Gerard Hochner’s eyes glimmered, his cheeks flamed. His mouth was a blur, his lips barely keeping pace with the rapid flow of his speech. Angry Young Man, Caridad called him privately, AYM, for short. She’d taken Victorian literature with him in the fall semester, so she was used to his outbursts, though they’d alarmed her at first. While angry and male, Gerard was no younger than Caridad, but his penchant for animated argument made him seem adolescent, even childish to her. She imagined herself hauling Gerard out of his seat and removing him to a quiet place until he grew calm. Though she’d never struck Miles, Caridad now pictured herself turning Angry Young Man over her knee to smack the flat bottom of his saggy jeans.
She glanced at the wall clock mounted over the shelves of books written by faculty members at the university where, after finishing her undergraduate studies with the help of summer coursework, she now worked toward a master of arts degree in English literature. The room was cramped and windowless. An oblong table and black vinyl chairs took up so much space that students had to squeeze in, jostling past one another to claim seats. According to the clock’s sallow face, the seminar would end in ten minutes, yet Angry Young Man seemed nowhere near to winding up. Directly across the table from Gerard, the professor, a mild man with sandy hair and wire-rimmed glasses, tilted his chair back against the wall, his eyes half closed and small puffy hands folded over his vast stomach.
Caridad swallowed a yawn. After she decorated the date—January 24, 1983—at the top of her notes with vines, leaves, and blossoms, her gaze flitted about the classroom, alighting like a winged insect on the others seated around the scarred table, one by one. To the right of Angry Young Man was Hilda Swan, an angular blond known for vague and baffling utterances. Next to Hilda perched Linda Burke, a plump brunette in her fifties who’d returned to college after her children were grown. Beside Linda, Lance Chu hunkered over his notes. Lance, an Asian studies scholar, rarely spoke, though he made much racket unwrapping granola bars at the start of each session. Appreciative of self-imposed silence, Caridad claimed a seat close to Lance’s. To her right was the professor, followed by the high school teachers, a trio of exhausted-looking and apologetic women who were taking the seminar for continuing education credit. Near the teachers—whom he treated in a courtly manner that amused them—sat Harrison McCann, a former actor in his late thirties, a lantern-jawed man with light brown hair and twinkling turquoise eyes. McCann, as Caridad thought of him, usually performed the role of enforcer, settling questions of authority in the sleepy professor’s favor with his deep voice.
“So it’s no wonder the book was critically condemned and banned,” AYM’s tone pitched toward crescendo, filling Caridad with hope that his diatribe would soon end. “What the character does to resolve her conflict is unconscionable, even immoral. Never mind her infidelity—as a mother of young children, she has no right to take her life.”
They were discussing The Awakening by Kate Chopin, a book that reignited Caridad’s passion for novels, the ardor that had dimmed while she recovered from the car accident. Though Caridad’s policy was to tune out Gerard Hochner, his criticism of Edna Pontellier offended her in the way it would if he’d insulted her sisters.
“So,” the professor said, “a woman with children forfeits choices over her own life?”
Gerard dipped his head in a decisive way. “Certain choices, yes.”
McCann wore a pensive look on his jut-jawed face. Linda Burke smiled and nodded at Gerard in an encouraging way. Two of the schoolteachers were slyly grading papers in their laps. The third was dozing, though her book was propped to hide her face.
Caridad drew breath to speak, but Lance beat her to it, ending weeks of elective muteness to say, “That is such bullshit.”
Gerard drove his fingers through his hair. He blinked rapidly, his lashes fluttering like frantic moths. “Bullshit? Bullshit? How is it bullshit to denounce a woman for deserting her children, leaving them to deal with the fact that she chose death over them?” Spittle misted the dull tabletop.
Caridad wondered if Gerard’s mother had been neglectful, absent, or even suicidal. Could this be the reason for his many outbursts? She reconsidered what she’d planned to say, which would have only echoed Lance’s observation. Instead, she asked, “What about men?” She thought of her father who’d vanished before she was born. “Shouldn’t men who have children also forfeit the right to abandon them?”
Angry Young Man sank back in his seat, shaking his head. “Men are different,” he said. “Mothers hold the key to the child’s sense of self.”
Caridad cocked her head, squinted at him.
“Especially back then,” he said, “in Chopin’s time—she should have known better than to write such a book, as if it’s okay for a mother of two little kids to up and drown herself, just because she can’t do whatever she feels like doing, just because society’s a little strict. Again and again in the novel, she makes bad decisions.”
Caridad was tired of this complaint about fictional characters. It often issued from the most unsophisticated readers. “Would we have this novel,” she said, “would we have any novels if characters always made good choices?”
“That’s right,” Lance said. “What kind of story would that be? She was a good wife and a good mother. The end.” He flipped through the pages. “What if she were just like the other women on Grand Isle?” Lance began reading a passage: “They were women who idolized their children, worshipped their husbands, and esteemed it a holy privilege to efface themselves as individuals and grow wings as ministering angels.” He slapped the book shut. “Would we be at all interested in a story about such women—women who aren’t even interested in themselves?”
“Okay, I know it wasn’t easy for women back then,” Gerard said, “but men had it tough, too. I mean, come on, what was so bad about her husband in the first place?”
McCann cleared his throat. “In fact, Léonce allows her a good deal of freedom and—”
“Allows her?” Lance said.
Papers rattled in the two schoolteachers’ laps, and the third awakened with a gasp. Hilda Swan tensed and leaned forward, preparing to speak.
“Look,” Gerard said, “I’m not saying anything antifeminist. In fact, I’m saying women are far too important. Mothers are too crucial to put their own desires before the welfare of their children.”
Linda Burke took up her pen, scribbled in her notebook.
Lance snorted. The schoolteacher who had been napping now shook her head and raised a hand before saying, “I’m sorry but I have to disagree—”
“Now, wait a minute.” McCann spread his thick fingers as if to ward off dissent in a physical way. “Gerard might have a point here.”
“Are you kidding me?” Having broken his silence, Lance appeared eager to make up for lost time.
Hilda nodded as if in self-agreement. “On a metaphysical level,” she said in her high, fluty voice, “especially from a Buddhist point of view, Edna’s suicide can be seen as an attempt to grasp the essence of her being—an act of heroism.” Hilda opened her book to a marked page. “In fact, Edna Pontellier says this outright: ‘I would give up the unessential; I would give my money, I would give my life for my children; but I wouldn’t give myself.’”
Caridad drew back, astonished that this made sense.
With Hilda’s unexpected coherence, sparks ignited, flames caught, and the discussion combusted into a bonfire of conflict. Gerard ridiculed Hilda’s statement, another schoolteacher begged his pardon before repudiating his ridicule, Harrison said he respected her opinion but they would just have to agree to disagree on this, Linda Burke oohed, and Lance stated that anyone who wanted to commit suicide—regardless of race, class, religion, or gender—should have the right to do so. A contented smile bloomed on the professor’s face. Caridad shifted in her seat to relieve pressure on her spine and bumped the rubber-tipped cane that hooked on the back of her chair. It was a heavy length of dark wood, a cumbersome, geriatric-looking thing that she needed to negotiate the vast commuter college on foot. She snatched at it. But the cane swayed out of reach and clattered to the floor, startling the others into silence.
In the kitchen of her three-bedroom rental in Reseda, Caridad sautéed celery, onions, and bell peppers for jambalaya. Chicken breasts cooled in the lukewarm broth she would later reheat to boil the rice. The apartment filled with a pungent aroma that would please Miles when he arrived home with Leslie. Jambalaya was his favorite meal, so she made it often. On weekdays when Caridad had afternoon seminars, Esperanza would pick up Miles and Mimi from school and bring them to Mama’s, where Leslie would later collect Miles after finishing work at the same Encino law office that handled Caridad’s workers’ compensation case. Who’d have thought that the scaly Philip T. Jefferson, Esquire, would wind up being the one to help her more than anyone else after the accident?
Phil, as she now called him, did know a thing or two about customer service, and as she’d expected, he was a fierce litigator. Just over two and a half years ago, he’d gotten her a settlement from Periwinkle Books that enabled her to finish her bachelor’s degree and pursue graduate education. Phil had argued that Caridad, due to on-the-job injuries, could no longer perform the physical work of bookstore management and so she had to retrain for a career in academia. On top of this, Phil, after meeting Leslie, had been intrigued by her gender reassignment. He admired the courage and determination this took, so when his receptionist retired, Phil hired Leslie to replace her.
The phone rang just as Caridad added minced garlic to the sauté. She turned off the burner, steeling herself for another call from Vera, who, like a telemarketer, used to phone near suppertime. But the regional manager hadn’t called since Caridad had mentioned this to Phil. Before then, Vera had phoned sporadically to ask how she was doing since the accident. Though not liable for damages covered by the other driver’s insurance, Periwinkle Books was responsible for workers’ compensation. Caridad’s tuition, books, and transportation to and from the university, as well as a monthly check for living expenses, were paid by the bookstore’s parent company, a conglomeration of specialty and department stores. “Corporate,” as Vera called it, no doubt encouraged her to uncover reasons for disqualifying Caridad from receiving benefits.
The first time Vera phoned, Caridad had been caught off guard, as if given a pop quiz for which she hadn’t prepared. When Vera asked how she was, Caridad had just said, “Not that good.” The next time, she had her medical report ready by the phone.
“I have hyperreflexia in the patellar tendon,” she’d told Vera, “and cervical spine flexion at sixty degrees, when fifty is normal. I’ve lost close to around sixty percent of my strength in both hands. Overall, I’ve had loss of motion, intense muscle spasms, and very limited movement of my neck with pain. I also have headaches and—”
“I just called to see how you’re doing. I don’t want to take up your time.”
“Wait, what about my x-rays? I haven’t even gotten to the vertebrae.”
“Okay, bye now,” Vera had said before hanging up. Still, she’d called again and again, as if she expected someone else to answer the phone and let slip that Caridad was off playing tennis professionally or teaching high-impact aerobics.
Caridad wiped her hands on a dish towel and hurried to the living room to answer the phone. “Hello?” she said into the mouthpiece, her tone more confrontational than friendly.
“Good evening, I’m calling for Caridad Kessler.” The deep masculine voice called to mind a radio or television announcer.
Suspecting a telemarketer, Caridad kept quiet, her hand hovering over the switch hook.
“Hello?” The voice wavered. “Is anyone there?”
“Who is this?” Perhaps Vera had enlisted another person to make her snooping calls. Caridad flipped open the medical report and cleared her throat.
“This is Harrison.”
“Harrison?”
“Harrison McCann—from Turn-of-the-Century U.S. Lit.”
How had she failed to connect his name to that distinctive voice? “Yes, of course, how are you?”
“I am well. Thank you.” His tone was again confident, tracking smoothly like a record after a skip. “I got your number from Hilda Swan. I hope that’s okay.”
“Sure.” Caridad closed her medical file and searched around for her book bag, expecting him to ask about her seminar notes.
“I’m calling to invite you to have dinner with me on Saturday night.”
“Oh?” Caridad’s heart plunged. Harrison McCann? Caridad scanned her memory for flirtatious comments he might have made to indicate interest in her, but what came to mind was the first day of the seminar. During introductions, McCann had barked at Lance for opening a granola bar while he was explaining his decision to give up acting for academia. She should say, “No! Absolutely not!” Caridad glimpsed her cane, hooked to the back of a dinette chair like the petrified neck of an ebony swan with a mean little head. She gripped the phone with both hands. This was the kind of person she now attracted? A bluff and blustery failed actor? “Listen, I’m in the middle of something right now. Can I call you back?”
Harrison gave her his number. She jotted it down on the file sleeve at hand. Then he wished her a good evening, and they hung up. Caridad limped back to the kitchen and relit the burner under the skillet, adding tomatoes, broth, rice, and spices to the sautéed garlic, peppers, and onions, which had gone a bit soft. Even so, her eyes stung as if the onion were freshly chopped. She stirred the vegetable broth and shifted her weight from one leg to the other to alleviate pressure in her hips and lower back, a throbbing sensation as regular as a pulse beat.
During dinner, Miles chattered about the pet rabbit a classmate had brought to school and told Caridad and Leslie about a fire-safety lesson. “Stop, drop, and roll.” Miles ate his favorite meal with gusto, but Leslie raked the mound of rice and chicken from one side of her plate to the other before saying she might save it to take for lunch the next day. After the dishes were washed, they played a few hands of Uno, and Leslie, still preoccupied, had to be reminded to take her turn. When Miles was in bed, Caridad asked Leslie if she might want to watch a rerun of Columbo with her. Leslie flushed and shook her head.
“What’s going on?” Caridad asked.
“Something strange happened at work.” Over time, Leslie had given up the hyper-girly mannerisms and the high-pitched voice that irritated Caridad. She had grown her hair out, a thick curly mane. She no longer wore the stiff wig nor plastered her face with makeup. As Caridad had predicted years ago when gathering that hank of hair into a ponytail, Gray ultimately did make a pretty girl. Apart from becoming more natural looking, after her surgery, Leslie had transformed from a man intent on passing as a woman into a human being who happened to be a woman, someone Caridad liked and trusted. More than roommates, or even friends, she and Leslie now forged a close bond, sharing responsibility for Miles in much the same way as they had when Leslie was Gray.
“What was it?”
Leslie shrugged and gave Caridad a shy smile. “Phil asked me to go to Florida with him for his brother’s wedding.”
Caridad drew a sharp breath. Leslie sometimes lunched with Phil, and once in a while, they went to foreign films together. But such an invitation crossed professional boundaries. “Tell him no,” she said. “Tell him it’s a mistake to get involved with the person you work for. If you want, I’ll talk to him for you. He should know better than—”
“I’m tired, and I’ve got a headache.” Leslie pinched the bridge of her nose. “I’m going to bed.” She made her way to her room and clicked the door shut behind her.
Alone in the living room, Caridad gathered up the Uno cards and replaced them in their box. She turned on the television. Columbo had been preempted by a basketball game going into overtime. Caridad changed the channel to a situation comedy with a hectoring laugh track. She flipped to another channel, then another. More and more rollicking hilarity sounded from the set. She snapped it off. Caridad approached the door to Leslie’s room to peer under the door for a strand of light. There was none. She slunk into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator to eat a few spoonfuls of jambalaya, but the lukewarm rice made her queasy, so she put it away and wandered back into the living room. She pawed through her book bag for Chopin’s novel, planning to review the passages she’d quote in her seminar paper.
She sank into an armchair and opened the book, turning pages until an underlined paragraph caught her eye: “The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clearing, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in the abysses of solitude; to lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation. The voice of the sea speaks to the soul. The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace.” In the margin, Caridad had written Tempting. She set the book down and wrapped arms around herself. What was it like to succumb to the voice of the sea? Had it been like falling into a dreamless sleep? Was it the end of pain? Caridad stretched her spine to ease her cramped back. Did the sea enfold Edna like a soothing embrace, masking that last moment of utter isolation? We are born and die alone, thought Caridad.
Yet, in the meantime, everyone seemed to have someone. Felicia now dated a jazz musician, a drummer from Panama who was much older than she, mature enough to be bemused instead of offended by her outbursts. Reynaldo, after joining Alcoholics Anonymous, had been baptized into an evangelical Christian church. He was now struggling to win back Esperanza. They still lived apart, but nearly every Saturday, Reynaldo took them on family outings, and on Sundays, they went with him to church. Even Mama had started playing cards in the evenings with Mr. Nevelson, a retired neighbor. And now Leslie would go to Florida with Phil for his brother’s wedding. You don’t bring a transsexual to a family wedding unless you mean business. Caridad returned to the kitchen and poured herself a glass of water to swallow down the familiar thickness forming in her throat. Soon she stood before the telephone, dialing the number she’d penned on the file sleeve of her medical report.
Glad the women’s dressing room was empty, Caridad tugged up the back of the black one-piece swimsuit Felicia had lent her. It was long in the torso but tight at the bust and saggy around her midsection and buttocks. She supposed she could drape a towel around her sarong-style and fasten it with the locker key’s pin. She’d remove the towel just before slipping into the pool. Caridad leaned her cane against the back of the locker and hung her Levi’s on a hook to obscure the thing. She banged the metal door shut, locked it, and pinned the towel at her waist. Caridad drew breath to pull her stomach in, her lungs aching from the chlorinated steam. Girlish voices bounced off the dank walls and wet cement floor, and she froze.
Two coeds in bikinis sauntered into the changing room. How easily they moved, their hips rolling with each rhythmic step. One opened a nearby locker and the other smiled at Caridad. She nodded in return. Hot and humiliating anger flared in her chest. She blamed Harrison for this. He was the one to insist on the outing and to invite Miles to go with them to the university pool. Now he and Miles, already wearing swim trunks, were waiting for her in the pool. Harrison had no doubt gawped at these two as they emerged from the water to sashay, hips swinging, toward the changing room.
“Swimming is the best therapy for joint and back pain,” he’d said after Caridad explained about the car accident during their first date a few weeks earlier at an Italian restaurant.
Caridad had nodded. This was what her physical therapist had said. Neither seemed to consider the self-consciousness she’d feel at a public pool or the fact that she could not swim a stroke. The latter had been the reason she’d given Harrison that night for not taking advantage of the therapeutic benefits of swimming.
His turquoise eyes had bulged in disbelief. “Are you joking?” Harrison told Caridad he’d been swimming since he was three. He had been on swim teams from elementary school into high school. In fact, Harrison had first entered college on a swimming scholarship, and he’d worked as a swimming instructor and lifeguard for a few years after that. Harrison promised to teach her to swim, claiming he could teach anyone to swim.
Now, as Caridad emerged from the changing room, Harrison was already showing Miles how to float on his back. Both of them were so absorbed in the lesson that they took no notice of her until she was standing in the chilly water nearby. “Oh, hi, darling,” Harrison said.
Caridad winced. She disliked the casual way he used endearments with her.
“Look, Mommy!” Miles stood chin deep in the pool and then leaned back to resume floating. “The water holds me up.”
“I see.” Caridad smiled at him. Though Harrison often irked her, she appreciated his interest in Miles. He’d also won over Leslie, now Caridad’s litmus test for potential friends. When she explained about Leslie’s sex change, Harrison had, like Phil, expressed admiration for the courage this took. He met Leslie soon after that first date, and when they discovered shared interests in music and film, they formed a liking for one another.
When wet, Harrison’s brown hair was much thinner on top than she’d thought, and there was no way to ignore the thick matting of prematurely blanched hair—white as shredded coconut—that covered his large chest. Caridad glanced away and patted the chilly water with her palms, imagining herself gliding along the marked lanes like the swimmers nearby. Harrison manipulated her son’s arms to teach him the backstroke, and she grinned in his direction, averting her eyes from the dense polar fur that spread from the hollow of his neck, past his navel, and into the waistband of his black trunks.
One Saturday weeks later, when Miles was spending the night at Mama’s and Leslie had gone with Phil to Santa Barbara, Caridad invited Harrison over for supper. She planned to try out a ratatouille recipe. It was the type of determinedly nutritious dish that Leslie and Miles would refuse to eat. Harrison, a big man, would consume just about anything she set before him. “I eat like a horse,” he often told her.
Though she paid close attention to the recipe, she must have mismeasured the ingredients or used tomatoes that were off because the ratatouille tasted odd to her—bland and bitter. Even so, Harrison ate every bit she served and then served himself a second heaping plate. She’d also bought a bottle of red wine and even drank a glass with dinner. Harrison enjoyed wine. In the weeks they’d been going out together, Caridad ended her long abstinence, sipping a glass with him now and then.
After dinner, they watched a videotape of Das Boot together on the couch. Though the film was long and focused on the tedium and terror experienced by the crew of a cramped vessel, Caridad was mesmerized. But before it ended, Harrison drew Caridad into his arms and began kissing her deeply, his pointy tongue darting into her mouth as she peeked around his head to catch glimpses of the movie. They’d kissed many times before and even discussed becoming intimate or, as Harrison liked to say, “being committed in an intimate relationship.” While Caridad had nothing against casual sex, this was how Harrison wanted things to be: committed and intimate. He insisted they wait until they were ready for this, but Caridad suspected her limp—that awful cane!—made her unappealing to him.
Harrison switched off the television. His kisses trailed down her throat to her clavicle. His fingers fumbled unbuttoning her blouse and unhitching her bra. Then his tongue flicked over her nipples. He raised his head and looked into her eyes. “Do you think we’re ready?” His words sounded histrionic, as if uttered in a soap opera just before organ chords sounded to signal a commercial break. “Are we ready to be committed?”
Committed? The word for consigning the insane to institutions—was she ready for this? “I mean,” Harrison said, “do you feel ready to be intimate with me?”
Caridad nodded, and Harrison stunned her by gathering her in his arms as if she were a small child. He lifted her off the couch and carried her into her bedroom. There he settled her on the bed and tugged off her clothing, kissing and tonguing her skin as he went. Harrison shed his slacks and briefs. He slipped on a condom before easing his large body over hers. Caridad pulled him toward her, drew a deep breath, tensing to meet his pressure with her own, and then, and then . . .
Something loose and damp as turkey gizzards flapped against her inner thigh.
“Oh god.” Harrison rolled away from her. “I’m sorry, darling.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Sometimes I have . . . trouble.” He sighed. “You’re so beautiful, you know that? It scares me. I start worrying that I won’t be able to satisfy you, and then, well . . .” He glanced down at his flaccid member, the condom shriveling like a discarded snakeskin as his penis retreated into its snowy pubic nest. “It turns out I can’t.”
“It’s okay.” Moved by his mortified expression, Caridad stroked his face. “Really, it is.”
“Do you mind if we just maybe sleep? Would it be okay if I stay the night?”
“Of course.” Caridad rose to wash the dishes, turn out the lights, and lock the front door. When she returned to her room, Harrison was under the sheet, spread-eagle on his back, taking up much of the bed and snoring. His face wore an open and trusting look, and as she gazed at him, Caridad supposed this was what he had been like as a child—a mild and tender boy, despite his great size. He’d told her he was often challenged to fight when he was younger because he was large, but this never went well for him. Harrison had no desire to hurt others. He was no fighter. No lover either. She suppressed that unkind thought, wondering instead what happened to the crew aboard das boot.
Caridad slept in fits that night, clinging to the edge of the mattress so she wouldn’t fall off. She had troubling dreams—fragmented images of raw poultry and moldy mushrooms in the snow. At daybreak, she woke to a warm pressure against her backside, then a string of soft kisses at the nape of her neck. “Good morning, darling,” Harrison whispered in her ear. Then he turned her over and dove under the covers to lap at her crotch like an eager sheepdog. When he emerged, red-faced and panting, he said, “I think it’ll work this time, if I get on top.”
He sheathed himself with another condom and entered her tentatively before plowing with industry. Chilly drops of sweat plopped from his face onto her shoulders. Harrison began snorting, then bellowing. Caridad flashed on a documentary film she’d seen about water buffalos. In it, a bull, wild-eyed and frenziedly tupping a cow, had lowed in the same way. She grew distracted by an image of those mud-slicked beasts locked in earsplitting collision until the cow shot out a hind leg, kicking spasmodically. Harrison’s cries soon subsided into wheezing grunts. As he quieted, Caridad fixed her thoughts in a determined way on Carl—his clove-scented flesh, his sure and silent movements that matched her own—and she shuddered with brief pleasure just before Harrison softened and slipped out.
That Sunday morning at dawn, while he perspired atop her, she had at last become intimate with Harrison. Caridad supposed this meant she should be committed, too.
One early afternoon in late spring, while Miles was at school, Caridad and Harrison made plans to trade end-of-term essays at her apartment. They had just finished lunch, and Harrison was washing the dishes while she looked over his paper. After cleaning up, Harrison would join her at the table to go over her essay. Caridad frowned at the pages before her, her face growing warm as she read. Like her, Harrison had written about The Awakening, but his thesis repeated Gerard Hochner’s fatuous argument. She warned herself not to criticize this. Changing his main point would require him to rewrite all twenty pages, an impossibility since the paper was due the next day. And the essay, as it should, expressed his opinion of the novel. She glanced into the kitchen at his broad back as he wiped the counters. However asinine these were, Caridad had no business pushing him to alter his ideas.
But why open the paper with a personal anecdote about competitive swimming? Was it necessary to mention his athletic scholarship? And why end that first paragraph with a hanging quotation from a vitriolic review in Public Opinion—“We are well-satisfied when [Edna Pontellier] deliberately swims out to her death in the waters of the gulf”? Was he trying to provoke her by concurring with that wrongheaded reviewer? Surely Harrison knew how she revered Chopin’s novel. Had he not noticed how she’d begun piling her thick hair atop her head in the style worn by the author on the book’s jacket? Eyes narrowed, Caridad continued reading Harrison’s scornful diatribe against the novel until a misspelling snagged her attention. She chuckled at it. There were many such errors, but this one achieved the humor Harrison aimed for with his sarcastic criticism.
He hurried to her side, grinning. “What is it, darling?”
“Malpheasants.” She pointed at the word. “What are malpheasants? Extra-foul fowl?”
Harrison’s face fell. “That’s a typo.” He called his misspellings “typos,” as if to blame them on his errant typewriter. He took the pencil from her, crossed out the word, and scribbled another above it.
“Malpeasants?” Caridad said. “So . . . bad rustic folks, evil peons?”
“Big deal. You know I can’t spell. Hemingway and Fitzgerald couldn’t spell.”
But they could write.
“I’m glad you’re going over it for me,” Harrison said, “to catch little things like that.”
“I see.” Caridad took the pencil for him. She printed malfeasance in the margin.
“Mea culpa,” he said in a tone of exaggerated contrition. “Mea maxima culpa.”
Caridad winced.
“That came out wrong. Look, I’m grateful that you’re reading my paper and correcting my stupid mistakes. I’m sorry I snapped at you. When you laughed, I thought you were enjoying my paper. It is witty in places, isn’t it?”
Picturing a brace of wicked game birds, Caridad nodded. She wouldn’t mention the odd anecdotal opening, the hanging quotation, the faulty argumentation. Like many graduate students, Harrison no doubt believed taking potshots at enduring works of literature somehow established his ascendancy as a scholar. Caridad should at least question him about his ideas and encourage him to think them through, but it was growing late. They would have to pick up Miles soon. Harrison would have to take her since she still didn’t drive and had no car. So Caridad returned to where she left off reading, continuing to circle misspelled words and to correct the punctuation. She focused her attention on catching the little things.
“Your ideas are very clear,” Caridad told Harrison. “There’s no mistaking your position.”
“Thank you, darling.” He smiled and sank into the seat across from her. He reached for another pencil and took up the pages she’d written.
More and more these days, Caridad found herself silencing an inner skeptic, even though Harrison sometimes said things that compromised his credibility. The introduction to his paper reminded her of his insistence that he’d once qualified for the Olympic swim team. When Caridad pressed him for details—what events, what year, and how he’d trained and qualified for this—Harrison grew vague and then irritable, claiming he didn’t like talking about it. He also told a few suspected whoppers related to his experiences as an actor. In one of the most outlandish of these, he said Farrah Fawcett had pursued him so relentlessly on the set of a TV show they’d both appeared in that he’d had to ask the director to intervene. When Caridad saw a video of the episode—Farrah, the ravishing young star, and Harrison, a walk-on baddie gunned down in under a minute of screen time—she had to wonder if he might be delusional.
Truthful or not, Harrison also told Caridad what she wanted to hear. He loved her writing, he said, and he admired how she could read an entire novel in the time it took him to slog through the first few chapters. Harrison was convinced of her culinary genius, though given his appetite, that didn’t count as high praise. He often told her how beautiful she was, how sex with her was the best he’d ever had, making her ashamed that she couldn’t say the same of him. But the intimacy between them did improve, though Caridad often wished for earplugs. She learned to finish quickly in the wake of his water-buffalo throes. But not wanting to alarm Miles and Leslie, she refused to let Harrison spend the night when they were home.
Everybody still had somebody else. The Panamanian drummer proposed to Felicia. Without a word of complaint, she accepted the engagement ring he’d offered her—his deceased mother’s opal set in gold filigree. Esperanza and Reynaldo, who, after years of separation, had never gotten around to filing for divorce, began talking about living together again. A few months ago, they started seeing a marriage counselor together. Unasked, Mr. Nevelson had varnished the porch to Mama’s duplex, a puzzling gesture that was discussed at length by Caridad and her sisters. Lately Leslie and Phil spent most weekends together at his large house in Topanga Canyon. On campus, Caridad caught sight of Daniel, who again worked at the university library, holding hands with a long-haired coed. Even Miles had a crush on another kindergartner, a little girl whose parents invited Miles along for picnics at the park. And now Caridad had Harrison, whose turquoise eyes sparkled, his prognathous face softening at the sight of her with an expression of longing, a look that was a lot like love.
Sitting across the table from her, Harrison again wore that tender look. “Brilliant,” he said. “Your introduction is absolutely compelling.”
Caridad beamed at him and gazed down at his paper. She circled an incomprehensible sentence fragment. In the margin, she printed a neat question mark.
Harrison took Caridad to poetry readings and wine bistros, to small ethnic restaurants where he ordered pungent and spicy dishes for Caridad that she’d never even heard of before, let alone tasted. He invited her to attend cocktail parties with him in the Hollywood Hills, where the other guests were fascinated by her cane, as if it were something she donned for distinction like a velvet cape. His friends were minor actors, stunt people, producers’ assistants, makeup artists, and others who worked in the periphery of filmmaking. His closest friend, Athena, a thirtyish redhead, awed Caridad because she had published an autobiographical novel. When they met at a poetry reading, Athena had been chewing on an onyx cigarette holder, eyeing Caridad. Then she turned to Harrison to say, “No fair, Harry! When you told me you were dating a Hispanic woman from the Valley, I expected big hair, long earrings, and spandex.” Athena leaned to air-kiss Caridad’s cheeks. “You don’t drive a Camaro, do you?” Baffled, Caridad shook her head.
True to his promise, Harrison taught Caridad to swim—freestyle, breaststroke, backstroke, and sidestroke. Nearly every weekday, she would head for the university pool to swim laps in the tepid aquamarine water. Sometimes Harrison accompanied her, and on weekends, they often brought Miles to the pool, but Caridad preferred swimming on her own. Knifing her long body through the water, reaching and pulling, had strengthened her back and neck, just as Harrison had predicted. Her latest x-rays showed such marked change in her spinal alignment that the physical therapist gave her a high-five at their last appointment. It wouldn’t be long, her doctor said, before Caridad would be able to walk without a cane.
Stroking and flutter-kicking the length of the lanes over and over again, Caridad often thought of Edna Pontellier. “A feeling of exultation overtook her, as if some power of significant import had been given to her to control the working of her body and her soul,” Chopin wrote. “She grew daring and reckless, overestimating her strength. She wanted to swim far out, where no woman had swum before.” Exquisite and sentient Edna darted through the waves toward her death, while Caridad trained like an amateur athlete, swimming lap after lap to build strength and mobility. But now and then, she imagined, as Edna had in her last moments, hearing an unseen barking dog, dragging its heavy chain, and Caridad knew that she and Edna Pontellier both plunged through water to outdistance that shackled hound.