10   I spent most of Friday morning doing calculations for my new client, the writer. It turned out that he and his wife had made agreements, with respect to each joint piece of writing, about their respective shares of the work. It was as if they had been anticipating an eventual divorce. After lunch I drove to the Civic Center, parked in the underground garage, and dropped off Libby’s petition at the Courthouse. With Labor Day coming up, it would not be processed for submission to a judge before Tuesday, but that was fine with me. I then wended my way through the downtown streets to the Wells Fargo building at Montgomery and California to meet with the trust officer, whose name was Walter Cantelli. I gave him a copy of the petition, and after examining it he agreed to give me some information. It turned out that the estate, or at least the part of it – probably the lion’s share – that was managed by the bank, was almost entirely held by Peter Hart as sole owner, with no specified beneficiary. A copy of the deed to the house was on hand, and it showed the same thing. There were two exceptions: an investment account whose beneficiary was the Randall Museum Association, and another such account that was held in joint tenancy with right of survivorship by Peter M. Hart and Thomas A. Stone. The current value of this account was a little over three hundred thousand dollars, of which some fifty thousand was in cash. This was, in all likelihood, the source of the money with which Andy was paying the cost of his rescue operation. Unless, of course, he had some other funds of his own. I took copious notes, and by the time I was done at the bank there was no point in going back to the office. I walked back to the Civic Center, using the most direct route along Market Street, and drove home. When I got there I checked my office voicemail. There was another message from Rose Bargallo. “More news, Gary. There may not be any need to go to Africa. I called the Namibian embassy in Washington, and I got a lead to someone who may have known Andy there. No need to call me back. I’ll tell you more about it tomorrow.” I had a snack, trimmed my beard, showered and changed. By six-twenty-five I was ready. I set myself down on the sofa with The New Yorker. My doorbell rang at ten to seven. Evidently Chris had overestimated the time it would take her to get to my house. She was wearing a long-sleeved white jacket, open in front, over a low-cut black sundress, which may have been the same one that she wore at Ann and Jeff’s party. Her hair was black, long and straight, and she was very pretty in a way that I think of as Mediterranean – southern Spanish or southern Italian – which just enough of an indigenous tinge to mark her unmistakably as the Latina that she called herself. Despite her very high heels she did not stand very tall; at least in this regard she was not a pseudo-Libby. Her breasts, by what she displayed of them, did not have the sculptural perfection of Libby’s, and were larger. Her hips were fuller. Overall she was quite shapely. I found her very desirable. “Hi, Gary,” she said as I opened the door. “Hi, Chris. It’s nice that you’re a little early, so we don’t need to rush. Would you like something to drink before we go?” “Sure, thanks. A little white wine would be nice.” She followed me into the kitchen. “You’ve got a nice house,” she said. As I opened the refrigerator door she looked inside and said, “Oh, you’ve got Charles Shaw chardonnay. My favorite!” She laughed, just as I had expected. While we were sipping the wine, I said to her, “There’s something you told me that intrigued me. You said that your kids were Latinos, but Ann told me that you’d been married to someone named Lynch. Would you care to explain?” She laughed again. “Ann’s all mixed up. Either she misunderstood Jeff, or Jeff told her wrong. Let’s see. First of all, I’ve never been married, but the father of my kids, who I lived with for years, is named Herrera, and my kids are named Herrera Martínez, in the Spanish way, though my son prefers to use just Martínez, with H as his middle initial. He doesn’t like his dad. My daughter, on the other hand, uses just Herrera. It gets confusing, trying to explain to people that they are full siblings. Sometimes… a veces no es tan fácil ser latino.” “Lo comprendo bien.” “Gracias por tu comprensión. Second, my full name is Cristina Martínez Lynch, because my mom’s descended from an Irishman named Lynch who went to Argentina, like, more than two hundred years ago, and then about a hundred years ago someone from that family moved to Peru, where my mom was born. And, just to complete the picture, my dad was born in Spain but moved to Peru with his parents when he was a kid, after the Civil War. So, you see, my kids are one hundred percent Latino. And they speak perfect Spanglish,” she said with a laugh. “And where were you born?” “In Peru, but my parents moved here when I was three. How about you?” “I’m a Californian, born in LA. My parents were from New York and New Jersey, but they moved to LA because my father worked in television.” “Jewish?” “By ancestry, but there was nothing of Jewish culture in my family.” “You said they were from New York and New Jersey.” “My mom died when I was eighteen. Ovarian cancer. She’d been diagnosed when I was eight, so she held on, against all odds, long enough to be at my high-school graduation.” “So your dad took care of you and your mom?” “Yes.” “No wonder you’ve been protective of your son.” Her insight, offered so matter-of-factly, struck me deeply, but she gave me no time to respond. “What about your dad?” “He had a heart attack five years ago.” She said nothing. “It’s seven o’clock,” I said. “Perhaps we should go.” In the car she asked me, “Did your dad every remarry?” “Yes, eventually, when I was already married and a lawyer. But it didn’t last. He tried it again, and it was the same thing. He never got over my mother.” Since Chris was silent, I chose to ask her a question. “Why did you and your kids’ father never marry?” She laughed. “It’s the Latino thing again. He was divorced, but he’d been married in the Church, and as far as my mom was concerned, if it wasn’t going to be a Catholic marriage then it didn’t count.” “How about you?” “I didn’t care. I loved him. But when we split up it was easier that we weren’t married.” “That’s not a nice thing to say to a divorce lawyer,” I said. “We need the business!” Chris laughed. Her laughter was growing on me, as I had suspected it might. “You wouldn’t have gotten much business from Gus and me,” she said. “We were too poor.” “I’ve got a sliding scale.” “With us, you would have slid all the way to the bottom.” “We call that pro bono.” “As opposed to Sonny Bono.” By this time we were both laughing heartily. “And cui bono.” Since I wasn’t sure if she was familiar with that expression, I went on. “You know, I’ve been to Peru, and I ate cuy.” “You’re kidding!” “No, I’m not.” I really did eat guinea pig there, and found it delicious. “There was an Italian tourist there, and he wanted to say that the cuy was good, so he said cui bono! Now I’m kidding. I hope you don’t mind bad puns.” “The badder the better,” Chris said while I was parking. As we were walking into the dining room, Chris said, “The problem with this place is that there’s no Peruvian food, which is the best food in Latin America, as I’m sure you’ll agree.” “Tonight I’ll agree to anything,” I said as we sat at our table. Chris took off her jacket, and her shoulders came into view. Each was crossed by three thin straps, two of which belonged to the dress and one to the bra, but I was not sure which was which. I was beginning to feel excited. “Even to drinking pisco,” I added. Chris laughed again. “You’re just as funny when you’re sober,” she said, taking my hand across the table and squeezing it. I squeezed back and held on to her hand, but she withdrew it. “It’s not what’s in me,” I said. “It’s who I’m with.” “You’re sweet,” she said, but the softly sexy expression with which she said it vanished as soon as I countered with “So are you.” We ordered piscos and toasted with cui bono! We then agreed that we would order a series of appetizers as our dinner. Some of the aperitivos, Caribbean in style, also bore the names of musical genres (guaracha, merengue, montuno), but most of them were the usual antojitos mexicanos that I grew up on, what with our Mexican housekeeper, Elena, from whom I learned colloquial Spanish (and from whom my father received physical solace, with my mother’s mediation, once she herself could no longer give it to him). “If I worked here,” Chris said, “there would be papas a la huancaína, which they could call huayno.” But she relished the Mexican dishes, showing none of the disdain toward Mexican cuisine that I have seen in other South Americans. “You like Mexican food,” I said to her as we each took an enchilada. “I like all Latino food,” she said between bites. “Or Hispanic, or whatever you want to call it.” “In LA, when I was a kid, Mexican food was called Spanish food by a lot of people. Even now there are people who say Spanish rice when they mean Mexican rice.” “It’s like a Spanish omelet. It’s got nothing to do with a tortilla española. You know what that is, don’t you?” “Yes.” “I thought so. My Spanish grandma makes the best tortilla española in the world. Do you know why?” “Peruvian potatoes?” I ventured. “You’re smart.” Another hand squeeze followed by a quick withdrawal. The salsa dance lesson was announced. We stayed at our table, taking little spoonfuls of flan and sipping chardonnay. I told her some details about myself – about law school and Margo and Greg and Margo and Joyce – and she told me about her family. As with most Latin American families I have known, beginning with Elena’s, her tale had a decided telenovela quality, this one of the political sort. Her paternal grandparents had been republicanos in Spain and became apristas in Peru, remaining firmly leftist and anticlerical, while the Lynches were conservative upper-crust Catholics. Her parents met and fell in love at the university. Her father, a leftist like his parents, reluctantly agreed to a Catholic wedding, but when Chris was born he balked at having her baptized. Finally her parents decided to emigrate to the United States in order to escape the family conflict. After their arrival in San Francisco they had twins, a boy and a girl. Chris was not particularly close to her siblings, both of whom lived in the East Bay and were married, the sister to an Anglo and the brother to a Chicana. I was going to ask her about the background of Gus Herrera, the father of her children, but the band suddenly started, brassy and relentless. Conversation was out of the question. Chris and I smiled at each other, and we got up to dance. It was a long number, and well before it was over I was sweating. Chris’s skin was also glistening, and she looked even more attractive. I took the lead in the dance for some of the time, but for the most part she danced on her own, turning and spinning with seemingly wild abandon. I could not tell whether her moves were learned or improvised, but it didn’t matter. “You’re a great dancer,” I said when we sat down and I took a sip of wine. “Thanks. You’re pretty good too.” We danced another number, similar to the first but not quite so long. As soon as we returned to our table, even before sitting down, a tall, thin dark-skinned man who seemed to know Chris, if only by sight, wordlessly asked her to dance. She gave me an eye signal that I took to represent asking me for approval, and I gave it with a smile. She went off to the dance floor and danced while hardly ever looking at her partner, though she threw a few glances at me, as though to say, I’d rather be dancing with you. I entertained myself by looking around at the dancers. The next number was a bolero, sung by the man who had played bongos in the fast numbers. It was an old song that I remembered from my father’s record collection, played even slower than I remembered it. I held Chris fairly closely, but when I tried to close the gap between us even more I felt resistance. In the course of the dance I felt the cell phone in my pants pocket vibrate. When the number ended Chris was immediately asked to dance again by another man, and I sat down to check my phone. The missed call was from Greg, and there was no message. Looking around me, I noticed that when a man would ask a woman to dance and she declined, he would simply, and with no seeming embarrassment, go on to the next one, until he found a willing partner. Chris and I danced again, and once again she was asked to dance and accepted. She really was a good dancer, and the men there seemed to know it. I decided that this time, instead of sitting and watching I would dance with someone else. I set my sights on an extremely pretty blonde who was sitting, with two other young women, a few tables away. I asked her to dance, and to my surprise she accepted eagerly. Unfortunately she was not a good dancer. I tried my best to guide her through some simple moves, but she had trouble catching the rhythm. I decided that if I were to dance again with a woman other than Chris, it would be with someone that I had observed on the floor. When the band’s set was over, recorded music was played, and it was far more varied than the band’s repertoire. It included merengue, cumbia, and cha-cha-cha, and Chris seemed delighted that I knew the dances. And when another bolero was played, I sensed less resistance on her part than in the previous one. By the time the band came back for the second set I was very tired. “Estoy agotado,” I said to Chris. “Let’s go then,” she said simply. During the ride back to my house I finally asked her about Gus Herrera. “His name is César Augusto,” she said with a laugh, “and he’s Colombian. He’s married again, and has another kid, so he’s a little tight with the child support.” “Would you like some help with that?” I asked. “No, thanks, Gary. I don’t think I want to be your client.” “Okay,” I said, not wanting to pursue the matter. “By the way, did César Augusto have any kids with his first wife?” “No, she couldn’t have any, and that’s why they split up. At least that’s what he told me.” We arrived at my house, and I parked in my driveway. She seemed in no hurry to get out of the car, so I went around and opened the passenger door for her. She took my right hand with her left as she got out, and with her right she pointed at a Honda Civic that was parked two houses away. “That’s my car,” she said. “I’d better go home.” “I see the question never came up.” “Oh, it did, in my mind. But it’s like this. I really like you, Gary, and it could get serious, but we need some time to find out if it does or doesn’t. Either way I want to sleep with you, but for me it would be two different things – just sex, or a relationship – and I need to know which is which. I’m going on forty, and I don’t want to make the same mistakes over and over. Do you understand?” “Completely,” I said. “I really like you too, Chris. Me gustas mucho.” She came up to me and kissed me briefly on the mouth, putting her left arm around my neck as she unlocked her car with the remote key that she held in her right hand. She then scurried off to the car, her high heels clacking on the sidewalk. She gave me a last look with a smile before letting herself and starting the engine. I turned around and walked into my house. I felt simultaneously let down, encouraged and confused. I had been looking forward to going to bed with Chris, but I did not feel as if she had led me on. She had given me numerous gestures of a cautious backing away after timid initial plunges. The confusion was over whether I wanted it to get serious. The issue had not arisen in my three years of dating. But as I got ready for bed, the feeling of having been led on grew. I had not counted on going to bed alone that night. It was Chris who had said more than just dinner. Who had brought up the question of your place or mine. Conditionally, to be sure, but still a tease if ever there was one. On my way to bed I noticed that there was a message on the answering machine. I surmised that the call was from Greg. By now it was too late to return anyone’s call. I would listen to the message in the morning.