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“Again, I got to remind you of your promise not to tell Rudy anything. If he hears I did something crazy like buying a leaky old boat on the Mediterranean with the money he made for me, he’ll split a gut. His idea of money is something you hide in the bank. Well, everybody to his own pleasure. When I have the business on a good, solid, paying basis, I’ll write and tell him and invite him to come on a cruise with us, with his wife. Free. Then he can see for himself just how dumb his brother is.
“You don’t write much, but in your letters I get the impression things aren’t so hot with you. I’m sorry. Maybe you ought to change whatever it is you’re doing and do something else. If my friend Dwyer wasn’t so close to being a fag as to make no difference, I’d ask you to marry him, so you could be the cook. Joke.
“If you have any rich friends who like the idea of a Mediterranean cruise this coming summer, mention my name. No joke.
“Maybe it seems gaga to you and Rudy, your brother’s being a yacht captain but I figure it must be in the blood. After all Pa sailed the Hudson in his own boat. One time too many. Not such a joke.
“The boat is painted white, with blue trim. It looks like a million dollars. The shipyard owner says we could sell it like it is right now and make 10,000 dollars profit. But we’re not selling.
“If you happen to go East you could do me a favor. See if you can find out where my wife is and what she’s doing and how the kid is. I don’t miss the flag and I don’t miss the bright lights, but I sure miss him.
“I am writing such a long letter because it is raining like crazy here and we can’t finish the second coat of the deck house (blue). Don’t believe anybody who tells you it doesn’t rain on the Mediterranean.
“Dwyer is cooking and he is calling me to come eat. You have no idea how awful it smells. Love and kisses, Tom.”
Rain in Porto Santo Stefano, rain in Venice, rain in California. The Jordaches weren’t having much luck with the weather. But two of them, at least, were having luck with everything else, if only for one season. “Five o’clock in the afternoon is a lousy time of day,” Gretchen said aloud. To stave off self-pity, she drew the curtains and made herself another drink.
It was still raining at seven o’clock, when she got into the car and went down to Wilshire Boulevard to pick up Kosi Krumah. She drove slowly and carefully down the hill, with the water, six inches deep, racing ahead of her, gurgling at the tires. Beverly Hills, city of a thousand rivers.
Kosi was taking his master’s in sociology and was in two of her courses and they sometimes studied together, before examinations. He had been at Oxford and was older than the other students and more intelligent, she thought. He was from Ghana and had a scholarship. The scholarship, she knew, was not a lavish one, so when they worked together, she tried to arrange to give him di
Her practice was to pick him up at the corner of Rodeo and Wilshire in Beverly Hills. He didn’t have a car, but he could take the bus along Wilshire from Westwood, where he lived, hear the university campus. As she came along Wilshire, peering through the spattered windshield, the rain so dense that the wipers couldn’t work fast enough to clear the glass, she saw him standing on the corner, with no raincoat, with not even the collar of his jacket turned up for protection. His head was up and he was looking out at the stream of traffic through his blurred glasses as though he were watching a parade.
She stopped and opened the door for him and he got in leisurely, water dripping from his clothes and forming an immediate pool on the floor around his shoes.
“Kosi!” Gretchen said. “You’re drowning. Why didn’t you wait in a doorway, at least?”
“In my tribe, my dear,” he said, “the men do not run from a little water.”
She was furious with him. “In my tribe,” she mimicked him, “in my tribe of white weaklings, the men have sense enough to come in out of the rain. You … you …” She racked’ her brain for an epithet. “You Israeli!”
There was a moment of stu
Obediently, he dried off his glasses.
When they got home, she made him take off his shirt and jacket and gave him one of Colin’s sweaters to wear. He was a small man, just about Colin’s size, and the sweater fit him. She hadn’t known what to do with Colin’s things, so they just lay in the drawers and hung in the closets, where he had left them. Every once in a while she told herself that she should give them to the Red Cross or some other organization, but she never got around to it.
They ate in the kitchen, fried chicken, peas, salad, cheese, ice cream, and coffee. She opened a bottle of wine. Kosi had once told her he had gotten used to drinking wine with his meals at Oxford.
He always protested that he wasn’t hungry and that she needn’t have bothered, but she noticed that he ate every morsel she put before him, even though she wasn’t much of a cook and the food was just passable. The only difference in their eating habits was that he used his fork with the left hand. Another thing he had learned in Oxford. He had gone through Oxford on a scholarship, too. His father kept a small cotton-goods shop in Accra, and without the scholarship there never would have been enough money to educate the brilliant son. He hadn’t been home in six years, but pla
He asked where Billy was. Usually, they all ate together. When Gretchen said that Billy was away for the weekend, he said, “Too bad. I miss the little man.”
Actually, Billy was taller than he, but Gretchen had become accustomed to Kosi’s speech, with its “my dears” and its “little men.”
The rain drummed on the flagstones of the patio outside the window. They dawdled over di
“To tell you the truth,” she said, “I don’t feel like working tonight.”
“None of that, now,” he said reprovingly. “I didn’t make that fearful journey in a flood just to eat.”
They finished the wine as they did the dishes, Gretchen washing and Kosi wiping. The dishwasher had been broken for six months, but there wasn’t much need for it, as there were never more than three people for any one meal and fiddling with the machine was more trouble than it was worth for so few dishes.
She carried the pot of coffee into the living room with her and they each had two cups as they went over the week’s work. He had a quick, agile mind, by now severely trained, and he was impatient with her slowness.
“My dear,” he said, “you’re just not concentrating. Stop being a dilettante.”
She slammed the book shut. It was the third or fourth time he had reprimanded her since they had sat down at the desk together. Like a—like a governess, she thought, a big black mammy governess. They were working on a course on statistics and statistics bored her to stupefaction. “Not everyone can be as goddamn clever as you,” she said. “I was never the brightest student in Accra, I never won a scholarship to …”