Back to Blood: A Novel

by Tom Wolfe

  “You gotta be the best you,” Amélia went on, “and that’s a la moda cubana! Just a couple more things. You got a gold necklace? You know, nothing showy.”

  “I’ve got one.”

  Magdalena turned and opened a bureau drawer. She produced a necklace with a small gold cross hanging from it.

  “A cross!” said Amélia. “That’s perfect! In fact, you don’t know how perfect that is. This won’t take a second,” said Amélia. “Just get into the skirt and get into the bustier, and you’re ready! I’ll zip it up in back.”

  Magdalena let loose with a big sigh of despair but did it anyway, and Amélia zipped up the back, which was cut so low it left her bare down to about six inches above the waist.

  “Now put on the necklace.” Magdalena put on the necklace.

  “Perfect!” said Amélia. “Now come look at yourself in the mirror.”

  Magdalena was shocked by what she saw. The bustier had pushed her breasts up so high, it created a very visible cleavage and rounded them slightly on top.

  “Oh, my God,” said Magdalena. “They look so big.”

  “ ‘Big’ is what we’re after,” said Amélia. “You look great. And that little cross? Didn’t I tell you? Perfection.”

  The cross lay upon her bosom right where the cleavage began.

  “You’re like a virgin on a hill overlooking the Devil’s playground, Magdalena! Just have the confidence. Tonight is all yours, Magdalena, yours! Smile a lot. Smile at empty spaces on the walls, if you have to. All of Chez Toi will be coming to you, not you to Chez Toi. You know what your secret will be? You’ll make your entrance a la moda cubana. You won’t have to act… like anything! You’ll be the most comfortable, most confident person in the house!”

  The whistler began whistling atop Magdalena’s bureau, and Amélia practically jumped out of her skin… Magdalena’s cell phone ring, it was… Nestor had rigged it up for her—the sound of a man whistling a tune, but nobody knew what tune. He loved playing around with things like that. His own phone rang with some hip-hop song. What was it, now? Oh, yes. “¡Caliente! Caliente baby… Got plenty fuego in yo’ caja china”—but that gave Magdalena no twinge of nostalgia at all. It merely made her think about what babies they had been… furtively doing the in and out, in and out, in and out always looking for some friend’s empty bed nobody would stumble upon… She couldn’t believe what children they had both been… living for the in and out, in and out, in and out—“Hello?”

  “Magdalena, I thought you were going to be waiting downstairs!” Norman, of course. “There’s no place to park.” Norman, resentful and cross.

  “Be right down!” Magdalena wheeled about to study herself in the mirror again. She started shaking her head. “I just don’t know about this, Amélia…”

  “I do know!” said Amélia. “Chez Toi needs you. They need a little sex, and it’ll be arriving looking very sweet! There’s a cross between your boobs!”

  Magdalena was still staring at the creature in the mirror, still transfixed by herself. “Oh, Dios mío, Amélia!” There was a little tremor in her voice. “You better be right! There’s no time to change, anyway. Norman will kill me!”

  “You’re a vision, Magdalena, a vision. Just remember two things. You’ve been revirginated. You’re a virgin with a cross over your heart! You’re younger, prettier, and purer than any other woman at Chez Toi. Remember that—and be confident. You’re better than they are… the snobs…”

  By the time she came down the elevator and went out to Norman’s car, her spirits, which had been lifted by no more than a thread in the first place, had collapsed. What was she doing? Some virgin… yeah, some virgin trying her best to look like a slut… in a bustier. What a fool she was!

  But as soon as she opened the door of Norman’s Audi, he broke into a big lascivious smile and said, “Heyyyy, look at you! The hell with Chez Toi! Let’s go straight to my place!”

  Magdalena slid into the passenger seat. “You sure this isn’t too much?”

  “You’re too much, Magdalena!” He kept leering at her. Norman wasn’t the best judge in the world. ::::::He is half crazed when it comes to sex, my eminent porn-addiction psychiatrist.:::::: Still, it was encouraging. At least her getup wasn’t a total obvious disaster. ::::::Be confident! Well, not yet. But maybe I have a fighting chance.::::::

  As they drove down Lincoln Road, Norman said, “Have you seen this thing on YouTube?”

  “What thing?”

  “You’ve got to see it! There’s a video of these two Miami cops on top of a black guy—they’re white—they’ve got this black prisoner lying on the floor with his hands tied behind his back, and they’re on top of him, giving him elbows to the head and calling him everything short of you nigger you can imagine! You’ve got to see it.”

  Got to see something? In fact, Magdalena was barely paying attention to what he was saying. The only question was, what will he think of it. Will he think I look like a little tramp… or did Norman have a believable reaction? She looked down at her bosom. Nothing had changed. You could see… everything.

  They arrived at Chez Toi and turned the Audi over to the valet. Magdalena said, “This is it? A hedge?”

  “This is it,” said Norman. “It’s behind the hedge.” They were just a few steps from a privet hedge that must have been ten or eleven feet high. An enormous privet hedge. The thing had been trimmed meticulously, absolutely evenly, on top. A portal had been cut through it… a rectangle well over seven feet high and four feet wide and at least a yard deep… a rectangle perfect down to the last trimmed tiny privet leaf. Darkness was closing in rapidly, and in the twilight one could easily mistake the hedge for a battlement, a forbidding wall of solid masonry.

  “I don’t even see a sign.”

  “There aren’t any signs,” said Norman in the tone of somebody who knows these things.

  Magdalena’s heart began racing. All over again she thought of something more basic. All over again she was plunged into despair. What if she were completely deceiving herself! What had Sergei said to her last week? Nothing!—not one personal word! Merely the polite, meaningless things proper people are supposed to say when they’re introduced to you. She had built this whole thing up out of looks and smiles and gestures that might or might not have revealed any feeling at all on his part. He had poured his long, searching, insinuating looks into her eyes… three times. But suppose they weren’t searching for anything, and they weren’t insinuating anything? Suppose they were merely long by her clock? Too late to figure it out now! Here she was, and there he was, presumably, somewhere on the other side of that hedge… and she was still aboard an insane flight, diving, soaring, diving, soaring soaring soaring until the next little what-if sends her into a fatal dive and the next faint hope pulls her out of it… and this had been going on every waking moment for seven days—

  “But how does anybody know it’s there?” said Magdalena.

  “Anybodies don’t know,” said Norman. “It’s open to the public, but it’s like a private club. Unless they know you or someone has put in a word for you, it’s very hard to make a reservation. Having no signs is… you know… part of the aura of the place.”

  Magdalena had no idea what an aura was… but this wasn’t the time to ask for definitions. They were right at the improbable portal, a rectangle cut through a three-foot-thick privet hedge with a precision that would cause a mere stonemason to swoon with envy. Two couples were honking away in English with their amusement turned up to the max. Then she and Norman walked through this precisely, prissily clipped formal hedgeway and—there was Chez Toi, Your House, right in front of them. Magdalena knew the restaurant was literally in a house, but her imagination had built a mansion. This was no mansion. That much was obvious even as the darkness closed in. By Miami standards, it was an old, old house, one of the few remaining examples of a style that had been fashionable a hundred years ago, Mediterranean Revival. Almost the entire front yard was now a terrace and a vi
sta of soft candle lights on the tables of people dining outside. There was more candlelight above, in the old-fashioned lamps that hung from the branches of spreading blackthorn trees. The candlelight did wonders for the white faces of the Anglos… who were everywhere… They seemed to occupy every last seat out here. Their voices created a buzz and a babble… none of it raucous.

  It was lovely out here, but ¡Dios mío! it was ¡hot!

  They found themselves in the entry gallery of what looked like somebody’s old house, comfortable but by no means luxurious… near, but not on, the ocean… and certainly not what Magdalena expected to see in the most eminent of all restaurants in Miami. Straight ahead was a set of stairs, but with no grand curving sweep of banisters and balustrades. On either side was an arched doorway… arched, but with arches no one would remember ten seconds later… and yet out from under one of them was pouring the noisy buzz and burble, the shrieks and bassos profundissimos of laughter, the irrational rapture of mortals who know they have arrived where things are happening. Anyone who had heard it before, the way Magdalena had at Art Basel, would recognize that sound forever after.

  Over to one side, at a console, a maître d’ was conferring with six customers, four men and two women. The servitor, i.e., the maître d’, was instantly recognizable. He was the one dressed like a gentleman. That was the way it seemed to be these days. He wore a cream-colored tropical worsted suit and a necktie of darkest aubergine. The other four males, being the customers, wore no jackets. In the contemporary fashion, even among older men like them, they wore shirts with open necks, the better to reveal the way the deep lines beside their noses descended into their wattles, their jowls, and that overture to old age, a pair of harp-string-size tendons on either side of the Adam’s apple. The maître d’ showed them all to the terrace, then hurried over to Norman and Magdalena with a pleasant smile and “Bonsoir, monsieur, madame.” That was it for French, unless you counted the restaurant’s name. “Welcome to Chez Toi.” He had a pleasant smile—and didn’t have what a little girl from Hialeah instinctively feared in a fancy place like this, namely, an attitude of maître de votre destin, your destiny. Norman mentioned Korolyov and his party, and the maître d’ said they were having drinks in the library, as he called it. He led them to the arched doorway of the rapturous noise.

  Mr. Korolyov… Magdalena put her hands together and could actually feel them trembling. Now she and Norman were inside the rapturous room. Men and women were gesticulating this way and that for emphasis and rolling their eyes as if I had never heard of such a thing or else My God, how could such a thing be?… and, above all, laughing so much, the world could tell that each and every one of them was an integral part of this exalted convening of the demigods. Magdalena had walked into Chez Toi swearing to Venus, Goddess of Seduction, that she would remain cool, even aloof, as if she could take the men in this room or leave them. Instead, she found herself caught up in the overwhelming status delirium of the place. Her eyes were darting about darting about darting about… looking for… him. The library, as the maître d’ had referred to it, had shelves of books, real books, on the wall, giving the restaurant still more of the chez-toi, your-house, mental atmosphere, but seemed to be used mainly as a small dining room. The tables had been pulled back toward the walls to allow Mr. Korolyov and his party more room to mingle, linger, tingle, blingle over drinks at this, the cocktail hour… but where is he? Suppose he’s not here, and this whole—

  —all at once Norman was leaving her side and heading into the madding crowd.

  “Norman!”

  Norman stopped for an instant and turned about with a guilty smile on his face and held up his forefinger in the pantomime that says, “Don’t worry, I’ll only be a second.”

  Magdalena was shocked… and then she panicked… What was she supposed to do, a twenty-four-year-old girl standing here among all these old people—they’re all so old!—and so white!—and she is a little Cuban girl, a nurse named Magdalena Otero, corseted into a bustier shoving her all-but-bare breasts into their faces like two big servings of flan!

  And then she was furious. When Norman lifted his forefinger, he wasn’t saying I’ll be back in a moment… oh, no… consciously or not, he was saying I’m Number One and I’ve spotted somebody immensely more important than you and, sorry, but I must lay my Famous Dr. Porn charm on him while I have him in my sights!

  What was she supposed to do now? Stand here like a tart on call? Already people were cutting glances at her… or was it just at the bustier and her breasts? ::::::Goddamn you, Norman!:::::: She remembered what Amélia had said. Always look confident… if you have no one to talk to, put on a confident smile. She put on a confident smile… but somehow standing here alone with a confident smile was no vast improvement upon standing here alone with a long face… Ahh! She spotted a painting on the wall nearest her, a big one… must have been four feet by three feet… She’d go look busy studying it… She stood before it… two half-round shapes, one a simple black and the other one a simple white, painted on a beigey-gray background. The two shapes were separated from each other and cocked at cockeyed angles… ::::::Ayúdame, Jesús… You’d have to be a cretin to stand here actually studying this mierda… Not even the old fools who pay millions for this idiotic nonsense at Miami Basel are so retarded that they actually look at it.:::::: She gave up and turned about to face once again this room where things were happening. Frantic laughter still reigned… shriek! shriek! shriek! shriek! went the women haw! haw! haw! haw! haw! went the men… but just then, from across the room, came a laugh that toppled them all “aahaaAAAHock hock hock hock”… and Magdalena stared that way, lasering through all the rapture laughter until she spotted Norman’s big head bobbing up and down for the benefit of a woman, a very striking woman—thirty?—but who knew any longer?—fair skin, oh, so fair… thick dark hair parted down the middle and swept back dramatically from her forehead… high cheekbones, lean square jaws, lips as red as rubies, eyes as brilliant and hypnotically blue as the bluest diamondsssuhhhhHAGGHH-HOCKhock hock hock hock… She had made up the rubies and diamonds just to feel sorrier for herself and angrier at Norman, but the laughhhfoghhhHHHock hock hock hock was real, all too real, you heartless insensitive sonofabitch! Back in a second—sure, you’ll be back in a second, as soon as you make your first move on some americana with hair as dark as midnight and skin as white as snow! We don’t have snow, we Cubans, as you, in your wisdom, perhaps know—

  “Miss Otero!”

  It was a voice from behind, a voice with an accent. She turned about, and it was him—the him… as handsome and Prince-charming and a lot of other things she had been dreaming of for a solid week. In a blip of unbelievable speed Sergei’s eyes turned down, inspected her breasts, which were threatening to pop out of the bustier—and blipped back up.

  Magdalena caught that… and liked that… and in that instant Norman and the anger he had engendered in her vanished. Just like that. ¡Mirabile visa! as one of the nuns, Sister Clota, used to say. ¡A miracle to see! ¡Sublimity itself! But in the next instant, wide awake in the dreamless real world, the love bombardier from Hialeah and her sublime self plummeted and crashed and burned, as they had all week from obsessing over the figure before her. Why had he approached her at this moment?… when all there was to see was a poor thing, a social misfit, all alone and trying to cover it up by “studying” an extremely stupid painting on a wall. Oh, it was obvious. He ever so kindly wanted to rescue her from social failure. What a horrid form of rendezvous this was! Who was she in his eyes?… Some silly simpleton who needed his pity! It was humiliating—humiliating!—so humiliating, it vaporized every role she might have chosen to morph into… flirt, vamp, disciple of Aesculapius, the god of medicine, merciful mother to the heavy-laden crushed by lust, groupie of great oligarchic Russian philanthropic art collectors. So without meaning to, she reacted with complete honesty… her jaws went slack, causing her mouth to fall open and her lips to part…

  S
ergei proceeded to pour his charm all over her, as if that were going to help. “I’m so happy to see you here, Magdalena!”

  Already another guest was at his shoulder, smile cocked to bag his attention the moment his lips stopped moving.

  Sergei leaned in closer to Magdalena and said in a low voice, “I barely had a chance to talk to you at Miami Basel.” Once more he blipped the quickest, slickest of eye-flicks at her bustier bosom.

  By now, from sheer nerves, Magdalena was nibbling the fingernail of her little finger. The intimate way he lowered his voice brought red blood and its bodyguard, guile, back into her system. She could literally feel it. Slowly she removed the little fingernail from her nervous nibblers and let the hand drop down upon the cloven center of her bustiered bust and got her lips to smile in a certain, ever-so-amused way… and said ever so softly and smokily, “Oh, I remember…”

  Now three people were huddled about Sergei, their glittering eyes anxious to lock onto his. One of them, a little weasel of a man with one side of his shirt collar collapsed upon his neck because it was designed to go with a necktie, was so gauche as to tap him on the shoulder. Sergei did a hopeless roll of his eyes for Magdalena’s benefit and said out loud, “To be continued—” and let his courtiers go ahead and swamp him. His eyes awarded themselves one last little hurried high-speed helping of her bosom.

  Magdalena was alone again, but this time she didn’t care. It didn’t bother her at all. There was only one other person in all of Chez Toi, and now she knew he was interested…

  By and by Norman returned from across the room. When she saw him, he did that tight-lipped, head-stuttering thing men do before they say, “I swear, honey, I did the best I could.”

  “Listen, I’m sorry. I saw somebody I’d been trying to get hold of and I wasn’t sure I’d have another chance to talk to him, and I never thought—” His voice slowed down when he saw that Magdalena was giving him a pleasant, friendly smile.