Such a Pretty Fiction: Chapter 12
This is the twelfth chapter of my novel, Such a Pretty Fiction. Chapter 11 is here.
Nicolas was a true professional. He waited on me as he had before. He made no reference to them whatsoever. As far as he was concerned, my night had just begun, with two other place settings on the table for some reason. He didn’t clear them. Maybe he thought they were coming back. I ordered another beer, pretending to be chipper and unbothered. As I sipped it I watched the stairs, hoping she would come back and it would be like it was before.
After the third beer I was ready to talk to Candace. I had barely touched my burger. Grease had congealed on the plate. Looking at it made me feel sick.
As I approached the bar, Nicolas motioned for me to put my wallet away. It had been taken care of. I set a few bills on the counter as a tip. He nodded politely, and I walked up the steps away from the bar, away from the patrons laughing, away from the empty chairs at the table.
Back in the electric glow from the heater, I felt like I was stranded on another planet. The palm trees tinged in yellow light, the bricks, the quiet. A private stage on a forgotten world, all for me. I took out my phone and called Candace.
It rang once. Twice. After the third time I realized I would be disappointed if she didn’t answer. Talking to Sophie had felt good. I needed someone familiar. I thought of the untouched salad on the table. Please answer. When I heard her voice, the feeling vanished in an instant. She’d been the one to get me into this in the first place. It enraged me to imagine her begging me to call her only to let the phone ring and ring before deigning to pick up.
Candace’s voice was one of her most arresting features. It was a velvety contralto. On the phone the signal dulled the high frequencies and emphasized the lower registers.
“Hello, Logan.” Slow. Flat. No excitement to hear from me, no trace of expectation, none of the concern she’d betrayed to Sophie. She said it like she was waking up from a nap to find me sitting next to her, just where she knew I would be.
I said nothing.
“Sophie seemed nice. I can see why you two get along.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I snapped.
“Oh good. You’re there.” I’d let her goad me. “I don’t mean anything. She was just very friendly. Happy to talk to someone she’d never met before. She seemed social. Laughed easily. Like someone you’d get along with.”
She was getting to me. I decided to keep it professional. I willed the frustration out of my voice. “She said you wanted to talk to me about Colombia?”
“New contract. A big one. Helping the Red Cross manage refugee information. It’s just a pilot, but if we stick the landing it’ll be a huge deal for us. Based in Cúcuta, on the border of Colombia and Venezuela.”
“That’s great. I’m on the contract here, though, you know.”
“That’s not a contract, Logan. You’re there on loan. And you’re mostly done anyways, aren’t you? I got your email. We upped your quota. It’s already way past what we expected. What do you have left to do?”
“We said two weeks. It’s barely been one. We can’t just give up on things at the first sign of a bigger fish. That’s no way to do business.”
“Calm down, Logan.” She spoke to me like I was a child. “First, you’ve done everything we said you’d do. You wrote the app. Traveling with her was a bonus to make sure she’d say nice things about us. Second, I’m not saying I’m pulling you out. I’m just asking if she still needs you.”
I wished I knew. “We’re still working.”
“I get that. What I’m trying to understand is if you could reasonably make it to Cúcuta. People are pouring over the border. Five thousand a day. Families. Mothers with their kids. The Red Cross is upgrading their system. They want to switch to us.”
That was my out. “There’s no way we’ll be able to build them an app that quickly. It’s not possible.”
“They’ve already written it. All we need to do is help them configure it for our cloud and be on hand to troubleshoot.”
I didn’t reply.
Her voice was soft. “I need you.”
The beer spread out in my head. I imagined hearing it from Soledad.
“I’m flying out in a few hours. Annoying flight. You know I hate the red eye. I bought you a ticket for tomorrow afternoon. Wrap up what you’re doing.”
“I’ll see.”
“See what?”
“See if I can wrap it up. See what happens. See if I want to go to Cúcuta. I don’t know. I’ll see.”
“OK. Looking forward to seeing you, Logan.” She hung up.
I took the phone from my ear. Alone again. Sitting on an empty bench. A door closed somewhere on the balcony. The glass doors opened and a clerk walked into the courtyard speaking casual Spanish into a cell phone. His professional solemnity was gone now that he was away from the desk.
Nothing felt real. The floodlights. The palm trees. The black sky over a city in the mountains.
I went back to the bar. Nicolas stirred a drink in a tall glass. He gave me the same smile he always gave me. What would he be like if it had been him, not the clerk, walking through the courtyard on his cell phone? It was hard to imagine him being anywhere else. Nicolas the professional. I asked for an eepuh. A short nod to say he understood. The ice clinked in the glass as he stirred.
“Nicolas, what do you do for fun?”
“When I am not working?”
I nodded.
“I think about working.”
I laughed. He darted off to fill a pint glass.
The bar was still full. The murmur of voices. Soft piano rebounding off the walls. Someone had cleared our table. I didn’t want to go back there. I rested my elbows on the cool marble of the bar and sipped my beer. I was drunk enough that I could think without feeling.
I was avoiding going back to the room. I knew it. Nicolas knew it. It felt like everyone who had seen us together in the bar knew it.
I took slow sips, as small as I could manage, and stared at the bottles of Prosecco perched on shelves in the low refrigerators at the back of the bar. When I finally drained the last bit from the bottom of the glass, it went down warm. It was almost midnight. I pinned a bill under the glass on the marble. Too much, really, even with a generous tip. Trying to buy Nicolas’s silence, or his sympathy, or lying to myself about the kind of person that I was. The crowd in the bar had thinned out. The piano player was still there, hammering out the hits.
Soledad had the key. I stopped at the desk for a spare. If the door was locked, I didn’t want to have to come back down and face them all again. The clerk was the one I’d seen in the courtyard on his phone. He was back to the version of himself he kept at work, the man who was happy to wear a vest and speak slow, accommodating Spanish to the gringos staying at the hotel.
The stairs to the balcony were wide and worn in the middle from centuries of footfalls. Glass doors at the top and bottom had been added to insulate what was once an exterior passageway. My steps echoed back at me in the tube of glass and stone. In front of our door I paused, the key between my fingers. Who was I going to find in the room? The girl I knew, or the woman who had been sitting at the table at dinner? Out here on the balcony it didn’t matter. I didn’t have to know. As long as I was on this side of the door, it could open into whichever world I wanted. Something had happened. Something had changed. But for now it was trapped in the room. Maybe if I focused on the good, I would step into the world where everything was how I wanted it to be. I thought about standing in the hallway in Iquitos. The first time I smelled her neck. I thought about the look in her eyes when I entered her, the exhale and the thrust. Falling into each other, laughing. Waking up with my face in her hair.
I touched the key card to the lock and opened the door.