chapter 31
In the ballroom Paul returned from the punch bowl to find a blank space where Minhi had been standing.
He kept his chin up—not one to go about slouching was Paul—but he had to admit this date was going poorly.
“Is that champagne?” Vienna spoke, and Paul looked up to see her standing with her father, who was the ministro de something or other.
Paul held out one of the glasses. “It’s, ah, sparkling . . . fruity something or other.”
She took the glass. “And to think the crystal is Lalique,” she said. “This just seems wrong.”
Vienna’s father was round at the middle and mustachioed, and he could have passed either for an aged matinee idol or a mustache-twirling cartoon villain. Paul turned to him and offered the other glass. “Care for one?”
“Sparkly fruity something or other?” said the man, with the same accent as Vienna’s. “No, that’s for recovering alcoholics and teenagers.”
“Wouldn’t care to live like a teen?” Paul smiled.
“Wouldn’t care to recover,” the Spaniard said. He didn’t wink but his mustache sort of danced. “I’m off to find the real thing. Let me know if anything interesting happens.”
Minhi’s mother approached. “Have you seen Minhi?”
Paul shrugged.
“It’s a small ship,” Mr. Cazorla said to Minhi’s mother. “She can’t have gotten far. Join me, I’m looking for something stronger than sparkly fruity something or other.”
Minhi’s mother rolled her eyes exactly, precisely the way that Minhi often did, and the two of them headed off for the good stuff.
“Where did your girlfriend go?” Vienna said, watching the parents wander away.
“Is that what she is?” Paul asked. “I sort of wonder.”
“That’s a terrible answer,” Vienna said. “That’s an American answer; I’d expect that from Alex, not from you.” She laughed, and Paul found her teasing very soft edged and infectious.
Vienna went on, “You’re supposed to say ‘But of course! She is my girlfriend!’ Or, ‘No, you fool! I would not have her!’ Leave the half answers and melancholia to the Americans. And the French. They hate one another but they are alike in those ways.”
Paul took a sip of the sparkling whatever and blanched. Syrupy stuff. “I don’t know. She wandered off.”
“My date wandered off before we got in the car,” answered Vienna.
“That’s . . .” Paul shook his head, suddenly defensive of Alex. “He can’t help that. The bloke’s on a short leash.” And that was the truth. Alex was always going to be half there. “He’s another bloody tennis player.”
“A what?”
“Tennis players. Gymnasts, speed skaters, prodigies. The professionals. They look like high school students, they talk like them, but they catch whatever bug, get nabbed by some agent, and you’ve lost them as a friend, or lost a lot of them. That’s what Alex is. Think of him as a speed skater.”
“Eh, I look around this room and I will bet the speed skaters were able to make it,” Vienna said. “I think it’s absurd. You’re only supposed to be married to your work when you have an actual marriage to ruin; when you’re fourteen it’s simply ridiculous.”
“Boy,” said Paul, “get a few sparkling ciders in you and you’re a Spanish Audrey Hepburn all of a sudden. Where’s Javi?”
“Around here somewhere,” Vienna said.
“I love Audrey Hepburn,” said Ilsa as she appeared with Sid in tow. Paul had noticed Sid gamely attempting to keep up with his taller, more graceful date. Not so bad when the band was playing calypso, but when they took a break and the PA started pumping French techno, Sid was lost. “Did you know she grew up in the Netherlands?”
“Who’s that?” Sid asked.
“Audrey . . . someone who was never in a vampire movie,” Paul said.
Sid looked around. “Where’s Minhi?”
Paul and Vienna shrugged, and then the music cut out.
It happened suddenly—one minute the PA system playing an appalling French cover of Rammstein’s “Du Hast,” and the next the heavy bass and French singing stopped, interrupted by a sudden high-pitched whistle.
“May I have your attention,” came a mellifluous voice speaking in English with an untraceable accent. Paul watched as the entire crowd stopped, listening, some in curiosity and some in anger.
“Some of you are prepared for this night. If so, there is something that you will want to do.”
Paul looked at Vienna and Sid. “Oh, no.”
Most of the crowd was listening to this new voice with complete incredulity, but Paul noticed a subtle shift among a few of them—among the debutantes. The debs had frozen, and appeared to be in full receiver mode next to their parents.
Paul saw a tall chestnut-haired deb step forward, her head lifted toward the sound. Another girl near her, a senior by the look of her, had also tilted her head up, eyes glassy and wide.
They were the same girls who had gone gaga over Sid’s stories. They were still poisoned.
“You have in your hands a symbol of your own slavery,” said the voice. “It is time to make yourself free.”
Suddenly the daughters lashed out with the pens, leaping behind their parents, each bringing one arm around the parent’s waist, the other bringing her newly received, sharp-as-a-knife Montblanc pen up to the mother’s or father’s throat.
“Come with us,” said the voice on the intercom.
“Come with us,” said the daughters.
Paul saw Vienna running. She grabbed her own father, but she was dragging him away from the others. “I’m sorry,” he heard her say. “Hurry, we have to get out of here.”