by Pablo Medina
What’s your name? he asks.
Amanda is my given name. My mother calls me Eye-fur.
Eye-fur?
Yeah. She claims I have an eye for everything. She laughs heartily.
Oh, he says, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet, feeling like a tree about to crash in the forest; then, rummaging deep into himself—his shyness is excruciating—he finds enough courage to ask what she’s writing.
I’m writing a story, she says.
What about?
People. What they do and why. For example, I just wrote that a boy entered the store and you did.
Oh, he says. He can’t tell if she is kidding or if she really is some sort of clairvoyant. He looks down at the glass case, which houses some silver jewelry, opals, and many types of crystals. Are you in school?
I graduated college this past January. I’m trying to save up for graduate school. What about you?
There is no way a college graduate will have anything to do with him, and he is tempted to lie but decides against it. I’m a junior at the high school.
No school today?
No. Teacher-training day.
You have an unusual name, Tadeo.
It’s Spanish for Thaddeus. I was born in Cuba.
You’re the second Cuban I know.
I’m the only one I know.
And your parents?
They’re Polish, but they’re still in Cuba. I have American foster parents.
At this point the door jingles and a middle-aged man walks in. Amanda greets him effusively and plants a furtive kiss on his lips, which makes the man stiffen noticeably. From his voice Tadeo identifies him as the man from the diner. He senses more than a friendly relationship between the two, and he is right. Not long ago they were lovers. There remains a strong attraction between them, and they speak in the code of love, or former love, a wisp of smoke escaping from the embers. This is what Tadeo intuits, in their words, their body language, the way they move in relation to each other in a dance only they know the steps to. The man, it turns out, is Amanda’s former college teacher. Their affair began when their eyes locked in an elevator, then through several classes until they moved in together—what else was there to do?—and lived in a cabin on the hill, surrounded by tall grass and wildflowers. In his imagination. The reality was something else. Quite romantic, to tell the truth, but all romance begins to sallow; all passion fallows. The fire on the lake dies down. The oily water once fed tall flames that lit the forest and the meadows. Now it is stagnant. The lake was a sea stretching beyond the horizon. Myopic to consequences, they couldn’t see an end to their love. Amanda fought indifference as much as she could. She loved the man, admired him, but in the end the cabin became a prison and she went away.
The man suffered. Every piece of furniture, every floorboard spoke of her absence. Grief can envelop and encrust the writer’s imagination, and it did the man’s for a long time. To this day he is unable to write. He still lives in the cabin, now with the woman he was with in the diner.
Tadeo is about to leave the store, but then he hears Amanda introducing him to the man. This, she says, is Tadeo. He is Cuban, too.
What is a Cuban doing in this godforsaken town? the man asks.
Tadeo doesn’t know how to answer the question. He’s here because he’s not anywhere else. This is where I was sent.
Do you like it? the man asks. His voice sounds winded, defeated.
It’s okay, I guess.
Where do you live?
With the Aldersons, answers Tadeo, uncomfortable with the interrogation. He’s not interested in finding out about this man’s life and wishes he would go away. Then he could have Amanda to himself.
The Aldersons are good solid citizens of the town, at least they appear that way. The truth is that Mr. Alderson is a cross-dresser, and he likes to parade around the house in women’s clothes when no one’s around. Tadeo saw him once when he got home early from school, and he was so embarrassed that he went to his room and wouldn’t come out for three days. At the end of the third day, Mr. and Mrs. Alderson sat him down in the living room and explained that he shouldn’t judge Mr. Alderson unfairly. Cross-dressing is a perfectly normal activity, Mrs. Alderson said. Many people do it, and it doesn’t mean that Mr. Alderson is a homosexual. Tadeo remained unconvinced.
Amanda’s story is becoming more complicated than she wants. Her marginal notes indicate that she has to integrate the man into the story. She should have left him out from the beginning. She’s written that Tadeo and the man are both from Cuba. Now she will be forced to have them interact, and she doesn’t know the least bit about being Cuban, except for black beans and rice. What will they say to each other? Will they speak in Spanish? She’s seen Spanish speakers use their hands when speaking but never with Americans present. She was hoping to be done with the story; then she could go on to something different, but she can’t yet. So, they are Cuban. The man will ask Tadeo where in Cuba he is from. Havana—she knows no other Cuban cities, though it would be easy enough for her to check a map, do a search on the Internet. The rest of Cuba is a blur to her.
What part? the man wants to know: a further complication. So, she will have to go to the Internet after all and find a suitable neighborhood where Tadeo’s parents might reside. Once that is solved they will go on to talk about the parents. His father is an engineer. He and Tadeo’s mother left Poland for Cuba in 1970 to help build a power plant. They liked it so much they stayed. Tadeo, reticent by nature, provides the merest amount of information. In parting, the man gives Tadeo his phone number. Make sure you call me. We’ll have you over for dinner. Amanda feels left out, but she can’t very well invite herself. The man is living with that other woman, the woman in the diner, who doesn’t believe in lust. The man pecks Amanda on the cheek, shakes Tadeo’s hand, and leaves. There, Amanda writes. Case closed.
Will you teach me about Cuba? she asks Tadeo.
What do you want to know?
What your neighborhood was like, what you did for fun, that sort of thing.
We lived in an old house that was divided into apartments.
Do you miss your parents?
My father’s sick. He’s got pleurisy. We played chess together. My mother takes care of him.
Is it a nice apartment?
No. It’s falling apart. All of Havana is falling apart. Not like here. Here the houses are in good shape. They’re fixed up. The power never goes out. The plumbing works. My parents will never come to this country. My father says he wants to die in Poland. My mother laughs at him. She says Poland is too cold. Do you live with your mother? he asks, feeling a slight flicker of confidence.
She lives in California. I live by myself, in an apartment. As she writes, Amanda feels increasingly attracted to the boy. She’s never known anyone so awkward, as if he were blind and had never learned facial expressions. He cannot keep from cracking his knuckles when he talks or moving his arms in random patterns. He is sincere and needy, and loneliness seems to ooze out of him. She wants him to be smart, a chess prodigy, perhaps, but he’s not the type. Besides, she’s sure she’d find a chess prodigy boring.
What’s your apartment like?
It’s okay, it’s very small. It’s okay. Would you like to see it?
Yes, he says so softly it is barely audible.
I get off at seven tonight. It’s only two blocks away.
There’s a break in the story here, and scribbled in the margins are notes about finding a way of transitioning from the scene at the store to the apartment, and from there to her bed, for that is where she wants to take Tadeo, make love to him, rid him of some of the neediness. Maybe he’ll meet her at the store at seven and they will walk together. Maybe he’ll show up at the apartment door with a bottle of wine. What does a teenager know about wine, and where
would he get it? No. Everything between now and the bed scene is irrelevant. After the note, the story simply jumps.
Tadeo is awkward in bed but not so awkward that he doesn’t kiss her softly, then more ardently, biting her lower lip and playing with her tongue. He comes in a quick shudder followed by a thrust that reaches the deepest parts of her. After a few minutes he wants to do it again, and that’s when Amanda realizes that she’s breaking the law. He’s only fourteen. Lying in bed next to him, she thinks perhaps she should go back into the story and make him older, legalize him, and avoid another complication that would take several pages to straighten out, then decides to hell with it. She likes him as he is. He’s a virgin and she’s deflowering him. It wouldn’t take much for her to love this boy much as she might love a pet or a favorite plant. She can watch him grow, turn into something, go off somewhere where he might become a chess champion or a car salesman.
The man who entered the store will stay in the small town teaching at the local college and looking out over the sea of his imagination, which increasingly becomes subordinate to his memory. Close to sixty, he wants comfort above all else, though it fails him often enough. Inside he feels no older than Thaddeus, waiting for someone to tell him that he has permission to lead the life he leads—a nice man who beds down women decades younger and sends them off wiser and stronger. He will grow older, perhaps with that dark-haired woman with whom he argues constantly, but more likely alone, his belly growing softer, his mind less able to leap playfully over the grave, waiting for fate to give him what he’s due. Chances are he will die away from the land of his birth. For all his protestations to the contrary, his habits are thoroughly North American. Beans give him gas, and flan raises his blood sugar to alarming levels. He stumbles when speaking Spanish and avoids places where Cubans might congregate. Great changes don’t come to a sixty-year-old man.
What about Amanda? She will suffer solitude in this small town, but she is young enough to pursue her talents. Tragedy will come in small, manageable doses. She will go to graduate school, publish many stories, have five children by different men, and live the rest of her life in the west, tending gladiolas, raising finches and songbirds, hundreds of them, that will turn her house into a palace of music.
DROWNING IN
A GLASS OF WATER
Years later as the crow flies, it occurred to Angel on the spur of the moment to call Amanda. He’d been driving up the California coast, and, via an Internet search that cost him $29.95, he found her in a small town south of San Jose. He had a double bourbon for courage at a bar at the edge of town and dialed her number. Naturally there was surprise in her voice as he identified himself, but she followed her greeting with the question What kept you so long? Things, time, vectors, he answered. You married? he asked. Yes, she said, with two sons. And you? she asked. He took a drink before answering, Not now, then asked about her husband, what he did. Works on a oil rig in Alaska. How romantic, he said, trying for humor. It came out like a barb. Who said marriage was romantic? she said. Where are you calling from? A bar. It’s called Quigley’s. I know it. I’m there, she said. And your kids, he wanted to say, but she’d already hung up.
The truth was that he was suddenly afraid what life had done to her in the intervening years and told himself he wasn’t ready to see her, briefly considering paying the bill and leaving. Instead, he ordered another drink and sat back on the stool, taking in the oceanfront establishment, where the scents of stale beer, sea, and cleaning fluid mixed uncertainly in the dead hours between lunch and dinner. Upscale Irish bar in California. How far west can you go before you stop being Irish? How far north before you stop being Cuban? He remembers eating in a Japanese restaurant in Madrid where the sushi tasted like criadillas, bull testicles. Go east far enough, fast enough, and you wind up in eighteenth-century Kyoto writing haiku to the emperor.
Several drinks later Amanda appeared on the stool next to him. Hi, she said, and made no excuse for being two hours late. He forced his eyes to focus, offered a faint smile—she was, after all, late beyond all measure of decorum, and she knew he hated waiting, unless the waiting was self-imposed. He was about to ask her what she wanted when the bartender placed a drink before her, vodka on the rocks with a dozen olives. You a regular? he asked. Sort of, she said. I work here two days a week. What happened to your insouciance? he asked, trying to keep his Cuban accent in check and failing. It invariably surfaced after more than two drinks, shortening the vowels, clipping some of the final syllables.
It’s alive and well, she said with that tart western voice of hers, or was it her confidence—he’d never known anyone so full of confidence—or was it her eyes that fixed on him until all his defenses crumbled into lumps of brick dust? I have two boys to support. She had a husband working in Alaska, making, he was sure, a healthy amount of money. Support was a euphemism for something else. Boredom?
There was a lull in the conversation. He ordered another drink, though he was well beyond his limit. You were very late, he said rewinding the film to the beginning, a way of filling the silence between them. She responded that she was setting the boys up; she had the rest of the afternoon free, and hearing this he felt a chill run up his spine. He had wanted to see Amanda very badly when he’d first called. Now he thought calling might have been a mistake. She had a life worlds away from what they’d had or he thought they had—the cottage on the hill, the tall grass, the big sky, the fantasy that grew from his heart, his penis, until reality could not compete. You are happy, he said. It was a statement for which he was seeking assent. I have good days, I have bad days, she said. Are you drunk? I’m alone, he said. You are, she said. You’re drunk. He leaned back on the chair, wanting to disengage, go away, fly back home. His life had become puny, peripheral; hers central, indispensable. Amanda called the bartender over and ordered food. They know what I like. That must be comforting, he said. And dull, she said. Small town. Everyone knows you. Children, he said. They’ll do that to you.
In forty-eight hours he’d be in Cubop City, out of the flickering past and back in the present, where all things happen. He dreaded it. For now, he had Amanda before him. At thirty a woman doesn’t yet show her age, and Amanda looked as good as she did at twenty. He found himself desiring her, though it seemed ludicrous considering how far and long they’d drifted from each other. At one point she leaned her head on his shoulder and his hand drifted to her thigh and stroked it. She let him, and he fell back into a miserable nostalgia. She, he, the hill overlooking the ocean, the late-afternoon sun, a song playing on the old radio they kept in the kitchen. Then back to the din of the bar, getting crowded with the happy-hour crowd, and Amanda off to another life, a Paul Bunyan husband, suburban boys who played soccer. She was the same; she was completely different, leading the life of American dreams, and yet, magically disengaged from that life, as if she had allowed herself this little slice of paradise and was simultaneously aware that at any time she would be swallowed by the maw of Saturn or some other divine glutton. That’s what made her irresistible—how she was the embodiment of grace before despair. He didn’t feel love for her at that moment. He felt marvel.
STORYTELLER
Stories were not cures. The cancer was final. Papa knew that and—truth be told—was glad of it. Mama dead ten days and festering. He’d be dead soon enough and I’d be freed from having to come up every day with a fresh one, caught right off the river of my imagination, which was fervent enough, considering all the time and solitude, my survival amid the corrosion, the move to Cubop City. I wanted to be not just blind but invisible, inhabiting the page. I thought the world was contained in books, not books in the world. Then filial duty: to obey first, to defer second, to oblige third. Love as practice, not emotion, unquestioned, unchallenged, as genetic mandate in defiance of time and the oblique tendencies of self. Love as a crab. The word for claw in Spanish, tenaza, like love—tenacious. Real love, of the sort I couldn’t help but practice:
tenacious and therefore oppressive. Love did not contain the world. The world contained it and the world beat outside the door.
The work of storytelling: to stand on the banks of the river, fishing pole in hand, jerking at its merest tug and coming up empty, slackening the line so that the hook could drift to the deeper parts at the center where the water rippled with currents and countercurrents. Somewhere in those waters was the big fish that had avoided being caught, that would make all the waiting, the dreaming, worthwhile. I tried to envision it: white, allegorical, and massive. I’d have to use all my strength and cunning to reel it in, pull it up on shore, then hoist it over my shoulder for the long trek to the place where love resides and carries on. Every day I offered my parents whatever I’d managed to catch, aware that the big fish had eluded me. No cure.
They complained. Sometimes the fish was too long, sometimes it was too short. Sometimes it had a weird shape with pieces going in several directions at once so that it looked more like an octopus than a fish. Sometimes it croaked like a toad or hissed like a snake or chirped like a bird. Once I brought one so heavy and motionless it was like a chunk of vulcanized rubber; another time I caught a feather that hovered over the bed a moment, then floated off behind the dresser. My parents’ silence, when they were silent, I took for assent. On rare occasions I might have heard a reluctant laugh or a grunt or a woeful sigh, but it was their silence I preferred, the story doing its proper work under the surface, through their veins, and into their organs, what was left of them.
Papa looked up from the bed with a smile, Mama dead and rotting beside him. Oh, the smell. The fish you bring us, he said, come from the depths. They suffer the maladies of creatures who have never known the sun. How about a surface fish awash in light?
How could I know surface when I didn’t know light? I kept that question from Papa. He would call me obfuscator, sophist, tautologist—words that wounded me not. I was already scar, regret, compunction, guilt. Rent by emotions, I quivered like a reed in shallow water.