“Nunca he tenido miedo,” Aldóvar said, his voice curling with his cigarette smoke past the dusty saxophone beside him, disappearing into the room. He ran his fingers over the red wine stain that had spread, thick and sticky, across the dining room table. He could feel the woman’s eyes on him, teeming, he was sure, with pity. He didn’t need to look at her—just imagining the look on her face warmed him. He examined the crescents of dirt under his nails, tapped hard on the cigarette and said it again: I have never been afraid. I have never had fear. But she had already left the room.
Aldóvar had been sitting this way, in this corner of the dining room, in this specific marinade of beer and smoke and what he felt was sad wisdom for ten days straight now—since the morning of his thirty-fifth birthday, when he awoke to find that Patrick had gone to work, taken the car, and left him with nothing more than a birthday note, in which he promised at once to be back soon and to stay gone forever. Since then, Aldóvar had gotten up only a handful of times. He rose once daily to use the bathroom. On Tuesday, he had gone to the living room for the box where the marijuana was kept. On Thursday, he went to the little studio room to get his alto saxophone so that it could sit beside him and remind him of his beauty and all the ways he’d failed. On Saturday night, the dining room light had died, and he got up to pull the window shade a little so he could re-read the note in the light from the alley next door. Only today had he gone outside—first to the deli on 73rd and York for a pack of Camels and some rolling papers, then to the East River, where he walked slow and talked to the pigeons until he found what he was looking for, sitting on a bench in old sneakers and a red skirt.
Now back home, with the woman there, watching, breathing, filling the space with him, he could read Patrick’s note once again. The note had been ten notes, a new note every time Aldóvar brought it to his face to squint at it under the back alley light. Ten days ago, it was a note about his birthday, a happy one, which Patrick would help him celebrate when he returned from the school, carrying a butterscotch cake. The note had said several things since then—things about his mother, his people, his home in Chile. Things about his thinning body and his habits, this attempt at a home here on the Upper East Side. By today, the tenth day, the note told him to mill about, to go out, to mourn and cry to someone else. All this in the last line, in the long indent, the short, indifferent dash where love should have been: “—Patrick.”
Pots rattled in the kitchen and a light came on. “Eso no puede ser, mi alma,” she said from down the hall. Fear isn’t optional in life. In memory, maybe, but that’s it.
The smell of food began to spread through the house—meats with comino and achiote, soups that smelled like things his grandmother said her grandmother used to make.
“No me digas nada de la vida. No me conoces.” Aldóvar started up from his corner, intending to gallop into the kitchen and tell this woman something about life and memory and the respect of the two. Don’t tell me about life. You don’t know me. But he burned himself with the cigarette he’d forgotten was in his hand, and rolled back into his corner, cursing.
She chuckled from the doorway. “Te quemaste, ¿eh, ancianito?” You burned yourself, huh, old man? Little ancient man?
He heard her thighs clap together as she walked away from him, down the hall, pausing every few steps to crack a door open and look in. Finally, he heard her step into the bathroom at the end of the hall and turn the water on. Then she was back, holding a wad of toilet paper, a stick of butter, and Patrick’s rosewater jug.
“El me piensa infante,” he said. “Tu tambien, a lo mejor. No saben na.” He thinks I’m a child. A pretty brown boy to play with and take care of. You think the same, but I disgust you, too. You both think I should be a man. Neither of you knows anything.
One hand on the table top, she knelt by him and dabbed his palm, first with the butter, then with the rosewater and tissue. He felt her, he smelled her, and he thought he could find his mother speaking to him through this woman’s lips. If he closed his eyes, he thought, these breasts brushing his shoulders and these fingers pressed on his hand could become the body of his ex-wife in Santiago, his first girlfriend in Isla Negra, all the roundness and softness of the lives he had lived before.
“¿Qué sería mi vida sín tí?” He said to her, dizzily. What would my life be without you?
She fingered the saxophone. Don’t talk to me about life. You don’t know me.
The children blew and banged on instruments all week, but Patrick did not mind. The sounds were horrid, airy, riotous, but he didn’t wince. They’d begun, this afternoon, to throw things at each other, and Patrick was calmer than he had ever known himself to be. He took them aside individually and explained, for what it was worth, that instruments, like people, were to be respected, and that shoving or hitting either was unacceptable. He doled out time-outs and trips to the principal’s office liberally but without malice. Palmer and Jackson told him in the lounge that he looked good, like a new man, they said, and they asked if he’d lost weight. On the first day after he left Aldo, Richards, the only other male teacher in the school—a science teacher, also gay—touched his shoulder and complimented him on his suit. It was a navy pinstripe which he had forgotten entirely until ten days ago, when he showed up, dazed, at his ex-wife’s house, a butterscotch cake in tow.
“Rhon,” he had said, and she opened the door and hugged him. She asked about Aldo, about their music and their apartment. He tried, at first, to tell her that things were fine, but by evening he had lost all his energy and could not explain his shattered face away. They cut the cake and spent the evening in the house where he had lived his last life, on the couch where she had helped him mourn his mother’s death, at the table where he had told her, over toast and eggs, that he needed a divorce. And now, years later, she listened to him as he explained Aldo’s mystery, the beauty of his sadness and his confusion, the terrible weight of his pain. He told her how hard it was to make music after work every day when Aldo had not played a note in months, how he drove around the block twice or three times each afternoon to delay coming home to a man that had not lived a second of life since he left him. Rhonda had worked through three slices of cake while listening, easing off bites of white sponge and smears of soft yellow cream with the edge of her fork and murmuring “yeah, mmhm,” her eyes locked on his as he talked. He had stayed with her since, talking and eating, and had not yet had to ask how life was treating her.
That first evening, he found his old suits, and was reminded of a past version of himself, one whose primary pursuit in life was to convince the world he was a certain kind of man. He wore the charcoal gray suit to school the next day, then some black ones and a slate gray stripe. There were ties, too, responsible ones with just enough flare to say, “And I have personality, too.” He had waived to old neighbors all week as he picked up the paper, smiled at them as he pulled into the driveway each evening. He had cooked for Rhonda twice—stuffed artichokes and risotto with basil on Friday, apple French toast with mixed berries and crème fraiche for Sunday brunch. She had come home from work as she used to, with bottles of wine and CDs by new artists her company had discovered. Each night, they would peel the cellophane off of the cases and look at the promo photos—a Tunisian-Swiss folksinger, a Franco-American electro band—and she would say which ones she thought had promise, which seemed too naïve or too indulgent for their own good. They judged together. They comforted each other. They ate and drank and laughed like young lovers, like life-long friends.
There had even been moments when she reminded him of Aldo—Aldo in the early days, four-and-a-half years ago, when his English was bare and essential, forcing him to rely mostly on more precise means of communication. These days with Rhon reminded Patrick of the time when he was a young man, married to a beautiful young woman executive, growing more and more willing each day to throw his life away for this person—another man—who made languages with his eyes and vows with his music. In a rented basement studio, they had played—first for each other, then with each other, first lightly and then not lightly at all—for nearly a year. They had played in a band together, and their first times touching happened late in the evenings, after the other band members had left, but soon they began to arrange to meet early in the afternoons, before the others arrived. Eventually there were hotel rooms, bed and breakfasts, and finally, the apartment on 73rd.
“Patrick, it’s going to happen, ok?” Aldo had said many times after hours of playing and pulling and pressing together, stretched and sweaty. “Music, I mean. We have to make it. I’m telling you.”
“Ok, Aldo,” he had responded, noticing only his fingers in Aldo’s long black hair, Aldo’s soft, stubbly cheek in his palm, the pulse of them both, pleading beneath their skins to be kissed and touched some more.
These things Patrick remembered in Rhonda’s house no longer existed in the apartment on York. These good memories had been forgotten, like his suits and his pride and his patience, under heaps of Aldo—his fallen dreams, his broken heart, his eyes whose precision and eloquence had cracked and left nothing but water.
Suited up and driving back to a home that had seen light all day, and to a person who had lived, Patrick resolved not to go back. He had known it all along, he decided. Eleven nights ago when he circled the block three times and entered the apartment to find Aldo face down in his own vomit, a full ashtray smoking beside him on the dining room floor. And before that even, each day that passed without Aldóvar’s making it. It seemed to Patrick that Aldo had devoted himself to proving it was all or nothing for him, that if he could not succeed he would be sure to fail. It was not surprising, Patrick resolved now. It was there from the beginning, all these years. It had taken him some time to see it, but as soon as he did, he acted—in his best interest and in Aldo’s, too. He found all the words he could and he tried to say them, stuff them into the curves and lines of the note he had left on the dining room table:
Aldo,
I hope you feel better, and that your
birthday is good to you.
I cleaned up the mess. I’m going to work.
Money is in the cabinet.
Food in the fridge. Please eat.
— Patrick
“Pero, ¿por qué no me quiere jamás?” But why doesn’t love me anymore?
But for Matilda, of course, there wasn’t much to say. She did not know what was going on, really, except that this man was in love with another man, most likely a white man, who lived in a nice apartment and spoke good enough English, which he used to write what seemed like a fairly straightforward note, with a fairly straightforward message: goodbye.
But there was a lot of good food in the kitchen, and she had not eaten good food in a while—nothing better than wings from the Crown Fried Chicken on 86th or hard rice and green pea slop from the cafeteria at the hospital where she worked, a few blocks away from this apartment. She had not been to work in a while, had not really talked to anyone, about anything, in days. There was no reason why, at least none to speak of. There had been a man, and now there was not, and the only thing there was to say about him was that he was gone, leaving her to swim in the silence she’d become during their time together. He had been loud and she had been quiet, and she hadn’t noticed it until it was too late. Now that he was gone, the quiet was all there was—quiet buzzing from the bathroom where he used to brush his teeth, quiet ringing from the sofa where he used to shout at basketball games, quiet clanging in the kitchen where he had slammed dishes and punched the wall, not often, but sometimes, while she stood there, mute. She felt menaced by the quiet now, in the sour way that comfort can menace. It was with her and it was in her—her throat and ears plugged with things unsaid.
So it was fine with her to have seen this man out the corner of her eye, cursing at pigeons on the FDR Drive this morning. She clocked his type immediately—the expensive but dirty clothes, the fancy shoes left unlaced and run-over—he was a pampered drifter. Men like him—and weren’t they all?—they always needed someone to take care of them. A bosomy mother, a sexy nurse, an audience for whatever elaborate show. She was too tired from the last man to offer much, but men like him never noticed those things. They wanted, and they usually received. But this one would have something to offer her. Men who needed to be taken care of usually were—more than taken care of, in fact, with plenty extra to go around. She could tell when she saw him that there would be food, maybe money, and who knew what else. At the very least, there would be sound.
“No sé, mi vida,” she put his hand back in his lap and stood up. “¿Como puede ser?” Why doesn’t he love you? I don’t know, my dear, my life. Look at you. What’s not to love?
His laughter broke into a mucusy cough.
“Bueno, amor, levántate. Vamos a comer.” She held him now for the first time, pulling him up by his shoulders and leaning both their weights on a tall wooden chair. Get up. We’re going to eat.
In her arms, his smell surprised her. It was not the simple compound of smoke, beer, and weed she had expected. There was a cinnamon smell, or maybe nutmeg, something that must belong to this white man—his soap, perhaps, or his shampoo. Had she noticed this smell on Aldóvar sooner, down by the water, she might have smiled at him. As it was, his sweet, sad face had only been enough to elicit a commanding “Hola, papi, how you doing today?”
“Bien, ¿y usted, señorita?” He had said, stumbling up to her bench with a cigarette in one hand and a paper bag in the other, the teal morning sky hanging heavy over his head. Fine, and you, young lady?
“Todo bien,” she had answered. “Gozando del ruído.” She leaned back on the bench with her legs straight in front of her, looking past him as the cars whipped the air. Good, all good, enjoying the noise.
This was exactly what she had been doing on that bench since the day before yesterday when the silence in her apartment began to beat on her ears. She had left that afternoon without her work uniform, without her tattered staff ID, without even five dollars, to go listen to the cars hum and the wind fly down the FDR. The man had not thought—or at least he had not said—that she was strange to be sitting there. He had not asked her why she so craved noise. He had not asked her to tell her story, to justify her restlessness or her effort to strangle it with sound.
By the time they had reached his apartment, she was sure he would expect her to sleep with him. This would not be the worst thing in the world, she had decided. She might do it. She had not been with a man in some time—the man who left had lost interest in that part of her months ago—and now the thought of sex brought to mind a set of huge, disfigured, subsuming sounds she’d almost forgotten. But when he pushed the door open and ushered her into the apartment, he had not so much as offered to take her jacket. He walked directly to the corner of the dining room and spilled down to the floor, amid a pile of Corona bottles, beside an ashtray, a box of weed, and a saxophone.
Matilda had often thought of being played like a musical instrument. She had imagined the feel of a bass player pushing deep against her g-spot, a guitarist who could pluck her clitoris like a knot of tight strings, the million tiny, cool notes a flautist might wrap around her neck. Sex with this man would not be a chore or mistake, she thought, looking at the brassy instrument. She had not yet imagined what a saxophone might be like.
“Hay vino en la nevera,” he had said without looking at her. He licked a white paper and began to crumble clumps of weed into it. There’s wine in the fridge.
Matilda was surprised to find that the wine in the refrigerator was a merlot. The well-stocked wine rack beside the pantry door indicated that someone around here knew not to chill red wine. Matilda was proud to know this, too. Still, she had liked her red wine cold since junior high school, when she discovered that the taste of cold cheap red wine was not entirely different from the taste of grape juice—not the sugary, purple bodega kind, but the real thing, bloody and bittersweet, from the gourmet stores on Madison Avenue. She had poured herself a glass and sat.
“Pues, ¿tu eres músico?” So you’re a musician?
“Ah, linda, mejor dicho soy fracaso.” Laughter. Better put, I am a failure.
“Pero eso te gusta, ¿no?” she said. You seem to like that title.
“Es el único que tengo. Me debe gustar.” He rolled the joint, lit it, and took a pull. I have to like it. It’s all I got.
Matilda had known men like this, hopeless dreamers who bathed themselves in the wreckage of fantasy to keep from having to make anything out of real life. Her father had been one, and her brother, and the man who’d left was probably one as well, although that, too, she had failed to notice in time. These men were selfish, too selfish to live with, but also too selfish not to love, at least a little. The insistence of their misery was pitiful, almost comical, and beautiful at once. The key, she thought now, was to take what they could offer and give them just that little bit, just enough so that the giving cost her nothing, and perhaps even felt good. Perhaps that was the closest she would come to an equal exchange.
“Qué caballero eres,” she said. “Que no compartes la hierba con tu compañera.” She crossed her legs and leaned toward him. What kind of gentleman are you, that you don’t even share the herb with your lady friend?
“Es que si fumamos juntos,” he said, dabbing the joint against the ashtray, “tu te vas a enamorar de mí.” He coughed. If we smoke together, you’ll fall in love with me. And I am a betrothed man.
Matilda smiled and took the joint. She blew smoke in his face and asked him about his life. She pushed the tall dining room windows open and spread the drapes, flinging them against the wall with a whack. She made pepper steak and cabbage, the grease popping like rainstorms in the skillets, the boiling water a song of burbles and licks. She drank the wine and spilled it on the table, heard the glass crash to the floor, and laughed. She listened to him talk about his boyfriend, a white teacher who had left him drunk and sick and lonely on his birthday. Once he had slid the last of the cabbage into his mouth, she got up to take his plate. He grabbed her arm and held it.
“Tu eres la mujer de mis suenos, señorita,” he said. You are the woman of my dreams.
Matilda put the plate on the table and lit a cigarette. So you’ve fallen in love with me?
“Claro.”
So play me something.
He dragged the saxophone from the corner and began to play. Matilda heard his lungs’ struggle, his breath like a smashed harmonica—all strain and no sound. But his fingers wrapped around the gold pads with more force than she had thought his body could muster. He pushed and pressed the instrument with a fierce diligence, and she began to believe that, eventually, something worth hearing would come out.
Patrick turned off of First Avenue, onto 73rd only once. He parked a few doors down and zipped up his jacket, keeping the car keys in his hand. He paid close attention to the look of the building—the low yellow lights of the lobby, the cracked marble floors in the hallways, the warm and faintly mildewy smell in the elevator, which the janitorial staff had never been able to defeat. He wanted to keep these things safe in his memory—because they were all memories now. Each floor that passed on the elevator, each number lit white as it climbed, was a step toward the end of this life and the beginning of the next one—a former life re-envisioned, refashioned and improved. The next life would be him and Rhon—friendly and comfortable—with good wine and a kitchen brimming with light. It would be his suits, the neighbors, a big airy home and weightless laughter. He would not take too much with him. He would not say too much of a goodbye.
The familiar groans of novice playing greeted him when the elevator doors opened on the eighth floor—an alto saxophone screeching a song he thought he might have heard once. But as Patrick walked toward his door, he heard the sounds easing down, tones becoming sturdier and more solid, notes clear as wind beginning to form. He turned his key in the lock and walked in to a place that he doubted, for a second, he had ever been before. Food and wine and an open window. Aldo playing the sax for a brown woman who sat on their dining room table with her legs crossed, smoking a cigarette. Her eyes were closed, and her head waved to the music.
But why doesn’t he love me? became a song, and the men played it for her. One on the alto saxophone, one on the soprano. It was a battle of beauty, of blood and of hearts. Matilda felt her spirit running on the underside of her skin. The men would not stop. Their notes made love, told stories. Arguments ensued and stopped just short of violence. Promises were made, and kept, and broken, but the sound made no move to leave.
She sat with the saxophones, in the noisr of them, for what could have been hours, thinking about the rush of cars she had left this morning, the food she had just eaten, all the things she had heard today. She thought about these men—this stranger who had declared from a pit of ash and headache that he had never been afraid, and this other one who wrote clear notes and did, in fact, bring home a cinnamon smell, whose love and whose absence clearly terrified the first. She thought about her life, herself, all the things that were or could one day be. Humming a melody that both matched theirs and didn’t, Matilda sipped her wine and listened as they talked.