The Accidental Native (24 page)

He was bent over, laughing, holding his sides.

“Are you okay, man?” I asked stupidly, loopy from the shots, the heat and the funeral.

He shooed me away with his hand, and after a few deep breaths, collected himself. You couldn't tell Foley had that laughing episode as he walked erect, somber, back toward the parking lot.

He got into his Saab to join the cars lining behind the hearse. Julia shouted for me on the other side of the parking lot. She was standing by Marisol who, crossed arms, looked my way. Micco asked if I wanted to drive with him, but I told him I'd ride with Julia and Marisol.

On the way to the cemetery, it started to drizzle. The radio played pop music, and I asked to turn it off. Both Julia and Mari agreed out loud, and we sat in silence for the rest of the slow ride.

At the burial site, Rita's father almost fainted, and his two sons had to hold him up, then sat him down by his wife. The light mist continued, umbrellas sprung open, the last words and prayers uttered, as everyone placed a flower on the casket before the crew pushed it into the family granite mausoleum.

A small crowd gathered around the niece with the voice, congratulating her on the song, the gift she had, wishing her well on what appeared to be a surefire career. The rest of us dispersed, heading to our automobiles, and our lives.

Julia drove us back to the funeral home, where Mari and I picked up our sidelined cars and followed her to the condo, a spacious penthouse suite with a generous view of Playa Azul. After dumping our stuff in our rooms, Julia opened her laptop to catch up on emails and work, so Marisol and I decided to stroll on the beach before dinner.

The wind was blowing hard, and Marisol kept holding on to her straw hat. We passed only a handful of people at the beach. Some American college kids had a lively touch football game going on. An artist painted the landscape. Several sunburned bodies strewn on blankets, sleeping past the time they should have packed for home. We waved to the beach police patrolling in their dune buggies.

When we reached jagged rocks overlooking an inlet, we sat for a while to take in the view. We sat with our arms and hands behind us, glancing out toward the ocean, Marisol holding her hat between her knees. Menacing clouds hung low; it had been drizzling on and off all the way from Fajardo, although at times bright rays of sun peeked through. We talked about the funeral, the niece with the voice, Rita's family, which neither one of us had ever met.

Marisol lounged back, hat held at her stomach, to catch some sun. I did the same but turned to look at her, my crooked arm supporting my face. I marveled at her full lips, her eyes at times intense while other times sad and exposed, but always expressive. The tiny freckles on her nose which I had grown to like. The wind had blown a strand of curly hair over her face, and I reached to
brush it back as she did the same. Our hands bumped and she opened her sleepy eyes, startled.

“I'm here,” I said.

She looked up at me, her eyes partly squinting. She stared up at me for a few seconds then sat up.

“Ay, Rennie. Sometimes you're really not.”

She was right. Most of the time in Puerto Rico I had felt like I was drifting away. She laughed softly and peered out toward seagulls squawking below.

We didn't speak for a few minutes.

“Everything's changed,” I said, breaking the silence. “Except you, you're the same for me, you're my anchor.”

The wind had subsided, so she put on her hat, stuffing her hair under it. She looked at me, suspiciously, studying my face, putting her hand over her eyes to protect them from the glare of the setting sun.

“What's that? Like the new ball and chain?”

“No,” I cracked up, shaking my head. “Not what I'm saying.”

We both laughed. She was busting my chops for sport, a good sign.

“You have a problem with that?”

She grinned, looking at her wiggling feet, then away to the horizon. “Don't know. Never been an anchor before.”

She gave me a sly look, and I leaned into her to explain how in the past few weeks she was always on my mind to the point of obsession, to tell her I loved her, but she put a hand on my mouth.

“Rennie, I'm just so tired of being alone. Can you understand that?” I nodded, and she brushed her thumb across my lips.

“Let's go,” she said, squeezing my shoulders. “Julia's waiting for us.”

We walked back along the water as swirls of orange and purple crowded the darkening sky. At one point, she put her arm around my waist and rested her head against my bicep. And we walked like that for a while.

By the time we returned, Julia had finished her work, showered, dressed and had made reservations at a local restaurant. She chided us for being late, because she was starved, and she hoped we
were in the mood for seafood. “Hurry up and get ready,” she said and scooted us toward our rooms.

El Rincón Sabroso was less than a ten-minute drive. A cozy place, clean, nestled between the ocean and the highway. Julia ordered lobsters for us all. We each had a cocktail, and then she surprised us by ordering champagne.

“What's the occasion?” I asked.

She smiled. “You don't need an occasion to have champagne, right Marisol?”

Marisol looked at her and shrugged her shoulders. “Of course, not. Pour, sister.”

The conversation drifted into platitudes—weather, food, the beach—and after a short pause, when it seemed we had exhausted all topics, I said, almost absent-mindedly, “I'm going to miss Rita.”

“She was a good friend and colleague,” Marisol said, nodding.

Julia looked at me and rubbed my arm, as she is wont to do when I look distressed or sad. Where before I might have clammed up, I grabbed her hand, and she smiled back. Trying to break the gloomy atmosphere that my previous comment had created, I told Julia about my renewal. At first, she didn't respond, which surprised me. After a few seconds, she lit a cigarette and turned to me.

“I'm proud of you, m'ijo, I am. But, down the line you should transfer out of there.” And then she bent past me and spoke to Marisol, “And that goes for you too.” We looked at each other, then at her.

I kept looking at her face to read for meaning. She whipped out a brush from her purse and combed her hair while holding the cigarette between her lips. She put the brush away with a loud click in her bag and turned to us again, blowing smoke out of her mouth in that urgent way of hers.

“What are you saying, Julia?”

“Ay, that was the champagne talking. Forget it,” she said, tapping my face playfully and ending the conversation. And then, lifting her glass, she added, “It's good to see you both together again.”

Marisol and I looked at each other, then away, both blushing. She stared at us, smiling, and her eyes were getting a bit glassy. Rubbing the stem of the flute champagne glass, she told us about how she had met my father, who she reminded us, was a bit older than she.

“We bumped into each other at the Lázaro library,” she laughed. “We needed the same book and we had a real debate over who should have the book.” She took a sip, looked into the flute glass.

“Juanma used to say that I smiled, or batted my eyelashes or something like that, and he melted and gave in.” Julia smiled again, in her tongue in cheek, pursed-lip way that says “Can you believe that?”

Marisol and I both laughed because the thought of Julia doing such a thing was so ridiculous.

“Your father, the revisionist historian.”

The food came. Some of the fattest lobster tails I had ever seen, with equally mammoth tostones. We toasted to the lobsters and ate heartily.

Throughout dinner, Julia served bits and pieces of that past. How my father turned over the book with a promise from her for a date. How after that first date, they were inseparable, argued over politics and other issues so often that friends started referring to them as “Crossfire,” after the popular pundit show of the time. Laughing out loud, she recounted my father's serenade at her apartment one night.

“He sang so badly for so long my roommates begged me to tell him to stop.” He made her laugh, she said as she fondled her silver necklace. In that first year, they roamed every known street of Old San Juan and discovered the secluded ones.

“There wasn't anything immediately attractive about your father, but after I got to know him, I don't know, he had this presence, and I began to appreciate his loveliness, his character, and he became the most handsome man to me.”

Marisol stared at my mother with a new sense of appreciation, I could tell, and frankly, so did I. At that moment, Julia was very much a real woman to me.

“Our thing became an obsession, both of us, unable to go a day without thinking about each other, without keeping our hands off each other,” she said, shaking her head, closing her eyes. “What did I know about love? I was so young, so näive.” She laughed, shaking her head again, and added, “And so stupid.”

I kept quiet at this remark, bowing my head. Under the table, Marisol grabbed my hand. Julia saw my face, and horror swept across hers.

“Oh, no,” she said, pain transforming her features. “It wasn't like that, René.”

I didn't respond.

Crying, she pushed herself from the table and trotted to the ladies' room. Marisol looked at me, agitated and confused, and ran after her. I sat at the table, my hands rubbing my face, running through my hair.

I was grateful it was a short ride. When she parked the car, she turned to me.

“Let me tell you one thing,” she said, pointing her finger, slurring her words. “The day I found out I was pregnant with you was the happiest day of my life.”

She was shaking, choking on her tears, and I brought her closer to me and embraced her hard. From the back seat, Mari rubbed my mother's shoulder and with the other hand ran her fingers through my hair.

Jake Foley lived on a highway that locals joked had a curve for every day of the year. It was a two-lane road, with captivating views of what awaited you below if you fell asleep at the wheel or were stupid enough to take it on under the influence. Like a skinny snake, it wound through the cordillera heading toward Guayama and the southern coast. Foley lived no more than seven miles from Baná, but on that road it felt farther. As a truck roared past me, and both my Civic and I shook, I cursed any man crazy enough to live in such a forsaken place. The invitation was for seven, but I had called and told him I was running late. With an exasperated sigh, he said the food was getting cold, so get my ass up there.

By the time I was getting closer, it was getting colder and darker. As my luck would have it, a heavy fog started settling in. I had never seen anything like this in Puerto Rico, or anywhere for that matter, and driving in it was not fun. I had taped Jake's directions to the dashboard—no GPS will get you there, he said—and after circling a few places and turning here and there, I managed to find the long ascending driveway that led to his chalet, now almost covered in mist.

He met me at the door, wearing jeans and a flowery shirt out of some Hawaiian movie. Barefoot, he ordered me to take my shoes off and leave them on a rubber pad near the doorway. It's been my experience that westerners who have this fetish about taking shoes off inside the house have traveled or lived extensively in areas of the world where this is a custom.

A quick pan of the man's crib confirmed he was an aficionado of East Asian culture. I wouldn't have figured Foley for a lover of any type of art, and not someone who collected anything other than paychecks, but in the foyer and throughout the living room, he had pieces of jade sculpture, Japanese lacquer vases, Chinese ceramic vases and Sumi-e paintings. On one wall he had mounted a calligraphic representation of what he told me was the Chinese character for fate, which looked like a man standing and leaning forward at the furthermost point of a sailing boat's bow.

Mounted on a large wall was an impressive collection of masks from the Far East, including a frightening Indonesian one with big teeth and large ears, and several Maori ones. Placidly, and alone, a Nepalese bronze Buddha sat on the middle of a credenza, contemplating the entire scene, which included my big toe sticking out of the hole in my right sock. Foley came back with a bottle of Beaujolais and two glasses. I shoved my foot under the large, square wooden coffee table.

“Well, had to re-heat the food. What the hell took you so long?” He said this as always in that soft tone that would belie any agitation.

“Jeez, Foley, you live out here in the freakin' boonies.”

He laughed. “You made it at least. People never visit me; they use the highway as an excuse.” He poured two hearty servings of wine. “Hell, I'm kinda glad, to tell you the truth.”

“Don't like our colleagues?”

He shrugged his shoulders, dismissed the entire department with a wave of the hand and a roll of the lips. “Don't need to see them day and night.”

“You're barely on campus, though,” I said, cringing inside after I said it, because I didn't know how he would take it.

He laughed. “Right out of Notre Dame, I came to PR with a doctorate in Anglo-Saxon literature. So, I accepted my obsolescence early, learned to be another brick in the wall.”

“And now you teach writing.”

“Makes me feel like I'm doing something worthwhile.”

“You teach the other stuff too, don't you?”

“A Shakespeare course for the majors, here and there. Early Brit survey.” He took a slow sip from his glass. “They couldn't care less about
Beowulf
.”

I had barely taken a sip of the Beaujolais when he signaled me to dinner. It was a chatty one, and I found Foley to be as fascinating a conversationalist as he was mysterious. When I mentioned the art, he described his travels in that region of the world, beginning as a child with his military family. His father was a naval officer, stationed in Yokosuka for an extended period, but with stints in Hawaii and San Diego. Young Jake got to see a good portion of the East, and by the time he was off to the University of Virginia for his undergraduate degree, he had an extensive collection of what he called touristy junk. But that initiated his love for the serious art collecting that would come later.