Asking for Love

by Robinson, Roxana;

  In the meantime, James invests the income from the smaller trust funds. James does that, and I do everything else. I run the household. I make the arrangements when we go away, and when we don’t. I buy James’s mother’s birthday present; I write the thank-you notes. I found our apartment, I arranged for the mortgage, and I got the letters for the board. I pay the bills, and I talk to the accountant about our taxes. I don’t mind this. James needs someone to look after him; I’m here, I’m fond of him, and I’m good at it. I like making things run smoothly. Besides, this isn’t all I do: I’m a book designer and illustrator; there are other things in my life.

  James sees no reason to worry about cholesterol, or anything else. Why should he worry? There he sits every morning, at his table overlooking the park. Lita brings in his breakfast at eight-thirty, the eggs cooked just the way he likes them.

  “Buenos días, señores,” Lita said, sliding the tray onto the table. Lita is from El Salvador. She is short and broad, with silvery-olive skin and jet-black hair. She is twenty-one years old and has a tempestuous private life.

  “Buenos días, Lita,” I said. “Gracias.”

  My family is from Boston, but when I was growing up we lived in Mexico City, where my father worked for an American bank. Spanish has always been with me, and speaking it is like entering another country. Every morning, when I talk with Lita in the kitchen, I slip back into it. We are only talking about the mechanics of the day, about groceries and the electrician, but everything in Spanish is different. The talk is rapid, the words click and rattle, the gestures are vehement. This is a world of high energy and powerful emotion. Even if it is only groceries and electricians, emotion gets into it. Every transaction in Spanish involves feelings.

  When we have done discussing the day, Lita turns back to her work and I go on to mine. But sometimes Lita’s face, as we talk, is stormy, and finally I ask her what is wrong. I know already: it’s always her boyfriend, Paco. Lita tells me her story, and then we are well and truly in Spanish, where things happen that would never happen in English. We are in a landscape of drama and passion, one that rings with accusations and denials, amorous declarations, cries of betrayal and rage.

  Lita stands before me, her eyes glittering, her hands on her hips. “Mentiras! Mentiras!” she cries, thrillingly. Lies! Lies! She holds her head high, like a heroine. Music rises in the background, and the crimson glow of a last sunset stains the backdrop. It is like having the third act of an opera in your kitchen, every morning. It is always like this in Spanish. I love it.

  “Poco más de mantequilla, por favor,” I said now to Lita, looking at the small pat of butter on the plate.

  “Sí, señora,” Lita said, her voice muted, her eyes lowered. She turned at once, silent in her crepe-soled shoes, and vanished through the swinging door into the kitchen. In public, Spanish is very formal.

  James speaks only English, and he is not interested in Lita’s thrilling life. He knows nothing of the passion and drama that take place in Spanish. James mostly ignores Lita, and seldom speaks to her. Sometimes he will say an English word to her in a loud voice, naming something that he wants, and smiling radiantly. James sees Lita as a kind of miraculous apparition: deaf, mute, and willing, there only to serve him. James wishes all women were like this.

  That morning at breakfast James was in a pale blue and white pin-striped dressing gown, Egyptian cotton, very elegant, and blue pajamas and his Brooks Brothers leather scuffs. James is handsome, in a charming, boyish way. He has tousled reddish-brown hair, with a kind of electric sunny gleam to it. He has blue eyes and wears reddish-brown tortoise-shell glasses. He has a wide brow, a wide jaw, and a wide, beguiling smile.

  James was reading the paper and turning irritable. I don’t know why it is that the Times puts all the upsetting news on the front page. It takes the whole rest of the paper—the heartwarming reunion of a separated family, or the story of a homeless man finding a job—to put you back in a mood in which you can face the day.

  “Just look at this,” James said, shaking his head. “Now we’re going to have the death penalty again.”

  “I didn’t vote for him,” I said. “He’s your governor.”

  I was not in the mood for politics that morning. I had skipped the whole first section and was reading the metropolitan news. “Listen,” I said. “This says that a dead body left out in the air will become a skeleton in a matter of weeks.” I looked up. “Isn’t that amazing?”

  James looked at me over the top of his paper. “What’s amazing about it?” James has uneven eyebrows, and always looks slightly quizzical.

  “Well, it seems amazing to me,” I said. “I thought you had to be buried. I thought it had to happen underground, like compost. What happens to all the flesh? I thought worms ate it, or little tiny organisms, bacteria or something. If the body was just sitting on a chair in the cellar, where would all the flesh go?”

  “What are you talking about?” James asked, now frowning. It irritates him when I talk about something he considers unimportant.

  “This article,” I said. “Here’s an elderly Chinese woman in the Bronx, who speaks no English. Her husband is missing. The meter man comes around, and she keeps refusing to let him in to read the electricity meter. Finally the meter man calls the police. They all arrive, push past the old woman, and go down to the basement. The cellar is dark and full of cobwebs, and in it is the skeleton of the woman’s husband, sitting bolt upright on a wooden chair.”

  James looked back at his paper. “How did she kill him?”

  “They don’t think she did,” I said. “It says she’s not a suspect. And then it says, just by the way, that a body will become a skeleton in a few weeks.”

  I like mysteries, and I particularly liked this one. I was pleased that I’d skipped the first section of the paper.

  “Well, what was her husband doing down there, then, if he wasn’t murdered?” James asked. He was barricaded now behind his paper. James doesn’t like mysteries unless they’re his.

  Lita appeared with a plate of butter pats.

  “Gracias,” I said.

  “De nada,” Lita murmured. She turned, erect in her neat gray uniform, and left us.

  “Nothing,” I said to James. “He was just down there.”

  James lowered his paper. “What?” He sounded deeply skeptical.

  “He was missing,” I reminded him. “He’s been missing for some time.”

  “But so what? Obviously she killed him,” James said. “Why don’t they suspect her?”

  “They just don’t,” I said. “It says there was no suggestion of violence.”

  “Absurd,” said James, impatient. He mistrusts all women. “Of course the wife did it.”

  “Maybe not,” I said. “Maybe they had a fight and he went down to the cellar to hide from her and then had a heart attack. Maybe his wife thought he was still wandering around Central Park in a two-month huff.”

  Central Park is where James goes when he’s mad at me. He did not reply.

  I looked over at James’s plate. In principle, I don’t eat bacon, but James’s plate always looks so appealing, with its sunny rumpled bed of eggs, the little twinkling triangles of buttered toast, the dark glistening strips of bacon. Sometimes the whole thing is irresistible. James had his paper up in front of him and I knew he couldn’t see if I took a slice of bacon, so I did.

  “I saw that,” James said at once, not moving from behind his paper.

  “I’ll get us some more,” I said, conciliatory. I wondered how he had seen me.

  Looking toward the kitchen, I saw that the swinging door was open, just a crack. Lita was behind it, invisible in the dark slit, watching us, waiting to see when we were finished. I called to her for more bacon, and the door swung silently shut.

  “Of course the wife killed him, it’s obvious. But why did she do it?” James asked. He closed his paper with a huge rattle and clatter and reopened it importantly to the next page.

  “You mean
, what had her husband done? It could have been anything,” I said. “He could have been listening in on her phone calls, for example. Or calling The New York Times for answers to the crossword puzzle and pretending he figured them out himself. There are lots of things.”

  James looked at me over his paper and over the tops of his glasses. “Most people,” he said, “would not think those things were capital offenses.”

  “Those would be people who have never experienced them,” I said. “The pain and anguish.”

  James shook his head and went back behind his paper. I broke my stolen bacon very quietly up into three pieces and laid them on an English muffin. I bit into this gingerly, muffling the sound by making a sort of hollow cave of my mouth.

  “I can hear you,” James said, “eating my bacon.”

  I didn’t answer.

  When I had finished my second cup of coffee I stood up and folded my paper. James had eaten the eggs, the toast, and the extra bacon and drunk two cups of coffee, but he wasn’t ready to move. I saw Lita hovering in the open kitchen door, the tray held down, flat against her leg.

  “She wants to clear,” I said.

  “She can,” he said, not looking up.

  “Puede despejar,” I said to Lita. Then, as I was leaving the room, I said to James, “Are you going to the office?”

  James put down the paper at once. “Why?”

  “No reason,” I said. “I just wondered if I was going to have the pleasure of your company all day.”

  James shares an office downtown with two other partners. The three of them look at deals. They have secretaries, and telephones and desks and file cabinets: it’s a real office, but since James is one of the partners, there’s no one who calls up sternly if he doesn’t appear. And if he decides not to go in on Monday, his money will still be there on Tuesday. Most days he goes in, some days not.

  “I haven’t decided yet,” he said, and went back to his paper. Just as James resents questions, he resists decisions.

  I left the dining room and went into my study. I was working at home that day, on a book jacket that was due on Friday. I had started it the day before, but I hadn’t gotten a lot done. I’d had trouble concentrating. James was restless. He was in and out of the apartment all day long, leaving without explanation, returning just when I thought finally he was gone for the day, leaving again just as I sat down to a sandwich, back again suddenly in the middle of the afternoon. It set my nerves on edge, those wordless arrivals and departures. I kept hearing the big front door open suddenly and then shut with a big crash. I’d think, There, that’s that, now he’s gone, I can settle down and work. Then he’d be back, fifteen minutes later, with another crash. Sometimes I’d call out, just to make sure it was him. “James?” He never answered, but sometimes Lita would hear me, and she would come to the door of my study and announce, “Ya se fué, señora.” He’s just gone out. Or, “Acaba de llegar.” He’s just come in. James himself never came in to tell me what he was doing, it was just those crashes.

  The book I was working on was a mystery, the old-fashioned nonthreatening, domestic kind. The cover was meant to be a lighthearted combination of charm and suspense. This is difficult to do without being cartoony, and I was having a hard time. James’s erratic openings and closings of the door made the atmosphere more and more unsettled.

  Finally, hearing a crash, at one point I shouted, more from frustration than curiosity, “James?”

  There was no answer, and this time I went out into the big dark front hall. James was standing in front of the closet, struggling with the sleeve of his coat and holding a small paper bag.

  We faced each other. James was now dressed in his work clothes, a sober suit and tie. I was wearing my work clothes: hot-pink sweatpants and a navy sweatshirt, thick wool socks, and slippers. To judge from appearances, James was the grownup and I the adolescent.

  “Is that you?” I asked pointlessly.

  James raised his eyebrows haughtily. “Certainly not,” he said, removing his arm from his sleeve. He hung his coat in the closet, still holding the paper bag.

  “What did you get?” I asked.

  “A pear,” he said. He opened the bag and held the fruit out like a magician with a rabbit. “I had a sudden urge.”

  The pear was a soft, lustrous yellowy-green. I thought of biting into it.

  “It looks delicious,” I said, feeling the same urge he had. “Did you get me one?”

  “Certainly not,” James said again, and vanished with the pear into his study.

  Later I heard the door slam two more times. James going out and returning, I thought. Now he’s in. But I must have lost track, somehow, because when I finally came out of my study at the end of the afternoon, thinking James was in, he was out. This meant that there had been a crash I hadn’t heard, which bothered me. If James normally slammed the door hard, without thinking about it, why had he shut it softly once, on purpose? Or was he deliberately slamming it loudly every time but once? There was no point in asking him.

  The next day, on Wednesday, as I left the breakfast table, I said, without looking at James, “Are you going to the office today?”

  James’s head snapped up. “Why?” he asked, as before. It was as though he’d just been called to attention.

  I turned around and looked at him. “I just wondered,” I said, holding my hand elaborately against my heart, as though he had given me palpitations. “I just wondered if I would have the pleasure of your company, again. That’s all.”

  James leaned back in his chair, his paper in his hands, his face turned watchfully to me. Lita had come in to clear, and behind him I could see her steep Mayan profile, her lowered eyelids, as she bent over the plates.

  “Well, you might,” James said. “You might have the pleasure of my company all day. Or I might go down to the office.”

  “O-kay,” I said, raising my eyebrows and smiling. “Right-o. Just wanted to know.” I left to get dressed. I was not happy.

  The thing was, I was seeing someone else. Guy was totally different from James: he was a grown-up. I had been seeing him for some time, and for a while we had been very careful, supremely discreet. We were still being careful, but things were starting to change somehow, and move faster. I wasn’t sure anymore that I could be careful, or that I could keep things under control. I wasn’t even sure if I wanted to; I didn’t know what I wanted. I wasn’t sure if there was some subversive part of me that didn’t want things under control. Something was slipping. I didn’t know if it was me, or everything around me.

  That day I was meeting Guy for lunch. By itself, that would have been all right, since I often go out for lunch, whether or not James is at home. But this time Guy had planned to pick me up at the apartment. If James was going to be popping in and out of the apartment all day, then I should tell Guy not to come, but if James was listening in on all my phone calls, how was I going to tell him not to?

  We have two phone lines, and when one is being used, a little yellow light on the telephone goes on, to show which line it is. Every time that light went on, I knew, James would stealthily lift up the receiver. He would do it utterly noiselessly, holding the twin plungers down until the receiver was completely still, the mouthpiece held away from his mouth, the earpiece pressed deep against his ear, his whole listening brain ready to plunge into the middle of my conversation.

  I went into the bedroom, working on this problem, and also the problem of what to wear. I wanted Guy to look at me and think: brainy and sexy. I chose a black short tight skirt, black tights, black cashmere sweater. I stood in front of the mirror, examining myself. The risk was that he would look at me and think: brainy undertaker. I tried on a gold chain and a gold bracelet: rich brainy undertaker? I took off the gold.

  It occurred to me that maybe right now would be the best time to call Guy, while James was reading the paper. The dining room was the only room in the apartment that didn’t have a telephone, with its two little yellow lights. But was James st
ill in there? It would be just like him to sneak after me as soon as I left, and go into his study to watch for the yellow light.

  I went into the front hall, where I could see into the dining room. James was still sitting at the table with the paper. He was leaning over the puzzle, a pencil in his hand. He looked placid and settled.

  The kitchen phone was the closest. Lita was standing at the sink with her back to me. I dialed Guy’s number. I stood facing the room, my head high, my chin lifted. I wasn’t going to turn my back, or whisper and act secretive; I was going to act perfectly normal, as though everything I was doing was respectable. Still, my heart was pounding a bit.

  When Guy answered I said, “Hi.” My voice sounded perfectly normal (I hoped) and cheerful, as if he were any old friend, and as if everything were fine. “It’s me. About lunch.”

  “Still on?” Guy asked.

  “Ye-e-es,” I said, dragging the word out to suggest complications. “But we can’t meet where we planned.”

  “You mean at your place,” he said.

  “Exactly,” I said.

  “Okay. What’s going on?” Guy asked.

  “It’s hard to say, exactly,” I said cheerfully.

  “You can’t talk,” said Guy. “Can you call me later?”

  “I certainly hope so,” I said, laughing and emphatic, as though I would be shocked and offended otherwise. “Okay, then. Talk to you soon. Bye.” I hung up.

  I hoped that I had made it sound, to anyone listening from the dining room, as though the conversation was quite different from what it was. But the whole thing had been more alarming than I had expected. My heart was still pounding, in fact it had gotten worse: this was more excitement than I had hoped for. Lita turned around and looked at me without speaking. I smiled at her in a perfectly natural way; she doesn’t speak much English anyway. She couldn’t have picked up anything from my conversation. Everything was still perfectly all right: Guy had been warned off, and James was still out there working on raising his cholesterol content.