The Angel Esmeralda - Don Delillo [5]
“We can charter. Let’s try, even if it’s just the two of us.”
“It’s hopeless. Nothing works here.”
“I don’t like leaving this way. This is so awful. I don’t want to go.”
“Darling Jill,” I said.
I watched her walk toward the ramp at the tail section. Soon the props were turning. I went inside and saw Christa near the door. I got my bags and walked out to the road. Rupert was sitting on a bench outside the gift shop. I had to walk about ten yards down the road before I was able to catch his eye. I looked back at Christa. She picked up her suitcase. Then the three of us from our separate locations started toward the car.
I was beginning to learn when a certain set of houses would appear, where the worst turns were, when and on which side the terrain would fall away to a stretch of deep jungle. She sat next to me absently rubbing an insect bite on her left forearm.
We went to the same hotel and I asked for a pool suite. We followed a maid along the beach and then up the path to one of the garden gates. The way Christa reacted to the garden and pool, I realized she’d spent the previous night in one of the beach units, which were ordinary.
When we were alone, I followed her into the bathroom. She took some lotion out of her makeup kit and poured a small amount on a piece of cotton. Slowly she moved the cotton over her face.
“You were number seven,” I said.
“They took four, only.”
“You would have come back alone? Or stayed at the airport?”
“I have very little money. I didn’t expect.”
“They have no computer.”
“I have gone out. I have called them from the hotel where I was. They have different lists. Two times they could not find my name anywhere. And there is no way to know when a flight is canceled.”
“The plane doesn’t come.”
“This is true,” she said. “The plane doesn’t come and you know you have gone out for nothing.”
I held her face in my hands.
“Is this nothing?”
“I don’t know.”
“You feel.”
“Yes, I feel.”
She walked inside and sat on the bed. Then she looked toward the doorway, taking me in—a delayed evaluation. After a period of what seemed dead silence, I was aware of the sound of waves rolling softly in, and realized I’d been hearing it all along, the ocean, the break and run of moving water. Christa kept her eyes on me as she reached back toward her handbag, which was sitting in the middle of the bed, and then as she felt inside for cigarettes.
“How much money do you have?” I said.
“One hundred dollars, E.C.”
“Less than two trips out and back.”
“It’s amusing, yes. This is how we must count our money.”
“Did you sleep last night?”
“No,” she said.
“The wind was incredible. The wind kept blowing. It blew hard until dawn. I love the sound and feel of that kind of wind. It was warm, it was almost hot. It bent those trees out there. You could hear the rush it makes through the trees. That heavy rushing scatter-sound it makes.”
“When you heard how loud it was and felt how hard it was blowing, you could not believe it would be warm.”
When everything is new, the pleasures are skin-deep. I found it mysteriously satisfying to say her name aloud, to recite the colors of her body. Hair and eyes and hands. The new snow of her breasts. Absolutely nothing seemed trite. I wanted to make lists and classifications. Simple, basic, true. Her voice was soft and knowing. Her eyes were sad. Her left hand trembled at times. She was a woman who’d had troubles in her life, a hauntingly bad marriage, perhaps, or the death of a dear friend. Her mouth was sensual. She let her head ease back when she listened. The brown of her hair was ordinary, with traces of gray, short strokes or flashes that seemed to come and go in varying light.
All this I said to her, and more, describing in some detail exactly how she appeared to me, and Christa seemed pleased by these attentions.
We used the morning in bed. After lunch I floated in the pool. Christa lay naked in the shade, moving farther into it whenever the sun line reached her elbow or the edge of her pink heel.
“We must start thinking,