JANE APPROVED. A RUN-DOWN New York bar, mid-afternoon—early mid-afternoon at that. Near the door, a well-dressed young alcoholic put away shots, furtive and efficient. A tobacco-stained graybeard at the deep end of the bar kept scratching under a Stars-and-Stripes necktie he wore as a headband. One couple was almost lost in shadow in the back. The girl, in tears maybe, bent over her knees. She looked sickened by something her boyfriend had told her. The boy was torturing a matchbook, staring at it with clockmaker’s concentration and an air of contempt. Jane sat at the bar.
Her elbows rose weightlessly when the bartender wiped the gouged wood before setting down a beer for her. The wood was just as sticky after a pass of his rag.
Jane had to wait a long time as usual. The Stars-and-Stripes codger exploded in argument with the bartender. His outburst turned into laughter. The boy in the back whispered tensely to his matches. Jane nursed her beer but was almost finished by the time Raimundo appeared, scrupulously neat, smelling of verbena and himself. His weighty hand, plaster at the cuticle of the thumb, skittered over the placket of a denim shirt, an orator’s dignified hand-on-heart. He said, “I don’t like this place so much.” The plaster on his thumbnail meant he’d been doing construction instead of manning the industrial dishwasher at Poco Loco.
“I was just thinking it’s nice. Unpretentious.”
“The rich girls always love trashy.”
She laughed happily at this crazy mistake, which he liked to insist on. Dutifully she repeated, “I’m not rich at all. I’m poor. I’m from Queens.”
To order, he held up two fingers in the slightly showoffy way he had. The bartender brought two beers, wiped and set them down. Raimundo appeared satisfied, happy to be with her, to complain, to be served promptly. He swung around on the barstool and slouched back against the bar on his elbows. His hand tolled lightly against her shoulder, then grasped it for a moment, feeling the material. “That’s soft. But look at these lights.” He nodded at the cheap string of Christmas lights kinked across walnut-stained plywood. “That’s like in Mexico. That’s like what the poor people put up.”
“Who cares?”
He shrugged. Then he insisted, “No. Me. I like clean. In fact, I like to have a bar one day which would have—mmm—like diffused light, little spotlights. Everything glass. Maybe with light under here.” He spun back around and tapped the underside of the bar. “You ever been to Miami? Everything is very well designed.” He gave his fingertips a Sicilian kiss. “Very clean. Very nice people. Look, nobody’s happy here.”
“I am.”
“Mm.” He grinned, nuzzled, kissed her. Despite herself, she stiffened, twittered. He could veer to the physical so suddenly. He flung a loose hand at the room, which meant, “Who cares what we do here?” He slumped and stuck out his lower lip. Then unslumped and crowded her again. “I wanna come to your place.”
“What? No conversation? No night on the town?”
“You never like it. What? You like to now? OK, me, too. Let’s go,” he countered.
“I don’t like going out. You’re right. I’m too old. Or just not into it at the moment.”
“I am. The bar I’d like to have—you ever see that Captain Morgan ad in the subway—with all these friends? A big poster of everybody being friendly?”
“Maybe. On the subway car?”
“No. Station.” He smiled, paused, then barreled ahead. Even if she thought him fatuous, he took the risk. “No. I know it’s stupid. But I imagine my bar is like that. With everybody very happy. Dressed very elegant. Very elegant place.”
“I thought you wanted to do more contracting. You said you wanted to incorporate—licensed, bonded, the whole shebang.” She made a face because she heard teacher in her voice, high school career counselor. Sudden as faintness, she relished intensely the obscurity of this bar. Of him. Of her. No one would ever look for her here. No one would ever guess she had anything to do with this man.
Raimundo noticed the startling gravity of her expression. “That’s right,” he admitted. “Maybe I would like to have the bar in the long term. Because I know how I can build it myself.” He was wondering if her expression meant she was lonely or bored with him and longed for someone more intellectual, more aggressive, passionate about politics, like a romantic trade union organizer. “Look, my mom was just a party girl in Mexico. Me too. I gotta tell her some time you never go out, you always talk politics and you hate fun. She’d like you a lot more.”
“That would impress her?”
“Yeah, she’d say, Good, Rai, you’re getting serious.”
“I’m not really political. Not anymore. How could I be? I’m American. America has no politics.”
He opened his mouth.
“If you want a bar, you should do it. I’m all for doing what you want now. You know, unless it hurts somebody else.”
He shrugged as if he wasn’t serious about the bar.
“And I don’t hate fun. If you’re wondering what I was thinking about a second ago, I was trying to decide if we were in love.”
He made a comic expression of surprise. “This you never decide.”
“Oh, really?” she disagreed.
“What do you think, then?”
“Are we in love?”
“It’s something,” he negotiated. “In a way,” he allowed.
“Have you had sex with other women since we’ve known each other?”
He merely smiled, though he hadn’t.
“I could’ve, too, I suppose. But I haven’t. And I hadn’t for a very long time before you. I do feel tender about you. Especially when you have nightmares.”
“I don’t have nightmares.” He did. The few times they’d fallen asleep together, he invariably started mouthing words in the most pathetic voice. They didn’t even sound Spanish.
“Whatever. I do feel tender. But it was a huge mistake us going over to see your mother.”
“She never said you were too old for me.”
“But she did say—well, it’s sort of plausible what she said. It’s been making me depressed. I hate being forced to think what other people are thinking.” Raimundo’s mother had given Jane a look like she was an erotic tourist who couldn’t afford airfare. She’d told Rai Jane was slumming. “You know what I mean, don’t you? It is plausible, what she said.”
He was visibly uncomfortable. “I should never told you.”
“Not that I think she’s right, but how can I know?”
“You just know.”
“No, I don’t! It’s like being raped, isn’t it? People looking at something you thought you were doing for your own reasons and calling it whatever they want. I thought I liked you—but no, according to your mom it’s erotic tourist. You were supposed to be my thing—this was our thing, I mean.” She stopped when he sighed. “I’m sorry, Rai. Look at how hurt I was by her.”
“Why’d you want to go meet her, my mom?”
“I just did. I wanted to be up front.”
“Why do you care what she thinks?”
“I just do.” She almost asked him, “Don’t you?” But she could see the subject was making him unhappy.
He smiled and slyly interposed. “I do love you, I think. Because you have perfect tits, you know that?”
Her horsey guffaw startled him. “My best feature.”
“Yeah, yeah, they’re not too big but perfect, you know that?” He’d slotted one of his big knees between hers. Careful as a seamstress he pulled the hem of her green silk skirt over it. He leaned forward to whisper something. She felt the side of her face bathed in a murmuring cloud of beer, verbena and thoracic heat turned into words. “It’s good we don’t see each other too much or I’d never stop fucking you. I’d do no work. When I see you, I think I cannot be at rest till I fuck you.”
“Well, I like fucking you, too,” she answered matter-of-factly, which made him smile and shake his head a little at their conjoined lap.
They did end up at her apartment. And though they fell into a long embrace as soon as the door closed, they broke it off. Raimundo walked around the studio trying light switches, none of which worked.
From the kitchen, Jane exclaimed à la Mexicaine, “Ai! The freezer melted all over everything.” Raimundo could hear tinkling steps as she hopped through a vast puddle of water on the floor. She slipped two beers from the dark refrigerator as quickly as possible and slammed the door shut. She tinkled back to him.
“What’s going on?”
Jane explained, “They shut off the electricity. Not really my fault. The idiot I’m subletting from was supposed to pay the bill. Plus—” She lit a cigarette. She’d started smoking again. “Con Ed treats you like some naughty high school kid. They want you to go down to their office and grovel. It’s insulting. And then they try to charge this outrageous penalty. I’m not going to pay for someone else’s mistake.”
He gave her a look. She was sounding arrogant. In the streetlight that barred the studio, his head hung forward slightly with a calm stare like a tiger’s.
She argued, “No. I’m not a snotty rich girl. And, you’re right, it would be a thousand times worse for somebody with no recourse, no money at all, but I don’t really have money, either.”
“It’s harder for them, because those people don’t mean to forget to pay the bill. They’re just stupid.”
She didn’t catch his smile and protested, “What, do you think I let this happen on purpose? I didn’t. She was supposed to be paying the bills, remember. I didn’t do this on purpose.”
“Partly it must be the way you like everything that’s trashy. So you trash this place. Even me, you think I’m this trashy, macho—and you’re only using me to crush you.”
Jane laughed. “Are you smiling? You’d better be.”
When he moved to show her he was, the shadows of the blinds moved across his body like a dancer’s tights being tugged on. They both wore this same sensual cloth of shadow and streetlight. Jane turned on a crank portable radio her father had given her in case of nuclear winter. The charge was nearly gone already, and she didn’t feel like cranking. Faint music settled behind static. The static, or the vaguely familiar tune she thought she recognized from a long time ago, made the lightless assignation feel even more obscure than the bar had.
“You want me to do your favorite thing?” Raimundo asked.
“What? Oh! Yes, I do.” She set her bottle on the floor next to the futon and flung herself down, corpse-straight and fully clothed.
Raimundo dropped to his knees. Slowly he lowered his body onto hers, transferring his weight little by little. His tiger face gleamed. Jane closed her eyes, enjoying the pressure. He quoted his romantic line again. “You’re just using me to crush you.”
With the little breath she could draw, she peeped, “Yes.”