by Jon Michaud
Over the Thanksgiving weekend, he took repeated walks past the Lugo house on Payson Street and spent excessive amounts of time sitting on the park wall across the street in the hope that Clara, home from Cornell, would look out from her bedroom window and see him. It was, of course, no more than a continuation of the vigils he had kept earlier in the spring and summer, always waiting, waiting for her. Sometimes it had actually produced results. Clara would emerge from the house and they would go for a walk, kissing in the trees and finding a spot where they could watch the barges and sailboats on the river. But this time there was no sight of her. Her younger brother came out of the house and looked across at him with a What's-it-to-you? scowl as he headed down to Broadway. That kid always seemed confused to Tito. Confused and mad about something. Darkness came and Tito climbed down from the wall and went home.
A month later, in the week before Christmas, he encountered Clara's mother in a discount clothing store on 207th and Sherman. He had not seen her close up in years. Whereas she had once looked fierce, she now seemed embittered, scowling, as if unable to let go of some grievance.
“Señora Lugo?” he said to her as they stood before a rack of winter coats. “How is Clara? Does she like college?”
“Who are you?” she said to him. He'd worried that she might recognize him, but it had been a long time. “Why are you asking me about Clara? What do you know about her?”
“Nothing,” said Tito. “She was in my class at Kennedy, that's all.”
“How did you know who I am?” she asked, walking around the rack of coats toward him. “How did you know I was her mother?” She looked demented. “Why are you asking me about Clara?”
“Never mind,” said Tito. “Feliz Navidad.” He got out of there as fast as he could. He heard her voice receding behind him as he made for the exit: “What business is it of his how Clara is doing, hmm? You tell me.”
Señora Lugo's vehement reaction and her use of the past tense made him consider, briefly, the idea that Clara was dead—that she had killed herself, that her letter to him was a suicide note. But he knew that wasn't it. She wasn't suicidal. More likely, she was someone who would run away and hide. The way they had conducted their affair over the summer told him that she knew how to pretend, how to deceive. Soon enough, he would become skilled at those arts, too. That autumn, he'd talked to some of their former classmates, going through lists of friends, asking about what so-and-so was doing. Nobody had any news about Clara. The Almonte girls had all dispersed to their fancy schools and it never occurred to him that he could have asked Ms. Almonte herself.
If Clara was home for the holidays, she would be working. During the week between Christmas and New Year's, he went into Lugo Hardware with the hood of his sweatshirt worn over his baseball cap. Don Roberto, probably thinking he was in there to steal something, had watched him the entire time. Tito browsed the aisles of plumbing parts, mini blinds, and cheap saucepans, hoping Clara would come out of the back room. There was no sign of her. After half an hour, he bought a roll of duct tape and left. Maybe Clara's father recognized him, maybe he didn't—he'd said nothing.
Perhaps she had not come back to New York. Perhaps, having had a taste of life away from the city, she was in no hurry to return. Perhaps she had stayed up at Cornell the whole time. There was only one place to go now, and that was to Ithaca. In January, he took a couple of days off work and drove up to the Finger Lakes. The journey took much longer than he expected—almost six hours—and it was dark when he arrived. The farther north and west he'd gone, the whiter the world had become. Snow covered everything from the Catskills through Binghamton and Ithaca. Once in town, he followed the mortarboard signs to the campus, which in its architectural splendor reminded him of Yeshiva University in the Heights. The registrar's office was closed. His search would have to wait until the morning. He took a room in a motel on Route 13. That night, with nothing else to do, he walked around the downtown. It was unbearably cold and there were piles of snow on the sides of all the roads. Tito felt as though he had traveled to another country. He thought of a movie he'd seen once: Ice Station Zebra. He half-expected people to speak to him in a foreign language. There was a bar not far from his motel, a student hangout full of people his own age, people who had recently graduated from high schools all across the country, people whose parents were proud to send their children to this frigid, remote town. It was the era of grunge and everyone was wearing denim and flannel. Tito, in his baggy jeans, his Yankees jersey, and his black skullcap, looked like no one else there. He was the only person of color in the room but nobody seemed to notice. Somehow that was even more unnerving. He went back to the motel and watched a movie.
In the morning, he was at the Cornell registrar's office when it opened. The woman behind the window told him that Clara was not currently enrolled at the university. How readily she had given him that information, he thought as he stood outside 86 Cooper. The middle-aged secretary had looked in her computer and said, “We have no record of a student by that name.” Tito asked the woman if Clara had been accepted to the school. “I don't see anything to that effect, sir, but you'd have to check with admissions.” How the world had changed. We live in a time of secrets now, he thought. Secrecy could mean different things in different situations. The openness of that earlier time had not helped him find Clara. He hoped that he would have better luck tracking down Raúl, especially now that the two quests had become fused in his mind—as if returning the bangle to Ms. Almonte would somehow reunite him with Clara. He pressed the button for apartment 3G.
After a time, a voice came over the intercom. “Sí?”
“Is Raúl Herrera there?” Tito asked. “He don't live here no more.”
“You know where I can find him?”
“What are you, the police?”
“No. We used to work together.”
“Oh,” said the voice, pausing. And then, as if speaking to someone else in the apartment: “I thought he wasn't doing that shit no more.”
“Do you know where he is?” Tito asked.
“No.”
“Can I leave a message for him?”
“You can leave a message, but he ain't gonna get it, 'cause he don't live here no more.”
“Thanks.”
He looked at the list of names next to the buzzers: FELIZ, CASTILLO, JACOBS, SCHMIDT, ALLEN, ESPINOZA, DAVIES, FRANKEL, LóPEZ. Still a lot of Spanish in this building, which was not as nice as his father's—not as well maintained, not as close to the park. The neighborhood was changing all around him. On weekends, yellow cabs appeared early in the morning dropping off passengers after a night out downtown. There was a farmer's market now that closed off Isham Street every Saturday afternoon and, in the summers, a Shakespeare festival. He saw the young white kids fresh from Cornell and God knows where else showing their parents around, walking them through the park, boasting about the Cloisters. He saw the older white couples pushing their strollers and talking in the playgrounds. The names beside the doors of apartment buildings were an index of these changes. At the bottom of the tenant list for 86 Cooper was the button for SUPERINTENDENT. This was Santiago's building, Tito remembered. He walked around to a tunnellike entrance with a grated metal door on the side of the building. The tunnel led through to the air-shaft where the garbage cans and recycling containers were kept. Tito knocked. Waited. Knocked again. “Santiago!” he called.
In time, there was the squeak of a hinge followed by the scrape of shoes on cement and a crash of bottles. Tall and thin, with thick glasses and his trademark blue baseball jacket, Santiago emerged into view. His coarse, bristle-like hair was now completely white, but still it looked like you could turn him upside down and paint a wall or clean a toilet with him.
“Oye, Santiago! It's Tito Moreno.”
“Ah!” said Santiago, tilting his head so that he could see Tito through his bifocals. “Come, come.” He unlocked the metal door.
Tito followed him back through the little tunn
el into the court-yard, then down a short flight of steps to another door, which led into the boiler room. The sound of those massive boilers—the symphonic hiss and rush of them at work—always comforted him. That sound said heat and hot water for winter mornings. It was a refuge from the elements in this cold city. He had spent all of his life falling asleep to that steam symphony coming through the wall from his little bedroom, and now that he lived on the third floor of his new building, he missed it. What he heard now were horns and sirens and garbage trucks and drunken arguments over some “ho.” Being in the basement of Santiago's building somehow made him more nostalgic for his parents' place than when he visited them on the weekend. This may have been because Santiago, who was close to Tito's father in age, lived alone now. His wife had died five years before and his daughters had married and moved out. Santiago had not said a word since opening the gate for him. Tito followed him past the boiler into the basement apartment, which was full of junk.
“Café?” said Santiago, leading him into the kitchen.
Tito looked around at the untidiness, registering the complete lack of embarrassment with which his host had invited him into this mess, and he felt an alarm go off inside himself, the alarm saying that this was how he was going to end up if he wasn't careful, if he didn't do something soon.
“No, gracias.” His heart went out to Santiago, and for a moment he thought he should play matchmaker. He should introduce him to Ms. Almonte's mother. She was probably ten years older than he was, but they had the same unhurried, un-American peasant manner about them. Then he dismissed the idea. Ms. Almonte's mother would probably be dead soon. No point getting Santiago's hopes up.
He watched his host unscrew a metal espresso maker and spoon Bustelo into the filter before filling the base with water and twisting the contraption back together. Santiago set it on the stovetop. Click, click, click, click, poof! The gas came on.
“¿Tu Mami? ¿Y tu Papi? ¿Cómo están?” asked Santiago, sitting down at the table.
“Están bien,” said Tito.
“You still living there?”
“No. I moved out.”
Santiago nodded and once again looked down at him through the lower lenses of his bifocals.
“How are your daughters?” asked Tito.
“Good, good. Elie, she married a policeman. They live in the Bronx. She comes to visit every week. A good daughter. She brings me food all the time. Like I'm going to starve living by myself.” Tito remembered Elie, a chunky girl who had grown breasts before any other girl in the fifth grade. The boys used to chase her around the schoolyard trying to grope them. Tito had been one of those boys but had never succeeded in catching Elie.
“And Laura?”
“In Miami.” He shook his head. Laura was one of the neighborhood's beauties, a great dancer who had boyfriends early and often.
“Still with the trumpet player?”
Santiago nodded gravely. “What can I do? She's in love. He's in some group down there.” He cleared his throat with a tectonic hawk. “So, is somebody moving out upstairs I don't know about? Is that why you're here?”
The espresso maker began to gurgle and percolate, filling the room with the smell of coffee.
“No. I'm looking for a tenant.”
“Yes?”
“Raúl Herrera.”
Santiago waved dismissively. “He's gone. Wasn't a tenant, either. He was here illegally. Nothing but bad attitude.”
“INS got him?”
“No, no. He was illegally in the building. The apartment was in his girlfriend's name. Yunis. She lived here for years.”
“Lived?”
“She moved back to D.R. a couple of weeks ago. Sublet the place.”
“And Raúl. Did he move with her?”
“Don't know. But I doubt it. Hold on.” Santiago stood up and walked out of the room. The espresso maker percolated with an accelerated, percussive bubbling. It sounded like it was going to explode, so Tito switched off the gas. The stove top was covered in spills and coffee grounds.
Santiago returned, holding a piece of paper.
“I've got an address where I'm supposed to send the mail,” he said, looking at the words on the paper as if they were written in Cyrillic. “Someplace in New Jersey.”
TITO WAS LATE for his first estimate of the day, a big house in Riverdale. He often wondered why someone this rich would call Cruz Brothers and not Allied or Mayflower. Maybe his estimate was a bargaining chip. Maybe you ended up in a house like this by going to the effort of finding the best price for everything you bought.
After that, he stopped for a late lunch at the Riverdale Diner, bringing his New York and vicinity road atlas to the table to look up the address that Santiago had given him. Millwood. One of those generic town names New Jersey was full of: Springfield, Union, Somerville. It was in Essex County. Millwood's proximity to Newark suggested a lateral move for Raúl, from one ghetto to another. Maybe some of his old pals from Rikers lived out there.
On his way to the George Washington Bridge, he stopped back in at the Cruz Brothers offices to check in with Orlando and pick up a box of flyers. This would be his business justification for the trip. Planting the seeds of new business. Expanding the customer base. All that horse-shit the brothers liked to say.
When he got off the Garden State Parkway in Irvington, his suspicions were confirmed: burned-out buildings, twenty-four-hour go-go bars, and not a white face to be seen. He drove through Irvington and headed south and west along local roads, the neighborhoods improving every couple of blocks. He passed a shopping plaza and turned onto a tree-lined street with large, old houses and well-tended lawns. It reminded him of the street in Bergen County where Ms. Almonte had moved from and it gave him pause. What was Raúl or his girlfriend doing having mail sent to this address?
He parked across the street from the house, a gabled white colonial, and decided to sit there for a few minutes. The driveway was empty and the light outside the front door had been left on the night before. He scanned the windows for movement, but saw nothing. It was a warm, beautiful early autumn afternoon. The leaves had not yet started to fall and there was not even a hint of winter in the wind, but he knew it was coming. In a few weeks the gutters would be choked with nature's orange and yellow refuse. Tito reclined his seat to hide himself as much as possible from passersby while keeping his lookout for Raúl. He covered his eyes with the brim of his cap. In five minutes, he'd fallen asleep.
The sound of a door slamming woke him. For a second he had no idea where he was. Then he remembered and anxiously thought that maybe a police officer was coming. His shirt was damp where it had been in contact with the upholstery. He rubbed his eyes and lifted his cap. A minivan was now in the driveway of the house across the street. The engine cut off and a chubby, brown-skinned girl in overalls and short sleeves walked from the car toward the front of the house. On her arm—son of a bitch—was what looked from this distance to be a gold bangle. But he didn't have time to dwell on that, because the driver's side door slammed and, around the back of the minivan, here came Clara.
Thomas
Thomas walked Guillermo down to the corner to wait for the school bus. The intersection of Passaic Street and Irvington Avenue, where they waited every day, marked the border between Millwood and the westernmost encroachment of the city of New-ark. On their side of the road, there were single-family homes leading, block by tree-lined block, to a town center that boasted a country club, micro-brewed beer, and handmade ice cream. On the other side of the avenue, facing Millwood, was a strip mall with a decrepit dollar store, a supermarket that smelled like rotting meat, and a Chinese takeout joint where the cooks worked behind bulletproof glass. The brown brick towers of the Ivy Hill apartments loomed above the stores as if ready to mug them. He and Clara had come to Millwood because they'd heard a lot about the town's ethnic diversity—that it was a place in the suburbs where no one looked twice at a mixed-race family. What they hadn't heard as much abou
t was the high cost of real estate there. It was only the ominous proximity of those Ivy Hill high-rises that brought the asking price of the third house they saw within their range.
The scene on Irvington Avenue no longer alarmed or amazed him as it had when they'd first moved. It had taken a little while to get used to the idea that the poor and middle class lived so close to each other here. In this part of New Jersey, half a mile separated a street you wouldn't walk down from a street you'd never want to leave. That seemed fine for the city, but not for the suburbs—and certainly not for the suburbs where Thomas had grown up. Barely a week went by without a story in the Star-Ledger about a fire in one of those nearby neighborhoods in which an elderly person or a young child died because their rental quarters were not equipped with smoke detectors or a fire escape. The previous week an explosion had destroyed half a dozen vacant houses in Hillside when drug addicts scavenging for scrap metal had accidentally cut a gas pipe. People always talked about the inconveniences of New York City—the crowds, the high prices, the noise—but what about all the conveniences of the place? They sometimes only became apparent once you'd left.
The school bus arrived in due time, halting at the curb in front of them, deploying its STOP sign and bringing the traffic on Irvington Avenue to a standstill. The doors accordioned open to reveal the two West African men—the driver, Jin, and his aide, Kimbe. Both wore tropical shirts and straw fedoras. Thomas always imagined them as missionaries delivering kids from a war zone. “Good morning, Germo!” they bellowed, abbreviating his name into something they could pronounce.
Guillermo said, “Hi!” and climbed the three steps, a smile on his face because riding in this big yellow machine never got old for him. Thomas handed Kimbe the backpack and leaned in to kiss his son on the cheek.
“Bye, Daddy!” said Guillermo. All had been forgiven with the purchase of the robot.
“Bye,” said Thomas. “Have fun today.”
The doors closed, the STOP sign folded back, and the bus pulled away. Traffic resumed behind it. In the tinted glass of the bus's window, Thomas could just see Guillermo waving. He waved back and watched the bus head down the avenue. Saying goodbye to his son every morning never failed to break his heart, but these last few weeks, when everything seemed to be turning to shit, it was especially poignant for him—as if, each time, he were rehearsing a much bigger goodbye.