When Tito Loved Clara

by Jon Michaud

“Not yet. I'll look at the timetable in the morning. Something in the afternoon, so I can spend a little time with my mom. So, how's everything there?”

  “A little crazy, actually,” said Clara without hesitation.

  “Really? Like what?”

  “Well, you remember how I said my sister might be coming back from D.R.?”

  “Yeah . . .”

  “She's flying in tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow? What the hell happened?”

  “She and my mother had a big fight and she stormed out of there this morning. She's staying with Plinio now. Tomorrow was the earliest flight she could get.” There was a long pause. “She's going to have to stay with us for a little while, Thomas.”

  “Why? Doesn't she have an apartment?” he said. “Why can't she and Deysei move back there?” That would solve a couple of problems, he thought but didn't say.

  “She sublet that apartment, remember?” said Clara. “The woman in there now is refusing to leave. I can't say I blame her.”

  “Your sister is homeless?” he said. “What about Raúl? Can't she move back in with him?”

  Here Clara paused. “No. God knows where Raúl's living now.”

  “I don't get it. Why the hell is she coming back here so soon? Why's she giving up so quickly?”

  “I don't know for sure, but I'd bet that she and the new boy-friend already burned through their little honeymoon period.”

  “A boyfriend? That's why she moved?”

  “Like I said, I don't know for sure, but based on her history, I wouldn't be too surprised. That's just how it goes with her.”

  “Shit. And what about that inheritance? Didn't her grandfather leave her money or something?”

  “There's a big legal battle over the estate. She might not see it for years. He had like ten kids with three different women and they all want their cut before Yunis gets hers. Anyway, it's not even that much, just a few thousand dollars.”

  “So, she's homeless, heartbroken, and penniless, and now she's coming to live with us?”

  “Yes.”

  He collected his thoughts for a moment. “Speaking of boy-friends, did you talk to that Tito guy yet?”

  Another pause. “No, not yet. Like I said, it's been a little crazy. I'll talk to him tomorrow.”

  “Don't humor him, Clara. Don't get sentimental. Tell him how it is.”

  “I will,” she said.

  “I'll call you tomorrow when I know what train I'm on. Hug Gilly for me.”

  The conversation wiped out all the good feelings he'd had after the interview. He boarded the train and stewed. This was one of those times when it seemed that every cliché about Latino immigrants was spot on, when every fear he'd had back when he'd first started dating Clara seemed to have been realized. He rued, if only for the duration of the journey to Bethesda, the fact that his marriage had brought him into such regular contact with these crazy Dominicans. Was that racist? Was that bigoted? He didn't know. He didn't care. All he knew was that this wasn't right. All he knew was that this kind of shit did not go on in his own extended family. All he knew was that he was now going to have not only his moody, pregnant teenage niece living under his roof but also his uncouth, loud-mouthed, and unstable sister-in-law. And all this would be happening while he and Clara were about to start IVF, which he'd gathered from the brochures the doctor had given them was a hormonal and emotional minefield. At this point he felt himself wishing he'd married into a nice, repressed family of New England WASPs; he found himself thinking that he should just ditch all of this and run off with Melissa. But he had not heard from Melissa in a couple of weeks—not since his visit with the flowers. She was waiting him out, letting him make a decision. Right now it seemed like an easy decision to make.

  HIS MOTHER MET him in downtown Bethesda and led him to a new restaurant. Thomas no longer tried to keep up with his hometown, with its unrestrained development and prosperity. It was like a childhood friend who'd married into money and suddenly started wearing designer clothes and driving a Bentley. You were still cordial with them, but whatever connection had been there was long gone. Every time he returned, the town where he'd grown up was less familiar to him. The one benefit of it was that his mother's house was now worth twenty times what she and Thomas's father had paid for it in the late sixties. His mother's financial security was not something Thomas worried about.

  She looked well, his mother. Her dark brown hair had grown back nicely and a healthy color had returned to her skin. She was dressing with care once again. Gone were the sweats and the T-shirts of her chemo days. Here she was in a nice pair of gray slacks and navy blue shell, a silver necklace, and matching earrings. She still wore the lymphedema sleeve on her arm, but she was, overall, looking better than she had in a long time. It had been two years, he realized, with some amazement.

  At dinner, she told him she was planning a trip, her first since the diagnosis: a cruise around the South Pacific. She showed Thomas the cruise brochure—Fiji, Tahiti, Bora Bora. The Gauguin experience. “Erin Siegert is going with me. You remember her? We went to Scandinavia together a few years ago to see the fjords.” (In the wake of her divorce from his father, Thomas's mother had established a substitute family, a network of women who lived nearby and looked after one another. Many of these women were either divorced or widowed. None had children living at home and most, like his mother, were retired from full-time employment in the federal government.) Thomas had to acknowledge that the divorce had definitely been a good thing for his mother—and for his father, who had remarried his much younger mistress and retired to Albuquerque, where he could indulge in his stargazing undistracted by family responsibilities. From the rare e-mails his father sent, Thomas gathered that he had become a nocturnal, nonsocial animal. Still, looking at his own life through the lens of his parents', he was spooked by the thought of an existence like theirs, an existence apart from Clara and Guillermo. He did not want to find himself twenty-five years down the road plotting some bachelor vacation, some golf outing with a divorced pal, waiting for news of a heart condition or an enlarged prostate to come back from his primary care physician before confirming his itinerary.

  “Looks like a lot of fun,” he said, handing the brochure back to her.

  “I tell you, I'm so ready. I want to go now,” said his mother.

  “I bet,” he said. “You deserve it, Mom.”

  He told her about the interview and parceled out a few stories about Guillermo. He'd even remembered to bring some recent photographs of his son. There was a good one, a family portrait taken in one of Millwood's numerous parks. It looked like a piece of clip art for a progressive, post-racial America. Thomas found himself on the verge of tears as he showed it to his mother, a tidal surge of panic blocking his throat. It was the same way he felt when he said goodbye to his son each day at the bus stop, when he was gripped with the possibility that he might never see his son again.

  “Oh, that's a good one!” his mother said. “Can I keep it?”

  THOMAS SLEPT LATE the next day and took his mother out for lunch at a restaurant near Union Station. On Amtrak, heading back to New York, his cell phone rang. He expected it to be Clara—he hadn't been able to reach her that morning before leaving his mother's house—but the ID on his phone told him otherwise. EPSTEIN HISTORY ARCHIVE, said the display, the name Thomas had come up with just in case Clara ever went snooping.

  “Hi, Tom,” said Melissa, as if nothing had changed between them, as if there had been no ultimatum delivered, as if they had been talking every day the last two weeks.

  “How did the interview go?”

  “Pretty good,” he said. “I don't want to jinx it.”

  “Are you in New Jersey?” she said.

  “On my way back from D.C.”

  “Well, I'm in the city. Could I meet you in Penn Station? I've got a little surprise.”

  Thomas had planned to get off in Newark and take a cab home, but he'd also been unable to reach Clara to giv
e her an ETA. She was probably at the airport picking up her sister, he realized. Yunis—another reason not to rush back to Millwood.

  “OK,” he said.

  “I'll meet you at the Eighth Avenue exit. Look for my car.”

  He spent the remainder of the journey wondering what the surprise might be. The ultimatum, he now saw, had signaled a shift in Melissa. No longer was she the addled widow in mourning. No longer was she the lonely but privileged housewife. No longer did she seem weak and helpless. Since the ultimatum, Thomas had seen something else in Melissa—a toughminded and ruthless competitiveness. He recalled a spring afternoon after he'd been laid off. Melissa, upon learning that he'd played tennis in his youth, had taken him to her indoor court in Montclair. They'd knocked the ball back and forth amiably enough until Thomas, with a couple of lucky shots, threatened to break her serve. At deuce, she'd clammed up and whizzed two aces past him, exclaiming, “Ha!” as he lurched after the ad point. The next game, she was back to her easygoing self, making him chase balls all over the court. That was the face Melissa was wearing these days, the focused and determined look of the competitor in mid-game flow. Thomas had the sense that, one way or another, all of this was going to be settled before the afternoon was out. The realization filled him with a kind of plummeting fear.

  AS PROMISED, SHE was waiting for him in her white Lexus on the curb near the intersection of Eighth Avenue and Thirty-third Street.

  He got in. No kiss. But otherwise, it was a pleasant experience: the subtly air-conditioned interior, Schubert's Trout Quintet on the stereo, and Melissa herself, looking delectable in dark blue jeans and a crushed satin blouse that she seemed to have chosen because it perfectly matched the pewter gray upholstery of the car. “Hi,” he said, tentatively.

  “Hello, Tom,” she said, with an unreadable little smile as she pulled into traffic.

  “Where are we going?” he asked, and ventured a joke: “To make out in the Temple of Dendur?”

  This got a laugh from her, which raised his spirits.

  “No. But what a great idea.” She turned right on Thirty-fourth and then right again on Seventh, heading downtown. “I thought maybe a change of venue would be good for us.”

  THEY MADE THEIR halting way downtown and Thomas tried to predict where they might be going. He realized that he was trying to predict this in the smallest and largest senses. Where were they going?

  They drove without a word. Melissa didn't mention her ultimatum, didn't mentioned the pregnancy that wasn't, didn't mention the several times in the last month that she'd turned him away at her door, but it was all there, interwoven with the bars of the Schubert. In the Village, Melissa crossed to Hudson Street and found parking. They got out and walked. The building she led him to was on Greenwich Street, a modestly sized modern high-rise with an undulating facade designed by a brandname architect. In Midtown or on Wall Street, it would have been unremarkable, but here, amid the brownstones and brick row houses, it seemed unreal, like something that had been added to the streetscape in Photoshop.

  The doorman greeted Melissa by name, and she and Thomas went through the sparsely decorated but striking lobby. For a moment, Thomas thought they were entering a boutique hotel—someplace without a sign, known only to the initiated—but there was no check-in desk, no bellhop station, no concierge. He was suddenly nervous, as if this were another job interview.

  “Very nice,” he said, realizing, too late, how inane a comment it was.

  Melissa still said nothing. The elevator took them up to the seventh floor and deposited them in a hallway with only three doors. Producing a set of keys, Melissa opened the farthest door and went in without waiting for him.

  Beyond the door was a room filled with sunset light. Thomas had the sense of walking into an art installation on the subject of tranquillity, of celestial repose. The apartment was unfurnished, or rather it was furnished with hopes and possibilities, with potential. To one side there was an open-plan kitchen with an array of stainless-steel appliances. In the other direction, more doors—bedrooms, he supposed. He remembered a Frank O'Hara poem about “a pleasant stranger whose apartment is in the Heaven on Earth Bldg.” This is was what he'd imagined the Heaven on Earth Building to look like when he first read the poem in college.

  Melissa was traversing the broad expanse of shiny blond flooring to open a sliding glass door that led out to a terrace. When the door slid open, a warm breeze came rushing in and flowed around him. Thomas followed her out to the terrace. The river was on the left, and beyond it, New Jersey, the sun a slowly dropping wrecking ball of lava light. Straight ahead, they had a view over the neighboring brick row houses and brownstones to the ascending skyline of Midtown—Penn Plaza, the Empire State Building, and Rockefeller Center. Lights were coming on in the city. Next to seeing Manhattan covered in newly fallen snow, he could not imagine it looking more magical, more inviting.

  “When are you moving in?” he asked.

  “Friday,” she said. “The question is, when are you moving in?”

  So this was it. No more stalling. No more thinking about it. No more hoping she would back down from her ultimatum. What she was showing him was the New York life he'd wanted when he first arrived in the city, the life many people imagined they would live once they made it in New York. It was the loss of exactly this kind of existence that he'd briefly mourned when he and Clara had moved to the suburbs, when they'd bought the Odyssey and begun commuting. Melissa knew. She and Thomas had talked about the draws of the city, the privilege of being able to walk out your front door to restaurants, theater, movies. How simple it would be to step right in, to shed his life in Millwood and reside here. No more crazy Domincans mooching off him, turning up pregnant in his house.

  But he found himself doubting those dreams, those idle fantasies. Much of their appeal was that they were just that: idle. The likelihood of a job offer in the next week allowed him to see things more clearly now. What Melissa was offering seemed suddenly fraudulent, requiring, as it did, the betrayal of his wife and child. Melissa herself, meanwhile, seemed to require nothing more of him than his presence. She seemed to be saying to him: You'll do. You'll save me from being alone. You'll save me the trouble of having to meet another man. He found himself thinking the worst of her—that her choice of husband had been no more than a way of maintaining the privileged ease of her life. What a luxury to be able to make decisions that way! It was what she was asking him to do now. I was married, but this great opportunity came along. He was seized by the vertiginous possibility that he was about to fuck everything up and the converse realization that he could still salvage something—maybe everything.

  “Six months ago, in the Botanical Garden, you said that there would be no complications,” Thomas said.

  “And I meant it. At the time. But it was naive of me—and naive of you to believe me.”

  “Why can't we just keep it the way it was? With you living in the city, it might actually be easier. Especially if I went back to work.”

  “I told you, Tom. When I thought I was pregnant, I realized that wasn't going to be enough. That feeling hasn't changed.”

  “This is what you want,” he said. “This is not my life. I've had no say in choosing this apartment.”

  “It was my money.”

  “You mean Stephen's.”

  “Not anymore. It's mine now and I'm willing to share it with you.”

  “I don't know. I think maybe it's best for you to begin again.”

  “Don't tell me what's best for me. This is your last chance, Tom. If your answer is no, you will never hear from me again. It will be as if I had died.”

  The finality of those words—intended to be threatening—was liberating. Isn't that what he wanted? Wasn't that a good outcome for him? For her to disappear.

  “I'm sorry,” he said. “I can't.”

  Her mouth flattened into a scowl. “Are you sure? Are you really certain that's what you want?”

  “Yes,” he said
, consciously appreciating her beautiful face, the seductive length of her neck, those blue eyes, in these final moments before she was no longer his mistress, no longer a part of his life.

  “You're fooling yourself, Tom. Nothing would have happened between us if things were all right in your marriage.”

  “That's still my answer.” His voice quavered as he spoke.

  “Then you're going to have to find your own way back to New Jersey. Get out of my apartment.”

  “Melissa—”

  “Goodbye, Tom. You're going to regret this.”

  He stepped back from the terrace ledge, retreated into the apartment, and crossed the shiny wood floor to the entrance. There he paused and took a last look at her, Melissa, silhouetted in the glass, leaning on the railing, and looking out over the city, as if already searching for someone else.

  WITHOUT REALLY KNOWING what he was doing, Thomas headed over to the subway station on Varick Street. He felt like he'd just survived a mugging, or that someone had pulled him out of the way of an oncoming bus. He was keyed up, jittery, unable to focus on anything. He boarded the train and stood in front of the in-car map of the subway system. Looking at the map, he realized that he could go anywhere—not just in the city, but anywhere. The subway connected to the airports, to the Port of New York. He was free, but deep down, he knew the freedom was fleeting. The hiatus he'd taken from work and family life the last six months was coming to an end. It was a Sunday-night freedom, an end-of-summer freedom: precious, limited, and waning. Turning away from the map, he got off at Penn Station.

  It was Saturday evening, but unlike a few hours earlier, the station was as crowded as if it were a weekday rush hour. This usually meant only one thing: delays. Sure enough, before he could even check the departure board, the announcement came over the PA: A train had broken down in the Hudson River tunnel. Delays of up to one hour. He went to the bar and ordered a beer. He tried calling the house to let Clara know that he was on his way home. He got their machine.

  He was glad to have a little time to recover from the confrontation with Melissa. He felt enormous relief. He'd gotten away with it: He'd had his extracurricular activity and now he could get back to his family. Melissa would not have any trouble finding another companion, someone willing to be kept. He took a sip of his beer and eyed the score of the game. The Yankees were losing. Yes, everything was going to be fine.