it was the dress that did it.
not the woman in his bed, for there had been many others after, to disappear in the morning with that first vodka splash. women who left no tracks, no visible proof they had ever been there. he could have dreamed them, but he didn’t dream belinda. and he didn’t dream that dress.
hanging from shower curtain rod. eye level as he pissed and flushed. there hadn’t been a dress hanging in his bathroom since belinda. was her habit, her mark of permanence.
(there was also: bra and panties. actually, a black g-string so flimsy that just staring at it made it slip off the curtain rod.)
“changó, changó.”
the cleansing tobacco rolling slow into the air, he especially puffing the dress. (how it shuddered from his smoke breath.) maybe he should have been praying something, but he only muttered changó, changó like in that song by celia cruz
fought off the first wave of disconnected images with vodka and ice. cleansed that sense of DOOM with that first bright hit. that tumultuous puerto rican aguacero splashing the windows clean.
the second ice-clinking swallow stopped the pictures. he busied his hands making another vodka ice, then rolling a cigarette slow calm. the cigar had gone out. maybe it meant something spiritually. he parked it on the ashtray for another cleanse later. but now sat in the small kitchen, in the narrow confined space with nothing but the ticking cateyes on the wall as his nerves settled, free of turbulence.
equilibrium.
that was the thing people left out when they started the rap on the evils of drinking. the equilibrium, the sense of things falling into place. someone should tell benny about the peace-and-tranquility part. liquor gave him that feeling of invulnerability. popeye’s can of spinach. he could slow the pictures down, pick and choose, no rush. benny should learn that shit before he preaches about the evils, but then benny should know better. he was once a drinker too, even owned a bar. used to toss them back like a pro, but he mistook liquor for a new belief system, depended on it to make him into someone else. benny was always looking to change himself. he convinced himself that liquor changed him for the worse. alex was not so convinced. drinking made him normal. his blood, his nervous system demanded it. “you can’t talk a drunk off a ledge with promises of bible,” he said to benny, he said to belinda.
—that did it, she said. you choose: the bottle, or me.
was it such a problem, his drinking? did it have to come up every time something went wrong? he tried it her way, pouring another bottle down the drain. proof he was a new man: but poses become roses, whither and die, crunchy and dry. did he really choose the bottle? was it really a question of choice? she had talked to him, endlessly, about how she had been in relationships before and how this was her last time, do or die. she would force it to work, with her own hands force it with sheer will. she had talked to him. she had always talked to him. she knew he was sick of running around waking with strangers, but she felt the liquor was what caused infidelity. it was like that with her father, she said, it would be like that with him. alex tried to tell her there was no connection, women came through his open doors until he closed them, he swore he was closing them for good. but the fighting about drinking caused more drinking, so alex one night opened his doors. sometimes it’s the only way out.
you’ll never have a woman again. you’re never going to find love like you had it, like I gave it to you, like you spent it.
it was a good speech, he wrote it on the bedroom wall. big letters in drippy black paint, just to prove he would never forget them, drunk or not drunk. alex had a hard time remembering how the rooms were then. it was far from him, almost another life. some people have to fill a room with clutter to remind themselves they’re alive. the curtains were all hers, the bureau. the big mirror where she used to stand in her panty hose, adjusting those bra straps. boxes of cosmetics, kitchen utensils, fashion magazines. bulby ceramic lamps. flowered tapetes.
the last time he saw her alive she was throwing the vase of yellow peonies at him. hit the wall with the impact of an RPG, him flinching from shrapnel where he stood under those drippy black letters. her face usually so calm, now so furious broken, as she charged out the door, stooping only to pick up her shoulder bag. going going gone. she never called about her clothes, her furniture, her things. “our things,” she would have said, insisted. she never called.
he tried her a few times at work, the investment firm of debussy and stark, but she wasn’t getting back. it was what he told the police barely a month after she left, when they came by to visit. it wasn’t that he was a suspect, they said, but whenever a daughter kills herself, the family always blames the boyfriend. the cops found it strange that he never met the family, which had nothing but derogatory things to say with what little they knew about him. belinda never spoke well of her parents. she always said they were too rich and too narrow-minded and that was why she was more than happy to move here and write them and say “I’m living with a man in the south bronx.” alex was the part of her rebellion that failed. a half-mad half-dominican blonde with castellano to her english, she had stopped taking her medication when she came to live with him. the details were sketchy now, intentionally so.
there was no memory of a funeral, of a gray day and umbrellas poking up amidst tombstones like black mushrooms. he didn’t really remember the cops, just monk on a rainy day asking him about it.
—cops looking for you, bro?
—belinda, he said. they’re looking for belinda.
—you mean she’s missing?
—I mean she left.
it started with the curtains, and after that everything came down. blank walls, her pictures taken down. pulled out, torn down, bundled. paid this one-eyed neighbor from downstairs fifty bucks and all the vodka hits he could take to get the sofa-bureau-love-seat and bed down the stairs. he pulled up the linoleum, scraped at the dirty old floor until it was fresh beautiful wood, varnished fresh slick. the black drippy words in the bedroom gradually disappeared with each different color he applied. by the time he settled on blue there was only
YOU SPENT IT
before that one night, finally painted over, the whole house blue—detoxed de-spirited de-boned. a slate wiped clean. it wasn’t that he forgot she was dead, but he forgot he was blaming himself for it. he forgot it was his fault. he forgot that as much as possible. only some things, some times brought it back.
he found her sitting up in bed, half-covered by blanket. she was facing the open windows, tucked into herself like a snail.
he came closer. her eyes were closed.
“Hey,” he said.
Her eyes opened. Green still, but maybe brown-flecked in sunlight. To wetly wetly blink.
“Ten,” she said.