The Scared Stiff

by Donald E. Westlake

  The medicine chest was stocked with unwrapped toothbrushes and combs and disposable razors and all the usual accessories. I could shave!

  So this was the guest area of the house, and this was the guest bathroom, and it was not at all what I would have expected from Cousin Carlos, but I was grateful. And that shower looked very tempting.

  And refreshing. When I went back into the guest room fifteen minutes later, I felt much more positive about life. I was clean and rested. My face was tingling with aftershave rather than itching with stubble, and in the bathroom mirror I had seen a man with a definite mustache: not nearly as luxurious as his driver’s license photo yet, but showing promise.

  Now that I felt physically better, I felt better about everything else, including Luz. She was family, after all. She might be a provocateur, but there was no reason for her to make real trouble.

  Next to the dresser in my guest room, on the floor, stood the ratty little cardboard suitcase Arturo had brought up to Rancio earlier, containing Ernesto/Felicio’s few shabby possessions. I emptied it now into the dresser, putting some of the clothing on my fresh new body along the way, and then I went out at last to see what the day had to offer.

  This morning, in the kitchen, it did not offer Luz but rather the woman servant who’d fed us all lunch outside last time I was here. She was slicing plantains when I walked in, but she turned around at once, smiled at me, dried her hands on her apron, and gestured for me to sit at the table. (I obviously couldn’t be the deaf mute with this woman, not and live here, so Carlos had told her she should be the deaf mute outside this house, in re me.)

  I nodded my thanks, took the same chair as Luz had used, and the woman started bringing me things: a tall glass of fresh orange juice, a huge colorful mug of strong black coffee, and, when I made pouring gestures, a tan earthenware jug of warm milk to pour in with it.

  And more: Three eggs, sunny side up. More coffee. Then half a melon the color of gold accompanied by half a lime the color of cash.

  I could get to like it here.

  13

  After breakfast, feeling better, I went from the kitchen to the patio, planning to sit quietly in the shade and watch the lazy river while I slowly digested. There were a few white chaise longues over by the pool, under the extensive blue-and-white awning; I started in that direction and then stopped when I realized I wasn’t alone.

  She realized it at the same instant and turned to look at me. She was seated on one of the chaises, legs up, in profile to me, but she immediately stood, a tall striking woman who was all bronze and black; bronze skin, black one-piece bathing suit, large black sunglasses, thick black hair pulled back through a glittering bronze figured circlet. She spoke to me in firm aristocratic Spanish, telling me that whoever I was, this was not my proper place.

  I gaped at her, partly doing my Ernesto number and partly just gaping at her. I don’t know if she was beautiful, but she was certainly dramatic, with a firm jawline and strong nose and full-lipped mouth and the tall lean body of a swimmer to go with that bathing suit. She was one of those women about whom it is impossible to guess the age; surely over thirty, most likely under fifty, but who could know?

  I had no idea who she could possibly be, but I thought I should get out of her way so, maintaining my blank expression, I began to nod my head and back toward the house door I’d just come out.

  But then she abruptly shook her head, and her expression changed. Her whole body language changed, from sternly authoritarian to casually dismissive. Bending one knee slightly as she turned a fraction away from me, she said, in English, “Oh, you’re the one the cousin married.”

  Who was she? Could Cousin Carlos possibly have a mistress who looked like this? (She certainly seemed as though she ought to be somebody’s mistress, but the somebody should be a high-ranking government official, at the very least.) Was she another cousin, from a loftier realm of the family than I’d so far met? Or possibly an important local woman, waiting for Carlos, here to hit him up for a charitable contribution to something or other?

  In a bathing suit? And why the switch to English? And what did she mean when she said I was the one the cousin married? Did she mean Lola? Does she know what’s going on?

  She frowned at me, and no doubt I was still wearing the stupid expression, honestly earned, because she shook her head and said, “Oh, come sit down out of the sun.” Then, turning away to spread herself out again on the chaise, she said, “The mustache is a good idea.”

  I moved forward until I was in the shade under the awning, but I didn’t feel comfortable enough to sit. I said, “I take it I’m not Ernesto Lopez at the moment.”

  “Is that the name?” Seated there, one long bronze leg stretched out on the white waterproof cushion of the chaise, the other knee lifted, she looked up at me appraisingly through the sunglasses. “Why not?” she decided. “Ernesto Lopez. And the clothing is good, that’s what confused me. How are you, Ernesto? I’m Maria.”

  Maria. I should have remembered having heard the name, but I was feeling a little flustered, not knowing if I had to worry that my secret was out, my security compromised, my cover blown. So I merely stepped forward closer to her, stuck out my hand, and said, “How do you do?”

  She took the hand, and hers was firm, maybe a bit too much so. Looking up at me, amused, she said, “You have no idea who I am, do you?”

  And then I did. Maria. Maria was Carlos’s wife, up in Caracas to see her dealer and now home. “Oh, for God’s sake,” I said, as she gave me my hand back. “I’m sorry, I’ve been a little… distracted.”

  She laughed, a musical sound, if throaty, and said, “Do sit down, Ernesto, you’re giving me a crick in the neck.”

  “Sorry.” I was saying sorry a lot; I must be rattled. I pulled the foot of a nearby chaise closer to her, so we’d see one another at an angle, and sat. “This is a beautiful place,” I said.

  “Thank you,” she said. “We brought most of the furniture from Ecuador. You know Carlos used to manage the bottling plant there.”

  “Is that where you’re from?” She had almost as little accent as Lola.

  “No,” she said. “Argentina.”

  “Way south,” I said, thinking, We’ve gone directly into cocktail party chat.

  But then she said, “How did your death scene go?” and I found myself laughing. I said, “It looked great when I left. I haven’t heard from anybody since. Tell you the truth, I just got up.”

  “Do you need something? I could have Esilda make some breakfast—”

  “No more,” I said, pressing both hands to my stomach. “Esilda — she’s the woman in the kitchen? — she just fed me very well.”

  “Good,” Maria said. “She’ll take care of you.”

  “I can see that. My real name, you know—”

  “Oh, don’t be silly,” she said. “I know your real name. I was at your wedding.”

  “You were? I’m sorry, I don’t—”

  “Grooms aren’t supposed to remember the other people at their wedding,” she assured me. “You were very handsome, and Lola was very beautiful, and you both looked as though you couldn’t wait to get away from everybody and fuck yourselves silly.”

  Being around Lola’s family and friends, I’ve noticed that people never treat dirty words in their second language as seriously as those words in their primary tongue. The taboo words you grew up with keep their strength, whether you use them as a grown-up or not, but other languages’ taboo words are never more than merely funny. Still, it is always startling — and it was now — to have an elegant woman say fuck early in a first conversation.

  Trying to stay in the spirit of our chat, I said, “As I remember, we succeeded.”

  She smiled. “Congratulations.”

  “Still,” I said, “I think it was wrong of me not to remember you.”

  “That’s very gallant of you, Ernesto,” she said. “Thank you.”

  “Ernesto.” I tasted the name, since I was hearing i
t addressed to me for the first time by a new person, and I didn’t much like it, not for me. “Ah, well,” I said, “I’m a deaf mute, so I don’t actually have to get used to answering to that name. And it’s only for a little while, anyway.”

  “Carlos says you might be here a month.”

  “Oh, less than that, I think,” I said, then hastily added, “Not that this isn’t a great place. It’s just that — to be without Lola. You know.”

  “Of course.” She smiled in sympathy. “But I’ll be pleased for you to stay,” she told me. “It can get a little boring in Rancio.”

  “You preferred Ecuador?”

  “Not particularly,” she said. “It’s all the same to me. Every place can get boring sometimes. But after that ridiculous business about the embezzling, of course, Carlos couldn’t stay in Ecuador any longer, and he does like to be near his family, so here we are.”

  Embezzling. She’d said that casually, as though, being a member of the family, I would know all about it. I didn’t know all about it, but I couldn’t think of a way to ask, so I’d find out from Lola when I saw her again. In the meantime, I had another question, even more urgent. Trying to sound as casual as she had, I said, “The last time I was here, I missed you, I’m sorry to say. Carlos said you were in Caracas to see your dealer.”

  “To have scenes with my dealer, in fact,” she told me. “To threaten I would go elsewhere. I may have to eventually.”

  This didn’t help much. I said, “Has he been your dealer long?”

  “Twelve years,” she said. “And really, he throws wonderful parties, you can meet the most astonishing people, but after a while you want more than that. You want a real hit.”

  Increasingly befuddled, I said, “You go to him for parties?”

  She looked confused, then amused, and said, “Ernesto, don’t you know what we’re talking about?”

  “Well, no,” I said.

  She went off into arias of laughter, rocking on the chaise, looking very alluring but also very self-contained. “Oh, Ernesto,” she said, when she could speak again, “that’s wonderful. What kind of dealer did you think? Did you think it was my drugs dealer?”

  “No, that didn’t seem to fit,” I admitted. “Nothing seems to fit. If it’s a riddle, I give up. Tell me the answer.”

  “Sweetheart,” she said, which I knew was horribly condescending, but there was no way out of it, “he’s my art dealer.”

  “Your art dealer.” She was buying art?

  She shook her head at me, still broadly smiling. “The sculptures on the walls? You’ve noticed them?”

  Oh, so that’s what she’s buying. “Yes,” I said, “they’re very striking, very interesting, I remember think—”

  “They’re mine! I make them! Later on, I’ll show you my studio; it’s at that end of the house down there.”

  “You’re an artist!” I said. I was feeling stupid and abashed, and she was right to condescend to me.

  But then she softened, saying, “I thought Carlos would have told you. Or Arturo. Yes, I am an artist, and my dealer sells me very well in Europe and in South America, but not at all in the United States. He has no contacts there, and I’m feeling a frenzy, because legitimacy comes from magazine articles, and the important magazines are in the United States, and they know nothing about me.”

  “Ah,” I said.

  “I need to get into Soho,” she declared. “Not LA; that just ghettoizes me as another Hispanic. I need to get into Soho, and Friedrich isn’t getting me there, and I will go to someone else unless he can come up with something.”

  “Friedrich,” I said, “is your art dealer in Caracas.”

  “Yes.” Then she smiled at me again and said, “I’m sorry I laughed, I was wrong. You couldn’t know, and you’re very sweet.”

  Which was more condescension, I realized, but that was all right. Speaking sincerely, I said, “I’ll have to go back and look at those pieces again, now that I know something about the mind that produced them.”

  “You’re going to understand me,” she said, openly mocking.

  “I doubt that,” I said.

  Which pleased her. “Good,” she said. “Will you forgive me for laughing?”

  “Of course,” I said. “Will you forgive my ignorance?”

  “We forgive each other,” she decided, “and now we are friends. Would you like to swim? Esilda will get you a suit.”

  “Later,” I said. “It’s too soon after breakfast for me.”

  “Well, I need to swim now,” Maria told me, and she got smoothly to her feet, strode to the edge of the pool, and dove in.

  I sat there and watched her swim laps, with strong unhurried strokes. I was thinking that Lola was about to go away for weeks, for who knew how many weeks. I was thinking that this woman could be something of a torment, and that Luz could be something of a temptation, and I certainly hoped the time spent waiting for the insurance company didn’t drag out very long.

  Tuesday she would leave, flying home to New York, while I stayed here. Between now and then, we had to get together, somehow, somewhere. That was definite. I sat in the chaise, under the white-and-blue awning, in the warm air, and watched Maria swim her steady laps, and schemed how to get together one more time with Lola.

  14

  Carlos appeared around five-thirty in the afternoon. By then I’d swum, in the bathing suit Esilda had brought me, boxer-style, very colorful, with matadors waving capes fore and aft. I’d also dealt with lunch, and dozed a bit in one of the chaises, and was feeling very comfortable and at home, pleased to be around Maria.

  In midafternoon, she’d showed me her studio, a bare concrete room at the opposite end of the house from my guest room and about twice its size. It looked mostly like an auto repair shop, with its acetylene torches and stacks of pipe and all the tools scattered around, including an array of hacksaws on the wall over the workbench. I looked at it all and said, “You should be covered with scars.”

  She laughed. “For the first few months, I was, but that was years ago.”

  I looked at what was apparently a work-in-progress, a two-foot-high twist of metal clamped in a vise at the end of the workbench. It was a kind of spiral that bent in on itself, as though in pain. I don’t know why it seemed so strong, but it was hard not to go on looking at it. I said, “I now realize you don’t do your work justice, hanging it in a row on the wall out there. One at a time, it’s more powerful.”

  “That isn’t display,” she said, dismissing the work on the wall with a careless wave of the hand, “that’s storage. I send photos to Friedrich, and then sometimes he asks me to ship this one or that one.”

  “He can tell from pictures?”

  “Now he can. And the dealers in Europe.”

  I looked at the bending spiral again. “I’ve never understood abstraction,” I said. “I don’t mean to look at, I mean to make. How do you know when it’s right?”

  “The emotion,” she said, and shrugged. She wasn’t really interested in talking about her art, just I guess in doing it. “Come back out in the sunlight,” she said.

  So I did, and was still there in my matador trunks when Carlos came home.

  I hadn’t really been thinking about Carlos all day, not in the aura of this strong woman, but now I looked at them together and I just didn’t get it. I know it’s a common thing for couples to look completely mismatched, so that only they themselves know why they’re a team, but Maria and Carlos took that notion to extremes. Here was this dramatic sophisticated woman, this artist, and over here in this corner we have a slob in a torn white T-shirt whose belly is so fat it lies on his belt buckle. He came out to the patio, nodded at us seated there on adjoining chaises, and said, “You met.”

  “Ernesto is very amusing,” Maria told him. “He thought I was in Caracas to see my drug dealer.”

  Carlos hid his amusement very well. “Huh,” he said.

  “Come for a swim, darling,” she said.

  “I got to sho
wer,” he said, and nodded at me. “Tell Esilda we want drinks.”

  “Beer?” I asked, as I stood up from the chaise.

  “She knows what we want. You tell her what you want.”

  “Okay.”

  Maria swam again, arms rhythmically moving, legs slowly scissoring, black-sheathed body thrusting smoothly through the clear water. Carlos went into the house, and I walked over to the kitchen entrance and inside, to find Esilda seated weeping in front of a small TV set that stood in the corner of the counter. It was a Spanish-language soap opera, fiercer and more passionate than American ones. The three people raging around what looked like a Holiday Inn motel room with the drapes drawn shut seemed somehow to have hurt one another deeply. They were discussing it.

  Esilda wiped her eyes and looked at me. I was sorry to tear her away from her fun, but I was on a mission, so I told her Carlos and Maria wanted drinks, then pointed at myself: “Cerveza.”

  She nodded, got to her feet, and abandoned the trio in the motel room without a backward glance. Over at the counter, she poured white wine into a graceful long-stemmed glass, then combined half light rum and half Coca-Cola in a heavier cut-glass tumbler. Seeing me still standing there, she made a shooing gesture that I should get out of her kitchen, so I did.

  Outside, Maria was still swimming laps. I considered joining her but felt too lazy, so I sat instead. Every once in a while, a grungy motorboat would go slowly by, out there on the river, and one did now, so I watched it until it was out of sight.

  Then I looked for a while at Colombia, which was the land on the other side of the river. Some of the riverside over there had been cleared for grazing, and scrawny cattle moved around picturesquely against a background of mountainous jungle. Where the land hadn’t been cleared, the jungle petered out as it approached the river, becoming a kind of messy savanna. Bird calls electrified the air from time to time, but which side of the river the birds were on I couldn’t tell.

  Esilda came out with a silver tray. Because it was the cocktail hour, I suppose, she had poured my beer into a frosty glass stein with a handle. She turned the tray so I could take it, and I said, “Gracias.” She smiled, put the tray on the round white table near the chaises, and went back into the kitchen.