Don't Make a Scene Page 8

  “Good design,” Vladimir said, trying to remember a time when it was all he cared about. He and Bebo rarely spoke about work; it raised awkward issues. Bebo was still making models. His career hadn't really taken off because of his English. Vladimir had stopped using Bebo because he often changed the design of a model when he thought he had a better idea.

  “Coming next week?” Manuel asked. “We have an event in front of the Mission.”

  At the last protest he'd attended, the exiles marched in a circle chanting “jCastro: traidor! jAsesino y dictador!” while the staff in the Cuban Mission office blasted the greatest hits of Van Van out the windows to drown out the protests. They also threw water on the protesters, which was why the City had moved all the protests across the street. Manuel and his friends, none of whom had done less than twelve years in prison, often planned events of this type. Vladimir didn't want to be rude, but the movement needed new blood and a different format.

  “I want to do a silent protest,” Vladimir said. “Think how effective it would be: gags and silence.”

  “How could there be a silent protest with Cubans involved?” Bebo asked, as his father roared, “We should be silent?” and the children screamed about dessert portions and Olga chatted with her friend about something else.

  “Everyone is shouting, and nobody is listening. Nobody is hearing us.”

  Bebo and Manuel shrugged and Olga and Carmen continued their separate conversation. Nobody had a response. The chaos of the ravaged table gave Vladimir a headache, and it was getting late. He offered to take Carmen home, to be polite.

  “She's staying here,” Olga said.

  “Unless you want to make her a better offer,” Manuel said, and shadowboxed him in the groin. Carmen smiled up at him.

  “Come on, then,” he said without enthusiasm.

  “Really?” she said, and gathered all her stuff into a heavy bag that he was soon carrying down four unlit flights of rickety stairs.

  He had once tried to reciprocate all the dinners, and the shock— of the white neighborhood, the clean, white apartment, all the space he had to himself—-had hit them in a bad way. This was when he'd been dating his neighbor Terry, a caterer who had a theory that what people really wanted was one perfect bite of a tiny, sculpted, labor-intensive still life. Bebo and Manuel had immediately inhaled the small plateful of beautiful, bite-sized hors d'oeuvres that had taken her all day to prepare. She had looked at them in shock. They had looked back at her with incomprehension. Three courses of small, elegant food with textures and layers and fresh herbs followed, and conversation ebbed: Bebo and Manuel really didn't have much to say in English, Terry didn't speak a word of Spanish and Olga was pregnant and still hungry. The whole thing worked only when Vladimir went to Union City.

  Carmen chatted nonstop through the rain to the bus stop, on the bus and in the subway. She'd left Cuba in her early twenties, and had been living in Miami for six years, working most recently as a receptionist in a carpet showroom owned by an uncle's friend. She wasn't married and her mother was worried; she told him this while rubbing her bare legs to get warm. Why did anyone put up with the cold? She was eligible for citizenship, but hadn't done anything about it.

  “Why not?” he asked, interrupting a story about her first experience of snow.

  “I don't know,” Carmen said, twisting the Virgin of Charity that hung from a chain into her cleavage. “I suppose I was hoping to keep my options open.”

  He had no patience for this kind of person. At one time, he would have given her a lecture about how lucky she was to have the opportunity and what an idiot she was to think a door to a Third World dictatorship was worth keeping open. There'd been a time when he thought he had to fight on all fronts. Now he just let it pass.

  Her eyes widened when he led her into his apartment building. He made up the couch for her with pillows and blankets he kept in the coffee table, which he'd designed for this purpose. She went to the window. Before she reached his drafting table he said, “Don't touch that. Do not go anywhere near that.”

  “I just wanted to see.”

  “You wanted a place to sleep,” he said. “Here it is.”

  She raised an eyebrow. He gave her a towel and a glass of water and closed his bedroom door. He wasn't inviting her into bed out of chivalry. No doubt Olga had explained his situation, reassuring her that he hadn't dated a Cubana since leaving the island. Manuel had no doubt joked about Vladimir's member, which only spoke English now.

  The following morning, he hustled her out of the house at nine on the pretext that traffic would be terrible; if she wanted to get to LaGuardia for her flight at two she had to leave immediately. He hailed a cab and gave her the fare to LaGuardia, for surely she wouldn't get there any other way and he didn't want her turning up on his doorstep after missing her plane. She kissed his cheek with an offended little pout.

  “Dear Vladimir ,” began the new missile of rhetoric from Migdalia.

  “Superfluous communication has never interested me. If you end our friendship, that's your problem.”

  The letter seemed to be sending sharp vibrations to his head and chest. Vladimir clicked the document off the screen and sent it to the trash.

  It was the Monday after Thanksgiving, unseasonably warm, in the high 60s. Nonetheless, he had arrived to find that Chris had put Christmas lights on the shelves, without asking him. He wondered if he should sound Chris out about the Diane situation, but decided that the taboo on romance with a client was a preposterous, hypocritical American custom that no one observed and that didn't apply to him. They were both adults, and there was nothing preventing him from getting involved with her. Except, of course, the fact that he was married.

  Assuming that he wanted to get involved. Vladimir peeled the lid off his coffee and searched for distraction on the Internet. More Cuban rafters had been picked up three miles off Miami by the United States Coast Guard. Several in the group had been lost in the waves; those who survived would be sent back, which meant either prison or retaliation—loss of a job, children denied access to school, pariah status, angry mobs besieging the house in acts of orchestrated harassment while the police sat by and watched.

  On second thought, he pulled Migdalia's message out of the trash.

  “Hatred has eaten away your entrails, causing an imperiousness that you don't recognize in yourself,” Migdalia continued, and he looked around him, embarrassed. “The only thing that interests you is your odious little individualistic life.”

  “Hah!” he said out loud.

  “So why do you bother to write?” she continued.

  A good question. And why was he reading this bile?

  “Who has brainwashed you with this propaganda? You think you are the one who opens my eyes? Incredible, the power that you attribute to yourself. When your fellow exiles in the Cuban American Mafia invade the island, where will you be? I ask out of curiosity only.

  “Formerly your friend,

  “Migdalia.”

  He wanted to slam her head into a concrete wall. The Cuban American Mafia? But anyone who wasn't specifically in the Revolution, according to the Supreme Leader in his speech of June 30, 1961, was outside the Revolution. And anyone who was outside the Revolution was allied with the Extreme Right Wing.

  Chris entered singing, bearing a small tree on his shoulder. He set it down on the windowsill.

  “You're blocking my view,” Vladimir said.

  “Where would you like the tree?” Chris asked.

  “I don't know, but not there.”

  Magnus entered and removed his massive hip-hop parka to reveal a T-shirt advertising the now ubiquitous image of Che Guevara in the revolutionary beret.

  Vladimir growled at him.

  Magnus looked up. “What's the matter?”

  “Would you walk around with an image of Hitler on your chest?”

  “Good morning to you, too, Vladimir.”

  “You people. You see one movie, and you're blinded by lo
ve.”

  “You say terrorist, I say freedom fighter.”

  “Yes, but do you know anything? You're simply trafficking in a symbol that you received from somebody else. Somebody else who knows nothing.”

  “What the hell is he talking about?” Magnus asked Chris.

  “Che Guevara threw homosexuals into concentration camps. Che Guevara gave the bullet to the heads of hundreds of people who weren't given fair trials, or any trials at all.”

  Magnus, a white kid from suburban Maryland, went into the pantry.

  “Che Guevara shot people on his office in the way that you make coffee on your office,” Vladimir called after him.

  Magnus emerged with coffee and sat down at the model table with an arrogant flourish. “In my office, Vladimir. In, not on.”

  “In my office, Magnus. Mine, not yours. I have a website for you. Find out what he really stood for, and then if you're still impressed by him, go ahead. Wear the shirt.”

  “It's just fashion.”

  You had to hand it to Fidel Castro: everyone still called it “the Revolution,” that thing that hadn't moved in almost fifty years. And what a skilled politician he was! He had the island mesmerized watching the one hand, while with the other hand he exiled, jailed or executed anyone who disagreed with him, including his brothers-in-arms, the Heroes of the Revolution. He had his rivals murdered to turn them into controllable martyrs at home, and fashion statements abroad. Fidel Castro had made repression cool.

  Chris had begun wrestling with a nest of electrical cords, to the accompaniment of loud choral music. Vladimir asked him to turn the volume down. He'd found out that Diane Kurasik was Jewish, as several of his American girlfriends had been. Jews were supposed to be such a minority in this country, so it was noteworthy that they kept turning up. American Jews never gave him a hard time about Cuba; if he told them that it was a police state, they didn't talk to him about free education and health care, or ask if he preferred Batista.

  Diane and her light blue eyes with the dark blue edges were on his mind as he sat down and began to draw the lobby of the cinema on a roll of vellum. He had said he would call her, and he'd meant to, but he wasn't sure he was in the mood to go through all the preliminaries. Chris untangled strings of lights while brewing something aromatic in the pantry. Later, he began to attach ribbons and shiny balls to the tree.

  Christianity seemed to be a collective decorative agreement in this country. One day, his first year in New York, Vladimir walked out of his apartment building and saw a woman with a dark check mark on her forehead. He debated telling her, but she'd crossed the street by the time he decided he would. On the next block, someone else passed by with a dark line on his forehead. In the subway, he saw three people smudged with x's. Were they marked for execution? No one was acting like anything was out of the ordinary! He was chilled. When he got to the office, he saw that the receptionist had the mark. He hesitated, and then walked down the hall with a dry mouth. But he had to turn around.

  “Ah, Millie?” he said, pointing to her forehead.

  “Ash Wednesday,” she said, answering phones.

  Of course! Miércoles de Ceniza.

  Finally, at eight, he composed a brief message and sent it off.

  “Dear Migdalia,” he wrote. “Please reread the list of personal insults that you directed at me in your e-mail, and then tell me who is eaten up by worms of hatred.

  “Farewell, Vladimir.”

  He sent the collected letters between Migdalia Rosario and himself to Bebo. On second thought, he decided to forward the exchange to a long list of people, Cuban and otherwise, with a note:

  “Dear Friends, The debate that I am sending you requires no commentary. It is priceless. Please do not re-send this e-mail. It is for your consumption only. Best, Vladimir.” He thought about including Diane, but decided that if she were a Spanish-speaker, he would know about it already. Americans who spoke Spanish were always so proud of themselves, they let you know right away.

  Around the corner from the theater, in a tiny basement apartment in a brick tenement, a male accountant at the tail end of middle age sat in front of two behemoths, sifting through a nasty, one-sided correspondence going back nearly forty years. The two enormous metal silos were telephone-switching equipment dating back to the early 1930s, and they lounged in the middle of his living room.

  Ma Bell begat New York Telephone begat NYNEX; Bell Atlantic and NYNEX merged, acquired GTE, and begat Verizon; and Sid Bernstein, the resident, had been fighting with disrespectful representatives of these faceless corporations since he'd moved into this hole, early in the Nixon administration. He'd taken the apartment on the condition that the phone company remove the equipment. They've been slated to go for a long time now, the super had told him.

  That was seven supers ago. He had protested: on the phone, by mail, in person, with a lawyer, with another lawyer, representing himself again, then with a slick class-action specialist who strung him along for a while but dropped him when he realized that there was no “class” for an action suit. Each time, he started from square one with a new company after a takeover; each time he went through the motions, being shifted and transferred and cut off. Each time he was told that someone new would look into it. Granted, his rent was quite low, currently $250 a month. And yes, it was the West Village, and his local phone service had been gratis for many years.

  Never mind: Sid Bernstein had been sold a bill of goods by that first super. He'd been suffering ever since. He had headaches. He had nightmares. He would never have moved in had he known the silos weren't leaving. The space they took up, the evil lint and dirt they collected weren't enough: they vibrated and hummed, sometimes in the same key, sometimes not. Loose paper in the apartment ended up plastered to their rounded drum walls. Periodically, someone came to service the evil twins and he had to allow access to his apartment—always when he was at work, so that he couldn't talk to the serviceman. On more than one occasion, he'd taken the day off to be there to interrogate the serviceman, only to be told by a rude dispatcher when he called late in the day that the serviceman wouldn't make it. Some nights, only the idea that he might unleash something that could harm him—bacteria, electric shock, nesting rodents—stopped him from taking an axe to mutilate these filthy throbbing metal monsters.

  In nearly forty years, nobody had been willing to take responsibility.

  The only solace in his life was the Bedford Street Cinema. It sat between his apartment and the office where he'd worked for more years than he cared to count.

  He snared Diane Kurasik in the lobby. “You didn't respond to my memo.”

  “I'm sorry, Sid. I was waiting to put the suggestion before the Board at the next meeting. I'll get back to you when they've had a chance to consider it.”

  “How is an audience representative on the Board something that requires approval by the Board? This is taxation without representation.”

  “The Bedford Street Cinema is not a democracy.”

  “Tell me about it! How could you leave Heaven Can Wait out of the Lubitsch retrospective? That was a slap in the face!”

  “Sid. The Board of Directors doesn't make decisions about programming.”

  “Does the Board make decisions about the theater?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I want to be on the Board. I've seen ninety-eight percent of the movies that have played at this theater over the last ten years. I have the ticket stubs to prove it. Can anyone else on the Board say that?” Some Board members attended only the annual fund-raiser. Some missed even that. So they were connected: big deal. It reeked of cronyism, kickbacks, patronage.

  “Sid, don't beat me up today. I've had a bad week. I've had a bad month.”

  “I've had a bad life, Diane,” Sid said, and stalked outside to smoke.

  DECEMBER

  THERE WERE SEVERAL responses to his group e-mail. “Dear Vladimir, I began reading, and had to stop after the first line. I was so nauseated I wanted to
throw up,” wrote one friend. “How sad this exchange!” wrote another. “Will the verbal carnage never end?” None of the non-Cubans responded. All were Spanish-speakers; but perhaps only a Cuban could be interested in this sort of thing.

  He heard two sharp notes signaling a new e-mail: a letter that appeared to be from someone in the Cuban Ministry of Education named Elena Gutiérrez Pérez. He skipped down to the end—it was signed “Yasmina.” He remembered Yasmina, Migdalia's friend and partner in crime in high school; her mother indeed had worked in the Ministry of Education. Elena Gutiérrez Pérez must have been Yasmina's mother.

  “Dear Vladimir,” Yasmina wrote.

  “I have just finished reading your letter to Migdalia, and it seems to me that all you talk about is politics and cheap criticism. Where is the Vladimir that I used to know? May I ask, don't you feel any nostalgia for Havana? The streets, the happiness you shared with friends on the rooftops and the Malecón? It gives me much pain, Vladimir, that you are empty and spout pure Hollywood drivel. It would be impossible to hate you, because I have always treasured peace and happiness among my friends. I am not perfect, but I believe in the betterment of humankind. Only those who earn my respect can criticize my homeland. That word may sound foreign to you because you are among those who BUY respect.

  “Until the victory forever, Yasmina.”

  He wanted to strike someone! She believed in the betterment of humankind! He stalked to the window. They would drown him in their rhetoric.

  Enough of this! The sun was shining on the thick blue scales of the Hudson River. He needed a light American lunch with a new woman, preferably one who didn't speak Spanish. He called Diane Kurasik.

  “Certainly,” she said. “When would you like?”

  “Now,” he said, looking at the clock. It was ten forty-five.

  “Okay!” she said, laughing. “Pick me up!”

  He was immediately out the door in brisk December sunshine. There was nothing so clarifying as this freezing-cold air and the sharp blue sky. In a burst of energy, he decided to walk to the theater. He started walking downtown on Tenth Avenue. The streets were a maze of small, dirty walls of packed snow, topped with bags of garbage. He picked his way over the terrain carefully; loose trash and dog turds were scattered across banks of snow and the slush at the curbs had refrozen. As much as he loved the autumn in this part of the world, the winter took discipline, energy, strength to bear. As he caught sight of the marquee, he had a comfortable, familiar feeling. He was enjoying this project.