Straits of Fortune - Anthony Gagliano [8]
I hesitated at the door, and for a moment it occurred to me that I could simply go quietly down the stairs, out the front door, and back to my car without saying good-bye. A man I had once thought of as a friend was dead on a yacht, and in my hand was a film he had made of a woman I didn’t want to see. I had come here half hoping I’d run into Vivian again, though, in one of those strange, schizoid acts of self-denial, I hadn’t allowed myself to think about what I would say to her if I had. Now I was going to get my wish. I was holding it in my right hand.
I opened the door and closed it behind me. Nothing had changed, and yet to call it her room is misleading. She’d had her own place down on South Beach for years now, ever since dropping out of Smith College. But in a house with eighteen bedrooms, most of them empty, there had been no reason to change anything, and now, whenever it became necessary, she used this place as a refuge from her new life.
It was the room of a woman in her late teens. In one corner sat the bronze Buddha I recalled, still wearing the Santa Claus hat she had stuck on its head and still sporting the cigarette she’d left dangling from the edge of its metallic mouth. Around the statue she had built a miniature temple of flagstones stacked in a progression of shelves. The two incense holders on either side of the Buddha were empty now, the last stick burned to a nub at its base.
She hadn’t been here in quite a while. The stems of two dozen or more dead flowers leaned from their vases like bony fingers, and everywhere on the floor before the shrine lay the petals of red and yellow roses, all as dry as doilies. I stood there looking around like a voyeur stranded in his own memories.
There was an enormous teakwood dresser imported from Cambodia that four strong men would have had trouble lifting, and on top of it, in front of the mirror, ran a row of old-fashioned atomizers, some of them still full of perfume. There were photographs of her family taken in Vietnam: one of Vivian and her mother, both in white dresses, and the Colonel, then a captain, much younger, with darker hair, in his uniform. They stood poised and smiling in front of a large white split-level chalet that looked like it belonged in a French suburb. In the driveway sat a battered army jeep that went with the Colonel’s uniform but not with the house it stood before. They were like two disparate dreams merged by memory, war, and accident.
None of this, of course, went with the Aerosmith poster on one powder blue wall or with that of Hendrix, Afro high and guitar in hand, on the other, any more than the plush, white teddy bear wearing a red ribbon around its neck went with the woman I recalled. Only a dead man or one not long for the living could have failed to remember at precisely that moment the first time I’d laid eyes on Mr. Bear. Why the first time had to be here with her father asleep and not at her apartment on South Beach, I never figured out, except for realizing I was about to enter a drama whose intricacies I didn’t care to decipher.
I had driven at midnight through a jungle rain, my companion heart keeping time with the wipers swiping away at the falling flood of water on the windshield. I remembered the expression on the guard’s face as I pulled up to the gate, how he emerged from his booth like a specter. The hood of his poncho covered all of his face except for the white of his teeth as he smiled and waved me through, not bothering this time or any future time to record