The Angel Esmeralda - Don Delillo [6]
“We’re not even wait-listed anymore. We left without telling them to move up our names. It’s useless.”
“I must get out.”
“I’ll call later. I’ll give them our names. We’ll see what the numbers are. We can leave tomorrow. Three flights tomorrow.”
She draped herself in a large towel and sat on the steps that led to the patio. It was clear there was something she wanted to say. I stood at chest level in the water.
This was the fourth day she’d been trying to get off the island. She had begun to be deeply afraid these past twenty-four hours. The ordeals at the airport, she said, had made her feel helpless and pathetic and lost. The strange way they spoke. Her diminishing supply of money. The cab rides through the mountains. The rain and heat. And the edge, the dark edge, the inwrought mood or tone, the ominous logic of the place. It was all dreamlike, a nightmare of isolation and constraint. She had to get off the island. We would have these hours together. This episode, she called it. But then I must help her get out.
She looked solemn in her white towel. I bobbed several times in the water. Then I climbed out and went inside to call the airline. A man said he had no record of our names. I told him we had valid tickets and explained some of our difficulties. He said to come out at six in the morning. We would all know more.
We had dinner in the suite. With a pencil I sketched her face in profile on the back of a linen napkin. We took our dessert out to the garden. I sketched her again, full figure this time, on a piece of hotel stationery. The ocean. The coastal sweep.
“You paint, then?”
“I write.”
“Yes, a writer?”
“What is it that smells so fantastic? Is that jasmine? I wish I knew the names.”
“It’s very pleasant, a garden.”
“Aside from getting out, just getting off the island, do you have to be somewhere at a particular time?”
“I have to fly Barbados–London. There are people who are meeting me.”
“People waiting.”
“Yes.”
“In an English garden.”
“In two small rooms, with babies crying.”
“You smile. She smiles.”
“This is a tremendous thing.”
“A secret smile, this smile of hers. Deep and private. But engaging all the same.”
“No one has seen this in years. It hurts my face to do.”
“Christa Landauer.”
A man came with brandy. Christa sat in an old robe. The night was clear.
“You have a desire to go unnoticed,” I said.
“How do you see this?”
“You want to be indistinct. I see this in different ways. Clothes, walk, posture. Your face, most of all. You had a different face not so long ago. I’m sure of that.”
“What else do we know about each other?”
“What we can see.”
“Touch. What we touch.”
“Speak German,” I said.
“Why?”
“I like hearing it.”
“Do you know the language?”
“I want to hear the sound. I like the sound of it. It’s full of heavy metal. I know how to say hello and goodbye.”
“This is all?”
“Speak naturally. Say anything at all. Be conversational.”
“We will be German in bed.”
She sat with one leg up on a chair, out of the robe, and held her brandy glass and cigarette in the same hand.
“Are you listening?”
“To what?”
“Listen carefully.”
“The waves,” she said.
In a while we went inside. I watched her walk to the bed. She moved a pillow out of the way and lay back on the bed, looking straight up, one arm hanging over the side. With her index finger she tapped cigarette ash onto the floor. Smoke climbed along her arm. Women in random positions, women lazing, have always aroused in me a powerful delight, women carelessly at rest, and I knew this image of Christa would become in time a recurring memory, her eyes open and very remote, the depths of stillness in her face, the shabby robe, the bed in disarray, the sense she conveyed of pensive reflection, of aloneness and somber distances, the smoke that rose along her arm, seeming to cling to it.
I called the desk. The man said he would have someone come with breakfast at four-thirty and would have Rupert sitting outside in his taxi at five.
The wind came up suddenly, rattling the louvres and blowing