Perhaps I really didn’t want to be the other woman anymore or maybe being his “other,” as opposed to his “one,” had begun to bother some part of me more than I realized.
The rain was coming down quick and thick now, and Hector would be here any minute, soaking wet if, as usual, he’d decided to walk the fifteen or so blocks from the bookstore, his precious Saab reserved only for unwalkable distances.
I kept writing.
And so, amor, I think today is that day. For me, and maybe for you? I wish you well. (I began practicing that phrase the day I met you.) As I write to you knowing that it’s over, and that it’s what you’re coming to say, all I want to do is thank you for the fun times. With love,
I considered that, then decided the letter was melodramatic enough as it was, and erased those two words, signing only:
M+E
Those are my initials and the way I had been signing my notes to him lately, wanting to state my existence in his life if only through “Mission Impossible” notes destined to “self-destruct” (be thrown away) as soon as they were read.
My phone rang again. It was Iris.
“What’s wrong, neighbor?” she asked when I answered as if she’d interrupted a state dinner.
“Nothing. What’s up?”
“Just making sure you don’t want to go to Hoy Como Ayer later. Last chance to go while you’re still in your thirties.”
“You know, Iris, I’m really not feeling all that well.”
“Want me to go over, make you a little tea with some ginger, lemon, and honey, and some—”
“That’s okay, Iris. I think I’m just going to rest up.”
“You know, if I didn’t know better, I’d say the Little Havana Community Committee has put a hex on Coffee Park.”
The committee was her only enemy in the world. In her mind, they were a threat to the liberal way of living, almost as bad as that other type of person she had to share the earth with: conservatives.
“Nooo, I’m just tired from all that hauling of Ellie’s trash we did yesterday.”
“Well, I think something’s definitely going on.”
Shit.
“What do you mean?” I asked, making myself sound sleepy and wishing she were capable of taking a hint.
“Well, I caught Abril sniffling on the back stoop last night after she came back from her downtown meetings or errands or whatever. So I go over to Pedro’s to get her extra-strength echinacea, and he looked worst than Abril.”
“Was he sick too?” I asked.
“You could say that. Sarah left him. Went back to Madison this morning, home to her family. He’s devastated.”
“I’m sure,” I said, remembering how he’d told her to go just a couple of days ago, but not sharing it with Iris to avoid being on the phone any longer.
“Anyway, no echinacea, not that Abril would’ve taken it. But it serves her right because today, of course, she came home from work sick. Been in bed with the bug since. And now you’re the one who doesn’t feel well, and you sound depressed. I tell you it’s those damn Little Havana people putting the evil eye on us.”
“Oh, Iris! You know, with the change in the weather and all the rain, I bet you that’s probably what it is. We’re both coming down with something. I’m sure I’ll feel better tomorrow,” I said, somehow knowing that Abril had not been sniffling, but crying.
“You’d better. It’s not every day one turns forty, my dear.”
“I know. Have fun, okay? I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
“Okay then.”
“Okay, bye.”
“Bye then.”
(You ever notice how Latinos take forever to say good-bye, as if hanging up after just one good-bye were impolite?)
I hung up and went back to the letter. I read it over, knowing I was making too much of this. It had only been eight months. Still, I couldn’t help being sad. Sad and tired. I was so, so tired of endings. Even turning forty felt like another ending instead of a beginning, and I wished I could put off just a little longer this latest farewell walking toward my house at that very moment.
As if in answer to my wish, a war-of-the-worlds-like thunderbolt brought me back to the present, the sound once again affecting me like a hypnotist’s second snap of the fingers.
Wait a minute, I thought. What if I was wrong? I was always wrong! It was the eve of my birthday. Hector was exquisite in his love of detail. Surely, he had not planned to break up with me on the eve of my birthday. Maybe there was something else he really needed to tell me. Since when was I so sure of anything?
I’d leave my options open, I decided, giving in to fear, tucking the letter I’d just written inside the journal along with the crumpled one, throwing it all inside my night table drawer, and going to put a couple of wineglasses and a bottle of locally made guava wine on the kitchen table, willing myself not to believe my own mind, as I’d gotten quite good at doing over the years. Why did I have to jump the gun? If he didn’t bring up breaking up, neither would I. It was as if my mind knew it had made me suffer enough and was giving me permission to grant myself a reprieve from the messy business of send-offs. A few seconds later, I heard the low rap on my back door.
“Ey, flaca,” he said, slipping inside and locking my kitchen door in one move.
“You’re soaking,” I said, kissing him and putting my arms around his neck, not caring that I’d get wet too.
“I know. I don’t have a lot of time,” he said in his clipped, but perfectly sexy accent, as he untangled himself from me and grabbed some paper towels from above the sink.
I sat down at the kitchen table, stomach overcome again with that nervous flutter of loss.
“Okay then. I think it’s safe to say my birthday tomorrow is not among the reasons for your urgency, so . . .”
He closed his eyes and tightened his lips in the impatient way he’d allowed me to see more of lately. Finally, he took off his scarf, as if resigned.
“Mariela, por favor.”
I didn’t answer, wondering if that thing rising inside me was anger. What was with the attitude? If anyone had a right to an attitude, it was me.
“You know what I’m going to say, right?” he said with a “life-is-tough-what-are-you-going-to-do?” expression.
And then I was angry for sure and decided not to make it easy for him.
“No idea.”
He sighed. “This is crazy.”
“What is?”
“This.”
“And what is ‘this,’ to you?”
“This is two people whose, eh, paths happened to cross . . .”
I couldn’t help it. I had to laugh.
“Somesing funny?” he asked.
“You!” I said. “Your clichés and your arrogance, and your gall, frankly, to come to my apartment to break up with me as if this were a fast-food breakup window. I just . . . find it funny.”
“You’re just upset. Plus,” he said, pronouncing the words just and plus as you’d pronounce the cous in couscous. “Plus, the same to do fast as to do slow, no? You’ll be upset no matter what.”
“Sure, I’m upset. I’m upset I put off breaking up with you, the way you’ve been acting lately. So, tell me—new lover?” I asked, barely refraining from asking who the “skanky ho” was, as my client Silvia would have, and conveniently forgetting that I’d been, until that very moment, in the very position of that skanky ho, whoever she happened to be.
How was I so sure there was someone else? Because when there isn’t, a man will invariably break up with you in a soft, muddled, undefined way. He’ll be nice about it. So nice you won’t be sure he actually broke up with you. The reason for that is that he thinks he may still want, or need, to have sex with you and doesn’t want to completely piss you off. But, when a man breaks up with you in a way that leaves no doubt that’s what he’s doing, trust me, he has no fear of a single lonely or boring night. He’s got a strong substitute.
“I asked you a question: new lover?
” I persisted.
He shook his head and smiled a little bit, not caring if I saw him for the pretentious, full-of-himself jerk he’d started to behave like the minute he decided he was done with me.
“You going to play the jealous wife? Now?”
“Jealous wife? Hector, I was going to break up with you.”
“I can see you were,” he said, making me angrier with every badly pronounced, well-modulated word that came out of his mouth.
“Wait here,” I said, and went into my bedroom.
When I walked back into the kitchen, he was putting his scarf back on, which made me even angrier.
“Here,” I said, pushing the journal with my breakup drafts, crumpled and not, sticking out of it hard onto his chest with my open palm.
He took it from me and began to read the letter I’d managed to finish just minutes earlier, then really looked at me for the first time since he’d come in.
“Well. What do you know?”
“Apparently nothing,” I said.
“Look, this—I never lied to you. You’ll at least admit this is, eh, a bit, pathetic?”
“Are we still speaking about you? If so, then yes, quite pathetic.”
He smiled.
“I come here. To talk to you, eh, face-to-face. But you . . . you’re expecting some biiiig pre-birthday celebration, even though I know I took care to write everysing in the wall.”
“What?”
“You know, that saying, the writing. It was in the wall,” he said, mimicking scribbling on a wall with his arm.
“The writing was in the wall?” I asked, hands on hips, too angry to correct him. “Really?”
“Sure. Yes.”
“And which wall would that be?”
“It’s an expre—”
“Get out.”
“Mariela, come on,” he said, trying to hug me.
“Get. The fuck. Out,” I said, pushing him away hard.
“Jesus, lower your voice. Am I going to have to look for an apartment now too?”
“Of course not. But you will have to look for another Mariela. Good luck with that, amor.”
He actually rolled his eyes at that.
“Show yourself out,” I said, turning my back on him and unable to keep myself from finishing with, “you motherfucking asshole.”
“Nice. Very elegant. I see my effort to teach you a little culture has really paid off, eh, for you. Or to you. You know what I mean.”
“They’re called prepositions. Learn to speak . . . some goddamn English and get out!” I screamed without even turning around again to face him, locking myself in the bathroom until I heard the back door close, the vein in my neck throbbing.
I filled the tub with warm water and got in, hearing the thunder outside and wishing some of it would land close to him and scare the smirk he’d left with right off his face. After a while, when I felt better, I tiptoed to the kitchen in my bathrobe, locked the back door, and decided to have myself that glass of guava wine to calm my nerves. The journal was on top of the table. He had drawn a happy face and written “Good Job” on the second letter, the one I’d written that night. The first one, the sarcastic, crumpled one I’d written the night I’d seen him leave with Olivia, was missing.
“Motherfucker!” I said out loud, wishing I could make him explode with the sound of my voice. Knowing him, I realized he could only have taken it to hide someplace like a trophy, a memento of the passion he was still capable of stirring. “Asshole,” I said, hoping he’d be careful not to leave it lying around. The last thing I needed was a problem with Morticia.
I crumpled the one he’d left behind, opened the kitchen side door, lifted the lid off the recycling bin just outside it, and threw it inside, noticing with a sigh that the mountain of wet green trash bags filled with Ellie’s things were still there, looking eerily like a black plastic wave poised to rise and swallow me.
I closed the door quickly and locked it, then filled my wineglass and dropped my bathrobe on the floor, thinking the hell with him. Another glass and I thought, the hell with her too, whoever she was. The hell with everything. Half a bottle later, I reached my bed and got into it fumblingly, turning off the light, determined to forget all about him, descending hard and fast into sleep.
Chapter 12
When I opened my eyes again, there were miles of forest around me, my vision filled with backlit trees in fast-forward, as if it were summer and I were on a horse-drawn carriage moving at high gallop. I could hear the rhythmic rustle of a thousand green leaves being left behind. The smell of wet roots was overwhelming. Still, strangely, I remember wondering what time period of human history I might be inhabiting, then thinking I should wake up, for starters, and realizing how odd it was to be aware that I was dreaming.
But then the forest gave way to Hector, drinking his watery, coffeelike mate tea and reading the business section of the newspaper, my newspaper, in my kitchen. Maybe I’d woken and gone to the kitchen for water. Otherwise, how was I standing in front of him?
He seemed to have forgotten that we’d broken up. Yet he never looked up or smiled conspiratorially. He didn’t reach out with his left hand, offhandedly cupping my right breast as if to say hello. He didn’t push his half-full, lukewarm cup toward me as if to ask me to pour him some more or give any sign of being aware of anything other than the paper in front of him.
He was smoking a cigar, its orange-yellow ember of a tip lighting up my entire kitchen like daylight. But when I started to ask him to be careful, to warn him that the smoke would cling to everything, to remind him that his wife, sleeping mere yards away, might recognize the smell of his smuggled Cohiba, I noticed there was no smoke and no ashes.
That’s when I knew.
What I was looking at was my own memory of Hector. A live image created by me. But why was it in my kitchen? I would think later, upon waking. What had happened to him that he appeared unable to see or hear me? I didn’t know. But if the guilt I felt enveloping me throughout the dream was any indication, what I did know was that, whatever it was, I was somehow responsible.
Chapter 13
When I woke up, all was as it had been when I’d gone to sleep, except for the fact that I was now officially forty, and that I couldn’t get that awful dream out of my head.
It had been so real, the feeling, no, the certainty, that something not so great had happened to Hector and I was to blame. Yet, try as I did, I couldn’t remember the part of the dream that had given me that impression. All I had was that image of him smoking his smokeless cigar and the lingering sensation of darkness and doom quickly coming closer, announcing itself from afar like a funeral parade whose lead float you can hear rolling toward you from twenty blocks away.
I didn’t particularly like dreaming, much less dreaming trouble, but what are you going to do, right? It had obviously been just that, a dream that was over now, just like Hector.
The clock by my bed read only six thirty, but it was no use trying to fall asleep again. (God forbid that insane dream decided to pick up where it had left off.)
I shuffled over to the bathroom and stood in front of the bathroom cabinet mirror.
“Well, happy birthday, Mariela!” I said out loud, trying to put enough cheer into it to convince myself it was a heartfelt birthday wish. “It’ll all be all right. Eventually,” I added, realizing there wasn’t enough cheer in the world to turn this day into anything other than what it was—the day after a man cared so little about me he decided to break up with me on the eve of my birthday.
Brushing my teeth, I knew that birthday or not, and breakup or not, I had more important things to do. For starters, I had to get a move on fixing up apartamento tres if I was going to rent it quickly and keep my finances flowing.
I trudged to the kitchen for coffee, last night’s dream assaulting me as soon as I stepped onto the linoleum. He was sitting in that same chair, I thought, half expecting him to appear again as I opened an old but pretty pink tin can that use
d to hold French tea and realized I was out of coffee.
Since going without caffeine in the state I was in was not an option, I decided to walk the few blocks to the I-95 bridge and cross the trembling, groaning underpass to Tinta y Café, a little community arts café where I used to hang out in another life, while going out with Jorge, if you must know.
My plan was to get some strong Cuban coffee into me, read the paper, and kill a little time until the hardware store where Gustavo worked opened at around eight and I could get my rental apartment makeover going.
I dressed in ripped (from use), oversized, and soft (also from use) boyfriend jeans, an old chocolate-colored T-shirt reading BAD COP! NO DOUGHNUTS, and well-worn, leather flip-flops with a silver Thai bead dangling from the place where the leather met to hold the toes in place. And then, for no reason, and with no conscious premeditation, I cut myself some bangs. And when I say bangs, I mean bangs: cut straight across, stopping only when there were at least two inches between my eyebrows and the tips of the hair on my forehead. It could’ve been a disaster, but the effect was fresh, playful, almost flapperlike. I thought it made me look lighter, renewed.
I’d read once that when women are heartbroken, they do two things: change their hair in a drastic way and travel somewhere far away. Since I didn’t have the money to travel at the moment, I decided to look at my bangs as low-cost breakup therapy and walked off in search of my coffee.
After last night’s showers, the streets looked as if God himself had given them a good scrubbing, their colors bright once again. Across the street, the square looked greener than ever after its bath, except for the grays and browns of the occasional homeless person sleeping on some bench, bundled in Salvation Army anythings. Soon it would be filled with card tables and domino-playing Cubans, the overflow from those who weren’t early enough to secure a seat at the Maximo Gomez Park, the official domino site for the area.
The Clairvoyant of Calle Ocho Page 9