“This place,” she’d say, “has potential. I may not have inherited the gift of seeing the future like you, Mariela, but I have the vision of instinct and experience, and I tell you Coffee Park has nowhere to go but up.”
On the Wednesday I returned from my afternoon with Hector, the area was clean, the trees still green, and there were no signs of the loud music sometimes heard on weeknights, of the couple of harmless pseudo-homeless people, or of the few prostitutes who sometimes brightened my afternoons with their sequined tops, hot pants, and high heels. Not that I judged them for being sluts. (How could I?) I judged them for failing to realize they’d attract more customers if they’d just invest $2.69 in a tube of ultra-whitening, tartar control toothpaste every once in a while. But, all of that said, Coffee Park was still, for the most part, a great little neighborhood.
It was also the place where I reinvented myself after my divorces. You’ll remember that when I couldn’t afford to continue living in my Coral Gables home (post husband number two), I’d decided (was forced) to get entrepreneurial, taking my post-divorce, highly sharpened computer skills and my knack for finding information and resources on the Internet and going right back to Coffee Park to hang my shingle.
At first, my clients had been people who had some disposable income, but no patience to wait all day for their turn at the Kiwanis Club of Little Havana, the only truly active community nonprofit offering immigrant services at the time. So they’d come to me instead, and I’d correct a billing mistake, negotiate a deferment on a loan, find an address on MapQuest, or download a bus route schedule. I’d do basic tax returns and fill out college financial aid or loan forms, as I had for Jorge. I wrote letters for every purpose and, once or twice, I’d even been hired to call a boss and say “my husband” was sick and would not be in to work that day.
And then, little by little, a certain kind of clientele began streaming in with more frequency than the rest: women. Confused, heartbroken, pissed-as-hell women getting divorced and who, having heard of “my history,” figured I’d have an extra lesson or two to share with them. This was perfectly normal. Living in Coffee Park one heard about everyone’s everything, and the fact that I’d twice had to return to the neighborhood after yet another man had cheated on me was the kind of history people tended to remember. Oh, let me tell you, that’s when I felt the tug of a new calling grabbing hold of my heart.
Take Silvia, for example.
“Did you already ask for a divorce?” I asked her when she came to see me.
“Of course!”
“Take it back.”
“What? Didn’t you hear what I said? He’s sleeping with my cousin! My cou-cou-couuuuuuuu-sin!” She sobbed for a few minutes before shaking her head and thundering “My cousin!” redundantly.
“I know that, Silvia. I know. Trust me. I know how you feel and this is why you need a lawyer: He doesn’t have a job. You have two. He’s been taking care of the kids while you work—”
“That’s the worst of it! Do you know lo que hizo ese hijo de la gran puta?”
(Nonliteral translation: son of the mother of all bitches.)
“All right,” I said, realizing I’d have to let her vent before she’d let me help her. “What did he do?”
“He’d get movies for the kids, and ice cream, and all kinds of junk food, and sneak that skanky ho in through the back room next to the laundry while the kids were watching TV.” She finished on the verge of a thrombosis, her abundant chest heaving like a body of water with tsunami symptoms.
“I know. I know, but—”
“You knew?”
“No, no. I mean that I know what it’s like.”
“Oh.” She nodded, no doubt remembering what she’d heard of “my history.”
I tried again: “In court, all they’ll know, or want to know, is that you’re the breadwinner with the two jobs and no time to take care of the kids, and they’ll probably say that keeping it that way would be less disruptive to the children since he’s been doing it now for about—”
“Oh, yeah, he’s been doing it all right. You want to hear disruptive?”
I sighed, willing myself to avoid joining her over there at the deep, dark end of her rage pool where I wouldn’t be able to help her.
“What I’m trying to say is that he could end up with joint custody, the kids living with him, and you having to pay him child support.”
“No! You think? He wouldn’t. He wouldn’t dare.”
“You say he was sleeping with your cousin, in your house, with your children present, while you were working two jobs?”
“Oh my God. You’re right. He would! He would dare.”
“I’m just saying, be careful. ’Cause let me tell you, that ‘equal distribution of assets’ in this lousy, no-fault divorce state is Florida’s way of charging you for the sunshine.”
Silvia nodded, wide-eyed, before saying, “What I need is a badass, motherfucking lawyer.”
I was happy she’d gone from “no lawyer” to wanting a “badass” one, but knowing my share of them from the work I did and knowing she didn’t have enough money for even five minutes of a Miami “motherfucking” lawyer’s time, I said, “Would you settle for a Legal Aid motherfucking lawyer?”
When she nodded urgently, I got the area number for Legal Aid and for the local children and family services office and made appointments for her while printing out every useful document on divorce and family law that I could find online.
It felt so good to help these women. I typically charged a nominal fee of ten dollars per hour, but often reduced my fee or worked extra hours I didn’t charge for because, as far as I was concerned, this was now my real gift. I was over clairvoyance and good riddance! If the failure of my marriages had proven something to me, it was that if I’d ever had “sight,” it was swimming in shit somewhere else.
On the other hand, with my keyboard I could see farther than any psychic. Sometimes, all I had to do was search the Internet and hand the woman a simple answer (no charge if the search took five minutes or less), and the next thing I knew they’d be looking at my computer and me as if I were magic incarnate and the computer were my crystal ball. I hated that. It reminded me of how my clairvoyance had made me feel special as a teen. You know, before my mother got sick and I realized I was a fraud.
And there I was, Mother-Teresa-with-a-laptop tending to my building, my clients, and my tenants by day, firm believer in my “married men only” rule by night: Both came with no real obligations and no money-loss issues, and had the added benefit of occupying space I might otherwise be tempted to hand over to dangerously unattached men.
I hadn’t always been that cynical and distrusting. All my life, I had yearned for a sister or a best friend. Another woman with whom to have an even closer bond than the one I’d had with my mother. But somehow, I didn’t know a single female besides Iris whom I could truly call a friend. And probably because so many of them seemed bent on taking my lousy husbands, I had lost the capacity to regret that I might now possibly be taking theirs.
I just went about my life, one day at a time, trying not to think about the fact that I helped women with one hand, while hurting them with the other.
Chapter 6
After Hector drove away, I stopped at Los Pinareños Frutería for a guava milk shake. It was amazing, the perfect mix of tart and sweet, and after just a few sips, I’d convinced myself once again that it was all in my head. There was nothing wrong with Hector. It was just me making a volcano out of an ashtray.
When a woman has been alone for a while, she’s like the girl in The Little Princess, climbing the stairs of her garret after a horrible dose of forced labor, poverty, and abuse, to find that a rich humanitarian has sent his monkey to leave all kinds of wonderful food, gifts, and comforting treats for her. God was my Humanitarian, Hector was his monkey, and all I had to do was keep my good fortune a secret and stay in the shadow area designated for “other women,” and everything would be dandy.<
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Cars zoomed past me as I walked down Eighth Street sipping my shake, making me wonder why I’d made Hector drive me over instead of staying in the Gables to browse the shops along Miracle Mile before taking the bus back.
That late in the afternoon, traffic was so loud, that by the time I got to Coffee Park, I had a headache and had to stop at the naturopathy pharmacy for some beet drops. Sarah, the owner’s girlfriend, was at the counter. She was a youngish-looking thing, all bones and blond, with huge blue eyes in a heart-shaped face where the nose and mouth were the simplest of punctuation marks. She’d come east from California with Pedro, but was from Madison, Wisconsin. The door opened with a clinking of small brass bells tied to a thick red rope, followed immediately by Pedro, hollering at Sarah from somewhere in the back.
“So go. Go back to Madison and raise some cows if that’s what you want to do. I don’t care!”
“You wish Miami had the class and sophistication that’s in one Madison, Wisconsin, square block, you hear? Oh . . . hi, Mariela. What can I get for you?”
“I can come back later.”
“Don’t be silly. No need to mind him.”
“Some beet drops, please. If you’ve got some ready to go.”
“Of course,” she said with a smile.
Pedro huffed in from the back room, red face on the verge of exploding, about to say something, but saw me, grumbled an embarrassed hello, and went back to whatever he’d been doing in the back.
The moment he was gone, Sarah turned to me and murmured, “I swear I am so sick of that man, I’d go home this minute if I could.” She said it with so much hatred, I had no doubt she meant it. In her anger, she hadn’t even written down my purchase or bothered ringing it up, putting the money I gave her in her jeans front pocket.
I left thinking there was another benefit to my relationship with Hector: not much time to fight. That was, if I still had a relationship with him.
Rounding the park toward my apartment, I concluded that the tension with Hector had been my fault. I knew the paramount rule of love affairs: always be mysterious, which works just as well for clairvoyants as for regular women trying to hang on to illicit affairs with married men. I also knew that the easiest road to the restoration of lost mystery is absence, which is why, a little rattled by Sarah and Pedro’s arguing, I suddenly wished to get home quickly, take a warm bath, find my center, and destroy neediness by cooking my delicious Spanish potato omelet with a side of piquillo peppers cooked in garlic, olive oil, balsamic vinegar, and a pinch of sugar. I’d enjoy a glass of wine, release the drama for one night, be mysterious again, and stop “doing that thing” that Hector had told me not to do. I even felt up to finishing The Elegance of the Hedgehog. Set in Paris, it was a novel about the concierge of a Parisian building so in love with art, she’d secretly become as delicate as the most cultured debutante by teaching it to herself. Where I’d left off, it looked like the wise, rich, handsome Japanese widower in her building had guessed her wonderful secret and was falling in love with her. Just thinking about a good story made me excited and hopeful, and I quickened my pace. Life was great again.
Until I got to my building and saw Hector’s car parked right there in front of it. What was he doing here instead of at the bookstore? What about his important meeting? I opened the wooden door and stepped into the little foyer that separated my apartment from Gustavo’s. It was a small space, about eight by eight feet, housing the electrical closet, the four metal mailboxes, and the staircase that led to the upstairs apartments.
I’d already started to coax my overstuffed mail from the narrow mailbox with apartamento uno written on it with nail polish when I heard Hector and Olivia coming down the stairs, laughing about some apparently hilarious thing. It was too late to hurry into my own apartment. In a matter of seconds they were upon me, leaving me no time to recover from the surprise. Her, I hadn’t seen in weeks, while he’d been inside me just a couple of hours earlier.
“Well. Hello,” I said.
“Hello, Mariela!” Hector said, as if he hadn’t seen me in years.
“I was just . . . had things to . . . you know, here,” I said, forgetting I lived there and didn’t need to explain my presence.
“Well, it’s very nice to see you, right, Olivia?”
She took her time answering, and then did so in the same clipped, icy Morticia tone I remembered from the few times we’d exchanged words in the time they’d lived in apartamento cuatro: “That’s a charming top.”
“Oh, yeah . . . yes, well, you look . . . great,” I replied, thinking, If you like that sort of look. She was in her early fifties and wore her long ash-blond hair curled into ringlets around her pale face, obviously ignorant of the fact that Farrah Fawcett herself retired that look long before she died. She was fashionably stick-thin with an angular face, huge brown eyes, and big lips that seemed to stretch as wide as her face. Her only good features, as far as I was concerned, were her cheekbones, high and pronounced. She’d put some makeup on, all very subdued except for the burgundy red color on her lips, and completed the look with a meant-to-be-snug black cocktail shift that just hung on her and pointy, black kitten-heel pumps. The one thing that didn’t match or fit perfectly was a chunky, gold-tone men’s watch, glaringly out of place in all its masculinity.
“It’s the first present Hector ever gave me,” she said, following my eyes. “His father’s watch, so I could float around in my little world and still know what time it was,” she said with just that drop of sarcasm you can never be completely sure of. Had he said it in that dismissive way back then? Or was she being sarcastic now? The possibilities enclosed within this tidbit of information were fascinating to me. Mistresses always want to know what happens inside the one place that’s forbidden to them: their lover’s marriage.
“Well, we really have to go,” said Hector, pushing her gently down the last few steps and toward the entry door so that they now stood between my apartment’s front door and me: Hector, comfortable and relaxed. I, amazed that he could be.
“Your scent,” she said.
“Thanks,” I said a little too quickly, since she hadn’t exactly complimented me on it. “It’s lemongrass.”
“Yes, I know,” she said, freezing my heart. “I grow it in the apartment. Useful for migraines.”
That last bit about smells made Hector visibly tense (her intent all along, I suspected), and now I wondered if she knew something because what had there been to be sarcastic about? Lemongrass?
Just when it couldn’t get any more awkward, the door to apartamento dos opened and Gustavo stepped out with Abril, who rented one of Iris’s apartments next door, and Henry, her seven-year-old son. Gustavo and Abril had recently begun dating. They seemed surprised to see us all crowding the rather small foyer, but Henry smiled wide when he saw Olivia.
“You look pretty,” he told her, looking up at her with his eyes made as big as hers by the Coke-bottle glasses he had recently begun to wear for his severe myopia, and dragged the heavy, high-top shoes he wore for his flat feet, wobbling over to touch her watch reverently.
“You notice it too, eh, Henry? Good taste!” said Hector, messing up Henry’s ash-brown hair, as if delighted to see him.
Since when did Hector like kids? Or maybe he just liked the convenient distraction this particular kid was providing?
Olivia was peering intently into Henry’s eyes.
“There’s a very good natural eye remedy for children,” she said to no one in particular.
“I used a perfectly natural remedy to repair mine: a laser,” said Hector, suddenly a comedian.
Olivia ignored him, continuing her intense examination of Henry’s face.
“You know, she’s always talking about natural this and natural that. Well, what is more natural than light?” continued Hector. Was he finally nervous? Or was he being dismissive of her macrobiotic, environmentally conscious, vegan ways for my benefit?
“You have to buy some licorice root
powder,” Olivia went on, without ever looking at Abril, even though it was now obvious that she was talking to her. “Mix a half teaspoon of the root’s powder, an equal amount of honey, and about a quarter teaspoon of ghee, and give it to him with a cup of milk on an empty stomach,” she finished.
“My stomach’s empty now,” said Henry, peering right back into her eyes and smiling wide, as if he were playing along.
“Oh, okay, thanks. I’ll have to come by your apartment with a notepad, write it all down in detail,” said Abril to Olivia as if she were a poor peasant and Olivia were the Pope.
This was something that annoyed me about Abril, the way she was always pushing Henry onto other people and being so thrilled when they liked him back or took him under their wing as if he were an orphan, just because his father was missing in action.
“The doctors say his extreme case of myopia is showing up ahead of time. He’s only seven, and it’s recently begun to really bother him,” continued Abril, oblivious to my bitchy thoughts.
“I got new glasses!” said Henry, smiling his adorable crooked smile at Olivia.
“Yes, well. You should do something about it,” said Olivia to Abril, without so much as a glance in either her or Henry’s direction, as if the conversation bored her and she was through talking.
I looked at Henry and, just as I thought, he looked hurt.
“Your glasses are really cool, Henry. I like them a lot,” I said, falling into Abril’s trap, wanting to protect her son from the rude ways of crappy grown-ups.
Henry smiled wide again, nodding at me maniacally.
“See, Henry. I told you they were cool. We picked them out together,” said Gustavo, putting his hand on Henry’s shoulder protectively.
“We really have to go,” Hector said with the same impatience he’d used toward me that afternoon.
“It was nice seeing you both,” said Abril in a ridiculously wistful manner. “Henry’s always asking me to take him to the bookstore, right, Henry?”
The Clairvoyant of Calle Ocho Page 4