The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (43 page)

A
ND NOW THE MEMORY OF THAT
woman again struggling down the escalator of Macy’s department store, overloaded with Christmas packages. The Mambo King had bought his niece and nephew their Christmas toys, a slim-banded watch for his sister-in-law, and a Japanese transistor radio for her husband, Pedro.
La Nochebuena
—Christmas Eve—was one of his favorite times of year: the man would make trips downtown to the docks and over to the big department stores, to Chinatown and Delancey Street, accumulating boxes of scarves, gloves, socks, hot watches, record albums, and bottles of imported perfume and cologne that he would give out to his acquaintances and friends. And he loved receiving gifts: the year before, the “family” had given him a white silk scarf. He loved the way it looked when he wore his overcoat and black-brimmed hat and soft Spanish-leather gloves. He was wearing that scarf and looking very dapper when he saw the woman’s shopping bag split open, her presents tumbling down the stairs. A gentleman, he stooped over, helping her with the packages and, as it turned out, got on the same train with her, an uptown number 2.

He lied to her, saying that he was going that way, and asked her if she’d need help getting those packages home. He charmed her with his politeness, and when he told her that he was a musician, she liked that very much, too. She lived up on Allerton Avenue, an hour out of his way, but he accompanied the woman to the door of her building, anyway. By her doorway she thanked him and they exchanged addresses, wishing each other a Merry Christmas. A week later she called him from her job with the telephone company—she was an operator—and one night they went on a date, ending up in a Sicilian restaurant where everyone knew her. Later he escorted this woman home—her name was Betty, he recalls now in the Hotel Splendour—politely bidding her farewell and bowing. She struck him as an Old World type of woman, with whom he couldn’t be forward. He took her out to the movies, to restaurants, and one night she turned up at a dance he and his pickup musicians were playing, where she spent the evening dancing with strangers. But she would not pass in front of the stage without giving him a big smile.

When he seduced her at three in the morning, in a bedroom decorated in Mediterranean colors—aqua blue, passion pink, Roman orange—she removed her white black-felt-buttoned dress, then her slip, and beneath that a pair of flowery-crotched panties and garters. When he’d taken his clothes off, his erection leapt out into the world and he started to kiss her and his hands went all over her body; each time he was about to mount her, however, she’d push him away. So he turned off the light, thinking that she felt inhibited, but then she flipped it back on. He got to the point where his member was weeping copiously as he pressed against her clamped-shut legs. Finally he sprang back, sitting against the bed frame. His penis, which he’d wedged under her leg, leapt free and smacked his belly.

In his room in the Hotel Splendour, he laughed, shaking his head, despite the pain. The Mambo King had looked at her, saying, “Jesus, I’m only human, woman. Why are you torturing me so?”

“It’s just that I’ve never done it before.”

“And how old are you?”

“Forty.”

“Forty—well, don’t you think it’s about time?”

“No, I’d have to be married first.”

“Then what are we doing here?” And he turned red in the face and was about to get dressed and leave. But then the woman showed him what she liked to do, taking his big thing (“It feels heavy”) into her mouth, and went at him like a pro, and when he started to come, Betty squirmed and twisted, grinding herself into the bed, and then, as her body flushed and her face turned the color of a spring rose, she came, too.

Heartened, the Mambo King thought the woman had to be joking about her virginity, but when he tried to mount her again, she locked her legs and solemnly told him, “Please, anything else but this.” And then she grasped his thing and began sucking him again, and when he came, she did, too, the same way as before. Then they fell asleep, but he woke around five-thirty because she was suckling him again. It was strange, waking up in the dark of the room, to find her moving up and down over his thing. Her mouth and tongue, wet with saliva, felt good on him, but she’d bitten him up so much and stretched and pulled and bent his thing to the point where he was feeling sore. He never thought he’d ever say this to a woman, but he did: “Please give me a rest.”

On Christmas, Cesar held a raucous party in his apartment. First he spent the day with the family upstairs, eating the roast turkey that Ana María and Delores had prepared, and fulfilling his avuncular duties. By the evening, he was back in his apartment playing host to musician and dance-hall friends who turned up with their families, so that by six-thirty in the evening Cesar’s bachelor apartment was overflowing with children and babies, pots of food and pastries, and eating, dancing, singing, drinking adults.

Bongos playing, Bing Crosby, cha-cha-cha out the phonograph, and the living-room floor sagging under the feet of happy dancers.

When the woman called him around eight-thirty to wish him Merry Christmas, he was dizzy with fantasies about making love to her. Drunk and infused with the holiday spirit, he found himself saying, “I love you, baby. I have to see you again, soon.”

“Then come here, tonight.”

“Okay, baby.”

Leaving Frankie and Bernardito in charge of the proceedings—“I’ll be back in two hours”—he made his way to the northeast Bronx. With the determination of an aviator about to circumnavigate the globe, he appeared at her door, vibrant with energy, and holding a bottle of champagne and a carton of food from the party. All the way up he had been thinking, “I’m not going to let her get away this time.”

And within a minute of walking through her door, they were on the bed kissing and fondling one another—she was feeling a little tipsy and amorous after attending a family party that day—and then events were about to unfold again in the usual way when he started to wrestle around with her on the bed, both laughing as if it were a joke, until he decided to part her legs, and this time, when she shut them close as a vise, he really used his strength and forced them apart and so wide that the inevitability of penetration was like heated breath flowing out of her vagina, and even though she had started to plead with him, saying, “Cesar, I mean it when I say stop, so please stop,” he couldn’t. With the smell of her femininity thick in his nostrils and his skin feverishly hot, he didn’t hear her or didn’t want to hear her: lowering himself and bringing the weight of his body to bear, he entered her and she felt as if she were being occupied by a living creature the weight and length of a two-year-old cat. When he had his climax, the Mediterranean colors of that bedroom swirled inside his head, and when he calmed down, he thought that he might have been a little rash in his impetuosity, but hell, he was just being a man. Besides, he’d treat her well, touch her hair, call her pretty, make everything all right with compliments.

But she was crying, and no matter what he tried, kissing her neck and brushing her hair away from her eyes, kissing her breasts, apologizing to her, and offering never never to force himself on her that way—“It was passion, woman. Do you understand? A man like me can’t help himself sometimes, do you understand?”—she kept on crying. Cried for the two hours that he sat beside her by the bed, feeling as if he were the cruelest man in the world, yet unable to understand why she was so upset.

“It was about time for you,” he said, patting her shoulder and making things even worse.

The Mambo King remembered that she continued to cry as he dressed and was crying as he left for the street. He never saw her again. As he sat drinking in the Hotel Splendour, he sort of shook his head, remembering her and still puzzling over how a woman, voracious with her mouth, could be so offended and hurt when all he wanted was that she take care of him in the more normal, natural way.

I
N THOSE DAYS HE ALWAYS
seemed busy with his superintendent’s duties, busy with music and with women, though not as many as he used to find, but enough that every few months Delores or Ana María would see him walking out of the building in a blue suit and looking dapper, on his way to meet his latest flame. There had been some nice ones like Celia, one of Ana María’s friends, who had overwhelmed the Mambo King with her strength and her powers to control men and who had him figured out—“What you have to do is learn to be content with what you have in this world,
hombre
”—but he never wanted to hear that. They were together for about six months and the family had hopes that she would calm the Mambo King down, slide him into a life of domestic tranquillity, and help him stop drinking.

But he broke off that love affair, saying, “I wasn’t meant to be tied down.” And he meant it literally, because Celia refused to take shit from him. She was a hard Cuban woman who’d lived in New York for most of her life and had always fended for herself. She smoked cigars if she felt like it, cursed with the best of them, and was always hustling around with different businesses, turning up at Christmas to sell the ladies perfume and with shopping bags of discount Korean and Japanese toys. And she was always out on Broadway in a wool cap and lumberjack’s jacket selling the semi-dry Christmas trees which she would buy in Poughkeepsie and drive back herself in a black pickup truck. Scandalous in bed—“Let’s see if you can satisfy me!”—she carried herself like a man and liked to give Cesar orders, all in the interest of helping him out. She was known locally as something of a clairvoyant and was always sensing presences in the house—his mother, his dead brother—and had wanted to take charge of his life, push him forward, play up his nearly glorious musical past, and encourage him to cultivate people in power like Machito and Desi Arnaz.

“Why don’t you go to California, see if he would give you a job. You say he’s so nice. You have to use your connections to get ahead in this world.”

Why wouldn’t he? Because he never wanted to bother Machito or Desi Arnaz, didn’t want them to think he might use their friendship for personal gain. And while he knew she was well-intentioned, he just couldn’t stand, after so many years of bachelorhood, to be told that he should change his ways. One night, when she had come over to watch television with him, he got drunk and then wanted to go out dancing. And when she told him, “It’s too late, Cesar,” he said, “To hell with this domesticity nonsense, I’ll go out alone!” That’s when she pushed him down into his easy chair and tied him up with a fifty-foot piece of laundry line, and told him, “No,
señor,
you’re not going anywhere.”

At first he laughed and had a change of heart and said, “Come on, Celia, you know, I promise you I won’t go anywhere.”

“No, this is to teach you a lesson that when you have an engagement with someone, as you do with me, that’s it. No going out, no doing as you please. You may have been able to do what you wanted with these other
fulanas,
but forget about that with me.

So he remained still and then told her to release him, but quite seriously, with the laugh gone out of his face, and when she refused, he wanted to probe the limits of his Herculean physicality and tried to break the rope by expanding his biceps and chest, but the rope did not break. Then he gave up and, defeated, fell asleep. In the early morning, both Celia and the rope were gone.

That was it, as much as he liked her, as much as everybody thought that she and he could be happy together, as much as he felt like bringing her flowers and liked the way she looked out for him; she had pushed him too far: “You crossed a line with me, Celia. No woman”—and he was pointing his finger around at her face—“can be allowed to do that to a man. You have humiliated and dishonored me. You have tried to reduce me in my stature. This act is something I cannot tolerate or forgive! Ever.”

“Forgive? I was trying to keep you from hurting yourself.”

“I have spoken, woman. Now you must live with the consequences of your act.”

That was that, and he found himself another woman, Estela, who would walk her two miniature poodles in the park and who drove the Mambo King crazy with the pleasant way she’d address those doll-sized canines, whose coats she had dyed pink and on whose heads she had affixed enormous red ribbons and bell collars, the dogs absolutely despising him and scratching at the bedroom door and yipping and jumping up and down whenever he started to carouse with her. It would take a long time to arouse Estela, to turn the leathery firmness between her legs into the soft down of dewy rose petals, and by then the animals would have given up and would stretch out before the bedroom door, morose and defeated. And it always seemed that the moment he had penetrated Estela—she was a trembling, tense woman who worked in the principal’s office of the local Catholic school—the hounds would begin to weep and whine so sadly that their squeals of displeasure always brought out Estela’s maternal nature, and she would disengage herself from him and, naked, attend to the poor little things, while the Mambo King would lie back and daydream about throwing the beasts out the window.

Then there had been the professor of Spanish language from the university, whom Cesar had met one morning while getting a haircut over at the beauty salon. (He loved it when Ana María or Delores pressed close to cut his hair.) She was named Frieda and had once been badly hurt by a love affair in Sevilla, Spain, a few years before he met her, and so she accepted when the Mambo King asked her to go out to a restaurant, loving the opportunity to practice her Spanish and to see a little bit of his world. She was about thirty-five years old and the Mambo King was already in his early fifties, slightly plump around the center, but definitely on the dapper side, holding doors for her and always treating whenever they’d go out. He would take her to nice restaurants and dance halls, teach her how to
merengue,
and she would haul him off into thickly carpeted and chandeliered rooms at the university, where they would attend readings and lectures by the leading intellectuals of Latin America and Spain. He never knew what was going on, but had very much liked hearing the writer Borges, who had a very pleasant, avuncular manner about him, the kind of fellow, Cesar figured, who would go out and have a few drinks with you. And that’s why he shook Borges’s hand (the poor man was blind). Another thing about the woman was that she was very fastidious in bed. The first time they made love she took a tape measure and figured out the Mambo King’s length from the bottom of his testicles to the tippy-tip of his member and wrote this happy figure down in a book she used as her diary. Then, frantic from the Spanish brandy and flamenco music, they made lascivious love. She was very serious and very nice, he used to think, but he had no use for her friends and always felt like an aborigine at those cultural gatherings. When that one ended, it had really hurt Delores, who sometimes accompanied them to those lectures. (She, too, saw Borges and went out to the library the next day and read one of his books.)