When they exited the subway in Spanish Harlem, they could hear the Yankee game broadcast in Spanish on many transistor radios. Men sat outside bodegas, on stoops, on their cars, radios by their ear or at their feet. Ted could see his father was curious for a score, so he kept up a constant stream of obfuscating chatter as he hustled Marty forward as quickly as the sick and tired old man could. Onward to Maria’s address.
They stopped outside the building. Marty looked up at the windows, lost somewhere deep within himself. “You recognize the place?” Mariana asked him. Marty didn’t answer, just kept staring up at the windows or the sky, it was impossible to tell which.
To get up the stairs to the third floor was slow going. At every landing they stopped for breath. “I’m fucking ridiculous,” Marty gasped. “I hate this. I’m breathing like a fucking fish. I look like a goddamm grouper.” They finally made it to Maria’s door and Ted, the stage manager, pushed Marty to the front so Maria would see Marty, and only Marty, when she opened the door. Ted waited for Marty to catch his breath. He knocked and then stepped back again behind his father. The knob turned, and Ted saw Marty straighten his back as best he could, trying to iron out the effect of decades of gravity and illness. Ted pulled at the tail of Marty’s jacket to make the fit work best and take the hunch from the fabric at his shoulders.
The door opened and there was Maria. She had transformed herself from the somewhat dowdy older woman of that afternoon into a beautiful relic. She was not trying to look young, she was just trying to look like her best self, and she had succeeded. Marty and Maria stood there speechless, looking at each other over the expanse of years, taking in all the damage, sensing all the experience in the other that they had not been part of and would never ever really know.
Maria’s eyes were wet and shining. She had no doubt who stood before her, and she said in her heavily accented English, “You look like a man I once knew.”
“I feel like half the man you once knew.”
They fell into eloquent silence again. Ted felt like they might stay here at the threshold all night, and that would be okay. The aroma of home-cooked Latin food seemed to draw them forward, however. Marty pulled the six-pack from behind his back, and said with a maître d’ flourish in a thick, put-on Nuyorican accent, “Ice-col’ Buh-whyssser.”
Maria laughed and wistfully repeated, “Buh-whyssser.”
Then she stepped away from the door, extending her arm as an invitation to enter, opening up her world and the past to Marty, Mariana, and Ted.