desperate housewives of roland park

On February 1, 2009, I pulled up behind the moving truck in front of my new home, a sage-green row house on a tree-lined street in Baltimore. With me were the last two family members still in my charge, eight-year-old Jane and the dog. As the movers began to unload, I went in to make sure everything was clean and ready. It was, except the basement, where a crew of workers was still remodeling a rocky, inhospitable cave into a usable room. The contractor had explained that the job was bigger than he’d expected, and they’d probably be around for several weeks after I moved in. No big deal, I said. I didn’t need the space until the boys came home to visit from college.

I stuck my head in the basement door to let the workers know I’d arrived. “Buenos dias!” I called.

Within the first few hours, one of my new neighbors had stopped by with a plate of chocolate chip cookies and her daughter Julianne, a fellow third grader at the school where Jane would start on Monday. When they left, they took Jane with them to their house. So I was alone in the kitchen, hanging pots on the rack over the stove, admiring a nice frying pan the previous owners had left behind, when an attractive, loose-limbed Latino man in a knit ski cap came upstairs to fill a bucket with water. The minute he saw me, his expression changed to a classic male moue of appreciation, the silent equivalent of a wolf whistle.

I stepped to the side to let him get to the sink and his paint-spattered plaid flannel shirt brushed my arm. Our eyes met. His were liquid black.

“Gracias, señora,” he said when the bucket was full, and turned to go back downstairs.

“Cómo te llamas?” I asked.

“Humberto,” he said, flashing me that look again before he shut the basement door. He had a way of gazing at me as if I were Aphrodite—as if my transcendent beauty demanded homage. If I had still been married to Crispin, I would have had to take a shower to get that look off me before he came home.

Sometime in the 1970s while driving from Florida to New Jersey, I exited I-95 in Baltimore. I was probably trying to avoid a toll, as I often was during this penurious phase of life. I spent the next several hours lost in a postindustrial wasteland, fringed with really bad neighborhoods, trying desperately to get back on the highway. This experience was the basis of my impression of Baltimore for decades.

The next time I came to Baltimore, it was 1998. I had been living in Austin, Texas, for twenty years; I was out on tour for my cheery book about being a widowed single mother. I met Crispin in the bookstore that night and moved across the country to marry him. Crispin lived halfway between Baltimore, the home of his ex-wife and kids, and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where he taught at a satellite school of Penn State. Get out a map and you’ll see: It’s Glen Rock, all right. On weekends, we met his ex-wife in a gas station in Hereford, the heart of Maryland horse country, to exchange the children.

The “ru-burbs,” as I called my new locale—with its rural farms and suburban developments, its single Wal-Mart, many fast food outlets, and conservative Christian mentality—was never right for me. Once my marriage ended, it was sheer desperation.

I couldn’t go back to Texas because I couldn’t take Jane so far from her father, who had rented a house in the woods a couple miles away. It would have made sense to move to Baltimore, since I was already commuting to teach there, but at first I didn’t even consider the possibility, probably because of my shattered mental state, described in the previous chapter.

Instead, I developed a deep irrational conviction that I had to live someplace with a view of the ocean. The closest thing I could find in driving distance was Havre de Grace, a Maryland town at the intersection of the Susquehanna River and the Chesapeake Bay. I had seen its lighthouse in the distance as I crossed the bridge; I imagined a quaint Breton village in France.

Without heaping unwarranted insults on Havre de Grace, this was incorrect.

Eventually a friend who had lived in Baltimore all her life slapped some sense into me. I had been thinking of the city as nothing more than a parking lot, she pointed out, but it was full of quirky delights I had yet to comprehend. She gave me the name of her real estate agent, a funny gay guy she was sure I would love.

Two weeks later, I shook hands with a tall, dark stranger in his real estate office. Ken Maher had sparkly brown eyes and a big Roman nose, and within moments we were telling each other the stories of our lives. Like me, Ken was floating around in the wreckage of the world he once knew: Within the space of few months, his brother had died, as had his adored grandmother, and his live-in boyfriend had been deported to Colombia. With no further ado, we grabbed onto each other’s driftwood rafts, brand-new best friends.

About six months later, after patiently touring me through every neighborhood in town, Ken showed me a place in Roland Park, the area he’d been promoting from the start, since it had the only decent public elementary school in the city. Another excellent thing about this house was that it was around the corner from his. This was it.

On weekends, that very same Exxon in Hereford would be the spot where I met my former soul mate to hand off our daughter.

By the time Humberto was so jubilantly feasting his eyes on me, it had been over a year since Crispin and I had split up. The only man I’d been with in that time was . . . Crispin. But that phase was over; it had been six months since I had last driven like a zombie to his house after yoga class and thrown myself onto his bed, the vortex of sexual energy still swirling between us.

It had been half a year, but still I’d felt physically ill that morning when I realized there was a woman at his house. I had called at 8:00 a.m. with a frantic last-minute question about some stuff he’d left in the basement. When he didn’t answer the phone, I called again. I called his landline and his cell about three times each, then texted and e-mailed. When he finally picked up at 10:30 and shouted, “What the hell do you want?” I absolutely knew.

Honestly I’d known since 8:01.

Have I mentioned the man’s initials are tattooed on my shoulder? Rings were not enough for us, I guess. So when he came home on our first anniversary with an mw designed by his daughter Emma inscribed on his forearm, I rushed out to ante up.

My marriage could not have ended much worse than it did, and I’d been unhappy for years before we split. But somehow I was still profoundly entangled with Crispin emotionally, and I still had either nightmares or sex dreams about him every night. I might never get over it, it seemed.

Nonetheless, now that he was with someone else, that was that. I had to move on. But how? Go online? Hit the bars? Beg my friends to fix me up? Start cruising the Central Americans in the basement? Or somehow adjust to a life without passion?

Only the last of these was out of the question.

Jane started school the Monday after we moved in, so I was alone in the house with the construction crew. Sitting at my desk grading papers, I was surprised when I felt someone standing behind me.

“¿Qué haces?” asked Humberto.

“Trabajo,” I replied. I speak very little Spanish, but I was able to explain that I am a writing teacher. And a writer. I gestured to my books, sitting on the shelf. Something about the way he looked at them suggested that it wasn’t just that he didn’t read English. It was that he didn’t read.

“¿Tu no lees?”

He shrugged. “No mucho.”

I pulled down a book whose cover shows a picture of my first husband and me with our baby sons. He pointed to my name and tried to pronounce it. “Mah ree on . . . Weeneek. ¿Es tu?”

“Es la historia de mi primera . . . umm, mi primera . . . marriage. Mi esposo murió de SIDA.”

His eyes widened. My first husband died of AIDS?

“Hace mucho tiempo,” I said. “Sixteen years.”

He shook his head sympathetically and touched my cheek.

Most of our interactions lasted no longer than that. A couple of times a day, he found a reason to venture upstairs. If I was at the desk, he’d come up behind me and touch my shoulders or stroke my hair. If I was in the kitchen, he would just stand there and look at me.

One day, I decided to use Crispin’s Amazon Prime account so I could get free shipping on some books I needed. This turned out to be the very last time I ever used it, because I saw that he had sent a copy of the Kama Sutra to his new girlfriend. I nearly passed out, even though I realized it was my own fault that I’d found this out, it was none of my business, and it was no surprise. I told myself to stop thinking immediately about whether this meant she was an innocent who needed to be initiated in the ways of the world or a super freak who would try things I never imagined.

But—did we ever even look at the Kama Sutra together? We did have a bunch of rubber electric dildos and stuff from when I did an article on sex-toy home parties for a women’s magazine. I was thinking of the thing that looked like a cross between a jellyfish and a rubber tarantula and fighting tears when suddenly Humberto appeared behind me.

For the first time, I got up out of my chair and turned to face him. He put his arms around me and I leaned into his chest. He was muscular yet soft, much bigger than me where my husband was about my same size, and there was a sweet unselfconscious quality to the way he held his body, as if he’d never given much thought to his abs, his pecs, or his quads, which makes sense when you come from a place where hunger is the bigger physical fitness issue.

Our hug lasted a minute or so, then we pulled apart. “Tu pelo,” I said, looking up at him, running my hand through his newly cropped hair.

“¿No te gustas?”

I smiled. “Me gusta más largo.” If this meant I like long hair, it was only sheer luck.

It went on like this for weeks—hugs, looks, confusing conversations—until I began to worry. By now all the other guys knew what was going on. Did they talk about us? Did he talk to them about me? What if they told the boss?

In fact, the other men were unfailingly nice to me, meticulously polite, and always helpful when I needed something. Every day, they all trooped upstairs and asked me if it would be okay to microwave their lunches, and we usually exchanged a few sentences about how great the basement was turning out. At some point, Humberto stopped going back down with them to eat. Instead, he sat at my kitchen counter and opened his plastic container of food and his bottle of orange soda.

“¿Qué es eso?” I wondered. It smelled so good. “¿Tu cocinas?”

No, he didn’t cook it himself. He explained that the ladies on his street sold plate lunches to go for the workingmen. “Ven aqui,” he said, putting a forkful in my mouth.

“Mmmmm,” I said as the masa melted on my tongue.

The next day, he brought me a foil package of fresh, hot tortillas.

When Jane got home from school, I rolled one up for her with butter and jam. “Humberto brought these for us,” I told her gaily. “Isn’t that so sweet?”

“Humberto?” she said, eyeing both me and the snack with suspicion in her big blue eyes. “Is he your boyfriend?”

“No, silly, of course not.”

“Then why are you always talking about him?” she said.

Well, Miss Third Grader, good question.

At this point the crew was almost done in the basement and began alternating my project with other jobs. One day, Humberto pulled out his cell phone and asked me to put my number in it. I couldn’t think why, since we could barely talk to each other, but I did it anyway. Sure enough, he called me often. He said ¡Hola!, I said ¡Hola!, then he would say something else which I had to ask to him to repeat two hundred times until we gave up. Then he said Adios and I said Adios.

Though we never kissed, unfortunate progress was eventually made on other fronts. He would run his hands over my body, but had a way of pinching whatever he got hold of that I couldn’t stand. It wasn’t your usual two-fingered pinch, but a whole-hand squeeze, as if he were juicing a particularly resistant citrus fruit. Finally I used Google Translate to look up “pinch.”

“No me pellizques,” I told him.

“¿Pellizques?”

“Como eso.” I did to him what he was doing to me.

He chuckled and pushed my hand away, but also looked a little hurt. No matter; I hadn’t gotten anywhere, because the next time we were together he started doing it again. Had no woman ever told him about this problem before? No one would like this technique, I was sure. Didn’t they complain?

The truth is, I liked it so little that I was beginning to cool toward him. Yes, he was cute, but the pinching delivered a message to me that nothing else had.

Really, we weren’t right for each other.

But to put it in Pokémon terms, the ability of looking must be stronger than the ability of pinching, because looking beat pinching in this Poké-battle. When Humberto called a few days later to say he wanted to come over and see me, I didn’t ignore it or pretend I didn’t understand, as I had in the past. I made a plan. He would come on a Saturday, when Jane would be with her dad in Pennsylvania. I’d drive over to where he lived and pick him up around noon; except for the bus, he had no other way to get here.

It took about ten minutes for him to give me the directions, since he was saying Fayette but I was hearing Fie-jet, so didn’t recognize the name of one of the biggest streets in town.

The day of our date, I was nervous. Why was I doing this, if I didn’t really want to? I guess it seemed like my best chance—or even my only chance—to have sex, which I obviously had to do as a phase in my recovery. I put on black yoga pants and a stretchy, V-necked black shirt, and I drove across town to the barrio, where he was waiting for me, standing in the rain without an umbrella.

He was dressed up, sort of heartbreakingly, in an ironed shirt, pants of shiny, thin material, and black lace-up shoes. Though I liked him better in the hoodie and ski cap, I appreciated the sense of occasion. When we got to my house, I offered him something to eat. He didn’t want food, but asked if I had any more champagne.

With my laptop open on the coffee table and Google Translate running harder than a shredder at Goldman Sachs, I was able to learn many new things about Humberto. Such as, he had three kids at home in El Salvador whom he hadn’t seen for four years. And their mother—his wife? he was vague on this—had left him. (Actually, it looked to me like he had left her.)

The kids? Didn’t he miss his kids?

Oh, yes, he did.

This is a sexy conversation, isn’t it?

He was tossing the ball for Beau, which only showed how uncomfortable he was, since he usually treated the dog as some kind of large rodent. Despite the champagne, neither of us was the least bit bubbly as we trooped grimly upstairs to the bedroom.

He took off his shoes and lay on top of the quilt.

I took off my shirt—somebody had to do something, right?—but when he started some halfhearted pinching through my black bra, I rolled away.

Then he said, “No tengo un condón. He olvidado.”

He forgot his condoms? This seemed hard to believe, so we confirmed the translation. Condón. Profilactico. Preservador. Perhaps I should try to tell him that my tubes were tied so we didn’t need the condón.

“¿Su marido murió de SIDA, no?”

Oh, okay. AIDS. Right. I could have attempted to explain that I didn’t have the HIV virus, but really, I just wanted to put my shirt back on. Meanwhile, he looked about to cry. “What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Estoy muy triste,” he told me. “Mi vida—es muy triste.”

“¿Por qué? ¿Cuál es el problema?” I sat up and looked around for my discarded top.

“Es mi hermano,” he said, and the tears rolled. He told me that his brother was trying to come to the United States from Salvador and was stuck in Mexico. He needed money to pay the coyote or they would keep him there. It was very, very dangerous; when Humberto himself had come, he’d almost died. So, maybe, could I please give him some money? He looked at me with tortured hope, his dark eyes wet.

“How much money is it?” I wondered, my head poking through the stretchy black collar of my shirt.

He told me.

At this point, my eyes also filled with tears and I leapt off the bed. I mean, I felt bad about his brother, and I knew I wasn’t Aphrodite, but this was pretty far to fall.

Before I took him home, we sat on my front porch with Google Translate and had as serious a conversation as we could manage. I tried to explain how I felt, and to reassure him that I knew how he must feel. I didn’t think he meant to hurt me, but he had, and I didn’t have three thousand dollars to spare. Also, I told him, you should never ask a woman for money in her bedroom. It just isn’t done.

He may or may not have understood, he may or may not have cared, but it was time for me to drive him back to Fie-jet, where I would give him two twenties toward the cause. Then, if I knew what was good for me, I would close Google Translate forever and sign up for Match.com, where I might not find love but I would at least find people who were looking for it, perhaps ones in my age group who spoke English.