XXI

I’d like to say that at some point before we separated I fell in love with Seth, that my heart burst, that it overflowed its borders with passion, that we consumed each other. But it never came, that intensity, that painful yearning. At least not with him.

If I’ve ever been absolutely naked, numb from the absolute need of another person, it was when I met Leni Bergman, with her spiky hair and dirty green vest, standing in the cavernous front hall of the Art Institute of Chicago. She was a friend of Seth’s, a pal from school who occasionally took photography classes to augment her video studies. When we saw each other at the museum entrance, for a minute I forgot her name.

“Ah, Jewish,” I noted when she told me again.

“I’m not Jewish,” she said, rolling her intense umber eyes in disgust. “My parents are.”

“Oh,” I said sarcastically, “you’re one of those.”

I was thinking of Seth, whose Jewishness consisted of bagels in the morning and a deep offense at anything anti-Semitic—not because he took it personally but because he thought Jews (in his mind, Hasidim, Orthodox, any Jew who outwardly manifested her or his Jewishness) should be protected from prejudice in the same way that blacks, Asians, and other racial groups should be free of discrimination.

“What? What? What do you mean?” Leni demanded, unable to take in the tidal force of Van Gogh’s strokes, the way the paint seemed to lap up off the canvas, because she was too preoccupied with my dismissive tone. (We’d ended up strolling through the museum together for no apparent reason.) “I mean, what makes a Jew, huh? Seeing all those horrible bodies in those awful films they showed us in Hebrew school? I don’t go to temple, you know, and I don’t believe in all that matrilineal shit, and I’m with the Palestinians on their right to the West Bank and Gaza, okay?”

Leni had stubby little fingers, wrists jangling with her own crafted silver—heavy, highly textured bracelets with her individualized hieroglyphics. I understood their message was more complicated than Seth’s, who offered me warm domesticity, fidelity, and armchair revolution; Leni was the rebellion itself, with all its anarchy and senselessness. When we got in bed, she would bury her hand inside me and I’d feel the coolness of the metal against my thighs. Her arms would ripple with tight tendons and lush veins, like mountains and waterways on the map of a faraway, magical country.

I trembled and imagined that I would always want her as much as that time when, in a state of uncontrolled rage about all the lovers she might have had, I pushed her against the wall and knelt before her in a urine-soaked subway stairwell. Pinning her hips with my hands, I used my mouth, my teeth, to get at those other pungent lips, at the soft core of her where I staked all my unsteady claims of conquest.

She called me her Latin Lover, reminded me that Dorothy Parker had humiliated us as lousy in a famed New Yorker piece, and prodded me into displays of adolescent paranoia I’d never known even when they were age appropriate. If she didn’t call, I’d dial her number and let it toll endlessly, torturing myself with visions of her ignoring the relentless rings or clicks on the answering machine, too busy with her bracelets clanging between somebody else’s legs. I’d show up breathless at her door, only to find her smirking and alone, surrounded by notes and storyboard drawings for her videos.

“I’m just helping you be Cuban,” she’d say about my addiction to her, my insane jealousies, “bringing out that torrid Latin soul buried in all that Midwestern equanimity you work at so much.”

Though her methods became predictable, and her scenarios eventually involved an elastic-limbed girl from a tai chi class and the husband of one her professors at the School of the Art Institute, there was something to her theory: I’ve never been more Cuban than when I was with her.

Between the two of us, I was the expert dancer, the gourmet, the one who related the history of Columbus and the island’s genocidal Indians; I was the one who translated Ricky Ricardo’s benign curses, explained why salsa is Cuban music without soul, and cleared up any doubts about how Latinos fit into the multicultural scheme in the United States. With Leni, I was closer than ever to all the dark peoples for whom I interpreted and to whom I represented a system and established order that I never felt a part of. With her, I relished my own darkness.

With Leni I could be as free as I wanted to be about my cubanidad because she never challenged my authenticity. I could use any stereotype I wanted in any way I wanted without fear or embarrassment. Leni listened, deferred; her very distance from Havana confirmed my proximity. When I confessed my collapse into Orlando’s arms in Cuba, Leni relished every detail, naughtily bringing a saucer of milk to bed that night.

But what Leni and I really shared was a certain shame about belonging to oppressed minorities that had their own paradoxical privileges in the world. Because while I could talk eloquently about how negative Latino media images affected us all, I could also— with my white Cuban skin, my perfect English—enter any retail store with the assurance that I could wander the aisles at liberty, sure to be perceived as the descendant of an Italian dancer or, perhaps, a French winemaker, if I had any ethnicity at all.

Ironically, Leni—who, like Seth, insists there’s no Jewish “race,” no Jewish type, only stereotypes—had a harder time finding that no-ethnic-fly-zone. With her big dark eyes, full lips, and cinnamon skin, she was always mistaken for Moroccan or Greek, sometimes Brazilian or even Cuban. In a way, she loved the confusion, the way the stereotypes worked to cast her as beautiful and exotic. She loved to defend herself against any latent racism by telling me how flattered she was by these mistakes.

But I was militant in my responses, always reminding her how easy it was to bask in such flattery when she could give her good Jewish name for restaurant reservations that were always affordable and available to her, or when car rentals always hinged on her less than exemplary credit over my own immaculate records.

Like Seth, Leni was remarkably alienated from her Jewish roots, her ethnicity nothing more than a name tag most of the time. Her parents had sent her to Hebrew school as a little kid, but never celebrated Shabbat or the High Holidays. Her first adult Pesaj was with me, with my friends, back in the old Rogers Park neighborhood of my childhood. While I knew every step, every syllable of every prayer in the haggadah, Leni fidgeted at the table, flipped the pages ahead of the reading, and made snide comments about how only Jews could turn Egypt’s resounding and fatal rejection into some kind of celebration. (Later I would note that Cubans had converted a similar disaster—the attack on the Moncada barracks, which Fidel’s men lost miserably—as the ceremonial centerpiece of revolutionary mythology.)

“The height of denial,” Leni huffed, all twisted in her chair, her arms across her chest.

But the real denial was mine.

One December, Leni and I found ourselves riding home on a CTA bus in the midst of the Christmas gift-buying crunch. We lived in a little loft on the near west side then, in a neighborhood that was rapidly gentrifying—the city’s premier producers of performance art had just relocated a few blocks away.

On the bus, everyone was balancing packages, some already gift-wrapped but most still in manufacturer’s boxes or swathed in plastic. There was a strange smell: a combination of dry, acrid winter sweat and virgin vinyl, like a new car on the very first day. We were all too crowded. Leni’s head seemed to fit into the armpit of the man who was holding on to the bar above her.

Then, as we crossed the river, as the bus strained over the bridge, a very large woman with honey-yellow skin positioned herself right up front, next to the driver, and began to sing Christmas carols. She had a lovely voice, low and gritty like Mavis Staples at her apogee, and gave even something as hackneyed as “Jingle Bells” a kind of gospel flavor. Whenever the bus stopped and a few folks got out, she’d stop her serenade long enough to say, “Merry Christmas! Jesus loves you!”

As we began to get closer to our stop, I realized no one would be spared. I looked over at Leni, who was already cranky over the whole ride.

“Merry Christmas! Jesus loves you!” shouted the sister.

Finally, the bus slid into our neat little triangle at Milwaukee, Chicago, and Ogden Avenues. “Merry Christmas!” the large woman said to me as I stepped down and into the blustery wind outside.

I turned around to help Leni, who was carrying a backpack stacked with videos for study and a gym bag with a sensitive new camera she’d borrowed from Seth, who’d remained a friend.

“And happy Hanukkah to you, little sister!” the big woman bellowed, her fat fingers touching Leni’s shoulder as if she were claiming her for herself. “Jesus loves you, too!”

Taken aback, Leni stumbled, sending the gym bag to the ground with a distinct metallic crash. Hundreds of dollars of equipment shattered, the top of the bag crumbled like a slow-motion disaster scene in a Japanese monster movie.

“What the fuck . . . ?” Leni groused, her body splayed out on the sidewalk, everything too heavy and scattered all over.

Quickly, I put my hand around her arm but she shook me off, standing up in a flash, angrily grabbing the gym bag and readjusting her backpack with a little hop. She rearranged her bracelets, too, some of which were now bent.

“Let’s just go,” she said, “let’s just go.” She was so agitated, so hard.

We didn’t talk about what happened, not then, not ever. But what I realized was that, for all the mistaken ethnicities with which Leni gets tagged, she’s also pegged right a lot of times. It makes her uncomfortable because Leni wants to disappear into the storm, into the dusting of clean, fuzzy stuff. Leni wants to be anonymously American, unfettered and free.

What I can’t tell her, even to this day—what I can barely admit to myself—is how much I secretly envy the inevitability of her Jewishness. Until I open my mouth and jabber or poke my tongue in some unholy tangle into another’s mouth, until somebody gets close enough to taste the bittersweet traces of Havana on my blue-veined skin, I’m this blank space, unconnected to history, bloodless.