Dr. Pearce told Caridad to let him know if the blade became too hot. Seated upright with legs extended on the table, she nodded. The doctor flicked on the electronic saw that vibrated with contact on her cast. Warmth emanated from this, countering the chill in the pallid exam room. Tendrils of dust wafted where the blade ruptured the plaster. How hot was too hot? How would Dr. Pearce hear her over the buzzing handheld saw? She would have to touch his tanned forearm. Caridad glanced at his heavily lidded gray eyes. Anton Chekhov had been a striking-looking doctor, too. While his eyes were attentive, Dr. Pearce’s jaw was slack, his mouth open. He had the dark piratical looks that are irresistible to many, coupled with a carelessness that was disturbing in a doctor. A yellowed button on his lab coat dangled like a jaundiced spider, his face was shadowed by stubble, his dark hair oily and uncombed.
Anton! How long had it been since she’d thought of him? The broken leg, the summer, the new semester, and especially a Shakespeare seminar—sparking a new infatuation—had all intervened since her preoccupation with Chekhov’s stories. She used to have his words at the tip of her thoughts, and now only one phrase, the ending of “The Lady with the Dog,” bobbed to the surface of memory: “the most complicated and difficult part of it was only just beginning.” The saw’s heat intensified. Caridad focused on the plaster cracking apart and her bony leg emerging, knobby but downed with fine dark hairs—a pale and tender hatchling.
Dr. Pearce warned her to take it easy. She’d have to build up her leg muscles through exercise. He produced a few pamphlets and a daily exercise chart. Caridad skimmed these gladly. She enjoyed lists, rules, and regimens. Hadn’t she followed the doctor’s instructions exactly in protecting her leg as it healed? Though at first the crutches hurt her underarms and caused her shoulders to ache, she became so adept that the sight of these, now propped against a chart illustrating the vascular system, released in her a surge of nostalgia.
Caridad would also miss the sympathy she’d drawn as she pegged along, swinging between her crutches to get to classes and work. She thought of Leland McWhorter, who saved a first-row seat for her in the auditorium where her psychology class met, and Barry Ketchum, a corny middle-aged student who carried her books from her Shakespeare seminar to her next class and then lingered, making bad puns until the professor arrived. At least she’d be done with that, but Caridad flashed on Leland’s emerald eyes and the hank of sun-bleached hair that spilled over his face when he set the crutches at her feet.
“The bone’s fused well,” Dr. Pearce said. “Keep up with your physical therapy and avoid falling off any more cliffs, and you’ll be fine.” He winked.
Caridad didn’t bother correcting him. It hadn’t been a cliff at all, but a deep shaft into which she’d leapt to retrieve a letter she’d ultimately lost in the excitement of being rescued by Boy Scouts and then airlifted to a nearby hospital. That night, nine weeks ago, she was already watching Jeopardy! on the wall-mounted television in a hospital room, her leg encased in plaster, by the time Jorge and Noah burst through the door, looking like old-time prospectors with windburned faces. She’d signaled them to sit in the scoop chairs near the bed and to shush. The contestants were working their way through “The Bard,” a category in which Caridad felt competitive. “Who is Oberon?” she’d called out, but before she could award herself dollar points for being correct, Jorge and Noah began asking so many questions that Caridad gave up, switching the television off with the remote control.
Noah wanted to know if she’d told anyone about the mushrooms they’d eaten. Caridad had been tempted to fan his anxiety, to torment him and Jorge in the way they provoked her. But they’d leave her alone sooner if she told them the truth, so Caridad admitted to keeping mum about this. She’d also refused all medication, in case it might interact badly with the hallucinogen. Her leg was throbbing by then in an excruciating way, as if Lilliputian miners drove pickaxes through her flesh and muscle, striking the shinbone until it reverberated, thrumming clear to her teeth with each blow.
Relieved, Noah ponied up to her bedside. He stroked his beard, sprinkling debris on the covers as he offered information on fractured bones with a focus on worst-case scenarios, including amputation. Caridad hoisted herself on her elbows, a hot white flash zapping her like an electric current. “I need rest,” she said, before settling back into the pillow, eyes closed. Noah mumbled something about shock, which he said was “potentially fatal,” but after a few moments, they’d shuffled out. Caridad flipped on the television in time for Double Jeopardy!
“Is your husband here to drive you home?” Dr. Pearce now asked.
“What? Oh, no, my sister’s taking me home.”
“In a day or so, you should be able to drive.”
Caridad nodded, wishing she knew how.
A nurse appeared to replace the borrowed crutches with an aluminum cane. Leaning on it, Caridad limped into the waiting room, where Felicia sat, paging through a Reader’s Digest. With her large brown eyes, tawny skin, and willowy shape, Felicia would be the loveliest of the three Delgado sisters, if not for her tendency to scowl, roll her eyes, and speak in a loud hectoring voice. Felicia now gathered up her purse and stood. “That only took for-fucking-ever.”
After they made their way out the door, Felicia glanced below Caridad’s gauzy skirt. “Ugh! Your leg’s all withered and pathetic looking. You better shave that sucker and fast. Wear pants until it looks normal.”
“It’s pretty awful, I know,” Caridad said, “but the bone has fused well.”
When they reached the elevator, Felicia pumped the button marked with a down arrow. “I still don’t get it.”
“Get what?”
“I don’t get why you were alone when you fell. Even though there were three of you since you took that jackass Noah with you on your honeymoon. I don’t get why you took that jackass with you on your honeymoon in the first place, or why anyone in her right mind would spend a honeymoon in the woods. I just don’t get any of it.”
Caridad tapped the down button.
“I think honeymoon,” Felicia continued, “and I think room service. I think candlelit dinners, champagne, and chocolates on the pillow. I do not associate honeymoons with sleeping on the ground and marching like a soldier.” She gestured at Caridad’s leg with the Reader’s Digest. “Or broken legs.”
Caridad gasped. “You took Dr. Pearce’s magazine!”
“There’s an article in here on the pancreas that Mama should read.”
“You can’t just steal things,” Caridad said, secretly thrilled by her sister’s minor theft and her dismissive attitude toward camping.
“And I don’t get why Jorge couldn’t bring you to this appointment,” Felicia said. “He’s not working, and he doesn’t have class on Tuesdays.”
Caridad shrugged.
A graduate student, Jorge collected unemployment on the sly. But on this day, he’d promised to help Geraldine build hutches for the rabbits she bred. Caridad insisted he follow through with his plans when she told him the appointment had been rescheduled. She needed some time away from him after their conversation that morning.
The day before, Noah had announced to Jorge that he and Geraldine planned to experiment with open marriage, “fortifying commitment to one another by developing a polyamorous relationship.” He then convinced Jorge that he and Caridad ought to do the same. Over breakfast, Jorge brought up the idea, relaying Noah’s suggestion that the couples try a foursome. While he was speaking, Caridad kept expecting Jorge to laugh, to say “gotcha” and tell her it was all a joke. Instead he’d fixed his eyes on the tabletop, repeating Noah’s reasons why this would strengthen their relationship. The phone rang, and despite the cast, Caridad had been first to hobble for it. When the doctor’s assistant asked her to come in that day, Caridad made up her mind to call her sister for a ride to the clinic.
Felicia punched the elevator button again. “Are there stairs?”
Caridad shoulders seized and her eyes filled. What if she slipped on the steps and rebroke her leg? While she’d managed well with the crutches, no way did she want to lumber on them for several weeks more, her leg outstretched before her like a length of wood. She pressed the button again. The elevator grumbled in an indecisive way, but a spaghetti strand of light seeped from the space between the doors and they slowly pulled apart.
After Felicia dropped her off at the guesthouse she and Jorge rented, Caridad changed into blue jeans and a tank top. Then she stumped about with the cane, collecting materials to paint the wall hanging she’d constructed for a studio art class. Jorge had urged her to enroll in the course, hoping she would become interested in art the way he was. Once in the workshop, Caridad enjoyed it. For her midterm project, she’d planned to construct a female torso out of bricks and mortar, as if a woman’s headless, limbless body were bursting forth from institutional confinement, the bricks molding to her shape as she emerged. But terracotta bricks proved too heavy for mounting on the plywood backing, and these were too porous to stick to anything without mortar.
Caridad found a solution as she waited for Jorge to finish up in the ceramics lab one day. Lightweight kiln bricks adhered to the backing with epoxy, and they were soft enough to file and sand, forming breasts, stomach, hips. Now she was ready to paint the work, but the blond bricks she’d experimented with had soaked up color, resulting in a pinkish hue, a shade that suggested a female torso breaking into a powder room. Only an inexpensive brand of oxblood tempera, close enough to terracotta, held its color on the bricks, but the cheap paint rubbed off easily, even after drying.
When it was painted, Caridad would spritz the work with fixative spray, though she was unsure if the aerosol acrylic would work on paint. What a great thing if it did hold color and prevent smudging on more than just charcoal and pastel sketches. She imagined applications for the spray beyond art. Couples could mist each other with it to keep one another vibrant, their edges clear and defined. Nothing could go blurry. Caridad thought of the paper she was writing on Shakespeare’s sonnets, the preoccupation with the ravages of time and the yearning for immortality in those verses. Although his poems composed a bonding solution of sorts in their ability to capture and preserve the observations of one great man long gone, the Bard would likely have appreciated a can of such stuff to spray over himself and those he loved.
Caridad, too, wished for some way to keep Jorge in sharp focus, the way he’d appeared when she’d first met him—sophisticated, mature, and even attractive. He’d had an attentiveness of expression in those early days that made Caridad feel as if what she had to say mattered. His brown eyes curved into quarter-moons when he laughed at her silly jokes. He’d rush home from class, and he would often take her to bed as soon as he arrived, and after they would talk and talk until it grew dark outside. Now when he returned home, he would kiss her cheek and pick up the newspaper to read the sports pages. If only she had sprayed that earlier draft of Jorge with something like fixative . . .
Caridad shook her head to release the silly thought. She propped the back door open and lugged out a crate containing the paint, brushes, rags, and a jar for water. Then she set the wall hanging atop a card table. She dipped her brush and stroked the kiln bricks with tempera, planning to fill in the spaces between the bricks with caulking putty once the paint was dry. The first coat soaked in a bit more than she liked, so Caridad repainted, saturating each brick. Radio music wafted through the bedroom window, the volume turned low so as not to disturb their elderly Cuban landlords who lived in the main house just yards away.
She’d already provoked them once by asking what was so bad about Fidel Castro anyway. After taking a survey course in Latin American politics, in which she learned that the dictator had nearly eradicated illiteracy and crime and developed a top-notch health-care program on the island, Caridad was curious why her landlords despised him. But the old man had given Caridad a withering look and shuffled off while his wife released a high-pitched stream of Spanish, like a teakettle whistling on a stove, as she vowed to shit on Fidel before naming members of his cabinet, friends, and family she would likewise defecate upon if given the chance.
The guesthouse was Caridad’s first home apart from her mother’s cluttered duplex. The maple-paneled living room and bedroom, the light and airy kitchen, and the closet-sized bathroom—all of it was neat and cozy, thanks to Jorge, who kept the paneling polished, the floors mopped, and the countertops, mirrors, and fixtures gleaming. He had also decorated the guesthouse with belongings he’d brought from the place he’d rented before moving here. While Caridad had vetoed the cartoonish black-light posters he’d had hanging in that room, she didn’t mind the installation of his heated water bed or the bookcases he’d built. On their shelves, he’d arranged vessels and sculptures he’d crafted in the ceramics lab along with various potted plants Caridad had acquired from her horticulture class. In the center of one bookcase, Jorge displayed a large fishbowl terrarium in which he grew a bonsai that he himself had stunted, training the branches to twist laterally. He had a teensy battery-operated vacuum for suctioning dust from the glass, so it sparkled on the top shelf, greeting Caridad like a dazzling face whenever she returned home.
She also enjoyed the small backyard, an apron of concrete fanning out to a grassy patch separated from the yard of the landlords’ house with chain-link fencing. They’d planted tomatoes and squash along the back fence. On warm evenings, they dragged out chairs and a hibachi to grill skewered vegetables for her and chicken or steak for Jorge. They would sip beers while their food seared, talking or listening to music through an open window the way Caridad was doing as she painted her wall hanging.
She recognized the first chords of a sentimental song as she painted, the lyrics lamenting a lost love. Slowed by the mournful song, Caridad applied final strokes of oxblood to the bricks, and the first line of a sonnet came to mind: “Music to hear, why hear’st thou music sadly?” She imagined herself regretting lost love, though she couldn’t think who she might miss in this way. Probably not Jorge, who, after only a few months of marriage, had just proposed sharing her with his friends. How suggestible Jorge was when it came to Noah’s ideas! No doubt he longed for an older brother, a surrogate for his weak-willed father. But this was too much. In a way, Noah pushed Jorge to choose between friendship and marriage, and he hadn’t chosen her.
Reflecting on Jorge’s connection to Noah, Caridad considered different ways of loving. Shakespeare’s sonnets covered a range of romantic connections, from youthful muse to longtime companion—a few of his amorous verses even seemed to be directed from one man to another. Though she’d never experienced that once-in-a-lifetime lightning flash of attraction described in the song on the radio, Caridad knew—maybe too well—the commonplace closeness that Shakespeare now and again described. For her, this meant a day-to-day thing involving laundry, cooking, and dishwashing, a familiar affection that endured despite the bad haircut she’d once given Jorge, the eye-smarting stench that sometimes trailed him out of the bathroom, that persistent acne on his neck and back—oh, she could go on and on.
Shakespeare described a mistress’s eyes as being nothing like the sun, and that seemed fair enough. But eyes not being like the sun, wiry hair, and even dun-colored breasts were little compared to that choking stink, those pustules, the way Jorge cracked his knuckles—all ten of them—and then his jaw and neck before starting again with his thumb, next the index finger . . . until Caridad yearned to slip off her shoe and smack him just as repeatedly on the head with it. She considered writing a sonnet about bad smells, pimples, and joint popping. She tried out a few verses, working through the meter in these. Then she rubbed her chin with her wrist, wondering what rhymes with “boredom”? Whoredom? More dumb? Sore thumb?
Caridad plunged her paintbrush into the jar of water nearby, pink-tinted clouds billowing as she stirred, and she hummed along with the radio. Despite the sad song, alone in the backyard that afternoon, she was pleased with her wall hanging. The sun warmed her bare shoulders. An occasional breeze bore the fragrance of burnt sugar from nearby magnolia blossoms, blending this with the scent of fresh-mown grass. Caridad cast her eyes upward and asked aloud of the mid-September sky, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” As if in response, the tinny pitch of children’s voices lofted from a few yards over, along with the repeated thwack-thwack-thwack of a bouncing ball. Beyond this, the regular whoosh of cars on the freeway sounded much like the susurrus of waves cresting and breaking.
Over these pleasant sounds, she didn’t register the side gate opening until its rusted hinges squealed. Caridad glanced up, and Noah, wearing rumpled khakis and a short-sleeved shirt, appeared at the edge of the paved apron, the gate banging shut behind him.
“I knocked in front,” he said. “You didn’t hear me, so I came around back.”
Caridad doused the paintbrush again, fanning the bristles at the bottom of the jar.
“A colleague dropped me off here to wait for a ride home. I took the car for an oil change this morning, and Jorge is driving Geraldine to the garage to retrieve it. They should be here soon, and Geraldine will spirit me home. No doubt Jorge has apprised you of all this.”
If Jorge had mentioned this, the information had been eclipsed by the polyamorous bombshell he’d dropped. Still, Caridad nodded as if she’d been expecting Noah.
He pointed at her leg. “Ah, they’ve removed the cast. How was that?”
“Fine,” Caridad said, glad she’d changed into Levi’s when she returned home.
Noah squinted in the sunlight, his face pinkening with the heat. Then he grinned at her. “What’s this?” He approached the card table. “This is very handsome work.”
Before she could warn him not to touch the wall hanging, Noah had his hands on it. He was cupping the brick bosom when the gate shrieked open again. Jorge and Geraldine appeared in the backyard. Noah lunged away from the piece and raised a rust-stained palm to greet his wife and friend.
“So you told Jorge no and yes?” Esperanza asked her that Saturday while they waited in line at Foster’s Freeze for lemon slushes to satisfy her sister’s latest craving. When a teenaged boy pivoted away from the counter bearing a chocolate-dipped cone, they advanced a few paces, cars whizzing by on the boulevard behind them.
“I told him yes and no,” said Caridad, reluctant to continue the conversation they’d started in the car.
“Yes and no?”
Caridad lowered her voice. “I said yes to the first thing and no to the second.”
“No to the second . . . now that was the—oh my god. The foursome?”
In front of them, an elderly man wearing a tweed ivy cap cast a curious glance at them.
“Shush,” Caridad hissed. “Lower your voice.”
“But that would mean you’d have to—yuck!” Esperanza frowned in distaste. “Noah has the skin of a piglet, a spotty little piglet. It would be like . . . having intercourse with a piglet.”
Now a woman with a toddler shifted sideways for a look at the sisters.
“Will you keep your voice down?” Caridad said. A lowrider Chevy pulled into the adjacent parking lot, mariachi music blasting from its open windows, seconds too late to drown out her sister’s penetrating voice.
“And her,” Esperanza said in a stage whisper. “You’d have to do something, like, with your mouth on her.” She grasped Caridad’s forearm. “Oh, Dah-Dah, that woman is awful. She’s pushy and rude and just awful!”
“I said no to the second thing. Remember? I’m not doing any of that.”
“Did I tell you she’s been calling me?” Esperanza’s smooth forehead crimped like gathered silk. “She calls and calls. Did you give her my number?”
“No, dummy, you did. Don’t you remember? You gave it to her at my wedding. I told you not to.” Caridad nudged her sister forward. Single-minded Esperanza couldn’t walk and chew gum at the same time, let alone walk while talking. “Why’s she calling you?”
“She wants to observe the birth.”
“What?”
“She’s trying to get my permission so she can watch the baby being born.”
“No, no way.” Caridad knew well how Geraldine behaved with her animals when she “mated them,” which she accomplished by jamming their sex organs together, the large woman mouth breathing the whole time. And when her rabbits gave birth, she’d gawk through the chicken wire, so as not to miss a speck of blood, a millimeter of placenta. Geraldine was far too interested in reproduction. She had no business bringing this disturbing fascination into Esperanza’s delivery room. “Tell her no.”
“I have,” Esperanza said. “Every time she calls, I tell her that I don’t want anyone but Reynaldo and of course the hospital people in the delivery room with me, but she keeps calling to see if I’ve changed my mind.” Esperanza’s dark eyes shone, her soft chin wobbled.
“Don’t worry.” Caridad clutched her sister’s elbow to steer her forward. “We’ll tell Felicia to call her.”
“Let’s get her a slush, too.” Esperanza wiped her eyes with a wrist. “We can go right over to get Felicia to call that woman because I really can’t take it anymore.”
Caridad handed Esperanza a tissue from her bag and stepped to the counter to order.
“Now, what was the first thing?” Esperanza asked as they bore their drinks to the car.
“Open marriage,” Caridad told her, “the polyamorous thing.”
“That must have felt terrible. How could Jorge even bring up with such a thing? I’d be devastated if Reynaldo suggested this.” Dog though he was, Rey was unlikely to coax his wife into participating in his extramarital activities. “That must have hurt you,” Esperanza said.
“It really wasn’t that bad.” But now a knot tightened in her throat, and Caridad swallowed hard before saying, “Though the foursome thing makes me want to throw up, I can see some potential with the polyamorous stuff.”
“So you said yes to that?”
“You bet I did.”
Standing before the kitchen sink in her mother’s house, Caridad felt like Gulliver or Alice in Wonderland just after taking a bite of the cake labeled Eat Me. The Formica countertop, cabinets, and basin appeared to have shrunk since the last time she’d been home, while Caridad had somehow expanded. Even the dining table, chairs, and stove seemed dollhouse-sized to her. Surely the guesthouse she and Jorge rented was much smaller than this. Had she then imagined this room larger while she was away? Her hand, pouring the syrupy dregs of her slush into the sink, flashed before her like a flesh-toned paddle. Or had she somehow increased in size? “Do I seem bigger to you?” she asked her mother, who was stirring beans on the stove nearby while Caridad’s sisters phoned Geraldine from a bedroom.
“No, m’ija. Why? Oh my goodness!” Mama surveyed Caridad’s midsection. “You and Esperanza both? When, tell me when?”
“What? No, no, no.”
“I thought maybe . . . you’re so quiet.”
“Believe me, Mama, I’d tell you first, if it was anything like that.”
“Es que, you are so misteriosa. I thought maybe that was your secret.” She squinted at Caridad. “You used to be such a chatterbug.”
“Chatterbox, Mama.” Caridad drew an arm over her mother’s soft shoulder. “Don’t worry about me. Really, I’m fine.” She inhaled her mother’s unmistakable scent—crushed coriander, tea roses, and traces of sandalwood soap. Caridad closed her eyes and she was five again, standing on the back porch, clinging to her mother and burying her face in her soft belly, clothespins in the pockets of Mama’s housecoat jutting against Caridad’s cheek. The memory of being safe and warm was so pervasive that she longed to stay in this shrunken kitchen now redolent with the aroma of bubbling beans and garlic, to remain here in her mother’s house. It wouldn’t take much. She could ask Felicia to take her to pick up her things while Jorge was on campus. Caridad pulled away from her mother, drawing breath to suggest this when Felicia burst into the kitchen, Esperanza in tow.
“What a twisted bitch!” Felicia said.
Mama cupped her ears. “Cuidate, muchacha. I didn’t raise you to curse like a salesman.”
“Sailor, Mama,” Esperanza said.
“This woman, this friend of Jorge’s wants to horn in on the baby’s birth. She’s trying to get ringside seats to the main event.” Felicia’s eyes widened with outrage.
“¿Que dice?” Mama asked Esperanza, who explained about the pestering phone calls.
Lips compressed, Caridad’s mother drew back, doubling her chin. “Pues, I hope this is the end of it.”
“Oh, it better be,” Felicia said, “or I’ll drive out there and seriously fuck that woman up.” She grabbed her slush and drew noisily on the straw. Then she turned to Caridad. “I really don’t know what Jorge is doing with such stupid friends, or why you put up with that.” Felicia’s eyes flashed as she redirected her hot feelings toward Caridad. “Seriously, who’s going to respect you if you don’t respect your own damn self and make people act right?”
Esperanza collected her purse and keys from the table. “I’ve got to get the car back in time for Rey to play basketball at noon. We’d better go,” she told Caridad. “Unless Felicia wants to drive you—”
“Actually, Felicia doesn’t want to drive anyone anywhere,” Felicia said. “I can’t believe you don’t drive! This is L.A., you know, not some sleepy pueblo where you can walk barefoot to the zocalo in minutes. You need to get your damn license and start driving like a normal person.”
“Déjala,” Mama told Felicia before turning to Caridad. “But, m’ija, you should learn to drive. Ask Jorge to teach you. He’s so patient and kind.” Mama smiled as she often did when she mentioned her son-in-law’s name. “I bet he’s a good teacher.”
Caridad nodded, glancing down at the pale flippers that were now her hands.
Just over two weeks later, on a Sunday afternoon, Caridad ironed a muslin peasant blouse. She would tuck it into her straight-leg Levi’s to offset her narrow waist and slim hips, and she planned to wear her long hair down so it would swing with her stride. In a camisole and jeans, she set up the ironing board in the living room where Jorge hunched in an armchair, staring into a thick paperback. He’d begun reading fiction lately, at last showing interest in the books Caridad loved. Now he was plowing through Anna Karenina in a determined way, though his face was set in an expression of contempt, as though he resented Tolstoy for coming up with the idea for the novel in the first place.
Caridad glanced up at her wall hanging, which was mounted over the chair where Jorge sat. How awful it would be if the bricks came loose and crashed down on his head. Noah had been right, though. It was a handsome piece. She’d repainted the places that he’d touched. This made the color richer and deeper, more oxblood than terracotta, even better than she had imagined. She misted her blouse with water and then ran the hissing iron over the fabric. The fragrant steam called to mind cloud-swollen skies on a summer afternoon just before the first raindrops patter down to sizzle on the cement.
“What time is he supposed to be here?” Jorge asked.
Caridad checked her wristwatch. “Not for another fifteen or twenty minutes.”
“I’m going to be pissed off if he’s late.”
“Why? He’s not coming to see you.” This was awkward—her husband waiting with her for her date to arrive.
“It’s rude to be late,” Jorge said. “Shows lack of consideration.”
Caridad shrugged. Leland had been so laid-back in making the date that he didn’t seem to care whether she accepted or not. When she told him she was married, he’d lifted an eyebrow as though intrigued, and after she explained about the open marriage, he’d said, “Cool.” He might easily be late or not turn up at all. “Even if he doesn’t come and I have to take the bus to Fairfax,” Caridad told Jorge, “I’m going to see that movie.” After learning she was in a Shakespeare seminar, Leland had invited her to see Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet with him at the Laemmle Theatre.
“I can take you.”
“No thanks.” Caridad pulled the warm blouse over her head and tucked it into her jeans. Then she collapsed the ironing board and stowed it in the closet with the iron. She brushed and brushed her hair until the dark waves crackled with static. Standing before the bathroom mirror, Caridad regarded her reflection. An ordinary face, she thought, distinguished by its lack of distinction apart from her hazel eyes, an unexpected contrast to her dark lashes, eyebrows, and hair. Her glasses muted this, making her even more commonplace and approachable to people like Jorge, Barry, and even Leland. Unlike Juliet, nothing about Caridad “doth teach the torches to burn bright!” She pinched color into her cheeks and turned away from the mirror. After packing her glasses in her purse, she was ready to go. As Jorge had predicted, Leland was late. While she waited, Caridad sat across from Jorge and listened to his complaints about Anna Karenina.
“She’s so selfish,” he said. “I mean, her husband’s really not that bad. All that stuff about Levin and local politics and agriculture—do we really need all that? I don’t get why this is supposed to be such a great book.”
“Maybe you should have started with something less complicated,” Caridad told him, a thread of meanness tightening her voice.
Jorge glanced up, his dark eyes round with surprise. Ruddy splotches bloomed above his beard as if Caridad had slapped him. He cleared his throat. “This isn’t what I meant, you know. This isn’t what I had in mind when I brought up open marriage.”
Caridad gazed into her lap. She plucked a strand of hair from the denim and released it to sail to the floor. He’d said this a few times before, explaining that he’d just hoped they’d grow closer to Noah and Geraldine, deepen their relationship by getting to know their friends and themselves more intimately. Jorge would go on and on before winding up with an accusation: She’d taken things too far. He’d never wanted the marriage opened this much. At which point, Caridad would observe that either a thing is open or it’s not. “You open anything up,” she’d told him, “and something’s liable to get out.”
Jorge now held up the book as if offering it in evidence. “Don’t you know how much I love you? I would do anything for you.”
The old Caridad, the Caridad she was just over a month ago, would have rushed to his side, enfolded him in her arms, and insisted she loved him, too. But that Caridad had slipped away—something had cracked apart, the space widening just enough for her to wriggle through. This new Caridad remained seated, tensing and releasing the leg she had broken, the habit of exercise difficult to shed, though the break had mended so well that Dr. Pearce had cleared her to take tennis in the spring.
“Anything,” Jorge said again. “I mean it. I’ll do whatever you want.”
She considered Noah and Geraldine, the things people never should ask of one another—giving up friendship had to be among these. How could she expect Jorge to surrender a relationship that was likely to prove more enduring over the long course of his lifetime than his now tenuous connection to her? And even if he gave up his friends, Caridad knew it would be impossible for her to unknow what she had discovered about Jorge and about herself during the brief time they’d been married.
Caridad glanced at the bookcase, her face reflected like a hologram in the luminous glass bowl housing the dwarf tree. She dropped her eyes. A patch of sunlight poured through the open window, funneling dust filaments glittery as stardust and blanching the flat gray carpet. Caridad and Jorge sat motionless, grim as Victorian portrait models. A mower coughed twice before rumbling over a nearby lawn, and the neighbor’s dog, scraping the links of its heavy chain against the concrete, woofed at this.
A fist pounded on the front door, and they both jumped.