The Superman Project

by A. E. Roman

  “Well,” Chase said, “it’s like for his papier-mâché projects.”

  “Qué?” said Pedro.

  Chase looked at Pedro as if he were an ignoramus. “Papier-mâché is newspapers mixed with glue, to make things. Andy Warhol had Soup Cans. Elvis will have papier-mâché. Every artist needs like a gimmick. He’ll experiment, then when he’s real good, we’ll sell his pieces at the TSP art gallery.”

  “Ah,” said Pedro. “Money.”

  “Not only money,” said Chase. She looked at Pedro as if he had like fallen off the back of a banana boat. “Elvis will do it because his soul needs him to do it. Because he longs to create. Elvis needs to do something with his hands. He’s an artist, not a grocer or a cartoonist. Cartoons are for children. I’m sure you can understand, Chico.”

  “He’s an artist,” I repeated. “Not a grocer or a cartoonist. Cartoons are for children. Sure.”

  “Exactly,” she continued. “We’re getting married tomorrow. We bought a dog and Elvis has like moved into my condo apartment in Brooklyn. I am really, really happy. The new art will just mean a rebirth for Elvis. Part of him has been dead, part of him never, ever came to life. It’s like a new and refined beginning for Elvis. Right, sweetie?”

  Elvis nodded and winked at me.

  The waitress, also dressed in black, came over with more chips and salsa.

  “Thank you, beautiful,” Elvis said.

  When the waitress walked away, Chase said, “That wasn’t right, Elvis.”

  “What?”

  “You’ve been flirting with girls like all night.”

  “Don’t be jealous, querida,” said Elvis. “My art belongs to the world. My heart belongs to you.”

  “I don’t like it,” Chase said, and crossed her chubby arms across her massive bosom. A silence fell over the table; then Pedro asked Elvis to speak at the bar. They got up, and I stayed seated with Chase at the window.

  Chase smiled coquettishly and sipped her margarita, sucking on the straw in an obscene manner, her lipstick smearing it red. She reached across the table, grabbed my face, jumped up, and kissed my mouth roughly. She sat back down with a big smile.

  “I know about you and Zena,” she said.

  “There is no me and Zena.”

  “Not what I heard.”

  “What do you know about Zena and me?” Now, I’m not used to trading spit without warning but it was a good kiss. I wasn’t sure if it said more about her or about me.

  “It’s okay,” said Chase. “I mean, Joey and Zena were in love. You and Joey are from the same place. It makes sense.”

  “Joey and Zena were in love?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “I thought you knew?”

  No.

  “What’s so hot about Zena?” she asked.

  “I don’t kiss and tell,” I said.

  “C’mon,” Chase said. “Are you a man or a wimp?”

  “Both,” I said. “I like balance.”

  “It won’t last, you know? You and Zena.”

  “Why not?”

  “You’re both too ambivalent. You’re both afraid of love. You’re like my mother and father. I grew up with that. I recognize it when I see it.”

  “When you see what?” I said.

  “Zena. She bats an eyelash and a sucker gets born. Next dope in line is Chico Santana.”

  “If that’s what you see,” I said, “I think you need glasses.”

  “Or maybe you do.”

  Maybe.

  Chase exhaled cigarette smoke and laughed. “Poor Hari doesn’t know! My little sister Zena’s a whore!”

  I sucked the dark burning clove smoke into my lungs.

  “Don’t call her that,” I said.

  Zena and Joey.

  I sucked the dark burning clove smoke into my lungs.

  “You fuckin’ Puerto Ricans think you run shit!”

  I turned and saw a massive young Dominican kid with a shaved head, holding an empty Presidente bottle and staring Elvis down. Pedro was nowhere in sight. I jumped up and ran over.

  “Hey,” I said, hands up and open. “We don’t want any trouble.”

  “Manito,” he said, looking at me. “You Dominican like me, how you gonna stand up for this Puerto Rican punk?”

  I didn’t want to break the news to him that I was also Puerto Rican in the hopes that he wouldn’t break his bottle of Presidente beer over Elvis’s head.

  “Can’t we all just get along?” I said, and smiled. “What’s your name?”

  “Juan.”

  “I’m Chico, Juan.”

  Juan looked like he was calming down. But then Elvis took out a dollar bill, threw it at Juan, and said, “Go buy some socks, you fuckin’ platano!”

  “I’m gonna kill you!”

  “Problema?”

  I turned and saw Pedro. Me and Juan traded stares, and I shrugged. Juan outweighed Pedro by at least a hundred pounds. A handlebar mustache would not be enough.

  “Problema?” Pedro repeated. I stepped between them. Juan grabbed my right shoulder, squeezed, and turned me. As I spun around, I swung the palm of my left hand up into his nose, not hard enough to break anything, but enough of a blow to ward off any further physical contact. His head snapped back, his massive body went loose, and he stumbled into some men at the bar, clutching at his nose. And Pedro exaggerated and swung his Presidente beer bottle into the guy’s head. “Cabrón! Pendejo!”

  The bouncers came running over, and Pedro flipped out a badge and said, “Policia.”

  “Call an ambulance,” I said and pushed everybody toward the door. We walked briskly out of Gonzalez y Gonzalez, through the doors, and into the warm night. Chase hurried out behind us.

  “Where’d you learn to do that?” Elvis asked me.

  Chase looked at me suspiciously. “Same place you learned everything you know, right? In da Bronx?”

  “St. Mary’s in da Bronx,” I said.

  “Those must’ve been some tough nuns.”

  We walked along Broadway in the heat of night. “And where’d you learn your technique, Pedro? The circus?”

  “Que vaina,” Pedro said. “I no like disrespect me.”

  Elvis slapped me on the back and unlocked the black Porsche’s door. A barking dog, the size of a small black fox, jumped up into Elvis’s arms.

  “Poros!” yelled Chase.

  “Welcome to The Superman Project, Chico,” said Elvis and kissed the dog on the mouth.

  Disgusting.

  I thought about my Chihuahua, Boo, and how mouth kissing was never gonna happen between us. I liked my dog, Boo. But only as a friend.

  “I need to find Giovanni,” I said.

  “You think this man kill my mother and not the boy in jail?”

  “I think something’s fishy and starting to stink and I got an itch to take out the garbage.”

  “Yes,” said Pedro, pulling back his jacket and revealing a gun almost two times his size. “I, too. I want this Giovanni.” He nodded as if he already had Giovanni in his sights.

  “I’m not saying that Giovanni is guilty of anything,” I said.

  Pedro nodded. “What kind of gun, Chico, you have?”

  “None,” I said.

  Pedro Sanchez shook his head, looked around, and slyly pulled a small handgun from his ankle holster.

  “Take.”

  I took the gun from Pedro, wrapped my hand around it, got my finger into it. Checked the chamber, filled with bullets. It was an old pistol.

  I shook my head and handed the pistol back to Pedro.

  “No guns,” I said.

  “Okay,” Pedro said, nodding his head. “But I need you alive. Stay alive, Chico Santana.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” I said. “And don’t tell Pablo about any of this.”

  “Pablo is a fool,” said Pedro, “for no to call me when this happen. But no matter for, nobody, no way, kills the mother of Pedro Sanchez and lives.”

  And the way Pedro said it, I believed he was, if
not a good man, or an innocent man, he was, as Pablo probably feared, at the very least, a man of his word.

  THIRTY

  A deal had been struck, Mara Gupta had backed down, Elvis was officially reinstated as a member of The Superman Project, and Hari Lachan was like voted the new president of TSP. Why? What had changed? Why now? That’s what raced through my head on the 6 train to go and finally pick up my 1972 Charger on River Avenue, putting the money I had gotten from Willow so far to good use, and by the time I drove home, it was raining when I found her.

  Zena Gupta was sitting cross-legged, dripping wet, in front of my door. Sweet clove smoke drifted from her lush mouth, and an inch of ash rested on the sleeve of her light blue sari. Watching Zena on the floor, smoking, drinking a beer, a box of half-eaten chicken wings in her lap . . . it broke my heart.

  I don’t know why.

  Zena handed me a clipping. It showed a color photo of a café-au-lait-colored woman with strategically messy reddish hair clipped to the top of a long, pretty face. She wore a V-neck blouse, hung low over generous cleavage. Her thick lips formed neither a smile nor a smirk, something in between. Her eyes were auburn and wide open, not cynical, but not innocent either. They were tired but hopeful; beautiful. The name beneath the photo of the writer was Ramona Guzman Balaguer. A caption read: Balaguer’s “The Detective” is a brutally poetic ride filled with the tragic and the absurd.

  “That’s your wife,” said Zena. “Ramona.”

  “That’s my soon-to-be ex-wife,” I said. “What’re you doing, Zena?”

  “Keeping tabs on you. Snooping.”

  “I don’t like that.”

  “Too bloody bad.”

  “I mean it, Zena,” I said.

  “What?” she said. “You can snoop, but I can’t, Mr. Private Investigator?”

  “It’s my job to snoop,” I said, crumpling up the clipping and sitting down.

  “So,” she said, “Private Investigator, have you done what the police haven’t managed? Have you found Gabby?”

  “No.”

  “Joey?”

  “No.”

  “Have you seen him at all?”

  “No,” I lied.

  I watched her face fall a bit and I knew. She was looking for him all along.

  “I didn’t think so,” she said softly.

  She told me that she had purchased the British beer from a very charming and quaint pub on 36th Street called The Ginger Man, named after a novel by a cat named J. P. Donleavy, very funny, very naughty writer, also from the Bronx, had I read him? Not yet, I said. She made me promise I would. I did.

  We could also, she said, smoke my sister’s ever-so-lovely Djarum cigarettes all night long. I told myself that I would smoke a pack with Zena that night, get the information on Giovanni that I needed, and quit again in the morning.

  I told myself a lot of things as I sat down there with her smoking and took the eighteen-ounce Fuller’s London Porter.

  If I said I wasn’t glad to see her in that blue sari with her long drooping golden earrings, matching golden choker, and sweet little diamond stud in her sweet little brown nose, I’d be lying.

  “So,” I said. “You and Joey.”

  She smirked. “Who told you?”

  “Mara. Chase. Aurelio, the mechanic who worked on my car. Everybody knew but me.”

  “Sisters,” Zena said and shook her head. “Chase is a bloody slug. She doesn’t do anything but wait for Elvis to come sniffing around. Then he has to drag her everywhere he goes. She tries to use me to break up the boredom. No thank you. Let them stew in their soup and grow up a bit, grow some bloody balls.”

  “That’s cold.”

  “Cold,” Zena said, and laughed. “They bought a dog. They call it Poros. It’s like their child. That makes me sick, too. Sorry. I like animals. So I don’t eat them. I am not a hypocrite when it comes to that. If someone is a vegetarian and treats animals with great respect and even coddles them, I can accept that. But when carnivores like Chase and Elvis act as if they have a special bond with an animal, it makes me sick. A tiger doesn’t coochy-coo a baby zebra, and say how important it is, and then go out and eat an emu. I can’t respect that. I’m ranting. However, I do know this. Chase is a lazy bitch, always has been, and Elvis is a shortcut, get-rich-quick kind of guy, they deserve each other. So be it. I just don’t want to watch it.”

  “What’re you doing here?”

  Zena Gupta sat there with her bronze face, no makeup, guilty strawberry lips, dark lashes, dark eyebrows, thick mouth, her black hair a mess, and touched me. She whispered, in that smoky voice of hers, “Can you be my Superman?” and before I even had a chance to answer, before her lips were anywhere near my mouth, I wanted to stand, go in and slam the door in her face like a man.

  But I’m not a man.

  I’m a private investigator.

  She took her hand away and looked me in the eye.

  “You don’t fancy me or something?”

  “I do,” I said. “I fancy you more than I should.”

  “Well,” she said, “I don’t mean to be forward.” She checked her watch. “It’s almost three in the morning and you haven’t even attempted to kiss me.”

  “I’m trying to be a Superman.”

  “Well,” she said, “knock it off.”

  “I’ve dated models who required less maintenance than you,” I said.

  “You dated models?” said Zena.

  “Sure,” I said. “Mostly for Walmart and Duane Reade. But the store discounts were great.”

  “You’re a wanker.”

  “And you’re trouble,” I said.

  I nodded, and noticed a light bruise under her left eye.

  “What’s that?”

  She pushed my hand off.

  “Mara and I got into it.”

  “Why?”

  “Listen,” she said. “I don’t want to be alone, but I didn’t come here to talk about Mara or Joey or Hari. It’s bloody hot and humid, and I’m emotionally exhausted, and I need some loving. I don’t need a Superman. I need a man tonight. Can you manage that? Have I come to the right place?”

  Zena fell into my arms and whispered, “When you hold me I feel like saying those three words every man likes to hear from a woman he cares deeply about.”

  “ ‘It’s not your baby’?”

  “That’s five words.”

  “ ‘I love bowling’?”

  “No.”

  “ ‘I love White Russians’?”

  “Stop joking!” said Zena and whispered, “Do you believe in reincarnation?”

  “With my luck, I’d come back as a lobster in a butter factory.”

  “Do you believe in true love?” she whispered.

  “I don’t know,” I whispered back but I was bothered, in more ways than one.

  “I didn’t think I did,” Zena said as I held her. “But I do. Love? Love is the most difficult thing on the planet, Chico. Faith, faithfulness, honesty, trust, giving, being open. So much work. Never ending. So hard. I am trying so hard to be a better person, a better human being in every way, to make a difference. But it’s not easy, it’s the most difficult thing. Life, when you look at it, is the most difficult. Death is easy. But that’s not the problem. The problem, if I can call it that, is that death is not final. No, no. It would be easy if it was. Death is an in-between phase, the tunnel under the East River, between Manhattan and Queens. Because we all come back. Except for those who reach enlightenment. Father Ravi, my dear, might be close to it, but I in all honesty, I’m not ready for it yet. I love myself, I do, to the extent that I am a sinner. I suffer, make problems, create them, all on my own. But I love my little sins. So how can I become chaste with that attitude? How can I become the Superman? Very difficult, you’ll agree, and I can’t tell exactly what’s happening here, but I can feel the wheels of fate turning in my favor when you hold me.”

  In her favor? One of her sisters was missing. She was a married woman. She was a liar. She
couldn’t be trusted but she spoke of fate. Even for me, Zena Gupta was a tango I had yet to dance.

  “Here’s to happy families,” Zena said, downing the last dregs of her beer. “Are you having fun?”

  “Interesting so far; and it is beautiful out here in the hallway but maybe we should go inside and talk.”

  She put out her arms and said, “Carry me.”

  I lifted her up and carried her in.

  I wanted to drop her out into the backyard.

  I should have.

  But she was lying to me, playing me, and I needed the truth.

  I wasn’t happy to be holding her in my arms, finally.

  That’s what I told myself.

  THIRTY-ONE

  I opened my front door, holding Zena in my arms, and Mimi sent Max to bed laughing and yelling all the way, “Oooh! I’m gonna tell Auntie Willow!”

  Mimi smiled, threw on her coat, whispered, “It’s about time,” and left without another word.

  Zena sighed as I put her down on the sofa. She closed her eyes and rested her head on my shoulder.

  She asked to see my bedroom and if I had any music that she could borrow. Here we go again, I thought as we went to the bedroom in silence, holding hands, and I told myself that she was probably just curious about Bronx interior design, even while she closed the bedroom door behind her, walked toward me, and started undoing my belt—which made her non-Superman intentions crystal.

  “Why did you come here?” I said.

  Zena looked away and said, “I’d rather not talk.”

  “I wanna help you, Zena. You tell me the truth. No matter what you’ve done, I’ll help.”

  She leaned back against the white wall.

  “Did you, Joey, and Giovanni have something to do with Gabby disappearing?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” said Zena.

  “What about your husband Hari?”

  “Hari?”

  “Hari was jealous of Joey,” I said. “Joey was the favorite. Hari brought Joey into TSP and got forgotten. Hari had the honor of marrying you, but really, Joey was going to take over after Father Ravi. Hari was being promoted to Joey’s office boy, while Joey was to be elevated to president. Joey had your father’s love. Joey’s gone. Hari controls everything now. You could’ve run for president, too. Don’t you want control?”