by Andy Schell
I think about my perky mother and wonder how she would endure such tragedy and loss in her own family. Would she become a Mother of the Plaza by going shopping on the Country Club Plaza in Kansas City? Treat herself to a Smoothie? Would she be devastating? No. I’m too hard on her. She would rise to the occasion, use her Midwestern pluck to live on, reinvent the family as best as she could. That’s my mother.
“So you see, Harry, I enjoy hearing the poetry of people’s homelands. Because mine is stuck inside of my heart and it will be a very long day before it will come out again.”
We’re silent for a few minutes while the candles flicker and the radio plays Eurythmics, “Here Comes the Rain Again.” It feels odd, lying here, holding hands, learning about the sorrowful past of this beautiful man beside me. But when Annie Lennox sings, “Talk to me, like lovers do,” I know that Nicolo is doing just thatqspeaking to me with the honesty of a lover. And the oddity of it falls away, and it feels just right.
Nicolo smiles, sighs. “This happens when I drink too much. I become lonely for my family. I’m sorry, Harry. You probably just wanted to get me in bed and taste the meat that Argentina is famous for. No?”
I smile, grateful that his sense of humor is intact. This time I kiss his hand. “Who’s left in your family?”
“My mother and my brother,” he answers.
He’s right. We are alike. Alike and so different.
He rolls off the bed, walks to the table, and carefully lifts the plate holding the burning candle. He carries it slowly back to bed
and lowers himself next to me until the flame is flickering near my face. “Look into the flame,” he says. “And tell me what you see.”
I look through the dancing fire connected to the wick, and what I see is his handsome, dark-skinned hand, beyond its glow, holding the plate. “I see your hand,” I answer, feeling stupid and literal. Shit, he likes poetry. I should have said something poetic.
“When you look into a flame you are looking into your future,” he explains. Then he smiles sexily and says, “And what you see is me.” He holds the candle in front of our faces, highlighting them with the swaggering flame, then suddenly blows it out, returning us to the middle gray light of the shade-darkened room. He puts the candle on the floor, rolls back to me, and wraps me in his muscular arms. Then he closes his eyes.
It’s nightfall. Nicolo and Thomas are gone. Amity is pooing up for real the whole two-hour show. I’m feeling almost dreamy, as if I’m still wrapped in Nicolo’s arms. I sit on the side of the tub and watch. I don’t know how she’s doing it, but she seems to have this incredible energy, she is fluffing her hair and painting her face and staying very focused and task oriented. “Thomas was unbelievable, Harry. He can go and go and go. You should hear his accent while he makes love. “I’m coming, Amity,” he said, but it sounded like he said, “I’m calming Amity.” European love makes me melt. From the moment he stamped my passport, I was wetter than a canal in Amsterdam!”
I smile. Quietly laugh.
“How was your Latin lover? Tell me about Nicolo, Harry. Did he scramble your huevos?”
I sigh, contented. “We didn’t have sex. We didn’t even take our clothes off. We just talked.”
“What? G’yaw, sounds like true love,” she says flippantly. “You just talked the whole time?”
“No, we talked a little while; then we fell asleep in each other’s arms. We were both kind of knocked over by the champagne.”
“And each other?” Amity asks. She does the Belushi eyebrow, but her smile is slightly tense.
“Kind of,” I say. I’m a little nervous about telling her my true feelings that I think this guy is the sexiest, sweetest, most real person I’ve ever met which is largely the way I felt about her when first we met. The fundamental difference is that Nicolo is a man. A man that I could instantly fall in love with and probably am. Even though my relationship with Amity is wide open, and honest as well, the whole situation seems loaded. How can I love two people at once?
“He doesn’t like me,” she says, putting her mascara on while she opens her mouth wide like a fish.
“How do you know?”
She pauses with the mascara wand. “Harry, don’t bullshit me. You see it too.”
“I think he likes you,” I lie. “He just didn’t like Hunt’ sfriends calling him a faggot, and since you dated Hunt, he finds you guilty.”
“I wish he wouldn’t judge me,” she says, going back to her mascara application.
“He’s a wonderful man. He’ll get over it.”
“Harry, are you in love?”
“Amity, I just met the guy. How could I be in love?” I don’t sound the least bit convincing.
She doesn’t answer, but smiles. It’s a smile I’ve not seen her wear; her lips aren’t raised or lowered, but spread to camouflage whatever her feelings may be. She quickly resumes her mission of readiness, and before I know it, she’s whipped herself back into a fresh and gorgeous woman in a black cocktail dress and pearls. “Libby’s sore,” she whines, slipping into her shoes. “Kim can have a blow job, but he’s not sticking it in.”
“You want me to tell him?” I ask, gallantly.
“You let me take care of that,” Amity says.
Kim comes to the door, and this time she answers it herself.
r,u!
She brings him in, and I’m surprised to see that he’s Chinese or Japanese or something like that. He’ sa short, wired-up guy of about fifty who shakes my hand as if we’ve made a thirty-million-dollar business deal that entitles him to the whole thirty million. His black hair is dirty and unkempt, his face has a five o’clock shadow, but with his sparse whiskers it looks as if he’s operating on daylight saving time. His clothes are jail cell fresh, and his breath smells like rotten sushi. I can’t believe she’s dating this guy. But Amity eagerly throws her Chanel purse over her shoulder, and whoosh, they’re out of the house.
With the house to myself, I revel in the quiet. Falling into the wingback chair, I raise my hand to my nose. I can still smell Nicolo’ s natural scent. It’s a powerful aphrodisiac, and I try to imagine him naked in my arms, kissing me. I’m feeling as if this is a day I’ll never forget, like the day Amity and I had in Mexico. A day when every smell, every piece of clothing, every word will be remembered.
Later in the evening, I run out to Butch’s Diner for dinner food. Recently, I’ve started eating all the fattening food I can and drinking protein shakes, because working out at the gym has made me hungrier. My body has been changing, and now that I’ve met Nicolo, I have more incentive to garner results. After I eat my takeout calories, I fall asleep in my room.
Later that night, I’m stirred slightly awake by sounds coming out of Amity’s bedroom. “Oh, Kim, you drive me wild!” she squeals. There’s something a little sick about it. She was just saying the same thing to Thomas this morning, and it makes me wonder which guy really drives her wild. And while the answer may be both, I have a feeling it could just as well be neither. I roll over and pull my feather pillow over my head and fall back into a deep sleep.
CHAPTER
SIXTEEN
t’s morning. Kim is smoking a cigarette, and Amity (topless) and he are sitting on the floor of my room, lotus style, in their underwear. Kim’s underpants have yellow stains in the crotch, and the stains are these weird shapes that provoke me to analyze them as if I’m taking a Rorschach test. I swear I see a raccoon and a garden rake.
Amity tells him to sit still because she’s going to pluck a gray hair from his head. I’m sure this is going to send his mid life crisis into a further tailspin, but he doesn’t flinch. Possibly because he’s so coked out of his mind at ten o’clock in the morning that his life is nothing but a big fat cabaret.
“Harry, read Kim some of your poetry,” Amity commands. There’s powder on her nose, and it isn’t the kind she gets at Max well’s cosmetics department.
“He doesn’t want to hear a poem,” I say, annoyed. There’s
something unseemly about being around a wired-up middle-aged guy who has pee-pee stains shaped like animals on his underwear at ten o’clock in the morning. I’m losing respect for Amity too it’s difficult to watch her coke-induced gushiness for this mutt before I’ve even had my morning cup of coffee.
“Come on!” she pleads.
I want to give him a flea bath, put him in a crate, and take him to the pound. And insist they neuter him before adopting him out. Oh hell, if I can improvise anew for Nicolo, I can certainly recite something old for Kim. I choose a poem I wrote when I was sixteen about a young boy who rides on a cloud looking for his lost horse. I decide on this poem because it is the one I will always know by heart meaning I don’t have to join the underwear party by getting out of bed to rustle through my file box.
He rode above the plains below
Upon a castle of ice and snow
O’er wheat fields and farms and creek beds stony In search of his friend, his cinnamon pony.
Amity tries to look interested while bending down with a rolled up hundred dollar bill in her hand to snort a line of coke. She holds her hair back, but it falls into the powder and obliterates the line. “Damn!” she says, pulling back, grabbing the razor to reconvene the little nasal convention into a straight line.
They’d joined as friends when he was nine
This Kansas boy and his pony fine
And grew together, from boy and colt
To handsome steed and young adult.
Kim holds her hair back so she can stick the bill down and suck up the cocaine with her perfectly shaped nose and send herself flying into the atmosphere. After Amity’s done, he pulls on her hair to guide her down to his Rorschach crotch. “Kim!” she says, mock horrified. He laughs while she looks at me disgusted and rolls her eyes. “Naughty boy,” she sniffs, pinching her nose. He starts
chopping more powder with the razor while Amity stares down into the glass of the mirror. “Go on, Harry,” she says. “It’s beautiful.”
She hasn’t heard a word, and this poem is more precious to me than others. Why in the fuck am I reciting it to them?
Along the way they learned to fly
O’er fences and gullies, to touch the sky.
No love had he, not yours nor mine,
Could touch the love of his pony fine.
Kim snorts up a huge line of blow, then reels back, eyes wide, and says something that I guess translates to “Killer shit, man!”
Amity giggles. “Don’t you love Korean? It sounds so … Korean!”
He pulls his head back, breathes in, holds out his hands. He’s going to sneeze. Amity screams and grabs the little mirror holding all the powder, lifts it away from him, and holds it over her shoulder just in time for him to explode with a sneeze that sounds as if he’s getting his head chopped off—four times. When he’s through, there’s a big green, phlegmy loogie hanging on his lips and chin.
“Nose floss!” Amity screams, holding her hand in front of her face so she doesn’t blow the coke off her mirror while laughing.
Kim wipes the loogie off with the back of his hand and reaches for another cigarette.
I’m baring my soul for this guy?
“Go on, babe,” Amity urges.
“I just finished,” I tell her, lying.
“You did?”
“Sure. Didn’t you listen?”
She nods as if she’s been hanging on every word. “Yes, it was great!” Grite!
Kim blows a cloud of smoke into my face. “Very good.” Velly Goo.
zuz nuy
Four days later, after working a trip to Atlanta, I’m back in Dallas cruising in a black Jaguar sedan. The interior is incredibly fine leather, and the dash is mahogany, and the sound system beats the shit out of anything. There’s a pack of cigarettes on the dash. I don’t smoke, not usually, but I light one up, and add to my mystique a twenty-three year old cruising the campus streets around DCU in a black Jag. I’ve never driven a Jaguar before because my parents were the Cadillac types, and I admit the power and design are intoxicating. I roll the electric window down and rest my arm as I drive. People look at me. On the street, in the next lane, at the stoplight. I pretend I don’t see them, but I do. Fuck, I’m acting like Winston. Isn’t it enough that I have my own dentedin BMW with a burned hole in the upholstery? What the hell is the matter with me?
Eventually, I park the Jaguar at Caldwell and Family, makers of fine clothing for the prep dogs at DCU, and I reach into my pocket and feel the five one hundred dollar bills. I hear Amity saying, minutes before, “Kim, you can’t expect Harry to stay around while we’re together at our house. We need our privacy and Harry needs his. I think you better send him shopping.” And so Kim peeled off five bills and handed me the keys to his car. Amity walked me to the door and suggested I go to Caldwell and Family and get myself something nice, and when Kim wasn’t looking, she pinched me on the ass and stuck her tongue in my ear. I walked to the car with a wet ear and a belief that I deserved the spree as a reward for putting up with Kim.
So here I am, in Caldwell and Family. The salesman is friendly, helpful. He probably saw me drive up in the black Jaguar, because he’s not shoveling out the usual Dallas attitude thrown upon young Yankee lads. I’m fitted for a nice pair of khaki slacks and two button-down dress shirts. I see a khaki cotton jacket with red plaid lining, and though it’s not quite the season yet, I take it.
I leave the shop and survey the surroundings, noticing a jewelry store. I stop in and decide to buy something for Amity since I’m really shopping with her hard-earned money. But as I wade through the necklaces, rings, and pendants and arrive at the fine writing instruments, I think of Nicolo and how he wants to be a journalist. If I buy him a pen, he can use it to take notes while investigating a story or while interviewing someone. After all, I’ve already bought Amity a car . sort of. I mean, she drives it as much as I do. So surely I can use the money to buy Nicolo a simple ink pen. I find a shiny sterling silver pen that is beautifully designed in the slightest curvature of the letter S. It fits perfectly in my hand, and it looks very elegant while I’m writing with it, testing it out. I tell the shop owner I’ll take it if I can get it engraved right away. He says, “Of course.” What shall I say? “With Love, Harry?” Too much, too fast. “With Love, From Your Hero?” Gag. I’m choking on my ego. I think I better go with inscribing his name on it. “Nicolo.”
I drive toward the restaurant where Nicolo works. When I get there, I find he isn’t working, but Thomas is. Thomas freely gives me Nicolo’s address and directions to get there.
I pull up to the duplex and try to breathe my heart into a normal rhythm, but it doesn’t work. I give up, grab the little gift-wrapped box, and head up to the door. Ring the bell twice.
A woman appears. His mother? She’s about the right age, but she doesn’t look anything like Evita. Come to think of it, I’ve never really seen Evita, just Patty Lupone pretending she’s Evita on a poster. “Yes?” she asks from behind the screen door, her accent noticeable in just one word. Her black hair is pulled back from her face.
“Is Nicolo here?”
“He is at school,” she says carefully.
I think about his stories, realize she’s probably distrusting of strangers. “Can I leave something for him?” Oh, God, she probably thinks it’s a bomb. “It’s a gift.”
“What is your name?”
Behind the screen I see her smile. “Of course,” she says, opening the door. “Come in.”
“You know who I am?” I ask, stepping into the apartment. “Nicolo speaks of you. You please him. He says you are funny.” I want to jump up and down and yelp with delight, “Nicolo told his mother about me! Nicolo told his mother about me!” But
I calmly tell her, “Nicolo’s cool. He pleases me too.” “And now you have bought him a gift.” “Yes.”
“Would you like to drink coffee?” “Sure.” ‘
She motions for me to sit, and as she turns and walks into the kitche
n, I realize that her hair isn’t pulled into a bun, but is hanging in a ponytail, which makes her seem less severe, less frightened. She’s wearing a sleeveless dress that looks very seventies. The apartment is conservatively decorated, and the color scheme is mostly gold and deep blue. The wooden chair I’m sitting in probably came with them, as it distinctly feels like a foreign chair. The coffee must have been already brewed, as she returns directly with two cups.
I take the cup and saucer from her. “Thanks.” She nods a welcome. I take a sip and only guess that I’m now drinking Argentinean coffee because the brew is mega strong and heavily sugared stronger than a baby’s fart and sweeter than his momma’s milk, Amity would say.
“You met Nicolo at the restaurant?” his mother asks.
“Yes. I was there with my … friend. Nicolo waited on us.” “Do you like the food?”
I nod. “Oh, yes. It was great. I liked the service too.”
“He is a terrible waiter,” she laughs. “He comes home with food on his pants. But he is a very attentive, very kind boy. He is a beautiful singer. Someday if you are lucky he will sing for you.”
“That would be nice,” I say. As she lifts her coffee to her lips,
I notice that her hands free of jewelry except for her wedding ring are beautifully aged, full of life. There is elegance in their lines, veins, and creases, and I see that she’s comfortable in using her hands, unlike my own mother. I want to make small talk, but I’m not quite sure what to say. Knowing her past has made me cautious. “How long have you lived here?”
“Five years,” she answers.
I meant the apartment, not the US. I’m not sure if she understands. “Do you like it?”
“Very much. But I miss Argentina, to be truthful. It is my home. I had to leave. Did Nicolo tell you?”
“Yes,” I answer, ashamed. I’m not sure why I feel this way. Maybe it’s because I don’t have any concept of difficulty or hardship. I certainly don’t experience torture at the hands of my government other than the suffering and agony I go through whenever Nancy Reagan appears on TV in one of her little red Adolfo dresses and insists that her ballet-dancing son is all man. “I’m sorry that you lost your husband and your daughter. I really am.”