“Who was at these parties that you went to with Baranov, then? Americans? Mexicans? Russians?”
“Yes. And Bulgarians and Spaniards and a few Cubans from time to time. I met Uncle Fidel when he was just a piss ant lawyer. He was nothing big in those days.”
“Americans?” he asked again.
“Some.”
“CIA?”
Evita shrugged. “I never asked. They were good times. Everyone was having a lot of fun. Sometimes we’d fly over to Acapulco … that was before it became really big. Sometimes we’d fly over to Cancun on the Gulf Coast. One night we had a picnic, a bunch of us, in front of a Mayan pyramid. We went up to the top, just Valentin and me, and we made love there. I was an offering to the gods. That’s what he told me.”
“Did you love him?” McGarvey asked gently.
She smiled dreamily and leaned her head back, her eyes toward the ceiling, her lips parted, her hands on her lap as if she were in some yoga position. “Maybe if you explained what that word means …” She drifted. “I used to know, but then it seemed to change. Every time I thought I had it, it would change again. Damndest thing, you know. There weren’t any answers anywhere … not even in the Mayan temple. Even the old ones didn’t know. So who was I, a lesser mortal, to figure it out? Darby wanted me sometimes. I understood that. Valentin wanted me at other times. I understood that, too. But it didn’t last very long.”
She’d been a little girl looking for love and security, McGarvey thought. What she’d gotten instead were lies and manipulation. Owens had seen the confusion and unhappiness in the girl, and it had made him angry at his student, at his superstar. Life was filled with disappointments, though. He didn’t know anyone who was guiltless, or anyone who had never suffered.
After the revolution came to Cuba and Castro installed himself in office, Mexico City cooled down for a time. Baranov stopped bringing her past the Ateneo Español to wait for him while he talked with friends. Even the nightlife seemed subdued compared to what it had once been. People had become more serious, Evita said. She had been flying high, and she began to come down. A week, or sometimes two, might pass during which she would see neither her husband nor Baranov. She had no idea where either of them were getting themselves off to in those days (later she learned that Baranov was bouncing back and forth between Mexico and Moscow, while Darby was commuting on a weekly basis between Mexico and Washington, D.C.). She did know that they were very busy. When they were together, she said, they seemed preoccupied, distant, as if only a part of them had returned to her. Big things were in the wind, she knew at least that much. And a year later, when the Bay of Pigs story broke in all the newspapers, she’d known what her husband and Baranov had been up to all that time, but by then, of course, she had been installed in their Washington house, and she became pregnant with Juanita. After that she rarely saw her husband, and only once in that first year, shortly after her daughter was born, did she see Baranov.
“I was a widow, but I was too dumb to realize it at the time,” she told McGarvey, sitting up. Already she was starting to come down from her coke high. Her tolerance was up. McGarvey figured she probably had a pretty heavy habit for it to work off so fast. She’d probably be on crack before too long. The cycle was common from what he’d read about it.
What about the three houses in Mexico? The town house that Owens had called a palace, the mountain house, the beach house? She had never gotten herself involved with the finances of their marriage. Darby was a more than adequate provider. She never wanted for anything. The bills were always paid, their house staff in Mexico City and again in Washington, operated a household account which took care of their physical needs, and five thousand dollars was automatically deposited into her own checking account each month. If she’d wanted more, even twice that amount, she knew that Darby would have given it to her, no questions asked. Not once in the years they were together had she ever balanced her checkbook, or even noted a check in the register. There simply was no need for it. Such work, when she first came to New York, was so alien to her, so outside the realm of her ordinary knowledge, that she immediately hired an accountant who did it all for her, and who was still doing things with numbers to keep her afloat. She was even quite prosperous in her own right, she’d been told a couple of years ago. But money meant nothing to her. It never had meant anything to her. She had wanted a relationship, plain and simple. It’s all she’d ever wanted, really.
“There were a lot of years there when I was alone, raising Juanita. And I didn’t mind being alone. Not really. Mexico City had been fun, but now I was a mother. That to me was a million times more important than all the little intrigues and schemes we’d played. I don’t think I even read a newspaper or looked at a news show for five years. I had my own little world raising my daughter, and I was content in it.”
“No friends?” McGarvey asked.
“I didn’t need any. Darby would breeze in every now and then. We’d get dressed up and make the rounds of the Washington parties. But it never lasted very long. A weekend, sometimes a little longer. Never more than a week. Which was fine with me. I’m telling you, I was done with that life. Completely done with it.” Her eyes glistened.
“But you still loved him. Your husband.”
“I wanted to, believe me, I wanted nothing more than to be in love with my husband and him with me.”
“And Valentin Baranov?”
“Sure,” she said noncommittally, glancing toward the silver box on the mantel. “Him too.”
McGarvey got up and poured Evita a fresh glass of champagne and himself another bourbon and water. It was still morning down on the street. He felt as if he’d actually lived through those twenty years with her since he’d come up here. But then it was an occupational hazard. He’d been a specialist at attaching himself to other people’s lives; listening to them, watching them, reading their mail and their personal notes, their diaries, even their shopping lists. Seeing where they had been, what they were up to now and in which directions they were likely to go in the future. He knew their schedules and routines, their habits and pet complaints. He got to know some people so well that like any competent biographer, he could lay out his subject’s life better than the subject could. Along with this occupational hazard or vice or whatever came another gift; he could tell when people were lying to him by commission, but especially if they lied by omission. Evita had left a gap a mile and a half wide back there sometime between the preparations for the Bay of Pigs invasion and her move to Washington, D.C. Something had happened in Mexico City, something terrible, something that irrevocably changed her life, transformed her overnight from a still-naive little girl to a hardened woman for whom isolation in a large city in a foreign land without her husband or any other emotional support was no particular strain. In fact, like a fallen princess who seeks the convent for solace, she had gotten along quite well in her solitude. She was content, she’d said, to remain alone in Washington raising her daughter without friends, without worries, without concerns. But it didn’t last.
“I sent Juanita away to boarding school when she was thirteen,” Evita explained.
“Why?”
“I went through a bad period there. She was growing up without a father. There was a lot I didn’t know. A lot I couldn’t give her. I knew that much.”
“Did you get to see her very much in those days?”
“Oh, sure,” she said, pushing her hair back away from her eyes. A car horn honked outside, startling her. She glanced toward the window then looked away guiltily. “But not enough. She was starting to ask questions that I couldn’t answer ….”