There must have been a cruel trigger hidden away somewhere in Consuela Castanon’s genes. Slim and airy as a small child, she began when she was twelve to put on weight, a very large part of it below her waist. During her years in grade school, she had many friends of both sexes, thanks to her sweet, appeasing ways and her ready smile. When she grew fat, no one baited her. She played at friends’ houses after school, often tumbling around in bodily play with boys and girls alike, as if they were all puppies. She did well in her studies. Everyone spoke of what a happy child she seemed to be. At home she was a good girl.
By the time she went to high school, she was huge. There were always four or five boys who vied for what seemed to them the privilege of turning up, one at a time, at her house, to hit the schoolbooks with her, or to play some board or TV game that was in vogue at the time, or, best of all, to sprawl on the Castanons’ living room sofa beside her, listening to the cool (because so hot) broadcasts of dance music from Havana. Her mother never left Consuela alone in the house with any of these boys. She would let the kids be off together without her for short times, as they whispered over textbooks in Consuela’s room or bobbed their heads and shoulders to the rhythms of salsas and comparsas and sambas and old-time cha-cha-chas pounding in the living room, but she made it a practice to stick her head in a doorway every fifteen minutes or so, making sure that no funny business was going on. The boys never seemed to mind. For her part, Consuela didn’t appear to care that not one of these boys ever asked her to go out on dates—to go to the movies, or to go dancing, or even just to hang out with others after school. Not one of them ever touched her. But they kept trooping to the house, one by one.
By the time she got out of high school, Consuela had stupendous legs and astonishing buttocks. Her whole body was outsized, but the main mass was in her hips and thighs. She was by no means alone in her enormity. Quite often in Key West you could see shapes like hers—whale thighs, elephantine seats. Mostly women, but a few men as well. Blacks, Hispanics, and white North Americans were indiscriminately chosen for this quirk of fate in the Southernmost City. One middle-aged woman could be seen trudging around town, bent forward and leaning her crossed arms and much of the weight of the upper part of her body onto an empty shopping cart with a Winn Dixie label on it, so that her huge legs, swinging in wide half-circles to make their way past each other, could propel at least part of her on wheels to whatever might be her goal. Was something like this to be in Consuela’s future?
Consuela had one redeeming blessing. Her pudgy face was pert and pretty—a soft mouth and a tipped nose and dewy eyes set in a comely dumpling of complexion that seemed to have been thinly glazed with honey. She had dear manners, and she still appeared to be deeply cheerful.
She came from a family of Key West old-timers, and some of her classmates, especially some of the Anglos, thought she was a little snooty about it. Her great-grandfather, Julio Castanon, had been brought to the town from Cuba in 1869 at the age of five, when his father, fleeing with many others from the atrocities of the Spanish volunteers at the time of the Bayamo uprising, moved to the small island town and took work with the newly founded cigar factory known as El Principe de Gales, owned by Vincente Martínez Ybor. Julio later also worked there, but when the factory moved to Tampa after the great fire of 1886, he chose to stay on in Key West, taking work eventually in the turtle soup cannery owned by the esteemed French chef Monsieur A. Granday.
The Castanon family, poor at that time, were stubbornly proud of their culture. Consuela’s grandfather, Julio’s son Limbano, used to tell her about having gone as a boy to the all-Cuban school in the upstairs rooms of the ornate San Carlos Cuban institute on Duval Street by day and being taken to Cuban musicals downstairs in the evenings. This Limbano Castanon grew into a hulk with unforgiving barracuda eyes and a mismatched bite that gave him the chin of a bully, and he was, besides, shrewd and greedy, and the small bakery he set up soon brought in such good money that he was suspected of running some dubious secondary enterprise under the counter.
A result of his prosperity, in any case, was that his son, Jacinto Castanon, Consuela’s father, inherited the bakery and came to own a big house on Von Phister, which had a bright Florida room rimmed with crinkled-glass jalousies. In the yard, a huge satellite dish. Under a carport’s aqua-colored metal roof, a black Lincoln Continental, with no-see-in windows. Jacinto Castanon was a wiry Cuban-American Jack Sprat, and his wife could eat no beans—but she did very well, thank you, on surfeits of lechón asado and boliche and picadillo, and hills of yellow rice, and bounties of fried plantain, and parades of long loaves of soft Cuban bread fresh from her husband’s bakery. Juliana Castanon was a very large woman, though not nearly so monstrous as her daughter became. No one could say what had happened in Key West in recent decades to cause such a difference. Could something have modified the fundamental code of the DNA of certain Key West mothers over the years? A sinister change, perhaps, in the chemistry of the water table, lying so close under the ground, or a mutated microbe carried by mosquitoes, or reckless new food additives on the shelves at the White Street Fausto’s, or even (Santa Maria del Mar forbid!) a voodoo spell—what was it that caused certain sons and daughters who were predisposed to heavy weight to have so much vaster underpinnings than their fat mothers? No one knew.
Since Consuela was the Castanons’ only child, Jacinto wanted her, after she graduated from high school, to join him at the bakery. She declined. Quite likely she had become self-conscious about her figure and felt that it would be unseemly for her to be associated professionally with so many complex carbohydrates. She studied shorthand and typing, and she got a job as receptionist and stenographer for Torres & Figueredo, attorneys, with an office on Whitehead. After three years of this she still lived at home, but she had kept many casual girlfriends, and she came and went, day and night, without undue governance by her parents. She had no close men friends, but in the bright front room at Torres & Figueredo, clearly visible from the street through a large picture window, with the surprising parts of her anatomy tucked discreetly out of view behind the reception desk’s splendid expanse of Philippine mahogany, and actively bringing into play her dimpled face and her sweetheart manner, she was soon, the law partners felt, attracting new male walk-in clients of sorts they had not previously had.
One day, one of them, an Anglo, a young man with caramel eyes like a spaniel’s, a nose worth calling a nose, and healthy tanned cheeks, dressed in a clean plain blue shirt and neatly ironed chinos, looking to Consuela as fresh as a newly baked croissant from The Patisserie, came swaying up to the reception desk and said in a deep, sonorous voice, “My name is Tommy Vance.” Then, instead of saying, as most clients did, “I have an appointment” or “I would like an appointment” with Mr. Torres or Mr. Figueredo, he cleared his throat and, blinking slightly as if looking into bright sunlight, said, “Will you marry me?”
Consuela said, sweetly, “Did you want to see Mr. Torres or Mr. Figueredo, or would you prefer it if I called the police?”
Mr. Vance laughed a charming laugh. “Forgive me,” he said. “It just popped out. I meant to say—well, I meant what I said, but yes, I would like to see one of the gentlemen. I had to have an excuse to come in, you know.”
Consuela ran her flat left hand over the appointment pad on the desk, as if to wipe out all possibility of there being an open hour for such an impertinent person as this, but finally she poised the tip of the index finger of that hand on one of the ruled lines on the right-hand page. “Mr. Torres could see you on Thursday morning at eleven o’clock.”
“You have the most beautiful hands,” Mr. Vance said.
Consuela tucked both her hands on her lap, under the mahogany desktop. “Do you want me to dial nine one one?” she asked. “They’d be here in two minutes.”
“Yes, I’d like the appointment,” Mr. Vance said. “Definitely. And no, you needn’t call for help. I’m on your side.”
Consuela had to bring her right hand up to write in the name.
“Ah, Consuela!” Mr. Vance said, his eyes drinking in the fluid movements of her hand. He must have picked up her name from the brass nameplate beside the appointment book on the desk.
“Thursday. Eleven o’clock,” Consuela said, as severely as she could. But she was so used to being polite that she couldn’t help smiling as she said this.
“Sí, hasta jueves, las once,” Mr. Vance said. “I’ve started studying Spanish because of you. Oh, I’ve been walking past this window”—he pointed a thumb at it over his shoulder—“for over a month now. Haven’t you ever noticed me?”
“We don’t speak Spanish all that much at my house,” Consuela said. “We’ve been in Key West for five generations.”
“Ah, well. I wasn’t doing very well in my lessons,” Mr. Vance said.
“Thursday. Eleven,” Consuela said.
“Don’t worry. I’ll remember,” Mr. Vance said.
At home that evening, at supper, Consuela was unusually quiet. She ate hungrily, with a bowed head. Dark shadows, pools of her mood, had gathered under her eyes. Her mother chattered as always, this time about the developer who planned to put in two hundred units up by the airport, he was going to fill the wetlands with a bunch of marl, the crooks on the Commission were going to let him, and the worst crook of all, sad to say, was Agustín Barranco, “your friend, Jacinto”—but then suddenly she broke off and asked Consuela whether something was the matter.
“No, Mom,” Consuela said. “I’m fine.”
“You look like you were run over by a ten-ton truck.”
“Leave her alone,” Consuela’s father said.
“I was thinking,” Consuela said, “about a man who came in the office today. He was so funny.”
“So funny you look like you’re going to cry,” Consuela’s mother said. “He must have been a howl.”
“Come on, Jula,” Consuela’s father said. “Lay off her.”
“Who’s this man, anyway?” Mrs. Castanon said. “Tell us about him.”
“He just came in for an appointment,” Consuela said. “What’s to tell?”
“So you started laughing when he asked for an appointment, he was so funny?”
Consuela threw her napkin down on the table. “Why do you always do this to me?” she said, and she got up and left the dining room.
“I suppose you’re happy now,” Jacinto Castanon said to his wife.
“I think she’s getting her period,” Juliana said.
The next day, Tuesday, twice, once in the morning and once in the afternoon, Consuela thought she might have seen Mr. Vance walking past the picture window, looking in. She couldn’t be sure. Both times she was dealing with a client, and she got only a glimpse of the person, whoever it was. It could have been he. She didn’t like the feeling that she might have just imagined seeing him.
Then on Wednesday, in midafternoon, here he was in the flesh. This time she did see him pause at the window, looking in, and then he walked in the door. “Buenos días,” he said. “Oh, excuse me. Aquí se habla inglés. Good day.”
“Good afternoon, Mr. Vance,” she said.
“You remembered my name,” he said.
“I’m good at names,” she said. “I remember them all.”
“I have to bother you with two questions,” he said.
“I’m here to answer questions—sensible ones.”
“First question. Is my appointment still on?”
Consuela studied the appointment book for quite a while, running her eyes up and down several pages, seeming to have no recollection whatsoever of an appointment for Mr. Vance. “Oh, yes, here we are,” she finally said. “Eleven o’clock tomorrow. Did you want to cancel?”
“The second question,” he said, not answering hers, “is the same as the other day. I want to ask for your beautiful hand. Really for both of your hands. I’d like to marry them both.”
Consuela, apparently thinking it was time for decisive action, stood up, and turning her back to go—for no particular reason—to the file cabinets against the inner wall of the waiting room, she exposed to Mr. Vance’s gaze the entirety of her bad news. This would surely shut him up.
“My God!” she heard him say. Then, after a pause, softly, “Please say you’ll marry me.”
She turned toward him with hot cheeks.
He spoke before she could. “You thought I was teasing,” he gently said. “I’m very clumsy. I’m sorry.”
Consuela collapsed into her desk chair.
“I meant it, I mean it. I truly do. I’m sorry if I gave the wrong impression. Please just think about it. I’ll be in in the morning.”
“I don’t know you from Adam,” Consuela said. “Would you kindly get out of my hair?”
“Eleven o’clock,” Mr. Vance said. And slipped out.
A little later, Mr. Figueredo poked his head out from his office door and asked Consuela to come in to take a couple of letters. She picked up her steno pad and went into his room, the walls of which were lined with framed photos of Mr. Figueredo standing in front of various charter-boat racks on the dock at Garrison Bight, on the display hooks of which were hung arrays—unimpressive, on the whole—of amberjack and grouper and dolphin and king mackerel. It seemed he always had his picture taken with his catch, no matter how meager. In his early forties, Mr. Figueredo already had some gray hair, frosty in the sideburns on his sallow cheeks. He suffered from piles. He had a thin wife and was respectful of Consuela. (Mr. Torres, on the other hand, had a fat wife and was inclined to pat or even massage Consuela in a more or less fatherly way now and again on her shoulder, or bare arm, or in the small, if it could be called that, of her back.)
“You’ve been crying,” Mr. Figueredo said.
She shook her head to deny it, just as new tears brimmed. Mr. Figueredo reached in a drawer and pulled out a Kleenex and handed it to her. She blew her nose.
“Trouble at home?” Mr. Figueredo asked.
“No. It’s right here,” Consuela said. She needed another Kleenex. Mr. Figueredo handed her the box.
“We loading too much on you?”
“No. It’s my fault. It’s nothing.”
“Nothing doesn’t make a person cry.”
“It’s not important,” Consuela said. “It’s just that my files are such a mess. It takes me hours to find anything. It’s all my fault. Please. Let’s not talk about it. Let’s do the letters.”
Mr. Figueredo began, in a kindly voice, to dictate.
With her steno pad open on her lap, her pencil idle, Consuela suddenly cried out, “I hate myself.”
“Come on,” Mr. Figueredo said. “You’ve got no reason.”
“Look at me!” Consuela shouted. “Just look at me for once.”
Mr. Figueredo was obviously embarrassed. “Come on, now. That’s enough. Take this down, please.”
“You’re like everybody else,” she said. “You don’t realize.”
In a quiet voice, insistent, he resumed sounding out a letter to a client. Consuela picked up her pencil.
When Juliana Castanon woke her daughter at six-thirty the next morning, Thursday, Consuela moaned, sat up in bed, and said, “I don’t feel good. I’m not going in today.”
“I thought this was coming on,” Mrs. Castanon said.
“What are you talking about, this was coming on?”
“Honey, I’m your mother. Remember? I know some things.”
Consuela, not finding an answer, sagged back down on the bed.
Her mother said, “You want me to call in to the office for you?”
“Okay,” Consuela groaned, turning her face to the wall. “You could call Mr. Figueredo at home. About seven-thirty.”
But twenty minutes later, before that time, Consuela appeared in the kitchen in a new yellow jumpsuit she’d bought the previous Saturday at J. Byron. “Changed my mind,” she said cheerfully to her mother. “They get confused when I’m not there.”
“You look like a four-alarm fire,” Mrs. Castanon said.
“So call the fire company,” Consuela said.
In two hours, between eight-thirty, when Consuela showed up at the office, and ten-thirty, she made at least a dozen bad mistakes. She dropped two clients from the wire, instead of putting them on hold; she broke Mr. Torres’s favorite ashtray; she couldn’t for the life of her find the message about a discovery hearing that Judge Blanford had given her on the phone for Mr. Figueredo the previous afternoon; she put a call for Mr. Torres on Mr. Figueredo’s line; she loaded the wrong paper in the copying machine and jammed the feeder….
At ten-thirty, she suddenly became efficient. That was when Mr. Vance walked in.
“Your appointment isn’t until eleven,” she said.
“I am aware,” he said. “Yesterday you told me you didn’t know me from Adam. I thought we should get acquainted. Do you mind if I tell you a little about myself?”
A little? He talked for over half an hour. He had a pleasing voice, deep and orotund. His puppy eyes flashed with the kind of deferential merriment that goes with a wagging tail. This was a person who was used to being pleasing. Somewhere in the torrent of his words he gave notice that he was twenty-six years old, and he asked Consuela how old she was. She wondered out loud if that was any concern of his, and he said he supposed he would have to guess. Twenty-one? Consuela was so used to being sweet to clients that she automatically smiled. Mr. Vance, apparently not bothering to parse the smile, went right on talking.
He presented himself as the hero of a picaresque tale. The end of the story came first: he had been in Key West three months. He seemed to have a bank account somewhere. There had been a past on a sailboat; he told about a fierce storm. In Boston, he had sat in a box at Fenway Park and seen Wade Boggs go five for five. He had watched bears fish for salmon in a river in Alaska. At college—he did not name the institution—he majored in political science; he had dreamed back then of running for the Senate someday. But since then, candidates’ negative commercials on TV had soured that dream. He liked to read books by Tony Hillerman, Joseph Conrad, Robert Stone, Robert B. Parker, and George Eliot. The closest he had come to a religious experience was among the sequoias in Muir Woods, in California. His favorite exercise was riding a bike with the ancient big bands—Benny Goodman, Casa Loma, Paul Whiteman—giving him energy on a Walkman. He loved heights, and for the kicks of it he had taken a job for a couple of weeks as a riveters’ helper up in the sky, on the beams of a skyscraper a-building in Dallas, along with some Native Americans who had the gift of perfect balance; they tossed hot rivets around as if playing catch on a diamond on terra firma. He liked cross-country skiing, hated downhill. Once, he won eleven hundred dollars in a poker game.
He said he didn’t want Consuela to get the wrong idea. He was a serious person. He cared about clean air. He had been shocked to hear about the mysteriously high incidence of multiple sclerosis among the nurses at the Key West hospital. He had volunteered to work with the homeless in Denver. He had…
Consuela wondered, as he babbled on: Was fibbing his game? Was he inventing a jumpy, harum-scarum life just for the fun of it? Why didn’t he talk about people? Didn’t he have any friends?
What he said next was startling, for he seemed to have read her mind. “I’ve been in love three times,” he said. “Once was when I was sixteen. Once in college; that lasted three years. And then there was a gal I really loved in Cleveland. Oh, Lord! Did I say three times? Because I’m in love again now, you know. You must have realized that, Consuela.”
He tried to cover what he’d just blurted out by telling a little about each of those other three, but Consuela was suddenly distracted by a dizzying conviction, and she hardly heard what he was saying. Her heart had begun to pound. She had seen those three all too clearly in the eye of her imagination. Beaming round faces, firmly packed limbs, full bosoms, prosperous waists, swooping hips. Dimples in all sorts of odd places—elbows, cheeks, chins, knuckles. Those three were huge. She was sure of it. And she was very angry.
She was not angry at Mr. Vance. She was angry at herself, for imagining such things. This entire loop about fat women—had her mind played her a nasty trick? Here was where she realized how sensitive Mr. Vance was, because, apparently having picked up vibrations of this anger of hers, which she had tried hard to hide, he immediately backed away and changed the subject. He began to tell about a canoe trip on the Penobscot River in Maine. How bad the mosquitoes were.
Just then Consuela looked at the little clock on her desk and saw that it was ten minutes past eleven. She had been supposed to call Mr. Torres to announce Mr. Vance as soon as he arrived, or at five minutes before the hour if he came in early, in order that Mr. Torres could wind up his business with the previous client and keep things going on time. Hastily, feeling guilty, she buzzed him and said, “Mr. Vance has just come in.”
Soon Mr. Torres stepped out of his office with the woman he’d been seeing—a messy divorce case—and after ardently shaking her hand with both of his, he greeted Mr. Vance.
As Mr. Vance went by Consuela’s desk, he said, “Thank you for your patience, Miss Castanon.”
“My pleasure,” Consuela said, but this time she didn’t smile.
Less than ten minutes later, Mr. Torres came out again with Mr. Vance. Mr. Torres said, “The gentleman wants to pay cash. The usual, Consuela.”
“That will be twenty-five dollars, Mr. Vance,” Consuela said, as Mr. Torres went back into his office.
Mr. Vance cheerfully took out his wallet and handed the money to Consuela. “I’ll be by again,” he said.
“Did you want another appointment?”
“Yes, with you,” he said, and before she could think what to say, he had turned and left.
That afternoon, taking some letters in to Mr. Torres, she stood by his desk and asked him what kind of day it had been. Anything interesting? He started talking about Mrs. Carrero’s divorce case. Consuela picked up some papers from Mr. Torres’s out basket. She asked, offhand, what the young man who came in after Mrs. Carrero—was his name Mr. Vance?—had wanted.
“Oh, that was ridiculous,” Mr. Torres said. “He wanted to know what you had to do in Key West if you wanted to get married—you know, did you have to get a Wassermann test, where should you go for a license. So on. I told him he didn’t need a lawyer, he could have just called up the city.”
“That was dumb of him,” Consuela said.
“I liked the guy,” Mr. Torres said. “He was, you know, kind of wet behind the ears, but—I don’t know—sincere.”
“He seemed polite enough,” Consuela said. “But still, twenty-five bucks. That was kind of dumb, wasn’t it?”
“As a matter of fact,” Mr. Torres said, with a teasing look in his eyes, “he complimented me on our receptionist. How’s that for dumb?”
“That really was,” Consuela said. Feeling a blush rise in her cheeks, she wheeled abruptly to leave, caught the sole of her new yellow wedgies in the shag carpet, lost her footing for a second, and dropped Mr. Torres’s papers all over the place. “Oh, man,” she said, going down on her hands and knees to gather them up. “Who’s dumb is me.”
Life speeded up for Consuela Castanon in the next few days. At dinner at home, on the following Friday evening, just over a week later, she suddenly said, looking radiant, “Guess what.”
“You got a raise,” her father said in a reflexive response to her happy look.
“From those two tightwads?” Mrs. Castanon said.
“It’s not that,” Consuela said.
“So?” her mother said.
Consuela looked first at her father and then at her mother, and softly she said, dropping her eyes to the plate in front of her, “I’m engaged to be married.”
This announcement was greeted by a long, long, long silence from both parents.
At last Consuela’s mother said, “You said yes and you never brought this person around to the house? I can’t believe what I just heard.”
Her father said, “Isn’t this a bit sudden?”
“First of all,” Consuela said, “I am twenty-one years old. I’m an adult, right?”
“Who is this person?” her mother asked.
She told her mother and father all about her Tommy. Everything. Even about being way up there on a bare girder in the Dallas skyscraper on a windy day with the American Indian workmen firing white-hot rivets at each other as fast as arrows. The more she said, the more appalled her mother became. Consuela could see that her father was gradually easing around to her side, but her mother began to break in on her with wild shouts.
“Only been in Key West three months, this drifter?”…“No job?”…“You never laid eyes on an ID, credit card, nothing like that—how could you know his name is even real?”…“He’s so sweet and sensitive, how come he don’t mention the name of his bank?”…“Is he some kind of Unitarian or Holy Roller, or you don’t know if he even believes in God?”…“He says college, but you have no idea which one?”…“What can this no-job know about the way we live?”
Finally a question that Consuela’s mother asked broke it for her. “Has this creep been in your great big pants? Is that what this is all about?”
Consuela slammed her fist down on the tablecloth, making all the plates jump, and she rose to leave, knocking her chair over backward.
“Jesus, Juliana!” Consuela’s father said.
Consuela was out the door when her mother shouted, twice, “I forbid it! I forbid it!”
Consuela’s face appeared in the doorway. “Just try,” she said.
The sensitive point was this: Tommy had. Been in her pants. Or at least, one of his hands had.
The week had gone by in a torrent of breathtaking surprises. On the Friday, the day after his appointment with Mr. Torres, Tommy had come in the office “just to talk—to correct some impressions I maybe gave you yesterday.” Consuela felt confused and irritable while he was there—what would Mr. Torres or Mr. Figueredo think if one of them saw him hanging around?—but after he left she thought about the nice round tones of his voice and about a zany impulse she had had, and had stifled, thank God, to say something kind, something comforting. His eyes were so sad. For a few moments she got the shivers.
All day on that Saturday Consuela mooned away the hours, lying on her bed reading trash and listening to radio music from Havana, the way she used to do when she was in high school. By suppertime she was in a foul mood. Her father seemed especially annoying at the table, making eating noises and talking too loud with her mother. She was about to get up and call her girlfriend Jennifer, to see if she wanted to go to a movie, when the phone rang. She ran to answer it. “Tommy here,” the voice said. He asked her to come over awhile. He was staying at The Samoa, he said, a little guesthouse at 1203 Southard, room 4-A, just walk right up, wouldn’t it be nice to sit around and chew the rag awhile? Consuela hung up and told her mother it had been her friend Jennifer, she was going over to see her, maybe they’d take in a movie, she wouldn’t be late, could she have the car?
Tommy’s small room was tidy; all his belongings that showed were lined up as neat as the keys of a piano. He sat on his bed, she on the one chair in the room. They just talked. Tommy ate her up with his eyes. At about eleven she said she thought she’d better be going. He didn’t offer to take her to the car.
That got to be the routine in the evenings. He made it clear that she should come over after dark. When she reached his room on Monday evening, he was already sitting on the bed, and he patted the mattress beside him, and quite naturally she sat down there. He held her hand and made love to her with words. She had never had such nice things said to her by anyone. He said she seemed to him an angel of curving lines. She was like the pink full moon at first rising—big coming up over the horizon. Her hand was as soft as silk from Siam. Her legs were made of whipped cream.
On Tuesday evening, at about ten o’clock, he kissed her. It was the first time she had ever been kissed in earnest by a man. He was very gentle. Both his hands were moving around on her, more or less measuring her. Yes, yes, she said, she would marry him. This was when his left hand wriggled under the belt of her slacks and caressed her lower abdomen. She put a hand on top of his. Was this to stop him or encourage him? She had no way of knowing.
He withdrew his hand and said he would get a license the next morning. She asked, shouldn’t she go with him? No, no, it wouldn’t be necessary. Mr. Torres had explained it all. Key West, he’d said, likes to make everything real easy for people. One member of the couple had to fill out the form and give them a check for fifty-two fifty. And that would be it. “And then, Consuela, they’ll give me my ticket to heaven.”
And the very next evening, Wednesday, there he was, sitting on his bed, waving a piece of paper at her when she came in the door. The license!
In her excitement she wanted to make all sorts of plans. She said, “Shouldn’t we go out someplace and celebrate? I’ve never even tasted champagne. Let’s go out and have some champagne!”
And she asked, “Will you come and meet my mom and pop? I’ve told them about you, and they’re dying to meet you.”
She also suggested, “We’ve got to look for a place to live. I have a friend who just got a job at Knight Realty; she could help us find something.”
She said, “I think we should have a two-ring ceremony. Wouldn’t you like to wear a ring too, Tommy?”
His answers seemed agreeable. He said, “Champagne gives me a headache, but sure thing, we should have some fun” and “I’d love to know your parents” and “I can afford the rent, no problem” and “Hey, two rings would be great” and…
But something was missing. He never said, When? When would you like to do this or that? When would be convenient?
She noticed this, but she didn’t press him, because she was drunk. She was drunk on his sweetness to her, with the joy and abandon and failure of doubt of someone who’d never had an intoxicating drink before. And then he said, “The nicest way to celebrate I could think of would be just to lie down here beside you. Just for a minute. I wouldn’t take any liberties. Just to be beside my fiancée.”
He stood up to put the license on top of the bureau, and she stretched out on the bed to please him. He lay beside her. He kissed her, and his hands moved around on her, very tenderly, indeed taking no liberties, not reaching under her slacks this time. Again it was as if his hands were taking measurements of various parts of her. He groaned in delight when they calipered her right thigh. Again he groaned as his gentle fingertips took the dimensions of her left breast. “You’re from a painting by Rubens!” he exclaimed. “I would love to see you in the altogether.” Then he kissed her some more. He stopped just as she felt she was reaching the moment of abandon. She was dizzy when she got up. Later, she couldn’t remember how she got home.
The next day she was bad-tempered. She sat at her desk thinking about things. About how she had started living two lives. One was her life at large. In it, she moved around freely, walked to the office in the mornings, over Von Phister to Reynolds, up to United, across to Whitehead, and five blocks up to the office, a good stroll, a bonfire of calories. Then the office. Tommy always called once a day, at precisely eleven-fifteen—between office appointments. Lunch wherever she wanted, sometimes with Jennifer, or Alejandra, or Polly. A little sleepy at her desk in the afternoon. Home on foot by suppertime. A quarrel with her mother: “Where is this Adonis?”…“I think this lover is in your head; you made the whole thing up, right?”…“Don’t you think you better have a talk with Father Valdéz?” And then, in the evening…
Then, in the evening, the other life. In a box. The room was like a box. She was like a pet rabbit in a box. Perhaps she shouldn’t think rabbit. A pet something. The box was nice enough. On two walls, old engravings of the Custom House and the ruins of the East Martello Tower. Silly lace curtains at a window that looked out on a kind of wall of thick foliage; no one could peep in. A teakwood chiffonier. And—well, she wasn’t sure she wanted to think about the bed. Anyway, a chenille spread. Good springs, oh…Always arrive after dark. Why? Enter the box. Be admired in the box, be praised, kissed, touched by trembling hands. Leave the box, finally, and go back in a thick fog of a baffling mood to the other life, the life at large.
Thinking these thoughts, she got a sliding feeling in her stomach, a feeling of fear mixed with pleasure. She suddenly realized how much she loved being loved by her mother, all the hullaballoo and hollering was really love, after all—and this, too, frightened her. She wanted to tell Jennifer she was going to get married. She wanted to announce her engagement in the Citizen. She wanted to taste champagne, somewhere outside the box. She wanted a wedding at the church, Father Valdéz, organ music. She wanted to live one life, not two.
That night she lost her virginity. Lost? She gave it away. To begin with, soon after she arrived in the box of wild desire, she freely offered to let Tommy see her as a figure in a Rubens painting, in the altogether. She took her clothes off. She stood there. He asked her to turn around, and she revolved. He groaned and said, “You are the Goddess of Plenty, and I’ll worship you for the rest of my life.” After that, he invited her to recline. He used that word. She got on the bed, naked. He sat on the mattress beside her, fully clothed. “Imagine that we’re in a painting. We’re on the bank of a stream, near some woods, and we’re having a fête champêtre.” She didn’t know exactly what that meant; it frightened her a little, but the last word sounded a bit like champagne, so she thought it was probably all right. He gazed at her awhile; she felt as if his glances were considering her—delightedly weighing every cubic inch of her. Then he, too, removed his clothes and reclined beside her. There seemed to be a good deal of kissing of new sorts to be got through, and of sweet measuring of everything with loving hands, until she was almost out of her mind, and then, quickly, it was done. She had given him her gift. He was very dear, and she wept for joy.
Her happiness the next morning was on the edge of being unbearable. She sat at her desk. She felt as if she were listening to Radio Havana; she wanted to cha-cha-cha on top of her desk. Now she had the confidence to tell Tommy that they were going to have to have a life at large. They were going to live one life. They were going to leave the box and go out into the world together. Her family couldn’t help liking him; he would look at her mother with his petitioning eyes, and she’d fall for him, she’d stop complaining. They’d find a place to live. Maybe she could persuade Tommy to go and have a talk with Father Valdéz. First of all, of course, they would set a date.
For a while she thought she would announce these and other upcoming changes in their lives right that morning, when he made his eleven-fifteen call; then she decided to wait and break it to him that evening. She wanted to look him in the eye. She had absolutely no doubt of her power. He would helplessly agree.
When she entered the box that night, Tommy was sitting on the bed. She sat down in the chair against the wall, facing him.
“Hey, sweetheart,” Tommy said, patting the mattress. “Over here.”
“Just a minute. I want to talk a minute.”
All afternoon she had rehearsed what she would say. She had been sure of her words, which were full of love and persuasion and consequence. But now she brought herself up sharp. She was amazed at what she heard herself say.
“I have a present for you.”
“All right!” he said.
“Want to know what it is?”
“Do I have to unwrap it? I’d like to unwrap you!”
She felt as if she hadn’t heard him. “My present is…” She had to breathe. “I’m going to reduce.”
“You’re…?”
“I know I can. I know it’s just eating, that’s all it is. You’ll see. I’ll get completely down to normal. Tommy, Tommy, I’ll do it for you.”
Something peculiar was happening to Tommy’s face.
“I’ve wanted to do this for years. Years and years. You’ve given me what I’ve needed all along, in order to know I can do it.”
Then, looking at him, she understood that she was angry. This was something like the anger she’d felt the other day in the office, when he talked about his three loves. His other three loves. But now she was angry not at herself but at him.
“Usually when a person gets a present he says, ‘Thank you.’ ”
“Hey, come on over here.” He was patting the bed again.
It took a while for her to realize she couldn’t help herself. She got up and sat on the bed beside him. She felt her anger swerve heavily toward herself.
This time he helped her undress. The same things happened as before, yet they were not the same. His spanning fingers had no tremor. His kisses didn’t reach into her being. She felt, in what seemed to be love’s labor, the force of some awful mistake she couldn’t name….
At her desk, the next morning, a jumble of thoughts raced through her mind. She was still excited by what she had offered to Tommy. She wanted to talk with him about it some more. There was a puzzle wrapped up in this desire; she would unravel that later. There had been a hush, a silence, when they got dressed afterward last night, a feeling of waiting for suitable words. She’d had none. She hovered, on this account, now, on the edge of some kind of shame; the embers of her exhilarating anger had gone to ash. She thought a little about how happy she’d been yesterday, polishing the speech she planned to make. Her feeling, all day, of so much strength.
This morning was a hectic one. There seemed to be more phone calls than usual. Numerous appointments. Both partners called on her to take letters. She did her work passably well. She felt hurried, though, typing the letters, with so much on her mind.
A client walked in for an appointment with Mr. Figueredo. She glanced at the digital clock on her desk. Shocked by it, she quickly checked her wristwatch. Yes, it was eleven twenty-seven.
He hadn’t called. He must have been delayed somehow. There was no phone in his room; he called from a pay booth; maybe someone had been making a long call in the booth.
She tried to go back to typing. She made a slew of typos. Two more clients came in at noon. She didn’t dare go out to lunch, in case he should call.
She survived the longest afternoon of her life. Mr. Figueredo and Mr. Torres left together at a few minutes past five. She locked up, and instead of going home, she walked all the way across Fleming to The Samoa. In broad daylight. She made her way up the stairs to 4-A. The door was locked. She went down to the entrance hall and pressed the button with the little sign below it: RING FOR MANAGER.
After a few minutes a woman in a baggy cotton dress and bedroom slippers came down from the second floor. “Can I help you?” she said.
“Do you know when Mr. Vance will be back? Did he say when he’d be back?”
The woman tugged at her messy hair. “Oh, honey,” she said, “he checked out. Early this morning.”
Consuela’s heart jumped. How wonderful! Her gift, her promise, had brought him around. He had known, without her even telling him, that it was time to leave the box. To have a single life with her out in the world. “You see,” she said to the lady manager, “we’re engaged. He knew we couldn’t both live in 4-A. It’s very nice, but two of us…Myself, I was thinking of, you know, one of those low-cost apartments in the Truman Annex? Did you get to know him at all?”
The woman shrugged in her ill-fitting dress.
Consuela felt a moment’s hesitation. “He’s a very unusual person,” she said.
“I guess you could say that again,” the woman said.
There was something not quite right in the sound of these words as they came out of the lady manager’s mouth, and Consuela wasn’t sure she liked the way the woman was looking at her, with her head canted to one side. She heard herself asking, a little too loud, “Just what did you mean by that?”
The woman shrugged again and looked at the wall. “Didn’t mean anything special, dear,” she said. Then she looked at Consuela and said in a rather quarrelsome way, “Your boyfriend checked out. He paid his bill and went, you know. I didn’t mean to offend you.”