Find Me in Havana

by Serena Burdick

  There is a dream I’ve had my whole life, or at least for as long as I can remember. I am in a room full of people I don’t recognize, and everyone keeps asking me if I’m all right. I think there must be something wrong with the way I look—my hair isn’t done right or I’m wearing the wrong clothes. I find a long hall with a mirror at the end, and as I move close enough to see myself, I suddenly can’t breathe. It is as if the air has gone out of the room. It is not a slow loss of breath but an instant, unimaginable suffocation.

  And then everything goes black.

  I wake up alone. The edge of the pool shifts in and out of focus, the water rippling outward unevenly. There’s not a breeze, which makes me think that not much time has passed. I am the one who has stirred up the water and now I lie immobile, heavy as brick in a cold puddle with my cheek pressed into gritty cement. My knees sting. Ricardo meant to kill me, I think. Maybe he believed he had.

  I hear the sound of distant cars and the rhythmic thud of a baseball being thrown from glove to glove by the boys next door. Tommy and Alexander. Nice boys. Ten and twelve. I might have stayed there all night if I wasn’t worried the ball was going to go over the fence and one of them might come looking for it.

  No need to alarm the neighbors.

  Shakily, I push myself up to my feet. The pool is glaringly bright, and little black threads float in front of my eyes as I make my way into the house. “Ricardo?” I call softly, looking around as if he might jump out from behind a door or the sofa. I can feel the pulse of my heart in my throat. A shadow of smoke drifts out of the kitchen toward the ceiling, thin as mist, almost undetectable. The house is quiet, other than the tick of the clock. The time. I suddenly remember our call. It is 5:03. The psychiatrist told me I wasn’t to miss a single phone call with you.

  “She needs consistency,” he’d said. These calls were an important step in establishing trust, he told me. Missing them would be a setback.

  I hurry to the kitchen, dizzy, my vision slightly blurred as I look out the window above the sink making sure Ricardo’s car is not in the driveway before calling Good Hope. When you answer, I slide to the floor and rest my back against the wall wishing you were here with me. I want to tell you everything, but I don’t want to upset you. The doctors say you are doing well. You will be home in a week. We are to keep things calm and normal.

  Calm and normal? I don’t even know what that means anymore.

  When we hang up, I go to the bedroom and change into slacks to hide my knees and a T-shirt so I look casual. I secure my wet hair back with a scarf, pack a suitcase and call Virginia. You haven’t met Virginia yet. She’s Ricardo’s colleague, the sole female doctor on staff. She told me that remaining single, childless and wearing pants suits is the only way to make it as a female in the medical profession, which made me laugh. Virginia always makes me laugh.

  We met at a party three months ago. I spotted her across the room, a ball glass of bourbon in her hand, her dress slacks and jacket fitted and flattering. It was a gathering of doctors and UCLA medical school professors. I was trying to imagine what it would be like to be the only female in a male profession, say a producer or director, when she suddenly strode over and stuck out her hand. “Dr. Virginia Poleo.”

  I shook it. She was a foot taller than me, full-figured with a wide jaw and dark, straight hair cut into a bob. Without hesitating she asked about the bruise on my arm, what had happened. Instinctively, I drew my hand over it, but there was a sincerity in her steady, no-nonsense gaze that stopped me from lying. I didn’t confess, I just kept my mouth shut, and she handed me her drink. “I’ve worked with Ricardo for seven years and have never seen him lose his temper until a month ago. Does he lose it at home now, too?”

  “Sometimes.” I took a sip of her bourbon and handed it back.

  The first time Ricardo hit me was three weeks before your graduation from Villa Cabrini Academy. I remember because I was worried the bruise wouldn’t be gone in time, and I’d have to explain it to you.

  I’d come home late from a show in Palm Springs. I’d gotten off stage and driven straight back to LA knowing Ricardo wanted to spend the weekend together and because he’d accused me of sleeping with other men in my hotel room, which was ludicrous.

  When I arrived home at one o’clock in the morning, I found him out on the deck staring into a dark firepit. I asked, laughingly, if he was waiting for it to light itself, and without a word he grabbed my arm and dragged me into the living room. The house was ablaze, as if he’d gone through every room turning on the lights. He was barefoot, his shirt unbuttoned.

  I pulled my arm away, indignant. “Don’t touch me like that. What has gotten into you?”

  “It’s one o’clock in the morning, Estelita.” He had an overblown, harangued tone to his voice and outrage in his eye.

  I was about to explain when his fist caught me in the chin, and I flew backward into the couch. I remember crying out in shock, pulling myself up and stumbling toward him instead of away.

  He had seemed a good choice for a husband, a doctor who specializes in bones, a man who doesn’t sing or act or juggle for a living. When we first met, I found him dashing in his pinstriped suits and waxed mustache, and I liked the way he talked so sincerely about his patients. He didn’t try and win me with any display of romance. He was thoughtful in the way he asked where I’d like to eat and if I preferred red or white wine. I was used to men who made decisions for me, as if it was expected that their decisions were what I wanted. Ricardo would ask, solicitously, if there was anything I needed. So simple, really. I don’t remember any of my other husbands asking if I needed anything. None of them waited at night for me to undress before getting into bed or left notes by the coffeepot in the morning with our names drawn in a heart.

  What Ricardo didn’t like was being married to an actress. He wasn’t prepared for it. When we were dating, he found my short skirts and tight sweaters attractive; after marriage they were revealing and inappropriate. It angered him that I kissed other men on-screen or looked seductively into the audience at my concerts. A year after we married, he told me he didn’t want me going out for auditions anymore or performing.

  “You’re too old, anyway,” he’d say.

  I was thirty-two.

  It was our first real argument. He was sitting up in bed, looking at me over the top of his book as if he’d just asked what time it was. I was standing with the sheet pulled back about to climb in, and in an instant, I saw our marriage for what it was, a masquerade, a shameful display of false intimacy, false impartiality. After all this careful attention he’d given me, I was now expected to do what he said. I threw the sheet down and told him that Chu Chu had tried to keep me at home and I’d left him within the year. “I’ve sacrificed everything for my career. Motherhood, my family. Don’t you dare think you’ll be any different.”

  I stormed out and slept in the guest room that night, and he never brought up the subject again, but he deliberately undermines me, making aggressive remarks about how fat my thighs are getting or how I should do something about the bags under my eyes. He tells me I need to start dressing my age and buys me checkered pants and high-collared blouses for my luncheons at the Beverly Hills Badminton Club with his colleagues’ wives.

  I’ve tried to talk to Mamá about the violence, but she never liked Ricardo to begin with, and it angers her that I’ve only done a few television shows since my marriage. “After all this time, you’re letting a man ruin your career,” she tells me, no matter how many times I remind her I’m singing more than ever and getting top billing in Las Vegas. “You could have sung in Havana” is her endless retort. “You came here to be in the movies.” In her mind, this is the only real success.

  Just a week ago, Mamá and I argued over lunch at La Paloma’s. She told me Ricardo is making me lose my confidence. “The way he insults you, it’s disgusting that you allow it.”

 
“I don’t take him seriously,” I say, a feeble argument. My transfer of power already so obvious.

  “Oh, no? Why aren’t you working, then?”

  “We’ve had this conversation, Mamá. I am working.”

  “Not acting.”

  “I’m not acting because Republic Pictures sold the studio.”

  “So go out and get a contract with another studio.”

  “Ed says the other studios aren’t contracting anymore. ‘Picture by picture,’ he says. Actors are free agents now. I have to go on auditions like everyone else.”

  “Hogwash.” She stabs her steak with her knife and begins sawing away at it. “You could get a new contract if you wanted one.”

  There is no arguing with your grandmother, as you know, Nina.

  Truth is, I am worried she is right, that Ricardo has worn away my confidence. I am getting older, and the only place I feel like I can be myself anymore is on stage. I am not used to auditioning in a small room with casting directors a foot away, staring at me. I get nervous and fumble my lines and have to take the scene from the top. They’re always very nice about it, but I leave humiliated.

  Singing is so much easier, and gratifying, but I am afraid Ricardo will take that away from me, too.

  After he hit me that first time, he fell on his knees in apology, weeping as if he was the one with a bruised jaw. I ended up comforting him. He’d never hit me before, but he’d also never wept in front of me before. He swore it wouldn’t happen again, and I believed him.

  I thought I knew violent men, but this is different. Ricardo’s anger comes out of nowhere. It is irrational and sporadic, and he is always sorry. He says he doesn’t know what comes over him, he loves me, it won’t happen again, and until today, before he held my head underwater, I kept believing him.

  Virginia claims this is what every abusive husband says, but it’s not what my father said to my mother after he hit her. He never apologized. He was correcting her, and I wonder, as I stand at the bedroom window watching for Virginia’s car, if I’ve taken the abuse because in some dark place I believe I needed correcting, too.

  The back of my neck hurts. I untie my scarf and shake my hair out to hide what I imagine are fingerprint bruises curled below my scalp. I glance at the clock. 6:15 p.m. I have been waiting for an hour. I didn’t tell Virginia what happened. I didn’t need to.

  “I’ve been waiting for you to come to your senses,” she said over the telephone. “No need for details, if you don’t want. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

  I am grateful she doesn’t ask me to explain.

  In Cuba, after Josepha was raped, I went into the kitchen and took a knife from the drawer and hid it in the waistband of my underwear. Over there, I somehow made sense of the violence and sex because it was war, generations of hatred and loss and suffering. Men who believed women deserved to be abused for what our fathers and grandfathers had done. With Che, my reaction was pure hate, and I would have slit his throat if he’d come near you or me again.

  Here, it is my husband. There is no war other than the one going on in our house. There is no history, no generational excuse. My husband says he loves me. So it is love and violence, and I do not know how to defend myself against such a perverse reality.

  Light fades from the window. Having made the decision to leave, I am terrified. If Ricardo comes home before Virginia gets here, I don’t know what I’ll do.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  * * *

  Who is Lupe Velez?

  Mother,

  I am not convinced that you have actually left Ricardo until we are driving to Virginia’s from Good Hope. With both hands on the steering wheel, your cat-eye sunglasses pulled over your eyes, you tell me he hit you. You were always a nervous driver, but you are especially jumpy, swerving in and out of traffic, as you recall how Ricardo almost drowned you in the pool. It’s shocking to know he hit you while I was living at home with you and I knew nothing about it, but you tell me it didn’t happen often and never when I was in the house.

  “Have you told Grandmother Maria?”

  “No, and you’re not to tell her, either.”

  “You tell Grandmother Maria everything.”

  “I tell you everything.” You peel one hand from the wheel and give my knee a quick pat before gripping it again. “I don’t want any secrets between us.”

  “But you want secrets between you and Grandmother Maria?”

  “No, silly. It would upset her. It’s done with. We can all move on. We don’t need to talk about it. I’ve brought the rest of your clothes to Virginia’s, and she said we can stay as long as we like.”

  “Why aren’t we staying with Grandmother Maria?” Dr. Gataki said I was to keep things as simple as possible, for a while. None of this feels simple.

  “She has a single bedroom. We’d have to sleep on the living room floor.”

  “Does she know you’ve moved out?”

  “Yes. I told her what she wanted to hear—that Ricardo was holding me back from my acting career.”

  It occurs to me you haven’t done a movie since Rio Bravo, but there’s been plenty of television and music venues. “Was he?”

  You slam to a stop at a red light and glance at me, your expression unreadable behind your lenses. “A bit, I guess. But I have a show every weekend this month in Las Vegas, and I have a film audition next week.”

  “How long are we going to stay with your doctor friend?”

  “Not long.” You slide your sunglasses to the top of your head and look directly at me. “We’re going to get our own place soon. Just the two of us. Won’t that be fun? We’ll have girls’ night whenever we want without a man sticking his nose into things.”

  The place in my heart that has longed for this my whole life swells. “I’d love that, Mom.”

  “We need to find an apartment first. Just a rental, for now. I’ll need to file for divorce.” The light turns green, and you step on the gas, eyes back on the road.

  “Has Ricardo tried to contact you?” I ask, the safety I felt at Good Hope vanishing in the time it took to drive away.

  “He came over the day after I left to apologize and beg me to come home. I asked what he was thinking, almost killing me, which he denied. To his credit, he walked away. He seemed genuinely sorry. Sad, not angry, which has always confused me about him. I feel sorry for him more than anything.”

  This is so like you, always giving men the benefit of the doubt. “That’s twisted, Mom. You should hate him.”

  You disregard this and say, “Do you remember what I used to tell you whenever you broke up with a boyfriend?”

  I’ve had four official breakups, the last one with Josh Parker being the most serious. We only dated for three months, but he had wavy blond hair and dreamy blue eyes, and I was sure I was in love with him. “I remember,” I say, then mimic your voice, throwing in the thick Spanish accent you use in your movies: “‘Nina, I want you to picture Josh right now sitting on the toilet with his socks on and his underwear around his ankles. Do you see it? I want you to just think about him sitting there.’”

  “That’s right.” You laugh. “It worked, didn’t it?”

  “I am totally over him. Are you picturing Ricardo?”

  “This very minute. He has the hairiest legs.” You start laughing so hard tears come out of your eyes, and I tell you to focus on the road before you crack up the car.

  Virginia lives in a small bungalow with lots of windows in Van Nuys. There’s a garden in the back with a magnolia tree and a Japanese-style fountain. She has immaculate white rugs and Asian vases the size of small children by the door. You and I sleep in the guest room where the twin beds have matching white coverlets and gold-trimmed, white nightstands that stand on either side. At the end of the hall, Virginia’s room has a king-size bed covered in a dark gray Japanese silk and sliding gl
ass doors that open onto the back patio.

  It’s nice to be away from the bare walls of the hospital, but I don’t like being in a stranger’s house. I miss Delia and feel nervous about the uncertainty of things. At least in the hospital, I didn’t have to make any decisions.

  After poking around the entire place, I drag my bag to the guest room and head to the kitchen. You are fumbling around in a ruffled apron that makes you look ridiculous, attempting a Betty Crocker pot roast from a cookbook you said you bought just for this dinner together.

  “Are we celebrating the fact that I am no longer mentally insane?” I jump up on the counter and take an orange from the fruit bowl, trying to feel like I’m at home. “Can I eat this?”

  “You can eat anything you like. You are to treat this house as your own. Virginia would want it that way.” You swat my leg. “And I never said you were mentally insane.”

  Some juice squirts into my face as I dig my nails into the peel. “No? Just a druggie, then.”

  “Don’t talk like that. You are an intelligent young woman who needs a little direction is all. When I was your age I had a singing career, was already married, had a baby and was about to make my first movie.”

  “Jesus, Mom.”

  “Don’t swear. Hand me that measuring spoon.”

  I turn to where you’re pointing, pick up the spoon and hand it to you. “Do you have any idea what you’re doing in the kitchen?”

  “None whatsoever.” You push hair out of your eyes with the back of your arm and scrunch up your face as you read the recipe, mouthing the directions and carefully measuring and pouring. Watching you in the kitchen makes me think there’s hope our lives can be simple and normal and easy.