I live in little rooms beneath the eaves, on floors where the elevator never arrives, where the staff polish shoes and copper. Sometimes I am given a real hotel room, when occupancy is low.
On the beach I say hello to people I saw in the bar the night before. The women, older than me, eyes that flash like stars. They count out the shrinking capital of their beauty. I am the investor who enhances it for them. In disbelief, they receive me in their beds. With the persistent hardness of my sex I take away their shame. It fills them with pride. They are the ones who have caused that turmoil, that boiling of the bloodstream, and they will help me to get rid of it as well. That is the deal.
In Biarritz, Abijail Falcón is awaiting her divorce. She comes out of the gym, she is wearing shiny white stretch pants, she looks healthy and hungry. I’m sure she’s had her breasts done. Before I come in her, she says, ‘Is this normal? Are you sure you don’t have some kind of deviation?’
The Argentine uses herself against me, she doesn’t believe in altruism, only in pathologies.
I don’t object when she insists on buying me a new wardrobe in the shops along Avenue Edouard VII.
‘You were made for Italian fashion,’ she tells me, seated on a pouffe, her smooth brown legs crossed at the knees.
She was virtuous for twenty-four years — although she quotes Leonard Cohen with a malicious little laugh when she says give or take a night or two — but now she follows her desires.
‘Life is short, dearest, shorter than you might think.’
I sport light linen blazers by Corneliani, a light gray woolen sport coat by Zegna; I have my doubts about pegged trouser legs, but Abijail says the pants make my ass look good. I enjoy making her feel like I’m some sort of erotic toy. That’s what she’s paying for — or at least her soon-to-be-ex, the car manufacturer from Córdoba, is: the gold card has his name on it.
After a few days she reveals her predilection for straddling my face, to ride me like that, rubbing her cunt over my mouth and nose. Then she takes possession of my member. She has little to lose, the older woman, restored like a monumental mansion, her eyes full of playfulness and defeat.
I avoid sleeping with them. To wake up beside them is an intimacy I cannot bear. Two or three times I accidentally fall asleep; by early light the dilapidation is more than I can stand. All lust then immediately reverts to its opposite.
‘Stay, would you,’ says the heiress to the Krause fortune in Karlovy Vary. ‘I’ll pay you for it.’
It proves negotiable. The repression of disgust can be expressed in cash; the start of all prostitution. But I don’t stay long in Karlovy Vary, the hard, bling-bling world of the Russian mafiosi who settled there after the fall of the Wall does not particularly appeal to me.
On the volcanic island of Nevis, on the other hand, I stay for six months. I rent a well-lighted room on the outskirts of Charlestown, above an eatery where they serve excellent Creole food — beans, rice, goat meat. The jungle starts where the houses stop, my balcony is only a few meters from the edge of it. Sometimes at night you hear something heavy crash to the ground, a piece of fruit perhaps, a branch. Above the bed, which creaks like a ship in distress, a mosquito net hangs in broad pleats. I like lying under it, staring at the wooden ceiling, the fan, and thinking about the winding road that brought me here.
I play at the Four Seasons Resort, a haven of hysterical luxury. It wasn’t easy finding a job in the Caribbean. I sent around a promotional CD, with a résumé and flattering photos in which you see me seated at the grand piano in the hall of mirrors at Grand Hotel Pupp. The Four Seasons’ regular pianist has gone to Miami for six months, that’s the slot into which I fit. Beside the pool in the evening a steel band plays, I sit at an undependably tuned piano at the edge of the patio. The sea washes in with a sigh, people walk hand in hand along the surf, which is lit up by phosphorescent plankton — you can have a good time there.
I meet Tate Bloom from New York. She’s a public relations manager for the Four Seasons chain, she has an office job in New York and travels every few weeks to Nevis, the Bahamas and Costa Rica, to maintain the local contacts, as she puts it during an introductory dinner in the dining room. She hands me her business card. I hand her mine. I’m feeling rowdy and steal bites of food from her plate.
‘Please, Ludwig,’ she says, ‘try to respect the process.’
That’s enough to give me a hint of what the future has in store.
She has red hair, a Jewish-looking face, an Irish-American background. Tate is thirty, only a couple of years older than me, it will be nice to be normal again. We go to Eddy’s Bar in my little four-wheel-drive rental. The music is loud, we can barely hear each other. A black man comes over and sits down at our table, he talks to Tate and a few times fetches us bottles of beer. He puts Tate’s glass on a napkin and pours her beer slowly. His dedication is over the top. He’s friendly to me. Being desired by two men does her good, she laughs and glows. Her light slip-ons gleam like silk. The polish on her toenails is still fresh. I tell the man it was nice of him to bring us beer, but that I’d like to continue my conversation with the lady now, without him around. He gets up, starts to say something, but then leaves without a word of protest. Tate is aghast, she says, ‘Do you know who that was? The owner!’
‘He was putting the make on you. Three is a crowd.’
She forgets her decorum for a moment, she bursts into laughter. In the car we kiss. She smells sweet, her teeth are perfect. American. Like new.
‘I have to get back to the hotel,’ she says, ‘I can’t. .’
The sky is wide open, its cool breath pours over us. I park in front of the Creole restaurant and she goes upstairs with me. Her resistance has an end. She whispers nasty things in my ear, words I’ve never heard that way before. I push into her a little ways, then there’s an obstacle.
‘Sorry,’ she says.
I’m drunk and boundless but she refuses, the tampon stays in. She exhibits an exciting pattern of surrender and refusal. She kneels in front of me on all fours, her body floating like a pale spot in the satin of the night. I smear saliva on my sex and put it in her with short, steady thrusts. Her little cries are broken by the pillow. She holds her hand back and presses it against my pelvis, a brake. I’m dizzy with pleasure. The jungle begins to throb. A cry rings out there, then another, then the tense silence returns, the bated breath.
She moans.
‘Oh, fuck. Oh, goddamn.’
We ride the rhythm of spasms. The blue mist in the room surrounds us like a shell.
She shakes me awake, frightened.
‘What’s that?’ she whispers.
‘Monkeys,’ I whisper back.
They move in little bands along the forest’s edge. Sometimes one of them will dare a leap onto the roof. They have flap-ears and black, serious little faces. I go to the window and see them in the weak, peach-like light, moving cautiously from tree to tree.
‘I have to get back,’ Tate says nervously. ‘You have to give me a ride.’
I drop her off along the lane of palms that leads to the Four Seasons; she doesn’t want the staff to see her now and know that we were together. She chooses a shortcut across the golf course, her heels punch holes in the mossy grass. She takes her shoes off, holds them in one hand and walks towards the first row of apartments, then disappears from sight.
That first night determines our routine. We sleep together, we wait till morning, the rustling of the monkeys at the forest’s edge, then I take her back to the hotel. During my time on the island she flies in from New York four times, for a couple of days. The last time she brings with her a new player in the game: Todd Greene, a designer, a New Yorker like her, they’re going to get married in December. The fisher — men have drawn their sloops up onto the sand for the season, you know that there is a skeleton of ancient trusses and planks beneath the thick layers of paint, the green, the blue, the yellow, the names Praise Him, Morning Star, Light of My Eyes.