Subtraction. Mary Robison
the squeak of her bottom as she realigned herself in the tub.
“Jewels?”
“Just help your ole fuckin’ self,” she said.
Facinita had probably been a bowling alley. It was a long, low unmarked building behind an acre of parking lot lighted bright as noon by security floods. A strip of stubby palms like giant pineapples lined up along the base of the façade. Shiny loud cars were patrolling.
Jewels had come in a dress right for an afternoon bride—pastry white, crisp, lacy. Her lips and eyelids were painted purple. “Muerte—very sensual,” she told me.
The dance crowd here was excited, extravagantly sharped up.
Inside, little lights flashed through cellophane red gel. The music was salsa; the floor bouncing full.
Jewels spoke quick, liquid Spanish, pretty to my ears. She knew everyone. She hooked a tall boy who wore a suit that glinted like minnows.
When he talked, I overheard the sound “Huh-reeba”—Jewels’s sister.
“Well, goddamn. Bingo,” Jewels shouted. “They’re here somewhere!”
“Where are the bars?” I asked.
She winked; nodded left.
I saw Raf.
He was bent over, his nose and mouth in the dark mane of a girl twenty years younger than he. Whatever he was saying made the young woman smile, shake her head no, smile again.
His shirt collar was open by three buttons and the V of his chest was tan. He did look handsome in his way, in his loose black suit, although there was a badge-sized bruise on his left cheekbone below his glass eye, and he seemed far along in his drunk. Just moving back and forth along the bar he stumbled twice.
His good eye finally caught me watching, and after a beat came his smile.
I moved by slow inches through the crowd.
“Paige . . . Buensima. Someone said you might be in town.”
I nodded once, yes; afraid to say anything, what my voice might give away.
“You must want a drink. This is . . . somebody,” he said, and the girl with the dark mane looked as though her arm were being bent out of socket.
“And this is uh . . . an old friend of mine, Julio,” Raf said.
Julio had on a cowboy hat, and he held a thin umber cigar in his fingers. He pursed his lips at me, kissed three times.
“So, Paige,” Raf said. “A drink?”
“Not now, thanks. Could we . . . ?”
“I must decamp,” he told the dark-haired girl.
“Did our tanker come in? Is this our car?” he asked me. We had walked out into Facinita’s yellow parking lot.
“It’s just a rental,” I said. “Raf?”
“A rental,” he said and spat on the car.
I asked, “How bad off are you?”
He gripped my shoulders, backed me up against the door. I had one hand full of keys, the other opened on his chest, ready to shove him.
“Can you say how you are exactly?” I said.
He pressed into me, kissing my throat, my collarbone.
“I’m O.K.,” he said. “Me? I’m . . . you know.”
I drove on shut-down streets.
Raf liked the car’s stereo and liked stamping the control tabs for the radio. He was doing this now with the toe of his shoe as he sipped bourbon from a silver flask.
I recognized a bridge that spanned Bray’s Bayou and pulled off into what I thought was a public park. It was a cemetery.
“Uh oh,” Raf said.
“Mind if we do without the radio for a minute?” I asked him.
“Here’s where I get mine,” he said.
“What happened to your face?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Keep falling down. You know, I read there’s a once-in-a-millennium order of the sun and moon and all the planets of our . . . um . . . solar thing going on. Which could account for my imbalances, some of ’em.”
We were under high trees that were bearded with ashen moss. Raf lit a cigarette, shutting his good eye to the burst of flame. The hot night was talking—crickets or frogs or sighing snakes—I didn’t know.
“You’re too thin,” he said.
“Umm,” I said.
His head dropped back on the car seat and he closed his eyes and smoked.
I studied his profile.
“Who’s Jewels?” I asked, just to keep him conscious.
“Nobody.”
“A friend? A toss?”
“Neither of those. Or not so’s I committed to memory.”
We were by a grove of banyans, yucca, drooping St. Agnes bushes.
Cozying up to the cemetery was a business line of gravestones with mirrory marble surfaces.
Raf pointed the glowing end of his cigarette at them. “Soon,” he said. “My face and numbers, going right there.”
“No. You’ve been having one long party, is all,” I said.
“I missed you,” he said. “Genuinely did. You know, someplace, not too many cities back . . . Somewhere I was at a zoo.”
I said, “Then what happened? They let you out?”
“Just listen. I’m serious. They had a . . . Not a cage, but a glass room . . . tiny. For this cheetah. She was sleeping in there with this rawhide bone—great big, femur-sized. Laid out, sleeping on the cement floor with her paws up under her chin. Finest thing I’ve ever seen. I can’t stop thinking about it. My mind just goes there and stays.”
I took a swallow from Raf’s silver flask and got hot straight bourbon, an eye crosser.
“You wanted to get inside the room and play with the cat?”
“No, no, just watching her sleep. She was twitching, her eyes moving, like she was having a dream. Feet flexing. Dreaming of hunting probably. You should’ve seen it.”
“How do you like Houston, Raf?”
He backhanded his jaw, making a brushing sound on his rough cheek. He took a second to think. He said, “Well, Paige, I don’t like Houston.”
“Because I have to go,” I said. “Have to leave day after tomorrow. I was hoping you’d go back with me.”
He pounded his clenched fist a couple times on the dash. “Well, probably should, but . . . you know me, how it goes with me. I’ll get back up, be better ’n ever.”
“I know,” I said. “But I have to go. This’s the last train out, I’m saying.”
Now he bashed his palm on the dash. “I can’t fuckin’ think,” he said.
A bandy-legged Asian groundskeeper was doing night work of some kind, laboring over by the roses near the main gates. He wore a platterlike hat. I watched him instead of looking at Raf, who was saying, “I am too old for the constant fuckin’. . . . One uncomplicated dream is all I ask. How could I think about going back with you? That seems so blessedly long ago I lived in the motherfucking East.”
“So, no?”
He sighed. “Gimme a little time. Christ fuck, Paige, give me a night before I decide.”
I thought of the