LaBrava Read Online Free PDF Page B

stoned at 11 A.M.
    LaBrava said, “Don’t you want to look at each other?”
    “At him?” the girl said. “I look at him and wish I never left Hialeah.”
    “Why don’t you go home then?” Paco said, looking straight up over his head.
    The girl looked down at him. “Yeah, you wouldn’t have nobody to push you. He sit in this thing all day.”
    LaBrava released the shutter and went down to his knees, eye level. “Come on, this’s supposed to be young love. You’re crazy about each other.”
    “Like The Blue Lagoon , man,” Paco said, looking bland, cool, not reacting when the girl punched him on the back of the neck.
    “He’s crazy all right,” she said.
    “That Blue Lagoon , man, you see that? Why did it take them so long, you know, to get it on? Man, they don’t do nothing for most of the movie.”
    The girl punched him again. “They kids. How do they know how to do it, nobody tell them.”
    “I knew,” Paco, the lover, said, grinning. “It’s something a man is born with, knowing how to do it.”
    “You the creature from the blue lagoon,” the girl said, “tha’s who you are.” Stretching now, bored.
    LaBrava got it, the girl’s upraised arms, the yawn hinting at seduction.
    But he was losing it, hoping for luck. He had begun with a good feeling and it would be in the first two head-on shots if he got it. Now he was moving around too much. He felt like a fashion photographer snicking away as the model throws her hair and sucks in her cheeks, getting split moments of the model pretending to be someone who wanted to go to bed with the photographer or with the lights or with whatever she saw out there. He didn’t want Boza and Mendoza to fall into a pose unless he could feel it was natural, something they wanted to do. But they were showing off for him now.
    LaBrava said, “I think that’ll do it.”
    Paco said, “Man, we just getting loosey goosey.”
    The girl said, “Hey, I got an idea. How about . . . one like this?”
     
    In the Della Robbia lobby, close to the oval front window, the old ladies would nod and comment to each other in Yiddish, then look at the young, frizzy-haired girl again to listen to her advice.
    “It saddens me,” the girl said, and she did sound sad, “when I see what neglect can do to skin. I’m sure you all know there’s a natural aging process that robs skin of its vitality, its lustre.” If they didn’t know it, who did? “But we don’t have to hurry the process through neglect. Not when, with a little care, we can have lovely skin and look years and years younger.”
    The girl was twenty-three. The youngest of the ladies sitting in the rattan semi-circle of lobby chairs had lived for at least a half century before the girl was born. But what did they know about skin care? Rub a peeled potato on your face, for sunburn.
    She told them that extracts of rare plants and herbs were used in Spring Song formulations to fortify and replenish amniotic fluids that nourish the skin. The old ladies, nodding, touched mottled cheeks, traced furrows. They raised their faces in the oval-window light as the girl told them that women have a beauty potential at every age. She told them it gave her pleasure to be able to provide the necessities that would help them achieve that potential. It was, in fact, this kind of satisfaction, making women of all ages happy, proud of their skin, that being a Spring Song girl was all about.
    She gave the ladies a pert smile, realigned the plastic bottles and jars on the marble table to keep moving, busy, as she said, “I thought for this first visit I’d just get you familiar with the Spring Song philosophy. Then next time I’ll give a facial, show you how it works.”
    A voice among the women said, “You don’t tell us how much it is, all this philosophy mish-mosh.”
    “We’ll get into all that. Actually,” the girl said, “I came to see the manager. What’s his name again?”
    “Mr. Zola,” a woman said. “A nice man.