Nineteen
We woke up early the next morning. I drove down to the hotel to get some papers while Chenault took a shower. I got a Times and a Trib, so we’d both have something to read, and then as an afterthought I bought two copies of what I figured was the final issue of the San Juan Daily News. I wanted to have one as a souvenir.
We had breakfast at the table by the window and afterward we drank coffee and read the papers. That morning was the only time I ever felt a sense of peace in the apartment, and when I thought about it I felt dumb, because that was the only reason I’d wanted it in the first place. I lay on the bed and smoked and listened to the radio while Chenault washed the dishes. There was a good breeze, and when I looked out the window I could see across the trees and the red-tiled rooftops all the way to the horizon.
Chenault was wearing my shirt again, and I watched it bounce and flutter around her thighs as she moved in the kitchen. After a while I got up and crept over to her, lifting the shirt and seizing her rump with both hands. She shrieked and spun around, then fell against me, laughing. I put my arms around her and playfully jerked the tail of the shirt up over her head. We stood there swaying slightly and then I carried her over to the bed, where we made love very quietly.
It was mid-morning when I left the house, but the sun was already so hot that it felt like mid-afternoon. Driving along the beach I remembered how much I’d enjoyed the mornings when I first came to San Juan. There is something fresh and crisp about the first hours of a Caribbean day, a happy anticipation that something is about to happen, maybe just up the street or around the next corner. Whenever I look back on those months and try to separate the good times from the bad, I recall those mornings when I had an early assignment — when I would borrow Sala’s car and go roaring along the big tree-lined boulevard. I remember the feel of the little car vibrating beneath me and the sudden heat of the sun on my face as I zipped out of the shade and into a patch of light; I remember the whiteness of my shirt and the sound of a silk tie flapping in the wind beside my head, the unhinged feel of the accelerator and a sudden switching of lanes to pass a truck and beat a red light.
Then into a palm-lined driveway and hit the rasping brakes, flip down the Press tag on the visor and leave the car in the nearest No Parking zone. Hurry into the lobby, pulling on the coat to my new black suit and dangling a camera in one hand while an oily clerk calls my man to confirm the appointment. Then up a soft elevator to the suite — big greeting, pompous conversation, and black coffee from a silver pot, a few quick photos on the balcony, grinning handshake, then back down the elevator and hustle off.
On my way back to the office, with a pocketful of notes, I would stop at one of the outdoor restaurants on the beach for a club sandwich and a beer; sitting in the shade to read the papers and ponder the madness of the news, or leaning back with a lusty grin at all the bright-wrapped nipples, trying to decide how many I could get my hands on before the week was out.
Those were the good mornings, when the sun was hot and the air was quick and promising, when the Real Business seemed right on the verge of happening and I felt that if I went just a little faster I might overtake that bright and fleeting thing that was always just ahead.
Then came noon, and morning withered like a lost dream. The sweat was torture and the rest of the day was littered with the dead remains of all those things that might have happened, but couldn’t stand the heat. When the sun got hot enough it burned away all the illusions and I saw the place as it was — cheap, sullen, and garish — nothing good was going to happen here.