Rachel Kushner - Telex From Cuba

“I meant your husband, Mrs. Mackey. He said the situation was nothing to worry about?”

“He said they’re just a few bandits.”

Hubert had said nothing to her about bandits. She was repeating what she’d overhead him say to someone on the telephone.

Mr. Gonzalez said he hoped her husband was right, but with all due respect, it wasn’t likely.

She was silent, thinking it best to feign that she knew what he meant in claiming Hubert was wrong. If they weren’t bandits, what were they? She felt sure Mr. Gonzalez knew, and that he would lower his opinion of her if he understood how little she herself knew.

When he dropped her off in front of the bakery, a made-up errand she invented to give the impression that she had some structure, things to do, she felt somewhat abandoned, as she had at the welcoming party, and then disturbed by her regret at having to leave the upholstered cocoon of his car.

She stood outside the bakery and watched his long, white car move slowly up the road. When his car had disappeared around a bend, she turned to enter the bakery and discovered that it was closed and locked.

It must have been after 2:00 P.M., she realized. Rain was falling in a fine veil, almost a mist, but coming down steadily. The air had turned chilly, and the water on the bay was a dull bluish-gray, and choppy. Birds were dropping low in the bushes beyond the road, the way birds do when the rain is about to fall harder. How do they know? They just know. Charmaine had no umbrella. Her feet, in a pair of flimsy Capezios, were soaked now, and cold. She watched the dull, choppy water, thinking school would be over soon, and Phillip wouldn’t take the boat out in this weather. He’d come straight home, go into his room and shut the door and study his nautical maps and fishing magazines. She’d pretend to be busy to avoid the servants, who all terrified her, boisterous and confident people who could have bossed her around and told her to mop the floor or fix them a snack and she would have. At five-thirty, Hubert would come home and grumpily cap off all possibility of conversation by responding in a terse and dismissive tone that his day went fine, that there was nothing worth mentioning.

She heard a car rounding the bend. Someone else, too late to buy a loaf of bread. But it was the white Cadillac. Mr. Gonzalez, coming slowly back down the road toward the bakery.

He stopped in front, his window down.

“You’re back,” she said.

“I remembered, when I got home and looked at the clock, that the bakery would be closed.”

“Yes, it’s closed. Oh, well. I hadn’t realized what time it was. Aren’t you going to the mine, Mr. Gonzalez?”

“I was. But now it’s raining, and the road is turning to mud. I don’t like taking this car through the mud. I’ll go tomorrow in a company jeep.”

He looked at her carefully, like he was gauging something.

“Why don’t you get in,” he said.

It was not a question. Her hands, in the pockets of her sweater, were shaking. But it wasn’t the bewildered shake that set in when others barraged her too-sensitive nervous system. Her hands were shaking with excitement.

Mr. Gonzalez’s house was dark and orderly and quiet. They turned on no lights and left the curtains closed. His butler and housekeeper, he explained, both had the afternoon off.

It was an afternoon of time outside of time, although it couldn’t have lasted more than forty-five minutes. When she arrived home, the kitchen clock showed 3:00 P.M. Phillip was nowhere to be found. She’d walked from Mr. Gonzalez’s, understanding that of course he couldn’t drive her home, but feeling slightly rebuffed that they separated with so little chivalry on his part. He’d simply said good-bye, turned, and gone inside, as she set off in the rain on foot. Still, she was elated.

As the days became weeks, the elation started to fade. She grew anxious that the chance of another visit to his home was growing more remote. When she saw him around Nicaro, he behaved as he had before that afternoon, polite and formal. Once, they were alone together outside the plant’s executive offices. She had just dropped Hubert off, and was on her way to send telexes to boarding schools, to inquire about enrolling Phillip. They chatted briefly, but Mr. Gonzalez was distant. It was an opportunity, a moment when they were finally alone together. He didn’t seize it. He asked if he’d be seeing her and her husband at the club, for the Saturday dance. Her and her husband. Was he speaking to her in code? Letting her know that if it weren’t for Hubert, they could have more afternoons like the one when he’d rescued her from the closed bakery? At the club that Saturday, she scanned the entrance all evening, waiting for Mr. Gonzalez to appear. He never did.

Twice she went to the bakery just after 2:00 P.M., knowing it would be closed. She stood in front, thinking if only rain were falling in a fine veil, as it had that day, his white car would appear. He would come down the road and invite her to get in it, and take her to his home, where they would turn on no lights and leave the curtains shut.

She understood that Mr. Gonzalez was not what many women would dream about. People said chemical, about attraction, and she supposed it was that. It had been immediate when she’d spoken to him during the party at his hunting lodge. Since their first conversation, she’d been waiting to speak with him again. He never came to the others’ parties, never to their club. She knew her attraction to him was real because there was no need to tell herself that other women would approve, which is what she’d told herself before she married Hubert — that many other women would have married him. No one would approve of Lito Gonzalez, and she didn’t care. He was up to no good, they declared, a greasy Cuban so-called millionaire, a word they uttered with invisible quotes around it, as if no one could reasonably believe he was any kind of millionaire. He was overweight. His hair smelled pungently of men’s cologne. But he caused a feeling to well in her, an electric anticipation.

She didn’t really believe that standing in the deserted parking lot of the closed bakery would summon his car down the road. She stood in front of the bakery because it brought her closer to that afternoon at his dark and quiet house, which was disappearing into the past, as if it had never occurred.

She thought she knew every moment, the notepad on his bedside table, the cold cotton sheets. After months had gone by, she remembered addressing him as Mr. Gonzalez, even as she’d reclipped her stockings, chattering nervously and sensing, suddenly, that he was waiting for her to leave. She’d called him Mr. Gonzalez, and he had not bothered to correct her.

One afternoon she’d been shopping at the almacén in Preston and was planning to get a ride back to Nicaro on the United Fruit launch, the Mollie and Me, when she saw the familiar white Cadillac parked at an angled spot in front of the United Fruit Company offices. She was ecstatic, and decided she’d take a seat on one of the benches in the square and wait.

Finally he came outside, shading his eyes from the noontime sun. She couldn’t tell if he’d spotted her, but then he was walking toward her. He sat down and asked if she needed a ride back to Nicaro, as if it were an old routine of theirs. All those lonely afternoons hoping she’d run into him. A few times, running into him only to encounter disappointment. Just, “Good afternoon, Mrs. Mackey,” and nothing more. After all that, this was so easy!

She got in his car as if they were a couple, two people who’d already been together, though not for long, because electricity was pulsing through her the way it only does when love is new. She decided she would not call him Mr. Gonzalez. But she couldn’t bring herself to say Lito, either. She called him by no name. He called her by none, either. Later she couldn’t decide if it was impersonal or intimate that they both used “you” as their mode of address.