Free Food for Millionaires (61 page)

“Phoning Tina.”

“Oh.”

How the hell did her mother have a miscarriage when her father had a vasectomy? Casey wondered. She took a breath.

“Did you have sex with someone else besides Daddy?” Casey asked. Had she actually formed those words in her brain, then uttered them out loud?

“Yes,” Leah answered.

Casey looked up at the ceiling.

Leah did not feel any better from unburdening this truth to her daughter. Her wish to die only resurfaced.

“I sinned against God.”

Casey shook her head. “He got you pregnant, then.”

“I didn’t know I was—”

“How could you not know?”

“My periods don’t come every month.”

“Daddy said he had a vasectomy.”

“He told you?”

“He thought I knew.”

“I deserve to die.”

Casey paused a little before speaking and made sure to speak as calmly as possible.

“I don’t care who you fuck exactly. I’m just a little surprised, that’s all.”

Leah closed her eyes. Her sin had to be punished. Her husband would leave her. Perhaps he had left her already. Everyone should know what a horrible person she was.

Casey turned to check the door. It remained closed.

“Daddy thinks it might have been his baby. Dr. Shim told him that vasectomies are not a hundred percent.”

“I sinned. Against God. Against my husband. Against myself.”

“Do you still love this other guy? Are you still seeing him?”

“No, no. But I sinned.”

“Cut the sin talk. Just tell me what happened and how it happened. Explain very carefully.”

Leah told her about the professor. The chicken pox, the choir rehearsal, the diner, and the sex in the car parked by the subway station.

“Wait a second. The choir director? Mr. Jun?” Casey made a face.

“No. Professor Hong, he’s new. Mr. Jun retired. The professor is also a voice coach. And he is a composer. He’s writing a song cycle that will have a world premiere at a famous music school.” Leah rattled off the impressive things she knew about the choir director. “He’s coached opera singers from the Metropolitan—”

“Okay. Whatever. Why did you get in the backseat with him?”

“I didn’t know he wanted to have sex.”

“Did you think he wanted to hold hands and sing you songs?”

Leah sobbed, and Casey grew silent.

“But I must have made him have this desire for me. I didn’t know how to make it stop. I told him no, but he said I didn’t understand. He said he loved me.”

“You said no?”

Leah nodded. “I asked him to please. Please, no. I begged him. To please. . . but he couldn’t. A man can’t stop when he’s excited. I knew that. Everyone had told me that when I was a girl. I should have—”

“You said no.” Casey rolled her eyes. She inhaled deeply. “But he did it anyway. Men are not all the same. Some men can stop and will stop. You know nothing about men.” She said it quietly, without any harshness in her voice. “Nothing. You’ve slept with one man in your life. No, technically two, but I think you were date-raped, so just one.” But her mother didn’t know what that meant.

“It wasn’t some sin for you to take him to a diner. He was hungry, and you had a car. You would have never let anyone be hungry. He was your choir director, and you had a crush on him. Big fucking deal. He knew you were having a crush on him, because he’s been around, and he took advantage of you. He’s an asshole.”

He’d said she was beautiful. That he wanted her to come live with him. It had given her pleasure to think about running away, even though she’d felt awful about that, too.

“What happened between you and the choir director was hardly consensual. Did you want to sleep with him?”

“No. I. . . ,” Leah stammered. “You have to believe me. I wanted him to be interested in me. I took him to the restaurant. I really enjoyed myself during the dinner.”

“You’re allowed to have dinner with someone you like. That’s not the same thing as letting a man fuck you afterwards just because he wants to.”

“I want to die. Please let me die!” Leah began to scream.

“Stop it! Stop it. Calm down.”

Leah opened her eyes wide. She became silent.

“I’m very sorry this happened to you. I really am. But you’re not going to die. You can’t.”

“Suicide is a sin,” Leah said softly. “I can’t kill myself.”

“I’m glad you feel that way.”

Leah was still crying.

“Listen. You can’t tell Daddy. You’re not going to tell him what happened. There’s no point. Trust me. It would kill him, and why? So you can have a clear conscience? You had a crush. And you were raped. It’s not your fault. I’m not mad at you. I’m not. I don’t think less of you.” Casey stroked her mother’s white hair, feeling the awkwardness of having to comfort her mother. “It’s going to be okay.” Her mother was less experienced than most American teenage girls. Didn’t she talk to her friends in her
geh
about sex? About men? Didn’t they at least complain about husbands? Couldn’t sex have come up?

By having slept with nearly a dozen men, Casey had developed theories about sex; she had her own sexual point of view. She was interested in making love, in being a good lover, sometimes just fucking. Sex was often bracketed by both humiliation and flattery; awkwardness and beauty were found in the spaces between. She had learned that her body had value to herself and others. Jay had been someone she had trusted with her body. Unu was someone who had deserved that trust, and she had blown it by fucking Hugh. Hugh had been an irrational lay. She had not loved him, and he had not loved her. It was questionable if Hugh was capable of loving someone for a sustained period. Experience was a funny thing: The downside of knowing things intimately was that she had also, in the process, degraded sex. She was still lost. What was sex for? She’d had good sex, bad sex, losses, and conquests. Stretches without. But more importantly, if she were to take off her clothes again and agree to another round, why? And whom would she love?

Her own mother had gotten pregnant after she had been with the choir director. If it wasn’t rape, it was certainly some kind of molesting—Casey hesitated at the words, because they made her forty-three-year-old mother sound dumb.

“It was my fault,” Leah burbled through her tears. “It was my fault. I have to confess my sin. Repent,” she cried.

Casey checked the door again.

“Please don’t do that. Please don’t hurt my father.” She touched her mother’s head. “I have never asked you for anything like this.”

Leah continued to sob. No one came to the door.

Tina offered to come to New York right away, but Joseph said it was okay. He explained that she’d had a spontaneous miscarriage, but the D&C had gone fine. The nurse said so.

“
Umma
can come home tonight. It was just a big shock for all of us. And Casey is here.”

“Casey is there?”

“Yes. She came a while ago. It’s easier for her to take care of
Umma
because she’s in New York. You have to think about Timothy and your husband. Don’t worry. And Chul needs you to be there while he has finals. You said his grades are really important.”

“Yes, but if
Umma
is sick. . .” It would be wildly expensive for her to take the baby and go to New York again. Their budget was tight as it was. “I could try—”

“She’s okay, Tina. Elder Shim said that she’ll heal very soon from something like this. It’s not something very serious. You should stay in California.”

“But, Daddy—”

“Tina, you don’t have to do everything. I know how hard you’re working at home. Casey can help out, and I’ll take care of
Umma,
too. You don’t have to do everything, Tina. I’ll tell
Umma
that you wanted to come. She knows that.”

Tina nodded. He was trying to make sure that she didn’t feel bad about not being able to come. “I’ll call her at home, then. Later.”

“Okay, okay.”

“Bye, Daddy. Thank you for calling. Take care of yourself.”

“Okay, okay. You take care of yourself, too, Tina. Good care. You can’t get sick. Your family depends on you.”

As he approached Leah’s hospital room, Joseph saw the large group of women by her closed door. It took a minute for him to realize that the group was made up of some of the female elders and deaconesses from the hospitality committee and many of the female choir members. The professor was not there.

At the sight of Elder Han, the women flipped through their hymnals to find the right page of “Our God, Our Help in Ages Past.” They bowed.

“Waaah,”
he exclaimed, astonished by the large number. There were at least twenty-five women.

“Is she all right?” asked Mrs. Noh, the choir secretary.

“Yes. She had a miscarriage. She’ll be able to go home today.”

The women clicked their tongues. It was always a heartbreak to have a miscarriage. Many of them had experienced it themselves. Of course, it was not an illness, but it was terrible just the same.

“We didn’t want to knock on the door. In case she was sleeping.”

“Have you been waiting here all this time?”

“Just a few minutes. Maybe you can knock for us,” a choir member suggested.

Joseph nodded and knocked on the door himself. Casey called out to him, “Come in.”

He opened the door, and at that moment, the choir burst into song. A hush fell at the sound. People leaned out of open doors to listen, and the doctors and nurses stopped moving for a moment. Nurse Bulosan, who’d spoken to them earlier, stood still to sing along. She crossed herself.

The music filled the hall, and Leah began to sing. The church had come to her. It was Sunday night, when the choir members should have been with their families. How did the girls leave behind their children and husbands, with dinners unmade, houses left to clean, all to come and sing for her, a sinner?

Casey helped her mother to sit up a little. Leah sang through her tears: “Under the shadow of Thy throne, Thy saints have dwelt secure; sufficient is Thine arm alone, and our defense is sure.”

Leah turned her head and saw her husband standing by the door. His concern for her was so clear. He smiled at her, and she reached her hand toward his direction.

13
GIFT

O
N SATURDAY MORNING,
Unu caught the Metro-North to New Haven, then took a bus to Foxwoods with a hundred bucks of gambling money. Following his bookie’s advice, he’d taken no credit cards or ATM card with him, because the temptation to borrow on cash advances would be too great. By nighttime, he returned with exactly a hundred and thirty-two dollars in his money clip. The transit cost and a Subway sandwich had neatly erased his thirty-two percent gain. Six hours of travel time door-to-door, five hours of gambling, with net zero in the margins—finally, Unu was standing in front of his apartment door.

The key wouldn’t fit. There were only two keys on the metal ring with its yellow plastic fob from Lucky Bastard Lounge off I-95: one for his apartment and another for the mailbox. His bookie already had the Volvo key. Unu kept at the lock, but nothing doing. The Medeco dead bolt wouldn’t budge. Was he on the right floor? His door? At his feet, near the pile of newspapers he’d neglected to bring in earlier, a squiggly length of masking tape affixed a thick envelope to the hallway brown carpet. From the city marshal’s office. His name typed in blurry carbon. In it, he recognized the photocopies of the notice of eviction papers he’d been served several weeks before. Unu tossed the envelope on the floor with his keys.

George Ortiz was tying up stacks of magazines with twine in the basement. The regular weekday porter left the monthly recycling jobs for George, who did not mind organizing-type work. Tidy cinder blocks of glossy periodicals formed a low wall along the corridor connecting the laundry room to the back-door exit—the harvest of an evening’s labor. The elevator dinged its arrival. George’s handsome round face contorted with worry. He nodded hey to his friend.

“The city marshal came by. Hernando changed the locks,” George told him, volunteering all that he knew. “You okay?”

Unu nodded, more lost than angry.

“I didn’t know where you were. I didn’t know how to call you, man.”

George’s pool buddy, the only resident of the ninety-four-unit building who had ever invited him to hang out, had aged this past year—thin lines fanned around his dark eyes, a patch of gray had formed smack dab in the heart of his right part. Usually these Oriental guys looked ten years younger than white guys, but Unu looked older than his age. George had worried about his friend, so much so that he’d mentioned it to his wife, Kathleen, and she’d said in her usual patient manner, “George, honey bear. You are not responsible for everyone. He’ll tell you when he’s ready.” But in all this time, Unu had not mentioned why he didn’t have a job, why that girl Casey left without taking most of her stuff or coming back for it, or why he hadn’t paid rent in three months so that the management company had to throw his ass out. The super had told him this before working on the locks.

“I asked Hernando, and he didn’t know, either. . . how to reach you.”

“No, of course not. That’s all right,” Unu said. No one was responsible for this but himself.

George liked Unu’s reserved manner. The Korean was someone who’d be tagged as a quiet brother in George’s neighborhood in Spanish Harlem. It wasn’t as though Unu were shy, because the
hermano
talked, but it was obvious that he was preoccupied with some deep shit, and when you hung out with him, he’d ask you thoughtful questions about stuff you knew. He listened carefully to your opinions on landfills, salsa, and Catholicism. Unu believed in labor unions, while George called Unu naive about those organized thugs. You’d shoot a couple of games with him at Westside Billiards, drink a few bottles of beer, and it wouldn’t hit you until you were on your way home that you’d done all the talking while the two of you were together, and that no one so smart had ever listened to you so respectfully, and that time and attention were a kind of present that you couldn’t buy. Yeah, Unu was a brother who liked his privacy, but George did not mind that.

“You have a lawyer or something?”

Unu shook his head no. He brushed his right hand through his hair, long overdue for a cut.

“You got a place to stay?”

Again, Unu did not answer. Because he didn’t know.

George felt terrible for him. But this guy had gone to college. Besides, weren’t Koreans rich compared with the people from Puerto Rico? They owned all those giant bodegas with neat-ass piles of oranges, and they hired Mexicans and Guatemalans to peel potatoes for their salad bars and break down the endless stream of boxes in the smelly basements. Their women owned nail salons and wore diamond rings the size of your eye. Frankly, he couldn’t remember who owned all those dry cleaners before the Koreans came and took over that job. And it had happened so fast. They had taken over—fast. The folks from P.R. were doing all right, but they weren’t like the Cubans, who were more successful like the Koreans. What was the matter with him? The brother was a real nice guy. But he didn’t have a single friend who could take him in for the night? I mean, really, c’mon now. If Kathleen threw his ass out, he could call up half a dozen buddies or ask his sister if he could sleep on her sofa. But no matter, the
hermano
was not talking. He looked as if someone had hit him, but there was no blood.

“I mean. . .” George hesitated.
“No le hagas a otros lo que no quieres que te hagan a ti.”
His
abuela
Liliana had taught him that as a boy. He could see his grandmother standing by the counter, chopping onions for her
asopao
—her deep-set brown eyes watery behind a pair of bifocals strung on a rope chain, her brown cheeks drooping with age for as long as he had known her, the small mouth that expressed her every feeling. When she spoke to you about something serious, she’d finger the rosaries blessed by the pope kept in the pocket of her yellow apron, as if she were trying to keep God in her hands. If George had nowhere to go, he’d hope that Unu wouldn’t turn him out. “You can stay at my house. Kathleen would be cool with that.”

Unu tried to smile.

“I’ll call her. Right now. You know, get the boss’s permission.” George chuckled.

“No, George, that’s okay. I’m fine. I’ll. . . I’ll call someone. I have a place to stay.” Unu tried to smile with assurance, as though he had people waiting for his call.

But there was no one. Especially at this hour. He couldn’t even imagine dialing up his bookie or any of his frat brothers, who’d surely have put him up. How could he explain this? If he called his parents, it would kill his father, and worse, his mother would fly in from Texas on the next flight and bail him out. Probably make him return to Dallas. He was divorced, unemployed, in hock, and evicted.

The doubt streaking across his face was hardly lost on George.

“It’s late, man, you know? To call people. Kathleen would understand. I don’t have to call her. She’ll be asleep anyway. You can even go in the morning if you feel more comfortable.” He knew Unu was fronting like he had places to go and money in his pocket. Like I was fucking born yesterday, he thought.

The truth was that the offer was tempting for Unu. But for some reason, he didn’t want George’s wife—a second-grade teacher from Far Rockaway, a woman George worshiped—to think poorly of him, even though he had never met Kathleen Leary Ortiz. When George talked about his smart wife, Unu felt wishful for a Kathleen of his own who might rescue him from his troubles, too.

George pulled up a metal folding chair splattered with dried paint. He pointed at it with his chin. Unu sat down.

“Thank you.” Unu covered his mouth with his hands and opened his eyes to wake himself up.

The scent of detergent and fabric softener drifted toward the two men from the building’s laundry room, somewhat masking the odor of the garbage bags. George continued to tie up the magazines, keeping an eye on his friend, who remained sitting.

The bright basement, lit by rows of naked white lightbulbs, felt cool and light. There had been many different climates in one day: the hot August morning, the air-conditioned train and bus ride, the seasonless casino with its make-believe daylight and filtered cold air, the muggy city evening, and now, a silent cool basement. Unu shivered a little in his black polo shirt and chinos.

Everything he owned was behind a strange lock: the closetful of suits he’d bought from all over—custom-made suits from Itaewon tailors from the time he was married, several from Century 21 that Casey had selected, a couple from Brooks Brothers that his mother had gotten for him after his first job in the city. His suit size hadn’t changed in a dozen years. He tried to catalog his possessions, but he could hardly recall what he owned. All of his furniture had been rented. He’d never wear those suits again. It was difficult to imagine returning to a finance job, putting on a tie—all to convince a money manager that his stock call was right—for a six-figure bonus that had never meant very much to him.

And there was that pile of laundry. He’d washed a large load of whites two nights before. After drying them, he’d dumped the snowy pile onto his rented sofa. He’d meant to fold the wash since then, but for some reason, the sight of it had comforted him—the cleanness of it; or perhaps because he’d done something that needed doing, some evidence of labor for the day—so he’d left it alone. When he’d gotten dressed the previous mornings, he’d plucked out his white boxers and Hanes T-shirt from the pile, its size hardly diminishing. He would never see that load of wash again. Oddly, Unu felt its loss. Why was he able to remember that his boxers were Fruit of the Loom bought from Kmart or that there had been four white bath sheets, six washcloths, a set of queen sheets from Macy’s? He yearned to put his nose into a warm towel fresh from the dryer smelling of Tide. When he gave up his Rolex or his car, he had not minded very much, far less than he’d have thought he would. Unu had never wanted a fancy watch for his college graduation. It had been his father’s idea—a thing a Dartmouth graduate who worked on Wall Street would wear. His father was a kind man who had only wanted his son to have an emblem of arrival and belonging—some talisman of protection. But the watch had not been that.

“¿Oye, tienes hambre?”
George had finished with the magazines and had moved aside the glass bottles. “Man, I’m starving. You know.”

Unu got up and helped George transfer the bundles of magazines to the other side of the wall. George didn’t stop him from helping. Kathleen always let her shy dinner guests work in the kitchen. She’d tell them to wash the lettuce or slice the tomatoes, no different from instructing her second graders; it was good to keep busy, important to feel useful—she’d say. They finished moving the bundles in a few minutes.

“I got meat loaf sandwiches in my cooler. I don’t know why she complains about this”—George patted the curve of his belly rising above his brown workman belt—“when she’ll go on and pack me like three sandwiches to eat in the middle of the night. Makes no sense, right? Women.” He checked to see if Unu was smiling. He wasn’t. The
hermano
was very low, but it wasn’t like he had no reason. “C’mon, man, you should have dinner with me. Keep me company. What, Mr. College too good to hang out with the porter?” He winked at Unu.

“The porter is too good to hang out with a bum like me.”

“Man, you are feeling like shit.” George looked at Unu tenderly, put out his fist, and hit him lightly on the shoulder. “It’s gonna be okay. You’ll work it out. You will work it out.”

Unu nodded to be polite.

“So you want a sandwich or what?”

“No, George. But thank you, though. I really. . . really appreciate it.” Unu swallowed. “That’s very kind of you.”

George reached into his back pocket. He had at least two hundred in twenties and fifties and a thick packet of singles in his front pocket from the tips he’d made from the residents of 178 East Seventy-second St. “You got money?”

“I’m flush.” A hundred bucks wouldn’t cover a cheap motel in Manhattan.

“You sure?” George looked Unu square in the eye.

“Yeah.”

“What happened, man? I mean, I don’t mean to be nosy. You know, I respect your privacy, man, but—”

“It’s complicated, George,” he said, but it wasn’t really, was it? He’d gambled and lost a lot of money. And losses led to more.

“Was it that girl?” George believed that Unu had been doing well until he’d met that girl. In the beginning, she was okay, and he’d seemed happy, but then George saw her in that taxi with that Anglo. A woman cheating could fuck a man up. A few years back, a quiet guy from the neighborhood set himself on fire when his girlfriend slept with his best friend. “That stuck-up tall girl. Casey what’s-her-name.”

“Nothing to tell, George. Nothing to tell.” Unu closed the folding chair and returned it to the spot where George had taken it from. He turned back to his friend and raised his hand. The men slapped their open palms first, then shook hands heartily. George reached out his left hand and tapped Unu’s right arm.

“You going?”

Unu nodded. “You’re a good man, George. I got some calls to make.”

Unu walked away without turning back. Mercifully, the elevator car was still waiting so he wouldn’t have to stay in the basement a moment longer. His friend’s mentioning of Casey had cut him unexpectedly. It was near midnight.

David Greene answered the door. His feet were bare, but he was dressed in a white button-down shirt and jeans.

“Hey, it’s good to see you,” David said.

“I’m really sorry to bother you,” Unu said. There was no sign of his cousin in the living room. “But Ella said that it would be okay if I dropped by—”

“She’s coming right out. She was putting something in the oven right after you called.”

Unu’s large hands swung uncomfortably from side to side. The fingers on his right hand would occasionally tap against his right thigh like a keyboard. David had seen this before. In fact, from his prison writing students. He almost wished he had a cigarette to offer a man who did not know what to do with his hands. “Come on in. Please. I was just about to leave, but—”

“I ruined your night.”

“No. We just had some dinner, and we were both wide awake. Talking about the wedding.. . .”