KRISTINE KATHRYN RUSCH
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I |
WAS SHOCKED,” Sandusky said. He leaned back in the pale blue booth and pushed his half-eaten eggs away. The café smelled of coffee and burned toast. “I mean, there were these delicate little creatures pirouetting on the stage and they were gorgeous. I always thought Russian women were like East German swimmers—big breasted, dough faced and too tall.”
“That’s racist,” Martina said. She hadn’t eaten anything. Her small hands were wrapped around an oversized coffee cup.
Sandusky and I always had breakfast together after the morning show. He did the news and I engineered, and after four hours of live, crazy radio, we would be wired. That morning we invited Martina. Actually, I invited Martina. Sandusky didn’t like her much, but I had always been attracted to women who had bristly personalities. Sandusky said that was because I was out to change the world. Maybe. I thought it was because I liked a challenge.
I frowned. “What about Olga Korbut? I had a crush on her when I was in the sixth grade, and I’ve liked tiny women ever since.”
Martina didn’t catch the hint, but Sandusky did. He made a face. “Olga Korbut wasn’t fully grown, Linameyer.”
“She is now and she’s still tiny.” I took a bite of my scrambled eggs. They were greasy and undercooked. Sandusky had been right to leave his. I pushed my plate away.
“I’m talking about my impressions here,” Sandusky said. “I don’t care if they’re right. I go to the ballet with Linda, I learn something.”
“Bully, bully,” Martina said to me, her black eyes snapping. “He learned that his racist stereotypes don’t always hold up.”
“I’m not being racist.” Sandusky grabbed his own coffee cup and held it over the back of the bench into the booth behind him. The waitress, who was pouring coffee for the couple sitting at that table, filled Sandusky’s cup without a blink. “I’m not talking about blacks or Indians.”
“Jesus.” Martina reached into the pocket of her jeans and pulled out three crumpled dollar bills. “How did this guy get a job at a listener-sponsored radio station? We’re supposed to be left wing—or at least open-minded.”
“He is open-minded, for Wisconsin.” I put my hand over Martina’s. Her fingers were dry and warm. “Let me get that. I’m the one who talked you into coming after the show.”
“It’s been quite an education,” she said and then she smiled. Her entire face lit up. I loved it when Martina smiled. I had been watching her ever since she started at the station three months before. She did the morning news with Sandusky. I wondered how many arguments I missed, trapped at the board, listening to Johnson babble while I spun the tunes. The program director claimed that engineering the “Morning Show” was too difficult for an announcer, so I had to engineer. I could have announced and engineered that program in my sleep and still done a better job than Johnson.
“You haven’t finished your coffee yet,” Sandusky said. His ears were red. Martina’s comments must have hit a sore spot. Sandusky was a little ignorant and a lot naive, especially for a college graduate in his early thirties, but he did try to learn. Unfortunately at the station he had absorbed the left-wing rhetoric, but not the ideals that characterized the most interesting radicals. Of course, open-mindedness didn’t exist at the station. The feminists fought with the environmentalists who fought with the Native Americans who fought with the gays, all of whom claimed their issues were the most important issues. Sometimes I wished I was a conservative. They seemed to have only three lines of ideological bullshit instead of two hundred.
“You don’t get it, do you?” she said. She hadn’t moved her hand from beneath mine. “You think you’re open-minded. You think you’re liberal, and yet you sit here and say Russian women—and it should be Soviet women, if you want to be precise—Russian women should be tall with big tits. American women come in all sizes. Why should the Soviets be one-size-fits-all?”
The flush was traveling down Sandusky’s neck. “My father was a farmer. He had a sixth-grade education.”
“You say that every time I pin you,” Martina said. “You have a master’s degree in history. You’d think that would give you a little more perspective on the world.”
“I didn’t know you had a master’s degree.” I took a sip of my water. It tasted like soap. I didn’t know why we came here every morning. The food was always terrible.
“You’re no better, Linameyer,” Martina said. She pulled her hand away from mine. “You’re real good at helping people write copy with nonsexist language, and you never insult anyone. You always say, “Native American,” and ‘Differently Abled,” and you can spout party line with the best of them, but you don’t have an open mind either.”
“I think you’re a little out of proportion, Martina.” I was secure in my open-mindedness. I was the one, not the station manager, that everyone used to settle disputes. Linameyer sees the human side, Johnson said once, and the entire station agreed that it was true.
I did see the human side. I saw all sides, and I could explain them clearly. Maybe that’s why I was doing talk radio: I could understand everything and never had to take a side, never had to make an action on my own.
“I’m very clear-sighted.” She straightened out her money and set it under her full water glass. “You do real good at spouting party line and picking which party line is appropriate under what circumstances. But if you ever were confronted with something really odd, you would deny it because it doesn’t fit into your neat, tidy little world.”
“Give me an example,” I said, leaning forward.
“I’ll do better than that.” She grabbed her coat from the side of the booth and shoved her arms in the sleeves. “I’ll let you prove yourself. You’re hosting ‘A Public Affair’ next week, right? Interview my roommate.”
“Who is your roommate?”
Martina glanced at Sandusky. He was clutching his empty coffee cup and staring at her. “She’s an Argentinian ballerina. She was famous once.”
“How did you get a famous ballerina for a roommate?”
Martina shrugged. “Twist of fate, maybe. Interview her.”
I took a deep breath. Most of my “Public Affairs” were scheduled. I hosted the talk show one week a month and I planned for it for weeks in advance. This time, though, Thursday was open. “Give me some background on her and I’ll see.”
“Is that open-minded?” Martina asked.
“It’s protecting my show. I like doing that program. I want to host it daily, not monthly.”
“Okay.” Martina slurped the coffee off the bottom of her cup, then set the cup aside. “I’ll bring her in for a prelim interview, how’s that? I’m sure she doesn’t have any background papers.”
“Sounds good,” I said. I grabbed the check, took Martina’s money from under the water glass, and threw the bills at her. “I said I was buying.”
“I’m not your date, Linameyer.”
I slid out of the booth. “I’m feeling guilty for bringing you here. Let me be a good American and clear my soul by throwing money at the problem.”
She laughed and stood beside me. Sandusky grunted as he climbed out of the booth.
“So, you never said. Was the ballet good?” I asked.
“Linda said their lines were off.” He took his coat off the back of the booth. “But I thought their lines were just fine.” There was enough of a leer in his statement to make Martina glare at him. He shrugged, the picture of innocence. “Then, what do I know about ballet?”
* * * *
I had the large reel-to-reel on edit and held both reels with the tips of my fingers, my gaze on the tape brushing up against the playback head. Senator Kasten slurred his words. I couldn’t find the beginning of the sentence. Somehow the senator managed to make the phrase, “Such a stupid bag of wind. He had no right to win a primary let alone an election,” sound like “Suchastupid baga windy dino right to winaprim ary letalone anlection.” I’d been struggling with that foot of tape for nearly fifteen minutes, trying to find a place to cut it. A truncated version of the Kasten interview was supposed to air at six. I would be lucky if I had it done for the next morning.
Sandusky had tried to talk with me for three days about Martina. I didn’t want to hear him. I wanted to make my own decision about her— and Sandusky seemed to want me to think like he did.
The studio door clicked shut. I turned, prepared to defend my studio time—I had had the four hours blocked off for nearly a week—when I saw Martina. She leaned against the door and smiled at me, almost hidden by the rack for the cassette player and the Dolby equalizer.
“My roommate’s outside,” she said. “You want to do that prelim interview now?”
I wound the tape back, then played it forward. “Can you hear where this breaks?” I said.
“Kasten has a southern Wisconsin mush-mouth. It could take you all day.” She advanced to the console and leaned against its side like a kid on his first station tour. “I had to work real hard to get her here.”
I sighed. I still hadn’t scheduled anyone for the Thursday show. And no one but that night’s producer would care if the Kasten piece was fifteen seconds shorter than planned. “All right,” I said. “But it has to be quick. And let’s do it in here. I don’t want to lose my studio time.”
“Gotcha.” Martina gave me a thumbs-up and let herself out the door. I bent over the reel-to-reel, rewound it, then moved very slowly. Finally I heard something that could pass for a pause. I marked the tape with a grease pencil, slid the tape forward and placed it on the cutter. The door creaked open as I ran a razor blade through the white grease mark. Then I pressed “Play” and listened to Kasten finish that stupid sentence. I made another grease mark and pushed away from the machine.
Martina stood next to a small, willowy woman who looked tall because she was so thin. “Ben Linameyer, this is Rosaura Correga.”
I held out my hand. After a moment, Rosaura took it. Her fingers felt as brittle as sticks. “It’s a pleasure,” I said.
“Gracias,” she murmured.
“Have a seat,” I said, indicating the plastic chair on her side of the console. After a quick glance at Martina, Rosaura sat down. “You do speak English, don’t you?”
“Si, señor.” Then she smiled a little. “Yes. Yes, I do.”
Her English was not heavily accented, something important if I were going to do an hour-long call-in program with her. “Did Martina tell you what we’re thinking of doing?”
Again Rosaura glanced at Martina. Martina smiled her encouragement and leaned against the soundpad on the far wall. “She said an interview.”
“In a few days, on our show ‘A Public Affair.’ “
“People will call?” Rosaura said.
I nodded. “And ask you questions. But today I want to see if you and I are compatible.”
She clutched her hands together and set them on the edge of the table. I scooted my chair over and pushed the mike aside. She was young, with the elastic skin of a teenager. The laugh lines around her eyes added about ten years to her age, though. If she had come from Argentina, she had probably lived through a lot. “Martina tells me that you used to dance in Argentina.”
“Si. Yes. I danced with Compañía Nacional de Argentina for many years, the last as prima ballerina.” She gazed down at her hands, but her words were filled with a quiet pride. Her accent was as clear as I had thought, and she seemed to have no fear of me. I would ask a few more perfunctory questions and then get back to Senator Kasten.
“Did you do the traditional works, or was the company more experimental?”
“Before the coup, we did Argentinian work. El Perón insisted on it. But Evita, she had us do Swan Lake as a secret. She had never seen it.”
El Perón. Evita. I glanced at Martina, remembering our conversation from a few days before. “You danced for Juan Perón?”
“And his wife.” Rosaura still did not look at me, but her voice was soft, a little husky. Her black hair fell in waves around her face. There was not a gray strand in it.
“Isabel?”
“Eva. Eva Perón. She was beautiful.”
Eva Perón had died in the early fifties. Juan Perón was overthrown a few years after that. He returned to power in 1973 and died a year later. His third wife, Isabel, took over for him until she was ousted by another coup in 1976. I remembered that from a special we did on Argentina a few months before. Rosaura could have danced, as a young woman, for Isabel thirteen or fourteen years ago. She hadn’t even been born when Eva died. “How long ago was that?” I asked.
Rosaura shrugged. “It seems a long time now.”
I glanced at Martina. Her face was very somber. She sat on the floor with her arms wrapped around her knees.
“Did you have trouble leaving Argentina?”
Rosaura shook her head. “We were here when they announced the coup, performing in Chicago. Argentina was not the same without Eva, and we were part of El Perón.”
“It would have been dangerous for her to return,” Martina said.
“So I stay.”
1 folded my hands in my lap, feeling a slow anger burn in my stomach. Perhaps this was how Sandusky felt when Martina baited him. Martina presented me with an obvious impossibility and expected me to accept it. “How old are you, Rosaura?”
“Ah—veinte-ocho—ah, how you say—?”
“Twenty-eight,” I said. “Eva Perón has been dead for nearly forty years.”
Martina hid her mouth and nose behind her knees. Only her eyes peered at me, studying me darkly. I wondered if I was failing her test.
Rosaura laughed. “I still dance,” she said. “I could not dance if I were so old as you think.”
“I hope I didn’t offend you.” I stood up and extended my hand. This time she took it as if she were a head of state and I, her servant. She rose slowly. “I will contact you about the show.”
“Did we—ah—are we compatiable?” Rosaura asked. Her eyes had a dark fire, and her skin was as pale as a dead woman’s.
“We are compatible,” I said, correcting her pronunciation. “We’ll see how the week’s schedule works out. I enjoyed talking with you.”
“Thank you,” she said. She turned for the door. Martina opened it for her, then opened the door to reception.
“I’ll be with you in a moment,” Martina said. She waited until both doors closed before turning to me. “You’re not going to use her, are you?”
“For Chrissake, Martina, she’s nuts.”
“That was easy.” Martina took a step toward me, moving with what Sandusky called her bantam walk. She looks like a little banty rooster, he would say, out to pick a fight “I would expect a comment like that from Sandusky, but you claim to have an open mind.”
“You expect me to believe that that girl, who looks no more than twenty-four, is actually fifty-eight and still dancing?”
“I expect you to believe that she is twenty-eight and danced for Evita Perón.”
“Eva Perón died in 1952.”
Martina shrugged.
“Everyone gets older. I don’t appreciate practical jokes, Martina.”
“This is no joke,” she said. “People can get stuck in time.”
I sighed. She said she had something that would test my open-mindedness and this certainly did. “If I believed you, what would you have me do?”
Martina put her arms behind her back. “Put her on the air.”
“This program is really important to me. And it’s obvious that she’s not operating with a full deck.”
“She’s very rational.” Martina spoke slowly, as if to a child. “Don’t ask her age, and you will be fine.”
“But she looks—”
“Too young. And no one can see her over the radio.” Martina nodded toward the reel-to-reel. “Senator Kasten waits. Such a limited worldview you have that allows the existence of dipshits like him and refuses the presence of an Argentinian prima ballerina.”
“I know she exists,” I started, but Martina had already turned her back and disappeared out the door. I unclenched my fists. Open-minded did not mean jeopardizing something I had worked for, at least not over something silly like Rosaura Correga. Martina should have understood that.
I went back to the Kasten tape and stared at the grease mark. Kasten was a jerk, and I couldn’t believe that the people of southeastern Wisconsin had elected him to the United States Senate. But I had done nothing about it. I hadn’t taken any risks for anything I believed in since my last year in college.
I shook my head. The argument I was having with myself was silly. I didn’t believe Martina’s roommate. And no one should have to take action for something he did not believe in, no matter how open his mind was.
Or how open he believed it should be.
* * * *
I checked the facts in the campus library the next morning. Eva Perón had died in 1952, as I had thought. She had been dynamic—a radio and movie actress—and beautiful, just as Rosaura had said. The Compañía Nacional de Argentina was performing in Chicago at the time of the 1955 coup. Then the company disappeared, missed its next performance and was never heard from again. Press speculation at the time assumed the company members had gone home to join the rebellion, although many were known Perónistas. None had applied for United States protection or a green card. One newspaper had a photo of the group’s prima ballerina. Rosaura Correga, as she had looked not twenty-four hours before.
People can get stuck in time.
I walked out the main doors onto the campus mall. A chill October wind blew leaves across the concrete. Students rushed from building to building, heads bent, under the gray sky. It felt as if the rain would start at any minute, but it had felt that way for days.
I stuck my hands in my jacket pockets and walked down the hill toward the lot where I had left my car. The students looked younger to me than they had ever looked before. Not that I felt old at thirty; I no longer felt naive. I had lost that searching, hungry look that the best students had. The world was no longer a place of wonder. It had become a familiar, dirty place, like a spacious penthouse apartment—lived in, but not clean.
Martina was trying to give that back to me, that sense of wonder. And for two brief moments, once when Rosaura was speaking and again when I saw her photo, I held a belief that what she said could possibly be true.
If I interviewed her, the interview would center on the dancing and the Perón years. I would have to screen the callers somehow, or not open the phone lines until late in the show. If anyone asked her her age, my credibility—and my chance to be a permanent talk-show host—would vanish.
And then I saw her, walking kitty-corner along the hill, the same small willowy woman who had stood in the studio the day before. Her hair streamed behind her in the wind and all the grace had left her movements. She walked with the stalking ease of a young lion. I ran until I caught up with her.
“Rosaura! Rosaura!”
She didn’t turn when I called her name, so when I reached her, I grabbed her arm. “Rosaura.”
“What?” She pulled away from me. Her accent was pure Midwest. Waat?
“Rosaura Correga?”
Her face was the same—eighteen years old except for the crow’s feet around the eyes. Her manner differed. She didn’t drop her gaze and look away. She stared at me, and color filled her windburned cheeks. “What the hell do you want?”
“You’re not Rosaura Correga?”
“Do I look like a Rosaura? Give it a rest.” She didn’t seem to recognize me. Not one flicker of fear or nervousness touched her face.
“You’re not a dancer then?”
“I’m on the crew team. That’s exercise enough.” Even the voice was the same. The same tenor, the same tone, only the accent differed. I knew voices. I worked with them intimately every day.
“Do you have a sister or a mother named Rosaura?” I asked, thinking that the look might run in a family.
“No. My mother’s name is Brigid, and I doubt my Gaelic ancestors would appreciate being confused with the Spanish.” She brushed her hair out of her face. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a class.”
Probably an acting class. She would go far. She was good. She was damn good. I watched her walk away, her slight body looking tall in the wind. Martina had almost convinced me, almost got me to jeopardize my show for a bit of silliness.
Thing was, standing there on the campus hillside, the October wind tousling my hair and bright-eyed students milling around me, I felt suddenly lonely, as if a part of me had flown away with that long-haired girl disappearing in the crowd.
* * * *
I pulled the last cart, signed the charts, and handed over the board to Dick, the 9 a.m. to noon programmer. The “Morning Show” had gone without a hitch, but I had half wanted something to deal with, troubleshoot, to take away some of the nervous energy that had been part of my mood.
I took the albums back to the record library. The stacks were quiet—no one was previewing new albums or pulling records for another show. I was tempted to shut off the station speakers and blast some music of my own —my own private rebellion—but I decided not to.
“There you are.” Martina was behind me, her hands on her hips. “Sandusky wants to go to breakfast again. You game?”
“Not today,” I said. I moved into the jazz section, away from the door, pretending to put music away. Most of the albums I held were old-time rock and roll, the stuff that hadn’t been remastered yet, but Martina didn’t know that.
She blocked the front of the aisle. “You haven’t said anything about Rosaura yet. Have you got a show for Thursday?”
“I saw Rosaura yesterday.” My hands were shaking. “I decided that I didn’t want her on the program.”
Martina tilted her head to one side. “You saw Rosaura?”
“On campus. Only she’s got Irish ancestors and she talks like someone from Waukesha.”
“And it was Rosaura.”
“No doubt.” I set the albums down. I suddenly wanted to face Martina. “You almost had me believing you, you know? I actually went to the library, checked the facts, and I probably would have put her on, if I hadn’t seen her cross campus with all the books under her arms. Theater major, right? Your roommate.”
“No.” Martina gripped the record shelves. “She was telling you the truth.”
“Yup.” I leaned against the Count Basic “Let me tell you a little truth. Your stunt, demanding that I prove my open-mindedness, probably did a lot more to close my mind than anything else could have. The next time someone brings me something that seems to be straight out of the Twilight Zone, I’m going to be a hell of a lot more skeptical. You proved your point. I’m not as open-minded as I like to think I am.”
She sighed. “I actually thought you were a little different.”
“What does it matter to you?” I had raised my voice. I hadn’t raised my voice in years. “It was a stupid conversation over breakfast a few mornings ago. Sandusky’s the Neanderthal, not me. I didn’t deserve this.”
“Neither did I,” she said softly. She touched my cheek. “I really liked you, Linameyer.”
Her use of the past tense deflated my anger. “That sounds final.”
She shrugged. “If your world doesn’t have a place for a twenty-eight-year-old ballerina who danced for Eva Perón, it certainly doesn’t have a place for me. I think I’m going to tell Sandusky to buy his own breakfast. See you, Linameyer.”
She waved and disappeared around the shelves. I followed her, but she was gone by the time I reached the classical section. I should have followed her out of the station, but I didn’t want to know. I didn’t want to know what she thought about herself that made her even more special than Rosaura Correga.
* * * *
The café still smelled of coffee and burned toast. I tried to talk Sandusky into a different restaurant, but he was a regular at the café—and a regular was a regular no matter how bad the food had gotten.
“What the hell did you say to Martina to make her stomp off like that?” Sandusky clutched the battered menu. “She was going to buy me breakfast.”
“Why would Martina buy you breakfast? I thought you two don’t get along.” I pushed the menu aside and decided that I’d try the oatmeal. The worst it could be was lumpy.
He colored. “We don’t, but I had a fight with Linda last night. I guess Martina thought she owed me some sympathy.”
“A fight about what?” I wasn’t really interested in the answer, except that it kept my attention off of Martina.
“The ballet. I told her I liked the ballet, I liked seeing all those beautiful women spread their legs—”
“You didn’t.”
“—and she said that was not what the ballet was all about. She said it was about the impossible. That the dancers were trained from childhood to do something impossible, and then they’d do it, and we should applaud them while we could because they would die young and their spirit was forever encased in their art, or some kind of weirdo female bullshit like that.”
“Linda really said that?” The waitress stopped at the table. I waved my empty coffee cup at her, gaze still trained on Sandusky.
“Yeah. And she said that I didn’t have the sensitivity to appreciate art.”
“She should have known that from the moment she saw you.” The waitress poured my coffee, and I realized that the burned-toast smell came right out of the pot. I pushed the cup aside.
Sandusky added milk to his. “So what was Martina all huffy about? You two got something going?”
“No. She decided I wasn’t open-minded enough.”
“That roommate thing.” Sandusky slurped his coffee. “Can’t say as I blame you. Thst old woman was enough to give anyone the creeps.”
I jerked, nearly spilling my cup. “You met her roommate?”
“Sure, that day Martina brought her to the station. Tiny and bent and some kind of cock-and-bull story about dancing for Juan Perón. If I know those Latin American dictators, she wasn’t dancing for him. She was letting him dance on her.”
“You don’t know Latin American dictators, Sandusky.” I leaned back, feeling tired. Martina had shaken me more than I realized.
The waitress set my oatmeal in front of me, along with a lump of raisins on the side. Sandusky’s eggs looked like they had a few days before, the morning we had come with Martina. I frowned.
“You’ve been saying weird stuff went on in the newsroom. What were you talking about?”
Sandusky poured catsup over his eggs and hash browns, then stirred them together as if he were making stew. “I don’t know, Linameyer. It’s kind of embarrassing.”
“Kinky predawn sex before the UPI machine?”
Sandusky glanced up, flushed to his ears. “I don’t like her, Linameyer. And besides, I would never do that.”
I nodded. My attempt at levity failed. “I’m sorry. You’ve been wanting to tell me this for days. I’m ready to hear it.”
“Martina and I, we got along okay in the beginning.” Sandusky took a bite of the red egg mixture and grimaced. He washed it down with a sip of coffee. “I would correct her grammar and she would correct my politics. Then, one morning, I caught her looking at me as if she could see all that secret stuff you don’t tell anybody, you know? And I felt like I did when I was fifteen. The summer my dad died.”
The flush had stayed in his face, and his voice had become so soft I could barely hear him. I stirred my oatmeal, waiting until the emotion had passed. “What makes that weird, Sandusky?”
He took another bite of the eggs, this time chewing as if he couldn’t taste them. Tears floated on the rims of his eyes. “She got me to tell her something I never told anybody else, not even Linda. And the next thing I knew, we were fifteen minutes behind schedule. Only I didn’t feel like I told her, Linameyer. I felt like I showed her. Like I took her back with me.”
“Some memories are strong enough,” I said. “They hold the power to sweep us with them.”
He nodded, and wiped at his eyes. “God, this shit is terrible,” he said, pushing his plate away by way of explanation. “That wasn’t the worst of it, Ben. It was after that. She treated me like she didn’t respect me anymore. Here I’d shared something crucial to me, and it was as if I no longer met some hidden standard.”
I took his hand and squeezed it. He pulled away and sipped his coffee. “And that’s why you don’t like Martina.”
“It’s as if she’s got a label for the whole world. I mean, I make mistakes, and I say stupid things, but I treat people the same, no matter who they are. Unless they hurt me.” His entire face was red. He smiled at me over the rim of his cup. “I like you, Linameyer.”
“I like you too, Sandusky.”
“I just don’t want to see her fuck you up even worse. You’re interested in her. You go to bed with her or something and then she starts treating you like dirt, and it could fuck you over.”
“I’ll be careful,” I said. “I promise.”
* * * *
After breakfast, I went down to the lake and watched the sailboats catch the midmorning light. As I watched, I tried to think of nothing at all, but Martina’s face kept appearing in my mind. Finally, I walked back to my car, and drove to her apartment.
Martina lived in one of the renovated Victorian mansions on Gorham. I had to drive nearly a mile out of my way on one-way streets to get to the building. My breath was coming in little gasps, and it felt as if someone had punched me through the heart.
People can get stuck in time.
I felt a thin thread of relief when I saw that the house still stood. I was afraid, somehow, that it would have disappeared with Martina. I parked the car in a numbered parking space in the back lot and went inside.
The building smelled of wood polish and dust. I took the stairs two at a time. With each step, I realized that the heartache I felt was not sadness, but anger. Martina had tested me and judged me unworthy, just as she had done to Sandusky. Only I wasn’t going to take it. I was going to find out her little secret.
The door to Martina’s apartment stood open. She sat on the couch, arms wrapped around her knees, staring at the floor. Swan Lake played faintly in the background, and a tiny old woman, dressed all in black, sat at the battered kitchen table.
“So,” I said to Martina. “What is it about you that I would never believe?”
Martina didn’t glance up, but the old woman did. Her face had no wrinkles, except for the laugh lines around her eyes. Her body had shriveled and her hair had grayed, but her features would stay the same forever. “Are we compatiable, young man?”
“Yes, we are, Mrs. Correga.” Somehow her age didn’t surprise me.
“And you want me for your radio show?”
“Let me talk to Martina first.”
Rosaura stood up. With her gray hair piled on top of her head and her arthritic slowness, she looked even smaller than she was. “You do not think, Martina,” she said. “At least this young man came to talk to you.”
“I can handle it, abuela.” The bitterness in Martina’s voice sent a shiver down my back.
“No, you can’t.” Rosaura turned to me. “I would like to do the show, dressed as I am now.”
“That would be fascinating, Mrs. Correga. Come to the station on Thursday, at 11:30. I’ll explain what to do then.”
She nodded once, then walked toward the back of the apartment, moving with the same willowy grace I had seen once before. I waited until I heard a door close toward the back before I spoke again. “What am I too narrow-minded to know?”
“She was beautiful once,” Martina said.
“She still is, if you know how to look.”
Martina rested her chin on her knees. “She really did dance for Eva Perón.”
“I know. And she’s lived here ever since.”
Martina nodded.
“You did something to her, and you did the same thing to Sandusky. Only he says it made you lose respect for him.” With each sentence, my vocal control slipped. The words vibrated, as they did when I interviewed a hostile guest on the talk show.
Martina pulled her legs closer, as if she could wrap herself into a tiny ball. “He ran away when his father was dying, couldn’t bear to watch the old man in pain, although the old man wanted him around. Sandusky’s been trying to make it up to him ever since. That’s why he brings his father up when he’s losing an argument. As if his father were a saint or something.”
A missing piece to Sandusky. That explained a lot: his unwillingness to try new things; the kindness he showed to people with problems; the hurt on his face when he had talked with me that morning. I inched forward into the apartment. The ceiling sloped, making it difficult for me to stand. “What do you do?” I asked.
“You ever talk to people?” She leaned forward. I sat down across from her. She didn’t seem to mind. “They have memories—a moment that they carry in their hearts, like a snapshot of a long-dead lover. And it’s that moment that gives them meaning.”
I suddenly remembered the brittle feel of Rosaura’s fingers when I first shook her hand; although her skin appeared elastic, it still felt old. “Like your grandmother being the prima ballerina for the Compañía Nacional de Argentina.”
“Like that.” Martina glanced down at her hands. The gesture seemed like Rosaura. “If I want to, I can grab that moment and let them wear it.”
“And you did for your grandmother in the studio.” My voice had slipped from interview to interrogation. The impossibilities of Martina’s claim impressed me less than her unwillingness to be honest with me from the first.
“Or I can actually bring the memory to the surface and let them relive it. I did that with Sandusky.” Martina looked up at me. She clutched her hands together so hard her knuckles were white. “You saw my sister on campus. She hates it when people ask her if she’s Rosaura.”
She had tested other people the same way. And they had failed too. “Then you do this a lot.”
Martina shrugged. “Enough that it has scared a few men away.”
“It seems that it would scare a lot of people away, Martina.” I clenched my fists. It wasn’t scaring me—or perhaps the anger covered the fear.
“I don’t tell my friends anymore,” she said. “I wanted to tell you.”
The floor was hard. I shifted a little to ease the physical discomfort. “Why me?”
“Because you seemed like someone who would like me anyway.” She whispered the sentence. “I started doing this when I was three, like some people start reading. My parents brought in a priest to exorcise me. When that didn’t work, they gave me to my grandmother.”
The words softened me a little, made me picture the young Martina, a little girl with a power that frightened the people around her. I couldn’t make her relive the event, but then, I didn’t need to. “Have you done this thing to me?”
Martina tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “I tried.”
I stiffened. All those times she had looked at me so deeply, I had thought that she was interested in me. She had only been interested in ferreting out my past. “And?”
“You don’t have a moment, at least not yet.” She stretched and slid farther away from me. “I suspect you’re living it, at the station, or something.”
“And that made me special.”
“No,” she said. “I’ve met other people like you. I like you, Linameyer.”
“You have a strange way of showing it,” I said. I got up, nearly hitting my head on the slanting ceiling. “You insult me, you test me and you try to invade my privacy. I’m amazed Sandusky even talks to you after the way you treated him.”
“I didn’t do anything wrong.” Martina had to tilt her head back to see me. She looked like a child. A confused, frightened child.
“Yes, you did. You have an ability to see people’s strongest memories and you view them without even asking permission. Then you judge people based on that past event and act as if that event defines their life.”
“It does.” Martina pushed herself onto the couch so that she didn’t have to look at me from such an odd angle.
“No,” I said. I didn’t move. I enjoyed her disadvantage. “It doesn’t. It seems to me that your grandmother has done a lot since she left Argentina. She had children, she raised you. And you probably weren’t the easiest child to be with. Your grandmother is a spectacular woman—and it wasn’t just because she danced for Eva Perón.”
“I’ve been doing this for a long time—”
“And you see what you want to see.” I walked to the back of the room, stared at the pictures on the wall, of Martina at various ages, Rosaura in her tutu, and Martina’s sister standing in front of a dock. “You accused me and Sandusky of being closed mirrored, when you had a special gift that allowed you to see parts of a person’s life. And you let that gift blind you. You let what you see define the person as much as some people let the word ‘nigger’ define a black man.”
“I do not!” Martina was on her feet.
“You do.” I shoved my hands in my pockets. “And the really sad thing is that if you used that gift right, you would have been able to help people instead of hurt them.”
I pushed my way past her, and hurried down the stairs. My car looked like home—a place to retreat to, a place to be silent in. I had never said things before like I said to Martina. But then, I had never met a person with such a unique gift before—and such a desire to waste it.
Two weeks went by. Rosaura showed up for the talk show and was a huge hit. People loved her stories about Argentina, the ballet, and about raising children in a strange country. Sandusky and I switched restaurants, and Martina avoided me. Sometimes I saw her working in the newsroom, but every time I smiled, she turned away.
One morning, I was checking my mail in the employees’ lounge when she rounded the corner. She stopped in the doorway. I stared at the station newsletter, waiting for her to go away.
“You got a minute, Linameyer?” she asked.
I tucked the newsletter back into the slot with the rest of my mail. Other rolled newsletters stuck out of the remaining boxes like hundreds of cardboard tubes. “I suppose.”
She came in and closed the door. “I’ve been thinking about what you said and I was wondering what you thought I could do to help people.”
I looked her over, trying to see if she was serious. Her face was paler than usual, and she had deep circles under her eyes. Little lines had formed beneath her lips, as if she hadn’t smiled for days. “You really want to know?”
She nodded.
I went over to the ratty pink couch and sat down, then patted the cushion beside me. Martina sat on the arm. “You said to me when I saw Rosaura for the first time,” I said, “that people get stuck in time. Sandusky’s stuck at fifteen, trying to make up to a dad who will never forgive him. You can see that, but you don’t reach out. You don’t help people move forward again.”
“How could I do that?”
“By asking if they want your help and then telling them what you see, how they’re stuck, if they’re stuck. Then they’re free to get counseling or to resolve the problem on their own. But you’ve helped them. You’ve given them vision.”
Martina had hunched over, as if my words were physical blows instead of sound. I watched her for a moment, then said softly, “You’re stuck too. You’re still a three-year-old whose parents thought she was possessed. That’s why you use your gift as a weapon, to make sure you get other people before they get you.”
She raised her head, eyes shiny. “You can see too?”
“No.” I ran a hand through my hair. “Sometimes I don’t need to. Sometimes it’s real obvious.” I stood up. “I’ve got a cat to feed. I’m going home.”
I grabbed my mail out of the box and opened the door.
“Linameyer?” she said.
I turned. She was still hunched over, her eyes sunken into her face. “I’ve been a real bitch.”
That was the closest thing to an apology that I would get. “I know,” I said. “But I like you, Martina, even when I’m mad at you.”
She smiled, and her face lit up. I loved it when Martina smiled. “That mean we’re friends?” she asked.
“I think so.” I grinned. “Tomorrow—breakfast with me and Sandusky?”
“I wouldn’t miss it,” she said. And then, almost a whisper: “Thanks, Linameyer.”
“You’re welcome.” I closed the door, giving her a moment of privacy, and walked down the hall. My mood had lightened. She had asked. She wanted to change. And I had changed. I had finally spoken up for something I believed in and it had made a difference. An ever-so-small, ever-so-important difference.