Sighing, he gave the operator Don Willie’s number. There was a long wait. A maid finally said, “Digame?” He asked for Don Willie. There was another wait. Then Don Willie’s voice exploded in his ear, high and tense and irritable. “Yes, yes? Who is it? What do you want?” Beecher could imagine him shouting into the phone, flushed and excited, with an eye rolling about anxiously to check last-minute preparations for his party.
“This is Mike Beecher.” He couldn’t make himself say Don Willie; the title was pure affectation, and Beecher salvaged some pride by not using it.
“Yes, yes, yes,” Don Willie cried, in a rush of sibilants. “What do you want? I am very busy, I have many things to do, please.”
“I’d like to come to your party tonight,” Beecher said. “Is that all right?”
“I have asked you before, you say no, you are not interested. I am hurt by these things. Why do you want to come tonight? Why are you interested?”
“I have an American friend who would enjoy your party. She’s a young girl, and this is her first visit to Spain.”
“She would like it, no? And you, Mike Beecher? It is not interesting to you?”
“Oh, I’d like it too, of course.” Beecher sighed and hauled down his pathetic little flag. “I’d be delighted.”
“There is a large crowd already.”
“Well, if we’d be in the way, Don Willie...”
“What did you say?”
“I said, if we’d be in the way, well forget it.”
Beecher knew that this wasn’t what Don Willie wanted to hear; it was the title, the lovely Don, that he wanted to hear ringing over the wires. “Another time, Don Willie,” he said. “But thanks anyway, Don Willie.”
“No, no, you must come to my party. I am happy to have you and your friend. She is, how is it, no tramp, eh, Mike?”
“She’s no tramp,” he said slowly.
“You must dress up, please, Mike. A tie and a coat. Many important people will be here.”
“Sure.”
Beecher went into his bedroom and poured himself a small peg of brandy from a bottle on his dressing table. He rolled it around in his mouth before swallowing it. It almost got rid of the taste of shame. He put on dark slacks and a white silk jacket he had had made in Gibraltar, and which now glowed softly and luminously from Encarna’s numerous gentle launderings. Don Willie wanted a tie, too, he remembered; mustn’t miss a trick. He chose a solid blue bow tie, and stuck a red carnation in his buttonhole. Then he stared at himself in the mirror. When you hung around because the booze was cheap, it was time to get out. That’s what Trumbull said. Well, Don Willie’s booze wasn’t just cheap, it was free. Beecher poured himself another drink and stood looking at himself in the mirror, the glass in one hand and a cigarette in the other. The romantic birdman, he thought, bitterly. He was tall and wiry, with thick black hair graying at the temples, and his face was deeply tanned except for a white scar that ran diagonally across his forehead from his hairline to his eyebrow. Once there had been a look of anger and impatience in his eyes, he remembered; when he was flying and there was reason and purpose in his life. Now that look was gone. His eyes were mild, and his expression was without conviction; he was a man who would not give offense, a man who would find a compromising solution to any challenge. This was what Beecher saw in the mirror, the reflection of a man who had solved his problems by smiling, shrugging, and taking a drink. Anybody’s drink.
4
The Espada was built on the beach a mile from Mirimar, a glittering complex of glass and steel, which, in Beecher’s view, was about as appropriate to the area as a row of igloos. He had a drink in the bar while Laura changed. The place was catching on; the lobby was clamorous with expensively turned-out tourists, and the bartenders and desk clerks all spoke English. It was typical of what was happening in southern Spain. Everything was becoming chic and haute. Beecher’s glass of brandy and soda cost thirty pesetas, or sixty cents, as contrasted with five pesetas in the Bar Central, and two pesetas in the fishermen’s cafés along the beach. The change grieved Beecher for other than economic reasons. While Spain was cheap tourists seemed tolerant of the fact that they weren’t in France, say, or America. They accepted the bad roads and meager electricity and whimsical train schedules with some grace, because their books of travelers checks stayed pleasantly plump in this bargain-basement of Europe. But as prices went up they became cranky and querulous, and their chorus of complaint irritated Beecher. He loved Spain, and he knew some of its faults and shortcomings. But he didn’t make a point of trying to understand it. The thing was too big, too complex, too full of contradictory currents of racial and religious and political feelings. Every thesis had its antithesis, but the middle areas of synthesis were found only by the stubbornly innocent or the stubbornly ignorant.
There was a group sitting alongside, and he decided they fell into both categories.
A woman was saying, “But it’s the Spanish mind, isn’t it, dear? I mean, they don’t have our ideas of property, for instance.” She spoke with piercing clarity, happily and arrogantly unaware of Spaniards within range of her mid-Western twang. “They steal things, of course, but like children do, isn’t that true?”
The man with her smiled affectionately and patted her plump hand. “Old soft-hearted Nellie. You’re letting them off easy. Actually, you know, Spain was run for a long time by the Moors. Yes, that’s a fact. And Moors are Africans. Now you consider the African mind, and you can understand what is behind a lot of the church superstition and immorality here.”
The bartender spoke to them in English. “Would you care for something else?”
“Yes. Another pair of brandies. French, remember, not Spanish.”
Beecher left a tip and walked from the bar. In the lobby he overheard a woman say, “I saved three weeks by skipping Greece,” and this presented him with such a funny and mysterious picture that it almost overcame his irritation.
Laura stepped from the elevator. She was dressed simply in a pale yellow dress, with a skirt that swung like a bell about her slim brown legs. Her blonde hair was brushed into a shining pageboy, and the brilliant lights in the lobby gleamed on her bare shoulders and arms.
She looked casual and happy, and somehow more expensive than the clotheshorses cantering about the lobby in racing colors of silver fox and blue mink. It was the vitamins and orange juice that cost the real money, he thought. And the swimming and golf and tennis lessons. She had the luxurious look of someone who had been lovingly and thoughtfully cultivated; and the time and money spent on her was evident in the lines of her body, and the bloom of her skin and eyes and hair. It was more conspicuous than an acre of mink.
He felt happy and excited as he took her arm.
They drove up the coastal road to Don Willie’s villa, with the sea as bright and smooth as a silver platter on their right, and the whitewashed homes and shops of the village lovely and peaceful against the moonlit bulk of the Sierra Nevadas.
“No wonder you’re happy here,” Laura said.
That was the pitch, he thought. He wanted her to think he was happy, and be happy herself these few days. He told her about the woman who had saved three weeks by skipping Greece, and was rewarded by her spontaneous howl of laughter.
“Isn’t it wonderful?” she said. “It opens up a whole new idea of travel. You could skip the Louvre and save a day or so. And maybe not go to the Vatican and get a whole week end to the good.”
“We ought to write a book,” Beecher said. “Just on what not to see. And we could work out schedules so people wouldn’t have to leave home at all.”