by Paul Batista
“Do you work for Tom Golden every day?”
“No.”
“Good. We need a full-time caretaker and handyman. Do you want to work for us?”
“You sure?”
“Of course. Otherwise I wouldn’t ask. Gardening, pruning, some carpentry, raking, whatever you know. Just raking and cleaning up, if that’s what you want to do. If you don’t like it, you can quit, no hard feelings.”
Brad was an efficient man. He told Juan that he and his wife would pay him one thousand dollars each week. After three years in America, Juan knew what that number meant. “You sure?” he mumbled.
Brad ignored him, saying his driver would pick him up at seven each morning wherever he lived. All Juan had to do was tell the driver where that was. The same driver would take him home. Brad and his wife would buy comfortable work clothes for him. The clothes would be cleaned and pressed so that he could start each day fresh. They would first be tailored for him. His name would be stitched over the left pockets and the name of the estate—the Bonac—over the right pockets.
All that Brad and Mrs. Richardson expected of Juan was that he would in the first days walk around the buildings at the estate—the house itself, the ancient potato barn mostly buried in the earth with its roof just above ground-level, the tennis court, and the gardens. Juan was to decide what needed to be done. It was important to Brad that Juan be a “self-starter.” Juan knew, and had been in America long enough to appreciate, that a self-starter was a guy who made up his own mind about what needed to be done, how to do it, and how to get it done, quickly.
“And,” Brad said, smiling, “we want you to spend some time each day with the dogs.”
Juan remembered two sleek dogs trotting from time to time down the hallway that connected Brad’s office with the gleaming kitchen. Their toenails had clicked on the burnished wooden floors.
The dogs were Borzois. Juan had never before seen or touched, fed or groomed, a Borzoi. In fact, he’d never heard the name of the breed. But he knew that no matter how elegant or inelegant a dog’s coat, muzzle, ears, legs, and tail were, all dogs responded the same way to love, discipline, attention and play—they became attentive, loving, obedient, sweetly dependent. Within a week, Felix and Sylvia, both of them benignly neglected during the two years they had lived essentially as trophies in the Richardsons’ homes, became Juan’s dogs. They followed him, waiting for him to play with them or feed them. They stayed near him as he worked inside or outside the house. He loved them.
And Juan also loved his work. He easily fell into the patterns of the Richardsons’ home—the treasures of the carefully constructed estate, the sloping expanses of the grounds so much like the nearby undulating golf course at the Maidstone Club, the needs of the seawalls, and the endless, repetitive sibilance of the ocean surf.
He also quickly fell into the patterns of the Richardsons’ lives. They lived with largesse and generosity, not just to their friends and Juan but to the furtive, cautious population of immigrants from Guatemala, Mexico, Honduras, and Costa Rica. They learned through Juan that there were houses and small warehouses that collected donations of cash and food and clothes for the men, women, and children, a kind of underground support system designed to elude the surveillance of the immigration police. The Richardsons bought large quantities of clean, durable clothes—jeans and sweatshirts and Nike and Adidas sneakers for the men, shirts and blouses and slacks for the women, sweatshirts with popular names like Ecko and A&F for the kids. The Richardsons bought food. They even paid for doctor visits. Many of the people among whom Juan lived knew that he worked for a generous man and woman. Some people admired him for that. Others resented him.
There were other aspects of the Richardsons’ lives that Juan soon came to love, including the parties. Joan and Brad gave parties almost every weekend, some small, most large. Brad even called the Borzois—so sleek, so clean, so perpetually groomed—“party animals.”
And Juan became a “party man.” At the start of the summer, Brad Richardson asked Juan to work at the weekend parties as a greeter at the front door, in a tuxedo. Together with Brad, Juan even made a one-day visit to Manhattan, to the corner of Madison Avenue and 45th Street, to buy the tuxedo at the muted, elegant Paul Stuart store where Brad’s father had started shopping in the late 1940s when it opened and to which he started bringing Brad when he was nine and already a well-mannered preppy. When the other Mexican men Juan had once worked with learned that he now sometimes wore a tuxedo, they ribbed him that even more of the white women in East Hampton and Southampton would take Juan to bed. “You get rich someday, Juan,” they said. “You give it hard enough to them you get rich.”
During the party season, Mariana, a dark, comely woman with two kids with whom Juan started living just a week after he arrived in Sag Harbor, served food and drinks and helped to clean in the quiet hours of early Sunday morning as the parties slowly dissolved after hours and hours of music, dancing, conversation, drinking, and cocaine-inhaling by the Richardsons’ guests. Mariana was paid five hundred dollars in cash each time she worked. This was a staggering amount. And it was made even more staggering because Juan was given seven hundred dollars each time he, in his beautifully tailored tuxedo, acted as a greeter and guide, Felix and Sylvia quietly roaming around him.
5.
The party on the Fourth of July weekend was the largest and the most festive. Blond boys—boarding school and college-age children of the Richardsons’ friends—worked in white shirts and black slacks as valet parkers. From his vantage point at the main entrance, Juan watched them hand chips with numbers engraved on them to the guests arriving in their Mercedes, BMWs, Bentleys, even old MGs and Triumphs. So many guests came that the quick boys, always running and laughing, high on marijuana, had to park many of the cars on the richly green lawns Juan knew he would have to re-sod and groom after the weekend.
As Juan passed dozens of guests along to Brad and Joan Richardson, he witnessed and heard the never-quite-touching air kisses, the quick hugs, the hand-shaking, and the endlessly repeated words, “How wonderful to seeee you!” He heard some men referred to as “Senator” and “Congressman.” Juan knew that Senators and Congressmen worked in Washington and that they spent time with President Obama. He even thought that from time to time he recognized people whose images he and Mariana had sometimes seen on the television they shared with all the other people who lived in the crowded ranch house.
Brad Richardson was a generous host. Dressed in a blue summer blazer, white shirt, and linen slacks, Brad saw to it that the guests had drinks and food in endless supply. He introduced Juan as his “friend and assistant.” Always somewhat shy, Juan had learned that a few soft words and a smile could bring him successfully through every brief conversation he had in a noisy, diverse crowd.
Toward nine, Brad asked Juan to urge people to move in the direction of the terrace overlooking the Atlantic. Fireworks soon began to fly skywards from the dunes. They were reflected on the sparkling surface of the ocean water. It was a thunderous, exciting show, with several rockets unfurling the American flag over the Atlantic before its image gradually decayed. Voices shouted “wow” or “oh” or murmured “my God” as the half-hour-long fireworks display boomed from crescendo to crescendo and then gradually dissolved. Smoke from the explosions drifted and faded.
Joan Richardson had spent increasing amounts of her time speaking with, and standing near, a tall man with blond-and-gray hair everyone called the Senator or Hank. As Joan and the Senator walked toward the pool at three in the morning, she told Mariana and the other waiters and waitresses, cooks and caterers to start the process of cleaning the detritus and debris that crowds of partying people created: the used glasses smeared with lipstick and greasy fingerprints, desiccated lemon and lime peels, plundered dishes and plates with the remnants of food, empty bottles of wine and champagne, ashtrays blackened with cigarette and cigar butts and stumps of joints. Juan’s job was to guide weakened guests, debilitat
ed by alcohol, drugs, or endless cocktail chatter, outside where the still-quick valets retrieved their cars. Juan was also, Brad told him, gently to persuade the remaining guests to come to the realization that the party was winding down. The objective was to be finished before dawn.
As the cleaning went on, Juan walked by one of the college girls (slim, fully developed, yet seemingly new to the world as if freshly minted). He overheard her talking to a boy with blond streaks in his hair who was almost as slim and attractive as she was. She held in her hands a book whose bright, arresting cover bore a drawing of what Juan recognized as the United States Capitol Building. Just below the image of the Capitol the name “Hank Rawls” was printed in slightly raised, iridescent letters.
The girl was laughing, rolling her eyes as she said to the boy, “Another new novel by Senator Rawls. There’s life after, like, runs for President. Did you, like, know that he once ran for President, you know? Like, that was until he got his picture taken on a sail boat with a girl. Like who was not his wife. They were naked. Like, end of campaign, end of Senate, beginning of a writer’s life.”
“No shit,” the boy said.
“No. Like it really did happen.”
“Must have been before we were born, you know.”
“Or maybe when you were like in kindergarten at Collegiate and I, you know, was in first grade at freakin’ Brearley.”
The girl noticed Juan and lifted her right hand, waving him toward them. As Juan and the boy stood on either side of her fragrant body, they looked at a full-page color picture of Senator Rawls, with his halo of sandy hair and the taut smile lines that made him resemble Clint Eastwood, but gentler, more refined.
The girl read aloud: “A graduate of Choate, Princeton, and Stanford Law School, Hank Rawls served in the United States Senate from Wyoming for two terms. After leaving the Senate, he returned to his Wyoming ranch. He is the author of four previous best-selling novels, all New York Times bestsellers. Congressional Privilege is his fifth novel. He has also performed in several recent major films directed by Ang Lee and Sofia Coppola. He lives in Wyoming and Washington. He has three grown children.”
Juan heard the boy laugh. “The Senator might live in Wyoming, but his spurs are like buried right here in East Hampton.”
The nubile girl closed the book and held it aloft before giving it to Juan. Although he couldn’t read English, Juan loved to touch and feel the school books Mariana’s children brought home from the Bridgehampton elementary school. He drew his index finger over the printing of Hank Rawls’s name on the cover; it was like touching braille. Then he put the book on a glass table and wandered away from them. He understood the meaning of the words The Senator’s spurs are buried right here in East Hampton. He was disoriented. He now knew Joan Richardson was Hank Rawls’s lover. This disturbed him. He felt a wave of hurt and jealousy.
Juan searched through three rooms for Brad. There were still men and women all over the place—rooms, hallways, even in bathrooms with open doors. In one of the airy, high-ceilinged rooms he saw Brad, a happy man, seated on a sofa. Joan Richardson wasn’t in the room. But there were several other men and women listening to Brad’s slow, deliberate, slightly Southern-accented voice. Juan stopped behind the sofa. Brad’s right hand rested on the wrist of another man, who had the broad shoulders and neck muscles of an athlete. Like many of the young men at this Independence Day party, he also had blond streaks in his hair. Brad, still speaking, didn’t remove his hand from the man’s wrist even when he saw Juan. In his gentle voice, Brad said, “Juan, you look better than anybody here. You’re the only sober one in the room. Sit down. Rest. Join us.”
The man with Brad said, “You hit the A-List with Juan. He’s gorgeous!”
Brad laughed. “He has a wife and little kids, Trevor.”
“Jesus Christ did, too. But that robe got all those boy disciples to fall in love with Jesus, and Juan’s tuxedo does the same.”
Juan had not only a ravishing smile—one that guided him through many of the new places and scenes in his life—but a stoic patience. He listened without speaking as he heard Brad, who had barely drank during the evening and was much more focused than his remaining guests, say, “Juan is a man for all seasons. Stonemason. Gardener. Landscaper. Grass cutter. Tree sculptor. Host.”
Trevor said, “And dog trainer, too, because those two skinny bitches were once just beasts.”
“He has a way,” said Brad, “with dogs.”
“That reminds me of a snide comment about Shakespeare’s wife, Anne Hathaway, who was much older than the Bard of Avon. She seduced him: people whispered, ‘Anne-hath-a-way.’”
Brad said, “Trevor, enough with the literary allusions. You spend too much time learning useless things.”
The discomfort the half-understood conversation caused Juan was broken by Sylvia and Felix as they suddenly trotted off in the direction of the pool. Juan took the dogs’ movement as his cue to walk toward the doors that opened onto the pool terrace. He was exhausted. He’d learned that maintaining the patience and dignity he desired in this world of new words, people, meanings, inflections, and gestures could make him more tired than building a stone wall. He decided to sit down for the first time during the long, noisy night on one of the patio chairs near the luminous pool lit from submerged lights. He was also unsettled by the image, etched in his mind, of Brad resting his hand for so long on Trevor’s wrist. In Mexico, men who touched for that long did so furtively, letting go as soon as they thought someone saw them. Had Juan misunderstood, or not completely understood, Brad’s grace and generosity toward him? Did Brad Richardson want to touch his hand?
Sitting near the gently illuminated pool, Juan thought he was alone. The Borzois stretched quietly on either side of him. He rubbed the bony base of Sylvia’s ears. Stars filled the clear sky—no haze, no clouds, just utter blackness surrounding the stars. Nights in Mexico, in the desert village where he was raised, were often this clear and with a sky alive with stars. As a teenager, he sometimes lay on his back on the ground and gazed at the faintly glowing stardust of nighttime skies.
And then Juan heard a sound, a voice, a moan of pleasure. Across the blue-and-green illumined water of the pool, Joan Richardson stretched out on her back on a long lounge chair at the far end of the terrace. On his knees between her spread legs kneeled Hank Rawls. Joan Richardson’s face was raised to the sky, her neck and upper back slightly arched.
The Senator’s right hand was between her open legs. Juan, who had first made love to a woman when he was 14 (she was 32), knew exactly what was happening. The cadence of Joan Richardson’s moans told Juan that this caressing, this climaxing had been unfolding for many minutes and that Hank Rawls was very skillful in making that happen.
Juan rose, soundlessly, from his chair. In unison, Sylvia and Felix got up and followed him. Although their paws clicked on the terrace, there was no way that either Joan Richardson or the man stroking her could hear Juan’s footsteps or the dogs’ nails. Juan slid the glass door to the terrace shut. Brad Richardson was still sitting on the sofa and talking. Trevor was still next to him. They weren’t touching. There was laughter from the people on the sofa opposite them.
Brad caught Juan’s eye. “What’s it like outside, Juan?”
“It’s pretty chilly, getting chilly, I think,” answered Juan.
He left the room with the dogs trailing him.
6.
Juan often felt that the only thing he owned in the world was the Schwinn bicycle he had found months earlier ditched in the woods off the Montauk Highway. It was the fleeting, distinct silver glint of the wire basket amid the green leaves that caught his eye. He had plunged into the tick-infested brambles and undergrowth. The closer he approached the silver glint, the more certain he became that it was an abandoned or stolen bicycle. It was intact but dirty. It was a girl’s bike—there was a curved metal bar fusing the front column to the rear column of the chunky frame—and when he yanked it out from the briars
and shrubs he saw it must have been recently stolen because the fat tires still contained so much air that he could ride the bike to a nearby gas station and fill the tires completely at the air pump. It had only one gear and one speed. The brakes were in the pedals. He had to push back and down with his feet to stop this machine he loved.
Juan was a prodigious rider. On Tuesdays, after he saw Mariana’s kids climb into the yellow school bus for their trip to the handsome brick elementary school in Bridgehampton, he took his bike out of the living room (the only secure place in the ranch house) and began his long rides. He wore no helmet. He wouldn’t have worn one even if he had one. He was free. He didn’t have to return to the house until almost four in the afternoon, when the children, tired and hungry, would jump down from the yellow bus. On Tuesdays, as on five other days of the week, Mariana worked at the old supermarket on Sag Harbor’s pretty Main Street at the end of which were Long Wharf, the windmill, and the marina where whaling ships once left for the oceans of the world. The wings of the windmill never turned.
Juan found it irresistible to ride to the ocean beaches. They were to the south, just three miles from his house. He crossed the intersection of the old turnpike and the Montauk Highway at the eastern end of Bridgehampton’s Main Street. There was a Civil War monument at the intersection—a stone sculpture of a Union soldier so old that the soldier’s features were almost effaced, and the gray surface of his uniform looked porous. Just beyond the intersection, the landscape changed suddenly from the woodsy clutter of the old road where he and the other immigrants lived into a classic country lane. The lawns became spacious. The widely spaced, shingled houses were handsome. The huge old trees lining Ocean Drive formed a canopy over the road. In the sky was light so radiant that the edges of the overhead leaves appeared to be on a fire that never consumed them.
