by John Nichols
Eventually I grew afraid that somebody would enter the room and be surprised by me, the unwanted intruder. So I got up and went away. When I stopped at the Downtown Café the friendly waitress with pretty green eyes came over. “Well, well,” she said, “long time no see. What’ll it be today—coffee?”
I ordered my java black and had a glazed doughnut, dabbing the pastry into my steaming cup before every bite. The restaurant was busy and the sidewalk was crowded also. On my napkin I wrote, Con alma ardiente, el cuerpo nunca se cansa. I wrote it three times in a row, then turned over the napkin and did the same thing again on the other side. If the soul is on fire, the body never gets tired.
When I raised my eyes the waitress was standing there with an inquisitive look on her face. “I don’t mean to pry,” she said, “but how did your story turn out?”
“They went away to be married,” I said. “The dancer and Liberace. For me it’s a sad story.” I didn’t want to tell her about Jorge, though, so I asked, “How’s Bobby? Did you get him out of jail?”
Her eyes widened in delight and she gave me a big fat grin. “You remember Bobby? Oh my goodness. How did you remember him?”
“I’m a trained professional,” I said.
She laughed, and I did too. Then she looked at her watch and said, “Hey, do you have plans, or would you like to go for a walk? My shift is over in fifteen minutes.”
I almost declined her invitation, but said instead, “Okay, if you want.”
She brought me a Daily News and a Journal-American that customers had discarded. I read them until she clocked out and figured her tips. Together we walked east on Fourteenth Street to Sixth Avenue, then down to Washington Square. She admitted that she’d never had a boyfriend named Bobby, and he hadn’t been arrested for stealing tires, either. When she made up stories to share with customers the time passed more quickly.
The evening in Washington Square was serene. We sat on a bench and talked.
Her name was Irene Dupree, not her real name, she had invented it when she came to Manhattan from Cincinnati three years ago. She was twenty-eight. Her four-year-old son, John, lived in Ohio with his dad, whose name was Doug. She had a serious alcohol problem but was working on it. Aside from being a waitress, she also did occasional secretarial jobs for a temp service that provided businesses with girls like herself who could type and act intelligent. At night, twice a week, she attended an academy I had never heard of, studying to be a nurse.
“I like to help people when they’re feeling down and out. I’ve been there myself.”
Her outfit was nondescript. A green blouse, a modest skirt, and saddle shoes. She had been a high-school cheerleader and really loved to dance. She could do cha-cha and mambo and the Charleston; she could jitterbug and was learning tango. What did I think of Rudolph Valentino? She liked movies; her favorite actresses were Natalie Wood and Eva Marie Saint. Had I seen Splendor in the Grass or On the Waterfront?
Irene wanted to visit my apartment. I balked. “It’s just a little pigpen,” I said.
“I don’t mind.” She took my hand and pulled me up off the bench. “I’ll only stay a minute. You don’t have to walk me home.”
We detoured off West Broadway so I could show her where the empanada stand had been. I told her about Roldán and my friend Alfonso, and Luigi with his burnt face. I wondered if Roldán was right now at the beach in San Sebastián drinking a rum and Coke.
She said her father worked as a ticket agent at the Cincinnati railroad station. Her mother taught people how to teach braille to the blind. She had two sisters, Kerry and Melissa, and a brother, Dave, who’d earned a football scholarship to Wayne State, in Indiana.
“I’m the black sheep of the family. I’ve even had an abortion.”
At West Broadway and Prince Street I opened my mailbox. There was a sealed letter for me from the seventh publisher on my list, and another envelope from my draft board. However, I didn’t want to open either of them in front of a stranger.
After we climbed up to my apartment I boiled some water and made two cups of instant coffee. We sat at my tin table painted to resemble wood. From her bitten-down fingernails the polish was flaking off. She had little pearls in her earlobes. One shoelace was untied. “I buy most of my clothes at the Salvation Army or Goodwill Industries or other secondhand places. If you’re selective, cheap things can look real nice.”
She lived in a building not far away, on Morton Street. Her apartment was about the size of mine, she told me, except the toilet was down a hallway beside the communal shower. She did sit-ups in her bedroom and walked all over New York unafraid of being mugged. In high school she had also played softball, a pitcher on the team.
My manuscripts littering the floor intrigued her. “How can you write a book? It seems like the most impossible thing to do.” She used to read a lot but not anymore, except for the nursing texts. She didn’t like the Bible. Norman Vincent Peale was okay. As a kid she read Nancy Drew. She remembered Kiss Me Deadly, by Mickey Spillane, because it had scared her half to death. A friend of hers at school, Dorothy, had an uncle who’d been murdered during the robbery of a toy store, shot with a .22.
Irene Dupree stood up and tiptoed through my manuscripts to check out my shelves of books. She read the titles aloud and asked me about the authors. Then she took off her shoes and invited me to lie down beside her on the bed. We held each other until gradually she quit talking. I hardly said a word, I was so surprised and afraid. After a while she kissed me and then we made love.
Of course I remember every detail of what transpired. I remember how her body was and the sensations I experienced and what we said to each other. But that seems private here. Somehow I had stumbled into the astonishing realm of sex when I least expected it.
And then my world changed in ways that I never could have imagined.
Epilogue: How to Eat an Empanada
Many years have passed, and I never again heard from any of those boys and girls at the empanada stand. Yet I still have a dream that one day Alfonso might track me down, showing up at my door as promised with the pragmatic Sofía on his arm and three handsome kids in tow, and the ratty purple scarf tossed loosely around his neck.
This is how I have always envisioned the moment:
“Hola, profe, qué hacés?” I say, and he throws his arms around me.
“Che, blondie—how the heck are you doing?”
They step inside and meet my first wife and pat the dog and shake hands with our two young children. After that, Alfonso produces a greasy paper bag and reaches inside, removing empanadas made of beef and quince and cheese and chicken and raisins. We turn on a burner under a pot of oil and drop them in. My wife runs off to buy wine, Tabasco sauce, and ice cream for dessert. While she is gone I open a trunk full of old manuscripts and locate a parcel containing the two pieces of Áureo Roldán’s plaster of Paris cast with all the greetings and signatures on it. Carefully, I unwrap this artifact and put it in the center of our dining room table, replacing the bowl of fruit. Between both halves of the cast I arrange a tall candle and light it.
Then we sit down at the table and, with a baroque flourish, Alfonso distributes the steamy empanadas. My daughter and her brother frown suspiciously at the hot little pies on their plates.
“This is how to eat an empanada,” Alfonso explains, picking one up and wrapping the bottom half with a paper napkin. He proceeds to nip off the top and splash on the Tabasco. After that he takes a good bite and chews for a while, savoring the delicious taste with his eyes closed, remembering how exquisite the empanadas tasted when we were desperately poor.
I pour the wine. A cheap bottle from Chile, so popular nowadays. And we lift our glasses, tapping them together as we proclaim in cheerful Spanish:
“Health, love, money … and all the time in the world to spend them!”