Somebody hit play on a PA and a scratchy recording of a man’s voice blasted out: “YOU—GOT—THE—MOVES, GIIIIRL?”
The idea was that I hadn’t—which was, like, true—and so, all evening, I’d wiggled my thorax as instructed and leered at the cameraman in fright until somebody yelled, “CUT!”
Now I lay in bed knowing that Tan, too, would be searching online for evidence of my humiliation, and that as soon as she’d found it, she’d share it across the entire Comp, and I’d be destroyed. Tan, I thought, Tan, Tan, Tan. The whole week she hadn’t called, or messaged, or emailed, and all I’d gotten in the post was a curt note from the deputy head reminding me of my “probationary status.” And Simon was losing patience: he was talking about dragging me down to the doctor’s if I wasn’t on my feet soon, and York kept sticking her head around the door, asking if I needed “an ear.”
“Get a grip, Cher,” I told the mirror. “It’s just Tania.”
All week, I’d been practicing this: it was just Tania! Like, of course I could face her! It wasn’t like I’d actually made it; it wasn’t like she’d actually missed out. And by Monday, I was (sort of) ready: I could face her, I decided. We’d laugh it off. I’d explain, even, about Fredek—we’d be single together, just like before.
So, at ten to four in the afternoon, I got dressed and headed down the High Street, thinking I’d cut her off on the way to Malachy’s.
And I did—that is, I saw her. Not hurrying down the road from the Comp, like I’d expected, or coming out of the newsagent’s with a bottle of pop, or even detouring up toward the Hole to see me, to make amends, but sauntering out of Lanigans chatting—like really casually chatting, as if they were solid mates—to Fredek.
I stopped. They were maybe ten yards away. “Tan?” I said, hesitantly, and then I was raging; I was screaming, “Tan! Hey, Tania!”
She didn’t reply, but she turned: Fuck you, she was saying—the arms folded, the shoulders back, lips thin as she glanced around at me. Look what I’ve gone and picked up.
Fredek glanced around, too; he saw me, winked, put a hand on the small of Tan’s back, his fingertips slipping behind the waistband of her school skirt.
No, I thought, don’t—
But I didn’t say it aloud, and she took his other hand and tossed her head at me—like, We’re done here, bitch.
I spun away and walked off quickly, almost trotting until I was safely around the corner, and then I sat down hard on the footpath, my feet splodged right in the sludgy overspill of a blocked gully. I heard—I thought I heard—Tania going, “Cher?” but she didn’t come after me. Don’t, I thought, don’t cry, don’t be such a fucking gom. That was one of Ma’s lines: Don’t be such a gom, Cher. Well, I wasn’t: I mean, what was there to cry about? Fredek? Tania? I barely even knew Tania.
“Cheryl? Cher, is that you?”
York—it was York, not Tan. York, trotting toward me, gabardine coat flapping, her face all agape, work satchel in one hand, a pint of milk in the other. She dropped the milk as she knelt beside me; it burst all over the two of us but she didn’t pause to mop it up—she blotted my face with her coat sleeve.
“Cheryl,” she went, “oh, pet. Look at me.” All this in her stupid counselor voice. “Oh, Cher. Oh, my love.”
Patricia Engel
Aguacero
I REMEMBER THE SKY had been dark since morning, as if protesting the start of another day. Rain held off till afternoon, then started heavy, long gray water shards dropping like scissors on the pavement. I’d just left my therapist’s office without an umbrella and stopped for a pack of cigarettes in one of those midtown shops, the size of a closet and smelling of nuts and tobacco, because nothing makes me want to smoke more than a visit to the shrink.
I remember the only other customer was a boy of about fifteen paying for rolling papers and a lottery ticket he told the cashier was for his mom, and after, I stood outside the shop, my back pressed against the glass window under the cover of the black awning, trying to decide if I should make a run for the nearest subway all the way over on Eighth Avenue. I hated city rain. The kind that sticks to your face, stiffens your hair, makes you stink like a dog drenched in its own piss. Nothing like the gentle purifying showers you see out in the country or by the sea.
One of my cousins in Bogotá once taught me a trick: light a cigarette, hold it out with your hand, and an available taxi will appear, guaranteed.
I opened a flame and extended my cigarette arm to the curb.
For my cousin, the trick never failed. For me, nothing.
I retreated to the shelter of the awning, watching the rain slashes, the glossy street current rush toward the sewers.
“You’re Colombian.”
This came from a guy I hadn’t noticed standing next to me. Something about urban living makes it so you don’t even feel when your arm is pressed against a stranger’s.
“How would you know?”
I didn’t speak much in those days unless I had to, so my own voice sounded strange, defensive, even to me.
“You have an Andean face. Also, you just tried to call a taxi with a cigarette. Only Colombians do that.”
He asked if I could spare one so I pulled another cigarette from my pack and passed him my lighter.
I watched the guy sideways as we both smoked. Late forties, maybe. Clean-shaven and pale. Small eyes behind square glasses. Sweatered, with hemmed jeans and brown suede loafers. He smoked vigorously, like a guy who’d been deprived, talking about how this rainstorm was like those of the Amazon, blinding and impossible to navigate. But, he said, rain sounds the same no matter where you are, and he could close his eyes and almost forget this was New York if not for the midtown smells, the song of car horns and screeching brakes.
For the first time in a while I wanted to talk, but felt my tongue curl into the back of my throat like a sleeping mouse. That very day, my shrink, a guy I’d been seeing three times a week for the past two months and who barely ever said a word even when challenged by my silence, told me I should push myself to talk to a stranger, to make conversation, to connect.
When I was down to a nub, I flicked it to the street and lit up another. The guy had the nerve to ask for a second cigarette too. I thought about telling him he could go in the shop behind us and buy his own pack, but just handed one over. He seemed to sense debt accumulating between us and stared at me as I held the lighter out for him.
“Can I invite you to wait out the rain with me over a coffee?”
I said okay because I didn’t feel like going home and had no other place to go. On afternoons like that, during the lull between therapy and the night, I often rode the train to the end of the subway line and back just to eat away a few hours, and because it was a way to be with people without really being with people.
We ducked into a coffee shop a few doors down. The exposure was enough to soak the back of my jacket and top of my head. We found a table along the wall. He went to the counter and ordered us two coffees, both black with no sugar. I remember we sat opposite each other as if we’d been assigned to one another for the afternoon, with duty and resignation. He didn’t seem particularly curious about me, just that he preferred company to being alone, and maybe it was the same for me.
* * *
—
His name was Juan and he was Colombian going several generations back. This much he revealed on that first afternoon. But he’d abandoned Colombia for Europe a decade earlier, and now lived in Madrid with his girlfriend of twenty years and their daughter, who was six. He didn’t ask much beyond my name and my instinct was to tell him a fake one—Sara. But by the end of our coffee, when the rain started to lift, he asked for my number and I gave it. He said we could meet for another coffee sometime. Maybe a walk in a park. We were speaking only Spanish together at this point—I don’t recall at which point we’d made the shift—his
with a heavy Bogotá monotone. Without my asking, he admitted he’d recently turned fifty and I responded that I was twenty-five.
“Look at us,” he said, “both partial markers of an incomplete century.”
It was only a day before he called. I hadn’t worked in three months, though nobody knew this, since a strange June when I was no longer able to sleep. I’d spent entire nights sitting on the stoop of my apartment building watching people come in and out, pass on the street, waiting for dawn, when my eyelids would finally surrender. I’d manage only a two-hour nap every twenty-four hours, and then my heart would begin beating at high velocity, vibrating through my gut and in my throat, and I would fall into a corner on the floor, place my head between the crease of two walls, and weep.
I didn’t want Juan to know where I lived so I agreed to meet him at a café on Elizabeth Street and looped around the whole block so he wouldn’t know from which direction I’d come. He appeared even older to me in the September sunlight, face laced with small wrinkles, and the lenses of his frames looked even thicker. He asked if I worked or was in school, so rather than admit I spent days hiding in my apartment, only venturing out to sell my best clothes at consignment shops as my only income, I took the opportunity to lie again, something I used to feel very guilty about, and invented a whole other life, said I was completing a Ph.D. in anthropology—ridiculous since the only anthropology class I’d ever taken, I’d dropped midsemester. He asked what I was specializing in and I said the indigenous peoples of the southern Americas, specifically the Sikuani tribe in Colombia because I’d just read an article about how many of them had been massacred by paramilitaries.
I impressed myself with my ability to lie on the fly. It was easier than being honest.
He told me he’d been a lawyer in Colombia, and in Madrid worked as some kind of legal consultant, but he’d given that up last year to pursue his dream of writing a novel, which he described as a time-travel supernatural saga about a twenty-first-century Colombian man who travels to ancient Europe and discovers the secrets of destiny, or something like that.
We talked about movies, then books, then about the city; museums and parks and specific streets we each liked to walk. He said he liked to explore neighborhoods at night and I said I did, too.
Then he let slip: “I’m not really supposed to be in this country right now.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, my girlfriend thinks I’m in London. My family thinks I’m in Paris. But I’m here. In this café. With you.”
“What are you supposed to be doing in London?”
“Research for my book. That’s what I told her. But I was really planning on spending the month in Paris. I have another girlfriend there, you see, and she’s been pressuring me to spend more time with her. But when I went to the airport, I canceled my ticket and instead bought one for New York. Nobody knows I’m here.”
“Your family knows about the second girlfriend?”
“Yes. They know I’ve been planning on leaving my girlfriend in Madrid for a long time. If not for our daughter, I would have left years ago.”
“I can’t imagine spending twenty years with someone, then leaving them.”
“You’re young. You will live through plenty of things you never could have imagined.”
“I guess you’re off the hook because you never took vows.”
“A child is a kind of vow. That’s why I’ve come here. To think.”
“Maybe you should see a therapist.”
“I don’t believe in that shit. I’ve spent years in therapy and it was useless. My sister is a psychologist and people pay her a fortune even though she’s a lunatic whose own life is a disaster. It’s a crime, the industry of therapy. We are all fucked no matter what and when you finally understand that—poof!—you’re cured.”
When we left each other that afternoon, he kissed me on the cheek in that casual way of every other Colombian on earth, but it felt different, suspended, and I was suddenly aware of his prickly stubble on my cheek, tiny hairs otherwise invisible in daylight.
* * *
—
The next day he called to invite me for dinner. He said he would cook. He was staying at the apartment of a friend near the newsstand where we met. I had an appointment with the shrink and would be in the neighborhood anyway so I agreed but didn’t tell him that detail. During my session, I talked about meeting this new stranger.
“You might even call us friends at this point,” I said.
The shrink asked if I was experiencing feelings of attraction toward Juan. I said no. Besides, he was old and already had two girlfriends and I found men who couldn’t make up their minds kind of pathetic.
He was staying in one of those cramped old Hell’s Kitchen buildings with fire escapes down the front and back, where you can hear everything happening in every apartment from the hall. Kids squealing, televisions buzzing. A man yelling that something wasn’t his fault.
Normally, if going out with a stranger or to a guy’s house for the first time, my friend Thea and I would tell each other exactly where we were headed with names and addresses, but today I hadn’t told her or anyone anything. My shrink had gotten me to admit a few weeks earlier that I was harboring anger toward Thea because she’d been the only person I told what happened and her response was that he was my boyfriend, he was allowed to do with me what he wanted, and I was the girlfriend, so I had to take it. “It’s not a tragedy,” she’d said. “All women go through it. You need to forget it and move on.”
I knocked on the door marked 302 and Juan swung it open, an apron tied around his waist. He led me into the apartment, a rectangular studio with a queen-size bed pushed into the corner, a small living area along the long wall, and most other walls lined with bookshelves, framed posters of old European films, photographs and postcards thumbtacked to vacant patches of Sheetrock.
I sat on an armchair while Juan dipped into the tiny kitchen and returned with a bottle of wine, which he poured into a pair of glasses already set on the coffee table. He toasted to meeting new friends, to the unknown, and we both sipped, though I kept my lips pressed tight so no wine would slip into my mouth.
Juan cooked pasta. We ate from plates set on our laps. He said he loved cooking but their chef in Madrid never let him, and the girlfriend in Paris always wanted to go to restaurants. He’d learned to cook the few years he’d lived on his own in Bogotá. In his childhood home, men weren’t allowed in the kitchen.
“Why did you leave Colombia?”
“The same reason everyone leaves. Colombia is a rabid dog.”
“Do you miss it?”
“Sometimes.”
“Why don’t you go back?”
He reached for a pack of cigarettes on the coffee table. This time he’d bought his own and offered me one, which I accepted.
He took a long drag.
“I can’t go back.”
“Why not?”
“Either they’ll kill me or I’ll kill myself.”
I couldn’t tell if he was being vague to provoke intrigue or if I was crossing a line of discretion. So I pulled back, my gaze bouncing around the room from books to photographs and the bed made with boarding school tucks and folds.
“Whose apartment is this?” I asked.
“A journalist friend. He’s not really a friend, more of an acquaintance. I hate when people use the word ‘friend’ so liberally. He’s Dutch. I met him through another acquaintance. We once had a pleasant conversation about the Basque resistance and he offered me his apartment in New York and I offered him a room in our place in Madrid.”
“I was in Madrid once,” I said, “but I had a stomach virus and stayed in the hotel room throwing up for four days and by then it was already time to leave so I saw nothing.”
“A reason to return.”
“
Most cities make me ill, New York included.”
“When I returned to Bogotá after several months in the countryside, I developed a terrible case of asthma.”
“You became allergic to your hometown.”
“So it would appear.”
He stood up abruptly and asked if I wanted coffee. I told him I never drink it at night.
“I’m sorry I didn’t think to get us dessert.”
“It’s fine. I should go anyway.”
In truth, I had nobody waiting for me anywhere, only a sense that I should keep things in motion, not linger anywhere too long, so I’d leave Juan’s place and migrate along city streets, probably walking the fifty blocks home rather than taking the subway or a cab. By the time I got to my building it might be midnight. The nights were still warm enough that I could sit out on the stoop with a light jacket and not feel too cold. Sometimes I brought a book outside with me though I didn’t have the concentration to read. Sometimes I tried to write in my journal, but my hand would go limp after only writing a sentence or two.
Juan walked me downstairs to the street. I thanked him for the meal.
“I hope it wasn’t too terrible,” he said.
I started to feel crowded by his body so close to mine in the doorway so I walked away without that kiss on the cheek that had become our hello and good-bye custom since yesterday. I didn’t think much of it but seconds later, as I crossed the street, he was at my side.
“Sara. Did I do something wrong?”
“No. Why?”
“You just seem, I don’t know.”
“You don’t know because you don’t know me,” I said.
We were on the corner now, standing by a garbage can as pedestrians passed close.
“I want you to know something. I’m not sure why I want you to know it. I left Colombia because I was kidnapped. They held me for five months. When they released me, I left the country within a week. I will never go back. Maybe this makes me a bad person, a man with no loyalties, no character.”
The O. Henry Prize Stories 100th Anniversary Edition (2019) Page 21