A MINUTE OR two late, the instructor walks into the room and introduces himself. He is not to be called professor or doctor, since he is only a TA in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures. He is twice the age of his students, at least. A wrinkled t-shirt drapes his round belly, and he often touches or tucks a stray brown curl behind an ear. When he talks, we listen. He talks and talks and talks. He has this way of always talking that keeps us always listening.
The class meets every day, and every day before class I stand outside on the steps, smoking a cigarette, under the awning and out of the snow. Every day the talkative Spanish Teacher says hello, or stops to chat about one thing or another. At first he asks about my major—education or engineering. I can’t decide, I say. It changes each time I drop out. He asks about my job. What I do in the evenings. He’s new here, you see. He asks where I am from. Where I live. With whom. I’m surprised by this attention. And by how he watches me so intently while I speak. The Spanish Teacher talks to me before class, during class, after class. I like his persistence, the way he makes it clear I’m being pursued.
Weeks later, I’m sitting in a dining chair in The Spanish Teacher’s living room in an apartment on campus: cinder-block walls painted white, government-issue tile floors, single-pane windows, window-unit air-conditioning. It passes here for graduate student housing, he tells me. I don’t know why I have come, or why I tracked down his number in the university directory, or why I called and invited myself over. It’s a risk to be here, to be seen. He sits across from me at the telephone table, fingering a stack of telephone books, wiping dust from the keys of his state-of-the-art fax machine. The opposite wall is lined with bookshelves constructed of cinder blocks and unfinished plywood boards. I’ve never heard of most of the titles: academic treatises on socialist utopias in film, or theoretical approaches to translation and international discourse.
Tonight I’m getting the short version of his international life history: an adventure hitchhiking across oceans and continents. It’s a far cry from my own life growing up in a town with only three stoplights, a short, failed stint as a model in New York, and a so-far mediocre career as a reluctant college student. By the end of the night he’s pulling pictures of his children from a plain white shoe box. Touching them makes him sob like a child. It all starts like this: he offers all that I didn’t know I wanted, asks in return for all that I haven’t yet learned how to give.
I have this image of my parents in an argument, which could occur at any time, on any given day: she sits on the couch like a sullen child—lips pursed, arms crossed—or leans against a wall in the kitchen. She doesn’t want to be the first one to walk away from the fight. She’s waiting for him to throw his hands wildly into the air, stare at her with his mouth open, sigh, smear one palm across his forehead or push his hair straight up on end. She’s betting he’ll walk down the hall and close himself behind a door. He talks calmly, deliberately, the giant wheel of his mind rolling her flat. I wish she would speak up, stand firm. Instead, she walks away, gives up, pronounces herself done.
Mostly my parents avoid one another: Dad in his armchair in the living room watching golf tournaments or reruns of M*A*S*H, Mom in her sewing room at the end of the hall, the door closed, her back toward the door, her lap tangled with needles and thread. They spend decades in this stalemate.
The worst of it comes when I’m in middle school, just before My Older Sister moves out. She argues almost constantly with Mom, or if My Older Sister happens to be at work at the town’s only ice cream shop, my parents argue about My Older Sister. My Mom says now that may have been what ruined everything, how he never backed her up. My Dad says it was that she never forgave him for anything. Not ever in the thirty-two years they were married. Not once.
Before I move out of the house I argue with Mom, too: crossed boundaries, invasions of privacy, unreasonable curfews. One day she finds a pack of cigarettes in my purse and demands I smoke them all in front of her. I break them into pieces and throw them in the trash. She calls me rotten. I call her a bitch and she slaps my open mouth for it. Maybe I deserve it. I think maybe she does, too.
By the time I walk into the classroom that first day of Spanish class, I have moved away from the town with only three stoplights and only one ice cream shop, away from the county with one major intersection, away down the highway to a college town, into an apartment near the mall with My Older Sister. I call home if the car needs repairs. Or if I need to buy an expensive book. I make the hour-long drive to visit on the holidays, but mostly to check on My Younger Sister, a sophomore in the town’s only high school. At the end of every visit, I grab my purse and my keys and turn toward the door. My parents hug me, in turns, and say I love you. And I smile and say, I love you, too.
It never occurs to me to ask for anything more.
In the apartment I rent with My Older Sister, we stitch together a family and leave out all the arguing. After work we make dinner while roaches scurry across the countertops. After dinner we smoke cigarettes on the balcony and watch mall traffic collect and disperse at stoplights along the boulevard. Each week we change the message on our answering machine: lately we take turns singing Michael Jackson’s “Workin’ Day and Night” in squeaky falsetto voices. If I am not working at one crappy job or another, I am sitting in a large lecture class at the university, or having sex with boys I barely know: the short one who lives in our building—in his car in the parking lot, on the couch in his living room, and in his roommate’s water bed; the customer service manager at the big box store where I work as a lab tech in the Vision Center fucks me in the HR office, the men’s bathroom, on the table in the contact lens room. One night I bring home a biker I’ve met at the bar, who returns the next night and the next, and then he has moved in. On my day off I see an ad for Persian kittens in the classifieds and My Biker Boyfriend drives me to a dark house where I select a black one with long hair from the stacks and stacks of cages. My Older Sister gets a puppy and we all move from the apartment to a duplex with a yard and a garage.
At the Vision Center I wear protective goggles and feed plastic lenses into the machine, programming precise sizes and shapes on the knobs and dials while music blares from a speaker I’ve set up in the tiny office at one end of the lab. From the window over the machines, I watch customers checking out at the rows and rows of registers in the main store. The checkers smiling, mouthing the words, Did you find everything you needed today?
I bevel the edges of the lenses and dip them into tint or UV coating before screwing them into frames, checking each pair to make sure the axes of the lenses match the prescription, that the distance between the center of each lens corresponds to the distance between the patient’s pupils. One of the technicians pokes her head into the lab to let me know a customer needs a contact lens tutorial. I wash my hands and step into the small room, the tiny table spread with lens solution and clean towels, a mirror and tiny cardboard boxes, tiny mouths gaping open: Oh.
In the break room at the back of the big box store, I try to call My Biker Boyfriend at his bar downtown. He doesn’t answer. I smoke a cigarette and buy a soda out of the machine. The technicians in the Vision Center page me over the intercom to come back to the lab. There’s a line out the door. One of the techs is a no-show for her shift. After I check out each customer, I adjust their new glasses to fit. The oil from their skin collects on my fingers and palms. I smile and say Have a nice day and return to the register to help the next customer. I look up and see My Spanish Teacher checking out at one of the registers in the main store. He pays and walks to the door. I’m busy, but he waits, watching me. All through the evening rush I feel his eyes on me. I want to see you again, he whispers in my ear as I’m counting down the register before close, his hand on my shoulder, my arm, the tips of my fingers.
After locking up, I call the bar again. I am eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in the tiny office at one end of the lab, the phone in my hand. Finally My Biker Boyfriend picks up. He was out last night doing coke with his friend, he says. I say, We need to talk when you get home. He asks, half joking, if we are breaking up. I haven’t decided until just now, until exactly this moment. I clear my throat: Yes.
My Older Sister doesn’t understand why I am moving out. My Biker Boyfriend should be the one to go. She and I should stay together. We’re a family. I need some space, I say. I need to be alone. I find a classified ad for a studio in a student slum between downtown and campus, where the rent is $250 a month. I have the security deposit because I have just gotten paid. My Older Sister borrows a friend’s pickup truck to help me move my things: a bed, a couch that seats two people, a skillet, a coffee pot, the black Persian kitten and its litter box. I have a few books and CDs and magazines tossed into a laundry basket. She’s pissed but hugs me anyway before she climbs into the truck and pulls away.
I spend the whole afternoon putting things in their places. After I drag the bed up the tiny flight of stairs into the raised loft, I use a broom I find in the closet to sweep dead spiders to the center of the brown-carpeted floor while the kitten bats at their carcasses. After I put my skillet into the cupboard and discover an inheritance of plastic cups, I arrange the plastic bottles of shampoo and conditioner in the shower. The kitten drinks water from the toilet. After I make the bed and hang my clothes in the closet, I shower and place a bowl each of cat food and water on the floor. I smoke and pace and look out the windows. I dress again and walk out the door.
My Spanish Teacher leans against the door frame as I pull into the parking lot, as I climb the concrete stairs to his apartment—his tall, wide frame lit by the glow of the lamp inside. He takes a long swig from a bottleneck beer. I walk past him, through the living room, past the chair and the fax machine, down the hallway, turning lights out as I go. He follows behind me, his hand in my hand. In the bedroom, I take off my coat, unbutton my shirt, my limbs shaking, every hair standing on end. He leans into me. This is what he wants, I tell myself, leaning back into him. This is why I have come. Because I believe a grown man’s rough hands can give, and take from me, what I’ve lost in coming here. Now my jeans pool around my ankles. Lie down with me, I say. Before my teeth shake loose. Before weeds grow from my bones. The unwashed sheets. The open window. His body on top of me: heavy as a pile of stones.
It’s strange, I think now, how even what the mind forgets, the body remembers. How the body remembers apart from the mind: the way of standing-beside or lying-under or sitting-above or rising-from. The body remembers the prepositions: its position in relation to other bodies. The raised shoulders, the lowered voice. How every muscle, even the tongue, can go stiff. Or shudder. How after the other is gone, the body continues on: beside, under, above, from. The shadow, the ghost, the trace. Habitus: second nature, a memory so deep the body will always remember.
We drive sixty miles from his apartment on campus, where I sleep every night, to my parents’ home in the town with a one-block business district. They’re standing on the front porch when we arrive. They shake hands with him, invite us into the living room, say to us, Have a seat. I sit with Mom on the floral-print couch by the front window. My dad sits in a brown recliner by the door. The Man I Live With sits on the edge of the other floral-print couch, in a corner, by the bookshelves, where Mom displays her collection of porcelain dolls. Behind him, pastel pink and blue flowers weave up and down the wallpaper. Mom hung all of it herself before we moved in. I felt ashamed of it then. I feel ashamed of it now as we’re making small talk: Oh, yes, the weather is very unusual this year.
Maybe it’s Mom who comes right out and says she is frankly shocked at how old he is: thirty-eight, exactly twice my age. Or maybe she first asks if he colors his hair. Then Dad wants to know if he has accepted Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior. I cover my face a little and sink deeper into the couch. The Man I Live With answers honestly; he’s told me in the car he will not placate these people. He delivers a moving lecture on world religions, including an in-depth deconstruction of the savior myth. Or it is not a lecture. Maybe he just waves his hands while telling my father his beliefs are the beliefs of a small-minded man.
During the argument that follows, Mom occasionally chimes in for some jab about this man’s morals, his appearance, his age. He jabs back, more forcefully and with a sharper blade. Within the span of an hour, my dad’s face has turned three shades of red and he has left the room, close to purple, fully saturated with the conversation. Mom cries, sitting next to me on the floral couch. I pick at a thread on the pillow. I do not say a word.
The Man I Live With puts our two plates on a little table by the window in the living room of his apartment: tonight it’s pescado a la Veracruzana. He plugs a CD into the player and we sit down to eat; the kitten jumps onto the table, attracted by the smell of the fish. He is asking about my day, about what I have been reading in my literature class, about what goes through my head while I’m cutting lenses at the Vision Center. I start to answer but then he is telling me about the flaws of capitalism, about how I will quit my job, how I will let him cover our expenses, about seeing Bob Marley in concert in Denmark, one of the last he ever performed. He tells me about the Danish political system and the anarchist camp in the center of Copenhagen. I’ll take you there, he says. A song comes on, one of his favorites. He puts down his fork, stands up, takes my hand, pulls me up and out of my seat. He holds my hand in his against his chest, his jaw against my forehead, the words in his throat sung so softly. We shuffle in circles from one side of the room to the other, back and forth, over and over, the kitten scarfing down the fish getting cold on our plates. His hand on my back so softly.
He asks if I will love him forever.
We leave for Mexico during the first week of summer vacation, stopping first in the southern part of the state to visit one of his half brothers, a former air force officer who works now for the Department of Justice. I sit mostly quietly on a lawn chair near the picnic table in the backyard, sipping an iced tea under the shade of a swaying oak tree, while The Man I Live With stands near the grill, his legs spread wide apart. He tells stories to entertain his nephews. He gestures wildly. His voice, his performance, fills the neighborhood.
The next day we drive and drive, stopping only at the Continental Divide. In the photo, I’m squinting into the sun, one hand shading my eyes, the other hanging limply at my side. We descend from the mountains, through the pine trees and spruce trees and juniper trees, into a desert spotted with sagebrush and manzanita, past signs warning drivers not to enter dense smoke, straight to his mother’s apartment, where we stop to pick her up and take her out to dinner. A Spanish place, he tells me in advance. Order the fish, he says, as we scootch into a booth. They speak in Spanish to one another the whole time. I don’t need to understand every word to know she doesn’t approve. She asks about his children, his ex-wife. Her eyes plead with him from behind her glasses. We stay only one night at her apartment, where we sleep and fuck on her living room floor. She’ll hear us, I protest. I need you, he insists. Or maybe we stay two nights. Or four. Long enough for her to wash our laundry and tell me in her thick accent that my clothes look like tiny children’s clothes.
Maybe at that time, when she is holding my shorts an arm’s length from her body, The Man I Live With has already told me that his mother was unmarried when she got pregnant with him. A young girl away at school in Caracas, knocked up by a Finnish oilman. She came to the United States to give birth, making her son an American citizen. She gave him the last name of his father and took him back to Venezuela to be raised by his grandmother and aunts. Or maybe I don’t know this yet. Maybe The Man I Live With tells me this story as we cross the border into Mexico, or while traveling south along the coast. I’m certain he’s already told me when we attend a bullfight in the resort town, and when he parades me through the town mercado like a prize, because all the next day while we drive down the coastal highway, he keeps bragging about what a good lover he is. It’s in my blood. A birthright, he says. He says he’s seduced women on almost every continent: women in tents and upper bunk beds in hostels. This is how he left Venezuela, he tells me as we approach the resort town, by hitchhiking in a woman’s sleeping bag. He hitchhiked across Europe this way, across Asia, and back to the States. We check in at the hotel, drop off our luggage, fuck in the shower, and dress for dinner. Before I order he starts telling me how another woman should come live with us. Would we share her? I ask, feeling vaguely curious. He explains that she would not be our girlfriend, only his. You are just not enough. We’d all be friends eventually, of course. That’s the only way it would work. By the time he’s turning the key to our hotel room, I’m fuming. This isn’t part of our deal. Actually, you’re not that great in bed, I say, emboldened by all the margaritas. Actually, maybe you should work a bit harder at satisfying me. I’ve been faking it for months.
The Man I Live With yells and slams lamps and luggage and furniture around the room. He opens the door and throws my suitcase into the sand. He rips my clothes off and throws them into the hallway. He grabs a fistful of my hair and slams my skull against the bed, holding me there while he spits in my face. He calls me Puta! Chingada! He shakes and shakes and shakes me until I am limp and then he storms out the door.
The next morning, he’s calmer. He says he’ll put me on a plane and send me back home, where I can go on being a stupid fucking hillbilly.
But I have no life back home to return to. I’ve quit my job at the Vision Center, like he asked. Focus on your studies, he said. I’ll cover the expenses. I can’t ask my parents for help. They’ve said I’m on my own. My Older Sister stopped taking my calls when she learned I never slept a single night in that cheap studio apartment in the student slum between campus and downtown. You lied to me, she said before she slammed down the phone. I don’t talk to the other students in my classes. I have no money, no belongings, no place to live.
I say I’ll do anything to stay with him.
The Man I Live With tells a good story. In the evenings, after we return from Mexico, he plays bridge and backgammon on his computer and wins nearly every time. Or he plays tennis on the courts at the recreation center and beats men half his age. I love to watch him play: his arms crossing back and forth across his body, his body crossing back and forth across the court, sweat running down his face and chest and back. On the weekends he watches Argentinian films and when I ask who Perón is he explains to me about the Dirty War. He makes beautiful dinners with names I can’t pronounce while my cat curls on my lap. We have discovered, after leaving the cat at the university animal hospital all summer during our trip to Mexico, that it has feline leukemia. I consider returning to my job at the Vision Center to pay for a blood transfusion, but The Man I Live With wants me to concentrate on getting good grades in school. He’s still sulking about what I said in Mexico, and I believe that if I do what he wants he will forgive me, and then things will go back to the way they were before, when I first moved in, when we would dance around the living room. Instead of skipping class, or showing up late, or a little drunk or a little high or low on drugs, I am the first to arrive in class, coffee in hand, and always have my best work done.
On the weekends, we drive downtown, where the bartender at our favorite dive talks to us from behind the bar and mixes us drinks. Sometimes the bartender’s girlfriend is there, too, a veterinarian at the university animal hospital, and she explains to us that, even with the blood transfusions, my cat cannot possibly live much longer with feline leukemia. The band starts playing and we stumble out to the dance floor, standing close together, my head on his shoulder, his chin on my forehead, swaying back and forth very slowly in no relation to the music. He calls me skat, a Danish word meaning pet, darling, treasure. He asks if I will love him forever.
One night, while we’re watching television at home, a Hair Club for Men commercial comes on, and the announcer asks: Do you have a problem with thinning hair? And The Man I Live With says No, as if he and the announcer are having a conversation, and we both laugh very hard for a long time, because his hair is absurdly thick and long and curly and not remotely thinning, and his laughter perpetuates my laughter, and my laughter perpetuates his laughter, and when we finally stop laughing, I snuggle into the space between his arm and his chest and we continue watching television.
When the cat finally gets very very sick, we take it to the hospital and it is put to sleep. We wrap its body in a tiny blanket I have knit from fluffy blue yarn and bury it in the yard behind our apartment. The Man I Live With makes a beautiful dinner while I am crying in the bed and when I come out of the room and sit down at the little table by the window in the living room we plan the trip we will take next summer to Europe.
Even what the mind forgets, the body remembers. I remember the dead cat. The knitted blue blanket. The yard behind our apartment. I remember the sun on my shoulders, the warm black dirt in my hands. I remember crying in the bed. I remember coming out of the room and sitting at the little table by the window in the living room.
I remember sitting, years later, with My Good Friend in her living room, drinking a glass of wine, when her cat draws the warm length of its body under my hand.
I lie in the dark bedroom crying about the cat that has become very ill, about the trip to Europe we will have to cancel because of the cat’s terrible illness, about the blood that I have found seeping out of its nose and ears and anus, when I hear from the kitchen a terrible thud, and then another, and another. The thud becomes a crack, a breaking of something that is not fragile. I stop crying and instead listen to the silence that follows, trying to understand what I have heard.
The front door opens and closes.
From the window in the living room I see The Man I Live With walking to the dumpster, carrying something dark and limp in a blue plastic shopping bag. He comes back inside and I ask what he has done. He walks into the kitchen in silence and leaves the apartment with a knife. Still breathing, he says, and walks out the door.
I tell people we have put the cat to sleep. I leave a short message on My Older Sister’s machine. I call my parents and they say it is for the best. For years I also say this. But, sitting with My Good Friend in her living room, I can’t remember how and when I came to believe that lie. I can go back to that dark bedroom. I can close the door and turn out the lights. I can swaddle myself in layers and layers of wrinkled sheets.
My love for the man requires the cat to be living. My fear of him requires the cat to be dead. Each needs and negates the other: the dark bedroom, the warm black dirt in my hands.