when the hotel's renovation was complete, I attended the ribbon-cutting ceremony and noticed- how could I not- that the developer's mother was asleep in her padded armchair, mouth open, dentures dry in the air, cane nestled between her bony knees.

Now Allison came back to me, her hips swaying. "Fish," she said. "You'd think they'd be easy! Somebody catches them, somebody buys them, somebody cooks them." She slumped in the chair. "Maybe Ha should look at them for me."

"Why should Ha look at the fish?"

"He knows a lot about them."

But this wasn't of interest; I was worried about the night before. "Allison, what else can you tell me about Jay? Where does he work, that kind of thing?"

She took a breath, let it out. "I don't know where he works."

"He's never discussed it?"

"I think he said he was in the construction business."

"When you call him, during the day, where do you call?"

She smiled a sick little smile. "I don't call."

"You don't call him?"

"No. Isn't that funny?"

"He calls you?"

"Yes."

"Have you ever seen his place?"

"No."

"Do you know where he lives?"

"No."

"You have any number for him?"

"No."

"No?"

"It's embarrassing. He won't give it to me."

"No home phone?"

"No."

"No cell phone, or business phone? I'm pretty sure he has a cell phone."

Allison doodled on the edge of her clipboard. "I worry that he doesn't really like me, sometimes."

"Why? Just because he won't tell you anything about himself? You search on the Internet?"

"Of course. Nothing."

"He just calls you up and tells you to meet him?"

"Basically."

"What happened to all your tough single New York woman survival rules?"

"I forgot them."

"What do you two do? I'm trying to get a bead on this guy."

"He calls me here. We meet at my place."

"And then?"

"Well, you know."

"Just tell me."

"Usually we you know, we have fun, and then I make him a bite to eat."

"So this is not at night?"

She wasn't expecting the question. "Not usually."

"When?"

"When it's slow here in the afternoon, maybe three or four."

"You ever go out to dinner?"

"Not much," she admitted. "He says he wants to see me in my apartment."

"And you put up with this because-"

Here Allison bit her lip and looked down and then found a cigarette in her bag. I'd pushed pretty hard. But I pushed some more. "The visits don't last long, do they? I mean, maybe an hour or two."

"Yeah," she said. "So?"

"That's not that long for a date, a romantic arrangement."

"You're telling me?"

"Does he begin with a lot of energy and then end up very tired?"

"Yes! That kind of happened last-" She didn't finish. Instead she looked up at a heavy man in a white uniform who had barged into the room.

It was the restaurant's chef. "I canna have this!" he called. "Again the swordfish!"

"You want me to look?" Allison asked.

"It is garbage! A direct insult! He is not wholesaler, he is a crook! He is saying, Eat my shit, take my delicious shit and press it through your teeth! That is what he is saying!" He turned and left.

Allison stood. "You want to see what I have to deal with today?"

I followed her through the swinging door with the little window and past long preparation tables and swinging steel pots. A Mexican man was hosing down the floor. The chef waited for us, a headless fish three feet long resting on a wet drainboard in front of him. I would have said it was a yellowfin tuna. Someone had started to clean it.

"I will not eat shit!" the chef sputtered. "Look!"

The fish had been slit down the middle and he lifted up one half of the pink meat to reveal a milky, pencil-thick tube that snaked through the flesh. It looked about two feet long and recoiled wetly when touched.

"Yeah, okay," said Allison. "I'll call him." She looked at me. "I have to deal with this."

"Worms! Parasites!" cried the chef as I turned to leave. "I canna have them! No worms!" He took his cleaver and hacked the fish. We stepped back. "No- no worms!" He chopped at the red flesh, pulverizing it. "Get- your- fucking- fish- man- to- deliv- er- fish!"

Among Manhattan's many improbable rooms is what appears from inside to be a Kashmiri houseboat floating fifteen stories above Central Park South. Filled with pillows and fabrics and statues of Ganesh, the room is a mogul's private love-chamber in the sky, every surface decorated, sitar music drifting in and out of consciousness. From this view, the park is a great dark lake, with the taxi headlights tunneling crosstown beneath the trees like miniature submarines bound for the lighted apartment buildings on the far shore. The room's many candles flicker in the windows, creating the odd sense of muted explosions over the park.

The room is in fact a small restaurant, only two tables deep, and it was here that I sat in my one good suit, fondling an ornate brass spoon, waiting for Marceno, the new owner of Jay Rainey's family farm. Across the table, saying nothing, sat a dark-eyed woman with a very small nose, pinched perfect by a surgeon, perfect and pointed and small. The nose accentuated the woman's beautiful and enormous mouth, a mouth that promised everything, promised itself as a cave of pleasure that would accept the most torrid urgencies, if only the mouth's owner were made comfortable. I had tried very hard not to look at the mouth as the woman introduced herself as Miss Allana, Mr. Marceno's New York associate. The name sounded like one of those soothingly synthetic names of cars or pharmaceuticals. Miss Allana spoke with a crisp South American accent and did not, I understood, see any reason to make further chitchat, instead sitting and staring into some imagined faraway place where- maid service includedlow-rent mouth-oglers like myself were not admitted.