FIREWORKS
The Manriques left us during that limbo time between Christmas and New Year’s. It should come as no surprise that we were glad to see the back of them. The day they left, Papá dumped all the Greek yogurt and granola in the bin, like he was purging the house of any remnant of the Manriques’ spirits.
New Year’s came and went. In January, three batches of illegals came for a week apiece. Just your run-of-the-mill escapees – a mix of fleeing intellectuals, political refugees, impoverished asylum seekers, and a smattering of adventurers just looking for a new start. No one won us over like Javier and the Jotas, but no one repulsed us as much as the Manriques. The novelty was gone and it was all very humdrum. No choice but to suck it up and deal with the pain in the ass of having illegals wandering our home, rifling our fridge, and forcing us to cut corners however we could just so we could feed everyone – basic cable, no more air-conditioning except on the most unbearably humid nights, a backyard clothes line in lieu of the dryer, the introduction of ‘Meatless Mondays’, ‘Canned Tuna Tuesdays’ and myriad culinary reincarnations of corned beef.
When each new batch of illegals was dropped off, always in the daytime when I was the only one home, I never gave in to the urge to look out the doorway or peek between the kitchen curtains to see if the jeep was there. Still, it was near-impossible not to care that Román was never waiting for me in my room, even if he was only respecting my wishes. No matter how much I told myself that I’d made the right decision on Christmas night, the zing of anxiety would still hit me when I heard his three knocks on the front door, and I’d force myself to smother the intractable impulse prodding me to whip the door open and declare with husky Jessica Rabbit allure that I was ready to abandon my scruples and throw sexual prudence to the wind.
The salt in the wound was that through it all, I couldn’t talk to Aunt Celia. Though she’d been dead for months I realized then how much she’d been My Person. I’d confided in her, turned to her for every heartbreak, every romantic triumph. I found myself looking at her number in my cell phone. Just looking at it, letting the grief cut into me like I was slowly pressing the edge of a razorblade into my skin. In those moments I understood that just because you know someone’s gone for good it doesn’t mean you stop needing them. The urge to call Aunt Celia would always be there, flaring up in times of need like emotional herpes.
The only cure for all of it was to keep busy. So I braved a few more trips to Buzz Bar with Zulema’s spa crew and my gym buddies, made out with cute strangers for something to do, closed my eyes and pretended their eager, sloppy mouths were Román’s – but it always felt like riding in a go-kart after driving a Lamborghini.
Mostly, I wrote like a motherfucker. The novel pages poured out of me, every character rapidly becoming more lovesick and horny and desperate than the last. I’d delete half the garbage I wrote the next day, but the catharsis of it was addictive. I even gave myself the added distraction of translating a few of my short stories into English, then sent them around to some competitions and journals.
The one saving grace that helped cement my resolve not to see Román again was the fact that my family hated his guts. They bitched about him constantly, blamed him for everything: it was his name I heard when Zulema bemoaned the loss of her bathroom grooming time, when my parents could barely afford the sky-high grocery bills, when Sancho got a cockroach infestation because of two illegal kids dropping food between his couch cushions. And when Román broke Mauricio’s right thumb after Mauricio pummelled an illegal caught stealing one of the twins’ panties off the clothesline, the entire family started referring to Román as Beelzebub. It was the only salve I had, and even that didn’t help much. Incredible – I barely even knew Román, but still I couldn’t swallow good old logic. I’d listened to my conscience instead of my crotch – I should’ve felt strong, like I was a WO-MAN refusing to give in to the carnivorous wiles of a Bad Boy. Instead I was tangled up in a mess of regret. I didn’t know what the hell was wrong with me.
Anyway, at least my distraction strategy of writing and translating at a manic pace worked. Worked so well, in fact, that a story I translated (on an especially remorse-tainted afternoon when I’d let myself peek through the kitchen window as Román made his way down our walkway back to the jeep) actually got accepted into the Paris Review. Maybe the secret to artistic success really does lie in emotional torment.
In case you’re not in the know, the Paris Review is kind of a momentously huge fucking deal. How that story of mine made it in there I have no clue – maybe Celia was up there with fluffy wings and a halo, wielding some kind of angel magic, I don’t know. Seeing that congratulatory acceptance email was just what I needed to pull me out of my slump.
After telling my family the news of this literary coup (to which Zulema, Sancho and my mother responded: ‘You write?’ and which led Mamá to sulk over my ‘secretive disposition’ for an entire afternoon), I took them all out for a fancy dinner to celebrate. We’d just got back home and I was effervescent as the champagne bubbles in my bloodstream. The night had been a good one, everyone in that especially light mood we all felt during illegal-free spells when we could pretend life was normal again, when we had a little extra cash in hand. Looking forward to re-reading the Paris Review email for the fiftieth time, I wafted into my room, kicked off my heels and was in the middle of peeling my dress off when I saw it.
Smack in the centre of the bed: a single white anthurium.
I stared at it for a long moment, like it was a stick of dynamite rather than a flower, before picking it up by its long stem, admiring the single enormous petal. I sat heavily on the bed, the flower across my lap.
Román knew about the Paris Review. And with just that flower, all my concrete resolve turned to dust.
I had no way of contacting Román other than when he dropped off illegals, but the way Ugly’s business was apparently thriving, I didn’t have long to wait. A couple days after the anthurium’s appearance, I heard the three knocks. I flew to the front door but wasn’t quick enough to catch Román. There was just a twenty-something guy on the doorstep with a duffel bag over his shoulder. He tried telling me hello but I blew past him, seeing the back of the jeep pulling away from the kerb on the opposite side of the road. I ran barefoot across the scorching asphalt until Román thankfully glimpsed me in the wing mirror and hit the brakes half a block from my house. When I got to the lowered driver’s window, he watched me evenly from behind his sunglasses, his expression indecipherable as always. I was hopping from foot to foot, the balls of my feet raw on the sun-baked road.
‘Thank you,’ I said, gripping the edge of the window, ‘for the flower.’
‘Don’t ever risk talking to me out here in the open like this,’ he said tersely.
My hands fell away from the window. ‘Oh,’ I said, embarrassed at his dry response in the face of my girlish, barefooted gratitude. ‘I’m sorry, I just wanted to say thanks, and— but you’re right, obviously. Sorry.’
I turned to walk back to the house, but heard Román exhale hard. ‘Fuck it,’ he said. I looked back as he shot his arm out the window to grip my wrist, pulling me back to the jeep. Instantly that familiar heat unfurled in me, the blood in my arteries, veins, capillaries pulsing harder and hotter. I watched his lips part, splitting the gossamer-fine scar. He hesitated before speaking, exhaling again, as though uncertain of what he was about to say.
‘Meet me outside. Two a.m.,’ he said finally.
I knew whatever I replied would be the fulcrum that would irrevocably pivot our relationship in one direction or the other. If I said no, he wouldn’t try seeing me again. Román wasn’t the desperate type to chase a girl after two rejections. If I agreed, I had no idea what would happen next. Nothing but trouble, most likely.
But I already knew I couldn’t keep that exigent longing coiled up and contained in me any longer. I had to let it unspool itself, and I’d follow the thread wherever it took me.
‘See you at two.’
<
br /> On my doorstep, wondering for the hundredth time if I’d completely lost my mind as I waited for the jeep to appear. The night was dead quiet except for the croaking and creeping of nocturnal animals. The ambient sounds of my street – padlocks clicking shut, deadbolts being drawn, twanging foreign accents on blue-lit screens – had long faded away, but I couldn’t help scanning my neighbours’ houses to see if anyone was watching me. We lived on a safe street in a decent Port of Spain suburb, knowing we’d have to stay away from the shithole areas if we didn’t want National Security to scoop us up like guppies in a fishnet alongside all the other illegals, but still there wasn’t a single house that wasn’t walled in by at least five feet of concrete, painted in bubblegum Caribbean hues that belied the pulsing fear all Trinis carry with them of ‘goontas’, ‘gunmen’, ‘grimers’, ‘bad-johns’, ‘Bad Man’. As many words for criminals as Eskimos have for snow. Since living here, I’d forgotten what a window looked like without a grille of burglar-proofing. And the fear had lodged itself in me, too. Standing outside the padlocked, burglar-proofed comfort of my own home, minutes away from two in the morning, every sense was keenly awake, listening not just for Román but for anything that might be lurking in the purple-black of the Trinidadian night.
At exactly two, the jeep turned the corner. Up to that moment, I wasn’t sure I could do it – the betrayal. But seeing him through the tinted glass, knowing what would come next, I was overwhelmed by the need that had been stewing, brewing, boiling in me for so long. The second the jeep was in front of me, I pulled the driver’s door open and climbed in, hungry to erase the space between us, smell his skin, taste him. Straddling him, I jammed my mouth against his so hard our teeth knocked, thrust my fingers in his hair, let his arms wrap around my waist to crush me into him, my knees banging into the handbrake and the gearstick and obscure car parts I couldn’t name. His hands slid down my body, our hips ground into each other, fingertips dug into my skin through the sheer cotton of my camisole. There could’ve been a hundred hands on me. My body was one exposed pleasure-filled nerve, all my senses addled – I could smell his body temperature rising, taste his pulse as it quickened, touch his breath with the tip of my tongue, see the hot blood coursing through his body. We were in a world of billions of people but entirely alone, held in the snow globe of that jeep, that quiet street.
When our lips came apart, we stared at each other, panting for a long moment before breaking into peals of laughter.
‘Someone’s happy to see me,’ he laughed.
I nodded and slumped against him, flopped my head onto his shoulder.
‘So,’ I said, ‘where to?’
‘I thought getting into the Paris Review called for fireworks.’
I didn’t bother asking how he’d found out about the Paris Review. By now I knew Román was good at his job. I didn’t ask where we were going either – just eased into my irresponsible decision, like the moment right after swallowing a Molly when you know there’s no point fighting it now. Just go with it and let the chemicals run through your bloodstream, pump your neurons full of glitter and the warm-and-fuzzies until the inevitable bitter comedown.
We drove along deserted streets until we finally hit the winding North Coast Road, etched into a hillside several hundred feet above sea level. As we cruised along through mist tart with salt, I looked out over the cliff drops to our left, onto the never-ending black ocean smeared white with moonlight. To our right, the verdurous savagery of raw rainforest spilled onto the road: Jurassic ferns and balisier leaves, tangles of creepers and lianas, tall thickets of arched bamboo. All silent observers.
We travelled through sleeping villages, past tranquil bays and overturned fishing boats discarded on the sand, along roads flanked by trees crowned with dense yellow flowers. The quietly beautiful landscape had a soporific effect, lulling us into a comfortable silence as we drove, Román’s hand firm on my bare thigh until he veered sharply onto a dirt track, startling my senses awake again. I braced myself against the seat as we bobbled along the potholed dirt to a small clearing where Román parked and switched off the headlights. Instantly we were swallowed up by darkness.
I heard his door open, saw the white beam of a flashlight as he pointed it to the ground. He came around to my side and took my hand, guiding me through the disorienting bush until the underbrush cleared and the ground began sloping downward, the air growing suddenly cooler, almost chilly. In the near distance: the sound of water plunging into water. Where the slant steepened, I slipped on moist leaves. Román’s arm swooped behind me, a steadying bough. I brought myself upright and we moved further downhill. In his other hand he held a machete, was using the flat side of the blade to push aside the leaves crisscrossing in front of us. I liked that he didn’t hack them apart to clear a path. For all his proven violence, it said something that he used the machete how he did.
And then we were at the edge of the treeline looking onto a deep natural lagoon, glossy with the moon’s reflection. A small waterfall gushed into the rippling water from high above, backed by raw rock face. It was beautiful. But that wasn’t what he’d brought me to see.
All around us and above the pool, the air shifted with flashing sparks of light. Hundreds of fireflies winking in the dark. A soft, silent firework display, a sheet of lightning shattered into a million scintillating splinters.
‘Increíble,’ I breathed.
Román turned me so we were facing one another, and then pulled me against him. I looked up. Fireflies, like starry snow flurries, floated around him, and again I felt like there was no one but us in the world.
‘Thank you,’ I said, ‘for showing me this.’
‘It’s nothing.’
We followed the edge of the pool to a cluster of rocks, damp from the light waterfall spray, climbed atop the largest rock and sat side by side. And we talked. Román was cagey about how he’d ended up working for Ugly, but we talked about other things. For starters, I wanted to know how a guy from Ugly’s underworld happened to have an affinity for literature. It still baffled me that he’d bothered to read my work at all, even with his supposed explanation about getting to know his ‘subjects’ from the inside out.
‘Listen,’ he said, prickling slightly. ‘I grew up rough in Caracas. No TV, no cash for the cinema. I could probably build the Tower of Babel out of all the library books I stole.’
‘So that’s it? Books were easily accessible entertainment?’
‘I always liked reading and yeah, books were more accessible to someone with no money and my natural … skillset.’ He laughed and I was relieved that his tone had lightened. ‘Frankly, I’m a little offended that you think I’m too ignorant to pick up a book.’
‘You just don’t think of someone who strangles people and breaks people’s fingers as much of a reader. No offence.’
‘What I do for a living has nothing to do with who I am.’
‘Doesn’t it have everything to do with who you are?’
He’d been leaning back on his elbows on the rock but now straightened up. He looked more pensive than irked by my needling. ‘Sometimes people have limited choices. Ugly presented me with an opportunity to get out of a life that gave me no choices. You should know a thing or two about that yourself. You’re a criminal, too, you know, living and working here illegally. We all have to make choices we wish we didn’t have to, and we can only hope we won’t be judged too harshly for it. You had to make a choice to get out of Caracas. Now you’re a criminal, whether you want to see it that way or not, and I’m sure you wouldn’t want anyone thinking you were some Vene stripper here to seduce a rich Trini, or that you didn’t have the ability to be an author just because the choice you felt compelled to make turned you into a criminal.’
He was right. And far more eloquent than I’d expected.
The conversation ran on seamlessly. We talked about Venezuela’s fall from grace, about living on an island we’d once seen as an inconsequential blip compared to the colossus of Vene
zuela, but where our people were now automatically pegged as a sub-stratum of society suited solely to menial jobs and/or the sex trade, about the caustic irony of being treated this way in a country whose nationals were subject to even worse prejudices when they managed to claw their way through the immigration labyrinth to live in North America and the UK. We talked about the scars on his arms, which turned out to be relics of a rough upbringing and casual teenage street fights, not gang-kingpin-inflicted war wounds like I’d imagined. And we talked about what he’d thought when he’d read my shortlisted stories online.
‘I re-read all of them at least twice,’ he said. ‘That’s what kept pulling me to you. I wouldn’t have risked it if it was just physical. Sex isn’t worth getting on the wrong side of Ugly.’
I elbowed him lightly. ‘So this is just platonic? You want to pick my big literary brain and that’s all?’
‘Let’s not get carried away.’ A smile played on his lips. ‘Unless of course that’s what you want. A nice platonic friendship.’
‘Hmm … I do need more friends.’
He cupped my face, watching me intently. ‘So you want me to be your friend then?’ His hands slid downward, fingertips trailing along my neck to my shoulders, pushing down the straps of my camisole. My pores were puckered with the chill of the waterfall spray, the thrill of feeling his hands on me, my chest rising and falling like a panicked bird’s. But I was far from panicked.
‘Sure,’ I said, standing, pulling the camisole over my head and stepping out of my shorts. ‘I’ll be the best friend you’ve ever had.’
We fucked slow and hard on that rock. And by the time it was over and we were catching our breath under the shifting stars of the fireflies, I knew that we were both in deep.
BITING INTO THE SUGARCANE
After that first time, Román and I didn’t need to say anything aloud to know we’d be doing it all over again. And soon.
Two nights later, he called, and I was there on the front step again at two a.m., waiting. This time he took me to a hilltop where, after a short uphill climb, we came to a small plateau with a three-sixty view of ocean. Sparse village lights speckled the dark hills sloping down below us to the sea, endless and opaquely black, edged with white froth where it collided with the island. We stood looking out over it, considering the possibility of the sea and everything it could hold. Like with the first time, and like with nearly every other time to come, it felt as though we were communing with nature, drawing on its energy to feed the primordial way we couldn’t help but take each other. That second time was even rougher and more carnal than the first, and it would always be that way with us. The softness, the gentle touches, the affection, those things came before and then after, never during. Simple skin-to-skin friction was never enough. Every sense had to be sated with a kind of urgency I’d never felt before. We licked, bit, clawed, grabbed, took one another savagely until we were completely enervated.
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