I found out my mother was a slut from my best friend, at a bar with my secret Greek boyfriend who was possibly a homosexual and his uptight brother who pretended to know nothing of our affair. I was high on myself that evening. It was a buzz I got rarely, the way somebody who hardly ever drinks gets plowed after one sip. At eighteen, I had progressed from being a girl who never attracted much attention, to a woman who never attracted much attention—so this kind of evening, featuring me as the heroine of an illicit liaison, flanked by single, sexless friends who suspected but could not confirm my “other life,” made me feel like a tingly imposter with all eyes upon me.
I was dancing, I remember that. My best friend, Sera, and my lover, Alex, were dancing with me—not with each other, or alone, but each trying to be my partner. Sera was fiercely jealous of Alex, not because she was either attracted to him or because she didn’t like him, but simply because he claimed my attention, and she was not accustomed to having to compete. She was used to being the flower around which all the bees buzzed; used to feeling magnanimous for allowing me to be the Queen Bee fed of her charm, wit, and loyalties on a priority basis, while others had to work hard. Alex’s older brother, George, was hot for Sera, but this was of little consequence since he was a prematurely balding, stoop-spined twenty-two-year-old, who worked at their father’s dry cleaners fifty hours per week, lived above the store, and had skin the color of flour-coated dough. If you yelled to him, “Hey, dude, where’d you put the beer?” he would reply in a Spock-like voice, “I believe it is in the vehicle.” He was weird, and while marginally sexy in a dark, mortician kind of way, definitely not Sera’s type.
Sera and I were fond of bars. Though I was not prone to getting drunk on my own sexual power (even the phrase seems absurd), I was quite known for getting inebriated on just about anything else. We’d had fake IDs since age sixteen, but we’d started drinking when we were twelve, stealing from my mother’s bottles and picking up an extra pack of Benson & Hedges when she sent us to the store to buy hers. We were not “fast girls”—Sera was a virgin, and Alex was my first lover—but like many young women who came of age in the mid-1980s, we were heavily into partying, dancing, dressing to the nines even to sit around at McDonald’s or study hall, and doing “everything but” with guys we picked up at parties, since dating per se (the way Sera’s mother described it at least) did not much exist among our crowd. You made out once, and then you either automatically became boyfriend-girlfriend (which did not necessarily involve dates), or you carefully ignored each other for the remainder of your teenaged life.
“I’ll stop the world and melt with you,” Sera sang, shimmying her shoulders on the dance floor. Alex had told me once that he could tell she’d be good in bed because of the way she moved her shoulders when she danced. She was uninhibited, he said; he could tell. Since I was the first girl he’d ever slept with, I was unsure what made him such the connoisseur, but felt both oddly proud of Sera and flattered that he might be trying to make me jealous. “There’s nothing you and I won’t do!” She pointed at me and threw her arm around me—this song was laden with significance for us as it had played constantly in the discos during our senior trip to the Bahamas a few months prior. But my time in the Bahamas had been spent stealing away from my friends to sneak to Alex’s room—he had even sprung for a single so we could be alone—and that Sera didn’t know it made me feel treasonous to both of them, no longer giddy with my wriggling, sex-kitten abandon. So I stiffened, drew my arm away.
I don’t remember the name of the bar. There were so many in those days. I don’t remember what Sera and I were talking about, or how talking was even possible in the midst of her singing and competing with Alex for my dancing attentions (funny since I was not a very good dancer; inhibited, I guess you could say), but somehow we got from point A to point B. Point A being that Sera suspected I was “totally in love with” Alex—something in her tone made me bristle as if wrongly accused—and point B being that she did not want to see me make the same mistakes my mother had. “I don’t want to see you turn into your mother,” was what she said, by which I thought she meant divorced. I figured she did not want me to marry Alex because she feared he would divorce me due to his family’s disapproval. Though I’d never discussed this worry with Sera, I assumed that, as usual, she had read my mind. “Oh, we’re just fooling around,” I laughed, trying to sound worldly and laissez-faire to put her off. But Sera’s pointed face puckered like I was something she had bitten into that had gone bad. “Emily,” she said, somber amid the music, “that’s exactly what I mean.”
My mother was popular. She had me when she was twenty, so when I was ten years old and she was thirty, she still had girlfriends—all single or divorced—who came over and smoked Benson & Hedges at our kitchen table, wearing silk blouses that revealed tan décolletage. They had bouncy, feathered hair like Charlie’s Angels, long fingernails, numerous shiny gold chains, and sometimes three rings on one finger. My mother got us a discount on our rent from Tony Guidubaldi, our middle-aged, married landlord, who also had a plumbing business and more money than most of the men in the neighborhood, even the mobsters. She knew all the bartenders; she never had to pay for drinks, her friends teased. I was proud of my mother. My father had been a heroin addict and car thief. I had a dim memory of watching him shoot up, but my mother said he never did that in front of me and that I must be imagining it based on something I saw in a movie. Mom kicked him out when I was three, and she heard he went to jail shortly afterward. Neither of us ever saw him again. My mother was like the women on the popular 1970s sitcoms: Rhoda, Alice, One Day At A Time. Divorced, independent, spunky. She made Sera’s parents, who were only a decade older than Mom, seem about a hundred years old.
Mom was initially upset about Sera, who, when we first met at ten, was bookish and fat. While we spent most of our time in my bedroom playing elaborate imaginary games that involved things like Charlie’s Angels living behind my wall and Marie Osmond secretly being my mother, Mom surveyed with anxiety out the picture window of our ground-floor apartment all the cool girls of the neighborhood, smoking their Newports and wearing their Italian jackets with red stars around their last names, emblazoned on the back. These girls, some only a couple years older than I, looked like mini versions of my mother’s friends, and Mom ached for me to be one of them so I could have a good life. She encouraged me to dump Sera, saying I would look fat and nerdy by association (though I was a stick and didn’t read much), but it was no use. I loved Sera with an intensity to which both my mother and I were unaccustomed—with the intensity Sera would later inspire in all our high school friends once she was no longer fat or buck-toothed or frizzy-haired, although still bookish, which had somehow become acceptable and even made her look a little like a rebel.
Sera’s family had bookshelves with The Brothers Karamazov and House of Mirth shoved alongside photo books of Paris with titillating titles like Love on the Left Bank. Mom kept her Jackie Collins and Harold Robbins novels in a messy pile on her dresser and lent them to her friends when she was finished and never asked for them back. Sera’s parents were fat and unpopular, too, but nicer to kids than any of the popular people I knew. They ate ice cream: there were always eight kinds in the house. Mom never had anything in our fridge except her unsweetened sun tea, which guests weren’t allowed to touch. When Sera slept over, her parents didn’t understand to feed her before she came (it must have been inconceivable to her father, the cook, that his bella figlia mia, Serafina, would not be greeted at the door with a meatball or a cannoli), so we had to order pizza, if Mom could afford it that week.
Mom stopped going out when she got breast cancer my sophomore year. And although by then she had come to like Sera well enough, remarking constantly on how thin and cute she had become (as though she had not seen her in four years, instead of almost every day), once she got sick she began disliking Sera for a different reason. Now Sera was too popular—dragging me to parties every weekend, when Mom could see full well, judging by the fact that the phone rarely rang for me unless it was Sera, that I was invited by virtue of our friendship and not on my own merit. Having a daughter in high social demand loses a significant amount of cachet when you are dropping weight and in pain and have lost one of your breasts. When you are sick, you want your children to be hopeless nerds who have nothing better to do than sit at home with you. Mom was jealous, though when I told Sera’s mother that in passing, she winced like I’d smacked myself in the face and said, “Mothers shouldn’t be jealous of their children’s lives,” as though Mom wasn’t ill and deserving of any special consideration. As though she’d been wanting to say something like that for a long time—even when Mom had firm, perky boobs. After that, I didn’t like Sera’s parents as well anymore.
My mother assumed Alex was my boyfriend because he took me to fancy places for dinner, like Oprah Winfrey’s new restaurant, The Eccentric, and I never had to bring any money. No variation of my “we’re just friends” speech could convince her. I’d been working at Alex’s family’s cleaners since January, and several times Mom had come in and run into his parents. Each time my heart throbbed with horror that she might insinuate something about “our lovesick kids,” accompanied by a lewd wink or some other horrible sign. Then Alex’s father would fire me, and I wasn’t entirely certain that if I didn’t see Alex at work every day, our relationship would long survive. (Albeit we were both beginning classes at UIC in less than a month, but all Alex’s Greek friends would be there, too, opting to stay close to their clan. I obsessed: what excuse would we make to even associate?) But each time Mom dropped by, she was quiet, almost unrecognizably demure. I’d taken my job to supplement her losses when she started taking so much time off work. Maybe she felt shamed, like Alex’s parents were giving her charity. Mom was on disability now; I made more money at the cleaners than she did off her checks.
I fell in love with Alex right away. I’d noticed him even before, in the halls at school, but he hung out with the Greek people speaking Greek, and didn’t listen to the Violent Femmes or wear black vintage clothing or swallow speed between classes and drink beer out of McDonald’s Coke cups. The Greeks were as foreign to us as the Amish—though once I knew them, I realized they only listened to dance music instead of alternative, wore shiny, tight clothing Sera’s crowd considered tacky, and drank mixed drinks at sponsored Greek dances without needing fake IDs. Alex had no qualms about his Americanized Italian girl-employee hanging around his Greek friends, but we had to hide our romance in case they told his father. We never held hands in public or made out by our lockers like some couples. To compensate for the lack of visible drama, I wrote him long, moony letters in class declaring my undying devotion and calling us “star-crossed lovers the world aims to keep apart.” When he visited Greece after graduation, I sent him a bottle of Chicago rain, and later, my dishwater-brown ponytail wrapped in a blue ribbon when I got my hair bobbed to surprise him. Alex acted pleased by my new hairdo, but George said the ponytail was creepy like Fatal Attraction and had scared his aunts, who apparently had no qualms about opening their seventeen-year-old nephew’s mail.
This had been going on for six months.
You may be wondering what kind of a person Sera was, that she would tell me, her best friend, that my cancer-ridden mother was a slut. You may be assuming that she said it in anger, out of jealousy that she did not have a boyfriend, that she was still a virgin, that I was leaving her behind. And on some level, I guess all of these deductions would be true. But on a more primal level, Sera’s motivation had little to do with guys or even teen-chick competition. She purposely upset me so that she could comfort me. She did it because that was what she knew how to do—was what she did—and, in retrospect, was why so many people loved her. She was the one who would point out that your boyfriend was probably cheating on you, and then take your phone calls four times a night and listen to you cry without ever tiring of your idiocy. She would play matchmaker between stocky, desperate girls and their hot, football-player crushes, and when things went wrong and the girls got burned, Sera would pick up the pieces. Sera would disguise her voice and call your mother pretending to be a proper adult for whose child you babysat, in an earnest attempt to enable you to go out on Saturday night, and then when the plot was ultimately foiled, she would scheme with you about how to break out of your house and concur that your mother was a bitch prison warden. She would get you high and then nurse you through a bad trip. Sera was everybody’s mother, but a Mephistopheles of a mother, honing in on and somehow catering to your darker side and secret fears or desires.
Oh, don’t think we weren’t on to her. Behind her back—and to her face—we all agreed she was manipulative, controlling. But teenagers are notoriously bad listeners, fickle-hearted, and by and large fairly stupid about the workings of the human mind, or even about how to forge a school absence note that actually looks and reads like it was penned by a fifty-year-old. She was a rare commodity we could not do without, and we did not, really, mind the dramas she stirred up. We liked to be the center of attention, and Sera could make you feel like you were the center of her world—even if it turned out you were one of ten people to call her that night, and you noticed that she rarely called you. Soon she would be majoring in psychology, but she had been our shrink for years, and much later, in therapy myself, I would see that, like all great analysts, she had a certain ruthless immunity to other people’s pain, just as a seasoned surgeon fails to gag when slicing through flesh and yellowed, bulbous fat to the blood and guts beneath. She was fascinated by being needed—by other people’s capacity for need. That was her fix, her need, and while I had not really considered the implications of my failing to confide in her about Alex—when being confided in was her prime vocation—I knew that my need for her was crucial to our relationship. She was the rescuer, and I often needed saving: from my mother’s stronger will; from the advances of scary asshole boys; from term papers on books I didn’t really grasp; from my future without direction. And now from the jaws of my mother’s looming death, which truly was inevitable, we all saw. Sera and I had been friends for eight years, and like a married couple, we had our patterns. She would slice open my skin and fat and stir around my guts, and then she would stitch me back together. And I didn’t mind, really. My mother had never been that interested in what went on under my skin—nobody had, even Alex. Her efforts made me feel loved.
“Before my dad opened the restaurant, when he was still tending bar at Cagney’s, he said your mother slept with every regular at the bar and used to hit on him all the time. She had no pride, he said. She’d go with married guys just for buying her a drink. I don’t want to see you like that with Alex, just because he has money, just because he’s all Oh-I’ll-Take-You-To-My-Condo-In-Athens or whatever. He’ll never admit he’s even dating you—he’s totally going to marry some tacky Greek bitch with big hair—if he’s even straight! Can’t you see he’s just using you?”
And I could. I could. I could have fallen right into her waiting arms.
But here is what happened instead: I became hysterical.
In the middle of the dance floor, while the Violent Femmes intoned, “One, one, one ’cause you left me,” I felt my face crumple into a grimace and whines well up between my throat glands. This is what I saw: my father, in a dark corner of the bedroom I would later know only as Mom’s, a strap around his arm, tapping, tapping. Then, the arm flying back, strap flailing, as he smacked my mother’s face. Some memories are fake: I know. I’ve had flashbacks of various grisly accidents I could never have experienced without being killed: cars plummeting off cliffs and the feeling of free-falling, the claustrophobia of chaos in a burning plane. Other memories verge on dream, like lying in my twin bed at night listening to the radio for so long that the Top 40 station turned into the religious station, muffled voices from my mother’s room, the sound of something pounding the wall rhythmically, the squeaking of an angry bed . . . I knew.
Once, I’d even intruded. Once, when I was old enough to know what sex was but young enough to still think it could not apply to my mother—once, knowing Sera got to sleep with her parents when she had a bad dream—I stirred in bed, plotting, gathering nerve, then scuttled across the dark kitchen, conscious of the fact that roaches scurried out of my way, still frightened of me after all the years we’d lived side by side. I had a nightmare, I would say to my mother, and wait for her to invite me into her wide, white-sheeted bed, rumpled with the smooth cool skin of her. I had the nightmare all planned just in case she asked: Satan lived behind my wall and I was going to have to marry him. But outside her door, I hesitated; I was aware of hunger scraping my stomach, but there was no food in the apartment. I had to pee, but I rarely used the bathroom at night because I didn’t like the sight of bugs scurrying when I turned on the light and shocked them. “Mom,” I whispered. “Mommy.”
An arm on my shoulder. I whirled around, terrified, as though one of the roaches had grown to monster size—I yelped. But it was only Tony Guidubaldi, in my mother’s striped terry cloth robe, his hand circling my shoulder blade like a broken wing he hoped he could repair. “Whatsa matter, babe?” he asked. “You have a bad dream? You lookin’ for your ma?” But I burst away and ran the few steps back to my room, hopping into my sweat-sticky bed, listening to the caller on the radio say, I was saved seven years ago but my son . . . I waited for my mother to come and find out what was wrong—she must have heard me in the hall—but she never arrived. In the morning, Tony Guidubaldi was gone, and after that Mom started letting me spend weekends with Sera. Her parents took us on long drives to the Michigan Dunes, cruising in their green Nova for quaint coffee shops in Cherry Valley, where one could obtain the world’s best apple pie. Years later, I said to my mother, “When you were dating Tony Guidubaldi,” and she said, “Don’t be crazy. We never dated—he’s married. We were just good friends.”
There are some memories that come from a kind of archetype of human suffering: the fear of falling; the hopelessness of trapped limbs thrashing everywhere in a dark, confined space; the itching sting of fire. I went through a stage where I loved all the made-for-TV junkie movies, imagining each addict was my father, and maybe, maybe I have transposed his image, his strap, his slap, on a picture I saw long ago: just actors playing a part. Not my father. Not my mother’s face. There are memories that do not belong to us, no matter how real they seem. But for a week, Tony Guidubaldi’s watch sat on my mother’s bureau, and the following weekend, it just disappeared. There are memories that will always be ours, no matter how hard we will them to go away.
Sera had chased me to the bathroom, where I was leaning, weeping over a sink like I might throw up. “Emmy,” she pleaded, “it’s no big deal. So what about your mom? She’s not like that anymore, and you’re not her—for God’s sake, you’re a virgin—”
“I’ve been screwing Alex for half a year!” I screamed. “We go at it everywhere—parking lots at night, the bathroom at work the minute George goes on an errand, the elevator at UIC after orientation. You have no idea—you don’t know anything about me!”
“Oh, you’re lying just to piss me off,” she said rationally. “You’d never do that; you’re totally scared of guys. Besides, we made a pact. You swore.”
“Duh,” I said. “I fucking lied.”
Even after she’d torn out of the bathroom, I lingered, sniveling and dwelling on my misery. I was just like my mother, who was dying alone at thirty-nine, jobless in a roach-infested apartment we could only afford because she’d boned the landlord for years, along with every other neighborhood asshole. None of them came around now. None of them would probably even show up at her wake, though maybe I’d get it for free if she’d fucked any of the Ragos who owned the funeral parlor. I would spend my college years letting Alex buy me things, shaking my shoulders on dance floors trying to be somebody else while poor George jerked off nights thinking about my tits, and then Alex would marry some Greek girl just like Sera predicted, or maybe he’d come out of the closet someday, but still I’d be kicked to the side of the road as an obstruction to his Athenian pursuit of tight boy ass. I was the world’s biggest loser; I would believe anything; the first time I made a move without Sera and look what I did. I was a slut, and my mother was worse than a slut. My mother was already dead.
Back near the bar, Sera and Alex were arguing. I approached them warily, like a tired mother having to break up the public spats of her annoying children one time too many. Alex grabbed my arm when he saw me. He was a lanky, ethereal boy with fine features, too much fashion sense about women’s clothing, and a soft, sweet voice; I had never seen him angry before. “How could you tell her about us?” he hissed in my face. “She’s the biggest gossip in the whole school. We might as well go have sex in front of my dad!”
Sera pushed his chest. “Who do you think you are, pretty boy, Conan the Barbarian? Let go of her!”
“Mind your own business,” Alex whined like a baby. “Don’t you think you’ve done enough?”
She rolled her eyes. “Don’t be a dork. I’m not going to tell anyone. I’m just mad that Emily broke our pact, so now you guys are going to have to make it up to me somehow.”
“Like how?” I said. I knew she was up to something, but I wanted it to be over quickly so I could go home. Alex had the car. I had no money, as usual.
“Well, we were supposed to lose our virginity at the same time,” Sera said. Then, with a flourish in Alex’s direction, “We vowed ages ago. But now I’m going to have to wait till I get to Madison, because there’s nobody here in Chicago I want to sleep with. I’ll have to start college a bitter virgin.” She laughed—suddenly, she did not sound bitter. “The sooner I get laid, the less likely I am to be angry that Emily is so selfish. Then I’d have a secret to keep, too.”
“So go screw George then,” I said irritably. “He’s totally in lust with you.”
“Eeew,” Sera said flatly. “I think not. Alex here got all the charm in the family. Alex, by the way, are you gay?”
“Huh?” Alex said.
“Bi, then?”
“Why are you asking me that?”
“Well, I wouldn’t want my best friend Emily to get AIDS. If you’re bi, I hope you use protection.”
Alex stared at me desperately as if for help. My arm felt bruised; I looked away. I wondered if my mother had fallen asleep on the couch watching TV as usual. I wondered what kind of girl goes out partying, losing her panties in the parking lot of her high school while her bald, breastless mother falls asleep to The Tonight Show.
“You are really cute,” Sera said to Alex. I noticed then that she had never become truly pretty—that despite her new, nice figure and smooth hair and post-braces teeth, her face was somehow already old, lacked the dewy innocence of youth. We all worshipped her for being smarter and braver than the rest of us, but guys feared her for that, too. Brains don’t go far toward getting guys in high school. Sera had never had a boyfriend—never even seemed to fool around with anyone we knew all that well. Our guy friends asked her advice about their naive, girlie-girl girlfriends while Sera collected dust like a spinster aunt. She must have hated us all: normal girls deemed stupid enough to date by the wannabe studs who were intimidated by her mind. Maybe she had a right.
“Emily and I always share everything,” she sing-songed. My eyes bugged. I glanced at Alex, but as I’d failed to come to his rescue a moment before, he refused to meet my eyes now. “I don’t like to feel left out.”
“Come on,” Alex laughed. “You’re never left out of anything. You know everything about everyone. What do you care what Emily does with a guy like me? I thought I was, like, totally beneath you.”
“Well, if Emily thinks you’re so great, maybe I should reconsider. She’s a very smart girl, you know.”
Alex didn’t even turn in my direction at this compliment—if that was what it was. His body leaned in closer to Sera, and I thought then: he is either totally not gay, or he is way smarter than I thought. Brighter than I was, apparently. Alex’s laugh was suddenly throaty; I turned away, speechless. Maybe Sera would not really go through with it—maybe she was only trying to show me what a dog Alex was—how he’d jump at the chance to put his dick in any hole, even right in front of me. I was convinced. How could I let her know? How could I beg her, right in front of him, not to take it too far?
“So if you and Emily share something, and it’s both of your secret, then you’d keep it together and not tell anybody else, right?” His eyes were seductive—never, even in the moments before climaxing, did he look at me that way. Even under the stars, on the beach in Freeport where I lost my virginity, his eyes had been confused, ambivalent, worried. I remembered how the first time we’d tried to put a condom on his half-mast penis, it kept popping off and flying around the room, and how we chased it, naked at the shabby Tip Top Motel on Lincoln, time and time again, until his erection was lost and the condom was dry, so we just watched videos for a couple of hours and then went home. I did not know that boy could become this man. Always, I had imagined us as partners in crime: children throwing rocks at old ladies’ windows, wild but harmless. I couldn’t pretend I hadn’t known Sera capable of treachery, but Alex . . . Maybe this was why Sera would win—would always win. I did not understand people; I looked at surfaces; I believed what I wanted to believe: in a grown-up mother who would invite me into her safe bed, in Charlie’s Angels protecting me from behind my wall. Sera believed in turning human need to her advantage. And need would always win out.
I walked out of the bar.
George was leaning against the brick wall of the building, smoking a cigarette. I had never seen him smoke. His dark eyes were in the shadow of the neon sign; he looked like a Gothic vampire, or a detective in a 1940s film. His gaze flicked lazily over me, then back toward the distance, as though he were trying to figure out where he was supposed to be instead of here.
“Do you have any money for a cab?” I asked him.
He shrugged. “I’ll take you.”
“What about Alex and Sera?”
“Alex has money for a cab. You don’t. Either way, my family pays for the cab. So I’ll take you.”
I followed him to the car. But once inside, he drove toward the cleaners, and I was confused. George lived above the cleaners, and Alex and his parents lived in the building next door. I’d crashed at George’s on numerous occasions, on the couch, when it was really late or I was too drunk to go home. But it was only midnight, and all the drama had sobered me. I said, “I don’t think Alex expects me to come back here or anything. I was planning to just go home.”
“It’s easier this way,” he said. “We’ll take you back in the morning.”
I didn’t know what to do. I felt dangerously near crying again, but George was not the sort of person one easily cried around—it was obvious he would think me frivolous and immature, and he might even mock me. I chewed on the inside of my mouth and ventured, “Um, Alex and I kind of had an argument.”
“Yeah, I know. My brother’s a spoiled asshole.”
I gulped.
He took me to his apartment. I was not so clueless as to fail to consider that he might be trying to get me into bed on the strength of my anger at his brother. But he just handed me a glass of water and left me in the living room, heading to his own bedroom without any attempt at friendly conversation, which was typical. Normally, Alex smuggled me over some blankets and a pillow when I stayed the night, but George hadn’t offered. The couch was covered in plastic and would be uncomfortable without a sheet over it—I curled up on the floor with a sofa pillow and a stiff afghan. Horizontal, my drunkenness returned; the room spun a little. Maybe I was just plowed, and that was why I had reacted so strongly to Sera’s comments about Mom. After all, she wasn’t saying anything I didn’t already know on some level. Maybe I was even drunk enough to have misinterpreted what was going on between Sera and Alex: maybe they were only fucking with me. Maybe Alex would turn up later and spoon me in his arms and say he and Sera had taken separate cabs. Maybe Sera would call my house in the morning and, in her Noël Coward accent, accuse, “Can’t you take a bloody joke?”
I couldn’t take a joke. That had always been a shortcoming of mine. This reassured me as I lulled into a hazy, drunken sleep.
In truth, I must have passed out. I only came to when he tried to enter me. Then my body screamed awake, squirming, jerking in protest, but George’s heavy arms, hot from contact and rage and want, bore down upon my bones. He used one hand to guide his rigid penis in, the other arm bent across my chest and bearing all his weight so I gasped for air, my arms flailing like dying snakes, unable to strike. His knees ground into my thighs, holding them apart. Once he was up me, he pushed himself onto both arms, grappling with me briefly as I struck at him, but soon my wrists were in his hands, gripped tight and pushed into the plush carpeting while he pumped into me and I shrieked, then begged, then finally murmured listlessly, “Stop, no.” He, too, had been drinking, so his act was perhaps neither as satisfying nor as quick as he’d intended. Near the end he started muttering frantically, “Shit, shit, come on!” By the time he climaxed, I was sobbing in pain.
The spasms of the climax seemed to reassure him. “I’ll stand up to my father,” he groaned into my neck as they shook him. “Forget about Alex, he’s a pussy. I have more money than he does, anyway. Ahhh, you feel so warm.”
I did not bolt for the door when he let go of my wrists, when he rolled off my throbbing legs. My skirt and tights were around my ankles in an indecipherable tangle, my shirt pushed up to my chin, breasts hanging out of my bra so the wires stabbed my tender skin. Semen leaked onto the afghan his mother had made. The clock on the side table indicated that almost four hours had transpired since we’d arrived here and I’d first passed out. Had he slept, too, or spent that time watching me, fantasizing, planning?
George fell asleep on the floor, clutching me. It surprised me, more than anything, that he had not invited me to his bed, so clear was it that this rape had, in his mind, heralded our new romantic relationship. He and Sera and Alex had played a hand of cards, and with a quick reshuffling I was now his. I wept silently while my body went numb and slick under his sweating arm. I did not move until daylight made my nudity unbearable, and I scurried to the bathroom to wash up and rearrange my clothes.
When I reentered the room, George was sitting up. He offered me orange juice, and I took it and drank it without speaking. While he drove me home, he was silent as usual, but before I got out of the car he said, “We’ll go to a movie and dinner on Friday. Alex and Sera can accompany us if you like. Think of a restaurant you want to try . . . but none of that raw fish or Ethiopian mush you girls like.”
I did not slam the door.
Approaching my front door under George’s gaze, if I thought anything it was, I always knew this would happen. Not him, not last night’s exact scenario, but that prickly sensation on the back of my neck when I found myself in a parking lot alone after dark, or in the deserted restroom of an office building, or when a strange man walked behind me on the street. My fear was the ancient archetype for all women: the knowledge, intrinsic in our flesh, that we can be violated at any time. Now it had happened. It did not occur to me, not once, to call the police—to tell anyone at all. While it would be wrong to say I felt anything resembling relief, it might be accurate to say that, finally, I could stop waiting. From now on my life would exist, like my mother’s, on the other side.
In the living room, Mom was still asleep under our own afghan, which was light and worn from years and store-bought. The TV was off. I sat down at her feet; her toenails were painted seashell pink, but the polish was peeling, her nails growing out. She had several purple splotches on her legs—she bruised easily now. Her head was wrapped in the turban she wore at home; she did not take it off except to shower. Although I was her daughter, and we had lived in this house alone together forever, we were not symbiotic enough that she was comfortable showing me her bald head. Whenever I saw it by accident, I felt a queasy horror akin to remembering my father shooting up, or seeing Tony Guidubaldi’s bare feet in our roach infested hall that by rights belonged to him.
I touched my mother’s leg, and she opened her eyes and looked at me, but not with any joy at seeing my face, or worry at the expression of pain I wore. Her eyes had gone blank a long time ago. Or maybe I didn’t wear any expression of pain, anyway. Maybe my eyes were blank, too. Then, abruptly, below her dead eyes, she smiled.
And suddenly, I could not imagine why I had been so angry at Sera for what she’d said about my mother’s past. The clarity of that fury drained from me, and I couldn’t remember what was so bad—so inexcusably shameful—about being the neighborhood slut, anyway. With an intensity so rough it doubled me over, I missed the long-past squeaking of my mother’s bed, the muffled, complicit adult laughter that excluded me, that rhythmic pounding on the wall our bedrooms shared—the lullaby of my youth. I longed for those days when my mother was still invincible, when I was proud of her for not being like me, but like those brazen girls on the corner who owned our small world. I wanted more than anything to escape the brutal, glaring truths of adulthood: That I never liked those girls, with their gang member boyfriends. That had we grown up together, my mother and I would not have been friends. That my mother never knew me; Sera was the one who understood. That they had both betrayed me. And the fact that I had betrayed them, too, with my secrets, my desertion, didn’t help. I was alone. Mothers die. College, with neither my best friend nor my first love, loomed.
“Did Sera call?” I asked, though it was only eight in the morning. Before Mom could answer, I blurted, “You know what? I don’t think we should answer the phone today. Let’s just spend some time together, you and me. Let’s not talk to anyone else.”
“But what if your boyfriend calls, hon?” Mom said groggily. “It’s Saturday. Isn’t he gonna want to take you out?” She closed her eyes. I wanted to shout: Don’t!
There is still one secret Sera never learned. One summer afternoon when we were eleven, on the hottest day of the year, I chose to accompany Mom on the bus to pick out linoleum rather than go with Sera’s family to the beach. I told Sera’s parents that Mom was dragging me against my will, but the truth was, I wouldn’t have traded that day for all the cool breezes along Lake Michigan—that I wouldn’t trade it now for all the romance of the Aegean Sea. I went because Mom invited me. She so rarely invited me. I wore my best, sparkling white jean shorts, like on a date. Sera would have thought I was nuts, but when Mom took me to lunch afterward, I was too excited to eat, full on nothing but the anticipation of our every happiness.
Chad’s mother has hired a wedding consultant, because that is what people who christen their sons Chad do. The consultant, Deanna, says it is not her first same-sex wedding. She’s savvy to the protocol, which is important to Chad’s mother, and to all of the Merrys. An anchorwoman from Chicago’s ABC News is among the guests.
There is no protocol for gay marriage in the Guerra clan, although two of Miguel’s Miami cousins are gay. They, though, have never attempted to have a knockdown, drag-out celebration of queer matrimony with two hundred guests at a historic theater that has been closed for years and will be opened for the evening just for them. It amazes Miguel: the way WASPs alternately throw Republican fundraisers and gala ceremonies for their faggot sons, whatever whim strikes them. They are entitled to anything. He will benefit from their entitlement now, it seems. If his mother and stepfather weren’t considering boycotting the affair, worried God might hurl a lightening bolt at the theater to damn all guests, they might be proud. He is marrying up.
Deanna speaks for Chad’s mother now. Miguel understands this as the real reason a wedding consultant must be hired, for a gay marriage most of all. Somebody to play the villain. “When it’s over, you should consider shaking hands so none of the guests feel uncomfortable,” Deanna says, staring them straight in the eye where Mrs. Merry would have stammered uncomfortably, looked down at her designer loafers (that Miguel would not know the name of because he is a sorry excuse for a gay man—no fashion sense). “I worked with a lesbian commitment ceremony in July, and that’s what they did. It was wonderfully apropos—marriage is a contract after all. Just because the state of Illinois doesn’t recognize your union doesn’t mean the contract isn’t sealed, and that’s what people do when they seal a contract—shake hands.”
Somehow, pandering to homophobes who might vomit paella from witnessing two men kissing has been translated into a subversive act against the anti-gay policies of the State of Illinois. This is how things have been going lately. Miguel should be used to it.
“If you even suggest to me that we go along with this, you can forget the whole thing,” he tells Chad that night. “Your mother can just hire some politician to stand in my place and not offend anybody—we’re not a couple of eunuchs whose purpose in having a ceremony is to prove how unthreatening homosexuality is!”
Chad is on the computer. They are making their own invitations; that battle took two days to win. He doesn’t look up.
“Oh, honey, shaking hands wasn’t my mother’s idea,” he says. “Anyway, I’m sure Deanna was only joking.”
Miguel stares at the back of Chad’s curly blond head. Do they all think he is a child—that he will buy anything? Or is Chad the child? Chad does not turn to witness the incredulity Miguel holds on his face, and Miguel cannot translate the expression into words, so eventually his eyebrows get tired of rising, and he has to swallow and close his mouth. Afterward he only says, “You promise? You swear to me we’re going to kiss?”
“Of course, baby,” Chad says. “Come kiss me now.” But Miguel doesn’t feel like it and goes to take two Advil before bed.
Almost nobody Miguel knows is invited to the wedding. This is not the fault of the Merry clan. In fact, Mrs. Merry—Elaine, please—has coaxed him over several Mexican dinners (the Merrys eat Mexican now to make Miguel feel at home, even though Mexico is about the only Spanish-speaking country from which none of his ancestors hail) to invite people he works with, family members from out of town.
Miguel is an options trader at a company where everyone except the boss’s busty administrative assistant is male, and nobody else is openly gay. He is reasonably certain that sending invitations around the office would result in his being fired—or gangbanged—to teach him a lesson.
His younger sisters, Norma and Angelina, and their husbands will probably tow his mother’s line, so Miriam, three years his senior, may be the only “Miguel contingent.” She has always been his biggest fan and surrogate mother; he, in turn, her mascot. Norma is twenty-eight, and at only twenty, Miguel barely knows Angelina. She is not even his sister exactly; she is Miriam’s child, born when Miriam was thirteen. After Miguel’s father died, his mother took Miguel and Norma and moved to Chicago. Miriam remained in Venezuela with an aunt. By the time Miriam, too, moved to Chicago and into the Guerra home, Angelina was five, and nobody ever spoke of Miriam having given birth to her or almost dying in the process, or even hounded her anymore to confess what perro she’d allowed to lie with her and spoil her so young. They spoke instead of sending her to Baptist church meetings to help her find a good man, and also of improving her English so she could get a job if the man was not so good as all that. Angelina called Miguel’s mother Mami; they all did.
Miriam will be Miguel’s Best Woman, not by default but because he carries her inside his rib cage like a world five feet one inch tall, pressing against his organs and bones. Now Miriam has three new daughters and a husband who watches TV so continually that if Miguel telephones and does not hear a cop show in the background, he knows there is trouble and to hang up before he can make it worse. His warrior sister has slipped into anonymity, become a middle-American housewife, an ordinary devout Latina, an everyday Chicago spic with too-tight pants, a soft apple ass and hair a shade of auburn that does not exist in nature on anyone with skin as dark as hers, her children trailing behind her. But Miguel remembers.
The paella has been vetoed. Deanna thinks it unwise to give guests only “one lump of food,” as she put it. People like to have choices. “But that’s the beauty of paella,” Chad piped up in the sing-song voice he uses on Deanna—the voice usually reserved for his tenants—“you have more choices than with any other meal. I mean, look in here, there’s chicken, sausage, shrimp, pork. Where would you ever go where you’d get all these types of protein on one plate? Imagine what that’d cost!”
Deanna was unmoved.
Now they are at Café Central, on Chicago Avenue in Miguel’s old neighborhood, to sample the chicken stew, which involves both potatoes and rice. (“Two starches?” exclaimed Elaine Please, as though it must be a mistake.) They are an ensemble: Deanna, Miguel and Chad, Elaine and Charles Merry, and Chad’s sister, Becky. Becky is a tennis pro, which Miguel translates into lesbian, but because it would be unacceptable for the Merrys to have two gay children, she has forfeited her right to come out since Chad got there first. She is married to a former golf pro, a man who squandered his earnings and is now financially dependent upon the Merry clan. In Miguel’s mind, this translates as: Preppie downs martinis to make self fuck lesbian wife. Shiny WASP child conceived.
Café Central is not exactly hip, but has a certain cachet with the straggly artist residue from Wicker Park, trying to recapture post-college, parent-funded trips to Central America. Tonight, though, they are the only white patrons. Miguel recognizes the waitress from when he and his mother and sisters lived down the street seventeen years ago. She did not work at Café Central back then; she was in Norma’s class, and Miguel made out with her once behind the field house at school, and afterward he pinched his own neck until it bruised and told everybody she had given him a hickey. Apparently she does not recognize him, though when he places the order in Spanish, she says, “Que haces con los blanquillos?” tipping her head quizzically, maybe flirtatiously. Her bangs are wisps of too-long hair sprayed into a lacquered arch across her forehead.
“Me voy a casar. Soy Miguel, te recuerdas de mi?” But she wouldn’t remember; when he kissed her he was called Mike, because at the German bakery where he bussed tables, the owner and customers were always calling him Carlos or Pedro or Jose, and he just got sick of it. It was a long time before he wanted to hear Miguel again. His old flame scans Becky, assumed to be the object of his impending matrimony. Becky whose arms are thicker than Chad’s—Becky who’d probably like to lick this hot little chica’s grape-colored lipstick and grab her thick hips.
The chicken stew arrives. At first Miguel thinks maybe they will get something on the house, and the Merrys will feel important. They like to feel important at restaurants, and although Café Central may not be much of a restaurant in their eyes, it would make a good story to tell their Winnetka friends: exotic free fried plantains. But when the bill arrives, the waitress hands it off without even looking. Then Miguel remembers: she knows everyone who comes into Café Central—acquaintances do not merit special treatment. Only in Miguel’s new world do strangers exist.
Another interminable evening. Even once they are standing outside, slipping on sunglasses despite the gray tinge of the seven o’clock sky, Deanna will not stop complaining to Charles Merry about her stock portfolio. “How long do you think is reasonable to ride out this plunge?” she shrills. “I lost sixteen thousand dollars last week. I know that isn’t much in the scheme of things, but I can’t help feeling nervous. My financial advisor says to look at losses as temporary numbers on a page, not real money—but this is the same man who told me to invest in Amazon last year. Is it wrong of me to feel betrayed?”
Charles nods sympathetically. “When Chad started raising bulldogs, Elaine wanted to buy into Pets.com as a lark—it seemed like such a safe bet at the time. I don’t even want to tell you how much money we’ve lost on those puppies! If they were our grandchildren, we could have sent them all to Princeton for four years.”
“Alan Greenspan warned us that the irrational exuberance couldn’t last,” Elaine Please demurs. “We’ve all been living high on the hog, and now it’s time to pay the piper. The timing’s unfortunate, though, with the ceremony coming up—and we just bought the house in Scottsdale.” She turns to Miguel, suddenly hopeful. “Dear, you don’t ever see Alan Greenspan around the Board, do you? I so admire that man!”
Miguel does not have sunglasses; they can all see his eyes. He cannot bring himself to grace, even with dismissal, this fantasy of Greenspan jocularly frequenting Chicago Board of Trade urinals, so he says, “My mother put her entire inheritance into tech companies—since the index dropped, she’s had to sell her condos in Venezuela and Miami and take out a second mortgage on her Chicago house. They had to get rid of my stepfather’s boat and pull my youngest sister out of college. She works as a cleaning woman now—she’s great . . . keep her in mind if you can still afford household help.”
The Merrys glance, with one simultaneous bob of blond heads, at Chad. Deanna has scrambled to her car; this does not concern her. Chad steps one sneakered foot onto Miguel’s steel-toed Doc Marten. The smile on Miguel’s face hurts at the hinge of the jaw. Elaine Please’s face crinkles like an English bulldog’s. Is she trying to cry? “But Miguel,” she moans, hand over her heart. “We wouldn’t want your sister to clean our house, dear. You’re part of our family, now. Oh . . .”
Chad has wedged his foot under Miguel’s boulder of a shoe and pried it off the concrete with the superhuman strength of a mother lifting a car off her child. “Looks like rain!” he shouts, waving one finger around an impeccably gray sky incapable of the passion required for a storm. He does not break the tension by quipping, Oh, Mom, don’t be so gullible, Miguel’s mother doesn’t know what a stock portfolio is; his stepfather’s never been in a boat; his sister manages a deli counter and doesn’t even clean her own apartment! He doesn’t say this, Miguel suddenly realizes with the sensation of battery acid spilling into his stomach—one drop, but how quickly it eats away at everything—because he isn’t sure that parts of the anecdote aren’t true. (Maybe condos are cheap in Venezuela? What does that youngest sister—Norma? Angelina?—do again?) “The puppies,” Chad cries. “We’ve gotta run. The puppies need to go out.”
Charles Merry nods sagely. “Be sure to kiss those pups for us, son,” he says. He sounds like he means it.
“I don’t want to upset you, honey, but I think you should be forewarned. I don’t know if my mother really, really liked the stew.”
Miguel turns onto his side, facing the end of the bedroom that is not under construction, where the three bulldogs do not snore, where Chad’s boxer-shorted form that has recently gained ten pounds cannot be seen.
“Do you know how fucking sick I am of haggling about our menu?” he says. “It amazes me that you still enjoy eating at all. There’s something wrong with you. No normal human being can go through life so immune to the assholedom of others.”
Chad’s hand—Miguel swears he can feel new padding like the paw of a young cub—circles his shoulder blades softly. “Uh, excuse me, honey, have you met my mother? Which route would you rather I have taken? Hmm, let’s see: immune or dead?”
He does not remember Venezuela, he tells Chad. Mentions nothing about the house: small, with dirt floors. The family’s progression to dirt had been in stages. First, when Papi worked, there were cracked stucco walls, crumbly concrete floors, dirt only on the roads. But by the time Miguel was in school, Papi slept during the day, and floors and roads were indistinguishable. Mountains lay forever on the horizon no matter where they moved: Caracas, San Felipe. “Chicago is flat,” Mami said over and over, but they never went to the mountains; peaks simply loomed like a taunt. People in Chicago were better off since they did not know the beauty they were missing.
The three children slept all to one room. In the yard out back, vegetables grew, but not well. Mami was an American city girl; the way her tomatoes bruised and caved in as if under a hex was the cause of many fights. Afterward, Miriam would say of Mami, “Su piel se ha puesto como estos tomates—algun dia, el se la comera tambien.” Miguel was afraid of the image of his father wolfing down his mother’s tendered skin in lieu of her faulty tomatoes, but couldn’t concentrate on that fear because there were too many mistakes to work to keep from making, or he would become the target of Papi’s anger. Miriam was not afraid; she provoked. When Papi passed out, she laid Mami’s handkerchiefs over his face to watch them soar with his powerful zzzz’s.
Miguel does not tell Chad about the time he woke to an itching on his back that, when scratched, lurched around inside his T-shirt like a camel’s hump wanting independence. His screaming woke Mami, but she was too afraid of the rat to touch Miguel—she kept approaching, then lunging back—so Miriam straddled him, yanked the garment over his head with one swift motion so forceful that, released, he fell against the mattress with a thud. Looming above him, with moonlight haloing her frizzy hair the color of dead leaves, Miriam touched his face only once before rising briskly to calm Norma. Miguel’s back stung like being belted when any of them were bad; they all had to lie on the floor while Papi beat them one by one. The innocent ones would make the guilty pay doubly for their having been punished, too, and that would do Papi’s work for him.
“How did your father drive his car off a bridge?” Chad asks him—once, actually, only once. “I don’t understand, was it a suicide?” But Papi had long been dying by degrees; the act seemed a logical extension, intentional or not. Toward the end, he often disappeared for weeks at a time, and Mami, with her desperate city-girl mind, thought to make little fake bouquets of flowers out of cloth and paper: an entrepreneur. She filled baskets with them and cajoled Miriam and Miguel to carry them door-to-door to sell them like gypsy children, as if the neighbors were not as poor as themselves. That was the only time Miguel remembers seeing Miriam cry, refusing to go out into the street with the bouquets, humiliated; the only time Mami got Papi’s belt and beat Miriam with it, wailing the whole time: Did she want her baby brother and sister to starve? Miriam had not resisted Mami’s blows, but she would not go—she claimed she would throw the flowers away and find some man to buy her flower instead, how would Mami like that? Mami sent Norma with Miguel, and afterward they had enough for butter, sugar, and corn flour: the buttered arepas were their meal, and for desert they sprinkled sugar on top.
“When I was a little boy, I used to eat sticks of butter,” Miguel regales Chad, who probably thinks this is some quaint Venezuelan custom. Chad listens, rapt. The looming mountain of truths he does not know can only be called Miguel’s fault.
On their first date, Chad took Miguel for a tour of historic buildings on the South Side. Miguel expected the excursion to be reminiscent of the architect’s in Hannah and Her Sisters and felt excited; he wanted to be assaulted by beauty. He was fresh back from a year in Barcelona, where he’d started losing his hair and generally made a fool of himself for love.
He needed to believe Chicago was worth coming home to.
Chad’s buildings—both the sixty he owned and those he just worshipped from afar—were located primarily in Bronzeville and Englewood, African-American neighborhoods where there seemed more vacant lots than homes. Brownish weeds sprang up just tall enough to rape a woman amid and not be seen; billboards for HIV medication loomed over every block. Miguel counted liquor stores, hair salons, Brown’s chicken chains, and churches, while Chad slowed down his car crooning, “Look at the detail!” at every home with a turret. Chad was especially intoxicated by boulevard mansions and English-style row houses. He referred to himself as a preservationist, to which Miguel said, “Uh, don’t you mean developer?”
“I develop, sure,” Chad explained. “But not like you understand development. Not like luxury loft condos with Euro-kitchens. I preserve everything—everything! And I don’t just turn around and sell to make a buck—I’m renting to good people, lots of them from the Section 8 housing program. My buildings are their first decent place to live.”
“So if you aren’t selling your properties, where are you getting money to fix them up and buy more?” Miguel said.
“Well, from a variety of sources—rent, loans, my father . . . and I do sell some, the ones with the least historical significance.” Chad narrowed his eyes, an Am I getting through to you? look. “It’s all about the buildings,” he tried. “I’ve thrown myself in front of bulldozers to protect them—I mean, literally, that is exactly what I’ve done. Any abandoned building I want to acquire, I’ll break in to start planning how to save it. Once I fell through a ceiling and had to cling to this beam while the floor swarmed with rats. If a place I buy turns out to be a crack house, I go in and drag out the mattresses and chase out the dealers and whores. Yesterday I walked in on a gang bang—well, actually the girl seemed into it so that was no big deal. But my point is, these buildings . . . Look, I’d rather an entire hick town starve to death than let one historic city block be knocked down by Daley’s fast-track demolition program. I’m serious. Daley is Satan, do you understand? This is not about money—this is my entire life.”
Miguel did not have much legroom in the passenger’s seat of Chad’s car. The floor apparently functioned as a trashcan; at his feet were discarded wrappers of apple pie and Styrofoam containers with hardened salad dressing leaking out the sides. The back seat was filled with newspapers, floor to ceiling. In the trunk, which Chad had opened to get money for dinner, were two industrial-sized buckets overflowing with quarters. Miguel pulled his knees in tight against the bucket seat. “Uh, what’s with the car?”
“This is my office,” Chad said. “I’m on the move all the time. I go to court to fight Daley’s people, and then I come down here to pay my workers and collect rent from my tenants. I work seven days a week out of this car. It’s not a datemobile.”
“Where is the datemobile?” Miguel asked. “Did your father loan you money to buy that, too, but you drive the dump to blend in when you’re slumming?”
Chad stared back, blank. His cheeks were the pink of models in J. Crew ads, of Harvard, Love Story boys. Miguel wanted to see sweat break out on his forehead when he entered him without lube; he wanted to see the blond dampen to brown.
“None of this is very old compared to European architecture anyway.” Miguel shrugged. “That’s history—this is just poverty. If you like crumbling deterioration so much, forget the South Side—these are palaces. You’d be euphoric in the third world.”
By the time they arrived safely back on the North Side and hit Roscoe’s for a midnight drink, Chad’s alcoholic ex (who’d introduced them) was already toasted at the bar. He dragged Miguel to the toilet and pinched his arm too hard to be a come-on. “What the fuck?” he said. “Chad thinks you hate his guts.”
“One can never look the fool by looking skeptical,” Miguel said.
X was too drunk to have a rosy glow; he resembled a silver-yellow liver. When he shook his head like Miguel was the saddest thing he’d ever seen, it was unconvincing.
“You are a fool,” X said. “That man’s an urban hero—he’s adorable—every guy in Chicago lusts him, and he’s been pining after you all summer, you moody little freak.”
“Leave me alone,” Miguel said. “I hate earnest boys.”
“You hate yourself,” X said. “Welcome to my club.”
Though Chicago was a big city, the gay community much larger than Barcelona’s, somehow all fags still knew one another, and a bad date could never be shaken off. Chad continued to appear, flushed with enthusiasm and tussled in his feckless, rich-boy way, every time Miguel hit the bars with his friends. Miguel took to drinking heavily at the bar with X while the others boogied on the dance floor.
Chad could not dance. His hips seemed welded between stomach and thigh; he could not move them without his entire body convulsing unsteadily back and forth, and after a few moments of this exhausting gesture, Chad would settle into a subtle, side-stepping motion that Miguel remembers practicing alone in his bedroom before his first school dance in the States. Once, nursing Glenlivets with X, Miguel thought to prove how uninterested he was in Chad by targeting the hottest man in the vicinity and telling the bartender to send him a drink. But when the bartender delivered the beer and turned to point out Miguel, Miguel suddenly panicked—WASPs were not accustomed to working for things; what if Chad simply gave up?—and crouched to hide, stumbling out of the bar area amid guffaws from X.
X must have clued the rest of the guys in, because somehow, staggering through Lincoln Park in a drunken cluster en route to a party, everyone managed to inexplicably free himself and hop into a cab in the span of three minutes, leaving Miguel and Chad gaping at one another. Miguel’s hands burrowed deeply in his pockets. Woody Allen-like he shuffled, muttering, “I guess we’d better go home.” They stood directly in front of a straight bar called Déjà Vu. When Miguel bumped into a sign proclaiming TANGO CONTEST, Chad grabbed his arm and directed, “Come on. Let’s go in.”
In Barcelona, Miguel once attempted to attend a Gay Pride parade only to find thirty lesbians hanging around haphazardly, smoking cigarettes and ambling down the Ramblas at a pace at which you’d walk to the dentist. Men in Spain were not “out,” he was told; they all lived at home with their mothers. It was a Catholic, machismo country; unemployment was high, and young men needed parental help—what could be done? Miguel told his Chicago friends that he’d left for that reason: he could not live among the closeted when he had been out since age eighteen. Of course, in truth he’d left because Tomas, the love of his life, owner of the world’s most perfect profile, and a man whose casual way of draping one ankle over the opposite knee was so perfectly European that simply being European could not adequately account for it, had been found with his mouth around one of Miguel’s English students—a “straight” seventeen-year-old. Oh, and because without Tomas, he was homeless, lived on nothing but corn nuts and canned tuna, lost thirty pounds, used his key to sneak into the language school at night and sleep on the floor, got caught and fired, answered an ad for a male escort service only to be told his ass was too skinny for even desperate old trolls to pay to fondle it, accepted wired money from Miriam (who had to lie to her husband and pay her rent late), and bought a ticket home one week before his thirtieth birthday and the official beginning of his life as a bitter old man. Now here was Chad, beaming beside him, saying, “You must know how to tango,” and Miguel, champion of open homosexuality and fleer of Spanish repression (and who did not, in fact, know how to tango), could think of no reply quick or politically correct enough to prevent being whirled around the floor of a straight, yuppie bar by the WASP with the incredibly convulsing pelvis.
When the D.J. announced the winner—“Two guys who can’t dance but gotta be awarded for nerve”—Chad kissed him amid the raucous cheers of breeder bar-goers aflutter with the illusion of having gotten into a kitschy drag show without paying a cover charge. Miguel fled the bar; Chad followed. Six months later, they bought a house.
When they go to visit Mami and Carlos, her American husband, Chad helps Carlos build a garage out back. At restaurants, he holds Miguel’s hands across the table, then manages to schmooze his way into complimentary dessert and champagne. His logic (“Why are gay patrons so afraid to show a little affection when the chef is obviously a queen and so are all the waiters—isn’t that silly?”), seems to cause the world to click into place around them, adapting to common sense according to Chad.
Despite having guns pulled on him, his car being vandalized, jumping out the window during a drug bust in one of his “abandoned” buildings, and being punched in the face every month or so, he emerges each day from the city’s roughest neighborhoods flawlessly bright and chatty.
And so in a similar fashion, Miguel has learned to speak in light sentences, as he would to a lover who spoke a different tongue. Theirs is a language devoid of causality: “I was the first in my family to go to college,” Miguel will say, omitting, I’d already slashed my wrists once and hoped a dose of university liberalism could save me. “I went to Barcelona to improve my Spanish,” he says, without, Travel or Prozac—the only two things that could get me out of bed. “I ran out of money, so I came home,” he tells Chad, never, I failed in starving myself to death or catching AIDS, and I’d lost the balls for outright suicide, so I didn’t know what else to do. “Love you,” he coos, adds “honey,” but never, Help—teach me how to be like you.
Miriam is crying. Miguel knows the sound: silence. She speaks only English. “I have to talk to you,” she says. “About the ceremony.”
Previously, she has said wedding. Miguel waits. He knows what she will say. Though it has not been made official, she will confirm that Mami and Carlos will not attend—cannot—although they love him and think Chad a nice boy. Mami will pray for him; he is welcome for dinner anytime, and Chad, too. She will not turn her back.
“I can’t be the Matron of Honor,” Miriam says like she is reading from Mami’s script, poking fun at someone else’s role. “This is the hardest decision I’ve ever made,” she says. “You know I love you,” she says, “but my children—”
“We’re calling it Best Woman.” Miguel is, uncontrollably, smiling.
“I just can’t support something I don’t believe God supports—not in public. I can’t act like the union is binding in the eyes of God. I don’t know what I think you should do, Miguel. I’m not saying the right thing would be to marry a woman if you just can’t love her that way. I know you were born like—I believe God made you the way you are. But He gives people tests, like some people are born without a leg or without sight, to see how you’ll handle adversity. You could still choose not to give in to the limitations you were born with, not to take the easy way out.”
“What,” he says, “are you talking about? Did Mami put you up to this?”
“Mami’s God is meetings and potlucks; she doesn’t know what she even believes.” Miriam pauses, snuffling. “Mami doesn’t know I’m talking to you, right? Her religion is about finding a new man who doesn’t drink liquor, you know? I don’t go to her church anymore. I don’t want my girls growing up like we did. I’ve been taking them to Eastern Orthodox church for a few—I feel it there, what I’ve been looking for.”
Two weeks till the big night. Miguel and Chad and X and the boys have been on their knees scrubbing the mildewy Uptown theater until the mildew gleams. “Being Baptist wasn’t restrictive enough for you?” Miguel asks incredulously. “I mean, they wouldn’t want you to be Best Woman, either—they think I’m burning in hell, too. You don’t have to change religions to get out of standing up at my wedding.”
“That kind of thinking,” Miriam says, “is exactly what I’m talking about. You know, the world does not revolve around individuals. Mami married a Baptist, so bam, she became one—you feel attracted to men, or whatever, so you think you can marry one like a man and a woman marry. Everyone does whatever they want. Papi did whatever he wanted, and he had bastard children running around Caracas and us with bruises starving to death while he partied. The Orthodox Church and its rituals have been around a long, long time—it’s not about what we want. It’s about what is.”
“Maybe what is is just you wanting morality prescribed in clear, unchanging terms,” Miguel says. “Maybe traditional ethics is about cowards not having to choose.”
“You can’t change good and evil by changing your opinion, Miguel!” Miriam shouts, agitated. “Christ has taught us the difference, and if you found him in your heart, you’d know what I’m saying is true. I’m not denouncing you or Chad as people. I love you both as children of God, and I’ll always stand by you and hope you find your way.”
“You’ll always stand by me unless I ask you to stand next to me on the most important day of my life?” Why is he doing this? He hears himself: rhetoric, like hers.
“This is useless.” Her tears have noise now, the sound of a common cold, Miriam’s voice a nasal congestion commercial. “I should never have agreed to support something I didn’t believe in—I’m still new to the church, and I was hoping to have my cake and eat it, too. I didn’t want to sacrifice. But I’ve spoken with my priest, and I know now that I can’t make exceptions just because I love you—”
“God forbid anyone make exceptions for love.” He is at it again.
Miriam’s voice is somber. “God does forbid it, Miguel.”
He is stunned. So this is it; his sister has joined the ranks of the earnest; the humor has been sucked from her pores by a vampire more powerful than their father ever was. Nothing left to say. Miguel remembers—he has occasional flashbacks of college, like a recurring acid trip—Kohlberg’s morality scale, in which lower moral beings slavishly adhere to the dogma of church or state, while those at the highest level—six—are able to use rational thought to deduce morality based on the complex nuances of individual situations, even if the “right” choice defies societal norms. At the dial tone in his ear, Miguel wonders if a union between two men is more or less morally right when based on the kind of compromises mainstream heterosexual marriage also extols. Would marrying Tomas for hysterical lust, for example, have been more meritorious? Or is marrying Chad—with whom he owns a house they will be paying off for fifty years, with whom he tends a litter of bulldog pups whose butts need wiping in the middle of the night, with whom watching The Simpsons at 10:00 PM is a far more regular ritual than sex—exactly the kind of circumstance that will, someday in the future, convince the religious right that gay love is not so different after all? If he’d said to his sister, We don’t even have anal sex—Chad guards his anus like Buckingham Palace, would that have made a dent? If he had said, I thought about killing myself for years, and only this man with his lightness and entitlement and oblivion has pulled me out of the depths of my own narcissistic despair, would Miriam consider the sin of suicide greater or lesser than that of loving a man? If he had confessed, I’m not sure I even am in love with him—I’m not sure he’s anything more than a survival tactic, would she take pity? Would she ask then, as he has asked himself a million times: If you are willing to incur the wrath of God and the world for your homosexuality, shouldn’t it be for something more?
“I’ve seen these beautiful sprigs of tall grass at Neiman’s,” Elaine Please says into the answering machine. “Perfect for the centerpieces of the tables. I’ll pick them up for you. I’ve spoken to Deanna about it, and she thinks it’s a wonderful, charming—” Beep.
“Also, I’ve been pondering the port-a-potties. I don’t see how, in an entire theater the size of the Uptown, there are no actual restrooms that can be made to function for one night—but what about some potpourri, just to dress things up a—” Beep.
X, fast: “OK, the sign-up sheet for sex in the Uptown has officially begun, so it’s up to you—Chad, I’m talking to you; Miguel would love to see us caught, he’s wicked—to make sure the nice Winnetka ladies stay far away from the actual theater section during the reception, since I personally have signed up three times, and I’m not even telling you how many times Dan—” Beep.
“Look, your machine keeps cutting me the fuck off—I wanted to say that at the stroke of midnight, you need to make sure the DJ is playing something seventies, ’cause I have a rendezvous in the theater balcony and I want it to be so Boogie Nights! All right you little bourgeois marrieds, wake up already—it is only eleven o—” Beep.
“Miguel? It’s me, Angie. Look, I want to talk to you, OK? You need to meet me in person, I don’t want to talk about this over the phone. So, OK, don’t call me at home ’cause . . . I’m not so much there right now, uh, so, I don’t know, call me on my cell . . .”
OK, Miguel thinks, Here is where they all start to fall.
Mami was looking for Miguel’s socks. Why she thought they’d be in Papi’s room, he does not recall. She had to take Miguel to the doctor to have his foot put in a cast; at school, worried about Mami, Miguel had claimed his foot hurt so he could be sent home. When he claimed it again, Mami dragged him to the clinic. None of Miguel’s friends ever went to the doctor; why did he have to be the one with a crazy mother from Chicago? Over his squirming protests, the doctor pried at him with fingers greasy from other people’s sweat, proclaimed the cartilage on the ball of his foot “cracked.” Mami, earnest with doctor-faith that would later become minister-faith, meant to drag Miguel back to have his foot obscured in plaster so the doctor could grow more fat and rich.
The socks were in Papi’s room, and so was Papi, passed out. He didn’t work anymore, was back from wherever he’d been the past month, still in the shirt worn when he left. Mami tiptoed; Miguel heard the clumsy thud of keys, bottles falling on dirt. He waited, full of hatred for the doctor and Mami, who never saw people for what they were.
“Thieving whore—you think you can trap me by hiding my keys?”
Papi’s voice came out English; Miguel did not know what the words meant. Only the tone, one of chasing, Papi’s heavy feet pounding dirt with hollow echoes; Mami’s, fleeing, too light to be heard. He pursued her to the yard, where the neighbors on both sides were out tending their gardens: watering, weeding, gathering—things his mother, the doctor-believer, did not know how to do. The neighbors turned their lazy eyes to Papi—he was just violent enough to be a bit of novelty, even in their violence-splattered lives. He caught Mami’s hair in a fist. Miguel felt his own head jerk. A yo-yo, her face making contact with Papi’s curled fingers, knuckles as torn and purple as a woman’s hidden parts. Mami’s bones made a louder noise than dirt, but her muffled cry was similar, like an echo inside her own chest. Miguel buried his head in his knees, thought, Let him stop now, God, let him stop now, I want to go to the doctor.
Girls screaming. Not Mami, but Miriam and Norma, running from the front yard. Mami on her knees, one knee catching the hem of her dress taut and hunching her over, the fabric too stiff to stretch. He held her hair at the scalp, no movement permitted. Mami had grown skinny from saving flour, butter, and sugar for the children: through her skin, sharp bones. The crunching of knuckle on jaw, knuckle on shoulder blade, knuckle on teeth. Blood on Papi’s hand. Was that where the purple came from—dried blood and dirt, never washed from some other beating?
In the past month, had Papi been at some other lady’s house, as Miriam sometimes said, collecting blood to stain his jagged fingers?
Or was the discoloration merely an old man’s decay, waiting for Miguel someday, too? Now, Miriam in the yard, a whirlwind in bare feet, shaking the fence. The neighbors stared: the girl was too proud, she and her American mother both. “Ayudenla! Ayuden a mi mami, ayudenla!” Who did the child think she was, asking that they get involved? That man was crazy—they had enough troubles of their own.
“Miriam!” Mami’s voice, weak but rising like a sharp note, stilling the air. “Go in the house!” The neighbors did not comprehend English, Mami’s command an unknown oracle. “Take the niños inside—now!”
Limbs flew. Miriam, soaring through the air with the wild grace of a savage ballerina in grand jeté—landing in a jumble of limbs on her father’s back, all gnarled ponytail, bare thighs, and dirty cotton underpants.
Papi reeled. At just thirteen, Miriam was a woman already, breasts and substance; he collapsed to his knees, flung her off by bending over so she flipped like TV kung fu: back against dirt, dress above her hips, collar still in Papi’s grip. Mami scampered to her feet, gathered Miguel and Norma tight; she did not seem to know her face was pulpy. The neighbors glanced at one another, worried—would the snotty American lady go away and leave him to beat the girl for show? They did not want to see him beat the little girl.
From the ground, Miriam shouted, phlegm and authority: “Mami—take them, take them!”
By the sockets of Miguel’s arms, Mami dragged. Around to the front of the house, down the street, farther, farther. Where was Miriam? Norma bawled next to him as they traveled en masse, away, off the block, running for their lives. A three-headed beast with one pair of legs: Mami’s. She did not stop pulling until Miguel was uncertain where he was and could no longer turn back. They stood on a corner, Mami’s face a fighter’s, her nose broken. Next week, she and Miguel would go to the doctor and the doctor would say, Sorry, nothing we can do for you, while Miguel’s healthy foot twitched in its cast. The week after that, Papi would be dead; they would hear it through the grapevine because by then, Mami and the two of them would be staying with “Tía,” an elderly widow who needed living assistance. Miriam would join them once Papi was dead, and after she had Angelina she would stay with Tía while Mami and the three youngest went to Mami’s family in Chicago, to throw themselves on the mercy of Abuela, who’d always known Mami should not go to Venezuela or marry Papi or do any of the things she had done. Miriam would arrive later, a grown woman, and at first Miguel would not remember that for two weeks prior to Papi’s death, he had not seen her. When he did, he assumed she’d been home still. Only years later would she mention, casually, in passing, how the police picked her off the street, tried to return her home before they made the connection that her father was el loco from the bridge. How they’d had to look for Mami, because Miriam didn’t know where the rest of the family had gone.
Angelina sits at the bar. She has a worn look inappropriate to her twenty years so that, though she is only five feet tall and still has acne littering the sides of her chiseled, Guerra jaw, she is able to gain entrance anywhere she chooses without question or fake ID. Of his sisters, Angelina is the least beautiful, with the wisest eyes. She has Miriam’s features, but on her they are larger, blunted, her skin too thick to appear feminine, though her hair is long and full, her smile wide. She looks to Miguel, with her ravaged little nut of a face, like a member of a girl gang in a 1980s made-for-TV movie. Tough but sweet. She was eight years old when he left for college; a generation separates them. He has never, that he can recall, had a conversation with her.
She blows smoke from a Marlboro Red into his face. “I just want you to know two things. One, I’m getting divorced. Two, nobody is coming to your wedding ’cause Miriam’s gone crazy and they all worship her, but I’ll be there. I won’t have a date, so maybe you can tell some of your cute flamer friends to take pity and dance with me.”
Miguel says, “Did he hit you?”
Angelina pushes his arm. “Are you on crack? Javier knows better than to be raising a hand to me. He’s just, you know, set in his ways. He doesn’t want me going to school, which I’m gonna do. He wants to, like, have a gazillion babies hanging off my boobs and shit, but I’m gonna be a nurse. Or a teacher. I don’t know. Something.”
“Oh.” He wants to say, Be something that pays better.
She is drinking a whiskey or scotch on the rocks. A strange drink for a girl her age, he thinks, but she gulps it with a kind of desperation that transcends age. Under the too-long arms of her shirt cuffs, he sees that her nails are bitten down so low the fingertips are scabbed: picked over, re-scabbed again, mutilated and made sport of, just as he did at her age. He guesses that when she wounds herself, she torments the skin, does not allow a quick healing, is perversely fascinated with damage, or just bored and looking for something to do. He wants to put his arms around her, but he has never known how to do that, not with anybody—which is why he has Chad.
“Uh, are you still working at Dominick’s Deli during the day, to, uh, pay for tuition and stuff?” he asks lamely.
Her eyes meet his. Mocking, the eyes of a mother—except his mother never teased, always wore a sheepish expression, embarrassed for her mistakes, for what her children had seen. Angelina lights another cigarette, rubs up and down on his leg like a lover—no, like a sister, except in his family, nobody ever touches anyone, it is too dangerous, love too close to violence. “So,” she says, “can I be your Best Man or what?”
Behind the front door, a dilapidated ticket booth swims with cobwebs—they simply did not have time to tackle any area of the theater where guests would not roam. The entryway ceiling is partially collapsed. Miguel feels his stomach tighten; Chad’s grip on his hand simultaneously loosens as he rushes ahead, Miguel reluctantly trailing, eyes on the (admittedly cool) marble floors. “Look,” Chad squeals—is he crazy, is Miguel marrying a crazy person, is this what it has come to? “Look, baby—look!”
Miguel does. Two spiraling staircases frame the great lobby; they are aglow, entwined with gauzy silver ribbons and white lights, giant bronze candelabras at the base of each, flames lit. From the upper balcony, columns strain two stories upward like worshippers toward heaven; below are friezes—some painted, some raw—with alcoves on either side. In a daze, Miguel pauses beneath the chandelier in the mezzanine where the ceremony will be, glimpses a fountain overflowing with roses, more candelabras burning bright. He rushes into the second lobby, a giant vaulted room with dark wood beams, stenciled elaborately. He glances up again: winding along the balconies are wrought iron railings embedded with emblems, shields, coats of arms . . . such precision. Each detail, spare ribbons and white Christmas lights and voluptuous flowers, is unchanged from the dozens of times he has been here, on his knees scouring filth, eyes down, always down. He has never been here before. Of course this is where Chad wanted to have the ceremony—fought to have the ceremony. This place is all about transformation. Decay is not what Chad loves, but the mythic possibility of regeneration, the promise of something eternal. Beautiful.
“Is it OK?” Chad whispers. Then, tentative-but-hopeful, “Do you like it?”
Miguel kisses his ready-to-speak mouth. “I do.”
The basement of the Uptown remains dank and chilled. Elaine and Charles Merry pace the bottom of the staircase leading to the mezzanine, where guests slowly sift to their seats. Elaine has dubbed the decor makeshift eclectic: luxurious silver taffeta ribbons on chairs; light-up Teletubbies—all purple—as favors atop each plate. Cocktails are available before the ceremony, for those who need them, and Miguel hasn’t seen an empty hand yet. Fags and Blue Bloods size each other up: Who is prettier? Who makes more money? He thinks, a rare moment of Chad-inspired optimism: Everyone here makes enough to buy their good looks—maybe just for tonight, everyone will be friends.
The music begins. For the warm-up, to create a proper mood of both romance and whimsy, Chad’s mousy administrative assistant sings the Indigo Girls’ “Power of Two,” accompanied by X on guitar. His strumming hums unexpectedly gentle. Angelina is a black-locked, pornographic Shirley Temple in a curve-hugging dress, hair coiled tight, vampy but comical. She is a fag’s wet hag dream, a vixen who does not take herself seriously, whose charm is in her self-creation. In lieu of a bride, she flits around doing her dangly-wrist scotch routine; she hugs miniature grandmothers—in keeping with his fine, long-living lineage, Chad has two. Miguel keeps his eyes on Angelina like a talisman. How has she managed to hide so long in the shadow of their sister, her mother? His chest feels swollen; he is unable to draw a full breath. Chad’s hand touches his arms at intervals—here—away—here.
Procession music begins.
“Oh, Christ!” Elaine, departing from her usual Tammy Faye Bakker, honey-tongued sweetness, stomps a low-heeled foot. “I’ve got to pee—Charles, what’ll I do?”
“Go to the toilet, dear.”
And she’s off. Scampering up the stairs, skirt gathered at the knee. The men shift weight from one leg to another and back again. Somebody has apparently clued in the pianist to stall. Pacabel’s Canon—are they kidding,
who OK’d this? Charles Merry belches quietly into his fist. He has had more martinis than the rest.
“She might have gotten lost,” Chad suggests after five minutes pass. “She’s never been here before.”
“How could she get lost—the port-a-potties take up an entire hallway!”
“Yeah, but they’re, you know . . .” Chad gestures vaguely, imitating his mother, appropriately confused. “Off hidden to the side.”
Miguel bolts. This is his job—husbands fetch cars while their wives wait under restaurant canopies in the rain, and so this will be his fate, too. He will go fetch Chad’s socialite mother who, perhaps so offended by the port-a-potties, has swooned and is lying on the inclined hallway like a damsel. He’d like to kick her ass.
At the port-a-potties, he stands outside the row of shut doors, clearing his throat. “Elaine? We’re ready to start, uh—are you—Chad wanted me to check and see if we should go ahead without you.”
No reply. Miguel begins to knock on plastic doors, and, when that fails, to fling them open. Empty. Paranoid, he runs toward the main entrance to glance outdoors and make sure she has not taken off—Cinderella amid the bums and club-goers on Broadway—having decided this was all a huge mistake after all. But once in the main lobby he glimpses, at the very top of the stairs next to the entrance for balcony seating, a door marked LADIES. Clearly Elaine—being Elaine—would have imagined that the port-a-potties would be in the ladies’ room—that would be the only civilized thing! Taking off, he tackles two stairs at a time. But at the top of the grand stairway, the door to the ladies’ room will not budge. Who knows what manner of rubble lies inside—like the crazy heaps of broken rocks and wood that obstruct the historic wood floors of Chad’s buildings—who can guess what bones and flecks of old skin inhabit this place? Downstairs, Pacabel’s Canon comes to an end. The pianist waits, a palpable pause, then begins Chopin’s Etudes—thank God. Miguel sinks to the floor to clear his head.
He sees her shoes first. Under the curtain that closes off the balcony: a red, cigarette-burned velvet curtain that does not reach the floor.
Miguel hops to his feet and flings it back—shit, has Elaine signed up on the sex list?—and gapes, eyes traveling the bent bump of ass, beige tweed gathered, garter tops visible, as Elaine Please Merry lets loose a stream of steaming urine that scatters dust. Drizzles a mist upon his wing tips.
“This cannot be happening.”
In the shadows, the back of her tailored mother-of-the-bride blazer convulses. Sobs rise to greet him alongside wet dust and ammonia. Miguel approaches cautiously: she is of a different breed than he; will she attack? But that is what he does when cornered—suddenly her arms burst around him, clutching the back of his tux, nose buried into his shoulder. They are the same height. Miguel wills his hand from investigating what he is fairly certain is a piss stain on his arm—instead, that hand, soon to bear a plain gold band, rubs an invisible circle on the back of his mother-in-law. Instead his voice soothes, “It’s OK. We didn’t start without you—everyone’s waiting downstairs.”
“It was horrible.” She has not yet looked up, speaks drippily into his collar. I had to . . . urinate so badly, and I couldn’t find those port-a-contraptions anywhere. The door to the ladies’ room was locked, or barricaded, and I started to—oh, after forty, the body falls apart, you just aren’t the same. It’s so humiliating . . . I’ve ruined my—”
“I can’t see anything on your skirt,” he offers quickly. “The tweed’s thick. Just get rid of your underpants—look, toss them here.” On impulse: “So many people are going to be having sex up here later, nobody will ever know it was you.”
Her eyes meet his: water and desperation staining blue irises. “But,” she says, her grip on his lapels suddenly hopeful, conspiratorial, “Darling, won’t they all be men?”
“Oh, lots of them wear lingerie,” he promises, and with his lie feels the nausea of treason, the instant revocation of his queer-advocacy card. What do you call a fag who reinforces a stereotype he’s spent his life fighting against, just to make his enemy feel better? Elaine beams, tickled. What do you call a man who chooses enmity over trust?
Backing away enough so the steam off their nervous bodies floats between them, his mother-in-law straightens his tie. “Chad is waiting.” Her voice has grown thick, huskier than her son’s. “We mustn’t disappoint him—chop chop, Miguel, let’s go.”
Hand in hand, Miguel lets himself be led.
Now, the procession begins.
Angelina and Becky march first. Arms linked like a shiny couple on a wedding cake, they saunter up the stairs. Becky wears black pleated pants; from behind, Miguel notes the breadth of her derriere as suitable for her future as a dyke. They should have included a more significant lesbian contingent among the guests—maybe Becky would get lucky. Or perhaps he is only wishing for the demise of a marriage the world is more supportive of than his own—how many guests are out there whispering, Well, I’ve seen everything now, into each other’s wrinkled ears? How many are here out of curiosity—a freak show—secretly laughing down the sleeves of their Carlisle and Armani suits at the Merrys and their absurd circus? As though three quarters of these guests don’t know they voted for George W.! Miguel feels a pang of pity, and though he is not sure who its recipient is, he puts his arm around Elaine’s disarmingly narrow shoulders and gives her an awkward squeeze. She brushes him off: “Don’t get nervous now! You’re next!”
Dignified by cummerbunds and bow ties, Miguel and Chad join arms and begin the arduous stairs. They have to time their steps together: a four-legged beast for life. Chad’s smile is blinding; Miguel glances at him, attempts eye contact, but in age-old bridal tradition, he is not even sure Chad sees him now. Lumps of bile push their way up Miguel’s throat as though he may begin to bawl—the sensation is almost foreign: panic grips him; his armpits prickle; his thighs slicken against his tux. Up front, Angelina is already weeping openly, her skinny face contorted, sage’s eyes squinty and childlike. Miguel recalls her as a baby—how Miriam would not kiss her good-bye, would not hold her. This, he remembers abruptly, so disorienting it reels him and he trips against Chad, is why they left. Heroic Miriam, who had sacrificed herself for them, could not even look at her own child, so Mami thought it best if they took the baby to Chicago. Miriam has grown good at giving people up, good at being a martyr—now she will be God’s. Some history he can never access; some secrets lie outside the orderly moral universe of blame. Perhaps good-byes mean little to her anymore; perhaps a higher law, the possibility of redemption later, is all that can keep her from dying now. He will be her casualty, and her sacrifice will give her no peace, this he knows, but for a moment he truly wishes it would.
And then, Angelina is waving. From alongside the podium set up for the (flaming) Unitarian minister who will perform the ceremony, his Best Woman raises her black-gloved hand and beckons—and against his will, Miguel spins, almost knocking Chad down. He turns, and he expects to see her, his older sister, there in the last hour—she would not let him down. But instead Angelina is beckoning to Carlos. Chad spins, too, and squeezes Miguel’s elbow, whispers, “What’s he doing here all alone?”
But scurrying self-consciously over the stockinged legs of Winnetka WASPs, Carlos is heading toward a row of dark heads. Mami, Norma with her husband and son—and Abuela, a confused expression set into her wrinkled brow, too short to see above the head in front of her. The space next to Mami is empty; Carlos fills it. Miriam is nowhere to be seen. They are, all six of them, dressed in their very best, in the dresses and suits they do not even wear to church except perhaps on Christmas or Easter.
Mami is beautiful. In this sea of white she glows like the Black Virgin on a Barcelona mountaintop; dignity radiates from her polished skin, new epidermis covering layers of war wounds. Who can tell why she allowed one child to sacrifice herself for the others—weren’t mothers supposed to sacrifice themselves instead? Who can tell what brought her here, she and her tribe who will, once again after tonight, sink back into basement bingo games and prayer meetings and huddling around the Spanish soaps in the tiny house’s constant orange glow, the smell of beans and rice thick in the cheaply-constructed walls. Has he ever assured her that he would be proud to have her at his wedding—that she would not shame him? Did she need him to? Who can guess at the secrets of the human heart, ever capable of perilous renewal, ever susceptible to dangerous beauty, however scarred? Has he ever wished, amid the hideous gleam of his disgust for the Merrys, that they were his parents instead?
I am a bride, I am a groom, I am loved. But the thought will not stick. In the next instant: Winnetka WASP Urinates in Historic Building Preservationist Son Strives to Save. Health Hazard Declared, Uptown Bulldozed to Ground. Somewhere, his older sister kneels, praying to a pitiless god of absolutes. Somewhere, somewhere, not here.
An Intelligent Woman and a Beautiful Woman go on vacation together with their Husbands. They go on a cruise, to Greece. The Intelligent Woman worries that her husband will like the Beautiful Woman’s breasts when they take off their bathing suit tops on the beach. Yet to refuse to remove her own top in hopes of forcing the Beautiful Woman to remain clothed in solidarity, the Intelligent Woman would have to be willing to portray herself as Conservative, Modest, and Unworldly. Someone who does not understand that in Greece breasts are No Big Deal. She is uncertain what to do.
But wait. Is it important to know that the Intelligent Woman’s Husband is more attractive (and also more successful) than the Beautiful Woman’s Husband? I think it is. You see, without that knowledge you might assume (rightly, you’d think) that the Intelligent Woman has grounds to be threatened by the Beautiful Woman. You might reckon that Beautiful People have better lives. Don’t they? Well, sometimes they do. But in this case, the Intelligent Woman has the Husband that all the Friends she and the Beautiful Woman share agree is the better of the two Husbands. Incidentally, all the Friends prefer the Intelligent Woman to the Beautiful Woman, too. Maybe they are jealous of the Beautiful Woman. But, to the Intelligent Woman, each other, and themselves, they simply claim to find the Beautiful Woman “nice but boring.”
The Intelligent Woman and the Beautiful Woman have been on vacation together before. They have been Friends for a long time (they are now thirty-one), and when they were eighteen, they went together to Ft. Lauderdale on spring break. Afterward, they did not speak for nearly a year. Then the Beautiful Woman’s Boyfriend broke up with her, and the Beautiful Woman was rumored to be suicidal. She had been witnessed causing a scene at the top of Bascom Hill on the way to class. The Beautiful Woman ripped the Boyfriend’s shirt while screaming. What she screamed had something to do with the Boyfriend thinking the Models in Vogue were prettier than the Beautiful Woman. The Intelligent Woman did not particularly desire to renew her friendship with the Beautiful Woman (they had never been that close), but to refuse would have seemed heartless, given what the Beautiful Woman was going through, and as the Beautiful Woman was now considered Unstable. So the friendship was renewed.
The Intelligent Woman’s Husband is, of course, an Intelligent Man. They are, in fact, Academics, which verifies their intelligence to the world, along with raising all kinds of assumptions about their sex life, some of which are true and some of which are not. One might assume, for example, that they have very cerebral sex, which is not the case. One might assume their lovemaking to be on the prudish side—also untrue. In the ten years they’ve been together, their sex has consisted prominently of the Intelligent Man tying up and spanking the Intelligent Woman, and the Intelligent Woman giving her Husband head. For variation, anal penetration occurs. Escapades outdoors and in cars and in the bathrooms of parties. Once, when abstaining from intercourse for a month before their wedding, the Intelligent Woman and the Intelligent Man hurled pornographic threats at one another for an hour while masturbating each other on the Best Man’s sofa. The year following the wedding, they fucked a minimum of five times a week.
The Beautiful Woman’s Husband is a Macho Man. The cruise was his idea. For all the reasons you might assume—yes, you would be right about all of that.
In Ft. Lauderdale, the Intelligent Woman and the Beautiful Woman had another traveling companion, the Aggressive Woman. On their very first night at the neon-signed bars, which the Intelligent Woman found embarrassingly contrary to the Bohemian image she wanted to project (though there was, as of yet, nobody to appreciate this projection, so the minimal lure of cheesy bars won out), the Aggressive Woman met a man. A boy, really, they were all only eighteen. He and the Aggressive Woman made out on the dance floor to a song that went: Boom Boom Boom, Let’s Go Back to My Room. Afterward, he walked the Aggressive Woman to the hotel, where she did not invite him to her room because she, the Beautiful Woman, and the Intelligent Woman were sharing quarters. That, and because she was a Virgin, though this was as embarrassing to her as attendance at cheesy bars was to the Intelligent Woman, and so she used her roommates (really straight girls who need their sleep), not virginity, as an excuse.
The Aggressive Woman may also be referred to as: the Smoking Woman, the Skinny Woman, the Foul-Mouthed Skank, the Special-Education Teacher, the Adopted Daughter, the World Traveler, and the Survivor of Childhood Hodgkin’s Disease.
On the cruise, the Beautiful Woman doubles her dose of Levsinex. The motion of the boat and all the exotic food is certain to make her Irritable Bowel Syndrome act up, which will annoy the Macho Man, who believes her illness is all in her mind and takes the opportunity of her diarrhea exoduses to mock her to any friends remaining around the dinner table, revealing her various unfounded anxieties while imitating her excitable voice until everyone howls even louder than she does when home sick on the toilet alone.
On the cruise, the Intelligent Woman brings with her Vicodin, Flexiril, and Valium. The Vicodin and Flexiril are for her bladder, which has an ulcer or something like an ulcer that is called Interstitial Cystitis and means her immune system is flawed but nobody knows how. There is no cure. The disease is neither progressive nor terminal. Men rarely get it. Doctors say the condition can be managed through rigorous avoidance of alcohol, all tomato and other citrus products, fermented foods (soy sauce, cheese) and molds (mushrooms, cheese again—she has to avoid cheese twice, though even with her limited math, 2 x 0 still equals zero.) The Intelligent Woman adheres to these rules like a nun, yet her symptoms include urinating as frequently as the pregnant and a burning mock-bladder-infection twenty-four hours a day every day with no end in sight.
You might assume that the Valium is self-explanatory given the Intelligent Woman’s predicament. It’s not: she is afraid of planes.
The Boyfriend of the Beautiful Woman, unaware that he would break up with her in less than a year, sent her roses every day she was in Ft. Lauderdale. At the time, he thought her more beautiful than any of the Models in Vogue. At the time, he was terrified of nothing more than that no matter where she went, every man would want her, and the burden of being so desired would prove too much, just as it had when the Boyfriend had relentlessly pursued and stolen her from Boyfriend Number One who had preceded him. So, every day, he sent roses to the hotel room the Beautiful Woman shared with her two Boyfriend-less Friends. But in his own cheater’s heart, he knew that she would stray.
On the cruise, the Intelligent Man and the Macho Man play chess all day. The Intelligent Man wins every game.
The Intelligent Woman was once a Neighborhood Girl. She wore an Italian jacket with her Italian surname printed on the back and encircled with red and green stars. She smoked Newport cigarettes and piled purple eye-shadow up to her dark, heavy brows. Still, none of the Neighborhood Boys wanted to fuck her, because she read too much and said things that made them feel stupid, plus she sounded like an ABC Afterschool Special, going off on preachy riffs about how doing drugs instead of going to school was wrong. She even made fun of the cool words they made up (to the tone of the Pledge of Allegiance) swearing loyalty to the Neighborhood Street Gang.
The Girls on the Corner counseled the Intelligent Neighborhood Girl that she never got a guy because she was fat, so when she was thirteen she became Anorexic and lost thirty pounds quick as that, and—though her hungry breasts immediately and forever ceased all development, remaining forever pubescent—all the Neighborhood Fat Ladies said how much better she looked and how envious they were (they were Uneducated People who did not know what Anorexia was). But the Neighborhood Boys still hated her.
Then they gang-raped another Neighborhood Fat Girl, which went to show that not wanting to fuck the Intelligent Neighborhood Girl had never had anything to do with the width of her ass in the first place.
Imagine that.
On the cruise the Intelligent Woman wanders the ship library and complains that the novels are too mainstream, and then finds one she can tolerate and reads.
The Beautiful Woman does not read. Somehow she made straight A’s through high school and college, a feat that required copious amounts of reading. But now that there is nothing she is required to memorize for a test she does not read anymore, and she never will, but you already knew that.
When the Aggressive Woman’s Ft. Lauderdale Fling told the Beautiful Woman he had fallen in love with her (in the span of three days), the Beautiful Woman let him kiss her even though he was short and stocky and a Guido who spoke with a New Jersey accent she would recall a decade later when watching The Sopranos on HBO. Nobody could fathom why a Beautiful Woman with a Boyfriend who sent roses every day would possibly kiss such a little toad, especially when her Best Friend the Aggressive Woman was so smitten with him, being as she preferred Guidos, for reasons of her own.
The Intelligent Woman and her Friends think, in retrospect, that they understand the Beautiful Woman’s motives now. But probably they are wrong. Probably they still don’t.
On the cruise, the Intelligent Man and the Macho Man play another round of chess. They speak about their Careers, though their work is not similar and they do not understand what the other does.
The Intelligent Man is an almost-renowned Scientist. The Macho Man is Regional Manager for a Best Buy and has a Company Car. But he is a good sport about losing at chess. And, being a Manager, he is a good listener, or good at pretending he is.
The Intelligent Woman failed both physics and trigonometry in high school because she was busy reading Anaïs Nin and scribbling secret poetry that did not turn out to be Any Good. She does not play chess. When her Husband discusses work too often, she cites his Presbyterian upbringing as though this is self-explanatory and necessarily a flaw.
Whenever the Beautiful Woman takes off her shirt at home, her Husband shouts, Boobies! No matter what else he is doing.
The Beautiful Woman grew up in the suburbs.
Duh!
The suburb in question is in Minnesota, and mostly Anglo-blond. The Beautiful Woman is Jewish and olive-skinned. In high school, she was not considered a Beautiful Woman. She was considered a Stingy Jew. Or a Puerto Rican, because she was so dark. That is what Boyfriend Number One was: Puerto Rican. When they were together, Minnesotans said, Look at the two Wetbacks. The Beautiful Woman loved Boyfriend Number One so fiercely, she wept every time they made love and kept his photo in her bathroom no matter how hysterical it drove her mother. He was the only one who understood.
When she got to college, she dumped him immediately for the first persistent Jew.
The Beautiful Woman told the Aggressive Woman that the kiss didn’t mean anything; she was only being polite. She said the Ft. Lauderdale Fling was ugly and the Aggressive Woman could have him, although of course he didn’t want her. The Aggressive Woman said, Your beak-nosed Boyfriend is ugly, too! The Beautiful Woman said, Well I don’t see anybody sending you roses, so you really have no right to judge.
The Intelligent Woman thought all the men in question were so undesirable it was literally amazing, but she didn’t open her mouth because not only was she receiving no roses, she didn’t even have a Fling to lose to another woman to begin with. So she kept quiet and flicked ants off the bed in their cheap room.
The Beautiful Woman daydreams about a man who looks deep into her eyes and says her name tenderly while making love. She likes kisses that are not too wet and sloppy. Whenever a man tells her she is pretty, she melts.
The Intelligent Woman has recurrent nightmares of damp, flabby sex with her mother.
Both of the Husbands, asleep and awake, dream about head.
On the cruise, which lasts for five nights, both Couples make love exactly twice, on the same days, at the same times. These are the only times they are not all together.
Afterward, the women tell each other about it in the bathroom and marvel at the coincidence.
Whenever her mouth is not otherwise engaged, the Macho Man likes the Beautiful Woman to talk dirty to him and tell him her fantasies. Though the Macho Man may not think she is smart, she is smart enough to know that he doesn’t want to hear: You look into my eyes and tell me how pretty I am and how special and how much you love me and only me and would die without me in your arms. So she says other things, but often he tells her she is repetitive and unimaginative and unconvincing.
And if you think that only fuels the fire of her actual fantasy and makes her want to run like hell but instead she goes into the bathroom to shit with bowel-churning anxiety because she knows she never will, well. You would be right.
Both women have TMJ and dentists who pretend not to understand why their jaws never improve. And that is enough of that.
On the beach in Rhodes, the first beach they’ve been on, about two-thirds of the women actually have on bikini tops, or even one-piece suits. The Intelligent Woman becomes flummoxed. Life is always exceedingly more difficult when choice is involved.
That Fat Neighborhood Girl who was once raped by the Gang Boys (who are now in prison, junkies, piddly runners for the mob, or else ordinary Family Men living in the Old Neighborhood or cheap Chicago suburbs) is now a Fat Counselor. After the rape, during which she was also beaten with a coat hanger and thrown down a flight of stairs, many ladies in the neighborhood came forward to offer alibis for the Gang Rapists. One of the Rapists was the Fat Neighborhood Girl’s Boyfriend, and one was a thirty-two-year-old small-time Mafioso who was president of the local school board. The Fat Neighborhood Girl and her Single Mother moved out of the Old Neighborhood down to the South Side, where other Italian people lived but where nobody knew them enough to know they were both Sluts. After they were gone, the Fat Neighborhood Ladies said, She’s always been a whore, that mother, and now the daughter is, too, see what you get?
On the South Side, the Fat Neighborhood Girl ate and did not have any more Boyfriends and developed a fascination with The Omen movies and had satisfying dreams of being seduced by Satan, while her mother fucked a string of men in the other small bedroom. She also kept in sporadic touch with the Intelligent Woman, who later introduced her to her future husband: a Heavyset Man who is also an Intelligent Man, though less intelligent than the Intelligent Woman’s Intelligent Man, and, while also an Academic, less successful, too.
If this were the Fat Counselor’s story, the Intelligent Woman would be called the Beautiful Woman, because her hair is wild and curly and she goes barefoot with a toe ring and her toenails are always the color of blood in a vial, and she gets her hands hennaed and has a Miró tattoo in the small of her back and wears size four slinky dresses and takes ballet class (at thirty-one!) and her smile lights up a room.
But the Fat Counselor’s not in Greece. She’s at home being fat. So you just forget about that.
In Minneapolis, the Sister of the Beautiful Woman lives with a Slacker Boy who looks like Shaggy from Scooby-Doo. They are in a band and rarely smile or shower, and though the Band Sister is a Beautiful Woman, too, she hides it under buzzed hair and gaudy makeup and thrift store boy’s striped pants until the only thing the Sisters have in common is that once, within a span of two days, each was attacked and bitten by a squirrel.
In different cities, mind you. What are the chances!
The Intelligent Woman, though she has a Ph.D., does not have a real job. Oh, she teaches part-time at a few universities and writes the occasional book review, but the money she makes yearly would barely even cover this cruise.
The Beautiful Woman works bringing coffee to Traveling Sales Reps and arranging flight and hotel accommodations for business trips that do not involve her presence, but that many of the Traveling Sales Reps imagine do.
Though everybody thinks she is a Trophy Wife, the Beautiful Woman doubts the truth of this since the Macho Man does not wish her to have a child. Most Trophy Wives bear Trophy Children, don’t they? The Macho Man enjoys driving two cars and owning a lakefront condo; if they had children, the Beautiful Woman might want to quit her job and become a Dead Weight like the Intelligent Woman, and then imagine the bills! What can the Intelligent Man be thinking, letting his Wife get away with that shit?
The Beautiful Woman is less valuable at the moment as a Mother than as a Cash Cow.
The Intelligent Woman and the Intelligent Man are in the process of adopting a Chinese Girl, because Chinese People are usually intelligent and because the Intelligent Woman is Infertile. They are excited about their forthcoming Baby. They are not the kind of people who get hung up on propagating their own genetics when there is a population problem at hand. They are happy for the chance to Do Good. Women who make such a big deal about Infertility are Stupid Dolts with Pointless Lives; Husbands who insist upon their own sperm are Narcissistic Assholes. They, however, are Intelligent People, expecting an Intelligent Baby. They are above bourgeois bullshit like that.
Are they really? Wow. Are they really? Hey, what do you want from me? This is what they say when asked.
Back in Madison, Wisconsin, in the private dorm full of out-of-staters like the Intelligent Woman, the Beautiful Woman, and the Aggressive Woman, hostilities brewed. One day, the Intelligent Woman was in the hallway relaying to her Gay Male Friend how the Beautiful Woman had said, Well I don’t see anybody buying you roses so you really have no right to judge, and the Beautiful Woman came out of her room and said, Don’t you know that I can hear you talking about me? To which the Intelligent Woman said, So what, you said it, didn’t you, so why should you care who hears? To which the Beautiful Woman replied, This is none of your business, why don’t you stop being such a gossip and butt out? After which the Intelligent Woman warned, You’d better just go back in your room you little suburban twit before I kick your ass.
Whereupon the Gay Male Friend exclaimed, Whoa—you can take the girl out of the neighborhood, but you can’t take the neighborhood out of the girl!
To which a year of silence between the Intelligent Woman and the Beautiful Woman was the response.
In the WASP-filled Minnesota suburb where the Jewish Girl and her younger Rebel Sister lived with their Jewish Mother and German Father, the Father was the Sun around which they, female planets, revolved. The Mother was jealous of her Beautiful Daughters, because the Father was obsessed with them and thought of nothing except saving money for their security and making sure they were not hit by cars. The Rebel Sister was tired of having her arm gripped tightly by the Father every time she approached a curb, so she had her head shaved and joined a band and painted vagina-looking abstractions on the walls of her bedroom and wrote beneath them, I am obsessed. The Good Sister got a Puerto Rican Boyfriend and repeatedly injured herself on the gymnastics team. At night in their shared bathroom, the Sisters made fun of their Father and wished that he’d get off their backs—He is such a dork, they said, He is so lame.
But when the Rebel Sister (now the Band Sister) was eighteen, and the Mother and the Father sold their pretty house to move to Long Island and live among the Jews, the Sisters could not believe the Mother had won. The new condo had only one extra bedroom, utilized as an exercise room. In Madison and Minneapolis respectively, the Sisters cried for days.
After the Boyfriend dumped her and she became Unstable, the Beautiful Woman acquired a reputation among off-campus Jewish Frat Boys as a Blow Job Queen. For months her Girlfriends, including the Intelligent Woman, strove to keep this hurtful gossip from her, but when news inevitably trickled her way (actually, one of the five guys who lived above Taco Bell on State Street, all of whom she’d blown, told her in an effort to make her leave his apartment so he could study), the Beautiful Woman was secretly proud.
In the fluorescent lights of the cruise ship bathroom, amid giddy tales of simultaneous copulation, the Intelligent Woman glimpses old acne scars embedded along the sides of her own face, like somebody took a smooth, clean picture of the Beautiful Woman and crumpled it up tight then left it there, ravaged under the glare.
And some things—like hearing that a woman who does not receive roses has no right to an opinion in this world—are things you never get over. Even when you receive your own roses, along with diamond earrings and a Victorian house and a Baby From China and everybody seems to respect you more than the person who made that Statement to begin with. You still don’t.
The Intelligent Woman’s Husband turns to her and says, Aren’t you going to take your top off? You’re always dying to take off your top. She looks at him, so pale in the sun, his laboratory-hidden body nearly transparent, the way it looks when he’s working naked in the morning after his shower, bathed in computer-glow. He has been with her on many a foreign beach—they met in France, for God’s sake!—and in addition has fucked her enough times in enough ways to know that, though she is not Beautiful and knows it, she is nonetheless an exhibitionist. She cannot fool him. He stares, waiting.
(It has not occurred to the Intelligent Man that his Wife may realize he has a hankering to see the Beautiful Woman’s juicy C—maybe D?—cuppers. He is too consumed by calculating that the Beautiful Woman, by far a more timid woman than his bold Wife, will only disrobe if his Wife does so first.)
The Intelligent Woman watches her Husband’s eager, glowing body. Once, when she had to get an MRI for her bladder and found herself unexpectedly claustrophobic, the Intelligent Man sat in a folding chair at her feet and held her toes comfortingly until the procedure was over. Every night in their shared bed he spoons her body and breathes into her hair, and she knows her curls tickle his nose but he stays in this position anyway until she falls asleep, and neither of them call it un-Feminist. She finds that she does not want to disappoint him—hasn’t he, in a sense, earned this stupid pleasure?
Men: they are like children. What can you do?
There was a period of time during which the Intelligent Woman lived in a rural college town out East, and the Beautiful Woman lived in Texas. This was shortly after college; both had relocated in order to be with men. The Intelligent Woman’s Intelligent Boyfriend (now Husband) was pursuing his Ph.D., and the Intelligent Woman made ends meet by waitressing, and for fun answered calls on a battered women’s hotline. The Beautiful Woman, meanwhile, lived with a Former Drug Dealer who was a college drop-out, worked at a gay bar, and liked to Rollerblade through the city. The Former Drug Dealer had given the Beautiful Woman her first orgasm, so naturally she was putty in his hands. At night she waited up for him at his mother’s house (where they both lived) and when he returned, keyed up from all the Hot Men who wanted to convert him, they had the most amazing sex she would ever experience. By day, the Former Drug Dealer still would not go back to college, would not seek a proper job, and dropped acid before Rollerblading between speeding cars—all of which became subjects of many fights.
A Mutual College Friend who also lived in Texas (but had been born there so it was less her fault), wrote to the Intelligent Woman up East: I think that druggie is smacking her around. The Intelligent Woman was shocked. Here her friend, the Beautiful Woman whom all the Frat Boys had so pursued (the Blowjob Queen phenomenon temporarily skipped her mind), was letting herself be beaten by some Rollerblading, non-Jewish Texan! One evening when the hotline was slow, the Intelligent Woman drafted a six-page letter to the Beautiful Woman. It read, in part: You have always suffered from low self-esteem—look at how you let that ugly little Guido kiss you in Ft. Lauderdale even though you knew he was gross—but you have to get out of this relationship and learn to love yourself, because batterers never change and no woman deserves to be hit even if you have totally given over all your power to this loser. You are a Beautiful Woman; is that how you want your life to be? That night, the Intelligent Woman went home and made love with her Intelligent Non-Abusive Boyfriend and fantasized about being tied up (at this time, the Intelligent Man had not yet worked up the nerve to actually act out such things), and felt smug that she had done a good deed.
In Texas, the Beautiful Woman read the letter and was embarrassed, not only because the Former Drug Dealer did in fact hit her on occasion but because she knew she did deserve it—she had once made such a scene at the bar that he’d had to have the bouncer remove her, all because she was convinced he was seeing another girl. He didn’t even know any other girls! All he did was Rollerblade and work in a gay bar! Once, too, she had ripped his shirt, just as she had done to the Boyfriend on Bascom Hill back in college, only the Former Drug Dealer struggled right out of his shirt and ran away from her, and she chased him down the street screaming, I blow other guys all the time! Even though it wasn’t true. The Beautiful Woman read the letter from the Intelligent Woman and thought how fortunate it must be to be so certain of one’s own opinions and ethics and what one will tolerate and not tolerate and exactly what to say and do to draw the line. But when she thought about the Intelligent Woman’s Intelligent Boyfriend, she knew she would never date him (though she might kiss him if he tried), because he was too nice and would want her to be her own person and do her own thing, and men like that made her tired, too tired to even contemplate, and not at all aroused.
So for the second time in the friendship between the Intelligent Woman and the Beautiful Woman, a silence ensued. This one lasted for six months, after which the Former Drug Dealer did actually cheat on her with a woman (go figure), and the Beautiful Woman allowed herself to be stolen away by an Australian Conservative, and she and her swell Aussie met up with the Intelligent Woman and her new Intelligent Husband to see the Miró exhibition in Manhattan, which the Intelligent Woman thought was miraculous and the Beautiful Woman thought was fine, but really not all that.
Speaking of battered women’s agencies (which tend to be staffed by Lesbians, do they not?), at the same time as the Beautiful Woman and the Intelligent Woman were writing or not writing to one another from the Southwest and the East respectively, back in the Midwest the Fat Counselor was trying diligently to date chicks. The sex was OK, maybe even a little better than with men; it was the romance that posed a problem. Like sometimes, she and her Partner would be dressed in their loose black slacks and eating by candlelight at a Vegetarian Restaurant, and she would feel strangely as though she were at a dress rehearsal and things were going well enough, but the audience had not yet arrived.
Of course, the Fat Counselor had always been a little in love with the Intelligent Woman, but later, when she abandoned girls and began dating the Heavyset Man she would eventually marry, she readjusted that love to the sisterly kind, which is easier for women to do than men can possibly imagine.
The Heavyset Man may also be referred to as: the Theater Major, Grisly Adams, Nature Boy, the Heavy Drinker, the Red-Faced Man, Sensitive Man, and Man-Suffering-from-Impotence-in-Times-of-Stress.
The Aggressive Woman lives in Bogotá, Colombia, kidnapping capital of the world. Though South America is resplendent with men who physically resemble North American Guidos, she is still unmarried. Her Friends back home joke that if she were to be kidnapped, the Guerillas would pay a ransom just to have America take her back, and the Mormons she works with (Mormons in Colombia? Don’t ask!) refer to her abrasive manners as Urban Humor in order to be kind.
Sometime after the cruise, let us say a year, the Intelligent Woman says to her Husband, Do you often get hard-ons for other women? And he says, No not at all. And she says, Even when we’re on the beach and you see other women’s bodies right there laid out in front of you? And he says, You mean like when (and says the Beautiful Woman’s name) took off her top in Greece? And she, feigning shock, says, No I didn’t mean her—you better not have had a hard-on then. And he says, Well I didn’t. And she knows that is true because she checked, back on the beach, watched his azure trunks from behind her sunglasses, but so what? That’s the lucky thing about being in one’s thirties: the dick doesn’t give as much away. Eroticism is in the mind anyway, she thinks, believing thirty-two is a wise age. The dick just has to calm down a little bit before men find out.
I always have a hard-on for you, the Intelligent Man adds (see, I told you he was Intelligent), and the Intelligent Woman, still playing dumb but enjoying it suddenly, says, Oooh. And they are both happy, though they do not have sex at that very moment because they are watching a documentary on A&E about Mao.
Remember those assumptions about Academics and sex? OK, so some of them are true.
In Rhodes, four Travelers lie on straw mats on rocky sand. Three are dark-skinned and blend in fairly well; the fourth, a man, is very light. One of the women sits up abruptly and looks around, then flicks off her bikini top and chucks it in the sand. She says to the darker-skinned man, Pass me some sunscreen, and he looks, registers no shock at seeing her tiny, baby-pink breasts staring back at him, and does as she commands. The pale man continues to lie on his back, sweaty T-shirt on to keep his Presbyterian skin from burning, eyes closed against the sun’s glare.
Two mats away, on the other side of the darker man, the other woman sits up. Indeed, she might easily pass for Greek. She, too, pulls off her bikini top (hers must go over her head; it’s a tank and somewhat awkward) and folds it neatly to lay it over her purse. She reclines again before requesting the lotion be passed to her, too.
The Intelligent Woman glances at the Beautiful Woman’s breasts, which she has actually seen many times before. Yep, they are Something.
Within half an hour, the Macho Man wants to rent mopeds and tour the island, and the Intelligent Man, responding to his cue to follow as the Macho Man does when they are playing chess, says, Cool.
The women put their tops back on and off they go to sit on the backs of mopeds, arms around the solid trunks of their Husbands, hair flying in the wind. Envisioning the image each Couple will create riding, the Beautiful Woman, whose Husband is an avid Motorcyclist, is glad for the first time on the cruise to have the Husband she has.
Or maybe the Intelligent Woman only believes this.
Things to do on Twenty-Seventh Birthday:
1) Hit Louis Vuitton to get replacement foot for one that fell off tote
“Mmm, your skin’s soft as silk.”
2) If I leave straight from here I can afford a cab . . .
“Tell me what it feels like in there.”
3) But if I don’t go home first, it’ll be hours before I can check the mail
“Come on, baby, talk to me.”
4) Shit, say something: “Mmm, yeah. Feels . . . full . . . good . . .”
Brent’s climax hits abrupt and silent. Over his shoulder, through his bedroom window, Annette watches the Ferris wheel at Navy Pier inching its jerky rotation to nowhere. Brent’s body rests upon hers, restraining the movement of her neck, blocking her view of the kitschy, touristy merriment, only for a moment. Then he is up, shaking his skin free of her, heading for the shower.
5) There are some phones in Ghana. Go home first, check mail and answering machine . . .
Mid-step, Brent’s eyes trail to the window and back to her breasts, which, in repose, have perhaps already started to roll a bit more toward her armpits than they did at twenty-six. His eyebrows gather. “Well, now I know how necrophilia feels. Thanks. Look, I’m leaving straight from work tonight, so . . .”
“Can’t wait for another trip to the morgue?” Annette turns onto her side.
“Yeah, well, I hate to leave when I’ve got a stiff body right here at home . . .” He half-laughs. Then: “She’s making me go, you know. I don’t care how damned hot it is outside, the water will be freezing. You can’t swim in March—what’s the point?”
Annette sighs.
“Look, why don’t you go to the gym today, get your nails done or something?” He turns back toward the bathroom. “Get a good night’s rest. Cheer yourself up.”
As if she has another option. “Thanks for the advice.”
“This ain’t no charity service, lady,” he growls with false jocularity, disappearing behind the door. “I expect to get what I’m paying for.”
Morning mimosas could be the answer. She should have told Brent it was her birthday—then there would be the two of them here, maybe a blue Tiffany’s box tied with a billowy white bow, two plane tickets under her coffee saucer, roses on the breakfast table. Instead, there is only Annette lingering naked in Brent’s bed chiding herself for being a bad lay, and worse, pathetic. She rises, hoping the champagne from last night isn’t too flat to ruin the vibe she’s striving for. Sometimes, something like this—an image of herself in her mind as a nude, sexy, mimosa-drinking woman on a rich man’s leather sofa during business hours—is enough to replace whatever other ugly image has been dominant. She wishes Brent’s city apartment had fresh-cut orchids or a grand piano or something romantic, but those touches are no doubt reserved for the real home he shares with his wife in Lake Forest. Still, this clubby, masculine atmosphere might work, too, in a different, more torrid way. She pirouettes toward the fridge.
A window washer is looking right at her.
“Fuck!”
Annette staggers, half-falls back through the doorway separating Brent’s bedroom and living room, then, in a panic that somehow the window washer can still see her (though she can no longer see him), scoots on her bare ass into the bathroom where there are no windows, and throws on Brent’s robe. Cross-legged on the floor, heart pulsing in her ears, she listens as though the soundproof walls might give something away. Her watch is on the coffee table; she has no idea how long to wait, the duration of time it might take to clean such a gargantuan window and whether he was almost finished or had just begun. Her stomach growls impatiently. Brent has no food, though the mimosa would have calmed her hunger. She shouldn’t have jumped, shouldn’t have freaked out—should have strode right to the refrigerator and poured herself a drink, raised it toward him in a salute. Then she could have come back into the bedroom and gotten dressed and left like a woman entitled to be here, not like some perverted cat-burglar who takes to undressing in the homes of her victims and prancing about like a fool. Annette bursts into tears. It must be hypoglycemia. She has not eaten since half a tuna sandwich yesterday for lunch.
By the time she emerges, the tears have only made her feel silly. From the way she bolted, he probably guessed she’d run cowering to the bathroom to bawl like a baby. It doesn’t matter now anyway. The window washer is gone.
Every afternoon, the butterflies in her stomach are the same. The turning of her key in the rusty mailbox, the flutter rising up her esophagus as she sorts through envelopes, scanning for a foreign stamp. Every afternoon, so that part of her always thinks today cannot be the day—good things have to catch you unaware, you cannot be caught waiting for them. A watched pot never boils. Once, Annette forced herself not to check the mail for four days, certain that her self-deprivation would magically produce a reward, but it produced only more bills Brent had to help her with, a jury summons, a letter from the INS addressed to her grandmother who has been dead for twenty years and never lived in this apartment. The way her hands perspired when she finally allowed herself to check the mail—key slipping from her grasp like a slimy bar of soap—embarrassed her sufficiently, so that she resigned herself to indulging her daily fix of nausea and disappointment. Since Nicky has been in Ghana, the progression has been from frequent long letters to sporadic postcards. He has been gone two years. Even his mother has more sense than to spend every day expecting.
Today is the day. Clutching what looks like an actual birthday card, Annette’s heart surges violently forward, the rest of her taking a moment to catch up. She is almost angry: usually Nicky’s holiday greetings arrive weeks late—now she will never know when to calm down. Unable to wait until she reaches the privacy of her own apartment, she rips open the envelope in the foyer, ankle-deep in discarded coupon pages, flyers, and advertisements. Netty Baby! But after that, she—Annette—disappears amid: . . . we got them to donate some old computers and I’ve spent the better part of a month trying to sort them out, most were archaic. Is relegated to the role of blind spectator: I call our best student “Powder” because she’s always covered in dust lighter than her skin, but her father won’t let her come to school anymore since her mother had another baby and Powder has to take care of him while her parents work . . .
When Annette got dirty as a child, Nicky called her Pig Pen. Her dirt—Chicago dirt—was not imbued with the drama of Africa. Her absences from school were not because her working parents made her take care of the home, but because they were too busy to know or care where she went—and so she went with Nicky. Maybe she was never enough of a victim for him; all the time she was struggling to keep up, maybe she should have let herself fall so he could rescue her. Maybe then he would not have needed to go halfway around the world to feel important. Maybe then “archaic” would be written with irony—with an implicit wink, Remember when we would’ve called that a ten-dollar-word?—instead of carelessly, as though he had forgotten he was not addressing one of his Peace Corps buddies. Or maybe then they would just both be where they had always been: on drugs, in trouble, stagnant.
How can she explain to anyone—her mother, Brent, least of all Nicky in his campaign to save the world through the civilized means of computer training—that she wishes the brutal, crazy race toward death they once shared had never come to an end?
The window washer’s jaw seemed vaguely Czech, she realizes. Square and animalistic, like the author of that novel she tried to read once—not at all like the actor who’d starred in the film version, ethereal Daniel Day-Lewis. The Unbearable Lightness of Being. She thinks it’s still hidden under a mattress in her parents’ home, like porn. Annette remembers a scene in the movie where Day-Lewis’s character, Tomas, a doctor by trade, is forced out of his practice by oppressive Communists and has to become a window washer to make a living. Tomas systematically beds the housewives inside the homes whose windows he cleans—including the wife (played by a flat-chested, pug-looking actress) of a high-ranking Communist official. The scene intrigued Annette even before having a window washer of her own to think about, because it showed a man in a chick role—without money or power—using sex the way women had to: as revenge, as an equalizer. Though if she remembers right, Tomas-the-Powerful-Doctor was a player to begin with (easy since every woman wants to fuck a doctor), so maybe she doesn’t get the point at all. Still, it makes her want to ask who ranks higher on the urban food chain: a financially dependent, poorly educated mistress of an influential married man, or a young, blue collar window washer, possibly of foreign descent, who has, regardless of other obvious social deficiencies, a dick?
She is not Brent’s wife; it is not her apartment; fucking her would offer, in the sad, bottom-line truth of it, no revenge on the alpha males of the world.
But her square-jawed, secret Tomas knows none of this.
Once upon a time, Annette and her cousin Nicky were partners in crime. He introduced her to every illicit thing she did; she dated the Mafioso wannabes he traveled with, snorted the coke he sold, hung out at the club where he bounced. Before that, when he was nothing but another punk in the hood, fourteen to her ten, she worshipped him; trailed around behind his fellow gangbangers until the scummier among them, who could not get fourteen-year-old girls to make out with them, would settle for French kissing Annette behind the shelter court in the playground, groping up her shirt for breasts that wouldn’t be there for three years.
She was prettier than other girls. It was her currency in the neighborhood, where being female or smart or ambitious didn’t count for much, could even be a liability. Guys liked her, and since she was an only child, Nicky was her stand-in brother, protector and pimp in one. He guarded her virginity ruthlessly at first—threatened to smack her around if she drank or got high with anyone but him. But by the time she started high school it was as though his mission was accomplished, and like a hippie dad overeager to relive his own youth, he hastily drew her into his fold as a full initiate. Her school acquaintances amused her with their adolescent antics. By then she was going out with Nicky’s best friend, a nineteen-year-old dealer; she got her coke for free. Even the sex didn’t seem to bother Nicky anymore—when her first lover tired of her, there were a string of others, all stamped with Nicky’s seal of approval, all in the club scene, all small-time aspiring gangsters in an era before The Sopranos made Guidos chic, all with a plethora of drugs and occasional free tickets to Vegas, all with hard, lean bodies and pissed-off pricks and a disgust for the female menstrual cycle that bordered on Hasidic.
In Nicky’s world, her closest girlfriends were the rotating parade of girls his friends fucked. Women existed only on the fringes. She was really the guys’ mascot; their team whore on a one-at-a-time basis. They trusted her, told her about the break-ins, the occasional shootings. She hid under the bed when somebody came trying to kill Nicky over a deal gone awry. It was a family.
“Blood is thicker than water,” Nicky always used to say. “You’re the only one I can talk to.” He was that cinematic breed: the soulful gang-leader. His hair, in a sea of Brillo-pad Italian-boy heads, fell into his eyes in loose locks. They made such a beautiful pair that, hair wet, in skimpy swimsuits on Oak Street Beach, people gawked. But out in society, in clothes that grew progressively more expensive the more Nicky sold, a certain gaud easily distinguished them from the righteous affluent, those whose establishment she and Nicky gladly skirted. Women averted their eyes; men tightened their grips on their wallets. Nowadays, even though it has come back in fashion, Annette refuses to wear gold.
The facts: It was a Friday when the window washer first arrived (or rather, when she accidentally flashed him and noticed his existence—he had probably been at this job for some time). So, each Thursday night she makes certain to sleep at Brent’s, which is easier now that his wife and their three children are in South Haven for the summer, and Brent drives up from Friday night to Sunday morning. Thursday evenings he is desperate to see her, desperate to fuck her brains out, even though he admits he and his wife do have sex. “It’s easier than having to talk about why we never screw,” he says. Clearly no brains will be hitting the headboard in South Haven.
Annette sat, a tight coil beside Nicky’s sprawled-wide legs. He was purposefully bored, having only come as a favor to her, one he wasn’t intending to let her forget. Annette had read a review of The Unbearable Lightness of Being and needed to see it. She nursed a fantasy of herself as the kind of girl who liked foreign films, but the prospect of getting anyone she knew to sit through subtitles was nonexistent, and this movie—in English, but with its European stars and director—seemed a possible compromise. “You’ll like it,” she’d begged Nicky. “It’s supposed to be sexy.” To which he replied, “I don’t need to go to the movies to get off.” He’d smuggled in more candy than they could eat, just to make a point.
This was the only cinema they’d ever visited together. Childhood movies they both loved—Grease, Saturday Night Fever—they’d seen separately, or on cable, getting high around the glow of somebody’s mother’s old TV. Yet he was here. It occurred to neither of them that she should go alone.
Nicky’s every squirm and twitch jarred her. She imagined him berating her in his head for not reading the part about the movie being three hours long. When the credits finally rolled, she felt numb with relief. The Unbearable Boredom of Being, Nicky called it, filing out of the theater with his arm around her, periodically knuckling her head like when they were kids. “Those chicks weren’t even hot,” he said. “One was old and the other had no tits. You put them to shame—why do you always wanna be somebody else?” It was the first time Annette ever felt embarrassed in front of Nicky, like he’d figured out something weak about her that she hadn’t even known herself.
Afterward, though, clips from the film began playing in her sexual fantasies. She went out and bought the novel, by a strange Czech dissident whose jacket photo looked aggressive, angry, potentially violent. In the book, the Tomas character was supposed to be a much older man than scrumptious Daniel Day-Lewis—probably near fifty. The author used simple words, but his train of thought was confusing, preoccupied with classical music and philosophies with which Annette was unfamiliar. While she could sense the same erotic current of the film swimming just beneath so many inaccessible ideas, she ultimately tossed the novel aside and allowed Day-Lewis and his voluptuous on-screen lover, Lena Olin of the sultry bowler hat, to claim space in her head again, dismissing the book on which their roles had been based as part of a giant heap of things in life entitled OVER MY HEAD.
Whenever they were bored and trying to figure out what to do, Nicky would quip, “Hey Netty, why don’t you pick out a movie for us to see,” and crack up. Sometimes she even scanned the paper for the dullest possible titles to throw his way deadpan—Babette’s Feast, The Belly of An Architect—he got a real kick out of that.
Every week, she waits. The trick is enticing Brent into remaining with her past 8:00 Friday mornings. She calculates that it was 10:15 the first time she saw the window washer, and she isn’t quite certain why Brent was running so late, or rather why he wanted to screw instead of walking out the door at his usual time. If only she hadn’t been so abysmal in bed that morning—damn Nicky, distracting her on her birthday—now there is probably no hope of getting Brent to sleep in again on a Friday morning so the window washer can watch them fuck. The first Thursday after the flashing, Annette is so desperate that she just turns off Brent’s alarm clock once he is asleep, although of course when he wakes, an hour late, he is frantic and rushing and would not touch her if he were off to spend a month in South Haven and his wife was the only woman in the town.
It turns out not to matter because the window washer does not show up anyway. The second week, Annette hits a grand slam by waking up and announcing she just had an orgasm in her sleep while dreaming about anal sex—that garners her so many points that she is even able to lure him out into the living room to do it on the floor only a foot away from the last window washer sighting. But again, the Czech-jawed boy does not arrive. The third week, Annette feels depressed and gives no effort at all; she refuses his advances at 7:00 since his timing is all wrong—no way can he last three hours. She claims she has to meet her mother at the hospital for an early morning colonoscopy Ma is afraid to have, and scurries out, then regrets not even being able to verify the window washer’s absence. So the fourth week, hope renews: once a month, that would make sense. Thursday night she stretches in the crook of Brent’s arm and says, “I never cook for you. I wish I could cook you breakfast tomorrow, before you leave for the weekend. Do you have any important meetings in the morning?”
Remarkably, the answer comes back, “Nothing I can’t change.”
The stage is set.
What she hopes: the window washer will imagine she’s in trouble. He will think Brent is exploiting her—even heroes in movies fall in love with whores if they belong to powerful men. Her Tomas will be an honest, hard-working, blue collar laborer. He will be the kind of man she would have met in her old neighborhood—the kind of man her mother met—if she had not spent so much time chasing Nicky’s drug-induced dreams of glamour and power and money. Nicky left her at the precipice between two worlds, where it was impossible anymore to be a normal neighborhood girl and get a job at the deli counter of Dominick’s and marry the night manager and buy a characterless new construction home in the cultural wasteland of the far southwest suburbs. But she could never be more either—never move among wives who summer in South Haven, or Gold Coast career women with their law degrees and androgynously beige Todd flats. She is a mistress out on the ledge of wealth and privilege, constantly in danger of falling, and she needs someone—a working class hero without a fear of heights—to throw her a rope. They could marry. She is only twenty-seven. She would bear him strong sons. Daughters are just too hard to raise.
If this were a film, the past three weeks would end up on the cutting-room floor. Jump from Scene 1: Annette sitting weeping on Brent’s bathroom floor, cowering in his robe after having been seen naked by (certainly, if it were Hollywood) a roguishly handsome, young, foreign window washer to Scene 2: Annette and Brent at dining room table, a distance from but still visible to the picture window where said washer first made his appearance. Brent’s back faces window, since that is the chair where Annette set his mimosa (and the view is commonplace to him); Annette, at his right, has eye on window. Washer appears—it is nearly 10:00 on the dot, like fucking clockwork; it is symbolism of some kind that the audience will be left to decipher later. Annette loosens Brent’s robe.
The washer is not alone this time. (Did he have a partner last time, too, and Annette was just in too much of a tizzy to notice?) He and the other man, also young, probably Mexican, halt laughing, stare as Annette, who has been serving breakfast in the nude, undoes her lover’s robe and sinks to her knees.
Head is a sure way to make certain a man has absolutely no desire to turn around and look out the window behind him.
This other guy, not at all good looking, with a shadow of pubescent acne, unnerves her, but she has come too far. He will be edited out for the movie’s release. No, he definitely wasn’t here last time; he couldn’t have been. Her window washer will remember her, remember what he saw last time. Will know this is for him.
Between Brent’s flapping robe and the fact that she must kneel directly in front of him if she means to keep his back fully to the window, Annette is unable to meet her window washer’s eyes.
Annette had just turned twenty-one the summer Nicky saved that woman.
The crime bosses with whom he was loosely affiliated were also heavily into construction, so since bouncing only took a few hours in the evenings, Nicky was a laborer by day. His buddies on the site mocked him when he shouted them over, “Look at that dude, shit, he’s gonna kill that woman!” “Yeah, it’s fucking Rear Window,” one of the older men scoffed, but Nicky was already racing for the lift. They hummed bars of the Superman theme song as he rode down to the ground, sped up God-only-remembered how many flights of stairs in the building across the way. Nobody followed him. Sure, several told the police later, “everyone” had seen “that spade smacking around his old lady,” but it looked like she was getting in his face pretty good—it didn’t look like anything serious. Nobody, Annette least of all, could guess how Nicky knew.
By the time he got there, the woman was unconscious. Though not yet showing, she was four months pregnant. Nicky ran right in through their unlocked door (“He wrestled the gun from that crazy sonofabitch’s hand,” said one of the witnesses at the construction site who’d watched it all through the apartment’s window), but the assault victim still miscarried. Nicky mourned the death of the child—the fetus. Publicly. On the news, over and over, while interviewed about his heroic rescue. On local talk shows, on NPR. On camera for Channel 7, he cried.
The baby-killer was strung out on crack, which he had not purchased from any of the numerous construction site dealers, having connections of his own. After that, Nicky wouldn’t touch drugs. Mere weed was repellent to him. He put in his time at the site, but he wouldn’t deal anymore. Even his ex-bosses approved. He was their resident hero, their local boy made good. They crowed when he joined the Army. His soldier’s patriotism would atone for all their sins.
All at once it is clear: the first Friday of every month, Brent’s building’s window washers clean his windows. Though their staff of cleaners may be quite large, her window washer is most frequently assigned to Brent’s windows—though not always. Once, two completely other men appeared outside, and Annette calmly walked into the bedroom, dressed, and went back to her own apartment to find her mailbox empty, then spent the day trying to find something clever to say to Nicky in a letter, but she suspected her grammar was faulty, her spelling childish, and that her life would depress him.
In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the Communist official’s wife opened her window and Tomas climbed right in, but the picture windows of Chicago high-rises do not open. In order to reach her, the washer would have to go past the doorman, through the lobby, up the elevator. She would have to mouth the apartment number through the glass—she imagines their hands meeting on opposite sides of the pane, like prisoners and their wives on visitation day.
Except that here, she is the prisoner, by choice, in a very expensive cage.
He probably thinks she is a prostitute. He must figure Brent for some kind of exhibitionist homosexual who pays a beautiful woman to come to his apartment and put on a show for the young hotties who do physical labor at his building. What woman, after all, would voluntarily spend the first Friday of every month performing sexual acts in front of a stranger outside the window—sometimes more than one stranger?
He probably thinks, on the mornings she has been unable to get Brent to stay put and put out (so she masturbates alone with her eyes clamped shut), that her john is lurking somewhere just out of eyesight, surveying his whore’s performance from the other side of the wall.
Nicky stood on her parents’ front porch waiting for her to come out and say good-bye. It was August then like now. She emerged with cotton stuffed between bare toes, nails glimmering with purple polish. He held out a can of MGD and Annette took a big swig, lipstick leaving a waxy lavender smudge. They stood swallowing hard like small town teens on a first date.
“They’ll make you cut your hair,” Annette said. His hair was not inordinately long. He stared at her, his expression vague, grasping.
“You’ll be cool, Netty. You’ve got a job, a diploma—shit, your dad’s right inside that door eating dinner with your ma, not rotting in jail like my old man. You’ve got everything going for you, babe. You don’t need me.”
She’d scraped her wet toenail against the tiny rocks embedded in the cement of her front steps, ruined all her hard work. “I never said I did.”
“Yeah, see.” He punched her in the arm. “You’re tough.” Then, like he couldn’t make up his mind: “Don’t be that way.”
He was right. His control over her life had always been conceptual, not actual. Sweat drizzled the bones of her chest, bare above an old terrycloth tube top she’d had since eighth grade. He was right. No point in even bringing up the three abortions she’d had over the past seven years at his counsel, or the fact that only the first guy to knock her up even merited a punch, while the other two were in his inner circle, entitled to plant their seed even if they did not want to raise it. No point in asking why he’d never shed any tears for her dead children, his thick blood, even when Channel 7 panned in for a close-up of his dramatically rolling tear over the probably-brain-damaged product of junkie parents. Annette’s nose membranes were so abused they both knew hers would have been brain damaged, too.
He leaned in to kiss her cheek, some kid sister too young to care that he was heading off to college. She turned abruptly so he got her lips instead. He jerked back and she glowed, triumphant, but then his hand reached out just as quick, so fast she feared he might belt her. Instead his fingers grazed lightly, almost lazily over her collarbones, downward, wiping away perspiration. She jumped, bumped her hip against the door frame. He grinned, and all at once it was a smile of everything, a smile of I could’ve had you if I wanted to, a smile of See, I did the right thing there, too. She sensed he wanted her to be grateful somehow, for leaving her intact. She felt abject, insignificant, naked. Nothing like gratitude.
But he was backing down the stairs, hands spread between a wave, an apology, an offering. Her lips parted to speak: nothing else. His eyes were over her already, busy doing his bad-boy-poet thing, dreaming of the stars.
This is how a hero is fashioned: like everyone else who knew him, the Army was impressed by Nicky. With the earnestness of a new convert, he set about devouring every education they could offer. In the span of four year’s time, he finagled not only a GED, but a BA in computer science, then hurled with all his might toward the Peace Corps. To Ghana, where fellow aid workers muttered how he’d “gone native”—that he failed to exhibit the proper alarm when flies congregated on an open sore. He wrote these things in letters at first; he wanted to impress her, maybe. He preached of his determination to drag his corner of the third world into a technological age that, here in Chicago, still baffled Annette. Words like archaic rolled off his pen. He learned to see art in the dusty dirt powdering a young African girl’s night-black skin. He forgot the audience of his letters home, then forgot to write letters home altogether. He was home.
“Are you leaving early this morning?” she asks Brent when he slings his suit jacket over his arm: another man with a mission.
“Early for what?” he asks. “I was supposed to be at the office five minutes ago.”
She has no answer. She has long suspected he is secretly aware of her games with the window washer—that he allows himself to be detained in order to play along. But no, Brent is a shy man really. He once told her a story about going to a nude beach with friends and pleading with his wife not to take her suit off so that he would not be the only one who refused to undress. His wife laughed at him and flung her bikini off. Annette has seen photos of her (clothed) and she is overweight, very Tipper Gore. Brent has a nice body, swimmer’s shoulders and no spare tire to speak of. The story surprised her—made her wonder for the first time if his wife might have a lover, too. If she might not consider Brent any great loss.
She re-dresses in the lingerie she wore last night, it having spent only five minutes on her body before Brent peeled it off. Patiently, she reclines on the leather sofa—but it is only 8:15 and she will have a long wait. She stands and paces the room, restless in luxurious captivity, touching everything she passes, leaving her scent. Brent’s bookshelves bear titles too divergent to reflect the mind of a man she has never seen reading anything but the Wall Street Journal: from self-help for golfers to volumes on the Ming Dynasty to Stephen King to Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus. Although the city apartment is mostly his, perhaps some of these belong to his nudist wife. That she is utterly uncertain which—cannot differentiate her lover’s taste from that of a woman she has never met—saddens her only vaguely. Among the closely packed book spines, she recognizes the name of the same angry Czech who wrote The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Has this always been here? It is a short story collection: Laughable Loves. A less imposing title, surely. She extracts it carefully, memorizing the books on either side, brings it back to the couch.
Annette’s course without Nicky was a smooth ascent among married men. From hostessing at ristoranti run by whichever of Nicky’s friends she was currently banging, to affairs with coke-loving options traders who frequented these establishments, and finally to the fortysomething head of a prestigious, privately-owned trading firm. Once she met Brent, being a “restaurant girl” didn’t fit anymore—didn’t leave her evenings free enough to accommodate a busy lover, made her too visible, exposed her to the eyes of too many men. Her breakfast of coke, snacks of speed, and bedtime milk-and-cookies of Flexiril compromised her looks, her ability to say the right thing at all times, so she quit cold: her own choice. She learned never to wear eyeliner on the inside of her lower eyelid—to wear just enough makeup to look like she doesn’t need makeup. To wear very high heels, but not too-tight clothes. She keeps her nails short and square.
Yet here she is. She cannot understand The Unbearable Lightness of Being. She does not even have a job. Her apartment is a shithole because she spends all her money on the maintenance of beauty, and Brent will help—as they all have—but not so much that she might feel she has enough and want to leave. Not so much that someone better might mistake her for being in his league. Her haircut is more flattering now; her life has been prolonged by getting off drugs; a rendezvous in Paris with a lover who speaks French beats those old weekends in Vegas hands down—obviously. Annette knows that Nicky saved his own life when he saved a stranger from a man just like him.
But what is that woman doing now, with her miscarried pregnancy and husband in prison? Is she in Ghana, too? Or is she letting some other jag-off pistol-whip her, hoping he gets it right this time without some freak playing Superman barging in?
Why couldn’t Nicky have just let that stupid woman die?
This Doctor Havel, who stars in two stories, might as well be Tomas. The plots are different, but the same things happen here, really. It’s simple: Big-Brotherish political backdrops, women reluctantly experiencing sexual pleasure divorced from love, succumbing to freedom. Annette is reminded of Tomas’s wife, Teresa, and her adulterous jaunt with the architect who may or may not be a Communist spy. Kundera’s women are so often devastated that bodies have wills of their own—Annette feels for them even though the only man she has ever loved is the one she never fucked. Still, she recognizes herself here—a roving shame turned into language—and if she were forced to read a million books (imagine reading a million books!) and told none of the authors, she would know these words as Kundera’s. The restrained violence of his jaw and his personal demons are smeared all over the pages. This time, she finds herself scanning stories almost hoping to find musical bars transposed onto the page, obscure references to composers and philosophers of whom she’s never heard—she longs to greet her own confusion like running into an old friend after many years and recognizing his befuddling traits and viewpoints as familiar and comforting. Rage boils, obliterating her desire to reach into the pages and grab Kundera’s hand—if this writer who makes his living adopting masks cannot hide his own soul behind the words, then how then can Nicky, who had scarcely ever written more than his name before he left her? Did even the fingerprints on his Army gun become different than on the one he carried in Chicago? How can the boy she loved shield and remake his identity so completely as to shut her out?
Knocking, rap rap rap. Where is it coming from? Annette jerks, bolts upright from where she has been curled over her book, whips her neck around to survey the room. Then she sees him: the Mexican window washer thumping Brent’s window with his wiper—has he already tried his own stocky hand and found the thick glass muffled all sound? She looks up and meets his eyes square on. He smirks at her expectantly, raises his eyebrows in question: Where’s the show?
She lowers her head again, searches for words on the page, a soul to recognize.
But the noise continues. Staccato, persistent, so she stands. Outside the window, the boy grabs his crotch, motions down—she thinks at first he’s suggesting she grab her crotch, too—but no, he is pointing at the ground. Gestures his watch, holds up all five fingers spread wide and mouths five since her track record of behavior surely necessitates stupidity. Her feet move.
It takes only moments to dress and make her way through the lobby to the wall of hot wet air waiting outside. Once out in the open, she nearly scurries to hail a cab instead, then stops, marches to the side of the building where she has seen trucks pull up—where workmen sometimes congregate. In the distance, that monstrous Ferris wheel watches over the city from Navy Pier, the pier itself remade from merely the ship’s port of her childhood into a tourists’ amusement park full of bells, whistles, and glitz. Annette’s legs plant strong on the pavement, waiting, her blood simmering a witches’ brew of shame and hope.
Then he is there. Walking with a cluster of six other men: the men who share his days, mock his frailties. Men he may someday surprise by saving a woman he does not know from a danger that does not quite have a name. He walks as though one leg is slightly shorter than the other; his jeans are too big. His hair, dark brown, looks dusty, and Annette thinks: I could find poetry here, too. I could see like Nicky sees. They approach, so close she can almost feel the steam of their cluster. They are a tangle of accents, but everyone is speaking English. Relief floods her—he will understand. Then terror. Understand what? Why is she here? He moves on, cloistered in his herd of men.
Her secret Tomas has passed. She stands, decked out in her filmy Gucci dress, hair slicked back tight from her face and suddenly pinching her scalp. Among the men he was with, two others have seen her naked. She turns to leave.
Their bodies collide—Annette stumbles. Inches from her body, spewing apologetic murmurs for his clumsiness, is, finally, the Mexican. He looks at her and, like a character in a soap opera or Shakespeare, blinks hard as though she is unrecognizable to him under the disguise of her expensive clothing. Where is his crotch grabbing now?
“You’re awfully shy,” she drawls. She wants to scare him, to be a scary, inappropriate woman; she does not know why. “For somebody who’s seen me give my boyfriend head in his dining room.”
“Shi-it,” the boy drawls, laughing. Then: “At first I thought you couldn’t see us, but I hear you do that all the time, huh? Put on a show for Canji. Hey, I would, too, if I were fine like you—you look pretty good even in them clothes. We see some weird-ass shit in this line of work, lemme tell you, but ain’t half of it fine like you—”
“Canji—is that the other guy?” she bursts. “Good-looking, maybe Eastern European—”
“Damn straight, mama, he goes for your show every time. Personally, I think a person ought to share, but the boss man heard about you and he don’t like no trouble. Guess he wants to keep you from wolves like the rest of us.” He howls: “Ahhoouu!”
“Does he?” Sweat stains must be visible. Now that is what the rich really should invent: clothing that under no circumstances shows moisture—that lets you truly look like a different breed. “So Canji’s supposed to protect me, huh?”
“Naw, man.” The boy cannot stop laughing—Annette is not sure whether she makes him nervous, or if he is simply giddy at his good fortune to be talking to the building’s stripper right out in broad daylight. Sing-song: “It ain’t like that—he-be-likin’-the-boys. He’d rather be watching, like, Broadway, eh? It’s an offense, for real, I’m telling you. I didn’t sign on for this kind of work thinking I’d have to be up on a ledge alone with a faggot. I’m scared for my life, if you know what I mean!”
Annette’s mouth has gone dry. “You’re lying,” she tries. “You’re telling me he’s gay because you know I like him.”
“Sheee-eet! Naw, I would not a-guessed that one, no ma’am. I ain’t shitting you, I swear on mi abuela’s soul, no bull. You can ask anyone. You want me to call one of the guys right now? Hey, I can do it, I got my cell—”
“That won’t be necessary.” Annette’s hand flutters to the gap in her suit jacket; the flesh stretched across her breastbones suddenly feels indecent. “I’ve got to go.”
“Hey, naw, don’t leave!” His voice, so loud—can the others hear him?—chases her through the tunnel of her own humiliation, her heels clicking on hot concrete. The air itself seems far away. She is heading the wrong way to best hail a cab.
“I’m no faggot!” the boy calls. “We don’t got no other faggots on our crew. If you’re lookin’ for a date, you look me up. My name’s Angel, remember, like I-will-be-your-Angel-of-Love. Uh-huh, girl, I’ll give you a real man, you come asking for me . . .”
Annette gathers the suit jacket tighter together until it skims her throat. Her heart, thrashing so loud in her ears, pounds like heavy running on the ground behind her—like the whole crew in hot pursuit. When she looks, though—once, twice—there is no one. She can no longer hear the boy’s voice, taunting. Inviting. She stands in the middle of Olive Park, in the shade of trees, the deceptive bliss of green sanctuary amid urban sprawl, body trembling. Is Canji really gay? And if it were a lie, then what? Did she expect him to arrive at her door with flowers, open the passenger’s door of his battered car, kiss her closed-mouthed at the drive-in and ask her father for her hand? What made her think she could go backward? What, exactly, made her think it would be less stifling this time around than when she and Nicky were so hot to court death just to get out?
A man can join the army. A man can save one woman and make up for the trail of female bodies strewn behind him, just like that. Presto change-o, instant hero, the world at his feet.
A woman can clamp her legs shut tight, declare No more, and watch herself become even more invisible—give up what little of the world she has.
Annette gropes through her Louis Vuitton tote for a tissue; her fingers brush her Tiffany’s keychain. Her mail key, Brent’s key, the key to an apartment she despises. Then: the slightly ragged paperback cover of Laughable Loves. She didn’t even realize, in her haste, that she’d taken it. Her fingers plunge deep inside the pages like into a bucket of ice or a Bible: some chilling relief. The sun scorches, a mere sliver of the heat of Ghana, this thin book under her hand a slim substitution for the redemption Nicky found under the African sky. There had to be a way he could have taken her with, like he planned when he was going to be a wise guy and shoot them to the moon. She was good enough to ruin, not good enough to save. But no, Nicky hadn’t ruined her fully either—he’d made sure she knew that, knew it was his choice. A hero would have let her believe in her own decency, her own importance—would have allowed her one small moment of triumph on that porch. OK, maybe she was merely beautiful, not entitled to transcendence, even in the anonymity of a movie theater, the pages of a book. But what more right had Nicky to the transformational, sun-parched, ugly beauty of this wide world than she?
“Hey!” she shouts out in the direction of the Mexican boy, though she can no longer see him. “Angel . . . !” He could have taught her Spanish. Something she would carry inside that nobody could take away. Light breeze answers. He was only a child. Besides, what would her end of the transaction have been but the same?
Annette’s tote is heavy. Holding her breath, she shoves the stolen book under a damp armpit, palms only the key to her apartment, and stuffs the tote and its remaining contents under a tree. Less an offering of peace than a sacrifice she prays will be miraculously ignited by the heat should she panic and rush back. Her wallet, spread open on top, should help in case the elements alone will not assist her. At last sucking air in, fast and thick, deliciously anonymous and far from dead, she slips out of her high-heeled mules, steps out of the comfort of shade, and begins to walk.
Approach
Her name is Merlot, she says, like the wine. It is not her real name, of course, but one she adopted in college because her lovers were always butchering the pronunciation of her actual name during sex. This is what she tells me as we stand by the coffeemaker in the telemarketing department of Houston Magazine. She does not lower her voice. She tosses her foamy, black, perfectly disheveled hair so it falls over her left breast in a way that makes me so envious I have to bite my lip. She says, “I’m talking to you because you don’t speak like a Texan.” She is even happier to learn that I’ve only been in Houston for three years, less than half the time she’s lived here. Later, though, when I accidentally say “y’all” in conversation, she looks at me out of the corner of her eye disapprovingly. I am careful not to do it again. I say “you all” or “all of you” or even “you guys,” like we used to say back in Minnesota. Merlot seems pleased by my effort.
She befriends me, and so I am befriended. The routine of my life changes with alarming speed. Quiet evenings with Bobby, watching reruns of Cheers and Star Trek: The Next Generation, are replaced by hours at cafes and gallery openings, which I attend in borrowed black outfits. I am pretty, Merlot says—unbelievably pretty given my mousy personality. “I am attracted to beauty,” she says, “any kind of beauty.” She was a dancer before she moved to Houston, and even now she goes to the symphony and the ballet all the time. I have never been to the symphony or the ballet. “You don’t do enough with your beauty,” she says, “so I’m going to help you.”
Her husband lives in Chicago, she tells me, because he had a great job opportunity at the Board of Trade. He is clerking now, but once he starts trading, she will move, too. They have a lot of debt, she says, and implies it is due to some habit that is terribly glamorous and somewhat decadent. At first I think she is hiding a drug addiction, but, although she smokes two packs of Dunhill Menthols a day, she hardly ever drinks (nothing but champagne and crème de cassis) and never says anything I would imagine a drug addict saying, nor would a drug addict want to be friends with someone as un-hip as me. Not that I understand why someone who can go into Brasil in a slinky black dress and kiss all the bartenders hello and who receives personalized invitations to receptions at the art galleries on Lower Westheimer would want to be friends with me, either.
I start to tell her stories about my few girlfriends (none of whom I have seen since I moved in with Bobby), about my relationship (though I omit almost everything, like the fact that I spent fifty-eight dollars and twenty-seven cents last month on self-help books for agoraphobics, which he has refused to look at and called me a bitch for buying), and about my cats (though I do not mention the part about Bobby never letting them leave the pantry). I hope these fragments of my life will keep her from thinking I’m a loser, even though my cowboy boots are not authentic Tony Lamas like hers. A month passes. She does not stop calling. Well, at least it isn’t pity, I think.
Merlot is an insomniac, which makes me think she is very worldly. I never have any trouble going to sleep. This is because I’m a simpler person than she is, and, in my opinion, the more complicated a person’s mind is, the harder it is to slow that mind down at night. Merlot spends hours thinking of things that never cross my mind at all, like who should play the roles of characters from her favorite books should they be made into films. With all the books she reads, it’s no wonder she has trouble sleeping.
Sometimes when she’s lying awake, she calls me in the middle of the night. After the first couple of times, I start to keep the cordless phone right by my pillow so that I’ll hear it first and sneak out of the room before Bobby wakes up and yells. I don’t tell her to stop calling so late, even though I hardly ever get a full night’s sleep anymore what with waiting for the phone to ring.
Usually when she calls I go into the pantry with the cats, though if I stay in there for too long, the ammonia smell of the litter box makes me dizzy, and I have to move to the bathroom. The sensation of the cats rubbing almost maniacally against my leg while Merlot talks to me makes me feel doubly loved. Of course, if the cats knew the truth about the world outside the pantry and how I am contributing to their captivity by my selfish desire to have pets despite Bobby’s allergies, they would probably hiss at me. Certainly if Merlot knew about their bleak treatment in my care, she would hang up on me. Even though she hates cats, still, no one approves of cruelty to animals.
Finally Bobby says, “What the hell’s the matter with you, sitting in the pantry talking on the phone all night? Don’t you think I hear the damned cats yowling? You’d better keep them quiet, or I’m throwing them out in the street.”
After that, I don’t go into the pantry. Sometimes, though, the cats hear me moving around and start to meow anyway. I crouch down outside the pantry, touching the ends of their paws, which they shove beneath the door, claws extended. I stroke the small pads of their fingers and whisper, “You won’t be in there forever. Don’t worry. Someday, I’m just going let you out.”
One night, after we have become good enough friends that people at work have started to refer to us as “they,” she calls during Seinfeld. Bobby and I always watch Seinfeld together, it is his favorite show. We are sitting on the couch with his arm around me. He has said again that he thinks he’s feeling calmer from the Valium—that having kept a job in sales for six months is making him believe in himself again. I have been thinking that maybe later we might actually make love, but when I stand up to answer the phone, I know I’ve blown it. He looks hurt, dejected, immediately puts on the headphones so he won’t miss a word. I take the phone into the kitchen anyway, though, in case he’s just pretending and has actually turned the sound down to eavesdrop.
The conversation goes like this:
“Hey,” she says. (Never hi, but hey.)
“Hey,” I say back.
“I talked to Jeffrey on the phone earlier,” she says. “He’s been working twelve-hour days and never goes out to the bars anymore. It makes me feel bad about all the money I spend here. I don’t mean to be inconsiderate of him, it’s just that I have such a hard time conceptualizing the world in concrete terms like finances. I’m going to improve, though. We had a talk about it.”
“That’s good,” I say. “You do spend a lot of money.” Then I fall silent in case she thinks I’m being rude.
Instead she says, “That’s what I like about you. A lot of women think their husbands should work themselves into the grave so that they can buy cool clothes, but you understand. I don’t love him for his money. It’s passion I’m after.”
I don’t stay on the phone long. I’m edgy and nervous and get off before Seinfeld is over in hopes of curling back up on the couch with Bobby. It is too late, though. When I come back in the room, he doesn’t take off the headphones. I go to bed early without him.
Eventually, after she gives me a ride home one night, Bobby says, “Why are you spending so much time with that Chinese girl?” For some reason the comment really bothers me. What irks me most is that Merlot is not Chinese; she is a mixture of Filipino and Spanish, although she looks Hawaiian. I say, “Well, you never want to go out. I have to spend time with someone.” He says, “Why can’t you stay home with me? I don’t like that girl. There’s something weird about her.”
I manage to avoid an argument by leaving the room. I don’t say, If you’d stop peeing in your pants every time I make plans for us to leave the house, I wouldn’t need her anymore, would I? I don’t say, Yeah, and how come you’re zoned out on Valium so much of the time that it took you two months to notice I’m going out? I don’t say, Hey, stupid, do you even know her name? I go into the kitchen and make dinner and hope that maybe he’s mad enough to break up with me, because all kinds of men talk to me now when I go out with Merlot. I don’t think about breaking up with him, because once I tried to before and he broke all the windows of my car and threatened to kill himself. Not that I think he’d really do it, but then that is probably what my mother thought when she left my father, and, generally speaking, I am wrong a lot more often than my mother.
Bobby doesn’t like Merlot because she is too pretty. Men don’t like beautiful women they can’t have. Merlot tells me this one day over coffee, but I have kind of known it all along.
Merlot is sick, so I decide to take Bobby out. I pick up Depends undergarments on my way home from work. The cashier looks at me strangely, and I want to say, They’re for my grandma, but I just stare at the counter until she hands me my receipt. The vodka is in the refrigerator already; we drink it before 6:00 PM. I have two shots just so I won’t care that he has five. I drive.
La Carafe is not as scary as some of the other places she takes me; it is homey with a rustic look to it, not sleek or modern or trendy. But it is farther away. By the time we get there, Bobby is shaking. He’s trying to say, “It’s OK, honey, I’ll be all right. I want to go,” but his face has turned red and droplets of sweat are popping out like air bubbles all over his forehead. When I park, he won’t get out of the car. I have to sit there on the curb waiting for him, but he doesn’t get out. When I touch him, his heartbeat is wild, pounding right through his now-soaked cotton shirt. He is ugly, sweating, mad with fear, and I think at this moment I could beat him with a stick until he bled his sweaty blood all over the curbside and people stopped to stare. I force myself to hug him, whisper, “It’s OK, Bobby, I’ll take you home.”
The stench of urine in the car on the drive back almost makes me puke. He is crying, saying he’s sorry, but I can’t answer; I just stare at the road. At home I say, “I’m not trying that again. You can just sit here and die for all I care!” He says, “Please don’t leave me. I’ll get help, I’ll see someone, I promise.” The cats are meowing top volume at the sound of our voices and Bobby starts screaming, “Shut them up, shut them up!” For a long time I look at him, choking and sputtering, no hint of the nice-looking, mild-mannered man I first started dating four years ago. I say, “What’s the matter with you? Don’t you know that cats don’t follow instructions? They aren’t like dogs, don’t you know anything?” I leave the room before he can answer.
That night I refuse to come to bed. I lie on the couch, seething, and when I fall asleep I dream of Bobby, and a therapist in a lab coat like my old physics teacher’s. My mother abandoned me when I was a kid, Bobby says. I’ve been kinda off ever since. It’s your girlfriend making you crazy, the therapist answers. Her mother did it to her father, and now she’s doing it to you.
Most psychiatric diseases have their onset when a person is around nineteen or twenty. I learned that in Abnormal Psychology, which didn’t help me understand my family any better but filled my head with a lot of statistics. Bobby is twenty-three, but he has always been a late bloomer. He was a virgin until he was twenty, so that would fit.
Interlude
When Merlot was a student at art school, she had a lover who was a paraplegic. His name was Geoff, too, like her husband, only her husband is Jeff with a J, and Merlot never calls him Jeff, only Jeffrey, emphasis on the rey.
Geoff the paraplegic had a hard time maintaining an erection because of his condition, Merlot tells me. He was a good-looking man and incredibly charismatic, with ice blue eyes. He used to be a race car driver, which is how he got injured. These things apparently enabled him to keep attracting beautiful women even after he couldn’t walk anymore, because Merlot was one of three or four lovers he had concurrently. Once she even agreed to make love with one of his other girlfriends because he swore he would be able to solve his erection problem if they would let him watch. She had never done anything like that before, but she went along with it because she loved him and wanted to help him. It worked, too, but not permanently.
Sometimes when Merlot went out with him, Geoff would ask her not to wear any panties. She would sit on his lap (right there in his wheelchair), and he would put his hand under her skirt and do things to her, but she couldn’t make any noise because they would be with another couple or something and they might look under the tablecloth to see why Merlot was moaning. Other times he put ice cubes inside her, because hearing her scream made his masculine difficulties less problematic. That is how Merlot put it, which I guess means he shot up like a rocket whenever she stubbed her toe. When she tells me these stories, she always stresses that she had never done anything like that before, but Geoff was so extraordinary she would have done anything he asked.
“He was like a Svengali,” she says, sounding breathless ever since we started talking about him. She drinks some of her cafe latte even though her face is looking a bit moist and excited and I think she should have some cold water instead—but the waiter hasn’t come back with her lemon slices yet, and Merlot won’t drink water without lemon.
Because I am curious, I force myself to ask, “What do you mean?”
“He was one of those men who, after you meet them, you are never the same. He had an almost hypnotic power, so that whenever we were together I was under his spell.” She pauses to lick the milk froth off her lips. “He was one of the three most important men of my life.”
For the rest of the day, I try to prioritize the most important men in my life. My father, who by dying when I was ten managed to avoid ever disappointing me, unless the fact that he blew his brains out can be counted as a disappointment. (My mother doesn’t like it when I make jokes like that.) My grandfather, who always gave me presents and called me sugar. Bobby, because even though his habits are getting harder and harder to explain, I lost my virginity to him, and that qualifies him for something. I wonder whether the third important man in Merlot’s life is the one she lost her virginity to. Jeffrey, I assume, is the other since he is, after all, her husband.
That night I am plagued with my first bout of insomnia. I lie awake next to the snoring, heat-radiating bulk that is Bobby, intoxicated with fantasies about the phantom Third Man. Maybe he was an international billionaire who had all-night sex orgies on a yacht in the Mediterranean. Maybe he was a European count who lived in a castle—Merlot has been to Europe before. Maybe he was a distant relative whom she met by accident and felt an immediate attraction to, despite their doomed fate. Maybe someday she will tell me.
I know she lives in the Champions area. It takes her forty-five minutes to get to where I live, near the Galleria. I am closer to the places she likes, though, so it is three months before I see her house. I know by then that she lives with her mom. I found out a month into our friendship when The Mother answered Merlot’s phone. She isn’t supposed to do that since they have separate lines. The Mother’s accent was thick, and she sounded like a commercial for a bad Chinese restaurant, though, as I said before, she isn’t Chinese. She just sounded that way to me.
I follow Merlot’s directions to the letter; take 610-N then 610-E, then 45-N and exit at 1960. Even before I reach her house, I am afraid of my surroundings, of the enormity of the land encompassing the two-or three-story houses, of the outdoor pools and in-ground sprinkler systems. I think of the wooden frame house where my mother and stepfather live. They rent the upstairs from a crotchety old woman who complains if they wear their shoes in the house and insists they are picking up the kitchen table and dropping it on the floor. I am embarrassed.
At her house she makes an impromptu Filipino noodle dish, then we sit in the Jacuzzi to watch the sun go down. The Mother is out of town visiting Merlot’s father in San Francisco where he lives, though they are not divorced. “He has a good job,” Merlot says, but when I ask questions like, “Are they planning to live together again someday?” she is vague and does not answer.
People sit naked in Jacuzzis, I discover. I have seen Merlot’s body before—when we go shopping and she brings me into the dressing room with her—but it seems different here, in the dim light of her backyard with glasses of champagne and cassis sitting within our reach. The bones that stretch across her chest above her small, upturned breasts keep catching my eye. Her neck appears longer without her clothes. When she rises to pour more champagne, the foam from the Jacuzzi clings to her jet-black pubic hair for a moment before evaporating. I can see her ribs.
“You really have to get rid of Bobby,” she says when the bottle is empty. “He’s dragging you down.”
My father, standing under our window waving a gun: I’ll kill myself, I swear I will. My mother on the phone: If he thinks he can emotionally blackmail me, he has another thing coming.
“He’s buying me an engagement ring,” I say. Then, as an afterthought, “Besides, I couldn’t afford my apartment alone.”
“The Galleria area sucks anyway,” Merlot says. “It’s nothing but a pseudo Lincoln Park, full of overpriced restaurants, and yuppie wannabes. Houston’s pathetic.”
“I thought you liked that gallery, Dream Land. You like Brasil.”
“The coffee at Brasil is dismal. It’s just one of the only places in this sad city that stays open now that they closed the late-night section of Treebeards.” She leans over and pulls my hair off my neck. “I think I’ll make a French braid for you later. It will look very elegant.”
The wetness of her touch slides down my back lightly, sending goose bumps down my arms. I say, “I’ve been thinking of telling Bobby that we’re growing apart. I love him, but I’m afraid for the cats. They’re becoming demented.”
“I’m relieved you’re coming to your senses,” she says. “What you ever saw in him anyway is beyond me.”
I choke back an angry response, Yeah, well, at least he has legs. “He wasn’t always like this. I mean, he was always shy, but not . . .” I feel tears close at hand and swallow them down. “There’s something wrong with him. It runs in his family. His mother abandoned him. He’ll die if I leave him, too.”
I look down at the bubbles, waiting for her to speak, but she is silent. When I glance up, her neck is tilted toward the sky and her eyes are shut. She appears to be wishing on a star.
“Merlot?” I say. “What are you doing?”
“I’m wishing you wouldn’t think that was your fault,” she says, still facing the sky. “I’m wishing you would see you don’t owe him your life, and that you’d taste this champagne and hear this music and understand what you need.” She looks at me, and I feel dangerously light, my impulse to cry as forgotten as if it had happened to somebody else. “I’m wishing you would go home and end that farce and come here and stay with me at my house. I’m wishing . . .” She pauses, then suddenly laughs aloud. “I’m wishing you would stop wasting our time.”
There is more to it than her house, than her boots, than the husband in Chicago, than the kinky paraplegic, than Bobby, than anyone else can see. There are the long silences over the telephone, fraught with recognition when she says that her mother cannot drive and that she depends on Merlot for everything, that she flies into hysterics at the thought of Merlot getting her own place. There is the confession of my own mother’s dependency after we found Dad in the basement, the year we spent in family therapy, Mom sobbing, We didn’t love him enough, we just let him die. There is the way Bobby started to talk about killing himself last year when he lost his fourth job and I tried to leave, and the way I believed I was cursed. There is the fact that her husband’s family doesn’t know about their marriage because they are very rich and important and Jewish, and she is none of these things (at least not by their standards), and Jeffrey is waiting for the right time to tell them; he doesn’t want to get disinherited, and she has to be patient, but it hurts. There are her tiny, dark fingers running through my hair after we leave the Jacuzzi, tucking, pulling, while she sings me songs from Madame Butterfly, which she has practically memorized. There is the sensation in my stomach that neither Bobby nor anyone else has ever made me feel, the dropping inside my gut when the silk of her wide-bottomed pants brushes against my leg at work as she leans over to tell me some banal secret. We share a common captivity: Houston, our mothers, the magazine. She tells me stories of other places: Chicago, San Francisco, Paris on Bastille Day. She says that her job at the magazine is just a stepping stone. She says she will not be like her mother.
Leaving Bobby is easier than I thought it would be. The moment he says he will accompany me to my boss’s birthday party, the words are out. They are, “I’d rather be shot in the foot than bring you to a party. If you wet your pants in front of the people I work with, I’d have to move to a foreign country. You know we really have to break up; I just can’t do this anymore.”
“But I almost have the ring paid for,” he says, smiling like he can’t believe I’m serious.
I glare at him and quote Merlot verbatim. “I don’t want a diamond solitaire anyway. They’re tacky.”
Some kind of realization begins to come across his face. He sits down on the couch, the muscles in his right leg jerking with involuntary agitation. “I will die without you,” he says.
The sound of the cats clawing at the pantry door make it easy for me to believe I hate him. “Bullshit,” I say (just like Merlot told me to). “Get over it.”
Even though I open all the doors in the house the moment that his sister picks him up and drives him away, four days pass without the cats venturing out. Eventually, I have to put their food in the kitchen to make them leave the dark, smelly room that has been their home for eight months. They never eat in front of me, though, only when I’m not at home.
After a couple of weeks, Bobby stops sitting outside the apartment waiting for me to come home. Mostly, I stay with Merlot anyway, in her black and white bedroom which is filled with the sounds of Nina Simone and Edith Piaf. We lay together on her king size bed and talk about what we would do with a million dollars. She would be a philanthropist, a patron of the arts. I would pay my college loans and buy a beautiful house. We decide that the fact that we are telemarketers is a sick joke. We have learned a lot from working at Houston Magazine, we should be assistant editors by now. If they don’t appreciate us, another company would.
Even while I am staying there, though, I always call to check the messages on my answering machine. No call comes to tell me Bobby is dead, so eventually I assume that he was only lying.
Incident
The day before we plan to give our two-week notices, we go to a reception at Dream Land. I am wearing an outfit that belongs to me. We bought it last week; I picked it out and she approved. My head feels light, though I have only had one glass of white wine and have eaten more than my share of cheese. I think I may be the youngest person at the reception.
Merlot says, “You would never have worn that dress when I met you.” My giddiness at my comparative youth is heightened by her reminiscence. The person in her memory feels like my younger sister or a character I read about once in a book, not me at all. From this detached position, it suddenly occurs to me that Dream Land looks strikingly like the wooden frame house my mother lives in. The floors even creak like her floors. This realization makes me want to laugh at the fact that I was once afraid to enter this gallery, when in fact I might just as well have lived here! When I turn to tell this to Merlot, the logic that led me to this conclusion suddenly seems cloudy, and I remain silent. She does not notice my befuddlement, however; she is staring across the room.
The Third Man is here.
She takes me aside, her face flushed scarlet, and whispers, “It’s him, God, do I look OK?” I say, “Who?” “The love of my life,” she says, flippant but somehow deadly serious. She does not say, Before Jeffrey. She does not say, Before you.
My stomach clutches with pain and excitement, and I turn in the direction she indicates to see a man in his mid-forties, medium height and balding, with gray hair and a wrinkled black blazer. He is standing surrounded by people, but I know she is talking about him because most of the others are women, except for one other man who must be fifty-five and looks like my stepfather. He is wearing a stereotypically Texas-style suede jacket that is tailored to look like a sports coat, and his hair looks as though it has recently been smashed down by a cowboy hat. He is fat. It disappoints me, The Third Man’s relatively ordinary appearance and choice in friends, but two of the women are beautiful (though not as striking or exotic as Merlot), and this gives me pleasure.
She pulls me in the general direction of the gaggle of art aficionados of which he is a part. They are looking at a painting that costs just over two thousand dollars. The Third Man is debating whether to buy it. Merlot says, “Don’t say anything about the Calvin Mills painting.” I try to think of what she could be talking about, then remember the painting in her house that she bought some months before, The Soldier, a four hundred and fifty dollar painting that resembled an African warrior. I am trying to figure out why I would be likely to bring this up when she walks up to The Third Man and slips her arm around him. He looks taken aback, smiles, kisses her cheek. She clings to his arm and whispers things in his ear until the three other women wander away. I am forgotten, holding a small plate full of cheese cubes. Once the other women have left, though, Fat Friend comes up to me, grinning and asking for introductions. Merlot stays affixed to The Third Man’s arm. When he goes to talk to someone else, she goes with him, leaving me with his friend.
After wandering around the room extensively, The Third Man and Merlot return to where Fat Friend, whose name is Larry, is telling me about how he outsmarted someone who sounds like an idiot by doing something that sounds like lying. I have gathered by then that he and The Third Man, whose name is Phillip, are business associates connected by a deal that they both desperately want, but that they don’t know each other very well. Fat Friend, for example, does not know how old Phillip is or whether he is seriously involved with anyone, though maybe it is just that businessmen don’t talk about those kinds of things.
The crowd is beginning to thin out. “Why don’t we all have coffee,” Merlot says, tossing her hair back over her shoulder with one quick motion of her slender neck. Phillip clears his throat, looks around the room and says, “Well.” Fat Friend puts an arm around me. I am not sure how we have become so familiar. “That would be great,” he says.
We go to Brasil because it’s close. Merlot is drinking Kir Royales and talking much louder than usual. She is still hanging on Phillip and laughing a lot. I am not sure what is funny, but fear that it may be me. Fat Friend keeps leaning over and pinching me on the arm, saying things like, “Don’t you ever talk, girl?” He speaks Texan. Phillip does not. Phillip is from New York and only lives here half-time for business. When Merlot finally excuses herself to go to the bathroom, I hurriedly rise to join her.
The bathroom at Brasil excites me. The door to the ladies’ room has no sign, just a drawing on it that looks like a breast. I like to walk into the bathroom without hesitation, because it indicates that I have been here before; newcomers always stand outside trying to figure out if they are in the right place. Tonight, though, Merlot pulls me in before I have a chance to enjoy my entrance.
“I’m so confused,” she says, pulling me into a stall and locking the door behind us. “What should I do? I can’t cheat on Jeff, but just being around Phillip is driving me mad. I shouldn’t have even let him take me out. There’s too much of an attraction between us.”
I am no help, sulking at the anticipation of F.F.’s sweaty fingers pinching me again when she is the married woman and I should get the eligible, thin man. I leave her at the mirror picking out her wild hair and reapplying red lipstick, angry at her sudden indifference to my presence. I go back to the table, planning to announce that I am taking a cab home. When I get there, F.F. is at the bar. Phillip pulls back my seat for me and says, “Hey, let me talk to you for a minute.”
“I have to call a cab.”
“You seem like a really nice girl,” he says. “Don’t let Larry put you off, he’s just had too much to drink. You know how married men are.”
I do not know anything about married men, but the conspiracy of the comment gives me a small rush. “So?”
“I don’t know how close you are to her,” he says, indicating the door with the tit on it, “but you should really be on your guard. You seem like a sweetheart, and she’s a just a player. You don’t belong with her. Do you see what I’m saying?”
Merlot is coming back to the table. F.F. is close behind, bearing drinks. When they sit down, he says to her, “Hey, darlin’, are you Thai? I went to Thailand once on business, and I never had head like that in my life. Are you Thai?”
“Cool it,” Phillip says, but Merlot laughs. “I’m a happily married woman,” she says. “No one gets to rate my performance except my husband.”
Phillip laughs, too, like he gets the joke. Then he stops abruptly and says, “Wait a minute. Does that mean you’re not coming home with me? Come on, baby, don’t waste my time.”
I am not sure whether or not he is kidding. Merlot, though, lowers her eyes flirtatiously. “You and I have a history,” she says, “that doesn’t pertain to my husband.”
“Aw, cut the talk about your husband,” F.F. says. “I’ve got a wife, and you don’t see me carrying on about it to no end. Your husband’s a damn drug addict from what I hear. He doesn’t deserve a pretty lady like you.”
Merlot looks at Phillip with a venom that I have seen her use at work to make people give her her way. “Jeffrey is out of rehab. He has a job at the Board of Trade in Chicago. It’s not like it was, so I’d appreciate your not spreading lies about me to your friends.”
“Look, don’t flatter yourself,” Phillip says. “If you’re so happily married, what are you doing here with us? When have you and I ever been together without ending up in bed?”
“Fuck you,” Merlot says. Even I know this is a mistake. I have never heard her curse before, and she sounds crude, out of control. F.F. is laughing.
“In good time,” Phillip says. “Only I wanted to send your little friend home first. She’s too sweet for what I had in mind.”
I stand up, take Merlot by the hand, but she pulls away. She is starting to cry now, and Phillip says, “Why are you always trying to con me? Now that fuck-up husband of yours is in Chicago? What kind of marriage do you have anyway? Don’t tell me you’re still living with your mother and spending all her money. When are you going to grow up?”
“Merlot,” I say, “let’s get out of here.”
She is crying so hard she cannot breathe. F.F. is staring off into space, drinking his scotch. Phillip looks at me with cool, glassy eyes and puts an arm around her. He pulls out a twenty and hands it to me. “Take a cab home, honey. She’s just drunk. I’ll see that she gets home OK.”
“I’m not leaving her with you.”
Merlot puts her face into Phillip’s shoulder. He strokes her hair rather absently.
“Aren’t you coming with me?” I say.
She looks up. She is biting her lip, not really crying anymore but sniffing in a somewhat theatrical manner. She does not quite look at me, but says to the air, “It’s all right. I think I’m going to stay awhile longer, until I sober up. You don’t have to worry about me.”
Phillip keeps staring at me. “She’ll be OK,” he says. “It’s still early. Just go on home now before the crazies start coming out.”
I keep looking back at her until I reach the door, but she doesn’t meet my eyes. Not once.
It is eleven when she comes in to work the next day. I am silent, trying to swallow the need to ask her what we are going to do with our letters of resignation, which are sitting in my top desk drawer. She smiles a weak smile at me as she goes to her desk. Her hair is messier than usual.
At lunch she comes to my desk and waits for me the way she always does. We are quiet in the elevator, but as soon as we get outside, she says, “I know I shouldn’t have done that last night. Please don’t lecture me. There’s just such an attraction between Phillip and me that I couldn’t resist it. It doesn’t affect how I feel about Jeffrey.”
There is a long silence during which I am sure that she imagines me to be struggling with my moral stance against adultery. I cannot think of what to say. When I speak, I say, “That was him, wasn’t it? The third important man in your life. The one besides Geoff and Jeffrey?”
“I have such a weakness for him,” she says. “No matter how long we spend apart, we’re always drawn back together. God, you should see his apartment here. The painting he was thinking of buying last night wasn’t even half as expensive as most of the art he owns. You should have come with us. Larry wasn’t so bad once he sobered up.”
The sudden realization that I have no idea what is going on hits me. “Look,” I say, “maybe it’s a bad day to resign.”
“I was thinking the same thing,” she says. “I don’t know if I can afford to be unemployed just now. Jeffrey is trying hard to save, but his expenses are making it difficult. As soon as he’s saved some more money, we’ll do it. That will give you a chance to save, too.”
“So did you have a good time last night?” I do not say, Besides your crying fit. I do not say, Did you actually sleep with that guy? I do not say, Don’t you see what’s going on? I do not say, Who are you?
“Phillip puts me through an emotional wringer,” she says. “But he’s just a very honest man; he says what he feels. He has the power to draw me out, to make me see things I don’t want to see and act in ways I don’t normally act.”
Geoff, a limp penis, and two women tumbling around on a bed to please him.
“Like a Svengali?” I venture.
“Exactly,” she says. “Do you see? We understand each other so well.”