Don't Make a Scene

by Valerie Block

  On the way home, he paused at the skateboard jump to practice some new slang he'd learned from Magnus and Paul. An enormous white Hummer with tinted windows sidled up to the curb, impossible to ignore. Diane had been derisive about a car like this when they saw one at the botanical gardens. But Javier found the car fascinating.

  One of the windows rolled down.

  “Javier,” someone called from inside the car.

  He turned around, breathless. It was Zoë. She knew his name.

  “Come here,” she beckoned, and opened a door.

  He got into the backseat next to her, with his grocery bags. He smelled overpowering incense in the car. This was the first time he'd been inside a new American car, not counting taxis. There were five people in the parked car, and a bottle of clear liquid was being passed around. The redheaded guy with the big jewelry looked back from the front passenger seat.

  “This the guy?” he asked.

  “This is Javier,” Zoë said, but didn't introduce any of the others.

  “He would do,” said a fat guy with a shaved head, handing him the bottle. Javier recognized the vodka label from a commercial on TV, but he declined to drink. What would he do?

  “What's all this about?” Javier asked Zoë, passing her the bottle.

  “Don't be stupid,” she said, knocking it back.

  “Why should we trust him?” asked the driver, who didn't look much younger than Vladimir. There was an enormous amount of gold jewelry in the car, Javier noticed. Was this the selfish consumerism and lack of humanity that corroded the American society? He looked around at this collection of cool people, and thought suddenly of what he might have been doing in Havana on a Friday evening at six. In the midst of this peculiar moment, being in two places at once in his mind, Javier heard tires screech and brakes squeal. There was a massive, loud jolt and shake as the Hummer was hit by a car.

  The driver was out of the car in an instant. “What the fuck?”

  “Whoah, whoah, whoah!” said the medallion man.

  There were shouts and the slamming of car doors; the car rocked back and forth as people crawled over Javier and his groceries to jump out. Nothing good could come of this. Javier stepped out of the enormous car and fell, not expecting so much distance to the curb. He pulled himself up and grabbed his grocery bags as the two drivers argued in the middle of the street; the Hummer driver yanked the other guy's hair and in short order it was a full-fledged fight. Javier began backing up as the woman in the blue car that had hit the Hummer began shrieking.

  “Get the gun!” shouted the medallion man.

  A sudden crowd of spectators had emerged around this event, including Zoë, who stood there in her short-shorts as if watching something on TV.

  A siren split the air. The last thing Javier needed was Vladimir picking him up at the police station. He began walking downtown, against the traffic, with deliberate slowness, as if he had nothing to do with this. And, in fact, he didn't have anything to do with this. Three blocks later, he crossed the street, walked a block east, and turned around to go back home. This was the end of passing the time at the skateboard jump. This was also the end of Zoë.

  “What's all that racket outside?” Vladimir called from his computer.

  “I have no idea,” Javier said, which was true.

  He put the food away and took a shower. What had they wanted him to do, and would he have done it if the out-of-control car hadn't changed everyone's plans for the evening? He debated whether to tell Diane about what had happened, or almost happened. He decided to focus on learning to conjugate verbs in the imperative, conditional and future tenses.

  DIANE HAD CHECKED INTO a fiercely stylish hotel in the Meatpacking District that Chris had renovated before his partnership with Vladimir. Everything was softly lit from below; underage models swung their naked midriffs down every hallway well-tanned athletes opened doors and young gorgeous men smiled at the front desk. Her passages in and out would have had the atmosphere of a music video, except that she had checked in with two ripped shopping bags and was often sporting the same outfit and sweating. She was wearing a necklace made of gum wrappers that Javier had given her. They probably thought she looked insane or homeless or both. She supposed she was.

  She'd been offered another job, this one in Hollywood, with a major film archive, through a Ronnie Lipsky connection. If all New York stories were about real estate, then all Hollywood stories were about popularity. It seemed to be about real estate (Meg Ryan lived here), but it was really about one's position on the food chain (I'm friends with Meg Ryan). Gladiator (Ridley Scott, 2000) may have been the most honest statement Big Hollywood ever made about itself, Ancient Rome reimagined as a popularity contest. All the personality disorders were collective in Los Angeles and she had never felt at home there. She also didn't trust Ronnie Lipsky. She turned the offer down.

  Now that Javier had started an English class, Diane saw him at night and on the weekends. They went to films and museums, concerts and parks, kitchen supply stores and farmers’ markets. He was equally excited about video games and nice restaurants, the people on the subway and the audience at City Center. He wanted to talk about baseball, capitalism, the Patriot Act, bathing suits, reality TV, the Supreme Court and electric guitars. No sooner did she answer one question than he asked another. She never knew that she knew so much. He wore his blue birthday sneakers every day.

  I'm dating a seventeen-year-old, she thought.

  Eighteen, she corrected herself. And she was just showing him the town. Javier struck up conversations, with anyone, about anything, with no embarrassment about his English, which was improving daily. He was pure interest and energy, applied in seven different directions, a communicator. With Javier, she felt like she was in the presence of a blooming plant.

  What had she been like at eighteen? As far as she could remember, she'd been bored and anxious, unwilling to throw herself into anything, because everything seemed futile. In a recent biography, Diane had read that George Soros had been on fire as a young man in London. “I felt things and absorbed ideas intensely, but I was unable to make an impact,” he'd said in an interview. “Later on, when I was much more able to make an impact, I would feel things much less intensely.” For some reason she remembered this now. Why was Javier bothering with her, when he could charm any female between the ages of thirteen and thirty? Perhaps he was too young to know how compelling he was. Vladimir was no longer a factor in their plans; she didn't know what he was doing, and she didn't care.

  Toward the end of the month, after two weeks of toxic humidity and incessant rain, an apartment came through: a studio on a tree-lined street in the West Village. A rental! A one-year lease! It was clean, and odor-free. The noise came from the music school next door, people practicing the piano, some of them quite good. She was cautious, but elated. As she signed a contract, she said to the super, “What will it take to make sure that all parties honor this contract?”

  “We honor all our contracts. You'll want to decorate, right?”

  “No.”

  “Paint?”

  “No. I mean, maybe later. I just want to move in as soon as possible.”

  “How does tomorrow sound? The place is just sitting empty anyhow.”

  She kissed his cheek. She ran out onto Grove Street reckless and joyful. She passed a pile of garbage that actually smelled kind of sexy.

  She ran to the theater. She called her parents and left a message; she called her sister and left a message. Who else could she call? Javier was her best friend now, but she didn't want to talk to Vladimir, or leave a message on his machine. Fortunately, Javier arrived in person to see another serious French comedy of awkward adolescence, Peppermint Soda (Diane Kurys, 1977), just as she was arranging for her furniture to be moved out of storage. He offered to help her set up in her new place. “You can come after your class?”

  “Diane finds an apartment? Are you kidding? I skip my class!” “Don't skip class. Come afterwards.�
�� “I will make you dinner in your new apartment!” “That may be a little ambitious for the first night.”

  She spent the following day waiting in the unfamiliar space, which was too small. The truck with her furniture was three hours late. The place was filthy. Not all the piano students were so accomplished. It was probably too late to take up a new instrument. She supposed that a year of not playing had eroded much of her ability on the guitar. She left a note on the door, ran out to buy supplies, returned and began to clean. The bathroom was crusty. Some stains could not be removed. She wanted to be renewed and excited, but she was hot, bored and distracted. She couldn't wait to get out of the apartment.

  The French made adult comedies about children. For example, in Beau-Père (Bertrand Blier, 1982), the attractively sorrowful character played by Patrick Dewaere is seduced by his fourteen-year-old stepdaughter after her mother is killed in a car accident. When their affair winds down due to stresses (jealousy high school), the melancholic Dewaere begins to sniff around a woman for whom his stepdaughter babysits (Nathalie Baye). The final shot rests on the eyes of her five-year-old child watching fascinated as the woman finds affection in the arms of this gloomy oddball, and the viewer is left to imagine the story repeating itself.

  If this were an American movie, the Special Victims Unit would be on to him. Or he would have to undergo a morally uplifting catharsis in the last reel, just as every tragedy out of Hollywood had to have a happy ending, and every movie had to have lovable characters. Diane resented the manipulation: present the situation, and she would decide whether to laugh or cry, and when to laugh or cry. French films at least gave you the freedom of your own opinion. You rarely loved the characters in a French movie. (Did the French? Could her position on this be merely cultural ignorance?)

  The furniture arrived finally: mismatched, stained and broken. It depressed her. Before she could even get to the guitar, she cut her palm on a piece of glass pulling something out of a box. She was able to pick out a large shard, but she couldn't be sure she'd removed all the slivers. There were fine invisible flakes of glass in her skin that might never come out.

  She was weeping by the time Javier bounded in, sweating and in high spirits.

  “I love the music!” he said, his arms full of bodega flowers. “Diane! What happen?”

  She sobbed with her bleeding palm held aloft.

  “You have the, the, the little hospital in a box?” he asked.

  “A first aid kit.”

  “Don't laugh at me, I am not in my first language.”

  “I'm not laughing at you. I don't know if I have one, or where it is if I do.”

  “Stay here.” He ran out the door.

  He was back in minutes with a tall woman and a first aid kit.

  “I hear you had an accident,” the woman said briskly, like a no-nonsense British wartime nurse from Central Casting.

  “Forgive me for not getting up,” Diane apologized. “This is really no way to make an impression on a neighbor.”

  “First things first,” the neighbor said, snapping on a pair of latex gloves. “What happened? A piece of broken glass, yes? Let's clean it and have a look. So you're the new tenant. I was wondering when we'd meet. Lucky me, I get you on opening night. Now, how does that feel? Do you think there's any more in there? Perhaps your son would like to hold this, while I open the gauze.”

  “Not my son.”

  “Interesting. How's that?” she asked, referring to the wrapped hand.

  After the woman left, Diane gave Javier a Chinese take-out menu and lay on the sofa with her eyes closed. Normally, she started him off with a push, told him what to say. Now she let him fend for himself.

  “I like to eat dinner, you will bring it to me?” he began, and quizzed the Chinese restaurant about the menu. “Ants on tree? Really? There are bugs in the food? No? There are trees in the food?”

  Javier was flirting on the phone; this could take quite some time.

  She shifted to roll onto her back, with difficulty. She was about to open a second screen for new features, something she'd been longing to do for ten years. She finally had her own apartment, which would be fine once she fixed it up. Why did she feel exhausted, defeated, uninspired? In the ten months since her eviction, she'd programmed fifteen film series and sent four catalogs to the printer. She'd stayed with four different sets of friends and family, and in four different sublet situations and three, maybe four, hotels. She'd been walking with Estelle and to the theater with Dorothy. She'd been book shopping with Daniel and had eaten in delicatessens with Lipsky She'd been to museums with her sister, the park with her niece and nephew and concerts with her parents. She'd seen apartments with Paul, and she'd gone to restaurants and fabric showrooms with Vladimir. But the only one she ever went to the movies with was Javier.

  He sat down on the floor next to the couch. Here he was, in her apartment, the younger, sweeter, more accessible, hormonally driven and energetic version of Vladimir. The same springy, curly lashes on eyes that were bigger, darker and always looking directly at her. Such a gorgeous kid. She couldn't help feeling as if she were around the young Vladimir, before bitterness and frustration took over his life. Before he turned into the married bachelor from hell.

  She shook her head.

  “Diane, why you fall apart now? You have a great apartment!”

  She laughed.

  “All summer you are running: apartment here, apartment there, bad apartment, apartment take away. Be happy! You have an address now.”

  She leaned over to him and kissed him on the mouth. Just like that.

  “Diane,” he said, kissing back. He tasted of Juicy Fruit; he smelled faintly of the spicy aftershave she had come to enjoy in his presence.

  “Come here.” She pulled him up onto the couch. He tried to hold her hand. She pulled it away, giving him the hand without the bandage. He took the hand as if it were a live bird. He licked her mouth with a quiet intensity, and pushed her back until he was lying on top of her. Why had she not spent the entire summer like this, on any couch, with this charming person? The neighbor with the first-aid kit floated back into frame in her mind.

  “No,” he said, as she pulled away. “Come back.”

  They were very involved.

  A buzzer sounded, and they both jumped.

  She gave him cash to pay for dinner, and he put the bag on the kitchen counter, which was crowded with chipped mugs and mismatched cutlery that surely belonged to someone else. He looked at her with sweet longing, and began kissing her forehead, her arms, her left hand. She let him lead her into the bedroom alcove. She was glad that the first box she'd opened had sheets, and she'd had the good sense to put them on the bed right away. She was glad that she didn't know anyone in the building yet (nurse neighbor notwithstanding). She was glad that she was finally getting to put at least one hand into his beautiful hair. Sounds of the city filtered through the window, the ever-present rumble of millions of people going places, doing things. There was nowhere else she would rather be. I have no idea what I'm doing, she thought, as the teenage son of her ex-boyfriend pulled off the turquoise pants, and she let him. Moreover, she thought, I don't care.

  A series of inappropriate images surfaced afterwards: Vladimir in moments of passion, Vladimir in moments of anger, Vladimir talking on the phone to María about Javier, exploding, “Cojones!”

  Couldn't she have a moment of happiness? She scattered thoughts of him away. She remembered the ex-boyfriend who lulled himself to sleep by rubbing his feet together. The ex-boyfriend who got short of breath after eating dried apricots. The ex-boyfriend who got leg cramps in the middle of the night. Who were these people? These glimpses of intimate situations that had gone nowhere didn't improve her mood.

  Javier was on his back, swollen with sleep, arm flung above his head, legs entwined in hers. What did she know of love? She knew about intrigue and infatuation; she knew about letdown, resentment, hostility and disgust. What she knew about was waiting for
love. This felt right. This was the first time she had ever spent nearly three full months getting to know anyone before touching him. He was a teenager. And Vladimir was his father.

  How unbelievably inconvenient.

  LABOR DAY WEEKEND

  THEY WERE LYING together on her bed; an orange glow and the sound of the nighttime traffic came in through the open window. Javier had never been in this situation with a woman. Yusleidis was like a cartoon compared to Diane. Even the ridiculous episode on the roof with Milady was irrelevant. All he wanted was to dig in and stay with Diane, mingling their limbs until they fell asleep again. But Diane was pushing him out of bed. He put his head on her stomach and wrapped his arms around her and squeezed—he wasn't moving.

  “If you don't go home tonight, we have no options,” she told him.

  “That is not home. Home is where you are.”

  She kissed him in a conclusive way, and as she sat up he noticed the articulations of her neck, her clavicle, her collarbone.

  “Go home, and don't say anything, for God's sake.”

  “Why not? I am ready to shout the love for you on the Seventh Avenue South! In the Times Square! I want everyone to know.”

  “Javier. Listen to me. If you do, anyone could accuse me of taking advantage of you.”

  “That's bullshit. I consented. Come here, Diane. I consent again.” “Consent or no consent, it's awkward. Because I'm older.” She was resisting him as he tried to put his arms around her. She was being dry and precise and unavailable.