Longing

by Espinosa, Maria

  He thought of his daughter’s unruly black hair, her small, round breasts, the way she walked with her buttocks moving from side to side, the shape of her thighs. But it was forbidden to think about these things.

  How could Jesse not be stirred by women, when he himself could not help but be aroused by their hair, their eyes, their skin, breasts, hips, bellies, the delicate forms of their cheeks, bones, fingers and toes, their ankles, the tufts of hair beneath their arms and at the groin, their flutterings towards and away from him when they sensed he was attracted.

  Eleanor would ask with a rueful laugh, “Why is it your most talented female students who are always the prettiest?”

  And then again as he watched Jerry work on the bust of Sheila, digging into a clay cheekbone with his long fingers, something electric sparked in him. Antonio’s jeering eyes, jeering voice came into his mind; his heart beat faster.

  He felt the beat become irregular. He feared it might be another tachycardiac attack. Leaving the room, once he was in the narrow hallway with its student paintings on the walls, he swallowed a yellow pill with water from the fountain. He always carried the Quinidex pills with him in a jacket pocket. One at the very beginning might be enough to stop it. Heavy foods set it off. Pressure and fatigue set it off. He shouldn’t have eaten at that greasy diner for lunch. He was under too much pressure, with the International Competition and the situation at home.

  He returned to the class. Only fifteen minutes left. He paced back and forth, watching the students as they began to clean up and put away their tools. The fluorescent lights illuminated everyone with a white-green, almost unreal glow.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Antonio, Rosa, Jesse, and Nick sat wedged together at a small round table inside the Five Spot in Manhattan. Charlie Mingus was playing bass. A tall elegant black man was on the piano. A white man, perhaps mulatto, with a dark beard, played drums.

  “Listen to Mingus,” said Jesse. “Oh he is GOOD. If only I could play as good as he does. Someday . . .”

  Stoned, looking down on them all, Jesse saw the tenderness inside Nick. He wanted to cry. Rosa was scared, while Antonio was confused. Antonio wanted to be loved. Antonio had enormous gentleness underneath his rages, his razor sharp voice. Although fatigue showed on his face, he was handsome, with sharply defined features, high cheekbones, a slender build. Antonio was a fine, sensitive man, if a bit whacko. Antonio had been sorely wounded, and he was too proud, and Rosa was too scared to love him. Jesse watched the dim lights flicker over his sister’s face and bare shoulders. Crazy bitch. He hated her. Rosa was driving Antonio crazier day by day. He heard their fights, her crying, her pleading from the bedroom across from his. A destroyer like Mom. Cut your balls off. Before she cracked up he’d admired her, even if at times he’d been jealous of all the attention she got. Why did she have to go crazy years ago, just when he needed her the most to be sane?

  He needed someone to talk to. He and Howard had grown apart, then, and there were things that only she in the family could understand. He would hear her alone in her room, listening to Bessie Smith, singing—at times he could not tell if it was a record of Billie Holliday or Bessie, or Rosa herself singing. She had a good voice when she sang.

  But then there were scenes between her and their parents. She would scream horrible things at them, smash furniture, spend the night crouched on the floor of the attic bathroom, crying, hugging her knees. He could no longer talk to her. She’d changed into someone he no longer knew. She’d gone into the mental hospital, and then she’d gone off to Europe.

  The music’s beat knocked against his sadness, filling him with itself. Blue and green throbbing drums. Mingus was golden with purple shadows. Mingus was one with the bass. The music flowed out of his fingers, and little molecules pulsed into them all.

  Jesse flowed out of the corner into the center of the ceiling to look down at the people who were like gigantic prehistoric ants.

  Bourbon and marijuana could kill the pain.

  He was floating.

  Soft hues of lights turned sometimes brilliant if he squinted. Reds and greens and blues, purples and blacks crawled inside his head where they throbbed to the beat of “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat.”

  Mingus in profile. Stomach protruding nearly against the bass strings. Taut mouth relaxes. A sensual man. Beer. Warm bellies. Had Mingus ever screwed a man in the ass or sucked off a juicy prick? A kindly giant with rages like Antonio’s because the world caused so much pain, but Mingus could climb above the pain with his music, and golden joy burst through the smoky lights, through the masks people wore. They were pitiful. Jesse laughed.

  “What’s so funny?” asked Nick.

  Nick was pale. He had silken hair and bones as delicate as a bird’s. He’d been raised in foster homes and hustled ever since he was fourteen. Nick looked up to Jesse as if Jesse were much older and wiser, yet Nick was nineteen, a year older than Jesse.

  “Oh . . . nothing.”

  “What?” Nick persisted.

  Jesse stubbed out his cigarette and brushed his hair back from his face. “Too long to explain. I’m going outside somewhere and smoke another joint. Come with me and you’ll see for yourself.”

  Nick leaned slightly against Jesse’s shoulder.

  “How long it is that you are lovers?” asked Antonio.

  Nick giggled almost like a girl. “About six months,” said Jesse, smiling a little.

  Antonio took out a cigarette—he smoked Kents, Eleanor’s brand—and offered cigarettes to the others. Nick took one.

  “Why do you fuck the men?”

  “I don’t know,” said Jesse, stubbing out his own cigarette. “I’m going outside.”

  “Wait . . . is not I am insulting you,” said Antonio, his voice aggressive, pleading, covering a steel core that commanded Jesse to remain at the table.

  “Is that I am curious . . . is all right?”

  Jesse nodded.

  “Is you are looking for a father, I think so, Jesse, yes?”

  “Who knows.”

  “And you have a father?” Antonio asked Nick.

  “I don’t have a father or mother.”

  A wave of bass and piano, submerging the trumpet, filled Jesse. “Come on,” he said to Nick. “Let’s get out of here. We can have a good smoke outside before the fuzz make their rounds.” Restless energy propelled him. He wanted to escape Antonio’s prying, although he was not angry with him.

  Antonio’s voice grew loud. It drowned out everything else in the room. “Is that Aaron Bernstein the great artist, he is a pederaste raté, and you live for him the life he is afraid to live. . . .”

  “Maybe so,” said Jesse. “Come on, Nick. Let’s go.” He stood up. Nick remained hunched over his whiskey sour.

  “Maybe Aaron he want to fuck you, Rosa, too,” said Antonio. “Is a sensual man . . . oh so sensual . . . and maybe you want to fuck him.”

  “God no!” said Rosa.

  “Why not? Is natural a daughter she want to fuck her father. Maybe he want to fuck Jesse, too.”

  “Stop it!” cried Rosa. “You make everything so goddamned sexual.”

  “Is that the people they are sexual,” said Antonio. “I see what is the reality.”

  Nick and Jesse were making their way through the crowd to the back entrance.

  Rosa too wanted to get away from all of them and be by herself. The music had stopped. It was intermission. She wove slowly through the dense crowd of people to the bar. She felt the most alone among strangers. The stools at the bar were all occupied. She stood in a corner by a cigarette machine and watched everyone. Then her heart began pounding.

  It couldn’t be Xavier.

  But it looked exactly like him.

  He wore his familiar tweed jacket and smoked the same pipe. His hair had grown longer. He sported a small Van Dyke beard that did not suit him at all.

  She signalled, but Xavier did not see her.

  Was he with that blonde, or was he alone? He was tal
king to her, but now he’d turned away and was talking to Mingus, laughing and joking with him.

  “Xavier!” she cried. She lurched towards him.

  He took her into his arms. “Precious! I thought you were in Paris.”

  She hoped Antonio couldn’t see them.

  Xavier felt bulky against her. He smelled of tobacco, Old Spice, Scotch, and a trace of sweat.

  He introduced her to Mingus but not the blonde girl. Then he introduced her to the piano player. She glanced in Antonio’s direction but couldn’t see him because it was so crowded. “I want you to meet my husband.”

  “I didn’t know you were married. Congratulations.”

  Her face burned. She felt humiliated, ashamed, the way he always ended up making her feel. She wished she could dissolve into the carpet. She and Xavier had been so close. If she hadn’t fucked up. If a wild animal inside her hadn’t reacted with hysteria, rage, fear, every time he was late. If she hadn’t been so messed up. If she had been able to clean an apartment better, wash dishes better, cook better, they would be living together. She might have given birth to his baby, to an infant with curling dark African hair and pale skin that did not burn but turned brown in the sun.

  She remembered the first time they’d made love in a hotel. Then she’d bitten into his chest in a frenzy. Later his wife saw the toothmarks, and in revenge took a lover whom she later married. Rosa was the cause of their breakup. But Xavier had hurt her too. He filled her with so much desire. His presence, his extraordinary valuation of her (no one ever perceived her before as he did) caused the anesthetic to wear away, and the pain was too enormous to bear.

  He had pushed her up against the cigarette machine. His thighs pressed against the soft crepe of her dress, against her pelvis. She was scarcely able to breathe. “No, no please!” she cried.

  He continued pressing against her.

  Tears sprouted in her eyes. “Get away!” She pushed him back.

  All her nerves were reaching out to him. She wanted to make love. She wanted to meet him alone. But she wanted to be faithful to Antonio. She vowed she would never be unfaithful, although making love with Antonio was not nearly as good as making love with Xavier had been. No one was as good as Xavier in bed.

  “Can you visit me sometime Thursday?”

  “I have a baby girl. I can’t.”

  “You have a baby? That’s wonderful. Bring the baby if you like.”

  “That’s impossible. I can’t! Come and meet Antonio. I have no secrets from him.”

  They couldn’t find Antonio at the table. Rosa felt frantic. He must have seen them. He had gone away forever. He would never come back. He would punish her.

  Finally she saw Antonio just emerging from the men’s room, and she introduced the two men. Xavier sat down at their table for a few minutes and talked with Antonio about the political situation in France and about the increasing U.S. involvement in Vietnam. It was difficult to hear what they were saying because the noise around them was so loud. Nick and Jesse returned, and Rosa introduced them, too.

  The music started up again. Xavier went off to talk to some other musicians there.

  Much later, as she and Antonio walked to a subway, he berated her over Xavier. Jesse had gone off to spend the night at Nick’s.

  “You must make love with Xavier,” Antonio insisted over and over again in French.

  Rosa kept refusing.

  Of what value was her faithfulness when Antonio had such x-ray vision?

  “I only love you!” she sobbed. “I ONLY LOVE YOU, DAMN IT. CAN’T YOU UNDERSTAND?”

  “You must make love with him,” he repeated for the fourteenth or fifteenth time, his voice fanatic, separated from him by a barrier of something molten, proud, so furious that he could not comprehend her at all. “You must call him up and make a rendezvous. I’m sure he’d like that. I saw the way he pressed up against you. I saw how you wanted him!”

  “NO, ANTONIO, PLEASE STOP STOP!” She pounded her fists against his chest. “PLEASE STOP. I DON’T WANT TO MAKE LOVE WITH ANYONE ELSE. SHUT UP, DAMN YOU!”

  He slapped her across the face.

  She collapsed on the sidewalk.

  “Hey buddy,” said a policman, who approached out of nowhere. “Want to spend the night in jail?” A burly man, his nightstick dangled from his belt.

  “He’s my husband! LEAVE HIM ALONE!”

  “Did he knock you down?”

  “I fell. He’s my HUSBAND. PLEASE LEAVE US ALONE!”

  “You gotta get off the sidewalk, lady. Both of you clear out of here. I oughta write you up, buddy, but this time I’ll let you go. Both of you clear out. It ain’t safe here this time of night.” They were at the intersection of completely deserted streets.

  “Where is the IRT?” asked Rosa.

  He gave them directions, but just then a taxi cruised past, and they hailed it.

  They rode back on the Long Island Railroad.

  In a daze, Rosa stared at the advertisements at the front of the car. Glossy colors blurred into straw-colored seats and into the heads and shoulders of one or two other passengers. Past Saint Albans to wait at the Jamaica platform. They were on the last train for the night. A few drunks reeked of liquor. Past Kew Gardens. Past Long Island City with its huge blinking red neon “NABISCO” sign. Factory smoke stacks blasted fumes all night long. Thousands of television aerials stood up against the night sky, rosy with artificial lights. Steep European-roofed houses gave way to miles of tracts. Into the middle of nowhere, to their house with its three stories towering over the other houses on the street, the middle of nowhere at all but loneliness. Clacking wheels on the track. Clacking metal against metal in the still night air. Identical houses.

  Wheels on the track wore grooves in her brain.

  Antonio smoked cigarette after cigarette. She coughed from the smoke. Once when she leaned her head against his shoulder, he stiffened. Antonio was telepathic. He sensed her desires.

  “Please forgive me, Antonio.”

  He showed no sign of hearing.

  The conductor, who had desiccated white skin and a pinched face, collected their tickets.

  Antonio pushed her aside and walked to a seat at the very front of the car.

  Not thinking, blindly following her instinct, she knelt down on the rolling floor beside him. “Please, please forgive me,” she begged. Her cheek was still sore from his blow. She grabbed his hands. He pulled away. “Idiote!” He bowed his head until it slumped against his chest.

  She went back to her seat.

  They got off at Plainville.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  When Antonio lingered one evening in the living room over cognac with Eleanor, Rosa cried out for him to come to bed because they never made love anymore.

  “Ah,” he said. “We never make love. Our servants will for us.” He mimicked her voice as he stood in an exaggerated pose at the foot of the stairs. Eleanor and he laughed heartily.

  Eleanor took some of Antonio’s published essays and short stories as well as El Sueño de Manuel to a publisher on Sixth Avenue who dealt with the work of Latin American writers. Perhaps if Antonio’s work were translated and published, things would work out somehow.

  The publisher, a short, stocky man who spoke with a trace of a Spanish accent, said he would read the work and let Antonio know his decision.

  Afterwards she met with Heinrich, who had come down to New York on business. Because Helen was in the apartment which they maintained in the City, Eleanor and Heinrich could not go there, and so they went to a favorite restaurant on East 66th Street.

  “Lady, it’s been far too long since I’ve seen you,” he said as he greeted her. How good it was to be with him again, to hold him close, to feel his chest, his bulky thighs, the roughness of his mustache. All this was familiar and comforting.

  During lunch he talked about the difficulties he’d had in getting paid for the etchings that were sold through his gallery. The owner was in financial difficulty. Flushe
d with steak and cold beer, he wiped his large, reddish face with a white cloth napkin.

  “The owner is an asshole,” he said, accentuating the last word in his thick German accent.

  “He must be. But you must see to it that you are paid. Perhaps you will need to hire a lawyer.”

  “Lawyers—I don’t trust a damn one of them.”

  “Oh Heinrich, you are impossible—almost as difficult as Antonio.”

  Antonio hovered in her consciousness, and she felt a distance from Heinrich which had not existed before. It seemed strange that she had been in love with him for so many years.

  “Perhaps if I were married to you, I would be less difficult,” said Heinrich.

  “But Helen is marvelous,” said Eleanor. “She is a better person than me. How would you ever live without her?” She thought of Helen—small, dark-haired, full of animation, and felt a rush of shame. There was no malice in Helen. Helen did not understand evil because she was simple and good, while Eleanor was not. Helen had worked uncomplainingly as a librarian ever since they moved to Maine so that Heinrich would not have financial worries.

  “You have the gift of inspiring others, Eleanor. There’s great richness in you.”

  “Oh Heinrich . . . I could not leave Aaron.” She faltered. “But we’ve been through this so many times before. I do love you.”

  How could Heinrich speak of abandoning his own wife? She would never be able to trust Heinrich if he were to run off with her. Then might he not some day tire of her, too?

  They walked west to Central Park.

  There it was lush and green and hot. The air was humid. She held his arm as they walked. For a moment she yielded to the joyous illusion that they lived together, that there were no children, not even any Antonio, no suburb to return to at the end of the day, that she was free, and that her life was empty of complications.

  “Children and husbands,” she said, “have hungry mouths. Like tiny birds. They always want more and more and still more. My life is filled with other people’s needs that I cannot satisfy.”