“Really?”
“No, why are you lying? I wish I knew how to draw birth charts,” Alex said. “My aunt does it, though. She’d need some other things, like your exact time of birth and where you were born. Anyway, the more you read the more you learn about it. There’s always more to learn.”
The waitress came around and asked for everyone’s order. Maria ordered the cheesy potato skins and sliders.
After the waitress left, Maria knew that if she didn’t speak now, she would lose her chance. She looked at Alex and didn’t care that her interest would no longer seem feigned.
“Do you believe it?”
“What?”
“Horoscopes,” she said nervously, avoiding the eyes of her brother. “Like if people really are like their signs? Do you really believe it?”
Alex tilted her head at Maria. “Of course,” she said.
The conversation moved on, without Maria. When the waitress finally brought the food, Maria still hadn’t said anything else. Ricky and Alex were arguing with fervor about the last movie they’d seen. She cut Ricky off midsentence.
“Can Pisces be good at getting money, too?” Her voice was impassioned. “What if their dream is to become rich? Can that come true?”
Ricky and Alex looked at her face, then her plate. Maria hadn’t touched any of the food yet, and her napkin was still folded in a square on the table.
Alex leaned in, over the forks and glasses and knives. She was so close to Maria’s face that Maria had the urge to back away, an urge she resisted. Alex was so close to her it felt like all she would need to do was pucker her lips to kiss her.
“Girl,” Alex said, her features perfectly still. “A Pisces can make any dream come true.”
Something was keeping Maria awake.
After Ricky and Alex had dropped her off at home, she texted Rocky. Hey, dude, she said, and when two hours passed without a reply, Maria texted again. Are you busy or are you really just trying to ignore me?
Rocky’s answer was instantaneous.
I’m sorry, the message said. I was with Matthew in the Hamptons for a few days. I’m back in the city now, though. I’ll call you tomorrow.
She exited the message screen and sat at her computer. When she was home, it always was on. As she scrolled aimlessly down her Facebook, something caught her eye. A picture of Stephen, one of the boys from Bell Seminary’s brother school, standing in front of the clearest body of water Maria had ever seen. A spattering of white and orange buildings, a dirt path, and behind him, on a sloping, narrow road, a donkey. She clicked on one picture, and then to the next, trying to determine where such picturesque photos had been taken. She came to another photograph, and in it Stephen shared the frame with someone else, his arm swung around the boy’s shoulders. Squinty blue eyes, a patch of rosacea. Maria gasped. Matthew.
She looked at the upload date—today, 3:00 p.m. As she kept scrolling through the photos, reading the captions under plates of broiled lemon fish and sailboats and bodies of water so turquoise that had Maria not believed her wealthy classmates were capable of going absolutely anywhere, she would’ve thought the colors were Photoshop-fake, it became clear—Matthew was in Greece at Stephen’s family’s villa. Regardless of whether Rocky was in the Hamptons at her country house, or in Manhattan at her apartment, she certainly wasn’t with Matthew. Maria looked at the date the album was made; there were photos that’d been uploaded as early as July. Matthew had left for Kalymnos the same day Rocky and Maria had come back from Vegas.
Maria stuffed the phone inside her pillowcase and clenched her eyes shut. Ever since Rocky had come over, Maria noticed something was off. As she lay there, trying to come up with alternate explanations, Maria became more and more convinced that there was no other possibility. Maria’s mind began to convulse. Andres had dumped her, her parents were struggling, and Karen hadn’t forgiven her yet. She suddenly bent at the waist and sat up on the mattress. She’d been jealous of Rocky, angry at her before, but this feeling was something different. When Jonathan got mad, he punched walls—Maria had seen it happen once, and it had embarrassed her to find that her opinion of him had so suddenly and drastically dimmed. Now, she clenched her fists and understood the impulse. Rocky had lied.
Maria buried her face in her hands, exhaling manically into her fingers. Couldn’t there be another explanation? A reason—a real, justifiable one—that could explain why Rocky had lied to her? Once Maria’s breathing was finally even, she lay back down in the bed. All they needed was to talk. In the morning, she would call her to find out what was going on. Everything would be fine. She imagined Rocky laughing as they sorted through the pile of porn cards on the edge of the bed in Vegas. She thought of how Rocky had held on to Alexis, the only brown girl in the bunch, until Maria, a bit aggressively, asserted that she wanted her for her own, and Rocky handed her over without question. It was silly of Maria to assume the absolute worst.
She breathed, and into the dark night, she laughed. She was getting worked up over nothing. It was likely a misunderstanding. Maria laid her head down, her teeth clenched, her brow knitted, until finally she untensed.
But was it possible that Rocky was a liar—a liar just like her father, who, after being given her number, promised to call her soon after they came home?
Maria’s jaw clenched again.
CHAPTER 20
Rocky answered a call from Laura, who had an invitation she couldn’t pass up. It was a restaurant with a rooftop, a sparkling view of the Hudson River from six stories above the water. By the time the second Bellini was served, Rocky could no longer keep her news to herself. She still hadn’t told a single person, and now, as she felt the wind blow like a playful lover on her neck, she confessed to Laura.
“Whoa.” Through the lenses of her sunglasses, Rocky couldn’t see how Laura’s eyes had widened.
“Yep,” Rocky said.
“Is he hot?”
“Wanna see him?”
“You have a picture?”
Rocky smiled. “Which one do you want to see? The PG version or the X?”
“You’re kidding!” Laura looked over at Rocky’s BlackBerry Pearl, where she’d pulled up her Facebook. Laura pursed her lips. The BlackBerry Pearl wasn’t being released until next month, yet Rocky somehow already had hers months before anyone else did. Rocky held one hand over the screen to block out the light. On the screen was a photo of a boy at a beach. He didn’t have his shirt on, and the lines of his stomach were pronounced and darkened with sweat and saltwater.
“Hm,” Laura said. “He’s cute.”
“He’s so cute.” Rocky fingered the screen with her pinkie.
“I wonder why Maria got shafted by the gene pool,” Laura said.
Rocky placed a hand around the stem of her glass. “Maria’s not ugly.”
“Well,” Laura said. “She doesn’t look like him. Anyway, are you going to tell her?”
Rocky giggled. “She’d freak out.”
“She’ll never find out.”
Rocky brought her hand back to the screen so the girls could see past the sunlight. She kept scrolling.
“Who’s that?” Laura said. On the screen were a boy and a girl. They were huddled over a pizza in a darkened room; the Dave & Buster’s logo was etched into their glasses of soda. He had his arm wrapped over her shoulder.
“I don’t know. Maybe his girlfriend.”
“He has a girlfriend?”
“I have a boyfriend. Matthew. So what?”
“Right.” Laura picked up her fork. She had ordered eggs Benedict without the hollandaise sauce—and extra spinach. She stabbed at a piece of english muffin and held it up in the sun. “Either way, you should be careful.”
“Careful? What do you mean?”
“I mean,” Laura said, bringing the food up to the sun to inspect it. “You know what Maria’s about. She’s the biggest mooch I’ve ever met. Hopefully her family isn’t the same way.”
Rocky paused. She thoug
ht of Maria now, her chin grizzled with ice cream at Denny’s, not offering Rocky a single bite. Not bothering to say please. Not even to say thank you.
Laura laughed. “I mean, right? What’s up with her wearing all of your clothes? Didn’t the two of you just get back from Vegas?”
“Yeah,” Rocky said. She shifted in her seat. Of course Maria hadn’t paid for her flight to Vegas, but what right did Laura have to ask? Last year, when Rocky invited Laura to Vegas, Laura’s family had bought the ticket, and Laura had brought along hundreds of dollars in cash. But if she hadn’t, Rocky’s family would’ve paid for her, too.
“What are you saying? Do you think Maria uses me?”
“What do you think?”
Rocky leaned back, and from behind her sunglasses, she furrowed her eyebrows. She didn’t like where Laura was going with this. Rocky was known in her grade for her extravagant parties, for inviting people out to dinner with her family’s credit card. If Maria was using her, other people were using her, too. As she watched Laura bring the long champagne flute to her lips, Rocky suddenly felt compelled to leave.
“Maria is a mooch,” Rocky said. “But, whatever. I feel bad for her. She’s not like us. She’s, like, never even been on vacation.”
“I just hope he’s a good guy.”
“I have Matthew for that.”
“Right.”
Rocky smiled, her big eyes full like moons. She scrolled away from the photo at Dave & Buster’s and back to the shoreside shot. His steady smile glinted in the sun, the board shorts cinched just above the place where his pelvis made a V. Rocky held up the cell phone to Laura’s face. The image on the screen glowed like a star. Fuck you, Laura, she wanted to say.
“I’m not getting a good guy,” she said, instead. “I’m getting a good fuck.”
The two girls, had it not been for all that sparkling water they’d drunk, could’ve floated away in laughter. They had another round of Bellinis, and when the waiter came to collect their plates, he didn’t ask if they wanted to take it to go, despite the considerable amount left uneaten. Laura placed her perfectly manicured nails on the sleek leather pocket containing the check. “It’s on me,” she said without letting Rocky look at how much it came out to. Rocky grinned and accepted.
Charlie was not used to seeing his wife at home. They had gotten so good at avoiding each other that they were never in the same space at once, so when he opened the door to the apartment, he was shocked to see her in the living room, wearing nothing but a bathrobe, a bowl of popcorn in front of her on the couch. Something in him stirred. He thought of excusing himself, of turning around and closing the door behind him, until he remembered he was wedded to this woman on the couch, and then he looked right back up.
It wasn’t the first time Charlie was ashamed of his desire. When Charlie was only twelve and had first started grabbing at himself, he realized he had no control over the assortment of images that came into his head, in rapid succession, like a deck of cards being shuffled and dealt. Because again and again, the image was the same: his live-in nanny, Tatiana. He knew it was wrong, knew it was awful to have noticed how her breasts moved on their own, but when he tried not to see her, he’d start seeing even more shameful images instead—a cousin, his golden retriever, and most bizarrely, his mother—and so he let Tati stay there, conjured and twisted. The more he did it, the more he noticed Tatiana throughout the day: in the hallway, bent over a toilet, reaching high above her head to get the fingerprints off a set of sliding glass doors.
By that point, Tatiana wasn’t cooking for the family very much because his older sister had already left the house for college, and Charlie, busy with music and sports, came home later and later every day. Neither did Tatiana go out of her way anymore to greet him when he came home from school or say good night to him before he closed his door, which he would not have liked anyway, since there was now a definitive amount of time that passed before he shut his door and went to sleep. Instead, Tati seemed more prone to spend her time in the tiny study room, where they kept a landline phone that was largely neglected. She would sit in the room whenever Charlie’s parents weren’t home, and Charlie would hear her whisper in Portuguese. He imagined her in there, sitting on the floor, next to the cardboard boxes stuffed with tiki lamps, string lights, candles, and fur blankets—seasonal decor that Tatiana was in charge of unpacking accordingly as the leaves changed from green to orange to gone.
One night, Charlie was alone in the house. It was the holidays, and Tatiana was in Brazil, as she always was during the holidays. Charlie’s parents were nowhere to be found. He went into Tatiana’s room, slowly opening the door into the darkness. Even then, he had a vague idea of what he was looking for, though he couldn’t have known just how lucky he would be. In the second drawer he looked in, underneath balls of Tatiana’s socks, was a stack of developed photos. The photograph was so unbelievable that at first, he thought it’d been ripped out of a magazine. She was even more beautiful than he could’ve ever thought. He grabbed the stack, and without shutting the door, he collapsed onto Tatiana’s bed, where that smell he’d once heard his parents giggle over, that smell they found strangely funny, the smell of shea butter, completely overpowered him. It was too strong to resist: his hands leapt into his pants, and he felt as if Tatiana were there—he could see the hole of her mouth wrapping around him, his body swallowed whole.
Why hadn’t he heard his mother come in? Why hadn’t he known she would be standing there horrified as Charlie’s sweat formed rings around Tatiana’s photo, the distinct smell of Tatiana’s hair on the pillow making him convulse? It was her scream that brought the end of the world. As if the earth was only a glass orb caught in midfall, he heard the whole planet shattering.
Tatiana never returned because Charlie’s mother fired her on the phone. She packed up all of Tatiana’s things herself, told her she would mail them to wherever she wanted, free of charge. It was mortifying, not just for Charlie, but for Tatiana, too, who couldn’t figure out what she had done, but who must have suffered the embarrassment of knowing that her photos were discovered when she received them days later in the mail. It was years before the family heard from her again, in a wedding invitation addressed not to the parents, but to Charlie and his older sister. But by then, Charlie was in college, and even when his mother told him about it, after the date of the wedding had passed, Charlie remembered feeling resentful, and not because of the husband-to-be, but because he had never imagined Tatiana wanting to raise her own family, and the idea of her looking after another child somehow, absurdly, felt like betrayal.
For a long time, Charlie blamed Tati’s disappearance on himself—until finally, he blamed his mother. He blamed her for overreacting, as if it weren’t natural for a boy to become overtaken by puberty and to have desired a woman like Tati. He would never forgive her for the shame she made him feel, and Charlie felt a similar rage toward Veronica when she first started ignoring him, when she’d lie next to him in bed wearing near nothing, yet not letting him lay a finger on her. Finally, he wouldn’t take it anymore, and he kicked her out. Since then, she’d been living at the country house in Long Island, doing whatever it was that she did out there—painting, spending money, having sex, most likely, with other rich married men.
In the apartment, Veronica’s eyes were enormous. They were swirls of rich brown, and now, they grew larger as if to make room for the sight of him.
“Hi,” she said. “We need to talk.” It wasn’t even the words, but her gaze that made his heart start racing. He was used to seeing nothing on her face but scorn, but now, there was something else. It looked a little bit like tenderness, but that was impossible.
“What’s wrong?” His voice cracked. She could have him on his knees by the slightest push of her finger. This is what he hated about Veronica—how much she could get him to act like a whimpering little boy. He wanted to wrap his arms around her. He wanted to undo her bathrobe by the knot. It would be so easy. All it would
take was her permission. That, and a singular pull.
Something moved on her face again as she stood up and approached him. It was then that he saw the emotion for what it was—a form of tenderness, but not love. Veronica, in her bathrobe, with her hair straight and wet, was looking at him with pity. He took two steps back as if he were afraid that she really might topple him over.
“There’s no point in waiting any longer.”
“You don’t want to wait until Nick graduates anymore?”
“Nick isn’t a child.” Veronica crossed her arms, and when she did, she opened a tiny window in her bathrobe through which Charlie could glimpse her cleavage.
“I can reach out to Larry on Monday.”
“I already did.”
Finally, Charlie couldn’t hide his anger anymore. “Are you fucking serious, Veronica?”
“Charlie.” Veronica’s face had been losing its color, and now it was as white as the robe. It was the middle of the summer, and still she’d stayed so pale. Looking at her incandescent skin, Charlie became incensed. Why hadn’t she gotten a tan in Vegas? She looked disgusting! Why hadn’t she sat out in the sun? You could see all her veins! Didn’t she enjoy what he gave her? Wasn’t that the only reason she’d even stayed with him? He could’ve left her so long ago, but then that would’ve made him the asshole! He needed to sit. No, he needed to leave.
“Whatever you want,” he said.
He was standing so close to the front door that he only had to turn around to be in the doorway outside the apartment. Still, he didn’t move. Their interaction had been so tragically brief, it was like they weren’t even acquaintances. He had longer conversations with bartenders, with strangers waiting in line at the drug store. But what else? What was he possibly waiting for? Still, for a second more, he stood there and waited.
The door caught on the floor mat before it could slam, but now that he was in motion, the spell had been broken, and there was no more waiting left in him, not even for the elevator. He flung open the door to the emergency staircase and ran down the flights as if he feared he’d be chased. Charlie hadn’t thought of Tati when he first started fantasizing about Maria, but since the connection was made, he could no longer see past it. As he went down the staircase, each time he reached another landing, the soles of his feet thundering in anger, he saw Maria and Tati, magnified in his mind so each limb seemed as tall as buildings. He saw them splayed across one another, their bodies impossibly twisted. It was Veronica’s fault—Veronica in her prim little bathrobe, with her orderly nails, her smooth and waxed calves—Veronica who had been the one to set it all into motion, who had cracked the bat and sent it flying like a home run, barreling forward and forging a trajectory that he couldn’t wait to come to the end of. Now, as Veronica nested back in the apartment, he knew exactly just where it would fall. She was in the city again, which meant that there was a new space she’d created—a big, empty space they called the country house.
They Could Have Named Her Anything Page 23