“What’swrong? Jesus Christ, Jimmy, I thought you were going to kill me. It was like fucking Jekyll and Hyde. You grabbed my neck and you had your fist all balled up and cocked and you had an expression on your face…it was like something out of my goddamnedbook.” She rose shakily to her feet. “I guess you’re back to normal now, ha ha. What happened? A little problem with handling rejection?”
But Paz had no desire to return to badinage. He felt a wash of self-contempt, mixed with confusion and not a little terror. He started grabbing up his clothes and jamming his limbs into them. He was sticky and badly wanted to take a shower, but it didn’t seem the thing to do just then.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I drove you literally crazy.”
He stopped and looked at her. “No, I’m the one should be sorry. I don’t know what the fuck just happened, but I don’t think I should be alone with you right now. I’ll call you,” he said, picking up his jacket. He started for the door and then made himself stop and give her a nice hug.
“Shouldn’t we sort of talk about this?”
“Nah, I don’t think so. Sorry.”
“The search for Miss Right begins immediately?”
“I guess.” He embraced her again. “No hard feelings, Willa,” he said into her hair. “You’ll send me your next book.”
“I’ll do that,” she said to his back and the closing door.
Paz went to his car and sat there for a while, watching his hands tremble. Gradually this passed as the rationalizing part of his mind, an industrial-strength unit, reinterpreted what had just occurred into something more normal, a mere flash of anger, mistaken by a hypersensitive and overimaginative woman as being something weird and alien. This done, he fell into a desperate numbness. It had simply never occurred to him that he would get turned down. Willa liked him, she’d said so, they got along fine. Everyoneknew that girls wanted a permanent hookup, just like everyone knew that gravity sucked. Meeting the contrary was like observing an object falling upward. He noticed the yellow poetry book on the passenger seat. Suddenly seized by fury again, he grabbed it and flung it into the dark. Two minutes later he cursed himself, went out into the night-deserted street, and picked it up again. It was lying open, facedown, its bright yellow cover looking like a painting mistake on the yellow traffic line. He stood there in the middle of South Bayshore and read the poem on the page that had fallen open:
“Nothing lasts”?
how bitterly the thought attends each loss
“Nothing lasts”?
a promise also of consolation
Grief and hope
the skipping rope’s two ends,
twin daughters of impatience.
One wears a dress of wool, the other cotton.
Paz felt a chill that was unconnected with the freshening bay breeze. He didn’t like it when books fell open with meaningful messages showing. Even more irksome was that he actually felt consoled by reading it. He got back in his car and drove to his apartment, where he made himself a stiff drink of freezing vodka and lime. He changed into cutoffs and a sweatshirt and sat in a lawn chair in his backyard, chewing on the taste of the drink, dozing fitfully while the soft Florida night passed away.
When the sun was fully risen and he could no longer pretend that sleep was a possibility, he hit the bathroom, and afterward he pulled on a pair of checked pants from the restaurant service and a pair of greasy boots, and walked around the corner to Calle Ocho, where he had a cafe con leche and a fruit tart at his usual little no-name joint, and read theHerald and smoked a short, fat, strong, black cigar. Then he went across the street and opened his mother’s restaurant.
There was something entrancing, he thought, about an empty restaurant early in the morning, rather like looking at a beloved but aging mistress at about the same time of day. You could see the scratches and wear that candlelight would obscure in the hours to come, but the revelation just added to the intimacy; no one else knew this side of her. He went into the kitchen, donned a tunic, a plastic apron, switched on the oil-splashed kitchen boom box. A samba band came on loud, Martinho da Vila, “Claustrofobia.” Paz, bouncing a little on his toes, used his keys to open the meat reefer, walked in, came out with a whole round of beef, the entire boned hip of a steer. At the sink he stripped off the purveyor’s thick plastic integument, washed the blood off the meat, dried it, and slapped it down on the butcher’s block set against the wall between the two standing refrigerators.
If you sell a lot of beef in a restaurant, then the difference between profit and loss on those items is portion control, and at Guantanamera portion control was Jimmy Paz. Paz sharpened his favorite knife, licked the back of his left wrist, shaved a swipe of hair off with the blade, wiped it carefully away. Now he proceeded to turn a thirty- two-pound full round into (ideally) 102palomilla steaks, each one weighing within a speckle of five ounces.
Paz sliced without obvious effort, peeling the red wafers off the mass, weighing each, and tossing each into a steel pan. This work took absolute attention if one were both to keep one’s thumbs and make a buck, but made little demand on the higher functions, and from an early age Paz had used portion control to let his mind roam free. He belonged to that small fraternity of extremely bright men who have no patience at all with academics, from which is drawn most of history’s entrepreneurial billionaires as well as those responsible for the physical maintenance of Western civilization: carpenters, masons, firefighters, soldiers, cops. Like most autodidacts, Paz had an original rather than a disciplined intellect, and much of what composed it had been put there across the pillow by a long skein of brainy women, the only sort he liked to take to bed.
His thoughts: how dumb could he have been, nearly twenty years of selecting from just that restricted set of women whodeclined to pursue permanent arrangements, and he’s surprised when one of them turns him down, hilarious really when you considered it, what a jerk; possibilities of love, romantic love as against love that lasts, how to transit;jerk, Christ!; elective affinities, Goethean phrase whispered into his ear by German grad student white-blond Helga, idea that linkage of romance between two people was as natural and irresistible as chemical bonding, sodium and chlorine, no, not Helga, Trude, Helga was the Danish geologist, marine oolites, radio-carbon dating thereof in shallow seas, he’d taken her diving down at Pennekamp, should get the boat hauled and scraped soon, shouldgo out in the boat sometime, find a girl, maybe run across to Bimini, where to find the time?; like a nun she said, with bleeding palms, stigmata, abnormal psych, varieties of religious experience, William James, skeptical acknowledgment of the reality of same, Beth the sociologist, not a believer but agreed with James’s rejection of the “agnostic veto” insisting on rationality in decision imposssible to decide on rational grounds. Nature of faith, why can’t he jump, given what he’s seen, given his mother…and the crazy woman, Dideroff, or not crazy, thoseeyes, no, didn’t happen, sleep deprivation, and the shrink, Wise, nice voice on the phone, and Sudan, Emma the geographer, the Sudan, sahel, savannah, ecotypes, ecotopes, dry, seasonal rains, thorny growth, the acacia, the baobab, something too about a civil war, she’d had to cancel a winter field trip, check that out…
He finished cutting and took the twenty-ounce cast-iron toothed mallet down from its hook above the butcher block and pounded steaks, making each one a quarter of an inch thick with just the correct number of blows, and afterward throwing each one into a bucket of the house marinade?garlic, lime juice, salt, pepper, and a bouquet of herbs whose composition was known only to Paz, his mom, and God. He pounded, pounded to the samba beat, and found (for this is why he had come in to do this task) that, as always, the work tenderized his heart along with thepalomillas. Just before nine Rafael, the prep cook, came in and started parboiling a hundred pounds of potatoes, saying not a word to Paz, as he understood as well as any man the meditative aspects of poundingbiftek. The kitchen grew warmer, sweat dripped from Paz’s face, and he pounded the drops into the meat. His mother, demonstrating the process in the cramped steaming hole-inthe-wall kitchen of their first restaurant, twenty years previously, had said that Paz sweat was the real secret ingredient in theirpalomilla. Paz had believed it as a boy and believed it now.
The last steak dropped into the bucket. Paz washed and put away his knife and his mallet, stretched, doused his head under the sink, dried his face on a towel, and when he put it down there was his mother, yellow pantsuit, hair in its afternoon turban, a flowered one, hands and wrists ringed with pounds of gold.
“What’s wrong,” she demanded.
“Nothing’s wrong, Mami,” he said.
