The Domino Diaries Read online

  Along the way she told me she enjoyed the walks to the boys’ houses more than the boys.

  Sometimes the wrong people have your number and I needed to put some miles between us.

  I hadn’t told anyone when I borrowed some money from my uncle and flew over to Madrid and stayed out all night Christmas Eve until that strange hour when the Chinese step out into the copper streetlight haze and huddle on hundreds of street corners across town clutching dozens of shopping bags full of to-go food for a few bucks. Chance being stuck over a toilet for ten hours and go sightseeing through the nighttime streets that get started around 3 a.m. Walking until the Chinese have abandoned the street corners and turn off the Gran Vía and head down to Puerta del Sol along a path where all the Africans are waiting for you, peddling movies and music and scarves and sunglasses on blankets, so that if a whistle echoes down a corridor that la policía are approaching, the blankets are packed up by the hundreds, swept up as quick as dominoes tip over, and two seconds later a thriving black market economy is a ghost echo of footsteps haunting eighty different directions, weaved into all the other squeaky Windex-scrubbed reflections on storefront windows of urgent men casting glances at their fake designer watches.

  A lot of strangers close in on one another to nurse their respective hangovers with scenic strolls down the streets near the statue of a bear reaching up into a tree, looking just like a boy going for his first kiss. For entertainment I gave reading Don Quixote another half-assed try in Spanish on a bench nearby, until the tourist buses rolled up and the Gypsies moved in like a kicked-over ant nest and set up their coordinated strikes.

  Then someone knocked on the door of my room.

  “¡El guapo! ¡Correo!”

  I opened the door to one of the transvestites with half her makeup off. I was pretty sure her name was Daisy. She handed me a letter. I opened it.

  Just a date and a time and a place. A little quote beneath as a flirtatious fuck-you:

  “I’m a romantic; a sentimental person thinks things will last, a romantic person hopes against hope they won’t.”

  —F. Scott Fitzgerald

  She had cigarette-stain eyes. I prefer dark eyes even though most girls who possess them dismiss them as common. They aren’t. You look into brown eyes, while you look at all the other colors. With no buildup or wind-down, apart from us nearly fucking, we’d said good-bye. She’d just finished doing some handstands for no particular reason.

  I went to see her at the café but she’d stopped working there. I was leaning over a table writing in a notebook when I heard some roller skates smack the pavement. I looked up and saw her.

  “Can I sit down?”

  I stood up and we looked at each other for a while. I pulled out her chair and she sat down.

  “The first time we met you were writing a story about a guy who falls in love with a prostitute.”

  I nodded.

  “It’s strange, it happened to me.”

  “Hold on a second.” I tried to process this. “You fell in love with a gigolo?”

  “No.” She smiled. “I was the hooker.”

  “When?”

  “For the last five years.”

  “You were a hooker when we met?”

  “Yeah.”

  “But you were working here.”

  “Part time.”

  “But you were in school.”

  “How do you think I paid my tuition?”

  “Your stepdad was a dentist!”

  “It’s creepy you remember so much. Are you in love with me or something? I came so close to telling you but, you know, it just sort of took care of itself.”

  “Well,” I said, “I still don’t even know your name.”

  * * *

  In Madrid my phone rang.

  “You know who this is?”

  “You’re the only person who has my phone number.”

  “I’m at Plaza Mayor.”

  “Okay. You’re close by.”

  “I’m high on ecstasy.”

  “That’s great.”

  “I’m drunk, too.”

  “Come over.”

  “You’re sure you know who this is?”

  “I already answered that question.”

  “Where do you live?”

  I gave her my address.

  “I’ll call you when I leave.”

  4 a.m. Phone rings.

  “Still up?”

  “No, I’m fast asleep.”

  “I’ve been dancing all night. I just got out of a swimming pool five minutes ago. I stink. Still want me to come over?”

  “Get over here.”

  “Positive?”

  4:15 a.m. Phone rings.

  “I’m getting the heebie-jeebies. I haven’t talked with you in a really long time. This is really weird.”

  “Don’t worry. I have strawberries. It’s fine.”

  “You have … strawberries?”

  “Exactly.”

  * * *

  “You have strawberries?”

  “Exactly. Nothing weird. Bowl of strawberries. Very wholesome arrangement. Everybody’s happy.”

  “Okay.”

  “Just come over.”

  There was a pause and I felt something in my brain creak.

  “I don’t think I—” Raped, pregnant, aborted pause. “Okay. I’ll be there in a second.”

  A few minutes later I saw her get out of a cab on the Gran Vía. I dug into my pocket and pulled out my keys and flicked them out the window. I heard them connect with the pavement.

  She entered the room and sat on the floor and grabbed a handful of strawberries and smoked from a pouch of Drum tobacco.

  She didn’t say much at first. Every ten minutes or so she’d go to the bathroom and leave the door open while she pissed. After the first time I leaned over to watch her.

  “Why don’t you close the door?” I asked.

  “Why should I?”

  This seemed to me a very sensible answer.

  “I don’t know.”

  “I’m peeing.”

  “I know that.”

  “Welllll?”

  “Well, do you ever close the door?”

  “Do you want me to?”

  “No. It’s just weird you’re so…”

  She wiped herself and flushed the toilet.

  “What?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It’s intimate.”

  She came back over to the carpet and sat cross-legged, facing me.

  She wouldn’t say anything.

  “Tell me how you got into it,” I asked, feeling like a jackass.

  “Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman.”

  I gave her a look.

  “My sister.”

  “Is she still working?”

  “No,” she said, pressing a strawberry against her lips. “She was a meth addict. So was my mom. But my sister kicked it and got out of turning tricks.”

  “So you worked on the street?”

  “No. I worked at places they have set up for it.”

  “Which ones?”

  “A bunch.”

  “What kind of type goes for it?”

  She smiled. “There’s no type. It’s everybody. Nobody.”

  “Did you fuck celebrities?”

  “Sometimes. Sure.”

  “Only Vancouver?”

  “No,” she said. “Other places. They give you an apartment. They set you up with a room. I’d write my essays or study and the johns would come over and I’d buzz them in. They’d leave and I’d go back to the books until the next one arrived. I worked at a place in Japan for a while. Hostess thing. I didn’t go over there for it. But it finds you.”

  “How’d you get out?” I asked. Are we on Larry fucking King? KISS HER.

  “Roll me another cigarette.” She waited until I’d finished and handed it over and lit it for her. “You do that nicely. I always was a little crazy for how you roll and prepare those things. Well, a john approached me and I could see
it in his eyes.”

  “See what?”

  “It happens to these guys. They fall for you.”

  “But you never fall for them?”

  “Anyway—this guy was gray, gray but not ugly. He was wearing an expensive but all wrinkled-up suit. And he came over to the bed and sat down beside me. He told me I didn’t belong there. And I was pretty cold about it and told him if he was feeling something for me it was probably a useful thing to know that for me love was money.”

  “You still believe that?” I asked.

  “No,” she responded. “But he said that was all right. It was fine. He took a second looking at the ground, then turned back to me while he reached into his briefcase. He told me he had money. Then he asked what my price was to get out. I asked him to repeat himself—just to be a bitch about it—and he found the checkbook in that at-ta-ché briefcase of his. I couldn’t breathe when I saw it. Sorry. I have to pee.”

  She tried to get up but stumbled. Behind her I saw a wallet drop from her pocket. She struggled to get to her feet and made it, albeit a little woozily. When her back was to me, I swiped the wallet. She had the bathroom door open so I couldn’t case it.

  “Had you ever put a price on getting out before?”

  “Roll me another one,” she said, flushing the toilet. “No, I’d never put a price on it. Not before that moment. But I thought about it. And I just, you know, crunched the numbers.”

  “What’d you come up with?”

  “I told him I wanted him to pay my full tuition up to a doctorate in whatever I wanted. I wanted a car. I wanted an apartment for a year. I wanted twenty grand upfront.”

  “And he tore off a check?”

  “He tore off a check. We walked out the door together.”

  “You were with him?”

  “No. I saw him. But I wasn’t with him. It was just your average sugar daddy arrangement for a while.”

  “You think so, huh?”

  “Anyway, then I met somebody. And I fell in love with that somebody. That had never happened before. Or since. And I told the guy who’d gotten me out of the game and he was good about it and backed off. He gave me space with it. And the guy I fell in love with fell in love with me. We played house. I was with him. And it was—I’m not sure how to put it—it was true.”

  I reached over and took the cigarette from her mouth.

  “Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “Is everything you’re telling me made up?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Okay.” I put the cigarette back between her lips. “Keep telling the story.”

  “I played it straight with this boy and a lot of stuff was around the corner. Playing house was nice. But one night I’m out walking my dog and I bump into that john. The sugar daddy. He offers me fifteen grand for one night. I took it. Turned the trick. And the next morning I go back to the guy I was living with and confess it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I loved him.”

  “I got that part. I meant, why’d you turn the trick?”

  “Anyway—I told him it was a horrible mistake. I told him that I loved him. And he said he loved me and that we were done. That’s why I left the city to come to Europe. Biggest mistake of my life.”

  “So the john bought you out and bought you back in?” I felt like a CNN ticker.

  “I’m getting tired.”

  “Did you kiss the john?”

  “I’m sleepy.”

  “Sleep here.”

  “Umm … I don’t think so.”

  “Not with me. Just sleep here. I can’t sleep on the bed anyway.”

  “Why?” she asked.

  I shrugged. “It intimidates me.”

  “I can’t stay here with you. I can’t stay here.”

  “Why?”

  “Because this is better. For you I mean. It’s a good little memory to gnaw on as it is.”

  She got up off the floor and looked at me, tilting her head to one side.

  “I have your name,” I said.

  “Do you now? You know my name?”

  “I don’t know it,” I corrected. “I have it.”

  I pulled out her wallet and stood up and gave it to her. We both held on to it for a second before I let go. She leaned over and I pulled back and everything was fine until she kissed me hard for a few moments, then slipped off my lips as softly as snow falling from a branch. Then she was gone and I went over to my window and watched the dawn breaking until she came out the entrance of the apartment and disappeared onto the Gran Vía, a suicide’s leap below my window.

  15

  MUSICAL CHAIRS

  Marco Polo describes a bridge, stone by stone.

  “But which is the stone that supports the bridge?” Kublai Khan asks.

  “The bridge is not supported by one stone or another,” Marco answers, “but by the line of the arch that they form.”

  Kublai Khan remains silent, reflecting.

  Then he adds: “Why do you speak to me of the stones? It is only the arch that matters to me.”

  Polo answers: “Without stones there is no arch.”

  —Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

  A COUPLE OF MONTHS LATER I scrounged enough money to take a direct flight from Madrid to Havana. I sat with a girl named Ría on the edge of the Malecón, with Miami somewhere off in the sunset behind us, ignited against the horizon like a lit cigar dropped into a puddle of gasoline.

  Ría was a pen pal who had just graduated from the university of Havana. Some Cubans I’d met in Madrid, who had married off the island, had put me in touch with her. They told me she was in love with the same books I was: Cervantes, Calvino, Kundera, Duras. Through her work designing Web sites for the government she was in the coveted position of having access to the Internet. This was exceedingly rare for Cubans. We wrote each other e-mails almost every day. It’s always strange finding someone on the page before you know them anywhere else. Sometimes you get lucky and start off with a curious mutual understanding—“landsman” is the lovely word to describe that sensation. She insisted we write in English so she could improve her grasp of the language. She’d taught herself English by learning the lyrics to seemingly every song ever written. She’d never left Cuba before yet knew, in great detail, about everywhere I’d ever traveled from literature, film, art, and history books. When I told her about my mother’s background she knew all kinds of details about the Hungarian revolution. After Hungary supplied Cuba with all their horribly unreliable humped Camelo buses, she’d gotten curious about the land that gave birth to those monstrosities of dysfunction.

  We broke the ice with Ría’s idea of small talk.

  “The tourists my friends meet from Gringolandia always try to seduce us with the cars they drive back home.” Ria giggled, wiping dark locks from her black eyes. We had corresponded for months, but I’d never seen a picture of her before. She was waif-thin, swimming in an oversized Terry Fox Marathon of Hope T-shirt, a little pair of battered tennis shoes beneath a white skirt patterned with purple lilacs she’d sewn on herself. She reminded me of a Cuban Audrey Hepburn, hopelessly beautiful in all her delicate features and almost apologetic grace. Over the years I would have the chance to meet several very important people in Cuban society, but I had the most luck in meeting Ría.

  That day, she introduced me to her smile that involuntarily tilted her head to one side like the girl Picasso captured in The Dreamer. She’d brought along some peso submarine-sized cigars for us to smoke. After she’d gushed about how much she enjoyed quality cigars, I’d felt too ashamed over our correspondence to confess that I didn’t care for them. For a present I’d brought her some Romeo y Julietas from the gift shop of the Habana Libre hotel. As she bit off and spit out the end of her cigar she discovered that her lighter had run out of fluid and spiked it on the pavement at our feet. “Cubaneo,” she growled. “Whatever isn’t broken here will be soon.”

  I reached over with the flame of my match while she puffed he
r cigar to life. After she filled her lungs with smoke, she filled her cheeks until they expanded in Louis Armstrong proportions before exhaling. “Oh how I’ve missed this smoke! As I was saying, in Cuba cars themselves tell you very little about us, but you can tell everything about someone by their license plate. License plates are the Cuban people’s Rosetta Stone.”

  “Decode all these drivers for me.” I cast my hand across the lanes of traffic racing along the Malecón.

  “In one glance you can tell if they are a foreigner, their job, how important they are, where they’re allowed to go. Even if you had a million dollars sent to you from Miami you can’t drive your car for five minutes without the government allowing you to. We stole the same system of license plates from the Soviet Union. My cousin was a secret policeman before they put him in jail for selling materials from the airport on the mercado negro. Soon they will have cameras all over the city monitoring all movements.”

  “What was he selling?”

  “Fuel. Cigars. Food. Anything.” She took a long draw from her cigar and inhaled deeply. “I can’t even concentrate because this cigar is giving my lungs an orgasm. Even my asthma is behaving and isn’t attacking me because of how luxurious this Romeo y Julieta is. I’m not even upset you lied to me all this time in our letters about cigars. How many other things did you lie about also? All writers are such liars.”

  “I didn’t lie to gain an advantage,” I told her. “Maybe I did. I just wanted to hear your description of how much you enjoyed them.”

  “That is an advantage over a stranger. Cigars were the only sensual pleasure I had as a teenager.”

  Ría’s uncle worked in a cigar factory as an inspector and brought home good stolen cigars for his family. It was the only luxury Ría’s family enjoyed until the uncle was caught and lost his job. Ría and I were the same age and during the Special Period, when she was a teenager, the food shortages were so severe it was a bigger crime to kill a cow than a person. She told me her boyfriend became a “cat fisherman” from people’s yards. There was no other source of meat. People went to prison for having an American dollar in their pocket. Santa Claus was illegal. But through all that awfulness her family had the best tobacco in the world whenever they wished.