she tells him to drive three-tenths of a mile upstream on the creek bed and turn left where the remains of an old paved country road stick down into the water—and he drives exactly three-tenths of a mile in the middle of a creek and turns left—and it works! She had it right! He was outta there! ::::::But how do it do it?::::::
Now he slowed down on her say-so, and the houses began drifting by, the kinds of houses they used to build way back in the twentieth century… all that white stucco and clay-colored rounded roof tiles, and so forth. The lots were narrow, and only a few of the houses were any more than twenty-five feet wide… but there were plenty of tall shade trees, indicating it was an old section… With the sun almost directly overhead, the trees cast blotchy shadows upon the stucco and on the front lawns. The houses were pretty close to the street. Nevertheless, the lawns were a lush green, and they had shrubs and brilliant flowers, fuchsia cockatoos, lavender and yellow irises, bright scarlet petunias… Nice neighborhood! This was up in northeastern Miami, the so-called Upper East Side… plenty of upscale Latinos and Anglos up here—and lots of Latins and Anglo gaybos, for that matter… Immediately to the west on the other side of Biscayne Boulevard were Little Haiti, Liberty City, Little River, Buena Vista, Brownsville… Nestor could imagine the Latins and the Anglos up here thanking God every day for Biscayne Boulevard, which fenced them off from the badlands.
“You have arrived,” said the unseen Queen of the magical GP Sphere.
Nestor pulled over to the curb and looked to his right. ::::::What’s that? Ghislaine lives… there?!:::::: He had never seen such a house… It had a flat roof you could only see the edge of… walls of white stucco with two narrow bands of black paint about a foot below the roof, running all the way around the house… a couple of dozen tall narrow windows installed next to one another to create an enormous curve that began on one side of the house and swept around until it took up close to half the front. He just stood there gawking until a front door opened and her voice rang out:
“Nestor! Hi! Come in!”
The way Ghislaine smiled! Her sheer unconcealed joy as she hurried toward him! He wanted to stand there with his chest inflated like the prince’s in Snow White and have her rush into his arms! There she was! Ghislaine!—in her long-sleeved shirt and her shorter-than-short shorts, lovely long legs bare! Only at the last moment did he manage to restrain himself. ::::::This is police work, damn it, not a hookup. Nobody authorized this police work, but—but what is this all about?::::::
Now she was right in front of him, looking into his eyes and saying, “You’re ten minutes early!”—as if that were the most loving tribute a man had ever paid to a woman. He was speechless.
To his amazement, she took his hand—not to hold, however, just to tug on and said, “Come on! Let’s go inside! Wouldn’t you like some iced tea?”—all the while beaming a smile of the purest, most defenseless love, or so it seemed to Nestor.
Inside, she took him into the living room, which was flooded with light pouring in through the immense array of windows. The other walls consisted, top to bottom, of shelves of books interrupted only by a door and spaces for three jumbo posters featuring men with hats, European posters, judging by the hats they advertised: “ChapeauxMossant,” “Manolo Dandy,” “Princeps S.A. Cervo Italia”…
“Have a look around!” said Ghislaine. Her tone was one of inexplicable excitement. “I’ll get us some iced tea!”
When she returned with the iced tea, she said, “Well, what do you think?”
Nestor said, “I… I don’t know what to say. This is the most… amazing house I’ve ever seen.” He had started to say “unusual.”
“Well, it’s all Daddy,” said Ghislaine. She rolled her eyes in a rather jocular what-can-you-do way. “It’s all Art Deco, inside and out. Do you know Art Deco?”
Nestor said, “No.” He shook his head slightly. Here was another of those things that made him feel so—ummmm not so much ignorant as uncultivated, around Ghislaine.
“Well, it’s a French style from the 1920s. In French it’s ‘Les Arts Décoratifs.’ That means a lot to Daddy, its being French. I’m sure that’s why Daddy bought this house in the first place. It’s not very big, and it’s not all