After Delores (9 page)

“You know,” she said, “when you love women the way I do, when your life has been built around the pursuit of women's love, there are a hundred moments bathed in shadows cast from a fire or candle or the strange yellow light of an old kitchen. She was so tender with me.

“‘So,' I asked, ‘when was the last time you made love with a woman?' And she said, ‘Eleven years ago.'

“At that moment,” Coco said, “I saw her pain right away. It jumped out at me. I touched her face and asked, ‘She hurt you, didn't she?'

“‘Yes,' this woman said, so real. ‘The woman I loved hurt me. She left me for a man. She was incredibly selfish. I wasn't heaven either, but she was incredibly selfish.'

“I touched her face like she was my baby, because she was so brave to have made love with me that night. I knew the humiliation she had been carrying longer than decade. I'd seen it many times before, across tables in bars, whispered in dark rooms and in the mirror.”

Coco got sad for a moment and fixed her hair.

“So she looked up at me beautiful and naked and said, ‘Women are so much easier to love than men,' and I wondered what would become of all this because I was so very deeply touched.”

Then Coco was finished. She took a little bow my way and started chewing on her ice cubes.

“Coco,” I said. “That was a great story. What happened next?”

“Her husband came up the following day,” she said, sucking the lemon. “And that was that. Oh, she called me a few times in the city, but she wanted to run around street corners where no one would see us, holding hands and kissing. I couldn't get involved in a trip like that. I wanted to have sex in my life.”

12

COCO'S STORIES HELPED
me think through things. They were like therapy or hypnosis probably are. But as soon as I got home and was alone again, it was back into the real self. I couldn't get away from the sprit of Delores that haunted my apartment and clawed its way back into my mind. Every time I sat in that place, the demon took hold. The only thing that led me away from my pain was to think about Charlotte. Then I could forget who I was.

I finally decided that the thing to do was to ask Charlotte if she honestly thought that Beatriz could have had anything to do with Punkette's death. If she was guilty, I wonder how long it took her to plan the murder. What was the final blow that made her decide, “Yes, I will take this step now”? If I killed Sunshine, I wonder what would happen next? I'd probably just sit in the apartment waiting for the police to come. There'd be no need to run away. Where would I go? Why? They'd come and take me to one of the women's prisons and I'd have to wear green smocks, trade cigarettes, and learn how to play cards all day long with the other girls. When they bring you into court, is the press really waiting in a sea of flashbulbs, or does nobody notice, so you end up spending fifteen years in Bedford Hills taking Thorazine? Or, do you ever get away with it? Did Beatriz?

“You get used to the handcuffs,” this customer told me.

She had been in Bedford for passing bad checks.

“'Cause handcuffs means you're going somewhere and somewhere is better than here. It's like a dog jumping around happy when he sees the leash.”

I met her when she ordered an orange soda at Herbie's and sat there for an hour sipping it.

“All the girls don't feel the same about it. That's just my way of looking at things.”

She had tattoos on her arm made from a blue pen and a pin.

“It gets pretty boring, so you look for little things to do.”

They were straggly and uneven. One tattoo said “Danger” inside a heart. That was her lover's name, she said. Danger got out first but they never did try to meet on the outside. She told me that women who were there for murder, some of them, told her that right after you kill someone who really deserved it, you feel great. But right away you have to pay for setting things so right.

The couch was getting pretty dirty from me sacking out there every night, but I could not bring myself to walk into the bedroom because as soon as I stepped into the doorway, all of Delores's lies came back to me.

“I love you so much,” she said. “You're my family.”

Sometimes it got so bad that all I could do was lie there on the couch and watch the sky. If I had money I would have gone to a decent psychiatric hospital, but instead I was just another pathetic person on the Lower East Side. Charlotte and Beatriz were really my only happy thought. I hoped Beatriz didn't do it. Some people's passions are so unique that reality doesn't have the right to invade. That's how I felt about her and Charlotte in general—that they couldn't be measured by regular standards. They were exceptional. They'd staked out a means of survival on their own terms, working together to take care of things. I'd rather think of them that way, then there was something for me to learn that was positive, instead of growing into another dimension of anger.

There were bars on my windows and outside them there were trees. I could hear radios from the street and at night, the moon peeked out from behind the projects. Sometimes I got so angry I thought my teeth would break. The only other thing I could think of to do was go find Charlotte. So I washed out Delores's shirt and put it on again. It hadn't totally dried and was starting to look a little tired.

Being out on the street felt better for a minute because everything was interesting there and I saw different levels of pain and possibility in a combination that was somehow palatable, or at least diverting. It's only when you're open that the harshest thoughts pop right in. Delores and I, we had our honeymoon and then we had our crisis. That's when everything stops dead and you find out what the other person really thinks. It was that mundane. But all along I thought that if we could have stayed together through our little war, it would have been an opportunity to love each other in the most honest way. When you get informed, that's when the real loving starts. Now I'd have to explain myself to someone all over again. And, truthfully, there's so much confusion that the explanation seems to be an impossible task.

When I knocked on Charlotte's door, it was Beatriz who answered.

“Is Charlotte around?”

Beatriz stood there relaxed, wearing her little black stretch pants and red everything else.

“No, she's at her place.”

I wasn't in the mood for any more surprises.

“Oh, I thought this was Charlotte's place.”

“No.”

“Oh.”

“Do you want to come in?”

I stood in the dark hallway for one second too long.

“You mean this is
your
place?”

“That's right. Charlotte has a place uptown. Are you hungry? I'm just about to make some eggs. Is something wrong?”

“Nothing. I lost my breath coming up the stairs. Sure. Do you … uh, mind if I look around?”

Everything was just the way I remembered it. There was one chair in the living room. The one I shivered on while Punkette danced. The tumor record was still on the stereo.

“Where did you get this album” I asked, holding up the jacket cover. It was a black-and-white photo of a French clone trying to look like a forties American movie imitating a thirties French movie.

“That's Daniel, my son. He thinks he's white these days and spends his money on these atrocities. Have you ever listened to this music?”

“Once.”

“So you know it's terrible. I said to him, ‘Daniel, this is bad music. It is worse than what you hear on the elevators in department stores.' But all he can say is, ‘It's wry, Ma. It's pretending to be stupid. You'll get it someday, leave me alone.'”

Beatriz had a huge personality in that tiny body, and the difference between the two was quite clear. One was sharp and dangerous, the other, simply adorable. Like you could cuddle her until she got completely bored and bit your head off.

“The Gambino family opened a punk club down the block and he's been wasting his mind hanging around there with the moneyed youth. He is sixteen now and totally beyond my influence. Last year he thought he was Puerto Rican. Even
refugees
from Argentina think they are better than all other Latins. Especially Puerto Ricans. Did you know that?”

“No, I didn't. Is that how you feel?”

“Not here in New York City, the great equalizer, where we all become spics. Besides, I've never been a nationalist. Argentines are like Americans, master barbarians.”

Beatriz started cooking up onions and scrambling eggs. She kept talking with her back turned, so I could choose between looking at her body or looking around the apartment and she wouldn't know the difference. I kept my hands in my pockets and tried to see everything, looking for remnants of Punkette. I was so uncomfortable and tense, I felt out of control and needed to do something that made an impact. Just so I could be sure I wouldn't disappear. I walked around a bit in the tiny kitchen looking for something to hold on to when, on a whim, I stopped by the front door and quietly snatched the matchbook cover off the peephole. Then I had a secret too.

“My son is ugly to me these days.”

The onions were sizzling on the broken stove.

“The more manly he becomes, the more I find him so … unattractive. His face is too long. His skin is bad, like mine. He has no grace. The girls his age are so much more alive and brilliant. That's when I was the smartest, age sixteen. I knew everything I know now, but I didn't believe myself.”

She could tell me anything. It didn't matter to her at all. I glanced, sideways, at the exposed peephole; it was huge. Beatriz was sort of humming and then she started laughing to herself. I was feeling nervous, sweating. She'd surely notice the hole in the door, then what would I say? She started to set the table, still laughing. What was she laughing about when everything was so serious? She looked up, suddenly, and caught me panicking. Then the door slammed.

I turned around expecting Charlotte's black eyes, demanding to know what had happened to the peephole. But instead, it was an overgrown teenaged boy.

“Daniel, why do you slam the door?” Beatriz said, knowing he was already in the next room.

Her son was homely and brash, filled with an authentic street cool of his own invention. His Nikes were laced, not tied, his cap was on backward. He had suspenders and wore his belt invitingly unbuckled. His style was too new and homemade to appear in any magazine. In two years it would all be mass-produced for white kids to wear, but for the moment Daniel was a happening young man. He was chill. He was fresh.

“Daniel, did you get the lock I asked you for?”

“I forgot.”

“Well, don't forget again.”

“All right, Ma, all right.”

He was filled with an energy that could as easily become brutality as anything, and had inherited his mother's masculine nature, a woman's masculinity that is too delicately defined to transfer well to sons. He smelled of the future and that future was frightening to me because I couldn't imagine ever being ready for it. There was too much in the present that I didn't understand. He kept going in and out of the bedroom, looking at me in the eye once in a while. I noticed his huge feet as he was out the door again, back to the things that were really important: matters of power and honor.

Beatriz was quiet for three heartbeats and then resumed her faint humming. I looked for something to say.

“How do you like living on this block?”

“Too many junkies. They're even stoned when they rip you off. We got broken into but they left the stereo and took a cheap answering machine. Too stoned to steal properly. Can you imagine? Then, after a bit of time, they die. Probably only got ten dollars for it. Junkies sell everything for ten dollars.”

Beatriz pointed to a dusty square on the side table where something had once been, something that was now sitting comfortably but underused in my living room. So Punkette needed small change and she needed it right away—or just wanted it, that might be more like her.

We sat down together at the table. Beatriz poured water from a clay pitcher and offered me good bread. She tore her piece in half and put it by the side of her plate.

“This neighborhood is a prison between C and D, Coke and Dope. You stay young in prison, did you know that?”

“No.”

“In my country, I remember a famous criminal who had been sentenced when he was twenty and when he came out he was sixty. People gasped on the street when they saw his photograph in the newspaper because he stayed young while they'd all become old.”

Then she grabbed my wrist and pulled up my sleeve. Her grip was like iron. Even though she was half my size, she was completely determined and in control.

“No, Beatriz, I don't have any track marks.”

“Good. I hate junkies. They're liars.”

“Well,” I said, still feeling her fingerprints on my wrist. “Crack's the thing these days anyway. No needles, no marks, no AIDS.”