long-sleeved shirt—and nothing else! Ghislaine! ::::::You’re seeing things, you idiot. Fool, you’re seeing only what you want to see.:::::: Now the fool realizes that a pair of white shorts covers the unspeakable delights that have set off such a tremor in his loins… Like those of half the girls he has seen since he got here, her shorts are short. They end barely an inch below her crotch. ::::::All those lubricious delights within. But her fair white legs, perfect, smooth as alabaster, are real, and the currents streaming through—¡for godsake cut it out, Camacho!::::::
Now she’s walking toward him through the colonnade. Only when she draws very close to the Camaro does she realize that is Nestor at the wheel. She smiles… faintly… more from nervousness than anything else, if he’s any judge.
“Hi!” said Nestor. “Hop in.”
She glanced at the car’s dubs, “dubs” being what car nuts like Nestor called the bespoke Baroque spokes the Camaro’s rims boasted. Their fantastic designs had been chrome plated so that when the car was rolling, every revolution of the wheels lit up the lives of onlookers with a thousand flashes from a thousand gleaming surfaces—or else stigmatized the driver as a gaudy Low-Rent lowlife. To tell the truth, Ghislaine’s life did not appear lit up by the sight. She looked at those flashy dubs—literally flashy—as if dubs, like tattoos, gave off whiffs of criminality.
When she first slipped into the passenger seat, she had to jackknife her legs before she could sit up straight, and the shorts were pushed up high enough to reveal the flesh of her hip—::::::Oh, come on, Nestor! You’re acting like some thirteen-year-old who has just felt the first churning of all that stuff in his pelvic saddle. They’re nothing but a pair of legs—okay?—and you’re a cop.::::::
Aloud he said, “Feeling a little better today?” A cheery tone he adopted, the tone that implies Of course you do, now that you’ve had time to think about it.
“Not really,” she said. “Except I’m grateful to you for coming over here.” What open, innocent, frightened eyes she had!
“Where would you like to go for coffee?” said Nestor. “There’s supposed to be a ‘food court’ or something here.”
“There is…” But she said it very tentatively.
“Well, you pick a place. It doesn’t make any difference to me.”
“Starbucks?”—as if she were making a plea he was likely to reject.
“Okay, that’s fine,” said Nestor. “I’ve never been to a Starbucks before. This is my big chance.”
The Starbucks turned out to be on the ground level, in an arcade that ran through the library, front to back. It was the only commercial enterprise anywhere near the place. The legendary Starbucks!
Inside… what a letdown… There was nothing fancy about it. It wasn’t all that different from Ricky’s—cheap chairs and tables, just like Ricky’s… sugar granules left unswept on the tabletops, just like Ricky’s… plasticized paper cups, paper napkins, wrappers, the little sticks to stir coffee with, just like Ricky’s… a counter the height of the girls working behind it, just like Ricky’s… But two things were different… One, no pastelitos and therefore no ambrosial aroma… Two, the place was packed with people, but amidst all the babbling and gabbling he wasn’t hearing any Spanish at all.
Nestor and Ghislaine were stuck in a real pileup of people waiting to place orders at a counter. Nestor happened to look at the big glass case he was beside—and what the hell was that? Those shelves didn’t just have pastries and cookies, they had wrapped-up foods… things like chicken lettuce wraps, sesame noodles with tofu, tarragon chicken salad on eight-grain bread, Mallorca sweet bread. When they finally made it to the order counter, Nestor insisted, grandly, on paying for both cups. He handed over a five-dollar bill—and got wiped out! A dollar and twenty cents he got back. This grand gesture had cost him $3.80! One ninety for one cup of coffee! You could get a cup of Cuban coffee, probably a hell of a lot better than this stuff, on Calle Ocho for seventy-five cents! No one could be more bitterly shocked by the price of a cup of coffee than a cop. He led the way to a little round table with a light-colored top… and sugar granules on it. Fuming, he got up and brought back a paper napkin and ostentatiously swept the sugar off. Wide-eyed, innocent Ghislaine didn’t know what to make of him. All at once Nestor realized he had become his own father… Patience on a Monument.