North of Havana Page 3

  “You get tired, want to stop, just tell me.”

  It wasn’t easy for me to find oxygen enough to form words. “In all the times… we’ve run together… you’ve never asked how I felt… or told me it was okay to stop.”

  She glanced over her shoulder at me. “So? I’m a year older. Maybe I’m a year nicer.”

  I was shaking my head. “Um-huh. There’s something on your mind. You want to talk, let’s talk.”

  “You always think you know so much. A guy your age, I’m just trying to be careful, that’s all. Save the paramedics a trip. They’ve got better things to do.”

  “I don’t need any favors. I feel fine.” I did, too. Well… I felt fair. I’d spent the last couple of months getting into pretty good shape. Running, swimming, a hundred pull-ups a day. No food after 8 p.m., beer only on the weekend.

  “It’s just that I don’t want you to blow a rod. Or have a stroke.”

  Chuckling, I grabbed her elbow and pulled her to a stop. She looked at me; looked away. I touched my finger to her chin and turned her face, forcing eye contact. Her cheeks were flushed the color of strawberries. Ringlets of blond hair, saturated with sweat, were now a tumid brown. “What’s the problem, Dewey?”

  “Problem? I don’t know what you’re talking about. There’s no problem.”

  “You sure?”

  “Look, I just told you.… Hey, buddy, I just traveled thirteen hundred miles to give you one of the all-time great Christmas surprises, and you’re already badgering me.” There was a warning tone to her voice—she was kidding, but I’d better watch my step.

  Protocol said I should let it go. But there was something in her demeanor… a curiously intense reserve that made me want to push it. She reminded me of some troubled adolescent who, driven by self-consciousness, was fronting stratagems to deflect entrance into her private, unhappy world.

  I tapped her chin to emphasize my concern. “Let’s have it. You come in here full of bluster, determined to make me believe that you’re happy as hell, not a care in the world. But you’ve got raccoon eyes, and you don’t get jet lag flying from New York to Florida. Plus your voice is a little shaky and your attention keeps wandering, and you’re trying way, way too hard to imitate the Old Dewey. There’s something troubling you and you want to talk about it, but maybe you figure the time’s not right… or maybe we’re not the buddies we both pretend to be… or maybe you just don’t have the courage.”

  I was looking into her gray eyes and I watched them gauge her deep softness, her pain, and then saw them glow with anger. She slapped my hand away from her chin and turned her back to me. “Knock it off. Sometimes, Doc, you push a little too hard. It’s not funny and I don’t appreciate it so… yeah, maybe you’re not the friend I thought you were.”

  I said, “Then let’s finish our run and we can both go our separate ways. We’ll each have our own very merry Christmas.”

  She swung around, fists on hips. “What the hell’s with you? Being articulate doesn’t give you license to act like a pious dick! All I want to do is run! Just fucking run and you’re turning it into some kind of shrink session. Do I pry into your private life?”

  “Yeah. All the time. You’re one of the very few people I discuss my private life with.”

  “As if you’ve told me everything. Don’t give me that crap, buster!”

  “Never said I did.”

  She was folded over, stretching her hamstrings, letting me know I was wasting her time; standing there talking, muscles getting tight when we should be running. “Gee, tell me everything, Doc. Make my life complete.”

  “No need. You’re already so happy, why risk being honest?”

  “To say that to me… it’s just so damn offensive—”

  “Honesty is offensive?”

  She was standing upright again, fists clenched. “Quit it! I’m serious—stop it right now! Nobody pries into my private life. You hear me? Nobody!”

  Because she shouted the last of it, the silence that followed resonated. Wind in mangroves made a riverine sound like a distant reach of white water. High aloft, an osprey drifted, whistling frantic, ascending notes. Looking into her face, I waited several beats before saying, “Then run, Dewey. Just keep on running. Sorry I tried to interfere.” I turned and jogged away; left her standing. Had run several hundred yards and was beginning to wonder if I had levered too hard; was already condemning myself for being unnecessarily pointed when I heard her deer-light stride behind me, getting closer, coming fast… entertained the unpleasant possibility that she might slug me in the back of the head as she ran past. I’d never seen Dewey so mad.

  But instead I felt her grab my elbow and I let her swing me around. “Goddamn you!” she said. “Goddamn it… what right do you have to speak to me that way?” She was crying. It was the first time that I had ever seen jock-hard, tour-tested Dewey Nye cry. “I don’t need to be interrogated and I don’t need that kind of cruelty. I don’t need that in my life right now!”

  I made an effort to say something sharp and clever in reply… but found myself taking her into my arms, holding her, feeling her ribs spasm beneath my fingers, feeling her face hot and wet against my cheek as she sobbed, squeezing her tightly to me as if that were the way to both protect her and to apologize.

  “I was a jerk,” I whispered. “It’s the new me. Lately… more and more… I’ve been acting like a jerk.”

  “No, you were a prick. There’s a difference.”

  “It’s been a rough year.”

  Dewey was nodding, her chin hard on my shoulder. “I’m so sorry about what happened, Doc. Losing that girl. How many nights did we talk and you hardly mentioned it? But I could tell.”

  Holding Dewey, I suffered a brief cerebral replay of once holding a woman of the same comfortable size and shape, but who had Navaho hair and Cracker sensibilities. I would never hold that woman again. I whispered, “Old news. Water under the bridge.”

  “It really gets to be like that? The hurt goes away?”

  “If you need to know… maybe there’s a reason.”

  “There is.”

  “Someone died?”

  “Not that bad.”

  Anticipating what had happened, I cupped my hand to the back of her head and patted softly. “Maybe worse, huh? In ways, probably worse. I’m sorry.”

  Dewey pushed herself away from me, wiping her face. “I lied to you. I didn’t come down here just for something to do over Christmas.”

  “No kidding?” I said dryly. “You were so convincing. So… are we going to run, or are we going to talk?”

  She managed a smile before jogging off—but now at a much slower pace. “What an asshole,” she said. “We’ll do both.”

  What happened was, Dewey hadn’t flown to Spain with her lover, Bets Bzantovski. She’d flown over on the red-eye a couple of days later as a last-minute birthday gift to Bets. Dewey had charmed the desk clerk at Madrid’s Hotel Barcelona out of a key to Bets’s room and carried her own luggage up. Her arrival was a surprise and Dewey didn’t want a bellboy around when she flicked on the lights and saw Bets’s face.

  But the surprise was on Dewey. She opened the door to hear muffled laughter, then an eerie silence. Then she hit the lights… and there was Bets, naked, in bed with a woman named Elaine Wengo, one of the young French stars on the circuit. The next part was harder for me to picture because I know Bets and like her very much. “I just stood there like a dope,” Dewey said. “It was like one of those god-awful nightmares where something’s chasing you but you can’t make your legs move. I had a big duffel bag in my hand and I didn’t even put it down, and the whole time she’s screaming at me to get the hell out, that she hadn’t invited me, and what right did I have to walk in on her like that.”

  “Bets was screaming at you?”

  “Who do you think I’m talking about—”

  “Well, the French girl—”r />
  “No, I’m telling you. Bets was saying that stuff to me. I’d flown all that way, changed my whole schedule, and she’s treating me like some stranger, some uninvited guest. Like she hated me…”

  I pictured Bets: a string-bean woman with muscles; long arms and longer legs; brown hair cropped short and brushed back; lean, European face with dark eyes that lived beneath heavy brows; eyes that knew a lot, that had seen a lot. Bets’s face was familiar to anyone who subscribed to sports magazines. Bets was the one with the controversial lifestyle; the one who once told a reporter: “Your average reader and I probably have a lot in common. We both love beautiful women.” Bets was the one who had become the darling of the news magazines because, as a Romanian, she had taken a hiatus from tennis to fight as a rebel leader against Ceausescu and the Securitate, his brutal secret police. I knew from friends, people in the intelligence community, that she had been implicated in the assassination of at least three of Ceausescu’s people. Used her celebrity to open doors, then popped them. It was not public information. Bets did not know that I knew.

  I told Dewey, “I’m surprised she behaved that way. She’s an extraordinary woman.”

  Dewey said, “Yeah, well… Bets can also be an extraordinary bitch.”

  The story didn’t come pouring out. It wasn’t easy for Dewey. She kept approaching the subject, then dodging away. I plodded along and listened, pretending to look at the scenery. There were pepper bushes and webs of Spanish moss on oaks and stilt-legged egrets high-stepping along the ditches as tourist traffic filed by… rental cars and mid-western license plates as pale as the winters they’d left behind; visitors viewing the tropics through windshields, as removed from the biota as if they were peering through television screens.

  I didn’t say much. Friends aren’t supposed to press friends for details, nor do friends leave friends waiting for answers. Both of us were chastened by our obligations. A further complication was that Dewey had never spoken openly to me about her homosexuality. We had a strange friendship. There were things I could not talk about and things she would not talk about, but everything else was on the table. Bets was always referred to as “my roommate” or “my housemate,” as if their relationship was based on economic considerations. That I knew and understood was implicit—just as it was also understood that I must never, ever approach the subject openly.

  But now, that’s just what Dewey had to do.

  “You’re in love with Bets?” I asked.

  We were back on the shell road that led to Dinkin’s Bay. It was nearly dark and a high wind sailed scudding clouds across a plum-colored sky. In a very small voice, she said, “I guess so… hell, I don’t know. Are you surprised? I mean, that it’s that way between Bets and me.”

  Apparently, it was easier for her to pretend that I didn’t know—as if that were the only reason she had never discussed it before.

  “I knew that you two were close,” I said.

  “You think any less of me now that I’ve told you? It seems so… weird.”

  “Offended, you mean? Outraged? Not likely.”

  “If it bothers you, I’d understand.”

  Nope, it didn’t bother me. The biological truth is that homosexual behavior is almost certainly genetically mandated.

  I said, “Why? Does it seem weird to you?”

  She shrugged. “At first it did… then it didn’t seem weird at all. Like the most natural thing in the world. I’d tried it with men”—she paused to look at me—“but it never seemed to work out.”

  I already knew that because Dewey and I had once tried. It was sweet and tender but utterly without passion. Rather than feeling closer to her, I’d finished feeling as if we’d been distanced and, worse, as if our friendship had been jeopardized.

  “So you caught Bets screwing around. You’re not the first couple to have to weather an affair. Maybe she was lonesome. Maybe she was drunk. Maybe she just had to get it out of her system. But one thing we both know is that Bets is a good person and has a hell of a lot of character. So, when we get back to the house, you call her on the phone and start sorting it out. Madrid? It’s about midnight there, I think.”

  Dewey said, “No. Nope, we’re done. What happened hurts like hell; catching them like that, but we were done before I ever flew to Spain. Before Bets left, we spent the whole time fighting.”

  “About wanting to see other people?”

  She hemmed and hawed and avoided the subject. Dewey is one of the private ones. Talking too much about herself makes her uncomfortable. She needed a break; no more pushing.

  It was later, when we were back at my stilthouse that she told me, no, what she and Bets had been fighting about was me.

  3

  We had showered and changed. Because Dewey said she wasn’t in a party mood, we decided not to go to the marina. How long had it been since I’d missed a Friday night with the fishing guides? I made a light dinner: grilled snapper with mango chutney and salad. We did the dishes exchanging the kind of polite conversation that is really silence. Finally, as I was putting the last dish away, she said, “Are you still in the mood to listen? There’re a couple of things I left out.”

  I told her, “No kidding,” then listened to her tell me that, for some reason, it would be a lot easier to talk about if she didn’t have to look at me. I suggested we sit out on the deck, lights off, and look at the winter sky. Dewey said no, what she wouldn’t mind doing was maybe lie on the bed, her face in a pillow, with only the reading light on. Then she added, “And you might as well rub my back while I’m down there,” giving it a tone of indifference—why not do two jobs at once? “I pulled a latissimus the other day when I was lifting. My whole back feels out of whack.”

  I thought: Why does she want to try this again? Then I thought: Because she’s trying to rebound from Bets.

  But I did what she said. She was trying to orchestrate so carefully that it seemed needlessly cruel not to go along with it. Sometimes I try hard to believe my own lies.…

  So I switched the reading light on, switched the other lights off. Heard her fiddling with the stereo and then heard Marianne Faithfull come on, soft, haunting, ephemeral—one of Tomlinson’s albums from his flower child days. Then came around the clothes locker into shadows to see Dewey lying there in nothing but her heavy bra and bikini panties. Anticipating me, she was up on one elbow, face looking soft and serious. Before I could speak, she said, “Just shut the hell up and let me get this out of my system. All I want you to do is work on my back.”

  I said, “Your call.”

  She buried her face in the pillow and said, “Don’t say a word.”

  “If that’s what you want.”

  “‘Cause what I need to do is, I’m going to pretend like you’re not here.…”

  Sitting on the bed, hip-to-hip; Dewey sprawled belly-down, talking softly about this and that, nothing serious, until she said: “I guess this thing with Bets’s been on my mind. So, yeah, maybe I need to talk with somebody about it. Lucky you, huh?”

  Long silence.

  Then: “What’d you ask me—am I in love with Bets? I answered you, but I didn’t answer you. Bets told me for nearly a year—‘I love you, Dewey’—before I could even make myself say the words.”

  I waited through another long pause. Heard, “So… I finally said them and… Christ, it was like freedom. Like I could finally admit, yeah, this is what I am. All the time I spent worrying—hey, why’m I the only one who doesn’t fit in? God… and the guilt. Gone, just like that. ‘I love you, Bets.’ Said those words and it was the greatest feeling. Like letting go. You know?”

  No, I didn’t know. But I didn’t say it. Kept working on her back, using my thumbs to knead the lean muscle cordage beneath soft skin. I wanted to tell her something Tomlinson had once said: Guilt is the curse of those who care. It wasn’t often, but the man’s unrestrained spiritualism sometimes made sense even to me. But this
was her time to talk… and it was sounding more and more like a catharsis.…

  “So I moved in with Bets. It wasn’t just because I wanted a roommate, like I told you. All I wanted to do was be with her. Be with Bets. Man—we laughed so much together. Something else, first time in my life, I enjoyed… sex. First time anyone ever touched me that I wasn’t tense or worried or felt like I had to fake it. You know Bets— those long fingers of hers?—but they’re soft, too. The way she uses them. And kissing—”

  I felt Dewey’s body shudder beneath me.

  Could feel my own pulse as I listened to her say, “The kissing was so nice. You know that feeling? You’re kissing someone so lost in it all, like you’re breathing for each other. Then we’d giggle like little girls.” She said, “Whatever happens, I’ve got Bets to thank for that,” as she pushed herself up on an elbow, fished around beneath her… heard the sound of contracting elastic… and she slipped her bra off. Got a brief look at the pendulous weight of her left breast as she turned to toss the bra on the floor. “You mind? This thing’s choking me plus it’s getting in your way.”

  I cleared my throat; looked at her clothes in a pile by my feet. Stood and folded them neatly over my telescope, more to put some distance between us than anything. My body was reacting to her story in a way that I could not control. I needed a break.

  Heard Dewey say, “Get back here, Ford.” Heard her say, “Hey—while you’re up? You got any oil? Body lotion, I mean?”

  I did. Knew I shouldn’t get it… but I found it in the medicine locker anyway. Then, when I was settled, pouring oil on her back, she said, “Now… where were we?”