‘Young lesbians don’t always want to look like boys,’ I told him. ‘That’s a cliché.’
‘No, it’s a stereotype,’ he corrected.
‘Nati, are you aware that you might be too clever on occasion?’
He rolled his eyes. The timer in the kitchen buzzed and Jorge screamed, ‘Dad!’, as if I might have gone deaf over the last fifteen minutes.
‘You could wake the dead!’ Ana hollered at him.
I put my shirt back on. Jorge bounded up the staircase and appeared in the doorway, panting, tomato sauce splattered on his shirt. He was naked from the waist down. Unfortunately, Nati is totally immune to his brother’s Peter Pan charm and said, ‘Where the hell are your pants, Dingo?’
He calls his brother Dingo, having concluded – accurately, I’m afraid – that the boy tended to eat like a wild dog.
‘They got stained,’ Jorge said. He was holding the spoon in his fist from which his mother had apparently given him a taste of the sauce. ‘Dinner!’ he added breathlessly.
Nati sat up. ‘We figured that out, meu cromo,’ he told him, meaning ‘you idiot’.
‘Shut up!’ Jorge yelled back, and they started calling each other names in Portuguese.
At least the monsters I’ve raised are bilingual, I thought. ‘If you’re going to fight,’ I said, jumping up, ‘then I’ll get your boxing gloves and sell tickets, so you nincompoops can at least earn me a few bucks.’
I hopped around like a kangaroo and made punching motions towards Jorge, who raced to me and crashed into my belly. Nati snorted. ‘Dad, don’t try so hard,’ he said, which sounded so much like his mom that I had a good laugh. After I hoisted Jorge over my shoulder, Nati pushed us out of his room.
After dinner, Jorge got out his sketchbook, sat on my lap and drew his mom and me in the windows of his roofless, left-leaning fantasy mansions. At a quarter to nine, I awoke from a light nap to find Nati coming down the stairs. He was wearing his jeans that are ripped at the knees and the blue T-shirt with pink writing across the chest saying Las Rosas Flour Company that he ordered on the Internet and puts on for important outings. He was headed to the movies with Binky and two other friends. When Ana refused to let him stay out past midnight, Nati targeted me with a wide-open, expectant look, and that’s when I realized that the back rub was meant to earn him a special dispensation for the evening.
‘What would you do if you went out after the movie?’ I asked, still so drowsy from my nap that I didn’t think this could possibly result in a quarrel.
‘We thought we might walk around the Bairro Alto for a while.’
The image of my son entering a dark, noisy, rancid-smelling bar made my stomach churn. Sensing defeat, Nati rushed to add, ‘It’s perfectly safe, and we’ll be in a group. Or, if you want, we could walk around somewhere closer to home.’
‘I’d rather we stick to our deal,’ I told him. ‘When you’re fifteen you can stay out past midnight – but only in a group.’
‘That’s more than a year away!’
I tried to reason with him, but he called my arguments ‘bogus’ and ‘irrelevant’. Before I had time to think up a compromise, he stormed out of the house to wait for Binky’s mother on the street.
I carried Jorge up to bed. While I was undressing him, he sang, ‘Sabe bem pagar tão pouco!’ It was the jingle for the Pingo Doce supermarket chain. ‘It tastes great to pay so little!’
Only one jingle an evening was a big improvement, so I told him he was doing great and tucked him in. After I checked the locks on the front door, I collapsed in bed. Ana had nearly reached the end of Philip Roth’s I Married a Communist.
‘I’d like to visit Ernie over the weekend,’ I told her as I fluffed my pillow. I sensed that this was the right moment to add that I’d be working on the case the next morning, but said nothing.
‘Then go tomorrow,’ Ana replied, ‘because on Sunday I’ve got the Brazilian ceramicist whose show we’ve been arranging, and I’ll need you for the dinner we’re having for him. He only talks about himself. I won’t survive it alone.’
I curled my feet around hers, since her toes were always cold. ‘Don’t get angry, but I may also have to put in a couple hours on my new case in the morning.’
She gave me a withering look. ‘What’s the weather like up there in cloud-cuckoo-land?’
‘I know I shouldn’t put in extra hours, but if you’d seen the wife and daughter of the guy who was murdered . . .’ I explained about Sandi Coutinho seeming so troubled. Ana started frowning when I told her how loudly the girl had shrieked, but I knew – after so many years together – that that meant she’d already given in.
‘I don’t suppose your mom or dad could watch the kids tomorrow for a few hours?’ I asked.
‘No, they’re visiting friends in Cascais. I can hang around here until just before noon, but you’ll have to come home after that. And King Kong and Godzilla will have to go with you to your brother’s.’
‘But I may want to stay over.’
‘That’s fine, it’ll give me the night off from being a wife and mother. Just get home sometime Sunday afternoon.’
‘You need a night off?’ I said, offended.
She showed me a sceptical look, then kissed the tip of my nose to soften what she was about to say. ‘Are you trying to tell me you don’t need a night off from being a dad and husband now and then?’
‘Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying.’
She rolled her eyes because she knew I was lying and returned to her reading. I rubbed my hand up the curve of her hip and down her leg, testing the shape of her against my memory. She always seemed more slender than I remembered.
‘Ana . . .?’ I said, to get her attention.
‘What?’
‘Did you get upset when you started menstruating?’ She put down her novel and looked at me questioningly, so I added, ‘I need to know because of the victim’s daughter.’
‘Believe it or not, Chief Inspector, bleeding between your legs isn’t a barrel of laughs. If men did it, there’d be encyclopedias written about every last aspect of it.’
‘Right,’ I said, uninterested for the moment in the feminist ramifications of my line of enquiry. ‘Did you talk to your mom about it?’ I asked.
She snorted. ‘Are you crazy? My mom never discussed anything to do with sex! She’ll be sixty-eight in October, and I’m sure she still hasn’t ever once taken a good look at her vagina. Jewish Argentinean women of her generation didn’t do that.’
‘Well, we can hope your poor dad has gotten a close-up on occasion.’
That earned me a reckless, hearty laugh, which made me feel better about her needing an occasional breather from the boys and me.
‘How did you find out it was perfectly normal?’ I asked.
‘I asked some older girlfriends. They explained the mechanics of my ovaries. One of them drew me a diagram of a vagina, too, just in case I ever had reason to use mine. The clitoris she sketched looked like a piece of okra. It scared the hell out of me!’
I caressed my hand over her behind. She didn’t mind. It was a continual surprise – and source of gratitude – that she let me touch her anywhere I wanted.
She took my penis in her hand and gave me a knowing look, but all the Valium I’d taken would prevent me from getting hard.
‘Sorry, I’m pooped,’ I told her.
‘Surprises happen, so I’ll just hold on to it for a while unless you mind,’ she told me.
‘Mi casa es su casa.’
While she jiggled me around in her hand, I explained about Sandra Coutinho getting scared by her period and about the bloody panties stuffed into the leg of her pants.
‘Maybe she didn’t want her parents to know she’d gotten her period,’ she suggested.
‘Could that make her want to look like a boy? I mean, she gave herself a haircut that was way too short. It looks really bad.’
‘Perhaps she’s got other girls on her mind.’
‘That’s what Nati said. But the thing is, Sandra Coutinho is only fourteen.’
‘Kids are figuring out that sort of thing earlier these days. Or maybe she just got sick of long hair.’ She gave my cock a hard squeeze. ‘Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, Dr Freud.’
‘And is a stuffed doll always just a stuffed doll?’
‘I don’t get it.’
‘There was blood on a stuffed panda I found on her bed.’
‘The girl held it between her legs while she was menstruating and pressed down,’ Ana said authoritatively.
‘Did you used to do that?’
‘I used a towel. A stuffed animal is a lot harder to wash without ruining it. I was a practical little girl.’
‘So maybe she wanted her parents to notice how she’d stained her panda.’
‘Sounds possible.’ She dropped her hold on me and picked up her book. When she turned the page, a dried flower slipped out. She handed it to me, and I put it in the small pile I kept on my night table. It was a wild delphinium, faded from purple to pale blue. Ernie always slipped flowers in the books he gave us. You never knew when a paper-thin yellow hibiscus would tumble out of a history book or a jasmine blossom from a nineteenth-century novel.
I opened Deaf People in Hitler’s Europe, since my latest reading project was on the Nazi war against disabled people. But I didn’t get very far before Jorge took up all the room in my mind. I’d been thinking of late that he might turn out to be gay. Like his uncle. If that’s what Ernie truly was, since I wasn’t sure he’d ever had sex. What I’d decided previously and what I concluded again now was that I just didn’t want my son to be in any hurry to grow up.
Ana turned off her reading light a few minutes later. It was pointless for me to try to fall asleep before Nati came back home, so I tiptoed downstairs and watched a baseball game on ESPN. Had hitting home runs for the Milwaukee Brewers really ever seemed like the future I wanted for myself?
The game was unable to hold my attention, so I moved my laptop to the dining table and attached Coutinho’s flash drive. It contained just one folder, Christmas Vacations. Inside it were twelve files: Phuket 2011, London 2010, New York 2009, Egypt 2008, Cape Verde 2007, Brazil 2006, Japan 2005, Vietnam 2004, California 2003, Italy 2002, Prague 2001, St Barth’s 2000.
I started hunting for information about Coutinho’s bribes with the Phuket file, but after an hour and a half I reached the conclusion that it and the eleven others held only the usual mind-numbing mix of posed portraits and postcard-pretty tourist shots.
Only two photos caught my attention. The older of the two had been taken in Japan in 2005, and it showed the victim leaning over a large sheet of blue paper, slashing a long brushstroke across its surface. Due to the slow exposure, his bamboo brush looked like an unfolding fan, and Coutinho’s eyes were so intensely focused on his work that if life were a comic book instead of what it was, two lasers would have issued from his eyes.
The other photo had been taken in Trafalgar Square in 2010. Susana was wrapped in a luscious white fur coat with a dramatically dipping black collar. Her showy, sex-kitten smile looked too practised and phony. Pedro was sporting a black trilby circled by an emerald-green band and smoking a gargantuan cigar. Had they quarrelled just before the shot? A glint of seething malice shone in his eyes. They looked like a furious Al Capone and an ageing mom trying to pretend she was a Playboy bunny.
If Sandra took the picture, then she had an excellent eye for the macabre – a nascent Diane Arbus. Very likely she’d wanted to reveal what a failing marriage had done to her parents. Or maybe she’d turned away from a dozen other chances to document the decline of their family before permitting herself this shot. Maybe she’d spent years doing her best not to break the spell.
My son’s key turned in the door while I was looking at a much younger version of Coutinho and his wife at a palm-shaded hideaway on St Barth’s. It was Christmas of 2000. Sandra had been a pudgy little Buddha, and Susana had been an achingly beautiful young mother.
Nati stumbled in at exactly 12.21 a.m., droopy-limbed and smelling faintly of beer, but I didn’t say a word about him being late or about possibly falling prey to a bottle of Super Bock. I steered him to our spiral staircase.
‘Louis Vuitton,’ he told me as he started up.
‘Come again?’ I said.
‘The fancy handbag designer. He made your panda. It’s a collector’s item. So steal it if you can. I’ll sell it for you on eBay and we’ll split the proceeds.’
‘Thanks, I’ll grab it after Forensics is through with it.’
Could Sandra have decided to ruin her most valuable doll as a way of making certain her parents would notice how troubled she was?
When I told Nati we’d be visiting my brother the next day and staying the night, I expected him to groan, but he just waved his hand in the air to acknowledge that he’d heard me and continued up towards his room.
I fell asleep shortly after getting into bed but woke up at 4 a.m. in Jorge’s room. I was sitting on the deckchair onto which he tossed his dirty clothing. On my lap was a lit candle standing in the star-shaped silver holder that I’d inherited from Aunt Olivia. On the floor beside me was my laptop.
In my hand, G had drawn a tight circle of protective stars around two feathers and written, H – it never hurts to make sure they’re safe.
Chapter 10
I remember Dad’s first test as though a door slammed closed behind me the moment he dragged me out of bed. In fact, I’d guess I started separating from myself then, though Gabriel didn’t write his first message to me until more than six months later. The way I figure it, it might take a while for a second person to come to life inside you.
It was Saturday 3 June 1978. I awoke into darkness, with a clasping weight over my mouth. Unable to breathe, I swung out and struck what felt like a padded wall. Dad’s deep laugh made me shiver and his massive hand lifted away. I sat up, gulping for breath. The hammering against my ribs was the sound of a near escape.
My father’s head tilted towards me. ‘You’ve got to be ready for anything, son!’
His moist, rum-soaked whisper seemed like the start of a bad illness. ‘Yes, sir,’ I replied, still straining for air.
He flipped on the light. He wore a white T-shirt and faded jeans. He stretched his arms behind his back and bent far forward – a morning ritual. ‘Son, you never know who might sneak up on you,’ he told me, as if it were a great, protective truth, but what he said made no sense; our closest neighbours, the Johnsons, lived half a mile away and were in their eighties. Besides, we always locked all the doors at night.
I’d only just turned eight, but I already knew that something big was missing in Dad, though I had no idea what it could be. It wasn’t obvious – like Ernie not being able to pronounce his name and saying Eeenie instead, or Mom not getting dressed all day. At some point in my childhood, I came to believe that no matter how long I lived, I’d never fail to understand as much about someone or something as what I failed to understand about my dad.
I found my brother’s bed empty; his blanket was on the floor. I had a cramped-up feeling about him having vanished and the bed being a mess, the kind of dread that twists your gut when a teacher is about to call on you in class and you don’t know the answer and you forgot to do your homework.
‘Where’s Ernie?’ I asked.
‘Waiting for us. Come on, get up!’ He pounded my pillow.
‘I’m really sleepy,’ I told him, making my voice sound drowsy; there were days when Dad could be calm and forgiving. Though, if my theories about him are correct, he was just imitating the generous behaviour he observed in others.
Maybe that was why he married Mom, in fact; to have someone to study up close – so he could figure out how regular people behaved. In particular, I can easily imagine him practising how she smiled at me – in front of a mirror, hour after hour, till he developed a perfect imitation of the twinkling affection in her eyes.
‘Get
up, you little slob!’ he ordered.
Swinging my legs over the side of the bed, my confusion seemed like a living thing inside me, chasing its own tail, because I never got any of the answers to my most important questions about how things could get so difficult.
I think now that Dad lacked the imagination to feel what others felt. Mom, Ernie and I were all props to him – everyone was; and the only reason he occasionally found us almost as engaging as his record collection or his old Plymouth was that he could make us – and not them – cry or smile or plead for him to stop.
‘Hank, you can’t possibly be that sleepy,’ Dad said. ‘You’ve had at least eight hours.’ I could tell from his eyes – wide open and darting, like he’d been energized by a secret plan – that he’d taken some pills to ease his hangover.
By then, I’d figured out that Dad lived in an us-against-them world, though I couldn’t have expressed it like that then. And it took me years to figure out that I was a member of them, even though he said I was part of us.
A cold wind was blasting in through the window, so Dad tossed me my cardigan sweater. It was lucky for him that Ernie wasn’t old enough for school yet, because a teacher would’ve probably noticed what was about to happen to him and might not have been so easily convinced that I’d accidentally hurt him while playing cops and robbers. While roughhousing, as Dad put it when we went to the hospital, like I said. Though now that I think about it, Dad’s timing must not have had anything to do with luck. He must have figured out that if he was going to steal something from Ernie and me that could never be returned, it had to be before his youngest son started first grade.
If you think that people can’t plan years ahead to destroy a life, then you’ve never had to learn what I’ve tried a long time to forget. You got lucky.
Dad moved too purposefully to still be drunk. He’d slept off his bar-hopping in Gunnison on the couch in the living room.
I think he took amphetamines to cure his hangovers. It could even be that he pioneered the use of crystal meth; he told me once that one of Patsy Cline’s musicians took it while on tour, though he could have been making that up. And it could be that I’m asking chemicals to explain what is a lot more complex.
The Night Watchman Page 12
