As the cleaning went on, Juan walked by one of the college girls (slim, fully developed, yet seemingly new to the world as if freshly minted). He overheard her talking to a boy with blond streaks in his hair who was almost as slim and attractive as she was. She held in her hands a book whose bright, arresting cover bore a drawing of what Juan recognized as the United States Capitol Building. Just below the image of the Capitol the name “Hank Rawls” was printed in slightly raised, iridescent letters.
The girl was laughing, rolling her eyes as she said to the boy, “Another new novel by Senator Rawls. There’s life after, like, runs for President. Did you, like, know that he once ran for President, you know? Like, that was until he got his picture taken on a sail boat with a girl. Like who was not his wife. They were naked. Like, end of campaign, end of Senate, beginning of a writer’s life.”
“No shit,” the boy said.
“No. Like it really did happen.”
“Must have been before we were born, you know.”
“Or maybe when you were like in kindergarten at Collegiate and I, you know, was in first grade at freakin’ Brearley.”
The girl noticed Juan and lifted her right hand, waving him toward them. As Juan and the boy stood on either side of her fragrant body, they looked at a full-page color picture of Senator Rawls, with his halo of sandy hair and the taut smile lines that made him resemble Clint Eastwood, but gentler, more refined.
The girl read aloud: “A graduate of Choate, Princeton, and Stanford Law School, Hank Rawls served in the United States Senate from Wyoming for two terms. After leaving the Senate, he returned to his Wyoming ranch. He is the author of four previous best-selling novels, all New York Times bestsellers. Congressional Privilege is his fifth novel. He has also performed in several recent major films directed by Ang Lee and Sofia Coppola. He lives in Wyoming and Washington. He has three grown children.”
Juan heard the boy laugh. “The Senator might live in Wyoming, but his spurs are like buried right here in East Hampton.”
The nubile girl closed the book and held it aloft before giving it to Juan. Although he couldn’t read English, Juan loved to touch and feel the school books Mariana’s children brought home from the Bridgehampton elementary school. He drew his index finger over the printing of Hank Rawls’s name on the cover; it was like touching braille. Then he put the book on a glass table and wandered away from them. He understood the meaning of the words The Senator’s spurs are buried right here in East Hampton. He was disoriented. He now knew Joan Richardson was Hank Rawls’s lover. This disturbed him. He felt a wave of hurt and jealousy.
Juan searched through three rooms for Brad. There were still men and women all over the place-rooms, hallways, even in bathrooms with open doors. In one of the airy, high-ceilinged rooms he saw Brad, a happy man, seated on a sofa. Joan Richardson wasn’t in the room. But there were several other men and women listening to Brad’s slow, deliberate, slightly Southern-accented voice. Juan stopped behind the sofa. Brad’s right hand rested on the wrist of another man, who had the broad shoulders and neck muscles of an athlete. Like many of the young men at this Independence Day party, he also had blond streaks in his hair. Brad, still speaking, didn’t remove his hand from the man’s wrist even when he saw Juan. In his gentle voice, Brad said, “Juan, you look better than anybody here. You’re the only sober one in the room. Sit down. Rest. Join us.”
The man with Brad said, “You hit the A-List with Juan. He’s gorgeous!”
Brad laughed. “He has a wife and little kids, Trevor.”
“Jesus Christ did, too. But that robe got all those boy disciples to fall in love with Jesus, and Juan’s tuxedo does the same.”
Juan had not only a ravishing smile-one that guided him through many of the new places and scenes in his life-but a stoic patience. He listened without speaking as he heard Brad, who had barely drank during the evening and was much more focused than his remaining guests, say, “Juan is a man for all seasons. Stonemason. Gardener. Landscaper. Grass cutter. Tree sculptor. Host.”
Trevor said, “And dog trainer, too, because those two skinny bitches were once just beasts.”
“He has a way,” said Brad, “with dogs.”
“That reminds me of a snide comment about Shakespeare’s wife, Anne Hathaway, who was much older than the Bard of Avon. She seduced him: people whispered, ‘Anne-hath-a-way.’”
Brad said, “Trevor, enough with the literary allusions. You spend too much time learning useless things.”
The discomfort the half-understood conversation caused Juan was broken by Sylvia and Felix as they suddenly trotted off in the direction of the pool. Juan took the dogs’ movement as his cue to walk toward the doors that opened onto the pool terrace. He was exhausted. He’d learned that maintaining the patience and dignity he desired in this world of new words, people, meanings, inflections, and gestures could make him more tired than building a stone wall. He decided to sit down for the first time during the long, noisy night on one of the patio chairs near the luminous pool lit from submerged lights. He was also unsettled by the image, etched in his mind, of Brad resting his hand for so long on Trevor’s wrist. In Mexico, men who touched for that long did so furtively, letting go as soon as they thought someone saw them. Had Juan misunderstood, or not completely understood, Brad’s grace and generosity toward him? Did Brad Richardson want to touch his hand?
Sitting near the gently illuminated pool, Juan thought he was alone. The Borzois stretched quietly on either side of him. He rubbed the bony base of Sylvia’s ears. Stars filled the clear sky-no haze, no clouds, just utter blackness surrounding the stars. Nights in Mexico, in the desert village where he was raised, were often this clear and with a sky alive with stars. As a teenager, he sometimes lay on his back on the ground and gazed at the faintly glowing stardust of nighttime skies.
And then Juan heard a sound, a voice, a moan of pleasure. Across the blue-and-green illumined water of the pool, Joan Richardson stretched out on her back on a long lounge chair at the far end of the terrace. On his knees between her spread legs kneeled Hank Rawls. Joan Richardson’s face was raised to the sky, her neck and upper back slightly arched.
The Senator’s right hand was between her open legs. Juan, who had first made love to a woman when he was 14 (she was 32), knew exactly what was happening. The cadence of Joan Richardson’s moans told Juan that this caressing, this climaxing had been unfolding for many minutes and that Hank Rawls was very skillful in making that happen.
Juan rose, soundlessly, from his chair. In unison, Sylvia and Felix got up and followed him. Although their paws clicked on the terrace, there was no way that either Joan Richardson or the man stroking her could hear Juan’s footsteps or the dogs’ nails. Juan slid the glass door to the terrace shut. Brad Richardson was still sitting on the sofa and talking. Trevor was still next to him. They weren’t touching. There was laughter from the people on the sofa opposite them.
Brad caught Juan’s eye. “What’s it like outside, Juan?”
“It’s pretty chilly, getting chilly, I think,” answered Juan.
He left the room with the dogs trailing him.
6.
Juan often felt that the only thing he owned in the world was the Schwinn bicycle he had found months earlier ditched in the woods off the Montauk Highway. It was the fleeting, distinct silver glint of the wire basket amid the green leaves that caught his eye. He had plunged into the tick-infested brambles and undergrowth. The closer he approached the silver glint, the more certain he became that it was an abandoned or stolen bicycle. It was intact but dirty. It was a girl’s bike-there was a curved metal bar fusing the front column to the rear column of the chunky frame-and when he yanked it out from the briars and shrubs he saw it must have been recently stolen because the fat tires still contained so much air that he could ride the bike to a nearby gas station and fill the tires completely at the air pump. It had only one gear and one speed. The brakes were in the pedals. He had to push back and down with his feet to stop this machine he loved.