The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (11 page)

He put up his hands as if to say, “I’m not armed . . .”

She blushed, looking away. “You can find me at the Woolworth’s on Fordham Road. I work there part-time.” And she wrote down her name, Delores Fuentes.

He looked over the piece of paper and said: “You have really beautiful handwriting.”

“I can write down poems for you. I write my own, and I learn poems in English.”

“Yeah?”

“You want me to write one down?”

“Sure.”

She turned to the bar and meticulously wrote out the poem “Annabel Lee,” by Edgar Allan Poe.

“You’re kidding me?” And he scratched his head, put the poem in his pocket, and said, “You’re really classy, you know that?”

Later, around three o’clock, when the dance was winding down, Delores no longer felt angry or anxious about her father. As a matter of fact, she now seemed happy about the dance hall. And her father didn’t even seem drunk. As they left the dance hall together, he walked with his back straight and his head held high. It made her happy to think about coming back here. People paid you compliments, and said you were pretty enough to enter a beauty contest! She and her father were heading to the bus stop, and as they crossed the street to catch a downtown bus, the American fellow dazzled Delores, pulling up alongside them in a 1946 Oldsmobile. It was a convertible and the canvas-top roof had been pulled down.

“Let me drive you folks home.”

And so they climbed into his car, feeling like wealthy people. Her father plopped down into the plump leather upholstery of the back seat. He put his arm around Delores, eventually falling asleep and snoring, as the car drove away.

The fellow she’d met in the dance hall was a nice man. He would show up at the Woolworth’s to make sure that she’d enter the contest, brought her a box of chocolates, a bouquet of flowers, a little cuddly teddy bear. On the day of the contest he drove over to the Bronx from his apartment on Dyckman Street and then took her down to the boardwalk of Coney Island in his open convertible. He was a sporty-looking fellow. That day he wore a light blue summer suit, with a light pink shirt and a red bandana around his neck. As they drove along, his golden hair whipped like a sea flag in the wind. He was
muy guapo
—handsome—and seemed prosperous. That day the beach’s sand warmed the bottoms of more than a million people, and while looking at them from the stage, she experienced vertigo. Being seen by so many people in that endless crowd was like flying through the air, especially when she stepped out of her robe and marched her winsome body out to where the people could see her. Greeted with a deafening volley of whistles and hoots, she took third place in the beauty contest and won twenty-five dollars. Then the nice man took her to the amusement park, paid for all the rides and treats she wanted. Then it was getting late and he said, “Now for the surprise.” And they drove beyond Coney Island and off to an Italian seafood restaurant by Avenue X.

He kept saying, “Well, this is our special little meal.”

Toasting her, he said, “I can’t believe that you didn’t win first place, but it was probably rigged, ya know? But there’s always next year.”

Then he ran out of that subject and said, “Pepsodent has this contest every year. Wouldn’t it just be swell if we could come back here next year?”

“Yes, it would.”

“And it’s good to get out of that hot sun. Trouble with New York in August, it just gets too darn hot.”

The waiter brought them a big platter of linguini with clam sauce, and this was followed by a large steamed silver-finned fish. And he said, “Gosh, we’re having a feast, aren’t we?”

He was enthusiastic and happy about just everything, and she couldn’t imagine that she’d stayed home so much, without dating any of the American fellows who looked at her on the street.

“You’re from Cuba-way, huh? My uncle goes down there like clockwork every winter. Down to Havana. Says it’s a nice place.”

“Yes, I haven’t been back for a long time. But I’ll go back one of these days.”

Then she talked about herself and the books she liked to read, romance and detective stories; told him that she wouldn’t mind studying one day to be a schoolteacher. He nodded intently and smiled a lot, and when he sat back she could see that his ears had turned a livid red from the wine. It was a noisy, cheerful restaurant. The Italian waiter was delighted with her, everyone was so nice to her.

“I guess it’s time we got back,” the nice man said, looking at his watch. “It’s almost eleven o’clock.” Then, as they were getting some little mints out of a bowl by the cash register, he stopped and said, “I grew up around here, can I interest you in looking at the house where I lived?”

“Okay.”

In the car she sat demurely beside him, not sure what she should do. She was worried about alienating him. A lady in her building who had lots of experience with men had told her, “If he’s nice to you, give him a kiss and let him fool around a little bit, but don’t let him do anything under your skirt.”

They drove beyond the restaurant, along the boardwalk, where the beaches started to hook out more into the sea, and where there were fewer houses.

“Keep going in this direction and you end up in southern Long Island,” he said. She noticed that there weren’t as many residential streets now, only occasional streetlights in the distance. The sea was gray and churning with a yellow moonlit foam.

“Are we almost there?” she asked.

“Yeah, we are.”

She thought he would turn left, but he turned right. By then they were on a street somewhere far beyond the Rockaways and Coney Island, where the subway line veered inland and disappeared. Abruptly he turned the car to one side and drove it out under a deserted boardwalk and through a forest of sea-rotted piers before finally stopping.

“Know what,” he said, letting out a deep breath in concern. “My car’s overheated, just feel the dashboard.”

She put her hand on the dashboard and it was hot.

“What say we sit here for a bit and enjoy the night air?”

They sat for a time watching the sea and he talked about how his mother would take him there in the afternoons and he would sit out by the shoreline with a toy bucket and shovel, making castles—his house wasn’t far away. And she just sat waiting for the moment when he would turn to her so that she could give him a kiss, and then it happened, just like that: he took a swig of some whiskey from a little flask, took her by the wrists, and said, “Delores, I’ve been wanting to kiss your pretty face all day.”

She felt him pressing close to her, and she said, under her breath, “Me, too.”

Then they started to kiss: he planted kisses on her cheeks and around her nose, and then he gave her real kisses, and his hands were touching her everywhere. She allowed him to fondle her breasts; then he tried to get his hands inside her bathing suit and slid them to between her legs, which she clenched shut like a vise. And, just like that, the fellow got a quite disbelieving look on his face, which was now a little twisted, and he said, “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Now relax, will ya? I’m not going to eat you.” But all the same he was still trying to hitch up her skirt and get his fingers inside the bottom part of her bathing suit, and then she pushed him away.

And just like that he seemed more disdainful and tore at the top of her bathing suit, shredding the straps and pulling down on the front of the suit so that he could get his mouth on her breasts; she squirmed under him, under his kisses and thick tongue.

“If you knew, Delores, how I feel right now,” he kept repeating. She tried to push him away, but he was a strong man and, at one point, annoyed with her resistance, slapped her face and said, “I’m not fooling with you, come on now, Delores. What the hell’s wrong with you, anyway?”

Then it hit her all at once that she was about to lose her virginity in the worst way imaginable. With this
pendejo!
Oh, Papi! There was nothing she could do to avoid it. Where could she go? Run off under this boardwalk out into those streets where there wasn’t a soul? It was so desolate she wished she was a mermaid so she could swim out into the beautiful sea. And she went through the possibilities of resistance and of compliance and felt herself in a world of pure gloom. How could she have been so trusting, so stupid? What could she do but sit back in the seat, feeling pity and shame in her heart and almost a fondness for his ardor. All these thoughts turned into a feeling of overwhelming sadness about being a woman. And where was this man’s kindness now? She rested back in the seat and he stood up, pulling off his shoes and then his socks. Then with the same manic devotion with which he had torn at her bathing suit he tugged at the erection inside his trousers, grabbed it proudly . . .

By the time he had undone his zipper she had gotten to the point where she wanted to get it all over with. He pushed open the door of the car and was standing over her when down to his knees went his trousers and his polka-dotted boxer shorts. And there it was, his member, slightly bent and wavering in the air. She thought, It’s like a child’s.

Something between a look of pity, mirth, and pure contempt crossed her face as she told him, “Go to hell,
hombre.
”

And as she turned herself around in that seat and drifted away like the wood and foam and debris that floated at the water’s edge, he kept trying to jam his thing into her bottom, he was so angry, and while this was going on, she had the impression of being in that room with her father the day she saw him naked; that she was now on the bed beside him and looking at his member, huge and powerful, an entity beyond the bodily weaknesses that would one day kill him.

Her poor father would die in 1949, collapsing on a stairway while making a seltzer delivery, boom, down two flights of stairs, dumbfounded, his last sight twenty bottles of seltzer bouncing off the steps, spraying everywhere and shattering to bits. Years later, she would say to herself, “Whatever anyone says about you, Papi, you were a worker, a protector, and a man, a sweet and gentle man, Papi, not like that bastard who abused me.”

That night, as she was assaulted on the beach, the word “virile” floated through her thoughts, brushed like a silk scarf against the edge of sexual speculation about her father. She was not on the beach but sitting on the edge of the bed, rubbing oil into her father’s aching back, and running her hands up and over his shoulders, hearing him say,
“Ay, qué rico!
—How good it feels!” and happy at his sighs of pleasure, even if he was a spirit in her thoughts. But in those few moments, while the Pepsodent man tried to enter her womb, now dry as a bone, she heard the man crying out in frustration: “Bring me off!” And then, “Goddammit!” When she opened her eyes, he was masturbating himself to help along the ejaculation that had started against his will, during the moment of his failure . . . With a certain amusement she watched the temper and passion drain from his face, watched him hitch back his trousers and all the rest, his back to her. He said to her: “I should drown you in the water. Now get out of my sight!”

That night he left her on the beach among the gnats and the fleas and the crabs that moved in clusters across the sand, feeding slowly, and she had to wander the streets searching for someone to help her. By morning she was sitting on a curb some seven blocks inland where there were houses. A milk truck pulled up and the man, dressed in white, leaned out and said, “Rough night, huh, lady?”

Then he drove her to a subway fifteen minutes away.

The night of the dance, Delores was thinking about what her sister Ana María had told her: “Love is the sunlight of the soul, water for the flowers of the heart, and the sweet-scented wind of the morning of life”—sentiments taken from corny boleros on the radio, but maybe they were true, no matter how cruel and stupid men can be. Perhaps there’ll be a man who’ll be different and good to me.

And so Delores put on a red dress with a pleated midsection and slit skirt, dark nylons and black high heels, a fake pearl necklace, got her hair done up like Claudette Colbert’s, dabbed some Chanel No. 5 behind her ear and between her breasts, and poured a few drops over the talcum-powdered crotch of her panties, so that the woman who would walk into the ballroom only remotely resembled the cleaning woman Nestor had met at the bus stop.

What Delores and Ana María saw posted outside the brass doors of the ballroom was:

!!! CONTEST!!!!!CONTEST!!!

★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

AT THE IMPERIAL BALLROOM

for the

BEST

and

MOST OUTRAGEOUS

BALDHEADED COUPLES!

★

$50 first prize! & CASE OF CHAMPAGNE &

A SET of YOUR VERY FAVORITE RECORDINGS

!!!!!!!MUCH MUCH MORE!!!!!!!

★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

featuring

THE FABULOUS MAMBO KINGS!!

★

Adm. $1.06. Doors open 9 pm

Checking their hats and coats, Delores and Ana María, their asses pinched by naughty hands, made their way through the bald and full-haired crowd gathered at the Imperial Ballroom. She was now in the world of courtship for which Delorita thought she had no use. But, just the night before, she’d dreamed about the musician she’d met at the bus stop. She was lying naked in a bed, pressed against him, and they were kissing, kissing; so tightly were they pressed together that her hair had wrapped around him like a coiling rope and their skin burned and, at the same time, she had the sensation that all the pores in her body had opened and that from each pore dripped a warm sweet liquid like honey. That dream soon blossomed into a funnel of sensations through which her body floated like a cloud: she awakened in the middle of the night, imagining the musician’s long, sensitive finger touching the juiciest valve in her body. As she moved toward the stage to point Nestor out to her sister, she blushed, thinking about that dream.