No, I answer. They wanted to talk about General Cara de Culo. I explain a little about Cara de Culo, the bishop’s murder, the general running for president. I don’t tell Marianne that it was as a consequence of my writing on that case that I had to leave Mexico City. Now I’ve been exiled to New York City, too, in a sense, like Martí. I didn’t want to leave Mexico, but I fled, there’s no other word for it, heeding that warning from the consul. Then I vowed to try to live in the here and now of New York, and now Boston, USA. “What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the woods.” Thoreau wrote that. I’ve tried to think of it as a motto. Though my past isn’t exactly a fantasy novel either. It’s not like I can just pack it up in a cardboard box and leave it outside Housing Works.
We’re into our second bottle of wine when Marianne begins to tell me about the last class reunion, about Ian Brown, why he’s as much an asshole as ever. Ian’s become a big deal contractor around Atlanta, building McMansions and shopping malls. According to Marianne, he got his start backed by his wife’s family money. But Ian is a fellow alumni of our middle school underachiever program, why should his success surprise? Artie Kaplan, another of his old neighborhood friends, was at the reunion, says Marianne, and he sat at Ian’s table. An early investor in some of those Route 128 tech start-ups, Artie is now a wealthy man too. Artie told Ian that his wife had left him for another woman, and Ian couldn’t get over that. For the rest of the night he kept shouting: Artie, your wife left you for another woman, jabbing his finger at him and laughing until finally Artie would shout back: She did, that bitch! Same Ian as ever, says Marianne.
The Sandy Koufax of Jewish bullies, I say.
She responds with an uncertain grin. I don’t think she gets the joke.
Ian gave me the name Monkey Boy, I say. Do you remember that?
I do, she says. He’s such a jerk.
I was called Gols too. Remember that one? I give her a fake smile.
Ian and his friend Jake used to call you Pablo too. Pablo, Monkey Boy, it was a racist thing, wasn’t it. I didn’t realize that back then. Now it seems too obvious.
You probably always thought of me as just another Jewish boy, I say.
Even a word like “halfie” wasn’t around back then. You were categorized as the one thing you most obviously might be and that was that, not that it’s changed so much since. Mexicans are always surprised that gringos have no word for or concept of “mestizaje.”
I knew your mom was foreign, she says. But I remember being surprised when I walked down your street and all the windows had those electric menorahs, except your house. You had poinsettias in your picture window. Am I remembering right?
Plastic poinsettias.
She laughs. I told Lana that I didn’t know poinsettias were a Chanukah flower too. I was a St. Joe’s girl, what did I know?
Monkey Boy, Chimp Face, that all started back in middle school, I say. But what if I did look kind of like a monkey back then? You know how teenagers are.
Marianne gives me a skeptical look.
Seriously, I say. I’ve given this a lot of thought over the years, and I’ve concluded that probably nobody in middle school looked more like a monkey than I did.
Okay, she says. You have curly hair, your ears aren’t small, but I really don’t think you look like a monkey, and I didn’t think so back then either.
I greatly resent that you consider curly hair a simian feature, I say. That’s a totally false stereotype, Marianne. When was the last time you actually went to the zoo and looked at monkeys?
After a few seconds of near panic in her eyes, I mime a theatrical guffaw, and Marianne bursts into laughter, then shakes her head, an affectionate shine in her eyes. Abruptly, her expression goes still, her brows lift, and she says, But you went through all those years thinking that what Ian and those kids said was true, didn’t you? Oh Frank.
I shrug and say, I guess. Well, who cares now.
A memory from high school of standing in front of the bathroom mirror and in a spasm of self-loathing punching my own face as hard as I could, blood from my lips smudging my cheeks, smearing it with fingers, punching myself in the face again, spitting at the mirror.
But as soon as you got away from our town, she says, did you stop thinking of yourself like that?
I take a drink and say, Pretty much. Then I ask, That day when you walked down my street and saw poinsettias, was I with you?
She looks like she’s quickly calculating a sum. No, she says. But I wanted to talk to you. I walked over to your house, and I was trying to work up the courage to ring your doorbell, and at that exact moment, your father pulled into your driveway in his car. When he got out he looked at me like I must be a drug dealer, there to sell his son drugs. I was afraid of him, so I just kept walking.
You were afraid of my father?
Of course I was, she says. You used to tell me horrible things. He was abusive and violent with you, right?
Yeah, I really hated him.
You used to tell me that too.
But it’s not like you had an easy time with your own dad, I say.
But I never thought I hated him, she says. He could be depressing to be around and vindictive with my mom, but he was terrified of her too, she could shut him up with a look. Did you forgive your father or at least make peace with him?
We got along better, I answer. A few years before he died, Bert tried to make a big apology for beating the shit out of me so much, but it was comically lame.
Well, at least he tried. That’s good, right? She puts on a sort of sad smile.
So why did you come looking for me at my house that day?
To talk about Ian, she says. I wanted to tell you I was going on a date with him. I wanted you to hear it from me. Even if your father hadn’t come home, I think I would have chickened out. One of the worse decisions of my life, going out with Ian. You remember what happened, don’t you?
This must be what she wanted to talk to me about. This is why we’re having dinner.
When I got to school that Monday morning, the idiotic horde was abuzz. Saturday night, Ian had picked up Marianne in his mother’s car, and they must have ended up doing the usual things teenage couples do when they’re not going all the way yet. But only Ian had ever come to school boasting about it in such an explicit manner, putting on an obscene show, provoking shrieks and blasts of laughter. I plotted routes through the corridors to avoid him, but I avoided Marianne too. It was all more about drawing attention to Ian than to Marianne, of course, but what he set loose took on a fiendish force of its own. Marianne was easily one of the most well-liked girls in our class, so friendly and kind to everyone, never a phony. Now they were calling her Piggy. Piggy Lucas they wrote in lipstick on bathroom mirrors. Marianne Lucas is a slutty pig! Someone even stole a fetal pig from the biology lab and put it inside Marianne’s locker. Between classes, kids milled nearby, excited, waiting. Just before the lunch period Marianne stopped at her locker, opened it, and found herself face-to-face with the pig fetus, pink and glazed, oversized eyes, propped like a Play-Doh idol on the edge of the shelf. She lifted her hands to her face. Everybody watching was silent. She took her winter coat out of the locker, put it on, and turned to go. By then, Lana Gatto had reached her. Marianne calmly told her that she was going home. She walked down the corridor to the nearest exit in her red wool coat, pulling its hood up just before pushing out the door. Lana told me she started to cry, because suddenly she felt sure she was never going to see Marianne again. I remember that coat and its hood; on its front Marianne had pinned a small wooden brooch of a red-eyed squirrel eating an acorn.
Of course I remember what happened, Marianne, I tell her. How could I forget?
I was cold to her, of course, avoided her, didn’t phone. Meanwhile I waited for her to come to me for the sympathy and forgiveness she knew I wouldn’t be
able to hold back. But she didn’t. She missed only a few days of school, but when she returned, it was like an inner light had been snuffed out, her gaze rowing through the fog in front of her feet. At lunch, she sat with her closest friends, all looking moribund, as if they didn’t know what to say to her. I wished they would talk her into dumping a lunch tray on Ian’s head the way that senior-class girl had done to that hockey star who was so obviously full of himself. If Marianne had done that to Ian, it might have provoked his downfall. The Christmas break came and when school started up again she was going out with Jimmy Gleason. I heard later from Lana Gatto that Marianne was out ice-skating with her little sisters on Sarah Hancock Pond when he skated over to join them, a scene out of Little Women. No wonder the pond was a special place to them.
Those first few months of tenth grade had been like a miracle for me, playing football, belonging to a group of friends, having Mr. Brainerd for a teacher, talking to Marianne on the telephone nearly every night. Everything had coalesced around her and was all part of the case I was making for why she should love me. When that was gone, the emptiness that replaced it stunned me.
We order a nightcap, a bourbon for me. Marianne says she really shouldn’t but orders a Ketel One on the rocks, twist of lemon. After she’s taken a sip she looks directly at me in a way that alerts me that something important is coming. She says:
Frank, I know all our high school memories aren’t that great, and I don’t deny that at fifteen I was confused and could be an idiot. But just that we’re here together now shows how much our friendship really did mean to me.
A speech she’d prepared for tonight, that sounded like.
What seems hard to believe is that my hands, as if leading their own bewildering lives apart from me, have begun to shake. But I say it. Marianne, do you remember a telephone conversation we had one night, a long one, maybe the last time we ever spoke, just before what happened with Ian?
Marianne looks like she’s thinking it over and finally says, Tell me more.
The part I remember is hard to describe, I answer, because I felt sure you wanted to tell me something but couldn’t bring yourself to. You kept saying things like: Frank, why can’t we—Then you’d stop. Or: Why can’t I— Or: Frank, why can’t they be— But you’d stop. Why can’t you or we or they be what? Marianne is watching me intently. I tell her: You also kept repeating my name in a certain way. Oh Fraaank, you’d go, drawing it out, sort of sighing. Oh Fraaank. And then you’d be silent. That’s not a very good imitation, but I remember it like it was yesterday, Marianne. I remember listening so hard to those silences, like I could almost hear in your breathing what you wanted to tell me. I’ve never forgotten that phone call, is all.
She says, And you think I might remember whatever it was I was trying to say?
I guess not, I answer. But here’s the thing. Ever since, I’ve felt convinced that was the first time anyone ever told me they were in love with me. You didn’t, I know. But that’s what I heard in your stammering and in those silences, that really you wanted to tell me. Years passed until the next time a woman told me she loved me and meant it. Sad but true, Marianne. That must be one reason why I remember it the way I do.
Marianne’s expression looks a little amused and moved too, maybe. She says, You think that what happened with Ian prevented something further from happening with us. Is that it?
I was really in love with you, I tell her. You knew, didn’t you?
Yes, she says. I guess I did know that.
I wait a moment, in case she’s about to say something more. But then I say, Even if it wasn’t requited, at least I knew what love felt like. Except after that phone call I felt it was requited, that the feeling was there, anyway.
At least my hands have stopped shaking.
She looks at me through squinted eyes, her smile lopsided. I wish I could remember that phone call as well as you do, she says.
I’ve always thought that if we’d gone to school in another town, maybe things could have gone differently between us.
I’ve never thought of it that way, she says. Maybe you’re right, in another town. She smiles at me in a way that reminds me of how she used to smile at me back then, both warmly and humorously, as if we were silently sharing a secret joke.
Friday
Given how much we’d had to drink, I suggested to Marianne that maybe she should get a hotel room, or even stay on the extra bed in my room, instead of driving back to Topsfield. But she insisted she was fine. Plus she had her weekly tennis match in the morning. She promised to call when she got home, but once I was in my room, I fell fast asleep. When I woke this morning, there was a message on my phone from Marianne: “What a fun night, sweet Frank. We’ll see how I play tennis with an ice pack on my head tomorrow morning, ha! Please, let’s stay in touch. It’s almost spring, let me take you canoeing on the Ipswich River.”
No messages from Lulú, but it’s still early, barely eleven. I’d meant to save half of this giant oatmeal and chocolate chip cookie for later in the day because I always get hungry at the nursing home and there’s nothing I ever want to eat there, but I’ve just taken the last bite. I look around at the other customers in this techie-seeming café having their healthy breakfasts and coffees, so many fresh-faced, casually stylish young women, and, unusually for Boston, not all of them white, and doubtlessly all highly educated and knowledgeable about ways of life I don’t have an inkling of.
I might as well get going. I’ll walk all the way back to South Station, maybe swing past the Congress Street Bridge, too, pulling along my wheeled suitcase, knapsack over my shoulders, gym lock muffled inside a pair of socks, and carrying the tin of French butter cookies inside its pretty shop bag. The exercise and chilly Atlantic air will do me good, but my bad knee aches like it’s a little hungover too. So what about last night? I think Marianne and I both got from it what we’d wanted. She was still hurt, after all these years, by what Ian and so many of our classmates had done to her, from one day to the next shattering everything she’d understood and trusted about her world and who she was in it. She’d wanted to talk to me because we’d been close back when it happened and she knew that I’d been hurt by it, too, and that at least I’d be interested. There are people who think, Oh come on, that was adolescence, how can you not be over it? They’re like the people who say, Who cares what happened in faraway tiny Guatemala all those years ago now, why do you make such a big deal out of it? I don’t like people like that. So why shouldn’t Lexi talk to her shrink about what it did to her to watch Bert beating me up all those years, if that’s what she thinks she needs? Who am I to dictate what should and shouldn’t leave a mark? My walking pace actually quickens, I feel hyped up to tell Lexi and to apologize for having been nasty about it before.
Last night with Marianne I got to confess something I’d kept silent about for over three decades, and the way I’m feeling about it this morning, it’s like I had a requited high school love after all. So I can go back in time and start my romantic life all over, fast-forwarding to now: a man confident since adolescence in his ability to inspire love, who knows what to do with it. Some people passing on the sidewalk glance suspiciously at a grown man laughing out loud to himself, like maybe he’s about to pull an axe out from under his coat, but others genuinely smile, what is it that makes them react so differently?
Exactly out there, past the far side of Fort Point Channel, on a sun-scorched field by Logan airport, at the start of my senior year of high school, trying out for varsity football, we had a late August preseason scrimmage against the East Boston High School Jets. Just a few plays after having been sent in as a sub at cornerback, I twisted my body to wave at a pass fluttering wide of its targeted Jet, my cleats caught in a withered clump of turf, and I fell. I got up, hopped around on one leg, limped to the sideline, and my football career was over. I’ve never understood how it was decided in the doctor’s office to pu
t me in a cast instead of operating, whether it was the decision of the doctor or my mother or both. The doctor who treated my knee and helped screw it up forever spoke in a heavy German accent. With one strong furry hand clamped around my thigh and the other grabbing my lower leg, he swiveled it side to side from the knee, and loudly singsonged in his cranky voice: Loosey Goosey, Loosey Goosey. Over the years, Herr Doktor said, he’d treated scores of mangled boys from our football team, and several times during the examination, as my mother looked on, he referred to Coach Tyree as a butcher, emphasizing the word “butcher” with such vehement contempt that he sounded like one of those comical Nazi commandants on television, Ach, ist a butcher! I had the impression the doctor was trying to impress my mother in some manly competitive way, cutting Coach Tyree down to size.
Having my leg in a cast that fall of senior year kept me at home after school, crucial in helping me earn the grades I needed to have a chance to get into a decent college. Practically from one day to the next, I learned to assert my will and use my brain in ways I never had before, paying attention in class, studying, doing homework. After Yolandita left to marry Richard the Vietnam War vet and Sears manager, Carlota Sánchez Motta, a Mormon girl from Guatemala who had a relative who was friendly with Abuelita, came to live with us and to go to our high school. Of course I never would have let anyone hear me speaking Spanish to Carlota at school, just as I never would have drawn that kind of attention to myself by speaking Spanish back in tenth-grade Spanish class. But at home, whenever Carlota spoke to me in her imperfect English, I insisted on answering in my imperfect Spanish, until finally one day she fell silent and looked at me with a hurt, flummoxed expression. You have a whole high school to practice your English with, I told her, but I can only practice Spanish here. Her eyes were like two full black moons of distress rising up from behind rounded, slightly pockmarked brown cheeks, and she exclaimed, Oh, Frankie, how did I not think of that? Here we will only speak Spanish, I promise! After that, when she spoke in Spanish, I answered in English. Ay, que malo eres, she said, turning and walking away. Carlota, I’m sorry, I piped after her, I was only kidding around, Carlota, perdón! Por favor, perdóname!
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