Years passed.
In my apartment on Los Feliz in Los Angeles, I was working out when the phone rang. A determinedly cheerful voice announced itself to be that of the famous columnist in San Francisco. I assumed he wanted to interview me for an item he would propose.
After a few moments, not many, of pleasantries exchanged between people who don’t know each other but suspect that one wants something from the other, he said, casually:
“I understand you knew my wife in El Paso.”
My instant surprise was not that he would not have known that, or believed it until now, but that it had taken Albert so long to tell him about the conversation I regretted.
“Who is your wife?” I asked. I wanted to mark time, to discover his real reason for his calling me now.
“Her name was Isabel Franklin before we married, but it might have been another name when you knew her.”
I was being ambushed by this startling call and the reason for it. I needed to be careful of what I said. I needed to hear more.
“My wife—” He was proceeding cautiously, as if he, too, wanted as much unqualified information from me as I now wanted from him. “When I met her—she claimed—she said—she told me she was from New Orleans, her family was from Spain, she was Castilian.”
Then it was true that he—specializing in gossip—had not known for years that those were lies. Out of the mixture of emotions this irony stirred in me, I laughed. “I’m sorry, I—”
“But it is funny,” he said. “My wife’s real name is the one you mentioned to Albert—Alicia Gonzales?—and she’s Mexican. I wouldn’t have cared about who she really is or what her background was. I care only that she lied, and now I want to put an end to her lies.”
“You’re divorcing her.” I understood.
“Yes.”
Was this what the call was about? Grounds for a favorable divorce? Considerations of alimony, property? Was he trying to engage me as a witness to the layers of fraudulence he had believed for years and would now use against her?
“I feel sorry for her,” he said quickly into the telephone. “She doesn’t know who she is.”
She doesn’t know who she is! I needed no rehearsal for what I said:
“When I spoke to Albert, I told him I wasn’t sure we were talking about the same woman. And, Mr. Schwartz, I am sure now that we were not. I confused her with a photograph I saw, only that.” My words would not convince him—there were too many links to the easily available evidence he needed about Alicia Gonzales. That didn’t matter to me. Only this mattered:
I needed to protect her.
She doesn’t know who she is.
I had heard those words before. No, I had heard words like them. Do you know who—? Where? When? Why did the memory of the kept woman of Augusto de Leon sweep into my mind with the insistence of something more, much more, nudging the familiar memory? As if deciding not to complete the smile, or because the memory aroused had turned bitter, her scarlet lips parted … I had felt that insistence before, of something more pushing at the cherished memorized details—an intricately graceful choreography of slight movements … a moment of suspense. Yes, I had been aware of the edge of another memory insinuating itself. Aren’t you ashamed? Of what? When? But those times, that hint of something more—Who do you think—? had withdrawn at the point when, in the memory, I had become aware of Isabel Franklin staring at the object of fascination at which I, too, stared in awe, that time when I, when we—I knew this for both of us—when we had clasped within our memories what we saw as a perfect creation, Marisa Guzman, who had escaped the drabness of the life we must have foreseen as our own; and she had brought, if only briefly into our unhappy lives, moments of beauty and possibility, and more, much more, to be discovered only later, much later. Isabel—no, she had been Alicia Gonzales then—Alicia and I had become allied, an allegiance that had extended, if only in our memories, through the years. In defending her, I had been defending myself.
And suddenly there it was, the full memory of that day, which had lain dormant until now, sprung awake by Schwartz’s words echoing other words, similar words, entirely different words, words always there, waiting to spring at the proper moment.
That day of my sister’s wedding the spell of the kept woman had been shattered as she sat on the drab couch she transformed into a throne. A harsh, square woman invaded the room, too brashly to have stumbled into it by chance. Like an authoritative guard, she held her hands over her ample bosom as she glowered sternly at the seated regal woman.
“Tú, mujer! No te da vergüenza que te vean aquí? Pos, quién te cres? Sabes quién eres?”
For moments, the poised woman seemed neither to see nor to hear the hostile woman who had demanded: “You, woman! Aren’t you ashamed to be seen here? Who do you think you are? Do you know who you are?”
The kept woman rose from the faded couch. She smoothed her dress, running her hands down it to banish any wrinkle that might linger. She stood. She lifted her hat’s veil entirely from her face. And she said—
Words that I heard and pushed away, words I wasn’t sure I heard, words I know I heard, words carried away by the sounds of the wedding party in the adjoining room, words kept away in my mind, words returning only now, allowed with the full force of their implied judgment on Alicia Gonzales—and on me—for all our subterfuges and masquerades, words that would now reverberate with full meaning in my own life.
“I am,” she answered the agitated woman, “Marisa Guzman. You probably know me as the kept woman of Augusto de Leon. No, I am not ashamed of who I am.”