Rachel Kushner - Telex From Cuba

“I’m going to burst out of this.” She was laughing, twisting to emphasize how tight it was. “I’m performing a ballet recital or something?”

“Just be still,” he said, and began tossing things off the bed — shoes, newspapers, piles of clothes, a long, auburn wig.

“You’re still a messy little girl. That hasn’t changed.”

“Had I known an ambassador would be dropping by, I would have tidied things up a bit.”

He stepped over the wig, which lay on the floor like the debris of some sort of domestic violence, picked her up — she hardly weighed anything at all — and tossed her on the bed.

“But anyway, tidying,” she continued, as he took off his jacket, his shoes, and set his tinted glasses on her nightstand, “is for desperate people.”

“In fact, I prefer you messy,” he said, and tugged her downward by the legs so that her head was off the pillow and flush to the bed. “It makes you seem vulnerable.”

The dress was thin cotton, a fine weave, cool and silky to the touch. Meant to be worn with a slip. Her body was faintly visible beneath it, the sheer white fabric with an underblush of flesh.

He pinned her down and proceeded with his pantomime, pretending he was taking something from her, a thing she was too fresh and young to understand, this girl in her white batiste dress. Underneath the dress, a body that was solicitous but vulnerable, laid out for his inverse ritual of passing through what was lewd to get to what was innocent, through inverse to get to verse. It was a cheap fantasy, and he hated his propensity to cheap fantasies, but he allowed them all the same.

Of course he was attractive. And he had the uncanny gift of making her feel as if time and everyone in its viscous grip were frozen, and only she and he were sentient and unfrozen. But on each visit he had paid her, at the club, or her apartment, she had been surprised to see him, having assumed he’d left the island for good.

He’d come and gone unpredictably for the past six years, since just after Batista took over. If he bothered to say good-bye, it was a canned charade, kissing her and proclaiming that he took his Little K wherever he went, that the version of her he carried along with him was just as real—“ more real,” he’d say. A refined essence to honor and elect as company, after the coarse materiality of their body-to-body conversation. A fine conversation, he’d amend. In fact he enjoyed conversing with her body immensely. But the two of them as entwined flesh was only one aspect of things, he’d declare, and the ethereal mingling that took place in her absence was another.

He seemed to have an arsenal of these performances. Not unlike her own performances, for which there were as many scripts and stages as there were reasons and affects. The role of walking to buy milk, of dancing for the men at the club, of giving the underground information — where Batista would be, at what hour — and preempting meaning with a Frenchman by understanding that there was none.

“How can I truly adore you, you and your body both,” he said, “if I don’t allow them to marinate properly in my imagination?”

They were saying their good-byes.

“I hate to go,” he said, “and I hate that the distance is so integral.”

“Oh, I hate it, too,” she could have replied in a syrupy voice, playing along. But their game was beginning to tire her.

“What you do mean, ‘integral’?” she asked. “Maybe you could just speak plainly. For once.”

“To love. Integral to love. There, I said it.” It surprised him how easy it was. But easy, he knew, because he was leaving. It was a tautology, of course, that whatever he took or mistook for love necessitated absence from the loved one. But this circular reasoning had become like a perfect wheel, motoring him here and there among various realms of tomcatting and novelty.

She scoffed. “Let’s not devalue the term.”

“But I don’t—”

“Darling, this isn’t love,” she said in a mock-consoling voice. “And I don’t buy your pretend belief that it is. Unless you’ve managed accidentally to seduce yourself. The hypnotist who put himself under.” She snapped her fingers, to wake him from the spell.

Prio had insisted he loved her, but it was all part of his gloomy narcissism. One more injustice he was forced to endure. And there was the deluded United Fruit executive. “I’m so sorry, dear, I just couldn’t get away,” he’d say, as if he and she were anxious lovers finally able to continue with their tryst. She’d seen him a few days before, on his Christmas vacation with the family. He took photos from his wallet and handed them to her, his pincer hands slightly trembling. Two tow-headed sons and a handsome wife, the wholesome type of woman whose cosmetics kit probably consisted of a bar of Dove soap. “Saw her on a road in Indiana and told myself here comes an angel,” he’d said. And in apologetic tones, “Sooner or later, you needed to see these. No getting around reality. And I don’t mean to make you feel bad, but this, what you and I have, it’s got limits.” She liked to think he was perverse, showing her photos of his “angel” to let her know that she herself was not one. Because the other explanation was that he was profoundly dumb.

“You’re cynical,” La Mazière said to her, as if he’d suddenly realized it.

“And you’re not?” She laughed.

“To the contrary. I believe that the briefest of interludes can be love.”

“You call it love because you don’t pay me.”

But even paid transactions, La Mazière resisted saying, could be affairs of the heart. Where was the heart actually located, and who could say what touched it? His own was impetuous and abstract, and many professional mistresses had touched it.

“Call it love if you want,” she said. “I’ll call it see-you-next-time. Perhaps you can bring me Dalida’s autograph. Your little Miss Egypt.”

“Little” was not how he thought of Dalida, his sometimes girlfriend back in Paris. She was a major pain, a grand hysteric whose sudden pop stardom was now one more source of anguish in her absurdly tragic life. But occasionally she amused him.

“You know that I won’t be seeing her, that I’ll be right here, in your country. ‘Your country’—how silly of me. I forget that my Miss K is French. Never mind her K name and that lovely Manouche face. Or maybe she’s German Jewish, with those sensual lips.”

He pressed on her lower lip, which felt buoyant and soft and warm under the pad of his thumb.

“What a coincidence,” he said. “You’re French, and Dalida — did you know? — despite the Miss Egypt title, is Italian. Two European girls, both performers, both what they call ‘exotics.’ And yet you couldn’t be more different. But surely you aren’t jealous—”

“Oh, please. I was serious. I love that song ‘Bambino.’ They play it forty times a day. Or they did, before Batista shut down the radio station.”

“I’m going to pretend that you are jealous. Because the idea pleases me very much. My tough and unfeeling little K, lighting a candle in my absence. Perhaps shedding a tear.”

He traced his finger down the side of her face, the path of this imaginary tear.

“But I fool myself. To think my chilly Miss K will cry over me. A girl who has to sleep without blankets to feel any warmth at all .”

He looked at her steadily through the tinted glasses.

“And do you know what? I adore this chilliness. It’s irresistible, just irresistible—”

He leaned in.

She let him kiss her.

Then she pushed him out the door and shut it.

Radio CMQ-AM 670

May 1, 1958 10:00 P.M .