Mi Tango Argentino

Birds and Worms

Moder is sitting in the backyard of her townhouse in Reston Virginia, as my brothers and I are clearing the plates from the birthday celebration. My children and my brother’s children -- mine are blonde because I married a German-Scott, theirs are darker like my family -- all of Moder’s grandchildren, are running around back there, among the trees that sprout in this crowded neighborhood, facing the back deck of the other townhouses in this cluster, calling out her name – abuelita, abuelita -- asking her to play with them – - one two three red-light being their favorite game -- making much too much noise for a Sunday afternoon. Moder seems oblivious to the racket, choosing instead to sit back in her lawn chair, enjoying this lazy Sunday afternoon, celebrating her 81st birthday, although she has had nothing to drink as she has not drank now in so many years, and she seems to be enjoying the children’s laughter. I wonder what she is thinking.

***

April 5, 2008, 10 A.M.

I was baptized Belinda Ana, but my father, a somewhat brown skinned man, called me Benita. I loved that name, such a lovely diminutive for Belinda Ana. My father, Picho Gonzales, invented the nickname, while he was drinking whiskey and fucking another woman (not my mother) As I remember the story, the prostitute asked him, “What is your daughter’s name?,” at a very imprudent time, just as he was cuming insider her. He grunted, Benita!, and after that he called me by no other name. Benita. I am Benita, daughter of Picho Gonzalez.

Sister Paulina, that dear lovely bitch nun at the convent boarding school where I lost almost my entire youth, Sister Paulina refused to call me Benita. Instead, she insisted on calling me by my full Christian name, that horrible mouthful that had been forced upon me when I was baptized . . . Belinda Ana. “Why do you call me Belinda Ana,” I asked her once, “why not simply Belinda?” She looked at me as if I had asked the stupidest question in the world. “Not to confuse you with the other Belinda, why else. Belinda Bebon. How would I know which one I was speaking to if I did not call you by your full name.” Belinda Bebon was my best friend at school, lovely girl, blonde hair, Italian blue eyes. I fell in love with her the day I met her, the impish smile, the sly child. “No one calls her Belinda Bebon,” I told Sister Paulina. “Every one calls her Bebe.”

“Bebe? As in baby?” asled Sister Paulina. “How strange.”

I am tired now. The sun is in my eyes. I think I will close them for a while.

***

I am washing the dishes in Moder’s kitchen, while Moder and Father are sitting outside, in the garden, with the children. I can see them from the patio door. A pink buddlia grows next to the white chair where Moder is sitting, recently planted. I helped Moder choose it out at a local nursery, while Father waited in the car. Moder said the color reminded her of the pink flowers of her school, when she was a child I don’t really know much about Moder’s youth, she has told me very little of those days, and I have not asked. I guess I have forgotten that she too was a child, once, and not always a parent.

***

April 5, 2008, 10.15 A.M.

How strange. I have just woken from a dream, dreams of when I was a child. How strange to be sitting here at age 81, and thinking of such things. In the dream, every one called me Benita. No one calls me Benita anymore, the don’t even call me Belinda Ana. My three sons call me Moder. I taught them that name myself, passed down from my own Moder. It’s what I called my mother, it’s what my mother called her mother, it’s what the Danes in my family have been calling their mothers and grandmothers for as long as anyone can remember. Not my grandchildren though, they insist in calling me “Abuelita,” in reference to my Argentine birth and Spanish heritage. That’s only hald the story, but they don’t want to hear about it. They are mostly busy playing games, growing up, having nothing to do with me. Although, they have come today to celebrate my 81st birthday. For that I should be grateful, I suppose.

There’s one of them now, pulling things out of the ground. What are they digging at I wonder? I wish they would stop making so much noise, for they will wake Tomas.

“Xavier, be a darling, get the children away from Tomas. I don’t want them to wake him up.”

Good, he heard me. Yes children, I say to them, I will play checkers with you later. Such a nuisance. At least they have not wakend him.

Tomás. My dear husband. My dear decrepid man. Do you remember when started calling me Red? You said, “a woman like you, a woman who wears her hair as her most precious possession, should always called Red.” Did you mean that as a compliment? I think you did. And you have called me that, ever since, always, even this morning as I helped you find your teeth that you had carelessly let drop in the bathroom floor. “My darling Red,” you said as you put them on. “My Red.” Silly old man, still calling me that name, although now she has so much white hair you would be hard pressed to guess its once natural color. And the others, the North Americans with whom she must now share her life, call her BelYnda – always pronounced wrongly, as far as she is concerned, without the delicacy and gusto of a strong Argentine accent. “Belinda,” she will say now, at age 81, to anyone who cares to listen to her. “With a strong “I,” as in indisputable.. That is how you should pronounce my name. It is Old Latin, it is Germanic.”

Belinda Ana, Benita, Moder, Abuelita, Red. Belynda. So many names for just one tiny person, so many lives for just one lifetime. And the life she misses the most is the one, or the many, that she left behind in Argentina. Those Argentine days now seem to her to belong to another time period, an other era, an other reality that no one remembers. Particularly not Belinda’s three grown sons. They seem to have no recollection of Argentina, for they were so young when escaped from Buenos Aires. “Not even their father remembers those days,” thinks Belinda, as she stares at her husband. “He just sits there,” she thinks. “He rememembers nothing.”

“Moder, would you like another piece of cake?” Belinda is sitting on a lounge chair in her backyard. A large straw hat covers her face from the sun, so that she must pull the flap back to see who is speaking to her. It is her oldest son, holding a piece of purple frosted cake on a green plate in one hand, and a plastic fork in the other. Most unattractive, she thinks to herself. Where did I go wrong? Manners really are too much bother these days, she supposes. What could she expect, her three boys, her sons, grown up and still incapable of boiling water or cutting bread. Was it the way I brought them up? – wonders Belinda.

“Moder, I asked if you wanted another piece of cake.” She looks up again. Such a nuisance, her divorced, now gay 48 year old. She shoos him away. “Not cake darling,” she says. “You know I’m watching my figure.” He laughs, smiles at her, dumps the cake in the garbage.

“Do you know what is a Porteño?” asks Belinda, to no one in particular as no one is listening. She is casting her voice out to her grandchildren, but they are too busy playing blind man’s bluff to pay attention to her chattering. So many grandchildren, she thinks, the spawn of her spawn, her DNA fingerprint now imprinted on US soil. Who would have guessed she would be surrounded by so many young American faces in her old age. Their childish voices are like bird songs in the air, soothing, ever present, almost unnoticeable. She has fed them lunch, today, they day her family has come to visit her to celebrate her 81st birthday, and they are now playing whimsically in these woods that envelope her townhouse, running away from her when she lectures about what life was like in Argentina. Still, she talks to them in case one of them should be listening. “Porteños is what you call people from Buenos Aires. We Europeans, living in South America – all before the escape.” Her voice trails. She never can tell the grandchildren more than this, never explains to them what she meant by the escape. “How many times must we hear this?” whispers one of the grandchildren to the others.

I heard you, little one, little worm, thinks Belinda. I know what you think of me. Belinda closes her eyes. She remembers what it was like to be a child, to snicker at the adults. She had done it too, but in such a more delicate manner, a subtle and undetectable way, as Bebe, her best girlfriend from school, had taught her even from the first day the met.

Belinda met Bebe at age ten, on the day that they both entered La Anunciata boarding school. They were like two orphans, waiting outside the office of the Mother Superior for their entrance interview. Both had been placed in school by their parents, Belinda because of her parent’s recent separation, Bebe because of her father’s recent widowhood. Belinda noticed immediately Bebe’s darkening blonde hair and sparkling blue eyes, but otherwise Latin looks. Belinda was thin, short, elegant even in the way she breathed. “I hear the nun is a bitch,” said Bebe to Belinda. Those were the first words the girls shared between them. Belinda smiled, her red freckles stretching on her face. Bebe laughed, easily, and wetted her lips. Even though the girls were only ten years old when they met, Belinda was aware that Bebe was a sexual person, except she did not have such words for it. Alluring, is the most she could conceive for describing Bebe. Simpatica.


***


I place a stack of now clean plates inside the cabinet above the oven, in Moder’s kitchen. She is still laying outside, sunbathing.

***

Fathers.

Belinda's father, Picho Gonzalez, and her mother, Carlotta Lundsen, were “divorced” (for all practical intent and purpose) when Belinda was placed in La Anunciata school Of course, in Argentina, a Catholic country, divorce was not permissible. Even if it had been legal, Carlotta Lundsen would have none of it. Picho had gotten into the habit of beating Carlotta, after drinking too much, and once left her bleeding at the bottom of the stairs. Belinda had seen this, when she waken at the sound of her father’s screaming and a thump at the bottom of the stairs; Belinda spied through her bedroom door, wearing silk pajamas and a wool cap to soften her curly hair. Any other woman would have left, would have begged her husband to divorce her, but Carlotta Lundsen refused to divorce Picho Gonzalez. That I won’t do, she said, that vow of marriage I won’t break. “Very well,” said Picho, the day he came back to collect his things. “You’ll have your title of wife, but none of me.” Picho moved out of the house, and Belinda was sent to a boarding school, taught by Dominican nuns. From then on, until she graduated from high school, Belinda was raised by the nuns.

Now that Belinda thinks about it, she considers that the nuns taught her a lot of foolishness, like taking a bath with a slip on for fear that your own nudity might arouse improper behavior. “There are things a girl should not see or touch until God mandates,” is what Sister Paulina told Belinda Ana. Even then she thought this was nonsense. But they taught her a lot of good as well, such as the two coats moral (one for yourself, one for the poor), the glass house story (cast no stones), the camel’s hair parable (easier through a needle than entering heaven). Belinda Ana learned her morality and values from the nuns. The stories were as magical to her as fairy tales are to other girls.

Her son offered her cake, but she rejected. Now she wishes she had asked him for a drink. She turns to call out to him “I could use something to drink. . .,” but he is already right there, holding out a glass to her. Lemonade. “Thank you darling,” she says. “I do think Tomás could use something to drink also.”

“You mean Dad?” he asks. “I’ve already given him some.” There is a half smile on his face which is easily mistaken by the uniniciated as a smirk. They do not know that he half smiles out of anxiety.

Belinda smiles, smiles at her son’s excessive eagerness. He so wants to be appreciated, but he so needs to work on that cockiness of his.

***

Fairy Tales.

“Real fairy tales,” says Belinda as she stretches on her garden chair. She is enjoying this August afternoon, letting her bones sink into the chair as her grandchildren play. Christina happens to be running by, and believes that Belinda is speaking to her. “What is it abuelita?” she asks her grandmother. Belinda looks at her grandchild, and smiles at her. “Nothing child,” she says, “just old memories.” Christina laughs and runs away.

Belinda loves her backyard, she loves the sound of her grandchildren laughing like sparrows in the trees, even if they do make fun of her. It’s not been a bad life, these many years now in the United States. Not a bad time to consider these things, today on this birthday, and yet and yet, she thinks, yet it was so much better in the world of illusions.

When she examines her past, she believes that they -- she and other Argentines of her generation -- lived in a world of illusions. Before they left Buenos Aires to immigrate to New York, she and her husband, Tomás owned a large Tudor style cottage, with well maintained gardens manicured by Bolivian boys with rich brown skin. No harm in looking at the boys while they mowed the lawn, fed the palm trees, hauled around the dirt, exposing the worms to the air. The other household chores, the laundry, the cooking, the child rearing, was taken care of by las muchachas (the girls, the maids). Usually they were post-pubescent teenagers of Indian descent, from the deep corners of the country, like Córdoba or Mendoza. Sometimes the girls were from other countries, like hefty Helga who was not much too look at but was strict with the children and knew how to keep them out of Belinda’s way. Belinda felt no qualms in leaving the child care in the hands of these girls. They were capable enough, and she could occupy herself with other responsibilities, other expectations. She and Tomás were often asked to dinner by important couples, or to a party, or dancing, and then of course Belinda had her own daytime friends, the girls she played Canasta with, the girls (women really, but don’t tell anyone) she had gone to school with and who now lived in the same neighborhood with Belinda. All these couples, all these girlfriends, clamoring for attention, really, thought Belinda; wanting to be recognized, fearing social isolation for that was merely all they had. Belinda befriended them all. The intellectuals, the old money, the new money, the fashion conscious, the military supporters, the leftist liberals. She would not discriminate against any of them; it was simply not practical. In Argentine society, you never know who you will need to call upon some day to do you a favor. Always best to keep people chatted up, thought Belinda. And so, many of her hours were spent making conversation. She loved to converse.

Belinda opens her eyes, wide. She wishes again that she had taken that extra piece of cake, it may have helped her get up, move from this chair that seems to be holding her prisoner today. There are birds flying above her. Starlings. They make such a continuous noise. She remembers that they come from Europe. Common though.

Belinda struggles to stay awake, but fails. Against her aging will, she falls asleep once more, aware that the grandchildren are mocking her in the background (look at Abuelita, she is snoring again!). The shade from the trees protects her face. The sound of the children playing is soothing to her (yes, even when she is the simple subject of their foolish taunts). Even the noise of the starlings is comforting. What was that silly phrase Sister Paulina loved to use so much? Forgive them, for they know not what they do. What a pompous ass that nun really was, how did I not see that, thinks Belinda. She should tell someone about that nun, no one ever really heard that story. The kids might want to hear about that, I’ll tell them, but they seem so far away, climbing on those trees. She would join them if she could, place her flat foot up against the branches just like she did when she was a little girl, and chat them up the way she chatted her girlfriends in her day. But today, she feels so sleepy, so ready to sleep. Oh if there was someone to talk with, someone to converse, someone who would keep her awake.


***

Joey and Christina are getting anxious. They have had their fill of cake and cookies, and they are ready to leave. They beg me to start up the car. I get angry with them. The party is not over yet. It’s not over until Moder wakes from her chair, opens her presents, and kisses us all good bye. “Not yet,” I tell Joey and Christina. “We are not leaving yet. Moder is still resting.”

***

Watercress sandwiches.

By her own judgment, at the height of her social life in Buenos Aires, she was the master of conversations. If left to her own devices, she would have preferred to speak of math and science, which fascinated her. But few people wanted to spend much time talking such subjects. Particularly not women, not then, not in Argentina of the 1950’s. The common subject, the one that occupied the most time, was fashion. Belinda’s father ridiculed the topic. “Man has better things to do than worry about costumes,” said Picho. “It’s embarrassing to spend so much time talking of such things.” Belinda however was not embarrassed by the subject, in fact, she enjoyed it, relished everything about fashion. She liked choosing and discussing what looked good on her, trying to emulate the latest trends, adorning her body with silks and fabrics, pendants, hats and roses. She would admit to herself that she did not have the most perfect body among her group of friends, but no one could deny to her that she had the most beautiful taste. All of it, everything she ever chose to wear, was meant to accentuate and flatter her most precious feature, her hair. It was “lusciously red” as her father had once called it, the day of her sixteenth birthday when Belinda had a party and invited all her classmates, and she was certain of her ability to accentuate the redness with the vibrancy of her clothes. Green, she found, was the most alluring of all colors to show off the ginger locks. And she knew, as she had long ago discovered, that women were as equally attracted to a good looking woman as they were to a good looking man. There was, she knew, an undeclared sexuality within the ranks of the same sex that expresses itself in deep friendship, deep desire to have the company of another woman. “You all flock to each other like birds,” said Picho Gonzales dismissively, on that same sixteenth birthday as Belinda and her girlfriends enjoyed tea and champagne. Belinda had served watercress sandwiches and croissants with ham and cheese.

***

I’m encouraging Joey and Christina to play with their cousins. There’s not a real close relationship there. I was never particularly close with my brothers, Xavier and Sebastian, and their children are not particularly close to my children. It’s a somewhat predictable cycle. We all come round to make homage to Moder and Tomás, but none of us really talk with each other. No real sense of affection, of being glad to see a family member. Some family.

***

Bebe.

Picho was a member of the oligarchy in Argentina, although he considered himself self made, without the assistance of anyone. He had a successful medical practice in downtown Buenos Aires, el Centro, because of his smarts and his good looks. That’s the way he saw it. No one ever helped him attain any of this, as far as he was concerned, so he felt neither obligation nor compassion for anyone. Not his father nor his mother (both of whom died in their 50’s) nor his siblings who were unable to find employment. He was not about the share the pie with anyone, not when he had worked so hard for it on his own time and effort. His clientele consisted mainly of women who found his manner gentle and educated. They were charmed by his good looks, his dark hair, his green eyes. The charm did not stop at the office. Picho Gonzalez was not afraid to have affairs with his patients, with their girlfriends, with women from the Cafes or the streets. Why society would accept a prominent man who was also know as a prominent womanizer is something that only a Latin American could explain. The double standard was very apparent to Belinda, even as a child she was acutely aware of the different expectations for her father, and her mother who was equally intelligent and handsome but fully expected to be the quiet housewife at home.

Belinda remembers her 16th Birthday, and her father’s embarrassing attendance at her party full of girls. Picho picked away at the food while staring at the well dressed girls, at the cusp of puberty. Some of them looked away in embarrassment, others (like Bebe) looked Picho right back in the eyes, and smiled “Which one of you is the worm?,” asked Picho, loud enough to be heard by everyone. Bebe, Belinda’s best friend, smiled in acknowledgment. “So yo,” she said. It is me.

* * *

Only a few of Moder’s girlfriends came to her 81st birthday party. It’s understandable. So many of her friends are dead or frailty, and those who aren’t live in Argentina. Too far a trip to make just for someone’s birthday when they are so close to death themselves. I wonder how Moder’s girlfriends would have celebrated this occasion in Buenos Aires. It would probably have been a catered affair, with white lace and fancy dress. Here in the U.S. we are celebrating her momentous birthday in her back yard, wearing shorts and polo shirts. My brothers did not even shave, best I can tell. The two of them are off in a corner talking with each other, excluding me, probably exchanging baseball statistics or football trivia. They love that crap. I’m bored by it, as I am boried with this party. If I was not so afraid of incurring Moder’s unforgiving wrath, I would have left about an hour ago. Instead, here I am still, trying to move this party along so that I can finally go home.

* * *

Bebe, again.

Bebe and Belinda lead parallel lives; they both married at about the same time; they later had children of similar age; they set up house in the same neighborhood of Vicente Lopez, in the outskirts of Buenos Aires. Bebe colored her hair yellow, more than merely blonde, and entered into marriage with a military doctor, Lorenzino. The military aspect did not please Belinda’s husband, he spoke ill of Bebe and her family, suspected them of living from dirty money stolen from the government. Belinda did not care. She was practical about these things, as she had been taught to be by her father. It is rare that a person who makes too much noise about such things can get along in a military dictatorship. “It’s all relative,” is what Belinda’s father had told her. “Just know that in your heart you are doing the right thing Benita, and let the others atone for their sins if and when God asks them too.” Very practical advice, very easily emulated.

***

Bebe, still.

“Bebe.” Belinda finds herself whispering her old friend’s name. She blurts it out as if there’s no room in her mouth to hold the four letters, as if she must set them free. “Bebe,” she practically screams out. Strange to be thinking of her, yelling her name out today on Belinda’s 81st birthday, as if Bebe was of any importance after all these years. Belinda’s son (who seems to staring me all day long, thinks Belinda) hears his mother say Bebe’s name. He raises his eyebrows, as if he’s been offended by a foul smell.
.
“What did you say Moder?, he asks.

Belinda wishes he had not heard her, but she has nothing to hide. She can’t think about anyone she wants. Privileges of old age is that no one dictates what you think or say. “I said Bebe,” she tells her son. “I’ve been thinking about her lately.:

“That’s a name from the past,” answers her oldest son. “Really scrapping the barrel for memories, aren’t we dear?”

Such sarcasm, thinks Belinda. What have I done to deserve this shit. “Have you been taking your medicine?” asks Belinda to her oldest son. “You know what the doctor says, ever since your incident. You need to take that medicine.” The boy, the man really, walks away.

He thinks I’m a bitch; I can tell by the darkening of his green eyes. “Yes, Moder I have,” he answers, clenching those white teeth. No sense in being uncivil today, not now, after so many years.

***

When they started to disappear. Los Desaparecidos.

Bebe introduced Belinda to the local Canasta Club, and through that Belinda met other wives in similar circumstances. They spent many long afternoons playing cards, and chatting. The women would compare the latest triumphs of their sons and husbands, they would argue about which places one should visit during vacation. They drank whiskey, sometimes red wine, and they dressed in the latest Paris fashions. This fantasy, this illusion of European life in Latin America, had a heavy price tag. The system worked only and solely if the country accepted the military in power. Those who did not know how to keep their mouths shut, those who dared confront the military, were treated as Argentine cattle -- their heads are cut off so that they can bleed to death. And the blood could be seen on the streets. It could be seen during the early morning hours, before the street cleaners wiped away the evidence of the night’s before massacred. It was not every night, but it was often enough that if one cared to, if one looked and admitted what was happening, one would know. Belinda knew. She noticed people who suddenly disappeared, family men who were not seen of or spoken about. It nagged her. Her father’s practicality told her to be quiet, the nun’s sensibility urged her to speak up. She bit her lips.

After a night of executions, while playing cards with the other ladies of Vicente Lopez, Belinda broached the subject delicately, once, just that once:

“Fulano disappeared,” said Belinda, as she put down a thee kings and a joker. “No one knows what happened to him and perhaps . . . well, as they say. . . “ Belinda discards a seven.

“He must have done something,” answered Bebe. She applied a bit of lipstick before realizing it was her turn. She puts down three sevens, and steels the deck. “You know that the ones that disappear are always the ones who have done something. It’s a question of protecting our Republic against those pigs.”

“Why is that?” answered Belinda, while counting the cards on her hand. She had 2 black threes, and she knew these would be pints against her if someone went out before she was able to put them down. “What have they done?” she asked.

“Don’t be a fool,” answered Bebe. “We simply will not speak of this. I am done with this nonsense. If there’s blood, then let them clean it up and be done with it. We have to support our military” She put down all her cards. Three canastas. Two red threes. “This will be a tidy little winnings.”

* * *

Moder is finally opening her eyes. The sun must have been bothering her, or maybe the children are screaming too much. She’ll never tell one way or the other.

* * *

Waking up, groggy.

How long have I been sleeping? – wanders Belinda. It may have been hours, or seconds, time seems so insignificant when one is 81 years old. The children, her grandchildren, appear to be just as energetic as they were before lunch, so they must not have been playing a long time. Her nap must not have been long. It seemed long, or complicated. She hates when she dreams about Argentina, the 1950’s. Belinda dislikes the abbreviated, condensed and time juxtaposed version of life that she always paints in her dreams. One would think that at age 81 one would be spared such nightmares, or perhaps that’s too strong a word; not nightmares, not really, just inconvenient, unnecessary, discomforting. Dreams should not be comforting, thinks Belinda. They should be neither nostalgic nor morose. Why bother dreaming if the dreams will bring no comfort?

She sees that the children are playing tag. She loved playing tag herself as a child, and red light, and statutes, and jacks, and basketball. No one would guess that she played basketball once. Lord, no one guess she was a child once! These children here, her grandchildren, all they see is an 81 year old woman, they don’t see the child that is still in her. They don’t see the imaginative child that is still beating strong in her heart, though she must admit the body has certainly slowed down. No more time, or no more energy, for acting out imaginations.

She looks at the starling again, perched on the telephone line above her. They have such strong feet, she thinks, to be able to hold on so tightly and precariously. The children are trying to shoo the birds away. Belinda would do the same at their age. It’s fun to watch the birds fly, their flight is strong and direct, and they seem so gregarious. She imagines that the birds have dressed up for the occasion, this her 81st birthday, their typically dark plumage today shining its metallic sheen, in celebration of her birthday.

She closes her eyes again.

Imaginations, thinks Belinda. Imaginations. How sad imaginations are and the illusions to which one can so easily submit.

***

Easy to believe.

She was born in Buenos Aires, in the economical and social epicenter of what was then one of the most important countries in the world. 1927. “We are the eighth largest economy on this globe,” would say Picho to her. “Who knows. We might even be the largest, as far as I’m concerned.”

It was easy for Belinda – it was so easy for Benita -- to believe everything Picho told and promised her. They were the promises of a life of luxury, interesting work, social responsibility and a non-meddling government. Of course, Picho was an intimate friend those days of the dictator then in power – the son of a bitch Peron. Son of a bitch because Peron, just like Picho, had promised grandiosities which never came to be.

It would have been easiest to continue this existence of illusions, this world of privilege in which the children attended the best Scottish school in the continent (who ever proved this detail?), this world of servants and hours of Canasta. Canasta marathons. It would have been easy.

After high school, Belinda had earned a degree in teaching match and biology. Her original dream had been to go on to study medicine and join her father’s medical practice, if Picho would have her. She had never discussed the subject with her father, but had assumed that it was what he would want. She was, after all, her father’s daughter, his image, the proud recipient of his high IQ genes. Belinda had the same contempt for her mother, Carlotta Lundsen, as did her father, and she imagined herself to be a female version of Picho Gonzales. She wanted nothing to do with domesticity, a quiet life in a quiet house, a room full of children. That was for the Carlotta’s of this world. Fine for them, but not for Belinda Gonzales, daughter of Picho Gonzales. She orchestrated an elaborate scenario for telling her father of the decision she had made to study medicine, plans she had harbored almost her entire life. She made reservations to have high tea with her father at Harrods, on Calle Florida in Buenos Aires. Harrods was a grand Belle Époque building, selling the same items sold in the London store, but catering to the South American elite. Tea at Harrods was for some middle class Porteños a dream come true, a once in a lifetime occasion. For Benita and her father it was customary, yet enjoyable.

***

Grandchildren clamoring for attention.

“Abuelita, abuelita, look at us?” Belinda opens her eyes. Joey, Christina and Michaela have climbed a tree. They are trying to get her attention, maybe have her come over and play with them. She does not have the energy. She looks at them and smile from the distance. She has false teeth, and the children think this is very funny. They laugh whenever she smiles, the perfect teeth against the wrinkles. The children laugh, and then turn away, back to their tree climbing.

Belinda turns to listens to the starlings. Their call is not easy to distinguish. They copy the call of other birds, sometimes they even mock car alarms. Some people consider them pests.

Belinda closes her eyes again.

***

Telling Picho about medical school.

She loved her father, even though he had prohibited her from becoming a doctor. She loved his captivating smile, his superior intelligence. Such a handsome man. “Everyone always commented on his beauty,” would tell Belinda. “All my girlfriends could see it. They were jealous.” With that phrase, usually, Belinda would take a sip of her whiskey. One sip after another. But she would never get drunk, or at least that’s what she thought to herself.

Belinda’s plan had been to tell Picho right in the middle of tea at Harrods, on Calle Florida. She had recently turned 17, and was eager to have her father join in her self-congratulating celebration, her decision to go on to study medicine. They would have tea at Harrods, and they Picho (or so she imagine) would order champagne and make a real celebration Of course, Picho had never drank champagne with his daughter; he was a whiskey man; but she thought that for this occasion, this sharing of the interests (daughter takes on the profession of her father), he would make an exception and celebrate the way people are supposed to; at least how Europeans as supposed to. Belinda ate very little, only nibbling the crusts of her watercress sandwiches, and drank simple Earl Grey. She watched the other beautiful Porteños, the women particularly in their elegant white dresses with rounded busts and waistline curves – their hair adorned with small plate shaped hats. The clothes were feminine, sweet and tidy. Some of the dresses made from metallic colored fabrics, which shimmered even more richly with their plastic sequins and glass beads. Belinda loved the fashion, admired it and emulated it. She had painted her lips richly red that day, to match her strawberry blonde locks. To Picho’s eyes she looked like a tart. He smoked at cigar while staring unsympathetically at his daughter. “I would have bed her,” he thought, “If she were not my daughter, I would bed her.” He felt brazen to entertain such thoughts, but he was confident that a man can have thoughts and not act on them. “I need to keep an eye an on you,” he said to Belinda, giving her a half hearted smile. She did not know what he meant, or knew exactly and chose to ignore it. Benito continued sipping his whiskey, ready to order another and to light up a new cigar. He couldn’t understand all the medical nonsense about the effects of tobacco smoke; it may shorten your life, but it surely brought a lot of pleasure. Kind of like a woman in bed, he thought; surely all that pounding about is not so good for the heart, but God does it feel good.

The waiter, wearing a cheap black tux but with an impeccably white crisp shirt, came around with the cake cart. It was stacked with lemon cake and napoleons, tea biscuits and strawberry tarts. Neither Picho nor Belinda would eat any of it, but Picho ordered one of each in any event. He lit a new cigar as he pointed to the waiter for an ashtray and a light. The waiter attended to Picho’s cigar first, almost as attentively as he would have if the cigar had been a special guest; and then he placed one of each dessert on the table, most of it within Belinda’s reach and not Picho’s. The waiter stared at Belinda, daring her to eat the sweets.

Belinda ignored the waiter, ignored the sweet cakes placed in front of her, always conscious of her figure. She thought this was an opportune time to tell father about her career decision. She could use a glass of champagne by now. She figured if she told Picho while the waiter was still there, the champagne would come to the table that much sooner.

Picho is looking at the other side of the room. It is unlikely that he is admiring the stained glass window, vibrant reds and blues depicting lilies suspended in air. Picho has no eye for such details. What’s more likely caught his eye is some “boquita pintada,” – a young woman with painted lips. Belinda knows this. Usually she is able to ignore her father’s public flirtations. She knows that Picho Gonzales will wolf a lamb at every chance, but today Belinda wishes he would stay focus on the conversation. Belinda turns to assess her competition, the little bitch who is taking away her father’s attention. She’s surprised to see it’s a morena, a dark skinned brunette with tight fitting dress, black, tassels hanging from the skirt like icicles. Not his type, thinks Belinda. He usually prefers them fair, redheaded or blonde.

“Picho” (she always called him Picho, never dad or papa or father). “I have great news for you.”

He looked at her suspiciously, as if women had only one piece of good news to ever give, and he had no interest in hearing at this time that she was pregnant. The noise from the crowd at the Harrods’ restaurant was suffocating. He really did not enjoy these outings. Why did Belinda always insist in these settings, and especially now, with her possibly about to tell him she was pregnant. He growled, snarled really, unable to smile at his daughter under these circumstances.

Belinda knew exactly what he was thinking, and she laughed. She could not help herself. How foolish Picho could be sometimes. “Relax Picho,” she said as she sipped her tea. She put down the cup and looked into his dark eyes, admired his luscious curly black hair. “I’ve made a decision. I’m going to study medicine, and become a doctor like you.” She held his hand and caressed his hairy forearms.

Picho did not take even two seconds to consider the proposal. The idea of a woman, his daughter, attending medical school was preposterous. This needed no thinking or consideration, no diplomatic maneuvering. He simply used his right hand to remove her hand from his arms, and used his left hand to put out his cigar. He looked at the ashtray rather than Belinda’s eyes as he pronounced definitively and nonchalantly his edict on this matter. “That’s for men,” he said, putting out his cigar. “Medicine is for men. You stick to teaching or the nunnery. Leave the rest to those who know best.”

***

Becoming 81 years old.

Now the sun is coming down. Belinda’s oldest son is caressing her shoulder, prompting her to wake up. “Moder, darling, are you ok?”

Belinda looks at him, his eyes, the ones that remind her of her own father, her Picho. Why is she dreaming so much about her father today? He was womanizer, a wife beater. You would think that by age 81 she would have learned to stop thinking about this man. Belinda, Benita as Picho called her, remembers the at age six she was awaken from her sleep when Picho was slapping Carlotta around. Carlotta had called him on it, questioned what diseases he would be bringing home if he kept sleeping around like a whore. Picho was livid. He pummeled Carlotta, until blood blinded her eyes, and then pushed her down the stairs. Miraculously she survived. Before leaving the house, Picho himself called the ambulance to come pick up Carlotta. Carlotta could talk, but she could not move. Both her legs had been broken during the fall. Belinda observed Carlotta’s bloody body at the bottom of the stairs. The maid took Belinda away. “Come away from their girl. Come sit outside with me. You father says everything will be fine.” While they were waiting for the ambulance, Belinda and the maid sat in the garden, under the moonlight, turning over worms under the rocks. “Birds will eat these, won’t they?” asked Belinda. “Yes child,” said the maid. Picho put on his black overcoat and top hat, kissed Belinda goodnight as if this were no different than any other night. “Benita,” he said to her. “You pay attention to Isabel tonight. Tomorrow you are going a new school, a boarding school with nuns. Won’t that be fun child?” Belinda said nothing. She kept playing with her worms.

Belinda opens her eyes wider. She is still sitting in her back yard, in the United States, not in Argentina. She is 81 years old, not 6. She must remember this. This she must remember.

“Let’s go inside, Moder,” says Belinda’s oldest son as he helps her get out of her chair.

Belinda looks at the sky. She can no longer see the birds. “Where have the starlings gone?” she asks.

* * *

I help Moder come inside. I would not say she is delicate and in need of assistance, but she is certainly not the same woman who raised her children with an iron fist. She is glad to lean on my shoulder as we walk up the stairs into her kitchen. It is almost as if we were a good mother and child, a loving couple. Such hypocrisy.

* * *

Still thinking like a 17 year old.

At age 17, a month before graduating from La Anunciata (the catholic school for girls run by nuns), Belinda asked her father permission to start attending medical school. He said no. There was no arguing the matter.

But just as her father, Belinda had an enormous intelligence and would not be satisfied with a future of tending house. She left Harrods that day, that cloudy August 1944, at age 17, determined to break with tradition. Her mind flustered as she walked down Calle Florida and then Corrientes, up the hill to her mother’s house. She debated during that walk the value of her intelligence, the futility of it if she was not to display it in a learned profession. “What is the purpose?” she pondered, “and where does it come from? Is it something I merely inherited from Picho, as a sperm’s afterthought, or is it a bit of education, something I learned from the nuns?” Most girls Belinda’s age, 17, would not have pondered any of this, but Belinda analyzed it thoroughly, even obsessed about it, and put it all down in letters to herself which she would seal into envelopes and keep on the top drawer of her desk. Letters that she would never mail but would always keep. She had written, she had written her letters religiously each night after her prayers, much mocked by her father but encouraged by the nuns. From her father, she said in so many words, she had inherited the unbeatable capability of ignoring other people’s judgment, beating them at their own game. From her mother, she could see nothing in her, but was forced to admit that her beauty, her true adoration for clothes and etiquette, fashion, came from Carlotta. And also the patience – the patience of knowing that even though men and society despised her, she was intelligent. But what Belinda feared, and what she wrote most about, was that she may inherited the dark side of his father. “Not his brutality,” she wrote in the letters. “Dear God, please do not let me know that I have his brutality.” Not the ability to brutalize a person, and to then walk away as if nothing had happened.

Let us skip that for now. Let us focus on the positive, on the values that Belinda learned or inherited and exemplified in her life. They came from the nuns, from Sister Paulina in particular. Paulina was an immigrant from Spain, arrived in Buenos Aires with nothing but “onion breath” as she would say. The nunnery had not been her choice, it was her destiny. Unable to find anything more than a maid’s position, she chose the church as refuge and self respect. She loathed the Argentine oligarchy, the ones that looked down their noses at her for her lack of refinement. But she loved being able to influence the oligarchy in a way that no other person could influence them – through their children. Paulina, through sheer determination and intelligence, had positioned herself as the headmistress of Buenos Aires’ best Catholic high school for girls - La Anunciata, a dormitory school, where she had uninterrupted access to the daughters and future wives of the most influential men in Argentina. She did not abuse this position, but she used it to humble and educate the girls who by the time they entered Paulina’s school were already spoiled by the wealth of their parents. Most girls she had only a minimal influence on, one that translated into devout Catholicism in the girls but no true understanding of the teachings of Christ, no true “share your coat” mentality as Paulina herself would espouse.

Paulina believed deeply in the mission of La Anunciata school: Respect for the dignity of the person and harvesting each person’s peculiar values (hence Paulina required that her dormitory girls take baths fully clothed less they should see their nakedness); the simplicity, opening, positive attitude, compassion, mercy and closeness to everyone, especially those most in need (hence Paulina required her girls to assist her in distributing food to the hungry in the shanty towns, the Villa Miseria); education from social welfare to fraternity in an environment of dialogue, participation, co-responsibility and solidarity (hence Paulina was a strict disciplinarian, known to punish girls by beating them over the knuckles with a ruler, just enough to turn red, never enough to bleed); profound search for truth through the Word of God and the contemplation of such reality (hence Paulina liked to masturbate at night, alone, in contemplation of the pleasure that God had granted her vagina); a progressive synthesis and harmony between faith, culture and life; and above all, unfailing love of Maria, Mother of Jesus.

She was a complex character, Paulina, suspected by more than one of the girls to be a lesbian at heart. They kept their distance from her, while at the same time they admired her deep sense of social responsibility, but they were horrified by her perverse obsession with religiosity and the “rules of chastity.” Few of the girls believed all of this nonsense; they chose in bits and portions what of Paulina’s words they would take with them, and make fun of the rest. Belinda had been a rare example of Paulina’s influence gone right. The girl was only six years old when she was interned at the convent school. She adored everything that Paulina had to offer, however strange it seemed. A smart child is a rare thing, a smart child bent on believing the words of a nun is a dangerous thing. Paulina was up for the job.

***

It started innocently on Saturdays.

Most girls go home. Even of those that staid in dorm for the weekend, only a handful went with Paulina, out of punishment or stupidity. Belinda was the only smart girl that ever joined Paulina’s weekend missions of charity, feeding the hungry at Villa Miseria (Village of Misery). They distributed food to the poor on Saturdays, from ten a.m. sharp (after morning mass) until 11:30 am (giving them time to come back to La Anunciata for mid-day mass). Paulina had been doing this service for decades, and she loved the autonomy it gave her, the hours away from the school and the convent. This was her domain. She had managed through guilt and prayer to talk one of the landlord’s into giving her a dilapidated building practically rent free, which she painted stark white and swept and scrubbed sanitary clean. She decorated it simply with wooden furniture she bartered for at an open market store off the Parana river. For decorations, she had the mandatory cross, a vibrantly colored painting of La Virgin Maria, and prints of folkloric dancers from her native Asturias. These were sent to her by her father and mother in Santander, who never quite understood why Paulina had left Spain. Belinda loved the cleanliness of Paulina’s offices contrasted to the shanty town misery that surrounded it. Paulina loved the charity work, but she also derived pleasure from the respect that the community gave to her. At her offices, as she called her food shelter, she was not the subservient mistress of Christ, the teacher of daughters of the Argentine privileged class, the Spanish immigrant in South American soil. Here she was mistress and master of her own domain, the giver of goods, the benefactress of many who respected her, viewed her as God’s emissary on Earth. She thought and knew these things, but never uttered them. It was enough to sense it, to believe in it, to carry her through the week at La Anunciata.

None of the other girls would have known or suspected such hubris from Paulina. They idiotically believed that Paulina’s charity work was a mere extension of her Christian beliefs, her martyr syndrome, her sisterly duties. Each girl had a different variant of the same theme for explaining Paulina, but they were only fractionally correct in their assumptions. Only Belinda understood the complexity of it, the duality of Paulina’s feelings. True, Christ had taught us to serve others, but what sin is there to derive pleasure form the duty, to extract homage from the sacrifice. Belinda would often sit in Paulina’s office, watching as Paulina administered alms in self righteous haughtiness. “I get it,” said Belinda to herself. “I get what this is all about.”

Sister Paulina derived particular pleasure of having her girls do service in the shantytowns; perhaps a stained dressed, a broken nail, spoiled garters would serve small penance for the haughtiness of the girls, while at the same time allowing them to serve Maria and Jesus as they were intended to. If Sister Paulina happened to derived some additional pleasure from the girls trivial torments, if Paulina happened to believe that this was just compensation for the dismissive disdain she received and endured from the girls’ parents, so be it; it was a small sin, and not one that anyone ever really needed to hear; no confession of this slight sin of hubris as far as Paulina was concerned.

* * *

We have laid out the gifts on the kitchen table. What do you buy an 81 year old woman? She is in need of nothing. She does not have a sweet tooth, so candy is not an option. All of us seem to have thought of the same gift, plants and flowers. There’s a veritable garden of potted daffodils and gladiolas in vases strewn on the table. One would think this was a florist shop. Moder looks at it graciously, smiles, thanks everyone for their generosity and kindness. She likes that we have gathered to celebrate her day.

***

Villages of misery.

When Picho Gonzalez informed Belinda Gonzalez that she would not become (was not to ever even think of becoming) a doctor, Belinda made two decisions. The first would be to marry the first eligible man that appeared in her life (and that came to be Tomás Humphrey). The second was to join forces with the most formidable woman she knew, and that would be Sister Paulina.

Belinda visited Paulina at the food shelter in Villa Miseria. The nun was resting as the girls from the school distributed food. She immediately recognized Belinda, her once favorite student.

“Belinda Ana. What brings you here?”

“Good morning Sister Paulina. It is so good to see you. You look well.”

“I look like an old lady. But I’m doing God’s work. So what more can I ask for.”

“There’s more,” said Belinda, staring straight at the eyes of her favorite nun. She held the stare, daring Sister Paulina to look beyond the shelter.

“And what would that be?” asked Paulina.

“I’ve given it some thought,” responded Belinda. “I think you should help me set up a woman’s clinic, here in Villa Miseria.”

Paulina did not blink. She did not offer the hundred and one reasons that any other person in her position would have coffered against the idea of a woman’s clinic. Rather, she thought to herself, “Finally,” finally one of my students gets it.

Paulina and Belinda worked on their new mission expeditiously but silently, not wanting to bring too much attention to themselves. Paulina negotiated once again a deal with a landlord for space not too far from the food shelter, but sufficiently far as to not be considered part of the same establishment. In it, Belinda began a simple clinic where she taught those who were not yet pregnant how to avoid getting pregnant, and teaching those who were pregnant how to protect the health of the fetus. All this Belinda and Paulina did in secret from those who knew them outside of Villa Miseria. Paulina had earned sufficient respect and independence in the convent, that no one questioned her long Saturdays away from the flock. During the week, when Sister Paulina could not attend the health clinic, Belinda spent morning hours supervising volunteers. Her Picho, her husband, her sons never found out what took up so much of Belinda’s time when she left the house in the morning after a small cup of strong coffee. They all imagined that she spent her days and afternoons shopping at the chicest stores, buying the latest French style, anything, trying on the most expensive dress she could find. And in this, perhaps these men in her life were correct. Belinda was capable of living in both worlds. Her social aesthetics led her to humanitarian acts in the Villa Miseria, but also her vanity would lead her to buy clothes that would accentuate her red hair, her slender legs, her excessively fair white skin.

I’ve helped Moder move the plants and flowers from the Kitchen table to the solarium. Father is sitting there by himself, as always. He is wearing tennis shoes and a three piece suit, a wrinkled shirt, a necktie that some grandchild has given him as a present, something in the past (no one remembers when), and boina (a beret, but from Spain rather than France). It is a dignified yet comic look. Even in the summer he will wear a suit and hat, remnants of his strict upbringing, the comfortable shoes, tennis shoes, were a recent addition, in the past twenty years, when he could no longer tolerate the rough leather of his black shoes against his arthritic toes. Only a man Tomás Humphrey could carry off this look. “Father,” I say, “are you having a good time?”

***

Tomás. Tomás Humphrey.

Tomás Humphrey. An Anglo-Argentine whose masculine beauty was well renowned within Belinda’s circle of friends. Tomás was a young attorney, a member of the Chamber of Deputies in the Argentine Congress, and a law partner of Juan de la Roca Gonzales, Belinda’s first cousin. Tomás and Belinda did not know each other directly, but knew of each other through their friends, relatives and mutual acquaintances. They had the same connections, or at least lived in the same small center of Argentine illusions. Tomás’ family, although of British descent, had under its belt more years, more decades, in Argentina than the Gonzales family. Belinda’s antecedents had arrived to the River Plate not more than two generations ago On her father’s side, Picho, the family came from Barcelona or Asturias (Belinda could never quite get this detail right), and on her mother’s side they had come from Denmark (Copenhagen and the Isle of Moen is what Belinda had always been told). But the Humphrey family had arrived in the Province of Buenos Aires almost four generations now, always maintaining their command of the English language and British customs. They spoke English with more care and elegance than a member of Parliament. At the same time, they tended sheep and herded cattle like true Argentine gauchos. Tomás himself would spend the entire summers of his early youth on the family estancia, in the far regions of the province, mounted all day on horseback. The rein would be so tight against his small fair wrists that the sunburn marks would leave white streaks where the leash was wrapped around the skin. And his eyes were blue. Not true blue, ,but pale blue with streaks of green

Every girl who knew Tomás Humphrey had dreams of marrying him, but none more so than Belinda. Tomás, despite his good looks and intelligence, was a shy man, incapable of bringing himself to chase after a woman. He had of course had his share of prostitutes, but no respectable girl yet, no one he could bring home. Belinda knew immediately what she was up against, and made it her mission to make this man fall in love with her. She figured out his daily schedule, and cleverly appeared at times and places where she could count on his presence. At the corner, waiting for the No. 54 Bus at 7:30 Am, at the confitería having tea at 4:00 pm, at the library at 6 pm, at a small restaurant at 10 pm. She was clever about it, always making it seem as a coincidence. At first Tomás took little note, but finally it registered. Her beauty which he had admired for so long suddenly seem to be everywhere, and he believed that destiny was trying to tell him something. “Why don’t you take me to the Teatro Colón on Saturday?” finally asked Belinda one night. “They are playing Lorca. We both like Lorca.” Tomás bought tickets the next day, for Belinda, himself, and Belinda’s mother, the chaperone. They dated for three months, always with Belinda’s mother in tow as chaperone. One month later they eloped.

“We would make beautiful children” thought Belinda when they married. “My red hair his blue eyes.”

Belinda imagined many things when she married Tomás Humphrey. There was of course the initial shock that would need to be overcome, having eloped without a ceremony, but this was easily glossed over. Belinda’s mother, now divorced from Picho, was not much for ceremony, and Picho Gonzalez was sufficiently pleased by the prospects of Tomás Humphrey as to not put up too much opposition. Belinda’s girlfriends were informed of the marriage by handwritten cards on expensive bonded paper, imported from Paris. They assumed the worst, that Belinda was pregnant and had to get married, and though this was not true, Belinda made no attempt to assure them otherwise. She gracefully accepted their congratulations, a few of them gave them gifts, and she set up house with Tomás Humphrey.

The second thing that Belinda imagined is that sex with Tomás Humphrey would be pleasurable. It was, it exceeded her expectations. For a shy man, Tomás was exceptionally uninhibited in the bedroom. Belinda imagined that he had learned his bed side manners at the estancia, on some Indian girl who showed him how to ride horse on a woman. At times it was even brutal, but always enjoyable. Belinda took pleasure in stripping quickly whenever they were in bed, shedding any false sense of immortality or indecency that the nuns would have otherwise imputed on her. Tomás would kneel at the food at the bed while Belinda spread her very white legs apart. He would crouch, as if seeking to sip water from a burbling creek, and kiss her genitals gently. “You are truly a red head,” he admired the first time he saw her pubes. “I thought as much.” He gently made love to her clitoris as if it were a newborn baby. From then on, Tomás always referred to Belinda as Red. Belinda had ceased to exist.

The third thing Belinda imagined, however, the thing she cherished the most, was the illusion that she and Tomás would make beautiful Argentine babies. They would have their combined Nordic good looks, her red hair, his green blue eyes, and Picho's intelligence and masculinity. Her sons, her eldest son in particular, would be everything that Belinda had not been allowed to be. He would be a take charge personality, he would be Argentina’s miracle child.

But it did not happen that way. Belinda’s and Tomás’ first born, the oldest son, had crisp curly hair. It was not red, Nordic, like Belinda’s. It was wavy, almost frizzy, like Picho Gonzales. His eyes were not blue either, they seemed darker, and certainly the same shape as Picho. Belinda could not help but feel disappointment in her son’s looks, appearances. He had inherited the darkness of her father. “Another illusion stolen by Picho Gonzales” thought Belinda to herself.


***

The party is over now, finally. It is nearly 8 pm, and we have been here since 10 am this morning. After opening her presents, her flowers really, Moder insisted in having the kids put on a play. She helped them write it, spontaneously, full of fairies and donkeys who turn into princes. Christina dusted everyone with crunched pedals, fairy dust she called it. Joey laughed. Moder has a way with children, a way that was never practiced on me. When I leave, I kids Father, I kiss Moder. She hugs him tight. Tighter than usual. As Joey and Christina and I leave in my car, Moder and Father are standing in their front porch waiving at us. “Bitch,” I think to myself.

***

The first born son of Tomás Humphrey.

He was a difficult child, Belinda’s oldest son. He was too prone to fantasies, fairies, irrationalities. Belinda still remembers the day, at age 7, when the boy was left to play in the garden, the front yard of their house in El Libertador. The house was Tudor style, with faux towers and large windows made up of small double triangle inserts. The windows opened by hinges, the doors were solid dark wood with stark white molding. The garden was overgrown, but neatly maintained, as if transplanted from a London suburb to Buenos Aires soil. Inside the house, the child was not allowed to run or play, lest he should make a mess of things or break some of Belinda’s favorite china or her treasured glasses. It would have been best for all if he had other children to play with, neighborhood friends he could run wild with and exhaust himself so that he would be docile at night and simply go to bed after dinner. That’s how Belinda believed boys should act, like wild animals in the back yard, comatose inside the house. And masculine, above all masculine.

The boy fitted none of these images. He had no friends in the neighborhood, except perhaps the little girl who lived at the corner house and who had an unnatural crush on the boy. Mostly, he played by himself, and they were simple games, quiet games of exploration and make belief. It was not unusual for him to want to put on little plays, which Belinda strongly discouraged. On this day, when he was let out in the front garden to play, Belinda had an excruciating headache. President Ilia had recently been overthrown by the military, lead by General Onganía. Already Onganía had moved the military into the University of Buenos Aires and subdued and drove out faculty members as well as students. It was widely rumored that Onganía would close down Congress, but he would set up a group of well chosen representatives to form Committees to advise him on political matters. Tomás had been handpicked for an interview with Onganía. Belinda had no illusions what this meant. Tomás would be asked to join Ongania’s government by committee, but only if Tomás would support the ardent anti-communism, anti-Peronist stands that Onganía espoused. Those who did not agree with Onganía’s methods or politics were exiled or otherwise made to disappear. Eventually, the judges of Argentina's supreme court would be replaced with Onganía’s hand chosen protégés; trade unions would be abolished, the press and the arts would came under the governments zero-tolerance censorship. These were not times for fancifulness; these were times for pragmatism.

Belinda herself had arranged in part for the meeting between Onganía and Tomás. Onganía’s wife, Emilia Green, was a distant cousin of Tomás, also part of the Argentina British oligarchy, and Belinda had made it a point to keep friends where Tomás himself had no interest. She had served tea to Emilia, she had ingratiated herself to the fat cow who ate all of Belinda’s Napoleons in one fast swoop. “Mine, but this weather does make us all hungry,” had said Belinda, serving tea to the old cow. It was always worth keeping up with the British; why, Peron himself was more than 50% Scottish.

***

As I’m driving home from Moder’s party, I can’t help but think about my own childhood. It was lonely, mostly, just always by myself.

***

Shut up Moder. Let me tell you how I saw it.

I was playing in the garden. It was sometime in 1966; I don’t remember the exact day or month. I do remember that Moder was inside the house, entertaining a fat lady, serving her Napoleons. Maybe this had been the day or week or month before, I don’t remember. I remember the Napoleons, however, and how I wished I would be allowed to stay in the house and have tea with the ladies. I was ordered outside.

There was no one for me to play with. Florenica, the only kid in the neighborhood who would consider speaking with me, was away at a cousin’s birthday party. Her maid sent me home packing, told me I should call in advance before simply showing up at their doorstep. I was not allowed inside the house, not while Moder was entertaining, so I stayed outside, playing by myself. I looked for snails and worms in the ground. They always come out after the rain, and it had rained all day the day before. Moder would be furious at me for dirtying my pants and my shoes, but I did not care. I examined each caracol, each snail, closely. Other boys thought these creatures were disgusting, I did not. It’s funny because I’m usually the one considered prissy, neat, and yet I’m the one that will dig into the dirt to pull out these little icky creatures. The worms I will dissect, because I have been told that if you cut them in half they will grow a new tail. I don’t know if it’s true, but they continue to wriggle. I see them wriggling. I admit I enjoy their pain.

I am knee deep in mud, dissecting worms, playing with snails. I do not face the sky. There is a rainbow above the house. It has stopped raining not too long ago, and the Buenos Aires sun is always brilliant and always causes a rainbow after the storm. I am tired of looking at rainbows, so I take no heed. I can imagine it in back of me, imagine that it is illuminating my dark spot in the ground so that I may better examine my catch.

There is a shadow. I did not expect any shadows as it seemed to me that whenever there is a rainbow there are no clouds. The shadow is in the shape of a butterfly, except that it cannot be a butterfly for it has a crown. The wings are spread wide, causing a shadow over the entire grounds, the crown is small, but prominent, the same as the Virgin Mary wears in the altar at San Ignacio Catholic Church. I turn around. I look into the sky and I see, I know I see, a butterfly with a gold crown. I am sure of this. I am certain that I saw this at age 9.


***

The beginning of the violence.

Belinda heard the shots. There were cannons, rifles, armored truck machine guns. The noise was unmistakable. She knew it came from downtown, from the congressional seat, el Palacio del Congreso. It always seemed odd to her that the elected government representatives housed themselves in a palace. It was now official, thought Belinda, the Congress is shut down. Almost as if in a premonition, but more out of experience and knowledge of her country’s history, Belinda knew what to expect next. The streets would be closed off to allow Onganía’s military trucks to parade though the center of the city, el Centro. Onganía would make a speech about the necessity’s of the nation’s stability and wellbeing “necessitating that the president be required to step down and the nations’ military branch step into power for a transitional period to battle the communist insurgents and those who would wish to cause harm to Argentina’s economy and well being.” For good measure, parts of the shanty towns, las Villas Miseria, would be demolished. Meanwhile, Emilia Green would continue to visit her husband’s political suitors, those who sought to ingratiate themselves to the military, and she would enjoy her Napoleons.

The boy came running into “el living room,” anxious to tell his Mother about a silly butterfly he thinks he has seen; a butterfly with the crown of the Virgin Mary.

Belinda could not abide by such nonsense. It was not masculine. Against her will or better judgment, she slapped him across the face. “No seas maricón,” she told him. The minute the words had escaped her well rouged lips she had regretted it, but she never asked for pardon nor changed her ways. Many times after that she corrected her effeminate son whenever she felt it necessary. A certain slap across the face, an occasional hard paddle across the buttocks, sometimes worse – worse – was certainly not unpardonable. “Not in the long run,” she came to think in her old age. “Not when you consider what I saved him from.”

Belinda turned on the radio, to hear the new “president” (General Onganía, who had taken power of government by force) deliver a speech:

“The Argentine armed forces, whose duty it is to protect our precious nation's liberties, cannot stand aside and watch our patient and generous people suffer a state of anarchy. This, our revolution, will strive to heal the divisions of our people as well as restore Argentina’s deserved grandeur in the eyes of the world.”

***

I’ve put the kids to sleep. They got very cranky in the car, they always do when they play all day without break. I wish I had left Moder’s house earlier, given them more time to unwind before I put them to bed. Still, I finally have them in bed and now I can sit back and have a drink. My time alone, at last.

***

The beginning of the violence as I saw it.

After Moder slapped me, I went to my room to take off my school uniform. I thought about the other kids, the other Anglo-Argentines who attended St. Andrew’s School of Scotts with me. I hated them. I called it St. Andrew’s School of Hell. Tomás Humphrey, my father, liked the idea of indoctrinating English manners in his descendants. Belinda, my mother, liked the discipline, the uniform, the strictness. “Why do you send your son to that school,” had asked my grandfather, Picho Gonzales, indifferent to the supposed academic standards of the overly-priced institution in Vicente Lopez, Buenos Aires.

“They will teach him to be a man,” is what she told him.

Masculinity. Above all, my Moder adored masculinity. If she would not, should not, dwell in the realm of medicine, reserved exclusively for Argentine machos (as Picho had succinctly phrased it), then she would at least ensure that her son would play the role. I would be brought up right, brought up straight.

Tomás Humphrey, my father, was ignorant of Argentine ways. In 1966, immediately after General Onganía took over the government and did away with all democratic institutions, my father was invited by the military to become part of the leadership by partaking in a group of commissions supposedly representing the country’s diverse economic interests in the dictator’s cabinet. My father refused. My Moder had gone through extraordinary means to set up a potential cabinet assignment for my Father, only for him to turn down the offer. Onganía did not take the refusal well. My Father was in a precarious position. His appointment as a member of the Camara de Diputados was over, he had no ministerial assignments, he had no prospects of future employment. He resumed his law practice, but few clients were interested in giving him their business. He had no more connections, not the right leanings.

On July 29, 1966, “La Noche de Los Bastones Largos” (the night of the long sticks), the Argentine army swept upon the campuses of all the major universities in the country. Hundreds were arrested and tortured. The military sent a clear message.

People heard the shootings that night. Decent families closed their windows and put the radio on louder. Just taking care of business. As a child, I did not hear the shots. I slept through history. All I remember is the morning after, Moder pacing restlessly through the kitchen, asking the maid whether she is sure she locked the doors. “What is it Moder,” I asked. She looked at me astonished, not knowing that I was capable of sensing her, watching her. “Nothing child. I simply had a dream last night.”

“What was the dream about?”

“Blood, child. I saw blood on the streets.”

***

The phone is ringing. I know who it is. She always calls after I visit her, wants to make sure that I got home ok and that the children had a good time. Why does she do that? “Yes Moder,” I tell her, “We all had a wonderful time. Thank you for helping the children put on a play; they really enjoyed it.” We chat a few minutes. I hang up the phone and turn on the TV. There’s a news story about the Argentine economy. I change channels. I don’t want to hear anything about Argentina. It hurts too much.

***

Bebe Lorenzino, as I saw her.

Moder, of all places, turned to her Canasta crowd. Bebe Lorenzino, the president of the canasta club, was married to a heart surgeon for the military. He was of Italian descent, thin, short, droopy mustache. He was rumored to be gay, and in fact was quite effeminate. He was also one of the best heart surgeons in the country, and had curried favored with many in the military whose heart could stand a few pumps, tweaks and teasing. The cold hearted bastards had weak tickers, and the fag Lorenzino was just the man to make them right. Bebe was a bleached blonde, blonde perhaps by birth, long legs that began where the ankle meets the heels and finished in what seemed to be unimaginable heights well into her skirt. The skirts were always short, her nails always red. I suppose it is not possible that she was always smoking, but I do remember her with a cigarette in her lips, the smoke hovering close to her painted blue eyes. She was gorgeous, by the then standards. She was also much in need of a fuck. Her two children, both blonde and good looking, were fathered by her now deceased first husband. Lorenzino gave her no dick; he gave her prestige and money instead. He also gave her respectability of sorts, the type that only in a military dictatorship would be appreciated. Bebe had very little education, but she had connections and ambition, and for this she had to be admired. Plus, she was pleasant to look at. Pleasant even for her fag husband, for little boys like me, for housewives of the Vicente Lopez Canasta Club.

***

I’ve drank too much. My head is spinning. Not a good thing. I can’t remember if I ate anything. Tomorrow is school day for the kids, work for me. I’m going to call in sick. These festivities, these family gatherings, they wipe me out each and every time. I take off my clothes, I will sleep naked. I floss and brush my teeth first; even when I’m drunk I know that I need to take care of these pearly whites. It’s my one good feature. I conk out.

***

Being with Bebe.

Bebe and Belinda went out for a drink after a Canasta night. As usual, Bebe had won the round, and had a few coins to show for it. Belinda was uncharacteristically quiet.

“What’s going on with you?” asked Bebe, as she lit a cigarette. She was simultaneously looking at the man at the end of the room.

Belinda is not accustomed to being in bars. Bebe has ordered her a whiskey, and Belinda is sipping it slowly. They are sitting at a table next to the back wall. Belinda feels hot. She takes of her hat, her gloves, places the white pocketbook on the table and takes another sip of her whiskey. “Things are funny around here, aren’t they Bebe?”

Bebe is still looking at the man across the room. She has lit a cigarette, and is not looking at Belinda. She is listening however. “In what way funny?” she asks. “Is this more about that nonsense you were talking about during the game?”

“How do you feel about it Bebe? How do you like the military?”

Bebe still does not look at Belinda. “I’ve asked you not to ask me such things. Some things one just has to learn to live with. Lorenzino does alright, he’s friends with them, and it’s good for his practice. No need to worry.” Bebe now puts out her cigarette and turns her face to look at Belinda. Such a handsome woman, thinks Belinda.

Bebe smiles. She knows what Belinda is thinking. “I need a favor,” says Belinda. The waiter approaches the two women, asks them if they want anything else. Bebe shoos him away, tells him to come back later.

“What sort of favor?” asks Bebe, except it is not a question, it is a statement, acknowledging that a favor has been asked and that Bebe needs more information. There is no suspicion or curiosity in her question. Belinda notices this; the lack of curiosity, the accepting that strange things will be asked during strange times. She wonders if all Argentina women are this way. She has seen it in herself often.

“Tomás is in trouble.” Belinda knew better than beating around the bush with Bebe. Again, Bebe has no reaction. She sips her Cherry Martini. She has already heard about Tomás turning down Onganía's offer to participate in government. A very foolish man, she had thought to herself. So had many others. “I know,” says Bebe.

Time to put all cards on the table. “I’m afraid,” says Belinda. “I don’t have the stomach for this, I don’t know what will happen to us. I thought perhaps if Tomás could get a diplomatic assignment, maybe to the U.S., then we would go away from all this and . . .”

Belinda cannot finish the sentence. She has not given the subject more thought than simply wanting to get away. She has no idea what would become of them in the U.S., what would become of Argentina. She has dreamt of blood in the streets, and the dream to her seems a reality. She must act upon this reality. This she shares with Bebe. Bebe has always been fascinated by dreams and omens.

“Very interesting,” says Bebe. “But I’m not sure what you want from me.”

They are playing a game. Belinda knows that Bebe knows. Bebe’s husband, Lorenzino, is a close friend of Onganía. Lorenzino can put the idea into Onganía's head, move Tomás to a consulate position in New York, get him out of the country and help out the bloke. Tomás is known for being a smart man, he would do well in the consulate. Bebe in fact has already formulated the same thoughts as Belinda, but there is the question of payment. Bebe likes Belinda, but why not benefit from the situation? Make it a win win situation. Belinda has all that furniture, Danish, modern. Bebe does not. Belinda is not going to need all that furniture in the U.S., in fact, it would be foolish to move the furniture. It would simply get damaged in transit and no one would benefit from that. Why not leave it to Bebe? Bebe would take care of it, along with all the other contents of the house, and when Belinda returns (if she returns) it will all be there for her. Belinda listens to Bebe as Bebe explains this rational argument

The price of a ticket out of the country, thinks Belinda. It’s small, she could have asked for more.

* * *

The constant violence.

On May 29, 1969, the Argentine army fell upon civilians marching in the streets of Cordoba. The army was instructed to open fire as if fighting a foreign enemy. Students and intellectuals engaged in peaceful protest, others looted stores. Fires burned down a major part of the city. The military blamed the rebels, the rebels blamed the military. The war between the military and the people lasted for three days. The events were filmed and presented by the government on national television throughout the country. “El Cordobazo” as it came to be known, left in the dust any belief that General Onganía would be a benevolent dictator.

Moder and Father did not speak of these things, not in front of us. I remember seeing the news reports, but Moder turned the TV off quickly. All she could say to us is that things were not good, not good at all. “Is it your dreams Moder?” Yes, the dreams. “Did you see blood in the streets again, Moder.” Yes, that was the dream. I was afraid and fascinated by the dream. I did not know what it meant.

***

I have told my current Reggie of what it was like when I left Buenos Aires in 1969. I was 11 years old. We have had a running argument as to whether it is possible that I have these memories, for he assures me that no 11 year old would remember such things. I disagree with him.

***

When I left Argentina.

I remember the year we left Argentina, 1969. I was 11 years old, old enough to have strong memories, though Moder does not know that. When we speak about it these days, now that she is 81, she believes that I remember nothing of those days. She is wrong.

I remember that Moder, for the first time in her life, felt penniless. In 1968, a year before we left the country, Picho had died, and left her nothing in his will. It all went to an illegitimate some she had never heard about – that and to his gambling debts. In 1967, a year before Picho died, Moder had given birth to the twins, Xavier and Gabriel. The many dresses she had accumulated during the years did not fit her well. Her body had changed, as had her circumstances. In 1969, she felt trapped, nowhere to go. I remember it, I felt it.

Bebe came through with finding Father a new job in New York. Moder thought I knew nothing of this, but the walls have ears, the children will always listen. Father argued for a long time with Moder, he did not want to move to New York. But Moder, always the pragmatist, pointed out to him that he had no other options. Even if it were not for the fact that he had no other job in Buenos Aires, she would leave the country without him if need be. She spoke again of her dreams, of blood in the streets. I remember this conversation and I remember also hearing shots in the outside air. I don’t remember if these happened at the same time. I imagine not. The adults would never acknowledge the shots in the air.

Father went to New York by himself, six months in advance of Moder and the kids. Disoriented, without Moder to tell him what to do, he rented a one room apartment in West New York. He commuted daily to Manhattan, by bus. His job at the Argentine consulate was prestigious in title but low in pay. He had definitely settled for a more modest living in order to escape Argentina. He was conscious of his obligations to his wife and three children in Buenos Aires, and sent them money whenever he could. However, after rent, taxes, commuting expenses, there was very little left over to send back to Argentina. Certainly not enough to buy passage for the family, and not enough to maintain Moder at the living style she had grown to expect.

In the last six months in Buenos Aires, my brothers and I kept going to school every day and finished out the school year. We also helped Moder pack trunks full of valuables, but the trunks would not make the trip with us. Bebe’s generosity in assisting Father obtain a position in New York had come at a price. All contents of the house, less whatever small memories Moder could scurry on a carryon bag. Moder chose her whiskey tumblers to bring with her. They were good crystal

After making promises and business arrangements with Bebe, Belinda booked passages for the family to New York. Thanks to diplomatic immunity, neither she nor the children required visas. Everyone embarked on Aerolineas Argentinas from Ezeiza Airport (near the Villa Miseria) to Kennedy Airport (near the burnt out ghettos of the Bronx).
Father picked us up at Kennedy International Airport. Moder was holding Xavier and Gabriel. No one was holding me – the oldest one – I was old enough to take care of myself. Xavier and Gabriel were three years old, so it would not have been unreasonable to expect they would recognize their father. They did not. They looked at Tomás in bewilderment, as tears ran down Tomás’ cheeks. He had lost much weight in the six months, and had aged considerably. He was no longer the handsome young attorney that Moder had fallen in love with. “He is weak,” thought Moder, as she handed me Xavier and Gabriel’s hands. She approached Tomás, not knowing whether to kiss or slap him. She did neither. Instead, she held him in her arms as a torrent of tears fell down his cheeks. “I have missed you so much, Red” said Tomás to her, barely in a whisper. And so Belinda took over the family.

These things I remember from 1969, from when we left Buenos Aires, but Reggie does not believe me. I have not told him everything, for he will dispute some of the details. He will deny for example that it is logical that the only thing my Moder packed when she left Buenos Aires were her crystal whiskey tumblers. More fervently, he will deny that these are real memories, that it is not possible that I should recollect such detail. Perhaps he is right, perhaps the detail comes from Moder’s own lips, or her veins, or her mind and my imagination. They are still real memories. They are what I recollect.

* * *

It’s been a restless night. I must have grinded my teeth all night long, because my jaw feels as tight as a wood clamp. Christina and Joey, as usual, got up at 6 A.M., clamoring for breakfast. “Can’t you make your own?” I asked them, still half asleep, as they jumped on top of my bed. “Depends,” says Joey, “what do you have?” There’s waffles in the freezer, syrup in the pantry. I regret later having given them permission to make breakfast. The kitchen looks like a tribe of a baboons has rummaged through it. “Dad,” says Christina, “would you like us to make you some waffles now?” There’s syrup all over her school uniform. I wipe them both up, get them into clean clothes, and drive them to school. “I love you,” they both say as they get out of the car in front of Bethesda Hills Elementary. “Sure,” I say.

***

Life outside of Argentina.

After high school, after getting married, Moder continued with her studies to obtain a teaching degree. She excelled in all subjects, and was encouraged by her professors to commence teaching as soon as possible. She refused. She had earned the degree only to show her Picho that she was capable of doing it and being married at the same time. She had no actual intentions of teaching . “You will regret it, “ had told her Sister Paulina, who had encouraged Belinda Ana to get her teaching degree. “You will regret not having taught.”

Now, in the United Sates, where she would have liked to teach, no one would have her. Her Argentine college degree, her master’s and doctorate, were meaningless in the United States. She would have to go back to school to earn an American teaching certificate. There was not sufficient money in the family budget to pay for her to go to college. Things were better now that they were maintaining one household (in the New Jersey suburbs), rather than two (one for Tomás in West new York and one for Belinda and the kids in Argentina). Still, Tomás’ salary was not significant, and every expenditure had to be weighed and measured. Both Belinda and Tomás could see the benefit to their incomes and their lives if Belinda were to teach, but Tomás could not see how to pay for tuition. There was nothing left to sell, no more jewelry to barter. “I’ll have to take a job doing whatever,” said Belinda.

* * *

Her perfect tumblers.

There was nothing left when we left Buenos Aires and came to the United States. There was the prestige of Tomás’ diplomatic assignment, but that barely paid the bill. There were no more maids, no latest style Danish furniture. No trips to Mar del Plata or Paris. At night, it seemed to her that all that was left of that prior life were the whiskey tumblers. They were made from cut and etched glass, with a flower and leaf pattern. Two sides of the glass had an etching of a rose, the other side leaves with thorns. The glasses were heavy, substantial when held by one hand, and Belinda liked the feel of the weight. She liked feeling the bottom of each glass, which was cut with an eight point star. Against the light, when held just at the perfect angle, the glasses displayed a hint lime green color. They were sheer perfection, in excellent condition, no chips, no cracks.

* * *

The perfect tumblers.

She loved the way the ice crackled in the glass, the whiskey swishing like sea waves, the tranquility poured from the glass and into her throat and then in a few minutes into her nerve system. It was then, those times, that she escaped the reality of their small rented house. She put on slippers, a ridiculously frilly nightgown, a somewhat worn out but still stylish robe that her mother had managed to send to her from Argentina, and she read poetry, while listening to classical music on a rickety radio. The reception was poor, and sometimes the music would fade in and out, interrupted by static, which sometimes to her seemed other worldly.

She loved these few movements of tranquility, always after the whiskey, in which she could reconstruct at least in her mind what had been hers when she was still Picho’s daughter and the illusion of what her life should have been in Buenos Aires.

Belinda in the United States took a job working at a factory at night in order to be able to go back to college.

* * *

I’m driving to work after all. I would have like to have taken the day off, blame it on my hangover, but there’s no way I can swing that. I know my schedule, the meetings lined up for both the morning and the afternoon. No fun working a company that’s trying to negotiate with all its creditors. All of them feel they can express their disdain towards us, by taking it out on me, the bankrupt company’s attorney. I take it with a smile. I’ll drink again tonight. Before I go into the office, I look at myself in the car mirror. I flash that smile. Good thing I remembered to floss last night. Wouldn’t want to lose these gems.

***

El tacatacatac.

“Tacatacatac That’s how Belinda described the noise of the frozen food factory where she worked at night. The machines were in constant movement, 24 hours a day. The noise was defining. All of the workers were Hispanic, mostly Cubans and Puerto Ricans. More than a few were illegal from Mexico or South America. Being able to communicate with the workers was a primary responsibility for the quality control manager. That was Belinda’s title. Even though she had still not finished college in the US., the owner of the food factory, Don Romani, was perfectly happy to change Belinda’s knowledge of a few basic scientific facts that would allowed her to run food control tests on the frozen products that came out of the assembly line. Besides speaking Spanish, which would allow her to communicate with those assembly line Spics, Belinda was an attractive woman. Don Romani was not against an occasional squeeze of the shoulders, pad on the buttocks, arms around the waist of a beautiful woman.

“Tacatacatac.” That’s all that Belinda would report back home of her overnight work at the factory. She would not tell Tomás or his sons, her sons, of the advances made by Don Romani. In some humiliating way the advances were flattering, a reminder that she was still desirable, but in an overwhelming way they were reminders of how much she had lost. Even here the atrocities of the Argentine military have affected my life, thought Belinda. She would not however stop working. Her determination to change the illusion was strong. During the day she continued to go to college and eventually would graduate with a teaching certificate. Then she would teach and life would (she believed), regain some semblance of normality, some proximity to what she had always aspired. Until then she would work at the factory and endure Romani’s approaches. Tacatacatac.

Belinda was drinking whiskey from her cut glass tumblers. She had finished her reading assignments for the week, and had a couple of hours before she had to get to work. This was the bewitching hour, the only time of day in which she could get lost without any sense of responsibilities. The ice crackled in her glass. She loved the sound of it. Xavier and Gabriel were outside playing with the neighborhood kids. She could see them from the window. They played on the paved courtyard at the back of the public school, directly across the street. They were playing football, American football, for which Belinda did not understand the rules at all. At least with European fútbol she understood the concept of chasing the ball and trying to kick it into the goal. She could not understand heads or tails what the aim was with American football. Why did the children seem to huddle every five minutes when playing this game? Where they engaging in gossip? I just hope they don’t get hurt against the pavement as they jump up trying to catch that funny looking oblong ball, thought Belinda. She was glad that Xavier and Gabriel were adapting to American customs, American life such as it was. Where was the other boy though? Why was he not playing with them? He was such a difficult child, always doing the most unexpected things. Why couldn’t he be more like herself? More like her father? She worried how he would turn out, now without even the benefits of a strict private school education to hem him and straighten him out. She sipped her whiskey, listened to her ice crumble.

The house was quiet, the boys outside, Tomás in the basement working on his dictionary that he will never finish. There was a creaking sound, though, and Belinda couldn’t figure out where it was coming from. At first she thought it was the ice crackling, amplified and distorted by an echo. But she quickly realized that the sound was coming from one of the bedrooms. Normally she would have ignored the sound, not being one to be distracted from her drink, but her instinct tells her that this needs to be examined. Xavier and Gabriel were outside, Tomás in the basement. “Where is that fag? Donde está el maricón?” The noise was coming from his bedroom. Now she feared something unnatural, like the sound itself. Her first instinct was to let it be, to leave the doors to his bedroom closed and never find out what was happening. Her stronger instinct, the one she would always listened to, caused her to slam the door open, suddenly wide open, exposing the boy. The boy was on his knees, naked, with a much older boy (a man, really – a hirsute teenager, well endowed she noticed) sticking his dick into her son’s mouth. Her son was sucking, sucking, sucking. Even from only the short glimpse of this scene, Belinda knew her son enjoyed it. The older boy, the teenager (a man, really, if truth be told) was the first to notice Belinda. He quickly pulled his dick out of her son’s face and grabbed his clothes. Her son was too stunned to react, he simply sat there bewildered, saddened that his fuck fest has ended. Belinda said nothing, she simply stood by the door, as the teenager ran past her, out the front door, his sneakers carried hastily in his hands, his pants unzipped, his shirt barely covering his hairy chest. He fled down the street, never to be seen again. Belinda had never seen him before. She suspected, correctly, that he was from another town, simply passing by the neighborhood, checking out the local bus depot where he had happened upon Belinda’s oldest son – a handsome boy who invited him to his house. All this Belinda knew instinctively and immediately, for she had seen such things; she knew of such boys in Villa Miseria. She knew they existed; but not in her own household.

The teenager got away. Belinda’s son was not as quick or as lucky. Belinda grabbed him by the hand, firmly, not gently, threatening, not consoling. He was 12 years old at the time. The act his mother had just seen him perform was adult like, at least in her mind, but he was very much still a child. He was frightened now, afraid of what her mother would do next. His childish heart called out for help for the only creatures he knew – his father, his mother.

His mother screamed. She called out for her husband at the top of her lungs. You would have thought someone had tried to commit murder. “Tomás!” she screamed. The loudness of her voice resonated out the doors of the house. Xavier and Gabriel heard it from across the street, and they came running back inside. Summoned witness to what followed.

* * *

Dirty war. La Guerra Sucia.

During those years when we were growing up in New Jersey, Argentina was engaged in the Dirty War. Los Desaparecidos. It does not affect us, said Moder. Except it did; we heard of friends and cousins that disappeared; we saw the country stumble as its economic debt, benefitting only the military, grew. It was in our bones. We had left Argentina, but we had brought the violence in our veins.

Moder was right about her dreams. Those early days of Onganía were child’s play compared to the later violence. It infiltrated us, it stayed with us, it was as if the military was part of who we were.

* * *

Turning 81 in 2008.

Belinda is now 81 years old. Not beautiful anymore but certainly very much still a lady. She is proud of what she and Tomás have accomplished in this county. Her career teaching English as a second language to immigrant children, Tomás leaving the diplomatic forces and joining a consulting firm where he was well compensated and finally appreciated. Her three sons. Her grandchildren. She isn’t one to romanticize, to look back at all that has happened. Sometimes, only sometimes, she has questions about that day; the day the loud screams summoned Xavier and Gabriel to be witnesses to their older brother’s punishment. She read his journal once, only that one, and she could not say she agreed with his recollection of what transpired. Surely the beating did not go for hours, as he claimed. Surely the belt against the 12 year’s skin did not leave as deep a mark as he claims they did, but everything is relative. If she had to do it over again she wouldn’t. But she is an 81 year old woman, not the same person who beat her son for his sexual indiscretion. She imagines he knows this. She imagines that it is not necessary to talk about it because he knows that parents do not intend to crucify their children. She imagines that if she was able to forgive her father, her Picho, her oldest son would be able to forgive her as well. Nothing to forgive, really. She meant only the best, even if he was left black and blue. Does she remember that? Does she recollect the marks he wrote about in his journal? She’s not sure, but that’s what his diary says. Is it true?

***

I am visiting Moder and Father after work. I promised them I would take them out to dinner, just the three of us. Gives us an opportunity to chat, without all the kids around and without my jealous brothers. Now I’m regretting having promised to take them out. Rush hour traffic from my office to their house in Reston is horrendous. I will be stuck in traffic for hours. I’ll just sit behind the wheel, and entertain bad thoughts. What a bummer.

* * *

I told my current Reggie about the beating.

I’ve told my current Reggie about the beating. I explained that when Moder screamed, shattering the silence of the suburbs with her monstrous guttural noises, I thought I would die. The tears began to fall from within me, but never through my eyes. In my mind, I was screaming – Moder, Father. Help me – but the very thought of uttering these words was nonsensical. They were the tormentors. They were the abusers I wanted my parents to rescue me from. Father started first, pulling off the belt from his pants. He had been in the basement working on the dictionary he would never publish. I know this for he wore a special pair of reading glasses for this occasion, a pair that had once broken in the middle and that he held together with adhesive white tape. He kept this pair in the basement, next to his pecking typewriter, his index and catalog of already defined words, his stack of newspaper clippings he would use to define words, his reams of white paper. Most often he simply sat in front of the typewriter, quietly, glasses with tape on face, while Belinda was upstairs either studying, or getting ready for work, or enjoying a glass of whiskey, probably more. I know he had been at his dictionary when Belinda summoned him with her unnatural scream, for the glasses were posed on top of his head. The belt buckle reflected on the glasses each time the belt came down upon me.

A child often has no concept of time. When doing homework, 5 minutes seems like five hours. When playing tag, 5 hours seems like five minutes. The beating felt like neither; it had no beginning, no end. It seemed as if it had always been, would always be – no past, no future, no time constraints. Just now, this unending, immeasurable period in which the belt bruised my body and my pleasure ceased. A red welt at the shoulders, a mark of blood at the buttocks, a slash on the back. I cannot accurately report what was said during this beating, for I was not there. My physical body was there, my 12 year old body, enduring the flagellations, but my mind was not present. I don’t know where it was. I only remember two words, uttered constantly, repetitively, by my Moder to my Father: “Beat him. Beat him.”

He obeyed.

As to the actual physical measurement of time, I must report I believe the incident took two hours. When they told me to strip entirely naked, the clock on the wall said 6:00. When they tucked me in bed after the beating had concluded, my body shaking, my teeth clattering uncontrollably, the clock said 10. Somewhere in between were the actual whippings. Was it four hours? I can’t say. I’m dyslexic and certainly at the time near comatose.

As they tucked me in, Moder showed some kindness. Maybe she was simply worried for herself. I don’t know which. She left me for a few minutes, with the light on and then came back to turn it off. She approached my bed, put her hand on my forehead. I was burning. “Why are you sweating?” she asked. I said nothing. “Do you need anything”

“Agua.” I said. “Agua.”

She got me a glass of water. “Thank you Moder,” I said, and then she turned off the light for good.

***

It’s 8 pm. I left the office at 5:30. Still, at least I’ve made it. It’s supposed to be a half hour trip, but there is always construction, or an accident, or simply unexplained delays. Modder sees me pull up to their driveway. She is in her kitchen. She waves at me frantically. I can read her lips, “Thank God you are finally here,” she is saying.

***

Putting away the dishes and getting ready to sleep.

Belinda is putting away dishes in the kitchen when her son finally comes for dinner. It has rained all day, today in Reston Virginia. Other than that, nothing much has happened. She spoke with Xavier earlier this morning, but he is so far away now, both in distance and time, that she does not understand his life. She pretends to understand, pretends to have interest in the local baseball team that Xavier has enrolled his children (her grandchildren), pretends to understand the computer basics that Michaela is learning in school, pretends to understand Xavier’s life, her own children’s lives, but she does not. It all seems so different than the life she knew when she was their age.

She is putting away the dishes. Tomás is sleeping in the other room. He has grown old, she can see that outwardly, but she believes that like her, inside, he must still be the young Argentine she feels she is. Tomás must feel the same sadness for the world they have left. But Tomás won’t say, not today in any event. Tomás won’t say much of anything. “Red,” he calls out, “a glass of water please Red?” She brings it to him, he smiles and sips, and goes to his silence. He is forgetful. He is dying of cancer, and that seems to be consuming his whole attention these days. It must be the cancer he spends his time with, for it is not with her. She kisses him. She admits honestly, to him, of being afraid of losing him. “Who will I be without you, Tomás?” she asks. “How will I survive?”

“Don’t be silly Red,” says Tomás. He still calls her Red, and it seems so ludicrous.

* * *

We had a lovely dinner. Sometimes I wonder, why do I hate this woman so much?

* **

I read her letters.

I am ashamed. The last time that I visited Moder, while she and Father slept, I rummaged through her desk. I found this letter. I don’t know what to make of it. Is Moder finally losing all her marbles?

****

April 16, 2008,
Reston, Virginia

Dear Son:

I am Belinda Ana Gonzales Lundsen de Humphrey. I was born in Buenos Aires Argentina in 1927. I have written to you before about my life, but perhaps you have not yet read these letters. I have not given them to you yet. I don’t know if I will ever give them to you.

You believe that you are superior to me. I sense it, taste it, experience it in almost every interaction we have. Just yesterday, when you brought your son to visit me, Joey, you kept measured looks over him and me, as if you were afraid I would beat him, distort him, corrupt him. “Joey is a very sensitive child,” you said to me, as I tried to explain to the boy the rules of chess playing. I smiled at you, said nothing. I held Joey’s hand and looked him in the eye. “Joey, do you want me to keep teaching you these rules?” The child said yes; the child said yes.

You believe that I am an old woman, incapable of learning new things. You believe that I don’t know how to interact with a sensitive child, how to work with children from this day and age who have more interaction with a computer and a TV set than they do with their mother and father, far less with their grandparents. But I proved our word, did I not? I taught Joey to play chess, and by the end of the night he was jumping those horses, crisscrossing those guards, plowing those towers and orchestrating the royal couple (the king, the queen) as if he were Machiavelli himself. Did you see the joy in Joey’s eyes when he thanked me for teaching him how to play? Probably not. You see nothing but an old lady when you look at me. You do not see how others treat me, how I treat them. You believe you know all about me, and yet you know nothing.

Dear son, was I really such a horrid mother? In those days, we all beat our children. Does that sound harsh to your thoroughly modern ears? I know it does, and for that I am sorry. It was what was expected then, it was what I was raised with. I’m perfectly aware of the new social consciousness, the antithesis of spare the rod and spoil the child. But at least I did not spoil you. Can you give me credit for that, or is it too insignificant and utterly unimportant to you? You turned out perfectly fine in the end, from what I can tell. You have a profession, you have two children that love you, you have a house in the suburbs. All very respectable, is it not? So why this moroseness, my dear son, why do you seem always so sad, so distant?

I have thought about this often, and I have my suspicions. Would you like to hear them? I believe it is because you believe that you are gay. I don’t believe you are, but I believe you believe you are. Is that clear my dear son? I believe you are confused. I believe you married the wrong woman, and she has made you the way you are. A woman should shape her husband, make her world and his life, as I did for your father. Do you remember the sacrifices I made for your father? I sold anything and everything I ever had to bring us to this country. I secured him a diplomatic position. I worked in a factory to pay my way through college. You’ve heard me describe that factory, the Tacatacatac. The interminable noise. I sacrificed.

So where are Anne’s sacrifices for you? When did she do anything to make you right? Why has she not figured a way to make herself attractive to you?

Oh, I can your face of disdain when you read these words. We’ve had this conversation before, and you have never fully answered me. You seek to protect Anne, you seek to assure me that Anne has nothing to do with your being gay. But I don’t believe it. If not Anne, then who and how? What happened to make you this way?

You think I don’t love you because I ask these questions. You are wrong. You think I don’t accept you as you are because I wonder how you came to be this way. You are wrong.

You are correct in thinking of me as an old woman, an 81 year old woman to be precise, but this old cow has learned a few things. I have learned that for whatever reason, you are in fact now gay, and that it is unlikely to change before my time here on earth is done and over with. I have learned that the only way you will ever be happy is if you have a partner. Have I told you this already? I do not recollect. I have learned that I will never question who you bring home. I will accept whatever man you find, as long as he is good to you. Good to you, son. Not the other way around. Where is this man, dear son? You have spoken of Reggie. Is that him? Is Reggie your man?

You surprised me last night when I made Argentine sausages and pastafrola. You told Joey that as a child these were your favorite dishes. “Was your mother a good cook?” asked Joey.

“Not in Argentina,” you answered. “She never cooked in Argentina. We had cooks to take care of that. But later, here in the U.S., she became a pretty good cook. Especially when she makes dishes like this, don’t you think?” You put a piece of pastafrola in your mouth, the melted quince dripping a bit on your fingers as you lick them, savoring the flavor. You smiled – you always smile when you eat sweets. You tousled Joey’s hair.

“But if Abuelita didn’t cook in Argentina, what did she do?” asked Joey.

“Lots of other things. She was a good mom. Like, she would take Xavier , Gabriel and me to the Villa Miseria, and then after that, after we felt thankful for what we had in comparison to all that poverty, she would buy us new shoes or a leather schoolbag.”

“What’s a Villa Miseria?”

“A shanty town, a ghetto. A group of houses made out of tin and cardboard. There’s no electricity, water or sewers. The stench is horrible. People live like animals, but they work hard. Many of them have simply never had the benefits of a good education or good parenting, so they are making good as best they can.”

“What sort of things did you see there?”

“Once we saw an old lady peeling potatoes. She was trying to sell them, and would scream at the top of her lungs ‘Papas! Papas!’ She was trembling, as if she had the shakes or some neurological damage. The knife she was using to peel potatoes was much too large. It was a butcher’s knife, meant to cut meat and flesh, not starch or peel. The old lady was not watching her hands as she peeled the potatoes. Instead, she looked maniacally at the crowd, hoping to spot a customer, someone who would buy her peeled potatoes. Moder and I both saw the knife as it cut into the woman’s thumb and index finger. It made wide gashes, and her hand was immediately red. The pot where she had placed the peeled potatoes looked like stew, as if she had poured tomato sauce, but it was merely her own blood. The woman kept screaming, ‘Papas! Papas!’ as if nothing had happened to her hand. She seemed unaware of her own injuries. Some people in the crowd started laughing at the old lady. Others were aghast and turned away in disgust. No one sought to help the old lady or call for help.”

“Moder told me to open the car. We were parked half a block from where the potato peeler was bleeding. I ran with keys in hand and opened all the doors to our Jeep. Moder took off her silk scarf and wrapped it around the woman’s hands. ‘Do you want to buy some papas?’ asked the old lady. Moder’s silk scarf turned red. ‘We need to take you to the hospital, querida (sweetness)’ said Moder to the hobo.”

“ ‘But what about my potatoes?’ asked the old lady.”

“ ‘Don’t worry,’ answered Moder ‘I’ll buy all of them from you.’ ”

“Moder took the woman to the hospital in her car. The silk scarf, the interior of the car, all had blood stains on them. Moder had to pay the hospital bill as they would not even see the old lady until they had assurances of payment. It took all day. We waited all day for that old hobo to get stitched up. First words from her mouth after she was released and we returned her to her street corner was ‘Where’s the money for my papas?’ Moder paid her.”

Joey did not understand everything you told him, but I did. I was surprised that you remembered that story. I had almost forgotten it myself, and you seemed so young to me back then – surely I had thought you would have no memory of this. I guess I’m wrong as to what a child can remember.

“I don’t understand, Dad,” said Joey. “Why would Abuelita take you to a Villa Miseria?”

“Because she is a wise woman,” you said to him. I heard you.

Dear son, I have written to you before about my life and I don’t know if you have read it. I have not given you the letters, and I don’t know if I ever will. I am an old woman, 81 years old to be exact. I need to let you know that in spite of what you may think, I love you. So let me ask you then, how long must I be punished for whatever sins you believe I committed against your flesh?

With love,

Your Moder.

* * *

Friends

Friends:

Many of you have asked why I have not been blogging. Depression is a loathsome disease, and unfortunately I am still battling this burden. I am doing very, very well, but each day is a struggle.

On the lighter side: Yes, of course I'm dating. I always date. His name is Ralph.


Ernesto

Anne is Sitting in Front of Her Mirror

Anne is sitting in front of her mirror. She is trying on her pearls, admiring the chain against her very pale skin. She has recently colored her hair red, and it is vibrant, exotic and even attractive one would say, given that she has always had splendidly green eyes. This she thinks as she pulls out the matching pearl earrings, and puts them on, always looking into the mirror. It is a lady’s mirror atop an 18th century chest. She loves furniture from that era, it so much more delicate than anything they can make these days. Celeste was with her when she bought the piece of furniture, out at Antique Row in Kensington Maryland.

“You really ought to buy something new,” said Celeste, “something modern, leathery and sexy if you will.”

Anne disagreed. It’s funny, she thought, how different she and her mother could be. Celeste was always of the moment, chasing the most current trends, the fashion of the day. Anne, her daughter, was the opposite. She admired classic lines and true and proven designs, like 18th century chests and simple pearl necklaces with matching pearl earrings.

“This will suit me fine,” she told Celeste. “Help me bargain with the shop owner, I want to get this on the cheap.”

She loves this mirror, she thinks this morning as she is rushing around, getting ready to go to work. She has a busy day ahead of her, but Anne is not worried. She’s accustomed to dealing with stress in her life, and keeping some semblance of order, her order, as it should be. Her order is not the same as anyone else’s, but she has never catered to the conventional rules. In life, you pick and choose your values, you construct the reality that fits your life best. This she believed adamantly. And so she had chosen a demanding career, she had chosen to be in your face in the world of male doctors, and at the same time she had chosen to be very feminine, delicate if you will, something old world.

She admires her pearls again, their beautiful shimmer against the looking glass. Looks great. She finishes putting on some powder on her cheeks, and steps away from her powder table. As she stands up, she trips on a pile of papers she has left next to her bed.

Someday I really have to clean up this clutter, she thinks to herself, but not really having any sense of urgency or conviction about it. She is comfortable with the clutter. There’s no need of overdoing cleanliness or neatness. As long as one’s appearance is well within decorum, there’s no need to spend time polishing the house, or straightening out the piles, or putting away the laundry. A little messiness never hurt anyone, except perhaps it deed seem to hurt her ex-husband. He hated messiness. He used to yell at her constantly about how messy she was.

“Good!” she thinks now, remembering his distaste for her clutter. “The bastard.” She was glad she had been able to bring some discomfort to his life.

Of course, she believed this only in small dosages. In spite of her hate him, in spite of her anger that he left her (leaving her when she was pregnant no less), she still liked him. One might even say she still loved him.

“Do I still love him?” she ponders.

“No,” she says to herself, again looking in the mirror. “Its only fondness, not love.” He is no different than the space left in your mouth when they pull out a molar, she thinks. You tongue caresses the crevice, missing the old molar, but eventually the tongue learns to live without the molar. That’s what her ex-husband represents to her by now, an old tooth that needed to be yanked.

“Mother, Joey is bothering me again!” Christina is screaming from the bottom of the stairs. Anne’s instinct is to start running downstairs, to attend to her children but Celeste takes matters in control.

“Don’t bother your mother now,” says Celeste to Christina and Joey. “Come into the kitchen and have some waffles. Let your mother get dressed in peace.”

The children listen to Celeste, and follow her into the kitchen. Their screaming ceases, for the time being. “Thank God,” thinks Anne. “Thank God for Celeste”.

Celeste lives up north, but she has come to stay with Anne for a long visit, “ a proper visit,” as Celeste put it. So far its been three months, and Celeste has made no mention yet of having to end her stay, of having to return back to her own house. Sometimes Anne supposes that Celeste has come to move in with her, but she does not want to seriously entertain the thought. Anne will not lose her independence, her solace, to Celeste or anyone else. Not this time, not evermore. Anne enjoys having guests now and then, the company of someone other than a child with whom one can talk at night, after dinner and coffee. Celeste offers such company these days. But Anne will not have her mother moving in with her. She has no intention of ever living with another person, of ever sharing a home. She has no intention of ever getting married again.

How life has changed. She had previously dedicated fifteen years to her ex-husband, and in those days she could not have imagined of ever wanting to live alone. Everything had been planned, and was supposed to take place according to the regimen she had prescribed for her life and the life of those around her. She was going to marry this terribly sexy man she had met in college, the one with the curly hair and the deep set green eyes. They would have fabulous careers, and then they would have lots of children. After the children were grown up, she and him would retire together to live by the sea, and write novels. It was a condensed version of a perfect life, the type that she had never seen anywhere other than in a movie, and she was determined to have it. Anne was certainly smart enough to accomplish all this. In fact, she was one of the brightest students at Barnard and later at NYU Medical School, and she could see no reason why she couldn’t get everything she wanted out of life, even if what she wanted was a cliché.

She remembers vaguely meeting her husband the first semester at college, in one of those classes that has too many students and that gets weeded out as the semester bears on and students drop out when the novelty of the course wears out. What attracted Anne to the curly haired college boy was his extreme shyness mixed in with a bit of intelligence. To her, this was an aphrodisiac; a sure sign of potential success. She remembers vaguely being attracted by his curls, but she could not remember how they started up a conversation, how they ended up as lovers and later as husband and wife.

Anne’s vagueness about how she met her ex-husband was dramatically stark compared to his version of the events. For years after they met and were married, he would entertain all their friends with the details of their supposedly romantic first three encounters. Anne hardly remembered or recognized any of the details he proposed.

The first time they met, he would claim, was in Greek Mythology 301. She was a student at Barnard, and all girls school, or all female as Anne preferred to refer to it. It was absurd to refer to those young college students as girls. Anne believed that a girl is distinguishable from a child by her sexual awareness, a woman’s self awareness her self sexual powers. In that respect, thought Anne, most of the Barnard girls she knew were true women in every sense of the word. Perhaps some, less kind than Anne, would refer to them as whores. Anne hated the stereotype image of the Barnard crowd, an image (she believed) made up, fabricated, rumored and spread about by the boys across the street, the Columbia College crowd. Those were boys, thought Anne, immature, pimply faced, still fixated with their cocks and still incapable of thinking with the larger brain. Most of them that is, not all, Anne would admit. There was much discussion among the Barnard girls about which Columbia boys were worth sleeping with, and the conclusion was almost always the same --- none of them. They are all fags.

Anne disliked talking about the College boys with her college girl chums. She preferred talking about the professors, the male handsome ones that is. She often initiated the gossip with her dorm friends about which professor had the deepest voice or the most flirtatious eyes. Some girls would take the conversation even further and discuss, intelligently and informatively, which professors were known to sleep with their female students in exchange for grades. Anne never pushed that form gossip, or at least if she heard it about she did not consider it valuable information. She didn’t need to sleep with anyone for her grades, she had more than enough brain power. But she relished the other gossip, the Peyton Place aspect of it, the silliness of it all. It was liberating to engage in such girl talk.

It was a result of just such a conversation, with a bunch of girls who had all gone to Hunter College High School together, that Anne learned about Mark Eigger’s Greek Mythology course. Eigger, said the girls from Hunter, had the body of a god, and was well known for wearing tight fitting clothes. It was 1979, and tight pants were fashionable. It was also trendy for men not to wear underwear, and to strategically arrange the fly of pants so that the bulge would protrude at a ninety degree angle. Eigger, said the girls from Hunter, had the most divine tight jeans that left nothing to the imagination. “You won’t be disappointed,” said one of the girls to Anne. “It’s worth taking the course just for his dick.”

Anne took the course as a lark, as did thirty other Barnard students, all straining to get a look at the bulge. They were not disappointed. Besides the obvious sexual treat, the course was fairly interesting. Eigger was in fact a good professor aside from being a good looker (in so many ways). The students at Columbia, across the street, were free to take courses at Barnard if they wished to. Few guys took the opportunity. It was therefore a surprise to Anne and to the other Barnard students that one single male from Columbia, one curly haired cutie, had decided to take Eigger’s course. “I’ve always loved Greek Mythology,” is how he later explained the matter away. “How was I supposed to know the only reason to take Eigger’s course was to take a gander at his cock?” He relished telling this story, laughing about it each time he told it, but now, now that things have turned out the way they have, Anne wonders. She wonders. Why did he really take Eigger’s course?

The second time they met, according to him, was on the subway. He painted this story in terms of attraction, romance, first impulses. He relished emphasizing to anyone that would listen to the story that Anne was the first to approach him, to befriend him, to flirt with him on the subway no less. She downplayed the incident. As far as she was concerned, the only reason she had approached him (on the subway, no less) was out of sheer practicality. Anne had grown up in an upper middle class house, with the stereotypical large front yard and a kidney shape swimming pool in the back. By most people’s standards, she might be considered to have grown up rich. But no matter how you characterized her upbringing (middle class, upper middle class or filthy rich), the fact was that during her college years Anne lived like a pauper. Her parents were in the middle of a divorce, squabbling over who would get the house (and its kidney swimming pool), squabbling over how much alimony Mr. Rex Emerson should pay to the soon to be former Mrs. Celeste Emerson. Celeste felt powerless against her husband. Although she was an intelligent and well read woman, Celeste had never gone to college, had not pursued a career (once she had given up her modeling career for marriage), had devoted herself to the kids and to the house. Rex held the purse strings, and he knew it. But Celeste did manage to accomplish two rather smart acts of self improvement during the divorce. First, first she got herself the best divorce attorney she could find. A real bull dog. Second, she managed to find refuge in Anne’s advise and support. Anne was only eighteen years old at the time, but already she had assumed the role of friend, confident and in some ways even parent to her mother.

Anne subsequently learned to detest her mother for putting her in that situation, for using her as a confident and to divulge to her bitterly negative assertions about her own father, Rex Foster. Anne thought she should have been allowed to enjoy a normal college lifestyle, allowed to get lost in books and parties and not worry about the real world. Instead, she was confronted with the difficulties of dealing with the divorce of her parents and the alimentation of her father, while simultaneously being asked to assume the role of moral anchor for her mother. Anne was not allowed to complaint during those college years. Mom, her dearest Celeste, wanted none of that from Anne, her dearest daughter. “Your role,” she had said jokingly to Anne, “it to give your dear old mom some really good advise.” Anne resented Celeste for many years afterwards, for having being used as . . . . Being used as what? She did not know as what, but she felt used.

Anne’s father extracted his revenge as well. He felt betrayed by Anne, felt that her allegiance should have been towards both parents, not towards Celeste alone. He knew that it was Anne who had found and chosen Celeste’s attorney; he knew that it was Anne who coached her mother not to settle for too little money; he knew it was Anne who gave Celeste the gumption to fight back. He extracted his revenge. He would pay for Anne’s college tuition, but nothing else. He would not pay for her clothing, her incidentals, her books, her living money. Even with respect to the tuition, he insisted in documenting this as a loan from Mr. Rex Foster to Miss Anne Foster. The terms required that she would repay to him with interest (when you graduate from that famous Jewish school, as he put it), or have the amount deducted from her inheritance. She hated the whole financial aspect of her relationship with her father, how she had been reduced to a negative asset, a liability, a financial obligation.

Celeste was only somewhat sensitive to Anne’s predicament. She managed to “scrape whatever I can from my alimony” (as Celeste put it), to pay Anne a monthly living allowance. It was not enough. Anne felt Celeste could have “scraped” a lot more from the generous sum that her father was required to pay her on a monthly basis for alimony. Anne took whatever Celeste gave her, and worked at the school library, or at a lab, or as a tutor to supplement her income. It was never enough.

Rather than allocate her monthly allowance evenly so that it would spread out over thirty days, Anne would spend heavily at the beginning of the month when she was still flush with Celeste’s monthly stipend. She referred to this time of the month as her salad days. By the fifteenth of the month Anne would feel poor again, as the money from Celeste would usually run out by then. She called this time of the month the “dammit days.” It was during the dammit days each month that Anne would have to come up with imaginative survival strategies. It was not beyond her to eat nothing all day except apples (she always bought apples), followed by soup made out of ketchup and hot water. Getting around town was a problem, but she would either bum a ride, hoof it, or jump the turnstile. Jumping the turnstile means hopping over the coin drop at the subway station to avoid paying the fare. It was Anne’s only illegal act in probably all of her life (other than the drugs, but she chose never to talk or think about that), and she hated being ratted out by her husband (now ex-husband) about this small indiscretion. It was necessity, is how she saw it, it was part of how she survived college.

The day Anne first met her husband (now ex-husband), on the subway at 116th Street (near Columbia), was a particularly difficult turnstile jumping day. The subway platform was crawling with cops. Either a gang shooting or a suicide jumper, is what Anne figured. Either way, Anne did not dare jump the turnstile with so many cops around. She was in a real predicament as she had to get downtown. Celeste was waiting for her at Tavern on the Green, to give her the next month’s monthly allowance. She needed the money, and knowing Celeste, if Anne did not pick up the check today it would be weeks before Celeste would get around to paying her. Anne lingered at the subway entrance, hoping furiously that the cops would leave soon so that she could jump the gate. She was literally down to her last pennies, and had not a coin to spare to buy a subway token. It was when she was about to give up, thinking perhaps that she would walk from 116th St. to 67th, that she saw him approaching the subway. He was wearing that ridiculous green scarf, crotched by someone’s mother (perhaps his own mother?) that was too green, too bright, and too long. Even after wrapping it two times around his neck it still reached his shoes. He was also sporting that crunchy short Afro that made him stand out in Greek mythology. He sat right in front of her and she remembered having stared at the back of that curly head, most particularly since it blocked the view of Eigger’s crotch. Perhaps he’s good for a dime, she thought. (God, she thinks as she looks at the mirror today. I’ll never ask anyone for a dime again.)

“I think we are in Mythology?” asked or said Anne. It came out as half question half statement, the way Valley Girls talk. Anne knew how stupid she sounded as soon as the words escaped her lips.

“Excuse me?” said curly head.

“I think we have Greek Mythology together. Eigger’s course.”

“Oh, yes. Good course.” He tightened his green scarf. She noticed that it matched the color of his eyes. That was unexpected, the smile, the smile of his eyes. She blushed. Now she felt surely stupid. She was not accustomed to blushing.

“I need a dime?” she asked, said again.

He smiled at her again, this time with more than just his eyes. He flashed his white, perfect teeth. The type that only the upper middle class can afford. She hated him for it.

“More than just a dime, actually,” she added. “In point of fact, I need subway fare. Can you help me out?” She stretched her hand out like a child, feeling foolish, embarrassed by the whole experience. Who was she, and why was she acting this way? She was never timid, never shy. “Buckle up!” she told herself. “What is it that this man is doing to me.” She needed to get composed, she thought to herself.

The curly haired man thought she was charming. As far as he could recollect, he had never met her before. Was she in Greek Mythology? What goddess is she, he thought. She seemed to have appeared of nowhere, and to know him instantly, fully, immediately. This he gathered from the few words she had shared, which was of course ludicrous. He was often fanciful with his thoughts, so poetic, he thought, but so incapable of sharing any of that. All he could do was smile, for it hid a world of bashfulness. This much he knew, this much his smile had brought him. He smiled at her, at . . . . He did not know her name.

“What is your name?” he asked, with that perfect smile.

“Anne.”

She never got around to asking him his name, but he did not notice. It would be months after that first encounter, after they had come to know each other though small talk and coffee, that she would ask him finally for his name. How odd, he thought then.

Back to the first day, to when they met in the subway, she pushed him for fare money. “So can you spare a dime?” she asked, this time without insecurity or hesitation in her voice. She was proud to feel strong and determined again, self composed once more. He smiled at her again, gave her a token, and she dropped it into the turnstile and disappeared.

And so years later, he would tell people, their neighbors, their kids (Joey and Christina), that this is how mommy and daddy had met, in the subway when Anne was jumping turnstiles. The punch line to his story was always the same, “She fell in love with my smile, right there and then when I gave her a token.’ Anne never bought his version of the story. It had nothing to do with his smile, as far as she was concerned. It was all about the token, shear practicality, the need to take the subway.

The third time they met for the first time, the version he told most often and of which she had absolutely no recollection, was on the George Washington Bridge, or across the bridge to be exact. This was his story, not hers. He told it all the time. Apparently he was crossing the George Washington Bridge by bus, reading (he was always reading) D.H. Laurence’s “Women in Love.” The main characters, or the one he remembered in any event, were Ursula and Gudrun, strong vibrant woman who wore brightly colored stockings. This struck his fancy, a woman in bright socks. This he pulled away from the novel.

They saw the two girls appear, small, brilliant figures in the near distance, in the strong light of the late afternoon. Both wore light, gay summer dresses, Ursula had an orange-coloured knitted coat, Gudrun a pale yellow, Ursula wore canary yellow stockings, Gudrun bright rose, the figures of the two women seemed to glitter in progress over the wide bay of the railway crossing, white and orange and yellow and rose glittering in motion across a hot world silted with coal-dust.

He read the passage, several times on the bus, savoring its meaning and not knowing really what it meant. It felt right, is what he told people. It felt as if there was significance in it. As he was contemplating this passage, he happened to look out the window of the bus and saw a woman, a young woman in stop-sign red socks, crossing the George Washington Bridge. This is not a common walk. Few people cross this bridge span, for the wind is so fierce it can blow you against the railing. This day, this day he was crossing the bridge and reading “Women In Love” was in fact a particularly windy day, “a howling wind” as he recalled it. Anne was never able to remember that. She could remember however the wind blew often blew her hair in disarray. He remembered more than that; he remembered her skirt flaring into the air, like a parachute around her, and he remembered seeing her vibrant red socks, made of pure wool, clean and crisp like an accent mark against the chilled clean air. He retold this story, using these words which to Anne meant so little, many times to their friends, years later that is, once they had already finished the courtship and settled into a practical marriage. He believed it was romantic, that destiny had put him and his book on a bus, and her and the wind on a bridge, and that the two would somehow meet, that there was meaning to all of this, that there was significance. “I thought to myself,” he would say to their friends with romantic smugness, -- “I thought to myself .... hey!, that’s Anne, Anne from Mythology. I thought to myself -- She’s an interesting woman.”

Whenever he delivered this punch line, he would lean over and kiss her on the cheeks – always the cheeks, never the lips. She hated the story telling ritual.

She should have known then and there what a world of illusion he lived in. She was nothing like Ursula from Women in Love, not the sex starved intellectual maiden he imagined, brightly colored socks or no socks at all. She was a simple college student, perhaps smatter than the average person, simply struggling to get through college without any financial assistance from her divorcing parents. “I was crossing the G. W. Bridge by foot to save on the bus fare,” she would tell people. “What romantic claptrap would D.H. Laurence have to say about that?”

She was the pragmatist, the scientist as he referred to her. She was the one that had to make all the hard decisions for both of them. Like the decision to leave New York. Except, it was not exactly leaving New York, it was more like escaping. That’s the word she would choose, the time they escaped new York.

* * *

When they graduated College, he went straight into law school. She started working as a secretary at a law firm. She needed to save money if she was going to get through medical school. They reached an agreement, a compromise for their living arrangements, before they got married. They would live together while he finished law school and she continued to work as a secretary. They could both share her one room apartment on 69th Street. It was small, but it was rent stabilized, and neither would ever find anything cheaper in the City. She would use her secretarial salary to buy the groceries, put food on the table, maybe even go to the beach once in a while (Naples Florida, where Celeste had moved to after the divorce). The plan, the construction she had come up with and that he had agreed to, was that once he started working for a big wall street firm, for she knew he would, she would then go to medical school. It was all very practical, no sentiment or romanticism in it. Eventually they would both have their degrees and enjoy life in New York as only two income professional couples can afford to do. It all sounded so perfectly achievable, normal.

There was a hitch in Anne’s plan, however. There was one aspect, one ingredient, one component necessary for it all to come to fruition which she did not realize was not accounted for: Normalcy. He had none of it. He was not normal.

At first, his romanticism seemed charming, but soon after moving in together it became obsessively weird. He insisted they spend every waking moment together, even bathroom time. She was suffocated by him. Sometimes her only means of getting away from him was to tell him she had food shopping to get done. He hated food shopping, though God knows he loved to eat. She would spend hours in the supermarket, enjoying the coolness of the air conditioned isles, the freedom of being away from his constant companionship. When she got home, she would find him either in a foul mood (where the hell where you?) or naked finishing off two or three bottles of wine. Ironically he had never drank before he moved in with her (“Reminds me too much of my Mother,” he had said) and Anne had been the one that pushed him to “Have a glass when you get home. . . it will relive the tension.” It did not. It had the opposite effect. The drink would make his anger and his controlling nature more acute. “Bitch!” he would say (although he had claimed that he did not like to use foul language), “Bitch! You’ve ruined my life. Look at the dump we are living in. Look at this mess, look at this cluttered mess!” He knocked over two or three piles of paper she had left on top of a table; her notes, her clippings, her structured and organized clutter. “Why did I ever listen to you!” he shouted, in a tone that only an animal should use, if wounded and dying. “I should have known your ideas were quirky and that you would be a slob.”

He hurt her, emotionally, never physically, but he hurt her to the bone. The next morning he would apologize, and Anne in good nature would accept the apology. “I’m a dunce,” he would say in the morning. “You know how much I love you. Your my George Washington Bridge girl; I could never leave you.”

Any other woman would have left, but Anne would not admit defeat. She had already declared in her mind and to others that he would be her life partner. There was no turning back on these plans. She was not going to be the loser Celeste was, she was not going to be left alone.
Celeste urged her to seek counsel, or better yet, to leave him. Celeste could see it all. Anne told everything to Celeste, as they had become each other’s best friends, confidents, but Anne would take no advise from Celeste. “You should leave him,” insisted Celeste. “Get yourself a little apartment by the Village, decorate it in some of that sleek plastic furniture they are making these days. I can help you set it all up, I know the owner of a store on Madison that specializes in it. Leave him, Anne. Leave him.”

Out of pure stubbornness, Anne would have noting of it, none of her mother’s advise, none of the furniture or solutions she offered. “It will get better,” she answered her mother. “It always gets better.”

It didn't. It got worse. Once he started working for the law firm, in Wall Street, he became a monster at home. The law firm work was demanding, and it drained him physically and emotionally. He had to put on the best face at work, keep his anxiety and anger in check. He would often get home at 2 in the morning, to get a few hours sleep and then march straight back to the office. But he could not simply go to bed, he had to unwind first, and this unwinding consisted of yelling at her, of blaming Anne for everything he perceived wrong in his life. “You are being unreasonable,” she once dared say to him. It was the wrong thing to say. This time he did get physical, put his hands up against her throat, and (though he did not squeeze) she felt terror and feared the worst. He screamed, louder than usual, so much so that the neighbors came knocking around the door. “Everything OK in there?” they asked. Anne pulled his hand away from her, and answered the neighbors inquiry. “We are fine,” she said. “Just a nightmare.”

The next morning, he apologized as usual. She suffered it, silently, her own martyrdom, the martyrdom of an atheist. It was part of her destiny, although certainly not part of her original plan. “Just don’t scream at the office,” she begged him. “Just keep it home, if you would.”

A man that screams at his partner, will sooner or later scream at the world. These were Celeste’s predictions. Anne knew Celeste was right of course, but she hoped for the best, expected that maybe he would be smart enough to yell at some stranger in the corner, someone who perhaps pushed him inadvertently, someone who perhaps stepped on his toe by mistake, but he would not yell in the office -- he would know it was inappropriate to yell in the office. After all, he did have a Columbia education; surely they taught him that much, she told Celeste.

The day he had a screaming match at work, with a secretary, was the least predictable day Anne would have thought that anything would happen. He had been in a extraordinary cheerful mood that morning, and Anne had allowed herself the illusion to think that life was getting better.

“I love you,” he had said that morning as he left the apartment, and kissed her on the cheek (never on the lips).

In the subway, he felt anger for no apparent reason, other than the sheer crowd, the grimness of it, the dirt. He noticed rats on the tracks and graffiti on the subway cars. While other times he would have been amused by the platform musicians, today he thought they were no better than panderers, gypsies and beggars. It all seemed reflective of something inside him that he could not put his finger on. As he walked away from the subway exit and stepped into the street, a taxi cab honked at him, and he took insult but no revenge. He internalized this, took the taxi caber’s honking as a personal offense, and thought again that this unkindness he experienced, this rat maze of a life he was living in New York City was reflective of what he kept hidden in his heart – that which he would discuss with no one, the memories that he would not allow to be thought again -- the villa miseria, the high heels across wooden floors, the hand that struck his face and seduction. Push it away, he thought whenever these thoughts sought to reach the surface. Push it away. Finally that morning, a secretary had the misfortune of taking too long at the copier when he was in a rush; he had people waiting for him in a conference room, and had to make copies of a document to be reviewed. He exploded on the secretary. He started out by saying, “get out of my way,” but when she ignored him (or when he thought she ignored), he let loose on her as he was accustomed to letting loose on Anne. The street, the subway, the taxi, the villa miseria, the high heels, the hand across the face all culminating in a scream that only a wounded animal should utter, if sick or dying. “Get your fat ass out of my way!” he demanded.

The secretary moved, and he proceeded with his copies. He returned to the conference room, thinking nothing of what had just transpired. Everything was fine, as far as he was concerned.

Anne was the first to hear about the screaming, before even he heard about it. Even in an office where partners were known to loose their temper periodically, usually against some associate, his screaming was perceived to be abnormal, not just temper but an illness, a medical condition that needed to be addressed. It did not help matters either that the secretary he had chosen to freak out on was Judge Collins’ personal assistance. Collins was the law firms founding partner, the biggest rainmaker the firm had, and his personal assistance wielded if not as much power as Collins, then close to it. She was not to be trifled with. Collins’ secretary promptly retold the story to the head of personnel, and insisted that amends be amend. She was also the one that suggested that the man’s live-in companion be called first. “I believe she is a medical student” said Collins’s secretary. “I met her at one of the office parties. She seems like a reasonable person. Get her to come over and take him away.”

Associates are a dime a dozen, a good secretary (or even better yet, a loyal secretary) is hard to find. It was discreetly suggested to him that although he could continue to work as an associate (they did after all need the labor, and he did after all put in the long hours), it was highly unlikely that he would be offered a partnership, and his time would not be badly spent if he simultaneously sought employment elsewhere. Preferably by the end of the normal associate training period. In that they were generous; in essence, they gave him three years to pack his bags.

Anne came to pick him up at the office. By then he had been told by no less than Collins himself how unacceptable it all was. He was waiting for Anne, in his small office on the 14th floor, reading the New York Bar magazine. He was scouting the want ads, seeing how difficult or easy it would be to find another job. “I am sorry,” he told Anne, “But I think they are overacting, don’t you?”

Anne said nothing that night or the following day or even the days after that. Instead, she used her connections at NYU Medical School to get him a good psychiatrist, someone who would not be afraid to medicate him. No therapy, she thought, just medication; that’s what he needs. She got him on drugs, sedated, subdued. The drugs felt right to him. It was his destiny. They were his unknown chalice, he was their unknowing knight – a blob, a mental case, a mess in search of a drug. The street, the subway, the taxi, the villa miseria, the high heels, the hand across the face – the seduction -- suddenly none of it matter, though none of it had gone away. He was calm, in a way he had not been for many years, if ever. (“But I weaned him off them now,” thinks Anne these days. “I did not keep him on them, for too long, not too very long, really.”)

He soon learned how unforgiving New York could be. With the felt of drugs, he felt calm, normal and he still had his Columbia degrees, College and Law School. Headhunters however would have nothing to do with him. Word had been let out from Collins’ own office that the strikingly handsome curly haired attorney from Argentina was a lunatic. Without a head hunter’s assistance, no law firm in New York (no self respecting law firm) will have you.

After nearly three years of job hunting, one job offer did miraculously appear as the result of a friend’s inquiries with his uncle in a North Carolina law firm. The curly haired attorney from Argentina was aghast of the idea of moving down south, but went on the North Carolina interview on Anne’s insistence. “It may be the only job that is offered to you,” she had said. And she was right.

Anne was about to graduate medical school, and had to continue with her residence training at a reputable hospital. Her preference would have been to stay in Manhattan, which she adored, but she knew that he would never find a job in the City. she pulled every connection she had in medical school to ensure herself a residency at Duke, in North Carolina. It was hard. She humiliated in having to ingratiate herself with those who could actually assist her. She wished she did not have to do this, to seek professional favors from others, but she did it for him, knowing that if he did not take up the one job that was offered to him in North Carolina he would be unemployed forever. She even pretended that they were moving to North Carolina for her benefit, for her medical training, for her benefit. She never made him feel that it was out of desperation, to secure the only job that would come down his way. She convinced him it was all for her, and he convinced himself likewise, but complained about it. “It’s an imprudent move,” he told her, “Those southern heathens, what will they know about our Ivy League education. But I’ll do it for you; I’ll live with you in North Carolina, after we get married.”

She feverishly worked to revise the plot for their lives, the carefully constructed plans she had made. There were some very elementary revisions that had to be made, like getting married. They had lived together for four years now, and that was fine for Manhattan. It would not go over well in North Carolina. Anne let Celeste take charge of this, let her buy the wedding clothes, let her set up the appointment with Wyckoff City Hall. She even let Celeste plan a very small garden party for after the ceremony. They drank Cherry and ate watercress sandwiches. Celeste hired one of her gay designer friends to spruce up her back yard. “There’s not much I can do with this,” said the friend, “but at least it won’t feel like New Jersey; it will feel like Florence.” Celeste and her gay friend planted pink flowers everywhere, and decorated the garden railings with white crepe paper. It did not feel like Florence, thought Anne. But it got the job done. They got married in September, soon after she graduated from Medical School, and then promptly moved to North Carolina to start a new life. Anne still remembers the comment Celeste made to the overly gay man that fitted her now ex-husband for his wedding suit. “Take good care of him, he’s going to be my son in law now and for the rest of a lifetime.”

* * *

What a joke, thought Celeste, now sitting in front of her mirror, so many years later and circumstances changed. And now that lifetime is over. Thank God. She is glad to be done of it, to be no longer of his world, his wife, his companion. She is glad to be sitting here, back in the civilized Northeast, the suburbs of DC, where she belongs, in front of her mirror, her home, not his, putting on her pearls, admiring herself in her mirror, so very glad to be alone – alone with her mother and her children that is. How very much the plans she once made have now changed for the best.

* * *

The phone rings. Celeste is downstairs with the kids, giving them breakfast. She is such a darling to help her out. Anne loves her mother dearly, even though most times they fight as if they were rivals. “You really should start dating again, Anne dear,” says Celeste so often.

“Someone pick up the phone, please!” screams Anne from the top of the stairs. “Mommy is still getting dressed, and she needs a little help here.” She hears Joey and Christina now bickering as to whose turn it is to pick up the phone. Then she hears Celeste. Finally one of the children answers the damned device, and she hears him or her say “Anne Foster’s residence,” as Celeste has taught them to do. She can’t tell if its Joey or Christina that has answered the phone, at this young an age their voices are indistinguishable. Later on in life, no doubt, his voice will become deep, rich, voluptuous, like his father’s. After all, he has his father’s green eyes, his father’s contagious smile, of course he’ll have his father’s voice.

“Mom!” It is a loud scream. This time she knows it is Joey’s voice. She has never heard such fright in Christina’s voice; only Joey is able to express such fright. “Mommy!,” she hears again, but this time it is Christina screaming. Both kids are hysterical. Celeste urges Anne to pick up the phone. Anne takes over. It’s him. He is hallucinating. She is telling him, from the other side of the phone from where his voice comes, that he has taken 90 pills. He is telling her, from the other side of the phone, that he believes he is dead.

* * *


That same day, that day he committed suicide but survived like Lazarus, Anne took matters into her own hands. As usual, she would bring order to the disaster he created. After her meeting with Faucci (she kept the meeting, she can do everything), she gave an urgent call to that quack psychiatrist her ex-husband has been seeing. She found the number in his bedroom, next to the pills, on a little appointment card.

“This is Anne Foster.”

(Surprised mumble on the other side of the line)

“That’s right,” continues Anne after the mumble of the phone. “I’m his ex-wife, and I think we need to meet, and we need to do it rather quickly.”

(More mumbling on the other side of the line.)

“Today is fine,” says Anne to Dr. Take Notes, and hangs up her blackberry cell phone.

* * *

They agreed to meet at 2 pm, in Dr. Take Notes’ office, in Dupont. He’s a tiny little man, but he has a very demanding way about him. Anne is not intimidated. She has fried much bigger fish than this in her days at Duke and at the NIH. She may look diminutive, lady like, reminiscent of the gentler sex as it was a century ago, but she has the ferocity and cunningness of a lioness. The conversation is quick, right to the point, just the manner in which Anne likes to conduct business.

“You should know that he tried to commit suicide today” she informs him. “Tried to overdose on sleeping pills.”

Dr. Take Notes takes a drag of his cigarette. Some people just can’t give up the nicotine is what she thinks. She admires the yellow film the smoke has built up around his chubby fingernails.

Dr. Take Notes pretends to be calm. “We’ll need to make arrangements to have him institutionalized.” He says. “He’ll need to be watched.” He taps some of the ashes at the tip of his cigarette right unto his expensive oriental rug. “Is he a danger to himself do you think?”

“You’ll do nothing like that,” says Anne, calmly. “I’m not going to have you ruin his career. If you were to send him to a hospital, he would loose all his professional credibility. That won’t happen. I’ll watch over him, I’ll be his caretaker. We don’t need to get the hospital involved.”

“Madam, I can’t ignore this. I have a professional obligation.”

She laughs at this. It comes out harsh, louder than she intended, but she’s glad of it. It allows her to come out strong. Now she’ll let him have it, setting him straight. Rip him a new asshole, as they used to say at Duke.

“Professional obligation? Where did he get the sleeping pills may I ask?”

“Excuse me?”

“I know his internist personally; he’s a colleague of mine. He would never prescribe sleeping pills for my ex-husband, seeing how this is not the first time, seeing how he has a history of suicide attempts.”

“Well, yes, but . . .” Dr. Take Notes smashes out his cigarette, against his expensive oriental rug.

“I saw the pills on his desk. They weren’t prescribed to him. They were prescribed to you. I assume that you have been providing him with these?”

“It was a professional accommodation. A special act of kindness if you will.”

“What others drugs have you given him?”
Dr. Take Notes assesses the situation. She recognizes the lioness in her, but he has heard all about her from his favorite patient. He wrongly assumes he can take her on. He feels no need to mince words with her.
“Some hallucinogens,” says Dr. Take Notes. “Nothing out of the ordinary. Just helping him see beyond his own self. Helping him recognize who he is, as part of our special therapy sessions.”

Anne puts on her take no prisoner smiles, the one she has perfected after all these years. This little man, this Dr. Take Notes, is slim as far as she is concerned. “What rock did you crawl from down under?” she asks him. “What possessed you to give him drugs?”

“Why do you stay with him?,” he asks, impulsively, purposely disagreeable. ”

“Stay with him? We are divorced, do you not remember that? He left me, when I got pregnant. But I won’t leave him. Not yet. Not until he is fully cured. He’s a lunatic, but he is an exceptional man, and I love him. Can you understand that? Have you ever loved anyone so much that you would stick to him even if he has hurt you to the bone?”

Dr. Take Notes stands up, to pull the shades of his office window. He loves to play with his shades. He takes his time in sitting back down, clearly measuring his words. As he sits, Dr. Take Notes blurts out an explanation. “It was his idea, really – the drugs that is. He seemed to be quite knowledgeable about mood altering drugs. Apparently he has been given these before. Apparently he was subdued, for many years was. How many years was that Ms. Foster? Apparently he had a violent temper that needed to be kept under control, for which no self respecting psychiatrist would prescribe a prolonged treatment with drugs. But he found a source, Ms. Foster. Someone supplied him the means. Someone with access to drugs kept him sedated. I think we both know who we mean.”

Anne is not shocked. She maintains her composure even through this, even after having been outed. She would love to stand up and open the shades, as she hates sitting in the dark, but she won’t play Dr. Take Notes game. She sits back, apparently feeling relaxed, and smiles at her counterpart doctor. “So he told you all about it,” she says, pleasantly, as if engaged in one of her many tea chat conversations with her best friends from college. “Nothing to get excited about,” she adds. “I had my reasons, I had the means, and I had the results I needed. It benefited me, and it benefited me.”

“And me as well,” asks Dr. Take Notes. “As I said to you, he is a very passionate man, and I find that in addition to being able to explore those childhood issues with hallucinogens, he becomes very relaxed, very receptive if you will. Very seductive. He is a passionate man.:

“You quack. You dirty rotten quack.”

“He’s an interesting man. Very passionate about his feelings. Very passionate in general.”

Stop saying that, she thinks. Stop saying that.

Keep calm, she says to herself. Outwardly, exteriorly, let the pearls shine through”

“Look buster,” says Anne to Dr. Take Notes, determined to bring this to an end. “Let’s get this straight. I don’t want to drag your name through the mud, and you don’t want to drag mine. I also want to save his reputation, if we can, by keeping some of this to ourselves. All three of us have too much to lose here, and much to gain by our collective silence. I will make everything alright again. I will nurse him back to sanity, now that he has tried to commit suicide again. But you will never see him; you will call him and drop him as a patient. If you disobey me, if I get even a hint that you made contact with him again other than to dismiss him, I will have your license revoked and your ass put up for public humiliation. I have connections, you understand. Being the head of an NIH Department does have its benefits. Are we in agreement here?.

The shrink nods his head. He lights up another cigarette. Unusual that a man of pseudo medicine should smoke. Someday he must quit. “As he would say,” he replies to Anne Foster -- “de acuerdo.”


Anne pulls out her bag. She carries a small mirror in it, not a compact mirror, but a Marie Antoinette mirror, with a long brass handle. She holds it up against her face. Per Celeste’s insistence, Anne has started to use make up, and she likes what it does for her. It takes away so many years, it makes it so easy to forget how much time she has wasted chasing a dream that could not exist. She applies powder to her nose, examines her eyes, the necklace, the pearls. She puts away the mirror.

“Well,” she says to the psychiatrist, ,as she stands up to leave. “I guess we are all done here. I must dash. I still have another meeting to attend to with Faucci.”

* * *

Subway Musings

What it felt like -- sitting in the Indian restaurant next to you, in Baltimore (a city I don’t really know, but will get to know like Edgar Allen Poe), seeing you watching me, scrutinizing me with your accepting eyes, and feeling self conscious about such stares (yet also feeling glad to be so admired, by your accepting eyes), periodically putting my hand on your knees – periodically -- hoping to communicate to you that “I love being here with you, in this city I don’t know but I wish to get to know;” listening to your friends talk and understanding that (like you – for like kind attracts like kindness --) they are easy going, accepting; and its lovely, but not always lovely, because at the same time that we are having dinner with your friends, who are so welcoming (in this city of Baltimore, in this Indian restaurant I have never eaten in before, among your two best friends whom I’ve only just me), while feeling euphoria, I also feel remorse, having brief flashbacks (which are not welcoming) of our earlier fight that very same morning (at another restaurant, also in this city of Baltimore which I don’t know, eating Spanish tapas for lunch, which neither of us liked really, and where the conversation was not so lovely, although it should have been because it was only the two of us) and I reflect that we still need to work on how to communicate best, how to be able to talk without making the other feel unappreciated (and this remember Ralph, I did not mean to hurt you – my Ralphie, my dear Ralphie); but fortunately the flashbacks are brief, overpowered as they should be by my desire of wanting to kiss you in the middle of this dinner at an Indian restaurant in the city of Baltimore, but deciding against it -- because I did not want your friends to think that I’m the show off type (they don’t know me, the don’t know that I am a cautious man, that I do not render my heart easily, that my wanting to kiss you in public is against my every pattern, against the deepest core of my crusty old self); perhaps, I thought, they will think I’m the kind that kisses his new beau in public because he is the type who is in it only for the momentary giddiness of it and not in it for the inevitable ups and downs of an adult gay relationship (but they would be wrong, I tell myself – if they thought that, they would be wrong), and as I think about kissing you in public (and choose against it), as I have this dread of being conspicuous, not wanting to embrace you in the middle of dinner in the middle of a crowded restaurant – at the same time and during all these times – I feel the sweet conquest of having been kissed by you, moments ago, when we entered the restaurant, unabashedly, in this city of Baltimore, telling me with that kiss, as you did and intended, that “we fought, but I’m still proud to love you.”

What it felt like: It felt like a dream (but don’t pinch me – I know that I’m awake).

Dog Days -- Part Two

Joey and Christina are standing at the foot of my bed. Anne is quiet, she has just woken me up and is holding me in her arms. I’m surprised that she brought the kids with her.

“Disgusting,” says Christina. “Daddy peed his pants!”

“Shut up Christina!” says Joey. He is looking at me with those same green eyes of mine, and I know exactly what he is thinking. I see the disappointment.

Anne leads me to the bathroom. She splashes my face with water. “You need to be awake,” she tells me. “I need to know what you’ve done. Tell me what you’ve taken.”

I am so glad that Anne is here. Maybe she will help me clean up this mess. There will be so much laundry to do today. Sluggishly, I point to the table by the side of my bed. There, my fingers tell her, those are the pills.

What happened next I either don’t remember or I have already told you. Anne left me alone for the day, confident that I would not die, or confident that she would check on me later and that she would straighten it all out. Faucci would have her head on a platter if she missed today’s meetings. That I remember. The head on the platter.

The kids left, but I don’t remember that part. I have only fading memories of what happened that day.

I remember that I tried to commit suicide again that day, but only half heartedly, out of a sense obligation to complete what I had started, but not really wanting to succeed. Have you ever had one of those days when you would rather commit suicide than get out of bed? I dragged myself to the kitchen, and I put my head in the oven. I’ve seen this form of suicide in at least thirty movies from the 1950’s. I had a slim chance of causing any harm, however. The oven is electric (not gas), and I did not even turn it on. At most I would get a headache from the pressure of the cookie rack against my temples. I put my head in the oven and a pillow at my feet, and fell asleep again. Sweat and shit stains all over my body, as I never did get around to taking a shower. I fell asleep in the kitchen, and the dream resumed.

---------------------------------------

“Welcome back,” says God. He is such a greedy bastard. He is counting the money I paid him for the last visit, and he is making out my bill for the next visit. Insurance doesn’t cover any of this, so I’m completely out of pocket for these visits. They are not cheap either. God is the best psychoanalyst there is; but he won’t prescribe drugs. For that I have to see my internist.

“Tell me about the doctors,” says God. “How did they get involved.”

It’s ironic, God, because the first one of us to have a breakdown, the first one who needed to get on drugs and stabilize her mood swings, was Anne. Once we left North Carolina, moved to Washington DC so that she could start a new job with the NIH, once we established ourselves into a crummy little house and I took that job as in-house counsel for a real estate company, once we moved away from all our pasts and brought Jack with us, once we knew we were no longer young and that if we did not have children now we never would, once Anne realized that she was close to forty and it was now or never, once it all sank in and we tried to have children --- once all that happened, at last, we discovered that Anne was infertile.

“The plight of the modern couple,” says God, all knowing, all causing. I can’t help but think that he is playing with me, that I am his Job, his plaything.

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I pull my head out of the oven. I would like to say that reason overcame me, but it was no more than a doorbell. Lisa across the street was at the front door. “Are you there?” she hollered. I banged my head against the oven rack as I pulled out. “Hold on!” I yelled out to her, although I don’t know how I found lucidity so quickly. I wrapped a blanket around my ass (I was still naked), and hesitantly opened the door a crack so that I could see Lisa’s face. It is red, and pimply, and she has long stringy blonde hair that has never been properly washed or cut.

“Are you alright?” she asks, breathlessly. She must have run from her house. “I just got home and saw your car in the driveway. Did you not go to work today?”

I have never found Lisa to be so inquisitive; nosey yes, but inquisitive about my needs and cares, no. I hardly believe she is hoping I am doing well; in fact I suspect she would have much preferred if the opposite was the case. She would love to be able to tell the neighborhood that she found me dead as leaves in winter, with my dodo head inside the oven.

“I’m fine, Lisa. Thank you.”
“I saw your ex-wife and the kids very early this morning. They all seemed quite agitated. Everything ok?” Now the truth comes out; she’s been wondering since this morning about the going-ons at my house. She must have heard Anne speaking with the children; perhaps Anne dropped the words “Daddy is sick,” or “Daddy needs help,” or even worse (or better, depending who’s side you are looking at it from) “Daddy might be dead.”

“I’m fine Lisa.”

“Well that’s what I figured all along. I told Timothy that everything is ‘OK.’ You know what a sensitive child he is, and he was so worried when he saw yours kids knocking at your front door this morning as if they were lunatics, and you not coming down to let them in, and your ex-wife rummaging through her purse looking for her keys to let herself in. . . Well, I said to Timothy: I said to him, “No, Timothy, the neighbor across the street is doing fine; nothing has happened to him. I’m sure he’s not dead. In fact I saw him cutting the grass just yesterday afternoon!”

I excuse myself. I politely but firmly close the door on Lisa’s face while muttering something about “a business telephone call I have to attend to.”

Slowly it is dawning on me that if I have not successfully committed suicide, that I need to start attending to the rituals and obligations of my daily life, like calling in to the office and letting them know that I will not be coming in today. I quickly dial Susana’s number. She is concerned that I had not called in earlier, but assumed that I would do so any moment.

“So you are coming into the office in a little while? We really need you today, you know.”

I feel no need to explain to Susana my predicament; I am undressed, stinky of vomit and poop, incapable of thinking straight, hallucinating. There is no way I’m going to get dressed or organized today “I’m in no shape for that today,” I tell Susana. “I’m really a very sick person. I’ll see you on Monday.”

I hang up and take the phone off the hook. I turn the laundry, put in more clothes to wash, some of which I must have washed two or three times that day. The water bill came later that month for over ten times what I normally consumed. Immediately after folding the laundry, I feel another wave of sleep kicking in, and I don’t want to be disturbed. I lay down in my bed, and resume the dreams.

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"Why are you here?” asks God this time. He is standing by the window and blocking my view of dirty hairy Harry across the street. He pulls the curtains again, and this time he means business. I hate God when he acts this way, when he calls me to the carpet. “Why are you truly here?” asks God again as he sits in his chair and crosses his legs. “Tell me what doctors you have seen before.” They always want to know about your prior history, your prior medicines, illness, weaknesses and frustrations. They are awful tricky those medical providers.


It’s not me who should be here, I tell God. It should be her. She’s the one who was infertile, not me. She’s the one who wept every night because we could not have children. She’s the one that wanted to talk about it, to resolve our infertility through chatter, reasoning, planning. But I had no time for it. I could not give her the attention she wanted; I could not devote my energies to planning a child. I was obsessed by my own thoughts.

“What thoughts were those?"

I could only think of men in general, and Reggie in particular. We had moved away from North Carolina, and settled in Washington DC, but I was still obsessed with Reggie’s hairy forearms. I saw them everywhere, on the subway, in the supermarket, in other men with rolled up sleeves exposing their gloriously hairy arms. I melted at the sight of so much hair against manly flesh. My own arms are hirsute, but I was unaware in myself how attractive this is. I noticed it and admired it only on others. It was of course a subject I could discuss with no one.

I internalized my obsession, shared it with not a soul, not even you God, and I held Anne all night long as she bereaved the death of our unborn child, our never conceived progenies. Although I held her so tenderly during the nights, during the days we had nothing to say to each other. I was silent, morose, a dead stone that sat in the living room and had nothing to share. I took my obsession out on Jack, and cooed him during the day incessantly. Anne in turn moved out to the garden, where she tended her tomatoes as a lover tends to the object of his desire. Sometimes she would pop her head through the door, her head covered by an oversize sun hat, her hands in gardening gloves, her pale skin and vivid green eyes damp with garden sweat. “What’s the matter, darling?” she would ask. “Nothing,” I replied as I pet my Jack. “Nothing.”

“Don’t you think she knew? asks God. “Don’t you think that your infidelity and distance were obvious to her, that she knew she had lost you?”

I don’t know what she knew. I cannot read her mind, and she did not tell me (or if she did, I do not remember). What I remember is the coldness of our DC house. Compared to the insufferable heat of North Carolina, that first winter we arrived in DC was bitterly cold. A freakish ice storm kept both of us from being able to go to work for five straight days. Those fives days, those five nights, and every night after that, she and I sat in the living room together, lights dimmed. We did not talk. We contemplated the stillness of the furniture, the coldness of the room, the emptiness of our lives. The silence of the winter storms was inside our house. It grew louder, deafening, obsessive.

At night, Anne would cry, lamenting our infertility, and I would hold her in bed. This much I could do for her; I could hold her in my arms all night long so that perhaps she could close her eyes; but it felt passionless and routine.

In the mornings I would drive to work, and I would take my turn crying.

“And why were you crying?”

I don’t know. I could never figure that out. A burly man like me, masculine, respectable, married, aggressive job. Why did I cry? What could possible cause a normal grown man to shed tears? At first it would simply get weepy eyed over a human interest news story I would hear on the news. You know how public radio is; they always have a sad story to tell, and I was more than ready to listen and to cry with the narrator. In a few months, the morning-news tears made way for real torrents of emotion, leaving wet marks in my face. I had to wipe my cheeks with a towel before I could go into the office from the car. After a few months I would find myself every morning engaging unabashed wailing, incoherent, with no thoughts behind it. I would drive my car, shed my tears, and chant like a lunatic while holding the steering wheel: “I hate my life. I hate my life. Oh God, I hate my life.”

I lost weight.

I grew quieter.

Anne and I continued our methodical sex, every night, aided by fertility drugs. We were determined in having children, in giving evidence of our partnership, the fruit of our love that did not exist.

“It was then that you started seeing a therapist,” adds God.

Yes, at Anne’s insistence and at long last I started seeing a much needed therapist. She found the very best therapist for me (of course), or so she said. He was not as clinically proven and all-knowing as you God, but he was supposedly a good therapist all the same.

The first day of therapy, I walked into his office we talked about nothing, and I said almost nothing. I resented being there; being ordered by my wife to see a loony doctor as if there were something wrong with me. I drank a Starbucks coffee while the therapist read a newspaper. “I’m here whenever you want to talk,” is what he said. I chose not to talk. Before I left the session, the therapist took down some notes and filled out an appointment card for me. “You are a very sick man,” he informed me. “We will need lots of therapy.” He signed me up for five consecutive sessions.

The second day of therapy I decided I would fast track the process; air out all my childhood dirty laundry; have the therapist make his snap decision, and then be done with it. I told him about the beating my parents had given me when they had caught me playing with a boy. I was twelve years old. They left me black and blue and I had to go to school wearing long sleeves, even though it was almost summer and all the other kids wore short sleeve shirts. “Is that why you cry in the mornings, at age 40, driving to work? Is it the beating you received when you were 12 years old.” They left almost dead, but no, that’s not why I cry. The therapist seemed very attentive, took down a lot of notes (as usual), and commented that “this process might take longer than we anticipated.”

The third day of therapy I told him about rolled up sleeves in adult men and their wonderfully hairy forearms; my pronounced obsession with the subject, my unnatural desire to rub my hands through each man’s body hair. This time the therapist seemed to take some interest in the matter. “Very interesting,” he said. “Now we are getting to the heart of the matter.” He rolled up his own sleeves, and exposed his hairless arms. “Does this cause you to stir?” he asked. I was unmoved. Sorry, I told him, not my type. He took some notes, rolled his sleeves back down, and asked again, “And your father? Did he have hairy arms?” Let’s not talk about my father, I asked. He’s got enough on his plate these days, and I don’t want to add burden by designating him the cause of my melt down. Mr. Take Notes wrote something on his pad, and shook his head. It seems that listening to my stories was a big emotional burden to him. I could almost hug him for his dignified, quiet sympathizing. No one had shown that much interest in my little foibles before.

The fourth day of therapy I was comfortable with Mr. Take Notes. I liked his style. He reminded me of my father; he didn’t say much, reflected a lot, expressed much through his eyes. The quiet, silent and yet sensitive type. I believe that the technical term for this is transferring, when you start falling for your therapist. Normally this doesn’t happen until the fourth or fifth month of therapy, but I don’t believe in long standing traditions. I like to do thinks fast, very fast. Perhaps there was more to this than met the eye. Perhaps Mr. Take Notes was another Reggie in disguise and I was not reading the message right. I needed to let him know where I stood. I admitted to him freely that I was attracted to men, and that it was ruining my marriage. “Not unusual,” he said. “Given all your fertility problems and your wife’s depression, I can see why you might go there.” Mr. Take Notes didn’t unzip his pants, didn’t welcome me into his arms, didn’t make a pass at me. He just took down a few more notes, made out my receipt, and told me I should come see him the following week. It was fine; I was not attracted to him anyway.

I drink from the cup that God has placed in front of me. We both know the rest of the story, as we have spoken about it many times before, relived and retold it, reconstructed and analyzed, revisited and rethought it, and yet always the same ending. “What then,” asks Go., “What happened then?”


I believed him. I believed Mr. Take Notes. I felt he was the first person who had brought some clarity to my confusion. My attraction to men was normal. Mr. Take Notes had said so. He told me that it was not “unnatural” for me to be having such thoughts. I left his office at two in the afternoon, and even though my cell phone had five messages waiting for me, all of them from my office, I decided not go back to work that day. Instead, I drove back home. I called Anne and told her to put on her party dress, I would be taking her out to dinner. She was surprised by the invitation. She and I had not shared a conversation in over a month, and we were not accustomed to going out together. She sounded cheerful. “Chinese food,” she said. “Let’s go to Joe’s Noodle House on Rockville Pike. You know they always have good food.” She giggled, and I felt embarrassed for her. She had misunderstood my invitation, she had imagined that I had had a good therapy session. She concocted in her mind that perhaps the therapist and I sorted everything out, and that I was coming home early to celebrate. She made a big deal out of my invitation to take her to dinner. I said nothing.

The food was tolerable. Joe’s Noodle House is full of Chinese people, and the staff has no interest in catering to white couples. The menus are in Chinese, and English speakers are relegated to pointing out their dishes by using the pictures on the wall. The service is not surly, but surely efficient and certainly not warm. They plop the food on your table, and never come back to ask if you want more or if the food is satisfactory. It’s a take it and leave it sort of service. If the white customer is not satisfied, there’s plenty of other Asian customers happy to take their place. The line to get into the restaurant goes all the way into the parking lot. The food is fast, cheap, and tasty. But today it was merely tolerable. I had no appetite, and no patience for the inpatient service. I rushed Anne along, and made her order quickly, eat quickly, get out of the restaurant quickly. We talked about nothing, and all the things I though I would tell her during dinner were left unsaid. I acted grumpy, snapped at her when she dallied too long in putting on her coat as we were getting ready to leave. Let’s go! – I shouted. She smiled, idiotically. I had no idea why she was in such a good mood. “Coming darling. That was truly a fabulous dinner.”
After dinner, I walked Jack around the block. He is getting older, and although he still barks and growls at anything that moves, he does it with less gusto. I picked him up and smooched him on the lips. He licked my face, and took a nip at my nose for good measure. When I returned to the house, Anne was sitting in the living room, with her sexy night gown on and a comfortable pair of slippers. She was sipping sherry. “Put him in his cage, would you please?” I bundled Jack up for the night, slipped a doggy sweater on him, and snuggled him into his kennel.

I walked slowly, hesitantly, back to the living room. I dreaded having to talk with Anne. I knew that if we spoke, I would tell, I would admit to her that I am gay.

Ann was waiting for me on the couch, with the lights on low dim, watching a chimney fire she had carefully constructed. She still sipped her sherry. I could hear Jack whimpering in his cage, as he always does when I put him away. He wants me. The night’s chores had been taken care of, dinner, the doggie walk, putting Jack away. Now Anne and I had nothing left to do but face each other. “Tiring day she said,” as she passed me a glass of sherry.

I took a seat on the other side of the couch, away from her, and said nothing. She sighed as she often does when she is tired but complacent; it sounds like a small pebble dropped into a lake. She laid on the couch, feet up, and sighed again. She sipped her sherry. I recognized the sigh. It is not a sad sigh, it is a satisfied sigh. I looked down, ready for another night of silence.

“Why are you being so quiet?”, she asked, cheerfully, as if this silence that we had lived for the past six months were something new, as if she expected that tonight I would turn the silence around and share something novel with her, something that would change our lives and repair them, make it all good again, if it ever had been good again.

I could not bear to tell her what I had told my therapist, and that he had given me permission to believe that it was all “natural.”

“Why the silence?” she repeated, this time not quite as cheerfully, this time demanding and answer, an explanation. Jack whimpered from his cage. “I wish that dog would shut up,” said Anne.

I went into the bedroom to check up on Jack. “Quiet,” I told him, and whispered to him what I could not tell Ann, whispered to him that I had at last confessed to at least one person in the whole wide world that I loved men. Jack quieted down, nuzzled his brown- black nose against the pillow in his cage, the pillow that had once been mine and that I put in his cage to comfort him. I went back into the living.

“Why the silence?” she repeated. I did not know why she is so insistent in knowing this tonight. “Why the silence” she reputed, this time definitely not so cheerful, but still hopeful.

She sipped on her glass, then put it down on the coffee table; too close to the edge. I was afraid the glass would drop and the sherry would ruin our expensive oriental carpet. I fidgeted. I dared suspect that perhaps she knew. I gave myself the luxury of confirming that she had to know. She had to be aware of the torment my mind was going through.

“I’m attracted to men,” I blurted out. “I’m gay.”

She stared at me in silent anger. She reached out to pick up her glass, the one that hade been precariously left too close to the edge of the table. She dropped it. It shattered.

It is amazing how many fragments a shattered glass can leave. The sherry spilled over the oriental rug, the glass bounced and hit the floor, shards spewing underneath the couch and into every corner of the room. Anne worried out loud about the glass, lest someone should get cut. She stood up quickly, got the vacuum cleaner out, and started sweeping. I worried about the oriental rug. I ran to get a towel, wet with cold water, and a bucket to squeeze into. I dabbed the towel against the sherry stains. Many times I had heard my mother’s advise on this subject. Dad, dab, never rub against the stain or it will stick. Every few minutes I ran the towel through cold water to freshen it up, and then continued dabbing against the stain. And so, incredibly, after confessing to Anne, to my wife, that I was gay, I found myself on my knees cleaning an oriental rug.
Anne knelt next to me. She held her stomach in a way that I had never seen before, in the way that mothers do when they are expecting. She put her hand over mine. She spoke slowly, clearly, and without passion. “The doctor thinks I’ll give birth to multiple children. The sonogram shows eight heartbeats, but many of them are too slow or too fast. There’s two of them however that have a good heartbeat, just as you want them to be at this stage. The have a good chance.”

I was shocked. While I was stupidly in therapy, Anne was secretly seeing her fertility specialist. I felt betrayed, stripped down, reduced to a sperm donor. What did I think would happen when she took fertility drugs? Why had I continued to have sex with her, methodical, passionless, obedient and routine? Why had she convinced me that we had to try, that we had to have children now or we would never be able to do so? This is what I felt when she told me she was pregnant.

“And how did she feel?” asks God. He taps his finger against his glass tumbler. God is a heavy drinker and a heavy smoker. He blows the smoke in my face again. “What about her,” he adds for emphasis. I won’t answer him.

Those two fetuses she mentioned, the ones in her stomach with the strong heartbeats, the ones that helped clean the carpet with us, they would survive (but the other fetuses in her would die), and they would become Joey and Christina. I had fulfilled her dream, performed my services. Our twin children; the evidence of our pretend love.

_____________________________________

The dream is interrupted here again. I wake with my head near the toilet. I must have been throwing up, but this time I have no recollection of it. The children are at the door again, clambering for me. Anne has picked them up from school, and as promised she has come back to check on me. I am undressed, still, with the dirty blanket wrapped around me, the one that has kept me company all night and all day long, this day after the suicide. The kids are scared, wanting to know why Daddy is not dressed yet, wanting to know what is wrong with Dad. Anne is gentle with them, as always, and sits them in the living room, in front of the TV so that they can watch some cartoons while Daddy gets cleaned up.

“Have you eaten?” she asks me.

No – I tell her --Not today, not yesterday, not the day before yesterday. I have lost my appetite.

“You have to eat,” she says. “You will eat. You go upstairs and get changed while I cook something. What do you have in the refrigerator?”

And so as she occupies herself in her element, the kitchen, I go upstairs to the bathroom. I step into the shower, and let the water wash away the thoughts of the day, I let the water run on top of me interminably, and I continue my dream with God. I think of him again.

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“Reggie,” says God, the loudness of his voice clear on my brain as the shower pounds my head.

I saw Reggie’s arms again, once, in the subway -- I tell God in the shower. It was of course not Reggie, but someone equally masculine, equally older than me and exceedingly confident. This time, for reasons I do not yet fully understand, I did not avert his eyes. They were not blue, not Reggie’s piercing glare, but equally attractive. He recognized me for what I was immediately, and he advanced quickly to pound on his fresh prey. He knew that I had no experience, but was more than lustfully curious. I have since learned to recognize that look in others, in men who wonder the streets of Dupont Circle in the city, in business suits and wedding bands, often more handsome than a heterosexual man has any right to be, looking to see what trouble they can get into. I recognize the look. And back then, back when I met the second Reggie in the subway, back when my masculine deflowering mentor would have me, I gave the look. The look gave me away, and I have been away ever since.

“You slept with him? Even after Anne told you she was pregnant?.” God clears his throat.

From the second pair of hairy arms, many followed. I bedded men, almost indiscriminately. I met them through sex chat lines, or ads in the back of the Washington Blade. I led a double life, lurching myself into what I thought was passionate sex, with men I hardly knew and rarely met again. At home, Anne and I stopped having sex. There was no need for it; she was pregnant; she had everything she ever desired and never wanted.

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I get out of the shower; wrap a green towel that looks strikingly bright against my hirsute naked body. I wipe the steam from against the glass, and stare at my equally green eyes, lost somewhere in the mirror. The drugs from the night before are finally wearing away, and I am commencing to realize the monstrosity of the act I tried to commit. The children (Joey and Christina, ages 6 and 6) are downstairs with Anne, helping her make dinner for me. I can hear her tell them that it is important that we all stick together right now. Did I think of them when I took those pills?

Did I think of them when I left her mother, even though they were still in her womb and not quite yet of this world?

I dreamt, and thought and imagined of Jack all day. Absurd that such a small creature should take up so much of my time when these could easily have been the last breaths I took, the last moments of my miserable life.

I wipe the bathroom counter dry; no sense in letting mildew grow; not if I’m going to live after all and be responsible from the upkeep of this place.

________________________________________

I hear Ann calling me from the bottom of the stairs. “Come and eat, I’ve made your favorite.” I don’t know what my favorite is, neither does she. She is trying to trick me, get me to eat, make me think I like it. She will try to nurse me back to health, even though we are divorced, even though I left her for Reggie, for so many Reggies. She will make me well again. I am her vegetated patient, I am the person you should let die if he comes to your hospital emergency room. But she won’t; she won’t be asking me to sign any living wills; she will simply ask me to live.

I call out from the bathroom, my ears still wet, my reasoning still murky. “I’m coming,” I tell her. I run into my bedroom, step over all the dirty sheets, the still dirty remnants of last night’s suicide attempt.

I’m a heel; I left her when she was pregnant with kids. And even though I love them; even though they are now my life, they will always know that I’m the father who left them.

As I come down the stairs, to resume life, to pretend together with Anne and the kids as if nothing happens (for we will not talk about this again, we will not admit that I killed myself and survived like Lazarus), as I stumble on one more step (Dad careful, says Joey, don’t hurt yourself), as I live and descend down the steps I permit myself the luxury of one final memory, one final thought about Jack.

Before the kids were born, Jack bit two of Anne’s nieces. His behavior became more erratic, aggressive, dangerously so. Once he even tried to maul me.

Anne and Celeste convinced me that Jack had to be put down. “If it were you, would you like to live like that?” said Anne (Oh Anne. Don’t use your old living will techniques on me. I know you too well.)

Celeste took the situation in hand, much as she did when she picked out my wedding suit. She sat me down, looked straight into my eyes, and told me point blank, “Jack has to go. Anne has more than she can handle right now.”

Celeste was compassionate, however, and arranged for all of us to drive out together to a veterinarian in Northern Virginia who would put Jack to sleep efficiently and economically.

I cried like a baby as I held Jack in my hands. After the doctor injected the dog, he asked if we wanted a few more minutes with him.

“Yes,” I said.

I held Jack in my hands and he looked up at me, at his God, and I swear I saw a tear in his eyes. Why – he seemed to ask.

“Why,” I asked Celeste, with tears in my own eyes. “Why does a dog have to die because of my sexuality?”

Celeste put her hands across my shoulders.

“Everything will be alright,” she assured me.

* * *

I still have Jacks’ ashes at the bottom of my closet.

* * *

The dream ends here.

Dog Days -- Part One

Dog Days
Part 1

I had a dream the day I committed suicide, the day the pills put me into a sleep that seemed to never end, but would not take me to the other side; the day I died and came back to life like a drunken Lazarus. I had a dream that day, and I have not dared mention it to anyone, much less myself, even though I have thought about the dream each and every day. I am afraid of being thought a lunatic (this from a man that tried to kill himself), for I dreamt that heaven is a psychiatrist’s office, an interrogation room, a confession booth where you come and tell your sins and God analyzes what is wrong with you.

“Who was your first lover?” asks God in my dream, without warning, without foreplay. He wants to get down to the nitty-gritty right away. I’m one hell of an obstinate sinner however, and I won’t play his game; not just now in any event. There are secrets that I keep to myself and that I won’t share even with God.

Jack! -- I tell God, the psychiatrist -- He was my first lover! The perfect lover. Furry all over, a good licker, jealous of anyone who would get near me.

“Jack?” asks God, sipping whiskey from an expensive glass tumbler. I can hear the ice rattling in the glass. “You mean, your dog? That miserable six pound mutt? The one made from fur, and full of spite, consumed with hate against the world?”

Yes, God, that’s the one. Jack. He was a neurotic toy fox terrier who liked no humans on Earth, other than me. For me he was licks and kisses, happy yelping and nose rubbing. For others, however, such as Anne, he was nothing but growls and teeth clenching. He was a pretty dog, and people often said he reminded them of a huggable stuffed animal. But those charming good looks were sheer deceit. Even when Anne would set down his food in a bowl, he would try to bite her hand. On a really good day, Jack would draw blood from Anne’s forearm and then come charging to sit between my legs, to protect him from her screams. This made Jack a happy puppy.

“I remember,” says God, putting down his drink, setting it on his desk. He pulls out his notepad and makes some notes. “Many a times I saw Jack sitting on your lap, snarling at all the passersby, and you would smile like an idiot. You pampered that dog the way a girl pampers her favorite doll. You hugged him, kissed him, allowed him to sleep in bed with you.” God lights a cigarette, and blows smoke in my eyes. “I am curious that you think of Jack when you speak to me. What is the significance of this dog and your perhaps unhealthy attachments? Tell me more of this behavior. Did you act in this pansy way at work?”

I am angered at God the psychiatrist. He is my in face, demanding that I share my intimacies with him. What does he mean about pansiness at the office? Is he insinuating something about my masculinity?

You know better than that, God! – I tell him. You were there; you saw me! I was tough at the office; no pansy, no cooer of small dogs! The called me “iron balls,” “ball buster,” the “machine.” I was the lawyer who had no fear of dreadfully long hours, tough deals, aggressive negotiations!

“God is not impressed by my ranting. He calmly takes down some more notes, puts down his pad, takes off his glasses and glares at me. I can see his dark brown eyes, his vibrant red hair. “But at home?” asks God, again taking a sip from his whiskey. “What were you like when you got home?”

You mean after a stiff drink and a quick dinner? OK, I’ll admit it. I became a subservient lover to a hairy dog. Jack was the tough one, the Alpha penis in the house. I was the mild one, the swooshy runt; the cunt if you will. I would rush home from the office, strip to my undies, and lie in bed with Jack, allowing his sandpaper tongue to explore every crevice of my heavily bearded face.

And inevitably Jack would pee on the bed from all the excitement, yes?” adds God. “Do you remember how your wife felt about that?” I see now that God’s face has turned into that of a woman, but not just any woman. He has aged and has transgendered, metamorphosed into another sex and into a deity, but it is her; it is the same woman who would take me to Villa Miseria wearing red rouge and high heels, walking among the poor as if they were flowers in the fields. “Tell me,” says God mother analyst. “Tell me how Anne felt about Jack?”

I hardly remember how Anne felt about it, seeing she was never home. She was usually on call, working at the hospital. But if she were home, for the sake of argument, if she did see me and Jack . . .

“acting practically as lovers,” adds God in a voice that is less than kind, leaning almost towards sarcasm.

. . . if she were home, she would say something that would express her disgust, something like “Take it outside, would you,” or “It’s unnatural.” I usually chose to ignore her, even if Jack peed on my lap, or on the couch, or on top of our matrimonial bed, with his penis pointed squarely towards Anne’s pillow.

God is wearing high heels. I know this because he has stood up, and is walking loudly against the over polished wooden floors. He is carrying his drink in his hand, and his legs jingle as they walk. The echo of the heels against the flat wood reminds me of distant memories, not to be remembered. God reaches the window which is only on the other side of the room, but from my small eyes appear to be miles away. He pulls the curtains with a furious jerk, and the light that comes into the room blinds me. I see now that we are in a city, that there are office buildings immediately across the street. God turns to me, and with a smile asks, “Who came first, the chicken or the egg. Anne or the dog?”

Don’t you remember God? Anne came first, always; I was faithful to her, always, or almost always. We met in college, when we were no more than seventeen. Both of us studied literature. I was the better student, even though she is the smarter one. After college, she ended up to medical school, and I want to law school. Throughout those many years we were lovers, and saw no one else, dated no one else, befriended no one else. We were each other’s best friends and constant companions, tender but inexperienced lovers. We married eight years after we met in college, two days after Anne graduated from medical school, one month before we moved to North Carolina, one year before we bought Jack in a Raleigh pet store.

You were invited to the wedding, that snowy day in September of 87, even though Anne was and is an atheist. She does not believe that you exist God, perhaps that’s why you have a hard time remembering her. But I invited you; in my heart you were there. We were married at Warwick City Hall, in Anne’s home town in New Jersey. Our witnesses were Celeste and the town clerk, but in my heart you were there too God, for I invited you. Did you not see Anne? She looked beautiful in a tailored white rose suit we had bought at Bonwitt Teller, and a pearl necklace and matching earrings I had given her instead of a wedding ring. You know that Anne wears no rings, God. And I . . ., looked handsome too God. I know because I have seen the pictures that Celeste took that day and that today remind me how very young and innocent we were that day.

“Tell me more about Celeste,” asks God. I don’t know why he asks so many questions. I stare out the window, and now it has turned dark, no transition from daylight to nighttime but simple darkness. I focus on the building across the street. It is a hotel. A man is undressing in the bathroom. He has left the lights on and the shades open, a blaring light in the night, and he is completely naked. He is hairy. He seems to be beckoning. “Tell me more about Celeste” asks God the psychiatrist, again. I stop my leering and focus on God’s question.

Celeste, Anne’s mom. Also an atheist, perhaps also unknown to you. Prettier than Anne, smarter than Anne, but not a doctor. She’s the flamboyant one in the family, the social butterfly; once a rebel maker, now a constant shopper. I met her almost the same week that I met her daughter, that first week in college. Celeste was helping Anne move into her dorm room. I was impressed by Celeste’s stature, her striking blonde looks, her expensive jewelry, the keys to her BMW. It was not, however, the best time in Celeste’s life. She was in the middle of getting a divorce from Anne’s father. To me, Celeste appeared confident and self-reliant. Anne however felt she was being abused by Celeste; too much information sharing. Celeste used Anne as her confident during the divorce, and said things regarding Anne’s father that no daughter would want to hear. “Your mother seems nice,” I said to Anne. “Not if you got to know her the way I do,” replied Anne. Celeste heard this, I'm sure. She chose to ignore it though. She wrapped a silk scarf around her neck, put on her leather gloves, and held her hand out for me to shake it. “It’s very nice to meet you young man,” she said. “I hope we can see more of each other as Anne gets to know you.” Anne gave an exasperated gasp, and Celeste left the room with her BMW keys dangling from her hand. I was intrigued.

Celeste was a shopper. She knew all the best stores in New York, and went out of her way to befriend the staff, the ones that could get her discounts or special showings. To Celeste, shopping was a profession. On her own insistence, after I proposed marriage to Anne, she helped us buy our respective suits for the wedding. Anne’s pearl white suit was purchased at Bonwit Teller; my charcoal grey came from Bloomingdales. Celeste got me a private fitting with one of her favorite sales attendants, Andre. He was well dressed, well coiffed, overly effeminate and overly attentive to my needs. I stood in the middle of the dressing room with my pants being hemmed by Andre. Celeste had convinced him it was okay if she and Anne came into the dressing room while he took my measurements. “You don’t mind if we come in while you’re taking the statistics, do you, Hon?” said Celeste to Andre. He gave her a discrete wink. “Just as long as I don’t get fired” he said. “That’s all I ask sweetie.” He leered at me. I felt like a naked man in front of a window, on display for everyone to see.

“And how did you feel about that?” asks God the psychiatrist. “About the salesman I mean, about his hands next to your crotch.”

It did nothing for me. The man was not hairy. You might think there was some sexual innuendo in all of this, but there wasn’t; not for me anyway. Nothing really happened in that dressing room. I was simply trying on what became the grey wedding suite, Ralph Lauren of course, perfectly matched to my rather short but robust stature, my dark looks. Andre pressed his hands against me, against my pant legs, against my thighs, as if feeling the fabric against the skin, making sure perhaps there was no allergic reaction. My crotch betrayed me, and got really hard. I turned frank red as his hands pressed too tightly and too close to my erection. “Bashful, isn’t he?” said the sales clerk, waiving his hand in the air for emphasis. “Just take good care of him,” said Celeste, noting my discomfort but hopefully not my bulge. “He’s a good guy, going to be my son in law next week and for a long time after that.” Bless her heart. If she only knew.

"Knew what?"

That some day I would break Anne’s world; that someday they would both think of me as nothing but a cocksucker.

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The dream stops here. If there is one thing I have learned in all my years, is that I am not very good when it comes to anything mechanical, technical, medical, engineering or mathematical. Words and phrases I can handle; arguments I can win; but anything that is the least bit scientific I will manage to botch up. We will have to add to this category the matter of suicide. I attempted it by taking 90 pills. I counted them diligently, and swallowed them all at once with a stiff drink. What I failed to realize, is that my sensitive stomach would throw up the pills soon after they were in my body. I woke from a deep sleep and a thunderous dream, and had to rush to the bathroom, to the small sink, to throw up everything in my stomach – 90 pills and perhaps all the liquor in my body. The pills are out of my stomach, or most of them, but I’m still drowsy and will be so for the next twenty four hours. On the way to the bathroom, and on the way back to my bed, I managed to fall on the floor and bang up my knees but good. One more fuck up I said to myself, as I went back to bed; back to sleep; back to the dream and God.

________________________________________________________________________

“Go on,” says God imploringly. (Oh God, I ask in my dream, are you truly nothing more than an armchair psychiatrist, a perverted observer who will reveal nothing of yourself but ask everything of me?)

We moved to Raleigh in 1987, more than eight years after we had met in college, two days after Anne graduated from medical school, one month after we had gotten married, one year before we bought Jack in a Raleigh pet store.

In retrospect, it was a rushed and imprudent decision, to leave Manhattan I mean, and to move to the South where they had never seen our kind. Anne wore her hair very short, one would say almost manly although everything about her was feminine. She preferred not to wear any rings, or jewelry, or perfume or other signs of frivolity, except that she always wore her peal earrings and matching pearl necklace. They were the ones I bought her in New York as an engagement gift. Anne had grown up in the New Jersey suburbs, with rich but dispassionate parents. She was accustomed to cold weather, boring dinner parties with the neighbors, competing for best grades at school. She had never lived anywhere other than the aggressive but straightforward Northeast. The Southerners were truly strangers to her, too friendly and at the same time to distrusting. As Anne was by nature disinclined to public displays of affection or friendship, she found it difficult to fit in with the overly socialized women and men of the South. As for me, I had grown up in Argentina with neurotic parents, and when I moved to the United States I lived nowhere else other than New York. I was an Argentine New Yorker, an oddity. The American South was a mystery to me. To put it mildly, Anne and I were more than just oddities in Raleigh; we were social pariahs, freaks. Anne was going to do her medical residence training at Duke Hospital, and I was going to work for a prominent Raleigh firm. We would endure daily reminders that we could not, would not fit in seamlessly with the Carolina crowd, the DAR, the golfers and the good old boys. We were too New York, too Northeast, too not of this place. We were not part of “Carolina’s God Country.”

“I love that expression,” says God.

Not me; I hate it. It’s what the North Carolinians call their state, “God’s country.” The first few times Anne and I heard the expression we thought it was quaint, reminiscent of rolling hills and quiet back yards where God’s peacefulness might reign. However, as we soon realized, God’s Country was the expression favored by small minded bigots, the ones who think that God created North Carolina as a home for his chosen people Anyone else who was not born or raised in North Carolina might just as well have been brought up in hell. There is only one type of good person for these folks; and that’s North Carolina folks. Everyone else is either an oddity or a sinner, or both.

“Didn’t you know that when you moved there?” asks God. He is still nursing his whiskey, smoking his cigarettes slowly, taking notes sporadically. “Everyone one knows that North Carolina is God’s county. Everyone.”

Not me God; and not Anne either. We knew nothing. We moved to North Carolina, straight from New York, understanding nothing about life in the South. Idiotically, we assumed we would we be welcomed with open arms. Fooled by our Ivy League educations, and having been accepted in New York as successful Columbia graduates, we expected life in North Carolina would be pleasant, perhaps even charming. We had not expected that we would be judged on things about ourselves which neither one of us could change; our manners, our ethnicity, our sex, our very essence. That’s right God, now you’re starting to understand. The managing partner, at my law firm wore polyester pants but drove a brand new Jaguar. I drove a low end economy car, but I wore Ralph Lauren suits and Brooks Brothers shirts. Anne and Celeste had taught me how to buy and dress in New York office style. And I had acquired other New York habits which were not much appreciated in Raleigh, like gesticulating my hands, emphasizing every word with a waive of the palm or pointing of fingers, just as I am doing right now.

God puts down his notes for a second, raises his glasses to look at me, notices my waiving hands and nods. “Very interesting,” he says.

It didn’t take me too long to realize that this was not acceptable in a North Carolina law firm. When talking to the other lawyers in the firm, I noticed that they would stare at my hands.

"Yes, I remember. You moved your hands around like a taxi driver."

And do you remember also what the managing partner said about me? Did you hear him talk about me with Reggie, also an attorney at my firm? “Such strange customs,” is what he said about me. “He sounds like a Jew when he talks, and he looks like a girl when he waives those hands about.” That’s right. He said it as we were all leaving a meeting. He knew I was within ear shot; he meant for me to hear it. I pretended not to hear him, but I could not hide my embarrassment. You must remember that God; you must have seen me when my cheeks turned bright red. After that, I forced myself to talk in a calm, turtle pace pattern, my voice barely raised above a whisper, my hands always tucked firmly in my pockets. Do you remember my prayers back then? How the mighty have fallen, valley of darkness, outcast among enemies.

“I remember all that,” says God with a yawn. “But what about Anne? Tell me about her. Did she fare any better with the Southerners?"

No. Her experiences at Duke Hospital were pretty much parallel to mine. She was learning the perils of being a woman trying to fit into a man’s world. Duke, at the time (and I believe still now) was fighting any attempts to limit the number of hours medical residents would work consecutively at the hospital. Proponents of shorter hours believed that a tired doctor presents a risk to the patient and increases the chances of medical error. The Duke hierarchy, the good old boys who had done their medical training thirty years earlier, believed that it was important for the doctor on call to see a patient through from morning to night; continuity of service, is what they called it. “Besides,” they argued, “that’s how we did it when we were in training, and there’s no need to change the system.” What they failed to realize is that thirty years earlier caring for a patient meant no more than sitting by his side, taking his temperature, prescribing a pill. There was comparatively little back then in the terms of emergency medical care. It’s been a relatively recent development that medical advances have allowed doctors to propose a battery of treatment, time consuming and exhausting, that can keep the patient alive although not necessarily well. By flogging the patient, it is possible to stretch out his existence over several days, weeks, months, but without necessarily improving the quality of life of either the patient or his family. They are dying anyway but it is a slow death; observed, measured, diagnosed and prolonged, but death all the same. This was the dilemma Anne and her colleagues faced in medical training, learning to draw a line between providing actual worthwhile medical care and keeping a corpse alive. Anne’s attempt to avoid aggressive medical treatment in favor of allowing a patient to die in comfort was seen by the hierarchy as weakness. “She just doesn’t think like a man,” is what they said about her. “She just can’t hack the hours.”

During the nights, Anne and I shared a glass of white wine, always white, and our sorry stories from the days. She tended to laugh about the matter, whereas I complained bitterly.

“The good old boys were at it again today,” said Anne jovially. “Bless their hearts, they kept a comatose 85 year old man going for three months. He never moved a muscle nor an eye, but they kept his heart alive. Cheers!” She laughed, held her glass high and drank.

I was not nearly as jovial. “Those fucking bastards,” I said, referring to my fellow Raleigh lawyers. “Those fucking cracker ass bastards. They think I’m a taxi cab driver!”

Anne smiled. There was no magic cure either of us could share with the other. We explained it away, or told each other it did not matter, but in our hearts we knew we had made a mistake by moving to North Carolina.

I drank my wine, and petted my little Jack. He did all the growling for me.

Anne was to remain at Duke for a minimum of four years for her medical internship, more if she decided to get a fellowship (which she did), and so we were forced to endure whatever hostilities we experienced, whether perceived or real.

“You would make the best of it,” says God, always the prognosticator of things to come.

Oh, God, are you still here? I have stopped listening to him. I am still looking at the man across the street. I can see his hands. I see his nakedness, but above all I see his hands, and they are furry.

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The dream stops here, again. I wake again. This time I have more lucidity, and I am aware, conscious, trying to make peace with the fact that I am still alive. I remember that I took pills, and that I threw them up. I cannot, however, remember why I took the pills, what drove me to it. That will come, or is coming. I want to move, there is thirst in my throat, but I feel no control of my muscles. I don’t think I will be able to get up. Suddenly I have fear, ignorance of what damage I may have caused to myself. I feel an intense need to urinate and defecate. I want to but I don’t want to. I cant move out of the bed. The vowel urges overcome my thoughts; I shit the biggest shit of my life and pee a torrent of urine. I am disgusted. I gather sufficient strength to take off my pants and to wrap myself around a blanket. This will all need to be washed tomorrow; more laundry. I rest my head in the pillow. I imagine that perhaps I have died, that perhaps I am dead and simply don’t know it. I fall asleep.

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“I’m losing you,” says God. He has changed. He is wearing a chiffon dress with polka dots, the type considered quite fashionable in the 1950’s of Buenos Aires. He has also rearranged the furniture; no longer are we in a stuffy study; the room is airy, decorated a la mode of the ‘50’s, aerodynamic shapes, thin veneer tables, the flat lines of Danish furniture. God is also wearing lipstick and rouge; perfume from Paris, very large round pearls. The transformation is complete. “I am losing you,” says God again. He walks toward the window. We are still in the city and there is still the naked man across the street, beckoning. “Is the light from the building across bothering your eyes?” I don’t answer. God closes the blinds. I cannot see the man across the street anymore. My heart sinks. “Let’s change the subject,” suggests God. Tell me more about Jack. Where did he come from?

From Hell, I believe. Anne made a bargain with me; she would give me one child for each dog we adopted. As I had no pets before, I was leery of the suggestion. I was however, interested in having kids, and I also knew how much a dog would mean to Anne. We adopted Jack on an impulse, from a pet store. We did no research, knew nothing about his breed or disposition, did not consider how a dog would fit into our lives. We saw him in a pet store window and instantly fell in love with him.

Anne was very excited the day we got Jack. He was shaking from the top of his black nose to the tip of his white tail. I couldn’t get over his smell; dogs are definitely an acquired taste. Anne held him wrapped in a blanket, as if he were a baby. We had made plans to have dinner that night. Anne insisted in sneaking the dog into the restaurant. “We can’t leave him home alone, not on his first night,” said Anne. She swaddled him in a blanket, like a newborn. Fortunately Jack must have been all doped up from whatever drugs they gave him at the pet store, because he hardly moved and did not bark (that first night). When we left the restaurant, someone in the street stopped to ask if they could “take a look at the baby” that Anne appeared to be swaddling. “Of course you can,” said Anne, pulling back the blanket to reveal Jack’s hideously grotesque yet amusingly charming face. “Lady, that’s a dog you have there!” said the stranger. “You people are insane. Where are you from anyway?”

When we got Jack home, things took a different turn. Jack’s drug must have worn off, and his true nature started to show. He barked incessantly at anything that moved. He peed on our bed. He shredded to pieces yesterday’s mail left in the corner, and when Anne tried to move away from him he bit her on the hand, hard, drawing blood. They say that some small dogs are mentally retarded because of all the inbreeding. I definitely believe this about Jack. Anne and I took a fool proof approach to the doggy madness. We bought training manuals, determined to make this dog behave. In less than a month, Anne had bruises on her shins and fingers where Jack had bitten her. I, on the other hand, had managed to teach Jack to “come” on command (as long as he was always rewarded by a treat) and to shake his little paw whenever I stretched out my hairy hand to him. I’m not sure who was the better trainer though, Jack or me. All I could get him to do were these two tricks (come and shake), whereas he had me wrapped around his small paws. I would do anything for that dog, clean up his messes, allow him to lick my lips, hold him up high and away from danger.

The first time I walked Jack on a leash, he almost fell through a drain pipe. That was my fault. I had never had a dog before, and I had no idea how to walk a dog on a leash. I should have known better than to try to get a six pound creature across an open street sewer drain. Jack’s little paws feel right through the grates, and I had to pull him out of it quickly before he fell through entirely. After that, Jack refused to walk anywhere near that sewer. If he sensed that we were getting anywhere near the sewer, he would dig into his heels and refuse to move. He would not budge until I would pick him up and carry him a safe distance from the dreaded grates. As he grew older, his fear of the sewer grew stronger, and the perimeter of what he considered dangerous sewer territory became wider and wider. Eventually he started digging into his heels as far away as two blocks from the sewer. I dutifully carried him the whole way.

His red collar was too large for his neck. He was so small that I could not find a proper fit for him. He was able to squeeze his head off the leash if he really wanted to. But the funniest thing about him is that even though he was the smallest dog in the neighborhood, he acted as he was the top dog, the most ferocious. I could not take him for a walk around the block without having him raise his back leg every few steps to let out a pee, his marking technique. He would pee at every corner, on top of every post, at the crossroads of each driveway. Sometimes he would even pee on top of other dogs, usually much larger than him. Other people walking their dogs would chuckle whenever they got a sight of my hairy head and my wiry dog yipping and peeing incessantly. “Might big dog you have there, son.”

God is taking notes. Someday I want to get a close look at what he is writing. There’s a long pause as I take a deep breath and observe his note taking. He does not seem to notice that I have stopped talking, or he doesn’t care. He wipes his glasses, takes off his shoes to scratch his toes, and finally focuses on me again. “So,” says God. “Enough with the dog. Tell me what was going on with you and Anne. How was your relationship in North Carolina?"

Quiet, agonizing, deteriorating. It’s hard sometimes to remember that we loved each other, and what it is that we loved about each other.

I take a sip of water. God wants me to use one of his tissues, but I push the box back. I’m not teary eyed. I’m not emotional. This is old news God, nothing here to get excited about.

Little by little Anne and I gained if not acceptance then at least familiarity with North Carolina. Anne learned to maneuver among the male doctors at Duke, showing them that despite her femininity, or perhaps possibly because of it, she had more ability and love for medicine than most of her colleagues. She gained the title of Ms. Living Will. A living will is a medical manifesto from the patient or sometimes the patient’s family that the hospital is not to use extraordinary medical procedures to keep a patient alive if the doctor determines that the possibility of recovery is remote. Most doctors were too afraid or too lazy to speak with the families or the patients to obtain a living will. Anne developed a tack for it. She would sit with the patient’s family, and ask simply, “if it were you, and you were unconscious, would you want your body to continue to be manipulated?”

“Not her exact words. I should know. I was there. She had a motherly touch, a caring tone.”

OK. Perhaps she used different words. I’ll I admit I don’t have her feminine knack. But the message was the same, and it was invariably well received and acted upon. The good old boys started to take note of the many hours of needles medical procedures that Anne had saved the hospital by obtaining executed living wills. Since many of these procedures ended up being provided by the hospital at a loss, the hierarchy was glad of Anne’s efforts.

I pause. I disobey God’s unspoken rule, and get up from my chair, glide to the window, and open the shades. I look out the window, unabashedly. The hairy man is still there. He is standing in front of a full glass pane, naked, totally exposed. He is smiling at me. I can tell; I feel the desire.

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The dream stops again. The breaks and seizures are becoming more frequent, more pronounce. This time when I wake up I sense fear, horror, self pity. What if I really fucked up and not only have I not died but I managed to cause damage to myself? Will I continue to live in a vegetative state, no movement, no life, but constant thought? Have I become one of Anne’s proverbial vegetable patients? I fucked up; I really fucked up this time. I fall asleep again.

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God sees me. “What are you thinking of right now?, he asks benevolently. The fool, he thinks I’m thinking of Anne. If he only knew. “I do know,” he says. “You are my Adam; I am your creator. You cannot lie to me.”

I choose to lie anyway. I will not tell him what I am thinking; my obsession with hairy hands, hairy men. I change the subject.

I am thinking of Anne. I see clouds and rain, and unbearable heat, and I think of that day that I visited her at the hospital, one hot Sunday night, to bring her dinner. She was on call for the weekend, and she was glad for it. The weather had been miserably, insufferably hot for days, and even the rains would not take the heat away. Our townhouse was of poor construction, and the air conditioning could not keep up with the heat blast. At night, we sweated and stained the sheets with perspiration, especially me as Jack insisted sleeping on top of my legs. In a word, it was inhuman; the steam and the heat were insufferable, as only North Carolina summers can produce. Anne suffered the hell more than me. She is of German and Nordic stock, and was not bread for the tropics. She loved snow and cold weather, sweaters and windrows open to the cold air. North Carolina provided none of that.

As a student in Manhattan, Anne lived in a fifth floor walk up on 89th street. A small one room apartment with no air conditioning and very little ventilation. To escape the heat in those days, Anne would plan long trips to the local A&P supermarket on 85th Street, between 2nd and 3rd, well known for its excessively cold air conditioned isles. She would spend hours in the store, reading labels, examining fruit, planning menus, escaping from the city.

In North Carolina, her refuge from the weather was Duke Hospital, in Durham. No other intern was as happy as Anne to be called for weekend duty at the hospital. Much like the A&P in Manhattan, the temperature at Duke Hospital was kept at a chilly 60 degrees at all time. “I’ll work hard,” said Anne, “but at least I’ll be cool.”

“You were angry when she said that.”

Yes, but no, not exactly angry. Jealous I would say, rather than angry.

“Of what?”

That she didn’t care, that she did not see that I would be alone while she was in the hospital.

“It was her job. What did you expect her to do? It was part of her medical training. As you said, the Duke hierarchy expected all their interns to put in long hours.”

But she never complained about it. Her disposition was too sweet. She seemed perfectly happy to be there, at work, away from me.

As for me, as much as I disliked my law firm, at least I did not have to work on weekends. I would put in long hours during the week but was free to enjoy my weekends.

"And that meant weekends alone, didn’t it?"

Yes, as Anne was almost always on call; and if she wasn’t on call, then she was either resting, or gardening.

"And what did you do on those weekends alone."

The usual. I read the newspaper, jogged, listened to the radio. Played with Jack.

“You mean played and cooed with Jack, until he fell asleep. And then what; what did you do with your time after all that was done.”

I would get bored, I would get anxious. My mind would start to wander and I would have thoughts of. . .

Turn it off God. Turn it off! Turn the thoughts off. I would not then and I will not allow myself to have these deep, pleasurable, thoughts that could, if I allowed them to, fill my mind and body with exquisite desire.

“No sears maricon.” Ahh, God said it. I knew he was thinking it all along.

I would go to the movies, watch a horror flick, and then for dinner if possible, meet up with Anne at the hospital.

I squirm in my chair. I have no interest in telling God any of this. He has no right to intrude, to ask so many questions “Leave me alone,” I tell him. That seems to have settled it. He asks no more questions. There is an insufferably long and immeasurable pause, silence. God is glaring. He writes something in his notes. I can tell, I imagine I know what he is writing: Patient uncooperative.

“So let’s talk about that, lets discuss a typical weekend night when you have dinner with Anne at the hospital. Pick a perfect night, and describe it. Let me make it easy for you, its August 14th, it is 6 pm, and you brought Chinese food . . .”

I brought Chinese food which we ate in a medical conference room on the 14th floor of the “Tower” (as they called that part of the hospital – the tallest structure in downtown Durham, NC.) There had been a severe summer storm the night before, and the streets were almost empty of traffic. Form the 14th floor, we could see all the main roads, most of them flooded. Anne ate quickly, as she was afraid of being called at any minute to attend to some medical emergency. It was unusual that I ate slower than her, but I had a lot of time to kill. I was bored at home, without Anne, nothing to do. I would rather pass the time with her, even if it was at a dingy hospital. Anything to escape the boredom and the thoughts.

“And what did Anne talk about?” asks God.

One of her patients, an elderly woman from Chapel Hill who had tried driving in the storm, and ended up in a ditch. Her family members at first wanted everything done, but Anne convinced them that the woman was in pain and morphine and a dignified death would be more compassionate. “I can’t believe I got those hillbillies to agree with me,” said Anne while swallowing a Chinese dumpling,. I sipped soup and looked out the window, imagining that old lady stuck in her car. She had to wait six hours before anyone found her. By then, she had bled mostly to death. “You are the queen of the living wills,” I said, handing her the last dumpling. Anne’s beeper went off and she rushed out the door without even time to give me a kiss. As she was rushing out, Anne kept talking about the old lady, “Hell, it was a true act of compassion. I felt what she really needed was a good blue rinse and a new perm. Better that than medical flogging!”

I packed up what was left of the dinner and went home, alone, to Jack. He kissed me with his little tongue as soon as I walked in the door. I gave him all the leftovers.

“But there is something you are leaving out. When Anne was talking, what were you thinking about? Tell me. I was there, I remember; don’t you?”

Reggie.

“Reggie? Again?”

They’re all Reggie. Everyone one of them is Reggie.

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This time when I wake I can move around more freely. I can walk again, and I run to the bathroom. I would have thought that after a night of vomiting, shitting and peeing, there would be nothing left in my body to expunge. But I’m wrong. There is still a torrent of green muck that forces its way out of my gut, down my throat and onto the bedroom floor. I hold my vomit in my throat by covering my mouth, and I manage to finish up dropping the rest of the vomit in the bathroom sink. Much of it splashes onto the bathroom tile. More stuff to clean up, later. I’m not going to start cleaning it now, but I need to start thinking clearly about the future; about how I will get out of this hole. First thing is to call out for help. I find the cell phone that I normally charge in the bathroom; I have no other electrical outlets in the house. While sitting in the toilet, still expunging, I dial Anne’s number. Fortunately there is light outside, so perhaps I have not waken her and perhaps she has not yet left for work. I don’t know what time it is. She picks up the phone. “Anne, I need help. . . .”

After that I go back to bed. Anne will be here soon. I can rest until she comes. The dream resumes.

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“And who was this Reggie?, says God. He hasn’t missed a beat. He’s exactly where we left off before I woke up and went back to sleep. He’s still focusing on Reggie. He wants to know all about Reggie.

This was North Carolina Reggie; my first obsession; my boss. He was lean, athletic. He wore crisp white shirts, heavily starched, rolled back at the sleeves to expose his sinewy arms and dark villous hair. I was obsessed by has hairy forearms, the hair ran from his elbows all the way to this palms. The teeth of a comb could get caught if one were to try to brush that forest. I wanted to try; I wanted to run my fingers through his pubes; but I couldn’t.

"He was one of your bosses at the law firm, wasn’t he? One of the senior partners."

Yes. He was an attractive man, fifty something years old but slender and muscular. His blue eyes were captivating, so much so that I had to force myself not to look at him in the face for too long for fear that he would get ideas in his head about me. This Reggie had been raised in a North Carolina farm which had now become a fully developed, and popular community outside of Raleigh. He had money, connections, good manners, and a lover (his secretary). Everyone in the firm knew his secretary was his woman, but not one dared whisper a word of it. I don’t know how this Reggie had time to do everything he did, exercise at noon, negotiating deals during the day, his wife and family for dinner, his secretary during the night. The only time he had free most days was between six and seven in the morning. He would sit at his desk, in his enormous corner office, and would watch the sun go up as he drank the only cup of coffee he would have all day. I would report to him every morning, since I knew it was the only time he would have during the day to pay attention to me.

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The dream has stopped again. I have a couple of squirrels that like to scratch on my roof every morning; it is their morning mating ritual. My bed is immediately under the roof line, and I can hear the squirrels as they scratch the shingles and run across the tiles. I am glad to hear this noise today; normally it annoys me. It means that it is daytime; that the night has finished. This wakefulness will not last though; I feel very hazy. I am in pain, from banging up my knees, from peeing and shitting in my pants, from possibly having blown my health and my brains out with drugs. Anne, when will you get here? I fall asleep again.

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“What do you envision?” asks God. “What do you see?”

I envision, recollect, Reggie’s hairy hands now. As many other mornings, I have chosen to meet with him at six A.M. so that I can discuss the Thomas project with him. I need his undivided attention, which I know I won’t receive any other time of the day. I sit across Reggie’s desk, my yellow legal pad on my lap, with my chicken scratch handwriting, notes of things I wish to discuss. Reggie scratches his head, plays with his hair, thinning but long, grey but with streaks of brown and blond – and white. The fading color of his no doubt once blond hair. I envy men with fine hair, the type that flies with the wind. It always makes me conscious of my crisp black locks, helmet like.

He drinks coffee. He tells me that Robert E., an attorney across the street, has been complaining about me. “He says you are pushing too hard, Let me tell you something, clients don’t care if you have the prettiest looking contract. All the client cares is that the deal gets done. Don’t kill the deal.” He laughs. I stare out the window as the sun rises.

His secretary arrives. Her usual smile is not on her face. She says hello to me, but says nothing to Reggie. I guess that they must have had a fight lass night. Reggie continues sipping his sole coup of the day.

“Robert E is an idiot, “ I say. “He tried to change the documents to take out our option in year five to buy back his shares at a fixed price. As you know, our client has told us that this is one of the key elements of the deal.”

I must not stare at Reggie’s arms; instead I pretend to focus on my legal pad. I am not afraid of his wrath, his judgment of my legal talent. I am afraid of what ideas he may get if he thinks I am staring at his beauty. So hairy, so masculine.

Reggie’s secretary waltzes into his office again, as I’m speaking. She puts down a red file on the corner of the desk. It’s the correspondence file from our client. Sheepishly, I look at Reggie, catch him as he is staring at Anne. His Anne; not mine; his mistress, Anne. She has long legs. I see lust in Reggie’s eyes, for her, and I imagine what it must be like for him to mount her. I suppose that his buttocks are as hairy as his arms, pounding into her soft white skin. I yearn to touch that ass.

At the top of the file is a memo which I had prepared with a cross referenced index to each major point in the transaction. Reggie reads the bullet points:

“Paragraph 6: Option to buy out shares in year 5. See Notes from Client Conference, 2-02-94.” Reggie had forgotten about this point.

“And Robert E. says he has a problem with this point?” he asks.

I look Reggie straight in the eye; not a lustful look, I tell you; it was a stare you down look because I knew I was right.

“Robert E. did not want to include this in the documents, until I pressed the point. That’s when he called you to complain about me.”

Reggie’s secretary winks at me. Reggie sips some more of his coffee. He looks uncomfortable, which is unusual for him.

“Yes sir-ree,” he says. “You are right on this one. But try not to act so New York about it.” He puts down his cup of coffee, and stares at me straight in the eyes. He knows.

That night, I worked late. Reggie came into my office, closed the door the behind him; said nothing. We were alone in the building, and we both knew it. I had been thinking about Reggie all day; about our stares, our unspoken cruising. He wasted no time in unzipping his pants, pulling out his member, and brining it up against my face.

“You knew what to do,” he said. “And you’ll love it.”

He said nothing more. I knew what had to be done. I got on my knees and performed the first blow job of my life. And I loved it.

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My cell phone is ringing, incessantly. Each time voice mail picks it up, whoever it is that’s calling hangs up and calls again. I have counted the number of calls; ten times so far. I will not answer the cell phone; I left it in the bathroom, and I’m not moving out of bed. Now the house phone is ringing; it is next to my pillow, so I answer. It’s Anne. Her voice is shrieking; I hear terror in it. Not like Anne; not like cool passionless Anne. “Don’t hang up on me again” she says. “Don’t you ever hang up on me again. Stay awake.” Funny, I don’t remember hanging up on her. My memory is not what is used to be.

Celeste gets on the line. I can hear her voice on the other side of the phone. “Stay awake,” says Celeste. “Anne will be there soon. You have to stay awake.”

I fall asleep.

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“What did you see in that dog,” asks God, incredulously. “He was raw nerves, vicious, uncontrollable. Where was the attraction?”

I know God. Yet I would risk my life for that dog. That same night, that very same night I blew Reggie at the office, I decided to take Jack for a walk around the block. My closest neighbor, fat man, owned a vicious dog named Doggo. Doggo weighed 200 pounds and he was half sled dog, half Doberman, and all monster. Those beasts were quite popular in the early eighties. I did not particularly care for the dog nor his owner, fat man. He was a coarse man with rough manners, dirty fingernails and cigar stained teeth. He kept all his curtains and shades open, and had the charming habit of running around the house shirtless and without trousers, exposing his breast size nipples and doughy white stomach. Since his house was in back of mine, and we had no other neighbors, I always assumed that his state of undress was meant for my benefit. Fat man usually tried to engage me in conversation whenever I was out walking Jack, but I would never get past saying “hello,” or “nice weather,” to which he would always answer, “mighty nice, sure is mighty nice.” He would chomp on his cigar as his eyes obviously focused on me, south of my belt buckle. Fat man gave me the creeps.

I detested fat man, but Jack despised him even more. Jack snarled feverishly whenever he saw fat man or Doggo. Two weeks earlier, Jack even lunged at Doggo and his owner, but fortunately the leash on his collar choked him before he could actually bite them. “I’m so sorry,” I said to fat man. “Mighty nice,” he said, staring in the usual direction of my crotch area. “Mighty nice.”

So the night I blew Reggie at the office, the night I came home feeling like shit and not knowing what I was (or not wanting to admit), I decided to take Jack for a walk, the customary route, right towards fat man’s house. As we approached fat man’s door, Jack gave his obligatory bark at Doggo, and I expected to hear Doggo’s customary rough reply. Surprisingly, Doggo made not a noise. Instead, he rushed out from his house, ears pinned back, tail down, teeth exposed. Fat man had unintentionally or purposely left his front door wide open. Doggo headed directly towards Jack. I started hallucinating out of fear, I imagined Doggo would rip Jack and me alive; I even thought I heard fat man yell out “Kill Him! Kill Him!” Jack tried to jump into my arms, but I was too slow to react. Doggo reached us before I could reach down to pick up Jack. The wolf beast pinned Jack down, with one paw, bit him in the ear, drew blood, and proceeded to hump him from behind. Jack wailed as I picked him up. By that time, after Doggo had made partial penetration, fat man came and pulled his monster back.

“Sorry,” said Doggo’s owner. “I guess he just got away from me.”

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The dream stops here, for now, for this instance when I am half awake and partly in death, grasping for life, with soiled pants and a headache that will never end. I believe I am conscious, and I remember calling Anne. I am waiting for her to arrive, to rescue me, to mother and nurture me as usual. But this time I may have done it; this time it may not be salvageable. I think of Reggie. So many Reggies since North Carolina Reggie, so many men, and now I am not ok with it. Annie, when will you get here? I fall asleep.

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“What did Anne do that night?” asks God. “After you gave your boss a blowjob, after you neighbor exposed himself, after Doggo bit and raped your precious Jack.”

Hell of a night. I wanted to tell Anne all about it, and wanted her to know nothing at the same time. She arrived home at 2 A.M in the morning, after having resuscitated a vegetable gommer (get out of my emergency room), and putting him on life support. She was cheerful as usual, but she wanted to go straight to bed that night. She was tired from having been on call.

“So you didn’t tell her about the night’s events?”

That bitch didn’t even notice that Jack had been bitten. The next day she woke up at 6 am, and went to work for the entire weekend. Serves her right I sucked Reggie’s cock. Anyway, I enjoyed my solitude with Jack.

God clears his throats. He is reviewing his notes. He wants me to say something else, to add fuel to his fire, but I won’t play his game. He adjusts those damn glasses of his again, and scratches those yeast infected toes once more. God disgusts me, even if he is my psychoanalyst. I can do better than him I think to myself.

“Go on,” says God after he is done taking his god-dam notes. “Tell me more about Reggie.”

I search my memories. All the time I am focusing on the man across the street, even in and out of my dreams, my drug induced stupor, I can see hairy man across the street and he is holding his cock up high. I think I’m in love. I decide to talk to God instead. Tell him about North Carolina Reggie.

One time Reggie asked me to join him for dinner with a client. “It’s going to be good,” he said. “He’s thinking about selling his business, and I want to talk to him before any of the other sharks gets a bite into him. We’ll have a few beers, talk a little ball, and then wrap it up with a bid for his business. What do you say?”

It was a rhetorical question. I was supposed to say “sure;” no questions; tell me where and when and I’ll be there. But my little Jack, gnarly face, was waiting for me at home. Anne was on call that night, and I knew Jack needed me. Like an idiot, I told Reggie I could not join the business dinner.

“Why not?”

I told him. Told him about my love affair with a dog named Jack. Of course Reggie tried to convince me that I was making a big mistake passing on this client dinner.

“You are a strange fellow,” said Reggie. Maybe he was right.

Reggie unbuttoned the sleeves of his shirt, and rolled them up. He carefully put away his cufflinks, while I leered over his hairy arms. Reggie caught me looking, but he said nothing.

“You are a strange fellow,” he repeated.

I blew Reggie again that night. Tasted his sweet masculine cock in my mouth.

I rushed home to be with my dog, and Reggie went to the client dinner without me. We got the business anyway, my absence notwithstanding. Jack got to spend the night on my lap.

God does not look happy, and I am angry at him for this. You are supposed to be impartial, God, you are supposed to be all knowing and forgiving. But God does not know the rules.

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The doorbell is ringing. I can hear Anne and the kids at the front door, but I am too lazy, too drugged up to answer. Let her use her keys, that’s the reason I gave them to her; so that she could save me from my dreams and my suicide attempts.

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“We need to fast-forward this,” says God. I can hear Anne’s car in my driveway. In my dreams it sounds like the stream that crossed our back yard in North Carolina, beyond fat man’s land, but in my half awake state I know that it is Anne’s lesbian Subaru. It rolls gently on my recently paved bricked driveway, a pretentiousness I put down solely for the benefit of my Bethesda neighbors, the same snobs I tired to impress by mowing my lawn before suicide. The children are getting out of the car, slamming the door as usual, the snap of which wakes me up, as usual. I hear the key at the door, but the drugs won’t let me wake up. I fall quickly back to sleep.

“You don’t have much time left.” Says God, “Our hour is almost up. We need to wrap this thing up quickly. So tell me, eventually, what happened with you and Anne?”

Eventually? I wish I could kill this word.

Eventually – I tell God -- eventually, Anne and I moved to Washington DC, and had two children of our own, and they are now knocking at the door.

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Flying to New Mexico

Flying to New Mexico

I loath the airplane motor,
insisting in reminding me that I’m flying to New Mexico,
where we set up house as “us,” but there is no more us;
to that dry aridness,
so thick that it watered my forehead
every time I stepped into our back yard;
but you rushed to me, always,
with your green cotton towel, and cleansed me while cooing,
“you are my sweet sweat lover;”
which sounds funny now, because, I never sweat,
except still-now, when I breathe this air.

I squirm inside this airplane,
white-knuckling the armrest,
wishing the stewardess would drop dead,
with her peanuts and soft drinks,
and “Lift your seatbacks!” and “Clear the aisles!”
intruding my half-wake, half-sleep memories
of your hairy chest, shirtless, wiry and lean,
moving tub-sized rocks in our red sands garden,
and I called out to you, “watch the cactus Peter!,”
because, I’ll pull no more thorns from the palm of your hand,
and you gave me that stubborn grin,
which I always loathed,
as you never did get that chipped tooth fixed;
and I called you careless and handsome, and you said,
“Ernesto still-now, you are my sweet sweat lover”

I feel the airplane landing,
caught in the wicked mountain breeze
that always bathed our back yard,
and once it even knocked me into your sinewy arms,
but now it barely keeps pace with this airplane,
and I sweat as I hear the motor whisper:
“there is no us, there is no us, there is no we;”
and I cover my ears,
as the noise is insufferably loud,
and the stewardess says, “Prepare for landing!”
and the passengers quickly arrange their bags and coats,
ready to depart;
but all I’m doing is standing in the aisle,
still-now thinking how some day soon
I’ll learn to let your memories go,
let it vanish from my head, like sweat that dries,
fading insufferably slow, softly,
leaving me, cleansing and marking me.

Chupapito

Cocksucker


I apologized,
when I left her.
For we had been
the American Yuppie Dream.
Two incomes, no children. No love.

I appeased,
when we settled,
for too much money.
Her forgiveness I seek,
her permission to be
what I know I should be.

I am 40,
and we had been. . .
A lifetime, a union.
As friends, as lovers.
As husband and wife.

I regret, when I hear,
what she calls me today.
“Cocksucker,” I am branded.
A man who wants Dick.

Together 15 years,
And now these tears. . .
In relief or disbelief?
At what was, what is. . .
At wondering if I have missed. . .


A lifetime.