Rachel Kushner - Telex From Cuba

All the lights were on in the house. He cut around the side of the Lederers’ place, wanting to see his whole house, take it in somehow, before going inside. Three weeks he’d been away. His return was inevitable, so why not resist it for a moment? When a romance was called off, usually by him, there was no reason not to sleep with the girl one last time. One or two or three last times, because the affair was officially over. And when he’d finally succeeded in seducing someone, there was no reason not to put her off. Because she was now guaranteed to submit. Inevitability always produced this in him, a juvenile instinct to stall and resist.

He walked across the Lederers’ backyard and into his own, pushing through the hibiscus bushes that divided the two properties. The sound of crunching foliage and snapping branches was loud enough that if someone were on the back veranda, or listening carefully from inside, he would have been heard.

He walked across the damp grass and stood behind the stout trunk of a bottle palm, looking into the windows of his own house.

The curtains were open, and he could see into the dining room. Dinner had been cleared away. Lights hanging from a fixture over the table blazed into the empty room.

They had all been drunk that afternoon. Not just he and Blythe.

Getting into the Mollie and Me for the trip back to Nicaro, he wasn’t even sure why they’d gone to Preston. Just a lot of stingers and shouting and something about the Stites boy’s birthday, which was elsewhere, but Malcolm Stites ran things, and so the festivity of his brat’s birthday party soaked in like a stain and everybody was at the Pan-American Club for an occasionless afternoon of living it up.

Malcolm Stites’s other son, the older one, was in the mountains somewhere, fighting with the rebels. A fact that had seemed perverse, almost astounding, until Carrington got up there and learned that there were all sorts of American boys volunteering. Six teenagers from Guantánamo had robbed weapons from an armory on the base and made a run for it. And there were foreigners helping to train various units. Soldiers from a nearby camp had come through one day. There was a Frenchman with them who seemed to be in charge, slightly shifty and moreover an annoyance, as Carrington got the distinct feeling that Rosa was flirting with the guy. I’m your hostage, he’d thought, and asked her in a weak voice for a glass of water, emphasizing his special needs as a migraine sufferer.

Carrington had behaved himself for the most part that afternoon at the Pan-American Club. There were no appealing women to ogle, much less seduce, just sexless Preston matrons rouged like corpses and stinking of baby powder. The exclusive Pan-American Club, no Cubans allowed, nothing but dowdy white women, the older ones in hats crusted with what looked like candy and cockatoo feathers bobbing as they nodded their heads, minding everyone else’s business, gossiping about this or that. About him. Did you hear? Playing it off with that phony name. His mother-in-law’s, apparently. Well, I’d certainly call that liberal. I mean really stretching it, taking your mother-in-law’s name!

Blythe had been drunk, but for once not overly drunk. On the ride home, the two of them had sat together on one of the yacht’s banquettes. Like a regular couple, a married couple, people who choose to be in proximity.

“You’re sunburned,” he’d said, touching her shoulder, making a colorless thumbprint that reflushed a painful bluish-pink.

“And you’re as dark as Roosevelt,” she replied, flicking her cigarette butt off the side of the boat.

Carrington looked at his arm.

“Roosevelt — may I remind my pale and lovely wife? — is a Negro. And hey, look on the bright side. If you’d married a Negro, they would have figured it out a hell of a lot sooner.”

They all knew, but still he felt that he was waiting for the other shoe to drop. Not sure what it would mean that they knew. It might mean nothing.

What would mean something was the embezzlement charge. A silly thing, really, just a car. Just one Cadillac he’d bought with company funds. I’ll return it, okay? Be punished, possibly serve a little time in some white-collar facility. But there was more, a lot more, and he had to keep pushing the more out of his mind so he could stand on this one charge and feel honest with himself. That’s what truth was. Establishing a truth in your mind, and declaring this truth to everyone else. If the truth he declared mirrored what he saw and felt inside, then it was true, period. And the more the others accused him of lying, the easier it would be to insist on his honesty. Because then it was no longer about denying one niggling detail, it was about defending character, and any man will defend his own character no matter what he’s done.

It was just a car and he’d been planning on returning it, he was rehearsing silently on that boat ride home from the Pan-American Club. Cold began pinging under the top of his skull. Ice crystals forming, and then melting painfully away. Just one car that he’d been planning on returning.

From his station behind the bottle palm, he heard a door slam inside the house.

“¡No me puedes decir lo que hacer!”

It sounded like Pamela. Her voice and Val’s weren’t easy to distinguish, but only Pamela would speak to their mother in Spanish.

“Fine!” Blythe Carrington yelled back. “I won’t tell you what to do. What’s the use? You seem to think you know. But you don’t. You don’t know anything.”

So everyone still existed. His life still existed. It had simply gone on without him.

“I know some things, Mother. I know we were chased from the last place and the one before it. It’s happening here. Luís says the rebels are going to win. And I know that you and Daddy live a lie.”

“I’ve got news for you, Pamela: it isn’t a lie anymore. Not after you told The New York Times reporter that your father — I mean ‘Señor Guzman’—is Cuban.”

His daughter had outed him in The New York Times ? Carrington wasn’t opposed to children. Not to the general idea of them or even his own. They certainly had a talent for broadcasting whatever the parent suppressed, and maybe that was as it should be. You paid up front with children, to see what came next. If they stabbed you in the back, set the nest on fire, chances were you deserved it.

“You blame me for telling the truth! Should I lie, Mother? Is that what you’re saying? We should all lie, that’s best? Just because you’re a racist. You and Daddy both—”

“Daddy and I have tried to get by and keep him employed so you and your sister — both of you are spoiled rotten, by the way — can continue burning through the money he makes. You think they would have hired a Cuban engineer in Nicaro? You’ve been taking something if you say yes. Because they would never have given him a job. You’re an ungrateful brat going through a phase, and I won’t tolerate it. It’s enough to make me want to defend the bastard.”

“I’m not talking to you anymore, Mother. Why don’t you go fix yourself a drink ?”

He could hear it all so clearly. It was like his wife and daughter were actors on a stage, performing for his benefit. And how peculiar it was that he, their secret audience, could so easily step from behind the bottle palm, walk up to the back porch, to the servants’ entrance, and suddenly and irreversibly enter this scene.

The ease of it froze him. He couldn’t move and didn’t dare. It would only take a second, the simplest of gestures, to enter the house and end his sabbatical. Be found instead of missing.

“You go ahead and ruin your goddamn life. Marry him, for all I care. But don’t come crying to me about your cunt-addicted Latin husband.”