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On the stage below the projection screen, Paul was in motion, making adjustments to dials, following the projection on his laptop, playing the keyboard at intervals. Vincent sensed movement to her right, and when she looked, the woman had fallen asleep, her head on her chest. Vincent rose and slipped out into the lobby, where the lights and the solid reality of marble and benches made her want to weep with relief, and fled outside into the winter air. She walked over the Manhattan Bridge and all the way up to Grand Central Terminal, trying to steady her thoughts. The idea came to her that she could sue him, but with what proof? He’d been in Caiette every summer and every second Christmas of her childhood. There was no way of proving that he hadn’t filmed the videos himself. And any legal action would be difficult or impossible to hide from Jonathan, for whom she was supposed to be a calm harbor, no drama, no friction. On the train back to Greenwich, she caught sight of her reflection in the window and closed her eyes. She’d started paying her own rent at seventeen. How had she become so dependent on another person? Of course the answer was depressingly obvious: she had slipped into dependency because dependency was easier.
“Not as often as I’d like. I took a couple art history classes in college,” he added, as if he had to justify his presence here. They parted ways after a brief volley of small talk—“I hope you’re coming to the party tonight?”—and it might have been unmemorable except that that was the first time she found herself dwelling on the limitations of her arrangement with Jonathan. She enjoyed being with Jonathan, for the most part, she didn’t mind it, but lately she’d found herself thinking that it might be nice to fall in love, or failing that, at least to sleep with someone she was actually attracted to and to whom she owed nothing. She hailed a taxi and traveled to Saks, where she spent some time under dazzling lights and emerged an hour later with a blue velvet dress and black patent leather shoes. There were still so many hours left in the day. Don’t think of Paul, probably in a studio somewhere composing new music to accompany her plundered work. She hailed another taxi and went downtown to the financial district, to linger for a while in a café that she’d always especially liked. She stayed in the Russian Café for two hours, drinking cappuccinos and reading the International Herald Tribune.
As he walked toward the subway, he even thought about how he’d spin it: “I realized there was fraud going on,” he imagined telling an admiring future employer, “and that was the day I walked out. I never would have imagined walking off a job like that, but sometimes you just have to draw the line.” Although the line, for Oskar, had been crossed eleven years earlier, when he’d first been asked to backdate a transaction. “It’s possible to both know and not know something,” he said later, under cross-examination, and the state tore him to pieces over this but he spoke for several of us, actually, several of us who’d been thinking a great deal about that doubleness, that knowing and not knowing, being honorable and not being honorable, knowing you’re not a good person but trying to be a good person regardless around the margins of the bad. We’d all die for the truth in our secret lives, or if not die exactly, then at least maybe make a couple of confidential phone calls and try to feign surprise when the authorities arrived, but in our actual lives we were being paid an exorbitant amount of money to keep our mouths shut, and you don’t have to be an entirely terrible person, we told ourselves later, to turn a blind eye to certain things—even actively participate in certain other things—when it’s not just you, because who among us is fully alone in the world? There are always other people in the picture. Our salaries and bonuses covered roofs over heads, crackers shaped like goldfish, tuition, retirement home expenses, the mortgage on Oskar’s mother’s apartment in Warsaw, etc.
didn't expect that leonard cohen reference <3
There’s something in it, he decides later, standing in line for dinner. It’s possible to know you’re a criminal, a liar, a man of weak moral character, and yet not know it, in the sense of feeling that your punishment is somehow undeserved, that despite the cold facts you’re deserving of warmth and some kind of special treatment. You can know that you’re guilty of an enormous crime, that you stole an immense amount of money from multiple people and that this caused destitution for some of them and suicide for others, you can know all of this and yet still somehow feel you’ve been wronged when your judgment arrives.
He named the place Kuba, which is what the natives—who appeared to greet him from beyond the green jungle drapery—said it was called. And what the Germans, fond of the letter K, still call it. The Admiral napped in a hammock strung between a palm and a paw-paw, tired after such a long journey, lulled by the syncopated crash of waves and the sultry and healthful air, happy in his own genius and exactly where he wanted to be. True beauty and the unknown are alike, in having no precedents. You recognize them when you see them, if you have such a gift of seeing. Numeric calculations are no match for life’s unrest. Far superior is knowing the world is a pear, a violin, a breast. By such poetic and razor precision, the Admiral mapped an unmappable world.
“A nothing. A stranger who left me here when I was thirteen.” She and her mother had ducked into the Tokio from the blinding sun of midday Havana. It was so dark inside the club that Rachel K could barely see. They waited at the Pam-Pam Room bar until a manager appeared from a back office, trailing Cigar smoke. He breathed audibly and in his labored breath she understood that he’d taken her on. That was ten years ago. She’d been at the Tokio so long now that it was a kind of mother. It gave her life a shape. Other girls passed through, regarded cabaret dancing as momentary and sordid, always hoping for some politician or businessman to rescue them. Because the Tokio gave her life a shape and never sent her fretting over imagined alternatives, Rachel K was free in a way the other girls weren’t. She had longings as well, but they weren’t an illness to be cured. They were part of who she was, and it was these very longings that reinforced the deeper reconciliation to her situation.
An executive of the United Fruit Company, a Mr. something Stites—she couldn’t remember his first name and simply called him “you”—took her east to Oriente in his private plane. She’d been hesitant to go. He seemed like a person who was dangerous because he didn’t know which parts of him were rotten, or even that he harbored rot. “All this belongs to us,” he said, as they hedgehopped over green cane fields. “Three hundred thousand acres. Those are our boats, anchored off shore there. You see them?” Maybe he wasn’t dangerous after all, she decided. He simply wanted a showgirl to marvel over his sugar empire. They landed at company headquarters and she ran through a canopy of banana groves near the airport, trees with long, flat leaves, taller than she was and loaded with dank and heavy clusters of bananas, a strange purple flower dangling off the end of each cluster. She put her hand around a banana stalk. “They’re full of water, pure water,” the executive said. It felt like a chilled human limb with a cold pulse.
im shocked i didnt save this from telex from cuba? i think it's in there? it's so good
Marcel bequeathed his aunt Leonie’s couch to a bordello, and whenever he visited the place, to tease Rachel of my Lord (but never buy her services), it unnerved him to see tarts flopped on its pink crushed velvet cushions, even if there was maybe nothing more perfect and appropriate than pink velvet plush flattening under a whore’s ass. De la Mazière was different. It didn’t matter to him whether he reclined on plush furniture in the lobby of the Ritz or in a squalid St. Denis cathouse. Ate his steak at Maxim’s or at a colonial outpost in Djibouti, a backwater of salt factories and scorching temperatures on the bacterial mouth of the Red Sea. Properly seared steak is everywhere the same. A traitor satisfies his tastes, gets his high- and his low-grade pleasures wherever he can. In Havana, de la Mazière found occupied Paris all over again. Amidst its nude and adorned girls, morphine slushees and luxury hotel suites, he sensed a vague but unshakeable dread darkening the reverie and lawlessness. Despite the city’s obvious, surreal wealth, he sniffed wretched poverty. Tall and neon-pulsing casinos staking the heart of a metropolis ringed in desperation: miles and miles of neighborhoods with no electricity, no running water, and smokily typhoid trash fires. It was occupied Paris, with Americans in Cadillacs instead of Germans in Mercedes. A sultrier climate and starrier nights, purple-mouthed girls, a cinema palace with a retractable roof. They even had Obelisk and Olympia books on Calle Belga, and obsolete French pornography—not sequestered in L’Enfer, on the top floor of the Bibliothèque Nationale, but displayed at the bookstalls, their pages riffling in the damp ocean breeze.
his characterisation is so good
Rachel K was leading President Prio, “Handsome,” she called him, as if it were his name, through the Pam-Pam Room to his own VIP booth. He was not, in truth, so handsome, but he was president and vain. She and Handsome passed the mysterious Frenchman’s table. A Frenchman who might have been, in fact, quite handsome. He seemed confident, amused, self-contained. A perfect loner. He’d been coming back, and each evening he was there, his presence distracted her, like he knew that she knew that he was watching her, though pretending not to, and his gaze colored her every movement. Just walking through the room, she was performing for an audience of one attentive Frenchman. It was strange, like he was whispering something and she could hear it even if she couldn’t translate into language what he said. She sensed a tacit agreement between them, that they would continue for some time with this ritual of him watching her and pretending not to, whispering a silent message more voluminous, airy and complex than language could transmit. She felt sure it was better to draw out the spell than risk breaking it prematurely. And anyway, she was with Handsome, her favorite of the revolving door of presidents. They sat together in a private booth, and he gave her an opal pendant and a silk dress with a secret pocket. She kissed his mustache and let him practice his soliloquies on her.
All men at the Tokio asked this. What do you like? It was part of the tête-à-tête of her profession, but what the men wanted was a limited variety of set responses: I like pleasing you. I like squirming on your lap. I like to fantasize about a man just like you watching me take my clothes off. I think about it when I’m alone, and I have to put my own little girl hands in my underwear, just to stop the longing to be on your lap. Gullibility was beside the point: hearing these things was a performance the men were paying for. They didn’t really want to know what she liked, and it never would have occurred to her to tell them. But she figured that the Frenchman, with his bemused half-smile, was too clever to want such an obvious put-on. He seemed to understand flirtation—real flirtation, and not a bluntly performed simulation of it. She suspected that if she said “I like squirming on your lap,” he’d surely laugh his head off, and at her expense.
“I like those few days of the year when it’s cold here, at the end of hurricane season,” she said. “It’s cold enough you need a sweater. And at night, blankets. But I don’t fall asleep with blankets over me. I leave them down at the end of the bed and make myself fall asleep uncovered. When I wake up later in the night, freezing cold, I reach down and pull up all the blankets.”
honestly i get it. it's like letting yourself fall asleep briefly on the couch midway through a book