by Xenia Ruiz
I didn’t respond.
“She’ll be okay,” Eva said as if trying to convince herself. “I’ll call her later.”
We had reservations at Buono Dio, one of the many restaurants that were sprouting up in the increasing gentrified areas all over Chicago. The restaurant boasted a neo-Italian-American cuisine. I ordered my staple steak and potatoes with a pesto salad, while Eva ordered whitefish with garlic vegetables, the sauce on the side. She always insisted that all her condiments be served, “on the side,” which usually elicited rolled eyes or blank stares from the waitstaff. It was something that would have driven me crazy in any other woman, but not with Eva.
She looked cool and chic in a paisley print pantsuit, the jacket long to her calves and a backward Kangol beret on her head. Her hair was gathered in a relaxed ponytail, loose tendrils hanging from the sides of her temples. In the last two weeks, since the night she confessed her feelings for me, we kept in contact via phone calls and almost daily e-mails. I had kept the compliments and endearments to a minimum, trying to play the cool brother, knowing she would see through my radar. But every once in a while, I slipped. I called her “babe” a couple of times over the phone or inserted rose icons into my e-mail messages.
We had met for lunch or dinner a few times in the weeks before the concert, and went to the movies and cultural events on the weekends, during which I noticed many things about Eva. For example, she wore only Indian or African costume jewelry. She never wore dresses, something I had always thought was characteristic of Christian women. When she wore skirts, they were long, almost to her ankles. Her blouses covered her arms and hid even the slightest cleavage. I was dying to see her legs and arms and I wondered if maybe she was concealing some flaw, or scars, but I refused to dwell on the negative. On one unseasonably warm day, she wore capris with high-heeled sandals, and the sight of her small perfect bare feet with pearl-polished toes and smooth veins distracted me to the point where I lost my train of thought.
The previous Sunday, she had talked me into going to church to hear a visiting pastor. The pastor, who had a thick Brooklyn accent and must have been a former stand-up comedian, told jokes throughout his sermon, and had the whole church in stitches. He had an awesome testimony, which included an abusive childhood, drug addiction, and a prison stint where he found Jesus. I was humbled by his journey, amazed at how far he had come. When altar call was announced, I expected Eva to nudge me or glance my way, but she didn’t. I sneaked a peek at her and noticed that she was praying fervently, her eyes closed, and I wondered whether she was praying for me.
“What did you pray about?” I asked her afterward. “Or is it like birthday wishes, it won’t come true if you tell someone?”
“I prayed for everything.” Then she smiled secretly and added, “And everyone.”
“You want me to get saved?” I then asked, knowing I was treading precarious, sacred ground.
“That would be great. But you should come to the Lord for yourself, when you feel the spirit, for the right reason. Not for anyone else.”
But sometimes I felt like she was trying to convert me subliminally, on the sly, slipping under my sinner’s veneer like a spy, using buzzwords like men used pickup lines to woo women.
I had actually contemplated taking the walk up to the altar, saying the words, wondering if it would make a difference in our relationship. But since I knew I’d be doing it for the wrong reason, it was a little too sacrilegious even for me. To me, her pious world was a whole other culture, a whole other dimension.
Eva convinced me to return on poetry night to read again from Sinner. I didn’t get sick on this occasion, focusing instead on Eva’s forehead the entire time. After the reading, I sold the surplus copies of my book to benefit the local women’s abuse shelter. I didn’t mind donating part of the proceeds since it was a worthy cause and the books had been collecting dust in my self-storage unit.
“Do you know what Buono Dio means in English?” Eva asked, bringing me back to the present while methodically cutting into her fish and gliding a forkful into her mouth.
I tried hard not to leer at her lips as she chewed. “I know ‘buono’ is good … Dio, I’m not sure.”
“God. It’s means ‘Good God.’” She moaned as she chewed her food.
“That good, huh?”
“Mm-hmm.” She offered me the next bite.
I accepted the morsel, grabbing hold of the fork as I delicately took the food into my mouth, gazing at her through half-closed eyes. Sometimes I did things like that just to see her reaction. Most of the time she smiled indulgently, as if I were a child in need of patience. This time she held my eyes and she didn’t pull the fork back. I couldn’t help but think about the kisses we had shared in the last two weeks. While I had enjoyed kissing her and was slightly intrigued by the pseudo foreplay, I didn’t know how much longer I was going to be able to keep it up. The power I had envied in women like her was beginning to drive me mad. And yet, I still wanted her. Wanting her was testing my patience. Lately, I was becoming short tempered and irritable—a side effect, I told myself, from wearing the smoking patch. Whoever said absence makes the heart grow fonder was definitely not talking about abstinence.
“Maybe they should have called it ‘Good Food,’” I suggested, letting go of the fork, and she laughed, the awkward moment broken.
The food was good and we were both hungry, so we resumed eating and I cooled it on the flirting.
“You want to taste this?” I asked, giving her some of my pesto salad.
She shook her head emphatically. “Pesto has eggs. I’m allergic to eggs.”
“That’s too bad. So you can’t eat anything with eggs? No cake, cornbread—?”
“Nothing. I don’t need the calories anyway.”
“You don’t look like you have a weight problem.”
“Ha!” she laughed, and began telling me about her battle with anorexia and crash diets. Periodically, she winced in between bites and eventually, she excused herself to go to the bathroom—I assumed to take her headache medication.
The night before, I had called Sondra to ask if she had taken my Chapman CDs when she moved out. I figured that it had been more than a year and we were definitely over each other. Of course, I could have let her keep the CDs and just bought new ones, but considering what happened just before we departed, I didn’t think she would assume I had a hidden motive for calling. It wasn’t even the principle of the matter. More than anything, I hated a thief.
“What makes you think I took them?” Sondra had asked, her voice flowing through the phone smooth and pure like milk and honey.
“They’re all missing. And you’re the only one I know who liked her as much as I did.”
“It could’ve been one of your other women.”
I didn’t bite at her attempt to inquire about the state of my present love life.
“So, are you seeing anybody?” she then asked bluntly.
“Are you?”
“What do you think?”
“Do you have my CDs or not?”
“Yeah, I have them.”
“Can I have them back?”
“Is that what you want? Is that really why you’re calling me? Because really, Adam, you can just buy new ones or download them from the Internet.”
“That’s time consuming and I have better things to do. Anyway, they’re mine.” I sounded like an insecure immature jerk, but I didn’t care.
“You want me to bring them over now?”
I tried not to picture her lounging lazily in bed, in a skimpy T-shirt and underwear, her eyes half closed as she smiled seductively into the phone. I was tempted, man was I tempted, but my insecurities got the best of me. There was no way I was going to risk a repeat of our last encounter. I could see her laughing at me already. And then there was Eva. We were officially going together, even though with past women that included physical consummation, and even though there was a possibility that it might never happen. Any other day
…
“I don’t think my lady would like that.”
There was a significant pause on her end and as juvenile as it was, I felt vindicated for that unfortunate incident during our last sexual encounter. For one glorious moment, I felt redeemed.
“I’ll mail them to you,” she muttered, before hanging up.
After what seemed like an excessive amount of time to use the restroom and take a pill, Eva still had not returned and I began to get worried. I signaled the waiter.
“Can you have one of the waitresses check the ladies’ room for my date?”
“I think the lady, she is sick,” the waiter said in a heavily accented European English I couldn’t quite place. He indicated toward the restroom area. “She say not to bother you.”
I got up and hurried toward the restrooms and found Eva sitting in the hallway, in a lounge chair, her head in her hands.
“Eva, are you alright?”
Startled, she looked up quickly, her face twisted in pain and tears brimming her half-closed eyes.
“You have a headache,” I stated matter-of-factly. “I’m taking you home.”
She waved me away. “It’s not bad. I’m supposed to take this new medication as soon as I feel a headache coming on. I waited too long. I’ll be fine.” It was obvious that she was in terrible, excruciating pain.
I sat down next to her. “Give me your hand.”
“What? Why?”
“Give me your hand,” I insisted.
She extended it and I firmly pinched the web between her thumb and forefinger.
“Breathe deeply,” I told her. She closed her eyes and inhaled, exhaled, then moaned. “How does that feel?”
“I can feel the pain going away, a little.” I momentarily stopped applying pressure. “Now it’s coming back again,” she said.
“It’s called ‘acupressure.’ Something about invisible channels of energy in this part of the hand being connected to the head. My mother used to do this when she got stress headaches during my father’s illness.”
“I’ve read about that. Your hands and feet are supposedly related to different organs or something. I always thought that stuff was quack medicine.”
“My mother believes in all that mess. She won’t take any kind of medicine. She has to be really sick to go to a doctor.”
“My mother was the same way. Then one day she had a headache, laid down, and died in her sleep.”
“Oh, man.”
“She had a brain aneurysm. I was always afraid that my migraines were a symptom and that one day I would have an aneurysm. But the doctor assured me that they’re almost always sudden. I get an annual MRI just to be sure.”
“And they’ve never found anything?”
“Yeah, they told me that my symptoms are consistent with migraines,” she said dryly. “I was, like, ‘thanks for stating the obvious, guys.’”
As I listened, I intermittently pressed and released her hand. “How does your head feel?”
“Better.”
“Seriously?”
“Yes. I guess there is some truth to it. Either that or the medication’s finally kicking in.”
“Because there’s a pressure point in your foot that works for headaches, between your first and second toe—”
She smiled wanly. “You are not touching my feet.”
“You ready to go home?”
“After the coffee.”
“I thought doctors said coffee was bad for migraines.”
“Are we reading medical journals now?”
“Internet.”
We got up and walked back to the table. As we waited for our coffees, I took her hand again and started massaging it between both of mine. Her skin was so soft it made my stomach clench. Perhaps because I had been abstinent so long, every little thought, smell, or touch of her set me off. God, your skin is so soft, I thought, wondering what the rest of her body felt like. I wanted to say the words, but I knew she wasn’t the type of woman who bought compliments, even well-intended and truthful ones, so I didn’t even try to put it out there. And knowing her for the short time I had, she might have taken it as a sexual comment. Judging by the way she broke her stare, however, I knew she must have read the pleasure in my eyes. The waiter brought our coffees and we pulled back. It was getting late and we were almost the last patrons in the restaurant. There was only one other table, where two loud and lively couples remained.
“You talk about your mother a lot, but you don’t talk about your father too much,” Eva said sipping from her cup.
In all our conversations, I had always managed to evade any discussion of my father. I would give her short answers or conveniently change the subject. Sensing my hesitation, Eva looked apologetic.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to pry. I don’t like talking about my father too much either. I understand.”
But then I started the saga of my father, beginning with the good, going into the bad, and ending with the ugly—meeting my half brother and half sister and their mother at the funeral. I felt as if a weight had been lifted from my chest. It wasn’t that I had never talked to anyone about my feelings for him, it had just been so long.
“And you’ve never visited his grave?” she asked.
I shook my head.
“Why not?”
I shrugged. “No use.”
“I think you should visit it. I go every year, on my mother’s birthday.”
“Yeah, but you loved your mother.”
“And you loved your dad, no?”
I liked it when she ended her sentences with a Spanish “no” or peppered her dialogue with Spanish words or phrases. It was something else about her that made her so out of the ordinary, and made me feel like this time, things were different. And it wasn’t, as Luciano claimed, that I saw her as this exotic woman just because she was of a different ethnicity. When we walked down the street, Black women didn’t give me the evil eye like they did when I was dating the French-Canadian female. For all they knew, Eva was one of “them”; a Black woman. Most times, because of her bronze skin and curly hair, I forgot she wasn’t a sister. It was only when she spoke Spanish, which she rarely did, that I was reminded.
“Before I found out what kind of a man he really was,” I finally answered. “Yes, I guess you could say I loved him.”
“After my mother died, my father dropped us off at my Aunt Titi’s,” Eva said quietly. “He didn’t tell us why or anything. He didn’t talk about my mother again, never mentioned her name. Then he stopped coming to visit us, and whenever we wanted or needed something, we had to track him down. It was like he had divorced us and stopped being our father.”
“And how often do you visit him?”
She paused and looked down at her cup, turning it counterclockwise slowly before looking up at me with a gleam in her eye.
“I told my father about you.”
“What did you say about me?”
“I told him I’m seeing this man whom I like very much.”
I smiled my gratitude. “And he said?”
“Otro moreno?”
“What does that mean?”
“Another Black man?”
That stung. I made a mental note to stay away from Papa Clemente. “He doesn’t like you being with a Black man?”
“He would just prefer that I be with a Hispanic man. I mean, he likes Alex. And he liked Anthony—until he cheated.”
“Do you want to be with a Hispanic man?”
“Remember what I said? You can’t help who you fall … who you like.” She smiled coyly and interlocked her fingers through mine. I remembered what she had said: You can’t help who you like, or fall in love with. Or think you love. But I didn’t correct her. “I want to be with you,” she continued.
I thought maybe I should return the same sentiment but she didn’t seem to expect it. Although she squeezed my hand, her mind seemed to momentarily wander away.
“I don’t think I’ve ever forgiven my father for w
hat he did back then,” she said, then looked into my eyes. “Have you? Forgiven your father?”
“I can’t forgive someone who’s no longer here.”
“Can’t you?”
I contemplated the question and thought about my father’s infidelity, and although I still felt I didn’t owe him anything, I began to wonder for the first time in years whether it was time to start facing my demons.
CHAPTER 17
EVA
HE WAS HOLDING my lips hostage, tightly but tenderly with his teeth. In turn, I was trying to get him to release them by holding his face in my hands, slowly pulling his head away. My body was trying to convince me it was tired of fighting, while my mind was screaming NO! One minute we were debating the spiritual connotations of The Matrix, the next minute he was asking me how to say his name in Spanish. He was babysitting his niece and nephew again, and this time, he had succeeded in persuading me to come over and watch The Matrix. One minute we were sitting on the floor eating popcorn and Raisinettes, and the next we were tasting each other’s tongues. Although his arms were neutrally on the small of my back, moving slightly up, at the same time, he was pressing me closer to him. The slight aftertaste of mint coupled with the buttery popcorn and sweet chocolate lingered on his tongue as it tangled with mine. This was a dangerous kiss, more sensual than the others, more urgent. I kept trying to convince myself that as long as we were just kissing, in a sitting position, I would be fine.
His hand moved up to my neck, palming my throat as if he were going to choke me, then he proceeded to caress the back of my neck. Suddenly, he stopped kissing me and I was relieved, able to take a few deep breaths. I slowly opened my eyes. I was ready to end our moment of reckless passion, at least for the night, but his face lingered in my personal space, the air between us sweet, salty, and heavy with expectation.
“How do you say lips?” he whispered into my parted mouth, his voice sensual and full of urging.
I swallowed before answering. “Labios.”
“I thought it was ‘besame’?”
“That means ‘kiss me.’”