"I"m on the crew team. That"s exercise enough." Even the voice was the same. The same tenor, the same tone, only the accent differed. I knew voices. I worked with them intimately every day.
"Do you have a sister or a mother named Rosaura?" I asked, thinking that the look might run in a family.
"No. My mother"s name is Brigid, and I doubt my Gaelic ancestors would appreciate being confused with the Spanish." She brushed her hair out of her face. "Now, if you"ll excuse me, I have a cla.s.s."
Probably an acting cla.s.s. She would go far. She was good. She was d.a.m.n good. I watched her walk away, her slight body looking tall in the wind. Martina had almost convinced me, almost got me to jeopardize my show for a bit of silliness.
Thing was, standing there on the campus hillside, the October wind tousling my hair and bright-eyed students milling around me, I felt suddenly lonely, as if a part of me had flown away with that long-haired girl disappearing in the crowd.
I pulled the last cart, signed the charts, and handed over the board to d.i.c.k, the 9 a.m. to noon programmer. The "Morning Show" had gone without a hitch, but I had half wanted something to deal with, troubleshoot, to take away some of the nervous energy that had been part of my mood.
I took the alb.u.ms back to the record library. The stacks were quiet-no one was previewing new alb.u.ms or pulling records for another show. I was tempted to shut off the station speakers and blast some music of my own -my own private rebellion-but I decided not to.
"There you are." Martina was behind me, her hands on her hips. "Sandusky wants to go to breakfast again. You game?"
"Not today," I said. I moved into the jazz section, away from the door, pretending to put music away. Most of the alb.u.ms I held were old-time rock and roll, the stuff that hadn"t been remastered yet, but Martina didn"t know that.
She blocked the front of the aisle. "You haven"t said anything about Rosaura yet. Have you got a show for Thursday?"
"I saw Rosaura yesterday." My hands were shaking. "I decided that I didn"t want her on the program."
Martina tilted her head to one side. "You saw Rosaura?"
"On campus. Only she"s got Irish ancestors and she talks like someone from Waukesha."
"And it was Rosaura."
"No doubt." I set the alb.u.ms down. I suddenly wanted to face Martina. "You almost had me believing you, you know? I actually went to the library, checked the facts, and I probably would have put her on, if I hadn"t seen her cross campus with all the books under her arms. Theater major, right? Your roommate."
"No." Martina gripped the record shelves. "She was telling you the truth."
"Yup." I leaned against the Count Basic "Let me tell you a little truth. Your stunt, demanding that I prove my open-mindedness, probably did a lot more to close my mind than anything else could have. The next time someone brings me something that seems to be straight out of the Twilight Zone, I"m going to be a h.e.l.l of a lot more skeptical. You proved your point. I"m not as open-minded as I like to think I am."
She sighed. "I actually thought you were a little different."
"What does it matter to you?" I had raised my voice. I hadn"t raised my voice in years. "It was a stupid conversation over breakfast a few mornings ago. Sandusky"s the Neanderthal, not me. I didn"t deserve this."
"Neither did I," she said softly. She touched my cheek. "I really liked you, Linameyer."
Her use of the past tense deflated my anger. "That sounds final."
She shrugged. "If your world doesn"t have a place for a twenty-eight-year-old ballerina who danced for Eva Peron, it certainly doesn"t have a place for me. I think I"m going to tell Sandusky to buy his own breakfast. See you, Linameyer."
She waved and disappeared around the shelves. I followed her, but she was gone by the time I reached the cla.s.sical section. I should have followed her out of the station, but I didn"t want to know. I didn"t want to know what she thought about herself that made her even more special than Rosaura Correga.
The cafe still smelled of coffee and burned toast. I tried to talk Sandusky into a different restaurant, but he was a regular at the cafe-and a regular was a regular no matter how bad the food had gotten.
"What the h.e.l.l did you say to Martina to make her stomp off like that?" Sandusky clutched the battered menu. "She was going to buy me breakfast."
"Why would Martina buy you breakfast? I thought you two don"t get along." I pushed the menu aside and decided that I"d try the oatmeal. The worst it could be was lumpy.
He colored. "We don"t, but I had a fight with Linda last night. I guess Martina thought she owed me some sympathy."
"A fight about what?" I wasn"t really interested in the answer, except that it kept my attention off of Martina.
"The ballet. I told her I liked the ballet, I liked seeing all those beautiful women spread their legs-"
"You didn"t."
"-and she said that was not what the ballet was all about. She said it was about the impossible. That the dancers were trained from childhood to do something impossible, and then they"d do it, and we should applaud them while we could because they would die young and their spirit was forever encased in their art, or some kind of weirdo female bulls.h.i.t like that."
"Linda really said that?" The waitress stopped at the table. I waved my empty coffee cup at her, gaze still trained on Sandusky.
"Yeah. And she said that I didn"t have the sensitivity to appreciate art."
"She should have known that from the moment she saw you." The waitress poured my coffee, and I realized that the burned-toast smell came right out of the pot. I pushed the cup aside.
Sandusky added milk to his. "So what was Martina all huffy about? You two got something going?"
"No. She decided I wasn"t open-minded enough."
"That roommate thing." Sandusky slurped his coffee. "Can"t say as I blame you. Thst old woman was enough to give anyone the creeps."
I jerked, nearly spilling my cup. "You met her roommate?"
"Sure, that day Martina brought her to the station. Tiny and bent and some kind of c.o.c.k-and-bull story about dancing for Juan Peron. If I know those Latin American dictators, she wasn"t dancing for him. She was letting him dance on her."
"You don"t know Latin American dictators, Sandusky." I leaned back, feeling tired. Martina had shaken me more than I realized.
The waitress set my oatmeal in front of me, along with a lump of raisins on the side. Sandusky"s eggs looked like they had a few days before, the morning we had come with Martina. I frowned.
"You"ve been saying weird stuff went on in the newsroom. What were you talking about?"
Sandusky poured catsup over his eggs and hash browns, then stirred them together as if he were making stew. "I don"t know, Linameyer. It"s kind of embarra.s.sing."
"Kinky predawn s.e.x before the UPI machine?"
Sandusky glanced up, flushed to his ears. "I don"t like her, Linameyer. And besides, I would never do that."
I nodded. My attempt at levity failed. "I"m sorry. You"ve been wanting to tell me this for days. I"m ready to hear it."
"Martina and I, we got along okay in the beginning." Sandusky took a bite of the red egg mixture and grimaced. He washed it down with a sip of coffee. "I would correct her grammar and she would correct my politics. Then, one morning, I caught her looking at me as if she could see all that secret stuff you don"t tell anybody, you know? And I felt like I did when I was fifteen. The summer my dad died."
The flush had stayed in his face, and his voice had become so soft I could barely hear him. I stirred my oatmeal, waiting until the emotion had pa.s.sed. "What makes that weird, Sandusky?"
He took another bite of the eggs, this time chewing as if he couldn"t taste them. Tears floated on the rims of his eyes. "She got me to tell her something I never told anybody else, not even Linda. And the next thing I knew, we were fifteen minutes behind schedule. Only I didn"t feel like I told her, Linameyer. I felt like I showed her. Like I took her back with me."
"Some memories are strong enough," I said. "They hold the power to sweep us with them."
He nodded, and wiped at his eyes. "G.o.d, this s.h.i.t is terrible," he said, pushing his plate away by way of explanation. "That wasn"t the worst of it, Ben. It was after that. She treated me like she didn"t respect me anymore. Here I"d shared something crucial to me, and it was as if I no longer met some hidden standard."
I took his hand and squeezed it. He pulled away and sipped his coffee. "And that"s why you don"t like Martina."
"It"s as if she"s got a label for the whole world. I mean, I make mistakes, and I say stupid things, but I treat people the same, no matter who they are. Unless they hurt me." His entire face was red. He smiled at me over the rim of his cup. "I like you, Linameyer."
"I like you too, Sandusky."
"I just don"t want to see her f.u.c.k you up even worse. You"re interested in her. You go to bed with her or something and then she starts treating you like dirt, and it could f.u.c.k you over."
"I"ll be careful," I said. "I promise."
After breakfast, I went down to the lake and watched the sailboats catch the midmorning light. As I watched, I tried to think of nothing at all, but Martina"s face kept appearing in my mind. Finally, I walked back to my car, and drove to her apartment.
Martina lived in one of the renovated Victorian mansions on Gorham. I had to drive nearly a mile out of my way on one-way streets to get to the building. My breath was coming in little gasps, and it felt as if someone had punched me through the heart.
People can get stuck in time.
I felt a thin thread of relief when I saw that the house still stood. I was afraid, somehow, that it would have disappeared with Martina. I parked the car in a numbered parking s.p.a.ce in the back lot and went inside.
The building smelled of wood polish and dust. I took the stairs two at a time. With each step, I realized that the heartache I felt was not sadness, but anger. Martina had tested me and judged me unworthy, just as she had done to Sandusky. Only I wasn"t going to take it. I was going to find out her little secret.
The door to Martina"s apartment stood open. She sat on the couch, arms wrapped around her knees, staring at the floor. Swan Lake played faintly in the background, and a tiny old woman, dressed all in black, sat at the battered kitchen table.
"So," I said to Martina. "What is it about you that I would never believe?"
Martina didn"t glance up, but the old woman did. Her face had no wrinkles, except for the laugh lines around her eyes. Her body had shriveled and her hair had grayed, but her features would stay the same forever. "Are we compatiable, young man?"
"Yes, we are, Mrs. Correga." Somehow her age didn"t surprise me.
"And you want me for your radio show?"
"Let me talk to Martina first."
Rosaura stood up. With her gray hair piled on top of her head and her arthritic slowness, she looked even smaller than she was. "You do not think, Martina," she said. "At least this young man came to talk to you."
"I can handle it, abuela." The bitterness in Martina"s voice sent a shiver down my back.
"No, you can"t." Rosaura turned to me. "I would like to do the show, dressed as I am now."
"That would be fascinating, Mrs. Correga. Come to the station on Thursday, at 11:30. I"ll explain what to do then."
She nodded once, then walked toward the back of the apartment, moving with the same willowy grace I had seen once before. I waited until I heard a door close toward the back before I spoke again. "What am I too narrow-minded to know?"
"She was beautiful once," Martina said.
"She still is, if you know how to look."
Martina rested her chin on her knees. "She really did dance for Eva Peron."
"I know. And she"s lived here ever since."
Martina nodded.
"You did something to her, and you did the same thing to Sandusky. Only he says it made you lose respect for him." With each sentence, my vocal control slipped. The words vibrated, as they did when I interviewed a hostile guest on the talk show.
Martina pulled her legs closer, as if she could wrap herself into a tiny ball. "He ran away when his father was dying, couldn"t bear to watch the old man in pain, although the old man wanted him around. Sandusky"s been trying to make it up to him ever since. That"s why he brings his father up when he"s losing an argument. As if his father were a saint or something."
A missing piece to Sandusky. That explained a lot: his unwillingness to try new things; the kindness he showed to people with problems; the hurt on his face when he had talked with me that morning. I inched forward into the apartment. The ceiling sloped, making it difficult for me to stand. "What do you do?" I asked.
"You ever talk to people?" She leaned forward. I sat down across from her. She didn"t seem to mind. "They have memories-a moment that they carry in their hearts, like a snapshot of a long-dead lover. And it"s that moment that gives them meaning."
I suddenly remembered the brittle feel of Rosaura"s fingers when I first shook her hand; although her skin appeared elastic, it still felt old. "Like your grandmother being the prima ballerina for the Compania Nacional de Argentina."
"Like that." Martina glanced down at her hands. The gesture seemed like Rosaura. "If I want to, I can grab that moment and let them wear it."
"And you did for your grandmother in the studio." My voice had slipped from interview to interrogation. The impossibilities of Martina"s claim impressed me less than her unwillingness to be honest with me from the first.
"Or I can actually bring the memory to the surface and let them relive it. I did that with Sandusky." Martina looked up at me. She clutched her hands together so hard her knuckles were white. "You saw my sister on campus. She hates it when people ask her if she"s Rosaura."
She had tested other people the same way. And they had failed too. "Then you do this a lot."
Martina shrugged. "Enough that it has scared a few men away."
"It seems that it would scare a lot of people away, Martina." I clenched my fists. It wasn"t scaring me-or perhaps the anger covered the fear.
"I don"t tell my friends anymore," she said. "I wanted to tell you."
The floor was hard. I shifted a little to ease the physical discomfort. "Why me?"
"Because you seemed like someone who would like me anyway." She whispered the sentence. "I started doing this when I was three, like some people start reading. My parents brought in a priest to exorcise me. When that didn"t work, they gave me to my grandmother."
The words softened me a little, made me picture the young Martina, a little girl with a power that frightened the people around her. I couldn"t make her relive the event, but then, I didn"t need to. "Have you done this thing to me?"
Martina tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. "I tried."
I stiffened. All those times she had looked at me so deeply, I had thought that she was interested in me. She had only been interested in ferreting out my past. "And?"
"You don"t have a moment, at least not yet." She stretched and slid farther away from me. "I suspect you"re living it, at the station, or something."
"And that made me special."
"No," she said. "I"ve met other people like you. I like you, Linameyer."