by Julie Mars
His determination to talk to her coalesced into action, so when she went into the bedroom that night to slip into her nightie and climb into bed, he followed her, closing the door behind him. She turned from him as she quickly undid her blouse, removed her bra, and pulled the nightgown on over her head. Then she lifted it to undo her slacks and slide them down over her hips.
“Are you coming to bed already, Rico? It’s so early for you,” she said. He could tell by the way she moved like a cat toward her side of the bed that she knew he was up to something, though she had elected to play it as if it were normal for him to come in and close the door. This had not been normal for four years now.
“Rosalita, I need to talk to you,” he said.
“It’s not a good time, Rico. I’m tired. I have to be up early for work.”
“It is a good time,” he countered. “It’s the perfect time.”
Rosalita snapped back the summer bedspread and got into the bed. She propped the pillows up against the headboard and leaned against them. “Okay,” she said. “What is it that’s so important?”
Her tone, which was full of annoyance, seemed like a high wall to scale, but Rico moved to the bed and sat down next to her. “I want to talk to you,” he said.
“We’ve established that. So go ahead. I’m listening. Start.”
It seemed almost impossible to begin, given the feeling of resistance in the room. “Rosalita,” he said, “I have to tell you that . . .” Here he stopped. There were so many ways to go from here, so many emotional strands to follow, but each one was so entangled that they all felt dangerous to him. He reached for her hand, and she let him have it. He had touched her hand, even held it occasionally, countless numbers of times, even after she disconnected from him. But now he turned it over and rubbed her palm with his thumb. He looked at the lines there, her whole past, present, and future story to a gypsy fortune-teller, but a mystery to him, except that the skin still felt so soft, like a young girl’s.
“What is it, Rico,” she asked, and this time her voice was just as soft as her skin.
He looked up and saw a fluttering in her eyes that reminded him of the woman she was before she entered the deep freeze state. He felt tears, hot as molten metal, fill his eyes, though, thank God, they didn’t spill over. They glistened there, though, a source of extra tension for Rico, who had probably not cried in front of Rosalita more than five times in all their years together.
“Rosalita,” he began, and then he added, “mi alma, mi vida, mi corazón,” just because he had used those words so constantly in the old days, “I have to tell you that I can’t go on the way we are anymore. I can’t.”
She looked as if she was holding her breath. She said nothing, but her fingers in his hand suddenly felt cooler.
“I don’t know what happened to us—to you, Rosalita. But it has to change because I’m going crazy.” He wanted to tell her how mystified he was, how hurt if he had to be truthful about it, how his patience had finally come to an end, how their marriage had become a kind of mockery of the love that united them in the first place. How he was perilously close to thinking of himself as a man stripped of his balls, and, if he had the courage, he wanted to say how angry he was and how disappointed—things that he knew she would perceive as fighting words when all the rest were feeling words. But instead of all this, he said, “I think about sex all the time, Rosalita. Too much. I’m having fantasies, weird fantasies, the kind that make me wonder if I’m normal anymore. I’m getting a hard-on every time I turn around, and, Rosalita, I can’t hold out any more. This is it, mujer. Either you get over whatever-it-is you’re in and we start up again or . . .”
He had no idea how to finish the sentence. He was not a man who had a plan in mind when he brought up a subject. He had a bad enough time just putting the words together in a coherent sentence when he was under stress like this. Her summer nightgown had fallen a little low on one shoulder, and her hair, already brushed out, looked like an intense shadow designed to match her eyes.
“Is there something you want to do to me, Rico?” she asked, and her voice sounded genuine, as if she were posing a real question, maybe one with a little humor it in, too.
“Yes,” he said. “Everything.”
“Then go ahead,” she said. Just like that.
“Take that nightgown off,” he whispered, and she obediently lifted it over her head and dropped it onto the floor next to the bed. He hadn’t seen her bare breasts, except by accident, in years, and his hands moved to them. Then he fell across the bed toward her, gathering her in his arms, burying his face in her neck, breathing her in, lifting her hair, and then whispering into her ear, “Where have you been, Rosalita? Where have you been?”
MARGARET HAD been in the same position on the couch for three hours, poring over the library books on the nature of metal, before she noticed that the pillow she’d wedged in behind her back against the wooden arm of the futon couch had slipped. The arm was digging into her back right across the place where the lower ribs attach, and she finally, with a little groan, pushed herself forward for relief. She had purchased this couch at the St. Vincent de Paul used furniture store for thirty dollars. The workers there, all of whom looked like recovering alcoholics, had tied it to the roof of her Dodge Colt Vista, and back at home she had dragged it inside by herself. It was comfortable and it looked clean, the latest, and perhaps the best, in a long parade of futon couches that had come and gone from Margaret’s apartments over the years.
When Donny died, Margaret had continued to live in their place on Forty-Eighth Street, the only home she’d known for fourteen years. It had all the essentials necessary to make her feel comfortable—a coffeemaker, a queen-size bed that had been his, a color TV and radio, plates and pots, drawers full of clothing and painting supplies—but it didn’t have Donny, and just being at home there made her ache inside, an ache so deep she once caught herself reaching into the knife drawer with the idea of cutting it out. Her high school friend Christina, who was in her first year of college at the University of Pennsylvania, spent most of her spring break at Margaret’s, packing up Donny’s clothes and shoes, and lugging the boxes down the four flights of stairs to the street, where they hailed a taxi and took them to the Salvation Army drop-off point. Afterward, they had sobbed in each other’s arms as they scrubbed the apartment, top to bottom, which was Christina’s idea. She referred to it as a ritual cleansing, which Margaret thought was funny, though she didn’t say so.
At night, they would break into Donny’s private scotch stash, twelve-year-old Glenlivit, even though neither of them liked the taste. In any case, it wasn’t the taste they were after—it was the place it took them, very efficiently. “The quickest way out of New York,” they called it, though, truthfully, Margaret had no desire to leave and Christina missed the city so much she was thinking of transferring to NYU at the end of the year. But they needed and wanted to get to the place where they could cry even harder at the kitchen table, tell each other Donny stories, because both had loved them—told in that brogue of his that made them all seem funnier—and both had loved him.
“Remember the one about his grandfather?” Margaret would say. Donny’s grandfather had been shot by a neighbor in a drunken party brawl. When he recovered he had to appear as a witness in court, where the judge had asked, “Is it true that you were shot in the fracas?”
“I think it was a little above the fracas,” Christina would reply, imitating Donny’s brogue, and they would both laugh and cry and pour another drink.
“Remember the leprechauns?” Christina would counter. One time when they were high school sophomores, they had come back to Margaret’s apartment to find Donny and his Irish friend Pat Connelly parked at the kitchen table having an intense conversation about leprechauns. The girls had found that hilarious, and Margaret had said, “I can’t believe I come home and find two grown men in a serious discussion about the wee little people in the green suits.”
“The
y don’t wear green, girls, they wear red!” Margaret would recite, and off they’d go again, into peals of laughter, a far better ritual cleansing than any amount of scrubbing the kitchen or washing the windows.
When Christina returned to school, Margaret fell into a black hole, into the dark night where it was more than she could manage to get out the door once a day to make a grocery run to the corner. She stopped eating. She stopped going to work—and she had a good job for someone inexperienced, as a go-fer in a company that published three different arts and crafts magazines. She also stopped attending her painting classes, which, after a few weeks, brought Nick, her teacher, to her door. She would never forget the look on his face when she answered it.
“Oh my God,” he had said. And she had tumbled into his arms as if he were her best friend, and said, “My grandfather died, Nick,” and then proceeded to faint, something she had never done in her life. It had simply taken everything out of her to say those few words. He had done all the right things: carried her to the couch, wet a washcloth with cool water and pressed it to her forehead, cleaned up the kitchen and made some food from scratch. He had drawn her a bath and made her get in it, collected the dirty clothes from the floor and taken them to the Chinese laundry on the corner. He even contacted the counselor at the School of Visual Arts, begging her to make a house call, even though Margaret—as a part-time student—didn’t actually qualify for her services.
Margaret, even in her fog, had suspected at the time—and later Nick confirmed it—that rescuing her in that moment had almost done him in. He had never before seen anyone who had gone over the edge. He had made a concentrated effort in his own life to stay as far away from the edges as he possibly could; but he forced himself to help Margaret, to pull her gently back. Once she was on her feet again, he took off running, and they barely spoke for over a year, by which time he had married another woman.
It took eight months for the sharp, deep ache of no-Donny to begin to dull, and then Margaret decided that she could not live in the apartment anymore. So she sublet it illegally for close to three times what she paid in rent. The monthly profit subsidized a smaller place in an unimproved building in the flower district, and then one in the East Village, and then a one-bedroom in Queens, and then a studio in Brooklyn, and so on. She held onto Donny’s apartment for nine years before the management company found her out and threatened legal proceedings if she didn’t surrender the keys immediately, which she did. She had stood in front of the building and looked up at the window where, twenty-three years before, she had watched her mother and father wave goodbye and disappear forever. She never returned to the block where she and her grandfather used to walk, hand in hand, back when she had thought that he was a giant, maybe the biggest and strongest man in the whole world.
Margaret shifted the book off her lap and stood up. It was late, past midnight, and the windowpanes looked solid black in the slits where she hadn’t quite closed the curtains. She walked to the kitchen door, Magpie dutifully trailing after her, and went out into the yard. The rusty parts on the cement pad drew her to them, as if they were sending a message that they were impatient to be assembled. They wanted her to breathe life into them, she thought. She had assumed, when the urge to go three-dimensional first overtook her—long before she had the space and time to do it—that she was artistically fed up with a flat surface and needed to break free of it. But now she knew that it was more. It was also about paying close attention to connection, to the mysteries of how to position parts so they were built to withstand all kinds of pressure, so they were built to last.
She picked up an old gear. It looked like a circle with a hole through the middle, some spines connecting that hole to the circumference, with a railroad track around the edge. She wanted to transform it into an ear on a being that was somewhat recognizable, but not quite human. She wanted to find a way to connect it so it seemed suspended in air, barely touching the other parts. And she wanted to bury this being in such a conglomeration of parts that it would take time to find it, even if you knew where to look. She had to admit that she didn’t even know what kind of metal it was, and therefore could not speculate on its melting point or anything else. Margaret had always entered her paintings from a place of not-knowing. She had no plan for them, wouldn’t think of making one, and was constantly surprised and always thrilled when they squirmed out of her control and did what they wanted. She wished, many times, that she could apply that model to her life in more ways than art. In her painting life, she never knew where she was going and she loved it that way. In her other life, her so-called normal life, she tried to manage it, saving money in her coffee cans, trying to dress up whatever apartment she was in to create a passable home, showing up on time for work, and having the integrity—rare in a bartender—not to steal even one dime. There was a wildness in her, but she kept it confined to her art, and sometimes she wondered what would happen if she just took the lid off the rest of her life and let the wildness in there, too. Perhaps that was coming toward her in some way, for suddenly, in her artistic life, she was imagining finished products before she even had the technical mastery to put them together. If her art became more orderly, more predictable in some way, would her other life get wilder, she wondered. Was she ready for that?
She climbed into the hammock and rocked back and forth like a metronome counting out the minutes until it all would unfold.
1985
VINCENT STANDS next to Will at the prison gate to say goodbye to Jean Pierre. They have known each other for ten long, long years. In each one of those years, Jean Pierre’s family has traveled back and forth from Marseilles to India, hired lawyers, offered bribes. Jean Pierre has never given up hope, something Vincent surrendered long ago, but not as long ago as Will did.
Jean Pierre wears clean clothes, brought in a small bundle by his father, who now sits inside the room marked “Processing,” staring out at his son, who will leave with him on this day. Jean Pierre has received a shave and a shampoo. He wears white sneakers.
His hands are shaking.
“I’m not gonna hug you and get you dirty, man,” says Will. “You clean up good.”
Jean Pierre laughs.
“Fuck some mademoiselles for me,” says Will. And then he turns and walks away.
Vincent steps forward. He is overwhelmed with sadness but he manages to say, “I’m happy for you, Jean Pierre,” even as his eyes fill with tears.
“I remember the address,” Jean Pierre says. “429 West 48th Street, New York, New York. I’ll send a letter. Don’t worry.” And then, on an impulse, he reaches up and lifts off the silver chain with the St. Christopher medal he wears around his neck. He places it on Vincent, like a blessing. “I hope you find your way home, mon ami,” he says. “I hope you find your wife and little girl.”
They hug, as if one of them is going to the gallows.
Then Jean Pierre disappears through the door, and Vincent is left standing in the hot sun, staring into the window of the “Processing” room, where men in khaki uniforms block his last glimpse of Jean Pierre.
He hears two days later, though he never knows for certain if it’s true, about the accident, the collision of a battered taxi carrying two foreign passengers and a bus on the winding road to Siruguppa. His hand moves to his throat, to the St. Christopher medal, and he wishes Jean Pierre, who believed in it so completely, had kept it.
He wants to give it back, to give it away.
But he is afraid to take it off.
RICO ARRIVED at the garage the next morning in a black mood. And the fact that he knew he should be feeling good, maybe even happy, only made him angrier. His life had been out of control in one way, and now it was just as out of control in another. Before last night, he had felt blocked out of something important. He had felt rejected and confused and, at times, very lonely. Now he felt enraged.
The ice between Rico and Rosalita had been officially broken. She had responded to him in a way that seemed genuine,
and while he held her in his arms, as she moaned quietly into his chest—trying to muffle her own sounds because all the girls were home and sitting in the living room not very far from their bedroom door—he felt a deep and powerful love flow between them. This love asked for no explanations. It stood outside the perimeter of the last four years as if time had no relevance whatsoever. It knew that forms came and went, including the many forms of relationship and love, sex and marriage. They had been in one phase. It had ended, and now another had begun. Why ask questions?
And Rico hadn’t really asked any last night, just the “Where have you been, Rosalita?” that he repeated twice before he fell into her and got lost. She had not answered anyway, except to say, “Waiting for you to come get me,” which, at the time, had a sexy edge because he was already on top of her at that point, and she had already opened her thighs to him, wrapped her legs around his hips and made it more than clear that the waiting, four years’ worth, was over. Rico had felt himself bear down and lift off at the same time, and after that he had felt as if he’d been sucked into outer space.
But later, after Rosalita had fallen asleep, her face pressed into his chest and her hand low on his stomach, so low that her ring and pinky fingers rested at the edge of his patch of pubic hair, Rico had begun to feel something else, and it wasn’t good. He had imagined this moment for four years, the moment when Rosalita’s winter would turn to spring, and everything between them would at last come back together. He had thought he would feel very good when it happened, but now that it had, Rico felt violated, used by Rosalita, as if she thought it was a fine thing to end her ice age and melt in his arms, offering no apology for all those cold years and acting like nothing had changed in the meantime.