“I have had,” Javier said, controlling himself, “a very bad day. I am going to sleep now, and I expect you all to leave me alone.”
He walked upstairs. Aikido had really taken his skills to a new level.
He still hadn't eaten anything.
Alicia came to his room and sat on his bed as he stewed in his mess.
“Your father was exactly the same at this age,” his grandmother said, a hand on his shoulder. “I don't know how many times he was arrested and for what.”
His father: antisocial scum or misunderstood saint, depending on whom you asked. “What about Nadia?”
“She got yelled at,” Alicia said. “But he never hit her. Vladimir really got it.”
And then he got out, Javier knew.
Which raised the inevitable, inconvenient, unanswerable question:
How could he leave me here?
MARCH
ON A BLUSTERY SUNDAY MORNING, Vladimir made coffee and dialed Cuba. The baseball diamond across the street still had a crusty edge of old snow that attracted paper and soot. The trees had begun to show signs of awakening, but actual leaves had not yet appeared. He got through after about fifteen minutes.
“Talk to your sister,” Alicia said. “All I asked is for help with the shopping. She's behaving as if I constantly demand favors!”
He held the phone away from his head.
Diane perked up; she was reading the newspaper on the sofa.
He cleared his throat. “If you speak to me in a reasonable tone of voice about neutral topics, like what's new, how's the weather, then fine. But if you continue to scream, I'm hanging up.”
Alicia continued to scream.
“I have a new way of handling this,” he said in English as he hung up.
Diane stared at him. “Did you just hang up on your mother?”
He smiled. “Yes, I did.”
“Just like that? What was she saying?”
“She wants me to get involved with some drama with my sister.”
“So you hung up on her? You could have said no.”
“I've been saying no for about twenty years now. She doesn't hear me.”
The phone rang, and he picked up. It was Nadia. He held out the receiver, so that Diane could hear the torrent of Spanish from the other end.
“No, really. I hung up on her, and I'm hanging up on you,” he said, and hung up the phone. He looked out the window and laughed. “I don't know why I didn't start doing this years ago.” Diane hung her head as if she were the guilty one, and looked up at him with a fearful expression. She could be so very beautiful. A shame she was always wearing the same thing.
“I think it's time we went out,” he said grandly. “It's a new day, and there's so much to see in the world.”
The phone rang as they collected their coats. María left a message on the machine in violent, sputtering Spanish. He waited for her to finish, and then erased her voice with a feeling of satisfaction. As gusts of wind assailed them on Hudson Street, his cellphone rang. María began to shout and he interrupted her.
“It would be no trouble to me never to speak to you again, so don't threaten me. And if you cry”—he turned to Diane, nodding: María was crying; of course she was—“I will end this conversation right now. So it's really your choice.”
He waited. She continued to sob. “Okay, then.” He hung up the phone, and took Diane's hand to stroll with her up the avenue.
“What was all that about?” she asked.
“They want to drag me back into their arguments, their stupid neighborhood soap operas. The fact that I won't listen to my mother talk about third parties is almost as bad as the fact that I don't visit.”
“Yes, but what specifically was the argument?”
“Who cares?”
“I care,” she said, as they crossed the street.
His new theory was that the soap operas on TV and in the households were the only thing that sustained them all amid the vast failures of the Revolution. No food, no space, no peace, no books, no freedom, no progress, no repairs? No problem: as long as they could have their daily melodramas over petty bullshit, and drive each other insane, they could survive. Trash swirled in little eddies on Hudson Street.
“I'm starving,” he said as he opened the door to the coffee shop. “Did I tell you that Chris had an affair with Jan Mattias a few years ago?”
“Well, that would explain things,” Diane said.
Vladimir had first come to the United States after winning a design competition sponsored by the University of Illinois. The invitation for postgraduate study came right after his final year in architecture school; perhaps he was too young to realize how good his luck was. After the fellowship ended, he had returned to Cuba with dread, sweating the whole way home. Nothing good could come of it, but he felt he had no other option. Gravity was stronger then.
It was like volunteering to stand in a cage. María was a bottomless pit of need. She had gained at least thirty pounds and was a seething, sobbing mess, impatient to pretend that he had never left. Javier was almost three, and had not yet learned how to pass half an hour without falling, screaming or crying. Pucho was still in his Army job and the house was organized around his schedule and moods. After two years of living his own life in a place where anything seemed possible, Vladimir was acutely aware of the narrowness of the place they expected him to squeeze himself back into in order to live.
His father took him aside the night he came back home.
“I don't have to tell you that they still have a file on you,” Pucho said, sitting down on his chair on the patio and lighting up a cigar. A fight broke out in the kitchen. “You'll be followed. This house will be watched. The entire family will be watched.” He waved the match out and exhaled.
Javier let out a howl from the kitchen.
This was a scene he hadn't missed: Pucho holding court from the only unbroken chair on the humid patio, while melodrama raged in the kitchen.
“What's the matter now?” Pucho called, but no one responded. His face had gotten thicker in the two years Vladimir had been away; he'd become a caricature of himself, with heavy jowls and dark, three-dimensional pouches under his eyes. He turned his attention back to Vladimir. “I don't care what you did in Disneyland. You're under my roof now, and I will not have you blight our careers or compromise our lives with your selfishness again.”
Javier climbed onto Vladimir's lap and squealed. María arrived and perched her heavy haunch on the arm of Pucho's chair. Vladimir's throat was beginning to close. Javier was now banging his head on the table repeatedly.
“Javier!” María shouted and dragged him upstairs. To their room, where Vladimir would have to go and make some kind of peace with her shortly.
“Vladimir, come take a look,” his mother called.
She led him to a corner where she'd been working on a perfectly proportioned replica of the Cathedral of Havana. He bent to look at the colonnades and the cobblestoned square. “I have to be careful, or someone will destroy this. Either Javier or Pucho, I don't know who.”
He sat down with her at her workbench. His mother had taught him how to measure, how to draw straight lines, how to think about space and how to make models, using pieces of cardboard dipped in tea for roof tiles. There was a time when she'd had an entire construction crew at her disposal, but her responsibilities had diminished year by year, even though there were buildings collapsing at least once a week and the need for architects and preservationists was visible on every street. She'd once been a gorgeous woman with magnificent posture and long black hair. She still stood up straight, but her hair was short now, a strange burgundy color, and she had dark, nearly navy blue blotches under her eyes.
He wanted to cry.
“How can you stand it anymore?” he asked her.
She looked at him directly. “What are the alternatives?”
He'd had alternatives! What had he been thinking?
When they came back to Vladimir's
apartment after breakfast, the phone was ringing, and Diane picked it up before Vladimir could stop her. She'd arrived the previous week with misgivings, apologies and the smallest of suitcases. She really shouldn't be picking up his phone without permission, but clearly something was wrong down there and his attitude was not helping. Also, she was curious.
“jOigo!” said a male voice.
“Hello. I'm sorry, I don't speak Spanish.”
There was a pause, as gears shifted into English. “Who are you?”
“This is Diane. I'm a friend of Vladimir's.”
The voice was deep and energetic. “This is the new woman?”
“You must be Javier! I've seen your picture. How do you do?”
Vladimir went to his desk, holding his hands away from his body, as if to say, I want nothing to do with this.
“Why my father hangs up the phone?” Javier asked.
“He's annoyed.”
“Always he's annoyed.”
She thought about this. “That's true. Tell me about you?”
He released a dark, humorless laugh. “I am on trouble all the time.”
She sat down to listen. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“Yes. You're a good person to talk. But not by phone. When we meet?”
“When are you coming, Javier? I don't think I can go there.”
“What's he talking about?” Vladimir asked, organizing his desk.
“Tell my father,” Javier was saying, “I come to you in this summer. They want me to go to the Army. I am not a militar, Diane. Even my grandfather knows this. But he makes me to go to the militar school.”
“What are your alternatives?”
“I can't talk now,” he said rapidly.
“Did someone just walk in?”
“Yes.” He sounded under pressure.
“Your grandfather?”
“Listen, Diane, I like to talk to you again. When you call me?”
“When would be a good time?”
Vladimir took the phone out of her hand.
“Wait,” she said, surprised.
He held his hand up and began speaking in rapid, incomprehensible Spanish. He hung up the phone, dialed the number a few times, and then got through. He listened for a long time. At one point, he laughed very hard. At another point he put his hand over his eyes. Whatever it was, it was very funny or very bad, and he probably wouldn't tell her. Why hadn't she asked Javier yes-or-no questions? Why hadn't she taken Spanish instead of French in school? Billy Wilder learned English when he first came to Hollywood by committing ten new words a day to memory. She could do that with Spanish. Why hadn't she started already?
Vladimir hung up, shaking his head, smirking. Now he would go to his desk and answer only the questions he wanted to answer.
Diane pursued him to his computer. “What happened?”
“Big trouble. It's too long to go into, but funny. I was cracking down.”
“Cracking up. Cracking down is what they do to the dissidents.”
“You're learning, Diane,” he said laughing, but she heard the distinctive volleying notes of an Internet chess game, and the conversation was over.
Diane had no problem imagining living in Vladimir's cool, open apartment. It was difficult, however, to imagine living there with Vladimir, even though this was what she was actually doing. They came home, separately or together, after eleven p.m., and he went directly to the computer to read updates on Cuba and play chess with international strangers. He was on the Internet by nine every morning, and often departed before she was fully awake, leaving very little time for talk, much of which concerned the longevity of the hijo de puta. He had yet to attend another movie. Was he avoiding her?
It was March, her annual chance to right the wrongs of Hollywood history, in the series “And the Envelope, Please …” As Neal Gabler argues in his brilliant treatise An Empire of Their Own, the dysfunctional, status-hungry Jewish tyrants who created the Studio System of old routinely turned to the classical stage and tragedy to give their new media more “class.” So when the industry got together to bestow awards on itself, the serious, high-art stuff naturally won the awards. The tradition continues, even though film stars represent the “class,” if not the deities, of the current era. Thoughts of golden-idol worship were inevitable, especially during Awards Season.
Her new cellphone rang for the first time. She hadn't given the number to anyone except Cindy, to use in case of emergency only, and Vladimir, who was sitting across from her, not communicating. This had to be a wrong number.
“That bastard Mattias has been blacklisting me in Hollywood for the last ten years.” She sighed. Daniel Dubrovnik, time-consuming Board member number two.
“How did you get this number?”
“Dorothy gave it to me.”
She closed her eyes. It was just a matter of time before the daily assault on her time went mobile.
Daniel was hopping mad: How else could she explain industrywide lack of interest in his scripts after twenty-five years of award-winning work?
“Assuming that you're right,” Diane yawned, “why would he do it?”
“Jealousy, Diane. I have ideas. Jan Mattias is essentially in real estate. He buys properties. He hasn't had an original thought in his life. I know for a fact that he's had face work done. He's even had body implants.”
Diane promised to consider options for Daniel, and hung up; he'd been unraveling in slow motion over the last year, she supposed, but she couldn't take him seriously.
The interesting downside of fame that Richard Schickel explores at length in his harrowing book Intimate Strangers is the ill will ordinary citizens bear the celebrities they worship. The bigger the fame, the bigger the resentment. Vladimir was right: bigness certainly was a factor in the movies, as in life. Would the Taliban have blown up the colossal Buddhas carved into the cliffs of Afghanistan if the statues had been just a little smaller? Dorothy and Estelle talking about the star-studded MGM commissary sounded like a scene out of Mean Girls (Mark Waters, 2004).
“Why don't you do like I do?” Vladimir asked. “Just hang up the phone.”
“You make a fine point. By the way, Javier wants to come here this summer.”
“Yeah, right,” Vladimir said, typing.
“Why not?”
He was about to say something but stopped with his mouth open. He looked cornered. “A family visa is next to impossible to get. He would need a formal invitation from an institution that would agree to pay all his expenses.”
“From Wiley Hurtado Padrón Architects, for example?”
“They'd see through that.”
“The Bedford Street Cinema's International Internship Program?”
Vladimir smiled at her with his eyes only.
“He sounds like fun. He sounds like he could use a visit with you.”
Vladimir grunted, and made a move on the electronic chessboard.
“His grandfather wants him in the army, did you hear that?”
“Cojones,” he said, shaking his head, staring at the screen. He held up his hands, as if to say, What can I do about it?
“I'd be glad to supply the letter. You tell me what to say.”
“Thank you,” he said, and squeezed her hand dismissively while waiting for his opponent to make a move. “I'll send you a letter tomorrow.”
“And give me his phone number—he wants me to call him.”
Vladimir dropped her hand.
“He needs someone to talk to.”
A look of disgust made a mash of his handsome face. Clearly there was a long, nasty history but why let it seep down on the kid? Vladimir was now fully absorbed in his game. The following day she would sign a year-long lease for a studio Paul had found in Brooklyn Heights. Without a fixed place to keep her clothing and a bed that she could sleep in without apologizing, she couldn't plan further than a day ahead. Regardless of what happened with Vladimir, she needed her own place. She settled back in to read the rest
of the paper. Vladimir wasn't unpleasant, but he wasn't ideal.
ON THE INTERNET when Vladimir got to the studio: He Who Must Not Be Named was still alive. Magnus wore two earrings that day, one in each ear.
Diane had been in residence in Vladimir's apartment for a week. Vladimir wanted to enjoy having her around, but she often seemed to be waiting for him to say or do something, and this made him uncomfortable. She was sloppy about her clothing, papers and personal space. She took forever in the shower. His thoughts went through the same loop over and over: Where is this going? This can go nowhere, so what's the point?
The phone rang. It was Rosa, an old friend of his mother's.
“Vladimir, I just got out. I'm visiting my son in Miami. I'm worried about your mother. You must call her.”
“I do call her.”
“No. You must call her every day and say something nice. It's the least you can do. She deserves better.”
“I will call her when I like, how often I like, and tell her what I like.”
Rosa began to cry. These women! It was all he could do not to slam down the phone.
“Vladimir, he's cruel, your father.”
“Exactly! And she chooses to stay with him. That's her business. Not yours.”
“She's really desperate to get out. She told me to call you.”
“Wait: She told you to tell me that I wasn't calling enough, or that she wants to get out? Out of the house? Or out of the country?”
“Yes, yes!”
“Yes what, Rosa?”
“All of the above. But she would settle for a nice phone call.”
He hung up. He stalked around the office.
Magnus looked up from his model making. “What did I do now?”
“The bullshit. The BULLSHIT!”
Vladimir went back to the phone and stabbed in the number. He couldn't get through. His anger abated somewhat as he dialed the number repeatedly while downloading new software, chewing gum violently and reading editorials he agreed with on the Internet.
AFTER VLADIMIR RETURNED from America, the family watched him for signs of corruption, freedom, ideological diversionism, despair. He did despair: he was back in the purview of the Neighborhood Watch Committee, standing on line for two hours in the hot sun in front of stores with no food. The loudspeakers on the street broadcast the Leader's speech, so even if you avoided the demonstration, or didn't watch it on TV, you still had to listen to it. Every thought was—forget judged!—interrupted.
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