Slut Lullabies (4 page)

Miriam will be Miguel's Best Woman, not by default but because he carries her inside his rib cage like a world five feet one inch tall, pressing against his organs and bones. Now Miriam has three new daughters and a husband who watches TV so continually that if Miguel telephones and does not hear a cop show in the background, he knows there is trouble and to hang up before he can make it worse. His warrior sister has slipped into anonymity, become a middle-American housewife, an ordinary devout Latina, an everyday Chicago spic with too-tight pants, a soft apple ass and hair a shade of auburn that does not exist in nature on anyone with skin as dark as hers, her children trailing behind her. But Miguel remembers.

The paella has been vetoed. Deanna thinks it unwise to give guests only “one lump of food,” as she put it. People like to have choices. “But that's the beauty of paella,” Chad piped up in the sing-song voice he uses on Deanna—the voice usually reserved for his tenants—“you have more choices than with any other meal. I mean, look in here, there's chicken, sausage, shrimp, pork. Where would you ever go where you'd get all these types of protein on one plate? Imagine what that'd cost!”

Deanna was unmoved.

Now they are at Café Central, on Chicago Avenue in Miguel's old neighborhood, to sample the chicken stew, which involves both potatoes and rice. (“Two starches?” exclaimed Elaine Please, as though it must be a mistake.) They are an ensemble: Deanna, Miguel and Chad, Elaine and Charles Merry, and Chad's sister, Becky. Becky is a tennis pro, which Miguel translates into
lesbian
, but because it would be unacceptable for the Merrys to have two gay children, she has forfeited her right to come out since Chad got there first. She is married to a former golf pro, a man who squandered his earnings and is now financially dependent upon the Merry clan. In Miguel's mind, this translates as:
Preppie downs martinis to make self fuck lesbian wife. Shiny WASP child conceived.

Café Central is not exactly hip, but has a certain cachet with the straggly artist residue from Wicker Park, trying to recapture post-college, parent-funded trips to Central America. Tonight, though, they are the only white patrons. Miguel recognizes the waitress from when he and his mother and sisters lived down the street seventeen years ago. She did not work at Café Central back then; she was in Norma's class, and Miguel made out with her once behind the field house at school, and afterward he pinched his own neck until it bruised and told everybody she had given him a hickey. Apparently she does not recognize him, though when he places the order in Spanish, she says, “Que haces con los blanquillos?” tipping her head quizzically, maybe flirtatiously. Her bangs are wisps of too-long hair sprayed into a lacquered arch across her forehead.

“Me voy a casar. Soy Miguel, te recuerdas de mi?” But she wouldn't remember; when he kissed her he was called Mike, because at the German bakery where he bussed tables, the owner and customers were always calling him Carlos or Pedro or Jose, and he just got sick of it. It was a long time before he wanted to hear Miguel again. His old flame scans Becky, assumed to be the object of his impending matrimony. Becky whose arms are thicker than Chad's—Becky who'd probably like to lick this hot little
chica's
grape-colored lipstick and grab her thick hips.

The chicken stew arrives. At first Miguel thinks maybe they will get something on the house, and the Merrys will feel important. They like to feel important at restaurants, and although Café Central may not be much of a restaurant in their eyes, it would make a good story to tell their Winnetka friends: exotic free fried plantains. But when the bill arrives, the waitress hands it off without even looking. Then Miguel remembers: she knows
everyone
who comes into Café Central—acquaintances do not merit special treatment. Only in Miguel's new world do strangers exist.

Another interminable evening. Even once they are standing outside, slipping on sunglasses despite the gray tinge of the seven o'clock sky, Deanna will not stop complaining to Charles Merry about her stock portfolio. “How long do you think is reasonable to ride out this plunge?” she shrills. “I lost sixteen thousand dollars last week. I know that isn't much in the scheme of things, but I can't help feeling nervous. My financial advisor says to look at losses as temporary numbers on a page, not real money—but this is the same man who told me to invest in Amazon last year. Is it wrong of me to feel betrayed?”

Charles nods sympathetically. “When Chad started raising bulldogs, Elaine wanted to buy into Pets.com as a lark—it seemed like such a safe bet at the time. I don't even want to tell you how much money we've lost on those puppies! If they were our grandchildren, we could have sent them all to Princeton for four years.”

“Alan Greenspan warned us that the irrational exuberance couldn't last,” Elaine Please demurs. “We've all been living high on the hog, and now it's time to pay the piper. The timing's unfortunate, though, with the ceremony coming up—and we just bought the house in Scottsdale.” She turns to Miguel, suddenly hopeful. “Dear, you don't ever see Alan Greenspan around the Board, do you? I so admire that man!”

Miguel does not have sunglasses; they can all see his eyes. He cannot bring himself to grace, even with dismissal, this fantasy of Greenspan jocularly frequenting Chicago Board of Trade urinals, so he says, “My mother put her entire inheritance into tech companies—since the index dropped, she's had to sell her condos in Venezuela and Miami and take out a second mortgage on her Chicago house. They had to get rid of my stepfather's boat and pull my youngest sister out of college. She works as a cleaning woman now—she's great . . . keep her in mind if you can still
afford
household help.”

The Merrys glance, with one simultaneous bob of blond heads, at Chad. Deanna has scrambled to her car; this does not concern her. Chad steps one sneakered foot onto Miguel's steel-toed Doc Marten. The smile on Miguel's face hurts at the hinge of the jaw. Elaine Please's face crinkles like an English bulldog's. Is she trying to cry? “But Miguel,” she moans, hand over her heart. “We wouldn't want your
sister
to clean our house, dear. You're part of our family, now. Oh . . .”

Chad has wedged his foot under Miguel's boulder of a shoe and pried it off the concrete with the superhuman strength of a mother lifting a car off her child. “Looks like rain!” he shouts, waving one finger around an impeccably gray sky incapable of the passion required for a storm. He does not break the tension by quipping,
Oh, Mom, don't be so gullible, Miguel's mother doesn't know what a stock portfolio is; his stepfather's never been in a boat; his sister manages a deli counter and doesn't even clean her own apartment!
He doesn't say this, Miguel suddenly realizes with the sensation of battery acid spilling into his stomach—one drop, but how quickly it eats away at everything—because he isn't sure that parts of the anecdote aren't true. (
Maybe condos are cheap in Venezuela? What does that youngest sister—Norma? Angelina?
—do
again?
) “The puppies,” Chad cries. “We've gotta run. The puppies need to go out.”

Charles Merry nods sagely. “Be sure to kiss those pups for us, son,” he says. He sounds like he means it.

“I don't want to upset you, honey, but I think you should be forewarned. I don't know if my mother really,
really
liked the stew.”

Miguel turns onto his side, facing the end of the bedroom that is not under construction, where the three bulldogs do not snore, where Chad's boxer-shorted form that has recently gained ten pounds cannot be seen.

“Do you know how fucking sick I am of haggling about our menu?” he says. “It amazes me that you still enjoy eating at all. There's something wrong with you. No normal human being can go through life so immune to the assholedom of others.”

Chad's hand—Miguel swears he can feel new padding like the paw of a young cub—circles his shoulder blades softly. “Uh, excuse me, honey, have you
met
my mother? Which route would you rather I have taken? Hmm, let's see: immune or dead?”

He does not remember Venezuela, he tells Chad. Mentions nothing about the house: small, with dirt floors. The family's progression to dirt had been in stages. First, when Papi worked, there were cracked stucco walls, crumbly concrete floors, dirt only on the roads. But by the time Miguel was in school, Papi slept during the day, and floors and roads were indistinguishable. Mountains lay forever on the horizon no matter where they moved: Caracas, San Felipe. “Chicago is flat,” Mami said over and over, but they never went to the mountains; peaks simply loomed like a taunt. People in Chicago were better off since they did not know the beauty they were missing.

The three children slept all to one room. In the yard out back, vegetables grew, but not well. Mami was an American city girl; the way her tomatoes bruised and caved in as if under a hex was the cause of many fights. Afterward, Miriam would say of Mami, “Su piel se ha puesto como estos tomates—algun dia, el se la comera tambien.” Miguel was afraid of the image of his father wolfing down his mother's tendered skin in lieu of her faulty tomatoes, but couldn't concentrate on that fear because there were too many mistakes to work to keep from making, or he would become the target of Papi's anger. Miriam was not afraid; she provoked. When Papi passed out, she laid Mami's handkerchiefs over his face to watch them soar with his powerful
zzzz's
.

Miguel does not tell Chad about the time he woke to an itching on his back that, when scratched, lurched around inside his T-shirt like a camel's hump wanting independence. His screaming woke Mami, but she was too afraid of the rat to touch Miguel—she kept approaching, then lunging back—so Miriam straddled him, yanked the garment over his head with one swift motion so forceful that, released, he fell against the mattress with a thud. Looming above him, with moonlight haloing her frizzy hair the color of dead leaves, Miriam touched his face only once before rising briskly to calm Norma. Miguel's back stung like being belted when any of them were bad; they all had to lie on the floor while Papi beat them one by one. The innocent ones would make the guilty pay doubly for their having been punished, too, and that would do Papi's work for him.

“How did your father drive his car off a bridge?” Chad asks him—once, actually, only once. “I don't understand, was it a suicide?” But Papi had long been dying by degrees; the act seemed a logical extension, intentional or not. Toward the end, he often disappeared for weeks at a time, and Mami, with her desperate city-girl mind, thought to make little fake bouquets of flowers out of cloth and paper: an entrepreneur. She filled baskets with them and cajoled Miriam and Miguel to carry them door-to-door to sell them like gypsy children, as if the neighbors were not as poor as themselves. That was the only time Miguel remembers seeing Miriam cry, refusing to go out into the street with the bouquets, humiliated; the only time Mami got Papi's belt and beat Miriam with it, wailing the whole time: Did she want her baby brother and sister to starve? Miriam had not resisted Mami's blows, but she would not go—she claimed she would throw the flowers away and find some man to buy
her
flower instead, how would Mami like that? Mami sent Norma with Miguel, and afterward they had enough for butter, sugar, and corn flour: the buttered arepas were their meal, and for desert they sprinkled sugar on top.

“When I was a little boy, I used to eat sticks of butter,” Miguel regales Chad, who probably thinks this is some quaint Venezuelan custom. Chad listens, rapt. The looming mountain of truths he does not know can only be called Miguel's fault.

On their first date, Chad took Miguel for a tour of historic buildings on the South Side. Miguel expected the excursion to be reminiscent of the architect's in
Hannah and Her Sisters
and felt excited; he wanted to be assaulted by beauty. He was fresh back from a year in Barcelona, where he'd started losing his hair and generally made a fool of himself for love.

He needed to believe Chicago was worth coming home to.

Chad's buildings—both the sixty he owned and those he just worshipped from afar—were located primarily in Bronzeville and Englewood, African-American neighborhoods where there seemed more vacant lots than homes. Brownish weeds sprang up just tall enough to rape a woman amid and not be seen; billboards for HIV medication loomed over every block. Miguel counted liquor stores, hair salons, Brown's chicken chains, and churches, while Chad slowed down his car crooning, “Look at the detail!” at every home with a turret. Chad was especially intoxicated by boulevard mansions and English-style row houses. He referred to himself as a preservationist, to which Miguel said, “Uh, don't you mean
developer
?”

“I develop, sure,” Chad explained. “But not like
you
understand development. Not like luxury loft condos with Euro-kitchens. I preserve everything—everything! And I don't just turn around and sell to make a buck—I'm renting to good people, lots of them from the Section 8 housing program. My buildings are their first decent place to live.”

“So if you aren't selling your properties, where are you getting money to fix them up and buy more?” Miguel said.

“Well, from a variety of sources—rent, loans, my father . . . and I do sell
some
, the ones with the least historical significance.” Chad narrowed his eyes, an
Am I getting through to you?
look. “It's all about the buildings,” he tried. “I've thrown myself in front of bulldozers to protect them—I mean, literally, that is exactly what I've done. Any abandoned building I want to acquire, I'll break in to start planning how to save it. Once I fell through a ceiling and had to cling to this beam while the floor swarmed with rats. If a place I buy turns out to be a crack house, I go in and drag out the mattresses and chase out the dealers and whores. Yesterday I walked in on a gang bang—well, actually the girl seemed into it so that was no big deal. But my point is, these buildings . . . Look, I'd rather an entire hick town starve to death than let one historic city block be knocked down by Daley's fast-track demolition program. I'm serious. Daley is Satan, do you understand? This is not about money—this is my entire life.”