(Walk with me)
I looked for Alberto everywhere on that first trip back to New York after more than twenty years. I looked everywhere and nowhere, even if I never really wanted to find him. But he was there in the sweep of Central Park. He was there in the curved steel of the Brooklyn Bridge. He was there in the hush of the MoMA, contemplating the searing blue and buoyant flesh of Matisse’s dancers. He was there in the weeping of the rain and at the shrinking of the tide, in eerie echoes of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s anguished sonnet.
He was there even if I didn’t want to find him. And he was there even if he didn’t want to be found.
Rewind to August 1988. It had taken us two hours to find this little hole-in-the-wall noodle shop in Chinatown, a nondescript restaurant Alberto used to frequent when he was a student at NYU. A restaurant, he said, whose walls were stamped with Chinese characters he couldn’t read, and whose interiors smelled of broth and sewage. But the food, he remembered, was excellent, nourishing, and cheap.
We’d taken our time, starting off at midtown, and making our way down Park Avenue, passing the city’s pretty little parks and squares, first Madison Square Park, then Union Square, then Cooper Square, into the bustle of the Bowery, until we reached Elizabeth Street. We walked silently, but in complicity, our bodies always touching, either his hand around my waist, then over my shoulder, mine on his hip, my fingers sometimes looping around the waistband of his jeans, or our hands clasped together, palms pressing against each other with a kind of rueful urgency. Occasionally, we’d stop to kiss, slow, sad, searching kisses that made me want to bite my lips afterwards so I wouldn’t cry.
For a week now, we’d awakened each morning lazily thinking we had all the time in the world to be together. Today was the end of the idyll. Alberto was flying back to San Francisco tonight while I was headed for Paris the next day, and then on to Spain to meet up with my parents before eventually moving back home.
We never found the restaurant. Alberto couldn’t even remember the name. Was it Happy Valley or Happy Dragon? He wasn’t sure, and the hawkers blocking the identical glass fronts of the restaurants along Canal, Mott, and Elizabeth festooned with the hanging lacquered carcasses of duck and geese, made it difficult to tell. In the end, we walked into a hole-in-the-wall noodle bar whose walls were stamped with Chinese characters we couldn’t understand, and whose interiors smelled of broth and sewage, and hoped for the best.
We slurped our noodles with mournful ceremony, bravely managing to smile between sips and laugh self-consciously at the half-hearted jokes we told each other in order to forget for an hour, at least, that farewells were imminent. We even attempted a serious discussion: Picasso or Matisse.
“I get Picasso’s genius,” I said, “I really do. Cubism was the original deconstructionism in a sense.”
“He was endlessly inventive. And cerebral. He’s a much greater artist than Matisse.”
“I don’t know. I’ve always been partial to Matisse. His colors. The depth of detail. He had so much more heart, I think.”
Alberto reached across the table and laid his hand on mine. “But Picasso’s art was so much more layered and complex. I admire Picasso for his intellectualism.”
“Era un hijo de puta tambien,” I muttered. “He wasn’t always so nice to his women. Clearly he prized intellect over emotion. Like you.”
“Hey,” Alberto said finally, stroking my cheek, “no seas tan triste, mi amor. It’s not the end.”
But we both knew it was. I was moving back home after Spain, and he wasn’t planning to leave San Francisco any time soon. He wasn’t planning to leave his girlfriend, either.
Yes, Alberto had a girlfriend waiting for him like a meek little Hausfrau back in San Francisco. He’d said they’d been together for so long that they were more friends than lovers. He’d said they’d been together for so long that her very predictability made her appealing, at least to him; she was like a cushion that yielded without resistance to the heft of his creative impulses. He said they’d been together for so long that he valued her loyalty and affection; she was staunch where he was stifled, and most forgiving when he was at his most flippant.
I said they’d been together for so long that he made her sound like a dog.
How much is that doggie in the window? Aw aw!
He may have been lying, or he may have been sincere, but after he left New York, I knew he’d end up marrying her and I’d never see him again. Perhaps despite his bohemian nature, he craved stability more than anything else. Perhaps he’d wanted one last summer when the grass did seem greener, the song of the birds sweeter, and the sky a truer blue than he’d ever seen. Perhaps he was content to sleep beside her at night but let me haunt his dreams when he was awake.
“When I close my eyes I see your face,” he’d said to me before he left.
“Make sure you don’t say my name,” I’d replied.
Perhaps it was none of the above. But it didn’t matter. I was in love. I was exuberant. I was miserable. And I never saw him again.
Soon after we parted, he married the sure thing, and she turned out to be a lapdog. Soon after we parted, I married the sure thing, and he turned out to be psycho.
Maybe that was my karma. But what was his? Unfulfillment?
Time does not bring relief; you all have lied
Who told me time would ease me of my pain
In time, however, my nostalgia for Alberto ceased being a sharp stab at my throat and morphed into a soft, cozy shawl wrapped around my shoulders.
Fast forward to 2012. I float instead in the recollection of how, cherished and adored by one man one summer, I fell in love with him and with New York. I returned to the city two decades later, on my own but still enamored. Like Woody Allen in Manhattan, I adore New York City and idolize it out of proportion, perhaps because the city has never disappointed me. New York stays the same, enough to make me feel I know its every street and every neighborhood, yet it changes each and every time, enough to make me feel there was still so much to explore. New York makes me want to walk everywhere, sometimes briskly, in trainers, sprinting across the park, sometimes comfortably, in flats, strolling in and out of galleries and museums, sometimes flirtatiously, in heels, swanning along Madison Avenue, stopping by Sant Ambroeus or Serafina for a skinny cappuccino.
I want you to walk this way …
There must have been a spring to my step because—
“Es que I don’t get it. I just don’t get it,” my mother exclaims one morning as we saunter out of the apartment to have lunch around the corner, at Swifty’s.
“What?”
“These men. Why are they all stopping you in the street to give you piropos? In Spanish and in English and I even heard that one man speaking to you in French! At your age? Even last year, when we were here in the spring, it was the same thing.”
It would be disingenuous of me to pretend I haven’t noticed. I’ve seen how some men look at me as I walk past. Some whistle, others nod their heads and whisper, “hello beautiful,” and a few bow gallantly and say, “que bonita.” And yes, I once heard “Qu'est-ce que vous êtes ravissante” once. But it’s not as if I go out walking or dressing a certain way to catch their eye; I am rather flummoxed by all the attention. Obviously I’m giving off some kind of energy; what exactly, I’m not sure, but I seem to exude something, and the universe is responding.
“Well it’s flattering,” I say, amused and rather thrilled. “My age is irrelevant. They don’t need to know how old I am or how many kids I have. Even Gia said the other day, ‘OMG Mom, at your age you’ve still got game!’”
“What the hell does she mean by that? You don’t play any sport!”
“It’s like saying I’m pretty fly for an old bag,” I tease, knowing it will irk her.
“Ay, por favor, speak plain English or plain Spanish and not gangster! Anyway, it’s just wrong,” she insists, puffing on her cigarette in irritation. “All these men!”
“So what? They’re just being appreciative, no? And they're never rude or coarse. I’m appreciative that they’re appreciative. I always say ‘thank you,’ you know. And that comes from you. You said it was important to receive compliments with grace.”
“But you’re almost fifty!”
“I can still say ‘thank you,’ can’t I?”
“The piropos stopped for me when I was thirty.”
Lady, you’ve got issues.
It surprises me that she is so scandalized by the piropos being strewn my way. But I understand her reaction to be more a reflection of her own fragility, her way of questioning her own attractiveness. When she was my age, she had already transitioned into the role of matron because that was what happened to women of her generation after they had children. Having traded passion for parenthood, her desirability as a woman in the eyes of men had ceased to be open to discussion. It was as if she had cloaked herself all these decades in a hijab fashioned out of society’s dictates that she might as well have been invisible. Simply because those were the rules of her time and her class. And now, in New York, she sees that her own middle-aged but far from matronly daughter is not invisible at all. If these men could see me and deem me desirable as measured by the compliments they paid me, couldn’t they see her as well?
In the afternoon, we walk around SoHo and wander into the Michael Kors boutique. A sales assistant, a beautifully soigné black man with smooth café latte skin and perfect eyebrows, comes up to me.
“Girl, you are so rocking that black and tan vibe,” he says, pointing with exaggerated grace at the black skinny pants and jacket I am wearing along with stiletto-heeled tan booties.
“Thank you!” I smile. “Not Michael Kors, though.”
“It don’t matter ‘cause girlfriend, you rockin’ it! You werq those tan booties, sister!”
“Even the gays,” my mom observes with resigned annoyance.
Yes, apparently even the gays. Javier pointed it out earlier this year when we met in Paris. I’d flown in for a brief trip to finalize Ariane’s living arrangements for the summer. It would be her first time being on her own, away from home. She’d be studying French in the mornings, and interning in the afternoons at an advertising firm. This summer Paris, next fall, college. Her flight from home was expected and inevitable, yet the thought of my first born leaving paralyzed me. And Dex, Dex would surely put up a fight. But let’s not go there.
Deep down I knew my daughter would be just fine on her own. Paris, watch out. Just to be on the safe side, however, Javier would be her fairy godmother, checking in on her from time to time.
Already she was taller and skinnier than me, and a lot more focused and mature than I ever was at her age. She was also a stunner, though she believed that her Eurasian looks were plain and unremarkable next to a gaggle of blonde and blue-eyed girls. But there were moments when she began to sense the power of her own youth and beauty. Like when a car packed with unbridled testosterone sidled up next to us one day at the traffic lights.
“They’re checking me out, Mom,” she’d said, the bold look she gave the teenage boys echoing the confidence in her voice. “Not you.”
“As they should, sweetheart,” I’d countered.
Satisfied, she leaned back in her seat and smiled.
“Yeah, Mom,” Gia, sitting at the back, had chimed in. “They’re way too young for you, anyway. You’d be like a cougar if you let them hit on you. No offense.”
Marnie, ever the quiet observer, followed the conversation thoughtfully, turning her head in the direction of whoever was speaking.
“Of course they’re too young, Gia! Ewww. They’re little twerps to me. Let’s let your older sister have the joy of crushing on them.”
“One of them was really hot,” said Ariane, “the one in the blue shirt. He smiled at me.” The lights turned green and the car sped away.
“Showoffs.” Marnie said. “Do they even know how much gas they’re wasting?”
“They were showing off for Ariane,” I said, coaxing the car onto the N1 toward Pretoria. “Ay, Marnie, my eco-warrior.”
We were on our way to spend the long weekend with Corinna and her family at their game farm in the Waterberg, the only people probably in the whole of South Africa who go to the bush and relish the simple joys of having Filipino food all weekend long, from chicken adobo and sinigang to garlic fried rice and bistek Tagalog, plus leche flan for dessert. It would be relaxing once we arrived, and there was all that food to look forward to, I was sure, but for now I could sense the anxiety and the fear, the throat-constricting fear, engulf me as I gripped the wheel so tightly my fingers would cramp if I didn’t loosen up.
“Anyway, Mom,” began Gia in her precocious know-it-all voice, “I know you don’t look your age and all that, I mean, compared to the other moms at school, but a guy might hit on you, but then he finds out you have children and it’s hasta la vista, baby!”
“Then he wouldn’t be worth my time then, would he?”
“But you still got game. I mean, for a MOM. No offense.”
I tried to shake off this ridiculous phobia, this debilitating dread I had of driving on the freeway. In the city I whizzed about with the daring of a Formula One driver. But on the freeway, on vast swathes of road, I froze. It was all Felipe's doing, the pendejo. Because driving never used to faze me. And I was—I used to be—an excellent driver, approaching highways, hills and dips everywhere in the world with utmost confidence.
“But shouldn’t you, like, be having fun?” Gia went on.
“Me? Don’t worry about me, sweetie.” Believe me, I am having fun, I wanted to say. If my children only knew …
“But what if we’re holding you back?”
“Of course you’re not holding me back. But thank you, darling, I’m fine on my own.”
What was holding me back was this ridiculous fear. For now I had to concentrate on the road, concentrate on getting us there. Alive.
“I don’t want you to be all alone when we’re grown up and married,” Gia insisted, her voice becoming shrill with pity. “But I wouldn’t mind if you married Javier or Orlando. Honestly.”
“Then I’d have a gay stepfather,” Marnie said flatly. But she soon brightened up. “Can it be Javier, Mommy, please? Then Gordo, his Boston terrier, will be ours, too!”
Damn you, Felipe, I thought. A few months before we broke up, we went on a seventeen-hour road trip along the Garden Route, taking turns driving from Johannesburg till we reached the Atlantic, and stopping overnight at a desolate town that looked like Redneckville. Every time I took the wheel, Felipe complained at how badly I drove on the highways, how I should step on the gas more, how timid I was about overtaking those massive container trucks. I told him to fuck off, of course, because I knew I was a good driver. Slowly, gradually, three years later however, the insidiousness of his words crept into my subconscious, to the point where I found myself today, terrified yet trying to stay calm for the sake of my children. Thankfully they were far too occupied discussing my marital prospects to notice my knuckles had turned an icy white.
“Huh, Mommy, can you?”
“Can I what, Marnie sweetie?”
“Marry Javier, I said.”
I hated how Felipe wormed his way into my thoughts whenever I found myself inching toward the highway. I had no desire to ever see Felipe again, much less sleep with him, even for old times' sake, but if I did, I would take his goddamn lingering still-in-denial late-life-crisis Porsche, slam it straight into the stone ramparts of the Quai du Mont-Blanc, and let it sink into the bottom of Lake Geneva for what he did to me. Yes, thanks for my boobs, but I paid in kind, so really, cuentas claras between you and me. Account settled. Thanks, too, for the hooker wardrobe, it will come in handy at some pimps and prostitutes costume party in the future, especially that Moulin Rouge–inspired tarty red satin lingerie you loved so much. But fuck you very much for making me lose my nerve, for this fear I certainly did not need in my life, this dread that intensified when my children were in the car and made me want to weep when I thought of how much of their lives was literally in my hands …
On a Freudian level, I wondered whether that was why I'd embarked on a this-isn't-going-anywhere affair with a driver. That's what Javier would say, if he were aware of my phobia. No one knew. Not even Corinna. They would be aghast at how I'd allowed Felipe to have this ridiculous power over me. I'd understand. I was aghast, too. And furious.
Breathe, Maxine, breathe, my dad had told me when I drove him to church the last time I was home. Stop gripping the wheel so tight, he'd said, in a voice that was light and jokey, you're not in South Africa anymore, don't worry about getting hijacked!
I breathed in deeply and exhaled. There were not too many cars on the road, thank God, no menacing trucks, no pompous politicians zipping about in black BMWs with accompanying sirens that blared, "Get out of the way, I'm a big shot." There was no one else but us, and miles and miles of Africa.
“Well, you know,” I said, “Javier may want to marry his longtime boyfriend, Omar, as soon as it becomes legal in France.”
“We’d have nicer clothes with Orlando, though,” said Ariane. “He’s the stylist to the stars. He’s got my vote. But I can tell you now, I’m never getting married.”
“Never say never, Ariane,” Gia said in a stern voice.
“I don’t need a man to make me feel complete.”
“Woo-hoo!” Gia cheered. “Girl power!”
“Don’t ever let a man make you feel incomplete, either,“ I said.
And don’t ever make him let you feel like you’re an incompetent driver, I wanted to add.
I blinked the tears away and tried to smile, even if I was biting my lip. We made it through the highway. My grip relaxed; the blood flowed back into my fingers. I had never been so happy to see stoplights at every bloody intersection.
“Earth to Maxine. Come back to Paris … ”
“Huh?”
Javier snapped his gloved fingers in my face. “Far away look, not listening to me. Must be thinking of your kids again. Don’t worry about Ariane, I’ll look after her.”
I clasped his hand. “I know you will. So, where to now?”
“There’s something about Mary,” Javier suddenly blurted out in a singsong voice that lingered on the long “a” sound of Mary.
“Whatcha talkin’ about, Willis?”
Javier had this tendency to go suddenly off tangent in the middle of a conversation. Here we were, shivering along the snow-strewn gardens of Palais-Royal in the late winter, underneath neatly lined trees crouched like scarecrows, debating at first whether Ariane should stay with a French family or live in student housing, which segued into whether we should cross the Seine to get to Pierre Hermé for macarrons, or to head for Ladurée. Real soul-searching stuff, I know, but we couldn’t decide what mood we were in, classic or experimental? And we’d just had lunch.
“Well, Mary Maxine Alexandra—”
“You know I hate being called that.”
“Mais pourquoi pas, chérie? It’s the name on your birth certificate.”
“Baptismal certificate,” I said grumpily, wishing I had worn a ski cap instead of a beret because my ears were frozen. “There is a difference, you know. My dad added Mary in when I was baptized because—”
“He wanted to honor the Virgin Mary, yes, yes I know, and your mother wanted something that sounded like you were royalty. I’ve heard the story a million times.” He drew an extended, exasperated breath.
“You were saying?”
“What I was saying, darling, before you had a hissy fit about your name, was, oh my Lord, but there goes another one!” He threw his gloved hands up in the air.
“Another what? Do take your ADHD medication, please, darling.”
“Have you not noticed how all these men keep checking you out?”
“Me? They just as well may be checking you out.”
It wasn’t improbable. Even in his fifties, Javier still had those brooding Latino movie star looks women and gay men drooled over: dark hair, now graying, green eyes, olive skin, and a lean physique. Plus he dressed like he’d just stepped out of a Ralph Lauren ad.
“Trust me, honey, it’s you they’re looking at.”
“Must be the over-the-knee boots and the leather coat. It’s just my winter uniform.”
“Stop with the false modesty, por favor. Sometimes it’s cute, but not today. You’ve got some major je ne sais quoi stuff going on in there, Maxine. Having witnessed the effect of your sex appeal up close on the waiter last night at the restaurant … he couldn’t take his eyes off you. Didn’t you notice how much bread he kept giving us?”
“All for naught. I don’t even eat bread!”
“You should have given him your number.” He paused to coat his lips with lip ice.
“Oh please, Javier.” It was a bit much. Didn’t all waiters in Paris try to flirt anyway? I shuddered, suddenly remembering how, when I was still a student in Paris, a sales attendant once sidled up to me in the fitting room of a boutique along the Champs-Elysées and started kissing my neck. Shocked and repulsed, I pushed him away and scampered out of the boutique and straight into the first church I could find, the one along Georges V.
Javier turned to face me, his cheeks as pink as mine in the wintry air. “Honestly, if I weren’t gay, I would so do you.”
“No offense, but eww.”
“Unfortunately, this—” he squiggled little circles in the air, referring to my breasts, “does nothing for me.”
“I’m guessing that’s a compliment. In a way.”
“No, really, you’ve got this energy, and I’m not bullshitting you. Apart from the fact that tu es belle—”
“Merci, mon cher, mais franchement, there will always be younger and prettier and taller and thinner girls … ”
“Will you stop interrupting? Yes, that’s true, but your energy is your energy, and it’s very attractive, it seems.”
“Okay. Explain.”
“To start with, you look young. No way anyone will believe you’re nearing fifty—”
“That’s probably an Asian thing.”
“—Or you’ve got a daughter who’s seventeen. Who’s gorgeous, by the way. Thank God it’s your genes your daughters have inherited and not—”
“You changed the channel again, Javier.”
“Oh, yes, back to you. Well, you look young and your energy is youthful but confident.”
“Hmmm. You think?”
“It’s like you’ve got this insatiable appetite for life.”
“As opposed to your insatiable appetite for dick?”
Now he became grumpy. “I wish. Omar and I had another one of our epic fights after we got back from dinner last night.”
“Those threesomes have to stop.”
“That last one wasn’t supposed to be a threesome, but I was careless, and I sort of got caught. But nothing happened.”
“Too much information, Javier.”
“Espera un minuto, you have to listen to this. This guy, right, he was older than me, very butch. Well, the minute he entered the apartment, he was all over me, pawing at me, and I screamed!”
“What were you screaming?” I clutched his elbow and steered him to the right, toward the Rue Saint-Honoré. There was a fromagerie tucked in a side street around here that I knew Javier loved.
“I was saying, ‘Mais attends, attends!’ I was so incensed at his roughness.”
“My God, that is so DSK!” I said, referring to Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former French IMF chief who was accused, and later cleared, of sexually assaulting an immigrant maid in his New York hotel suite the year before. My mother and I were in New York, in fact, when it happened.
“But he wouldn’t stop. ‘Doucement, s'il te plaît!’ I cried. I spend too much money on creams for here—” he pointed to his cheeks, “and here—” then to his neck, “and here—” and finally to the area around his chest. “‘I won’t tolerate brutes,’ I added.”
“Don’t tell me, that’s when Omar walked in. Ayayay.”
“Yes,” he replied gloomily. Then he perked up. “Hey, I have an idea. Let’s go back to that restaurant and flirt with the waiter!”
“Non, merci. I’m already sleeping with the driver, remember? The one in New York.”
“Driver, waiter, who cares? The more, the merrier!” And then, five seconds later, he howled, “No, no, no! C'est pas possible!” as he manically scrolled up and down his phone.
“What is it?”
“Whitney Houston. She’s dead.”
Oh, I wanna dance with somebody
I wanna feel the heat with somebody
“I want to dance with you,” the stranger says.
Though still perplexed by them, I graciously acknowledge the sprinkling of compliments and admiring glances I’ve been receiving, but the man standing by the bar at the Top of the Standard has not stopped staring at me since I walked in. And not just a casual stare, but an intense, brooding, eyes-only-for-you kind of stare. I can feel him staring at me while I dance with Orlando and the rest of my gay posse to Madonna, Kylie, Whitney, and J-Lo. I can feel him staring at me while I wait at the bar for the mojito I’d ordered. And I can feel him staring at me while I stand beside him, retrieving my bag from the floor to check if there are any messages from my kids, my mom, perhaps even Emilio, on my phone. He is staring at me so hard that I am beginning to think he is either a serious pervert or some mystic who sees dead people.
It’s Emilio’s night off, and I sort of hoped he’d come into the city to hang out with us, maybe go dancing. But he begged off, saying he had to work on a paper. I know the Meatpacking District isn’t his ’hood, and I don’t think his ideal Saturday night includes hanging out with a bunch of hedonistic queens, not to mention Francesca, a stunning transsexual with a reconstructed vagina in a va-va-voom body and the manners of a courtesan wrapped in a skin-tight Hervé Leger bandage dress.
Talk about the great class divide. It was silly of me to have invited Emilio to join us anyway. This is not his scene. Amid the air-kissers and peacocks, an alpha male king-of-the-hood like him would feel so out of his depth in the gilded paradise of decadence that is The Standard High Line.
The man at the bar continues staring.
I feel compelled to approach him. “Are you okay?”
He looks unperturbed. “I’m perfectly fine,” he says, his gaze still fixed on me, his voice barely audible above Jennifer Lopez’s bouncy, over-synthesized vocals.
I wanna dance, and love, and dance again
I decide to parry his stare with one of my own. But in looking at him, I am strangely reminded of Alberto. It’s his eyes. The same deep, dark eyes with the slightest of slants at the ends, the same intense gaze. His hair is dark, not thick and straight like Alberto’s, but short and wiry. He is also taller and broad-shouldered, with a muscular physique. Apart from the similar coloring, the resemblance is far-fetched; in fact, come to think of it, he looks vaguely Middle Eastern, but that there is something of Alberto that I can see in him, Alberto my lost love, the man who made New York so magical for me the first time around, makes me smile.
The stranger doesn’t drop his gaze. He doesn’t say a word, either. Then it occurs to me that maybe he’s gay, maybe he’s interested in Orlando or Jerome or Cameron, but is feeling shy. In my head I construct this elaborate and, upon reflection, ridiculously implausible plotline where he has just come out and doesn’t know how to approach other men, so he thinks, maybe go for the girl first to get to the gay best friend. Or maybe it’s Francesca he wants but finds her feral brand of sexuality intimidating. There are men with transsexual fetishes; this is New York, after all. At any rate, in my mixed-up universe this makes perfect sense.
“Do you want to dance or something?” I say, and gestures toward Orlando and company. “With one of those guys, maybe? I can introduce you to whoever.”
“I want to dance with you.”
“Me?” So he’s not gay. He must be drawn to my insatiable appetite for life, then. The field of irresistible energy radiating from me, as Javier recently and laconically suggested.
“Yes. I want to dance with you.”
“But I don’t even know your name.”
“It’s Carlos. My name’s Carlos.”
Carlos? You’ve got to be kidding me. Definitely Latino. Seriously, do I have a sign on my forehead? Because of the intensity of his gaze and the precision of his speech, I figure he has some Middle Eastern blood in him. Lebanese or Syrian, maybe, mixed with British, named Ahmed, as in “Silence, I kill you!” Ahmed. Instead I get another terrorist, Carlos the Jackal. Close enough. But what is going on with me? Both my gaydar and Hispanic detector are clearly off tonight. In a club full of every nationality under the sun representing every sexual orientation possible, I manage to attract the one straight Latino man.
Maybe it’s the presence of Francesca, that man/woman/vixen, that’s got my sensors out of whack. She is legally the only other woman in our group. I say legally, because she was a man by birth. Through the magic of hormones, a Brazilian plastic surgeon, and deed poll, she became a woman. She is so blatantly sexy—bountiful breasts and a perfectly shaped killer ass, plus she purrs when she speaks—yet there is an air of Oriental mystique about her, with her long, glossy curtain of hair, almond-shaped eyes, and porcelain skin. She is a modern-day geisha trapped in a porn star’s body. With the libido of a gay man. Which, in her opinion, is infinitely less tragic than being a Marilyn Monroe condemned to live in the body of, say, a Bill Gates. Without his money.
Francesca noticed Carlos staring at me earlier, right before I asked him if he was okay. “That man’s got leukemia,” she whispered to me at the bar as she ordered a martini.
“Leukemia? What do you mean? But how can you even tell he’s sick?”
“Leukemia,” she repeated. “The looky-at-you, looky-at-me disease. Go on, honey, talk to him. He’s hot, if you like them intense. And he’s wearing a Breguet watch. Approved.”
Francesca may be a snob, but she can be a good doctor when the occasion arises. For indeed, Carlos seems so afflicted. And he wants to dance.
So we dance.
And if he makes you feel like a million dollar bill …
Say oh oh oh, say oh oh oh!
Emboldened by the mojito, as well as Orlando, who is flipping his head from side to side, his eyes closed, and body swaying while he worships Whitney at the altar of disco, and Francesca, who thrusts her breasts forward and her bottom out as she slithers around an imaginary pole, I move against Carlos’ body a little too closely, a little too provocatively. I can sense the taut muscles through his blazer and underneath his shirt, and the tang of his aftershave.
He doesn’t seem to mind.
We make a feeble attempt at conversation amid music that thumps too loudly and booms too monotonously, then decide to go upstairs to the rooftop terrace. It is packed and noisy and redolent of cigarette smoke and weed, but the sharp spring air is bracing.
The rooftop at The Standard is a playground padded in AstroTurf and wrapped in house music. Deep into the night, it’s a nocturnal wonderland with the whole of New York beckoning beyond the Plexiglas fencing. It is the perfect setting for fleeting intimacy, urgent, reckless, and furtive, and alcohol provides the willing unguent.
We keep trying to talk, leaping onto the getting-to-know-you merry-go-round, pressed against a concrete wall that we think will shield us from the din, our bodies so close to each other, his lips touch my ears when he speaks, my lips touch his ears when I speak.
He reveals that he’s originally from somewhere in South America, but whether the Amazon runs through it remains to be determined, thanks to the awful acoustics. He’s on the cusp of forty, and he’s a venture capitalist. New York has been home since leaving college, around the time, I surmise, I was pregnant with my second child. He was supposed to meet up with friends that evening, but he arrived late, forgetting his phone in the process. There was no sign of his friends. And then he saw me.
At least that’s what I think he whispers into my ear. And then the merry-go-round stops, or maybe it doesn’t, or maybe we’ve leapt onto another ride, because everything is spinning around and flipping over, and Carlos is kissing me, and I am kissing him back.
And then he is grinding against me, the bulge in his pants rubbing into my pussy through the soft fabric of my dress. I should have slung a mini-shoulder bag across my body, I think, instead of a beaded minaudière. My own daughter, Ariane, had the good sense to barricade herself with such a bag the first time she went clubbing with her cousins in Barcelona last summer, creating an instant do-not-trespass frontier to deter horny young Spanish boys. I giggle suddenly at the memory of sheltered innocence rudely confronted by teenage lust.
“What’s funny?” Carlos asks.
“No, nothing, nothing,” I say, shaking my head. “This is crazy. I don’t know you, yet here we are. I don’t—I don’t do this sort of thing—”
How many women say the exact same thing without a word of it being true? It’s standard hook-up lingo, I imagine, but this—this hedonistic recklessness is, I swear, virgin territory to me. And yet it’s hardly anything out of the ordinary at The Standard.
And then he is kissing me again, and I lose myself in his kiss, lose myself in the sensation of his hand snaking up my dress, searching for my clit and stroking it, encouraged by the wetness in my pussy. I push his hand away, not because it doesn’t feel good, but because we are in a public space. Never mind that we’re in a dimly lit area, and the rest of the rooftop revelers are not in the least bit scandalized by this display of public carnality.
His hand moves upwards and claims my breast, massaging it insistently. I can feel his erection against my leg, and I desperately want to cup my hand over the bulge in his pants and caress his dick. But—
“I want to see what’s underneath the dress,” he murmurs, his lips on my neck.
“Los pezones del cielo,” I say boldly and breathlessly. Nipples to heaven.
He pulls back in surprise, then smiles. “You speak Spanish?”
“Si.”
“How fluent are you?”
“This fluent,” I say, tilting my face to kiss him. And then I break away and laugh, remembering my grandmother.
“What’s so funny now?” Carlos is smiling, but it’s a perplexed, please-let-me-in-on-the-joke kind of smile.
“No, nothing, really.”
“You’re giving me a complex here, laughing every time I try to kiss you.”
“I just remembered something my grandmother said—”
“I remind you of your grandmother? Muchas gracias!” He laughs, even if he is still confused.
It’s a step up from humorless terrorist, though. “Well, she’s Spanish, and last summer—”
“Aaaaah, ahora intiendo.” And then he kisses me, as if to silence me.
But he doesn’t understand, not really. We grew up speaking Spanish at home, naturally, because of my mother, but ours was a lilting, singsong kind of Spanish with a lazy drawl that was peculiar to our tropical islands, or at least to the pockets of the population that could still speak the language.
Over the years, my accent has become less country bumpkin and more city mouse, or so I like to think. My ninety-five-year-old grandmother, who moved to Barcelona, my late grandfather’s hometown, upon his retirement, was always the ultimate arbiter. Last summer, when I visited her with my children, she told me again about her youth in poverty-stricken Cantabria, and how all her brothers died one after another, and how her father decided to bundle his remaining children into a boat bound for the Philippines, and there they settled, and she eventually met my grandfather. It was the same story every time, but I never tired hearing of it, watching her pale, drawn face become animated, her green eyes glinting with fury at the memory of some injustice, or filling with tears at the memory of some sorrow. This time, in the middle of recounting the story, she suddenly asked me why my Spanish was so good.
“But hasn’t it always been good?”
“Sí, sí, sí,” she acknowledged, pursing her lips and nodding in agreement. She was still formidably sharp at her age. “But something’s different.”
“De verdad?”
“I have the impression,” she said slowly, “that you now think and even dream in Spanish.”
I was flattered. “You know, abuelita, I think you’re right. I do think and dream in Spanish now.”
“Pero por qué? Don’t they speak English there where you live? Or that ouga-douga Zulu language no sé que.”
“Pues,” I said, “haciendo el amor en español ayuda mucho.”
She looked at me, dumbstruck for a second, not quite knowing how to react, her skin blanching a shade even whiter than her hair, unable to believe I’d actually told her that not only do I think and dream in Spanish, I made love in that language as well. And it had certainly done wonders for my linguistic skills. Then she relaxed, slapped my thigh and howled with laughter. “You’re definitely my granddaughter.”
It could have been minutes, it could have been an hour, and Carlos and I haven’t let go of each other. I’m not thinking of my grandmother anymore, and he no longer wonders how fluent I am. My friends have lost me to the stranger. I lost my friends to the crowd, which hasn’t seemed to thin at all.
Letting go of me, Carlos finally says, “Do you want to go for a walk?” His voice is quiet and precise, but he seems to speak more with his eyes.
“A walk?”
“It’s a madhouse in here.”
We walk out into the night, walking along the Meatpacking District, making our way toward SoHo, the sidewalks swelling with throngs of people swaying with drink, shouting to each other, making merry, competing for cabs.
We walk, our gait sober and steady, until we reach a little dive of a bar in a street whose name I can’t remember. It smells of beer and nostalgia.
Carlos orders a beer, I have a glass of water, and we sit, perched on barstools, talking, getting back onto the merry-go-round, this time less giddily and more thoughtfully. And then we walk straight into the fleeting embrace of dawn, our arms wrapped around each other, in silence.