“Martin. Miss Navarro is hungry. Please ask Gina to prepare her something.”
Honorata steeled herself. The slight note of kindness in Jimbo’s voice was worse than what had come before. She was very close to losing control, to beginning to cry; she imagined herself dropping to the cold wet flagstones, begging for mercy. The driver, Martin, was still there. She could feel him looking at her, and this kept her upright. Already, so many men had stared at her today. It was as if she were wearing a sign—who she was, what she had done—and that imaginary sign was blood in the water. The man next to her on the plane had smelled it. Jimbo smelled it. The driver, the bellhop at the hotel, they all smelled it.
Jimbo held her arm as she climbed up the two steps, and then just as she was about to enter through the door, he squeezed her waist.
“This is your home now. I hope you’ll be happy here.”
His arm held her body. She did not look at his face.
There was a huge vase of flowers in the entryway: orchids and sampaguita, gumamela. Flowers from home. The container looked like the one her mother used to catch rainwater. Honorata felt dizzy. Was she being welcomed?
“You’re tired. Let me take you to your room.”
It was too much to imagine she would have her own room, but she did. It was larger than the apartment she had shared with Kidlat.
“I bought the bedding to match the dress you wore in the photo you sent.”
Honorata could not speak.
“This door leads to my room.”
She looked at the heavy door on the far side of the sitting area.
“I’m very tired,” she finally said. “I’m so tired.”
It was not the right thing to say, but it was all she could manage. Jimbo looked at her, his thoughts hidden, and helped her sit on the bed.
“Gina will bring you a tray. You can sleep. I’m going to go out, and I’ll see you when I return.”
“Thank you,” she said. She didn’t want to thank him, but it was bred in her: to thank someone who had been kind.
That night, the woman named Gina woke her for dinner. She said that Mr. Wohlmann would like her to dress for their first evening together, so Honorata wore the green sheath her uncle had given her.
Later, Jimbo knocked on the door between their two rooms and then entered immediately. He was carrying the small black box.
“This is yours,” he said without ceremony.
When she looked in his eyes, he opened the box, and reached for her hand. Slowly, he slipped the ring, studded with diamonds, onto her left hand. She had narrow fingers, but it fit perfectly. She wondered how her uncle had managed to find her ring size; whether he might have measured her finger one night when she was sleeping. Anything was possible; nothing made sense. She was caught in some other life: one that disconnected her from everything she had known; a world in which her once-pious uncle might indeed be an incubus.
“You’re older than your uncle said.”
Honorata trembled. She had no idea what her uncle had said.
“But you’re more beautiful in person. Even more beautiful than your photo.”
He undressed her then, and they had sex. Honorata fell asleep after, but when she woke up, he was lying next to her, awake. Without speaking, he rolled her over and entered her from behind. Only then did he get up and go through the door to the room Honorata had not yet seen. Lying alone, she stroked the ring on her finger. A bitter taste rose in her throat, but she did not cry.
Their days settled into a rhythm.
Jimbo woke her every morning before it was light. He left when the first timid rays of dawn peeked through the curtains. They had dinner together, sometimes at the house, prepared by Gina, and sometimes in a restaurant downtown. Afterward, they came back to her room. They watched television, sitcoms like Cheers, or Jimbo read to her from the book he was reading: a crime story about a woman who had been raped and murdered, which Jimbo read as if it would mean nothing to her. Some nights, he would ask her if she wanted a bath, and her trembling excited him. He liked to wash her back, rub soap over her small body, and then lift her up and take her to bed still wet and slippery.
He was not, however, a cruel lover. He liked to talk. He could talk without stopping, about his work, about Las Vegas, about mystery novels, about his time as a young man. The army had sent him to Japan, and he had gone to college late, when he was twenty-five. He despised rich college students. Often, his talk washed over her. She would lie in bed after he left, back through the door to his own room, and be unable to remember anything he had said.
On the weekends, they sometimes played cards. Jimbo liked blackjack and poker and pinochle; Honorata found a cribbage board in a drawer, and they played this instead. She liked the language of cribbage: 15-2, 15-4, 15-6 and nobs is seven, your cut, in the stink hole, his nibs. She would call out “Muggins, I’ll take two!” in the tickatick rhythm with which she spoke, and Jimbo would play game after game with her, though at first he had said that cribbage was dull. Sometimes when they were playing, sitting in the room that Gina called the study, with the game laid out on a heavy oak table and the light coming from the stained glass sconces and a ray of sunshine striking the leaded bottles of scotch and whiskey that Jimbo kept on the sideboard, sometimes, Honorata was at peace.
There were no locks on the doors. Jimbo was away at work all day, and on Tuesdays and Thursdays, Gina did not come, and so she had the house to herself. Martin came each morning and drove Jimbo to work. She wondered if her fiancé—if that was the word for him—knew how to drive.
In any case, Honorata didn’t know how to drive and didn’t have a car. She was free to go where she wanted, and she often took long walks in the neighborhood, lacing up the heavy boots that Gina had bought her. She had found a grocery store—a big American one—with pale leaves of lettuce and tall stacks of canned food, which seemed as if they might collapse on top of her when she hurried down the aisle, but she didn’t have any money. She fingered the ring, realizing it was not quite the same as money.