by Jon Michaud
Tito smiled and bowed. “Right this way, ma'am.” He showed her a bedroom near the entrance to apartment, telling her it was her study, pointing out the bookcases. “I had your diploma from Cornell framed and put up on the wall.”
“That's very thoughtful of you,” she said. He seemed to understand what was going on, that he needed to make her feel comfortable, that he needed to seduce her all over again. He made a few attempts to take her hand or kiss her cheek, but they were playful. Many men, she thought, would have grabbed her, forced themselves on her. But Tito was his father's son, a gentleman.
There was food in the kitchen and a bottle of wine chilling in the fridge. “You hoping to get lucky, or something?” she asked, which made him laugh.
“Hoping.” He said it in such a way that she knew if nothing happened between them this afternoon, he would wait. He would not force her. The futility of his patience chastened her. She would need to give him something.
They made their way through the rest of his tour, which ended at a second bedroom, where a sleeping bag had been laid on the floor and made up with clean linens like a proper bed.
“Let's try it out,” she said, and lowered herself onto the sleeping bag, slipping off her sandals. Tito sat down next to her, but she got up again and went to the window, still anxious. A moment later, he was there behind her, his hands on her hips, his chest pressing gently against her back. She could smell him, a faint whiff of cologne mixed with fresh sweat. Slowly, he turned her around and reached up and squeezed the flesh of her earlobe. It was something he liked to do, like a cat swatting a ball of yarn. Her earlobe must have been some kind of pressure point, because his squeezing of it always relaxed her, always turned her on. With his other hand, he swept his fingers across her throat in a gesture as soft as a breeze. Whatever he was doing was working. She felt desire, like the tickle of someone's breath between her legs.
The hand that had been at her neck reached behind her, up under her blouse, the fingers pressing against the small of her back. Almost of its own accord, her mouth opened to kiss him.
WHEN IT WAS over, she cried, small spasm-like sobs, not much louder than hiccups. She and Tito were mostly naked, mostly uncovered on the sleeping bag, cooling off after the heat of sex.
“What?” Tito asked. “Did I hurt you?”
“No, no,” she said. “I'm sorry.” It had been uncomfortable, at times awkward, but also pleasurable, the first taste of something she wanted more of.
“What is it? Are you OK?”
“I'm fine,” she said.
“Are you hungry? We've got all that food.”
“Yes,” she said. “I am hungry.” She wiped her nose on her wrist. He got up and went into the kitchen, and while he was in there, heating the food in the microwave, popping the cork on the wine, she decided: She wasn't going to tell him. She wasn't going to ruin this by saying goodbye.
EARLY IN THE morning on Sunday, when everyone else in the house was asleep, Clara got out of bed and made her final rounds, her farewell tour. She was still a little sore from the sex three days earlier. It was not an unpleasant feeling, a tenderness, a reminder of Tito she could carry with her into her new life (un-aware as she was of the much more enduring reminder that was already growing and dividing within her).
The dawn came later and later every day. Now, at a quarter to seven, the house was filled with the murky light of hazy late summer. When she had first been brought to New York, Sunday was a church day. Dolores insisted that they all attend Mass, a ritual Clara's father endured for a time because his wife was still undergoing a temporary kindling of religious faith from surviving the accident. It had stopped not long after Efran was born, when sleep became more important than church. Sleep had consumed Sunday mornings ever since.
Clara went down to the basement, to the room where she used to hang the laundry in the years before her father bought the dryer. It was now a kind of storage area and workshop for renovations to the house, renovations that had taken on the status of an elderly relative who would not die. Down there, she found what she had been looking for—her last piece of business before she left, a fare-well gesture for Dolores, which, after a few minutes of labor, she left on the kitchen table.
As she went back upstairs, she heard explosions and gunfire coming from the living room. Efran was awake, watching cartoons, sneaking them in before their father woke up. She left him alone, went up to her room. Her satchel and a plastic Mandee bag were behind her bed. She looked around at the unadorned space where she had spent the last twelve years. It had been not much better than a cell. She nodded, as if to affirm this thought and then, as softly as she could, she climbed the stairs to the third floor, where she would have a good view of the street in front of the house. She wondered how this was going to work. Were they coming in a car? In a taxi? Would they knock?
The third floor showed a few improvements from the days when she used it as a refuge from Dolores. The holes in the plaster had been repaired. New windows had been installed to cut down drafts and reduce heating costs. But it still needed paint, still needed wiring, still needed the long-promised second bathroom to be installed. Here she was at last. She was not going to fly out of there as she had so often dreamed as a child. She would walk out the door, into daylight.
A black cab came to a stop, double-parked in front of the house, its windows rolled down. Clara could hear the voices of the people in the car discussing something. Then Yunis stepped out of the back, looking up at the house. She waved. Was it really going to be this easy?
Clara went down to her room, rushing now, not caring about waking anyone up. She retrieved her bags and descended to the ground floor. On her way to the front door, she walked into the den. Efran, in pajamas, was lying on the couch watching Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers.
“I'm leaving,” she said.
“Where are you going?”
“Away from here,” she said.
He sat up, suddenly aware that something out of the ordinary was taking place. “What?”
“Goodbye.”
She did not lock the front door behind her. There, on the street, was Yunis, beckoning her into the cab. Clara ran between the two parked cars and got in. Sitting behind the driver, in the back of the cab, was a middle-aged woman.
“Hola, Clarita,” she said.
“Hola, Mami.”
They hugged desperately in that backseat, her mother kissing her on the head, as Clara started to weep. Yunis got in the cab and slammed the door.
“¡Vámonos!” she said to the driver, and they pulled away.
Still hugging her mother, Clara looked back through the rear window as the cab descended Payson Street and her father's house shrank farther and father away. In the house, Efran would be up-stairs by now, waking her father and Dolores from their Sunday slumbers. They would shake their hangover-heavy heads. They would not understand at first what he was talking about. Her father might even tell Efran to shut the fuck up. But Efran would persist and finally they would understand what he was saying and they would come downstairs, her father in his baggy pajamas and his wife-beater, Dolores in a ragged housecoat, like the one she had been wearing the night Clara had first arrived in New York. They would come downstairs and look outside and see nothing and lock the front door. Then they would go into the kitchen, shaking their heads in disbelief, and in the kitchen they would see what Clara had left them as her parting gift: the pieces of Dolores's paint pole sawed into harmless foot-long sections and laid end to end. And on those pieces, they would read the message she had written in permanent marker, one word to each sawed-off piece: You can't hurt me anymore.
Tito
In the Piper's Kilt, the four flat screens were showing two college football games and two baseball games—Rutgers, UConn, the Yankees, and the Mets, a tristate sporting flush. It was the month of transition, when both of Tito's favorite pastimes shared the city and its airwaves: summer to fall, hardball to pigskin; warm to cold, vacation to work. He w
as still on vacation, still had two weeks before he had to go back to Cruz Brothers. He hoped that in those two weeks he would manage a period of transition for himself, too, that he would somehow be different when he went back to work. This meeting with Clara would have a lot to do with that.
He'd arrived at one o'clock, early enough to watch two innings of the Yankees game while drinking rum and Coke to mellow himself out. The Bombers' late-summer resurgence had faded in the past week and they were behind three runs early in the game against the pesky Devil Rays. Unbelievably, it looked like they would not catch the Red Sox this year. And that, in itself, was another transition. For a decade they had always finished first.
The bar held about two dozen other customers, mostly young men in baseball caps and T-shirts. Had he been there earlier, he would likely have seen the hordes of Columbia alumni who flooded the neighborhood whenever there was a game at Baker Field. Parking was hard to find on these mornings. Tempers were short in the streets near his father's building, which were suddenly lined with a better make of car. The alumni came up from the more desirable precincts of Manhattan, down from Westchester and Connecticut, plump, successful men decked out in baby blue attire, cheering for a historically bad team. He thought of them as an invasion force like the Mongols or the Apache: the Alumni.
Outside, it was sunny, another in what seemed to be an endless string of beautiful September days. But inside, it was dim and seasonless—bar time. Every minute or so, Tito's eyes ticked toward the door, looking for Clara. It was ten past two and still she was not there. Was she going to stand him up? He didn't think so. He did not think there was that kind of cruelty in her. She wouldn't have called him just to do that. He took another sip of his drink.
He'd been disappointed when she'd refused his offer to drive her into the city. Having listened to countless confessions and confidences of men he barely knew in the cab of a moving truck, he'd formed the conviction that it was easier to talk about difficult things when you were not looking at the person you were talking to. The car ride would have given them that opportunity. But he understood her reasons for refusing, or thought he did. Clara did not know yet if she could trust him. She might even be a little afraid, he supposed.
Awaiting her arrival, he was reminded of the days in late August after they'd had sex in the empty apartment, the stormy, hazy, oppressive days into which the summers in New York always seemed to dwindle. He had been so self-contented, so inebriated with his love for her that he was, at first, completely unconcerned by his inability to get in touch with her. After all, she'd never been easy to reach. She'd told him that her father was making her work every day in the store and that her stepmother was on her every moment at the house. It was a family life so far removed from his own that it sometimes seemed like a fairy tale, like something Clara had made up. While he waited, Tito let himself get carried away. He imagined going to visit her at Cornell, staying in her dorm room; he pictured the two of them getting together during the Christmas break to go ice skating and see the tree at Rockefeller Center. (His dream life, even early on, tended toward the conventional.) This was it; they were on their way.
The door opened and two couples entered. It was a moment before Tito realized that the fifth person, who came in behind them, was not with the first four. The fifth person was Clara. From the doorway, she made eye contact with him and crossed the bar in the direction of his booth. There was enough of a crowd that she had to work her way through them, saying, “Permiso,” and “Excuse me.” This gave him a few seconds to take her in as she turned and squeezed through the Yankee jerseys. She was much closer to him now than she had been the days he parked outside her house. She was wearing a pair of jeans and a navy blazer with a white T-shirt under it, low heels on her feet. It was not, he noted, funeral attire. Her hair was up in a moño. She looked good, he confirmed to himself. Definitely older, definitely a little heavier (and definitely a little more filled out in the breasts, if he wasn't mistaken), but still good. Still beautiful. Still Clara. He wasn't disappointed and hoped that she would feel the same way about him. He'd put on a pair of charcoal gray pants and a white shirt. He was going to borrow a black blazer and tie from his father before the funeral—an excuse to show Clara off to his parents, to take her to the old apartment. He'd gotten his hair cut the night before, gotten those crazy tufts of his trimmed. He felt ready, excited.
As she neared the booth, he stood. What was it going to be? A kiss? A hug? A handshake? He was feeling unsteady on his feet, dizzied by seeing her again. He let her decide and was disappointed when she extended her hand. He shook it and they sat down.
“Hello, Tito. Sorry I'm a little late.”
“No, no,” he waved. “No problem. I was watching the game.” He hoped she couldn't smell the rum on his breath.
“I have to tell you, this is a little weird for me.”
“I know,” he smiled. “It's a little weird for me, too. But we're here. Thank you. I mean it. You didn't have to come. It has been a long time.”
“Yes. A long time,” she agreed, and smiled, as if in relief. “But I felt like I had to come. I owed it to you. At least that much.”
He nodded and smiled. So far so good, but don't push it. “You want something to drink?”
“Sure, what are you having? Is that Coke?”
“There's a little rum in there, too.”
“Oh. Well, maybe a glass of white wine. Whatever they've got.” When he returned with her drink, she was still sitting straight-backed with her elbow on the table. She had not looked over at him even once while he was at the bar. “Thanks,” she said, accepting the glass. He wasn't getting much from her, but at least she was here, he reminded himself. “So, can you tell me how you found me? Not that I was hiding, but, you know, there are ten million people in greater New York. I've been wondering how it happened. It just seemed so random.”
He grinned with inordinate pride. “Yeah, sure.”
“I mean, you were looking for Raúl—that's what Deysei told me. Why were you looking for him?”
He held up his hand. “Wait. Let me go back to the beginning. Not to the beginning beginning, but the start of this part. About a month ago, I got a call to do an estimate for a move in New Jersey—Oradell, you know it? No? It's in Bergen County. Guess who answered the door? Ms. Almonte. Even though I never had her as a teacher, I remembered her. I mean, how could I forget? Especially since you used to talk about how great she was.”
“Wow. Where was she moving to?” asked Clara.
“She was moving back into the city, back here to Inwood, to look after her mother. Did you know she grew up on Academy Street?”
“Yes, she told me that once. She said she wanted to help other Dominican girls do what she did—get out. That's what the Word Club was all about.”
“I guess she succeeded,” said Tito, realizing too late how that might sound. There was an awkward silence. “Anyway,” he continued, “she told me her husband didn't want the mother-in-law moving in with them.”
“Harsh.”
“Yeah, can you believe it? Probably some uptight white guy.” He winced. The same might be said of Clara's husband. He needed to watch his mouth. “So Raúl was on my crew for that move. You know he used to work for Cruz Brothers?”
“I did,” said Clara. “But I never thought you were still working there.”
“The only job I've ever had,” Tito said with more melancholy than he intended. He got back to the point: “A couple of weeks after the move, Ms. Almonte calls me up and tells me that something was stolen from her dresser during the move.”
“The bangle.”
“Right. Anyway, I knew that there was no way Hector—the other guy on the crew—had taken it. Very religious. Sends half his money home to his family in Guatemala or El Salvador or wherever. He wasn't going to risk losing his paycheck. Besides, I also heard that Raúl had been in Rikers.”
“Yeah,” said Clara. “It's true. He's definitely a little suspect.”
“So I tracked him down. The address we had was on Cooper Street. I guess that was your sister's apartment. I didn't know you had a sister.”
“She's my half-sister. Yunis. From my mother's second marriage. I have to tell you, I was kind of relieved when she broke up with him.”
“Yeah?” “I never liked the way he looked at me when he thought I wasn't looking at him. Go on.”
“Right.” He almost asked about Deysei, but thought better of it. That would come later. The conversation was going well. Finish the story first. “So anyway, Santiago, you know—the super in your sister's building—is an old friend of my papi's. He gave me your address in New Jersey. Of course, I didn't know it was your address. I was looking for Raúl, and because of that, I was careful. I kind of hung out on the street for a little while checking out the comings and goings. No offense, but for all I knew it was a crack house—Rikers and all. That was when I saw Deysei with the bangle on her arm. And that was when I saw you.”
Clara nodded thoughtfully, as if pondering his story, as if look-ing for flaws in it. “Did you ever find Raúl?” she asked.
“No. Once I took the bangle back to Ms. Almonte, she was cool. Besides, her mother had just passed.” He said nothing for a long moment. Then: “So that's how I found you, Clara. Now it's my turn. What happened to you?”
Clara did not speak at first. To Tito, it seemed like she was trying to get the facts straight in her head, like the moments before an exam in school. “My mother happened,” she said, at last. “She was at a party my father took me to that summer after you and I graduated from Kennedy. This was right around the time of—you know, that day in the apartment. I hadn't seen her since before my father brought me to New York when I was six. I had the chance to go live with her in Queens. I knew it had to be an all or nothing deal. My father wasn't going to share me with her. I wasn't going to be able to come back. I couldn't show my face around the neighborhood. My mother and her second husband came and got me and I went to live with her. It happened so fast. I'm sorry, Tito. I'm really sorry. I didn't have a chance to tell you. But I just couldn't keep living with my father and Dolores. I had to get out of there.”