Ted and Mariana walked around and around the block. Ted bought them both shaved ice and colored syrup from a street vendor, and as he handed Mariana hers, she said, “First, Jell-O. Now, this. Wow; you sure know how to make a girl feel special.”
“Second date. Gotta step it up.”
“Ah, my favorite flavor—uh, aquamarine.”
Ted slurped at his. “If you put a gun to my head, I could not tell you what flavor mine is.”
“I know—isn’t that the best? It’s like an alternate universe where color is taste.”
“Where do they get those blocks of ice from? It’s like they tore down an igloo.”
“I know. Who makes ice that big? Puerto Ricans, that’s who.”
Ted wanted to ask Mariana about herself. Had she ever been married? What were her parents like? When did she lose her virginity? What were her SATs? But she seemed so happy to just be this evening, just laugh and be silly, that he held back and felt himself getting lighter too. Did any of that heavy shit even matter? It was like a dance where they both put their feet down lightly. Ted remembered an old Columbia professor of his who had said, when Ted complained that The Waste Land was devoid of personality and feeling, “Only those with big feelings know the need to get away from them.” At the time, he had thought it was crap and a curmudgeonly rebuke, but strolling the night with Mariana, he could feel her big feelings shadowed in her need to escape from them. There was a big there there, but it was a long way from here and would not be rushed. He wordlessly opened his heart to her wordlessness, and he had no idea how or why. He kept looking for a moment to kiss her, but felt a second too slow, kept missing the beat. Must’ve been the disco. Blame it on the DJ. He felt like a runner on first, looking for the third-base coach for signs, but the signs had been changed. He had missed some team meeting where new signs were adopted. He couldn’t read the signals, so he stayed put, and they walked and walked and didn’t kiss.
A couple of hours passed as they strolled the neighborhood just laughing and bullshitting until Ted deemed it safe to collect Marty. When they got back, Marty and Maria were dressed, sitting on the couch together, holding hands and talking like high schoolers. Fucking adorable. They all kissed and hugged Maria goodbye like the old friends that they were and weren’t.
Marty, Mariana, and Ted walked in silence back to the subway. It felt like one of those perfect nights in life, there was no need for embellishment; it was sad to think that Marty had only a handful of these left. It was late and the subway was mostly deserted. As they moved underneath the water to Brooklyn, the subway car had completely emptied, so it was just the three of them alone. The car abruptly stopped, as they do, for no fathomable reason, in the middle of the river, and the lights died. Subway riders are used to these moments when you are not sure if this is just a harmless, unexplained pause, like the train catching its breath, or a catastrophic failure. The three of them sat in the quiet darkness buried beneath the millions of tons of ancient water. Ted looked over at his dad and asked, “What are you thinking?”
And Marty said, “Good ol’ Walt.” Which is exactly what Ted thought he was thinking.
Ted began declaiming from “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.”
What is it then between us?
What is the count of the scores or hundreds of years between us?…
I too felt the curious abrupt questionings …
Marty picked the poem up just as accurately:
It is not upon you alone that dark patches fall,
The dark threw its patches down upon me also …
Now Ted:
The best I had done seemed to me blank and suspicious …
And Marty:
My great thoughts as I supposed them, were they not in reality meagre?
They fell silent again. Crossing Brooklyn Subway. Slightly stunned at themselves and stunned at Whitman and at the tangible presence, the sudden unannounced appearance of eternity. A sea change. The lights flicked on and off, then stayed on, and the train jumped to life.
When they had made the water crossing, and were back underneath bedrock, the Whitmania lifted, and Ted spoke up again. “How do you say ‘closure’ in Spanish?”
Marty nodded at his son, glanced quickly at Mariana, and said somberly, “Pendejo.”
Mariana smiled broadly, and Ted intoned, “This was truly a night for pendejo.”
And as they rode on in silence, Ted repeated again with reverence, “Pendejo.” It was only years later that Ted learned that the true translation of pendejo was not actually “closure,” as Marty had so readily offered, no, not even close. A closer translation of pendejo, as the old fucker surely knew, would be “pubic hair.”