'Round Midnight

by Laura McBride

  He had noticed her the night before, dressed in a similar way, carrying the same heavy bucket, wandering disinterestedly from one area of the casino to another. He often noticed the people in the casinos where he played. The regulars. The tourists. It was an occupational hazard to wonder who they were, what brought them there, whether they were having a good time, whether they believed this place would change their lives. He could think like this—he could think about other people gambling and how foolish they might be, how vulnerable—but he couldn’t stop himself from playing, couldn’t stop thinking about the whir of the reels spinning, the lights, the feel of the heavy metal ball in his hand as he pulled on the machine’s arm. No, he couldn’t stop thinking of these things, even as he sat and listened to a confession or helped an altar boy lift the heavy book to a stand.

  He was sorry for his weakness. Sorry and embarrassed and discouraged. He tried to make up for it in other ways.

  The small woman stopped to read the playbill outside the Midnight Room. Father Burns had seen the show: it was a “Psychedelic Sixties Revue” whose pulsing lights and electronic sounds had only made him want to play more, so here he was hours later, in this dark corner of the casino, sitting at a machine that had not hit in a long time. An employee slowly moved a carpet sweeper back and forth, an older woman with a cigarette turned mostly to ash stared blankly at the reels of her own machine. The Filipino woman studied the poster of the 1960s revue, opened the door that led to the nightclub, and looked inside for a moment. Then she turned and walked unsteadily toward the oversized Megabucks machine just a few feet away.

  Megabucks was even more of a sucker’s game than the slot machines to which he and ash-lady were tethered. He watched her climb onto the slightly too high seat; he saw her look for a place to set down the bucket, and then decide to balance it between her knees, with the silk dress stretched along her thighs. She played slowly and without enthusiasm, mechanically dropping in three one-dollar coins, lifting them from the bucket one by one, letting each one drop and settle before adding the next. Then she leaned forward, reached out her hand as far as it would go, and pulled down the oversized arm. She did it again and again. The priest could have set his watch to her methodical motions, and somehow it transfixed him: the tiny woman, the huge machine, the drop-drop-drop of coins, the body stretching to catch the great arm and pull it down.

  When the machine hit, when the lights and the bells and the horn sounded, the woman reared back as if there had been an explosion. The still-heavy bucket slipped and fell to the floor. Coins rolled. The woman with the cigarette yelled. The employee dropped the handle of the vacuum. Father Burns jumped to his feet. And the woman looked stunned, afraid, confused.

  People started running toward her, toward the machine. Before the crowd descended, the priest saw the words and the numbers running across the top of it.

  “Jackpot! $1,414,153.00! Winner!”

  12

  Of course, they had sex first. They went directly from the airport to a room at a nearby hotel. He had paid someone to take her things: the gray plaid suitcase her mother had given her and the small leather-like one that had belonged to her uncle. And when the sex was over—when he had showered and then offered his cock for a blow job after (it surprised her that he could do this, as fat as he was, as pale and large and soft as her uncle’s old couch)—after that, he called someone on the hotel phone. A few minutes later, a man in a round hat, such as a young boy might find in the boxes left by missionaries, brought the bags to her room. Jimbo said she could take a shower, that she could change her clothes, but not to unpack anything; the car would be coming to take them home in an hour.

  So it was done. She was going to his house. According to her uncle’s agreement, he would marry her now. Just as he came—the first time, his heavy body pressing the design of the bed’s brocade cover onto her skin—he had cried out that they would be getting married in Las Vegas, that he had already made the arrangements, that his friends at the El Capitan would show her a wedding she could write home about.

  He also mentioned the ring, as if he might give it to her then. He had showed it to her at O’Hare. Not two minutes after she had emerged from customs, hungry and disoriented, still in shock that this thing had happened to her, that the whole string of impossible, unlikely, unbelievable events had occurred one after another (as if some diabolical cherub had been given control of her fate and was wildly stacking the least likely scenarios on top of one another, laughing as the madcap pile teetered and grew), right then, with her fellow passengers still bunched around her, looking for whoever had come to meet them, he had caught her eye, called out her name, and held open the small black box with the ring in it. When she walked up to him, he closed the lid of the box and handed her only the receipt, which showed exactly what he had paid to a jeweler on East Walton Street.

  The ring was her trump card. At least her uncle thought it was. He thought it was why she had agreed.

  “You’ll be wearing a five-thousand-dollar ring,” her uncle said. “You can walk away anytime. It’s yours, and it’s on your finger. You’ll both know what that means.”

  Honorata tried to imagine five thousand dollars. One hundred thirty thousand pesos. In Manila, she had laughed when Kidlat told her about the businessmen who paid fifteen hundred pesos for dinner in Makati. At the tinapayan, she made three thousand pesos a month, and gave a third to her mother in Buninan. It had been her mother’s whole income.

  “I don’t want a ring.”

  “Silly little fool. Do you think it was easy to talk him into that ring? Do you think it was easy to persuade him to give you something you could walk away with? You’re pretty, Honorata, but you’re spoiled meat. You think you’ll get another deal this good?”

  She’d never known it was possible for her uncle to talk like this. She’d never known any man to talk like this, and certainly not her uncle, who walked with her mother up the hill to where the priest said Mass on Sunday mornings, and who had come to Manila after Kidlat disappeared, telling her that even after all this time, after everything that had happened, her family still wanted her; she should come home to her village.

  She showered quickly, her body like a thing tethered to her. She wished it were something she could unhook and release, something that would slide off her and down the drain, something to be dispersed into the sewers beneath the airport. She didn’t bother to change her dress when she finished. It was wrinkled and limp, but even the tiny act of choosing another one seemed too much in that moment.

  In the car—a big black sedan, with a driver wearing another one of those stupid hats—Jimbo brought up her name.

  “You can’t be Honorata here. We’ll call you Rita.”

  For an instant, something rose in her. The deal did not allow him to choose her name. Then, what did it matter? It wasn’t her body that had slipped down the hotel room drain, but her name.

  He had not given her the ring.

  She wondered when he would give it to her. If she would have to wait for Las Vegas. The car moved slowly in traffic. Outside the air was cold, there were heavy clouds, white and black and gray. She could only occasionally glimpse the lake, but it looked metallic and angry. She could not see more than a few hundred yards in any direction.

  Next to her, Jimbo busied himself with papers in his briefcase. There was a phone in the car—her left knee kept bumping the plastic cradle that held it to the floor—but Jimbo had his own phone, with an antenna that extended rigidly from the top, the sight of which made her slightly sick.

  She was starting to feel as if she might not be able to ride calmly after all. Her head ached. She had not eaten in at least twenty-four hours. All that had happened to her in the last two days was brewing in her now: kneeling on the dirt floor with her mother before the statue of the Sacred Heart; kissing her mother’s frail, sad face good-bye; her uncle’s clipped instructions, vaguely threatening; the long flight, and the smell of the man sitting next to her, who eyed her
from the side, pressing his knee into her leg; the speed with which her uncle’s deal had been consummated. It was all brewing and stewing and fermenting in her to the rhythm of the phone’s wagging antenna as Jimbo talked and leaned forward and dug in his case for something the lawyer, the accountant, whoever it was on the other end, wanted.

  What kind of name was Jimbo?

  The black car pulled into a curved driveway and stopped. Jimbo kept talking on the phone. When the driver opened the door, she stepped out.

  “Be careful, ma’am. The stones are wet.”

  The stones were wet. Wet and slick and uneven. Not far from her was a mound of what she realized must be snow—so dirty, not pretty, not what she had imagined. She tottered unsteadily in the narrow strapped sandals that had seemed right back home. The driver offered his arm.

  “I’ll do that,” said Jimbo. And there he was, at her side. The mass of him was alarming. She thought of the neighbor boy, the one with the Nike shirt, who brought his basketball to the park near where she and Kidlat had lived. “Kidlat, you are matangkad at mataba,” he would say. Jimbo was matangkad at mataba. Thinking of his size made her dizzy. She wobbled in her ridiculous shoes, and Jimbo steadied her.

  “It’s okay, Rita. I’ve got you.”

  He said it softly, kindly. Rita. That’s not my name, she wanted to say.

  “Martin. Miss Navarro is hungry. Please ask Gina to prepare her something.”

  Honorata steeled herself. The slight note of kindness in Jimbo’s voice was worse than what had come before. She was very close to losing control, to beginning to cry; she imagined herself dropping to the cold wet flagstones, begging for mercy. The driver, Martin, was still there. She could feel him looking at her, and this kept her upright. Already, so many men had stared at her today. It was as if she were wearing a sign—who she was, what she had done—and that imaginary sign was blood in the water. The man next to her on the plane had smelled it. Jimbo smelled it. The driver, the bellhop at the hotel, they all smelled it.

  Jimbo held her arm as she climbed up the two steps, and then just as she was about to enter through the door, he squeezed her waist.

  “This is your home now. I hope you’ll be happy here.”

  His arm held her body. She did not look at his face.

  There was a huge vase of flowers in the entryway: orchids and sampaguita, gumamela. Flowers from home. The container looked like the one her mother used to catch rainwater. Honorata felt dizzy. Was she being welcomed?

  “You’re tired. Let me take you to your room.”

  It was too much to imagine she would have her own room, but she did. It was larger than the apartment she had shared with Kidlat.

  “I bought the bedding to match the dress you wore in the photo you sent.”

  Honorata could not speak.

  “This door leads to my room.”

  She looked at the heavy door on the far side of the sitting area.

  “I’m very tired,” she finally said. “I’m so tired.”

  It was not the right thing to say, but it was all she could manage. Jimbo looked at her, his thoughts hidden, and helped her sit on the bed.

  “Gina will bring you a tray. You can sleep. I’m going to go out, and I’ll see you when I return.”

  “Thank you,” she said. She didn’t want to thank him, but it was bred in her: to thank someone who had been kind.

  That night, the woman named Gina woke her for dinner. She said that Mr. Wohlmann would like her to dress for their first evening together, so Honorata wore the green sheath her uncle had given her.

  Later, Jimbo knocked on the door between their two rooms and then entered immediately. He was carrying the small black box.

  “This is yours,” he said without ceremony.

  When she looked in his eyes, he opened the box, and reached for her hand. Slowly, he slipped the ring, studded with diamonds, onto her left hand. She had narrow fingers, but it fit perfectly. She wondered how her uncle had managed to find her ring size; whether he might have measured her finger one night when she was sleeping. Anything was possible; nothing made sense. She was caught in some other life: one that disconnected her from everything she had known; a world in which her once-pious uncle might indeed be an incubus.

  “You’re older than your uncle said.”

  Honorata trembled. She had no idea what her uncle had said.

  “But you’re more beautiful in person. Even more beautiful than your photo.”

  He undressed her then, and they had sex. Honorata fell asleep after, but when she woke up, he was lying next to her, awake. Without speaking, he rolled her over and entered her from behind. Only then did he get up and go through the door to the room Honorata had not yet seen. Lying alone, she stroked the ring on her finger. A bitter taste rose in her throat, but she did not cry.

  Their days settled into a rhythm.

  Jimbo woke her every morning before it was light. He left when the first timid rays of dawn peeked through the curtains. They had dinner together, sometimes at the house, prepared by Gina, and sometimes in a restaurant downtown. Afterward, they came back to her room. They watched television, sitcoms like Cheers, or Jimbo read to her from the book he was reading: a crime story about a woman who had been raped and murdered, which Jimbo read as if it would mean nothing to her. Some nights, he would ask her if she wanted a bath, and her trembling excited him. He liked to wash her back, rub soap over her small body, and then lift her up and take her to bed still wet and slippery.

  He was not, however, a cruel lover. He liked to talk. He could talk without stopping, about his work, about Las Vegas, about mystery novels, about his time as a young man. The army had sent him to Japan, and he had gone to college late, when he was twenty-five. He despised rich college students. Often, his talk washed over her. She would lie in bed after he left, back through the door to his own room, and be unable to remember anything he had said.

  On the weekends, they sometimes played cards. Jimbo liked blackjack and poker and pinochle; Honorata found a cribbage board in a drawer, and they played this instead. She liked the language of cribbage: 15-2, 15-4, 15-6 and nobs is seven, your cut, in the stink hole, his nibs. She would call out “Muggins, I’ll take two!” in the tickatick rhythm with which she spoke, and Jimbo would play game after game with her, though at first he had said that cribbage was dull. Sometimes when they were playing, sitting in the room that Gina called the study, with the game laid out on a heavy oak table and the light coming from the stained glass sconces and a ray of sunshine striking the leaded bottles of scotch and whiskey that Jimbo kept on the sideboard, sometimes, Honorata was at peace.

  There were no locks on the doors. Jimbo was away at work all day, and on Tuesdays and Thursdays, Gina did not come, and so she had the house to herself. Martin came each morning and drove Jimbo to work. She wondered if her fiancé—if that was the word for him—knew how to drive.

  In any case, Honorata didn’t know how to drive and didn’t have a car. She was free to go where she wanted, and she often took long walks in the neighborhood, lacing up the heavy boots that Gina had bought her. She had found a grocery store—a big American one—with pale leaves of lettuce and tall stacks of canned food, which seemed as if they might collapse on top of her when she hurried down the aisle, but she didn’t have any money. She fingered the ring, realizing it was not quite the same as money.

  Jimbo had never invited her into his room on the other side of the door, but she had gone in there once. She was surprised to find that his room was smaller than hers. There was no sitting area, and the bathroom was in the hall. Honorata liked the room better than her brightly colored one. The walls were a deep gray, and the mix of gray and tan and chocolate colors calmed her. Honorata looked at everything in the room carefully—she stared at Jimbo’s things—but she didn’t touch anything, didn’t open a drawer, or move anything sitting on his dresser.

  After awhile, the days became more difficult than the nights. There was nothing for her to do. S
he didn’t know anyone and didn’t have anywhere to go. Gina took care of the house and the food. Trembling, she asked Jimbo if she could buy some groceries and cook dinner. At first, he said that she did not need to cook, but the next day, he left a hundred dollars in an envelope and told her to take a cab home from the store.

  Honorata carefully smoothed out each bill and studied it. She thought about the pesos she had sent to her mother and wondered if her uncle was giving her mother money now. She had let her uncle tell her mother that she had fallen in love with an American, that she was leaving with him, and she had not written her mother since. There was no phone in Buninan, and she could not have risked hearing her mother’s voice anyway. She knew she should write, but Honorata could not find the courage to tell her mother that she was fine, that she was happy, that she was rich. This is what she would have to write, and even thinking about it made her cry. No, she could not write her mother.

  Instead, she went to the American store and tried to find what she needed to make a meal. The rice was dry and fell off her fork when she tried to eat it, but a customer pointed her to tamarind one day when a clerk said that they did not carry sampalok, and another time, a man gave her directions to an Asian market not too far away. The market was mostly Chinese, but she found good rice there.

  That night, Jimbo asked her if she liked the ring.

  “It’s pretty,” she said.

  She didn’t know how to answer his question.

  “Do you know why I gave it to you?”

  Honorata thought of her uncle. She thought of Jimbo’s house, of Gina, of Martin taking him to work each morning. It didn’t seem likely that he had given her the ring because her uncle had bargained for it.

  “I gave it to you because your uncle asked for it. Because I wanted you to be happy.”