Loving Eyes

She had been schooled for years never to intrude into personal matters; now she had done so and disaster was the result. She was ashamed of her stupidity.

Then he turned to her. 'Yes, I would like to have a nice girl. Very much.'

As daybreak had brought the miracle of Enlightenment to the Lord Buddha as he sat under the bodhi tree, at last she understood. It came to her in that moment of understanding that this man had never found his fulfillment – that no girl had wanted him."

She closed the book. He took another sip of the mescal. "The story of my life as an Asperger's male," he said softly. "Except that so far, no Masayo Kanno has appeared to provide solace, with or without a geisha house to complicate matters."

Almira signaled for a refill. They clinked glasses and drank in comfortable silence. The music changed from the thump-thump-thump of the dance club to something slower and smoother in the Mexican romantic style. Jim exhaled quietly.

"That's a major improvement in the ambience."

"Excuse me?"

"One reason I dislike nightclubs is the loud, frenetic music they play. You see, I don't just hear music; I see it as well."

"You mean that you visualize the score the musicians are playing?"

"No." He paused, trying to think how he could explain to Almira his perception of music. "Have you seen the Disney movie Fantasia?"

"Of course."

"Do you remember the sequence in the middle, where they brought the sound track to the center of the screen and played various instruments, and the sound track reacted to their pitch, timbre and volume?"

"Yes."

He breathed a sigh of relief. "That is sort of how I see music. But it's not just the shape of the waves; they have colors as well. For instance, trumpets are bright brass in their lower range, but the higher they go, the more silver their notes become. And if the trumpeter hits a clinker, the note stretches like an accordion fold made of sandpaper. French horns are a tarnished dark brass with red and blue overtones, like brass that has been in a fire. Higher notes are brighter, lower one duller. Violins are black threads vibrating at different speeds and shapes. All orchestral strings are black, just of various thicknesses. Percussion instruments press on my skin like sharpened hammers and their sound is like ink drops exploding in water, with the higher drums like snares crimson, tympani royal blue, and bass drums darkest violet. Cymbals and glockenspiels are silver starbursts at different altitudes in different patterns."

"And electric guitars and basses?" she asked.

Jim shuddered. "Basses are okay; they are just drops of india ink on white. But electric guitars! They're fluorescent-colored hacksaw edges flaring across my mind's eye except when plucked, and then they are drops of paint spattering on the canvas. Oddly, that is not true of banjos. Those come across as fast-flying BBs embedding themselves in patterns on the canvas as it scrolls along, and it's rather pleasant – sort of pointillist.

"Sounds have textures, too, especially vocalists. They vary quite a lot. Some sound like furs caressing the skin. Others are like silks. A few, mostly women with low voices, feel like smoke, just brushing you with an elusive feel like a sharpened fingernail down your back. And there are a few who are of what I call the 'screech and scream' school, who feel like coarse steel wool on a raw scrape. I can't stand screechers, they are beyond painful. They make want to stick my fingers in my ears.

"I dare say all this sounds a long way beyond weird to you, but you asked."

Almira said nothing, but sat back and studied him. The tension she had seen when she had come up to him that she had attributed to residual anger at those chochos estupidos in the cantina was gone, and the thought came to her that perhaps it had not been a result of anger at all, but rather physical pain caused by mindless dance club music meant to encourage boys and girls to flaunt their bodies on the dance floor. She tipped her glass, finishing her drink before she stood.

"Jim, when the weather is as pleasant as it is tonight, with just enough of a breeze to keep the mosquitoes away, it is my custom to go for a stroll on the beach. Would you care to join me?" She kicked off her shoes and extended a hand to him. He kicked off his sandals, set down his drink, and took it. She gently pulled him to his feet and did not let go as they went down to the water. She led Jim down the beach, the two of them strolling companionably as the hotel lights faded behind them, leaving only the moon to guide their way. After a little, Almira spoke.

"There has always been a village here. Fish from our boats have fed the Aztecs, the Mayans, the Spaniards, and the Mexican people for longer than anyone can remember. We call ourselves a poor village, but no one starves in Chicalo. Today, although the village men still fish and sell their catch, a lot of the money we see comes from foreign turistas who come here for the sport.

"The hotel was built in the 1920s, after the Hollywood movie people discovered us. It gave them a place where newspaper reporters and news crews could not follow them; where they could relax and just be themselves. If you were to look at the pictures in the cantina and examine the old hotel registers, you'd find many stars from the Golden Age of Hollywood, posing with fish they caught, or having a tryst with their mistresses or their luces de amor.

"We still get a few guests from the entertainment business, but more from Mexico City than Hollywood; and more yet from the Mexican business world. If the walls of the Azul could talk, their stories would make a scandalous bestseller."

"How is it that you own the hotel, Almira? I would expect one so stunning as you to be starring in a telenovela, wined, dined and courted by the uber-wealthy, not running a – I'm sorry, but there is no way to put this delicately – a seaside bordello."

"I can take no credit for my looks, that rightly belonging to my sire and dam, but I enjoy the flattery that flows off your ready tongue; no woman resents being told she is such a beauty that she should be starring in television or the movies. Pray do not let my pro forma protests stop your extravagant sallies. Compared to my mother, I think I look plain, yet you speak of me as though I was Miss Universe." She smiled, her eyes sparkling, and squeezed his hand.

"As to the hotel itself, it is my inheritance." She stopped, looking back at the lights in the distance. "I am a mestiza, the result of an affair between a married criolle businessman and his beautiful Mayan mistress, my mother. When she became pregnant, he settled money on her on the condition she leave Mexico City. She returned home to Chicalo and bought the Azul from the family that had built it. When I was born, he settled money on me as well for my education and the future. I grew up here, absorbing how to run a hotel through my skin. All areas, from housekeeping to cooking to tending bar, I learned by doing them. After mi madre was killed – she had flown up to Mexico City on a shopping trip, and was in the wrong place at the wrong time when two street gangs had a shootout – I took over as manager.

"Which brings us to what you referred to as the burdel aspect of my hotel. I am not a madam, and the Azul is not una casa de la alegria. Neither are the girls who frequent the cantinas putas, though I understand your confusion. They dress provocatively; they offer companionship in return for drinks and a good time; and they will, if they like, take a man to their beds and let him have his way with them. The next morning, the man is expected to give the girl a present. However, there is a difference.

"All these girls have other jobs during the day. Some are shop girls here in the town. A couple are daughters of landowners outside Chicalo, who want something more to do of an evening than pray the rosary. Some come here from nearby villages for the chance of a night on the town, a good time for which they will be well rewarded by their partners. At the most, girls like Pilar, Idola, and Novia could be called ... what is the phrase? ... semi-professionals.

"I have an arrangement with the girls who regularly have liaisons with men in my hotel. I allow them to keep rooms for a token rent, plus a third of any gift the man may bestow upon them, as long as they create no disturbances. A couple of them have places of their own in the village, and what happens there is not my affair." Almira smiled at her inadvertent pun, her teeth flashing in the moonlight. Jim thought her smile was one of the most attractive things he had seen since arriving at the Plaza del Mar.

"The same can be said of my waitresses and barmaids. Take Raquella, who is working in the cantina tonight and seems quite taken with your friend Roberto. She married young, to a fisherman, who drowned and left her with a toddler. They live with her grandparents, who are bakers in the village. She works here to get her son better things and put money into the family treasury. She has little opportunity for the sort of good times a pretty girl in her twenties deserves, and she has the same urges you hombres get. Women get se caliente demasiado and want to have a man quench his thirst with them. If I know Raquella – and I do – your amigo is going to have a long, sweet ride on the magic mountain, Raquella will have a satisfied expression on her face in the morning, and Roberto will be a little unsteady on his feet but looking smug, having pleasured his grateful lover all night and secured a willing bedmate for as long as his stay lasts."

"We have something in common, my Mayan princess. Like you, I lost my parents far too soon." She turned them around and they slowly started back, the occasional wave washing over their feet.

"Our family business is nothing so pleasant as yours, though it is as practical. We own a salvage yard. Grandfather started it, and brought my father and Uncle Bob into it, like you learning the business from the bottom up. Father began the same process with me. Uncle Bob and Aunt Lilah couldn't have children, so they adopted my cousin Fiona as a babe in arms, reluctantly on my aunt's part – she is in no way maternal.

"Mom and Dad were driving home on the parkway late one night after a night out in New York when a driver who was drugged out of her mind got on the highway going south on the northbound side at 100 miles an hour – that's about 160 kph – in an SUV. She hit them head on at a combined speed of 250 kph, and they died instantly. As you might guess, it was a closed casket funeral.

"In accordance with their will, I inherited Dad's majority holding in the yard, along with everything else. However, the will assigned guardianship to Uncle Bob and Aunt Lilah, something of which I did not approve. They had never really liked me; I think it had something to do with the partnership agreement between him and Dad that had had their shares going to each other before Fiona and I appeared. Even with Dad gone it meant my uncle could never be the real boss, with all the prestige that brings with it; I could overrule him or order him around simply by calling a stockholders' meeting, and he knew it. And resented it.

"The two of them moved from their ordinary suburban house into the mansion Grandpa had built and Dad had inherited as the elder son. They immediately took over the master suite that was Mom and Dad's, which I deeply resented; both that they moved into the suite, and the fact that they moved into my house without so much as a by-your-leave. And because I was a 14-year-old minor, there was nothing I could do about it.

"There was something wrong with their marriage. I was never told what it was, but I can make a good guess. About a year after they usurped the house, he started staying out late, taking long lunches and returning looking rumpled and smug, going to out of state conferences, that sort of thing. One night there was screaming in the master suite and Uncle Bob came out carrying a suitcase. He left, and I haven't seen him since.

"As part of the divorce Aunt Lilah ended up with Uncle Bob's forty percent of the business, but she also ended up with Fiona and me. She made no bones about the fact she was just waiting for the day we turned 18, so she could throw us both out. I guess it never occurred to her that the house was held in trust for me, and that when I turned 18 I could throw her out. She did not do much with the business, spending her days shopping, having her nails done, working out at the health spa, that sort of thing. She only went to the office every couple of weeks to examine the books and sign the payroll checks, or when protocol demanded she be present at a meeting or something.

"Some time after her divorce, she hooked up with a guy named Perry. He moved in with her, which I hated even more than Uncle Bob's taking over Mom and Dad's space. I thought he was a slimeball from the start, and it turned out I was right. After they had been together for a year, his eye started roving.

"Fiona is good-looking; tall, red hair, bright blue eyes, long legs, nice figure. She's something of a marimacho, a tomboy – or at least, she was. After Perry showed up, all of a sudden she started dressing girlier, but at the same time she became withdrawn. I thought she had just discovered boys, you know? I may be autistic, but that does not mean I don't see things.

"Then she came to my room late one night, crying. It turned out the cabron was forcing her to sleep with him as the price for us not being sent away to boarding school the way Aunt Lilah wanted, to get us out of 'her' house. She was apparently okay with Perry seducing Fee because he wasn't bothering her to have sex with him all the time; in any case, that was what he told Fee when she threatened to rat him out to Aunt Lilah. So I resolved to do something about the two of them. Being treated like you are an interloper in your own home by a couple of people who have no right to be there is a lot much, you know?

"First, I talked to K.C. Gogleigh, the lawyer Dad had used for all the company's legal business, whom Uncle Bob had dumped as the corporate attorney, and got some advice. Next, I installed spy cams in the rooms where Fee told me Perry had forced her, because the abnormal psychology books I read to get a grasp of the pathology said perverts have a comfort zone in which they prefer to do their sick things. Encoded signals feeding back to a dedicated laptop with no connection to the house router let me record what he was doing. Then I used a bank account that Dad had set up for me so I could buy presents for him and Mom without their finding out first, an account Aunt Lilah did not know I had, to hire a private investigator to find out everything I could about Perry.

"It turned out Fiona was a target of opportunity, but he was definitely a shady character who'd had a couple of brushes with the law. The PI retained a forensic accountant after irregularities in Perry's bank accounts turned up, and those in turn led the bean-counter to Aunt Lilah's playing fast and loose with the books at the yard. She was writing checks to a shell company and splitting the money with Perry. That in turn explained a few things I had wondered about after I took an accounting course in summer school and spent some time working in the office handling payroll and payments to the people we bought scrap metal and wrecked cars from." He paused.

"This sounds like something out of a telenovela. What happened then?"

"We got footage of him abusing Fee, and I programmed her phone so all she had to do was press one button, my phone would ring with a particular ring, and I would come running. It went off one night when I had supposedly gone out with a friend to see a movie, but was really in the house. I had Dad's skeet gun. Perry was in the process of stripping Fee naked in Dad's home office when I slipped into the room. I smashed him behind the knee and when he hit the floor I butt-stroked him in the head and stunned him. I yanked down his pants to hobble him, gave Fee the shotgun and told her to watch him, and went to find Aunt Lilah. She was in the master bedroom; I grabbed her in a come-along, dragged her down to the office, and threw her into a chair. We confronted them, Lilah seated, Perry kneeling with his fingers laced behind his head and his pants around his ankles, with me covering both of them with the 12-gauge.

"I told Perry the Pervert that I had enough evidence to send him to prison and get him labeled a child molester; but I would let him go if he got up, walked out of the house in what he was wearing, left town, and never came back. He told me I didn't have the stones, so I gave him the butt right between the eyes and repeated what I had said. I told him to toss Fee his wallet, and she yanked out all his credit cards before tossing it back. He saw I meant it, got up, and limped out. A little later I watched his car drive away. One down.

"Then I turned my attention to Lilah, and told her what I thought of a frigada chapera who would allow her boyfriend to molest her daughter. She shot back that Fiona wasn't really her daughter and she did not care what happened to her. Fee got in one good backhand that spun Lilah's head before I could stop her. I told Fiona to go find Lilah's purse. While she was out of the room, I explained the facts of life to the bitch.

"If she would sign over her shares in the business to Fiona right then and there, and did not oppose our court petitions to become emancipated minors, I would permit her to walk out of the house in the clothes she was wearing and drive away without reporting her to the police for complicity in child abuse, embezzling, and misfeasance – "

"Misfeasance? I do not know that word."

"It is a legal term meaning in business that the directors of a stock company have deliberately acted in an inappropriate way. As a guardian, it means to deliberately act in such a way as to harm the persons or interests of the minors whom the guardian is supposed to be protecting. I suspected she had tried to gain access to the trust fund Dad established for me; my PI reported she had talked to a lawyer about it, but the trust documents Mr. Gogleigh had drawn up were unbreakable, fortunately for me and indirectly for Fee.

"The hija de mil padres knew that she was beaten. In some ways, high functioning autistic males are like Vulcans: we do not lie, and we do not bluff. She knew I would do exactly what I had said I would do if she did not cooperate.

"So she hand-wrote what I dictated to her and irrevocably assigned ownership of the shares in the company she had gotten in her divorce to Fiona, while Fee emptied her purse. She relieved her of everything related to the company, her cell phone, and all the keys but the one for her car. We saw her to the front door and watched her drive away.

"The next day, after I told him what we'd done Mr. Gogleigh called in some favors and we saw the judge in his chambers. We walked in as wards of the court, and walked out as emancipated minors, legally adults for almost every purpose. Fiona took advantage of the decree to change her last name back to Kilkerran, the name she was born with. After the way her adoptive mother treated her, I don't blame her."

Jim's monologue had brought them back almost to the hotel path. Almira stopped and turned to face him.

"So you have no one waiting for you at home?"

"Well, there is Consuela, our housekeeper. She's been the housekeeper all my life and was always a second mother to me. One of the conditions of the emancipation was that until we turn 21, we have someone in the house to keep an eye on us. Consuela has been mothering us since I lost my parents, so it was natural we would ask her to continue in that role. And Fiona is living at home while she goes to college, so it is not as though I am coming back to an empty house."