COMPARED WITH PLUMED LIZARD, my life comrade, Willie, is a freaking wonder; he takes care of me. And compared to Tabra’s expeditions to the farthest confines of the earth, my little professional trips were pitiful; even so, they left me drained. I had to board a plane day after day, where I struggled valiantly against the viruses and bacteria of the other passengers; I spent weeks away from home, and days preparing talks. I don’t know how I stole time to write. I learned to speak in public without panicking, to go through airports without getting lost, to survive on what a carry-on would hold, to whistle down a taxi, and to smile at people greeting me, even though my stomach hurt and my shoes were too tight. I don’t remember all the places I went, it doesn’t matter. I know I traveled through Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Latin America, parts of Africa and Asia, and all the states of the union except North Dakota. On planes, I wrote my mother by hand to tell her my adventures, but when I read the letters a decade later, it’s as if all that had happened to another person.
The one vivid memory that stays in my mind was of a scene in New York in midwinter that would haunt me until later, following a trip to India, I was able to exorcise it. Willie had joined me for the weekend and we had just visited Jason and a group of his university friends, young intellectuals in leather jackets. In the months he’d been away from Sally, he’d not spoken of marriage again, and we had the idea that their engagement was ended. Sally herself had hinted at that on a couple of occasions, but Jason denied it. According to him, they were going to be married as soon as he graduated, but when Ernesto had visited us in California we’d learned that he’d had a brief but intense affair with Sally, so we assumed that she and Jason no longer had ties. Jason, incidentally, didn’t learn about Sally and Ernesto until many years later. By then the events that demolished his faith in our family, which he had idealized, had already been set in motion.
Willie and I had said good-bye to his son with great emotion, thinking how much he had changed. When I had come to live with Willie, Jason spent his nights reading or out partying with his buddies; he got up at four in the afternoon, threw a grimy coverlet around him, and settled on the terrace to smoke, drink beer, and talk on the phone until I rapped him on the head enough times that he went to class. Now he was on the way to becoming a writer, something we’d always thought he would do because he was very talented. Willie and I were remembering that stage of the past as we walked down Fifth Avenue in the midst of the noise and crowds and traffic and cement and frost. In front of a shop window exhibiting a collection of the ancient jewels of imperial Russia, we saw a woman huddled on the ground, shivering. She was of the African race, filthy, wearing rags topped with a black garbage bag. She was sobbing. People were hurrying by without looking at her. Her weeping was so desperate that for me the world froze, as in a photograph; even the air absorbed the fathomless pain of that wretched woman. I crouched down at her side and gave her all my cash, though I was sure that a pimp would soon be by to take it from her. I tried to communicate, but she didn’t speak English—or else she was beyond words. Who was she? How had she arrived at such a state of desolation? Perhaps she’d come from a Caribbean island, or from the coast of Africa, and waves had haphazardly washed her onto Fifth Avenue the way that meteorites fall to earth from another dimension. I always wonder what could have become of her. I’ve never forgotten her, and I carry the terrible guilt that I couldn’t or wouldn’t help her. We kept walking, hurrying in the cold, and a few blocks later we were inside the theater and the woman was left behind, lost in the night. I never imagined then that I could never forget her, that her tears would be an inescapable call, until a couple of years later life would give me the opportunity to respond.
If Willie could manage to get away from work, he would fly and meet me at different points of the country so we could spend one or two nights together. His office kept him tied down and gave him more disappointments than satisfaction. His clients were down-and-out folks who’d been injured on the job. As the number of immigrants from Mexico and Central America, most of them illegal, increased in California, so did the xenophobia. Willie charged a percentage of the compensation he negotiated for his clients, or obtained in a trial, but those sums were getting smaller and smaller, and the cases difficult to win. Fortunately, he didn’t pay rent since his office was housed in our erstwhile brothel in Sausalito. Tong, his accountant, performed juggling acts to cover salaries, bills, taxes, insurance, and banks. This noble Chinese man looked after Willie as he would a foolish son, and he cut so many corners that his frugality had reached the level of legend. Celia swore to us that at night, after we left the office, he pulled the paper cups from the trash, washed them, and put them back in the kitchen. The truth is that without the vigilant eye and the abacus of his accountant, Willie would have gone under.
Tong was almost fifty, but he looked like a young student: slim, small, with a mop of bristly hair, he always dressed in jeans and sneakers. He hadn’t spoken to his wife for twelve years, though they had lived under the same roof; they hadn’t divorced because they would have had to divide their savings. They were also afraid of his mother, a tiny, ferocious old lady who had lived in California for thirty years but believed she was in the south of China. This lady did not speak a word of English; she did all her shopping with merchants in Chinatown, listened to a Cantonese radio station, and read the San Francisco newspaper in Mandarin. Tong and I had in common our affection for Willie; that was a bond despite the fact that neither of us could understand the other’s accent. At the beginning, when I had just come to live with Willie, Tong felt an atavistic distrust of me, which he made obvious at the slightest opportunity.
“What does your accountant have against me?” I asked Willie one day.
“Nothing in particular. All the women in my life have been expensive, and since he pays my bills, he would like for me to live in strict celibacy,” he informed me.
“Tell him that I have supported myself since I was seventeen.”
I suppose that he did, because Tong began to look at me with something like respect. One Saturday he found me in the office scrubbing the bathrooms and vacuuming; at that point his respect was transformed into open admiration.
“You marry this one. She clean,” he counseled Willie in his rather limited English. He was the first to congratulate us when we announced we were going to be married.
This long love affair with Willie has been a gift of the mature years of my life. When I divorced your father, Paula, I prepared myself to go on alone, because I thought it would be next to impossible to find a new life companion. I’m bossy, independent, tribal, and I have unusual work habits that cause me to spend half my available time alone, not speaking, in hiding. Few men can cope with all that. But I don’t want to commit the sin of false modesty, I also have a few virtues. Do you remember any, daughter? Let’s see, let me think. . . . Well, for example, I’m low-maintenance, and I’m healthy and affectionate. You always said that I’m entertaining and that no one would ever get bored with me, but that was then. After I lost you, I also lost my desire to be the life of the party. I’ve become introverted; you wouldn’t recognize me. The miracle was finding—where and when I least expected—the one man who could put up with me. Synchronicity. Luck. Destiny, my grandmother would have said. Willie maintains that we have loved each other in previous lives and will continue to do so in future ones, but you know how the idea of karma and reincarnation frightens me. I’d rather limit this amorous experiment to a single life, for that’s enough. Willie still seems such a stranger to me! In the morning, when he’s shaving and I see him in the mirror, I often ask myself who the devil that large, too white, North American man is, and what are we doing in the same bathroom. When we met we had very little in common; we came from very different backgrounds and we had to invent a language—Spanglish—in order to understand each other. Past, culture, and customs separated us, as well as the inevitable problems of children in a family artificially glued together, but by elbowing our way forward, we succeeded in opening the space that is indispensable for love. It’s true that to make my life in the United States with Willie, I left behind nearly everything I had, and adjusted however I could to the disarray of his existence—but he had to make his own concessions and changes in order for us to be together. From the beginning, he adopted my family and respected my work; he has accompanied me in every way he could; he has backed me up and protected me even from myself; he never criticizes me; he gently laughs at my manias; he doesn’t let me run over him; he doesn’t compete with me, and even in the fights we’ve had he acts with honor. Willie defends his territory, but without aggression; he says he had traced a small chalk circle around him, and within it he is safe from me and my tribe: be careful not to invade it. A great pool of sweetness lies just beneath the surface of his tough appearance; he is as sentimental as a big dog. Without him, I wouldn’t be able to write as much and as calmly as I do because he takes care of all the things that frighten me, from my contracts and our social life to the functioning of all our mysterious household machines. Even though I am still surprised to find him by my side, I have become so used to his massive presence that now I couldn’t live without him. Willie fills the house, fills my life.