Never Too Real

by Carmen Rita

  “We just haven’t spent any time together . . . out of this apartment.” Her face was full of honest pleading and resigned woe. She was tempted to keep talking, to say something therapy-like about “breeding intimacy” or “maintaining connection,” but her throat had closed on her. Gabi’s silence held Bert’s attention like a tether. His eyes widened as something seemed to sink in. She wasn’t sure what it was, but the panic was replaced by more wounded—or were they worried?—eyes.

  “Oh. Yeah. I mean, are you sure?” He paused, rubbed the top of his thighs with his hands, a nervous tic. “But, but, won’t Zuri be mad? I mean . . .” He moved his right hand to run it through his hair. He was looking for a way out—and it hurt Gabi horribly to notice this—but after so many months of being neglected, Gabi knew that whether it was guilt or love, something made him feel inclined to say yes to his wife.

  Gabi shook her head. “Yeah. Maybe. But this is much more important.” This time the catch in her throat made its way up and cracked her voice. It was rare for Gabi to be vulnerable. She was always in command, a national, well-known cornerstone of fortitude, for Pete’s sake. There was little room for weakness from her, or need. Sure, she needed people and things, but she never had to plead.

  Bert’s face was slack again, still mildly stunned by her request. “Oh, uh, yeah, I mean, I miss you, too.” He paused. Gabi was sitting still, her eyes speaking loudly. “Yeah, okay, let’s do it.”

  Two hours later, Gabi and Bert were cleaned up, Gabi particularly making an effort to look lovely. As they entered the restaurant and took in the trendy beauty of the railroad-style, wood-grain, green succulents built flush into the wall, ten feet full up and breathed deeply the scent of char, Bert ambled over to the open kitchen to shake hands and congratulate the new chef in town. The chef that wasn’t him. Bert’s notoriety from the show gave him props in kitchens all around town, but he was just a smidge too old and too needy to break into the freshest spots. Gabi was left to sit alone at the table for a while, ordering a glass of wine right away. The server was an adorkable girl in a cropped tee that looked like it had been used to soak up spilt coffee; proudly grunge. Gabi knew that the exposed inch of her bare, young belly was going to get a long look from her husband. It reminded her what a Sisyphean task she had. And look at where Sisyphus ended up.

  Gabi thought back to a particular session with their couples’ therapist.

  “Are you okay?” the therapist asked as Bert suddenly released a sob in the middle of their session, abruptly startling both women. It was a sound that escaped from him with a jump, followed by a red creep of color on his face and streaming tears, all in a matter of seconds. Gabi was shocked. She stared. She was incredulous and couldn’t, or wouldn’t, say a word. She couldn’t believe not only that her husband was crying, but how he released what seemed like a break in a dam.

  All therapists have therapists, and after becoming more and more shunned by her husband, their voices escalating daily in anger and resentment, Gabi knew that another voice and point of view were needed. They’d been seeing Marion every week for nearly a year. She was almost sixty, a round woman with dramatically coiffed blond hair set in Upper East Side waves. Her makeup firmly and colorfully applied, she gave off a sexy grandma feel, like an abuela with style. She had been referred to them by a friend of Gabi’s, a pioneer in television psychology.

  “Bert. What’s this about?” Marion asked with genuine concern as Gabi unconsciously shifted her body away from her husband and just stared at him. Finally, she thought, some emotion. Finally, something was breaking through. Was he going to admit it? That he was having an affair, or affairs?

  “I’m just . . . It’s sad, y’know?” He sniffed and visibly worked at pulling back in all that he’d just let escape.

  “What’s sad?”

  “Just . . . this. All this.”

  Gabi maintained her silence. She set her jaw as she realized that her husband’s moment of honest vulnerability was over as quickly as it had begun. She knew deeply, not only in her trained therapist’s mind, but in her soul, that she had married someone with a character disorder. These people were incapable of being anything but lonely. After all, they were alone—all they saw in every human face they encountered was a reflection of themselves. That’s where Gabi’s pity came from. Right now it was sinking in that soon enough, she’d be alone, too. But only for a while.

  Bert shifted quickly from open and emotional to his default setting: slick and closed. Gabi could see his mind working around an explanation. She marveled at how well she could read his face and body language. She could hear him loud and clear without his uttering a word. And yet, she had willingly ignored so much for so long.

  Marion seemed intrigued for once. Lately Gabi was questioning the choice and expense of seeing her, as they’d made zero headway and at times Marion’s eyes appeared too half-lidded for Gabi not to suspect she was dipping into her own supply of antianxiety medication. But this was a moment in which Marion could redeem herself. Gabi didn’t want to be the bad guy here, the nag. She needed Marion to press Bert. Press him until the juice of truth ran out to the floor. That was going to be the only way this marriage could be saved.

  “Gabi?” Marion asked, squeezing the wrong fruit.

  Gabi turned her head to face her; her eyes until this point had been boring holes into Bert’s. Without a blink, she looked at Marion and slightly shrugged. Therapist-speak for “you talk.” Marion got the message. Both women turned to Bert. His head was down as he fiddled with tissues, breathing dramatically.

  “Y’know, I don’t know . . . It must be that, that I miss you, too.”

  Nah, Gabi thought. That’s not it. That’s not it at all.You bastard.

  Gabi’s attention came back to her seat in the restaurant as Bert returned.

  “Oh, whew, sorry, babe.” He scooted between the narrow tables, his growing drinking belly almost knocking over Gabi’s water glass. “Yeah, so, he’s cool, pretty cool.”

  “The chef? That’s great.” Gabi stifled the impulse to encourage him further and coach him into networking with this young “hot” guy, following up, etc., etc. She was always trying to help, but even she had to remind herself that sometimes helping is perceived as a bid for control. Especially when gender was involved.

  The meal was four stars and Gabi maintained her confidence as much as she could through the meal, but the pleading and melancholy in her eyes was still clear. Bert reached out for her hand once or twice, but it felt so robotic and automatic that she felt a layer of mutual deception between their skins. She didn’t want to think of how many other women he’d touched the same way, and different ways, during the course of their marriage. She knew they had something incredibly unique, a connection that neither of them had ever had before and, she knew, possibly never again. That was her sadness. And that was also why she just kept trying, despite the truth she knew they had both buried down deep over the years.

  As the server came by and her slice of naked belly glowed white just at their chin level, Gabi watched her husband’s eyes take it in and his smile grow. He held his gaze for two beats too long, then looked up at the server’s young, unlined, un-made-up face, took in a sharp breath, puffed out his chest, and leaned back in the chair, like a silverback male gorilla, ready to take her in, or on.

  Gabi reached for her wineglass, her ears now only hearing white noise, her eyes glazed over until all in front of her was a hazy blur.

  Chapter 18

  Luz always brightened when she walked through the small iron gates of her parents’ Harlem townhouse, her childhood home. This time, though, as she shut the doors behind her, she heard its metal squeak in another way, another level. It felt like the opening and closing of a door in her life. The rusting iron spoke differently than it had when she was a child. Of course back then, she had barely paid attention, filing the groan away into her subconscious. The noise from the street also competed so loudly for her attention—kids playing on the sidewal
k, and in the street, as if it were a schoolyard, water cascading from hydrants, Dominican neighbors yelling for Anaaa! Now the neighborhood was clean, quiet, all grown up. Just like her. A daughter with a new father.

  Luz had never gone this long without speaking to her parents. She was close to them and her children were so close to them. But she also knew herself. She knew that she could be much too emotional—nasty, even—when prompted and perturbed. And right now they deserved better. She deserved answers, too, but it was hard to get honest answers when you showed up with guns blazing. So, Luz needed time.

  As a mother herself, she understood the difficulty of figuring out when a child was old enough to know certain things. But why lie for over thirty years? What had that accomplished, beyond deceiving her into believing she was this proud sistah in a long line of proud sistahs? Had it saved her father—the one who raised her—from embarrassment? It certainly explained how the family had avoided giving her the exact date of her parents’ wedding. She had the pictures. Beautiful! But it had been a small shindig at the house. Luz thought it was that way because her mother didn’t like ostentation and waste. Not because she had been knocked up and it was a shotgun wedding.

  But why would her father raise this other man’s child? Cuckolded, that was the word for it, yes? It happened often enough that it had its own word. How bizarre. Men.

  After warm but guarded greetings at the door, Luz, her father, and her mother sat at the family breakfast nook, where all big talks traditionally happened. The clinking and clanking of tea being made echoed loudly above the silence hovering over them. Luz waited for her proud, stable parents to open this potentially painful conversation. But, they seemed to sit back in apprehension, waiting for their daughter to lay into them. Tomas had called them earlier to give them a heads-up as to why they hadn’t heard from his older sister and why she was going to the home today. Luz’s parents also seemed ashamed. That made the surly words waiting in her throat taste worse.

  “So,” Luz said sourly. “Want to tell me what’s going on?”

  Roger and Altagracia seemed nearly beyond reproach in life. They had raised their children almost entirely without drama, much less trauma. Somehow this made Luz feel even worse. It was as if they’d saved up all their secrets for this one thing, this one day.

  “Your mother did the right thing, Luz.” Her father’s voice was steady and caring.

  “What did she do, Dad?” Luz knew right well what she’d done, and what he’d done. But she wanted to hear it from them. Their version.

  “Don’t be mad at him, m’ija. He saved you.”

  “Saved me? Saved me from what, exactly? Life as a drug dealer’s kid?”

  “He saved you from being aborted.”

  The air was sucked out of Luz’s lungs. She hadn’t considered that at all. She had never thought her mother would do such a thing.

  Luz was stunned into silence. She sat, humbled.

  “M’ija,” her mother said gently as she carefully placed her cup onto its saucer—a child of a revolution, the daughter of a married man and his mistress who came to this country with barely an education, barely a suitcase, but so many hopes and dreams, who placed her cup down as if she had stepped off the Mayflower itself. “I was young. And, I was es-stupid. But more than that, I was confused.”

  Luz’s father sniffed and straightened in his chair.

  “I didn’t know where I belonged and I was scared of everything. So, I made a mistake.”

  Luz, who had been staring at the corner of the table, the crease in the tablecloth, slowly brought her eyes to her mother’s.

  “Mistake?” she whispered.

  “No, no. Ju are not a mistake. But at de time, it wasn’ de right t’ing to do.” She took a sip of her tea, carefully choosing words in her second language.

  “And . . . and you were going to abort me?” Luz’s anger was gone, replaced by a desire to understand. To understand her mother at nineteen years old, pregnant by a man she didn’t love.

  “Jes. An’ I am very, very ashamed ’bout dat. I’ve prayed for years for God to forgive me for even t’inking of it.”

  “But I wasn’t going to let that happen.” Luz’s father took the baton. “Luz, it wasn’t a great situation, but it was what it was. We had broken up for a short while and I didn’t want her to go through that.”

  “And you knew the whole time?”

  He couldn’t look Luz in the eye.

  “You knew that I wasn’t yours?”

  “Yes,” he said hoarsely, picking up his own mug.

  Ma brought her napkin up to her tears.

  “But how could you not tell me? I mean, at some point, like when I had kids or when I got married. Or how about while I was growing up, when all those kids made fun of how I looked different from you guys, from my brother?”

  “It was a different time,” Luz’s father said after a moment. “We did what we thought was best.”

  “For whom? You guys?”

  Slam!

  Luz’s mother had brought her hand down on the table, sending a jolt through everyone, rattling the china. Her mother might usually be reserved, but she hadn’t made it this far in this country by being anything but a force of nature.

  “Enough!” she barked, ensuring that Luz was awoken from her self-righteous stupor.

  “Jor father saved jor life! Maybe ees not de story ju want to hear—maybe ees not de story dat sounds good or works wit’ jor job or jor friends, but das it! Dis ees jor father—dees man! Jor real father.” Altagracia pointed at her husband with her index finger. The rest of her hand clutched a very wet tissue. That hand would be holding a lot of tissues until this speed bump on the road of life was way off into a rearview mirror.

  Tears poured down Luz’s cheeks. She looked at her father. As usual, Roger was holding it together. But his shoulders slumped more than usual, his posture now reflecting his true age, the age and weight of his history. His eyes glistened with softness and sadness.

  It was her mother’s turn to be angry. For Luz’s mama, the one mortal sin was ungratefulness. Each and every day of their lives, she had made sure to teach her children gratitude for the bounty they enjoyed. To be grateful for the homes their parents owned, while most of their family lived in rentals. To be grateful they were healthy and educated—self-sufficient, unlike her aunt’s family. Luz’s cousins had never left the ’hood, at least in terms of their attitudes. At least they had a different last name, Luz often thought. Maybe no one would make the connection.

  Releasing a sob, Altagracia got up from the table. She put her cup and saucer on the kitchen counter and made her way up the creaky brownstone stairs to another floor, another room.

  Luz and her father sat in silence for a moment.

  “I’m sorry,” Luz said at last.

  “It’s okay.”

  “I’m just . . . trying to figure this out.”

  He patted her hand. “Just know that you are always my daughter. From the moment you kicked in her belly, I was committed to you and to your mother, no matter how you got in there.”

  They both chuckled softly through tears.

  “Thanks, Dad,” Luz said. Then asked, “Does your family know . . . about me?”

  “Well . . . I remember once when you were about four years old, Gran’mama came to visit, and she didn’t say this to me, but she said to my sister, ‘I bet that that’s not his chil’. But I’m glad he’s doin’ the right thing by that woman. She’s a good woman.’”

  Luz smiled at the warm memory of her grandmother. Luz had always felt so much love from her—it was as if there was nothing else inside of her but love to give.

  “That was the last anyone said anything about it.”

  Typical, Luz thought, for that side of the family. “What about Mom’s side?”

  “Now, that side.” Her father’s face lit up a bit. “Well, you know how they felt about your mother marrying me—a moreno.”

  For a Dominican to marry someone even da
rker than herself, and here in the “J’united Es-states?” Sacrilege. This was the land of opportunity, of plenty, of... plenty of white people! Why not up your station and at least marry un chino? That was the Altagracia-family take on her father. They didn’t care how wealthy and educated his family was. All they cared about was that he was black. Black as night, they’d say. Como Miles Davis! Though he was much more Denzel.

  Luz had to chuckle at the memories. It was a serious matter, but she and her father historically had a sense of humor about it because it was so absurd. And Roger had the healthiest ego of any black man she’d ever known. It would take a lot more than some racist Dominicans to nick his pride. Plus, he loved his wife much too much.

  Roger continued. “Then, when you came out as light as you did, they were so damn relieved, it was even more insulting. But I took it in stride. And no one dared question a thing.”

  I’m so grateful for this man, Luz thought.

  “Plus, when she married me, your mother told everyone to go to hell. She gave up a lot and I gave up some, too. But I never see it that way.” He paused and looked at Luz directly and with warmth. “I got the best thing of all. My girl.”

  “Shit, Papi . . .” Luz went into his arms. She wasn’t that much closer to figuring things out, but at least one parent was happy. She’d try to reach her mother next. Each character in a story has her own story.