one hot summer (6 page)

“
Chica,
you’re playing with fire and you know it.” Vivian was so livid her words were coming out in sputters. “What the hell are you doing, meeting your ex like that? Are you
loca
?”

Before I had a chance to reply, Anabel raised a finger to interrupt me. “You didn’t tell Ariel, did you?” she asked, ever practical.

Vivian, Anabel, and I were huddled around a tiny table at Starbucks in Coconut Grove, right next to Cocowalk. It was eleven the next morning after my lunch with Luther. I had called both of them and explained my need to meet with a single word:
Luther
. This wasn’t a conversation we could have on a speaker-phone conference call. I’m not sure which alarmed them more—the fact that I had seen Luther, or that I suggested we meet at Starbucks. They knew my strongly held opinion that no self-respecting Cuban would voluntarily drink the watered-down liquid Starbucks passes off as coffee and serves in cardboard cups.

We were sitting at one of the indoor tables, far away from the counter for as much privacy as possible. I chose Starbucks because it was doubtful we’d see anyone we knew there, but I certainly wanted to make sure no one overheard us just in case. Miami might be a city of three million people, but it was still a small town in many respects. The last thing I needed was for malicious ears to hear what I was saying.

When I had telephoned my friends Vivian told me she had a one o’clock court hearing downtown; Anabel said she had to pick up her triplets from playschool a few blocks away at twelve thirty. Starbucks might have been the heart of enemy territory but it was geographically central to all our needs. Also, there was parking nearby. There is no way to overemphasize the importance of parking in daily life in Miami. I knew individuals, especially on Miami Beach, who wouldn’t date anyone who didn’t have a parking space allotted to them by City Hall. It was too much trouble otherwise, with all the parking tickets and towing charges.

Anabel had heard me out so far, but now she put on her glasses. This meant she was serious. Anabel only put on her glasses in public when it was a matter of life and death.

“Margarita, have you thought through the implications of your meeting Luther?” Anabel asked in a gentle voice. I could tell from her tone that she was trying to give me the benefit of the doubt.

“He caught me by surprise,” I explained. “But when he asked to meet for lunch, it just seemed natural to accept.”

I looked at my two friends and felt a sudden rush of misery, knowing I was opening myself up to insult and criticism, both of which I deserved. I knew Vivian and Anabel would spare my feelings only to a point. One of the reasons our friendship had survived so long was because we were capable of brutal honesty with one another.

“It was almost as if I was waiting for him to call, actually,” I added.

This was too much for Vivian; she sighed in disgust.

“You’re so weak, Margarita,” she said. “You have a great life, a husband and a child. And now this gringo you haven’t heard from in about ten years picks up the phone and calls, and you go running to him. One call and you drop your drawers.”

“You’re such a slut, Margarita,” Anabel flatly concurred.

“I have
not
been to bed with him,” I sternly reminded them. I wasn’t about to be crucified for crimes I hadn’t committed.

“Not yet,” Vivian and Anabel said at the same time.

The three of us looked at each other and, despite the seriousness of the situation, howled with laughter. We knew each other too well, that’s for sure. I believed the reason none of us had ever been to therapy was because we had each other. Well, that and our innate Cuban distrust of going to a stranger for help when we were too arrogant to acknowledge we had any kind of flaw. God knows we probably could have used some help somewhere along the line.

Laughing like this broke the tension, and I felt less defensive.

“Really,
chicas,
help me out with this,” I said. “I need to talk about it and figure it out.”

Vivian leaped to cross-examination. “So you had lunch and nothing happened. Is that right?”

“It was all pretty innocent,” I answered. “He told me about the case he’s working. It’s a commercial litigation with—”

“Just the facts, ma’am,” Anabel interrupted. Neither Vivian nor I pointed out that her Joe Friday impression was pretty pathetic. She sounded like Ricky Ricardo tripping on acid. We would tell her, though, if she kept it up. “What about personal stuff? What did you talk about?”

“We really didn’t get into personal matters,” I said.

My answer didn’t convince them. Vivian and Anabel both frowned and inched their chairs closer to mine so they could watch my reactions in order to gauge the truthfulness of my replies.

“I promise,” I insisted. “We really didn’t talk about anything personal. I would tell you if we had.”

Vivian paused, reconsidering her approach. “How did you feel about him? Any vibes?”

It was a few seconds before I could speak.

“Yes, I did find him attractive,” I said. “Remember, I was thinking about marrying him at one point in my life.”

I took a sip of my lukewarm coffee and nearly gagged. Steaming hot it was barely tolerable, but tepid it was atrocious.

“To tell you the truth, he looks better than ever.” I then went on to describe Luther as best I could. I guess I went overboard because Vivian started to nod knowingly and make a clucking sound.

“You’re in heat,
chica,
” she said. “That gringo is in your system.”

“Well, he can’t be all bad,” Anabel said, “if he’s still willing to talk to you after the Elian fiasco.”

Anabel lowered her voice for that comment. Cuban exiles still felt like we were viewed as pariahs by most Americans. We were right-wing zealots and nut cases who went to extraordinary lengths to keep that boy from being reunited with his father. The whole thing had been incredibly painful and heartwrenching. The six-year-old boy had seen his mother drowned and eaten by sharks in the Florida Straits three days after the rickety motorboat they’d used to flee Cuba had capsized. Before she died she had placed the boy in an inner tube in a desperate hope that he might survive. On Thanksgiving Day he’d been picked up by a couple of fishermen and brought to the United States. The symbolism of his rescue wasn’t lost on anyone, especially Fidel Castro—after the seemingly miraculous rescue, Fidel demanded instantly that the boy be returned to Cuba. The whole thing erupted in a firestorm of publicity.

Elian had relatives in the U.S.—his great-uncle and the uncle’s wife and daughter. They took the boy in and gave him a home. Once press interest waned, Elian’s story would have been just another one of thousands had it not been for Castro’s personal involvement. Soon the whole thing was front-page news and then started the lawsuits, the allegations, the court orders.

Even before Elian, Cuban exiles had been perceived differently from other immigrants to America; rightly or wrongly, we enjoyed special immigration status and were able to bypass a lot of restrictions other groups faced in establishing residency. As a result, there was always resentment. During and after Elian, public opinion vilified and attacked Cubans in a way that truly shocked us. Not all Cuban exiles believed the boy should be kept in America, away from his father, but it was definitely a minority opinion. It didn’t matter what an individual thought, though—we were all tarred with the same brush.

The fact is, Americans never really understood the Cuban exiles’ side of the story. They didn’t want to hear about the fact that one and a half million Cubans had left the island, abandoning everything they knew and loved because of political persecution. For most exiles, it was unthinkable that a boy who succeeded in escaping should be ordered to return. Few in America wanted to consider what awaited Elian after he got back to Cuba. His life would change in very real ways—and not simply because he would no longer have access to Disney World and Toys “R” Us, as was portrayed in the press.

Under Cuban law, a child didn’t belong to his family. He belonged to the
patria,
and the government made final decisions concerning his welfare. Parents’ wishes were secondary. As a teenager, he would be removed from his home and sent to work in the countryside. He would live in camps and coed dormitories, where sexually transmitted diseases were common and the rate of pregnancy was sky high. At age seven his rationed provisions would start limiting his diet—he wouldn’t be eligible for the milk, beef, and proteins that he’d gotten used to. And, of course, the first order of business upon his return would be to openly denounce his mother as a traitor.
That
was required of everyone who came back. However, these realities were not portrayed in the press, which saw it simply as a father being kept from his son.

Elian’s great-uncle was a mechanic, his wife worked in a factory sewing garments, and the daughter was a bank clerk. They were unsophisticated people and had absolutely no media savvy. They made a big mistake when they picked as their spokesman a political operative, a slickster who did them a disservice with the decisions he made on their behalf. There were no winners in the Elian Gonzalez family. The little boy had to return to live under Castro’s regime, and the Cuban exiles were cast in a harsh, negative light. Miami was incredibly polarized. Americans and Cubans who had been friends, neighbors, and business partners broke off relations. Some thought that the divisions had always been there, and that the Elian disaster simply brought them to the forefront.

Cubans used to enjoy an image as industrious good citizens and, believe me, it was an impression that we worked hard to project. It had evaporated in the space of a few months, and it was devastating. I knew of deep personal relationships that had been permanently and completely severed because of rancorous arguments about Elian.

“What would Ariel do if he found out you met with Luther?” Vivian asked me.

“He wouldn’t like it,” I admitted. “But Ariel has always let me do pretty much whatever I want.”

“Margarita, Ariel might be liberated and all that, but
chica,
he’s still a Cuban man,” Anabel pointed out. “He might have trained himself to be open-minded about women—or you might have trained him, I don’t know—but you can’t change what’s in the genes.”

“You know, I think what’s troubling me is that I don’t feel like I’m being unfaithful to Ariel.” To make sure my friends didn’t get the wrong idea, I hastened to add, “I mean, I’ve done nothing wrong and I have nothing to hide. I’ve been to lunch with plenty of men in my life without anything happening.”

I could tell from Anabel and Vivian’s expressions that I was protesting too much.

“Margarita, this is us you’re talking to. You don’t have to rationalize your behavior.” Anabel fixed her gaze on me; her eyes behind the Coke-bottle lenses reminded me of fish swimming in an aquarium. “But none of those men you had lunch with was your lover for three years, were they? And none of them made your toes curl—now did they?”

Leave it to Anabel to nail me. She might not be able to see a thing, but nothing important ever got past her.

“How long is Luther going to be in Miami?” Vivian asked. “Did he say how long his case is going to take?”

Vivian took out her cell phone, checked it for messages. Time was running short.

“Somewhere between two and three months,” I told her.

Vivian and Anabel looked at each other, shook their heads, and rolled their eyes. Anabel looked at her watch and started to gather her things.

“So how did you leave it?” she asked me.

Just then my cell phone rang. I grabbed it, intending to shut it off. I had thought it was set for voice mail, so I wouldn’t be interrupted while talking to my friends, but obviously I had forgotten.

I looked down at the screen to see the caller’s number displayed. From the exchange I could tell it was coming from downtown. I felt my heart start beating a little faster.

What the hell, I picked it up.

“Daisy?”

The second I heard Luther’s voice I tried to turn away from my friends to talk in private, but it was not to be. They could both tell who was on the line. Both Vivian and Anabel pointed at their watches in a secret code we’d established twenty years before. It meant
Hey, chica, it’s just a matter of time
.

Listening to Luther, feeling what I was feeling, I had to admit my friends were right. After all, they knew me best.

After I left Vivian and Anabel, I went straight to my parents’ house in Coral Gables. Though it had been just a few days since I’d been there last, it had been an eternity by Cuban standards—behavior that could cause serious friction, and for which I would pay dearly in one form or another.

I had told my mother that I would arrive around lunchtime, which had triggered a ten-minute digression into what I might like to eat that day. I knew that Mamá would assume I was bringing Marti, and that she would be disappointed when I showed up alone. I would have ordinarily brought my son along—if nothing else, he was a good buffer against my mother—but I didn’t think it was appropriate to discuss the situation with Luther at Starbucks in front of him, even though he wouldn’t have known what I was talking about. Just because I was contemplating having an affair with my former boyfriend didn’t mean that I lacked all moral consideration. And, on the practical side, it’s impossible to have any kind of serious conversation with a three-year-old running around.

The truth was, I was loath to expose Marti to Starbucks. He might have been born in the United States, but the blood that flowed through his veins was definitely Cuban.

The traffic from Coconut Grove to Coral Gables that time of day was light, and I made the trip in less than fifteen minutes. Mamá and Papa’s house was in northern Coral Gables, near the Biltmore Hotel. My parents bought the place in the mid-sixties, just before I was born, because they and my two older brothers had outgrown the place they’d rented during the tumult and uncertainty following their arrival from Cuba. Our lives were so ingrained in the Coral Gables house that it was almost impossible to imagine that they had ever lived anyplace else.

My parents were among the few Cubans fortunate enough not to have arrived in the United States penniless and destitute after leaving the island. The bulk of their wealth remained back home, but they had some investments outside of Cuba, primarily in the American stock market. As was the case with many other Cuban families of our class, our ties to America were longstanding and strong.

My father’s side of the family had always been staunchly pro-American: My paternal grandfather had studied at Yale, my father at the University of Virginia. All the men in my family had studied for their MBAs at Columbia in New York City. They had been sent to America for the educational opportunities, but perhaps more important they were to learn about American business practices and to make American friends. Still, no matter how much they came to love and admire the United States, they always knew that Cuba was their home. That was a fact that was never in question.

The Santos family, like many other upper-class Cubans, had money in the American stock market that was out of Castro’s greedy reach when he began confiscating private property on the island. This was the money my parents used to start their business over again from scratch after fleeing their homeland. The Americans hadn’t disclosed any information on Cuban holdings to the Castro government, so many exiles were able to retain at least a part of their wealth. Canadian banks, incredible to my mind, cooperated with the Cuban government—they granted Castro access to their records, and those Cubans unfortunate enough to have placed their trust in Canadian banks saw their deposits confiscated along with their holdings back home.

When Castro began his wholesale theft of private enterprise, my family owned the largest chain of drugstores in Cuba. Santos Pharmacies had been founded more than a century before, by my great-great-grandfather Don Emiliano Santos, the very year Cuba gained its independence from Spain. Until 1960, when we were forced to leave Cuba, the pharmacies remained a family-owned and-operated business in which all of Don Emiliano’s male descendents worked, all the way down to my father and his three brothers. And, although the Santos family had some money in the U.S., the vast majority of its wealth stayed behind in Cuba. My family owned all the land on which the drugstores stood—prime, valuable real estate throughout the island. The last we heard, a Spanish hotel chain had built some resorts on our land in Varadero.

After landing in Miami, a couple of years passed before a harsh realization descended on my father and his brothers: Castro wasn’t going anywhere in the near future. Many Cubans had arrived in this country with the assumption that their exile was only going to last a few months, perhaps a year or two at the most. Surely, they thought, word would leak out about the atrocities and injustice perpetrated by the Castro regime and he would be removed from power. This mistaken belief delayed implementing plans to make America into a new home, and a lot of families burned through their money without making plans for the future. If only they’d known what was in store.

The Bay of Pigs fiasco killed off all hope that the exiles would be returning home any time soon. Not only did many exiles lose relatives in that ill-fated military operation, but, more important, they learned the cold fact that they couldn’t rely on the United States to help them return home. It was a sobering moment. So many exiles felt that America had helped put Castro in power and that the country had a duty and obligation to get rid of him. They soon learned that history does not follow the law of justice.

The Bay of Pigs was the turning point for the Santos family. Instead of concentrating on how to regain what was taken from them in Cuba, my father and my uncles decided to think about how they were going to succeed in Miami. The drugstore business was all any of them had ever known, and they decided to play to their strengths. A week after the Bay of Pigs, Santos Pharmacies started over again in the United States. Papa and his brothers sold off all their holdings in the stock market and leased a building in Little Havana; with the last of their cash they bought inventory to stock the shelves. They invested every penny they owned in that first drugstore, and they knew that failure was not an option.

They were fortunate to have established credibility with American suppliers they had dealt with in Cuba, who extended my family a line of credit and extended favorable rates in inventory. Papa soon realized he was reaping the benefits from decades of paying his bills on time. He and his brothers worked hard, and adapted to their new market. They figured that, since conditions were getting worse in Cuba, there would be a continued influx of new exiles who would need pharmacy supplies. They would cater to this group which, although penniless at the moment, would eventually establish itself into a loyal customer base. They extended credit to fellow Cubans, and payment plans with no interest. Sooner or later, every single customer paid his or her bill in full.

Many a parent left the Santos Pharmacy with medicine for a sick child that they had taken on good faith. That kind of compassion didn’t go unrewarded. Even now, more than forty years later, the same customers come to Santos—only now, they pay with American Express platinum cards. No one would ever go broke from counting on the Cuban work ethic.

Things went so well that my family opened a second pharmacy within a year of the first; within the decade, there were several more. Papa and my uncles have since retired from working full time, but they maintained an office in the original building and stopped in at least once a week. My cousins were now in charge, and still upholding the family tradition of increasing profits. As a result, the Santoses were one of the wealthier exile families.

Lately my brothers and cousins had contracted a chemist to start research into developing our own line of pharmaceutical products and, from initial reports, it looked as though we were going to be expanding our business yet again. We had already established a bilingual Web site—one of the first in the country—from which customers could order products to be delivered within twenty-four hours.

I tried not to take our success for granted. After all, I was born in the United States, and I had no real notion of how much they had lost when they left Cuba. There were no photographs to provide me with a mental picture of their old life, so I had to rely on the verbal descriptions my parents offered up on the few occasions they chose to talk about life before exile. My parents, in a sense, left their souls behind on the island. Mamá and Papa were talkative by nature, but they rarely spoke about Cuba to my brothers and me. It was too painful, even after four decades. Time clouds memories, and leads to exaggeration, but from what little I knew I imagined them living a golden existence in a breathtakingly beautiful land that had nurtured our family for generations. I felt the loss of a country in which I had never set foot.

My parents’ house was on North Greenway Drive, in an upscale part of Coral Gables. The place was two-story, light pink, built in the old Spanish style with lots of balconies and wrought-iron embellishments. In the devastation of Hurricane Andrew, in 1992, most of the beautiful old trees that shaded the place were lost—pulled from the ground by the force of the winds. Papa and Mamá had had new ones planted, but they couldn’t match the majesty of their predecessors. Rather, they were a raw reminder of a late-August dawn a decade past when the skies opened up over South Florida.

I waited for the light to change at the intersection of Le Jeune Road, so I could turn left for the final stretch to my parents’ house. This was the point at which, like clockwork, it struck me how much my life had changed since I married Ariel and moved to Miami Beach. My life in Coral Gables seemed tainted with conformity and convention. Since moving to the Beach I felt freer and more in touch with my true self. When I took the causeway to Miami Beach and crossed the waters of Biscayne Bay, I left behind more than just the city of Miami. I shed the more restrained, traditional side of myself. It was liberating, and I liked it more and more.

I thought of Luther just then. The old me never would have.

I spent the first two-thirds of my life in Coral Gables, but now whenever I went back I felt like a visitor to a place that was only vaguely familiar. I had no bond with the stately tree-lined streets, or the homes of my friends in which so many scenes of my life had been played out, or the parks where I had spent the sun-bleached afternoons of my childhood. I was little more than an observer now of a place that had once been everything to me.

This detachment almost frightened me. If I could feel this was about the place where I was born and raised, it might mean I could shed other crucial components of my life, too. There could be another new self inside me, waiting to come into being, which was capable of abandoning the places and people that made up my life as I knew it.

But I was probably getting way ahead of myself.

I wasn’t an unfeeling person. If anything, I was feeling too much. Luther’s reappearance in my life had showed me that my sense of equilibrium was more delicate than I had imagined. I warmed at the thought of our lunch at Nemo’s the afternoon before; when we parted, I had promised Luther that we would see each other again. It was a quiet, civilized parting, but the undercurrents had been deafeningly loud.

That lunch at Nemo’s had taken almost three hours—time I knew that Luther, on the clock for billable hours, could scarcely afford to take. I’d even had to come up with a viable explanation for my disappearance, vaguely alluding to a shopping trip with a friend at Sawgrass Mills, a discount mall in Fort Lauderdale that was a notoriously long trek and in a well-known black hole for cell phone reception. Thankfully, Ariel was preoccupied with a case going to trial in a week or so, and we had barely spoken the night before.

I’d never lied to Ariel before. A half-ass story about Sawgrass Mills was one thing, but not telling him about meeting with Luther made me burn with guilt. Nothing had happened between us, but I knew that on some level I was leaving the door open for the possibility that something might. As long as Ariel knew nothing about Luther’s presence in Miami, then he would have no reason to be suspicious.

I almost ran a red light when the thought hit me: I was acting just like an adulterer. But I wasn’t getting the great sex.

I was brought back to reality by the screeching sound of tires; I had hit the brakes at the red light, and a Mercedes, assuming I was going to run it, had to stop fast to keep from rear-ending me. His assumption hadn’t been without basis—red lights in Miami mostly serve as decoration. Only old people, Canadians, and European tourists ever obeyed them.

With a look in the mirror, I offered a hard-hearted wave of apology to the driver in the Mercedes. He was a Latino guy in his twenties, with slicked-back hair and gold chains around his neck. He just shrugged, looking faintly disgusted, his manner broadcasting his opinion that old women like me had no place on the road. Waiting at a red light was probably an insult to his manhood.

Then I looked back and saw Marti’s car seat. I had almost just caused an accident because I was thinking about Luther. That was what my life had suddenly become.

Luther wanted us to meet again. Having dinner with him was out of the question; it wasn’t as though he could walk up to the front door and pick me up for a date. And another three-hour lunch wasn’t likely, either. When I last spoke with Luther, I was sitting at the table with Vivian and Anabel, so the matter of our next meeting was left up in the air.

I executed the final turn onto North Greenway Drive without causing an accident—it was never a good idea to think about major life issues while negotiating Miami traffic—and drove the long block up to my parents’ house. None of the kids lived at home anymore. My brother Sergio and I were both married
. My oldest brother Emiliano—Micky—was still a bachelor at forty and lived in an apartment on Brickell Avenue. But my parents had never moved into a smaller place, and they kept our rooms decorated as though we were still living there. Going upstairs was like walking into a time warp, a sort of museum to our childhood.

As I turned off the motor and got out of the car, I realized that if I were still single and living at home, then there would be no ethical problem with Luther picking me up for a date. The only issue would be explaining to Mamá and Papa that I was dating an American.