Like Son

by Felicia Luna Lemus

  I hated seeing Nathalie cry. I really fucking hated it. I knew she was totally torturing herself about crashing into the mailman. And, sure, she needed to take responsibility for what she’d done, but she didn’t need to beat herself up over it. Her guilt hadn’t subsided in the least after the paramedics told her George was fine. Nathalie had seemed almost more horrified when George came to and said the same himself. He’d even told Nathalie she shouldn’t worry, it was an accident, everyone had accidents.

  To be honest, I wondered if maybe George had killed someone. It blew me away that he hadn’t wanted Nathalie at least cited for what she’d done to him. But he’d just smiled and waved away her desperate apologies. Maybe he was scared of her. I mean, Nathalie did look pretty fucking wild by the time he’d regained consciousness. If I saw a creature as frantic as Nathalie had been, I think I too would have backed away with my hands up, doing my best to remain even-tempered so as not to agitate the situation further.

  I finally persuaded Nathalie to walk up the remaining flight of stairs to our apartment—and so began a restorative day of herbal tea and hot baths and dual comatose naps, all of which seemed to have the added benefit of curing Nathalie of her flu. Her eyes brightened and her sneezes stopped.

  I was making us yet another cup of tea when I tried to ask casually, “Nat, why’d you rent the station wagon?”

  “It’s Valentine’s Day,” she said.

  Her answer clarified nothing. True, we were both sentimental idiots, but from day one Nathalie had threatened that if I ever came home on Valentine’s Day with chalky cheap chocolates and a bunch of genetically modified and scentless red roses, she might just throw them at me. Of course, the idea had been all the more tempting as a result. And there was one year I brought home the forbidden items, along with a crappy little bodega teddy bear, just to make her laugh. But, seeing as we’d never been “do something special on Valentine’s Day” sorts, I couldn’t tell if her explanation for renting the car was sincere or a failed attempt at irony.

  Later that night, when we were leaving the apartment to return the station wagon, Nathalie handed me my father’s glasses.

  “I don’t want them anymore,” she said, folding the glasses shut and sliding them into my coat pocket.

  I pulled the apartment door shut and Nathalie stopped me. She hugged me, harder than maybe ever before. And then she pulled me to her even tighter. The plastic bulk of the glasses dug through my coat and sweater and T-shirt to thin skin and then to bones and bruised us both. Her embrace was a death grip. It was every ounce of her adoration.

  “I wanted to get another tree,” she said. “I know, I totally fucked up, but I wanted to surprise you so we could drive to the forest and get another sapling. And when we planted the tree, I thought maybe instead of a glittery bird like you used last time, maybe this time we could put a little plastic dove on the top branch or something. I don’t know, I thought it could be like some sort of eco-anarchist protest and a Valentine all in one. Frank, I’m sorry. I’m so totally lame, right?”

  So not lame. In fact, Nathalie had just given me thirty seconds of perfection.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  We were walking home after dropping off the rental car when, practically right outside our building, Nathalie pulled me into Tompkins Square Park. My hand in hers, she led me down one of the park’s circuitous paved paths, past the central bricked area with the two giant elm trees whose trunks were perpetually wrapped in remnants of strung Hare Krishna flowers, and over to the cramped and fenced-in patches of landscaping on the east side of the park.

  Nathalie stopped and stood on tiptoe to lean over one of the wrought-iron fences, squinting her eyes to peer into a winter-dead strip of city flower garden.

  “Razzle-dazzle,” she said.

  “Pardon?”

  “Razzle-dazzle,” she said again. “That’s what this one’s tag says.”

  She pointed to a cluster of tiny rusted botanical identification plates staked in the ground among tragically pruned and barren rosebushes. In all the years I’d walked through the park, I’d never noticed there were rosebushes, let alone that each one was tagged with an official miniature plaque.

  “Look at that rose, Frank. I’ve never seen such a luminescent purple,” she continued. “It’s almost electric. Like a Lite-Brite or something.”

  “The roses are hibernating, Nathalie.”

  Sleeping flowers. Rest in peace. I pictured a funeral wreath made of white roses and baby’s breath propped beside a small open grave, a banner across its middle with Ángel embroidered in silk thread.

  “These are the most gorgeous roses I’ve ever seen,” Nathalie said, thankfully snapping me out of my unpleasant distraction. She smiled calmly. “They have magnificent noses. Don’t you think?”

  Ah, I got it. Invitation accepted, I joined her game and leaned forward to where, come spring, roses would flourish. I inhaled deeply. The air was chilled damp oxygen. A blue scent. Icy crisp.

  “Exquisite,” I said.

  “My sentiments precisely,” she said, and took my hand.

  We continued on our detour trip through the park, stopping at each fenced-in patch of dead plants. Nathalie described in elaborate detail the nonexistent blooms on every sleeping rosebush. I wanted to live there in that moment with Nathalie. Forever.

  “I love you,” she said before we headed home.

  “Thank you.”

  “For saying I love you?”

  “That too.”

  Dinner that night consisted of ridiculously huge slices of frosted instant pink cake. Nathalie served it on her ornate Wedgwood Valentine “collectibles”—Ladies Home Journal gaudy pink dishware circa 1983. Each plate featured a faux-china relief of a bewigged dude dressed in knickers and holding a rose up to a bodice-and-wig-wearing chick who sat on a swing that hung from a flowered bough. I hated those plates. But Nathalie adored her tacky collection, and she swore the plates were safe even though For decorative purposes only, not for use with food was written clearly on the back of each one. Whatever, the plates made her happy. Nathalie turned on the radio and brought us cake to eat in bed.

  “Almonds?” I sniffed the air as she sat beside me.

  “Yes, dear,” she said.

  The girl must have palmed a small puddle of almond extract into her hair when she was in the kitchen. She smelled like old-fashioned marzipan candy, like some hand-painted little pear. I wanted to consume her. But, marzipan being named for the god of war, I knew damn well the prospect wouldn’t be without complications. Pink plates of pink cake balanced on our laps, we sat in bed and listened to the news crackling from our stereo’s ancient and disintegrating blackfoam speakers.

  An international research team of astrophysicists took the mic. One two, one two, this was not a test. The scientists made their announcement:

  The speed of light had evolved. A nasal-voiced nerdy scientist explained:

  Given that the speed of light can no longer be considered a definite fixed constant, nothing, not even the equations used to calculate the characteristics of nothing itself, nothing, absolutely nothing remains as we had previously understood.

  Tell me, who wants news like that?

  Another astrophysicist, not of the aforementioned team, was interviewed. When asked for his professional two cents, he responded: Exceptional results deserve extraordinary evidence.

  The evening music program began. Nathalie disappeared into the closet for a few minutes, then reappeared with the scarf she’d knitted for me and began searching through the kitchen junk drawer. She came back to bed with a huge pair of scissors and cut off several inches of that totally gorgeous soft handmade scarf—she just fucking lopped off a good chunk like it was nobody’s business. Horrified, I watched her pull back row after row of the knitting until barely a few inches were left. She took a knitting needle and tried to slide the scarf back onto it, one stitch at a time. I knew nothing about knitting, but it was clear the corrective surgery had gone awry.


  “Can I help?”

  “Thank you, but you don’t know how,” she said.

  Hunched over, focused stare, tense jaw, strands of yarn covering her lap and an unraveling scarf tangled on her knitting needles, Nathalie started to cry.

  “I thought I knew how to fix it.”

  “Maybe it’d be better to start over …”

  “No,” she snapped. And I mean snapped.

  Fuck.

  I didn’t know what to do. There was so much we weren’t saying. I wanted to tell Nathalie I understood, that I didn’t want to start over either, that I had endless love for her, and that even with the horrible story about Nahui’s baby still in my thoughts, I could actually foresee planning for a baby someday—but I wanted to remind Nathalie, it wasn’t me who’d bailed, who’d wanted to play blind, who’d mowed down the mailman, who needed everything to be a big grand production all the time. So could she please try to quit being so easily pissed off at me already? If either of us had any right to scream for sweets, it was me. Fuck slices of pink cake or even marzipan for that matter, I wanted Nathalie to tell me under no uncertain terms that she loved me, that she was happy with our life, that she wanted to be my girl forever and ever. Instead, I just sat there as she, frustrated and unapproachable, ate what was left of her slice of pink cake. The sound of her chewing nearly set me to tears—disgusted, revolted, scared-shitless tears.

  The speed of light had evolved. Fucking ridiculous. Who could live in that reality? I imagined walking on cracked downtown sidewalks and spying with my smart eye endless concrete fluctuations squirming as quickly or as slowly as need be to avoid the extinguishing tug of shifting universal truths. It was a most unsteady stroll. And I didn’t like it one fucking bit.

  Acid jazz played on the radio. The music was loud. I stacked Nathalie’s scraped-clean plate and pink-frostingcoated fork under my own, turned off the radio, and retreated to the kitchen sink. By the time I’d finished washing the dishes, the palpable tension in the room was just about to kill me.

  “Nat, let’s talk, okay?”

  “Please drop it, Frank.”

  I sat at the kitchen table, head cradled in my hands, and I stared at the thick solid dirt permanently stuck deep between our floor’s hardwood planks. Hour upon hour, I’d watched that same unchanging dirt when Nathalie had disappeared right before our anniversary. And now, as I looked at the dirt yet again, a deep well of anger I hadn’t even realized I had in me boiled over. My voice, booming and determined, ricocheted off the floor and to Nathalie: “Nat, why do you always get to decide when we’re done?”

  She looked up from her mess of knitting, stunned. Clearly, she hadn’t been expecting the attack. Truth was, neither had I, but I continued anyway, venting the hurt and frustration I’d tucked away in some shadowed part of my psyche for months.

  “I mean, really, how was it okay for you to leave our home, our life, without ever talking to me about it? You just up and bailed on everything for fucking three weeks like I never needed anything while you were gone and then, oh, get the baskets of rose petals to sprinkle in her path, here she is, Nathalie’s home, who knows why she left exactly or if she’s even planning to stay, but it doesn’t matter, I should be so honored to be in her presence, so let me just bow down and kiss her darling little feet, and if she wants a baby, damnit, give her a baby, if she snaps at you, let it roll off your back like water, it’s all about her, everything is about her—”

  “Fuck you,” she said, her voice faint and strained.

  I was shaking. Hard. My head throbbed.

  We sat in silence for minutes, neither of us willing to budge.

  “I’m sorry,” I eventually gave in. “It’s just, I don’t get it—no matter what I do, everything turns so fucking impossible lately.”

  “Yeah, well, likewise.”

  “I just want us to have a happy, normal life, you know?”

  “Oh, come on,” she said, annoyed, “we don’t want to be normal.”

  “Honestly, Nat, yeah, I think we do,” I answered with complete sincerity.

  A strange smile settled on her face. She got up from the bed, sat across from me at the kitchen table, and dug through the mess of our things coating the tabletop. She found my wallet, opened it, and removed the photo of the flapper girl. Nathalie’s smile faded as she stared at the image. I watched as she slid the photo into the wallet’s dollar-bill compartment, not the plastic picture pocket. I took the wallet from her and returned the photograph to its proper place.

  “Was it like that before?” Nathalie asked.

  “What?” I wasn’t certain if she was referring to the way I’d repositioned the photograph or our mutual angst.

  “Was it like that before?”

  “Yes.”

  And then:

  How could this be healthy, she asked, this human need for love? Was it right to want so intensely, to feel so much? She damned me for affecting her, for her wish to have a baby. A person should be comfortable all on their own, she said, without needing anyone else to make them feel whole.

  I sat and listened to Nathalie. And my neck grew stiff.

  If there aren’t at least five people you can depend on and who can depend on you, you are in deep murky waters.

  My father once threw this advice my direction. It was a strange ethos coming from a man who could have easily died alone, but I caught his words and clutched them tightly to my chest. In fact, I had come to imagine those words as beribboned medals—the sort awarded to Olympians for their exemplary efforts—and I wore them proudly. After my father’s death, when I tried to run far away from home and everything and everyone I knew, those medals clanged heavily around my neck.

  Then I met Nathalie. For lack of other resources, I melted the medals down to sculpt a statue in her honor. I carried that statue with me wherever I went with intentions of making each moment a monument of devotion to her. So long as I had her love, I thought, I’d have everything I’d ever need. But somehow we’d fucked up. The statue slid and cracked. I feared that all that gold, all that shimmering glory we’d once been, had transformed into a shattered mess of dead weight.

  My hand massaged the knot forming at the base of my skull as Nathalie spoke. I didn’t interrupt her to say that maybe I had all the same questions and fears as she did. And I refused to beg her to see it my way, because maybe if I had to beg, really beg, not just beg for play, but really beg, then maybe her love wasn’t truly meant to be mine.

  Nathalie sat on my lap. Slender fingers grazing my skin, she played with the fine hairs on the back of my neck.

  “I love you,” she said, and kissed my brow.

  “I love you too, Nat.”

  Uncertain of what I could count on for the future, I breathed in the warmth of her body.

  Razzle-dazzle. Purple buttons, peachy, sexy rexy, prima ballerina, secret love, dusky maiden, show girl, Penelope, sweet vixen, Madame Bravery, whiskey mac, impatient, tiara, angel face, plum crazy, touch of class, double talk, pretty doll.

  These were not the names of all the roses Nathalie had shown me earlier that night, just the ones I remembered the most. Our walk through the park had been so intensely lovely, and yet the sentiment of that moment already felt unreachably distant. If I had believed in the notion of appealing to temperamental ancient gods for favors, I would have gladly tattooed the roses’ names on my imperfect human form as a humble plea for returned happiness. I could picture the names inked in blue gothic script up my arm like a sailor’s laundry list of ports claimed. Hell, if it would have helped seal the deal any, I would have trekked to high desert mountains and plucked coccus insects off cacti blossoms to whip up a batch of holy red dye like the stuff made back in olden Aztec times. As I was thinking these thoughts, it occurred to me that, although not necessarily to please the gods but rather for my own selfish reasons, an act of devotion might not be such a bad idea. I suddenly wanted a needle tapping into my skin, searing me alive like the blood Nathalie sent flowing hot
through my veins. I wanted a tattoo as reverence for love itself, for the pain of its imprint, for my healing, for the continuum of it all.

  “Nat?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m going to get a tattoo.”

  She leaned back and squinted at me.

  “A ventricular heart,” I said. “On my chest. Huge …” I took a deep breath before continuing and hoped the gods were listening after all. “… with your name in a banner across the middle.”

  And if the gods were listening, I seriously hoped they’d not confuse my optimistic banner with a banner of mourning like the embroidered funeral wreath I’d imagined in the park earlier that night.

  “You’re crazy,” Nathalie said, laughed slightly, and snuggled into my shoulder.

  The suddenness of my promising something so permanent for her—something that couldn’t be erased or taken back, a declaration of love so literally carved into my body—freaked her out.

  The roses from the park imprinted themselves all the more vividly in my thoughts. Razzle-dazzle. What a name for a rose. I imagined vibrant violet petals and green, green, such very green leaves, silver shimmering thorns that were as much ornamentation as they were weapon. Razzle-dazzle. Nathalie. Nahui. Razzle-dazzle girls. Somehow I was certain Nahui would have loved it if someone got a tattoo for her. Hell, she’d have given her admirer the tattoo herself. And afterward she would have reveled in licking off the blood pilled on the surface of her love’s inflamed hot flesh. Tongue stained inky blue, she would have been a beautifully grotesque realization of the saying, I’ll eat you alive.