“What's this?”
“I tried to make a flan,” Javier said. “I don't know what went wrong.”
“Are you going to eat it?”
Javier shook his head, ashamed.
“Then throw it out.”
“That's wasteful.”
“So either make it correctly or don't cook.”
Javier lowered his head, and Vladimir left the dish out on the counter.
“By the way, all this stuff”—he gestured toward the detritus floating around—“could you find a way to store it? It's making me crazy.”
Javier made as if to hand him his demerit card. And then he turned his attention back to the TV.
Vladimir went to his computer. On cubaencuentro.com he read a piece by someone in Cuba who wrote, “How lucky we are to have the blackouts! We can see the beauty of the stars! We're not poisoned by bad TV!”
Vladimir exited the site in protest. You're welcome to your misery, he thought. Good thing you enjoy it, since you have so much of it. He went to RedHotPawn.com to catch up with his chess—he was now playing twelve games simultaneously. He made moves in four games where it was his turn; no one responded, so he'd just have to wait for his opponents to move.
ON SUNDAY MORNING,Vladimir reached for half-and-half for his coffee and saw the brick of flan back in the fridge. He put the dish out on the counter again. Javier had made it: he should either eat it or throw it out.
He searched online and found an intensive English immersion course that started in a week and met at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Javier could learn English, and pick up fashion students. The cost was almost fifteen hundred dollars. He thought, Javier doesn't deserve that class, and was instantly ashamed.
Of course Javier deserved the class.
In the meantime, Javier wasn't asking for the class. He seemed happy to follow Diane around like a puppy by day and watch double features at the theater every night. Everything was new and fascinating: Burger King and cable TV were revelations to him. The previous evening notwithstanding, Javier's needs were small, prosaic, incessant and kind of pathetic. His eyes lit up every time he saw an ice-cream shop. It was hard to turn him down.
There was a knock on the door.
“Dad, could I have some quarters for the arcade?”
“Come on, Javier.” Since discovering the arcade, his son had turned into a gaming addict.
Javier sat on his bed, without being invited. “You know, I can't work here legally, but I'd like to earn money so I don't have to ask you for it.”
“So you can throw it away at the arcade. Play,” he said, setting up the chessboard, giving his son white.
“Oh, come on, Dad: let's go out! There's a farmers’ market I heard about.”
Vladimir didn't want anybody, including Javier, making demands on his time right now. If he wanted to stay inside with the blinds closed on a gorgeous summer's day, so be it. He worked hard enough, and this was his day off.
“The kids downstairs all have portable game players. So they don't have to go to the arcade; they can play anywhere they want,” Javier said, and looked up at him with shining eyes. Periodically, Vladimir glimpsed what Javier must have been like as a child.
They began the opening moves.
“If you move there, I'll take you with my knight.”
“What is MP3?” Javier asked.
“You could then take me here, but I'd take your bishop. It's up to you.”
Javier made the move anyway.
“You know, if I were you, I'd feel lucky to have such a willing chess partner, someone who could really teach me strategy.”
“What's MP3?”
“It's a digital technology.”
Javier launched his queen into open space without backup.
“That's a bad move.”
“Could I have digital technology?”
This brought up an issue he'd not addressed, that of an allowance.
“Okay, how's this? In addition to the walking-around money for food and transport, I will give you twenty dollars a week for whatever you want to do or buy. Including the arcade, and any technology you want to save up for.”
He pulled a twenty-dollar bill out of his wallet; Javier stared at it.
“Twenty dollars in New York is not like twenty dollars in Havana,” Vladimir warned.
Javier clapped him on the shoulders in a burst of enthusiasm. “Thank you! Let's play chess later, okay?” He bounded out of the apartment with the bill.
He wanted to do the right thing by Javier, but the idea of this hormonally charged adolescent staying on indefinitely made Vladimir short of breath. He collected his clothes for the dry cleaner. There it was again, Diane's green sweater. It was summer: she wouldn't need it. Why should he get involved with her dry cleaning? He took it out of the pile. But he couldn't hang it in his closet. So he put it back on the desk chair. He found the bad flan back in the fridge.
Anticipating his son's thunderous return was no more relaxing than being with him in the first place. Javier would probably lose some credits and have to work extra hard because of language issues if he finished high school here. But eventually he would graduate, go to college and live somewhere else.
How on earth would Vladimir pay college tuition?
Javier spent his first American money at the arcade and the convenience store: games, gum, juice and comics. Twenty dollars in twenty minutes. The end. He went back to his father's apartment feeling bewildered and burned.
“I just spent a Cuban professional's monthly wage in less than a half an hour,” he announced.
Vladimir looked amused. “I told you. Come on,” he said, setting up the chessboard again.
Enough chess! Javier hadn't known what to expect from his father, but he certainly hadn't counted on his being silent, impenetrable and humorless, constantly working or reading about Cuba on the Internet. And yes: it was thrilling to read cubaencuentro.com, but at some point, Javier wanted to talk. Vladimir had no talk.
“Why are you sad?” he asked his father.
“I'm not sad.”
“You're not talking.”
“Just because I'm not talking doesn't mean I'm sad.”
“But Dad: you never talk.”
“I really don't have much to say. It's all been said before.”
“Not by me!” Javier said.
The person who liked to talk was Diane. He was always making links between ideas and learning wonderful new things from Diane.
There was so much stimulation around here, all of it foreign, interesting and thought-provoking. Since he'd arrived in America, he'd been so stimulated, he hadn't given a single thought to being combative in the unceasing struggle against Imperialism. It was restful not to have the constant Revolutionary soundtrack hectoring him, but he was exhausted trying to interpret the siren song of the Advertising that had replaced it.
Nothing was quite as he had expected in New York. The streets weren't paved in gold, but every little thing cost money, and it added up to a lot. Nobody drove anywhere, although there were cars everywhere, and they were magnificent, new, all of them—or at least less than ten years old. Hitching rides was pointless (no one would stop), dangerous and perhaps illegal. Taxis were everywhere and expensive. Everybody took public transportation, which was less crowded and more reliable than in Havana. People didn't speak to each other unless they knew each other, and even then there were unwritten rules about who could speak to whom. The woman who sold gum and newspapers, for example, pretended each time that she'd never seen him before, even though he was in her store every day.
The older kids who hung out in the baseball field wouldn't speak to him. Javier had had more success with the skateboarders; he went to the jump every morning before heading to the theater. The regulars—Tom, Blake, and Jamie—had each allowed him one chance on their boards, and Javier had fallen so spectacularly that it had been good for a laugh. Sometimes Blake's older sister Zoë showed up. Zoë had shoulder-length dark
blond hair and great legs on display in olive green short-shorts. Other girls stopped by the jump, but they were less interesting. Zoë evaporated each time he saw her. All four of them teased him about his accent, but Diane had told him that they didn't speak “the Queen's English” either.
Something had to happen soon; Javier had almost touched Diane the previous evening when they watched Stolen Kisses, a French movie about a guy not much older than he was with a crush on his boss's wife. When the woman eventually comes to the guy's apartment to seduce him, Javier was acutely aware of Diane's smooth bare arm on the armrest, her elegant horselike neck, her thick black hair pulled back in clips. She was nothing like Yusleidis or anyone else he'd ever had a thing for; she smelled of oranges and radiated frustration and energy. Javier could talk to Diane for hours. Vladimir refused to discuss her. He was so lame, at home alone every night and weekend, in front of his computer. Vladimir had no idea what to do with Diane. He didn't deserve her.
ON MONDAY MORNING,Javier went to the convenience store.
“Hello, Fatima!” he said. He'd heard someone yelling her name the day before.
She looked at him with a wild expression. “How dare you address me this way! Abdul!”
A stocky man in a vest came out of the back of the store, chewing gum. Fatima said something to him rapidly in another language.
“Get out of here, now,” the man said. “Never come back, understand?”
“But I come here every day!”
“We don't need your business.”
“I'm only being friendly!”
“Go away.” The man took the bottle of juice and the gum that Javier had been about to buy, and waved him off.
Maybe he had made a mistake in English. So much of the language remained beyond his grasp.
When he got to the theater, he went to the construction zone. He asked Joe, the contractor, if he could be of use. Joe told him again that he couldn't work, in case he got hurt.
“Why would I get hurt?”
“Nobody plans to get hurt, kid. It just happens. You're not covered on my plan, so I couldn't help you if you did get hurt. And you could sue me.”
Javier turned to his father, who was squinting at the floor, measuring a set of steps. “What is he talking about?” he asked in Spanish.
“We'll talk about it later,” Vladimir said, and handed him a note to give Diane. “Find out what she wants done with these steps.”
A man wouldn't do that. A man would go into her office and ask her himself. A man wouldn't call her “she.”
Javier found Diane writing a nasty letter to a distributor who had failed to deliver a movie. She read it to him and he clapped, and suggested a few more insulting rhetorical flourishes. He then told her about what Joe had just said.
“Joe's worried you'll sue him?” Diane explained the concept of litigation, telling him a story about a sixty-two-year-old man who had fallen in the lobby two years earlier on a rainy night and then sued the theater for two million dollars in damages.
“WHAT?”
“I'm not kidding. Fortunately, he was seen dancing at his niece's wedding right before the trial, so the case was thrown out of court.”
America was a whole different universe. “How will I help you today?”
She smiled and asked him to change the printer cartridge, which he did.
“What else?”
She asked him to put mailing labels on the new calendars, which he did.
“What else?”
“Gosh, you're fast! Well, why don't you go have lunch?”
“Come with me.”
“No, thank you, I have to get this done. If you don't mind, bring me a turkey sandwich when you come back,” she said, and opened her wallet.
“I will pay for lunch.” Vladimir had given him another twenty dollars for the week, after he had come back with empty pockets, promising to renounce the arcade.
“Absolutely not.”
“Diane. You pay all the time for me.”
“And you help me every day for nothing.”
“And you sent to me my invitation, which I can never pay”
“And you do twice what my employees do, put together. And they do get paid.”
This had become an issue. Storm had decided that Javier was a threat to her job, and routinely walked away while he was talking to her. Floyd ignored him, but not in an active way. Cindy, on the other hand, had been very friendly, and had recently invited him to dinner at her home. He'd accepted with excitement: it would be his first dinner in an American home. He didn't count Chinese takeout with his father in his home.
“Don't make a mountain out of a sandwich,” Diane said, smiling. “I'm touched by the offer, but I can't accept it.”
“By the way, this is from Vladimir,” he said, and handed her the note.
She read it and went to give him her answer in person.
Diane was an honorable woman. He wanted to take her out to lunch and talk about Claire's Knee, which was boring and incomprehensible. This hypocritical Frenchman with his hands all over every female around the lake, talking to them about friendship, how he was getting married so he wasn't interested in women. The ugly, annoying teenager yapping constantly about love had reminded him of Milady; the passivity of her pretty stepsister, who did nothing to stop the older man's creepy caresses, had reminded him of Yusleidis.
When he came back with the sandwiches, he asked to join her for lunch, and they spread their sandwiches out on her coffee table and sat on the sofa.
“Claire's Knee is really annoying, and I want to tell you why.”
“I saw most of Rohmer's movies when I was your age, and I was fascinated by them,” Diane said. “But I've seen some recently and I have to agree with you. Talk is one thing. Annoying people talking incessantly and congratulating themselves is something else.”
He told her about the Fatima incident, and she laughed very hard. “Was she wearing a head scarf?”
“How did you know?”
“She's probably a good Muslim woman, and that was her husband or father who told you to get lost. If you see a woman with a head covering, it's usually the case. Either Muslim or Orthodox Jewish—either way, they don't chat with men.”
He told her that Cindy had invited him for dinner.
She raised an eyebrow and opened a soda can.
“What?” he demanded. “Say what you almost say.”
“What you almost said,” she corrected. “Nothing.”
“You think I should not go?”
“No, of course not! Go, and have a good time.”
“What do you mean?”
“You're a big boy, Javier. I don't want to know about it.”
He snuck glances at Cindy all afternoon. She was so unbelievably not his type that it hadn't even occurred to him! Her age was unclear—she was older than Storm, younger than Diane. He wanted to get out of the dinner, but she cornered him at the concession stand after the second show.
“Diane agreed to let us off early, so it's a date!”
“Twenty -three,” Cindy told him, as they sat side by side on the subway.
He was slightly appalled at the idea that people might think they were a couple. On the other hand, how often had he ever been in this situation? Never. He had always been the interested party.
Suddenly the train emerged into the open air and the car was flooded with light. They were above the ground on an elevated track in a different part of the city. He watched billboards and shop signs in a half-dozen languages flying by. He didn't know what he would do. He decided not to make a decision until the moment presented itself.
“I rarely have anyone over,” she said as she opened her apartment door. “But you seemed like a good candidate for a home-cooked meal.”
He was intrigued by a collection of plants on her windowsill. She showed him a fully grown plant that she had started from an avocado pit; all you needed, she said, was an avocado, a glass, water and toothpicks. She was making beans and
rice. While things were cooking, she asked him questions about Cuba. He told her the story about the prison. She laughed when she was supposed to laugh, and was grave when he told her about the beating. He omitted the part where he performed aikido on his grandfather.
“Wow,” she said when he was done.
“Are you a Muslim woman?”
She laughed very hard.
“I mean, the head thing,” he pointed to her kerchief.
“Watch you don't trip.” She pointed to the rug he was pacing over.
“It's okay. I will not sue you.”
She laughed and the timer went off.
They gossiped about the Bedford Street Cinema. Cindy disliked Storm and Floyd, but she really resented Diane. “I shouldn't tell you this, but she's a terrible boss.”
“Why?”
“She expects you to know everything. I'm not a mind reader. How am I supposed to know she wants the floor washed?”
“Isn't that a daily job?” Diane had told him that Cindy's attitude about washing the floor was one of her pet peeves. Then she'd explained what a pet peeve was.
“Yeah, but she acts like it's a cardinal sin if I haven't done it. I guess you have a different relationship with her. She doesn't invite me in for lunch in her office. To me, she's just a bitch.”
“Oh,” he said, deciding to warn Diane about Cindy in some vague way.
After dinner, he stood at the stove, scraping the pot for every last bean, licking the spoon. She came up behind him. “I really like you, Javier.”
“I like you, too, Cindy,” he said, trying not to panic.
She lifted a curtain and made a gesture leading the conversation into her bedroom. Here it was. He hesitated, holding on to the spoon.
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