Once in my car, with the air conditioner running, I got out my cell phone and checked for messages. Although I was numb from everything I’d told Violeta, checking my phone was such a ritual that I did it without thinking. On the screen, I saw that there were three calls from Vivian. Three calls from anyone else would have panicked me, but it was perfectly in character for Vivian and her ADD personality. I was still reeling from the Violeta session, and not ready to deal with Vivian’s mania. If it was a really important matter, there would have been twelve calls instead of just three.
I didn’t want Violeta to see me sitting immobilized in my parked car in front of her house, so I started the motor and drove off toward the 826, the Palmetto Expressway, the first leg of my journey home. Just before I got on the ramp, though, I pulled over to the side of the road. I really didn’t feel steady enough to drive and, God knows, there were enough spaced-out drivers in Miami without my adding to the number.
Even though the air-conditioning was on full-blast, I was sweating. My nerves were on edge, and I needed to relax. So I did something I hadn’t done in a while: I unbuckled my seat belt, reached over to the glove compartment, and started rummaging around until I found the pack of Marlboros I stashed in there for emergencies. My current situation had reached the point at which a crisis cigarette was in order.
Before I lit up, I lowered the car window and tilted the seat as far back as it would go. I turned up the volume on the Gloria Estefan CD that had been playing softly. Then, as prepared as possible, I took out a cigarette and rolled it between my thumb and forefinger for a while. It was stale, as I feared, but it would have to do. I probably could have used a couple of tokes on a joint, but I was so unused to smoking anything that a couple of puffs on a Marlboro would be almost as satisfying.
I lay there listening to the music and trying to blow smoke rings. I wished I could stay in the car forever, never getting out, never having to make any of the decisions facing me. Up until a couple of days before, I had thought I was in a quandry about whether to stay at the firm or have another baby. Now that situation seemed perfectly manageable in comparison to Luther’s appearance in my life. Now I was seriously contemplating whether to stay with Ariel, or start a new life with my old lover. My session with Violeta, if nothing else, had clarified that choice.
Looking at the cigarette, I tried to wish it into becoming weed. I never indulged in drugs in any serious fashion, but I enjoyed the feeling of a light buzz. My first year at Penn I had smoked a little too much grass, which had scared me and made me back away from it. Now I smoked sometimes with Vivian and Anabel, not enough to get wasted but enough to get giggly. In a way we were reliving our youth, when we used to get high on hot summer nights at the Venetian pool in Coral Gables. Even at thirty-five, the smell of weed makes me think of those nights—kind of like an illicit madeleine.
A song had just finished when my cell phone rang out from the passenger seat. The sound of “Jingle Bells” startled me so much that I almost dropped the lit cigarette in my lap. I picked it up and saw Vivian’s office number displayed on the screen. Well, she had probably saved me from my own thoughts. I sighed and pressed the “receive” button.
“Hello, Vivian.”
“Chica! Where the hell have you been?” Vivian shrieked. I had to move the phone a couple of inches from my ear. “I’ve called you three times already. Your phone was turned off.”
“I went to see Violeta,” I explained, dragging on the Marlboro. “That’s why I turned the phone off. Right now I’m parked right by the entrance ramp on to 826.”
Vivian paused. “Are you smoking?” she asked.
I chuckled nervously, which of course Violeta took for an affirmative. I could never hide anything from her.
“Oh, God, Margarita,” Vivian said sadly. “If you need to see Violeta, and then smoke a cigarette afterward, that’s bad enough. But the worst part is that you’re sitting in a parked car by the expressway. Are you okay? Do you need me?”
Her voice raised an octave as she spoke. As close as we were, the last thing I needed was for Vivian to come and play Cuban Dr. Ruth. I knew I should change the subject from her proposed mission of mercy.
“What’s going on that you needed to reach me?” I asked. I knew that getting Vivian to talk about herself was always a good offensive move.
“I can’t tell you over the phone,” she said, lowering her voice. “That’s why I was calling. I need to set up a time and place for me, you, and Anabel to meet.”
It was totally unlike Vivian to keep any kind of secret. I hoped that she didn’t want to get together to deliver bad news.
“Have you talked to Anabel?” I asked.
“Yes. I reached her right away.” I could tell Vivian was having a hard time keeping herself from chastising me for not being available to her twenty-four–seven. “She has a meeting all afternoon, but she’s available tomorrow for lunch. Is that good for you?”
“Sure. Sounds fine.” I didn’t have my planner with me, so I had no idea whether I had anything planned the next day at lunchtime. But I was willing to reschedule just about anything, just to hear what Vivian needed to say only in person. I couldn’t remember a time she had ever kept anything from me.
“Listen, Margarita, are you sure you’re all right?” Vivian asked. “It’s not exactly normal to park by an expressway. Especially the Palmetto.”
I knew why she was worried. The Palmetto was an eight-lane expressway that bisected Miami east to west—the kind of highway that required nerves of steel and more than a little recklessness to drive on. It was full of speeding trucks with their overloaded rigs waving dangerously side to side, canvas tarps flapping wildly in the wind behind them. Motorists either drove so slow as to constitute a safety hazard, or else they raced thirty miles over the posted limit. There was no such thing as normal driving on the Palmetto—it was kill or be killed. The road was cracked, full of potholes and debris, but the Department of Transportation had apparently decided long ago that the situation was hopeless, and gave up on fixing it. The Palmetto made L.A.’s 405, or Boston’s Storrow Drive, seem relaxing and leisurely by comparison.
“I’m okay,” I said unconvincingly. “I just had an intense session with Violeta, and I need to get my head together before I drive anywhere. I’m going straight home now, really.”
“Call me if you need anything,” Vivian said. “Promise?”
“Yes, mother,” I said before we both hung up. I was dying to know what Vivian was being so close-mouthed about, but I was also glad we were meeting tomorrow and not later that day. I had something planned that didn’t involve my friends.
The night before, I had made up my mind that it was time to pass by my firm and just sort of check in. I was still officially on a leave of absence, and I wasn’t expected to visit on any regular schedule. But it had been more than two weeks since I’d gone into the halls of Weber, Miranda, Blanco, et al., and I knew that I should show my face.
I also needed distraction from the Luther situation, to ground myself in something familiar. I reminded myself that I did have a life before he called me up: a husband, a son, a fulfilling career. I couldn’t figure out why Luther was threatening all that. I supposed it was possible that I wasn’t as happy as I thought. I couldn’t tell whether what I felt for Luther was real, feelings long buried by circumstances, or just some kind of bizarre early midlife crisis. The more I thought about it, the less I knew. It was flattering to hear everything that Luther said to me, but Ariel had said all the same things many times before. And I knew that it was impossible to keep the same level of intensity in a marriage that had existed in the beginning.
I knew a lot of things. I also knew that Luther and I had unfinished business between us. Our relationship hadn’t run its course, I understood that now. Our lives had kept us apart, not our feelings for each other. He had gone back to his WASP life, and I had immersed myself in the life of a Miami Cuban exile. We had each sought our roots. It might have been w
hat we both really wanted, but it might have just been the easiest road to take.
Luther and I had never really fought to stay together and make our relationship a success. It had been too easy to say that the differences in our backgrounds would keep it from working. Looking back on how things ended for us, I saw that we were both scared to be the one who tried hardest.
I married Ariel, a fellow Cuban American who didn’t share my social class or background—it might sound shallow, but it was the truth—in part because of our shared ethnicity. I couldn’t deny that Ariel’s being Cuban was a major factor in my picking him as a mate. After seven years of living in the north away from my roots, I was looking for a man who saw the world as I did, who understood the tragedy of the exile experience and who would know what Cuba meant to me. The fact that he was intelligent, attractive, and ambitious hadn’t hurt his chances, either. He was everything I wanted. And he openly cherished me.
So why was I considering getting involved with Luther? I was taught in law school to think a certain way, to analyze every situation from different angles. Luther had been back in my life for less than a week, and I had devoted an inordinate amount of time to thinking about him. The lawyer inside me couldn’t help but think about how many billable hours I’d racked up.
I was, if anything, more amazed now by Luther’s declaration than I had been when he made it. I thought I knew him pretty well, and I never thought he was capable of such passionate feeling, and that he’d had the patience to wait for the right opportunity to speak with me. And as for his learning Spanish, I still remembered how he would struggle in Fren
ch restaurants ordering dinner, so I knew how much time and effort he must have spent learning a new language. He had proved to me that he had meticulously planned his proposal, and that he wasn’t treating my feelings lightly.
Apart from holding hands at the Dinner Key Marina, we hadn’t had any physical contact. I knew I might have been unfaithful to Ariel in my thoughts, but so far I hadn’t broken anything that couldn’t be fixed. But it wouldn’t be long before Ariel realized that something deeper than a spat with my mother was making me distant and preoccupied. He was too perceptive not to figure out that something seriously wrong was between us.
Even with all the years that had passed, thinking of the sex life I had once enjoyed with Luther was enough to make me blush. I don’t think there was a centimeter of his body that I hadn’t explored, and vice versa.
I got on the expressway, shaking my head. What a mess.
[15]
Ashley Gutierrez, my firm’s receptionist, spotted me and shrieked out my name in her earsplitting, high-pitched little girl’s voice. I took a quick, instinctive look around as I stepped out of the elevator, hoping there were no clients around to hear her very unprofessional greeting. Mercifully, we were alone, which was a blessing because a moment later she enveloped me in an aggressive bear hug.
One might think from her first name that Ashley was an American, but the truth was that she was a Cuban from Hialeah. It wasn’t uncommon for first-generation Cubans to give their children American names, hoping it would help their offspring assimilate into their new country as easily and quickly as possible. Really, though, those names rarely went well with Spanish surnames. I knew a Samantha Perez, a Tiffany Gonzalez, a Sean Gomez, and a Zack Ramirez. Sometimes intermarriage resulted in Anglo first names paired with Spanish last names. The results, to my mind at least, were often hilarious.
Pamela Anderson was Ashley’s role model in life, and it showed. She resembled nothing more than a Cuban version of the former Baywatch temptress. Her hair was died a shocking blond, and she liked to wear it gathered on top of her head and accented with multicolored glass barrettes. Long tight curls cascaded down to the middle of her back. It was a hairstyle not often seen since the seventies. Someone seemed to have told Ashley that her black eyes looked best with smoky-colored eye shadow, so to accentuate them she applied makeup from her eyelashes up to her eyebrows. She ringed her eyes in midnight black liner and, to make sure everyone got the point, heavily coated her lashes with mascara. To balance out her eyes, Ashley wore crimson lipstick applied so heavily that her teeth almost always sported traces of red.
A firm believer in manicures and pedicures, Ashley often sneaked out to the nail salon in the basement of our building for frequent touch-ups of her two-inch-long fingernails. It was hard to type, operate the switchboard, or accomplish any of the tasks associated with being a receptionist with those beauties on the ends of her hands, and as a result she was a pretty haphazard worker. But as time passed we all got used to her ways, and by and large we saw nothing unusual in employing a receptionist who couldn’t type, answer the phone, or even effectively sign for packages. She had taught the FedEx, UPS, and DHL couriers to forge her signature so she wouldn’t have to risk chipping her nails on such a mundane task.
Ashley was tiny in stature, but her breast implants were so big it was rumored that she’d had to pay extra to her plastic surgeon, who balked at their size and grumbled about losing his license. She was so proud of her breasts that she made sure everyone could see them in all their glory. Her outfits seemed strategically designed to show as much cleavage and nipple-through-fabric as possible. Her breasts were so big that she was always tipped forward by their weight, making total exposure a constant possibility. Her miniskirts were so small that I wondered whether she was on a crusade to conserve the world’s supply of fabric. And, as everyone in the office knew from watching her bend over, she wore Victoria’s Secret panties exclusively.
But she was a good young woman. Personally, I had liked her from the moment we met, and I took her appearance and drama-queen tendencies in stride. Her peculiar ways never seemed to adversely affect the firm in any way. I think outsiders viewed Ashley with curiosity, as though our firm was flaunting its success by showing it could even employ someone like Ashley and still thrive. One of my favorite thrills upon arriving at work each morning was seeing what Ashley was wearing.
Ashley had been our receptionist for three years. She hadn’t exactly applied for the job: In fact, she was working off her husband’s legal bills. One of my partners, Miguel Blanco, represented Ashley’s husband Freddy, the owner of a chain of stores called Saints-R-Us, on an arson case. Miguel lost the case, which was no surprise to anyone. His real job was to minimize the punishment Freddy Gutierrez would receive for his actions. It was no secret that Freddy wasn’t the brightest bulb on the marquee, and it was obvious that he had torched six of his stores because they were hemorrhaging money. He had never been much of a businessman, but even Freddy should have known better than to open up stores selling Santeria relics and objects of voodoo worship in white, upper-middle-class neighborhoods. As if the fact that all six stores were torched by the same method within a two-hour period wasn’t enough to raise suspicion, Freddy had applied for the insurance money while firefighters were still trying to douse the flames in six separate locations. The partners had agreed that Miguel had an uphill climb, and that the case was a surefire loser. Still, as long as Freddy footed the hefty bills, no one minded.
At the conclusion of the case, Freddy revealed a particularly unpleasant surprise: He’d had to liquidate the last of his possessions to pay off gambling debts, and he had no money to pay the final installment of his massive legal fees. Freddy figured he’d rather deal with us than his bookie, who apparently said that it would be no problem exacting revenge even if Freddy was in jail. To mollify us, Freddy offered the good-faith gesture of the services of his wife. We had no choice. Anyway, as someone pointed out, her breast implants alone were worth thousands. Freddy was going to be a guest of the State of Florida for the foreseeable future, so we had no choice but to accept his offer of a discount receptionist. We at the firm are nothing if not realistic.
Mauricio, our accountant, projected that, based on what a receptionist in our office earned, it would take Ashley about seventy-five years working in our firm to pay off the debt. When Mig
uel told Freddy, Freddy replied: “Well, she can start tomorrow. Time’s a wasting.”
Our only other option was to eat the bill, so we took on Ashley Gutierrez as our receptionist. We arranged to pay her a nominal salary—I mean, we weren’t completely heartless—and she had health insurance and benefits. Still, I had no idea how she got by. Her husband was incarcerated and, unless he was pardoned by the president, he was going to stay that way for many years. Still, Ashley maintained a consistently cheery disposition. As far as I knew, she hadn’t been involved with any other men since Freddy was sent to prison, although I’m sure there was no shortage of potential suitors. There was something about those astonishing breasts that invited curiosity.
Ashley called out my name a second time and hugged me so tight her rock-hard breasts nearly knocked the wind out of me. My instinct for self-preservation made me jump back. Ashley must have been in a Beverly Hillbillies mood that day—she looked like a Latina interpretation of Ellie Mae in her denim hot pants topped by scraps of lace dangerously masquerading as a blouse. We were standing a couple of feet apart, but I was still smothered in her perfume. I hated to be catty, but it smelled like Eau de Swamp.
“Ashley, how are you?” I asked. It was hard to be put off for long by someone so genuine and friendly. “Great outfit. Very Appalachian.”
“Thanks, Margarita,” Ashley frowned. “But it’s not a designer outfit. I put it together myself.”
I felt a little ashamed of myself for being so thoughtless. Being witty with Ashley always went over her head, and anything I said could be misinterpreted. I had been away from the office for ten months, and it showed. Already I felt out of sync.
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