Rachel Kushner - Telex From Cuba

At the cotillion, Del sat along the wall and stared at Tee-Tee the whole night and refused to dance with Alina, the Diaz-Hart girl. I danced with her, although she was a foot taller. She wore white cotton gloves, and her hands were bigger than mine. I took turns between her and the younger one. I didn’t mind.

Del protested when Daddy first told us about the setup. He said the Diaz-Hart girls were “shallow.” I didn’t ask him how he knew Tee-Tee wasn’t shallow, considering she never said a word. I was a kid. I didn’t know about love, that you see someone and whether or not they say much, they make the world suddenly different, a mysterious and more alive place that you can access only through them. And the new, better world falls lifeless and flat when they go away.

Phillip Mackey danced with Tee-Tee during the slow dance. He went to put his tongue in her mouth, and she bit him on the face. He let out a loud yelp. Everyone looked over. She left a crescent of red tooth marks on his cheek. It looked like a dog had locked on to him.

I don’t think Phillip had any special affection for Tee-Tee, and wouldn’t have even if she’d let him put his tongue in her mouth, put his hand over the front of her dress, et cetera. And even the et cetera probably wouldn’t have meant much: a lot of the older boys were getting their practice on the cheap. Daddy shut those places down, but they always reopened. There was a guy who procured small-town girls. They came on boats from Antilla. You’d see them with these dour expressions, fanning themselves in the heat. You know why they’re called red-light districts? In Oriente, the brakemen would leave their railroad lanterns out front when they visited those places. If a train was coming in and they were needed, they could be called back to work. Sometimes at night you’d see two or three red lanterns glowing like buoys along the row of shacks where the girls from Antilla worked.

After the night she bit him on the dance floor, Tee-Tee started following Phillip Mackey around. When the Nicaro kids came over to Preston to swim in the pool, Tee-Tee would sit at the edge with her bruised white legs in the water, staring, glum and intense, watching Phillip go off the high dive. Phillip told everybody she gave him the creeps, that she looked at him like she wanted to hunt him down with an animal net.

Phillip’s parents bought him a boat, and he and Del started going out fishing together. Suddenly my brother was obsessed with that instead of Tee-Tee. I once heard him chime in about the “spooky broad” who wouldn’t leave Phillip alone, no mention that he had spent years of his life obsessed with that same spooky broad.

Phillip kept his boat anchored in Levisa Bay, by the nickel processing plant. He and Del became friendly with the Cuban mine employees who fished off the dock, younger guys from the countryside around Mayarí. A couple of months before our Christmas stay at the Havelins’, in October of ’57, there was a phone call to the Mackeys from Chatsworth — Chatty, the Saetía watchman who gave me my silvered conch. Chatty said Phillip was up to something. That’s when the Mackeys sent him away.

These peculiar Cubans arrived late to the Havelins’ party, ministers in Batista’s government. Deke, Daddy, and the Cubans all went down to the billiards room. Mother went to bed. Desi Arnaz’s niece Elisia— Elithia, she said, like she was missing her front teeth — and I snuck out for a late-night swim.

We were clowning and splashing; I cannonballed into the pool, innocent stuff. We got out, and Elisia pushed me into a cabaña. I remember that she was a pretty aggressive kisser. We were kissing, and she stepped out of her wet bathing suit, just rolled it down and stepped out of it, and put her arms around me. Her skin was cold where the bathing suit had been, but with a body warmth coming through from underneath the cold. I’d gone to second base with girls in Preston, but getting your hand in a blouse is not the same thing as a Cuban girl well into puberty standing in front you with a wet bathing suit looped around her ankle. The truth is, Elithia was ready for a lot more than I was. I wasn’t one bit ready, as it turned out. It was cold. I was nervous. But she was sweet about it, and said we could try again. We didn’t, but that second try happened about a thousand times in my mind, and it wasn’t at all awkward, as it would have been in real life.

The next morning rain was falling in a steady shower. Mother came and woke me. It took me a minute to remember about the night before in the cabaña. I wondered if Mother could tell. She always said that a mother can detect her son’s presence, that she knows his smell like no one else does. If I’d taken a nap on the porch, she knew because she could smell where I’d laid my head on the pillows of the divan. I wondered if I smelled like Elisia Arnaz. Of course, I didn’t want Mother to know anything about that, but then again it makes me sad to think of her as naive, as unable to detect the smell of a stranger on me. Mothers are possessive. Mine certainly would not have wanted to entertain the idea of me naked in a cabaña with some girl, high society or not. It would have been more palatable to her if it were a proper courtship with someone she knew and liked. I think she wanted me to date Everly Lederer, and I remember waking up and knowing I was betraying that.

A servant brought breakfast to the guesthouse on carts — poached eggs, bacon, guava juice, butter, and rolls. Mother said Daddy had gone to the Hotel Nacional early to get work done. Because he came to Havana on business so often, he kept a suite at the Nacional as an office. The Yacht Club was having its annual tea party — they hosted it every year, the day after Christmas, but Mother said she’d had enough socializing and would I like to go to the movies instead. One of the Havelins’ drivers took us to La Rampa for a matinee, Mother in a green rain slicker with a black velvet collar, me smelling secretly like Elisia Arnaz.

We saw Jet Pilot, and I remember thinking it was a pretty good film. Then we went to El Louvre for ice cream. There were these French places in Havana — the Tuileries, El Louvre — but they were just names. There was more French ancestry in Oriente, the descendants of the planters who started coffee operations in the Cristal, above us, after they were run out of Haiti by the blacks. The culture wasn’t exactly what you’d call “French”—there were Rousseaus and Carpentiers up in the mountains and in Santiago, but they weren’t so different from wealthy Cubans, except they danced quadrilles and minuets, and their servants called you “maître.”

El Louvre was famous for sherbet, but at Christmas you could get tropical snow — a frozen guanabana-flavored custard under a thick layer of flaked coconut. Nothing tasted so exquisite as tropical snow. They were also famous for delicados, cognac and ice cream whipped in a milkshake machine. It gives me a headache just thinking about a cognac milkshake.

El Louvre was elegant — marble tables, marble floors, waiters in formal jackets, a fountain in the middle of the room, nymphs with water bubbling out of their mouths. I spooned my tropical snow and Mother drank black coffee. She seemed preoccupied, and I knew she was thinking about Del. It was cruel of Daddy to make her leave him at home. Different from putting limits on her, as he sometimes did when she wanted to feed people at the back door.

When I went to use the men’s room, I passed by an older man sitting with a much younger girl. I didn’t look at them until I was practically squeezing by their table, and it wasn’t until I got down the hall to the washroom that I realized the older man was my father. I didn’t expect to see Daddy at an ice cream parlor and certainly not with a strange girl. The mind does things to correct for what doesn’t make sense, and I just didn’t think it was he. I came out and had to pass by them again. His back was to me, but it was my father’s back. I thought there must be some mistake, but I didn’t know what kind of mistake. She was eating ice cream and he wasn’t, the way I was eating ice cream and Mother wasn’t. But she wasn’t a kid. She was probably in her early twenties, attractive in an unwholesome way, heavy makeup and high heels, that sort of bottle-blond, Lana Turner hair. Her clothes looked too tight. Walking back to the table, I listened to the voices and clattering dishes and had that dreamy, disconnected sensation that takes over in those moments in life when things turn suddenly queer.