Carlos glowered. “Who with?”
Maria seemed amused by the question. “By myself, sweetheart,” she said.
Carlos is a jealous guy? That surprised me and might have worried me. I’m here alone with his wife every day and he never seems to think about it, but maybe I’ve been wrong about that. A good thing he couldn’t read my mind. I watched him more carefully as he said, “Friedrich gonna meet you there?”
“He can’t this time,” Maria said, easy and unaffected, as though Carlos weren’t showing jealousy at all. “He’s sending me to a woman with a gallery in Palm Beach. I think Palm Beach is too... bourgeois for me, but Friedrich says this woman has excellent contacts in New York.”
Carlos said, “When you comin’ back?”
“Wednesday. Unless I go see Friedrich on the way back. I’ll phone you, darling.” Smiling, she said, “You won’t be lonely, you’ll have Ernesto here.”
He grunted at that and went back to his lunch.
She said, “My plane’s at eleven-twenty. Can you take me?”
“The chauffeur’ll take you,” Carlos said.
“Oh, good,” Maria said, and smiled at me.
The chauffeur? Listen, I’m not really the chauffeur. But before I could figure out what if anything to say, Arturo bounded out from the house, a Heineken in his hand. “¡Hola!” he cried, and everybody greeted everybody, even Carlos lightening up a little. Arturo dragged a chair over to join us and grinned at me. “How you doin’, hermano?”
“Oh, going along,” I said. “Helping out where I can.”
Arturo turned his happy smile on Carlos. “That right? Felicio being useful?”
“Ernesto,” Maria said.
“He’s a good driver,” Carlos said.
I said, “I’ve got my own chauffeur suit.”
“A whole new career,” Arturo said, happy for me.
I said, “You heard from Lola.”
“Oh, sure,” he said.
Maria said, “Carlos and I are finished. You sit here and get your messages.”
“Thanks, Maria,” I said.
They went away, and I said, “What did she say, Arturo?”
“Well, she couldn’t say much, you know. On the telephone and all.”
“She could say something.”
“Yeah, but you know,” he said, “she had to talk like you was really dead, so what I had to do was — uh, waddaya say?”
“Translate,” I suggested.
“No. Get at the meaning. You know?”
We both thought about it. “Interpret,” I suggested.
“That’s it,” he said, and slapped his knee. “I had to interpret what she says, so when she says, ‘I love Barry so much, and I wish he was still around so we could be together and I could tell him how much I love him,’ I interpret that, you see, that it means I should say, ‘She loves you and misses you and wishes you could be together.’ ”
“Me, too,” I said.
“I told her that,” Arturo assured me. “I told her, ‘Wherever he is, Lola, I’m sure Barry feels the exact same way’.”
“Thank you, Arturo. Did she say anything about the insurance?”
“She give all the stuff to the insurance man, and it don’t look like a problem. It looks like a week or two, and then they send the check.”
“That’s great. It’s time for me to get my passport.”
“Sure. When?”
“I gotta drive Maria to the plane Monday,” I said, “so I’ll be right there in San Cristobal, dressed up in my chauffeur suit, with the tie and all. How about then?”
“Easy,” he said.
I grinned at him. “Every day in every way, Arturo,” I said, “I’m getting less and less dead.”
20
Monday, after lunch, I put on my chauffeur suit and drove Maria to the airport. She sat in back, explaining it. looked better that way, and the fact that she felt the need to offer the explanation took the sting out of it.
But it also confirmed the realization I’d come to after the cool way she’d dealt with Carlos’s show of jealousy at lunch. There was no invitation for me in that woman. She was self-contained to a remarkable degree. She’d brought Carlos into her life, for whatever reason, but she mostly inhabited her world by herself. I needn’t feel I was letting an opportunity slide; there was nothing there.
So as we drove I spent more attention on the beautiful day outside than on the beautiful woman behind me, and when I thought about beautiful women at all, it was mostly Lola. How close we were to being together again.
We were a quarter hour out of Rancio, amid the usual traffic, when Maria said, “You’re very quiet today, Ernesto.”
I looked at her in the rearview mirror, and her ironic smile was aimed at the back of my head. “Well,” I said, “I am a deaf mute.”
“Even for a deaf mute,” she said, “you’re being very quiet. I believe you miss Lola.”
“A whole lot,” I said.
She nodded. “You know, when you first came to stay, I wondered if you were going to be difficult. You understand what I’m saying.”
“Yes,” I said.
“My response was all prepared,” she told me, and met my eyes in the mirror, and smiled again. “I was going to be flattered but distant.”
“And just a little contemptuous,” I said.
The smile became a laugh. “Just a very little,” she agreed. “It would have been amusing for both of us. Poor Ernesto, you’re a faithful husband.”
“I am,” I said.
“There are very few faithful husbands in this part of the world,” she said. “It is not a trait that is particularly valued.”
“I think that’s true everywhere,” I said. “But Lola and me... it isn’t that I’m being faithful to her. It’s that I don’t have any other way to live. To go do something else would be like breaking a bone.”
“Yes, of course,” she said, and switched to look at the back of my head again, speculatively. “It seems like a contradiction, but it isn’t,” she decided. “You aren’t the faithful type, actually, you’re a rogue.”
“Thank you — I think,” I said.
“Oh, I know you like being a rogue,” she assured me. “What the English call a chancer. You’re unfaithful to the entire world, so why are you faithful to your wife?”
“Maybe that’s why,” I said, and met her eyes in the mirror. “Maybe I need one little island in a sea of untrustworthy water. And so does Lola.”
“You’re each other’s island.”
“We are the island,” I said, “and I need to be with her again.”
“Poor Barry,” she said, which was the first time she’d used my former name, and without the usual mockery.
I didn’t think I could stand sympathy. Smiling back at her, I said, “Poor Felicio, in fact.”
That made her laugh and restored our relationship. “You aren’t a man,” she said, “you’re an anthology!”
I was about to say something, I don’t know what, but when I looked in the mirror I saw, beyond her, a red light flashing. “A cop is stopping us,” I said.
“What?” Annoyed, not at all worried, she twisted around to glare out the back window. She said something in Spanish that I doubted was a prayer, then faced front and with great irritation said, “We might as well stop.”
“I thought so too,” I said, pulling over to the weedy verge and touching the brakes. “But what do I do, Maria? He’s going to ask me questions.”
“Leave your window closed,” she told me, “and I’ll open mine. When he comes to the car, I’ll order you not to speak, to let me handle it. So he’ll hear me say it.”
I was now stopped, and the police car was going past to pull onto the shoulder in front of me and switch off its red dome light. It was a big American car, black and white, POLICIA on doors and trunk. A brown-uniformed driver was at the wheel, and two plainclothes men in back.