We hide. I hate to hide. But we do.
He took me home one day, out of necessity because he had left some papers at the house and, really, making me wait in the car would have been a bit much.
But, as luck would have it, his mother was there. In a way, I was perversely happy to finally meet her face-to-face, to force Juan José’s hand.
I could see all the questions in her expression, all the questions she would later ask Juan José: Isn’t this Cristina’s daughter who married the American film director? Didn’t she have a little girl? Why are you bringing her home then?
But to me, she was just polite.
“Ah, I’m so delighted to see you!” she said, smiling brightly. “You look exactly like your mother; it’s the most incredible thing. Don’t you think so, m’ijo?”
And Juan José, looking uncomfortable, looking guilty, as if such behavior weren’t cliché in this city where everybody has a backstory.
Even in Los Angeles it isn’t like this, or if it is, I don’t hear about it. Perhaps I don’t because I’ve never been an insider, just an appendix to Marcus’s social sphere.
Here, I’m part of it, and people talk. I see it in their eyes, in my mother’s surreptitious comments—“You’re going out with JJ? Again?” Resigned. Hurt.
She always wanted me to marry someone like Juan José. A boy from Cali. From a nice family. A known family—una familia conocida. Someone familiar. Predictable. And I would continue my life like hers: raise my children, prepare lovely dinners, and on the weekends, play tennis at the club.
But now all that seemed frightfully provincial alongside Marcus and his blond, stately good looks and his money and his fame and his mansion in Beverly Hills, for Christ’s sake, not in Cali, Colombia.
I saw this in her reproachful glance when I went out at night, again, to hide with him.
In the morning, she asked me about it directly, the one and only time that she did.
“I don’t understand, Helenita,” she said as she sipped her tea, looking away from me. “You never liked JJ, or did you?” A small frown furrowed her creamy brow.
I looked at nothing, blanking out, as I did more and more often those days.
“You never liked boys from Cali,” my mother plowed on, relentless. “What does this one have?”
I was momentarily stumped.
What did this one have?
“I don’t know,” I said, not realizing I’d spoken out loud and startled by the matter-of-fact loudness of my voice.
“I don’t know,” I said more quietly, more to myself than to her, and I shrugged. We both finished our breakfast in silence.