The Tailor of Panama (20 page)

If he would only hit her, if that was what he needed to do. If he would lash out, bawl at her, drag her into the garden where the children couldn't hear and say: “Louisa, we're all washed up, I'm leaving you, I've got someone else.” If that was what he had. Anything, absolutely anything, was better than the bland pretence that their life together was fine, nothing had changed, except that he just had to pop out and measure a valued customer at nine o'clock at night and come back three hours later, saying wasn't it time they had the Delgados to dinner? And why not have the Oakleys and Rafi Domingo as well? Which, as any fool in the world could have seen at a glance, was a recipe for catastrophe, but somehow the gap that had recently formed between herself and Harry didn't let her say this to him.

So Louisa held her tongue and duly invited Ernesto. One evening as he was on the point of going home she pressed the envelope into his hand and he took it cursorily, thinking it must be a reminder of some sort, Ernesto was such a dreamer and schemer, so wrapped up
in his daily struggle against the lobbyists and intriguers, that sometimes he hardly knew which hemisphere he was in, let alone what time of day it was. But next morning when he arrived he was courtesy itself, a real Spanish gentleman as always, and yes, he and his wife would be delighted, so long as Louisa would not be offended if they left early; Isabel, his wife, was concerned about their small son Jorge and his eye infection; sometimes he didn't seem to sleep at all.

After that she sent a card to Rafi Domingo, knowing that his wife wouldn't come because she never did, it was that sort of lousy marriage. And next day sure enough a huge bouquet of roses arrived, like fifty dollars' worth, with a racehorse on the card and Rafi saying in his own handwriting that he would be thrilled and enchanted, darling Louisa, but alas, his wife would be somewhere or other. And Louisa knew exactly what the flowers meant, because no woman under eighty was safe from Rafi's advances; the gossip said he had given up underpants in order to improve his time-andmotion ratio. And the shameful thing was, if Louisa was truthful with herself, which largely after a couple or three vodkas she was, she found him disconcertingly attractive. So finally she called Donna Oakley, a chore she had deliberately left till last, and Donna said, “Oh shit, Louisa, we'd
love
to,” which was Donna's level exactly. What a group!

The dreaded day arrived and Harry came home early for once, armed with a pair of three-hundred-dollar porcelain candlesticks from Ludwig's, and French champagne from Motta's and a whole side of smoked salmon from somewhere else. And an hour later a team of fancy caterers showed up, led by a cocksure Argentine gigolo, and took over Louisa's kitchen because Harry said their own servants weren't reliable. Then Hannah raised a god-awful stink for no reason Louisa could fathom—aren't you going to be nice to Mr. Delgado, darling? After all he's Mummy's boss and a close friend of the President of Panama.
And
he's going to save the Canal for us and, yes, Anytime Island too. And
no
, Mark, thank
you, this is not an occasion for you to play “Lazy Sheep” on your violin; Mr. and Mrs. Delgado might appreciate it but the other guests would not.

Then in walks Harry and says, Oh, Louisa, go on, let him play it, but Louisa is adamant and gets into one of her monologues, they just pour out of her, she can't control them, she can only listen to them and groan: Harry, I do not understand why every time I give an instruction to my children you have to march in here and countermand it just to show you are master of the house. At which Hannah throws another screaming fit and Mark locks himself in his room and plays “Lazy Sheep” nonstop till Louisa beats on his door and says, “Mark, they'll be here
any minute,
” which was true, because the doorbell rang just at that moment and in marches Rafi Domingo, with his body lotion and his insinuating leer and sideburns and crocodile shoes—not all of Harry's tailoring wiles could save him from looking like the worst kind of stage dago, her father would have ordered him round to the back door on the strength of his hair oil alone.

And immediately after Rafi, enter the Delgados and the Oakleys all in short order, which proved just how unnatural the occasion was, because in Panama
nobody
shows up on time unless it's a stiff occasion, and suddenly it was all happening, with Ernesto sitting on her right side, looking like the wise, good mandarin he was: just water, thank you, Louisa dear, I'm afraid I'm not much of a drinker; to which Louisa, who is by now the better for a couple of large ones taken in the privacy of her bathroom, says to be truthful neither is she, she always thinks drink spoils a nice evening. But Mrs. Delgado, down the table on Harry's right, overhears this and gives an odd, disbelieving smile as if she has heard better.

Meanwhile Rafi Domingo on Louisa's left is dividing his time between clamping his stockinged foot on Louisa's whenever she lets him—he has slipped off one crocodile shoe for the purpose— and squinting down the front of Donna Oakley's dress which is cut on the lines of Emily's dresses, breasts pushed up like tennis balls
and the cleavage pointing due southward to what her father when he was drunk had called the industrial area.

“You know what she means to me, your wife, Harry?” Rafi asks in mouthfuls of execrable Spanish-English, down the table to Harry. Lingua franca is English tonight, for the Oakleys' benefit.

“Don't listen to him,” Louisa orders.

“She's my conscience!” Huge laugh with all his teeth and food showing. “And I didn't know I got one till Louisa come along!”

And finds this so wonderfully funny that everybody has to toast his conscience while he cranes his neck for another helping of Donna's décolleté and wiggles his toes up and down Louisa's calf, which makes her furious and randy at the same time, Emily I hate you, Rafi leave me alone you sleazeball and take your eyes off Donna, and Jesus, Harry, are you finally going to fuck me tonight?

Why Harry had invited the Oakleys was another mystery to Louisa, until she remembered that Kevin was floating some sort of speculation to do with the Canal, Kevin being something in commodities and otherwise what her father used to call a damned Yankee hustler, while his wife, Donna, worked out to Jane Fonda videos and jogged in vinyl shorts and wiggled her ass at every pretty Panamanian boy who pushed her trolley for her in the supermarket, and from all she heard not just her trolley.

And Harry from the first moment they sat down had been determined to talk about the Canal, first picking on Delgado, who responded with dignified patrician platitudes, then pressing everybody else into the discussion, whether or not they had anything to contribute. His questions of Delgado were so crude she was embarrassed. Only Rafi's roaming foot and the recognition that she was a tad oversedated prevented her from telling him:
Harry, Mr. Delgado is my fucking boss, not yours. So why are you making such a horse's ass of yourself, you prick?
But that was Whore Emily talking, not Virtuous Louisa who never swore, or not in front of the children and never when she was sober.

No, Delgado replied politely to Harry's bombardment, nothing had been agreed during the presidential tour, but some interesting ideas had been put forward, Harry, there was a general spirit of cooperation, goodwill was of the essence.

Well done, Ernesto, thought Louisa, tell him where he gets off.

“Still, I mean, everyone knows those Japs are
after
the Canal, don't they, Ernie?” said Harry, branching into inane generalisations that he hadn't the knowledge to sustain. “The only question is which way they're going to come at us, I don't know what
you
think, Rafi, at all?”

Rafi's silk stocking toes were jammed into the flesh of Louisa's knee joint and Donna's cleavage was opening like a barn door.

“I tell you what I think about Japs, Harry. You want to know what I think about Japs?” said Rafi in his rattly, auctioneer's voice, as he gathered in his audience.

“I would indeed,” said Harry unctuously.

But Rafi needed everyone.

“Ernesto, you want to know what I think about Japs?”

Delgado graciously expressed an interest in hearing what Rafi thought about the Japanese.

“Donna, you want to hear what I think about the Japs?”

“Just
say
it, for Christ's sake, Rafi,” Oakley said irritably.

But Rafi was still gathering them in.

“Louisa?” he asked, wiggling his toes behind her knee.

“I guess we're all hanging on your words, Rafi,” said Louisa in her role of charming hostess and whore sister.

So Rafi finally delivered himself of his opinion of the Japanese:

“I think those Jap bastards inject my horse Dolce Vita a doubledose Valium before the big race last week!” he cried, and laughed so loudly at his own joke, to the glint of so many gold teeth, that his audience of necessity laughed with him, Louisa loudest and Donna after her by a short head.

But Harry was not put off. Instead, he launched himself on the subject that he knew upset his wife more than any other: the disposal of the former Canal Zone itself.

“I mean we've got to face it, Ernie, it's a nice little piece of real estate that you boys are carving up. Five hundred square miles of garden America, mown and watered like Central Park, more swimming pools than in the whole of the rest of Panama—it does make you
wonder,
doesn't it? I don't know whether the City of Knowledge idea is still a starter, Ernie. Some of my customers seem to think it's a bit of a dead duck, frankly, a university in the middle of a jungle. It's hard to imagine a learned professor seeing that as the summit of his career, I don't know if they're right.”

He was running low but nobody helped him out, so he forged on:

“I suppose it all depends on how many U.S. military bases are going to be left vacant at the end of the day, doesn't it? Which requires the assistance of a crystal ball, by all accounts. We'd have to tap the highly secret wires to the Pentagon, I dare say, to know the answer to
that
little conundrum.”

“It's bullshit,” said Kevin loudly. “The smart boys have had the land all carved up among themselves for years, right, Ernie?”

A frightful emptiness set in. Delgado's fine face turned pale and stony. Nobody could think of anything to say except for Rafi who, indifferent to all atmosphere, was cheerfully interrogating Donna about the makeup she was wearing so that he could have his wife buy some. He was also trying to get his foot between Louisa's legs, which she had crossed in self-defence. Then suddenly Emily the Shrew found the words that Louisa the Immaculate was piously holding back, and they came spilling out of her, first in a series of jerky statements of record, then in an unstoppable, alcohol-induced rush.

“Kevin. I do not understand what you are implying. Dr. Delgado is a champion of Canal conservation. If you are not aware of this, it is because Ernesto is too courteous and modest to tell you. You, on the other hand, are here in Panama with the sole intention of making money out of the Canal, a purpose for which it was not designed. The only way to make money out of the Canal is ruin it.” Her voice began sliding as she counted off the crimes that Kevin was contemplating. “By cutting down the forests, Kevin. By depriving it of fresh water.
By failing to maintain its structure and machinery to the standards required by our forefathers.” Her voice became harsh and nasal. She could hear it but not stop it. “And so, Kevin, if you truly feel impelled to make money by selling off the achievements of great Americans, I suggest you go right back to San Francisco where you came from and sell the Golden Gate to the Japs. And Rafi, if you don't take your hand off my thigh, I'm going to stick a fork in your knuckles.”

At which everybody seemed to decide they really ought to be getting back—to the ailing child, to the baby-sitter, to the dog, to whatever they had that was a safe distance from where they were right now.

But what does Harry do when he has soothed his guests, escorted them to their cars and waved goodbye to them from the doorstep? Deliver a Statement to the Board.

“It's expansion, Lou”—patting her back while he hugs her— “that's all it is. Massaging the customers”—dabbing away her tears with his Irish linen handkerchief. “It's expand or die, Lou, is what it is these days. Look what happened to dear old Arthur Braithwaite. First his business went, then he did. You wouldn't want that to happen to
me,
would you? So we expand. We open the club. We socialise. We put ourselves about, because it's got to be. Eh, Lou? Right?”

But by now his patronising attentions have hardened her, and she pulls free of him.

“Harry, there are other ways of dying. I wish you to think about your family. I know of too many cases, and so do you, where men of forty have suffered heart attacks and other stress-related maladies. If your shop is not expanding I'm surprised, since I recall a lot of stories recently of increased sales and output. But if you are truly worried about the future and not just using it as a pretext, we have the rice farm to fall back on and we would surely all prefer to live in reduced circumstances practising Christian abstinence than try to keep pace with your rich, immoral friends and have you die on us.”

At which Pendel grasps her to him in a fiery bear hug and promises to be home really early tomorrow—maybe take the kids to the fun fair, do a movie. And Louisa cries and says, Oh yes, let's do it, Harry! Really let's. But they don't. Because when tomorrow comes he remembers the reception for the Brazilian Trade Delegation—lot of important players, Lou—why don't we do it tomorrow instead? And when
that
tomorrow comes, I'm a liar, Lou, there's this dinner club I've gone and got myself elected to. They're throwing a jamboree for some heavy hitters down from Mexico, and did I see you had the new
Spillway
on your desk?