When in Rio (29 page)

Marisa didn’t seem perturbed by the crass behavior of her children. In fact, she had barely noticed the interactions between the children and Marta, from what I could tell. Her full attention seemed focused on Jack, whose head had been tilted toward hers throughout lunch as he listened to what I assumed was her tale of woe. I couldn’t hear the words—she was speaking in Portuguese and in a voice that was too low for me to hear, although clearly fervent.

Marta kept up a distracting string of bright conversation throughout the meal with Mario and the children, asking the two grumpy nephews about school, about their friends, about a dozen other little details of their lives I never would have thought to question. They answered in monosyllables, squirming in their chairs uneasily, and then Mario would fill in the rest for them with a slightly overblown bonhomie. At a few points during lunch I could see Marta’s smile falter and tears brighten her eyes. Whether they were tears of compassion or frustration, I couldn’t tell, only that she was clearly at her wits’ end with the whole situation, and that the last thing she wanted was to play hostess to this woman and her two ill-mannered children.

Little Silvia had clammed up again at her aunt and cousins’ arrival, and barely picked at her lunch. She watched Jack with Marisa furtively, sensing she had lost her recent conquest to another. I wanted to pick her up and hug her, commiserate with her, because I knew how she felt. I was giving them the same stealthy looks while I tried to eat and make appropriately meaningless conversation with our hosts. Once or twice I caught Jack’s eye and he gave me tiny, tight-lipped smiles before turning his attention back to Marisa. Whether he was displeased with what she was telling him, or the distraction from it, I couldn’t tell.

It was one of the most bizarre meals I’d ever sat through. Nobody, with the possible exception of Marisa, was saying what they meant.

Afterward Gabriel took his cousins into the snug and attempted to draw them out. If they were spoiled brats, he was, by contrast, a gracious young prince, playing the consummate junior host as he offered books and activities and eventually even the video games I had known must be hiding somewhere in the house. He was a bit over the top but seemed determined to succeed, and kept glancing to his parents for approval. He received it, in smiles and touches and nods. But the two cousins resisted his attempts to entertain them and ended up retreating into the private worlds their little handheld video game players provided. I could see his father in Gabriel, both of them nearly falling over themselves to try to haul their guests into enjoyment. It was hard on them, being good natural hosts, to have such resoundingly bad guests.

Strangely enough, it was Jack who pulled the two boys farthest out of their shells, and he did it incidentally. Gabriel, giving up on his cousins, had asked Jack to play a video game with him, braving a glare from his aunt to make his request. And Jack obliged, to my surprise, leaving Marisa’s side on the couch and plunking himself down on the floor next to Gabriel in front of the television that had been cleverly concealed behind a panel in the wall next to the fireplace.

He turned out to be quite astonishingly good at the game, which involved a snowboarding race of some sort. Slowly the two other boys began paying more attention to his onscreen antics than to their own games, until they ended up seated on the floor behind him and Gabriel, cheering him on through turns and gates and impossible freestyle jumps. The computer-generated snow was a sharp contrast to the scenery outside, but the whole scene in the room soon began to develop a wintry feel, the group starting to feel cozy by the fireplace while the rain poured outside and the little characters on the screen schussed and leapt their way down their
cybertronic
hill. There was cheering, there were high-fives, and at some point Silvia snuck into Jack’s lap and sat curled there while he stabbed at the controller with practiced fingers.

“I’m sorry about this,” Marta said gently to me as I stood at the archway leading down into the little room, watching them, watching the rain still sheeting down the window, feeling like the grayness of the day was all too appropriate. Feeling miserable and trying not to look it. “She’s…we’ve known this was coming, but for it to be this weekend…”

“That’s quite all right,” I said, smiling falsely and regretting it instantly. I could see Marta’s kind face harden just a little. I didn’t want to be churlish, didn’t want to lose her approval.

But I was watching the man I’d come to realize I’d loved for two years, the man I had only started to grow close to in the past few days, do his best to make overtures to the boys that might have been his. Boys that clearly might
still
become his, if Marisa had anything to say about it. And I didn’t feel nice, I didn’t feel pleasant, I felt sick down in the pit of my stomach and I suddenly wanted so badly to go home that my throat was choking up hard with the thought of it.

I wished I knew the full extent of what was going on with Marisa, of what had Marta and Mario so distraught, but I had no idea how to ask, so I resigned myself to finding out by degrees as I pieced things together.

“In all of this, who my greatest feelings for are those two,” Marta went on, her emotion getting the better of her grammar for once as she nodded toward her nephews. It would be the only slip, the only syntactic awkwardness I would ever hear from her. Her English was usually much better than my own. “They were never happy children, but now…” Her gesture was futile, resigned. “I’m so grateful for my own children.”

“Your children aren’t happy by accident,” I said firmly, and it turned out to be a good thing to say. Marta hugged me impetuously. But then she frowned again as we heard raised voices from down the hall, where Mario and Marisa had disappeared to talk once Jack became caught up in the game.

Antonio and Oscar, who had been discussing the finer points of play in increasingly enthusiastic voices as Jack worked up through level after level, fell ominously silent. As I watched, they seemed to shrink back into themselves, looking as though they wished the thick wool rug would open up and swallow them whole. Marisa’s voice carried, a little shrill but very insistent, and when she preceded Mario into the kitchen, she saw us standing there and switched to English, never missing a beat.

“I don’t
have
to hear you, Mario, because you make no sense! It is through, it is finished. I thought you would understand, or at least offer some support for me, for your nephews. But obviously I do not have your support. We will go to the ranch once the road is clear tomorrow. We won’t trouble you longer than this one night.” She was imperious, magnificent, eyes snapping and hair tossing back over her shoulder, but it was
too
much, like a soap opera.

She reminded me of Lourdes Johnston suddenly—everything had the potential to be a drama. She
fed
off making her life into theater, and unlike Lourdes she didn’t require that it be tasteful theater. She didn’t seem to require that the ending work out well for any of the characters, herself included.

But because she did it with style and was beautiful, men watched her drama and applauded. Not Mario, obviously. But Jack? He’d played Lourdes so well, and now I thought I knew where he’d started learning that skill. Marisa had been his first choice, she was the one he had asked to marry him all those years ago. He’d been learning how to manage her because he’d been planning to do it for the rest of his life. He hadn’t asked anyone else since she’d turned him down.

Marta rolled her eyes just a little, but not where Marisa could see her do it. “Marisa, of course you can stay here as long as you need to. We can discuss it after the children are asleep. Why don’t you go freshen up, I’m sure you’re exhausted.”

Why she should be exhausted, I wasn’t sure. But it seemed to make sense to Marisa.

“I
am
exhausted,” she agreed. “In my
bones
, I’m so tired, Marta. You have no idea. You, who have this quiet little life with Mario.” Her condescension was not even thinly veiled, and I gaped at the boldness. “You’re so sweet together. So fortunate. And Eduardo is…ah!” She broke into another long diatribe in Portuguese, and raised her graceful fingers to her eyes as if to block out the very thought of her husband. I couldn’t tell what she was saying about him but it clearly wasn’t flattering. It was becoming evident that she was here because she was disenchanted with her husband, was perhaps even in the process of leaving him.

I wondered idly what he must be like. Why had she accepted him, when she had refused Jack?
How
could she have refused Jack? And how could she not regret that refusal? Well, obviously she did regret it. Her body language around Jack spoke volumes about that regret.

Silence had descended on the little group playing by the fireplace in the adjacent room. Antonio and Oscar had returned to their solitary handheld games, Gabriel was lounging moodily on the carpet in front of the TV, staring fixedly at his outstretched toes, and Jack had walked a sleepy-looking Silvia closer to the window to look at the rain.

“It’s her naptime.” Marta sounded as though she was relieved for any excuse to break the little tableau we’d all fallen into. She went to gather Silvia, whom I could hear whispering her protests, and carried her off down the hall, leaving Jack without a prop.

To my horror, he sighed as if shouldering a burden he’d been expecting and came into the kitchen to lead Marisa away too. She slipped her hand into his and he let it stay there, tugging her out of the room. Mario trailed behind them but it was clear I wasn’t invited along. I was left alone in the kitchen, the three young boys in the next room neither needing nor wanting my supervision.

I never knew where they all got off to. The house was too big and rambling to track them all down and the sound generally didn’t carry up and down the many levels. After a few minutes I went exploring and ended up on a long gallery overlooking an enormous room that apparently served as both the dining room and a more general venue for entertainment.

Finding the stairs that led there after a little more searching, I made my way down and spent some minutes staring out the giant windowed wall that offered an unimpeded view of the forest and hills beyond. The windows went from the floor to the top of the ceiling, which was probably over twenty feet high, and I could see why the family chose to spend their time in a cozier setting. This view was stunning, but I almost felt ready to tumble out of the room when I walked too close to the windows.

At the end of the space opposite the stairs, the glass wall had clearly been designed to slide open, granting access to a wide, flagged patio surrounded by a railing. Again, not nearly as comfortable as the terrace gardens and deck on the other end of the house, but I could imagine a party of truly grand scope being held here. A party such as one might see in movies, although I’d never actually attended one of those parties myself.

The room was enormous and could easily accommodate dozens, perhaps a hundred or more of the glitterati. In addition to the long dining table that dominated the raised area by the window wall, there was another larger, more formal sitting area I hadn’t seen from up on the gallery, as well as several smaller clusters of chairs grouped for conversation and, in one corner, a substantial wet bar that was better equipped than the kitchens had been in any of the three apartments I’d lived in during college. From there, the waiters at the party I was envisioning would issue forth with champagne and hors d’oeuvres on little trays, serving celebrities who were mingling with oil magnates, that sort of thing. There was even a conveniently located concert grand at which a piano player would be seated, providing tasteful background music. I could almost hear the babble of cultured voices, the
ching
of a bottleneck against crystal as another glass was poured, the subtle notes of jazz underneath it all.

Parties I would never attend. Parties for the likes of Marisa, who would no doubt have the perfect dress for such an occasion and be the envy of all the other socialites.

I realized I was now making myself feel inadequate over an event that had never actually taken place, and vowed to make myself stop. There were bookshelves, of course, lining the back of the room, the part that must run into the hillside itself. Finding a title in English, I opened the volume and sat on one of the long sofas to start reading, my eyes scanning the pages relentlessly but my brain never taking in a single word.

Chapter Twenty-Four

I had obviously fallen asleep at some point, because the next thing I was aware of was a gentle nudge against my shoulder.

“Kate, it’s dinnertime. Katie?” Jack was sitting next to me on the couch, wearing an amused but weary look, and when I blinked up at him his smile deepened a little. “You fell asleep. What were you reading?”

“I don’t remember,” I admitted, looking at the book with that sense of mild confusion that comes with waking up in a strange place after an unexpected nap. “Um…
A Tale of Two Cities
.”

“Oh.”

“I’ve read it before.”

“Okay.”

Waking a fraction farther, I heard soft clinking noises and Gabriel’s whispered voice. He was instructing his two cousins as they helped him set one end of the long dining table. It could probably have seated twenty or so. The nine places the boys set only occupied about half its length, and it looked strangely undressed when they were through. Although that might have been the lack of napkins, since they’d forgotten to bring any, as Marta pointed out with wry patience when she came to inspect their work.

“Back to the kitchen, back to work with you,” she said briskly to her young charges when she saw me and Jack on the couch, and as she ushered the boys from the room through a door I hadn’t noticed before, she gave us a cheeky little wave. Perhaps, I considered, Gabriel didn’t get it
all
from his father.

Jack waved back, then scratched uneasily at the back of his head and spoke without really looking at me. “I’m really sorry about today. It’s been sort of a write-off for you.”