one… must have been four feet by three feet… She’d go look busy studying it… She stood before it… two half-round shapes, one a simple black and the other one a simple white, painted on a beigey-gray background. The two shapes were separated from each other and cocked at cockeyed angles… ::::::Ayúdame, Jesús… You’d have to be a cretin to stand here actually studying this mierda… Not even the old fools who pay millions for this idiotic nonsense at Miami Basel are so retarded that they actually look at it.:::::: She gave up and turned about to face once again this room where things were happening. Frantic laughter still reigned… shriek! shriek! shriek! shriek! went the women haw! haw! haw! haw! haw! went the men… but just then, from across the room, came a laugh that toppled them all “aahaaAAAHock hock hock hock”… and Magdalena stared that way, lasering through all the rapture laughter until she spotted Norman’s big head bobbing up and down for the benefit of a woman, a very striking woman—thirty?—but who knew any longer?—fair skin, oh, so fair… thick dark hair parted down the middle and swept back dramatically from her forehead… high cheekbones, lean square jaws, lips as red as rubies, eyes as brilliant and hypnotically blue as the bluest diamondsssuhhhhHAGGHH-HOCKhock hock hock hock… She had made up the rubies and diamonds just to feel sorrier for herself and angrier at Norman, but the laughhhfoghhhHHHock hock hock hock was real, all too real, you heartless insensitive sonofabitch! Back in a second—sure, you’ll be back in a second, as soon as you make your first move on some americana with hair as dark as midnight and skin as white as snow! We don’t have snow, we Cubans, as you, in your wisdom, perhaps know—
“Miss Otero!”
It was a voice from behind, a voice with an accent. She turned about, and it was him—the him… as handsome and Prince-charming and a lot of other things she had been dreaming of for a solid week. In a blip of unbelievable speed Sergei’s eyes turned down, inspected her breasts, which were threatening to pop out of the bustier—and blipped back up.
Magdalena caught that… and liked that… and in that instant Norman and the anger he had engendered in her vanished. Just like that. ¡Mirabile visa! as one of the nuns, Sister Clota, used to say. ¡A miracle to see! ¡Sublimity itself! But in the next instant, wide awake in the dreamless real world, the love bombardier from Hialeah and her sublime self plummeted and crashed and burned, as they had all week from obsessing over the figure before her. Why had he approached her at this moment?… when all there was to see was a poor thing, a social misfit, all alone and trying to cover it up by “studying” an extremely stupid painting on a wall. Oh, it was obvious. He ever so kindly wanted to rescue her from social failure. What a horrid form of rendezvous this was! Who was she in his eyes?… Some silly simpleton who needed his pity! It was humiliating—humiliating!—so humiliating, it vaporized every role she might have chosen to morph into… flirt, vamp, disciple of Aesculapius, the god of medicine, merciful mother to the heavy-laden crushed by lust, groupie of great oligarchic Russian philanthropic art collectors. So without meaning to, she reacted with complete honesty… her jaws went slack, causing her mouth to fall open and her lips to part…
Sergei proceeded to pour his charm all over her, as if that were going to help. “I’m so happy to see you here, Magdalena!”
Already another guest was at his shoulder, smile cocked to bag his attention the moment his lips stopped moving.
Sergei leaned in closer to Magdalena and said in a low voice, “I barely had a chance to talk to you at Miami Basel.” Once more he blipped the quickest, slickest of eye-flicks at her bustier bosom.
By now, from sheer nerves, Magdalena was nibbling the fingernail of her little finger. The intimate way he lowered his voice brought red blood and its bodyguard, guile, back into her system. She could literally feel it. Slowly she removed the little fingernail from her nervous nibblers and let the hand drop down upon the cloven center of her bustiered bust and got her lips to smile in a certain, ever-so-amused way… and said ever so softly and smokily, “Oh, I remember…”
Now three people were huddled about Sergei, their glittering eyes anxious to lock onto his. One