by Jon Michaud
About halfway through that first semester, a typewritten letter arrived in her mailbox. Up in the lefthand corner of the envelope was his return address:
T. Walker 24-24
24th St.
Astoria, NY 11218
Standing in the lobby of her Morningside Heights apartment building, with the brass mouth of her mailbox agape before her, she rubbed at the envelope and knew, just knew before she opened it, that it was a love letter. If she opened it and read what he had written to her, there would be no turning back: The feelings that had been gathering force in her heart during their weeks of studying together would overwhelm her caution, her fear, her desire not to rush into anything just so quickly. She believed that there was no end in sight for where the relationship might go, no end except for the one she hoped for most.
She tore open the flap.
IT HAD BEEN a love letter, of course, the first of many. Thomas enjoyed writing them (and enjoyed her response to them) so much that Clara feared that when it came time to propose he would do so by mail. But he had not. Instead, he'd fumblingly, charmingly, proposed to her on one knee in Astoria Park at sunset with the engagement ring he'd purchased with his first bonus, just as an Amtrak train went over the viaduct on its way north to Boston, the sky orange and red behind the skyscrapers of the East Side.
Lying in bed with Thomas now, after he'd complied with her request for sex, Clara thought how you never, at the outset of a love affair, looked ahead to the difficulties. You never thought, I'll marry this guy and three or five or seven years from now, we'll be arguing about our inability to have a child and I'll have to beg him for sex. You never thought your relationship, the one you'd been waiting all your life for, would be anything but magnificent. Clara did not rue the falseness of such optimism now; if anything, as she glided in to sleep, she found herself hoping for its improbable return.
Tito
People liked to point out how strange it was that Tito worked for a moving company when he himself had never moved. Until earlier that summer, the only address he had ever had was: Small Bedroom, Basement Apartment, 222 Seaman Avenue, New York, NY 10034. His parents put no pressure on him, their only child, to leave, and he knew that, as his father grew older and the demands of the job became harder for him, his mother was (even beyond the usual coddling Dominican mothers give their sons) increasingly grateful to have him around. There was a local kid, Nelson, a skinny teenager with big round glasses and a shaved head, who helped with the painting and the endless sorting of recyclables, but when it came to dealing with the tenants, Tito's father wanted them handled only by Tito or himself. Nelson, earnest and hardworking, spoke almost no English and the building was full of tenants who spoke nothing but.
Tito had his dream life, of course. That was how he survived the indignities and embarrassments of cohabiting with his parents at an age when everyone he had gone to school with had moved out, gotten married, sired children, or disappeared into the world. The posse of neighborhood friends he'd grown up with had crumbled away, rendering him the lone holdout. Last Man Standing. The only people he saw now were those kids' parents. He saw them in the supermarket and the liquor store, buying their gandules verdes, their bottles of Brugal, and their lottery tickets. He saw them in the park, walking their dogs. They looked completely lost, as if life had gotten too easy for them now that they'd emigrated, raised their children in America, and made it into late middle age. What was left for them now? He sometimes felt that he was a stand-in for the departed. How quickly it had all vanished, the life he'd had in his teens and early twenties: the ball games at Yankee Stadium, the trips to City Island beaches and New Jersey amusement parks, the pickup basketball and touch-football games, the sledding in cardboard boxes on the hills near the river, the snowball wars fueled with beer and cheap brandy, the pranking and talking smack, the weekends out at the bars and nightclubs uptown and downtown, drinking and bullshitting and trying to meet girls. At the time, it seemed like it would go on forever, but one by one his friends had succumbed to other lives. Alejandro had been the first. He had gotten his crazy Grenadan girlfriend pregnant and moved to Staten Island, where her people owned a bunch of businesses—a bicycle repair shop, a car service, and a chicken joint. Jansel was next. He had finally married that girl Eva, the one he'd been chasing since the eighth grade, the one who'd always played hard to get with him. Eva had a job in a hospital in Englewood Cliffs and Jansel moved out to Paramus, where he was working part-time in the billing department of a Ford dealership. Meanwhile, Tito's distant cousin Hershel, always the least stable of the posse, had let his drug problem get out of control and started stealing from everyone. Watches, cell phones, rings, chains. One minute there, the next gone. Finally, someone got tired of it and called the police. Hershel had been in a halfway house in Long Island City, a place with a cheerful name and a seven o'clock curfew, until he'd fallen off the wagon. He was up top now, in the state pen. Also Edgar, who'd had a football scholarship to some school in the middle of the country before a doctor reset his broken leg out of line. Edgar walked with a limp after that and couldn't play football anymore. He worked nights as a doorman in a rich building downtown. It was a job for life, he'd told Tito, but he was the lowest on the totem pole and wouldn't get a day shift or a regular weekend day off until he was forty. Lastly, there was Ruben, the most successful of them all, a bona fide entrepreneur, who'd made a fortune with some Web site and bought his mother a house in Fair Lawn and drove a Range Rover. Ruben was always flying to Atlanta or California or Chicago for some convention, always making deals on his cell phone, but he'd gotten too big for the neighborhood. Tito still saw them, his boys, sometimes, on birthdays and holidays, for the Super Bowl or the Dominican Day Parade, but they were no longer a part of his normal existence. And with their departure, his life went back to being what it had been when he was a schoolboy: routine, repetitive, and limited.
Sometimes, when he was sitting down to dinner with his parents or dealing with a tenant complaining about the noisy people upstairs or looking for something to do on a Friday night, he felt stagnant and festering, felt that the very simplicity and lack of change were poisoning him. At such times, he always went back to Clara's disappearance as the root of all his problems, as the missed chance to change his life's trajectory. There had been plenty of other girls since then—most recently, the luscious but difficult Jasmina, who'd finally broken up with him for not proposing after they'd been together a year. Jasmina was a teller at the Banco Popular on Dyckman. She had once confessed to him that she'd taken the job in the hopes of meeting a Dominican businessman, but she'd ended up with Tito instead. Tito didn't want to settle for a woman and he didn't want to feel settled for. It didn't work out with Jasmina just as it never seemed to work out with anyone else. The relationships ended and he looked around at the wreckage as if a natural disaster had been the cause. Some guys would have welcomed the serial monogamy, but not Tito. He felt cursed, snake-bit, and as he grew older, he became simultaneously resigned to and terrified of the rut he was in. He coped by withdrawing into a vividly imagined alternate reality in which he was married and living in suburbs like Jansel or Ruben; in which he and his family came into the city on Sundays to dine with his mother and father; in which, after those Sunday lunches, he took his kids to the Emerson Playground.
Now and then, the real collided with the imaginary. For a few weeks, earlier in the summer, Tito had taken a flesh-and-blood child to the playground, a five-year-old boy named Wyatt. Pretending became a lot easier as he sat on the benches with the nannies and stay-at-home moms calling to their kids. Because Wyatt was freckled and blond and Tito was as brown as the mulch in the park's flowerbeds, the women on the benches initially gave him the hairy eyeball. But repeated appearances in the playground along with the boy's obvious affection for him soon vanquished their suspicions. He instructed Wyatt to call him Tío—close enough to his real name—and that seemed to satisfy the curious.
Wyatt and his mothe
r, Tamsin, had moved into the building in June, two months before Tito's sales call with Ms. Almonte. Tito saw the U-Haul as he came up the street from the subway after work one evening, saw Tamsin and another woman—her friend from Philly, it later turned out—carrying a sofa into the building's front entrance. Halfway up the steps, the friend set her end of the couch down and said, “I can't. My arms are killing me.”
By the time she said this, Tito was right behind Tamsin, admiring her square shoulders and her lobeless ears. Normally the last thing he wanted to do when he got off work was help someone lift furniture, but the women were good-looking and he sensed that he needed to do something to change his luck. It had been almost a year since his breakup with Jasmina, and the loneliness was getting to him. When a Stranger Comes to Town, he thought. He offered to lend a hand.
“Wow, that would be great,” said Tamsin, sweeping her fingers through her hair.
With Tito's help, they got the couch into the elevator and took it up to the second-floor apartment, which had previously been the home of two gay men his father was glad to have out of the building. (The management company handled the showing and leasing of apartments; Tito and his father often did not know until moving day who would be coming in.) He went back down and helped them with the last things in the truck: a futon and a dresser—not much work, really, to have earned the gratitude of the attractive new tenant. It was only after all that, when they were standing outside on the sidewalk saying goodbye to the friend, that he noticed the kid sleeping in the cab of the truck, his face half-hidden by a book with a train on the cover, the windows cracked open for air. Tito relished the idea that anybody watching the scene from one of the apartments across the street might have come to the conclusion that he and Tamsin were moving into the building together. While he was having this little daydream, she unlocked the rental truck and lifted the boy, still sleeping, onto her shoulder. “It's been a tough move on him,” she explained. “Thanks again for your help.”
“No problem,” said Tito, and held the door open for her.
HE EXPECTED TO have to contrive ways of running into her in the lobby, or the deli, or the subway. He imagined these encounters, played them out in moment-by-moment detail in his mind—Oh, hi. Sure, I'd love to come in—and then, with the rapidity of a plot being advanced in a porno movie, he was taking off her clothes.
All of that was wiped away the next night, however, when she knocked on his father's door. Tito, thinking it was a tenant looking for a package, answered. Tamsin wore a pair of denim cutoffs and a T-shirt with the word RICE across the front. It would be a week before he learned that Rice was the name of the college she'd gone to and not her favorite football player—or food.
“Hey,” she said. “Sorry to bother you, but I was just wondering: Is the park safe?”
He stood in the doorway, next to the pile of signed-for packages, trying to minimize her view of the inside of his parents' apartment while simultaneously scoping her out. She had a heart-shaped face, reddish-brown hair, and sensitive skin that bruised easily—her arms were covered in black and blue marks from the move. On her neck and biceps there were large, jagged freckles, like pencil shavings. She looked slim but athletic, tensile. Tito could see that she was not wearing anything underneath her T-shirt.
“Ah, you know . . .” he started off, hesitant to tell her that a girl had been murdered in the park earlier in the year—a white college student. Not only that, but a white college student who had been a Cruz Brothers client. Rebecca Waverly was her name. Tito hadn't been involved in the move, but he'd monitored the coverage of her murder closely—as had everyone at work. The Cruz brothers sent flowers to the funeral. Attracted by cheap rents and an express subway line, so many people moved to the neighborhood without knowing anything about it. Tamsin was still looking at him, waiting for an answer. “I've never had any problems,” he said, finally.
“So you think it would be OK for me to go jogging in there?”
“Yes,” he said. “Only I wouldn't go in there at night.”
“Right. Sure. And the playground? For Wyatt?”
“I played there as a kid,” he said. “He'll be fine. Just not at night.”
“That's good to know. And thanks again for helping us yesterday. I'm not sure what we would have done without you.”
“It's nothing,” he said. If his parents had been away, he would have invited her in, but they were eating in the kitchen and he knew they hated to have their meals disturbed. His mother was crazy about it. And besides, Tito could tell from the way Tamsin kept looking over her shoulder that she was worried about leaving Wyatt alone upstairs.
“Well, see you around,” she said.
A FEW DAYS later, a package came for her. It was DHL, not the usual FedEx or UPS. He took it up to her in the evening, knocking on the door.
“Oh, hi!” she said. Today she was wearing capri pants and a halter top, her hair held back from her face by black barrettes. The bruises on her arms were yellowing. Naughty Neighbor Next Door, he thought.
“This came for you,” he said. “It looks important.”
“Oh, it's probably from my husband,” she said.
“Husband?” he asked before he could stop himself. He'd taken care to notice that she didn't wear a ring.
“Yeah,” she said. “He lives in Peru. We're kind of separated right now. You want to come in?”
The scene was so familiar to him that he hardly registered the chaos of the apartment: Moving cartons everywhere, many opened. Half-assembled IKEA furniture. A pizza box with a pair of crusty crescents amid the crumbs and oil stains. It took him a moment to notice that some of the cartons had been shifted into a fortification in the back of the living room. The boy's head appeared from the space behind the wall of boxes.
“Is that your castle?” Tito asked.
“It's my station,” said the kid.
“What kind of station?” Tito asked. “A radio station?”
“No!” said Wyatt. “Train station!”
Tito walked across the room and peered behind the line of boxes. An oval of wooden track was laid out on the floor. Wyatt was pulling a long, multicolored procession of cars around it.
“You like trains?” he asked.
“Yes!” said Wyatt.
“Like is an understatement,” said Tamsin. “What did we do all day yesterday, kiddo?”
“Rode subway trains!” he said.
“Cool,” said Tito looking around at the mess. He turned to Tamsin. “You need a hand with anything?”
“That's OK. You've already helped us a lot.”
“What about that AC? Aren't you kind of hot in here?”
“Well . . . yeah. That would be great.”
He installed the window unit, propping it on the windowsill outside with a can of soup the gay guys had left in one of the cabinets, screwing the accordion wings into the seams of the window to hold it in place. Then he assembled a bookcase, furtively scoping out her stuff, trying to learn more about her. That was when he noticed the framed diploma from Rice University on the floor. Meanwhile, Tamsin was emptying boxes, putting things away, clearing a space around the couch. After a while she disappeared and returned with two bottles of beer.
Wyatt had come out from behind his fortifications and stood in the flow of cool air from the Fedders. “Wa!” He said. “That's nice.”
Tito twisted the top off his bottle. “So, is your husband Peruvian?” he asked as nonchalantly as he could.
“Oh—no,” she said. “An all-American boy from South Dakota. He's an epidemiologist.”
“A dimelo-what?” said Tito.
A giggle escaped her. “He studies infectious diseases,” she said. “Pandemics, plagues, that kind of thing.”
“Like that chicken flu everybody keeps talking about?”
“Yes. Like that. We lived in the jungle—in the Amazon basin—for a year. His research took a lot longer than he expected, though maybe he was just lying to me when he said it would
only take six months.” She rolled her eyes. Tito thought it was a gesture she might have made in the company of a girlfriend.
“Must have been hard,” he said.
“It was. Harder than I expected, anyway. I used to think of myself as intrepid, a risk taker. I lived by myself in Houston and backpacked around Europe after college, but having a kid changes everything. Stuff that wouldn't have been a big deal when I was single suddenly seemed impossible. I just couldn't handle it anymore—the weird superstitions, the goddamn insects, the fear of disease, having to boil the water, nobody speaking English.”
Tito laughed.
“What's so funny?”
“Sounds like the Dominican Republic,” he said.
WEDNESDAY, HIS MIDWEEK day off work, Tito was lying in bed half awake with his hand down his boxers, passively playing with himself, thinking about the word rice. His mother knocked and immediately entered the room.
“La muchacha esta aquí.”
“What muchacha?”
“The new one. She just moved in. The one you've been sniffing around.”
“Tamsin?”
“Sí. Tom-seen.”
“She's here?”
“Sí. I don't know why you're wasting your time on her when you could have had Jasmina.”
“Forget Jasmina, Mami. I know you liked her, but it's over.”
“I know it's over. Her mother still calls me sometimes. Jasmina's down in D.R. right now with her new man.”
“Good for her,” said Tito. “Tell Tamsin I'll be right out.”
He waited until his mother left before getting out of bed and putting on a pair of jeans to hide his middling hardon. He found a clean T-shirt and messed with his hair. Barefoot and euphoric, he went out to meet her.
She was sitting on the sofa in the living room, wearing more clothing than he'd seen on her since she moved in: a knee-length skirt with a matching jacket and a white blouse. She looked like the star of a different movie altogether. Classroom Confessions. His mother was waiting silently with her but got up once he entered the room.