“City Hall,” I said.
“You getting married, miss? Where’s the groom?”
I was out of practice and Dominican Spanish was fast, the consonants eroded. It took me a second to catch up with his joke. “I guess I lost him,” I said. The woman finally paid, and I dropped into the back seat and pulled the door shut. The cab inched through traffic. I was glad to have dark glasses; we were surrounded on all sides by bright windshields, shining chrome, sprays of water lit brilliantly by the sun as shopkeepers and doormen showered the sidewalks with hoses.
“I picked a busy time,” I said to the driver.
“It’s always a busy time.”
After twenty minutes the street opened into a broad plaza, paved with white stones, where a colonnaded municipal fortress stared down a few palms and a dry fountain. I paid the driver and stepped out. It was approaching one o’clock, and men in dark suits, their jackets slung over their arms, walked in pairs and smoked under the palms. The entrance was an immense set of wooden doors that bulged with rivets and looked like they could repel a battering ram. They were propped open, and I stepped into the dim, marble hush with relief. At the far end of the lobby were four narrow, grated windows, lit with weak yellow lamps. A row of clerks waited there in varying states of collapse, observing my approach as if I were an enemy vessel they had sighted from the shore.
ARCHIVOS said the sign over the third window from the left. I tacked in that direction.
“I’m looking for marriage records,” I said in Spanish.
“Marriage records,” he repeated.
“Yes. Public records. The records of marriage licenses.”
“For what purpose?”
“It’s a family matter.” Bigamy, I thought. Maybe someone’s been bigamized. Or questions of illegitimacy have been cast on a birth. It could be lots of things. The clerk got down from his stool and made a production of turning around to consult the large clock on the wall behind him.
“It’s twelve thirty,” he observed.
“Yes?”
“The archives are closed from twelve thirty until three o’clock.”
I sighed. “They open again at three?”
He was irritated, as if that didn’t follow. “Not on Tuesdays.”
“So the archives do not open again at three?”
“The marriage records are not open to the public in the afternoon on Tuesdays.”
“But the rest of the archives are?”
“Yes, but not the marriage records.”
I took a deep breath and set my hands on the counter beneath his window. “Would I be correct to understand that the marriage records will be open to the public again on Wednesday?”
“Yes, miss.”
“Thank you so much.”
“Of course.”
As I stepped back out into the plaza I realized that my mistake should have been obvious. What business could be conducted at this time of day? The heat was annihilating. Another cab took me back to the hotel.
Back in my room again, empty-handed, I lay on the bed and stared at the ceiling fan for a while. The breeze from the balcony turned the blades. I kept losing the thread of this day. It was hard work avoiding my own doubts. I slept for a few minutes, then woke sweating from a half-dream—the same room I lay in, the same growing heat, but unable to move, as if staked through the chest to the mattress. I saw that what I needed was the pool. I changed into the swimsuit I had packed after so much thought, and went down the stairs again, my sandals loud in the dim, tiled corridor.
There were loungers lined up in ranks around the pool, and I chose one and cranked open the sun umbrella. A few other guests lay here and there, reading paperbacks and newspapers. A child squatted over a busy line of ants that issued from a crack in the concrete pool deck. Spindly date palms reached into a relentless sky. The woman who had come with my breakfast appeared and asked if I would like anything—un sándwich, un batido, un traguito, un bocadito, un refresco? Yes, please, a sandwich and a Coke. She brought me a club sandwich with a pile of potato chips whose grease glittered in the sun. I had expected something more Dominican—a chimi, maybe. Always the same confusion, an American traveler failing to understand that customs warp and bend around her. I hadn’t realized how hungry I was. I ate my lunch in five minutes and settled back in the lounger with the book I had brought: it was The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, which I reread whenever I was at loose ends.
“So sorry,” someone said, in mid-Atlantic English.
A man was perched on the next lounger, leaning toward me, his extended fingers a respectful six inches from my arm.
“A light?” he said.
He was young, about my age, in swimming trunks and an open shirt. He was wearing a silver chain. There was a feeling—something like recognition. I took my lighter from my bag, and from some impulse I leaned over into the space between our chairs and lit his cigarette for him. He laughed. “Chivalry isn’t dead,” he said. That was it—he was queer, I thought. Probably. He settled back into the blue shade under his umbrella, looking pleased with his cigarette, with his own outstretched legs, perhaps with having made my acquaintance. “What brings you to Santo Domingo?” he said.
“You’re looking at it,” I said.
He smiled, glancing around the pool deck. “It’s not bad for the price, is it?”
“I’ve got no complaints.”
“I stayed here once before. The woman who runs it is a sweetheart.” He unfolded a Miami Herald that had been resting on the table between our chairs, and I returned to my book, obscurely reassured. He seemed like someone I might know at home. Mrs. Spark was saying something devastating about Miss Brodie. Two teenage girls had gotten into the pool, self-conscious in their swimsuits, alternately holding their bodies as if for a photograph and trying to bend and slip sideways to hide them; once they were up to their necks they relaxed and the air filled with their conversation, which was in French. Miss Brodie said, “Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life.” I had taken a vacation with my mother to Puerto Rico when I was fourteen and I remembered being this way around the pool, abruptly too tall, not yet in possession of a figure but knowing it was coming, already the recipient of hooded looks and shouted commentary from passing cars back in Chevy Chase. My mother had let me buy a swimsuit from the ladies’ department instead of junior miss at Hecht’s, which meant that it had a complicated foam-rubber structure inside “for support,” and she studiously avoided looking at me whenever I wore it. I had felt like there were spotlights on me on the beach, a feeling that I both hated and loved. My father had been dead two years by then, and my mother and I revolved around each other cautiously. I talked with my best friend, Joanne, about our futures: we would finish school and find an apartment together in the city; she would paint and I would get a job in an office and pay the rent. It was funny now, looking back, this little lesbian fantasy hiding in plain sight. Joanne must have felt some of it too, whatever she said later. The last time I was in Chevy Chase, during that visit to my mother, I ran into a classmate from B-CC at the grocery while I was out buying ground beef, and she told me that Joanne had married a navy man and lived in Annapolis with their two little girls.
CHAPTER 13
I ran into the man again later, in the lobby. He was at a pay phone by the stairs, flustered, reading numbers aloud from a scrap of paper in his hand. I wanted to use the phone myself. I waited in a chair nearby.
“No, routing number,” he was saying. “R-o-u-t—” He stopped, searching the ceiling. “Ah, número de—no es el número de la cuenta. Es el número de—de—”
“Ruta,” I said, taking mercy on him.
He looked over, frenzied. “What?”
“It’s número de ruta.”
He repeated that into the phone, apparently with success. He finished his call, looking calmer, and then came over to my chair. “Thanks,” he said. “I was spinning in circles.”
“Not at all,” I said. I didn’t
want to make my call with other people around—it was an old habit. I thought about coming down to do it later.
“Your Spanish is good,” he said.
I laughed. “You’ve only heard three words.”
“But I can tell!” He folded the paper and put it back in his shirt pocket. “I’m a reporter. It’s hard enough to get them to pay you when you’re in New York. Go in the field and suddenly no one knows how to use Western Union.”
“Oh,” I said, and then, because it seemed harmless, “I live in New York too.”
“Oh, lovely,” he said, and leaned over to offer his hand. “I’m Nick.”
I took it. “Anne. What are you reporting on?”
“Economic redevelopment.”
“Yours?”
He laughed. “The Dominican Republic’s.”
“Huh. So how’s it going?”
“I wish I knew.” A woman came into the lobby accompanied by the hotel’s overburdened bellhop, who was guiding a luggage rack. We watched him negotiate the foyer, concentrating fiercely, while the wheels of the rack all turned in different directions. “It’s just that people don’t want to talk to me.”
“No?”
“People tend to get in trouble around here for giving their opinions.”
“I see.”
In the evening, after I had had dinner at a cheap place around the corner and come back to read in my room, there was a knock at the door.
“It’s Nick,” called a muffled voice. “Sorry to intrude.”
I undid the chain and swung open the door. “Oh, hello!”
He was dressed up, and he smelled like sandalwood.
“Well, look at you,” I said. “How’d you find my room?”
“I asked downstairs. Is that forward?” he said. “Listen, I’m going out to Club Florida tonight and—well, it’s just nicer to have company, isn’t it?”
I wondered if he had spotted me the way I had spotted him. Something in his manner did suggest that this was not a date but a performance of a date that could amuse us both. I laughed. “Well sure, that is a little forward.”
“Are you busy? Or too tired? I understand. It’s only—for single men—at clubs like Florida, it’s easier to be in a pair.”
“Is that right?”
He shrugged apologetically. I considered it. He looked hopeful and it had been a long time since I’d gone dancing. “Give me a minute to think over my clothes,” I said. “I’ll meet you downstairs.”
“Terrific,” he said.
I looked through the things I had brought, which were already crumpled, even though I had gone to the trouble of unpacking them and putting them away in the bureau in the room. I had brought a yellow minidress with some funny beading around the collar, which I had bought in a moment of exuberance the summer before and had been unsure of ever since; it seemed about right for this. In the mirror it strove for an effect that was geometric and minimal, an ancient rune in the form of a dress, and almost made it. My hair was too curly for the dress: it didn’t strive for anything in particular, but there we were. I pushed it out of my face with a white headband. Max, I thought, would have had white eyeliner. I could see her in my clothes, clear as day, standing next to me in the hotel room. I could see how she would finish it, pull it off. I could see the shoes she would wear. She always looked like she was in a movie. Where was she tonight? I blotted my lipstick and put on some clacking bracelets. Maybe she wondered where I was right now, and I wanted to have a good answer.
Nick was waiting in the lobby. “Well, hello!” he said, looking over from the conversation he was having with the night girl at the front desk, who was pink from talking to him. “Look at you, a total doll.”
“Thank you.”
“I thought we could walk. It’s only a few blocks. Unless that’s—God, how classless. I’ll get us a cab—”
“We can walk!”
“Que la pasen bien,” said the girl at the desk, her eyes darting back and forth between us.
Club Florida was resplendent on a corner, outlined and buzzing with neon tubes, an ornate facade rising and losing itself in the dark above the colored lights. Velvet ropes stretched down both sidewalks. A policeman in a uniform that bagged at the knees stood in the intersection in front, directing columns of traffic. The cars dawdled in the crossing to scan the hopefuls clinging to each other in front of the club. We joined the line, and I could see why Nick had wanted to bring a woman. Young men on their own were chased to the back of the line by a contemptuous wave from the bouncers; cigarette girls in garters lingered back there, making half-hearted runs at them. “You know your way around this place,” I said.
“It’s my second trip here since the summer. I’m starting to pick some things up.”
“How long did you stay the first time?”
“A month or so.”
“And what did you learn?”
He glanced at me. Ahead of us, the doors opened, and a forceful merengue flooded into the street and then was gone again. “What a question,” he said. “There’s no quick answer to that.”
“Well, take your time then.”
He laughed. “I’ll get there.” He looked idly up into the dark. “It’s a small island, you know? I didn’t realize before I came how a man like Trujillo could be everywhere. And he was everywhere. People kept saying things to me—one man said, ‘If you made a joke about Trujillo on the bus, the police would be waiting for you at home.’ And now that’s all over, but . . .” He shrugged. “But it’s not over.”
“So it’s hard to get interviews?”
“It’s hard to know what’s happening economically. The reports are all good. The reports are beautiful. But no one really knows. They set up their own rating companies and rate their own bonds. I need to get out into the country and see the cane fields and the coffee and cocoa plantations. There’s a nickel mine I want to see.” He fell quiet as if aware again of the line, the giddy partygoers ahead and behind.
“Maybe this isn’t the place to talk about it,” I said.
“Maybe not. Hard to imagine anyone in this crowd is on the clock, though.” The couple in front of us was arguing, the woman’s sparkling purse swinging as she declaimed; the couple behind us had fallen into a slow-moving embrace that did not bear inspection.
“Do you go out much in New York?” I said.
He held my look and winked. “Not to this kind of place.”
“I see.”
“I thought you might.”
A final settling in occurred. I stood a little closer to him.
In twenty minutes we were ushered inside, into an atmosphere that was both expansive and stifling. To our left was a bar where uniformed cocktail waitresses alighted and departed, bearing trays. They looked martial and secretarial at once, in short skirts and jackets with epaulets, fabric that glittered darkly in the low light. In front of us stretched a sea of small tables that ended at the shore of an immense and crowded dance floor. We stood still, taking it all in. It had been a theater once, I could see now, one of the old movie palaces from the thirties. I had seen similar ones in New York. The ceiling arched high above us in the dark, painted with geometric shapes that radiated out from the center, art nouveau lozenges becoming Islamic loops and curves. It had faded and there were patches of paint missing, but it was so far away that it could be forgiven, as if the ceiling were subject to distant processes in which human custodians could not be expected to intervene. A band in green tuxedos played on an ample stage at the back of the room, overhung by golden curtains. I watched the dancers. They were good, the place was full of people who knew how to dance, and they had none of the adolescent irony, the protective self-consciousness seen on rock-and-roll dance floors in clubs in New York. Their faces were serious, their hands held high, and they danced navel to navel, breaking apart when the song ended to laugh and applaud. Nick leaned over. “You see how the men keep their shoulders so straight?” he said. “That’s because soldiers used to dance merengue with
rifles on their backs.”
“Is that true?”
“I don’t know, but people keep saying it to me.”
It seemed hopeless to get a table. Not all of them were occupied by couples, I saw now. There were groups of men at larger ones that ringed the dance floor and lined the bar, their shoulders forward, turning drinks in their hands. They were in uniform. Nick took my hand and towed me around the perimeter of the room, toward a smaller bar not flocked with waitresses, where he ordered us champagne.
“Who are they?” I said, nodding to a table nearby, where three men sat smoking cigars, their hats on, while a cocktail waitress stood just out of range. There were dozens of these men, clustered here and there in the huge ballroom, a few dancing, the flats of their caps visible at a distance, one or two talking to women in the skittish crowds that waited for turns at the edge of the dance floor, but most brooding in the lamplight, smoking, surveying the room.
“How’d they get past those bouncers with so many men?” I said.
Nick executed a flicker of a salute over the rim of his champagne glass. “They’re the army,” he said. “Some are police. They go where they want.”
I felt tension across my rib cage. “They seem to like this place.”
“It’s one of their favorites.”
I watched him, wondering why he would choose a club like this. The table closest to us were armed: the men leaned heavily on their elbows, and I could see pistols below the hems of their jackets. Their waitress came close to set their drinks on the table, and the tallest of the men put his hand around her thigh as if it were a lamppost. She ignored him.
“Do you dance?” Nick said.
“Not like this crowd.”
“Give it a try.”
We set our empty glasses on the bar, and he led me to the dance floor. We squared up and I presented my hand. I felt safer here, in the throng of dancers. We were both good at play-acting—of course we were. How many straight dances like this had each of us dodged and weaved through?
Vera Kelly Is Not a Mystery Page 11
