The Last Gentleman

aside she put her head over coquettishly. Tock, she said, clicking her tongue and eyeing the darkness behind him. They were having a sort of date here in the doorway.
    â€œThere is something I wanted to ask you. It will not take long. Your phone didn’t answer.”
    â€œIt didn’t?” She called something over her shoulder. It seemed that here was the issue: the telephone. If this issue could be settled, it seemed, he would take his leave like a telephone man. But it allowed her to admit him: she stood aside.
    So it was at last that he found himself in the living room standing, in a kind of service capacity. He had come about the telephone. The two women smiled up at him from a low couch covered with Navaho blankets. No, only Kitty smiled. Rita eyed him ironically, her head appearing to turn perpetually away.
    It was not a Barbados cottage after all but an Indian hogan. Rita wore a Chamula huipil (Kitty was explaining nervously) of heavy homespun. Kitty herself had wound a white quezquemetl above her Capri pants. Brilliant quetzals and crude votive offerings painted on tin hung from the walls.
    They were drinking a strong-smelling tea.
    â€œI’ve been unable to reach you by phone,” he told Kitty.
    The two women looked at him.
    â€œI may as well state my business,” said the engineer, still more or less at attention, though listing a bit.
    â€œGood idea,” said Rita, taking a swig of the tea, which smelled like burnt corn. He watched as the muscular movement of her throat sent the liquid strumming along.
    â€œKitty, I want to ask you something.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œCould I speak to you alone?”
    â€œYou’re among friends, ha-ha,” said Kitty laughing loudly.
    â€œVery well. I wanted to ask you to change your mind about going to Europe and instead go south with Jamie and me.” Until the moment he opened his mouth, he had no idea what he wished to ask her. “Here is your check, Mrs. Vaught. I really appreciate it, but—”
    â€œGood grief,” said Kitty, jumping to her feet as if she had received an electric shock. “Listen to the man,” she cried to Rita and smacked her thigh in a Jewish gesture.
    Rita shrugged. She ignored the check.
    The engineer advanced and actually took Kitty’s hand. For a second her pupils enlarged and she was as black-eyed as an Alabama girl on a summer night. Then she gaped at her own hand in stupefaction: it could not be so! He was holding her hand! But instead of snatching it away, she pulled him down on the couch.
    â€œHere. Try some hikuli tea,”
    â€œNo thanks.” As he lay back among the pillows, his eye fell upon a votive painting. It showed a man who had been thrown from a motorcycle and now lay in a ditch. He had apparently suffered internal injuries, for blood spurted from his mouth like a stream from a garden hose.
    â€œThat’s my favorite,” said Kitty. “Isn’t it wonderful?”
    â€œI guess so.”
    â€œHe was cured miraculously by the Black Virgin.”
    â€œIs that right?”
    As Kitty went on, no longer so nervous now but seeming rather to have hit upon a course she might steer between the two of them, he noticed a spot of color in her cheek. There was a liquid light, not a tear, in the corner of her eye.
    â€œRee’s been giving me the most fascinating account of the hikuli rite which is practiced by the Huichol Indians. The women are absolved from their sins by tying knots in a palm-leaf string, one knot for each lover. Then they throw the string into Grandfather Fire. Meanwhile the men—Ree was just getting to the men. What do the men do, Ree?”
    â€œI really couldn’t say,” said Rita, rising abruptly and leaving the room.
    â€œTie a knot for me,” said the engineer.
    â€œWhat,” cried Kitty, craning her neck and searching the horizon like a sea bird. “Oh.”
    â€œLet us now—” he began and sought dizzily to hold her charms in his arms.
    â€œAh,” said the girl, lying passive, eyes full of light.
    â€œI’ve reached a decision,” he said and leaned back uncomfortably among the pillows, head in the air.
    â€œWhat is that?”
    â€œNow you know that I need you.”
    â€œYou do?”
    â€œAnd that although I will be all right eventually, I still have a nervous condition, and that for some time to come I’ll need you to call upon.”
    â€œYou