"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 nons.e.xist 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 gla.s.s. "You do real good at spouting party line and picking which party line is appropriate under what circ.u.mstances. 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 gla.s.s, 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 ca.s.sette 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 pa.s.s 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, senor." 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 Compania 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 Peron insisted on it. But Evita, she had us do Swan Lake as a secret. She had never seen it."
El Peron. Evita. I glanced at Martina, remembering our conversation from a few days before. "You danced for Juan Peron?"
"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 Peron. She was beautiful."
Eva Peron had died in the early fifties. Juan Peron 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 Peron."
"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 Peron 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 p.r.o.nunciation. "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 Peron."
"Eva Peron 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 dips.h.i.ts 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 Peron 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 Compania 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 a.s.sumed the company members had gone home to join the rebellion, although many were known Peronistas. 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 s.p.a.cious 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 Peron 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 h.e.l.l 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?"