The Cat Woman.
Victor’s Match.
The evening Victor rented us the furnished condo in Isla Verde he asked Mickey and me to come view it, since we were going to live there. So we came along, about six p.m. Of course we loved the luxury and the location. Then the landlady showed up with the papers to sign. Mickey and I immediately gave her the nickname ‘the Cat Woman’. She was Victor’s age and extremely seductive for a fifty year old, dressed all in black with the leather jacket, pants and boots and black hair, all matching.
They were both recently divorced and fell in love, (as much as fifty year old’s can) in that first encounter. I wouldn’t exactly call it love but a strong admiration of each other’s talents, a similarity of character and goals and finally the sexual lure, the perfume, the tight leather suit, revealing every curve in her and Victor also well dressed, drenched in cologne, both attractive and in good shape for their age and both probably without sex for a long time and horny.
We watched them fall for each other at that kitchen table as they began to discuss the contract, much longer than necessary, then their own lives, talking ever more intimately, their heads closer and closer together. They both had the exact same goal in life, to be rich. Both were sharp talkers. They negotiated some terms of the lease, heatedly, cleverly, over small details, just to prolong the meeting and test each others acumen. I’m sure she could see that Victor was ruthless and knew she was too. But it was friendly repartee, each sizing the other up and soon seeing they were an amazing match.
Mickey and I sat at the same table, surprised at this embarrassing scenario, the room thick and hot with perfume and emotion. After twenty minutes we realized it wasn’t about to end anytime soon. We excused ourselves and left them alone. There were bars just down the street, the Isla Verde strip, like a tiny slice of Las Vegas, for drinks and fresh air. After that we went to our respective dens. But I’m sure Victor and the ‘Cat Woman’ went to a single den.
We moved in a few days later with John, a new employee Victor found, who’d worked with Bechtel for ten years, in Columbia and Panama. He was forty-five and had a twenty-two year old Columbian wife. They were just getting divorced too, like everybody, it seemed. He was a great drinking companion, full of stories from all around the world and Mickey and I enjoyed his company every night after work. His job, which he did well, was to visit all our job sites, (we had about six going at the time) and ask us about any deviations we made from the print in building each store. He had a notebook and made long lists. These he presented to Victor, who charged the customer extra for each one, every minor detail.
I remember he came to one store I was finishing, a hamburger booth in a food court in a new mall in Aguadilla. The set of burners they sent were two-twenty volt, not one-ten, as listed on the print. All I had to do was buy a twenty dollar breaker and pull two more wires, a twenty minute operation. But Victor, with this information, after an angry telephone call to the client in the States, probably charged him an extra five hundred dollars and got it. Before this I just corrected all such minor details, nothing said. John told me one night at the bar that he was making Victor well over twice the cost of his salary and board, about five hundred a week.
He told me he’d spent the last year in St. Croix, in a large house on a hilltop and his neighbor told him that every day he left for work at seven another truck would show up in his driveway at eight and be there several hours. He did some detective work and found it was a bartender her age. But with his forty-five year old wisdom he realized he wasn’t up to her twenty-two year old libido, agreed to the divorce, and was in the process of finalizing it at this time. He wasn’t bitter at all. The way he told it to us he seemed almost relieved, happy for the two years they shared a bed.
She was quite beautiful. We met her one night at our condo, the one, single time Sanita dropped in, as we were all going to a friend’s (Tony’s) fancy wedding nearby, all dressed up. He lived in a house right below ours in Rincon and did all our flooring work, tile and carpet, for the many stores we completed, making lots of money along with us, and with his friend, R.S. (Randy) an even closer friend to me over time and probably the best surfer in P.R.
The ironic thing was that the two women, both divorcées, took to each other immediately, spending an hour in the living room in intimate talk before the reception, sitting close together. You might almost imagine them holding hands. John and Mickey and I were getting dressed, fidgeting with our ties in front of mirrors.
It was quite the scene. Tony had money so the reception was a gala event. Victor came but without his ‘ex’ or the ‘Cat Woman’. He sat with the five of us through dinner, leaving right after, and the two lovely women a little later, who knows where, while we stayed and imbibed the free champagne, drowning our sorrows. Then home to our condo by midnight, to our single, empty beds. We had a business to run. A few months later, in June of 1996, even that changed.
It seemed like nothing lasted long on that island, for us white expatriates at least. Tony’s marriage lasted only three years. He was an excellent tile man and hard worker but he also had a crack problem. He could put it off for months at a time, but when he did go on a binge it was marathon. I witnessed one of these at an early store we built in St. Croix when Mike was still with us.
We were staying in a four bedroom apartment which I’d rented. Mike probably got Tony started but before dawn, with all their cash spent, Mike actually loaded the T.V. in our rented car to get more crack for them. The next morning, stepping into the living room I saw him standing there wide-eyed, Tony sitting quietly on the couch.
Mike claimed someone must have stolen it. I told him ‘how could that be? You were right here, up all night’. Their dilated eyes and downcast looks told the whole story. Crack turns men into shameful little boys. I gave them a stern lecture, docked his next paycheck and dragged him along to a store to replace the T.V. that evening. It didn’t happen again.
Jaime lasted with Cindy about seven years. But twice in that period he invited his old girlfriend Barbara to fly in for a week-long visit from Dallas. He always kept her in the wings and she always loved him, lucky for him. She was a rising executive with Hewlett Packard devoting all her energy to her job, soon flying to Europe to sign large contracts. Her love life she devoted to Jaime, often far away and with another girl. But she remained spellbound to his unique charisma and good looks (even after his health was shot) and supported him in luxury in Dallas his last fifteen years. He had a magnetism women couldn’t resist, even after infidelities. It was a superabundance of charm, able to introduce Barbara to Cindy and sleep with her during her trip, then back to Cindy’s bed, both in love with him.
After he broke his back in ninety-six, his father flew in and rescued him from the Puerto Rican doctors. He was sent to Huston where three titanium disks were inserted into his lower back.
And once again, just as she’d done for me, Sanita flew there to spent seven days at his bedside, as Jack had his business to attend to in St. Croix. Jack never hired another assistant, (except me, my first week there). He could manage the small store by himself and didn’t mind working six or seven days a week. But I suspect there was one other motive at play. He could never trust anyone.
Jaime returned a few weeks later, looking a little haggard and walking with a strange, rigid step, almost like he needed a cane but too proud to use one. He was still cheerful, upbeat, joking sometimes, able to run the bar and talk away with the customers, now constantly with a drink in hand, from noon till the place closed at two or three, then turning out the lights and limping upstairs to bed alone. He went nowhere else.
I noticed that Cindy, who would sleep with him upstairs before the accident, now spent most of her nights at her shack with Nonny, her eleven year old daughter. The painkillers along with the now constant drinking slowly took their toll on him, and their relationship. Two years later he flew home, broke and broken.
Cindy finally had what she wanted, uncontested title and full control of the Calypso, a lucrative business, easily the most famous place in Rincon. When she pulled her own plug in 2017, slitting her wrists, Nonny took over, having lived there as her Mother’s slave for over a decade, a part of the place. A few years later she left for North Carolina and a family, too many sad memories.
The view from my house, never changing.
A few months after Victor met the cat woman they were living together. Our company, in another six months, mysteriously went bankrupt and changed it’s name from ‘New Vision’ to ‘New Horizon’ construction. Our office moved to an almost hidden location, behind warehouses in an ugly, windowless set of rooms, all cement and damp, but not far away. The secretaries hated it there. But that retreat lasted only four months. Victor discovered it was no place to do business, to see clients and sign contracts. I had no desk there and only visited it twice, to repair some electrical flaws, for free.
He moved again to another office much like our first place, an empty store on a commercial main drag. Our secretaries remained employed. Our clients were informed of our new phone numbers. But my contributions to the company for three years, my deserved share for building up the business, disappeared and my supply houses, three of them, were mad at me for a short while, ripped-off of twenty to thirty thousand each, the last few months of the supplies I'd purchased, because of the bankruptcy.
But they weren’t so angry as to refuse us a new credit line, as I found out shortly after. I ran into one of the part-owners of my main supply house in a restaurant, just down the street from it. She was a woman in her mid-fifties, sitting alone at a table eating lunch. We recognized each other and she beckoned me over. I thought I was about to get a painful drilling because the first thing she said was: “Why’d you change your company name from ‘New Vision’ to ‘New Horizons’? That doesn’t show much imagination”.
When she said this I figured she knew everything, that I was still working for them, same as before. Then she invited me to order lunch and sit with her. I told her what she already knew: that it was all Victor’s machinations. I also told her that all of my hard-earned profits were lost. She’d met him after the bankruptcy notification and saw right through him. That was easy. He always did have beady eyes and the fast-talk, New York scam accent.
Feeling a great deal relieved that she wasn’t mad at me personally, I was still thinking I must have caused her business a great loss. I wondered at this and asked how they could re-coup from such a blow, as we must have owed them at least thirty thousand when we declared bankruptcy, which was my average monthly tab with them.
She told me not to worry, her insurance covered ninety percent of the loss. I was puzzled at this and mentioned that such insurance must cost quite a bit to be so generous. She laughed and gave me one deep lesson in the economics of the business world. She said every supplier has it and it does cost a lot but they tack it into all their prices to the customer, who has no clue.
She told me: "imagine a world where if one big construction company failed and all its suppliers took an equally big hit. Without insurance, they too would collapse and a domino effect of broken companies would result, all the way up the supply chain. This never happens in the business world. That’s why insurance companies exist. They collect from everyone sizable monthly fees and gladly cover the few rare, unexpected defaults, however large. The insurance companies grow the fattest of all, as most clients never need to draw on them. She told me this bankruptcy probably lost her two months of the profits on my orders and that the other twenty five months were deep in the black and that she’d be glad to continue our relationship. And we did, I with the same business agent there and he just as friendly as before, the whole time I was on the island. She even bought me lunch.
Such is business. Victor and the cat woman bought a mansion a few years later in one of the richest retreats of the island, called ‘Dorado Beach’, with ‘Fords’ and ‘Rockefellers’ as their neighbors.
If I’d had an honest partner, I would have left the island with at least a hundred grand in my pocket, for all my contributions to the company’s early success with all the hard and brilliant work I did and the reputation and clients which that professionalism won over.
But I left the island broke, chasing after Sanita and Will, who were constantly moving. I also kept improving my house, every time I had a few thousand in the bank from store profits over all these years. In ninety-five I added another bedroom, as large in size as the first room. This one I slowly finished, with the same base, floors, walls and roof, cutting the window on that side of the first cabin into a door, the two rooms now a unit. I foolishly dreamed that if I made the house nice enough, Sanita might return.
It took another six months of stores for me to sheet rock the walls. Frank finished them for me and painted them and a new friend, Tom, helped me put down a wood laminate floor. I built two desks, bookshelves, a large bed stand for a queen size mattress, put a ceiling fan over it and had a much more comfortable, presentable home, no longer cramped.
The trouble was, I sank all my profits into it, through ninety-six, the good years, with the fallow years about to begin. By then I had a front deck with a washer and dryer in one corner, a six foot tall, plastic water tank dug into the hillside for a permanent supply, (the town water failed at least one day every month, and still does, I hear) and another room framed in above the new bedroom, the roof moved up one floor, a ladder staircase to it, but never finished, just wood studs, the windows just openings. That’s when the money ran out.
