(Not) Home for
the Holidays
* * *
A week away from his tangible absence makes returning to New York a fresh hell.
Would living elsewhere ease the pain?
Hard to be content with any other American city after living in Manhattan—but maybe overseas?
Venice is on the To-Visit List. So is Portofino and Mykonos. And Saigon and Sydney. Maybe if I keep mapping and flying and shooting and crying, one day I’ll wake up without a stuffed monkey in my bed or the words goodmorningiloveyou in my head.
* * *
We’re on for Cuba, Hilda shouts through the phone.
As in, legally?
Thank Obama for that one, she says. As of this year, Cuban citizens can escort American relatives into the country on a tourist visa.
We can fly directly from Miami?
Yes, she says. And because we’re booking a hotel for at least five nights, the Cuban government doesn’t require you to get your visa through an embassy. We’ll pick it up through the travel agency when you come to Miami next week.
So we spend money on a hotel and Cuba throws in a free visa? For a communist country, that sounds a lot like capitalism.
Welcome to fucking Cuba, she laughs.
* * *
Are those real? my friend Erin asks, pointing to the vase of flowers atop the box of Alberto’s ashes.
They are, I say.
And you replace them every week?
Every few weeks—orchids die rather elegantly.
Why don’t you just get fake ones?
I don’t know, I say. Maybe because I’m not eighty with plastic covers on my sofa.
She laughs and asks if we should go to dinner or do the ashes first?
Erin has become my go-to girl when I transfer the ashes. She lost her sister a decade ago—she was babysitting her when it happened—and she knew Alberto, so she cries along with me while somehow keeping track of the urn’s base screws.
Tonight, I transfer more ash than usual because I’ll be spreading him in two places in Brazil. As I’m pushing the air out of the Ziploc, I suddenly become conscious of what I’m holding and folding.
Of the sharp shards.
His bones.
His teeth.
The clutch in my esophagus starts.
My hand movements stop.
Can I give it a try? Erin whispers.
I hand it over and she finishes what I cannot.
* * *
* * *
After picking up my Cuban visa, Hilda and I head to lunch in Coral Gables, where I’m mesmerized by her method of eating French fries: it’s the same dainty two-finger method as Alberto.
I don’t like getting my hands dirty, she explains.
I’m well aware, I say.
Hey, have I ever told you the Albert-Moving-to-New-York-story?
Tell me.
He had a girlfriend named Kristen here in Miami. She had a car and they were going to drive to New York for his new job and get a place together.
How old was he?
I think he was twenty-three. But the night before the road trip, Albert says, “They need me in New York, Mumu. Can you drive up with Kristen?”
I said “okay” and he hops on a plane, leaving me and the girlfriend to drive one thousand miles. I’m pretty sure there wasn’t any crisis in New York, but off he went. I realized only after he was gone that Kristen’s car was a—what do you call it—a stick shift. When I tell her I don’t know how to drive it, she says, “Albert said you could do anything. And that you used to drive stick shift when you were at school.”
So I drove the stick shift with the ridiculous girlfriend and we got stuck in a storm in North Carolina.
Sounds like a road trip from hell.
It was. Kristen didn’t last long in New York. And when she left, she took the car, along with the dining table and all but one of the dining chairs.
Do you remember what it looked like? I ask. Because there’s a random French chair in our storage unit that I never asked Alberto about. It’s got black-and-white striped upholstery—and tons of rips.
Sounds about right, his mother says.
* * *
Back in New York, I sit down to write Christmas cards, one of the wifely duties I’m determined to carry on. I launch Alberto’s Christmas playlist, open a bottle of wine and take a red pen from the desk drawer.
I’ve powered through half the cards when I notice the bite marks on the pen cap.
His bite marks.
I stare at the pen, an object he once held in his hands and mouth.
I leave the Christmas chaos on the coffee table and head to bed, where I fall asleep spooning the stuffed monkey.
* * *
Tré, darling, Mariana says, between sips of sauvignon blanc. I’m thinking of spending the summer in Europe. I know June is a long way off, but I have family scattered about the continent, so I’m just putting it out there.
Should I start missing you now, I ask. Or start planning to join you?
Join me, silly, she laughs.
The following December, I do join her.
She will have taken a flat in Budapest, where we’ll spend a snowy week dancing, drinking Palinka, and lunching with her embassy friends before flying to Venice for Christmas. In Italy, we’ll spend our afternoons apart—she at the ancient museums and me at the modern ones—but we’ll eat together every night on the Ponte di Rialto. On Christmas Eve, we’ll splash through two feet of acqua alta for midnight mass at St. Mark’s and a nightcap at the Bauer Hotel.
* * *
After work tonight, I sort through the mail and open an envelope containing a 2010 calendar, courtesy of the funeral home.
A calendar.
I cannot think of a more inappropriate item and I’m rattled enough to dial the number on the mailer.
Greenwich Village Funeral Home, how may I help you?
Hi, I’m Tré. You carried out the viewing services for my husband nine months ago and I just received a calendar from you that I can only describe as insensitive and insulting.
Silence.
I’m a widow. This is my first Christmas without my husband. Why would I want a funeral home to remind me that time is marching on?
Silence.
Maybe if I’d had a civilized experience with your company, this wouldn’t seem so tacky. But your funeral director is the same man who left cookies “with his compliments” in the limo that took us to my husband’s service—cookies! Who eats dessert on their way to a funeral?
Uh, would you like to leave your name, Miss?
I’m sure you didn’t sign off on the calendar, but have you seen this thing?
I haven’t, no. I’m offsite. I’m just with the answering company.
Of course you are. If you could leave the director a message from Tré Rodríguez, a former client. Tell him this calendar is one of the most hard-boiled things a funeral home could ever send to a person in mourning. Tell him, next year, maybe try a toothbrush. Or an extra set of house keys. Something that people like me keep losing track of. Because time is the one damn thing I do not need a funeral home reminding me to remember.
Well, Tré, thank you for calling. I’ll pass on your message.
His dignified voice.
His Emily-Post-formality.
Dear God.
Have I become that girl?
The one ranting about a free calendar in the middle of the night?
* * *
I come with several decades of Christmas ornaments. When I was a kid, we made them as a family: snowmen with top hats, skiing pandas on popsicle sticks, our names stenciled on plastic apples. As we grew up, the ornaments were store-bought and commemorated a new hobby or a major milestone.
During my first December with Alberto, I hauled out the ornaments. From the couch, Alberto raised an eyebrow as my sea of mementos crept across the dining table.
You’re putting all those up?
They’ll fit! It’s a big tree.
He walked over, examined a badly painted dough figure in the hollow of a walnut.
Seriously? he said.
That’s the first ornament I made, I squealed. I was, like, three!
He laughed, shook his head, and went back to the TV remote.
You’re not? Going to help?
Um, no. This is your thing.
I was newly married and a little devastated. Hadn’t yet realized that everything in a marriage isn’t met with mutual enthusiasm, so I decorated the stupid tree with a pout on my face.
That first Christmas Eve, he’d grimaced when he unwrapped six ornaments from our respective families and me.
And then.
He handed me a box that contained a flaming, Mexican-style heart decorated with the words “I Love You.”
The following year, I dressed the tree on an early December night when he worked late. No pouting.
By Christmas Number Three, as we drove back from Jersey with an evergreen on our convertible, he announced that it would only be fair if we switched off the Christmas-tree theme every other year.
What does that mean? I asked.
This year, we continue your Craft Land Adventure. Next year, we do an all-monochromatic tree. The lights, the ornaments, everything. I’m thinking white or silver.
Does this mean you’ll help me decorate? I laughed.
Are you kidding? I will art-direct that motherfucking tree!
When Christmas Number Four was within sight, I reminded him about the monochromatic tree.
Right, we need to do that.
The second weekend in December, I mentioned it again.
Honey, he smiled, how would you feel about not getting a tree this year? I mean, we’re leaving for Quebec in ten days and then we’ll just have to pack everything away when we get back . . .
I did not interrupt to say that, actually, I would have to pack everything away when we got back.
Instead, I agreed. Not getting a tree sounded brilliant. And practical.
I did not give him an ornament on our last holiday together.
He didn’t get me one either.
And as we celebrated Christmas Day from our suite in Montreal, neither of us gave two shits about ornaments or trees.
* * *
In the Rodríguez household, Alberto was the I.T. department. He handled warranties, billing, and service for the equipment that kept our home office humming. The wireless in our apartment stopped working a few weeks after he died, but the mere thought of repairing it had exhausted me. Unfortunately, the cable Internet has now gone the way of the wireless, so a service visit is scheduled for today.
Except the technician hasn’t shown.
Our desktop address book contains every detail about our Time Warner account except their stupid phone number, so I dig through Alberto’s mail to find a hard-copy bill. As I’m dialing, I notice the Movies & Events section on the statement:
03/14/09: Che Part One: Start 8:10pm
03/14/09: Che Part Two: Start 10:22pm
03/14/2009 is the Night Before He Died.
I hang up the phone and stare at the two last movies he ever watched. I remember the look and light of our apartment that night, when I fell asleep at the wrong end of our bed, watching “Che Part Two.” That movie is the last thing I remember about the lazy Saturday that became his last Saturday.
It began at 8:30am with him sleeping and me tiptoeing around our apartment, looking for clean socks and an iPod charger before my 9am cardio class. When I returned from the gym with coffees, he was still in bed, playing naked Scrabble on the laptop. I’d slipped out of my Nikes and slid under the covers and joined him.
Is there breakfast? he had asked.
There is, I’d said. Whatcha in the mood for?
Two waffles with snausages please!
Over breakfast in bed, we watched last week’s “CBS Sunday Morning” on the DVR. When it ended, he said I’ll be here! and pulled the duvet around him for a nap. I’d curled up with Warren Buffett’s biography for a few hours.
When Alberto awoke, he apologized for being such a sleepyhead.
Stop, I said, it’s grumpy out and it’s a perfect book-reading day.
I love you, he said.
Me too, I said, borrowing his favorite response.
We watched Silence of the Lambs—somehow he’d never seen it before—and ordered sandwiches from the deli downstairs. Another nap for him and a few more chapters for me, and the sky began darkening. He’d woken just before the laundry was delivered and helped me haul it inside, hanging everything on the back of the front door.
What should we have for dinner, he asked.
We flipped through our three-ring binder of menus in plastic sheets and decided on Greek. I still have the notepad with our dinner order: scallops and salad for me; an order of saganaki and a gyro platter with an extra side of gyro meat for him. I still turn away when I pass the Greek restaurant that delivered his last meal. I still wonder, if he’d ordered something less artery-clogging for dinner, would he have lived another day?
* * *
We need to talk, says my agency’s CFO, clearing his throat. About how much commitment you’ll be able to give the agency in 2010.
Of course, I say, glancing at the HR woman and back to the CFO.
Tré, you’ve exhausted all of your vacation and leave, he says, and after the New Year, we won’t be able to grant you any more unpaid time off.
The subtext of this conversation?
No one at this PR firm appreciates you taking two weeks off for the holidays.
Also, don’t even think about going to Cuba in March.
Do you feel, the HR woman asks, that your upcoming vacation in Brazil will enable you to turn over a new leaf in the New Year?
My upcoming . . . what?
Vacation?
This will be my first Christmas as a widow.
Brazil isn’t a vacation. It’s self-preservation. It’s Prozac.
But how do I explain this to people who are spending the holidays with their fiancés or pregnant wives?
I don’t speak their language anymore and they don’t understand mine, but I summon what I think they want to hear: that I appreciate the candor of this conversation and that yes, I’m hoping my Brazil trip will be restorative and that when I return, I’ll be able to bring the noise.
Everyone smiles and nods.
We’d like you to think about benchmarks in which to measure your performance in the upcoming year, says the CFO. So when you return, we can all sit down with your director and discuss these goals.
Wow, I think, that sounds brilliant. When I’m trying to not hurl myself over the cliffs of Iguazu on Christmas, I’ll just focus on media benchmarks. Super helpful, guys.
I give them my best brave face and head home to pack.
* * *
Despite my 4am pick-up for the airport, Mariana and I decide to attend a girlfriend’s birthday party on the roof of Gramercy Park Hotel. A thirty-something guy in a newsboy hat catches my eye from across the party. He looks at me, lingers, and leaves the room.
I’m intrigued, so I follow and find him checking his phone near the elevators.
Hi Hat.
He looks up.
Hi there.
I’m Tré, and you’re wearing the hat I would be wearing if I didn’t get my silly hair cut tonight and wasn’t trying to make it last ’til Christmas.
And what are you doing for Christmas?
Brazil.
Really? First time?
Yep.
Why Brazil?
It’s the furthest I could get from the holidays in America.
Why are you fleeing the holidays in America?
Long story. Let’s talk about you. And how you know the birthday girl.
My friend, who I came with, is her dermatologist.
Wow, that’s sexy, I say. Wanna try again?
The Hat laughs, disarmingly. Throws it back to me. How do you know the birthday girl?
We worked together at a California art gallery before she went off to Harvard and I went off to Berkeley. Ten years later, our moms became Facebook friends, realized both their daughters were in New York, put us in touch, and now they live vicariously through us.
That’s a pretty good story.
I have hundreds of these.
I have all night.
Unfortunately, I do not, I say, with a mock check to my watchless wrist. Airport in four hours.
Better make those four hours count.
I plan to. What are you and the derm up to? My friend and I have a car downstairs.
We have a party at a Westside bar.
The four of us relocate to Galway Hooker, elbowing our way past Quentin Tarantino—much taller than anyone figures him for—and this guy with the hat?
I cannot believe how much I want to be alone with him.
I keep ducking away from Mariana because she’s never seen me hold hands with anyone besides Alberto and it seems a little soon for me to play the merry widow.
Around 1am, the logistics fall into place. Mariana and the derm realize they both live on the Upper West and Hat and I remind everyone that we both live in Chelsea.
You guys take the car, I say.
We’ll grab a cab, Hat echoes.
We shut the taxi door and devour each other’s mouths and necks. I climb out of the cab on 23rd Street, adjusting my hiked-up dress like a high-schooler in heat.