IN MY MOTHER’S EYES, Willie’s best quality is that he is “well trained.” It would never have occurred to her to telephone Tío Ramón at the office to ask him to pick up sardines for dinner, or ask him to take off his shoes, climb on a chair, and go over the top of some piece of furniture with the feather duster, things that Willie does without a fuss. As for me, I think my husband’s most admirable quality is his stubborn optimism. There is no way to sink Willie. I have a few times seen him on his knees, but he gets up, brushes off the dust, claps his hat on his head, and keeps going. He has had so many problems with his children that had I been in his place I would have been incurably depressed. It wasn’t just Jennifer he suffered over; his two sons have lived dramatic lives owing to their addiction to drugs. Willie has always helped them, but with the passing of the years his hopes have been flagging; that is one reason he clings to Jason.
“Why are you the only one who learned something from me? All the others do is ask: give me, give me, give me,” Willie told him once.
“They feel entitled because they’re your sons, but you don’t owe me anything. You aren’t my father but you’ve always looked after me. Why wouldn’t I think what you tell me is important?” Jason replied.
“I’m proud of you,” Willie grunted, disguising a smile.
“That’s not too difficult, Willie, your yardstick isn’t very high.”
Jason adapted to New York, the most entertaining city in the world, where he is successful in his work; he has friends there and makes a living with his writing, and he has found the girl, “as reliable as Willie,” he was looking for. Judy graduated from Harvard, and writes on sex and relationships for the Internet and women’s magazines. She has a Korean mother and North American father; she’s beautiful, intelligent, and as fiercely independent as I am. She can’t tolerate the idea that someone is supporting her, partly because she saw her mother—who barely speaks English—completely subjected by her father, who in due time left her for a younger woman. Judy had cured Jason of his vice of exploiting his drama as a way to seduce women. With the story of the girlfriend who left him for his sister-in-law, Jason had all the dates he wanted; he never lacked for a female shoulder, and a little more, when he sought consolation. With Judy that formula didn’t work; she learned early to make her own way, and she is not a person to complain. She was sympathetic to what he had gone through, but that was not what had attracted her. When Jason met her she had been living with another man for four years, but she wasn’t happy.
“Do you love him?” Jason asked her.
“I don’t know.”
“If it’s that difficult to answer that question, it’s probably because you don’t love him.”
“What do you know? You don’t have any right to say that,” she replied indignantly.
They kissed, but Jason told her that they wouldn’t even touch until she left the fellow because he wasn’t inclined to be dumped another time. In less than a week she left the stupendous apartment where she was living—which seems to be the ultimate test of love in New York—and moved to a dark garret at some distance from the center of the city. A couple of years went by before the relationship jelled because Jason still didn’t trust women in general and marriage in particular, since his parents, stepmothers, and stepfathers had been divorced one, two, even three times. One day Judy told him that she wasn’t going to be made to pay for Sally’s betrayal. That, plus the fact that she loved him even though he was resistant to making a commitment, brought a reaction. Finally he could let down his defenses and laugh about the past. Now from time to time he even communicates with Sally by e-mail. “I’m happy she’s been with Celia for so long, that means that she didn’t leave me on a whim. A lot of people were hurt but at least something good has come out of all this mess,” he told me.
According to Jason, Judy is the most decent person he knows, without the least affectation or malice. She is always surprised by the cruelty of the world because it would never occur to her to harm anyone. She adores animals. When they met she was walking abandoned dogs with the hope that someone would be attracted to them. At the time she was walking Toby, a pathetic animal that looked like a hairless mouse; he urinated uncontrollably and suffered attacks of epilepsy. He would lie on his back with four stiff paws in the air, foaming at the mouth. He was the fourth dog she’d taken care of, but there was no hope that anyone would ever fall in love with such a horror and take him home, so she took him to Jason, to keep him company as he wrote. In the end, they kept poor Toby.
For more than a year, Jason had been working for a men’s magazine, one of those with full-color pages of lascivious girls with open lips and open legs, when he was given an assignment to cover the strange crime of a young man who had killed his best friend in the New Mexico desert, where they’d gone to camp. They were lost, and close to dying when one man asked the other to give him a merciful death, he didn’t want to die of thirst . . . and his friend killed him with his knife. The circumstances were rather murky, but the judge determined that the murderer was temporarily insane from dehydration, and let him go with a minimal penalty. Jason’s assignment was not an easy one because despite the notoriety of the crime; the details had not been spelled out during the trial, and neither the accused nor his friends and family would speak with him. He had to base his report on what he gathered at the site of the crime and the commentaries of rangers and police. Nevertheless, even with so little material, he gave his article the urgency and suspense of a detective novel. A week after the magazine hit the street, a publishing house contracted him to write a book on the case, and paid him an advance unusual for a new author. It was published with the title Journal of the Dead. Soon it fell into the hands of some film producers, and Jason sold the rights to the movie. Overnight he was on his way to becoming the next Truman Capote. He moved easily from journalism to literature, just as I had predicted the first time he showed me one of his stories, when he was eighteen and vegetating in Willie’s house wrapped in a blanket and drinking beer at four in the afternoon. That was the period in which he didn’t want to separate from the family and called our office at mid-afternoon to ask us what time we would be back home, and what were we going to fix him for dinner. Now he is the only one of our brood who doesn’t need any help. With the money from the book and the movie, he decided to buy an apartment in Brooklyn. Judy suggested that they each pay half, and to the stupefaction of Jason and the rest of the family, she wrote a check for six figures. She had worked hard since she was a teenager, and she is frugal and knows how to invest her money. Jason won a prize with that girl, but she doesn’t want to marry him until he stops smoking.