Colin Harrison - The Havana Room

"My left ear," Jay said now, sitting up. "Feel it."

"You want me to touch your ear?" I said.

"Just go ahead."

So I did, tentatively, reaching out to pinch the cartilage at the end of his ear. The vein in his temple pointed to his eye like an arrow.

"Feel it? There's a bump."

"No."

He directed my fingers with his own. "There."

I felt exactly what he was talking about, a small triangular ridge, the tiniest of horns.

"Did you see the baby again?" I asked.

"No."

"No? What were you doing?"

He made, he told me, a point of cycling past the house every month or so, just to torture himself, or to remember, maybe both. And one April afternoon, he said, when he did this he saw that all the wooden trim had been painted a garish blue, a cerulean blue. The shutters and cornice and French doors. C'mon, he thought, why mess it up, it was something the newly arrived Turks or Arabs would do, someone with no understanding of- then he knew. The family was gone. This time for good. They'd sold the house and moved and that meant that something had happened. He turned the bike around and rode back the other way, slowly. Fuck it, he thought, I'm going to find out. He pulled over at the next house. A blond woman in her thirties was kneeling in one of the rose beds, turning fireplace ashes into the earth.

"Excuse me," said Jay.

The woman shaded her eyes. "Yes?"

"I'm an old friend of the Carmodys," he said. "Did they move?"

"Yes," she said. "Hated to see them go."

"But why?"

The woman stood, perhaps because of the naked misery of his voice. "They couldn't be here anymore." She brushed some earth off her trowel. "Business, I suppose."

He mumbled his acknowledgment. He sat there looking at the dusting of tree pollen on the road. Then he walked back to the woman.

"What about the little girl, the family?"

"With Mr. Cowles, you mean? I think they moved to Tokyo. Something about a branch office, I didn't quite follow it. A very good opportunity with the bank."

Thus did Jay lose contact with Eliza Carmody Cowles and his daughter, Sally Cowles.

"I tried to find them, calling, but it was no good. It was too far away."

"You think of following them?" I asked.

He touched the oxygen mask to his face. Shook his head.

"Too far?" I interpreted. "Too difficult and expensive."

He pulled the mask off. "I was a kid, you know? I didn't know anything. I didn't really know what it meant, either." He decided not to go back to America, he said, so he found a better job, not in a bar, where the smoke bothered him, but teaching American conversational English to Saudi princes located in London. A strange job, but not one he minded. All he had to do was talk. "They were very well educated," Jay said, "much better than me. Oxford, usually. Some had gone to school in the States. But they wanted to get the American idiom, the flavor." When one of the students, a young woman, saw him coughing and heard the story of his accident, she took him to her father, a doctor. The man put Jay on a course of steroids that changed his life. The steroids shrunk the swollen lung tissue and his coughing subsided. The chronic infections could clear and he began to gain back weight. Within three months he'd put on thirty pounds, and his color was better. Now a little older, back to nearly his full strength, much of his natural substantiality restored, and with a little money to spend, he began to explore London.

"I think there are women in the next part of the story," I said.

"Yes."

"You were feeling better, your mood was nihilistic, you didn't mind having a good time."

"Something like that," he said. "That's when I learned to like a good cigar, actually. Pubs. The young Brits, the traders and bankers, were giving up pipes and hitting the cigars."

A couple of years followed, Jay continued, in which he met dozens of young professional women in London, a few American, many European, and simply enjoyed himself. He dated two or three women at a time, sometimes seeing older women who were in unhappy marriages. So much money was washing around London that the collective euphoria rounded away the ends of these affairs. "It got a little crazy," he said. "I got a little crazy. I was sometimes sleeping with three or four different women a week."

"You're lucky you didn't get anyone pregnant."

"I was very careful about that," Jay said. "There are tricks you can use."

"Besides a rubber?"

"You don't come."

"You pull out?"

"No, you just don't come. You teach yourself not to."

"You're a weird fucking guy, you know that?"

"You can have sex with a lot of women if you never come," Jay noted. "Or not often, at least."

"It sounds pretty hostile," I said, "a way of having control over women. Also a way to make sure you didn't have another child taken from you."

"Thank you, doctor."

"Shit, Jay, it's obvious."

"I know that. I mean, I know that now."

"Keep telling me," I said. "I want to hear about how you found Sally again."

London was a spinning carousel of money, he went on. "The boom happened there, too, just like in New York," he said, "and I got into a real estate firm that was relocating people into London. Offices, apartments, the whole thing. All you had to do was wear a suit."

"You met a lot of people. It was an education."

He nodded. "Five years. I ran some rehab jobs, I took a few architecture courses, that kind of thing. Learned the lingo. Everybody's a faker in this business. I was working the investment and sales side, in a very minor way. Little projects, nothing big, nothing where my complete lack of knowledge would show. Usually I hired some old boozed-out carpenter to run the site for me. I made some money, and I kept a little of it."

"Stayed in touch with the farm, with your father?"

"No. Not much."

"Your mother hadn't communicated."

"My father told me that he was pretty sure that she'd gone to Texas, because her father was from there. She'd always wanted to know him. I had to think whether I wanted to chase after my mother in Dallas or Houston or someplace or stay in London."

"You were waiting for Eliza to come back."

He was, he said, at least subconsciously. By now he had the business connections to track David Cowles, had even met a few of his associates socially. And then one day he heard that Cowles had moved back to London. "I found his office and followed him home. Sunglasses and a hat. Easy, right? He didn't know my face. There had been no direct communication and I'm sure Eliza never told him a thing. He had no idea. By then he owned a very nice house in the suburbs. High bushes, mansard roof, casement windows. He'd made a lot of money in Tokyo. I spied on him a bit. I saw Sally. She was almost seven now. A little Eliza. Looked just like her, the hair and eyes and legs. Of course, now, she really looks like Eliza at twenty. I mean, it's disturbing. But even then, it killed me to see her, Bill, it broke me up. That was my daughter. My daughter. Then-"

He stopped talking.

"What?"

"She died."

"Eliza?"

"In a car, with a man."

"An accident?"

"He was driving, driving too fast, and they rolled over, in a Jaguar. Roof collapsed."

Ripped from life. I wasn't sure what question to ask next.

"The guy lived," Jay narrated. "The fucker, though there's not much left of him."

"Who was he-?"

"They knew each other. Were driving at a high rate of speed to London from the country late in the afternoon. That's about all I could find out."

"Who was he?"

"Some guy, also in the financial community. I looked him up, he'd been in Japan the same time she'd been. Same age."

"An affair, hurrying back to town?"

"Yeah, maybe. Hard to say. She was capable of it. After all, that's how she got pregnant with Sally."