After the shrieks had subsided, Paz set her up with a pan of radishes to be carved into roses. When she was settled, he went to talk to his mother. Margarita Paz was a black peasant from Guantanamo and still bore as she closed in on sixty the marks of that origin: strong arms, wide hips, a bosom like a shelf, and a hard, calculating stare. She dressed in bright colors and lipsticks and nail polishes that set off her shiny chocolate skin; a turban was often on her head, as now. Paz had always been a little afraid of her; he knew no one who was not, except his daughter.
“The produce was garbage today,” she said when he came into her little box of an office. “Talk to Moreno, and tell him we’re definitely going to switch to Torres Brothers if it happens again. Tell him his father never treated us like Americans.”
“I’ll take care of it, Mami,” said Paz, although the produce was prime as always. Complaining and snapping orders was her way of showing affection. “Look, I wanted to ask you…Amelia’s been having nightmares, and she wakes up screaming at night, and when I tell her not to worry, that the monsters in the dreams aren’t real, what do I get? Abuela says they are real. I wish you wouldn’t tell her stuff like that, okay?”
“You want me to lie to my granddaughter?”
“It upsets her. She’s too young to be worrying about all that.”
“And what about you? Are you also too young?”
Paz took a deep breath. “I don’t want to start with this now, Mami. Santeria is your thing, we’re not going to get involved in it. Not me, and definitely not Amelia.”
“What kind of dreams?” asked his mother, ignoring this last, as she did any statement she chose not to hear.
“That’s not important. We don’t want you telling her stuff like that.”
She shot him a sharp look; it was that “we.” Mrs. Paz had always imagined that when her son finally brought home a daughter-in-law, she would be a girl amenable to direction, as was only right. Instead, she got an American doctor with insane ideas about child rearing. A doctor! The man should be the doctor, and the woman should take care of the children, emphasis on the plural, and listen to her suegra with respect, or else how was society to continue? But this daughter-in-law had been so bold as to state, on more than one occasion, that if Margarita insisted on inducting the girl into “your cult” she would have to reconsider letting her spend so much time with her grandmother, and all because a few little charms, anide for her small wrist, the sacrifice of a few birds in order to cast the child’s future and protect her from danger…absurd, and especially after all she had done for them. It did not occur to her to wonder why her son had chosen a woman precisely as stubborn and hardheaded as his mother.
She sighed dramatically and threw up her hands. “All right! What can I do, I’m just an old woman, it’s perfectly all right to ignore me. I never expected after the life I’ve lived, to end up being despised like this, but let it be! I won’t say another word to the child, ever. Take her away!” Here she removed a bright silk hankie from her sleeve and dabbed at her eyes.
“Come on, Mami, don’t make me crazy. It’s not like that and you know it….”
“But,” she said, and now fixed him with her terrible eye, “but there is something.” Here a gesture, hands like birds, conjuring the unseen.
“What something?”
“Something”-darkly-“there is something moving in theorun, I don’t know what it is, but something very powerful, and it has to do with you, my son, and with her. Yes, you think I’m stupid, but I know what I know.”
There seemed to be nothing to say to that, so Paz kissed his mother on the cheek and went out.
“That’s a good rose,” he said to his daughter, “but you need to slice the petals thinner so they’ll flop over and be more like a real flower. Look, watch me.” With which he picked up a parer and an icy, crisp radish from the pan and in eight seconds whipped it into a blossom.
Amelia looked coldly at the proffered garnish. “I prefer it the way I do it,” she said, showing yet again how close to the tree fell the fruit among the tribe of Paz.
Some hours later, Paz was again sweating over a grill, but now he had taken on a load of his own banana daiquiri and was feeling pretty fine. The grill stood on his own patio, and on it sizzled and smoked several racks of Cuban-style barbecued pork ribs, marinated in lime juice, cumin, oregano, and sherry. Amelia had set the picnic table for five, a seafood and endive salad had been prepped and was now cooling in the refrigerator, in company with two magnums of fairly drinkable Spanish white and a dozen little pots of flan. He had a tape going, guajira music, Arsenio Rodriguez, that floated out through the windows of the Florida room and mixed with the sweet smoke from the grill. Paz before marriage had hardly ever cooked at home, and his social life had consisted of presex activities only. Lola had become more social since the M.D. came through, and they had people over almost every week. He didn’t mind cooking for these events, nor did he mind Lola’s friends. She did not hang out with people apt to patronize him. Before his marriage, Paz had acquired virtually all his knowledge of the intellectual world from pillow talk. He dated bright women only, showed them a good time, provided plenty of athletic sex, and afterward sucked out their brains, for although he was natively bright, he had no patience for sitting in a classroom listening to the professorial drone, or for poring over texts, or for being tested. He had an extraordinarily retentive memory, which was fed only via the audio channel, and could produce, during these dinner parties, remarks that were surprising from the mouth of a high school grad cook and former cop. He was inordinately pleased when this occurred, as was his wife, the intellectual snob. At such times he could see it on her face: look, he’s not just a stud.
He heard the clicking of a coasting bicycle, and Lola rolled into view in the driveway. Amelia came shouting up to show off the garland of yellow allamanda blossoms she had constructed and also the dollar earned at the restaurant. Then a kiss for Paz. She looked around, sniffed luxuriously.
“That smells great. You’re being the perfect husband again.”
“Not perfect. I grabbed Yolanda’s butt in the reefer before lunch.”
“Oh, I totally understand about that,” she said. “I know how men are-you haven’t had a piece of ass in what, seven hours?”
“Seven hours and thirty-two minutes,” said Paz, “but who’s counting?” She laughed and went off to shower and change her clothes. Paz drank some more daiquiri and painted more sauce on his meat.
Bob Zwick was a blocky, confident man with a Jewish Afro of some length and an unrepentant New York accent that in social situations he rarely let rest. He had graduated from MIT at sixteen and thereafter had spent five years working on M-theory with Edward Witten at Princeton. Having plumbed the secrets of subatomic structure as far as he wanted, he had surprised everyone by switching fields to molecular biology, had picked up another Ph.D. (Stanford) in that, and then, feeling the need for a little break, had come down to Miami to work on his tan and get an M.D. at the university. There he had met Lola, had hit on her instantly, as he did on very nearly every woman who crossed his path, been laughingly rejected, and become her friend. Zwick, it had to be said, neither pressed his suit beyond the first no, nor held a grudge. Paz would not have picked him off a menu as a pal, but he got along with him, had even taken him out on the boat to fish a time or two. He found Zwick entertaining in a headachy sort of way, like daiquiris.
Dressed this evening in shorts, sandals, and a T-shirt that said PRINCETON COSMOLOGICAL CO.INC.CUSTOM UNIVERSES,WE DELIVER, he strode in, embraced and kissed the hostess, snatched up Amelia and whirled her around to the giggle point, shook hands with Paz, and introduced his current girl, a leggy blonde with a bony sardonic face. She was wearing a sleeveless top and a long skirt of some nubbly clinging stuff, in lavender. Paz felt a little flutter in his belly, but she didn’t bat an eye.
“Beth Morgensen,” she said, extending a cool hand. “You must be Jimmy Paz.”
“I am,” he said and wondered if she had told Zwick, and more important, whether she would let it out this evening.
“What is that, a banana daiquiri?” said Zwick. “I want one. Beth, this guy makes the best banana daiquiris in the galaxy. These are galactic-level daiquiris.”
“So I’ve heard,” said Morgensen, who had, in fact, consumed any number of them during the months eight years ago when she had been one of Jimmy Paz’s many girlfriends. He produced the drinks, along with a salver of boiled shrimps with small pots of various sauces, and avoided her gaze.
They drank around the picnic table and talked, their shoulders swaying helplessly, their fingers tapping to the
