Garbo Laughs Read Free

movie-fed rapture, she is nearly pretty. He likes to watch her good looks come and go.
    Were he to die, how she or their children would manage he doesn’t know. They would watch old movies, but what about the real world?
    “You met a
blind
photographer?” she repeated, weighing this new piece of information.
“Blind?”
    Lew was feeling the full extent of his exhaustion, weeks of meetings and almost no sleep. For a moment he lost track of the conversation, overcome by a wave of indescribable weakness. As a boy he fainted so often he had to give up baseball. The feeling was like that, but confined to his heart.
    “Tell me,” he heard Harriet say, but her face was receding from him.
    She observed his gentle smile and resisted snapping her fingers. Lew was not an aggressive man except in this, offering part of a story, then refusing the rest until he was questioned. One day she was going to whack him over the head.
    Lew smiled at her, but now he couldn’t even remember her name. Then slowly he felt his strength return, and with an effort he explained.
    They’re pictures of objects he knows well, things he can touch. His cane, for instance. He leans it against a wall beside a bucket. He has people arrange the objects for him, according to his directions. He knows from the feel of the sun on his face how much light there is, and he adjusts the light meter accordingly.
    She was taking all this in, the fern-and-circus man, the blind photographer, when he remembered one more thing. He had visited the beach where they went together twelve years before on holiday, “but it was unrecognizable.”
    “Oh?”
    Even twelve years before, he knew Havana well, first from photographs and then from visits as an architect working to preserve old cities. Back then the beach was empty except for a group of muscle-bound men in swimsuits: the national wrestling team, of all things. “It’s completely different,” he said.
    “All the tourists?”
    “Not exactly.”
    He paused, and she thought again what a good if infuriating storyteller he was.
He
should be the writer.
    “It’s like a brothel,” he said.
    He said it without emotion and she looked at him, startled. He went on. The beach was full of Canadian and Italian men with young Cuban women hanging off them. “They don’t let the women into the hotels,” he explained, “not during the day. But you go outside and they’re waiting in a throng. I couldn’t walk down a street in Havana without getting hit on at least once or twice.” This is real life, he was thinking. Forget the movies.
    “How can that be?” she demanded. “Why do they allow it?”
    He didn’t know. A few years ago they said it was poverty. There wasn’t enough food on the island and women were desperate. But there was enough food now.
    The fern was dry and fragile. Like tissue paper, she thought, turning it over in her hands and drawn forward, for a moment, to Christmas.
    Then she put an end to their enchanted mood, already complicated by his description of prostitutes, with a question. She prided herself on her questions, imagined obituaries where she was described as having had an inquiring mind. “She wasn’t aprolific writer,” the obituaries would say, “but often the best writers are not.”
    She mentioned the present he had brought for their daughter, wondering if it was appropriate. “Is it appropriate,” she asked, eyeing him, “for a father to give a daughter entering puberty such a suggestive gift?”
    He looked at her. Then he said, “That’s the trouble with Ottawa,” and he was vehement and angry.
    “You don’t mean that’s the trouble with Ottawa,” she returned. “You mean that’s the trouble with me. You aren’t talking to Ottawa. You are talking to me.”
    That’s the trouble, and he continued his thought, not shifting his weary, saddened, aging-by-the-minute eyes off his honest needle of a wife. “People here don’t know how to enjoy their bodies. They don’t know