He took a step away from the car, lessening the space between us. We were close enough that if we were in a Harlequin romance, I’d say he smelled of sandalwood and leather. (He didn’t.)
I scoffed, shifting my weight and adjusting the strap on my laptop bag. But under his stare I was frost melting into wet, glistening dew.
‘Obviously perception isn’t one of your stronger skills,’ I bluffed. ‘Nothing about you is interesting to me.’
But he only laughed, a laugh that was unexpectedly genuine, warm. It took me off guard. Something about him – the laugh, his easy languidness – made me feel like a teenager flirting with a harmless bad-boy crush. Like I was still in control.
He took another step forward. We were much too close. The tension between us suddenly swelled into something so palpable it felt almost natural, like our respective roles of blackmail-enforcer and blackmailee had slipped off us to land in crumpled heaps on the concrete, leaving us in a bare state of unsheathed mutual attraction. I didn’t flinch when he reached a hand out to push my hair away from my face with the knuckle of his index finger. I even found myself fighting the urge to lean into it. The knuckle slowly grazed my jaw until it stopped beneath the centre of my chin and tilted my face upward. Keeping my chin lifted, Román pressed his thumb against my bottom lip, almost imperceptibly pulling my lips apart.
‘You have a perfect mouth.’
The heat of his thumb sent my dopamine levels skyrocketing, potent as a hit of Molly straight into my bloodstream.
Only the beep beep! of a nearby car alarm cracked that moment between us. I turned to see a sweaty man opening his car door as Román took a step back, shoving his hands into his pockets. My lip burned where his thumb had been. I ran my tongue over the spot, wishing he’d touch it again.
This was not good. I knew nothing about Román other than the fact that he’d assaulted my father and was implementing Ugly’s blackmail. And still, I was caving. I had to get outta there.
But as I rounded on my heel to walk away, he grabbed my arm. I twisted myself out of his grip, glaring. ‘¡Carajo! What are you, an animal?’
‘I told you I came here to have a word.’ The imperturbable tone of Al Pacino in The Godfather telling Diane Keaton to chill with her upper-middle-class moralist neuroses. ‘I don’t believe in beating around the bush, Yola. We’re intrigued by each other. I felt it the other day, so did you. And I feel it now. So do you. But I want to make it clear that I’m not in a position to give in to that intrigue. Ugly doesn’t believe in mixing business with pleasure, do you understand?’
I whipped my head back in disbelief. Who was that brazenly direct? Immediately I wanted to knock his ego down a few pegs. ‘You seriously came all the way here to tell me that? Well, let me make it clear: I am not intrigued by you. You’re just some scumbag working for Ugly. Trust me, we won’t have a problem.’
Infuriatingly, he dipped his head and smiled, flashing his canines. Something about their prominence made me want to feel them pressing into my skin.
‘Yola.’ He reached out to brush my cheek. I jerked my head away and he laughed. ‘You might not be intrigued by me.’ He turned to open the door of the jeep, then looked back. ‘But you do want me.’
He got in, started the engine, and peeled away, leaving me fuming at his arrogance and mortified by his accuracy. Motherfucker had seen right through me.
LESSONS IN PROMISCUITY
I learned from the little elves at Google, working tirelessly to bring us all the information we could ever need, regardless of factual accuracy, thanks to the advent of Search Engine Optimization, that insomnia can be due to myriad causes. Such as anxiety (at feeling a searing and highly inappropriate lust for a man whose living relies on the ability to intimidate people, specifically people comprising your family). Anger and resentment (at said man pinpointing your lust and calling you out on it). Or mental excitement (and we’re back to the lust). It therefore shouldn’t come as a shock that I couldn’t sleep for days after that encounter with Román. The guilt of feeling that shame-tinged longing metastasizing in me was the proverbial pea under my mattress. I mean, a bad report from Román could spell the difference between life and death for us, between busted kneecaps and intact kneecaps. Not even the Memory Foam mattresses advertised on four a.m. infomercials and supposedly invented by NASA-funded researchers (bet NASA was thrilled by the outcome of that investment) would be able to get me a night of untormented rest.
Right after Ugly told us random illegals would be invading our homes, there’d been a few nights when no one in my house had been able to sleep. Zulema and I had stayed up until three in the morning playing cards and waiting for exhaustion to kick in, while my parents spent their all-nighters watching cheesy Eighties movies till they eventually passed out on the couch. But those insomnolent nights were finito now that so much time had gone by without any illegals being delivered. Everyone’s nerves had steadied. We could almost pretend there wasn’t some crime lord holding a six-hundred-grand debt over us.
I was now the family’s lone insomniac. And while I lay there, enraged at my inability to sleep, I drew on Aunt Celia’s manuscript as my only source of counsel, reading on into the heyday of her twenties in Panama City and Miami, interpreting every salacious anecdote as Aunt Celia giving advice from the Great Promiscuous Beyond. If those chapters of the manuscript proved anything, it was that she would’ve told me to bed Román immediately, then write about it and get some goddamned sleep. When she was even younger than me, freshly released from the grips of my abuelos, she hadn’t cared who the hell she was sleeping with.
Twenty-one years old and my yellow-brick road has finally led me out of Venezuela to Oz: Panama City. Life is a beautiful thing here. Me and the girls, we go out on a couple modelling gigs, get easy cash to blow on sequinned everything – then nothing else to do but DANCE! And the men! We’re devouring them. We’re a fucking wolf pack in this Emerald City. They could be anything – drug barons, politicians, priests, princes, no nos importa, we could care less. If they’re cute, know the right lines and have a big polla, we’ll take them for a spin. Doesn’t hurt if they have a few bucks to spend on cocktails and cocaine either. I’ve never felt so free, wild and beautiful in my life.
Obviously I wasn’t going to follow her ‘advice’ to a T and start coke-bingeing and blowing a million different guys for the heck of it. But I did think to myself, lying there sleepless night after sleepless night, that it couldn’t hurt to take a leaf out of Aunt Celia’s book. I needed to slut it up a little, distract myself with another man who’d take my mind off Román. Someone who could stop me compulsively picking apart every moment of what had gone down in the parking lot, help me forget the warm spot on my lip where Román’s thumb had been.
So the next morning: ‘Zulema, what’re you doing tonight?’
My sister eyed me. ‘Why?’
It was early on a Friday. Zulema was touching up her red-carpet make-up with a pocket mirror before heading to work.
I shrugged, blew into my coffee mug. ‘I need a good night out, so if you’re doing anything …’
Zulema squealed. I jumped, sloshing coffee onto myself. ‘¿Qué carajo, Zulema?’ I pulled the hot, wet patch away from my skin, tenting the T-shirt.
‘You actually want to go out, Yola! Finally! I’m always like, “Yola, let’s go here” and “Yola, let’s go there”, and you’re always like, “oh, I’m busy” and “oh, I don’t feel like it.” And now you actually want to go out! Ohmygosh ohmygosh, can I do your make-up? Ooh! I can dress you too! You have to wear a dress, Yola. And heels! You can’t go out in jeans on a Friday night, bruja.’
I laughed, though already regretting the decision to socialize with my sister, thus committing myself to a makeover of Miss Congeniality proportions. ‘I’m not sold on the heels and the dress, but count me in for whatever you guys have planned for tonight.’
‘Ohmygosh, I’m soooooo excited!’
Later that night we were at Buzz Ba
r, on a nightlife strip built as part of a luxury condo complex. Very Miami. Very swank. With all the bougie condo residents living only an elevator ride away, the strip was a hot spot for well-to-do patrons. Here, there were none of the usual night-time sounds of frogs and crickets. Wildlife was drowned out by prosecco corks popping, ambient electro-house music, and the tinkling laughter of the financially secure.
The place was rammed, people swarming around the single bar like flies fighting for a spot on a turd. Zulema and I wove our way through the tightly packed bodies on our five-inch stilts (she’d won me over on the outfit), scanning the place for her Colour Me Beautiful work friends. Finally, we pushed our way through to a table ringed with girls I recognized from social media as Zulema’s friends: all honey-hued blondes and glossy brunettes. The only specks of brown skin at that table were the freckles spattering all their shoulders. (Here’s a tip: if you ever want to discern a white creole from a tourist, look for the freckles on the shoulders. You can’t grow up white in Trinidad without the sun leaving that mark of authenticity. Like the etching on wallets that says ‘genuine leather’ to show it’s the real deal.) At the centre of their table were two ice buckets bearing bottles of prosecco, smartphones laid out around the buckets, every girl keeping a beady eye on her phone to avoid the utter catastrophe of a missed call.
As we approached, they all greeted Zulema perkily with chirps of ‘Zu-Zu!’ and they all smiled while I was introduced, then applauded our gene pool and noted how much Zulema and I looked alike. I could tell off the bat that these were girls adept at social niceties, raised on the fringes of parents’ dinner parties and cocktail nights, skilled in the art of pointless conversation and empty compliments.
‘The hubbies are coming later,’ a brunette explained to Zulema after the initial pleasantries had wrapped up. ‘They’re at ye old Yacht Club.’
‘Like they are every Friday,’ moaned a swishy-haired blonde, rolling her eyes. The others sighed in agreement, signalling that they too shared the burden of hubbies who drank at ye old Yacht Club every Friday.
Most of Zulema’s work friends were older than both of us, in their late twenties. Even so, I couldn’t believe they were all married. People obviously got hitched young in Trinidad. One girl even had three kids – three! She was the only one who didn’t work at the spa. She used to, but now she didn’t work at all. Another shocker for me. Housewives were supposed to be old, matronly, boring, or from the Fifties. Not hip twenty-somethings in faux-leather midi-dresses and spiked heels. I’d have been less thrown if Zulema said her friend was a sea monkey with three pet dragons. Even more bizarre was how the others reacted when Zulema introduced the girl as a housewife with three sons. They all swooped in, as if to her rescue, with comments like:
‘God, that’s a job I could never handle!’
‘She’s really more like a chef, a doctor and a nanny who’s always on call!’
‘Hardest job in the world!’
At these accolades, Housewife shook her head modestly. ‘Tell me about it. I really am a full-time doctor and chef!’
I wondered if a real doctor or chef would agree. But like any woman, I masked my true feelings and chipped in with a totally false, totally supportive comment. ‘That must be so rewarding!’ And then a misstep: ‘Is that what you’ve always wanted to be?’
I recognized the awkward, unified lifting of champagne flutes to mouths while gazes were uncomfortably averted. But Housewife held her own. This wasn’t her first rodeo.
‘Of course! I mean, it’s very challenging and it really is a twenty-four-hour job. No sick leave for Mummy! But it’s so rewarding, too. Just you wait till your time comes, you have no idea until you’re a mother. NO IDEA.’
Relieved at Housewife’s adept navigation of my question, the group laughed, heads tilted in sympathy for the domestic veteran in their midst. The things she must have seen. The things she must have been through!
I laughed too, and I continued laughing while the conversation went on to reveal that Housewife had a driver (like Papá) who collected her kids from school and daycare, and that she had a live-in housekeeper (like Fidel’s mother Camille) who did all the cooking, cleaning and after-school childcare. Twenty-four-hour job my ass.
As the night wore on I endured the superficial middle-class chatter with the stoicism of wartime Winston Churchill, laughing and nodding and giving eye-rolls of solidarity on cue, and to make it all a tad easier, I pounded the prosecco hard. Sancho and my deceased alcoholic uncles would’ve been proud.
I’d just come back from another protracted trip to the bar, a G&T in either hand, when I saw that Zulema’s friends had been joined by their respective hubbies. The hubbies had also brought along a few stragglers from the Yacht Club, one of whom instantly caught my eye, mostly because he looked so out of place. Though he sounded and dressed like a local, he looked like a character straight out of an Irish folktale: thick red hair and a jaw aflame with a wiry red beard. Then, of course, there were the startling green eyes, the fair skin. Usual ginger package.
Now I know what you’re thinking: A ginger stud? Really?
Yes – really. This guy was an absolute Goliath. So instead of the gingerness giving him the dweeby look of most red-headed guys, it made him look like a Celtic warlord who should be in a loincloth astride a black stallion.
His eyes were on me the second I walked up. Zulema began a round of introductions. I shook all the hubbies’ hands, smiled, forgot their names as soon as I heard them.
‘And who’s this?’ asked the Pseudo-Celt before Zulema had got to his intro. I was shaking the hand of Hubby #5. I eyed Pseudo-Celt. He gave me a cheesy wink.
‘Yola, my big sister.’ Zulema swept her hand in front of me like I was a brooch she was presenting on the Home Shopping Network.
‘Lola?’ he said, extending a hand.
‘Yola,’ I corrected, letting his hand engulf mine in its pink-skinned, freckled hugeness.
Our hands lingered the same way Román’s and mine had when we met. And I’ll be honest, I was attracted. But fireworks? Not even the snap, crackle, pop of a Rice Krispies treat.
While we shook hands, Zulema introduced him as Ben Brown. The name left me a little underwhelmed. I’d expected a Gaston or a Thor, or at least a more riveting alliteration along the lines of Hulk Hogan.
Anyway, this Ben character and I got to talking, and with five proseccos and two gin-and-tonics under my belt, I had a whole lot to say. We talked until it was well after two in the morning. My head was spinning. I hadn’t even noticed when Zulema left. When I blearily checked my phone, I had a message from her telling me to get a lift home with Ben, along with a row of emojis: smiley faces sticking their tongues out beside several phallic eggplants.
I was reading that message just as Ben ran a hand down the back of my bare arm. We were still at the table, now empty except for the two of us and an ice bucket holding a bouquet of upturned prosecco bottles.
‘You ready to go, baby? Hmm?’ He’d become greasier the drunker he’d gotten, his fingers insistent on the back of my arm.
I hesitated. ‘Um.’ Stalling for time, I drained the dregs of my glass.
With maudlin drunken longing, I ached for Román’s thumb on my lip. But Román wasn’t there. He was out somewhere stalking my family members, choking people who gave Ugly back-talk. Maybe he was there, stalking me right then. And that’s what made me decide to leave with Ben. My drunk logic was: if Román was there watching, he’d see me leave with Ben and he’d get jealous. If Román wasn’t there, then I’d leave with Ben and maybe he’d turn out to be the love of my life and I’d forget all about Román forever. Seemed like I couldn’t lose.
So Ben and I went back to his place and went at it with all the fervour and clumsiness of two very, very drunk people. Was it good? Who knows. From what I can dredge out of that alcohol-soaked corner of my memory, it was as fun as a drunken hook-up can be – orgasmless (for me) and more worthwhile as an anecdote than anything else.
The second he finished, Ben tugged on his jeans and said he’d drop me home. Outside my house twenty minutes later, he left me with a kiss that actually made me squirm. The final proof that my social experiment was a flop. Babbling and boozing with a bunch of women wouldn’t distract me from Román, and sleeping around with randoms obviously wouldn’t do the trick either. Because as I hurled myself into bed – fully clothed, make-up smeared, hair in tangles – I knew that all I’d be thinking of until I drifted into a stale-drunk slumber, was him.
INVASIONS
Luckily, just after my hook-up with Ben, I was pulled back from the precipice of endless Román-obsessing: the illegal invasion struck.
It was a hot, sunshiny day typical of a Trinidadian December. Christmas was less than three weeks away. Proving the power of American neo-imperialism, Trinidad was aglow with wintry fairy lights and bedecked with plastic pine trees covered in fake snow, while carols of Jack Frost and chestnuts roasting on open fires rang throughout the tropical days and nights. To its credit, though, the island also had a rich Christmas culture all its own: seasonal sorrel juice, highly alcoholic eggnog called punch-à-crème, pastelles made of cornmeal and minced meat (almost exactly like the hallacas we ate in Venezuela at Christmas), that catchy Spanish parang music, and of course, soca-parang sung in English that was chock-full of sexual innuendos about pork.
It was during this usual Trini Christmas bonanza, while I continued to languish with Román-induced sleep deprivation, that our first ‘guests’ from the motherland arrived. As we’d always feared, it was a knock on the door that heralded the four horsemen of our apocalypse. And there were, funnily enough, four men on our front step. Not horsemen, but cattle farmers (close enough).
I was the first one to meet them. Papá was out doing school pick-ups, Mamá was working in the annex, and Zulema was at the spa colouring people beautiful. I was translating a radiology report at my desk when the knock on the front door came. I waited a few moments, knowing the FedEx guy would call on the landline if it were him. The phone didn’t ring, but just as I relaxed enough to start typing again, more knocking, this time three loud, precise raps. At the exact same moment, making me jump out of my skin, my cell phone started ringing. I picked it up. Blocked number.
One Year of Ugly Page 6