“You sound jealous, Griff.” She turns her wicked, bottomless blacks on me and I feel myself squirm.
“Go up to the cabin if you want to. I don’t do jealousy, hon.”
She starts trapping on defense herself now. “You don’t do jealousy! Well, you don’t have the right to be jealous! You don’t have any rights, period! You can’t change the ground rules!”
Maybe Wendi wasn’t all that certifiable a disaster. Come to think of it, Wendi had her moments. She could be a warm, nurturing person. We talked, we did things together. The summer we were breaking up, I built her kid a treehouse, which might be the only unselfish good I’ve accomplished in my life. Blanquita’s a Third World aristocrat, a hothouse orchid you worship but don’t dare touch. I wouldn’t dare ask her to help me knock together a bookcase or scrub the grout around the bathroom tiles. But Wendi, alas, never made me feel this special, this loved.
“I’m serious, Griff.” She closes her eyes and rams her fists in eyelids that are as delicately mauve as her sweatshirt. “You keep me in limbo. I need to know where we stand.”
“I don’t want you to go,” I say. I’m not myself. I’m a romantic in red suspenders.
“What do you want me to do?”
“Whatever you want to do, hon.”
Her body sags inside her oversized sweatshirt. She gets off the mattress, strokes Marcos with the toes of her Reeboks, checks a shredded ficus leaf, tosses the skein of orange wool from the balcony down to the parking lot.
“Hullo,” I say. “Hey, Baby.” I really want to reach her. “Hey, watch him!” Wendi was a big basketball fan, a refugee from Hoosierland, and she was the first and so far the only woman I’ve known who could sit through a Braves or Falcons game. If I could get Miss Bataan to watch the Gorilla stuff it, we’d be okay, but she doesn’t even pretend to watch.
“I’m going to make myself a cup of tea,” she says.
We say nothing while she brews herself a pot of cherry almond. Then she sits on my bed and drinks a slow cup, fiddling with the remote control and putting to flight all ten sweaty goons. F. Lee Bailey comes on and talks up the Bhopal tragedy. I can’t believe it’s been a year. I must have been seeing Emilou on the side when it happened. Yes, in fact Emilou cried, and Wendi had made a fuss about the mascara on my sixty-buck shirt. An auditorium packed with Herbalifers comes on the screen. The Herbalifers are very upbeat and very free enterprise. They perk her up.
“We don’t need that,” I plead.
“You don’t know what you need,” she snaps. “You’re so narcissistic you don’t need anyone. You don’t know how to love.”
Sailor, I think. It thrills me.
“That’s not fair.”
But Blanquita the Beautiful races on to bigger issues. “Not just you, Griff,” she scolds in that eerily well-bred, Asian convent-schooled voice. “You’re all emotional cripples. All you Americans. You just worry about your own measly little relationships. You don’t care how much you hurt the world.”
In changing gears, she’s right up there with Mario Andretti. I envy her her freedom, her Green Card politics. It’s love, not justice, that powers her. Emilou and Wendi would have died if I caught them in an inconsistency.
She jabs at more buttons on the remote control doodad. Herbalifers scuttle into permanent blackness, and a Soweto funeral procession comes on. Big guys in black boots come at pallbearers with whips and clubs. Blanquita lays her teacup on the top sheet. These are serious designer sheets, debris from my months with Emilou. When Joker Rosario went to South Africa back in the long, long ago, he was treated very, very white. He wrote pleasant things about South Africa in his paper. Yesterday’s statesman is today’s purveyor of Muscatel. South Africa is making her morose, and I dare not ask why. I suddenly remember that the neighborhood dry cleaner doesn’t know how to take tea stains off but does a good job with Kahlúa. Blanquita flashes the black inscrutables one more time and says, “I can’t stand it anymore, Griff. It’s got to stop.”
South Africa? I wonder, but dare not hope. I carefully remove her teacup and take hold of her fingertips, which are still warm from holding the cup, and pull them up to my beard. “We have each other,” I say.
“Do we?”
It’s time to take charge, to force the good times to roll. Some nations were built to take charge. It’s okay for a nation of pioneers to bully the rest of the world as long as the cause is just. My heart is pure, my head is clear. I retrieve the doodad from Blanquita’s perfect hand. I want to show her the funtimes of TV-land. I slice through a Mexican variety show on SIN. Any time of the day or night, those Mexicans are in tuxedos. All those blow-dried Mexican emcees in soccer stadiums, looking like Ricardo Montalbans who never made it.
I know she’s a secret fan.
On cue, my trusty nineteen-incher serves up the right stuff. It’s National Cheerleading Contest time. A squad in skimpy skirts, Oceanside High’s cutest, synchronizes cartwheels and handstands, and starts to dust the competition. I feel godly powers surge through my body as Blanquita relaxes. Soon she relaxes enough to laugh.
“Did you ever try out as a cheerleader?” I ask. I can sense the imminence of terrific times.
Blanquita the Beautiful watches the kids on the screen with gratifying intensity. Then she thrusts a hesitant leg in the air. It’s the fault of the French maid’s apron that she’s wearing over her baggy sweats; my saucy exotic’s turned a schoolgirl routine into something alien and absurd. Oh, Blanquita, not so fast!
“I’m too good for you, Griff,” she pants, twirling an invisible baton and high-stepping across the condo’s wall-to-wall. “Pappy would call you illiterate scum.”
“And so I am. But Joker’s selling rotgut through a retractable grate and Mama’s perming Koreans in her living room. Ferdie and Imelda they’re not.” If People Power hadn’t cut them down, if Joker’s own reporters hadn’t locked him out, Blanquita was promised a place in the Miss Universe contest. That’s why she kept her citizenship.
“That’s needlessly cruel.”
“Baby, you’ve got to stop living in the past.”
“Okay.” She stops the twirling and marching. She turns the TV off without the doodad though I’ve begged her not to many times. Without the light from the screen, the condo room seems as dull and impersonal as a room in a Holiday Inn.
Without Blanquita I’d be just another Joe Blow Buckhead yuppie in his Reeboks. It’s she who brings me to bed each night and wakes me up each morning, big as a house and hard as a sidewalk.
“Okay,” she goes again. “Who needs a crummy tropical past?”
We’re out of the woods. I start to relax.
“Two cheers for cable sleaze,” I shout. She plucks Marcos from his hidey hole behind the ficus and babies him. “I’m saying yes to the Chief, Griff. Hip, hip!”
“What?”
“He says I make him look like a million dollars and make him feel like even more.”
“Get it in writing. That’s a low-rent come-on. He wouldn’t dare try it on the office girls.”
“Of course not.”
She’s not been getting my point.
“I have to get on with my life. And anyway, you said you weren’t jealous so what’s to hold me up?”
I check out her pulse rate with my lips. I’m not verbal. Maybe I don’t love Blanquita. Because I don’t know what love is. I’m not ready for one-on-one.
Baby Blanquita is too agitated to smell the charred lamb whooshing off the hibachi, so it’s up to me, the narcissist, to rescue the rescue-worthy. The balcony that holds the smoking hibachi is eighteen floors up. Standing between the high gray sky and the pocket-sized pool, I feel omnipotent. Everything’s in place.