“You had a bad day,” Maximo said.
“No, I didn’t,” Nicki said.
“You’ve got exasperation all over your face,” he said.
“Maybe it’s because I just had to mail my car payment.”
“That’s enough to make anybody grouchy,” Haydee said. She held a large glass, almost a basin, with orange slices sticking up.
Who drinks like this? Now Nicki saw that Maximo had something in his drink. Something long and white and when the drink moved the white thing revealed itself against the side of the glass, it looked like something—Nicki wouldn’t even say to herself what it looked like that Maximo was sticking in his mouth.
“What are you drinking?” she asked him.
“Rum and banana. See? They crush the bananas, but this time he left one in, like a celery stalk.”
“What is this, when you drink you mix a bar and a vegetable store? I’ll have a Scotch and water.”
“This is Nicki,” Maximo said to the others. He turned and ordered her drink.
“I’m Haydee Fernandez.”
“Pleased,” Nicki said.
“And I’m Ron Seguera.”
“Pleased,” Nicki said. She looked unhappy.
When Nicki’s drink came, she became silent and looked at her glass carefully.
“Your earrings are fantastic,” Haydee said.
“Oh, thank you,” Nicki said, brightening immediately. “I’m glad you like them. These are my favorites.” She turned to Maximo. “Don’t you like them?”
“They’re quite attractive.” In the smoky late afternoon light of the bar, the gold had an age and richness to it.
“Where would I go to get a pair like that?” Maximo asked her.
“Snatch them off somebody’s ears downtown on the street,” Haydee said.
Maximo fingered a charm that hung from a thin gold bracelet on her right wrist.
“What does it stand for?” he asked.
“The hands are for friendship, the heart is for love and the crown is for loyalty.”
“What about sex?”
“That doesn’t go on a bracelet. You need money. Then you get sex. The two go together.”
To Maximo, her meaning was quite unmistakable; while she might find his career and concerns interesting, the general topic of poverty was alien to her. You have to be something, Maximo told himself proudly, to overcome this kind of materialism.
Ron Seguera stood up and began to dance and clap his hands. “Oh, did you see those faces today!”
Maximo watched Nicki’s eyes as she stared at this dancing flag of Puerto Rico. Maximo never had seen great fighting bulls, but he had read of them, and he was certain that not even the greatest bull, a bull bred to fight a dozen swords at once, became as agitated at the show of a cape as Nicki was by the Puerto Rican flag wrapped around Ron’s moving body.
The three, with Nicki as outsider, went into a clipped, name-filled discussion of what they had just attended and what they thought would happen next, and after several minutes, Haydee said to Nicki, “This must be awfully boring to you.”
“It’s all about getting to be a judge,” Maximo said. “If I had time, I’d explain it to you.”
“Oh, I think you’d find it boring,” Haydee said.
Nicki’s eyes widened and her lips parted slightly in a look that, for part of an instant, Maximo thought could be purposely dumb, but he dismissed this, for his own eye contact with her was too sexually warm for him to feel that she was anything but captured by his style and knowledge. She just didn’t understand Haydee, but she will when I explain it to her, he told himself. Nicki kept looking at Haydee with a face that gave nothing away.
Haydee said to Seguera that she would see him the next day, at another meeting, this one a meeting of those in favor of keeping bilingual education.
“They’re sure trying to do away with us,” Haydee said.
“Do away with what?” Nicki asked.
“Teaching in Spanish to children in school,” Haydee said.
“Why would they do that?” Nicki asked.
“If you force a child from a Hispanic household to learn everything in English, then you’re asking him to handle two unknowns at once. Learning in a new school, and learning in a strange language.”
“What’s strange about English?” Nicki asked.
“You work into it,” Haydee said.
“How?” Nicki asked.
“Let me tell you,” Haydee said firmly. “While they are being taught English, this new language, it makes no sense to have them miss out on arithmetic and history because they don’t know enough English yet. So you teach these things to them in Spanish. Then day by day, little by little, you teach them English.”
Maximo said, “It’s like—”
“—Let me explain it to her,” Haydee said. She lectured directly into Nicki’s eyes and parted lips. “Let me tell you how it works. While the children are being taught their new language, English, each day, it makes no sense for them to miss out on arithmetic and history simply because they don’t know enough English words. So you teach them English. Then, while they’re learning English, you keep them up in the other courses by teaching them in Spanish. It seems to go slowly for a while but you get up to the seventh grade and it all comes together. But you teach many things in Spanish for a while.”
“I don’t know about that,” Nicki said.
“What don’t you know?” Haydee said.
“Who says the teachers are so good they can teach in Spanish and English both?” Nicki said.
“We have Hispanic teachers who can handle this,” Haydee said.
“They could speak in Spanish and you couldn’t understand a word they say in English,” Nicki said.
Maximo cut in. “We are dealing here with—”
“—Not me. You are, darling. My people speak English.” Nicki’s eyes were not so wide now.
“We’re speaking of children from homes where no one speaks English,” Haydee said.
“Both my grandfathers couldn’t speak English when they got here,” Nicki said. “Nobody gave them this—what do you call it?”
“Bilingual education,” Haydee said.
“That’s for Spanish. What’s the word for Italian?” Nicki said.
“Bilingual,” Haydee said.
“Bilingual is your kind, not my kind,” Nicki said.
“So whatever,” Haydee said.
“Yeah, well, whatever it is, they didn’t do it for my grandparents. They had to learn English or else.”
“It’s quite difficult for these children to start English right away,” Haydee said.
“Oh, is it?” Nicki said.
“Sure is.”
“Well, they don’t have any trouble learning how to say, ‘Stick ’em up.’ ”
Haydee shrieked so loudly that the Chinese sitting in the back of the empty restaurant were startled. “That’s wonderful!” Haydee said. She and Seguera finished their drinks and left with a laugh. At the bar, Maximo was still wondering whether it was a simple case of openness or something a bit more stealthy, a trap carefully covered with leaves.
When they sat down to eat, Maximo saw her staring at the menu, which was printed in Spanish.
“Do you know what you want?” he asked her.
“I can’t even read the thing,” she said.
“Do you trust me?”
“Dear, I trust nobody.”
“Then I won’t order.”
“No, go ahead. I’ll just watch you careful.”
He ordered in Spanish to the old Chinese waiter. When the waiter arrived with the first course, a soup, Nicki asked suspiciously, “What is this?”
“Caldo gallepago,” Maximo said.
She held the spoon hesitantly over the dish. “And?”
“It’s a soup named after Galicia, which is a province in Spain.”
Oh, good, Nicki told herself, a Spaniard from Spain soup. Happily, her spoon went into the soup.
> “Tell me something,” she said.
“What?”
“How can these Chinks have Spanish restaurants? You don’t see a Chink with an Italian restaurant, I’ll tell you that.”
“If the Chinese had an opium addict in the family they used to send him away on a freighter,” Maximo said. “Make him an outcast. A lot of them wound up in Cuba, Peru, Mexico, places like that. Then when they came up here, they had Spanish mixed with their Chinese cooking.”
“The guy who owns this place is a junkie?” Nicki said.
“Nope. But I’ll bet his grandfather or father was.”
“Well all your people should feel right at home here,” she said.
“So should your father,” Maximo said.
“And your friend,” she said.
“I don’t see my friend anymore. You see your father every day.”
Her eyes were narrowing and she was about to say something when the waiter reached past her and began placing bowls on the table.
“Now what’s all this?” she said suspiciously.
“Ropa vieja,” Maximo said, placing some on Nicki’s plate.
“It looks like meat.”
“It’s shredded beef.”
“Oh. All right. And what’s all this black stuff?”
“Black beans.”
The waiter put a couple of more dishes on the table. “Here, give me your plate,” Maximo said. He gave her what appeared to be large potato chips.
“What are these?” Nicki said.
“Tostones.”
He then put fried black fingers on her plate. Her spinal column went up against the back of the chair as he put the dish in front of her.
“Platanos maduros,” Maximo said, indicating the black fingers.
Her fork touched the food as if it were about to detonate.
“Try it, you’ll love it,” Maximo said.
She picked at the black finger and put a small amount against her tongue. She frowned as she tried to place the taste.
“What is that in real language?”
“Fried bananas.”
She thought of pushing the bananas onto the butter plate and demanding they be taken away. Monkey food. Then for some reason, looking at Maximo, she took a forkful of fried bananas and ate it.
“I thought I could meet you Saturday afternoon, Maximo said.”
“You can’t. I got to go to Paramus Mall.”
“I’ll come with you.”
“To the Paramus Mall with me? Never. The whole state of New Jersey is off limits to you.”
“I’ll meet you after you go shopping.”
“That sounds very nice,” she said. “You’ll call Angela about four, five o’clock and I’ll get back to you. But early, please. Otherwise I just can’t, you know, walk out. I got my mother there and my aunts come over and all of a sudden at eight o’clock or something I say I got to meet Angela. Then I don’t come home until three in the morning. If you call Angela early, I can get out at a decent hour. I could meet you seven o’clock someplace for a real dinner. Not some monkey jungle like this place. But I can’t meet you any earlier. I got to shop Saturday.”
“What do you have to get?”
“I need collar shirts.”
“You’re wearing a collar shirt right now.” She was wearing a raspberry cotton shirt with a flat round collar.
“I need a cotton shirt with ombre stripes. Ombre! What’s the matter with you? You should know what that means. Ombre stripes!”
“Hombre?” Maximo said.
“Ombre. You don’t know what it is? The stripe that starts up here. It’s mauve up here. Then it gets darker as it comes down.” Her long fingernails traced a wavering line across the front of her shirt. “It goes to tan and then you get further down and it becomes dark brown.”
“I don’t know what it looks like,” Maximo said. “When you wear it for me, I’ll see it and I’ll like it.”
“Oh, you will,” she said. “That’s what I’ve got to do tomorrow. Go shopping for a collar shirt with ombre stripes.”
“For the entire day?”
“It takes time.”
“That’s something I can’t do,” Maximo said.
“You never feel like just going out and buying something?”
“What for?”
“Just to have things.”
“What things?”
“Things that you could have.”
“I’d like to have a painting,” Maximo said. “I’d live in a shack the rest of my life if it had paintings on the wall.”
“Not me. I like nice houses. Right now I don’t need a painting. I need a collar shirt with ombre stripes. After that, I need a car and some nice big diamonds.”
“You got the wrong person for diamonds,” Maximo said. “You ought to get your father to buy you diamonds.”
“How are your towels?” Nicki said.
“Every day when I wrap one around me I think of you.”
“That’s nice.”
“I keep thinking it’s the same towel that was around you.”
“No!”
“Yes, don’t you like that?”
“I’d like it better if you washed the towels once in a while. Use Tide. I like it better than Cheer.”
“I wash them when I get a chance.”
“How could you wash if you’re wrapping the same towel around you that I used a week ago?”
“Is it a week? That’s too long.”
“An hour is too long for a dirty towel.”
Maximo shrugged his shoulders. What was she getting so excited about towels for? Maximo didn’t share this mania for cleanliness.
“You were off on Wednesday?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Then I called you Thursday and you still weren’t around.”
“Thursday? What time Thursday?” “Two o’clock.
“Oh, I went out to lunch with Galligan and we had such a good time that we said, freak it, we go back to the office when we feel like it. We got back late.”
“Who’s Galligan?”
“The nice big guy in the office. He’s my friend. I told you about him.”
“What were you doing out to lunch with him all afternoon?”
“Because I was out with him.”
“I don’t want you to go to lunch with him.”
“What?”
“I don’t want you to.”
“You can’t tell me that.”
“I don’t want you going out to lunch with Galligan or anybody else.”
She absently toyed with the spoon in front of her.
“Is that how you feel?” she said. Her eyes were wide and the lips parted slightly.
Maximo spoke into this face he saw as open, vulnerable as if he were a commander. “That’s exactly how I feel.”
Her fingers spread and covered the rest of the silverware. My husband sits in prison and sends out orders and I’m supposed to run for him. Then I go see him and he looks at me like I’m one of his new sweatshirts. Now look at you, just because you’re a movie star you think you own me too? She picked up the silverware and threw it onto the table and a couple of pieces bounced off the table and onto the tile floor. They made a noise in the empty restaurant.
Nicki stood up and walked to the ladies’ room. She fumed in front of the mirror. Giving me orders and he’s not responsible for me and I’m not responsible for him. He’s got it wrong. As she redid her eyes, rubbing a thumb over the part of the blue that needed more tone, she decided that she would punish Maximo for this.
Maximo had paid the check and was waiting at the door. He said nothing and walked her toward the subway.
“I want a cab,” she said.
He stepped off the curb and hailed a gypsy cab. The cab, dented and with no company name, was driven by a Puerto Rican in a black T-shirt, sounded as if there were men hidden under the hood who were swinging sledge hammers.
“I don’t get in a cab like that,” Nicki said.
Maximo waved the gypsy cab on. “Too messy for you?”
“You know it, darling.”
A yellow metered cab stopped for a red light a block away and when Maximo waved, put on a directional. When Nicki stepped out with her hand up, the cab jumped the light and pulled up.
“It’s only seven-thirty,” Maximo said.
“That’s good. We said it would be an early night.”
“Why don’t you change your plans and come home with me for a little while?”
“I told you, I can’t.”
“It’s still early.”
“I have to get up early. I have to go to the Paramus Mall and buy a collar shirt with ombre stripes. Ombre! You know ombre.”
Maximo held the door. Nicki paused as she was about to get in.
“Tomorrow?” she said.
“I guess so,” Maximo said.
“Don’t guess. Don’t leave me hanging home all night.”
“All right.”
“Call Angela. Call her early tomorrow.” She kissed him on the cheek and slipped into the cab.
Nicki took the cab over to the bus terminal on Broadway and 165th Street where the commuter buses leave for New Jersey. Before she got on her bus she called Angela and asked her not to answer the phone all weekend. Angela said, yes, that she would love to do a thing like this for Nicki.
20
MAXIMO TRIED NICKI AT her office twice during the week, was told each time that she was at a meeting, never received a call back and found himself, at dusk on Saturday, with a great restlessness through the insides of his thighs. He went down to the phone booth to call Angela and tell her that he was waiting at the booth number, 263-2090. This would, of course, produce a callback from Nicki, who then could save herself from a night of sitting at home with her mother and aunts. Maximo knew that Nicki would say to him that it had to be early, and he knew exactly what he would say to her: leave right now.
He felt Nicki’s body against his, and he saw her face vividly. She dug her teeth into the left side of her lower lip just before coming, and while it was a confirmation of the pleasure within herself, Maximo preferred to regard it as dramatic proof of his ability to screw until it hurts. As he dialed Angela, he marveled at the speed with which he could arrange his sex life. One call now, a few words to Angela, hang up, stand here and wait and within, oh, five minutes, she would be on the phone saying, yes, she would be there quickly, her body prepared to reveal all its secrets. Maximo dialed Angela and after eight rings, hung up. He went upstairs for a half hour and then came down. Maximo dialed Angela again. The first ring became another and the phone settled down to ring to eternity. He went back upstairs and dropped onto the bed for a few minutes. He awoke at midnight. On Sunday afternoon, stretching, he felt need welling up again. This time Angela’s phone rang ten times without an answer.
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