Rachel Kushner - Telex From Cuba

“Daddy, can we go there?” Stevie asked.

The answer would, of course, be no. Their parents were too cheap for that, but Everly admired her sister’s optimism.

Their father stepped closer and stared at the photograph. “It’s for adults,” he said.

“How come?” Stevie asked.

“Because it’s a burlesque.”

A burlesque. Everly thought she might have seen one, when she and Stevie sneaked into the wrong movie one Saturday afternoon. On the screen, a woman was dancing in a saloon, singing in a high, breathy voice. You can touch my cherries, but you cannot touch my plums. The audience was all adults, and mostly men. She whispered to Stevie that they were in the wrong theater, but Stevie shushed her. They watched the woman perform her song, her white breasts practically falling out of the top of her dress, which seemed more of an undergarment, like their mother’s merry widow. But this woman had a different kind of body than their mother. When the song was finished, she and Stevie ran out of the theater. They pushed the double doors and were pitched into the flooding light and noise of the lobby, where kids stood in line to buy buckets of popcorn and paper cups of cola with crushed ice. Everly felt queer, like she had done something naughty that she couldn’t reverse. Stevie kept singing the song as they walked home. You can touch my cherries, but you cannot touch my plums .

A dockworker pulled up in their Studebaker. Their familiar car had crossed the Tropic of Cancer, too, and here it was in this dirty and exotic, underwater-feeling place. It looked the same, with its forest green paint and shiny, bullet-nosed grille, except that a purple-colored man was driving it, his arm hanging casually out the window. He slammed on the brakes, and the car screeched to a stop. Her mother winced. The man got out. He stood leaning against the driver’s side. Her father thanked him, but the man wouldn’t step aside until her father produced a coin.

As they were driving away, someone called after them, “Excuse me — sir! Americano!” Her father put on the brake.

“George, do not talk to these people!” her mother said. “Keep the car moving!”

They bumped down the street. Two men ran behind the car yelling, “Americanos! Americanos!” Her mother put her head out the window, looked back down the street. “Drive faster!” she said. One of the men running after them yelled, “Hey, lady, take me with you!” The others running beside him all laughed. “I’m very good!” he shouted. “I’m very nice!”

Everly watched out the back window. People running on foot can’t keep up with an automobile for long. Not even a dog can keep up with a car. The men were getting smaller. They were a block behind them now, but still running and laughing. The car picked up speed, went through a yellow light, and the men faded out of view.

Blue lights flip on. Smoky haze drifts above the tables.

“Introducing, from Paris, zazou dancer Rachel K!”

Rachel K steps from behind a Chinois screen. She is draped in black chiffon and a cascade of rooster tail feathers that glint metallic green under the lights.

The Frenchman remembers zazou. It was a jazz thing during the war. Girls in chunky heels and fishnets, with dark lipstick and parasols. Or maybe it was berets — he can’t recall. Boys in zoot suits, an unseemly glisten of salad oil in their hair. They were bohemians who struck poses near the outdoor tables at the Café de Flore, begging cigarettes and slurping the soup people left in the bottom of their bowls. The point of it was more than just poverty. It was a form of protest. But by the time the zazou were being rounded up by German patrols, he was far away from Paris. Marching waist-deep into a cold apocalypse with a panzerfaust over his shoulder.

The Tokio marquee had said French Variety Dancer, but watching her through his aubergine-tinted dictator’s glasses, he senses immediately she isn’t French. Whatever she is or isn’t, she looks like a liar and he likes liars. He imagines there is someone for whom honesty is a potent seduction, but he is not that sentimental someone. Seduction, he knows, is a slew of projections, disguises, denials. What can you claim to accurately know about anyone, much less a stranger to whom you’re attracted? And yet you can claim, accurately, that a person is evasive and that their evasions interest you.

This Frenchman, a certain Christian de La Mazière — ex-Charlemagne Division Waffen SS, minor aristocrat, memoirist, and traitor to the state of France — had taken an airplane from Paris to Havana the day after he heard about the coup. He caught a limousine from the airport, then ran a bubble bath in the sunken marble tub at his suite in the Hotel Nacional. Ordered a split of Perrier-Jouët, two boiled eggs, and a saltshaker. Ate his light lunch and headed for the Cabaret Tokio.

He sat in the back of the Pam-Pam Room and watched Rachel K’s show, her golden sartouche whipping like a lasso as she swung around a pole, no less graceful than a ballerina, though ballet dancers were like porcelain figurines, elegantly molded and coldly unsexed, while Rachel K was warm-looking, soft-contoured flesh. A gaudy spill of platinum hair and those barely bobbing firm-jelly breasts that are not only rare, a happy coincidence of genetics and luck, but utterly time-sensitive, existing only in a slim window of youth. Youth was no miracle, he knew. Or it was a banal miracle. And yet he loved the blunt perfection of young flesh. Unreflective, knowing only its own moment-to-moment existence. She had a narrow face, dark eyes, the full lips and large teeth of a Manouche Gypsy or a German Jew. Zazou —of all things! The framing made her seem oddly knowing, despite her blunt and stupid and perfect flesh.

La Mazière watched her kneel before the blue lights and smile coyly for the men at the front tables. They were serious and stoic, and he understood that the cabaret was their church, her show an engrossing sermon they took in with naive and absolute faith. He was serious, too, but while the other men watched her with awe, an exotic creature as mysterious as conical rays of divine light coming through a stainedglass window, he’d immediately seen something he was sure they could not. She’d gauzed her person in persona, but he sensed the person slipping through, person and persona in an elaborate tangle.

He studied her with detached desire, in no hurry to get closer. He was patient, almost perversely so. The delay of pleasure, after all, was a more refined and intense category of pleasure.

He began going to the Tokio nightly, showing up just as it was her turn to dance. He sat in a shadowy back corner of the Pam-Pam Room where the tables were always empty. He had a clear view of the stage as well as the hallway that led to the private booths, where drunk and enthusiastic businessmen clumsily swatted the booth curtains out of their way and ducked in with girls who wore sly, proud looks on their faces, the men and the girls each thinking it was they who’d triumphed over the other. He watched the Tokio bartender, a man with down-turned eyes that made his face melancholy, like a song in a minor key. He observed as the sad bartender ritually played canasta with two bored and customerless dancers, girls whom La Mazière guessed had no choice but to bide their time waiting for specialty clientele. One was much too thin, with an unappealing, shovel-like pelvis. The other, maximally fleshy and six feet tall, a regular giantess. One evening, after watching the giantess lose at canasta and circulate the room twice, approaching him on both sweeps, La Mazière dug out a couple of pesos for a lap dance. He suspected Rachel K might notice he’d bought company, though it was part of the game for him to pay attention to everyone in the room but her. For two weeks now, he’d avoided her gaze, and she’d avoided his. Because what he waited for felt inevitable, he could sample a giantess, get her squirming and giggling and moving her brown Caribbean hips in just the right way, and do it with full concentration.