of flan was standing right in front of her, and he said, “Hey, you with him?”
She knew he meant Norman, who was coming up the ladder behind her.
Norman took Magdalena by the hand and went straight to the guy who had invited them aboard in the first place. He turned out to be a tall, slender man, in his early twenties, probably.
He was wearing a pair of the au courant extralong board shorts. They had a go-to-hell Hawaiian print all over them. Nevertheless, up this close he seemed to rate promotion from boy to young man, in nomenclature at least.
When he saw Norman, his mouth fell open, his eyes popped open, and he said, “Dr. Lewis! This is so cooool! I just saw you on 60 Minutes—and here you are… on my boat! It’s soooooo cooooool!”
The awe seemed to be genuine—and Magdalena saw genuine gratitude spread over Norman’s face in the form of a smile that said, “That’s more like it.” He put out his hand, and the young man shook it and felt compelled to say, “Actually, this isn’t really my boat, it’s my father’s.”
Norman said in the friendliest possible way, “Please tell me your name!”
“I’m Cary!” That was it—Cary. He was part of this, the first generation to have no last names. Using a last name was considered pompous… or else too much of a tip-off as to your background… ethnic, racial, sometimes social. Nobody used a last name until he was forced to fill out a form.
Norman said, “And this is Magdalena, Cary.”
Cary flashed those incomparable teeth of his and said, “I would! Honest, that’s a compliment!”
Laughter and “I woulds” broke out among the crowd that had gathered around them to see the supposedly famous Dr. Lewis, whoever he might be.
“I would!” Laughter.
“I would!” Laughter.
“I would!” Laughter.
“I would!” More laughter.
“I definitely would!” Whoops of laughter over that one.
“That’s a big compliment,” said Cary. “Honest truth!”
A wave of embarrassment… and bliss… Cuban girls were no different from americana girls in most things. They spent half of every day asking themselves… or their girlfriends… “Did he notice me? Do you think he did? What kind of look was that, would you say?”
Magdalena couldn’t dream up a single reply that wouldn’t… kill the bliss of it. If she openly took it as a compliment, she would sound like an unsophisticated little Latina, and if she tried some becomingly cool and witty piece of self-deprecation, she would come off as an awkward creature who had a fear of being envied. Wisely, she did the only safe thing. She stood there blushing and fighting off the smile… and what bliss it was!
The sun had sunk a bit, but it couldn’t have been later than 5:30 when Magdalena heard a chorus of those ironic whooooops that young men seem to enjoy… They were on the deck of the next boat over… and there she was… a blond girl who had just removed the top of her bikini. She had her back arched and her arms out wide… with the bra dangling from one hand… and her breasts popped out in a way that said, “No more hide-and-peek. Now we… live!”
“Come on!” said Norman… with a lewdly happy face. “This you’ve got to see!” He took her hand and hurried her over to the railing to get a better look. “Now it begins!”
The blonde with the breasts did a few mild shimmies with her hips, showing her chorus of admirers how taut her pectoral glories were… how they stuck out, defying gravity…
“What begins?” she said.
“The regatta is essentially an orgy,” said Norman. “That’s what I want you to see. You have to see something like this once anyway.” But he wasn’t looking at Magdalena when he said it. Like every other male on the boat, he only had eyes for the sprung-free naked breasts. She was casting glances this way and that, vamping, like a comedienne playing the coquette, urgently trying to convey the message: “Oh, I’m just having fun… just using sex as irony… you can’t take this seriously”… as she switched her hips this way and that… comically, of course, because this was not serious… but enough for everyone to see her body in her tan thong, very nearly the color of her skin.
The girl suddenly stopped her little performance, crossed her arms over her breasts, and doubled over laughing and then rose erect, still laughing, dabbing her eyes with the backs of her hands, as if it had all been so