Exposure

  “Yeah, maybe. Okay, you’re right. Let’s do it.”

  “You don’t sound too happy about it. What’s the problem?”

  “No. It’s fine. I think you’re right. Honestly.”

  “No,” Otello says, quietly insistent. “What’s the problem?”

  Diego puts his cup down carefully. “Okay, then, two things. First, I think he’s too fond of her.”

  Otello blinks. “What?”

  “Well, he doesn’t exactly try to hide the fact that he adores her, does he?”

  “Yeah, but hey . . . What are you saying here?”

  Diego drinks more coffee before replying. “I’m saying that despite him being built like a tank, Dezi could twist Michael around her little finger. And that’s not the ideal bodyguard-client relationship. Look, you say that what happened last week wouldn’t have happened if he’d been in the car. But think about it: Dezi puts her hand on his and says, ‘Michael, sweetheart, can we pull into this place just ahead and pick up some coffee?’ Or they’re somewhere else and she says, ‘Michael, let’s make a little detour and watch the sun set over the river.’ You think he’d say no to her? D’you think Michael could say no to anything Desmerelda wants?”

  Otello is staring as though a second nose has sprouted from Diego’s face.

  “It’s about discipline, Capitano. Or self-discipline, I should say. That’s what security is all about.”

  Otello shakes his head very slightly, like a man coming out of a trance. “Uh . . . okay. I take your point. But I think you underestimate Michael. You always have. He’s tough up here”— Otello taps the side of his head —“as well as everywhere else. I don’t think there’ll be a problem with his self-discipline.”

  Diego nods. “Okay. You know him better than I do.”

  “Yeah, I do. What’s the second thing? You said there were two things.”

  Diego hesitates. He shrugs and sticks his lower lip out. If you didn’t know him well, you’d think he was slightly embarrassed.

  “What?” Otello says, and there’s a rough edge to his voice now.

  “I’m just being straight with you here, Capitano.”

  “So, what?”

  “Okay. The booze.”

  Otello sits back in the chair and goes slack like a supporter whose team has just, predictably, conceded a goal.

  Diego holds his hands up in an apologetic gesture. “I know, I know,” he says.

  “Michael hasn’t touched a drink for three years,” Otello says flatly. “And I know that for a fact.”

  “He still goes to Alcoholics Anonymous.”

  “Yeah, he does. But that’s like, you know . . .”

  “For the support. The discipline. Of course.”

  Otello says nothing for several heavy seconds, so Diego does his manual apology again. “Okay, fine. End of subject. I’m done. If you’re happy to put Michael on Dezi, that’s fine with me. I’m sure she’ll be very pleased with the arrangement.”

  On the way back to his car, Diego smiles. It’s like walking on eggshells, talking to Otello about drinking. Diego likes the way the shells crunch beneath his feet.

  OTELLO LOUNGES ON the bed watching Desmerelda put on her makeup. It is a ritual that fascinates him, absorbs him; he finds himself making the same slightly comical faces that she makes, applying the eyeshadow, the lipstick. On occasion she has caught him at it in the mirror, and rewarded him with that dirtily artless laugh of hers, which delights him. The intimacy of such moments is softly shocking; he thinks, We are married. Married.

  It is the first time in three days that they have been in the penthouse together. On Sunday he arrived back from an away game two hours after she had flown down to the delta for a photo shoot. And tonight they are guests of honor at a party for the U.S. executives of Desmerelda’s record company. Soon he will have to put on his gray silk suit. Desmerelda likes him in gray.

  If he were honest with himself, he would perhaps admit that he does not want to go. More than that, he might admit that just lately he has started to feel, well, a sort of resentment. Impatience, perhaps. That his life, their marriage, is managed by Diego and Shakespeare and people whom he barely knows. Stitched into a glittering patchwork of events at which, usually, he feels like an exhibit. He has started, before games, to find it more difficult to get clean, to focus. To concentrate on the spaces that need to be made, the routes to the goal, to find the deep disregard for pain. (And avoiding injury has become more important; it would inconvenience too many people.)

  Of course, he cannot confess any of this. He cannot tell her that he would like to come home from work to his wife. He cannot admit to the idiotic simplicity of his needs. She’d told him from the outset that they could never be ordinary. On that astonishing night at the hotel on Cypress, she looked down at him and said, very seriously, “We can never be members of the public.” She’d said it with capitals: Members of the Public. And then, smiling, “But hey, who wants to be?”

  At another level entirely, none of this matters. Because he, and he alone, is married to Desmerelda Brabanta. And he is the only man on the planet watching her as she puts on her makeup dressed in a couple of scraps of white lace.

  He says, “How’s it going with Michael?”

  She leans closer to the mirror, checking the symmetry of her eyes. “Michael? Michael’s great. Really solid.”

  “Yeah? So you’re happy with the arrangement?”

  “Baby,” she says, “if he’s good enough for you, he’s got to be good enough for me.” She studies her eyelashes. “Lord, he’s strict, though, isn’t he? It’s like everywhere I am, someone comes in the door, he’s on them, taking their names, checking them over and everything. And if there’s any change to the schedule, he’s like a new world war might break out.”

  “That’s good. It’s what we pay him for.”

  She tilts her head in another direction. “He’s cute, too. The plane back, it was one of those little ones, you know? Thirty seats or something, and Michael had to sit next to me, which is not what he likes to do. He prefers to sit two rows back on the opposite side, on the aisle. Anyway, I was really wiped out, and pretty much as soon as we took off, I was dead to the world. Didn’t wake up until the plane was coming in. And I realize that I’ve been asleep on his shoulder the whole time and that I’ve drooled on this nice white shirt he’s wearing, and because I’d been chewing fruit gum to stop my ears from popping, the drool is pink. I was so embarrassed. I said, ‘Michael, I’m so sorry; we’ll get that cleaned.’ And he said, ‘No, sign your name to authenticate the drool and I’ll get it framed.’ Sweet, huh?”

  She turns away from the mirror and does a ta-da! gesture. “How do I look?”

  With very little difficulty, Otello smiles. “Like the most beautiful woman in the world.”

  She raises a perfect eyebrow. “Only like the most beautiful woman in the world?”

  They return to the penthouse a little after two in the morning. Otello goes to their bedroom, throws his jacket on the couch, and flips on the TV, which has recorded the UEFA game between Arsenal and Barcelona. Three of his international colleagues are involved.

  In the bathroom, Desmerelda watches herself in the mirror carefully cleansing away the makeup. The evening has been beautiful. The dinner, the elaborate courtesy of the americanos, the politeness of the photographers, the smoothness of the security arrangements, Michael’s funny filthy stories on the way home. But.

  She turns on the taps, adds a measure of aromatherapy oil, and goes back to the bedroom. “I’m going to take a bath. You going to come and scrub my back?”

  “Try and stop me,” he says. His speech is blurry; he has drunk more than usual.

  The oil forms shifting archipelagos on the surface of the water. Below them, mottled by their shadows, her body seems remote, unfamiliar.

  Things are going wrong.

  No, things are changing.

  She is slightly shocked that the word wrong entered her head. It means unha
ppy.

  She is not unhappy. But.

  Her new single, “The Darker the Night, the Brighter the Stars,” is not getting the airplay they had expected. After the launch week, press coverage had dropped away sharply. The singles chart is completely rigged, of course, but all the same, it is disappointing that the new song by that tart Carmina Flor has beaten hers to the number-one spot. The video for “The Darker the Night” is not the most requested item on TVQ, the twenty-four-hour music channel. Tonight, discussing the proposed mini-tour of the U.S. with the americanos, their eyes had dimmed slightly, as though they had suddenly found the need for lightly frosted contact lenses.

  She considers these things calmly. She sees them for what they are: the beginning of the end of this part of her life. Which is, therefore, the beginning of the next part. The difficulty is that she does not know what this next part will be. She does know what is bringing about this shift, this key change, sea change. To be the wild rich rock chick is one thing; to be the married wild rich rock chick is quite another. It does not, in fact, work. It is one word too many. That’s why she won’t be top of the singles chart again. Because she’s not single anymore. Ha!

  She stirs the hot water, breaking up the little islands of oil, sending them swirling. She sinks lower and closes her eyes. He has not come to wash her back, then slip into the bath with her. She thinks about calling to him but decides not to.

  It is slightly embarrassing that she has not foreseen all this. Did not foresee it when she drove to Puerto Río and cajoled those two wide-eyed rich boys into ignoring all good sense and taking her over to Cypress on their playboy boat. Did not predict it when she descended onto his beautiful body and asked him to marry her.

  Or maybe she did. Yes, perhaps she did. Reliving the moment, she remembers feeling that she was standing in the doorway of a room. A dark room full of brilliant possibilities. Now it connects with another memory. On the evening of her thirteenth birthday, her father blindfolded her and guided her to the doorway of the dining room. She stood with his hand on her shoulder for several seconds, listening to a silence that could barely contain itself. Then her father had removed the blindfold and there, ranged behind the laden party table, were her family and friends, smiling, holding gifts, beneath a cloud of gold and silver balloons. But it is those moments when she was still blind that she now re-experiences: standing there, knowing that something amazing was waiting for her. Feeling a thrill that was almost fearful. Almost sexual.

  Soon, very soon, she will no longer be Desmerelda Brabanta. She will no longer own, much less control, her own celebrity. She will cease to be a star because she has stopped being dangerous, outrageous. She has married; she has become safe. She has become one half, maybe less, of a fixed constellation called Otello-Dezi.

  She has always known that one day something like this would happen, that the party would come to an end, the table cleared, the cake and balloons shared out among the other children. And she has told herself that she would not care. She is not, after all, needy. But in the warm soothing water, in a warm room lined with Italian marble, she allows herself a minute or two to grieve.

  She will not confess her thoughts to him. It would hurt him to do so; it would be stupid. At the heart of a true marriage is a shared silence, as her divorced mother used to say.

  She calls to him now, but there is no reply. When she goes through to the bedroom wrapped in a towel, she finds him asleep. He has taken off some of his clothes and rolled onto his side. She turns the TV off, then stands marveling at him, astonished all over again that he is there, that he is what has happened to her.

  When she has maneuvered him between the sheets and switched off the lights, she remembers that she has forgotten to take her contraceptive pill. But because he has fitted himself to her body and she doesn’t want to disturb him, she does not get out of the bed to go to the bathroom cabinet. She will take the damn thing in the morning.

  But she forgets. She somehow forgets the following night, too. And the nights that follow, one after another.

  PAUL FAUSTINO BLUFFED his way out through the fiendish glass doors by concealing himself inside a small knot of other employees, and to celebrate this small triumph, he lit a cigarette, hunching his shoulders over the flame. A chilly evening wind eddied around the patio; the ornamental trees dipped and shook their heads. A plastic bag wallowed through the air like a jellyfish. Something attached itself to his ankle: a flier for the New Conservative Party, bearing the slogan A CLEANER TOMORROW. Faustino flipped it off, although, usefully, it reminded him that his cleaner hadn’t shown up yesterday. He went down the steps to get into the lee of the wind and saw Bush slooshing his wash bucket into the gutter.

  The kid had been out of sorts lately. Nothing that Faustino could put his finger on, but something like a shadow had settled over the boy. He hadn’t been quite the same since he’d disappeared for three days a while back. The smile and the eagerness were still there, but somehow less authentic than they used to be. And now, when he looked up and saw Faustino, his greeting was flat.

  “Maestro.”

  “How’re you doing, Bush?”

  “Pretty good.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. Kinda cold today, though.”

  “Well, maybe you should be wearing more than just that T-shirt, you know? Don’t you have something else you could put on?”

  “It wasn’ so cold when I come out this morning.”

  It was an answer of sorts. But Faustino felt stranded. Bush held on to his bucket, shuffling his feet a bit, glancing right and left.

  “Hey, c’mon, Bush. What’s up?”

  The boy shrugged.

  “And don’t just do that shruggy thing.”

  “Well, you know, Maestro. Woman problems.”

  Faustino laughed. He couldn’t help himself. “What, all your girls fighting over you?”

  “Not exackly.”

  Faustino could not tell from the boy’s body language whether he was anxious to go or had something he wanted to talk about. Possibly both, or neither. With an awkward jocularity, he said, “So, d’you have a girlfriend, Bush? I bet you do.”

  “Nah. A sister an’, uh, like another girl with us. Tha’s trouble enough.”

  Faustino had wondered, of course, about the boy’s life. Whether he was alone, where he slept at night, what he did with his paltry earnings. He knew that street kids often formed themselves into small clans, established territories, protected each other, operated a harsh kind of communism whereby they shared whatever they could steal or scavenge. Memories of his own childhood — a suburban childhood that had been solitary and frequently anxious, but ordered and comfortable — could not help him to imagine such a way of life. And, in truth, he shied away from imagining it, just as he avoided actually seeing it. He knew that he was not strong enough to cope with his helplessness in the face of it.

  For some reason he did not think that Bush was a member of a clan. The boy seemed too . . . independent, was that the word? Or was it unprotected? But the mention of a sister and another girl was a glimpse into his life. A kind of offering.

  “So, uh, you look after them, do you? Your sister and the other girl?”

  “Kind of. Mostly they look after each other.”

  “Right.” Not knowing what to say next, Faustino dropped his cigarette butt and ground it under his foot.

  “Time to go,” Bush observed. “Things to meet, people to do.”

  Faustino smiled. “Yeah. You could say that.”

  Bush’s skin looked grayish and puckered. Faustino realized that the boy’s restlessness, his fidgeting, was a way of concealing the fact that he was shivering. He reached into his inside jacket pocket and took out his wallet. He found a twenty, folded it lengthwise, and held it out. Bush looked at it but didn’t move.

  “Take it. Buy yourself a sweatshirt or a hoodie or something, okay? Something warm.”

  Bush pulled his gaze from the bank note and glanced toward the avenue.
A woman walking to her car grimaced and turned her face away.

  “Bush?”

  “You wan’ me to get in your car with you?”

  “What?”

  The boy looked back at Faustino but did not meet his eyes. “For the twenny. You wan’ me to come to your car with you?”

  It took perhaps three seconds for Faustino to understand the question; then his hurt was so deep, so shocking, that before he could think of anything to say, he had already hit the boy. The slap made a wet sound that was audible above the noise of the traffic; Faustino’s hand registered the shape of teeth through the flesh of the boy’s cheek.

  Bush stumbled backward. He dropped the plastic bucket, made as if to retrieve it but did not; the wind tumbled it away. Then he was gone, running awkwardly, an erratic shadow in front of the oncoming headlights. The fallen twenty-dollar bill was plucked up by invisible fingers, dangled briefly above Faustino’s head, and then thrown into the slipstream of the hurtling cars. The cry of pain that seemed to linger in the air was not the boy’s. It was Faustino’s.

  DESMERELDA IS SITTING upright in bed with her phone in one hand and the TV remote in the other. Every now and again she says, “Oh, my God.” Several newspapers are spread-eagled over the sheets. The headlines are pretty much the same:

  OTELLO BODYGUARD ARRESTED

  DEZI’S BODYGUARD IN SAVAGE

  ATTACK ON FORMER RIALTO STAR

  OTELLO BODYGUARD AND LUIS

  MONTANO IN NIGHTCLUB BRAWL

  OTELLO AND MONTANO: THE GLOVES COME OFF

  Several of the photographs are of Desmerelda herself attending some function with Michael close to her. Or of Otello with a stern-looking Michael watching his back. Other pictures show a disheveled Michael being manhandled toward a police van by half a dozen cops. Or Luis Montano, bloody-faced, being helped into an ambulance. (It has not occurred to her, yet, to wonder why so many photographers were on hand to witness the incident.) The television is yabbering commentary at her over footage of Michael emerging from a downtown police station. He looks terrible. Stunned, like someone who has suffered a great loss. The only good thing she sees is Diego, who is trying to shield Michael from the cameras, ushering him into a car. She hears Diego’s voice, blurred and broken by background noise, saying something like, “Misunderstanding . . . no . . . absolutely not. Nothing to do with that. No. No further comment.” She switches channels, and her own face appears on the screen. She presses the mute button.