Read from "Going to Cuba" in the forthcoming book, In Rooms of Memory: Essays by Hilary Masters:

" “Where is the Isle of Pines?” It is August of 1951, and the basement dive of Louis’s on Sheridan Square is a frosty enclave within the steamed province of Greenwich Village. Rosemary Clooney is singing “C’mon to My House,” and the woman who has just sat down at my table has jumped up to dance to the quasi-Arabic melody, swaying in her summer dress to the blast of the jukebox. No one takes any notice of her; she moves within a cell of her own, a figurine turning within a bell jar.

Someone is always playing the song, always feeding the jukebox so that Clooney sings without let-up until closing time, which it is close to right now. Three a.m. Just before, while Clooney takes a break, this blonde walks over from the bar and sits down at my table. She doesn’t seem to be with anyone, and she carries a worn leather portfolio under one arm. Out of this folder she has taken a newspaper clipping and hands it to me. She is very pale with stringy hair and eyes of beer-bottle green that seem to slide offinto the whites around the pupils.

“C’mon to my house, c’mon to my house . . . c’mon,” Clooney starts up again. “I give you ca-nn-dy.”

This woman has just asked me to go to Cuba with her, to the Isle of Pines, then jumps up to dance by herself, not waiting for my answer nor hearing my question. Her bare feet pivot and shuffle on the sawdusted floor of the bar, and she gives herself to the music in a way that seems to be a demonstration of some-thing. I think of the women in Robinson Jeff ers’s poetry. Wild. Primitive. Probably dangerous.

So when she sits down, I have to ask her again. She is a little breathless and tastes a droplet of moisture above her lips before she answers.

“It’s an island off the south coast of Cuba,” she tells me. “I own one hundred acres on the beach. They’ve discovered oil on my property. What do you think?” She motioned to the newspaper clipping in my hand. “Will he die?” "