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"Yes, Hot--I had a beer there last night," I told him.
"Bears are all right, if you like bellies," Bovary said.
"I have nothing against bears--I just like beer," I said. "It's all I drink."
"I just drink agua con gas," Senor Bovary said, giving me his small, twinkling smile.
"Mineral water, with bubbles--right?" I asked him.
"I guess we both like bubbles," was all Bovary said; he had continued walking along Hortaleza. I wasn't paying very close attention to the street, but I recognized that nightclub with the Portuguese name--A Noite.
When Senor Bovary led me inside, I asked, "Oh, is this the club?"
"Mercifully, no," the little man replied. "We're just killing time. If the show were starting here, I wouldn't have brought you, but the show starts very late here. It's safe just to have a drink."
There were some skinny gay boys hanging around the bar. "If you were alone, they'd be all over you," Bovary told me. It was a black marble bar, or maybe it was polished granite. I had a beer and Senor Bovary had an agua con gas while we waited.
There was a blue-tinted ballroom and a proscenium stage at A Noite; they were playing Sinatra songs backstage. When I quietly used the retro word for the nightclub, all Bovary said was, "To be kind." He kept checking his watch.
When we went out on Hortaleza again, it was almost 11 P.M.; I had never seen as many people on the street. When Bovary brought me to the club, I realized I'd walked past it and not noticed it--at least twice. It was a very small club with a long line out front--on Hortaleza, between the Calle de las Infantas and San Marcos. The name of the club I saw only now--for the first time. The club was called SENOR BOVARY.
"Oh," I said, as Bovary led me around the line to the stage door.
"We'll see Franny's show, then you'll meet him," the little man was saying. "If I'm lucky, he won't see you with me till the end of his routine--or near the end, anyway."
The same types I'd seen at A Noite, those skinny gay boys, were crowding the bar, but they made room for Senor Bovary and me. Onstage was a transsexual dancer, very passable--nothing retro about her.
"Shameless catering to straight guys," Bovary whispered in my ear. "Oh, and guys like you, I suppose--is she your type?"
"Yes, definitely," I told him. (I thought the lime-green strobe pulsing on the dancer was a little tacky.) It wasn't exactly a strip show; the dancer had certainly had her boobs done, and she was very proud of them, but she never took off the thong. The crowd gave her a big hand when she exited the stage, passing through the audience--even passing by the bar, still in her thong but carrying the rest of her clothes. Bovary said something to her in Spanish, and she smiled.
"I told her you were a very important guest, and that she was definitely your type," the little man said mischievously to me. When I started to say something, he put an index finger to his lips and whispered: "I'll be your translator."
I first thought he was making a joke--about translating for me, if I were later to find
myself with the transsexual dancer--but Bovary meant that he would translate for my father. "Franny! Franny! Franny!" voices in the crowd kept calling.
From the instant Franny Dean came onstage, there were ooohs and ahhhs; it wasn't just the glitter and drop-dead decolletage of the dress, but with that plunging neckline and the poised way my father carried it off, I could see why Grandpa Harry had a soft spot for William Francis Dean. The wig was a jet-black mane with silver sparkles; it matched the dress. The falsies were modest--small, like the rest of him--and the pearl necklace wasn't ostentatious, yet it picked up the powder-blue light onstage. That same powder-blue light had turned all the white onstage and in the audience a pearl-gray color--even Senor Bovary's white shirt, where we sat at the bar.
"I have a little story to tell you," my dad told the crowd, in Spanish. "It won't take very long," he said with a smile; his old, thin fingers toyed with his pearls. "Maybe you've heard this before?" he asked--as Bovary whispered, in English, in my ear.
"Si!" shouted the crowd, in chorus.
"Sorry," my father replied, "but it's the only story I know. It's the story of my life, and the one love in it."
I already knew the story. It was, in part, what he'd told me when I was recovering from scarlet fever--only in more detail than a child could possibly have remembered.
"Imagine meeting the love of your life on a toilet!" Franny Dean cried. "We were in a latrine, awash with seawater; we were on a ship, awash with vomit!"
"Vomito!" the crowd repeated, in a unified cry.
I was amazed how many of them had heard the story; they knew it by heart. There were many older people in the audience, both men and women; there were young people, too--mostly boys.
"There's no sound quite like the sound of a human derriere, passing a succession of toilet seats--that slapping sound, as the love of your life approaches, coming nearer and nearer," my father said; he paused and took a deep breath while many of the young boys in the audience dropped their pants down to their ankles (their underpants, too) and slapped one another on their bare asses.
My father exhaled onstage and said, with a condemning sigh, "No, not like that--it was a different slapping sound, more refined." In his glittering black dress with the plunging neckline, my dad paused again--while those chastised boys pulled up their pants, and the audience settled down.
"Imagine reading in a storm at sea. How much of a reader would you need to be?" my father asked. "I've been a reader all my life. I knew that if I ever met the love of my life, he would have to be a reader, too. But, oh--to first make contact with him that way! Cheek to cheek, so to speak," my dad said, jutting out one skinny hip and slapping himself on the buttocks.
