Baby on her hip, Caridad swung open the kitchen door. A rare deluge obscured the yard, raindrops darkening the orange trees, freighting branches, and plopping from leaves. Runnels of mud sluiced over the brick footpath, submerging the welcome mat. Since midnight, rain had been pounding the North Hollywood rental where Caridad was living with Gray in late summer 1978, waking her with an insistent sizzle that thickened into thumping. Hours later, the rainfall undulated, quicksilver drapes of it rippling with each gust. A cannon boom of thunder rattled the walls. In her arms, Miles cried out. Caridad banged the swollen door shut and lugged him into the yellow-walled bedroom, where she found Gray near the closet, fingering the sleeve of her new blouse—a seashell-printed fabric—a birthday gift from her mother.
Caridad coughed. He dropped the sleeve and spun to face her.
“It’s not letting up,” she said.
“Are you going to work?” Gray winked at Miles, who thrust dimpled arms out to him.
Caridad kissed the baby’s cheek and handed him to Gray. “I have to.” She kneaded the small of her back. At fourteen months, Miles spoke a few words, and he crawled about in a swift and sure way like a windup toy, but he was a late walker—he’d so far shown little interest in taking his first steps.
“Bike.” Miles jabbed a finger at the door. “Bike!” Most Saturdays, Gray strapped Miles into the baby seat affixed to his ten-speed, and they’d ride to the park while Caridad worked.
“Not today, honey boy,” he told Miles. “It’s wet outside. Let’s play in your little house instead.” Gray had found a large cardboard box in a Dumpster, and he’d covered the outside of it with blue contact paper. He’d cut a door and windows to make a playhouse for Miles. Gray was nimble enough to crawl into it with him. But when Caridad crouched within its corrugated walls, the tight space constricted her, tightening her lungs and filling her ears with pressure.
Miles squinted, his mouth pursed. Then he bobbed his head, saying, “’Kay.” Gray swung him up onto his shoulders, and Miles shrieked with laughter.
Caridad reached to stroke Gray’s jawline, her fingertips grazing stubble. Working outdoors had sun-bleached Gray’s hair, infusing his cheeks and the small wedge of his nose with the color of a ripened apricot. His eyes had also darkened, now a shade closer to maple syrup than honey. “Are you growing a beard?” she asked.
He looked away. “Just forgot to shave.”
“I like you with a beard.”
Gray withdrew from her touch and galloped toward the back room, neighing as Miles tugged on tufts of his hair like reins.
Caridad gazed about the bedroom, taking in the daffodil-colored walls. The bed was still a tumble. Gray’s mother, a saleswoman at Sears, used her employee discount to purchase its indigo comforter. This now formed a cozy hillock in the center of the bed, along with a smaller turquoise blanket belonging to Miles. Though a crib stood in one corner of the room, Miles usually slept with Gray and Caridad. He’d doze off on his own, but near midnight he’d awaken, whimpering until Gray or Caridad roused to change him and bring him to their bed. Near the bed a three-legged stool served as her nightstand, holding her oil lamp and a borrowed novel, Nabokov’s Lolita, spine up and splayed open where she’d left off reading it the night before. The upside-down crate on Gray’s side contained a notebook, a few pens, and a thick stack of magazines—Vogue, Cosmopolitan, Glamour.
In another corner of the room stood a wood-burning stove installed by the Loudermilks, their landlords who’d touted this as an attraction instead of admitting that the house had no heating system. “Your very own wood-burning stove,” Rusty Loudermilk had said when he and his wife first led Gray and Caridad through the rental. He’d pointed at the wrought-iron contraption as if it were a valuable sculpture. “Who else,” asked his wife Helga, “do you know who has such a thing?” Gray and Caridad had exchanged puzzled looks. In winter, they struggled to keep wood on hand for stoking its flames, though the Loudermilks provided planks torn from the barn they were dismantling in the side yard, and the stove took time to heat a room as large as this. But when it glowed like a crucible in the dark, the grate was as magnificent as a roaring dragon’s maw.
The rental wasn’t built as a dwelling, they’d learned after signing the lease nearly two years ago. It had been a citrus orchard office. Intended for seasonal occupancy, the structure lacked air conditioning as well as heating. There were, though, phone jacks in every room, even the bathroom. “You can plug in a phone wherever you want,” Rusty bragged. “You can even make a call in the bathtub.” The phone jacks had seemed more a plus than the wood-burning stove. The last house they’d rented, the yellow cottage next door to Ernie’s place, had only one jack—not that this was the reason they’d hurriedly moved out when Caridad quit school. “Who else,” added Helga, “do you know who has phone jacks in every room?” Caridad and Gray traded another glance.
Over time, the sunless living room with its dark paneled walls depressed Caridad, despite the olive-green pleather sofa they’d purchased with Gray’s mother’s store discount, so they spent most of their time in the kitchen or in the spacious bedroom. The brick-colored linoleum floors accumulated dirt from the woodpile no matter how often they swept. To save money, they had a wall-mounted phone installed in the kitchen with a short cord that tethered callers near the sink. They never used the many phone jacks.
Soon after Caridad and Gray moved in, the Loudermilks began chopping down the orange trees while dismantling the barn. Since it was a large orchard and only the two of them worked at it, this took time. Still, they’d managed to remove more than half the trees. After earning rent on the place to raise money for building, the Loudermilks planned to raze the orchard office, to replace it with a Swiss chalet–style horror. Almost every weekend, the robust couple worked on the property, arriving early with their daughter Bettina, a blond kindergartener with skin so lucent that her veins were visible, her complexion blue-tinged like skim milk. Silent Bettina wafted about like a vapor, spooking Caridad when she’d appear nearby, a sudden glowing apparition. Today’s rain meant there would be no Loudermilks, no ghost child sightings. Bad weather would keep them away.
Caridad surveyed the bedroom again, deciding whether or not to tidy up before preparing for her shift at the bookstore. Miles’s and Gray’s voices echoed from the back room. Her gaze returned to the tangled nest of bedding, her soft pillow beckoning to her, near the novel that she was now rereading. Days ago, Caridad had devoured the book in great greedy gulps, and at the last page, she regretted not lingering over the dazzling prose. “Love at first sight,” she murmured to herself, quoting Nabokov, “at last sight, at ever and ever sight.” As she pored over it again, Caridad savored its intricacies of language, deft turns of plot, the ebb and flow of sympathy and revulsion for Humbert Humbert. This read, a deeper vein of feeling opened in Caridad for orphaned Lolita, who sobbed herself to sleep each night of that first North American odyssey.
Laughter rang from the next room. Caridad would crawl back into bed with the book, but first, she stepped to the closet, grit rasping the soles of her feet. She clutched the makeshift curtains—two orange batik bedspreads printed with headdress-wearing elephants—and yanked them shut, obscuring the rack of clothing, the seashell blouse. “No Loudermilks,” she said in a low voice, “and no Leslie. Please.” The decorative elephants trembled in her wake, the tusked beasts still quivering when she climbed back into bed.
How was it that Gray, an imaginative man of depth and complexity, became such a dull cliché of a woman? With face caked in foundation cream, lips waxy with color, and synthetic hair styled in yesteryear’s flippy ’do, Leslie was far more caricature than character, her breathy falsetto more Minnie Mouse than Marilyn Monroe. And those outfits! High heels, pantyhose, skirts, gauzy scarves, and ruffle-trimmed blouses spritzed with perfume—all this to wear in a converted orchard office with a wood-burning stove and an ever-gritty floor?
“Seriously,” Caridad would say, “why bother?” She’d point at her own long hair knotted into a messy bun, her T-shirt and cutoffs. “It’s kind of casual around here.”
But Leslie would say, “Let’s talk about boyfriends.” And she’d pull her chair to the table and light a cigarette.
Boyfriends? Caridad and her sisters never ponied up to talk boyfriends or even husbands. Felicia would roll her eyes and Esperanza would crack up if anyone opened a conversation this way, and if the subject came up spontaneously, it would unleash a barrage of complaint, especially from Esperanza. Instead, they usually talked about other people. Who said what to whom and who was acting like an asshole and who was being a stupid martyr and who would be a total fool for getting together with that chorizo sin huevos. Human behavior fascinated them, not boyfriends or husbands specifically. Leslie, though, only wanted to discuss her make-believe romances, all involving boyfriends with forgettable one-syllable names like Bob or Joe. Every one of whom, Leslie claimed, was madly in love with her. They were all big silly dopes who just wouldn’t leave her alone.
“Why don’t you ever date someone named Iggy?” Caridad asked Leslie that Saturday night after she returned from work, the bedroom door shut with a towel wadded underneath to keep out cigarette smoke. The weather prevented a Loudermilk visit, as Caridad hoped, but Leslie appeared soon after Miles fell asleep. “That’s at least an original-sounding name.”
“Iggy? What kind of name is that?”
“Short for something,” Caridad said. “Ignatius, Ignacio—”
“Why would anyone date an Iggy?”
Hot-faced, Caridad glanced at her hands, the nails bitten so far down that her fingertips bulged into blanched bulbs.
“Besides I’m in love with Bill. He’s the sweetest thing on earth.” Leslie drew on her cigarette and exhaled, waving the blue-gray spumes toward the open door.
The rain had stopped hours ago, and the night was starless, damp, and dark. Under the cigarette smoke and Shalimar, the bittersweet breath of the vestigial citrus orchard wafted into the kitchen. Phantom fumes, thought Caridad, haunting us like persistent memories. She gulped a bitter mouthful of wine and set her tumbler on the table. “You know something, Leslie? I don’t always talk about it, but I have a husband I love.” Caridad searched Leslie’s face, fixing on her maple-colored eyes. “And you know what? I love him most when he’s just being himself.”
Leslie recoiled, as if slapped. Her fingers flew up to pat her stiff hair. “Well, I bet he loves you, too, just like Bill loves me. Did I tell you that Bill’s in construction? He gets all sweaty at work, so I have to tell him, ‘Now, go take a shower before you kiss me!’ And he’s such a big sweet goof that—”
“Stop.” Caridad raised a hand. “Just stop, stop, stop. That is not how it goes.”
Leslie’s eyes thickened, inky pupils subsuming the irises. A deeper voice sounded from the vivid gash of her mouth. “I can do better.”
Caridad shook her head. “Really, you have no idea how—”
“Let me try again,” Leslie said. “Please.”
With a smacking sound, Caridad peeled bare thighs from the dinette chair, rising to pad to the refrigerator. Her face warm and buzzing, she yanked it open to pull out a spouted carton. “We don’t have much wine left,” she said. By the time she got off work, Caridad would be quaking, shivering even on warm summer evenings like this. After her first glass of wine, she grew still and calm. “We need more.”
“I’ll go.” Leslie’s voice was again high-pitched and fluty. “If you’ll just let me . . . I mean, we can keep going, right? We can chat more—when I get back?”
A motor churned and fans whirred, issuing a chilly gust. “Chat,” Caridad said, as if pronouncing an unfamiliar word. She touched a fingertip to the refrigerator door, nudging it just enough so the suction would draw it shut.
Weekdays, Caridad looked after her niece Mimi, along with Miles. Her sister worked mornings as a medical aide in Northridge and took classes in the afternoons to become a registered nurse. The next day was Labor Day, a holiday for the nursing school, so Esperanza offered to take both children to the zoo when she finished her early shift at the hospital.
Before Esperanza arrived with Mimi that morning, Caridad hoisted Miles into his high chair and served him a bowl of yogurt sprinkled with muesli. The baby, just learning to use a spoon, spilled more food than he managed to get in his mouth. While he ate, Caridad lifted the receiver from the wall phone. She dialed a number. A sleepy voice answered, and Caridad said, “Sorry if I woke you . . . Listen, my sister’s taking Miles and Mimi to the zoo this afternoon. Want me to . . . Sure, about one?”
Within minutes, Esperanza’s car rumbled into the drive, gravel crunching under its tires. The car idled while Esperanza, dressed in aqua scrubs, bustled into the orchard office with Mimi in one arm and a duffel bag in the other. “I’m late.” She kissed Mimi and set her down in the kitchen. “I’ll see you after lunch.”
Mimi scrambled into her aunt’s arms for an embrace. Caridad lifted and spun her around the kitchen. “Bye,” Esperanza called over her shoulder.
Miles waved his goopy spoon. “Buh-bye.”
Caridad released Mimi, who approached Miles. “Eat, Miles, eat. Look,” she pointed to a dollop of yogurt that had fallen on the tray. “You missed that. Get it. With the spoon, use the spoon.” She stood by the high chair, coaching him while Caridad washed breakfast dishes.
When Miles later settled for a midmorning nap, Caridad prepared lunch with Mimi’s help. The toddler stood on a chair and rinsed grapes in the sink. She gazed out the kitchen window. “Why the sky?” Mimi asked. Almost as soon as she could speak, she began asking her aunt such questions and listening in grave silence to Caridad’s answers.
“Good question.” Caridad dredged up what she could recall from that long-ago climatology class. “The sky is cupped over us. Like this.” She took a bowl from the dish rack and inverted it on the counter. “It’s what we can see of outer space.” Caridad pointed overhead. “It’s like the ceiling.”
Mimi nodded. “Why blue?”
“It’s blue because when there aren’t too many clouds, the molecules—these little bitty bits too tiny to see—throw out more blue light from the sun than any other color. When the sun sets, the light that’s tossed out is mostly red.”
“Bitty bits?” Mimi squinted, crinkling her nose, as if straining to see molecules.
While Caridad was astounded by the depth of feeling she had for Miles, she connected more to her niece, especially in moments like this, when Mimi favored her with an intensity of attention that no one else bestowed on Caridad, attention missed like a phantom limb when her niece was away from her. Mimi would follow Caridad about, imitating her expressions and parroting her speech. With long dark curls and pink cheeks, Mimi even looked more like Caridad than Miles did. Miles was olive-skinned and flat-nosed, with such straight black hair that Caridad perceived little of herself, and no trace at all of Gray, in the baby. And while Miles would chew on their covers and crumple pages, Mimi cherished books, the stories in them. Over the months that she cared for her niece, Caridad had read Mimi many of her childhood favorites—The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and The Secret Garden, adopting what she considered a convincing burr for the moor-dwellers.
Mimi now cocked her head, still gazing out the window. “Why the sun?”
Nash, in bed beside her, reeked of the fistful of vitamins he took each morning and of sweat. The water was turned off in his bungalow apartment to correct a plumbing problem, so he couldn’t shower or flush the toilet, he’d explained to Caridad when she arrived, apologizing for the odors. She minded the odors much less than she minded the shelf of Monarch Notes near his bed. When she’d studied literature in college, Caridad had had no idea such things existed.
Nash worked as a pharmaceutical assistant in a drugstore and was taking evening classes to become a high school English teacher. Maybe he didn’t have much time to read. Naked now on his bed, Caridad click-click-clicked a fingernail over the stapled spines of his many Monarch Notes: The Sound and the Fury, Vanity Fair, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Silas Marner, Moby-Dick, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Bleak House. From examining these, Caridad learned his full name—Ignacio Quiñones. He’d printed it with the unselfconscious pride of ownership on the front of each booklet.
Nash nuzzled the back of her neck, telling her of the dream he had that night. It was much like other dreams he’d described to her. These involved Gray’s disappearance or death, events that would clear the way for him to live with Caridad. As Nash spoke, she envisioned him packing his Monarch Notes in a carton for moving into the converted orchard office.
“So his car breaks down near this off-ramp.” His breath was warm in Caridad’s ear, redolent of ascorbic acid and cod-liver oil. This scenario required little imagination of him. Their used green Fiat, bought to replace the now-extinct Impala, was a catastrophe on wheels, notorious for stalling out and stranding them all over the Valley.
“And you and Miles are at home, so he’s alone,” Nash continued. “And the car just sort of dies, so he’s all puzzled. Like, what’s happening? He rolls the window down and sticks his head all the way out. And this semi comes barreling along, right near the shoulder, and—”
Caridad turned to cup his mouth with her palm, saying, “Don’t.” Nash might think her squeamish, disturbed by the graphic details of his dream. But it was the idea of losing Gray that upset her. Such dreams offended her in the way they would if they involved her mother or sisters. “I don’t want to hear this.”
Nash clasped her hand, placed it over his bare chest. “I hate that we can’t be together because of him. I can’t stand how selfish he is, how he treats you.” A knot of bronze skin between his eyebrows bulged when he knitted these. His deep-set eyes darkened. Nash would no doubt make a dedicated and conscientious high school teacher, the type to volunteer at athletic events, chaperone dances, and moderate extracurricular clubs. And he would be dumbfounded, deeply wounded by the betrayals—tacks on his seat, tires punctured, even accusations of sexual advances—that would surely assail him.
Caridad had no clue why Nash thought Gray mistreated her or that he was selfish. Though distracted, even absent-minded, Gray, who did more than his share of the childcare and housekeeping on top of working full time, was the opposite of selfish. Caridad hadn’t said much about Gray to Nash, apart from mentioning that he had a few troubling habits. At thirty, Nash was eight years older than Caridad and three years older than Gray, yet he still clung to simple convictions—like the belief that couples who were intimate were somehow obliged to plan a future together and that husbands whose wives were unfaithful must be so cruel that they deserved not only cuckolding but also dismemberment and death.
“Can we not talk about this?” Caridad glanced again at the Monarch Notes. The authors should publish another set, a few handy booklets to explain more complicated relationships for people like Nash.
The phone on the nightstand rang, and he snatched up the receiver. “Hello? . . . Hey, man,” he said. “What’s up?”
So as not to eavesdrop on his conversation, Caridad reached for the radio that had been playing softly on the shelf beneath the Monarch Notes. She turned the dial, raising the volume a notch for “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.”
Nash cupped the receiver. “Shush. Turn that off. He’s calling from the station.”
Caridad narrowed eyes at him before flicking the dial. She flashed on Seth’s outburst years ago in his car. What was it with these two and the radio? In this case, Nash bragged about having friends on the police force, cops who played handball with him. Did he think that his officer friend would send out a squad car and a drug-sniffing dog because he’d heard rock music playing in the background?
Gray never shushed her.
Caridad rose out of bed and plucked her panties from the floor, wondering if the butterfly silhouetted on Monarch Notes signified freedom from thinking too hard about things. She dressed, slipped on one sandal and reached under the bed for the other.
Nash hung up the phone. “Sorry about that.”
She shrugged.
He stood and stepped into his boxers.
Where was that other sandal? Caridad lifted the quilt. Her fingers scrabbled over the beige shag carpet, feeling for the leather straps. Her fingertips grazed a slick surface. She crouched beside the bed and peered under. A Polaroid photograph. Caridad palmed the picture, tilted it toward the light to see the image of a girl’s bare torso: thin shoulders, waifish neck, and no more of a face than its pointy chin. The girl’s breasts were pink-tipped buds like those of the pubescent nymphets, the girleens that Humbert Humbert lusted after in Lolita. Caridad’s scalp tightened, an ocean pounding the shore in her head.
“What’ve you got there?” Nash said, now pulling on pants.
“A picture.” Dizzy with dread, she set one hand on the floor to brace herself and lifted the photo with the other.
“Dana.”
“What?”
“That’s Dana,” he said. “I told you about Dana.”
Weeks ago, Nash mentioned that his last long-term relationship ended a year ago when his then-girlfriend Dana completed dental hygienist school, found a job, and moved into her own place. “The woman you lived with,” Caridad said, “is this girl? She looks twelve.”
“Fourteen.”
“Fourteen?”
“She was around fourteen when she moved in.”
Hot-faced, she gawked at Nash. He’d lent her Nabokov’s book, said it was his favorite.
“I know it sounds off,” he said, “but she was a handful for her parents. I’m talking really wild—drinking, drugs, shoplifting, you name it.” Nash shrugged on his shirt, fastened it with slow care, one button after another. “I was tutoring her to bring up her grades, and—I don’t know—she just sort of took to me. She listened, you know, cooperated and all that.”
“Cooperated?”
He waved this off. “You know what I mean. Anyways . . . we sort of fell in love, you know, and her folks were, like, great, you handle her, so she moved in with me.”
Caridad shook her head as if to dislodge insects in it. “You fell in love?”
“Hey,” he said, searching her face. “It was nothing like what we have.”
“You think I’m jealous? You think that’s the problem?”
“Maybe you don’t get it, then. Yeah, okay. On the surface, it looks bad. It’s not exactly something I’d put on a résumé, especially not for a teaching job, but it’s also not anything I would ever deny. Look, her parents didn’t want her, so for Dana, it was me or the street. And, hey, I got that kid through high school. I put her through technical college. I even helped her find an apartment, gave her money for first and last.” Nash’s eyes shone, his face set in an aggrieved expression.
Caridad scanned that row of narrow red spines, the staples glinting in them, searching these for notes on Lolita. Such notes should have explained the novel for him, telling how it implicates instead of rationalizing the narrator’s obsession. Nash really did need help with his reading comprehension skills. Or else . . . she could be wrong. That idea about Monarch Notes for people who couldn’t understand complicated things—maybe she was the one who needed them. “The other woman,” she said, “the one you lived with before Dana, how old was she?”
Nash turned away, jammed on his loafers. “I’m not telling you.”
Caridad set the photo on his bed. “Why did you leave out her face?”
Nash released an exasperated breath. He pointed under the bookshelf. “There’s your shoe,” he said. “You left your purse in the kitchen. I guess you won’t want to leave anything behind.”
She shook her head and slipped on the sandal without looking up.
Minutes later, Caridad pulled into the driveway alongside the van owned by the metal-refinishing company that employed Gray. Dave Wong, his work partner, usually drove this home. The two of them must have taken a break or knocked off early to have a beer at the house. She slid out of the ticking car into sunshine so bright, the sky pulsed with white heat. A fresh crop of dandelions dotted the lawn, now strangled by snaky cords of crabgrass. She and Gray should pull weeds while the soil was still damp and pliant. Though the Loudermilks chopped down fruit trees and tore apart the barn, they did nothing to improve the yard.
“I’m in here,” Gray called through the open door. He stood in the living room, still wearing his navy painter’s pants and light blue T-shirt with its red-and-white company logo.
“Where’s Dave?” Caridad asked
“Sick. I had to take him home.”
“Sick sick or sick?”
“Sick.” Gray mimed tipping a bottle to his lips.
Caridad nodded, catching a whiff of her skin—traces of vitamins, Nash’s hair oil, and, unmistakably, the sweaty musk of sex. “Hmm,” she said. “That’s not good.”
Gray shook his head. Both he and Caridad worried that Dave’s drinking would jeopardize the job for Gray more quickly than he would manage on his own through distractibility and a slapdash approach to physical work. “I called in, though, said he had food poisoning. Supervisor told me to drive him home and keep the truck overnight.”
“Whew! It’s hotter than blazes,” she said. “I need a shower.”
“Wait,” Gray said. “I have a surprise for you.”
Caridad shrank back. Though it had been months since he’d touched her, she feared he’d embrace her. Instead Gray stepped aside to reveal a TV tray laden with crackers, cubes of cheese, and slices of apple. “Voilà!” he said. “I even have two bottles of Cold Duck chilling.”
“Champagne!” Caridad’s mouth flooded. “But what are we celebrating?”
“This.” Gray handed her a thin bound volume that he pulled from the back waistband of his pants. “Check out the table of contents.”
A monochromatic photo of a hand holding a rusted bucket was displayed on the cover, and below that image appeared the words Points and Lines. It was an issue of the university’s literary journal. She opened it and flipped to the table of contents. She was stunned to find her name listed and across from that the title of a poem she’d written, “The Bluest Clown.” It was a series of verses about Mimi drifting off to sleep—her moist brow, the translucency of her fluttering eyelids, the way she puckered and released her coral lips as if suckling while she slept. Then the poem shifted, describing the toddler being drawn, even seduced into the gaudy circus of her unconscious by a sky-colored fool.
“But how . . . ?” Caridad had been distressed by the downturn the poem had taken, the easy way it veered toward darkness, that leering buffoon in an azure fright wig. Though written for Mimi, it was something Caridad could never read to her niece, not even when she was grown—a love lyric that devolved into a dystopian lament. “I know I threw this away.”
Gray nodded, beaming. “I found it in the trash, typed it up, and sent it in.”
“Why can’t you ever leave trash alone?”
His face folded. “Aren’t you happy it’s published?” Gray snatched the journal, opened it to her poem. “Look, look at this. First place,” he read. “Your poem won first place, best in the magazine. Isn’t that great?”
“I guess.” Though it was kind of nice, Caridad didn’t ever want to read the thing again. Her face heated up just thinking of it. “I wasn’t done with it.”
“You threw it away.” Gray pulled out his billfold and extracted a folded slip of pale green paper. “And here, look at this.” It was a check for fifty dollars. “It’s your prize money. Look at the date. It was written months ago, when the poem was first accepted. I’ve been waiting all this time to surprise you with this. I can’t believe you’re not thrilled.”
“It is a surprise.” Caridad smiled, pleasure rising like a bright balloon in her. “A poem of mine—published. The money’s nice, too.”
“You bet it is,” Gray said. “We should celebrate.”
“I’ll just have a quick shower, change—”
“Oh, and I called Esperanza.” While Gray uncorked and poured the champagne, he told Caridad that he’d asked her sister to keep Miles overnight and to bring him in the morning with Mimi. “So, maybe . . . we can go out tonight.”
Caridad paused in the doorway, staring down at that weirdly patterned linoleum, each square imprinted with a mandala design comprised of pinprick-sized indentations, each of which trapped dust and grit. Under that fine sifting and in the shadowy room, the flooring was oxblood—not brick red, the same shade as the wall hanging she’d constructed for her studio art class. Oxblood—she envisioned a great beast lowing, a blade glinting at its muscle-corded throat. “I guess we could.”
“Just an idea. We’ll see what we feel like later.”
Caridad shuffled toward the bathroom. The scraping of her sandals on the linoleum sounded like well-worn sandpaper on splintered wood.
Early on, the night promised to be hard to remember and worse to forget, constituting what Nabokov called “the insolent logic of nightmare” even before molecules began casting about more red light than blue. After two shared bottles of champagne, followed by tumblers of boxed Chablis, impressions and images for Caridad were already fragmenting into kaleidoscopic shards—both remembered and imagined—while they were still at home. By the time Caridad rested her forehead against the cool mirror hours later in the restroom at Dante’s, she had trouble arranging these mosaic pieces in a recognizable pattern before rejoining the blur of faces in the dark and noisy club.
Though she couldn’t say when Leslie first appeared that evening, Caridad envisioned her at the dining table, deep in a monologue about her boyfriends. Caridad had interrupted this by flouncing off to the bedroom. She’d returned with a stack of fashion magazines that she’d slapped on the tabletop. “Think I could be a model?” Caridad asked, flipping through the pages and pointing at the hollow-cheeked images. “I could be her or her or her.”
Leslie shook her head.
“But I’m pretty, aren’t I?” Caridad’s voice sounded petulant, grating in own ears. “I can be like that, can’t I?”
“You’re too fleshy to model,” Leslie said, “too much bust and hip. And, honey, you’re too old to start now.” Then Leslie steered the conversation back to boyfriends, her crimson lips flashing, the blouse with seashells tucked into a blue skirt of Caridad’s.
Later, they’d climbed into the car and driven out—god knows how—to the nightclub, but Caridad had no recollection of this. What else? What else? Shoes—something about shoes. Caridad’s feet were bare and sticky on the damp floor of the restroom. She cupped a hand over her mouth, heartbroken that she’d lost her shoes. Another fragment flashed: Leslie, in a shadowy corner booth with a boozy man in a bowling shirt. The drunk had accosted Caridad first, weaving before her with a lit cigarette in one hand, the tip flickering like a firefly in the dim bar. He’d asked to be introduced to her friend.
When she hesitated, he winked. “I get it. I know the score, see.”
Now Caridad squeezed her eyes shut. She’d left the two of them in the booth—gobbling at each other like greedy fish. Caridad wheeled away from the mirror, yanked the stall door open, and crouched before the toilet. She heaved until her stomach churned up no more than bile, her throat raw as a gash.
The outer door banged open, and music and laughter gusted in, followed by the hollow pock-pock-pock of heels.
Leslie? Caridad flushed the toilet, wiped her mouth, and rose to exit the stall.
Before her stood a large woman, a brassy blond monument in a fringed green shift, her small eyes outlined in kohl, her bowed lips tinted cherry red. A vast sequined bag, shimmery as a mermaid’s tail, dangled from one meaty shoulder. “Sweetie, you okay?” she asked, her voice deep.
“My husband . . .”
“Your husband out there?” The big gal raised a penciled-in eyebrow. “You want me to get your husband for you?”
Caridad shook her head. “I need to, I just . . .”
“What, honey? You been sick?” the blond asked. “Can I get you anything?”
“Phone? I need to call someone.”
“There’s a pay phone just outside the door there. You got change?”
Lips quirking, Caridad shrugged. No shoes. No purse.
The blond opened her handbag and fished out a worn leather pouch. “I got some.”
Caridad held out her palm, and the woman dropped coins into it.
The blond behemoth smiled, baring a row of small teeth. “Splash some water on your face, darling. Makes a world of difference. Trust me, it does.” She sidestepped Caridad and slipped into the stall, graceful despite her girth. “Gum, sweetie?” she called out. “I may have a stick or two in my bag.”
No more than ten minutes, he’d promised. Caridad said she’d wait outside, so she pushed through the crowded bar. Blinkered by hanks of sodden hair, she fixed her gaze on the glowing exit sign. She soon heaved the door open and stepped out. After the rain, the street was slick as vinyl. Rainbow-ringed puddles glimmered under the amber glow of streetlights. Dampness sharpened the stench of trash bins nearby, along with the acrid odor of urine. “I shall be dumped where the weed decays,” lamented Humbert Humbert. “And the rest is rust and stardust.” Footsteps and voices faded in and out, tires hissed past. No one bothered Caridad as she waited on the damp and warm pavement, not far from the club’s red-lacquered door.
After rinsing her mouth and hair, Caridad had glimpsed her face in the restroom mirror. Swollen and mascara-smeared, her eyes stood out against her ashen face as if she’d again been slugged. A wine stain, dark as blood, spattered the front of her skirt. Her hair, frizzed by moisture, now cast an umbra on the pavement in the shape of an explosion. “Our imagination flies—we are its shadow on the earth,” she said aloud, quoting Nabokov. A trio of emaciated women, miniskirted and tottering on stiletto heels, glanced at her and looked away as they hurried past. A car rolled near, its tires misting her bare legs. The driver’s side window scrolled down. “I got here as soon as I could,” Nash said. He took in her smudged eyes and stained skirt, and his coppery face tightened. “Damn, what did he do to you?”
Caridad picked her way to the passenger side, and Nash reached to push open the door. She slid in.
“Where are your shoes?”
Her chin wobbled. She clamped her jaw, but a thick tear rolled down her nose to plop on her bare thigh. She rubbed it away and drew in a shuddery breath.
Nash jutted a thumb at the red door. “Is he still in there?”
“Sort of, but not really . . .”
“I can’t stand to see you like this. I swear to god, I can’t.” He swung the car in an arc and nosed it into a parking space facing the club’s entrance. Then he released the trunk latch and opened his door. He bounded behind the car, and muffled thumps sounded from the trunk before he slammed it shut. Nash returned to the car bearing a tire iron and a wadded sweatshirt that he tossed to her. “Put this on.”
Caridad nested the sweatshirt in her lap, stroking it like a pet rabbit.
Nash ran a hand along the tire iron. “When he comes out, boy, I tell you.” He released a low whistle. “He’s not going to know—no, sir—not going to know what hit him.” Nash stared at the red door, his face knotted like a fist. He’d examined their photos mounted with magnets on their refrigerator, taking measure of Gray in these. Now Nash seemed sure he would know Caridad’s husband as soon as he stepped out of the club.
“Just take me home,” she said. “Please.”
“Not yet.”
Wine and weariness threatened to flatten her. Caridad wadded the sweatshirt against the car window and leaned on it. Nash could watch that chipped red door all night and he would never recognize Gray, bewigged and costumed as Leslie. Caridad’s eyes burned, her eyelids fluttered shut. Another image flashed: Miles—his mouth gaping in confusion, his arms outstretched, windmilling as he fell backward into a vortex, a deep and churning column of smoky shadows. Caridad lunged to catch him, jerking with such force that she banged a knee on the glove box.
Nash turned to her. “You okay?”
Alert now, Caridad raised her head. “Look,” she said in a low voice. “Take me home now, or I’m getting out. I’ll walk.”
Nash tossed the tire iron on the backseat and then churned the engine. The car surged over the drive, and Caridad again thought of Miles—and Mimi. Why the sun? Why the sky? She gazed at Nash’s sharp profile. Why this guy? Or that? Caridad shifted in the seat so she was sitting upright. She flexed her arms as if bracing to absorb the weight of both children. Then she glanced back at the nightclub’s entrance, the battered red door that remained shut.