Last Flight of José Luis Balboa

by Gonzalo Barr

  I open his closet and tear his shirts and pants. The suits are too hard, so I stuff them into paper bags and drop the bags down the trash chute in the hall.

  I return to the kitchen and pour myself more champagne. The phones started ringing a few minutes after he left. It was as if he’d tipped off the press. TV people, newspaper people, friends, friends of friends called, all wanting me to confirm what they already knew—that José Luis is leaving me.

  My producer was the last to call. He wanted to know if I would be able to make the taping tomorrow. Oh, Mari, I am so sorry about José Luis. You must be devastated, he said. But I knew the real reason he called. I know this is a difficult time for you, but I wanted to know. “If I am going to make it in tomorrow? Yes, Sammy. I will be there tomorrow. And the next day. And the day after that!” That’s when I slammed the phone down so hard that I cracked the glass table underneath.

  At least if I had had the baby, then there would be something of José Luis left for me. But he insisted that I get an abortion. And even if I can barely remember the clinic and that nurse who reminded me of the nuns at school, there was the pain. First physical. Then nothing. Less than nothing. A negative that drew me in, made me want to explore it, like you do a broken tooth with the tip of your tongue. It hurts each time you touch it, but you cannot stop. Then the memory yellows. And only enough of the old pain remains so that you do not forget. There are venial sins and cardinal sins and mortal sins, the kind of sins you can never erase. Like India ink. They stain your soul forever. My soul must look like a smoker’s lungs.

  PETE BURGER

  Maylin and Jasmine speak English. They were just pretending not to understand me. I laugh along. OK, I’m a little annoyed. But I drink some more beer and imagine everything being sucked through a black hole into another universe—Cheryl, her parents, my father’s e-mails.

  Maylin tells me that she’s from Colombia. She’s here to study English. I tell her where I’m from. She nods as if she’s heard of it. Jasmine, she says, is her cousin. She’s visiting for the summer. Maylin’s family has a condo. Her father heads the Colombian branch of an American multinational. The name of the company sounds familiar. Jasmine makes a joke about the condo, but Maylin elbows her to be quiet. Maylin says her brother lives with her. He’s training to be a pilot. Her parents want him to look after her, but he’s too busy with his studies and his American girlfriend. So Jasmine’s here for the summer to keep her company.

  “Don’t you have a boyfriend?” I ask her.

  Maylin shakes her head. Jasmine nods.

  More games, I think.

  They ask me what I do, and I tell them almost everything. I leave Cheryl out. No need to complicate things. I tell them about my work and where I’m staying. They’re impressed. I shrug my shoulders, but I’m glad. Now we’re getting somewhere.

  So we’re talking, having a nice time. Jasmine puts her top on and says she’s going to buy drinks from the kiosk nearby. I dig in my pocket to give her cash, but she waves my hand away. I watch her run over the hot sand. I am fascinated by the physics of her bathing suit.

  Something catches Maylin’s attention, and I turn to look. Two guys wearing sleeveless tee shirts and long gym pants come toward us. They are muscular. One has shaved his head. The other has long hair in a ponytail. The one with the shaved head crouches down and talks to Maylin in Spanish, and I’m thinking it’s her brother or a boyfriend. Ponytail stands behind me. Maylin’s saying something. She points to me. Then the guy looks at me and smiles.

  “Hi, roe,” he says. Or hi-lo. I can’t really tell. He offers his hand, which is twice the size of mine.

  I tell him my ñrst name. I’m trying my best to be friendly, show him that I don’t want trouble. He says that he hopes everything is OK. And as he says this, he holds up one hand and joins the tips of his index finger and thumb, forming a circle. Then he pushes his other index finger back and forth through the circle and waits for me to react. When I don’t, he laughs and stands and says bye-bye. Maylin moves her own index finger in circles next to her head and says something that sounds like “low-coe,” which I know means crazy in Spanish. I turn to look for the other guy, but he’s walking away, next to Hi-Lo.

  MARÍA ISABEL COSTA

  I close all the curtains. I do not want to see the sky or the ocean. I do not want to see José Luis flying that stupid contraption of his as if this were any Sunday, as if we had not made love last night and early this morning and he had not held me, before we got up to have breakfast and he became serious and quiet. When I asked him about it, he didn’t want to say anything. Not at first. Until I insisted, and he told me that it was over, only this time it is for good, Isabel. He denied there was anyone else. But I knew. How could I not know? Hola printed a picture of him snuggling with that model, the one with the funny name that sounds like an Austrian pastry. I can’t even say it. What kind of a name is that? And she, a head taller than him. They look ridiculous together.

  How could he have been so calm last night and pretended that everything was fine?

  Last night, we ate at Sushi Pazzo. People came to our table. José Luis stood to shake their hands. One of our friends said how happy we looked. After dinner, he ordered the driver to drop us a few blocks from our apartment so we could walk along the beach.

  The ocean looked phosphorescent when the waves broke on the sand. We took off our shoes and watched our feet disappear in the foamy water. José Luis held my hand and we walked the rest of the way in silence. And I thought that whatever had happened between him and that model was over. At home, he made love to me more tenderly than usual. How could I have known?

  I get another bottle of champagne out of the refrigerator and open it, steadying it as I pour the wine into the glass.

  This morning too, he was tender. Unless I am on assignment or José Luis is on tour, on Sundays we sleep late and eat breakfast together. The maid takes the day off, so we have the condo to ourselves.

  José Luis made love to me again and held me for a long time. It wasn’t until breakfast that his mood changed and he was quiet.

  When he finished eating, he said, “We have been together almost four years. Plenty of time, I think, for us to know whether this will work.”

  Something sour sprang up into my mouth, but I ignored it and ate another piece of melon.

  “Don’t think that I am not grateful,” he said, “or that I have forgotten everything you did for me. I will never forget that.” He reached for my hand. I drew it back.

  Three months after we met, I realized that I was in love with José Luis, and I asked him to move into my apartment. At that time, I was the one making all the money. José Luis was living with that useless poet he thinks so highly of, sleeping on the couch of a studio apartment near Eighth Street. That was almost a year before he became famous and rich with his song “Isabel,” which he wrote for me, which he could not have written without me. Back then, he drank a bottle of vodka every day or else he could not write, he said, or else the world was such a sharp-edged place that he hurt just being in it and he could not feel the music inside him. The alcohol dulled the world, he said. It protected him from all the sharpness. So he drank.

  I had not noticed it before he moved in, but so many things do not become evident until you live with someone. Every few days, he drank until he could not stand. When he threw up on me in bed while we slept, I told him that was enough and forced him to enter a clinic. The doctor said he could have drowned in his own vomit. He could have died had it not been for me.

  You owe me your miserable life, you bastard, I thought.

  José Luis looked at his plate.

  “Just say it,” I said. “It should be easy for you.”

  “This time it is for good, Isabel. I’m leaving and I’m not coming back.”

  He gave me a little speech. He had obviously prepared it, maybe even with the help of his model friend. Miss Austrian Pastry. It was his thank-you speech to me, like the one he delivered last y
ear when he won a Latin Grammy for “Isabel.” He thanked his producer, his agent, all his friends. Thank you, thank you.

  “You will always be very special to me,” he said.

  I slapped him. Hard. Something rose inside me and I slapped him again. And when he dropped his face into his hands, I took a deep breath and hit his ears, the back of his neck. I stood, balled up my fists, and pounded him on his back, his head, frustrated that my blows did not seem to hurt him, not wanting to hurt him, angry at my impotence.

  He wrapped his arms around my legs and picked me up and carried me to the living room. I cried, but I kept hitting him. He put me down on the sofa, stepped back, and watched me try to catch my breath between sobs.

  When he came closer I kicked at him, but he grabbed my legs by the ankles and held them.

  “Are you going to rape me too?” I screamed.

  He stopped, let go of my legs, and backed away.

  RICHARD JOLICOEUR, PH.D.

  We are at another red light on Ocean Drive, in front of the house where Gianni Versace was shot. Three girls and a young man embrace and smile on the steps where Versace died while another woman takes their picture. I look away, toward the ocean, and see a glider going up and down and around. The way it moves reminds me of a fly buzzing about food. I have never seen anything like that. I even say “Hey, look!” to the Americans in the back, and they look up from their papers. One of them says, “It’s an ultralight.”

  “Look at the way it is flying,” I say. And I feel there is going to be trouble even though I do not want to believe it. I feel the nothingness swell within me. I hope my passengers do not notice.

  When I was a child, my mother told me that I could sense the future. My spinster aunt visited us, hoping that I would help her find a man. We sat at the kitchen table, my mother at one end, my aunt at the other. My aunt asked me to tell her if this or that man was a good match. When I told her that I did not sense anything, my mother took my hand, put it on my aunt’s forehead, and told me to try harder, concentrate. My aunt never married. She died a year later of a rare disease. That confirmed my powers to my mother. “Of course you sensed nothing. What you sensed was death,” she said, blessing herself.

  As a teenager, I rebelled and stopped believing in God and all the saints. I studied philosophy and worshiped Progress and Science. It was religion, voodoo, dictators, and coups d’état that kept my country poor, hungry, and ignorant. I wanted to leave all that behind.

  Once I started university in Port-au-Prince, I spoke only French, even when I telephoned back home. I saved money and bought a pipe that I carried unlit because I could not afford to buy good tobacco and was not about to smoke the black, foul-smelling stuff that our washerwoman smoked. My mother made fun of me and called me monsieur le professeur. I won a scholarship to study in Paris. I pretended that I was French and modern, but if I had sounded very French in Haiti, now I sounded very Haitian in France. The other students wanted to talk about the things I was most embarrassed to discuss. Can you put a spell on people? they asked me. Can you make me go into a trance? Sometimes I gave in, touched their foreheads, and told them what I saw. I had left Haiti to become someone else, but the truth was that I had brought my country with me.

  When I was awarded my doctorat, I returned to Haiti. I had my little library of philosophy books and my stylish French clothes. I tried to adapt to life in Port-au-Prince, but my country has no need for people like me. It wants only soldiers or politicians or merchants, and I am none of those. So I left again. This time for Miami. I packed my doctorat, some clothes, and all my books. I had no clue what I would do. Maybe I would teach at a university, some place like Texas or Oklahoma, some quiet American place. But the closest I came to teaching was when a private school in Miami interviewed me for a position as assistant librarian. I even took a typing test. They said they would call me back, but they never did. That was thirteen years ago. Since then at home there has been more unrest, more poverty. I have never returned.

  I ask my mother to come here. Each time she gives me the same answer. She cannot leave Haiti because my sister and her children are there, because who would look after the house, your house after I die, she says, because my father is buried not ten minutes away. So many becauses.

  My sister and her husband have a good business. They import electrical appliances from Miami. I see my brother-in-law several times a year. Last year, he brought my sister and their two children. Haiti is good to men like him. He sells you practical things that make your life easier.

  The traffic light changes to green. I drive slowly, trying not to lose sight of the glider, which is now diving and climbing again.

  PETE BURGER

  Jasmine returns with a couple of beers for me and two bottles of water for herself and Maylin. I hold out some money to pay for my beers, but she puts her hand on mine and squeezes it before she pushes it away. She sits facing me. Maylin kneels behind Jasmine to unsnap the top of her bathing suit. Jasmine says that her breasts are too white. She cups them in her hands and looks at me. I tell her they’re fine and take a drink. Fine? she says, cocking her head. Bway-noe, I say. Rico, Maylin says, and smacks her lips. They both laugh. Maylin gives Jasmine the bottle of suntan oil before she lies down on her back. Jasmine squeezes a line of oil across her breasts. Using both hands she spreads the oil evenly. Then she turns and lies next to Maylin.

  I watch them. I want to remember this, regardless of what happens. It will be something I will never tell anyone, something I can call up when I’m waiting for a program to download and I’m bored. I want to take it all in, turn myself into a camera. More than a camera because I want to remember what the breeze feels like and how the music coming from the hotel behind me rises and falls with the wind. When the wind shifts, you can hear the steady beat from the pool bar. The wind carries the beat over the low dunes capped with sea oats, between wire-mesh trash baskets overflowing with garbage and people carrying beach chairs and coolers. A tractor plows the sand and moves slowly north. The sound of its engine is a steady rumble. The tractor clears a wide swath of sand between the dunes and us. The sand there is hard and compact. A steady stream of joggers and power walkers flow over it wearing headphones, looking straight ahead.

  Closer to the water, a small village of blue umbrellas and chaises longues are arranged on the beach into rows. Most of the chaises are occupied by middle-aged couples reading newspapers and paperback books. Two couples nearby are having an animated discussion in French. A dozen young men and women dressed in white shirts and shorts run between the hotel pool bars and the beach carrying trays of drinks and food. Closer still, unprotected by any umbrellas and ignored by the waiters, are the younger people, like Maylin and Jasmine, lying on beach towels and smoking cigarettes. Most of them are talking on their cell phones. Almost all the young women are topless. The boys sit separately. Occasionally, a boy will ask a girl for a cigarette.

  Along the edge of the water, men in big bathing shorts and women wearing small bikinis walk south and north, looking at the sights. There are no children.

  Heads and shoulders bob in the shallow green water. Three Jet Skis buzz behind them. A man swims toward a sandbar.

  Beyond that, three motorboats have dropped anchor. A man dives off the deck of one boat. Two women lie on the deck of another. On the horizon, too far to make out any details, are the unmoved gray ships.

  The ultralight flies low over the water.

  Jasmine and Maylin lie next to each other. Jasmine’s hand finds Maylin’s and caresses it.

  Maybe I should leave, I think. I’m not hungry, but I could eat. I could sleep too. Besides, what do I think I’m doing here? It isn’t as if I’m going to do anything with these two. I’ve had my fun.

  Cheryl’s a nice woman. She loves me. OK, so the passion’s gone. Sex is something we do, like getting a haircut or washing the car. But sex isn’t everything. Someday, we’ll get married. I’m not keen on children, but they’re kind of a package deal with Cher
yl, and if that’s what she wants, then I’ll do it. Won’t be the end of the world. Plenty of people have children. You go to the mall and all you see are children. There’s no getting around it, having children is part of life, like jerking off, squeezing pimples, growing your hair long, then losing it, voting Democrat, before you grow up and vote Republican (that’s what my father says).

  Enough, I think. I’ve probably drunk too much beer. On an empty stomach, in this heat, no wonder it went straight to my head.

  I lie back on the sand and close my eyes and let the ocean breeze flow over me. And I wonder whether the air carries some bit of Africa, maybe a grain of sand, something of the land where my brother lives.

  I love my brother. He found a purpose for his life. I have mostly stumbled through mine. In college, I changed majors so often that it took me six years to finish, and when I did it was with the lowest average you could get and still graduate. I took a job as a computer tech in a law firm. I told myself that I’d do that for a little while before I’d do something else, something that mattered. From the law firm, I went to work at an insurance company. From there, I went to a payroll company. And from there, I came to my current job. I’ve been at it four years. Sometimes I think it’s stupid to look for a purpose to life. It’s like asking why the sky is blue or why the sun rises in the east. There’s a scientific reason for it, but there’s no why, not in the big sense.

  I sit up. The tractor is coming back. I watch it make neat straight grooves, like the kind you see in a Japanese garden, grooves that are supposed to make you feel peace and balance. A thin man walks two black Labradors along the water. The dogs run in and out of the water and shake themselves dry. Three girls walking the opposite way stop and try to pet the dogs. The man smiles patiently, but it is obvious that he wants to walk on.

  The beer is too hot to drink so I empty the bottle and bury it. I dig my fingers into the hard sand. A shard of seashell stabs one of my nail beds. It hurts, but I do not move my finger. The pain makes me feel more alive.