The first room on the left was the “grandkids’ room.” I was surprised to see the light on. I stuck my head in to be sure it was still unfurnished: nothing but the sewing machine, the rococo mirror, and the small Miró Dad had bought me and that I felt uncomfortable taking with me to hang in the Turret. Not even a mysterious shadow; I flipped the light switch. I heard Helen’s voice gushing in her most melodious idiolect, and instead of going into the bathroom, I ducked furtively into my parents’ room. There was his bedside table, the damask-covered lamp, that showy clotheshorse he’d brought all the way from Sydney. It was all arranged as if he might come in at any moment, fold his glasses, and put on his robe. Nor had Mother removed the painting of that hunting scene; the oil had lost its shine, and even under the influence of the electric light a muddy, ocean-floor tone prevailed. I breathed in deeply, but I could barely catch a trace of Dad’s spicy, hot cinnamon scent. I opened the wardrobe and was startled to see a row of old suit jackets hanging above two halves of a ripening quince; the shoulder pads and wide lapels looked like they’d been designed to satisfy anatomical possibilities that had long since lost the evolutionary struggle. I also found two green knit ties with soft sienna striping. He hadn’t taken them, and she hadn’t thrown them away. I did not, however, find his old robe.
When my parents were in here, they would almost never summon me unless it was to scold me. As a child I’d liked to wander around their room when I was alone, ramrod straight, talking to myself: anticipating my entrance into the adult world, which I could only guess at then. During my teenage years I’d lie on that mattress with half a dozen weekend girlfriends, and we’d kiss like wrestlers locked in a struggle that almost brought us tumbling to the floor. The bed frame would—who knows whether from use or disuse—squeal like one of those old country locks, rusted and corroded. I can hardly believe it was the same place, and that twenty birthdays really go by, you leave home and follow new rules, ten years pass and another ten and, just like that, you’re over forty.
If I put my mind to it I could even taste that thick nipple sprouting from a vein so blue it was scary to think I could sever it with my teeth. The girl’s name, though, wouldn’t come. If I saw her now I’d recognize the fantastic hips that led only to a couple of flat buttocks dotted with red-tipped pimples—disappointing, yes, in terms of what I expect in a woman these days, after being spoiled by you and Helen. But back then they were just as exciting as those little eyes dying to please me, or the armpits where the poor, silly girl had forgotten to shave off the soft mat of hair. I’m almost sure that this freckle-face and I struggled with something—it must have been the clasp of her bra, because not even in my dreams could I have hoped that that afternoon would get us to the finish line, the point of sweetness and strain where beauty is penetrated.
I threw myself on her—which was my way back then—ready to devour that moment so overflowing with life and health. My hands sought out swells and zips, and for once it wasn’t my tongue but the girl’s that started thrashing around in my mouth, like she was trying to crush something. My saliva took on an acidic tinge. I couldn’t concentrate; I pushed her away and there was a sucking sound. She started to laugh, and she took her clothes off as if unwrapping the gift of her own flesh. She kept her panties on. I didn’t dare look below her waist, I didn’t want to scare her, I kept my eyes busy on her breasts, two uneven masses crisscrossed with a network of veins. Her eyes and the opening of her mouth suggested warmth and wetness, an internal wave swelled her like a water balloon, and even though I wasn’t overjoyed with the package as a whole, the heady aroma emanating from her clefts held me to her, and in the confusion I stared right between her thighs: a ridge of flesh pressing thickly and wetly against the cloth. I threw myself on the girl, turning her, I found her breast and I started to suck hard on its tip, I heard her laughter, her protests and other kinds of noises, but I didn’t let up, and while I grant that it was not a subtle maneuver, I don’t believe it deserved the spasms that preceded the first drops of liquid that started leaking, gushing, from within her—a watery, sticky geyser.
The torrent flowed for two minutes; my heart ran riot with confusion, and I started shaking. I was getting information at different speeds: I saw the frilly sound of her hair, I heard the snowy color of her flat behind creak, I couldn’t stand the incoherent cushiony scent of her armpits. I would have liked to blind my touch, suffocate my ears, shut my nose. Among the ideas that piled up in the bottleneck in my mind were: she was dying, the girl was mutating, she was going into labor. But when she finally stopped writhing, it turned out she only wanted me to hold her, to wrap her skin in my arms, rigid like two fish just taken from the freezer. I shook as I embraced her, I was a big body about to black out, I could feel hypothermia tingling in my feet. The girl felt the desperation of my hug, but she interpreted it wrong:
“It’s not pee, it’s just what happens to me. It’s natural.”
I lifted my head and saw that once again neither the laws of physics nor the guardian angels watching over us were going to lift a finger for me. The sheets were soaked in juicy secretions, a constellation of stains. It wouldn’t take much for my parents to move from that evidence to the suspicion that their son took advantage of their absence to hijack their bed for his first erotic adventures. I closed my eyes and watched my promising career as a weekend Casanova collapse. Good-bye to sexual advances with more appetizing feminine specimens: I’d been shut down by the vaginal fountain of a girl I wasn’t even taken with (and I do give myself credit for not bashing in her head while she was covering my neck in kisses). I will say in my defense that even if she’d had Helen’s kind of beauty, the kind that leaves you unsure whether to caress her or cover her skin in bites, deep relationships and emotions were out of the question. Is it the same with middle-class boys and girls? Up here we used to change girlfriends like shirts—all it took was a shower to clear your pores, free your body of lingering hairs and smells. Though you’d walk them down to the street when they got dressed to leave, or to the bus stop or home, none of those half-formed girls left anything behind to take root in your heart. It was enough to file away a name and a face that, as you matured, would become part of your blurry erotic prehistory. And it’s funny how none of that really prepares you for your first love, the one for whom you thought you’d been training your hands, your words, and your cock all that time.
“Where do your parents keep the sheets?”
She jumped up and put on some underpants that covered her entire backside (too scrawny to deserve the name “derrière,” whose lustful connotations made me feel faint) and that ever since then I associate with the flag of some impoverished country. I didn’t know where my mother kept the sheets, I’m not sure I could have even recognized a “bedspread,” I didn’t know techniques for covering mattresses, and since the most mature response I could offer to the vision of Dad’s curious finger moving over the dampness left by “my girl” was to throw a tantrum, I was grateful to the point of tears that she decided to ignore me and start opening and closing drawers in search of a set of the same color. When she found them, I hugged the Australian clotheshorse so she could remove the dirty sheets and fit the fresh ones with the same naturalness some people have when they pet strangers’ dogs. And although I was behaving like an idiot with defects in important areas of my brain, she had the courtesy to turn and offer me a smile. My hands were trembling too much to help with all that careful folding, so my contribution was to bundle the dirty sheets into a ball that I stuffed into her backpack. She promised to return them clean in two days. And that’s what she did, so well ironed and fragrant I had to crumple them a little so they’d pass for the kind of careless work our servants did.
“My mother trusts me.”
The incident gave us a feeling of camaraderie. I must admit that her fifteen years of experience had lent her a great deal of ease moving that big, friendly body of hers. The smile she gave me after her last invasive kiss announced possibilities
that, consumed as I was by adolescent prejudices in favor of elegance, I’m sorry to admit I ignored. Anyway, I guess those memories aren’t worth all that much if I can’t even remember her name. I turned off the light and took my leave of the hunting scene that would remain hanging there until its very canvas rotted away.
Neither Helen nor Mother was complaining about my absence, so I went into the bathroom to freshen up. I loosened the knot of my tie, let the water run from the tap, and scrubbed my hands. There was something incredible about the fact that my parents had given me a life to occupy and I was still unable to remember the exact date that Dad left our apartment and my mother inside it. Don’t get me wrong, by that time it was barely my home anymore. My father had entrusted me with a sum of money, and I was thinking of using it to open a bar. I only went to Barcelona on Tuesdays and Wednesdays for my master’s degree classes; otherwise I moved around Madrid like a good catechism student repeating the plain facts that constitute all he knows and expects from society and its inhabitants.
Of course, they didn’t exactly summon me home to announce that he was leaving. It was a quiet process, with subtle outward signs, like when you slowly pull a bandage off hairy skin…you get the idea. Making a fuss wasn’t my parents’ style. They weathered any shocks and contrived to bottle them up in silence; they knew how to manage the ripples of emotion. If they ever fought, if they waged their own little wars, it all stayed within the walls of their bedroom. And Dad delayed the final separation by leaving behind books that were as much Mother’s as his, his music collection, most of his suits, his best pairs of shoes, and the letter opener with a faun carved into its marble handle. Mother had never opened a letter in her life, and though I didn’t dare take it with me to Madrid, I vainly fantasized that he’d left it in the drawer for me to find.
He never told us (never told me) where he had gone or with whom. Luckily my sister, who called me almost daily by reversing the charges from Boston (where she’d gone to live and from where she returned with halting English, determined to study something related to the arrangement of furniture), clarified the matter:
“Dad is a selfish pig. And if you don’t see that it’s because you’re nothing more than his lapdog who obeys after the first smack. Children are supposed to rebel against their parents, yell at them, reject their world to establish their own, storm out of the house, and slam the door behind them. But you, you still get choked up if he gives you a present, even if it’s your birthday, even if it’s the same thing he gave you last year. You’re like an appendix, a great big appendix, and you’ll only ever be independent if you actually manage to kill him with all your fussing.”
I tend to picture myself listening to my sister’s monologues (the stream of abuse barely let me get a few emphatic sighs in) in the Turret, but in those days I must have still been living in Madrid. Moving away from home made me feel rebellious—it was like being left alone in the dining room and sucking out a shrimp head filled with the juices of adult life. My spirit was too overstimulated for me to reproach Dad for anything. Months later, as I flew home from Madrid, soaring over stratonimbus clouds through which I could see the dense blue of the ocean, it would have been good to toy with the marble of the letter opener. Instead, my sweaty fingers clutched the leather handle of the briefcase where I’d stashed the innocuous-looking reports disclosing the waning profits of my first business. Which was really just ridiculous. I’d been educated so that things would go relatively well for us. I was going through a patch of human turbulence, and my parents’ separation made me feel less dense, as if the atoms that held molecules and cells and tissues together without ever touching each other had moved apart a few degrees in space: I was dematerializing. The anxiety had begun to manifest in a series of physical outrages: red spots, an itchy neck, a mocking wart on my shoulder blade. My parents’ love, the energy it had engendered, wasn’t enough to last an entire lifetime. Nor was it foreseeable that I would take the split so personally. Supposedly I was cutting the apron strings—what did I care whether they lived together or apart? As the sturdy plane moved onward over a narrower and narrower sliver of ocean, the outline of the Catalan coast began to show in relief, dominated by barrels, dry docks, containers, and those gangways of rock and mortar that bend into the water like insect legs. The plane turned inland on its route toward the runway, as if nothing were so important it couldn’t be left behind.
Dad only summoned me to “ask forgiveness” once there was no more hiding the separation. After that he started rationing himself, and I always had to be the one to chase him down with a barrage of phone calls. We stopped seeing him at Christmas and during Holy Week (which we used to celebrate properly, taking after the Mallorcan branch of Mother’s family). The real disappointment came when he didn’t bother calling on my birthday, an occasion that, more than twenty years before, had been one of the high points of his life: full of nerves, intensity, and expectations for a Joan-Marc who would be his and Mother’s almost completely.
Dad looked worse every time I saw him. I even flirted with the possibility that the reason behind his decline was that he missed us (missed me). He didn’t even have to act aloof: he was shielded by our good manners. During the years we’d lived together and I’d been his responsibility, Dad and I had developed a language that served well to communicate basic instructions, comment on current events, and cheer on Espanyol. But those conversational skills were no good for delving into each other’s “emotional makeup” (I got that phrase from your brother); the words became too quickly steeped in shame.
Again and again we would return to our traditional conversational territory and, a table always between us, he would update me on his health issues and digestive rhythms, on the stomach cramps that tightened the skin of his belly and left him with a residual pain he imagined as damp, like the trail of a slug. Sometimes I managed to forget that after talking and eating and paying (and after interrogating the waiter about the laxative or restrictive effects of the blue fruits peeking out between the layers of a puff pastry), Dad wouldn’t be walking back to the apartment. Instead, he’d head off in some unknown direction, to join other people who knew my name and other things about me, but who could never love me. If I didn’t try my hardest, Dad would become more and more distant, until he disappeared entirely. His paternity over me could not be taken for granted—if I didn’t work to keep his interest in me alive, I’d end up an orphan in all but name.
There were signs that made me suspect he’d moved in with someone younger, but over time I’ve developed serious doubts about my detective skills. The fine woven bracelet could have been a gift from one of his girlfriend’s adult daughters (my stepsisters—oh, what new and repugnant vistas familial upheaval opens up); nor could I know to what point the idea of the greedy young gold digger was clouding my vision and leading me astray. When all is said and done, Dad had spent two decades as a young man who didn’t know a thing about me or my sister, and now he was entering the next phase, when men who can’t bring themselves to believe in anything supernatural start to get a whiff of their mortality. Maybe he wanted to forget his kids a while, graft himself onto a different person, take a dip into novelty, adrenaline, rekindled emotion.
Dad had enough perspective to understand the contradictions of reinventing life in his fifties, but whatever my sister might say, it wasn’t his style to leave those clothes behind as an insurance policy to facilitate his eventual return. I like to think that Dad didn’t take his shoes, the Australian clotheshorse, or his favorite ties because he never really managed to leave—that given Mother’s “situation,” his ventricles would’ve gotten all twisted up if he’d ever truly abandoned her.
“John.”
Helen’s voice, skillfully negotiating the bend in the hallway, carried with it a sweet reproach. I’d left the water running too long; the sink was filling up. I opened the three mirrored cabinet doors in the bathroom; ever since I was a child I’d liked to focus them to reflect my image in an apparently in
finite series. My face hadn’t changed much since I’d left home—it still wouldn’t have occurred to me to move the mirrors and make sure no areas of my skull were shedding any hair. I’d been married almost half a year (months during which I’d managed to shield my family from Helen’s social voracity), and the changes had all been on the inside. Our cohabitation was taking root in me: a common nervous system was forming that fed me with a different kind of energy, sweeping away the last residue of insecurity, strengthening me. But if I lay there at night and imagined something happening to Helen, someone hurting her, I would never get to sleep. I was implicated in her future, and I wasn’t sure that if the time ever came I’d be able to extract myself from the web of capillaries that emerged from one of us and spilled into the other.
“I’m coming! I saw something weird in the bathroom.”
“Cockroaches?”
“I’ll tell you in a second.”
Helen was obsessed with cockroaches. She fell back on all sorts of questionable statistics to warn me that Barcelona’s underground spaces were overflowing with the creatures, swarming in hordes like crunchy sheets, in search of cracks in pipes and kitchen walls where they could employ their astonishing reproductive abilities. I never saw any in my parents’ apartment, or at school or at any of my friends’ houses. I lived convinced that they’d been wiped out in Europe, but Helen’s eye was alert and terrified by the possibility of making contact with her first living specimen.
Divorce Is in the Air Page 9