Cargo of Orchids (3 page)

I tried to nap, but then gave up, got dressed again in my jeans and T-shirt and duffel coat with two toggles missing, and went for a walk—without my pack. Halfway across the park I got tired and sat to rest on the only empty bench I could find, one with a used tampon and a dead rat lying beneath it. I returned to the hotel, took a long bath and dressed for the third time that day in the same clothes I’d been wearing since I’d picked them out of the dirty laundry before leaving Vancouver. It was either that or go to the launch in my pyjamas. I’d forgotten to pack anything fancy.

When Bret, who had even changed her hair colour for the evening (to match her boa constrictor pantsuit), arrived, we took a death-defying cab ride through the potholes of New York to Philippe’s Chopsticks Restaurant. “Don’t order the Strange Taste Chicken,” Bret advised when a tiny waitperson brought us a menu thicker than Carmen María’s book,
Rescate
(Ransom). “It doesn’t taste like any bird you’ll ever eat.” Bret was an expert on everything from Chinese beer to firm-textured tofu; she knew the caloric content of every dish I considered ordering, and when I couldn’t make up my mind, she told me the only thing you could be sure had no calories was sex. One teaspoon of spermatozoa contained thirty-two different substances, including vitamin C, vitamin B12, fructose, sulphur, zinc, copper, magnesium, potassium, calcium and many anti-free radicals, she explained. She figured she could even give up eating if she could find a man to have
oral sex with once a day. “But not for the sex, just for the health part. I stopped going to bed—with men—centuries ago. All they were ever interested in was, you know, spreading their gene pool around.”

I drank three Tsing-Tao’s in a row and left most of my WorWonton untouched. I didn’t say this to Bret, but I wished I could meet
one
man who wanted to procreate. There’d been men in my life—but either they already had children and didn’t want the prospect of more child support, or they were too young and didn’t want the commitment, or they were away from home with their work too often, or they worked at home and didn’t want to share the playroom. I’d always wanted babies, and the life that went with them, everything from the environmentally friendly diaper service to the folding stroller. Well, at least
one
baby. Someone to love, who would love me back, forever.

That kind of forever didn’t seem to be in the offing. Even my fortune cookie advised, “Romance is iffy.” Bret snorted when I showed it to her, and said Margaret Trudeau was the only person she’d ever heard of who got lucky in New York, “if you can call giving Jack Nicholson head in the back seat of a stretch getting lucky.”

After she’d paid the bill and flagged down another cab, we endured a second near-death experience all the way to The Purple Reign; Carmen María’s husband had shares in the fashionable nightclub, now owned by “the Asians.” After briefing the doorman to ensure I would have no problems getting in (they had a no-jeans policy, she explained), Bret said she was abandoning me because she had a coming-out party to attend; a friend of hers had just done nine
months, and they were going out celebrating. Bret kissed me on both cheeks and said she regretted not having the chance to get to know me better. In retrospect, I felt I had barely escaped from an iffy situation: when she embraced me, it felt like being hugged by a knife drawer.

Inside the club I climbed the purple-and-gold-carpeted steps to a landing where a woman barely dressed in a gold lamé gown informed me I would have to check my handguns at the door. I checked my duffel coat instead, glancing around the room trying not to appear as nervous as I felt, and when I saw no familiar faces, helped myself to a tray of soggy canapés. A man in a white suit introduced himself, saying he was looking forward to hearing me recite from … his voice trailed off, and I filled in the name of the book for him … which would be in half an hour or so, after a few drinks.

A Cuban waiter tried to tempt me with one of his mini sausage rolls as I sipped a cautious new wine from the Niagara region, which, I was sure, Carmen had had imported especially for me. The Chinese beer I’d had earlier, and the canapé mixed with the wine, started, suddenly, to have an unexpected effect, and I asked a man in a mauve tux, who looked like he ought to know, where the ladies’ was. I pushed open the heavy doors he pointed me to and had ensconced myself in the cubicle furthest from the door (the toilet that has the least germs, according to an article I read; the one in the middle has the most, and it was occupied), thinking I would stay there until I threw up or it was time to give my reading, when I heard the person in the middle stall clearing his throat. Then, with the hint of a question in his voice, he spoke my name.

I got to my feet, flushed the toilet, even though it wasn’t necessary, and pushed open the door, certain now I was in the wrong washroom. He came out of
his
stall and that’s when we both began apologizing. With his wind-blown blond hair and blue eyes that looked as if they were more suited to picking rocks on the beach than picking weenies off toothpicks, he looked attractively out of place, not just in this washroom but in the clothes he wore too: he was the only person—besides me—who had not dressed formally. He met my gaze, smiled as if he had been caught, then looked away. The scar on his cheek, just below his right eye, made him look dangerous.

Our hands touched as we both reached for the brass door handle. Once we were on neutral ground, I asked him how he’d known it was me in that cubicle next to him.

“Only someone from Vancouver would wear hiking boots to a nightclub in New York,” he said, smiling. He pointed: his own boots were the same make as mine.

Back in the crowded room, Carmen brought us each a glass of champagne and kissed Vernal on the cheek. “I wondered who’d kidnapped you,” she said. She looked exotic—her red hair, sullen, scarlet lips and black-painted fingernails embedded with emeralds like cut stars. Her eyes were the light green of a parrot’s wings, and her body smelled faintly of nutmeg.

Carmen and I had spent hours together on the telephone when I was translating her book. At first I didn’t know why I had been asked to take on the work—New York must have been full of Spanish-into-English translators—but I soon learned that nobody south of the border
would even
look
at the manuscript for fear of reprisals, of being kidnapped themselves or having their families threatened. I’d learned a lot more from Carmen María than just the Spanish colloquialisms for
bribe
and
assassin.

“Vernal is
canadiense, mijita
, just like you!” Carmen exclaimed. “He lawyer.” She pronounced
lawyer
“liar,” and when I looked at Vernal he pushed his hair out of his face and gave me a what-can-I-say kind of smile. Carmen told him to bring us some more drinks.

I ran my thumb over my own chewed fingernails as Carmen dabbed at her mouth with a paper napkin covered with small blue fleurs-de-lys, her way of showing off the emerald ring, worth ten times what I’d been paid for translating her book. I raised my eyebrows, and she waved her hand dismissively.

“A gift from my husband. He is in prison again today, or else he would be here with us, celebrating. What can I tell you? At least he remembered my birthday.”

When Vernal came back with our drinks, Carmen turned to speak to a group of women dressed as if they were going on a safari to Tiffany’s. Vernal had a copy of
Rescate
but couldn’t decide whether it was the right thing to do, to ask the translator to autograph it; he kept flipping through the book instead, the way people do when they haven’t read it yet and don’t know what to say.

“I look forward to reading it … very much,” he said finally. He looked down at the floor, and it seemed to me he blushed. “That goes without saying, I suppose—I mean, that I look forward to reading it. What else are you supposed to do with a book?”

“You could put it on your head,” I said, trying to make him feel at ease. “It’s an exercise they used to make us do … at charm school. Walk across the room with a book on your head, to improve your posture. I grew up thinking books were instruments of torture.”

He was still looking at his feet. “
Writing
must be torture for you then. Is it?”

“Translating is very different from writing,” I said. Vernal downed his second glass of champagne rather too quickly. I straightened my shoulders. “Do you read … many books?” I asked.

He stared into his empty glass, turning it round in his hand. “I hate to confess, but only what puts me to sleep. Which means I like very dull books.
Burke on the Law of Recision in Contracts
, for example. I don’t think I’ve ever got to the end of the first paragraph.”

I laughed, trying to sound impressed.

“I hope Carmen María’s book doesn’t put you to sleep
that
quickly,” I said.

“It won’t. Of course it won’t. Not if the cover is anything to go by. And I’m sure you … your translation will keep me awake. If nothing else does.”

After an awkward pause, where we tried not to make eye contact, I asked Vernal how he knew Carmen. “I know her husband,” Vernal said. “He’s been to Vancouver … on several occasions. In the past.” He dropped his voice as he looked around the room. “He’s a client of mine.”

“And vice versa,” said Carmen. She apologized for butting in on our conversation, but said she wanted to excuse herself—she needed to compose herself before her reading.

I watched two men in white jackets setting up chairs, another filling goblets with ice water from a cut-glass pitcher. Shortly afterwards, the man who had introduced himself to me earlier cleared his voice in the microphone and, when he had the crowd’s attention, said that—he hesitated, and I prayed he would at least remember
her
name—Carmen María would read first and her translator would follow. Those who didn’t have glasses in their hands clapped, so the applause sounded a bit thin and I began to wish I was safe under the covers in my round bed back at the Ritz.

Carmen had not warned me what part of her memoir she would be reading. Not everyone in the audience understood Spanish, but all listened attentively, picking up, no doubt, on the emotional intensity in her voice. Halfway through her performance her voice suddenly broke, and she collapsed on the floor and had to be taken upstairs to recuperate. I assumed Vernal had gone with her, because I looked for him when I got up to read but couldn’t find him in the audience.

I explained to the crowd that this had been the most difficult part of the book for me to translate, and how brave I thought Carmen María was for having written about such a brutal and offensive act. I took a deep breath and read that Carmen María had been eight months pregnant at the time she was taken hostage, that she had been kept tied up in a dirty underground cell until she was ready to give birth. Even when she went into labour, her captors wouldn’t loosen the ropes around her ankles or her wrists so she could bear down properly, and when the baby came out
they wouldn’t let her hold him, but took him to another room where she couldn’t see him, only hear his cries. When she heard her baby cry, her milk would come in. She could not feed him and his cries grew weaker every day. She thought her breasts, and her heart, would burst.

I signed thirty books, and when Carmen reappeared we both signed more. Vernal told me he’d been watching me read on a closed-circuit television, and that he could have listened to me all night, despite the subject matter. He asked where I was staying, and I told him the Ritz. He said he had a room there also, then asked if I’d like to share a taxi back to the hotel.

Vernal asked Carmen to come too, which, I secretly hoped, meant he didn’t trust himself to be alone with me. The doorman called a cab for us. I felt a strong attraction to Vernal; I also felt that, in my nervousness, I must have drunk more than I ought to have, because I sat close to him and didn’t pull away every time his arm brushed my breast.

Halfway to the hotel, Carmen lit a cigar and Vernal rolled down the window. Carmen kept complaining the potholes in New York were caused by bad taxi drivers, and Vernal kept saying, “Shhhhh,” to which Carmen would reply that she lived there, what was the driver going to do, shoot us?

Vernal sighed through his nose. When we stopped at a red light, a man wearing nothing but a burned-out television set around his waist approached our car.

“Tell him you’ve only got Canadian,” Carmen said. Vernal patted his jacket, as if to say he’d left his wallet at
home, locked the door and leaned back in his seat, resignedly. The man hurled an empty bottle at the cab, shouting, “I have no shoes, I have no shoes,” as the light turned green and we sped off.

“He is fortunate he still has feet,” Carmen said.

Vernal sighed again. “New York, New York. They liked it so much they named it twice.”

At the Ritz he ordered a bottle of brandy, and after I’d had too much to drink, I found myself telling the story of dinner with Carmen María’s bodyguard and the caloric content of a mouthful of come. Carmen, who was by now so drunk she could hardly lift her snifter to her lips, put her head in Vernal’s lap and went to sleep. Vernal gave me his card and asked me to call him when I got back to Vancouver. I wrote my phone number for him on the back of a cocktail napkin. We said good night, and I rode the elevator alone to the hotel’s top floor.

My rooms seemed bigger and lonelier than ever. I put on the top half of my pyjamas and climbed between the heavily starched sheets. Then I remembered I’d forgotten to bolt the door, and was on my way downstairs to secure it when I heard a key turn in the lock. For a moment, I thought my crab fisherman from Rupert had tracked me down.

“Who is it?” I called when I heard the door rebounding off the door stopper and the sound of someone breathing unevenly.

“I beg your pardon? Who is
this?
” came a familiar voice. Vernal stepped into the room with Carmen over his shoulder. When he saw me, half-naked on the stairs, his mouth made a perfect O.

“There must be a mistake,” he said, glancing at the key in his hand.