He loves it that she can turn, in a heartbeat, from playfully seductive to coolly rational.
After nearly one hundred visits, past countless confidences and evasions, Lockwood had not wanted to go to the Señora’s condominium the morning she died. Vague apprehension had tightened into a knot. Locked into the thick of traffic, with little choice but to continue grinding down I-5 toward La Jolla, he listened to her legendary “Sempre libera” of thirty years ago, turning the volume high—above road whir, traffic hum, engine whine, wind flap. Louder. The melody uncoiled dangerously, the consummate soprano slicing through the tape hiss in his cheap player, buzzing the speakers and sending a vibration all the way up his chest to the metallic frames of his sunglasses. Brushing anxiety aside, he drove on; a day without Mercè Casals’ meandering talk would be like the silent yawn of an empty house.
Still, diminishing returns had set in; week by week, their ongoing conversation added up to less and less. Lockwood could handle being the Señora’s hired scribbler, “Marcos Loco”: also tapeworm, father confessor, unpaid shrink, reliable yes-man, royal hack, and bad-dream exterminator. She was, after all, a client; he’d had worse, and none of them famous.
At forty, Mark Lockwood felt on the verge of his first big book. Only modestly successful in his home-based business—Mark My Words, Inc., freelance writing of just about anything—he’d been promised a big share of the advance and a cut of the book-club deal, foreign rights, perhaps a miniseries. With his anticipated success, he had also become prone to moments of unexpected anxiety. Along with the disturbing evidence of his braking metabolism—softening flesh, thinning hair, dying brain cells—had come a heightened awareness that his recent good fortune could unravel in an eyeblink.
He already had on tape five hundred hours of reminiscences, confessions, gossip, and the occasional rant; they were bound up in a Gordian tangle. “You can busy yourself with the unraveling after I’m done speaking into your little box,” the Señora had promised. “But first the story has to come out. In whatever way it chooses. Ask and listen. Leave the arias to me.” He had gone along with her. There would be time to follow the thread that wound through the singer’s triumphs and disasters, her loves and betrayals.
Lockwood wedged his tennis shoe of a car into a tight slot inside a garage studded with Benzes, Range Rovers, and Jaguars in Vortex Black, Eternity Blue, Gunmetal Gray. He reached into the backseat for his cassette recorder, blank tapes, extra Uniball pens, notepad with curling pages, and a brown paper bag containing two mangoes that had been ripening for three days, their scent now jammy and promisingly sweet. He felt a rush of anticipation because he was bringing them to Perla as a special gift.
By the time he reached Shore Tower, he was resigned to whatever approaching turmoil his stomach was signaling. He tucked the tails of his white shirt into his khakis, slipped the tie knot to the collar, and checked his hair in the lobby mirror; the Señora was critical of his appearance. Preston, jovial behind the concierge desk, let him into the lobby.
“A glorious day,” Preston offered, because it was not in his nature to be less than radiantly optimistic. “Will be nice and bright once the fog lifts.”
They chatted about the traffic on I-5; Preston wanted a full report so he could relay the information to Tower residents venturing out to San Diego or LA, out for an early start on hair and nails, Neiman’s or Saks, and always the doctors, legions of them, the cardio man, the knee jerk, the chemo gal, the diet director.
The guard’s affable reception lifted Lockwood’s spirits. The elevator carried him up to floor twenty-eight, where he expected to sit one more day, listening to Mercè Casals, his thumb poised over the pause button of a cassette recorder, a $29 antique from Radio Shack that produces tapes to play in his car and office boom box,
Perla, here since seven, greeted him at the door. “Señora is still in her bath,” she said. “I’ll check on her soon.” The Señora was usually dressed by the time Lockwood arrived.
He hovered in the kitchen and drank the coffee Perla offered him. He persuaded himself that every one of her gestures of goodwill was evidence of some erotic current flowing between them. He found her exotic: a big-city girl from the DF, the Mexican capital. After considering the variations on olive and cinnamon used to describe Latino skin, he decided hers was nutmeg. Lustrous black hair, cut short and combed into a boyish part, gave her a bold, somewhat dismissive look. Her brisk Spanish accent was by turns amusing and provocative.
This morning he tried to please Perla with a mango. He took it out of the wrinkled brown bag and held out to her the plump yellow fruit.
She showed him how Mexicans eat them, stabbing a fork through the mango’s rump to the seed, then peeling down strips with a paring knife to reveal the golden pulp awaiting the first bite of her perfect teeth.
“I’m having a hard time keeping this under control.” She laughed, the back of her hand wiping the juice that ran from her mouth.
“Few acts are as sensual as a woman biting into a mango,” he observed.
“You’re pushing your luck, Lockwood.”
“I’ve made an impression on you at last.”
“Not necessarily a good one.”
“Perla, what a heartbreaker you are.”
“Tontito. You don’t think adolescent behavior comes with risks?”
He sighed unhappily. “It’s nice of you to worry.”
“I’m a nurse.”
“Do you have any professional advice?”
“Yes. Back off a little.”
“You’re not telling me to go away, though.”
Perla only shrugged.
“It could lead to something interesting?”
“Don’t count on it, Lockwood.”
He liked Perla to call him Lockwood. He found the mixture of familiarity and distance wonderfully unsettling. Sometimes she called him “Mark-in-Time Lockwood.” Or “Top-of-the-Mark” when she wanted to flatter him. It beat being called Marcos Loco, as Mercè Casals had done when she’d first met him.
“Señora is taking a long time with her bath.” Perla nodded toward the closed door beyond the living room.
“Let her,” he said, clinging to her presence. This moment alone was a gift, possibly planned by the Señora, prolonging her bath so her scribbler and her nurse could be alone. She was like that in her sense of fun, her meddling. “Will you know when she’s ready to come out?”
“She’ll ring her bell, and I’ll hold up a big towel in front of my eyes.” She added seriously, “I’d better check on her.” Disappointed, Lockwood watched her march toward the bedroom. Even as medical fashion tended to pastels, the Señora liked Perla in white because it was the professional color for a nurse. Lockwood was both attracted and frustrated by her crinkly whites, the panels of starched fabric boxing and masking the roundness of womanly shapes, boat-like shoes and opaque hosiery inhibiting his imagination.
When the job of day nurse to Señora Mercè Casals had been posted, Perla had called immediately. Señora Casals explained the position. “I want you to wear a uniform at all times. No, I’m not sick, and beyond handing me my pills at the appointed times and informing my personal physician, Dr. Velasco, when my blood pressure reads high, you will hardly need to do anything medical at all. But wearing your nurse’s uniform will keep our relationship serious. It’s too easy for two women spending day after day together to become too chummy. I need you to remain a professional. We will become friends, of course. I like you already.”
“Gracias, Señora.”
“But it’s even more important that you like me.” The Señora had sighed, as if she were already despairing of the young applicant’s rising to such a challenge. “I will be able to tell, you know, no matter how cheerful and efficient