Frauen Lieben Nie

Francis met Andrea at a summer evening party on a yacht on Biscayne Bay, with greater Miami glowing off the bow and Miami Beach glittering astern. One glance from the woman put Francis in a trance. The party was years ago, but this morning Francis woke up melancholy after having dreamt of her.

Andrea's face was in clearer focus than the rest of the world. Her hair, its waviness engineered to look natural, hung beside ears graced with ornaments that swung with every turn of her head, and even, it seemed, by themselves. When her eyes met Francis's, she probed him, especially him, only him. Soon she was sitting across from him, speaking in a voice that silenced all other sounds.

"I wanted to become an actress, but settled on modeling because you can make money more quickly, and because you needn't get your hands dirty," said Andrea.

"I'd love to be an actor, even if it meant getting my whole body dirty," said Francis.

"But it is hard work. And the things people do to you, the things they want from you. The business can make your soul dirty."

"Is modeling as hard as acting?"

"Almost."

"Are you paid well?"

"Enough to be self-sufficient and put myself through school. I only have to work part-time to pay the bills."

"School? For what?" Francis asked.

"Medicine," said Andrea. "Eventually I would like to be a doctor. A surgeon, maybe. Or an anesthesiologist."

"Ah, ambition."

"I am realistic. I'm not getting younger," she said. "Beauty fades. I like the human body, and I like money, so medicine would seem to be a pretty good long-term career choice."

Francis felt an impulse to get up, disrobe, dive into the bay, and swim until he drowned.

"I like ambitious women," Francis said, and clinked the ice in his glass.

"Ah, forthrightness," said Andrea, and then she smiled.

"I was brought up on a plantation," Francis said. "I speak my heart."

"People told me about you," said Andrea. "You've written books."

"A scribbler," Francis said. "A hack."

"Come on."

"My work is more like journalism than the sort of stuff people imagine writers do, except in one way I lead a very literary existence. Make that two ways."

"How is that?" asked Andrea. "Do you have two lovers?"

"Yes," Francis said. "Loneliness and tequila."

"All writers are like that."

"No, not all."

"What name do you use in your writing?"

"My real name," said Francis. "The formal version. Francisco Alfredo Carrera."

"Seems I've seen that name," said Andrea.

"If you've taken any engineering courses, or built any radio transmitters lately, maybe you have," Francis said.

"You're an engineer?"

"I was. I was vice president of a small electronics company. But I quit. Can't work for anyone else. Now I sit in a corner and write. And use the Internet. Alone in a dark room. No boss. No employees. No bullshit."

"Look at your freckles and your peeling nose," said Andrea. "You do more than sit in a dark room."

"Cathode-ray-tube burn," said Francis. "I sit too close to the computer."

"What?"

"Just kidding. I get out some. Beach-bumming, swimming, that sort of stuff. Keeps me from going insane."

"Maybe I've seen your name in book stores," said Andrea.

"Possibly."

"Are you well known in your field?"

"I am what you might call library famous. But lots of people are library famous. It doesn't mean much."

"I can't write a decent sentence," said Andrea. "I am in awe of people who can earn a living by, as you say, scribbling."

"It's barely a living," Francis said. "I am in awe of people who can earn a real living by virtue of their physical beauty."

"But writers get better with age. As for models ..." Andrea looked down.

A slow number was playing. "Dance?" asked Francis.

"All right," Andrea said.

Francis took Andrea onto the dance floor and led her. The top of her head came level with his eyes. Lights from homes on the bayshore were reflected and scattered by the water. Each light was the center of a material universe, something Francis's career might never afford him.

"Those houses all belong to me," said Francis, waving at the sky.

"Give me one," said Andrea.

"Only one?"

"A half dozen."

"Here."

"Mmm."

"All those yards and pools and boats are mine."

"What about the property taxes? Are they yours too?"

"The people who rent from me, they pay the taxes."

Andrea moved her face close to Francis. He caressed her cheek and neck with his lips. He smelled perfume and ocean air. He sensed Andrea's nipples through her blouse and his shirt. Her breath blew hot and small against his neck.

The number finished. Francis led Andrea back to the table, which seemed light years in diameter as he touched her hand and saw that there were no rings on any of her fingers, and that her nails were cut short like those of a little boy.

"You have incredible eyes," said Francis.

"Is that good?" smiled Andrea.

"They say things. Things we scribblers can't scribble, although we have been trying for thousands of years."

"Mmm."

"Would you go out with a deprived rural bumpkin?"

"Depends."

"Frauen lieben nie," said Francis.

"What?" asked Andrea.

"I think that’s German for Women never love."

Andrea laughed. "How do you know that?"

"A friend told me that, long ago."

"Did your friend know many women?"

"Hardly any."

"So maybe women did not love him," said Andrea.

"I don't think he knew how to love a woman," said Francis.

"What do you write?"

"I told you."

"Tell me again."

"Romance novels."

"Write one for me."

"I'll start tomorrow morning."

"What is is like to write a book?" asked Andrea.

"You type things on a keyboard and watch data files get bigger," said Francis. "The computer tells you how much stuff you have written. Every day there is a little more. The book is alive and growing. You nurture it. One day you stop typing and put all the stuff on a little disk and send it to the publisher."

Andrea looked at Francis, unblinking.

"A year or so after that," he continued, "you get to hold it in your hands, your own book, all bound up, a creature you created from nothing, a little brat that wouldn't have existed if not for you." He paused to take a breath. "It's almost like ..."

Andrea's gaze fell, and Francis knew that Andrea knew what he had left unsaid: "It's almost like raising a child!" When she looked up again, her eyes had changed from diamonds to slate.

"I want to be on one of those big TV talk shows," Francis said. "But my genre doesn't make people famous."

"Gotta have fame or money," said Andrea.

"I'd like both. But I doubt I'll ever have much of either."

"Money makes life convenient, especially for ex-husbands who can't get decent jobs. But the more money you get, the more expensive your problems get. As for fame? There are troubles there too."

"You? Problems? You are a goddess."

"That is the problem."

"How so?"

"Stalkers. Ex husband. Ex boyfriend. Ex this. Ex that. I ask them, ‘Why don't you find someone else?’ but they follow me all around," said Andrea.

"Hire somebody to shoot ‘em," said Francis.

Andrea laughed the way an actress laughs when she has a migraine and has to be on camera anyway.

"I'm serious. The law won't do anything around here," said Francis.

"Mmm." Andrea looked at the table.

"You have great skin," said Francis. "Do you get in the sun much?"

"Not too much. You know what it does. Aging and all that. But a little color is becoming in bed," said Andrea.

"When I was a kid I used to always have this dream."

"About what?"

"It was before I ever flew on an airplane. I would dream that I was about to travel somewhere exotic, far away, and was going to fly. I would get to the airport and would be just about ready to get onto the plane, and then something would go wrong. The plane would break down, or there would be some baggage missing, or someone would get sick, or the pilot wouldn't show up."

"So you didn't get to go?"

"I would always wake up before the plane took off."

"But of course, in real life, you have flown on airplanes, haven't you?" asked Andrea.

"Many times," said Francis.

"Is it as much fun as you dreamed it would be?"

"The first time, maybe."

"But not after that?"

"After the first few flights, I began thinking more about the destination than the flight itself. And I began to fly places not because I wanted to go there, so much as because I had to go."

"You grew up."

"I guess so."

"When I was little, I used to dream I was a champion swimmer," said Andrea.

"Swimming is like flying," said Francis.

"I wouldn't know. I can't swim a stroke."

"Just this morning I went out to the beach. The water was like glass. On South Beach there is nothing on the bottom but sand. I must have swum for an hour, looking down at the sand ripples on the bottom, imagining I was flying in an airplane over the Sahara Desert, or in a space ship over Mars."

"You make me wish I could swim," said Andrea.

"I could teach you," said Francis.

"I'm a slow learner."

"What were your swimming dreams like? Winning races?"

"Yeah," Andrea smiled, as if she had been in the Olympics when she was younger. "Well, sort of. I was always winning but I would wake up before the finish."

"You've won other things in your life, though, I'll bet," said Francis.

"I was prom queen in high school. Some band wrote a song about me, slobbering into a microphone about how cute I was."

"Did it get recorded?"

"Yes, but it didn't make the charts."

"Boo-hoo."

Something made a tweeting noise. Andrea pulled a beeper from her handbag and looked at it. Then she smiled at Francis momentarily, in a way he had never seen anyone smile before. It was as if some old hag’s mouth had been pasted over her own mouth for two seconds and then ripped off again.

"I have to make a phone call, but I suppose there is no phone on this boat," said Andrea.

"I think there is," said Francis.

"Well, it can wait a couple of minutes."

"Do you read Scott Fitzgerald?"

"No."

"I thought maybe you did."

"Why?"

"I don't know. The rich girls versus poor boys thing, I guess."

"I'm not very rich," said Andrea.

"I'm not very poor," said Francis. "But Fitzgerald didn't say anything about very rich or very poor. There was no very in his life. He was an all-or-nothing guy."

"What are you talking about?"

"I don't know."

Another slow number had begun, and Francis led Andrea onto the floor again. They danced again, and everything was just the same, except he did not feel her breath. The number concluded and they went back to the table again. Andrea looked at Francis as if he was a young boy and she was his baby sitter.

"What brings you to a singles party like this?" asked Francis.

"A man named Steve," said Andrea.

"You have a date?"

"Sort of," she said.

"Either you do, or you don't."

"Steve brought me here, but Steve might not be taking me home."

"Have you read anything by Guy de Maupassant?" asked Francis.

"I don't read much," she said.

"Work keeps you busy?"

"And play."

"Working out a lot?"

"In a way," she said, bringing her glass up to her mouth although it held only ice, and looking at Francis over the rim.

"Such as?"

Andrea put her glass down. "Futon gymnastics." Then she flashed that grin again and her eyes spat in Francis's face. His vodka martini began to rise into his throat. He took a deep breath and it settled back down.

The band was playing a fast number. Couples danced but never embraced. They gyrated and shook and smiled. They all looked identical. Soon the boat would dock, and some people would go home alone; others would depart in pairs, or in pairs of pairs. And they would all be smiling.

"None of us can love," Francis muttered. The music drowned out his voice, and Andrea was looking at the lights on the shore and did not see his mouth move. The number was about to end. It sounded like all such music sounded when it was ending. Francis reached across the table and touched Andrea's hand and asked, "In modeling school, did they teach you how to love?"

The music and Francis fell silent at the same instant.

"What?" asked Andrea.

"Never mind."

"I'd better go look for the phone."

"Nice meeting you."

A jet flew low over the bay, its lights stabbing at the homes on shore. Andrea prepared to leave the table. Francis had put on swim trunks under his pants, hoping there would be a hot tub on the boat. There wasn't. He took off his shoes and clothes and threw them on deck, and tied his key ring in his trunks with the drawstring. Then he dove into the bay head first. He swam all the way to his bayfront apartment in South Beach, drank a half pint of rum straight from the bottle, and passed out.

A week later Francis received a padded envelope in the mail. It contained his wallet, along with a clipping of an article from the Miami Herald about a woman who had gone skinny-dipping in the bay during an evening yacht party and had disappeared. She was an Andrea something-or-other, the article said, an aspiring model from South Dakota who had just gotten a job selling medical equipment for a company in North Miami. On the clipping was scrawled, in lead pencil, "Do you know her?"

Copyright 1998, 1999, 2000 by Francisco Carrera.