He offered me the job and housing too, right there, and I accepted it, and though he gave me time, I didn’t want any, and when I felt that early warning derealization creeping up in me at the prospect of the open meadow and my passage, I looked out at Arthur at the car door and knew he would be back for me and that he’d pull the shades.
Carlos Ébano was half turned in his leaving when I felt the absence of the dog’s paw on my foot, and he paused there for a moment, waiting for the bright yellow animal to skip down and join him in the stones. Leaves had blown across the porch steps in the early wind, oak leaves, a little wet and glistening still from the rain, and when I looked up from them and saw his posture I thought of the last leaving of my lost lover, so far in the past. I’d wished it a posture of hesitancy and indecision, but I knew then it had been no more than a final sighting of what had been put behind out of complete resolve and recognition of the impossibility of relationship with someone such as I, with my malady, which was itself impossible. This one though was leaving only temporarily, and I’d be following, and would soon see him again. I looked up at Arthur then and thought he was smiling. Then I watched the man, the dog prancing before him, as he headed back toward the barricades and the limousine, and before he got there I had turned and entered my ruined house for the last time.
Peter
When someone called at the house those days, there was a ring in Sara’s sewing room, my half-finished office. I’d been sitting in there a lot, working on the civil service examination, and just that morning it was Warren, phoning to buck me up.
“You’ll do okay,” he said. “It’s nothing.”
And he was right, nothing but a little embarrassment and chagrin, but thoughts of freedom also from the private life. Soon the tourists would be gone and the summer cops too, and if the promised vacancy held up and the exam went well, I’d be on the force again by fall, and I could edge back into the job and forget my civilian failures.
It was raining earlier, a soft August rain, and I was working on Miranda and those odd situations when it’s difficult to give it, a dry run through a series of multiple-choice questions in the prep book, and I remembered it was raining too when I woke from that coma in Philadelphia to find Charlie standing over me at the bedside. He was smiling, then he was speaking, having to repeat himself to get the words down into the last fading of my delirium. “It isn’t the AIDS,” he said. “Not yet.”
I’d been out for more than a week, and it took me a few days to get my legs again when I awakened and another few before I was able to fly back to Provincetown, where I went the very next morning to see Doctor Minten, who gave me a clean bill of health and her usual warning. “You’re still HIV positive. That doesn’t change.”
“Just a good hard whack dentro de la cabeza,“ Carlos said, the next time I saw him. He was dressed in rich casual clothing, an indulgence I hadn’t expected, linen shirt and tooled leather cowboy boots and a fine, recently brushed fedora he’d bought for himself in Tampico. He’d called as soon as he and the men got back to the Manor, but he’d been busy and so had I, and it had been a while before he’d come to the house for drinks and a good long talk in the evening. He placed his hat carefully on a chair, and we sat with our elbows on the bare porcelain, the same kitchen table at which we’d eaten our Thanksgiving dinner more than a year ago.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “How did she know enough to find you?”
“She didn’t. She’d gotten a call from that guy at the records office, telling her John and I had been there and that I was headed out to the house for the survey. Then she sent Alma down with the horses.”
“She had a phone?”
“Oh, hell yes, a cellular. She had a gas generator too, at that glass house. A TV and a radio, a very comfortable setup. It was hard to pull John away from there. He’ll be going back pretty soon in fact, my grandfather.”
“Christ,” I said. “But the house. How in the hell did she get the materials up there, get it built?”
“Well, you see it was a little theatrical, the whole thing. Maybe even a hoax, if you don’t think kindly. There’s a good sized village, a town really, just over the hill from there. Paved streets and a good road in. Department stores, markets, lumberyards, you name it. It’s only a quarter mile away. Some of that light, moonlight, the torches and all? A good deal of that was electrical, flooding into the sky from there.”
There was nothing much to be said about that, so I let it settle and tried something else.
“And why didn’t she leave the place to your father? The house in Tampico, I mean.”
“That’s a whole other story,” he said. “The village was decimated by disease, and when she found out she was pregnant and then had him, she put him out for adoption, both because of the disease and his gringo blood. Then I was born and was an Indian, and she knew about that and took my grandfather’s name off the document. He was gone, you see, she thought permanently, maybe even dead, and it was after my mother died and my father left for the States, just a brief period when I was alone there. And it seemed right to her. Then, of course, I was gone too. There was no reason to change anything after that. She had her position in the village, what was left of it then, and she just went on with her life.”
“Did she every marry?”
“No. She became a public person, a kind of matriarch. Most of the men her age had died, and she took charge of the younger men and women. She kept busy with their economy, in touch with Joaquín Sánchez on the legal-political side of things. It’s a wonder the village lasted at all. But she managed it, and it did.”
“Such a simple story,” I said, laughing lightly, knowing it was only the bones of the matrix.
“Yeah. But in the spaces,” Carlos said. “That’s where the real thing got played out.”
Renovations at the Manor were finished in the second week of September, and I received my formal invitation to the open house and lawn party on the Monday before the Saturday of the event. Carlos had called earlier with the date, on the very day I received notice that I’d passed the civil service examination and had heard from the chief that I was reinstated and could start work on the first of October.
They’d repaired the rutted road that ran in from the highway, and when I reached the last rise and entered the stone parking area I could see balloons bobbing at the railing of the wheelchair ramp leading up to the ambulance dock. Carlos was there, in the doorway in his fedora and a white summer suit, and I saw him touch his brim, then wave, as I pulled in beside the other cars, two with MD plates, Cadillacs, and a half dozen more modest vehicles lined up to the side of them. I saw the pickup truck with the PAL sticker on the back window, and knew Warren was already there.
I’d been in the Manor only once, years ago when I’d been called there officially about some disturbance or other, and I didn’t remember the layout of the place, but once Carlos had handed me a glass of champagne and I’d followed him in and across the short hallway and into the small doctor’s office, I thought I remembered being there. It was still a doctor’s office, though they’d replaced the asphalt tile with hardwood, and where diplomas had hung behind the desk was now a large painting of the lighthouse at the cliff’s edge, and I recognized the work of a local artist. There was a glass instrument cabinet against the wall, gussied up with a Mexican serape that hung down into fringe at the cabinet’s sides, and Carlos told me it was the best they could do. The room was for the on-call doctors, when they came to see the one remaining patient, and they thought they’d continue to leave it this way, even after he was gone. “For the rest of us,” he said, “if necessary.”