Round Rock - Michelle Huneven [129]
David demanded to speak to Mina again. There was a scuffle, the security man’s creak, the abrasive brush of ink-dark gabardine. Once David was pinioned, another paper was held up for his scrutiny: a restraining order, he was told, signed in Mina’s half-cursive printing.
David didn’t know, of course, that a summons and a hearing were required before a true restraining order could go into effect. For him, the document produced a silent, raging clarity. The room with its chairs, the cop, El Cuarto’s quiet, raspy voice, seemed to be crystallizing. “Just let me talk to her,” he said.
“That, my boy, you will never do again.”
The check reappeared.
“I’ll only tear it up,” David said, which made the father laugh out loud in his muted, genteel, sand-colored voice. “I wish you would. Oh, how I wish you would.”
David did not tear up the check. He cashed it and gave ten thousand dollars to Rafael to be used for the villagers. The rest he used to travel in Thailand, Malaysia, India.
DAVID was in Goa, drowsing on the beach, thinking he was extremely depressed, not yet aware he was in the first stages of hepatitis B, when he noticed a tall, striking woman walking out of the ocean. Her wet hair was dark, her body full-bellied, deeply tanned, soft. Not fat so much as large, big-boned, well-fleshed-out—a largeness exaggerated by the tiniest bikini. Her face was intelligent, if not beautiful. The closer she came, the older she appeared, perhaps decades older than he. One breast bore a thin, arching scar.
Divorced, wealthy, recovering from breast cancer, Gayle Sterling was thirty-eight. Her two children were only a few years younger than David. She was in Goa studying meditation and tantric healing with an iconoclastic Buddhist teacher. She guessed David was a Sephardic Jew and laughed when he said no, a California Mexican.
At Gayle’s invitation, David went to her house that evening to use the telephone. She’d rented a bungalow on stilts, all polished wood; blue paisley curtains roiled out of windows in the ocean breeze. He called Rafael, who explained that the villagers had won large financial settlements in lieu of the right to return to their homes and jobs. “Mina had a son,” Rafael said finally. “He is El Quinto. And she is Bill now, too. Billie.” David hung up the phone and found he couldn’t get up from Gayle’s sofa. This would become their joke: “David came to use the phone and never left.”
The doctor said David would die unless he made it to a U.S. hospital, so Gayle booked a flight. She told no one he was sick, or he never would have been allowed to board the plane. David would say he died en route, in the air over Burma. “I saw the bright light, and felt this enormous, sweet calmness, like falling into the most magnificent mattress.” At this point of the story, if Gayle was present, she’d burst out laughing. “He may have felt calm, but he terrorized everybody on the plane—moaning, raving, screeching like a demon. They kicked us off in Singapore and I had to bribe an entire airport bureaucracy to get us out of there.”
David spent a month in the hospital, then convalesced in Gayle’s Upper West Side apartment. Looking out the window into the quavery springtime air over Central Park, David understood what Sally Morrot had given him along with all the conversation, the coaxing, the education: an uncanny, life-saving ability to connect with wealthy women.
Once his liver recovered, he started drinking again and couldn’t seem to stop. When the hepatitis came back, Gayle threatened to kick him out unless he went into treatment. His first sixty days of sobriety were spent in a private recovery center in the East Nineties. Upon his release, Gayle presented him with a puppy, a bluetick bitch he named Sally.
David lived and traveled with Gayle for twelve years; together, they compiled