The actors had been gone in the morning. Johanna had walked out to their quarters, which were wiped clean as if they had never been. That had been a month ago.
This morning Johanna had to journey to down-town Miami to see a doctor. Tom was in Atlanta, and she had dreaded everything about the trip: going, facing the doctor alone, what he would say. Tom had sent a car and driver from his office who had picked her up the evening before and taken her to the Occidental Plaza. She had arrived after dinner and gone directly to her suite, where the plum and champagne bed spreads and walls and mahogany furniture disgusted her. The first time she had seen it after it was remodeled, she thought it was elegant, but now it made her think of cheap wine hangovers in college days when she had foreseen that Tom would matter, but not how. The rooms had a view of the bay and a vague floral fragrance. She had phoned the girls, as if she were the possible truant. Tanya said she was going to the tennis club after school, and Lizzy had told her to keep her stiff upper lip.
But the news at the doctor's office was good, and when she rode down in the elevator she felt exhilarated, nothing like the last few weeks of chemotherapy, and called the driver to tell him she would walk back to the parking lot along Bayfront Park. She didn't go to down-town Miami very often any more, or to Miami at all. She walked down Flagler Street toward the bay. Flagler had built the railroad to the Keys; that had been the money-making, uniting force of that day, as Tom's network was the money-making, uniting force of the present—that was how he mattered.
She wanted to make up for lost afternoons in Miami and followed along Flalger street. The brick-lined modern buildings footed with jewelry shops blinking out the message that the eye can be caught, the electronics shops blaring Cuban music to catch the ear, the sidewalks jammed with Cuban street vendors, and the streetway jammed with taxi cabs-all veiled in her imagination the street of her past, which had been more desperate in quiet colors and muted grime. Johanna was not one of those long-time Floridians who hated the Cubans: they were alive, they were fighting. It was the Cubans who meant something. They had come here for freedom, and had brought energy. She felt more than ever attracted to energy. The actors had had energy; yet they had not, or it was worn out. In fact they had been trying to feed off the energy of her children to revive themselves, or, no, they had wanted to feed off the energy of conflict between her and her children. She felt a stab to her heart. She remembered the crash in her gut when she'd walked into Tanya's room months ago to find her and a friend bent over a mirror sniffing lines of cocaine. It was one of the worst moments of her life; it seemed to her at that moment that white was black. But her therapist had reminded her of when her mother had found a bottle of whiskey in her drawer, of her hot, mouth-filling rage, of how her wonderful mother had turned in an instant into a prying bitch. In college she had been in love with Castro. Her grandfather had told her about going to Havana in the days of Battista, going down to Havana to gamble and drink and get laid, a nation of whores and pimps. She had begun to hate Castro when she learned what he did to gays. Now she thought he was OK, he was better than what had gone before. She'd heard he was going for the Canadian tourist dollars, that prostitution and gambling were up, the old society rebuilding itself on the ashes of the new.
She turned and continued along the sidewalk by Bayfront Park. She was thinking that the city, for all its color and energy, was rotten. She suddenly felt tired. She was frightened she would die after all. She wandered down into the park looking for a bench. The salt in the sea breeze was wrapped in oil; it did not clean her like the salt wind in the churchyard. She heard a commotion in the amphitheater and walked on to a bench, which overlooked it. She found herself exhausted. She put her elbows on her knees and her face in her hands and let the sound, the smell, the motion of light sweep though her. Her condition horrified her. This was the bad Johanna, the one who did not act, did not care. Yet here she was. She was planning compromise about TV: they would have only one set, in the conversation pit, which was being remodeled, and there would be rules about how many hours each of them could watch; they would get a VCR and a library of classic cinema.
After a time the sense of a performance brought her back to herself. She took in the amphitheater. She could only catch fragments of dialogue that blew like bits of paper to her ears. A wooden dollar sign loomed at the back of the stage; it rose above the back wall and from where she sat was partly outlined against the shipping in the bay. A man dressed and bearded as Fidel was hanging like Christ on the dollar. A small cherry picker, like telephone lineman use, had been driven onto the stage, and in its shaky raised basket a bird figure with a fluttering banner labeling it 'Jesse Helms' bobbed, jabbing its beak at Fidel's gaunt belly. Johanna wished she had such tireless mechanical strength as the machine. A few people were scattered on the lower tiers of the amphitheater, laughing and applauding. Higher up the slope, as if held away by a repellent field, was a more numerous audience of Cubans, mostly standing, tossing jeers at the play. She narrowed her eyes at the figure crucified on the dollar. It was the actor. Of course. The eagle was probably his wife.
Tanya stepped out of the cherry picker and slipped off her eagle wings. Before she turned to the next scene, she glanced up the hill and noticed a frayed figure crouching on a bench just beyond the rim of the amphitheater. She reached over to the pile of props and picked up a pair of opera glasses. Yes, in the circle surrounded by blackness her mother crouched. What was she doing up there? Had Lizzy ratted on her? She felt confused, frightened, and angry. Her mother looked so ragged, like a young bird in tattered, pre-flight feathers that Tanya wanted to feed her, and, at the same time, wanted to turn away to escape her image. She put the glasses down and started to thread her way up the tiers to bury her face in her breast.
Dirk van Nouhuys says, "I was born in Berkeley and have lived most of my life in the Bay Area. I have a BS from Stanford in Creative Writing and a MA from Columbia in contemporary literature. I've published fiction regularly in literary and other magazines for decades, occasionally poetry and photography as well. For a long time I worked in Silicon Valley as a tech writer but these days I'm only writing fiction. I'm working on a novel about non-Americans working in Silicon Valley. You can learn about me at my web site, wandd.com. Check out my life in pictures."
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Geoff Fox
2010-12-03 02:08:24
I started reading this and couldn't stop, even though it was much longer than I'd expected. Marvelous scenes and a surprisingly complex structure — at least three stories are unfolding here, the actor Joe and his company, Johanna's desperation and confusion, and, implicit, Tanya's self-liberation.