Velocities by Kathe Koja

Author:Kathe Koja [Koja, Kathe]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Meerkat Press, LLC
Published: 2019-12-14T18:46:19+00:00

OVER THERE

TOUJOURS

Hey, hey, is he in? That’s how they talk to me, these girls, girls with their knee boots and tiny little telephones, leaning against the elevator doors, tugging on their hair, lighting cigarettes—cigarettes! and right on the building wall the sign NO SMOKING. In Italian and English! Hey, is he in?

Foolish, I told my wife, my Lu. These girls—twenty years I am with Señor, and not one of these girls will ever learn my name.

She shrugged; she poured the coffee. Her hair, in the sun through the windows—gold and silver, like a painting, a Titian. Ah, she said, they are infants. Can you be angry with an infant? Besides, Carlos knows your name . . . Maritsa called again this morning. The christening dinner—

Señor may need me. Today the journalists come, and the man from the art school—I will try.

To give the toast, at least? He is your grandson. And Maritsa says—

I took her hand, her left hand with that tiny seed-drop of a diamond; she deserves something grander, I have said this before. I will try.

And then I was on my way, from the table, the apartment with the sunny windows, the terrace where she grows her flowers, pots of white daisies, I used to call her “Daisy,” as if she were an American girl. The smell of French coffee in the hallways, the stone faces at each landing like the saints and gargoyles one sees at cemeteries: weighing, approving, denying— That journalist, that English fellow from Le Pop! said the same last month of me: An aging but formidable factotum, forever looming like a gargoyle over the Ezterhas brand: that is how this business is, if there is nothing to say, still they must say something. This business, where the money flies and they take so many drugs, and the girls—“infants,” yes, and younger all the time, but none too young to spread themselves for anyone, anywhere, at the shows, in the atelier, the things I have seen—!

See them now, this very morning in Gold Street: one busy with her little phone, the other scowling behind round black sunglasses, the Desmundo glasses they all wear this season, leaping up like greyhounds when I approach: “Listen, hey listen, Carlos wants me, he called—” while the other one shoves forward, “Me too—he wants me too!” Breathless and rude all the way up in the elevator, but I make them wait outside, Señor inside with a pair of gloves, blue leather, very nice goods. He pulls on the left, smiles at me, holds out his hand; I adjust the right.

“They sent two pair,” he says, “one red and one blue. Which do you prefer?”

“Red-handed,” I say, “that’s guilty, non?” and he smiles, white as the petals of a daisy. When I first met him, he never smiled at all. “You think of everything, Gianfranco. All right, blue it is.”

“Did you call for models, Señor? From Vita?” and when he nods I let them in: greedy they clamber up beside him, grab his blue hands, no thought between them to thank me who opened the door.

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