“Why would I want one?”
I wasn’t sure.
She seemed to be always forgetting her iPhone somewhere. At Tim Hortons, at the library, at Lily’s. Thank god for Apple’s Find My Phone app. I also added her name to my bank and credit card accounts. I thought it would make her feel more independent. Little did I know. I offered to pay for driving lessons—one of us should know how, I joked—with the promise I’d buy us a car if she got her licence. I even asked her if there was a university course or other class she’d always wanted to take but had never had the chance. Now was her chance. I wasn’t really sure she was allowed to do that on her visitor’s visa, but school turned out to be a bridge I didn’t have to cross.
“No,” she said. “I’m fine.”
So every day I went off to work to a job that bored and now sometimes annoyed me, for both its big-picture irrelevance to real life and also for the small-picture inconvenience that being at work meant I couldn’t be with Mariela all the time. I’d have quit if I didn’t know how important having a job was. Once Mariela got permanent residency, I’d quit. And do? I’d figure that out when the time came.
How did Mariela spend her days? I no longer knew. I knew about her nights. Sort of. She often woke with a scream or a shout in the middle of the night. A nightmare, she would tell me. What about, I would ask? Nothing, she would reply. Or, I don’t remember. She would slowly fall back to sleep entangled in me. In the morning, I’d have to disentangle, trying not to wake her. She would still be asleep when I left for work. So what did she do after that? At first, she would tell me about her adventures. About the day she’d spent at the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic, for example, learning about the infamous Halifax Explosion, which had flattened much of the city way back in 1917.
“Right where we’re standing,” she marvelled. “The biggest man-made explosion before the atomic bomb,” she quoted from the brochure like the tour guide she had been. “We would have been killed.” About her afternoon adventure walking the aisles at our local Superstore, counting the different brands of toilet paper. “Why so many different kinds of everything?”
“Wait until I take you to Costco,” I said. I’d never been, but I’d read about it. If I remembered correctly, you had to be a member to shop there. And besides, we’d need a car. We never went. We did take a bus to Value Village once. Mariela created spiffy new wardrobes for both of us for almost no money in just an hour of rummaging through the racks of used clothing. She would have looked good in anything, of course, but even I began to get compliments from the women at work.
One night, I arrived home from work to find all the downstairs furniture rearranged. “Do you like it?” she asked. I didn’t. I thought the couch had looked perfectly fine, perfect in fact, in front of the large living room bay window where it had sat since I was a child. Mariela had relocated it to a side wall and replaced it with two wingback chairs facing each other from either side of the window.
“It blocked the view,” she said of the couch. “Now we can sit after dinner and talk and have our coffee and watch the world go by. Do you like it?”
I still didn’t. I didn’t say that, of course. I didn’t say anything, which Mariela rightly took as disapproval. That was the beginning of our first fight as a married couple. It wasn’t a fight exactly. Neither of us was good at fighting. We stewed, we simmered. We didn’t talk to one another for a week. I knew I should tell her I was sorry, that what she had done with the furniture improved both the look and also the functionality of the living room, which it did, and why the fuck should I care anyway, and I would try to be more open in the future because my house really was her house, and blah blah bah.
I was not good at saying I was sorry. Living alone—or with my demented father—I’d never had to utter the words aloud. So I decided to wait Mariela out. I would not apologize, but I would not escalate either. Pretend nothing had changed. A few nights into our radio-silence non-communication, I happened to mention that Glee—a TV series, a musical comedy about an American high school choir full of singing, dancing, and social issues—which I knew Mariela liked was airing that evening. “Want to watch it with me,” I said. We did. But we didn’t talk, just watched, companionably.
The next day, Mariela told me David had emailed her and asked to be remembered to me.
“Tell him ‘Hi’ back,” I responded.
And so it went, chipping away at the silences, talking about nothing and then something, and then something else, none of which had anything to with the furniture, which was now just there. One night, after dinner, I sat in the wingback chair, looking out at the street. Mariela brought me coffee, sat opposite me, stared out the window. Our first official married fight was over.
Looking back, however, I think that was when she stopped telling me about her days.
****
Lily called while Mariela and I were in the middle of dinner. “I need to talk to you,” she said. “Just you. Not her.” Not her? When I arrived at Lily’s house, Umberto was not there.
“Gone out,” Lily said flatly, handing me a glass of white wine and filling her own, which, I gathered from the slur in her voice, was not her first, nor even perhaps her second.
“Did you know?”
“Know what?”
“What was going on with them? Between them?”
“What do you mean?”
“What do I mean, ‘what do you mean’? You know what I mean.” I didn’t. “Between Umberto and your little chica.”
Umberto? Mariela? I tried to knit all the fragments of my own unanswered questions and disconnected, disconcerting thoughts into a single, logical fact-string, allow the spinning tumblers of my doubts to lock into place. They didn’t. Or did they? These days, whenever I asked Mariela what she’d been up to, she played blasé. Or perhaps evasive? “The usual.” “Nothing much.” “What I told you yesterday.” “Why do you keep asking when you already know the answer is still nothing?”
Because I love you and want to know about everything you do every day. I did not say that. I did not say anything. Fact. I did not know if I still loved Mariela, or if I loved her in the way I’d loved her back in Havana. Totally, unconditionally. Love was harder than I’d ever imagined, and I wasn’t sure it was worth it.
I had discovered to my surprise Mariela was not perfect, not even physically. There was a small mole on her left cheek. It had been there as long as I had known her, of course. At first, I thought of it as a beauty mark, but now, occasionally, when she forgot to pluck it, I could see a single hair rising from its volcano. It was not her only facial hair. There was a wispy shadow moustache above her lip whenever she perspired, or if she failed to shave for a few days. And the fine sideburn hairs that seemed to matt to her skin in the heat? Who would have guessed she would sweat as much as she did? Even in Nova Scotia? Not me. But she did.
And then, too, still, always, there was the jealousy. I will confess I did worry where she really went every day, with whom she went, and what she might be doing with whomever she went wherever with. How could I not? She was young and beautiful—my newfound pickiness notwithstanding—and I was old and not. One morning before she woke up, I had searched through the emails on her computer, scanned the text messages on her phone. Looking, I suppose, for proof of her secret life. But, with my limited Spanish, nothing seemed untoward. There were emails from David that seemed to be about the latest tribulations in his relationship with his Italian lover, and one from Silvia asking how Mariela liked Canada—“Very much. The people here are so friendly.” There were texts from Lío (from my phone?) relaying messages from regular clients who missed Mariela and just wanted to say hi and wish her well in Canada. I even surveyed the “Recents” on her phone log. It contained mostly Cuban numbers, along with one or two calls to an area code I didn’t recognize but then forgot to check out—a mistake I would only discover later. There were a few calls to me, a
nd some calls to and from Lily’s number. That hadn’t struck me as strange. She and Lily would often make the arrangements for the four of us to get together for dinner, or a movie. I hadn’t imagined Umberto and Mariela might be calling each other, let alone having an affair. Mariela had always made it plain she considered Umberto no muy brillante. Whenever the four of us got together, I couldn’t help but note the two of them indulging in backs-and-forths about Cuba, but that was only natural. Spanish was their shared language, Cuba their shared home.
“How do you know?” I finally asked Lily, hoping she didn’t. “About Umberto and Mariela?”
“I’ll show you,” she said. Before she did, she poured us each another full-to-the-lip glass of wine and led me into the spare bedroom she had converted into Umberto’s painting studio. “There,” she said, pointing to a large canvas perched on an easel in the corner of the room. Staring back was a perfect likeness of Mariela. Umberto had captured her luminous, penetrating, laser green eyes, focused at that moment on something, or someone, beyond the frame. Her raven hair, loosed from the ponytail in which she most often wore it these days, framed her face. It was tousled, as if she’d just woken up. There was the hint of a smile playing at her lips. Was it lascivious? I willed myself to keep my eyes focused on her eyes, her face, her smile—no, not lascivious—but I sensed there was more. My gaze slid down past her long, delicate neck to the tawny bare skin of her chest down to just above her nipples. You couldn’t actually see them or anything else. Mariela sat astride a wooden chair whose solid back hid the rest of her breasts and feminine charms from prying eyes. But you knew she was naked. Her legs were splayed out from the sides of the chair, the sides of her haunches visible, more than hinting at what could not be seen.
“So…” Lily said.
“So,” I repeated dumbly.
She began to cry. “My friends warned me, told me it would never last, that I was being an old fool. And I was…we were. Both of us—you, me—fools!”
Were we? I’d always thought of Umberto—with a mantle of condescension I had no right to don—as poor old Lily’s pool-boy boy-toy. So what did that make me? Poor old Eli? Was that why I had never invited Mariela to C3’s regular Friday Night Frivols, Steve’s weekly steam-blowing-off staff social events in the firm’s board room? “You really should join us,” Steve had said more than once, “and bring along that mysterious woman of yours we’re all dying to meet.” I never did, and I only attended myself on a couple of occasions, all before Mariela arrived. Would they have judged me as I would have judged me?
At this moment, I did not like being lumped in with Lily’s lament.
“Have you talked to him about…about…?” I asked, not able to find my way to the end of my thought.
“He says it was nothing, just an assignment for one of his art college courses. ‘A life study,’ he told me. He said he needed a model, and Mariela volunteered. I’ll just bet she did! If that was really all it was, just an assignment, why didn’t he paint me? And what happens now? To them? To us? We’re responsible, you know. They can do whatever they want—shack up together, go on welfare—and we’ll have to pay for it.”
I tried to remember the forms I’d signed, what Vince said they meant. I thought Lily’s assessment was probably spot on.
“What will you do?” she asked. Do? “I told Umberto I’d buy him a ticket home,” she said, “but he says he doesn’t want to leave. Surprise, surprise. He says I’m being too harsh. Am I? What will you do?”
“Talk to her, hear her side, I suppose.” I didn’t want to talk to Mariela, not about this. It was unfair, of course, but I felt more bubbling, unfocused anger at Lily for forcing me to confront Mariela’s behaviour than I did with Mariela for doing whatever she had done. What had she done? “I should go,” I said.
“Yes, you should,” Lily said. I sensed she was angrier with me too. “We were fine until she came along, until you brought her into our lives. You ruined everything. And I don’t think we should be seeing each other anymore.”
Amen to that.
****
When I returned from Lily’s, Mariela was sitting in the wingback chair in the living room, reading. I had been tempted to wait, confront her later when I’d sorted out my own conflicted emotions, thought it all through. But I knew me too well. If I didn’t raise it now, I never would. In for one semi-nude painting, I decided, in for the full emotional pounding.
Mariela denied nothing. And everything. She acknowledged—how could she not?—she’d posed for Umberto, but insisted there’d been no affair. “He had this assignment and everyone in his class was pairing off, but he was too shy and his English not good enough to ask anyone else, so he asked me.” Besides, she said, she wasn’t really naked. She’d worn a bra and a thong. Umberto had simply replaced the straps and the tops of her bra cups, as well as her panty waistband with imagined, painted skin to make her appear naked. “It was better for his assignment.” That made me feel much better.
“What about all those phone calls to Lily’s number?” I said, upping the ante. “Were you really talking to Umberto?”
“How would you know about that?” she demanded, eyes flashing. “Are you spying on me now?”
“No.” Yes. “I just happened to see…. Were you? Talking to Umberto, I mean?”
“Sometimes. He was lonely. And Lily barely speaks any Spanish, so we talked. It made him feel better.”
“Just talked?”
“Yes. Just talked. I can’t believe you’re jealous, Mr. Eli Cooper. How many times have I told you, Umberto is not a very smart person. He is not my type.”
Did that mean I was smart, that I was her type? Had she ever actually said Umberto was not her type before?
“Do you want to send me back to Cuba?” she asked finally, her voice rising to a controlled shout. “Because if you do, all you have to do is say it and I will be gone.”
The gauntlet had been tossed, the glove dropped.
“No,” I said quickly. “That’s not what I want.” Was I too hasty? What did I want? “I just…I just…I don’t want to be surprised like that. Especially not by Lily.”
“Es fea,” Mariela spat. I had no idea what she said, but I could guess what she meant. “You wouldn’t believe the things she makes him do.”
I didn’t want to know, and I didn’t want to know how she knew, but I was grateful we’d found something we could agree on.
“Look,” I said, “I still love you. I want us to be together, but I have to know I can trust you.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, her eyes welling up. She was better at I’m-sorry than I would ever be. But was she? Really? Sorry? “I love you too,” she said, standing up, running toward me, arms open, collapsing into my chest. I wrapped my arms around her, felt her heart. “I know I should have told you. But I was afraid you would be angry. And nothing happened, really, nothing. I love you.”
We stood there for a long time, holding each other, slowing down time, speeding up the blood coursing now through our bodies. And then we made love. It was the best love we’d made since that night in Havana on the bed beneath Lío’s mirrored ceiling, the night I’d proposed to Mariela. But then the lovemaking was over. As our breathing slowed to normal, I stared at the ceiling that was not mirrored, and willed myself to believe we had just jumped another relationship hurdle, that things could only get better now.
3
“It’s too bad you didn’t get to meet Arty, dear,” Aunt Abigail said to Mariela, then fumbled. “Before he….” Before he died? Before he cracked up? Before he went off to war and won a medal he didn’t want and came back damaged goods?
Bringing Mariela to the old folks’ home to meet Aunt Abigail in advance of our family gathering had been Sarah’s idea. “So Mariela isn’t overwhelmed all at once with all these new people she’s never met.”
The family gathering had been Sarah’s idea
too. It had begun with talk—Sarah talk—that Mariela and I should get married again in Halifax, “so your family can attend and celebrate with you this time.” That idea had eventually been folded—and then disappeared—into the more inclusive and generic notion of a family gathering featuring a final goodbye to dear old Dad. Sarah called it the First Ever Cooper Family Reunion, but since there’d never been a previous gathering to make this a reunion, I called it a union.
The day before the official events, I took Mariela to meet my aunt for the first time. I’d been reluctant to introduce them because I worried Abigail might blurt some casual comment about Mariela’s brown skin or about the obvious age difference between us. I need not have worried. Abigail was just happy to have visitors to show off to her fellow residents and so she invited us to lunch, introducing us to everyone at every table in the entire dining room. “Meet my nephew, Elijah, and his beautiful wife, Mary. Isn’t she a doll?”
Aunt Abigail seemed less interested in learning anything about Mariela, including her actual name or the story of Mariela and me, than in corralling a fresh audience for her own old stories, most of which seemed to revolve around her long-estranged, now-dead brother from a time before he became my father.
Although I had told Mariela about the circumstances in which my father died, as I now decorously phrased it, I’d never explained about Dad’s medal, about how he had come to send it back, about how I had inadvertently celebrated his private shame in his public obituary.
After revisiting my death-notice faux pas for the edification of my wife, my “late” Aunt Abigail did her best to rehabilitate my father’s reputation, if not my own.
“Arty really was a hero,” she told Mariela. “He saw this U-boat on his radar, and he…” and she proceeded to unfold the story she’d told Sarah and me in the funeral home, the one I now revisit nightly in the nightmare movies that play on an endless loop in my own head.
It had happened on the Irish Sea in the dying-ember days of World War Two aboard a destroyer assigned to convoy protection duties. Dad, having only recently joined the navy, was a junior radar operator. At some point in the middle of one night, he’d spotted what he thought was the exhaust snorkel of a lurking German submarine on his screen. He alerted a senior officer. The officer noted nothing untoward. “Your mind’s playing tricks, son.” But my father refused to concede—he must have been a stubborn bastard, even then—and went to the captain, insisting the blip came from an enemy U-boat. The captain ordered the destroyer back toward whatever my father had seen. My father had been right. By the time the skirmish was over, the submarine had been sunk and the convoy—along with its hundreds of sailors and soldiers—saved.
The Sweetness in the Lime Page 21