Angels in Heaven

her—’ ”
    “Isn’t this office in one of its metamorphosisms
supposed to look like the Cultural Ass.?”
    “Obviously,” I said patiently.
    “Well, it doesn’t,” she said.
    “How would you know?” I said, looking
around. “It looks OK to me.”
    “Because I poked my head in the one
downstairs when I was going to the bathroom,” she said.
    “Oh,” I said.
    “I mean, I figured it made sense,”
she said. “What’s the sense of calling yourself a Cultural Ass. if you don’t
look like one?”
    “There’s so many answers to that,” I
said, “that I won’t even begin to start. Also, it so happens,” I said, picking
up my desk diary and waving it at her, “it so happens that there is an entry in
this diary for ten minutes from now and that entry says—I quote—‘Check out C.
A. noonish.’ ” I put the diary in my top desk drawer and locked the drawer just
in case Doris was petty enough to disbelieve me and tried to take a look before
I had time to write the entry in.
    “You big fibber,” she said.
    “So what did you say when you poked
your head in?” I asked her. “I hope you didn’t ruin our whole setup by saying,
‘Hello, we’re the fake Cultural Ass. on the top floor. How’re ya doin’ down
here?”
    She grimaced in pretended agony.
    “ ‘We’ll see you in a jiff is what I
said,” she said.
    “Well, what’s keeping us?” I said. We
locked up and took the elevator down one flight. I had to admit it did make
sense to drop by our neighbor and rival, not only for Doris’s reason, which was
good enough on its own, but also to make ourselves known so they wouldn’t call
the cops if they saw us prowling around. On the way down I put on my specs to
make myself look even more cultural than usual.
    They didn’t seem to be up to all that
much downstairs, frankly. They weren’t even a “they”; they were one middle-aged
American lady with a face suntanned to the exact orangy-brown color of an NBA
basketball, dressed in all-Mexican finery including leather sandals and
embroidered peasant blouse and sitting behind a desk whose top was cluttered
with travel brochures, rolled-up posters, piles of hand-printed handouts for
local events, and the like. She introduced herself as Ethel Sayers and
pronounced herself delighted to see us and wasn’t the weather wonderful again!
I said it was and introduced ourselves as Mr. Blackman and Miss Day and
pronounced us the new upstairs tenants. Ethel was thrilled to have fellow
Americans in the building. And wasn’t she looking forward to getting to know us
real well! The permanent foreign community in Mérida was quite small, actually,
and it was always delighted to wheel out the welcome wagon for additions to its
little group.
    Doris and I smiled and tried to look
like welcome additions, despite the odds against. After responding politely and
mainly untruthfully to a spate of questions—such as, did we play bridge? were
we interested in Scottish dancing? were we perchance amateur painters or
pottery throwers or aficionados of the Mexican style of horseback riding? and
so on—we finally managed to take our leave, clutching in our fevered palms
stacks of leaflets outlining the activities of the association and how it came to
be set up in the first place, along with assorted posters advertising upcoming
art events in Mérida, which we promised to display chez nous prominently.
    As to the origins of the U.S.
Cultural Ass. (cutting a long story down to almost nothing compared to the
original), some fifteen years ago the doyenne of the southern Yucatán foreign
community, one Martha M. Moberg (of the well-known Austin, Texas, Mobergs) had
died and left a small trust fund to promote American cultural activities in
Mérida and environs—exhibitions of expatriate art, pottery, sculpture, weaving,
jewelry, batiks and God knows what else, recitals, poetry readings, and the
screening of American film classics (every second Friday).
    “What are you doing a week from
Friday?” I asked Doris as we waited outside in the hall for the elevator. “I
see they’re going to screen that famous American film classic The Nutty
Professor, with sandwiches afterward.”
    “Spare me,” Doris muttered.
    We delivered our goodies upstairs to
our office and scattered some of them on Doris’s desk and pinned up a few more
on the walls of Doris’s office, but none in the inner office. I was thinking of
telling her that it did make the place look a lot more