Lisa Wixon - Dirty Blonde and Half-Cuban

“You are the man I’ve been looking for my whole life,” she whispers convincingly.

Reinaldo allows her to take his hand and lead him from the couch toward a bedroom. He stops and turns, as if not to forget me.

“Come, Alysia,” he says, his face drunk on greed, and when I shake my head instinctively, in horror, he comes back for me, taking both my hands and insisting: “You’re going to love this.”

The bedroom is full of luscious antiques propped up with plywood. Modesta wastes no time. Melodious inch by melodious inch, her dress is stripped off her exquisite shoulders and down to her waist, and when I turn to leave, Reinaldo grabs my arm.

“Your turn,” he says, indicating I, too, am to undress.

Modesta is triumphant. I cringe and curse silently, considering my few options. I’m a bull in the ring with a star matador. I stand no chance, and when I look at Reinaldo I consider his lack of munificence with me, and wonder if he’s worth it, worth this.

“So he’s not buying you things,” Camila had mused earlier that day. She was in front of the mirror, trying on the lacy Prada underwear Ignacio brought from Europe. The bra’s cups were too loose, and Camila smirked, making a crack about Ignacio’s optimistic nature. “Well, you can’t complain to him.”

“We’ve had sex nearly twenty-two times, and the only thing he gave me was a hickey,” I complain, pulling back my shirt and displaying my gift. “So don’t tell me I can’t whine.”

“Directly,” she clarifies. “ Mi corazón,you can’t complain directly.Men want to believe certain things about themselves,” she says, sitting me down. “They want to believe they’re powerful and attractive and generous. Especially generous.”

It dawns on me what she’s getting at. “You want me to tell him I think he’s generous, don’t you?” I say, exasperated.

She lightly pulls my chin. “Tell him he’s the most generous man you’ve ever encountered. Tell him you’re sohappy he’s generous because you despise a stingy man, and are glad he is anything but.”

“He’ll know I’m lying!” I protested. “I can’t say that with a straight face. He’s cheaper than Jack Benny.”

My obscure reference does little to derail her advice. “Just tell him. You can get anything from him if you employ this little trick, te lo prometo.”

In this brothel, Modesta’s calculations register on her face, and the skilled matador signals with a wave of her red muletathat she’s just one move away from driving the knife into my skull.

Modesta believes I’m going to chicken out and exit this room, leaving her with the spoils. Myself unsure, I think about how I’ve not yet employed Camila’s tactic on Reinaldo. Reinaldo, indeed, may be a prince under his frog skin of stinginess, and I want a chance to find out. I think of my mother, of the risk she took to be with José Antonio those many years ago. Then I send a telegram heavenward for an appetizer-size portion of the strength she held.

My dress goes down. There’s little charm to my move, but my breasts are now bare, and Modesta, licking her chops, begins to lower her dress around carved hips. Her long fingers slink down Reinaldo.

My dress, too, falls to the floor, though with considerably less charm. Determined, my lips find Reinaldo’s neck, and when Modesta whips off his belt, I move for the buttons on his shirt, and then she has his pants around his ankles and her mouth and hands begin their trained maneuverings. Reinaldo grabs at her hair like it’s the reins on a thoroughbred and moans in pleasure, and not to be outdone, I find his mouth, but he wants to keep it free so he may broadcast his delight with Modesta’s craftsmanship. He motions for her to move, and then my mouth finds him, but the pressure drops steadily and, despite my ebullience, my boyfriend can take no excitement in my ministrations. I’m thrust aside.

Modesta slays the bull.

In triumph, she pushes Reinaldo on the bed and, sliding over him, her arms thrown skyward, she jockeys like an Olympic equestrian, pausing only to sidekick my dress into the hallway. I close the door on them all—on Reinaldo and his tattooed Christ and his Mary Magdalene—and wonder if I’d only employed a twist on Camila’s tactic and told Reinaldo he was a monogamous man, and I was so glad he was a one-woman kind of man, the only kind I admire, I wonder that maybe if I’d said that, I’d be able to hold on to his affections.

I’m bawling at Camila’s house—humiliation more than hurt—and the neighbors chatter excitedly about my losses, about my miscalculations, about the extraordinary lack of talent possessed by this girl, this unlucky one, this norteamericanalooking for her father, and how it’s una penathat I’m from the land of great cars and great freedoms but very, very bad sex.

A s I’m traipsingback from the auto mechanic’s with my collection of high heels, a teenager greets me with a bonjour.Absently, I return a salutation in French. Then I realize it’s the third time this week I’ve come across a Cuban Francophone.

At home, I dump my stilettos on the bed and inspect them. The auto mechanic had melded the slick soles with spare bits of tire. I’d done so at Limón’s insistence, as I’m constantly tumbling from my artificial heights. My knees and elbows are banged and bruised, and the neighbors refer to me as la yanqui que no puede caminar en sus zapatos.The Yankee who can’t walk in her shoes.

In my neighborhood, I’m rarely referred to by my first name. It’s always the Yankee who can’t find her father, the Yankee who can’t go home, the Yankee who can’t carve a chicken, the Yankee who can’t chupaa tourist’s pinga.

When I hear French being spoken again a week later, this time by grownups in the park playing hopscotch, I’m too shy to inquire. I remember my mother having written that in Havana, nothing is ever as it seems. I leave it at that.

Days later, I’m watching two small boys dressed in the blue shades of the ocean goddess Yemayá. They’re peering into a neighbor’s house where a TV is blaring, and the two are singing French phrases in unison. Unable to stand the mystery any longer, I ask them about it. The boys look at me as if I’m the stupidest foreigner in Havana—a common reaction—and point to the TV.

French lessons, they say. The whole country is learning it this year, out of solidarity with France’s abstention from the Iraq war. I think about my family and wonder if—in one of the kitchens not so far away, where chickens are being roasted and rice is being boiled—José Antonio is practicing his verbs and whiling away time until his daughter happens upon the trail of breadcrumbs leading to his home.

This is what I’m imagining. This is what sustains me. This from the Yankee who can’t learn that in Havana, nothing is ever as it seems.

B liss is $6a glass at El Floridita, the famed Hemingway bar on the western tip of the pedestrian-only strip, Calle Obispo. Outside, the saloon serves as a western gateway to Old Havana, the section with skinny streets and plazas and colonial wonders under restoration by the United Nations.

Inside the bar is cool, Old World grandeur, and it’s no wonder El Floridita was once on a short list of the planet’s great watering holes. Bull’s-blood curtains hang from the walls, as do crystal chandeliers, Arabic stars, and black-and-whites of the famous and notorious who’ve sashayed through its shuttered doors.

A Canadian turistaasks if I’ll pose on the lap of the Hemingway statue, a bronze figure hunched over a slab of the bar reserved just for him. Rolling my eyes, and feeling like a zoo monkey, I comply. She tips me a dollar.

It’s dark and barely crowded once the Canadian cruise-shippers empty out at dinnertime. I’m sitting at the bar, my Hemingway daiquiri served in a martini glass filled with an alchemist’s elixir of rum, grapefruit juice, maraschino liqueur, and lime. Once it’s sucked down, all that remains is shaved ice, and it shimmers under lights like cut diamonds.