by Jon Michaud
“Thank you,” she said, and turned away to walk down the path and out of the park.
The Lugos owned one of the single-family homes that were scattered among the crumbling Art Deco apartment buildings of Inwood. It was a three-story brick wreck with boards in the windows of the upper floor and planks on breeze blocks for a stoop. A Dumpster had occupied the short driveway for as long as Tito could remember. If progress was being made on restoring the house, it was all happening on the inside, because the outside was as derelict as it had been when their fathers were friends. In Tito's imagination, the house had, over the years, anthropomorphized into a giant, decapitated head, its chin on the sidewalk, the garage an open mouth, the windows above them like a pair of eyes, and the boarded orifices on the top floor some kind of pagan headdress. As Tito watched Clara walk across the street, it seemed like the house was going to swallow her alive.
WITHOUT HAVING TO be told, Tito understood that the Friday afternoon walks home with Clara would be a secret—not just from their parents, but also from their schoolmates, from his friends. He could tell no one. The romantic lives of the Almonte girls spurred endless speculation among the boys (and, he guessed, the girls) of John F. Kennedy High School. The speculation filled a void. There were rumors of the Word Club girls going on dates with Columbia students and New York Presbyterian doctors, of limousines and downtown nightclubs, of trips to resorts in the Poconos or long skiing weekends in Vermont, but these were merely rumors, never substantiated. The only certainty was that they did not date boys from Kennedy. If Tito had claimed that he was Clara's boyfriend, no one would have believed him; he would have succeed only in attracting ridicule or, perhaps, pity. During the school week he could presume no change in Clara's attitude toward him. In short, he could not expect her to acknowledge his existence beyond sharing her amusement with her friends about the boy who sometimes followed her in the halls. He was fine with this. It was a small price to pay.
The next Friday was Good Friday—something Clara may or may not have realized when she issued her invitation the week before. It was a half day. He waited for her by the U-Haul lot, figuring she wouldn't want to be seen near the school grounds with him. He positioned himself there immediately after the final bell rang and was still there well after the time when he had run into her the week before. Rain threatened and he sensed the disapproval of the people passing by: He must be up to no good. Still she did not appear. Maybe she'd gone to church or something? It was then that he realized there would be no school the following week because of the Easter break and that he would not see her for at least ten more days.
Those ten days passed slowly. He worked a move on the Saturday, a family relocating from a shitty apartment on Nagle Avenue to a slightly less shitty apartment on Fordham Road. Sunday he went to an early season Yankees game with his cousin Hershel. Hershel attended George Washington High, but Tito refrained from telling him about Clara, just in case the rumor leaked back to Kennedy. During the week off he helped his father. He repainted a vacant one-bedroom apartment by himself; he hauled the mounds of trash out to the curb for the weekly collection; he unclogged a drain for Mrs. Canby on the fourth floor. When his father sent him out to buy a new faucet for the Hernández family in 2G, he momentarily thought of going down to Dyckman and buying it from Clara's father, just on the off chance that she was working. But his own father would never forgive him.
On the Monday after the Easter break, Tito saw her in the hallway, walking by herself between classes, and was relieved to learn that she still existed. She appeared to take no notice of him until she was almost past and then, at the last moment, she winked at him. It was so quick that anyone seeing them might have thought she got something caught in her eye. But it was enough.
That Friday—it was mid-April already—he waited for her closer to the school, standing outside a bodega in the weak spring sunshine, pretending to read a newspaper. About an hour after the final bell, she walked by with one of the other Word Club girls, Yesenia Matos, and he followed them, keeping his distance. At Broadway, Yesenia climbed the stairs to the subway while Clara turned and walked south toward the bridge. He followed, catching up with her on the span as a train made its cacophonous passage over them on the elevated track.
“I was beginning to think you didn't like me, Tito,” she said.
They walked home together by the same evasive route they'd taken before, talking and joshing each other about the mix-up on Good Friday. Clara's mother, in one of her fits of piety, had made them go to Mass. That afternoon in the park Tito kissed her for the first time. It was on the path in the woods as they descended toward her house. He was motivated by a sense of desperation, a sense that she might contrive ways of avoiding him on Fridays the rest of his life. If nothing else, he would at least have this one kiss. How modest that aspiration seemed to him later, but how immense it seemed to him at the time. He took her by the hand and pulled her close, fully expecting to be struck across the face. She gave no resistance, opening her mouth to his. Tito tasted icing sugar on her lips—a dissolving sweetness—along with traces of lip balm. He felt her warm breath against his cheek. When he finally pulled away, she smiled at him. “See you next week,” she said.
FOR THE REMAINDER of the spring, Tito did not have any trouble finding Clara on Friday afternoons. Even after school ended in late June, they maintained their schedule. He worked both weekend days so that his Fridays would be free for her. He moved furniture, hung out with his boys, ate meals with his parents, listened to music, read his comic books, exchanged bullshit with Nelson, did his daily pushups and sit-ups, watched the Yankees on TV, went to a couple of lame parties, but all of it was just a means of distraction until Friday afternoon came around again. To minimize their chances of being seen together, they took to arriving separately in the forested part of the park. These dates, as Tito liked to think of them, soon turned into extended sessions of kissing and reaching into each other's clothes. The warm weather conspired to make things easier for them—thickening the greenery of the wilder sections of the park, inviting Clara to go barelegged in skirts and short dresses, the inciting sight of her brown skin on display. They explored each other as much as possible under the cover of the park's flora, but the lack of privacy kept them from going as far as Tito would have liked. There remained always something elusive about Clara. He was increasingly aware of her imminent departure for Cornell. He had tried to talk about it with her, saying that he would visit her at college, promising to do whatever it took to carry their relationship forward, always seeking signs of assurance from her. But Clara inevitably stopped these entreaties by kissing him or taking his hand and placing it over her heart. As much as he loved those gestures, they did not allay his fears—if anything they heightened them. Tito became convinced that the only way to ensure that they would stay together beyond September was to sleep with her. They were both virgins and he believed that sex would somehow create an unbreakable bond between them.
In August, an opportunity finally presented itself. His mother and father were going to celebrate their twentieth wedding anniversary with a week at a resort in Punta Cana. Tito took the time off work to be available for the building's tenants. There was an empty apartment on the third floor. He'd repainted it earlier in the month and helped his father install a new refrigerator. In the refrigerator now was a bottle of wine and some of the food his mother had left for him. The apartment's layout was unconventional, with a bedroom right by the entrance then a long living room opening to an alcove kitchen and leading to the second bedroom. The previous tenants had lived in filth and disorder, with clothes and garbage on the floor, but the place was clean now. All of the rooms had windows that opened into the airshaft—and therefore were visible to people in other apartments—except for the second bedroom, which had a view of the ballfields of Inwood Hill Park. On the hardwood of that second bedroom, Tito had laid out his old sleeping bag, along with a sheet, a blanket, and two pillows. He brought up a vase of flo
wers. He brought up toilet paper. When the buzzer rang, he was in the bedroom looking out the window at a Little League game.
Clara was wearing nothing special—jeans, sandals, and a lacy short-sleeved blouse—but she looked astounding to him. He tried to kiss her as she entered the apartment, but she danced away, laughing. He could tell that she was in a strange mood. “So, come on, show me around our new place,” she said.
He walked her from room to room, describing the apartment as if they lived there together. In the first bedroom, he said, “This is your study. Notice the bookcases over there, and the desk with the nice new computer. See that, I had your diploma from Cornell framed and put up on the wall.”
“That's very thoughtful of you.”
Every time they went to another room, he tried to take her hand or kiss her cheek, but she moved away. “This is the kitchen,” he said, prepared to leave it at that, but she said, “So, who's the cook in the house? You?”
“Of course,” he said. “Look what I made earlier today.” He opened the fridge and showed her the roasted chicken and the rice and beans his mother had left for him.
“Mmm,” she said. “And wine, too? You hoping to get lucky or something?”
“Hoping,” he said. She had been willing all summer, but now that they had the opportunity, she had become coy.
He walked her through the living room, pointing out the projection television and the oriental rugs. In the second bedroom, he indicated the sleeping bag and said, “This is our new fourposter bed.”
“Let's try it out,” she said, and sat down. He got down beside her. He was desperate to feel her skin, even a glancing brush of its warmth, but, continuing to tease him, she rose again and went to the window where he had been when she rang. Tito followed like a dog. She had her back to him and he stood behind her, with his hands on her hips. She did not try to move away. He turned her around and reached up to her face, swept his fingers across her cheek and let his hand glide along her throat. He tugged at her earlobe, teasing the nub of flesh between his fingers like a little piece of dough. She was watching him, her mouth slightly open. His other hand reached behind her and curled up into the back of her blouse. She was naked beneath it and he felt the little canal of her spine between the muscles of her back, the way it flattened out just below her waist. He brought his hand away from her ear and pulled her close. Her mouth felt pulpy. They lowered themselves to the sleeping bag and she was still silent, but busy now, her hands on him, in his hair, clutching at his neck.
Tito was on his knees and she was sitting up in front of him. “Take it off me,” she said, pulling at her blouse with a gesture of impatience. Using both hands, he pulled it over her head. He bent forward to kiss her breasts but she stopped him. “These too,” she said, squirming as she unzipped her jeans and hooked her finger through a belt loop. “Take them off me.” Tito grabbed the cuffs and pulled. They came off slowly at first as her hips resisted his tugs and then they slipped quickly down her legs and she was naked on the sleeping bag before him in the broad afternoon light. Nothing about her was coy anymore and, seeing her this way, Tito was seized by a queasy sense of doubt as he realized how little he really knew her, this beautiful girl he had fantasized about for years. In all, they'd spent a dozen afternoons together. The weight of what they were doing frightened him. Suddenly, he wanted to be done with it, to rush through the act and have it finished, to move on to the next stage of things, but she would not let him. She pushed him onto his back and slowly unbuttoned his shirt, kissing his chest after each button was unfastened.
The buzzer sounded.
“Who's that?” Clara whispered.
“Get under,” he said, ridiculously, and lifted the sheet and the blanket for her. Maybe one of the tenants had tracked him down here. Or maybe his parents had come back early. He ran to the intercom. “¿Si?” he said. He was still dressed and had to adjust himself.
“Yolanda?” said the voice through the speaker.
“No.” said Tito.
“Yolanda? Marta?”
“They moved,” said Tito. “They don't live here anymore.”
The buzzer sounded again, but he was already on his way back to the bedroom.
“Who was that, your other girlfriend?” Clara asked.
Tito said nothing. He took his clothes off and got into the make-shift bed with her. As he lifted the blanket and the sheet, he caught sight of her naked body again, but this time it unnerved him less. Instead, he took pleasure in it, the lovely geometry of her limbs and joints arranging themselves, her breasts swaying, gravity-tugged, and her skin puckering in tiny circles of brown gooseflesh. He felt momentarily that he had created her, willed her into being.
Clara turned and looked at him with a direct and open tenderness that he had not seen from her that afternoon. She kissed him softly, long and drawing with the mouth he had wounded in the playground many years before. Tito felt himself becoming erect again. She continued to kiss him. His tongue went into her mouth and searched for the scars on the inside of her lip. The disruption had settled them and stopped their anxious playing. Tito was not afraid now and he felt calm and watched her and saw that there was none of the nervous, flirty behavior of before. She withdrew under the blankets, kissed him, and turned him so that he lay on his back. Then she straddled him, her body substantial and warm. Tito watched her fingers take hold of him and he felt the firm, bristly pressure as his cock was guided up inside her.
A FEW DAYS after the move, he returned to the apartment on Sherman Avenue. Ms. Almonte opened the door. She did not look surprised to see him.
“I've brought the key for your storage unit,” he said. “And, if you don't mind, perhaps you have time to fill out a customer satisfaction survey for me?”
She regarded him for a long moment, a gentle, condescending smile curling one side of her mouth, and then nodded. “Come in,” she said. “But you must be quiet. My mother is sleeping.” It was six-thirty in the evening. She led him into the kitchen. En route, they passed the mother, who was sitting in a recliner with her eyes closed and her mouth slightly agape, a blanket draped across her.
“Would you like something to eat? My mother made sancocho,” said Ms. Almonte.
“Sancocho? In this heat?” said Tito.
“She's always cold—it doesn't matter what the season. The sanco-cho helps her feel warm. It's just about all she eats these days. Would you like some?”
“Sure,” said Tito, sitting at the white, plastic-topped table. Since moving out of his parents' apartment, he'd subsisted on pizza and Chinese takeout. He could smell the sancocho as Ms. Almonte ladled it into the bowl. The starchy thickness of it stung his salivary glands to life.
“School opens soon, right?” he asked.
“I'm not teaching this year,” she said, bringing the two bowls to the table and sitting down opposite him.
“Did you retire?”
She laughed. “I'm not that old. I'm taking a sabbatical. I need to look after my mother,” she gestured in the direction of the living room. “It's a full-time job now.”
“Why didn't you move her to Oradell? Is it OK for me to ask that?”
She gave the mildest of shrugs, no more than a wince of her bony shoulder. “My husband refused,” she said.
Tito nodded. He placed the storage key on the table between them. It was tagged with her name and the unit's location in the Cruz Brothers warehouse. Ms. Almonte did not look at the key, maintaining eye contact with him. “I know why you came back,” she said. “So let's not waste time on the survey. My mother will wake up soon and I won't be able to talk to you.”
Tito nodded again. “Are you still in touch with Clara?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “I was going to ask you the same thing.”
“When did you last hear from her?”
“It's been a long time,” she said. “Not since her first year of college. And you?”
“Around the same time,” he said.
She a
te a spoonful of the sancocho and seemed to consider what he had said. “It's a shame,” she began.
“What?”
“That she didn't go to Cornell.”
“Uhh—yes,” said Tito. He stirred the sancocho with his spoon, steering a piece of carrot around the bowl.
“I'm sorry,” she said. “I see that I'm upsetting you. I didn't mean to do that.”
“None of the other Word Club girls know where she is?” asked Tito.
She shook her head. “They weren't as close as you might think. I guess Clara's whereabouts remain a mystery.” She looked at his left hand and he felt himself being assessed anew. “I take it you're not married now?”
“No,” he said.
She raised her eyebrows. “A girlfriend, at least? Surely. You're a handsome fellow, after all.”
“No,” he said, looking up from his bowl. “Not right now.”
She nodded once, a kind of directive. “You should eat your sancocho,” she said. “Before it gets cold.”
AFTERWARD, TITO GOT in his car and drove across the bridge. It was rush hour and traffic was heavy. By the time he reached Oradell, it was dark. He parked on the street and climbed the steps, but instead of going in, he went around the side of the house, past the graves of the deceased pets and the shed where he kept the lawn equipment. He stopped at one of the back windows, hoping to spy his wife and children at play—a golden moment of domestic happiness that would affirm everything. But all he could see was a middle-aged man eating dinner alone in a room where the art had recently been removed from the walls.
Clara
The envelope must have come in the mail while she was at the airport—big as a kitchen bulletin board, with DO NOT BEND stamped in red letters beneath the address. She'd been expecting it, dreading it. Thomas had left it for her on the sideboard in the front hall and it was the first thing she saw as she and Deysei entered the house.
“What's that?” said her niece.