Atticus

I was famished for English at the time and fairly indifferent to those florid tall tales, so I offered him feeble amens through all the foregoing (“Wow.” “Too bad.” “Amazing.” “No!”), but as he put a gel on my hair, he turned his attention to me. Was I here on an inheritance? Was my father rich? Were my paintings selling well enough to afford a house like this? Oh, was I renting? Were the owners here often? Were the house and its contents fully insured? Reinhardt had seen a friend lose everything; he was just fantastically worried about me, he didn’t know why. Well, he did. Don’t be offended, but I seemed a wunderkind, even at forty. Which is why I ought to have worldly people to watch over my affairs. “You are so honest and trusting and others, I can tell you, are so… I have not the word: schlau?”

“Sly?”

“Yes! Sly. You do not realize. I have no talent myself, but I have skills. You know? You maybe need help with the finances? Business affairs? Finding things at the cheapest price? I have contacts. And abilities. Arranging things is my gift.”

“Here. Hold my wallet for me,” I said.

Reinhardt smiled and flicked off the hair dryer. “Excuse me?”

His scheming was so obvious, so insultingly free of finesse and bunco, that I fell into silence. And then he held a mirror up and held his face close to mine so that both of us were in the frame. “Great haircut,” I said. And it was true; just like his.

“Look at us,” he said. “We could be brothers.”

“I have one already.”

Reinhardt casually turned to put the mirror on the kitchen countertop. “Oh? And what is his name?”

“Frank.”

“And is he living in Colorado?”

But I was heading upstairs by then. I got thirty dollars in pesos and heard him fool with the Sinatra CD on the dining room player until he found “Witchcraft.” And when I got downstairs he was hunting through the full rack of discs.

“Are you casing the joint?”

Reinhardt smiled uneasily. “What does it mean, ‘casing’?”

I handed him the pesos and he stuffed them in his front pocket with only a furtive count. “Was it expensive,” he asked, “this stereo system?”

Weeks hence, I feared, I’d return from my night work in the jungle and everything in that house would be gone, presto chango, and Reinhardt would be showing his kindness to some other wunderkind. “I have something I’d like to give you,” I said.

“Oh?” he asked, and there was a child’s Christmas glimmer in his eyes as I went to the hallway closet and hauled out a fair painting I’d fired off of a hillside and rainstorm skies and the seething gray waters just below my studio. I was frankly surprised by the honest respect he offered that sketch, the fascination and honor and joy Reinhardt took in holding it up and fully appraising it. You’d have thought it was a Corot. “This is fantastic!” he said. “This is great!” And there was a faint gloss of tears in his eyes as he fetchingly grinned at me. “We Europeans take friendship seriously. I’ll have to do something for you.”

Eight years ago at an East Village party I locked on to a psychologist who was researching a book on “thereness,” as she called it, the high feeling some people have after going to a geography far from home and finding a here is where I was meant to be that they’d never felt before, as if the function of their lives was the bringing them to that place. I felt that way when I first got to Resurrección, but initially thought it was just because Renata was there. But she was lost to me then, I knew that. I would telephone Stuart’s villa and Stuart would be the first one to it, a husk in his voice as he asked, just to annoy me, “And whom shall I say is calling?” Envy and rivalry for Renata’s affections were turning our meetings into skirmishes and our retreats into siegecraft and intrigues. Stuart told me once, “You’ll be the ruin of her,” as if I were a hooligan trampling the flower of Renata’s reputation, and Stuart treated me in other ways like a frat boy and lout, like a fired employee. He pitied me openly at parties, he put up with me as one does a chronic pain, he once cleared our places after a dinner and pitched my cutlery into the trash.

Elated when Renata was with me, sick with despair and emptiness when she was away, I was powerless in the relationship, and she played with that just as I probably would have in the same position. Renata slept with me for old time’s sake or out of inchoate spite for Stuart or in the hell-with-it spirit of a high school girl grown tired of the heavy struggles in the car. We did not do ourselves proud, Renata and I, and she came to the house one afternoon looking sleepless and forlorn and cried-out, and she told me, “I just can’t do this anymore.”

But she did do that anymore. We were both completely dependable in our irresponsibility. Whenever Stuart was away, I hurried over to the villa in order to sit in palapa shade with Renata and piña coladas, our knees just touching, holding my stare on a bead of sweat as it trickled down her side and I thought Oh, lucky droplet!, and being gradually destroyed by the soft caress of her voice. Each sentence burnished and fathomable. The hour or two would have to end for some reason having to do with Stuart and we’d kiss and hold each other’s misery to ourselves and my hands would find the old familiar places until she pushed me away.

Hardly a week before I went up to Colorado for the holidays I called her, my stomach flipping and my throat tightening with worry, wrapping myself inside the phone cord like a sitcom simpleton, and I tried to fix where I was in our emotional geography, fully unbuttoning my chest and informing Renata I felt like an inflamed teenager just born into the world of romance, No one has ever loved like this, and I was frustrated that there was no other way of putting it but to say again that I really really really loved her, had always loved her, as she knew, and the only future with any solace or purity or meaning for me was one with Renata in it: Would she fly up to Colorado with me? And then could we get married?

Renata sighed like the slow drag of a razor blade and said, “Ohhh, Scott …,” four beats at least to that phrase, four hammer blows to the spike I’d held to my fluttering heart. She told me she didn’t trust herself with commitment, she felt too much turbulence just then, she didn’t know if she was right for me, why didn’t I try to find somebody else?

I was boyish with embarrassment. Awkward as a box full of shoes. Half-afraid I’d choke up or my shaky voice would crack, I hurriedly put up the fences and told her, “Well, there’s no pressure. I just wanted some clarity, to find out what was real.”

She said, “I think this is the reality we’ve heard so much about.”

“Well, that’s why I needed to say it. Everything gets to be Las Vegas after a while.”

She told me prettily, “Don’t feel rejected.”

“If you say so.” The phone seemed to weigh a hundred pounds. Silt seemed to be funneling from my head to my feet.

“We can stay friends, can’t we?”

We’d both gone to high school, apparently. “Oh sure,” I said. “Hell yes. I’d hate not seeing you at all.”

“Stuart’s here,” she then whispered, and hung up.