by Lucia Berlin
We never did discuss Max. We both worked hard in New York. Jude practiced and jammed, played Bronx weddings, strip shows in Jersey until he got into the union. I made children’s clothes that even sold at Bloomingdales. We were happy. New York was wonderful then. Allen Ginsberg and Ed Dorn read at the Y. The Mark Rothko show at MOMA, during the big snowstorm. The light was intense from the snow through the skylights; the paintings pulsated. We heard Bill Evans and Scott La Faro. John Coltrane on soprano sax. Ornette’s first night at the Five Spot.
In the daytime, while Jude slept, the boys and I took the subway all over the city, getting off each day at new stops. We rode ferries, over and over. Once, when Jude was playing at Grossinger’s, we camped out in Central Park. That’s how nice New York was then, or how dumb I was …We lived on Greenwich Street down by the Washington Market, by Fulton Street.
Jude made a red toy box for the boys, hung swings from the pipes in our loft. He was patient and stern with them. At night when he got home we made love. All the anger and sadness and tenderness between us electric in our bodies. It was never spoken out loud.
At night when Jude was at work I read to Ben and Keith, sang them to sleep and then I sewed. I called the Symphony Sid program and asked him to play Charlie Parker and King Pleasure until he told me not to call so often. Summers were very hot and we slept on the roof. Winters were cold and there was no heat after five or on weekends. The boys wore ear-muffs and mittens to bed. Steam came out of my mouth as I sang to them.
In Mexico now I sing King Pleasure songs to Sally. “Little Red Top.” “Parker’s Blues.” “Sometimes I’m Happy.”
It’s pretty horrible when there is nothing else you can do.
In New York when the phone rang at night it was Max.
Hello, he said.
He was racing in Hawaii. He was racing in Wisconsin. He was watching TV, thinking of me. Iris were blooming in New Mexico. Flash floods in arroyos in August. Cottonwoods turned yellow in the fall.
He came to New York often, to hear music, but I never saw him. He would call and tell me all about New York and I would tell him all about New York. Marry me, he said, give me a reason to live. Talk to me, I said, don’t hang up.
One night it was bitterly cold, Ben and Keith were sleeping with me, in snowsuits. The shutters banged in the wind, shutters as old as Herman Melville. It was Sunday so there were no cars. Below in the streets the sailmaker passed, in a horse-drawn cart. Clop clop. Sleet hissed cold against the windows and Max called. Hello, he said. I’m right around the corner in a phone booth.
He came with roses, a bottle of brandy and four tickets to Acapulco. I woke up the boys and we left.
It’s not true, what I said about no regrets, although I felt not the slightest regret at the time. This was just one of the many things I did wrong in my life, leaving like that.
The Plaza Hotel was warm. Hot, in fact. Ben and Keith got into the steaming bath with an expression of awe, as if into a Texan baptism. They fell asleep on clean white sheets. In the adjoining room Max and I made love and we talked until morning.
We drank champagne over Illinois. We kissed while the boys slept across from us and clouds billowed outside the window. When we landed, the sky above Acapulco was streaked coral and pink.
The four of us swam and then ate lobster and swam some more. In the morning the sun shone through the wooden shutters making stripes on Max and Ben and Keith. I sat up in bed, looking at them, with happiness.
Max would carry each boy to bed and tuck him in. Kiss him sweet, the way he had kissed his father. Max slept as deeply as they. I thought he must be exhausted from what we were doing, his leaving his wife, taking on a family.
He taught them both to swim and to snorkel. He told them things. He told me things. Just things, about life, people he knew. We interrupted each other telling him things back. We lay on the fine sand on Caleta beach, warm in the sun. Keith and Ben buried me in the sand. Max’s finger tracing my lips. Bursts of color from the sun against my closed sandy eyelids. Desire.
In the evenings we went to a park by the docks where they rented tricycles. Max and I held hands as the boys raced furiously around the park, flashing past pink bougainvillaea, red canna lilies. Beyond them ships were being loaded on the docks.
One afternoon my mother and father, chatting away, walked up the gangplank to the S.S. Slavengerfjord, a Norwegian ship. My sister had written to me that they were traveling from Tacoma to Valparaiso. My parents weren’t speaking to me then, because of my marriage to Jude. I couldn’t call out to them and say, Hi Mama! Hi Daddy! Isn’t this a coincidence? This is Max.
But it made me feel good, to know my parents were right there. And now they were at the railings as the ship sailed out to sea. My father was sunburnt and wore a floppy white hat. My mother smoked. Ben and Keith just kept riding faster and faster around the cement track, calling to one another, and to us … Look at me!
Today there was a big gas explosion in Guadalajara, hundreds of people killed, their homes destroyed. Max called to see if I was all right. I told him how everybody in Mexico thinks it’s funny now to go around asking, “Say… do you smell gas?”
In Acapulco we made friends at the hotel. Don and Maria, who had a six-year-old daughter, Lourdes. In the evenings the children would color on their terrace until they fell asleep.
We stayed very late, until the moon grew high and pale. Don and Max played chess by the light of a kerosene lantern. Caress of moths. Maria and I lay crosswise on a big hammock, talking softly about silly things like clothes, about our children, love. She and Don had been married only six months. Before she met him she had been very alone. I told her how in the morning I said Max’s name before I even opened my eyes. She said her life had been like a dreary record over and over each day and now in a second the record was turned over, music. Max overheard her and he smiled at me. See, amor, we’re the flip side now.
We had some other friends, too. Raúl, the diver and his wife Soledad. One weekend the six of us steamed clams on the terrace of our hotel. All the children had been sent to take naps. But one by one different children would pop up, wanting to watch what was going on. Back to bed! Another would want water, another just plain couldn’t sleep. Back to bed. Keith came out and said he saw a giraffe! Now go back to bed, we’ll wake you soon. Ben came out and said there were tigers and elephants. Oh for God’s sake. But there it was in the street beneath us. A circus parade. We woke all the children then. One of the circus men thought Max was a movie star so they gave us free tickets. We all went to the circus that night. It was magical, but the children fell asleep before the end of the trapeze act.
There was an earthquake in California today. Max called to say that it wasn’t his fault and he can’t find his cat.
It was the ghostly setting moon that shone upon us as we made love that night. We lay next to each other then under the wooden revolving fan, hot, sticky. Max’s hand on my wet hair. Thank you, I whispered, to God, I think…
In the mornings when I woke his arms would be around me, his lips against my neck, his hand on my thigh.
One day I woke before the sun came up and he wasn’t there. The room was silent. He must be swimming, I thought. I went into the bathroom. Max was sitting on the toilet, cooking something in a blackened spoon. A syringe was on the sink.
“Hello,” he said.
“Max, what is that?”
“It’s heroin,” he said.
That sounds like the end of a story, or the beginning, when really it was just a part of the years that were to come. Times of intense technicolor happiness and times that were sordid and frightening.
We had two more sons, Nathan and Joel. We traveled all over Mexico and the United States in a Beechcraft Bonanza. We lived in Oaxaca, finally settled in a village on the coast of Mexico. We were happy, all of us, for a long time and then it became hard and lonely because he loved heroin much more.
Not detox … Max says on the phone … Retox, that’s wha
t everybody needs. And Just say no? You should say No, thank you. He is joking, he hasn’t been on drugs for many years now.
For months Sally and I worked hard trying to analyze our lives, our marriages, our children. She never even drank or smoked like I did.
Her ex-husband is a politician. He stops by almost every day, in a car with two bodyguards, and two escort cars with men in them. Sally is as close to him as I am with Max. So what is marriage anyway? I never figured it out. And now it is death I don’t understand.
Not just Sally’s death. My country, after Rodney King and the riots. All over the world, the rage and despair.
Sally and I write rebuses to each other so she doesn’t hurt her lung talking. Rebus is where you draw pictures instead of words or letters. Violence, for example, is a viola and some ants. Sucks is somebody drinking through a straw. We laugh, quietly, in her room, drawing. Actually, love is not a mystery for me anymore. Max calls and says hello. I tell him that my sister will be dead soon. How are you? he asks.