When Tito Loved Clara (10 page)

Mrs. Molloy handed out the syllabus and talked through the
semester's work with them. Each week they would be given a series of reference queries that they were required to answer using the resources discussed in the class: encyclopedias, directories, indexes, databases. “You may work alone, or with a partner, as you wish,” she said. She went over the assignment for the following week and dismissed them.

Clara couldn't help but notice that Thomas Walker did not rush to leave the classroom like almost everyone else. He carefully packed his laptop back in its case, glancing her way now and then. She stood and walked slowly, self-consciously, to the exit. She was wearing a short-sleeved dress and low heels and was aware of the air on her shins as she walked along the corridor toward the elevator. The doors were closing on carload of her classmates and she let it go. Then she waited a moment before pushing the down button, just to be sure the doors of the crowded car would not reopen. The arrow lit up and she sensed his presence beside her.

“It's Clara, right?”

“Yes.” Turning, she looked right at the lapels of his blazer. He was taller than she'd thought. Then she looked up at his face. He was cleanshaven, had a smile with one tooth slightly darker than the rest. No errant hairs poking from his nostrils.

“Did you say you already work in a library?”

“A law library, yes.”

“Well, I wonder if you'd like to be my study partner for this class?” He smiled. “I'm new to this and I think I could use all the help I can get.”

“Oh,” she laughed. She was surprised and charmed by the self-deprecation. Very unlawyerlike. “Um. Sure. I work up near the SIBL. Do you want to meet there sometime this weekend to do the first assignment?”

T
HEY BOTH SEEMED
to know that it was as much a date as a work session. They dressed better than they needed to, and
they were both edgy. Clara was already familiar with many of the reference resources on the syllabus and did most of the research. Thomas assumed the role of scribe, typing both of their names atop the document on his laptop, filling out the description of how they'd looked up the gross domestic product of Mongolia, the patent number for Amazon's one-click purchase feature, the average age at which Californians got married, and the origin of the phrase “in a pickle.” When the assignment was completed, they went to a café nearby to talk and eat. And that was how it went for the rest of the semester, the homework for the class becoming, it was increasingly obvious, just a pretense for the date afterward.

There was a lot to like about him. He was courteous. He listened. He was careful and precise. He showed restraint, both in advancing the physical side of things and in his inquiries about her background. Most guys were nosy and blundering. “So, what are you?” they asked. “Are you black?” In her own mind, Clara thought that, save for her modestly sized backside, she looked stereotypically Dominican. But she had learned from years of interacting with people who hadn't grown up around Dominicans that her ethnicity was not so obvious to many. On train platforms, other brown-skinned, dark-haired people came up to her and spoke to her in languages she did not recognize. An Indian attorney had once asked her if she was from Madras. “Another fifty pounds and you'd look Samoan,” she'd been told at a party in college. When she finally did reveal to Thomas where she was from, he laughed. “Aha!”

“Why, what did you think?”

“I didn't think. I was waiting for you to tell me.”

“Come on, really, you must have had at least a guess.”

“When I first saw you, I thought maybe Filipino or Brazilian, but when I heard your last name I didn't know what to think.”

He'd gone to Boston College but had somehow ended up sharing a house with a group of engineers from MIT, and from them he had learned a lot about new technologies. Unlike most people
she met in the library world, he was excited about what digital innovation might do for the profession.

About halfway through that first semester, a typewritten letter arrived in her mailbox. Up in the lefthand corner of the envelope was his return address:

T. Walker 24-24
24th St.
Astoria, NY 11218

Standing in the lobby of her Morningside Heights apartment building, with the brass mouth of her mailbox agape before her, she rubbed at the envelope and knew, just
knew
before she opened it, that it was a love letter. If she opened it and read what he had written to her, there would be no turning back: The feelings that had been gathering force in her heart during their weeks of studying together would overwhelm her caution, her fear, her desire not to rush into anything just so quickly. She believed that there was no end in sight for where the relationship might go, no end except for the one she hoped for most.

She tore open the flap.

I
T HAD BEEN
a love letter, of course, the first of many. Thomas enjoyed writing them (and enjoyed her response to them) so much that Clara feared that when it came time to propose he would do so by mail. But he had not. Instead, he'd fumblingly, charmingly, proposed to her on one knee in Astoria Park at sunset with the engagement ring he'd purchased with his first bonus, just as an Amtrak train went over the viaduct on its way north to Boston, the sky orange and red behind the skyscrapers of the East Side.

Lying in bed with Thomas now, after he'd complied with her request for sex, Clara thought how you never, at the outset of a love affair, looked ahead to the difficulties. You never thought,
I'll marry
this guy and three or five or seven years from now, we'll be arguing about our inability to have a child and I'll have to beg him for sex.
You never thought your relationship, the one you'd been waiting all your life for, would be anything but magnificent. Clara did not rue the falseness of such optimism now; if anything, as she glided in to sleep, she found herself hoping for its improbable return.

People liked to point out how strange it was that Tito worked for a moving company when he himself had never moved. Until earlier that summer, the only address he had ever had was: Small Bedroom, Basement Apartment, 222 Seaman Avenue, New York, NY 10034. His parents put no pressure on him, their only child, to leave, and he knew that, as his father grew older and the demands of the job became harder for him, his mother was (even beyond the usual coddling Dominican mothers give their sons) increasingly grateful to have him around. There was a local kid, Nelson, a skinny teenager with big round glasses and a shaved head, who helped with the painting and the endless sorting of recyclables, but when it came to dealing with the tenants, Tito's father wanted them handled only by Tito or himself. Nelson, earnest and hardworking, spoke almost no English and the building was full of tenants who spoke nothing but.

Tito had his dream life, of course. That was how he survived the indignities and embarrassments of cohabiting with his parents at an age when everyone he had gone to school with had moved out, gotten married, sired children, or disappeared into the world. The posse of neighborhood friends he'd grown up with had crumbled away, rendering him the lone holdout.
Last Man Standing.
The only people he saw now were those kids' parents. He saw them in the supermarket and the liquor store, buying their
gandules verdes,
their bottles of Brugal, and their lottery tickets. He saw them in
the park, walking their dogs. They looked completely lost, as if life had gotten too easy for them now that they'd emigrated, raised their children in America, and made it into late middle age. What was left for them now? He sometimes felt that he was a stand-in for the departed. How quickly it had all vanished, the life he'd had in his teens and early twenties: the ball games at Yankee Stadium, the trips to City Island beaches and New Jersey amusement parks, the pickup basketball and touch-football games, the sledding in cardboard boxes on the hills near the river, the snowball wars fueled with beer and cheap brandy, the pranking and talking smack, the weekends out at the bars and nightclubs uptown and downtown, drinking and bullshitting and trying to meet girls. At the time, it seemed like it would go on forever, but one by one his friends had succumbed to other lives. Alejandro had been the first. He had gotten his crazy Grenadan girlfriend pregnant and moved to Staten Island, where her people owned a bunch of businesses—a bicycle repair shop, a car service, and a chicken joint. Jansel was next. He had finally married that girl Eva, the one he'd been chasing since the eighth grade, the one who'd always played hard to get with him. Eva had a job in a hospital in Englewood Cliffs and Jansel moved out to Paramus, where he was working part-time in the billing department of a Ford dealership. Meanwhile, Tito's distant cousin Hershel, always the least stable of the posse, had let his drug problem get out of control and started stealing from everyone. Watches, cell phones, rings, chains. One minute there, the next gone. Finally, someone got tired of it and called the police. Hershel had been in a halfway house in Long Island City, a place with a cheerful name and a seven o'clock curfew, until he'd fallen off the wagon. He was up top now, in the state pen. Also Edgar, who'd had a football scholarship to some school in the middle of the country before a doctor reset his broken leg out of line. Edgar walked with a limp after that and couldn't play football anymore. He worked nights as a doorman in a rich building downtown. It was a job for life, he'd
told Tito, but he was the lowest on the totem pole and wouldn't get a day shift or a regular weekend day off until he was forty. Lastly, there was Ruben, the most successful of them all, a bona fide entrepreneur, who'd made a fortune with some Web site and bought his mother a house in Fair Lawn and drove a Range Rover. Ruben was always flying to Atlanta or California or Chicago for some convention, always making deals on his cell phone, but he'd gotten too big for the neighborhood. Tito still saw them, his boys, sometimes, on birthdays and holidays, for the Super Bowl or the Dominican Day Parade, but they were no longer a part of his normal existence. And with their departure, his life went back to being what it had been when he was a schoolboy: routine, repetitive, and limited.

Sometimes, when he was sitting down to dinner with his parents or dealing with a tenant complaining about the noisy people upstairs or looking for something to do on a Friday night, he felt stagnant and festering, felt that the very simplicity and lack of change were poisoning him. At such times, he always went back to Clara's disappearance as the root of all his problems, as the missed chance to change his life's trajectory. There had been plenty of other girls since then—most recently, the luscious but difficult Jasmina, who'd finally broken up with him for not proposing after they'd been together a year. Jasmina was a teller at the Banco Popular on Dyckman. She had once confessed to him that she'd taken the job in the hopes of meeting a Dominican businessman, but she'd ended up with Tito instead. Tito didn't want to settle for a woman and he didn't want to feel settled for. It didn't work out with Jasmina just as it never seemed to work out with anyone else. The relationships ended and he looked around at the wreckage as if a natural disaster had been the cause. Some guys would have welcomed the serial monogamy, but not Tito. He felt cursed, snake-bit, and as he grew older, he became simultaneously resigned to and terrified of the rut he was in. He coped by withdrawing into a vividly imagined alternate reality in which he was married and living in suburbs like
Jansel or Ruben; in which he and his family came into the city on Sundays to dine with his mother and father; in which, after those Sunday lunches, he took his kids to the Emerson Playground.

Now and then, the real collided with the imaginary. For a few weeks, earlier in the summer, Tito had taken a flesh-and-blood child to the playground, a five-year-old boy named Wyatt. Pretending became a lot easier as he sat on the benches with the nannies and stay-at-home moms calling to their kids. Because Wyatt was freckled and blond and Tito was as brown as the mulch in the park's flowerbeds, the women on the benches initially gave him the hairy eyeball. But repeated appearances in the playground along with the boy's obvious affection for him soon vanquished their suspicions. He instructed Wyatt to call him Tío—close enough to his real name—and that seemed to satisfy the curious.

Wyatt and his mother, Tamsin, had moved into the building in June, two months before Tito's sales call with Ms. Almonte. Tito saw the U-Haul as he came up the street from the subway after work one evening, saw Tamsin and another woman—her friend from Philly, it later turned out—carrying a sofa into the building's front entrance. Halfway up the steps, the friend set her end of the couch down and said, “I can't. My arms are killing me.”

By the time she said this, Tito was right behind Tamsin, admiring her square shoulders and her lobeless ears. Normally the last thing he wanted to do when he got off work was help someone lift furniture, but the women were good-looking and he sensed that he needed to do something to change his luck. It had been almost a year since his breakup with Jasmina, and the loneliness was getting to him.
When a Stranger Comes to Town,
he thought. He offered to lend a hand.

“Wow, that would be great,” said Tamsin, sweeping her fingers through her hair.

With Tito's help, they got the couch into the elevator and took it up to the second-floor apartment, which had previously been the
home of two gay men his father was glad to have out of the building. (The management company handled the showing and leasing of apartments; Tito and his father often did not know until moving day who would be coming in.) He went back down and helped them with the last things in the truck: a futon and a dresser—not much work, really, to have earned the gratitude of the attractive new tenant. It was only after all that, when they were standing outside on the sidewalk saying goodbye to the friend, that he noticed the kid sleeping in the cab of the truck, his face half-hidden by a book with a train on the cover, the windows cracked open for air. Tito relished the idea that anybody watching the scene from one of the apartments across the street might have come to the conclusion that he and Tamsin were moving into the building together. While he was having this little daydream, she unlocked the rental truck and lifted the boy, still sleeping, onto her shoulder. “It's been a tough move on him,” she explained. “Thanks again for your help.”