I put on my zebra-striped swimming trunks, threw a towel over my shoulder, picked up my book with three crisp ten spots in it, checked my hair in the bathroom mirror and left the hotel room. In the foyer of the New Yorker, the young receptionist’s jaw dropped slightly as I approached. I’m always glad by signs of respect, especially in today’s youth, so I gave him my brightest smile.
‘Any messages come in for me today, well, put them directly into the waste-paper basket, any from my ex-wife, SHRED ’EM!’
I smiled again, turning as sharply as I could in my flip-flops.
‘But Mr Darling, you can’t walk around …’
‘Anything else young man, just put it on the bill, just put it on the bill,’ I called over my shoulder.
I stepped into the baking heat—it must have been 35 degrees Celsius in mid town—hoping it might drop as I went downtown. There was a taxi waiting and I climbed right in, strapping the belt over my towel.
‘Where to, Mac?’
I looked at him twice—didn’t think they still had this brand of New York cabbie around. I gave the address of an open-air swimming pool on the Lower East Side and he swung the cab out in a wide circle. He was talkative. Said he and his missus had moved to California some years back but couldn’t stand it there. There was nothing to do, no real life.
‘No culture, no nothing!’
‘I’ve got three suitcases back at the hotel. One is full of clothes and the usual suspects, the other two are full of books.’
‘Books, you some kind of salesman?’
‘Nah!’ I laughed.
‘Intellectual?’
‘Semi. I’m a semi-intellectual, I never read them you see. It all started like this …’
And I proceeded to tell him an old myth, the tale of Lancelot and Guinevere—with me in the role of King Arthur and my wife legging it with Lancelot.
‘My best friend! Can you beat that?’
The cabbie bunched his jaw and shook his head.
‘So, what did you do?’
What did I do? That was a question, all right. Well, I went down to the second-hand book shop, Frank’s Place. If you’re retired or schizoid you get a 15% discount. Frank, I said, if you had to pick two philosophies, religions, psychological approaches, political systems, hell, drugs, that could calm a man down, what would they be? Frank looked at me, frowning slightly. I watched the pages turning in his green eyes for maybe two or three minutes as he stroked his beard. Mark, he said, for you, I’d recommend the Stoics. He walked over to one of his bookcases, pulled down a thick tome and read aloud:
Begin each day by telling yourself: today I shall be met by interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will and selfishness—all of them due to the offender’s ignorance of what is good or evil. But for my part I have long perceived the nature of good and its nobility, the nature of evil and its meanness, and also the nature of the culprit himself who is my brother …
Stop! Stop! I yelled, that’s fine, fill up one of these two suitcases will you, with those kind of books. After Frank had done so, and it took maybe three-quarters of an hour, he’s very selective and the suitcase is a pretty big one, Frank stood still and frowned some more. I watched a different kind of page turning over in his eyes. He went over to a different bookcase and picked out a book so thin you could call it scrawny.
What’s that! I don’t want no poetry, Frank, I called out, don’t go giving me no poetry! He read: Each time the desire to hurt stops, a pain disappears. What’s that, I asked, it’s not poetry is it? It’s Buddhism, he said. Okay, okay, I said, so, a suitcase of that stuff as well.
I smiled at the taxi driver.
‘But if you don’t read ’em, what good do they do you?’ he asked.
‘Well, when I get angry, which is every goddamn morning as I’m brushing my teeth, I take one of those suitcases in my left hand, the other in my right, and I proceed to walk around in circles until I’ve calmed down.’
‘Listen, you gotta be careful in this neighbourhood, even the cops pull out at sundown,’ he warned me.
‘Hey, you think I’m wearing my zoot suit and my dancing shoes?’
He glanced down at my zebra-striped trunks and my flip-flops. We both laughed. I gave him one of the ten spots for a tip. He was happy. He said the smart folks had stopped tipping.
As I climbed out of the cab he asked if I was meeting somebody I knew.
‘No, just going on the off-chance.’
‘The off-chance of what?’ he asked.
‘Of bumping into somebody who has read this.’
I held up my book for his inspection.
‘It’s a Puerto Rican neighbourhood, y’know.’
‘I know,’ I said, laughing, ‘This book is written by a Puerto Rican.’
‘We don’t call ’em Puerto Ricans ’round here, we call ’em Newyoricans.’
‘Thanks, I’ll try and remember that.’
The pool and the surrounding area were crowded but I managed to find a spot to spread my towel. I didn’t feel naked till I sat down, I guess because I was so white whereas everybody else was, well, so Newyorican. I read a few pages of my book, chuckling aloud as you do, when a rather oveweight man came over. I reckon he was a few years younger than me, early thirties. He was wearing trousers cut off at the knees and a string vest.
‘That supposed to be Hendrix?’ he asked.
I looked down at my towel. I was up on my elbows and the head of the icon was shadowed by my chest.
‘Guess so.’
‘Looking a bit pale, ain’t he?’
‘Maybe it’s Bob Dylan.’
‘Looking a bit dark then, don’t you think?’
And then I heard it, as I had done so often before, the song, ‘For Your Love’, tinkling through my synapses.
‘Now, I remember, it’s The Yardbirds,’ I said.
He sat down next to me. Looked around and then back at me.
‘You looking for trouble?’
Only he didn’t say ‘trouble’ but ‘trabble.’
‘Trabble?’
‘Yeah, you looking for trabble.’
I smiled at him then because he reminded me of Frank, not that he looked anything like Frank.
‘I don’t know anybody around here,’ I replied.
He started to say something, stopped, looked me up and down and then started to laugh.
‘Say, you’re not American, right?’
‘English,’ I said, ‘How can you tell?’
‘What are you doing here?’ he asked.
‘Simply had to get out of London, the atmosphere was depressing me, driving me bonkers,’ I said, ‘I mean, stark raving mad!’
‘Man, what I mean is, what are you doing at our local pool?’
‘Hoping to find somebody who has read this,’ I smiled, turning over my reading matter so he could see the cover.
He looked at it: El Gíbaro, by Manuel Alonso. The blurb promised that it would be full of ‘columbrismo’ (local colour): politics, race relations, weddings, cockfights and spiritualism. It didn’t mean anything to him.
‘But the author is Puerto Rican,’ I said.
‘Maybe my cousin would know.’
He unhitched a mobile phone from his belt and I watched his fat fingers dexterously punch numbers into something that was not quite visible in the palm of his huge hand. He talked in Spanish for a few minutes then disconnected.
‘She’ll be right down,’ he said.
I looked around. We were surrounded by large blocks of flats, tatty, without the elegant lines of the skyscraper. He pointed one out to me, the one where his cousin lived. The feeling of being in a fortress came over me. I thought of the Puerto Ricans battling the Dutch, the English and those late colonisers, the Americans.
‘Maybe we are in a fortress,’ I said aloud.
‘You what?’
‘Ghettoes,’ I said, ‘aren’t they just a kind of fortress against an overweening outer structure. I mean, in here, aren’t you free from the downgrading stares of that American version of the dreaded dengue fly, the WASP.’
‘Of the WHAT?’
‘The White Anglo-Saxon Protestant.’
‘Are you nuts? Will you pu-lease speak English, man.’
Maybe ten minutes passed by. An attractive young woman, I’d put her in her late twenties, turned up. She stood before me, blocking out the sun, her arms folded across her chest.
‘Are you really English?’ she asked.
‘Sure, I mean, yes!’
Her eyes were sharp: appraising. Her form willowy. She had an easy smile, as though used to trouble. I looked at the big guy and smiled but the twinkle had gone from his eyes.
‘What are you doing here?’ she demanded.
‘Trying to put as much distance between the ex-wife and me as possible,’ I returned, ‘and it was either here or San Francisco.’
‘I mean, what are you doing here, at our pool?’
‘Well,’ I said, indicating my book, ‘I’m reading this Puerto Rican novel, so I thought, well, you know, what better place to read it then …’
‘Puerto Rico,’ she cut in sharp.
Her cousin laughed a touch raucously.
I didn’t tell her that I had almost been on my way to Puerto Rico, had changed plans at the last minute, hoping to evade my ex who, for some unknown reason, was trying to get in touch with me. I mean, what for? So she could apologise for destroying both my marriage and my friendship? I somehow doubted it.
‘Let me see that book,’ the young woman said.
I passed it to her. She took out my bookmark and then loosely held the spine of the book in the palm of her right hand, a hand that bore little relation to her cousin’s. The book fell open on pages 178 through 179. She passed it back to me.
‘You’re crazy,’ she said.
I smiled. There was a short silence, I didn’t have anything to throw into it, so I improvised.
‘Nice pool you guys have got here.’
Actually, it looked a bit of a dump. The chain mail face was full of holes the size of pit-bull terriers, the pool itself looked like it could do with a lick of paint. You sensed, even without going in, that this would be no dipping into liquid stars in a bioluminescent bay.
‘It gets us out of the apartment,’ she said.
‘You got any frogs in your trees?’ I asked.
‘You what?’ she retorted.
‘Tiny tree frogs, coquí, you know.’
‘No,’ she said.
‘So, this book,’ I jabbed a finger at it, ‘do you know it?’
‘I’ve read all the Puerto Rican literature,’ she said, ‘even the … the …’ she waved an arm at my book, a graceful arm, ‘romantic literature.’
I blushed.
‘She’s a teach,’ her cousin put in.
She looked down at my hands.
‘Do you mind?’ she asked.
I held my hands up. Her cousin turned them over so she could see my palms.
‘You have the hands of an intellectual,’ she said.
‘Is that good or bad in your neck of the woods?’
‘Neck of the woods!’ the big man repeated, laughing easily, letting go of my hands, yawning, he was beginning to get restless in his lethargic way.
‘You’re okay,’ she said.
‘And since when have I not been okay?’ I asked, a touch shrill, the ex-wife not at all out of my system.
‘Since you walked your lily-white ass in here,’ she said, then turning to her relative, if that’s what he was, ‘He ain’t no cop.’
‘What! You guys thought I might be a cop?’ I asked, astounded.
The big man laughed now that his intelligence unit—for what else was she?—had given me the okay.
‘I mean,’ I said, ‘do I look anything like a cop?’
She considered.
‘You look too intelligent and act too dumb. But hey, cops are only …’
‘Inhuman!’ her cousin shouted.
The big man got up and ambled off without so much as saying goodbye.
‘Do you really teach?’ I asked.
‘Yes. You?’
‘Help the rich buy property abroad so that they can avoid paying top tax.’
‘We are worlds apart in more ways than one,’ she said.
I pattted my book, affectionately, as though it was a dog or large tabby cat.
‘Which must mean that we have a big middle to meet in,’ I returned.
I felt a foreign—or at least long-dormant energy—rising within me but I caged it in, keeping it at bay.
‘Barred in!’ I said aloud.
‘Sorry?’
‘What do you think of my flip-flops?’ I asked.
‘How much did you pay for them?’
‘I stole them from my ex-wife.’
‘You was robbed.’
I looked over at a woman selling jewelry under a large mahogony tree on the far side of the pool. Some of the older folks, shaded beneath faded rainbow-coloured sun umbrellas, were playing dominoes or slowly reading newspapers, backwards. Salsa music wafted over from the apartment building but was cut short, muted, by the hip-hop of youth. There was a sense of timelessness about the place, as though it had existed forever. I pointed over at the pool.
‘Is it really safe to go in?’
‘Jellyfish season is August through October.’
‘Do you ever get out there?’
‘Once, maybe twice, a year.’
‘Is it nice?’
‘Turquoise blue off the coast of Culebra, the red brittle star … it has its good points.’
The big fellow returned carrying a brown paper bag containing small cans of Medella beer. He passed me one.
‘Thanks! Nice clutch of neighbours you’ve got yourselves,’ I said, waving an arm expansively.
‘We get by,’ he said.
‘Is there anywhere around here I can grab a bite to eat, I’m getting a bit peckish.’
He reached a huge hand into the brown paper back and extracted some kind of caramel custard he called a ‘flan’.
The young woman’s mobile rang.
‘Gotta go,’ she said.
‘Maybe see you tomorrow?’ I asked, hopefully.
‘Why not,’ she said, ‘drop by, I’ll cook up some asopao de pollo.’
‘Sorry?’ I queried.
The cousin shook his head sorrowfully.
‘Chicken stew, to you,’ she said.
I watched the willowy form move off.
There wasn’t much talk in the big fellow after that and I wondered why he remained by my side. We drank another beer apiece, he chatted to those who passed, sometimes in English, sometimes in Spanish, and he answered calls on his mobile which rang too frequently for my reading. After an hour or so, he heaved himself up.
‘See you, man,’ he said.
‘Tomorrow,’ I returned.
I read a bit more until my stomach protested overmuch. I had to walk a bit to catch a cab but it was no real bother. I was in a good mood, carrying the young teacher’s face in my mind.
Back at the hotel I marched over to Reception.
‘Any messages?’
‘But Mr Darling, you asked us to throw them in the waste-paper basket or if they were from your wife to—’
‘Ex-wife!’
‘Yes, well, sir, we have thrown out two messages and shredded six.’
‘Keeping on shredding the ex-wife’s but you can let the others through now.’
‘There’s just one other thing, sir.’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m afraid we’ll have to ask you to leave. You see, you were initially registered here for four days, well, it’s been over a week now and we have a conference starting tomorrow afternoon, so, as you’ll appreciate, we are fully booked.’
I wondered what that chicken stew would taste like; if her cousin would be there … I smiled at the young man.
‘Just put it on the bill, son, just put it on the bill.’
