The Peacock Emporium(45)
“So you do something similar in the window. But you do it about someone who comes in the shop. People are nosy around here, they like to talk, they like to know about each other’s lives. So you do a little display on, say, Arturro. I don’t know, a little written thing about his life in Italy, how he came to have the deli. Or perhaps just take one thing from his life—the best or worst day he can remember—and do a display around it. People would stop to read it and if they’re vain, like most of them are, they might even want one of their own.”
Suzanna fought the urge to tell Jessie that, the way she felt right now, the shop might not be around for long. “I don’t think people will want to put their life in a window.”
“You might not. But you’re not like most people.”
Suzanna looked up sharply. Jessie’s face was guileless.
“It’ll bring more people in. It’ll get them interested in the shop. I bet I could get people to do it—just let me try it.”
“Everyone in this town seems to know all there is to know about each other anyway.”
“I’ll do it myself. And if you don’t think it’s working, I’ll stop. It’s not going to cost you anything.”
Jessie moved in front of her, her smile broad and sympathetic. Her wire wings bounced jauntily behind her. “I’ll show you how it can work. Look, the next person who walks in here, I’ll persuade them to let me do it to them. I promise. You’ll find out all sorts of things you didn’t know.”
“You reckon?”
“Go on, it’ll be fun.”
“Oh, God, if it’s Mrs. Creek, we’ll have no room left in the window.”
As Suzanna reached for the empty milk carton, the door swung open. The two women looked almost guiltily at each other. Jessie hesitated, then smiled, a broad, complicit smile.
The man glanced at them, as if unsure whether to enter.
“Would you like a coffee? We’re still serving.”
He was olive-skinned, tall, and he wore the uncomfortable expression of someone who considered that a warm day in England qualified as cold weather. He was dressed in the blue scrubs of the local hospital beneath an old leather jacket and looked exhausted.
Suzanna realized she was staring and looked abruptly at her feet.
“You do espresso?” His accent was foreign, but not one she could easily place. He glanced up at the board, then back at the two women, trying to gauge the reasons for the smaller one’s barely suppressed merriment.
“Oh, yes,” said Jessie, beaming at Suzanna and then at him. She grabbed a cup and placed it, with something of a flourish, under the spout of the espresso machine, motioning to him to sit down. “In fact, if you’re prepared to spare me a few minutes, I reckon you can have this one on me.”
11
The peacock bass is an aggressive, belligerent fish. Despite its deceptive iridescent beauty, it is mean enough to straighten a hook and bend a fishing rod almost double. Even a four-or five-pounder can wear a man out in under an hour. It evolved in the same waters as the piranha, the alligator, the armor-scaled pirarucus—creatures as big as cars, and routinely fights rivals even bigger or more dangerous than itself. In the flowing waters of the Amazon, its natural habitat, it can grow to thirty pounds, providing a sparring partner worthy of Moby Dick himself.
It is, in short, a mean fish, and when it shoots from the water, several feet up, it is easy to detect in that prehistoric eye a hunger for the fight. You can see its attraction to a young man keen to prove himself in the eyes of others. Or even an older one keen to retain his son’s respect.
Perhaps this was why Jorge and Alejandro de Marenas liked to fish. They would pack up the fishing rods, take Jorge’s big four-wheel drive to the airport, and catch a flight to Brazil to spend two, maybe three days flexing their muscles against this cichlid, then go home with satisfactorily broken tackle and bloodied hands, having satisfied some elemental sense of man’s eternal struggle against nature. It was a biannual pilgrimage for them, and was the one place, Alejandro often thought, where they felt truly at ease with each other.
Jorge de Marenas was a plastic surgeon in Buenos Aires, and one of the best. His client list contained more than three thousand names, including many prominent politicians, singers, and television personalities. The women came to him increasingly young, for higher bosoms, slimmer thighs, noses like this television presenter, or bee-stung lips like that starlet. With a manner as smooth as the skin he re-created, he satisfied them all, injecting, hauling up, filling, and smoothing, often shaping and reshaping the same people over the years until they resembled more startled versions of themselves ten years previously. Except Alejandro’s mother. He would not touch his wife. Not her plump, fifty-year-old thighs, her tired, furious eyes camouflaged by expensive makeup and the religious application of expensive creams. He didn’t even like her dyeing her hair. She told her friends proudly that it was because he thought her perfect as she was. Though she believed, she told her son, that, as with builders and plumbers, the job waiting at home was always the last to be considered. Alejandro himself could not say which version was correct: his father seemed to treat his mother with the same detached respect that he treated everybody else.
For while his mother was almost stereotypically Latina—operatic, passionate, prone to dizzying highs and lows—he and his father were an emotional disappointment, both unusually even-tempered and, especially in the case of Alejandro, possessing what was often described as an almost off-putting reserve. His father defended him against this (frequently made) charge, saying the Marenas men had never felt the need to communicate as they did in soap operas, with angry, posturing confrontations or extravagant declarations of love. Possibly this was because Alejandro had been sent to boarding school from the age of seven, or possibly it was because Jorge possessed the air of calm that made him such a good surgeon. That biannual fight with the gamefish was the one occasion on which both father and son would let loose, their emotions briefly unbuttoned in the swirling waters, and their laughter, frustration, joy, desperation all expressed from the safety net of waders and a waistcoat full of hooks.