Like Son

by Felicia Luna Lemus

  “Hello?”

  There was a pause. And then:

  “Hey,” Nathalie said all monosyllabic monotone.

  That was all she could say—“hey”? It was so obvious she hadn’t expected me to be home. She’d probably figured I’d be at work and she could just leave a message. Nice, Nat.

  “How are you?” she asked.

  “Sweetheart, where the fuck are you?”

  “This horrid town called Shamrock,” she said. “The McDonald’s here has a bathroom sink the shape of Texas.”

  She said it so matter-of-fact, just like that, like a trip to Shamrock, Texas was one she’d been planning forever, and that I’d known she was going on. What I wanted to know was if Shamrock was so goddamned awful, why was she there? And McDonald’s? What was she trying to prove? She didn’t even eat fast food. Hello, and why the fuck had she gone off in the first place? Was she going to apologize? Explain? I wanted to demand answers. But more than that, I wanted Nat to come home. And so I tried to be patient. My ear burned from how long I’d tightly held the phone to it, listening to total silence.

  “Nat, are you coming back?”

  “Of course. And I’ll explain when I get home, okay?”

  I didn’t respond.

  “Frank?”

  “Fine,” I said.

  I hated myself the moment that answer left my mouth because it wasn’t fine, nothing about the situation was fine. In fact, everything I’d thought I’d known had been royally screwed. I had absolutely no clue how to deal with the intense misery her departure made me feel. Gun to foot, ready to shoot—and why not, my heart was already ripped apart—I started in on surface bullshit.

  “I saw Johnny yesterday.”

  “Oh, that’s nice. How is he?” I could tell Nathalie was grateful for the deflection of drama.

  “He’s fine, I guess,” I answered.

  Fine. Yup, I’m fine. And he’s fine. We’re all just fucking fine.

  Really, on the matter of how Johnny was doing, I wasn’t trying to be flip or obtuse. I just didn’t know. In fact, I could count on less than two hands how much I knew about Johnny:

  1. Johnny lived in our building.

  2. He was an ancient WWII vet.

  3. He rented the apartment directly downstairs.

  4. He had inhabited that apartment for centuries probably.

  5. He watched TV loud enough to hear the commercials through our shared ceiling/floor.

  6. Each night he went to the corner bar for as many beers as the money in his wallet could buy.

  7. More often than not, a lit Camel hung from his craggily thin-lipped mouth.

  8. I liked Johnny.

  9. And Johnny liked me.

  With his irony-free meticulous flattop, flannel shirts, and pressed jeans, at first I’d dismissed Johnny as some sort of redneck throwback who’d love to beat the crap out of me if he still had the wherewithal. But then one night I held the vestibule door open for him, more automatic gesture than intended courtesy, and he responded with a wink and a heavily laced, “Thank you, young man.”

  The wink. The knowing smile. His tone of voice, like we were in on some shared secret. Were we? Just how much had I misperceived the dude? Was he one of the neighborhood’s leftist rebels of yesteryear? Could it be that his lumberjack style was more Village People than Midwest hick? It would have been insane to presume anything, but exactly how much did we have in common? That smile. The look in his eyes. We never spoke about any of this directly, but over time he took to chummy hellos with me and exaggerated flirty winks with Nathalie when we’d see him around the neighborhood. I don’t know, the whole thing was sweet somehow. And strangely comforting. Only a few feet of concrete and drywall between us as we slept and shit and ate, we were nearly complete strangers, but I liked that there was a shared membrane of building and routine connecting us.

  I’d seen him the day before when I was getting the mail. Johnny had made his way down the stairwell, his walking stick one step ahead of his house-slipper feet, his drooping face looking particularly tired, his gray flattop not as military precise as usual. I watched to make sure his pajama pants hem didn’t catch on his feet as he took the final steps to the mailboxes. I hadn’t seen him dressed in his dark jeans and red plaid shirt in weeks. He seemed utterly drained.

  “Where’s that firecracker of yours been?” he asked.

  “She’ll be back soon,” I said. And tried to convince myself it was necessarily true.

  “Lucky dog,” he said, and laid an unsteady slap on my back.

  I told Nathalie: “He said to tell the firecracker hello.”

  “Tell him I send hugs … So, what else is up?”

  The woman I thought would be with me always is gone, that’s what else is fucking up.

  “Nothing major,” I said.

  “You been working hard?”

  What the fuck?! Could we please have a real conversation already?

  And, as for me working hard, until Nathalie gave a little on her end of the line, there was no way in hell I was going to confess that I’d been calling in sick to the temp office each day since she’d left. I’d spent all week just like I was spending that particular day—in bed, wearing pajama pants and a hoody, hood up, slumped down in blankets, and staring at the television I’d dragged over and put on the nightstand. I was living a parallel life to Johnny’s, slightly cooler dressed and without the evening forays to the corner bar, but still.

  In all my moping about, I hadn’t even taken down the Day of the Dead altar. Well, I had managed to deal with some of its edible parts. The fruit was first to go, then I made my way through the final meal I’d left for my father. Box of Wheaties: eaten dry, box to hand to mouth. Can of chili beans: opened, scraped from the can with a fork, and washed down with alternate swigs of cranberry and grape juice. The three scoops of rocky road ice cream had melted into a thick sludge moldy mess I wouldn’t eat no matter how hungry I was, and the wilted stalks of green onion had turned dark slime and stuck to the lace tablecloth. The unopened pints of coffee yogurt bulged with gassy rot.

  The apartment smelled sour and totally stale, and I didn’t fucking care. All in all, I was useless. Other than my one night at the Strand and a few quick trips downstairs to get the mail, I’d pretty much lain in bed for a week straight.

  Was I working hard? Well …

  “Frank?”

  “Nat, are you really coming back?”

  “Of course, love.”

  “When?”

  “Soon. I promise.”

  There was something in her voice that told me not to push for more answers. I could tell she meant it, she’d be back. So that was that. She said she loved me. I said the same in return. And it was true. I did love her. More than I’d ever loved anyone. But I also sort of hated her. That night, I hated her for not immediately running back home and throwing herself at my feet and groveling by way of apology for leaving me.

  After we hung up, I felt like I’d go crazy if I stayed alone a second longer. At the same time, I didn’t want to be around anyone. Unless Nathalie walked in the door, that is. But, although she’d said she’d be back home soon, I knew not to expect her to walk in the door that night. So, naïvely hoping to cure my anxious loneliness, I went to the closet, reached to the top shelf, moved a stack of extra blankets and towels, and retrieved my father’s briefcase. My fingerprints marked the dusty black leather. Briefcase balanced on my knee, I used my sleeve to give the CIA-man case a quick shine. Clicking open the gold clasps was such a satisfying feeling—the metal spring lock giving way, pushing up into the pad of my thumb. Pathetic, Frank. Totally pathetic. I needed Nat back. Tough beans, kid, she won’t be home tonight. Deal. I sat on the bed to give the briefcase a thorough look-see.

  The wad of bills my mother had given me the day she closed her front door on my face was long gone and used up, and Nahui’s retablo had been promoted to formal framed display in the apartment, but the rest of the briefcase’s contents remained
almost exactly as they’d been the day I left Los Angeles. My father’s dark glasses. His folded-up walking stick. Little pebble worry stone his mother had given him. Two safe deposit keys I’d taken off my keychain and stashed inside the briefcase for safekeeping. A padded manila envelope with Paquita, Birthday Girl written on it. And in that envelope: the disintegrating clothbound book whose yellowed pages barely clung together by patches of torn fabric and rotted thread. A dix ans sur mon pupitre. Inscribed to my father’s mother. Given to me by my father. Ignored by me for nearly seven years.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said.

  To Nahui, I guess. Maybe a little to my dad and his mother, too. I really was sorry. Nahui’s book deserved to be revered by white-gloved researchers and stored in an archival box somewhere climate-controlled and protected. My lazyass possession of her book was practically sacrilege. Out of guilt and curiosity, I decided finally to read her poems.

  Nahui’s book and Nathalie’s pocket-sized Spanish/English dictionary in hand, I cleared off a corner of the kitchen table altar and pulled up a chair. Nahui watched me from the retablo at the center of the table, her serious stare now stern schoolteacher as much as seductive vixen.

  Trying not to damage the book any further, I opened it flat on the table and read. Esoteric incantations of cosmic truths and revolution pulsed on page after page. My frequent stops to look things up in the dictionary were welcome breaks. To say the stuff Nahui wrote was convoluted and dense is just the half of it. Her words were overwhelmingly hot and brilliant—something like combining all of Patti Smith’s Horses lyrics and Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons rants and Albert Einstein’s theories into a single condensed form. It fucking rocked. I read for hours but made it only halfway through the book before my brain started to ache.

  The sun set outside and the apartment turned dark. I opened the book to the peeling deco plate on the back cover. My eyes strained, I lingered over the inscription written so long ago:

  My love,

  “She went through me like a pavement saw.”

  Yours as ever for the revolution,

  Nahui

  Wasn’t no way to top that. Exhausted and wired all at once, I couldn’t read anymore. Totally ready to put the book away, but wanting to honor it, at least to protect it somehow, to keep it from falling apart outright, I wrapped it in an old soft T-shirt before gently nestling it back in the briefcase. I was extra careful not to tilt the briefcase as I placed it flat on the closet’s top shelf. Maybe I should have lit some candles on the altar again? Hell, I had no clue. I really wasn’t a natural at these sorts of things. Nathalie would have known what to do, but I didn’t.

  Strange voodoo twist, minutes after I’d put the briefcase away, ants invaded the apartment like a heat wave had come. They arrived in drunken groups of three and four. Too frenzied to walk in tidy lines, they stampeded each other in their excitement. I watched as some gathered the dead upon their backs for eventual return to the farm. And inexplicably, the room suddenly smelled of Nathalie—of sugar, cloves, and ginger. Her warm sweet spice self detectable in the air, on my clothes, on my very skin, she was a hypnotizing force even in her absence. It was like the ants had arrived in a mad hunt for Nathalie, our candied queen, our sweet heaven. But armies of ants and traces of Nathalie or not, I remained alone. Well, maybe not entirely.

  I turned off the lights and picked up the retablo of Nahui from the altar. Even through the darkness, her stare punctured me to my core. She was mine. Or maybe I was hers. Either way, for better or worse, through thick and thin, Nahui had stayed with me like no one else. Of course, I would have preferred Nathalie’s company instead of a paper ghost. For the moment at least, I took what I could get.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  9 November 2002.

  I woke totally buzzed and bright-eyed with a cultlike “I adore life” and “The world is love” sort of optimism. Fuck knows where the burst of energy came from, but I was stoked for the change. For the first time in days, I showered and combed my hair and dressed in clean clothes that weren’t designed to be slept in. Gliding around all giddy with my feet barely touching the ground, I tidied up the apartment. I opened the windows wide for fresh air and leaned out to take in the view. Hello Gorgeous Autumn Day! And greetings to you, Mr. Bluebird sitting in your tree. Then I moved the tiny television from its depressive-viewer position on the nightstand and put it back on its typing table home near the kitchen. What a good little television you are, thank you for taking such good care of me. I picked up dirty clothes off the floor and even dusted some surfaces with a more or less clean sock. Look at you, you pretty little counter, all nice and shiny! Careful to not tear it—Don’t worry, this won’t hurt a bit—I peeled the jewel-encrusted altar foil from the wall. I’d just started scraping the nasty food remains from the altar plates into the garbage, when the phone rang.

  “Hello?”

  “Frank, I’ll be gone longer than planned,” Nathalie said.

  Wait a minute, there was a plan? I didn’t recall being included in any planning. Had Nathalie shown me an itinerary or projected goals or whatever would go into this sort of plan? Just like that, piss on the parade, my fizzy pep burned out.

  “I went grocery shopping this morning,” she said, and paused for effect.

  By “shopping” she meant that she had wandered up the delivery dock of a health food supermarket and filled her bag with produce and deliveries—she was genius at this, at being so obvious and outrageous that she was beyond reproach.

  “So I was shopping,” she continued, “and then I realized this other kid was shopping too …”

  I resisted reminding Nathalie she hadn’t qualified for the moniker “kid” in many years.

  “… we wandered off in the same direction and started talking. He’s meeting up with some friends tomorrow and they’re headed to Tennessee …”

  Just to torture me more, of course the other person had to be a dude.

  “I’ve always wanted to go to Nashville,” she added.

  Nathalie wouldn’t make it to Tennessee. She’d end up somewhere else and I wouldn’t know where she was. I was beginning to realize this was part of the plan.

  “Nat, you realize Thanksgiving is coming up?”

  “In two weeks.”

  “It’s our seventh anniversary.”

  “I know.”

  My silent and? sat heavily on the line.

  “You plan to be home by then?” I finally asked.

  “Promise,” she said.

  Swing music played in a faint echo through the phone.

  “Frank? What’s that?”

  “Just the phone,” I said.

  “It’s spooky.”

  “Not really,” I said.

  “I love you.”

  “Love you too.”

  I kept the phone to my ear long after Nathalie had hung up. And I stared blankly at the retablo on the kitchen table. Nahui had been witness to everything that happened in the apartment. I wished she could speak.

  “Come on, can’t you say something? Just one little thing?”

  Of course the retablo didn’t respond.

  Stuck, unwilling to move quite yet, I continued to hold the phone to my ear. No dial tone or operator came on. Music continued to play faintly over the line, one scratchy classic tune after another. It might have been the result of a cracked telephone wire somewhere picking up the wrong signal, but I was pretty sure that if I listened hard enough, I’d hear it was Nahui doing the singing.

  Even though Nathalie wouldn’t be coming home as soon as I’d hoped, I was still showered and dressed and more socially presentable than I’d been in days. And so I headed to the coffee house on 9th Street. Baby steps, you know? At least I’d be out in the world, breathing cool crisp air. In fact, by the time I walked up Avenue B to 9th, I had a slight bounce in my step. And when I walked under the weeping willows at the community garden on Avenue C, long delicate tree tendrils reached down to bless my journey. Determined to stay in m
y good mood, I even stopped to pet this fat golden retriever tied to the benches outside the coffee house. Inside, I pulled a stool to the clunky wooden bar and said a friendly hello to the cute anarchist-squatter-chic girl working behind the counter. She took my order and brought me a pile of little brown napkins, two sugars, and a wooden stirring stick with my coffee. And she even smiled. Sort of. I mean, as much as an anarchist-squatter-chic girl can smile without blowing her cool.

  I sipped my coffee and flipped through a Village Voice someone had left lying around. Black ink smearing my fingers, I read my horoscope. Nothing good there. I kept cruising the back pages aimlessly. And that’s when I found the announcement:

  Estate Sale!

  BUSHWICK, BROOKLYN

  Saturday November 9th, 8:30 a.m.-4 p.m.

  1938 Gaffer & Sattler stove, 1940s movie magazines and books

  and family photos. Sofas, assorted chairs, coffee/end tables,

  dining room table, king bed, 6-piece full bedroom set, desk, many

  cabinets. Vintage jewelry, furs, linens, TVs, trunks, oils, kitchen

  banquet set, refrigerator, washer/dryer, assorted pots/pans/

  glassware. Wood working stuff, yard/garage tools, used bricks.

  Cash only!

  **Look for red balloon and signs at L train Montrose exit.**

  What a fucking wonky mix of old-school stuff. And it was up for in grabs in the middle of barrio Bushwick? There would be a red balloon? It was all too strange and cool to be true. I left a tip on the bar for the barista and I walked to the L.

  A four-year-old whiner sat next to me, squirming and picking his nose the entire ride from First & 14th to Brooklyn. He stared at me. And I stared at him. By the time the train had crossed under the river, it was like we knew each other. I hated that kid. I wanted to bite him. But still, since no other commuters seemed in the mood to be decent, when he and his young mom got off at Montrose Avenue, I took pity on them and helped carry his condo-sized stroller up the stairs to the street. Out on the sidewalk, the kid waved goodbye to me as though we were best friends. And—like suddenly being caught in a little fox trap, the kind that gets your ankle in its metal razor jaw teeth—my flesh ached.