Beautiful Fools

by R. Clifton Spargo

  The café owner returned with a pad of film, and Zelda told him exactly where to set up the camera. Minutes later she was traipsing across the sandy lot toward the black Plymouth sedan, the photograph wedged between the pages of a book, the negative in her hand.

  The unhappy boys loitered near the car, again drawing near to Scott to see if he would compensate them for their loss, again chased off by Señor Famosa García, less kindly the second time around.

  “They are unfortunate today,” the guide said with a sigh, “and wish to blame somebody.”

  “You are a handsome man,” Zelda told the guide, entranced by the photograph, talking to his image rather than the man himself. “And you liked having your picture taken with us.”

  In the backseat she was distracted, her mirth quieted by the shock of studying herself, the crooked smile, her face gaunter than she remembered it. She recognized the roundness in her cheeks, flushed and healthy from the day’s activities, but she couldn’t quite place the eyes, so small, stealthy, and averted. She was never sure how she would photograph, her responses to her image ranging from alienation to full-on disgust to the despairing conviction “That’s not me.” Even in the prime of youth, when the camera had liked her as much as anyone she knew, friends used to remark that she never took the same picture twice.

  It was true, you could run through photo albums, through the pictures in magazines, and there was Zelda in shots taken within minutes of one another, often by the very same photographer, yet she appeared as two entirely different women. More peculiar than how it portrayed her eyes, though, were two facts about the picture in her hand: first, it showed Scott and her together, after all these years still resembling a couple; and, second, it depicted the guide’s face as oddly familiar, the graying black mustache and strong chin underneath a straw hat wrapped in a black band.

  It took her a minute, but then she understood. “You remind me of an old friend of ours,” she said to the guide as they rode into town, waving the photograph in front of Scott’s nose, asking if he too could discern the resemblance.

  6

  “SCOTT, SCOTT, YOU’RE NOT AWAKE, ARE YOU?” He didn’t answer, but she continued whispering to him, rehearsing a conversation they would need to have sooner rather than later. The days passed so quickly on their holidays. It was Monday already, the weekend having come and gone. She couldn’t let this trip lapse—he still hadn’t said how long they were to stay in Cuba—without addressing the question of whether or not they planned to forge a future together.

  “Once I thought, if I went away, I could create myself again—for you, Scott, it was all for you. I could remake myself, never without cost, never without doubts, and I thought, how long will he wait until I am new?” He didn’t stir, but she was restive, wishing to be out on the streets of the Old City, so she swung open the window, inclining into the low balcony wall, the chill of its stone entering her thighs as she let the street noises climb the evening air. Breathing deeply, she dipped into a plié, up and down several times, and then, as if her yearning were at one with the movement, rose on the balls of her feet, pressing her toes into the ground as though en pointe, imitating old habits, wishing she could feel the platform of her Capezio pointe shoes as she leaned out over the balcony, testing her balance, thinking to herself, It would be so easy to fall.

  Beneath her, the Calle Obispo was lively with music, chatter, traffic whistles, and impatient horns, with cries of vendors and the squeal and grind of trolleys—the evening’s bustle preparing to give way to the sordidness of night. She could hear someone playing a variation on ragtime, the spangled shimmer of ivory. She withdrew from the window. At the desk, Scott’s sport jacket was folded over the chair, his Florsheim shoes tucked beneath it. He was still so fastidious, she liked that about him. Reaching inside his jacket, she found the journal where she expected to find it, knowing she shouldn’t pull it from the coat or snoop in its pages.

  Still she ran her thumb along its spine, resisting temptation, satisfied merely to be touching an object that Scott held daily in his hands, remembering his habit of jotting down ideas day by day, keeping a ledger of characters, dialogue, paragraphs or scenes he’d written, sketches for new plots. A spike of jealousy pierced her, not resentment of the secret contents of the journal per se, but of his arrogant belief in his right to so much secrecy. “I have to trust him,” she chanted under her breath. “If he’s going to come back to me, I have to trust him.” But she couldn’t bring herself to return the journal to his jacket. She remembered a technique of divination taught to her by a psychic she had visited in Asheville. First, you stood a book of sacred import, say, the Bible or the Koran, upright on its spine on a desk or flat surface. It was hard getting the soft leather binding of the Moleskine to stand upright, it wouldn’t balance on its own, so she placed a finger atop the spine. She heard the raspy hum of snoring behind her, Scott murmuring and stirring in the bed, but when she turned to check on him he rolled onto his side to stop himself from making the noise that was interrupting his sleep.

  How did the technique work again? You let the book fall forward, the pages splaying on the surface of the desk, as you slid your finger beneath the folded-open book with eyes shut and then flipped it, running your hands over the surface of the page as if reading braille until your index finger stopped. That’s all she would read, nothing else, no matter how awful or mysterious those few words might prove to be. Just the sentence on which her finger came to rest, enough also of the surrounding passage to make sense of it. Then she would close the journal and become his obedient wife, respecting those sacrosanct boundaries he was always so worried about. She let the journal fall onto the desktop, inserting her finger into the tented space beneath the binding to turn it right-side up, eyes still shut, gliding her hand along the provident page. When her finger paused, she worried she was on the wrong passage, so inched it downward, but then, not wanting to second-guess herself, slid it up to the original location. After a few seconds she opened her eyes. Reconstituted. Her finger had come to rest on that word. She read from the beginning of the sentence: To go back to her and be reconstituted—that was what he wanted today as on so many previous days, the wanting of it like a nagging injury, a hole at the center of his being. After a few drinks he was able to make the desire subside, grateful for the dulling of memory, but always he could recall, even after the sensation itself was gone, what it felt like to want her again.

  “Where are you?” Scott asked from the bed.

  Those few words from his journal could only refer to her, maybe some fictive version of her, but they were about her nevertheless. She must not let Scott see what she had been doing. Quietly she folded shut the journal, dangling it behind her over the desk, craning her neck toward him.

  “I’ve given myself a chill,” she said. “I woke up a while ago and stood too long by the window in the evening air. So I came over here to put your coat on, you don’t mind, it smells like you and I like the feeling of being wrapped in you.”

  She lifted the jacket onto her shoulders, arms crossed over her chest as she tugged at the lapels from inside, then reached a hand beneath to stash the Moleskine in the inner pocket. The jacket really did smell like Scott as she poked her nose inside the collar, detecting the traces of Bay Rum, also the spicy scent of cinnamon, chocolate, and cigarettes, and an earthy odor she associated with the back of his head. She heard rustling and when she lifted her chin again he had tossed off the sheets, thrown his lanky white legs to the floor, pausing to catch his breath.

  “Are you all right?” she asked. He did not appear to be rested from the nap, the side of his face ruddy, irritated from the pillow.

  “You’re probably hungry by now,” he said.

  “How did you guess? Am I always so hungry when we travel? I really can’t remember, but it seems to me it’s been a long time since I had such an appetite.”

  “Only when you’re happy,” he started to say.

  “I suppose it’s because I’m
happy,” she said, answering her own question, laughing at the happy coincidence of their words, then splashing onto the bed beside him, soon caressing the high tense muscles of his neck and running fingers through the mossy thin hair at the back of his head. Even as her fingers combed the hair, she was thinking two opposite things at once: He is a stranger, his life is full of strangers, and, I know this person better than anyone in the world.

  “When I’m miserable,” she said aloud, “I never want to eat at all. You remember how pinched and cadaverous I was only three or was it five years ago in New York when I had to stay at the, what was the name of that institution, oh, let’s not dwell on such things. Right now all I am is happy—for the two of us, for our days in Cuba, for this time out of time.”

  “And, doubtless, you’ll appropriate my dinner again,” he said.

  “Not if you’re going to be so ornery about it, memorizing and then listing all my trespasses,” she said. “Although I can’t see how it matters, since you hardly ever finish your meals. It’s my duty to eat for both of us.”

  “Well, maybe if I had half a ch, ch—,” he started to say, breaking off in laughter that dissolved into a fit of coughing, in which she could hear the customary wheezing of the disease tunneling deeper into his lungs, the hollow barking of his badly bruised brachia.

  “I don’t like the sound of that cough,” she said. “Are you sure you’re taking care of yourself in California?”

  “It’s nothing,” he said. “I’ve beaten worse. You should know better than anybody the wonder of my recuperative powers. I’ll rest up and be better in no time.”

  “Yes, and I’ll make sure you eat something more than chocolate for dinner tonight. Of course, you won’t be able to keep up with me, but can you imagine how much I might eat if we ever again have a run of good luck—I might become as big as one of those Goya women.”

  Outside the hotel she took his arm and he walked to her left, stepping now and then off the narrow sidewalks into the street thick with pedestrians, cars, and horse-drawn carriages, sheltering her from its dirt, exhaust, manure, smears of discarded food, all the refuse from a day on Calle Obispo. The foot traffic parted only for street trolleys, their bells angrily clanking as they rattled along tracks that protruded abruptly from the street, the drivers slowing but never fully stopping to release passengers or take on new ones. In the wake of the trolleys, the automobiles would make a run of half a block, swerving around potholes only to bog down again among the people crossing indiscriminately from one narrow walk to the other. Repeatedly a bright red Packard raced ahead of them, and then slowly they reeled it in.

  “Tonight is too early,” she whispered, keeping herself from leaping ahead, from plunging straight into years of pent-up desire.

  Wading through the crowds that funneled in either direction down the narrow street, she stepped up onto the sidewalk, then down into the street, careful not to snag her heel on the broken, crumbling curb, her wide-heeled shoes catching on an exposed iron rod, but Scott was there to prevent her stumble. Vendors tried to draw them into shops whose bright window displays featured flowers, fine dresses, shoes, and everywhere the colorful banners of the lottery, the numbers in bold display. “Americans, come here, please,” the shopkeepers called, walking alongside Scott, wares in hand. Again she and Scott caught up to the red Packard and she stared down at the well-dressed passengers, immersed in pleasant conversation, unfazed by their sluggish pace.

  Out of nowhere a girl with bare feet, sporting streaks of dirt on her nose and jaw and a soiled beige jumper, appeared at Zelda’s side. Uttering words in Spanish that Zelda could not understand, the girl petitioned the señora, taking hold of her wrist with softly supplicating words. “Bonita mujer Americana,” she said and inserted her small, soft, clammy palm into Zelda’s, directing her attention across the street, but at what it was impossible to say.

  “What is she saying, Scott?” Zelda asked, smiling at the child, flattered but also rendered uneasy by her pleas. “I think she wants us to follow her. Do you suppose something’s wrong?” The girl tugged at Zelda’s arm with ever-greater urgency.

  “Zelda, we have to be at the Floridita in a few minutes.”

  This was the first she’d heard about a schedule, and it annoyed her that Scott hadn’t said anything until now. She had a right to be kept apprised of their plans.

  “Well, what do you want me to do?”

  “Let go of her hand.”

  “Give her some money, Scott. I’m sure that’s all she wants.”

  He started to take out his billfold, peeling off a five-dollar bill, but the little girl waved her head from side to side, motioning with her free hand for Zelda to follow her, saying, “No, no, de ésta manera no, por favor; me siguen,” jerking almost violently at Zelda’s arm now that she detected reluctance.

  Angling across Calle Obispo, led by the girl, they headed down a side street and Zelda, briefly overwhelmed by the rotting-eggs stench of sewage from nearby drains, felt queasy as a woman with an infant in her arms greeted them. Even before the woman spoke, it was clear what she would say. Indicating the infant bundled against her chest, holding out an empty palm, she informed them that she was without food for her family.

  “No tengo comida para el bebé,” she said, repeating herself several times. “El bebé,” she said, extending the child in her arms, as if the wants of an emaciated child need never be translated. She scraped together enough English to say, “You come, please.”

  “Zelda, we have to be going,” Scott said without resolve, and she looked at him with helplessness, shrugging her shoulders, tipping her head sideways to indicate the girl still clamped to her wrist. At a store doubling as grocer and pharmacy, they approached a window that opened onto the street, where a slight, round-faced Chinese man had already prepared a sack of groceries for the woman.

  “You pay money, yes,” the woman announced. The man behind the counter passed the sack to the woman, then looked up at Scott, naming a price in excess of what he expected.

  Money matters made him irritable. He could recall years when he’d thought nothing of throwing ten-dollar bills at waifs, friends, strangers met in a bar, the doormen at the Waldorf or the Algonquin, Zelda all but indifferent to how they squandered money as long as enough of it was spent on her. It was her simple belief that he would always provide more. Even now she couldn’t understand that the sum he was giving away, if doubled just twice, might make the difference between seven days in Cuba and five.

  “Zelda,” he said, forking over the money to the clerk, hearing the sharp treble of the Western United States creep into his rebuke, as the woman with the infant in her arms and her beggar child at her side waved goodbye, retreating down a narrow lane on which the yellow, pink, and green buildings so closely fronted the sidewalks that the awnings and white iron balconies above seemed to form an arbor here in the middle of the city.

  “We can’t afford,” he said carefully, “to pay for the upkeep of every waif we encounter.”

  Back on Calle Obispo he checked his watch, wondering how Cubans interpreted late arrivals, whether they took them for granted much as the Spaniards did. La Floridita came into view, the building framed in gold frieze and folding around the corner of Obispo and Bernaza, its shuttered doors thrown open so that the street and restaurant were continuous, some of the patrons standing above friends seated at dark wood tables whose bowing legs crawled crablike onto the sidewalks, the actual entry to the club seeming a mere formality. Scott led them under an awning, where a host greeted them, inquiring if they were here for drinks or dinner. “We’re meeting Mr. Matéo Cardoña,” Scott said, and the host waved him through, saying, “Of course.” Beyond a refrigerated seafood display case emanating cold air and the ocean-heavy scent of mackerel, shrimp, stone crabs, and lobster, he guided Zelda to an open spot along the bar, where a bartender measured rum and maraschino liqueur in arcing plashes into a silver-plated shaker, adding shaved ice, then tossing the concoction, before po
uring the drink into long-necked martini glasses.

  “Two of those,” Scott said in clumsy Spanish.

  “How did you know about this place?” she asked. It was reminiscent of cafés they used to visit along the Riviera before it was overrun by Americans.

  “Señor Cardoña is meeting us here,” he said.

  Scott didn’t mention that he’d also heard Ernest speak of La Floridita last year in California, nor that Max had reminded him by cable that, whether or not he looked Ernest up, he ought to try the daiquiris there. Nothing complicated about Max’s motives, and though Scott wasn’t altogether against a rapprochement with his old friend, he knew the fates were set against it. It was never just the two of them in a room anymore—all the history of unwanted advice tossed back and forth, the omnivorous ego of Ernest to be grappled with, and of course the dreadful combination of Scott’s failures and Ernest’s constant climb.

  The bartender slid the daiquiris along the bar, and Scott peeled off a few bills from his roll of pesos. Drinks were cheap, at least someone in this country wasn’t gouging him. He looked around the bar. Matéo was nowhere in sight, which meant they weren’t late, which meant Scott could relax, enjoy his drink, and feel the knot inside his stomach release.

  So far it had been one of those days squandered on trivialities: a fruitless follow-up to yesterday’s visit with the detective succeeded by an errand to the bank, a dispute over the sum in his account, then the hassle of wiring payment to a lawyer in New York City for paperwork he was executing on behalf of an American investor (the lawyer kept billing him for additional petty costs). His reporter friend from the Havana Post was to arrive shortly after the siesta hours, no specified time, but it was growing late. Annoyed by the fact that he still hadn’t received a reply on his query to the chief of police, Matéo kept busy in the meantime. Displacing papers on his desk, he moved items from one stack to another while drafting a list of potential investors in a new casino near the Hotel Nacional, a list filled with local citizens but also Europeans and Americans who were regular or part-time residents of Havana. Appetite began to kick in and he decided the reporter wasn’t coming. He snatched his sport coat from a rack by the door, preparing to set out for La Floridita early, when he heard the buzzer. Pulling on his white linen jacket, he met the reporter outside, remarking, “Almost left without you,” before leading him along San Pedro, the noisome harbor to their right, ships running in and out at this time of day, belching smoke, releasing the flatulence of burnt oil and gas from their engines, horns blaring so that the skiffs and smaller boats would steer clear.