Cubop City Blues (11 page)

MELODRAMA

Y
ou are in love. You seek (and find) your lover in all that surrounds you—the pens and pencils that blossom like spiny flowers from the cup on your desk; the faint buzz of the printer in harmony with the hum of the city; that sheet on which your mother embroidered fantails once. If you eat a strawberry, it is the lover's lips you are biting; if you inadvertently brush against a bare arm on the subway it is your lover's skin you feel. At dusk it is the lover's voice you hear coming from the radio and her smell, attar of musk and moss, that wakes you at midnight. Her breath is your breath, her moans your moans. All love is erasure, the bicycle you ride to her neighborhood. Then you realize she's not there but on the other side of town. Every mirror gives you back a shadow.

It is not a dream. Beyond the window of your study is a field overlooking the sea; you watch yellow flowers bend with the wind. You'd like to be on one of those sailboats that come and go with amazing grace. From the small cottage on the hill she comes down to you. She wears a stern look like an executioner puts on when coming to meet his victim. You are sitting on the grass with your knees drawn to your chest, the sun warming your body, your mind liberated—momentarily—from duty and ambition. She stands over you and blocks the sun and suddenly a shiver runs through you. You ask her to sit and she refuses, comes straight to the truth. She no longer loves you and is leaving, going home. No, no, you say, we'll work it out. After your entreaties fail, your strategy changes to feigned anger. You stand, loom over her, and cry out, calling her thankless and duplicitous, a liar, a witch, but the anger is shallow, lacking self-preservation to give it solidity, and soon it turns to weeping. Why? you ask, and the question becomes a demand. Anger again, then the tear floods and sigh tempests. Ah, melodrama!

You go inside the house, walk out, then go inside again. What to do? To do what? Standing at the door to the bedroom, you watch her pack all her white dresses, her blue jeans, her work boots, books, CDs. But how will she get them to the road? You will not give her your car, you will not lend her your wheelbarrow or the donkey cart or the burlap sacks in which once you carried coconuts. All the time she's been avoiding your sight, and when she finally looks at you, her eyes have no fire in them, only disdain. You try a rational approach. That, too, is flimsy, without the pillars of indifference to secure it: You ask in a kind and measured tone for an explanation. She is almost finished packing and is rifling through the drawers in search of a last article to put into the suitcase. This is her story and she knows it. There is a splotch of red on her neck where yesterday a bee stung her. What kind of bee is it that would change her so irrevocably? Love is a balloon, she says without speaking. At first it is full to bursting with warm air. As the air cools it escapes. In time the balloon deflates and falls to the ground, a despicable flat piece of red latex. But your toes, you cry, your lips, the slope of your belly, and you smoke an imaginary cigarette, have an imaginary drink in a poorly lit bar in an outer borough of Cubop City, where nothing ever happens and one bolero follows the next forever through dusk. Later that night you sit at the edge of the bed and wonder how you will tolerate the emptiness that has taken residence inside the house and sits on your chair speaking a language in reverse. Amardolem, ha!

MR. HANDLEBAR

T
he man with the handlebar mustache appears at the door holding a dead fish, a large brown grouper with bulging milky eyes. He tells Angel the fish is good and fresh, and with that he enters the apartment and sets the fish down on the table. Flap! There is no Amanda this time. Angel takes the grouper to the kitchen and cleans it. Holding the curved scaling knife in his hand, he thinks that if there was a time to get back at his attacker, it is now. If only he lived in the Midwest, Mr. Handlebar would not come to him with a grouper. Angel would not be cleaning it and he'd not be tempted to strike Handlebar with the scaling knife. If this were the Midwest, he'd have brought corn or apples. He wouldn't have known about groupers, let alone how to catch one.

The man with the handlebar mustache goes to the refrigerator, takes a beer, and sits at the table. He is eager to befriend Angel and asks about his woman. There is no woman, Angel says. A fulsome necromancer, Handlebar insists. Angel tries to smile but his lips don't spread, his teeth don't show.

What Angel doesn't say to this man is that he broke up with Amanda just over a year ago. It was nothing in particular. There was arguing and recrimination and broken promises and betrayals. She claimed he was a political brute. He called her a red menace and an antipapist. Just to irk her he went to church, told her it was comforting. She yelled that that was a deal breaker, whatever that meant. You talk to the dead, he tried arguing back. I don't go around molesting children. Huh? he said. Priests, she said, you know, then locked herself in the bathroom. Some nights it was him watching television or her communicating with her spirits. Then things grew quiet between them. It was the quiet of desolation. The desolation became indifference and the indifference led to Amanda one day walking out. Among her last words to him were, The man with the handlebar mustache will come back into your life. Angel didn't pay attention. He was a wreck on the shoals of self-pity.

There he is, drinking Angel's beer. For a moment he wishes Amanda were back. She would know what to do. He cleans the fish and rubs the outside with mojo until the kitchen is redolent of garlic and lime. He hears Handlebar at the table smacking his lips after each sip of beer. Angel wills away his discomfort and dresses the grouper, stuffs sprigs of rosemary into the gills, covers it with aluminum foil, and puts it in the oven at 325° F. Then he opens a beer and sits across from Handlebar, who is, as is the habit with men of his ilk, twirling his mustache. He smiles, but the hair on his upper lip is so thick that only his two front teeth show, a large, happy rodent.

Did you try to kill me? Angel asks in a confrontational tone. My former lover, the necromancer and soothsayer in training, claims you did. Did you?

Handlebar does not change his expression. Instead of answering he takes a sip of his beer, then brings his tongue up and around to lick the foam off his mustache. In the blink of an eye he's gone from rodent to feline. Long straight hairs grow from his muzzle and his eyes are yellow.

Did you, Angel asks, knife someone at the corner of
Twentieth and Seventh?

Handlebar blinks slowly. He is still smiling.

Angel stares at him for a long time. Handlebar stares back, blinking those slow alligator blinks of his. Now he is a reptile with a long green snout and mouth lined with teeth. He could bite off Angel's head. Angel is growing concerned about the fish in the oven—what use is a burned grouper?—but he's determined to get an answer. Finally Handlebar speaks.

I am your hometown butcher.

What are you saying? I have no hometown.

Everyone does. Remember? La Habana, Sabana, Banana. I had sides of beef hanging on the shop windows and calf heads under them. Your mother would come in for boliche or palomilla or picadillo. I was an artist and meat was my medium. My shop smelled of blood and sinew. Better than a rose patch.

Angel doesn't remember going to a butcher shop with his mother. How does Handlebar know he's from Havana? If he is a butcher, why has he brought along a fish? And why doesn't he speak with an accent?

Would you like another beer? Angel asks. It's a chess game he's playing and Handlebar's a master.

Yes, Handlebar says without hesitation.

Angel gets two beers, checks on the fish, and by the time he returns to the table, Handlebar has turned into an amoeba, transparent and damp, with the handlebar mustache floating in the cytoplasm.

My ancestors came from passive blubbery, he says. And you, my child, he adds like a priestly protozoan, what is your story?

I want to know if you tried to kill me.

I am a master with the knife, says Handlebar. If I'd wanted to kill you, I would know precisely where to strike.

But you are here, Angel says, sounding shrill.

Because I am not there.

Who did it then? Why did you come to my home?

Handlebar raises his wet, goopy hands and shrugs his shoulders.

Amanda sent me. She gave me the fish, he says, slurping the beer.

Angel can see the liquid dissolve into the cytoplasm. He has nothing to say. There's a wall between him and everything he thought had been real. Nothing in his life has connection to anything else. His life is an Aristotelian failure. Then he smells the fish cooking. At least there is that. Fish appears, is cleaned and dressed, put into the oven, watched over, and after an hour, fish is ready. Progression. Forward movement in time and all the events sequenced. Life should be a recipe. He opens the oven and pulls out the grouper. It is magnificent, golden and crisp on the outside, and when he cuts into it, it lets off a cloud of steam, a sure sign that it has remained moist on the inside. He can smell the ocean coming out of the pan and the earth, too.

When he goes back to the living room, he sees a moist trail leading to the door. Handlebar has left, without saying good-bye, without even finishing his beer. Angel returns to the kitchen, serves himself a large chunk of the grouper, and spoons pan drippings over it, topping everything with several slices of tomato and onion. He opens a bottle of white wine he's kept in the refrigerator and sits at the table. Momentarily he forgets about Handlebar and Amanda and the knifing. He begins slowly, tasting every bite. Then, suddenly, he tears large chunks of the flesh with his hands and stuffs them into his mouth. He eats like a barbarian. He eats like tomorrow never comes. It doesn't.

WAR OF
THE WORLDS

S
omehow Angel managed to get it all: the three-bedroom house with flower beds in the back, the sweet wife all smiles and tenderness, two teenage daughters, sunlight gleaming off their auburn hair and eager eyes. They lived in a suburban development at the edge of a forest. Beyond the backyard were tall oaks and pines, a shadowy place where deer sometimes gathered and where he occasionally saw an angry-looking stray dog come out of the shadows to nose around the grass and piss on the flowers. He'd go back there to get away from the family and smoke cigarettes. He came from the heat and sun of the tropics, and he never felt comfortable in the forest, but it was his only escape other than work. The ground was damp and musty and the canopy pressed down on him. Large wolf spiders looked lethal and purple beetles stuck to the underside of leaves, dropping on his shirt as he walked under them. Once he spied an insect that had huge pincers in the back. It rested on a fallen log, and when he poked it with a stick, the thing flew straight at his face. That's what you get for going into the forest primeval, he said to himself afterward, drinking a whiskey to calm his nerves.

A few days later as he smoked his cigarettes a safe distance from the woods, he noticed a group of airplanes over the trees. They were propeller types, B-17s and B-24s, flying in battle formation. He called his daughters outside and said, Look, girls, they're going to war. They ran around the yard yelling, War, war, and his wife, hearing the commotion, came outside and said, What war? He shrugged and smoked more cigarettes.

This happened over the next few days. At first, whenever they heard the noise of the engines, they rushed outside and marveled that there could be so many planes on this earth. They pointed to their insignia. They waved at them. One of the girls thought she saw a pilot waving back. He has a mustache, she said, and a white bandana flapping in the wind. Angel thought of Errol Flynn and smiled. It was war. His wife bought a big American flag and unfurled it whenever the planes passed over, claiming the boys needed all the support they could get. They flew in V-formation during the day and at night, and the family cheered loudly. Go get 'em, boys. Give 'em hell!

After two weeks they couldn't sleep because the engine roar made their sternums rattle; they couldn't have dinner without the windows trembling and his wife's ceramic figurines dancing dangerously close to the edge of the mantel. Three fell to the floor and shattered, including a Lladró shepherd girl that had belonged to her Spanish grandmother.

Angel developed ticks—a continual blinking and involuntary movements of his limbs that kept him from concentrating. From frustration he yelled at his wife, who yelled at his daughters, who yelled at him, the circle broken only during those few hours when the planes weren't flying. The situation became intolerable. He started spending more time away from home. He sat in his car every night after work, the windows rolled up, the radio off, listening to nothing but the traffic on the interstate whooshing by. He joined some of his coworkers at a local bar where drinks were cheap and didn't come home until midnight when he knew his wife would be asleep from the effects of booze and sleeping pills.

Where were those planes going? What retro war had begun and was spreading its poison into his family life? Every morning he woke to his haggard wife, his harping daughters, and that stray dog that came out of the woods. He thought of buying a gun and shooting it. Boom, right between the eyes. Work suddenly became a solace, the bar a sought-after refuge where he could converse about those things he cared about—sports, women, movies—never the war, since none of his friends brought it up. Come to think of it, it seemed as if only his family was afflicted, only his house that had vintage planes flying over it and dread filling up its rooms like thick, impassable mucilage.

It was at the bar that he met Nancy with the size 11 feet. She wore her blonde hair short and had a long neck exacerbated by a small round face. His friends were arguing about NASCAR racing when he noticed her sitting next to him eating a hot dog. There was a spot of mustard on her cheek. Finally, he took a bar napkin, said, Excuse me, and wiped it off. Instead of telling him off as he expected, she turned red, like paprika, like a bullfighter's muleta flashing in the bullring. She patted both cheeks nervously, then asked if it was all gone. Yes, he said. Don't worry. Mustard is like cream cheese. It gets on everything. He bought her a cosmopolitan. They talked about nothing in particular and that was that. She was there the next night, sitting on the other side of the U-shaped bar eating a burger, no mustard this time. He took his drink and moved next to her and said something stupid like, I like the view better from here. He bought her two cosmopolitans and he had two martinis, dry, straight up with olives, enough drink to loosen them up. She told him about her lousy job at a nonprofit organization. Nonprofits don't make money, that's their problem, she said. I'm looking for a career change. He tried not to be sardonic and described his job at the factory assembling scuba oxygen valves.

It's a big responsibility, he said. Someone could drown or die from nitrogen narcosis if the valve isn't calibrated just right. It's a terrible death; your blood vessels fill with gas and your blood boils. High stress, he emphasized, fishing in his glass for an olive. But after ten years it's second nature. It sounded like he was boasting but he wasn't. The truth was that the job kept him out of the house for eight hours a day. He didn't mention the war, though he was tempted. He could've talked to Nancy about anything that night. Instead they discussed politics, and for some reason they got into mercury pollution. He'd ordered fish and chips. Before he knew it, it was midnight. He asked if she was going to be there the following night. She said she was going on a trip.

Next week, she said. I'll be here next week.

She was back the next week but she had changed. She wore new makeup that made her look vampish and a different hairdo, which fell asymmetrically down the left side of her head, and she was wearing a pink turtleneck that disguised her llama neck. From five thirty to eight o'clock they talked. They talked a tide of language, a storm of words. By eight thirty he'd had four drinks, enough to say, I'm attracted to you. She looked at him, eyes flattened by alcohol, and suggested they go to her place. I'll cook something up, she said.

They wound up in bed, had sex like vultures, and forgot about dinner. When he was done he turned over and saw outlined by the light coming through the window two white mounds rising from the end of the bed. He looked under the sheets and beheld the biggest feet he'd ever seen on a woman, the Popocatepetl and Ixtaccihuatl of feet. They were so large they could only be seen in sections—the heel, the arch, the instep, the toes. He became so excited he slithered onto her again. He roared, he bellowed, he wailed, he whinnied, he honked and chirped and hooted and clonked. Nancy was a turbulent ocean beneath him, a hurricane above him, but it was her feet that captivated him, not the dirty words she whispered in his ear or the rhythmic gyrations of her pelvis. He had found it at last, the place beyond heaven, the protoparadise, and it was her feet that led him there.

They stopped the pretense of meeting at the bar and went to her apartment every night after work, where they made the bed shake and the walls vibrate and the ceiling lift off the crossbeams. He went home punctually at midnight. He wanted his wife to think he was still spending his time at the bar with his friends, but it was too late for that. The war had gotten worse. More planes, more noise. He could hear the whine of Spitfires, P-51s, and Messerschmitts dogfighting over the house, their engines strained to the limit as they swooped and looped over and around one another, machine guns blazing and the
ack-ack
of antiaircraft fire making fiery blossoms in midair. Where did it all come from? In the living room was his wife sitting on the sofa, silent, murderous. Not even the sleeping pills were working. Her eyes were ablaze with hatred and exhaustion, her skin aglow with outrage. I know what you're up to, she said. Who's the slut? Then she went off to the guest room and locked the door behind her. The girls were already asleep, or in what passed for sleep in their house, and he was glad not to witness their twitching faces, their bloodshot eyes. He went straight to bed and left the house in the morning before anyone else was up. It was easier that way.

The following night as he pulled into the driveway he noticed that a suburban quiet had returned to the house. He looked up into the night sky and all he could see was stars, millions of them, dotting the darkness. He got out of the car and rushed into the house. All the furniture was gone. Even the curtains had been pulled from their runners, leaving the rods dangling obliquely across the windows.

Upstairs there was only the king-size bed they'd bought the previous year and his dresser. On it was a note that read simply, I surrender. You win. Win what? he asked himself, this gravelike silence, this emptiness? He moved from room to room, gradually sinking deeper into the quicksand of melancholia. In his daughters' room he finally leaned his back against the wall and looked to the ceiling, wanting to cry so that the sadness of the world would evaporate. He couldn't. The sadness grew dense inside him. He thought of the stray, that hound stalking his backyard. He thought of his girls being raised by a strange man in a checkered shirt and suspenders, an electrical engineer like his wife's father, making much more money than Angel ever would. For a moment he felt nostalgic about the war and wished for the planes to return. I'll get rid of that dog, I promise, he imagined telling his wife. It was madness.

He left the empty house and returned to Nancy's apartment. He knocked a number of times before she answered. She stood before him in a bathrobe, her hair disheveled, her neck rising out of her torso like a jet of flesh and bone on top of which floated her small round head like a doll's. Behind her the figure of a man flashed from the bedroom to the bathroom and shut the door. He pushed her aside and rushed into the apartment, ready to rip the guy apart with his bare hands and choke that long neck of hers until she turned blue in the face. A part of him remained cool, however, and that part prevailed. He thought, Why should I kill this woman for whom I have no wish to be with beyond an hour or two, dimmed by alcohol, driven only by a voyeur's desire to behold her feet?

Nancy's postcoital conversation was limited to the nonprofit sector. God, she was dull. And now she had someone else in the house. His rage was gone and he felt pity for the man and pitied himself as well. Nancy yelled that she was going to call the cops if he didn't leave immediately. She picked up a vase from her bookcase and made as if she was going to throw it at him. He looked down at her feet, long and narrow as Roman triremes on the wine-dark sea of the rug, and found them ridiculous. That was okay. To the victor belong the spoils, he said to himself. He turned on his heels and went downstairs to the parking lot. The war had begun again. Only this time it was on the ground. Soldiers with bayonets fixed to their rifles ran between the cars in the parking lot, and the flash and roar of artillery approached ineluctably in Angel's direction.