The Sound Of Boots (cont.) Part 5
The next time Gabriel Raul sent her tickets, Savannah called to say she could only stay one night. She had to work. She had found a job at a popular restaurant where she worked double shifts. He was disappointed, but he understood.
Of course, he understood.
She arrived at the hotel around six. She tried to eat shrimp cocktail in the dining room then went to her room and tried to watch T.V. She opened the mini bar; selected rum, put it in her Coke and then put in another. She drank it as slowly as possible, which meant five swallows. She took a shower and put her clothes back on. She did not feel the rum at all so she drank another straight from the little bottle plus vodka and then a scotch. As soon as she finished it she ran to the bathroom and spewed brown liquid into the toilet. Savannah took another shower and brushed her teeth until they hurt. Gabriel arrived at eight o’clock. When she opened the door, he pulled her against him and hugged her hard. He was shaking. “Leave your boots on, at least at first,” he said.
Boots on, boots off, it was a fine long night.
Toward morning, Gabe took her hand, turned it over and looked at the palm. “Will you come to my games even if I can’t see you, except a little?”
Savannah hesitated.
“You must work. I know. I can give you money. I have much.”
“That,” she said, “would not be a good idea.”
“No.”
Savannah looked at his shoulders, his loose hair covering the pillow, the paint brush eye lashes, the square hands. “I will come to your games whenever you want me to,” she said.
Though her seats were excellent Gabe never put Savannah near the box with his family and coach. It did not matter. It did not matter if he won or lost. All that mattered was watching every expression on his face. When a hair came loose and he tucked it behind an ear, she felt dizzy.
When Gabe was not playing, Savannah walked. She covered all the streets around the stadium, her hotel, his hotel, she went into restaurants and picked at bread and butter and drank sparkling water. She went into shops, tried to look at the jewelry, the clothes, left in five minutes and kept walking, her cell phone in her pocket. When it rang and she met him, the sounds and the smells of the city, the crowds, and the terrible agitation dropped away and the world began and ended with the sight and the smell and the feel of Gabriel Raul.
She was fired again. This time she never left her subterranean room except to go to the book store to look for sports magazines that might have an article about Gabe. She went on-line and watched his games over and over late into the night until one night she saw him on the screen of her lap top with a dark haired, beautiful girl. “Gabriel’s New Girlfriend?” the caption read. Yet, a ticket arrived the next week. When they talked on the phone neither of them mentioned the possibility of another woman.
During the three days she was in France, he was often surrounded by women. This was more like it she told herself. This was the way it should be. This was in keeping with the spirit of things; therefore, to help matters along Savannah surveyed the field. She chose a tennis player from Germany who had a mop of dark blond curls, aquiline nose, square jaw and symmetrical features. Even squinting into the sun, he was beautiful. She caught up to him waiting for a cab. It was amazingly easy to invite herself along. He was worldly in his view of these matters and therefore kind, but when he had fallen asleep, Savannah slid out of bed, scurried out of the hotel back to hers, stripped and showered and crawled into bed with the sheets pulled over her head. She took the next plane back to New York City where she begged to get her job back and because she was so good when she was there, the owner hired her again. She no longer watched Gabriel on T.V. or the computer or read her subscription to Tennis Magazine or listened to sports radio. When Gabe called she told him she couldn’t leave work, this job meant a lot to her. She threw herself into waitressing with such gusto that she was offered the Maitre’D position. She preferred the hardscrabble, contentious energy of the kitchen, however, and asked if she could be a cook. Her boss told her this would be impossible with her dashing off every time he turned around.
“I won’t be doing that so much anymore.”
“You will start at the bottom, prep cook,” he said. She worked hard, pestered the Sous chef into letting her watch.
“Just don’t get in the way,” he said.
When the restaurant closed for the night she invited him to her place for sex. Tennis had become a part of her past until plane tickets arrived to the most prestigious tournament of all.
Gabriel Raul had made it to the semi-finals. There was a note with the tickets. “Please, come. I have missed you. You are my good luck and I will need it.” Savannah was on the plane in four hours.
She was unprepared for the pomp, the age-old procedures, tradition, rules and staid crowds. Gabriel called her several times a day. “Don’t leave,” he said. He was cloistered among his entourage, but she stayed. She watched. She waited. He won, but at what cost. She felt despair at what he put his body through.
“Don’t go away,” he said. “Don’t leave. It will be a few more hours. Don’t leave.”
Finally, a strange male voice told her over the phone where and when she could meet Gabriel Raul.
Savannah walked into a brass and chandeliered palace of a hotel, through the lobby where uniformed guards stood stiffly, down a corridor thick with carpet, into the mirrored elevator, out at the top floor, through the doors into a glitz of a living room filled with unknown men. One of them indicated the bedroom door.
Savannah stood in the middle of the room and dropped her purse with a thud on the floor. Gabe lay on the round bed with his legs spread.
“I feel like a whore.”
“Please do not say that.”
Savannah looked around the room. “This is not the way I expected it to go.”
“This is who I am now.”
“I liked it better before.”
Gabriel held out his arms and Savannah sat on the bed next to him. “I have missed you,” he said.
Savannah managed not to cry.
“Remember your Life Plan,” he said.
She stretched beside him.
“My girl with the so white skin.” He took her hand. After a long, long while during which Gabriel was tender and Savannah at times brutal using teeth and nails and when they had touched each other everywhere possible as though to keep the memories in the finger tips, Savannah rested on him, her cheek beside his, feeling his breath on her neck, seeing the tangle of her red gold and his black hair on the pillow.
“Did I hurt you?” she said. Gabe laughed and then they both did, belly to belly gasping and snorting and then Savannah went limp and they both sighed and were silent.
Gabe ran his fingers along her spine. “You are right,” he said. “I am now at the top. I am young and it feels good. Very good. But, this will not always be so. Soon, I will be twenty-five and in the tennis world that is no longer young.” He tipped her face. He smiled. “We are on the same schedule you and I.”
“You think you can keep playing like this for eight more years?”
“Eight?”
“I mean three.”
Gabe looked at her carefully. “Oh, Savannah,” he said. She kissed him long and deep then was on her feet, into her skirt, shirt and cowboy boots, swinging her purse from the floor onto her shoulder.
“Come to my next Major. It is in your own city.” he said.
“Sure.”
Savannah blew him a kiss on the way out the door, smiled at the goons in the living room, rode the mirrored elevator down to the lobby and was on the next flight back to New York City where she dropped her acting classes and enrolled in Columbia University.
The school was crawling with material many of whom had black hair and dark skin, but Savannah avoided them and concentrated with self-destructive intensity on light skinned WASPY types. At the age of twenty-four and nine months she married John Townsend, her history professor and they moved to William and Mary College in Virginia where she had a baby girl named Allison. When the child went to school she worked in a small, inconsequential restaurant during lunch so she could be home for her when she returned.
To be continued after the holidays
