“Our thing being the cuddle, of course,” I say.
Malicia tells me she acquiesced, reluctantly, even allowing the humiliation of trading the bikini she’d bought from her friend for a black one provided by the magazine team, and, even worse, she permitted the makeup artist to clean up the makeup she was already wearing and redo it, but more subtly, less overdone.
“And you let her, fearsome Malicia?” I ask.
“All for love, Hobbit. And from that moment on I was under the guerrilla producer’s command.”
“And she had deep ideas about the time-space relationships between humans, architecture, and landscapes,” I say.
“Exactly. And she gave orders like ‘We should capture the silence of material things.’ And she’d also say, ‘You here, yes, like that, but wait, don’t take up the center, better here to the side and from behind so you don’t interfere with nature’s power.’”
“Wait. I can imagine her—she also said, ‘I’d like to see you reclining on this balcony as if you had no desire at all.’”
“That’s right!” shouted Malicia. “That was the tone of it. ‘You there lying down as if you were going to spend hours absorbed by the view.’ The things she said to me. Oh, and the best one: ‘Come here, you, sorry, what’s your name? Oh yes, Alicia, come here please, Alicia, stand here in profile, as if you were a vertical line between the blue horizons of the sky and the pool.’”
I laugh. But I still don’t understand why Malicia doesn’t want to come on the poker trip; up to this point, I haven’t found anything criminal in what happened last Tuesday in Atolaima. Nothing she couldn’t forgive and eventually forget. So much to cover. I ask, again, what Dux was doing all that time.
“Your friend Dux?” she says. “I already told you, he was very inspired, going all out to help the process along. Bent on making everything turn out perfectly.”
“Understand your boyfriend, girl,” I say. “Everything he does has to be perfect. As perfect as he is himself.”
“Sure, of course, everything perfect, including me. If you could hear the way he gave me advice, ‘Not with your hair down, better to tie it back so you show off your elegant neck because really, it looks superb.’ I asked him for a michelada cocktail because I was dying of thirst and he still hadn’t offered me anything, and off Duque goes and comes back instead with a Hendrick’s Fever-Tree . . .”
“A what?”
“A Hendrick’s Fever-Tree. But what would you know about it, Hobbo, you’re like me, more of a Corona type, you know, with a wedge of lemon stuffed in the bottle’s neck. Well listen, Hendrick’s Fever-Tree is a gin and tonic on the rocks with two fresh slices of cucumber, served in a round glass.”
“Incredible. Especially the cucumber part.”
“I was so thirsty I kept chugging at that Hendrick’s. And the producer didn’t like that, she had to keep stopping to refill my cup so the photo would turn out right. And your friend Duque was all about helping the shoot, he was just as insistent on the instructions, going, ‘Better without earrings so it comes out looking clean,’ and ‘Maybe don’t recline because a bit of your tummy peeks out,’ and even Wilson Yisus felt empowered to do it: ‘Don’t let her cross her legs, it makes her thigh look fatter.’ The her in that was me, of course, and the fatter thigh was mine.”
“An ugly thing,” I laugh, “that fattening of your thigh.”
“Oh! And there’s more! The producer asked the photographer to take a close-up that shows the line of my arm because, according to her, it’s ‘extremely correct, not uneven in the slightest.’”
“I concur. I, too, find the line of your arm to be extremely correct.”
“But wait, Hobbo, shut up, you still haven’t heard the best part. At one point they discussed it and decided that, since this rural setting was so sophisticated, it would be good for me to be seen reading, so they brought me the first book they found. Guess which one.”
“The King James Bible.”
“No. The instruction manual for a Honda lawn mower with a recyclable bag.”
“Essential. The Honda Manual with Recyclable Bag is a key work of world literature.”
“It’s what you call a classic. And the producer: ‘Let’s see, Alicia, but make sure you seem engrossed by what you’re reading.’ Me: ‘Okay, okay, this chapter on the motor’s power could not be more riveting.’ And with all that, it was midafternoon when those people finally gathered their gear and wound up their cables and drove off in their Jeeps, raising dust clouds on the dirt road. And then finally Dux and I were alone and the servants returned the furniture to where it was before.”
“And at last the erotic Tuesday cuddle began,” I say.
“Duque came at me with a sensual vibe and a seductive tone,” she says. “Finally, my darling, my queen, you beautiful girl.”
“Finally, Alicia my love,” I offer.
“Just like that, all intimate, Duque suggests we go to the pool to take advantage of the last rays of sun. I thought, sure, all right, sex in the pool, why not.”
“Obviously, sex in a pool is high style, just like in Wild Things where Kevin Bacon is stunned to see Neve Campbell and Denise Richards making out in the water, or like Marilyn Monroe and Dean Martin in that flick where—”
“Stop it, Hobbo, don’t give me a tirade about your vast film knowledge.”
“All right. The important thing is that you finally got some gaver.”
“Huh? Gaver?”
She hadn’t figured it out yet, the childhood word game, the syllable inversion. “He’d been starving you, girl.”
“Oh. Gaver. Ga-ver, ver-ga. Dick. Ha ha, very funny, you pig. Well, no, I didn’t get any dick, because your friend Duque threw himself into twenty laps of the crawl, and I joined him in the first three before giving up. I got out of the water and lay down like a walrus in the afternoon’s last rays of sun, and when Duque finally finished his Olympic task, hallelujah, finally, off we go now to the bedroom.”
“To the long-awaited climax.”
“Not quite, let’s say that at that point the man complained of lumbago due to overworked muscles.”
“What?”
“Lumbago due to overworked muscles—also known as back pain. You know how precise and fastidious he is about describing his aches.”
“I bet his toes had started cramping too.”
“He said all the nervous tension combined with exercise had caused the problem, but no worries, he’d overcome it with fifteen minutes of rest on his back. That’s what he said, but as always, with him, you end up finding another motive under the first one. It turned out that at seven o’clock on the dot, the exact time Duque turned the television on from the bed, the final match of the US Open began.”
“And that aforementioned quarter of an hour went by . . .”
“Yes, and another half hour, and since the man was still glued to the tennis match and disconnected from everything else, I said to myself: ‘Enough.’”
“You said to yourself: ‘Enough,’” I say for emphasis.