A few nights after that first night with Aura in Copilco, before I went up to New York, the Argentinean woman to whom I was going to sublet the apartment came by to give me a check and pick up the keys. She was a graphic artist, maybe in her midthirties, just separated from her Mexican husband; she had sad brown eyes, a dimpled chin, thin straight dirty blonde hair, and she was wearing tight faded jeans and a flannel shirt that revealed the top of her shadowy cleavage. After we dealt with the apartment, we went out for a few drinks, then she drove me home. It was late, the street was empty and dark, and somehow we ended up having sex right there, her straddling me in the passenger seat of her car after she’d wriggled out of her jeans. Looking over her shoulder I noticed, amazed, how quickly the windshield fogged, the glare of the streetlamp behind the trees above making the moisture glow like pinkish ice. When was the last time I’d fucked in a car?—in college, I think. It was the first sex I’d had in many months. Why this totally unexpected episode now? Was I coming back to life? I never saw her again.
Back in New York, I didn’t rush to see Aura. I wouldn’t call it a strategy, but I sensed that to have any chance with her, I shouldn’t in the least crowd her. She’d quickly become immersed in her new Columbia life, I was sure: her studies, new friends, brilliant young men from all over the world—dashing robot scientists! Why shouldn’t she forget about me? I readied myself for disappointment, vowed not to hold it against her. I hadn’t been back in New York a week before my mother phoned to tell me that my father was back in the hospital. I went to Wadley, gave my first classes of the semester, and then headed up to Boston in the late summer heat to see him. By then, I’d sent Aura an e-mail saying hello, and from her new Columbia account she’d responded with her telephone number. The first time I phoned, so nervous and excited my belly felt like a basket of writhing eels, her roommate, the Korean botanist, answered. She had a young cheerful voice that came through the phone line like a fresh breeze of spring. Aura was in the shower, she told me. She was in the shower. That phrase evoked so much—it was about six or seven on a weekday evening, normally not an hour for showering unless she was going out, most likely on a date, or whatever it is, I thought, that grad students call “dates.” Even now it hurts to imagine her engaged in that sweet ritual for anyone other than me: coming out of the bathroom with her hair turbaned in a towel, another wrapped around her torso, choosing her dress, blow-drying her hair, putting on the dress, studying herself in the mirror, applying makeup, taking off the dress and putting on another—one that’s less pretty and sexy but that’s cut in a way that covers the yin-yang-faced sun-moon tattoo on her chest above her left breast that she’s had since she was fifteen—reapplying her lip gloss with a Zen calligrapher’s perfect touch, padding around the apartment in still bare or stockinged feet, in that state of restrained excitement just before going out into the night. I left my name, asked her to tell Aura I’d phone again, and a few days later I did. We talked awhile about her courses and professors—the department head, the pale Peruvian who’d told her she was accepted, had taken a job in Michigan, and decamped, just like that!—but she sounded happy, told me she’d thrown a party for the students in her department, that she’d been able to find all the Mexican ingredients in Spanish Harlem that she needed for the food she’d served, even the bottled Mexican syrups and a big block of ice and ice-shaving instruments to make raspados. She loved giving parties. I asked her if she was free for dinner one of these nights. She asked if we could meet for lunch instead. I said that I never met for lunch, because it interrupted my working hours. Why did I say that? Because I thought that her saying she wanted to meet for lunch was her way of letting me know that she wanted to be just friends. It didn’t take much, in those days, to discourage me. Before she hung up, she repeated that she was always free in the daytime. I wonder if eventually I would have given in and gone up to Columbia to meet her for lunch, or for afternoon coffee in the Hungarian Pastry Shop, and how that might have affected our fates. But our standoff was interrupted by my father’s rapid decline. He was moved from the hospital in Boston to a bleak Medicare hospice in Dedham, just off Route 128. It was understood that the move to the hospice meant that the end was finally at hand, yet my father had escaped death so many times that I was sure he would again, though by now nobody really wanted him to, my mother especially.
My parents had a miserable marriage. I never saw them kiss, not once. He was eighteen years older than she. During my last year of high school they finally separated, something my sisters had been urging my mother to do for years. But the separation never became a divorce. After he retired, at age seventy, my father bought a little condo in Florida, where he’d stay in the winter, driving himself back up to Massachusetts in the spring. He had a condo in Walpole, too, but after a few years he sold it and went back to living with my mother in our house in Namoset whenever he came north, on the pretext that my mother couldn’t handle the house on her own—paying the bills, the landscapers, and so on. At eighty-seven, when my father started getting sick and couldn’t do the long drives anymore, he sold the Florida condo, too. Living with my father year-round again, dealing with his illnesses and cantankerous nature, so wore my mother out that within a few years she seemed almost as old and doddering as he. In his youth my father had been an athlete, a high school football and semipro baseball player, but during his last years, while a slow-moving cancer in his intestines was devouring him, he had the wasted skinniness of the decrepit Fidel Castro. In 1999, he choked on vomit in his sleep and spent eight days in a coma, from which he miraculously emerged with a crazy glint in his eyes, skinny limbs electric with dancing-skeleton energy. The coma left him with memory loss and disorientation, though four years later he still did the Times crossword puzzle every day and was opinionated about everything. Sometimes he’d say something strange and spookily suggestive, as if his coma had opened a leak from which dream logic seeped unchecked, like when we were on the phone right after 9/11 and he said, Frankie, why aren’t you out guarding the airports? I had no idea what he meant. Frankie, he persisted, all the young men are out guarding the airports, why aren’t you with them?
About two weeks into September, I went directly from Wadley to see him at the hospice. The room he was in was a cement box and he was hooked up to the familiar IV tree of nutrient and piss bags and monitors. My father spent his last days in that horrible place mostly just lying on his side, staring at the wall. The nurses were rough and bad tempered; my mother told me that she hadn’t met one yet who was nice. When I asked him to tell me what his mother had been like he started to sob. I’d never seen him break down like that, boohooing away. His mother had died years before I was born and I’d never had much curiosity about her. My father was from a Russian immigrant family that had fled the pogroms; he was one of the youngest of eight or nine children, and he came of age in the Depression. He’d worked his whole adult life, until he was seventy, as a chemical engineer for a dental products company in Somerville, leaving for work every morning at six-thirty a.m. His mother, he told me that day in the hospice, was “a foul-mouthed fucking bitch,” always fighting with his father and her children, making everybody’s life miserable. It was close to the opposite of how I’d heard her described years before in what must have been the abridged for-children version. But the way my father wept, as if in helpless rage, as he spoke about his mother surprised me even more. I think he knew that if I was asking about his mother, it could only be because his death was imminent. He probably figured that it must be my novelist’s opportunism: better get this info now before it’s lost forever. He’d had what some might think was a pretty shitty life, but he’d sure loved its few pleasures: his flower and vegetable gardens, betting on horses and football, his spy novels and American history books. At eighty-six, he’d still drive out to Fenway and buy a standing-room ticket to watch Roger Clemens pitch. In most ways he’d done better than I: he’d owned a house in the suburbs, helped put his kids through college, had married a be
autiful Central American woman—a bilingual secretary at the plant where he worked when they met, a future schoolteacher, who never really loved him, just as he probably never really loved her. But not being loved by his wife wasn’t making it any easier for my father to let go of life. I told him I’d be back in another week. He was going to hang in there, I was sure of it, I figured probably even for another year. Pretty soon, Daddy, I said, we’ll be watching the Red Sox in the World Series. We used to joke about how there was no way he was going to leave this life until the Red Sox finally won the World Series. It wasn’t going to be that year, 2003, though it still looked like it might be. I’d already bought my train ticket to Boston for the weekend, when, sitting in my closet-sized office at Wadley College, I got a call on my cell phone from the hospice telling me that he had died. Nobody had been with him, he’d died alone, facing that wall, or so I pictured it.
You could say I never really had a chance to grieve for or mourn my father, but I don’t think I would have mourned him that much anyway. One night I woke from a bad dream and he was sitting on the edge of my bed, only where his face should have been there was just a shadow-filled oval, like the portal to a black hole. It was a little more than two weeks after the funeral that Aura phoned and said she needed urgently to speak to me; she needed my advice about a problem she was having. She wanted to see me that very day; could I? I told her to meet me at two in the Barnes & Noble in Union Square. I was standing by one of the new-books tables in the front of the store when she came up to me. She was wearing faded jeans and a striped jersey under a hooded zippered sweatshirt; with her bangs partly hiding her eyes, her smile looked magnified. Slung over her shoulder was a cloth book bag emblazoned with the Columbia emblem; she was even skinnier than when I’d last seen her in Mexico six weeks before. My only friends have turned against me! she blurted. Those were the first words out of her mouth. I’ve made such a mess! She laughed as if embarrassed at herself, the damsel in distress. I suggested we go outside and talk in the park. It was a sunny fall day, just like the day of my father’s funeral, limpid azure sky, a few white clouds, trees patched with color, the air clean and brisk, a beautiful day that turned Union Square, I told Aura, into the Luxembourg Gardens minus the statues of the queens. The queens have escaped, I went on, but look how they shed their long, brown stone dresses so that they could run away, do you see? See all those crumpled brown paper bags blown against the curbs and mixed in with the leaves, and balled into those trash cans over there, and that one standing up straight on that park bench next to that man eating a sandwich? Those are the queens’ dresses. Aura slowly looked around at all the paper bags, as if what I said might be true, and grinned. And where did the queens go? she asked. That’s what everyone’s trying to find out, I said. Well, maybe I can run away there, too, she said. We sat down on one of the benches and she told me about the problem she was having with her friends. During her first days at Columbia, two girls, inseparable best friends, neither of them first-year students, had adopted Aura as the proverbial third wheel. One, Moira, was from the Dominican Republic and New York, the other, Lizette, was from Venezuela. At an academic conference sponsored by the department, Moira, a very pretty mulatta but also a total neurótica and a pinche obsesiva de controlar todo, got a crush on a guy from Princeton who’d come to give a presentation on the subject of his dissertation, “The Representation of Childhood in Three Latin American Female Writers.” Here we digressed into a brief conversation about the three female writers: one, Clarice Lispector—Clarice L’Inspector, Aura called her—was a favorite of us both; she liked Rosario Castellanos, too, who I’d never read; Aura said the third, who I’d never heard of, was practically the only contemporary writer the professors in her department approved of, and that was because her novels are so well suited to theoretical readings. The Princeton guy had initially seemed interested in Moira, he’d even made plans with her to get together the next weekend, but ever since he’d gone back to New Jersey he’d been phoning Aura. Worse, he e-mailed Moira to tell her he’d fallen in love with Aura, going so far as to describe himself as a victim of the flechazo, love’s arrow, and Moira had immediately forwarded that e-mail to Aura and the other friend, Lizette, and probably to other people in the department as well. After a series of distraught confrontations, Moira and Lizette had written Aura an e-mail formally ending their friendship, as if she’d signed some sort of friendship contract and now they were abrogating it. Aura had gone to both of their apartments, but her knocks had gone unanswered, though she was positive she’d heard muffled voices through the door at Lizette’s. So, here she was six weeks into her first semester, without friends, being unjustly portrayed as a man stealer.
After an interlude of apparently sage mulling, I asked, Did he pick that as his dissertation topic because he’s more interested in women’s issues than in any other subject, or because he wants other women to think he is?
Aura laughed. Oh, but there must be easier ways to pick up women, even in academia, she said. He’s obsessed with his mother, and I’m obsessed with my mother, so that’s what we talked about. But just because a guy is obsessed with his mom doesn’t make me want to go out with him. Probably the opposite.
Well, I’m not obsessed with my mom, I said, so you don’t have to worry about that.
Aura’s bag was heavy with books and her laptop. Was she going to the library? I asked. No, but she did have some reading to do. There wouldn’t be a day the rest of her life when she wouldn’t “have some reading to do.” She was thinking of going to a café. If she wanted, I told her, we could go back to my place to read for a while, and then I’d take her to dinner. We rode the subway back to Brooklyn and spent the rest of the afternoon and into the evening sitting in my apartment, she on the ugly blue- and-white striped couch that was destined to be the first piece of furniture she was going to jettison, and soon I was being lulled by the soft rapid clicking of her keyboard.
We had dinner in a restaurant on Fifth Avenue in Park Slope, a Mediterranean place; it was still warm enough to sit outside in the garden. I tried to kiss her on the sidewalk after. She turned her head away with a winsome smile. What, she wasn’t going to kiss me? I laughed, as if I didn’t care whether she kissed me or not, ever. We walked back to my apartment and made love until just about dawn and again in the late morning after we woke up. But when she was leaving I actually said,
Will I see you again?
She looked at me, a little disconcerted, and said, Of course you will. She came back that night.
13
My mother and her friends belong to the Shaky Grasp Generation, Aura told me once. Of reality, she added. The post-’68 generation stranded in a Mexico City that had turned out not to be San Francisco, New York, or Paris after all, just the same old Mexico City, only more traumatized and disorienting than ever before.
Among the Shaky Grasp Generation’s Mexico City intelligentsia, an enthusiasm for psychoanalysis took hold. The promise of a higher, more just, and poetic organization of life—according to Aura—was now to be sought and perfected in the individual’s intimate core and within the circle of the nuclear family and closest friends, before, surely someday, it could be brought to the masses. Certain Mexican shrinks were almost obsessively discussed and gossiped about among her mother’s and uncle’s colleagues and friends. Some seduced and had love affairs with their patients. And it became a fashion, represented as an enlightened duty, among the Shaky Graspers to send their domestic servants—women and adolescent girls who were almost without exception uneducated and illiterate—into therapy. In Mexico, of course, even an administrative secretary can afford to hire at least a part-time housekeeper, because domestic workers are paid so little. Aura’s uncle was among the first to send his live-in “muchacha” to the family psychotherapist. If he and his wife and their children were in therapy, Leopoldo had explained, it could only benefit the household gestalt for the family servant to undergo therapy, too.
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