“What do you mean you’re in my apartment building?”
“I mean I’m in your apartment building. By the elevator. I followed someone else in.”
“What?”
“I went to your house first. Your mami told me you moved. Nestor, she almost started crying when she told me. I can’t believe you abandoned your mami like that.”
“What?”
“Do you want to let me up? Or can you come down and get me?”
The phone felt light in my hand. I was having trouble processing what was going on. “I’ll be down,” I said, breathing fast.
If I had happened to walk by her, there’s a good chance I wouldn’t have recognized her. She looked so different. Her hair was a light caramel color now and shoulder-length, tucked behind her ears. She wore torn jeans and an oversized purple T-shirt. An enormous red duffel bag rested at her feet. She smiled when she saw me. That’s what gave her away. And then she practically jumped on me and buried her chin in my neck and said, “Oh my God,” over my shoulder. When she pulled away, she said, “I knew it would be like this, seeing you again. It’s so great.” She grinned fiercely.
I drew her back to me and hugged her again, something I never would have attempted before. But I felt different now, like I knew who I was, and because of knowing I could handle her, could control her effect on me.
In my apartment, she left the bag just inside the door and glanced around. She went to the window and gazed out. “All Latin American countries look exactly the same,” she said. “And they also look completely different. Don’t you think?”
“I don’t know.”
She turned around.
“Did you just get here?” I asked.
“I came for you,” she said.
I smiled blandly, not knowing what she meant and not wanting to ask. I picked a shirt off my desk chair and motioned for her to sit. I sat on the bed.
“How’s your mamá?” I asked.
“The last I heard, she’s fine.”
“You don’t talk to her?”
“Not lately. She thinks I’m still in Guatemala. I want to let her believe I’m happy. Happily married.”
“Gabriella, what’s going on?”
Gabriella smoothed her hair behind her ears. “Nestor, do you remember the time you said you would marry me?”
It seemed funny to think about now, but I did remember. “Of course.”
“Would you still?”
“You didn’t already get married?”
“He kicked me out.” I watched her work her jaw a bit.
“What happened?” I asked.
“It hardly matters. How are things going for you here?”
“Actually, they’re going well. Really well. But wait—”
Her eyes widened. “Really? That’s good. We could stay around here, then. This apartment is nice.”
“Wait a second. I still don’t understand—”
“I married that guy. Larissa’s friend in Guatemala. The one I went there for, you know. It was fine for a while. He had a good job. Good enough that I had ten pairs of pajamas. Can you believe that? Pajama sets. Who do you know that has ten pajama sets?” She swallowed. “He kicked me out about a week ago. We’re getting a divorce.”
“He kicked you out?”
She nodded.
“Why?”
“He had another woman on the side. He told me I was finished, that he loved her and that he wanted to marry her. She started moving in the day I left.” She sighed and slid her hands under her thighs. “So I was thinking,” she continued, “now you and I could get married. I don’t know. Back when we knew each other, I wondered whether you were a pato—I’m sorry, but everyone used to say that—but then a few weeks ago I remembered that time you said you would marry me, so I started thinking maybe we were all wrong about you. And I wanted to come and see.”
I stared at her, not knowing what to say. This was why she had come to me? To see whether I was gay? To see whether I would marry her? Because she was desperate? I wasn’t mad at her exactly—even after not seeing her for more than a year, even with this being why she had come, I still looked at her and simply couldn’t muster anger—but I felt like she had walked in and socked me one right in the gut.
Gabriella got up and strode toward me. “Nestor,” she said softly. She put both her warm hands on my face and leaned down—I could feel her breath against my skin—and kissed me. It startled me so much that I didn’t stop her at first. I could smell the scent of baby powder lifting off her. When I pulled back a second later, she kept her hands on my face and held me close enough so that our noses were almost touching. Her eyes were shut.
“You weren’t wrong about me,” I whispered.
She was the first person from my old life I had told.
Her eyelids popped up and she straightened. She tucked her hair behind her ears and darted her eyes around the room. “Bathroom?” she asked. “Where’s the bathroom?”
I pointed. “Over there.”
I slumped on the bed. I felt lightheaded. Through the window, the day was growing dark and the sky was a deep, shimmering violet color.
When Gabriella came out of the bathroom, she said quickly and without looking at me, “Do you mind if I stay here tonight? I don’t have anywhere else to go.”
“Gabriella, I’m sorry.”
She shrugged.
“Of course you can stay. You can take my bed.” I stood and pushed the textbooks off my bed, laid the bedspread on the floor. She got in right away, even though it was still early in the evening.
“Don’t you even want to change into your pajamas?” I asked.
“I hate pajamas now,” she said, her hair spread over the pillowcase. “Ten pairs of pajamas! It’s ridiculous.” She forced a laugh.
Since I didn’t know what else to do, I turned off the light and lay down, too, folding myself in the bedspread. After a few minutes of listening to her breathe, I said, “Gabriella—” but she cut me off.
“I don’t really want to talk anymore tonight,” she said.
There was such weariness in her voice, and I didn’t want to push her. “Good night,” I said.
Later, I woke to the sound of her weeping. My clock read 2:30.
“Gabriella,” I whispered. My mouth was dry. She didn’t answer.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
She was absolutely quiet, and I thought maybe she was holding her breath to make me think she was sleeping.
“Please,” I said.
“It’s too bad,” she murmured. “I always thought about you.”
I felt my stomach tighten. “I loved you once, Gabriella. I know it doesn’t make sense, but it’s true.” I don’t know why, but I felt tears tickle down the side of my face as I said it.
“But you don’t now?” she said.
“It’s just different. I’m different.”
Silence swelled in the room. After a few minutes, she said, “I loved you once too, Nestor. I bet you never knew that. I would have told you back then, but I thought it wouldn’t matter. I mean, I thought you knew you were gay, but you just weren’t open about it.”
My voice was weak. “No, I didn’t know until later,” I said.
“So I missed my chance.”
I didn’t say anything.
“I guess it all ended up the same anyway. A broken heart back when I thought you knew. A broken heart now when you do know.” She sniffled. “It’s all the same.”
In the morning, she was gone. There was a note on the floor where her duffel bag had been.
Don’t worry about me, N. I’ll be fine. Thanks for the bed.
—G.
My first thought was to call Rey, but I hung up before he answered. I went to the window, foolishly thinking I would glimpse her, then took the elevator to street level and stood in front of my building, looking around in desperation. The air was humid and the sky was threatening rain. I had no idea what to do. I didn’t know whether I would ever see h
er again.
After a time, I went back to my apartment and crawled into bed. I smelled her—baby powder—in my sheets. I lay there all day. In the afternoon, Rey called. He left a message on the machine.
“Nestor!” he shouted. “The movie place finally had Pi. I rented it. Call me if you want to watch it tonight.”
I smiled with my face pressed against the pillow. I knew that in a little while, I would call him. I would go on. My heart would reassemble itself with a part for Gabriella that I would keep but that would stay closed, and a part for Rey that would burn and stay strong. And no matter what configuration my heart ever took, this was the truth: even though I never would again, I had a loved a girl once. But every story starts that way, right?
Caitlin Macy
In the afternoons before the holidays Trish had started frequenting a restaurant a few blocks west of the apartment. It was an expensive place inside, with hard, cushionless chairs that seemed to suggest that if you found them uncomfortable, you didn’t belong. Trish had actually dined there only once, to celebrate Tim’s promotion. But a cappuccino could set you back only so far, even on Madison Avenue. Trish fancied the idea of becoming a regular, and it worried her to think that the progress she had made had been wiped out by the recent two-week Christmas vacation. She hurried a little as she walked the crosstown blocks, leaning forward into the wind, her chin stuck out, as if she were trying to catch up with someone.
The restaurant was empty and quiet, with the conspicuous exception of a noisy party at the bar—two long-haired, angular women—models, probably—getting messily drunk and practically pouring themselves, too, all over the bartender. The man did not detach himself to wait on Trish, as he should have, and after several long minutes, she looked around peevishly, a summoning hand raised in the air. One of the women had a cigarette between her teeth and was leaning forward across the bar to solicit a light. “Oldest trick in the book,” Trish thought disgustedly, wondering what kind of woman would stoop to such an obvious, clichéd come-on to get a man’s attention. “Excuse me!” she called peremptorily. Then she snapped her head back around and hunched down in her chair, hiding herself. For it was Evgenia.
It was four months since she’d met the girl—four months since Beth and John had been transferred to London. “We’re moving!” the invitations said, and the apartment on East Ninety-third was mostly packed up and people stood around drinking Dom Pérignon out of plastic cups amid stacks of boxes, and making bids on the DeSilvas’ IKEA couch and console. Early on in the evening, Beth had come out of the kitchen with a tray of bacon-wrapped shrimp and said, “Hey, does anyone need a great cleaning lady?”
At first everyone seemed to have a cleaning woman she was satisfied with. Perched on the arm of an L-shaped sofa, Trish had listened, smiling from time to time, as Karen and Kelly and Meg and Christine griped happily about their inadequate help—Lupe, who shrank a $250 cashmere sweater; Nadia, who refused to clean the oven; Sancha, who called from São Paulo one day to say she wouldn’t be back; Liubov, who eschewed the organic cleaning products purchased by her employer and instead seemed to clean the whole apartment with industrial-strength bleach that made even the cat’s eyes water. Trish laughed in unison with the others, clutching her champagne, but said nothing—for what could she add? She didn’t have a cleaning lady; she never had—she cleaned their apartment herself. It wasn’t until the end of the party, when only the stragglers remained, that Trish caught Beth alone in the kitchen, tying up the garbage, and asked for the woman’s number.
“You’re gonna love her,” Beth had said. “Real self-starter. I’ve had her over a year and I don’t have a single complaint.”
“Just ‘Evgenia,’ huh?” Trish asked, eyeing the Post-it.
“I don’t know her last name,” Beth said, taking obvious pleasure in the fact. “I just put ‘Cash’ on the check.”
Trish née Moore had come to New York in the late eighties with a degree in communications from her state university. The industrial town she’d grown up in, in southern New Hampshire, was a former mill city, with all that the phrase implies: the rows of abandoned factory buildings lining a polluted river; the deserted downtown with the barely subsisting, family-owned department store displaying corsets and fedoras in its windows, and other dusty anachronistic goods. For several years after moving to New York Trish’s emotional sustenance had derived almost entirely from that achievement alone.
There were days, well into the mid-nineties even, when she could hardly believe she had done it. She had announced to her family and friends that she was moving to New York, and she had moved to New York. She had squeezed some money out of her mother and gone back once for some more, but by the end of the summer she had found a job crunching numbers at a midtown consulting firm. She had rented herself a studio apartment on York Avenue; later on she put up a wall and advertised for a roommate so she could afford the rent hike. When she took the Greyhound bus up to New Hampshire at the holidays, she would tell people she lived in Manhattan, and she vowed never to leave, no matter how poor she was, for an outer borough. Though her own apartment building was a former tenement, a site of peeling linoleum, bare bulbs in porcelain sockets, and knotted plastic grocery bags of trash left on landings, at least it was well away from the outer boroughs, which Trish associated with dinginess.
The city was different when Trish arrived. The gaunt, unshaven men who wore undershirts in the middle of the day had not been driven out of the Village. There were no Starbucks franchises to kill time in without arousing suspicion, and in certain neighborhoods, where trash cans were chained outside of buildings, the doorframes and stoops of which were painted over in mud brown, you could still catch the grotty scent of the 1970s as it fought its way up from the subway grates—a stimulating aroma for some, suggestive of funkier, more authentic times; alarming, merely, for someone like Trish, who had, from those first few years in the city, before she knew better, half a dozen unsavory memories.
One involved answering a roommate ad in The Village Voice and realizing, when the man offered her a glass of sweet wine before showing her around the apartment, that she was complicit in something sleazy. Another time she had taken a cab home from a bar in the Village when she knew she didn’t have the fare. She went through the motions of having the driver stop at a cash machine, knowing her card would be rejected, but figuring that, as a pretty girl, she could charm her way out of it this once. She emerged from the bank with a goofy smile, saying, “I cannot believe this…” and was about to launch into a highly nuanced apology for just why she could not, at that particular moment, access her checking account, when the cabbie demanded, “How much you got?” And when Trish said, “A dollar fifty?” he said, “Ah, fuck you!” It was the tone of his voice that bothered Trish—the disgust, yes, but what made her feel painfully humiliated, months later, when she lay awake reviewing the moment, was the man’s utter lack of surprise; it was as if, the cabbie seemed to imply, she did that kind of thing all the time.
Trish had been raised Catholic, and for years, when she woke up hungover and full of recriminations, she would revisit a laundry list of these moments of mortal shame in an attempt to marshal the evidence outstanding against her. Once in a while, when she was at her lowest, Trish would go to church on Sundays and pray, the way she had as a girl, with her eyes squeezed tight. But most Sundays she lay in bed till noon and then rose and cleaned the apartment from top to bottom, scouring the ringed bathtub, scrubbing the patch of kitchen floor on her hands and knees, washing all of her lingerie by hand and hanging it out to dry, and finally taking a shower and combing out her hair to let it dry naturally.
All those first years, too, Trish believed that until she changed her ways and stopped waking up hungover she would be punished. She assumed the punishment would manifest itself in the thwarting of her most obvious goal: marriage.
But life did not seem to play the retributive role Trish had cast it in. Life was altogether more charitable—it was alm
ost Christian in its forgiveness. At the midtown firm where she’d worked her way up to research manager, she met Tim, fresh from business school in the Midwest. Trish got drunk and slept with him on the first date—he married her anyway. She floated the subject of matrimony two weeks into their relationship—he was not deterred. She had not changed her ways, and yet she had been rewarded.
After she got the ring, Trish gave up her own apartment and moved into Tim’s bachelor studio. It was an upgrade for her, in that, though the studio was small, it was in a luxury building, with a health club in the basement. The cooking and cleaning were the least she could do, said Trish, who had given notice at her job at once. And she honestly didn’t mind housework. In fact, reaching down to scour the bathtub or feeling her muscles begin to tire from running the German vacuum over the bedroom carpet were among the times that Trish felt most robustly connected to the promise of her and Tim’s union.
“It’s not like we were rolling in dough,” Tim liked to say of his childhood in Detroit, “and yet my mother never worked.”
“Of course not!” Trish would agree, a scornful edge to her voice. “It’s so much better for the family,” she would say, as if she, too, could remember family dinners of roast beef and mashed potatoes rather than the broiler fish sticks or macaroni and cheese out of a box she and her older sister, Jan, had made the nights neither her mother—an ICU nurse at the hospital—nor her father—a tax advisor—could be home to prepare a meal. In public and in private, too, Trish and Tim would agree on this one issue with that avid, defensive posturing that is characteristic of all kinds of traditionalists in Manhattan. Tim’s latent desire for a stay-at-home wife, teased out by Trish on their second date, had become their sustaining vanity as a couple.
Then had come the DeSilvas’ going-away party. Perching there on the arm of the sofa, faux-commiserating with one of the women for her inability to fire a particularly careless cleaner on account of the known exigencies of her personal life (single mom, etc.), Trish felt duped. She was ill at ease, and the feeling of anxiety stayed with her for some weeks as it slowly occurred to her that perhaps there was a whole host of other things she was ignorant of, standards no one had told her about, and that she would discover belatedly and by accident, in some unsympathetic public forum.
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