Dark Plums

by Maria Espinosa

  Instead of screaming, she finished off the beer, ate some rice and chicken, and lit a half-smoked cigarette lying in the ashtray. She felt an even stronger sense that something outside herself was taking over her mind. It was forcing her to think these horrible thoughts, have these feelings. But this alien will was intertwined with her own; she could not separate them.

  A malign presence pressed in on her. The kitchen was so bright; the beer tasted sour; the crucified man in the picture seemed an omen of evil. Perhaps she was the disembodied face. Against her will, perhaps she would cause Alfredo some deep harm.

  She imagined him with a girl at this moment, their bodies entwined, whispering words of endearment.

  Perhaps he had been run over, stabbed, or shot. Or perhaps, overcome with fatigue because he drove himself so hard, he had tripped and fallen into a gutter, cut open his skull on a ragged bottle edge. Perhaps he had been beaten up and robbed.

  She went into the studio where the black window panes reflected her shadowy image. In the corner she found a sketchbook filled with drawings. There were lots of portraits of her. Nude. Clothed. Her face. Her hands. Ankles. Feet. She was touched, and a smile of pleasure swept over her face.

  A strange humming noise filled the silence.

  Could someone be hiding inside the loft?

  Alfredo, please come. God, protect him.

  After drinking another can of beer to numb herself, she finally dozed off on the bed, fully clothed.

  The sound of footsteps awakened her. When she opened her eyes, she saw Alfredo moving in the dark. The clock showed 2:40 a.m.

  “Alfredo, where were you? Tell me.”

  “Out,” he said genially. His breath smelled of liquor.

  All the anxiety and rage she had been suppressing erupted, and she grabbed him and dug her nails into his back. “Tell me Alfredo, where were you? Tell me!” she cried.

  “Out.”

  “Where? Why are you so late?”

  He wrenched himself away from her. “I lost my job.”

  “What happened?”

  “They asked me to work overtime for the next month—twelve fucking hours a day! I told them to shove it.”

  “Oh, Alfredo.”

  He reached behind some books on the shelves for the lacquer box. Inside it was a joint which he lit, inhaled, and then passed to her.

  She shook her head. “Marijuana costs money.”

  “Idiot! You know nothing about life,” he snapped.

  She burst into tears, and he put his arms around her. “Baby, I didn’t mean to make you cry. Sometimes marijuana nourishes the soul.”

  “It’s addicting.”

  “Don’t worry, sweetheart. I can handle it.”

  He lit a candle and took off his clothes. They lay in bed together watching the shadows cast by the flame. Love and pity surged up in her as she looked at his tired face.

  “I wish I could help you more,” she said.

  He laughed. “With your salary?” Then he sat up suddenly and looked at her. “There is something you can do. But I don’t know if you have the guts.”

  “What?”

  “A while back we talked about hustling. Remember? We were joking. But, Adrianne, it’s no joke that if you were out on the street you could bring home in one night what you do now in a month. We’d be okay. Harris wants me to do six or seven new paintings in time for the exhibit. There’s no way I can while I’m working another gig.”

  A shock ran through her. “You want me to hustle? I thought you loved me.”

  “Love’s got nothing to do with it, baby. I’ll love you all the more for helping me survive. I’m talking spiritual survival. How can I paint when I’m working forty hours a week in a bar?”

  “You’re doing it now.”

  “I’m not painting enough, and I’m wearing down. Sometimes I’ll paint all night after I get home from work. Then I catch a few hours sleep. Baby, I can’t go on like this.”

  He relit the joint, inhaled, and slowly blew out the smoke. “The God I worship is far beyond most people’s limited understanding. This God wants me to create the visions He’s inspired. Shit, if I’m working some half-assed job, then I’m copping out. Do you understand?”

  “I can’t do it!”

  “They just touch your skin. What’s skin anyway? Your skin’s not you.” Lightly he punched her arm.

  “I don’t want to screw anybody else,” she cried. “I love you. I wanted you to be the last man I ever screwed.”

  He laughed. “You! Adrianne! Just a couple of weeks ago you were making it with Lucille.”

  “She’s like a sister. That’s different.”

  “Bullshit! It’s all skin. Look, why romanticize fucking? You’ve fucked enough men in the past. Besides, when I met you, you were giving it away. All they touch is your skin. They can’t touch the real you, because you belong to me.”

  His bare back was narrow, like Lucille’s, only darker and more muscular. She smoothed his skin and leaned against him for a moment. “I don’t want to,” she said, even while a part of her was responding with an unhealthy desire. Hadn’t she thought about working as a hooker before she met Alfredo? Take strange men’s money and run. Stop giving it away. Buy beautiful clothes and luxuries. Get back at men in this way for the hurt they had inflicted on her.

  She inhaled on the joint, held it in while it burned her throat, then let it out slowly.

  “Baby, it’s hell to be living like this. If I don’t paint, something in me dies. You can help me do what I was born to do.”

  “Let me think about all this,” she murmured.

  He took her face in his hands. “You’re so young,” he said. “You’ve got an innocence about you, like Marilyn Monroe. That’s the secret of her charm. You’ve got it, too.”

  “Really?” she beamed with pleasure. Maybe it was the effect of the marijuana, but she could see rays of light around his head. She understood how badly he wanted her to do this.

  “I suffered too much while I was growing up,” he said. “But it opened me up and made me aware and made me an artist.”

  Was he a con artist like Lucille said? His eyes had a gentle look in the candlelight just now.

  “What was your childhood like?”

  He took a sip of cold tea from the cup on the floor. “Mama left my father in Havana and took my little brother Luis and me to New York when I was three. We moved in for a while with an uncle and aunt. I think Mama slept around with different men. She hated my father, and she took it out on me because I looked like him. She loved Luis. Then Mama remarried and things only got worse.”

  He took a deep breath, and a look of torment came over him, as if he were once again in the past.

  “My stepfather was a janitor. He drank too much, and he had terrible, jealous fights with Mama. I don’t think he had ever really learned to read, and it bugged the shit out of him to see me reading and drawing all the time. He used to beat me while Mama just looked on, although she never let him touch Luis. Finally, I got big enough to hit back, and I nearly killed that man. The next day I moved out.”

  “That’s so sad,” she said. Perhaps because her perceptions were intensified by the marijuana, his emotions flooded through her, filling her up so that she scarcely knew where she ended and Alfredo began.

  “Did you ever see your father again?”

  “When I was ten, I went down to Cuba for the summer. He was kind to me. Un hombre verdadero. I wanted to see him again, but I never had a chance.

  “Then I started Cooper Union—never got a dime from my family. I was working my way through, and I saved up money for passage on a freighter to Havana because I wanted to see my father once more. He died just a week before I got there! Later, I learned that he’d tried to get me back after the summer I spent with him. He’d written Mama that he wanted me to come back and live with him, but she never showed me that letter.”

  “Oh, Alfredo.”

  “I learned about this from his relatives. They told m
e that he’d written me several letters, too. But I never got them. Mama destroyed them. All the time I’d been thinking that he didn’t want me around, and maybe he didn’t even like me.”

  “I want to help you!” Adrianne cried out in a burst of emotion. “I want to make it all up to you.”

  “Que Dios te bendiga, preciosa,” He kissed her and held her in his arms. “I’m wearing down. I haven’t had enough sleep in months.”

  She put her hand on his warm chest.

  “Am I taking up too much time?”

  “No, baby, no, but you do demand time.”

  She was silent for a moment.

  “I’ll do it for you,” she said at last. “Because I love you.”

  “Do you know what you’re getting into? It takes guts.”

  “I’ll do it for you,” she repeated. “Because I love you more than anyone in the world.”

  “You’re beautiful.”

  “I’m scared. I don’t want to go to jail.”

  “I’ll protect you, baby. Whether something is legal has no connection with whether or not it’s right. Madmen make up the rules. But God is watching over us. He knows what’s in your heart.”

  They lay against each other in silence. She had never felt so much harmony between them. Their energies flowed into each other; they were indeed one larger being. Shadows cast by the candle flickered.

  “Our bodies don’t last,” he said. “We’re born, and then we die. What happens when you fuck a stranger? Nothing really.”

  “I think so,” she said, still in the realm of vastness into which the marijuana had propelled her.

  “There’s no emotional bond. They just get to feel your body, that’s all. They never touch the real you.”

  She gripped his hand. Gradually the realm of light had vanished. Now she was in a desert, and the only human being who could touch her lonely core was Alfredo.

  “It scares me though,” she said. “It’s so dangerous.”

  “Not if you use common sense,” he said. “You’re intuitive. When you’re scared, you even get psychic, right?”

  “How do you know?”

  “I know you in my bones. Baby, you and I belong together. You won’t be hustling long. We’ll save up money so we can split. Then soon, with any luck, my paintings will start to sell. We’ll leave New York. It’s a different world on the Caribbean Islands or in South America. We’ll travel. We’ll get married.”

  Her heart thudded with excitement.

  “I know about South America,” she said. “I told you, my parents are from Chile.”

  “We’ll go there, chica. We’ll go to Cuba, where Castro is creating a whole new society.”

  He was kneeling over her now, and very gently and sensitively and slowly he made love to her until finally she let herself go in a flooding orgasm.

  “This is spiritual,” she whispered.

  “You can shut it down and make it just physical,” he said. “That’s what Gurdjieff would do.”

  He got up and worked in the studio while she slept.

  Not until the first morning light shone in through the air shaft did he finally lie down again. His body curved around her. As he breathed against her shoulder, she stirred and turned to him.

  “Alfredo, will you still love me?”

  “Of course, baby. I’ll love you all the more,” he mumbled into her hair. “Now let me get some sleep.”

  PART TWO

  September, 1959

  Chapter 15

  Adrianne clung to Alfredo’s arm as they made their way uptown along Broadway. It was muggy and overcast. They had both slept little the previous night. As she walked, her spike heels wobbled. She realized that she’d forgotten to take her diet pills. Since waking up, she had consumed only tea and half a piece of toast. With almost no food inside her, she felt dizzy, nervous, and tired from the marijuana she’d smoked last night as well as conspicuous in the tight blue jersey dress and flashy brass earrings that she’d bought this morning at Klein’s on the Square.

  It was four in the afternoon when they went into a bar that was dark and smoky, thick with odors of beer and roasting meat. Alfredo ordered two draft beers.

  “Want something to eat, baby?”

  “No, thanks.” She wanted to show him she was strong-willed about sticking to her diet, even though the smell of food made her ache with hunger.

  There was stubble on Alfredo’s face. Marked with fatigue, he looked older.

  “Are you sure you can go through with this?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  He nuzzled her fingers and lit another cigarette, although in the last hour he’d already smoked five or six.

  After he had eaten, they continued walking uptown until he stopped and said, “Here’s your turf, baby. I’ll hang around for a while.” He motioned to the bar behind them.

  Why had he chosen this neighborhood, this particular block? A cluster of tough-looking men at the corner filled her with fear.

  The next block felt safer, although she didn’t know exactly why. Perhaps it was the Spanish grocery store on the corner. She went into a hotel a few doors down from the grocery. There she rented a room from a young, pimply-faced hotel clerk who sat behind the desk of a small lobby which had a stuffy, sweetish smell. The room was nineteen dollars a week. Luckily she had enough money with her to pay for it. Alfredo had gone over all this with her earlier before he cashed his severance check at the corner grocery.

  “I may have a few visitors,” she said, giving the clerk a big smile. “Is that all right?”

  “That’s your business,” he said, apparently bored with the transaction, and he returned to reading his Police Gazette.

  Going outside again, she stood a few doors away against the window of a lingerie store, and as she swung her handbag slightly, shifting her weight occasionally from foot to foot, waves of people flowed past. She had a headache from the beer, and her stomach ached with hunger, although at the same time she felt curiously weightless and adrift in space. Standing at the other corner were two young women wearing tight dresses and spike heels like her. One was tall and blond; the other was plump with long, wavy black hair. Their hostile stares frightened her. She hoped they wouldn’t hassle her about invading their territory. All the people looked somehow deformed, incomplete, ugly, their skins sallow beneath the polluted gray sky. The air was so heavy that it felt as if a storm were about to break.

  A man in a brown suit with horn-rimmed glasses approached. He looked her up and down, as if mentally undressing her. “Wanna have some fun, sweetheart?” he asked. Maybe he was a buyer in the garment district. He didn’t give off vibes of being a cop or a weirdo, so she decided to chance it.

  “You got twenty dollars?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “Come with me,” she said.

  She hoped to God he wasn’t a cop. She would treat him as if he were part of a dream, and indeed she felt as if she were now living inside a dream. All this wasn’t real. Only Alfredo and she together were real.

  The hotel clerk glanced at them as they walked through the lobby. She’d better slip him a bill later on, as Alfredo had told her to.

  They walked up three flights of stairs into her newly rented room, narrow like a box car with its fresh, unrumpled bed. Sink in a corner. The room smelled of Lysol. Beige drapes and worn, greenish carpet. Chenille bedspread, creaky springs, mattress sagging with the weights of all the bodies that had lain on it. Old mahogany dresser.

  “You can put the money on the dresser,” she said airily, as if she were acting in a play. Alfredo had told her how to handle the money part—to ask for it first. He had told her what to say and do. God, she was dumb—that he had to tell her!

  The stranger undressed casually as if he were used to going with prostitutes. At least he seemed safe. And he actually put some bills on the dresser. Didn’t dispute the price or threaten her, nor did he object when, still in her underwear, she washed him off with a damp washcloth.

 
She took off the rest of her clothes.

  “Mmmm, you’re nice,” the man, said almost dreamily as he ran his hands along her thighs.

  They got underneath the sheet. Fondling his cock, she slipped a thin rubber condom over it, as Alfredo had advised her.

  “Do you have to do this, doll?”

  “Yes.”

  Then he was on top of her, weighty, hairy, solid-smelling. It was quick and uncomplicated. She was surprised to feel within herself a slight stirring of desire, even an orgasm.

  Five minutes and it was over.

  Finished.

  He left.

  She sat on the bed and stared at the flowered wallpaper for a long time, still naked, shivering a little. Since she had lost weight, she felt chilly a great deal of the time. Finally, she went over and picked up the bills on the dresser—a ten and two fives. Carefully she placed them inside her wallet. Then she returned to the murkily lit Flamingo Bar where Alfredo said he’d be, and she found him at a corner table.

  “How’d it go?” he asked.

  “Okay.” She reached inside her purse and handed him the money.

  “Great, baby. You’re doing great,” he said as he slid his hand along her nylon-sheathed leg. “Are you going to be all right on your own for a while?”

  She nodded. She felt as if he were leaving her alone on the North Pole surrounded by a vast expanse of ice that merged with the sky, and her blood was freezing in her veins.

  “See you later. I’ve got to get some work done for the show. Be careful, sweetheart, and take a taxi home.”

  He could he be so casual about all this?

  How could he concentrate on painting while she was out here alone on this chilly street corner in front of a discount luggage store? She had moved south a block, as it felt safer.

  It grew colder, and she shivered in her jersey dress. Finally, she decided to return to the Flamingo and have a drink. There she gave herself the luxury of ordering spaghetti and meatballs to still her hunger pangs. Then feeling bolder, she accepted a proposition from a hulking man in a dark blue suit and loud tie who was sitting next to her at the bar. The fat, red-faced Irish bartender looked at her curiously. Would she have to pay him off, too?