Say Her Name (17 page)

At least once a year I went back to Mexico City. I developed a fast allegiance to the city and was enthralled by its medieval
mysteries because something about post-earthquake DF was like a medieval city celebrating the end of a death plague with carnivals and mystery plays. In 1993, my girlfriend and I even lived there for a year, in Coyoacán, when we must have walked by fifteen-year-old Aura hanging out with other scruffy teenagers and hippies in the plaza—she went nearly every weekend—or browsed alongside her in the Parnaso and Gandhi bookstores, or passed her rattling down the cobblestones of Calle Francisco Sosa on her bike. In 1995, when that same woman broke up with me, she stayed on in our apartment in Brooklyn and I moved down there, to the DF, feeling liberated from a failed relationship and exhilarated to be starting over, fueled by the romantic fantasy that I was going to find and marry that girl I’d kissed on the Museo Tamayo steps a decade before. I was definitely that kind of romantic fool, and though I was pretty sure I remembered her name, Selena Yanez, it’s not true that fortune always favors the fool, and I never found her, nor anyone who even knew her.

Over the next few years, I ended up spending much more time in Mexico City than I did in New York, until I got a part-time post at Wadley College. The plan was to live in Brooklyn only when I was teaching, and in Mexico the rest of the year. My apartment was on Avenida Amsterdam in the Condesa, a rambling, five-room, barely furnished place in a nearly century-old building neglected in every way by its landlord. (He’s in prison now; a few years ago he was arrested for being the money launderer to a kidnapping ring.) There was a permanent gas leak in the kitchen; perilous, ancient light fixtures; spongy wooden floors painted a peeling viscous bathhouse-brown; and the French windows had termite-churned frames, with a few missing panes that let the rain and sometimes stray birds in. The only furniture I kept there were my cheap Dormimundo bed, two tables, a few chairs, and an old set of drawers that had come with the place. Trees stood outside the front windows, and during the long, rainy summer afternoons, I thought it was the most peaceful place to write I’d ever found. When I’d first moved there the Condesa was still a quiet residential neighborhood of
middle-class homes, art deco apartment buildings, random old mansions, tree-lined streets, parks, circular plazas with fountains, and a few surviving old Jewish bakeries and musty Eastern European cafés, remnants from when Jewish immigrants and refugees had populated the neighborhood before prospering and moving their families to Polanco and the suburbs. But the Condesa was also on the cusp of what was going to be a speedy transformation into the city’s and maybe all of Latin America’s trendiest hipster neighborhood, triggered, went the usual explanation, by the return of those same Jews’ artistic, bohemian, entrepreneurial, and coke-snorting Mexican-born descendants.

Those first few months in Mexico, while I searched for Selena Yanez, I had an exuberant string of affairs and seductions, just what I thought I needed because I’d been in relationships, one after the other, since college, serially and sometimes overlapping. D., who I moved to New York with from college; Gus (we were married and divorced before I was twenty-six and now she was probably my closest friend); J.; then M.; and finally S. Then, practically before I knew it, I fell into yet another on-and-mostly-off-again nightmare, the most obsessive frenzied self-destructive relationship of my life. She was a heartbreakingly self-thwarting woman, a gifted artist probably destined never to realize her potential, thirteen years younger than me, acrimoniously self-exiled from her upper-class family, the only one of four sisters not to live at home until she married. It was still a fairly new phenomenon in Mexico City for young women of a certain upbringing to strike out on their own, living in tiny apartments like their counterparts in New York or Paris. She hardly knew what to make of herself. Damaged and full of conflict, she was also maniacally controlling: the first time I slept over at her apartment she threw me out in the morning for hanging a towel on the wrong rack in her bathroom. A
niña perversa,
as she liked to call herself, sultry and gorgeous, her enormous dark eyes an opaque glower, and yet so gentle and shy beneath all that. I don’t think I’d ever met anyone who so craved love, which she couldn’t help but spurn; it seems that everyone knows this type, though it seems I didn’t.
Shouldn’t I have known what was coming after that first fuck in my apartment, when she declared that we were only going to have sex for one week and then never again? For a week she dutifully turned up at my door every afternoon; she’d ring my buzzer and I’d see her through the peephole nervously twirling a finger in her hair, and after that week was up she was gone. I nearly went insane, waiting for her outside her apartment, howling into the phone, leaving little love poems on strips of paper folded like Chinese cookie fortunes into the nameplate by her door buzzer. After about a month, she gave in, and we started up again. I seriously debased and fucked myself up with Z., that’s the truth of it. I didn’t have a friend who didn’t try to convince me to flee the torments of that relationship. That I wasted so many years on it is sad proof that I was missing something that every mature, functioning man should possess, except I didn’t even know what that something was. When it was finally over I had to confront, for what felt like the first time, the fact that even if I let someone really get to know me, and did my very best to love them, that it wouldn’t necessarily be enough to make them love me back. Gradually, I fell into a long funk. I dated, was rejected a lot (though almost never by anyone I cared that much about), and on a few occasions did the rejecting myself. By any measure that wasn’t deluded, I wasn’t young anymore. One year led to another and then to another, until it became five years of loneliness, with no affair that lasted more than a few weeks or days, and all of those a year or more apart. I worked on my novel like a dreamy tinkerer, without any urgency or drive to finish; did very little journalism; went to the gym; frequented places like El Mitote or El Closet, a strip club; ended up in after-hours dives like El Bullpen and El Jacalito and others whose names and addresses I don’t remember. Now I look back on that whole time as a long dress rehearsal for the real thing, the grief and melancholy and loneliness and dissolving of self that lay far ahead and that maybe now will never end. My father was slowly dying during those years. He took a long time to die, in and out of the hospital for about five years, battling for life with desperation and panic, starkly terrified of death, and suffering a lot,
and I was always being summoned back to Boston from wherever I was—from Mexico, once from Barcelona, once from Havana where I was doing research—to his bedside for what was supposed to be the end at last, except he always pulled through.

A few nights after that first night with Aura in Copilco, before I went up to New York, the Argentinean woman to whom I was going to sublet the apartment came by to give me a check and pick up the keys. She was a graphic artist, maybe in her midthirties, just separated from her Mexican husband; she had sad brown eyes, a dimpled chin, thin straight dirty blonde hair, and she was wearing tight faded jeans and a flannel shirt that revealed the top of her shadowy cleavage. After we dealt with the apartment, we went out for a few drinks, then she drove me home. It was late, the street was empty and dark, and somehow we ended up having sex right there, her straddling me in the passenger seat of her car after she’d wriggled out of her jeans. Looking over her shoulder I noticed, amazed, how quickly the windshield fogged, the glare of the streetlamp behind the trees above making the moisture glow like pinkish ice. When was the last time I’d fucked in a car?—in college, I think. It was the first sex I’d had in many months. Why this totally unexpected episode now? Was I coming back to life? I never saw her again.

Back in New York, I didn’t rush to see Aura. I wouldn’t call it a strategy, but I sensed that to have any chance with her, I shouldn’t in the least crowd her. She’d quickly become immersed in her new Columbia life, I was sure: her studies, new friends, brilliant young men from all over the world—dashing robot scientists! Why shouldn’t she forget about me? I readied myself for disappointment, vowed not to hold it against her. I hadn’t been back in New York a week before my mother phoned to tell me that my father was back in the hospital. I went to Wadley, gave my first classes of the semester, and then headed up to Boston in the late summer heat to see him. By then, I’d sent Aura an e-mail saying hello, and from her new Columbia account she’d responded with her telephone number. The first time I phoned, so nervous and excited my belly felt like a basket of writhing eels, her roommate, the Korean botanist,
answered. She had a young cheerful voice that came through the phone line like a fresh breeze of spring. Aura was in the shower, she told me. She was
in the shower
. That phrase evoked so much—it was about six or seven on a weekday evening, normally not an hour for showering unless she was going out, most likely on a date, or whatever it is, I thought, that grad students call “dates.” Even now it hurts to imagine her engaged in that sweet ritual for anyone other than me: coming out of the bathroom with her hair turbaned in a towel, another wrapped around her torso, choosing her dress, blow-drying her hair, putting on the dress, studying herself in the mirror, applying makeup, taking off the dress and putting on another—one that’s less pretty and sexy but that’s cut in a way that covers the yin-yang-faced sun-moon tattoo on her chest above her left breast that she’s had since she was fifteen—reapplying her lip gloss with a Zen calligrapher’s perfect touch, padding around the apartment in still bare or stockinged feet, in that state of restrained excitement just before going out into the night. I left my name, asked her to tell Aura I’d phone again, and a few days later I did. We talked awhile about her courses and professors—the department head, the pale Peruvian who’d told her she was accepted, had taken a job in Michigan, and decamped, just like that!—but she sounded happy, told me she’d thrown a party for the students in her department, that she’d been able to find all the Mexican ingredients in Spanish Harlem that she needed for the food she’d served, even the bottled Mexican syrups and a big block of ice and ice-shaving instruments to make raspados. She loved giving parties. I asked her if she was free for dinner one of these nights. She asked if we could meet for lunch instead. I said that I never met for lunch, because it interrupted my working hours. Why did I say that? Because I thought that her saying she wanted to meet for lunch was her way of letting me know that she wanted to be just friends. It didn’t take much, in those days, to discourage me. Before she hung up, she repeated that she was always free in the daytime. I wonder if eventually I would have given in and gone up to Columbia to meet her for lunch, or for afternoon coffee in the Hungarian Pastry Shop, and how that
might have affected our fates. But our standoff was interrupted by my father’s rapid decline. He was moved from the hospital in Boston to a bleak Medicare hospice in Dedham, just off Route 128. It was understood that the move to the hospice meant that the end was finally at hand, yet my father had escaped death so many times that I was sure he would again, though by now nobody really wanted him to, my mother especially.

My parents had a miserable marriage. I never saw them kiss, not once. He was eighteen years older than she. During my last year of high school they finally separated, something my sisters had been urging my mother to do for years. But the separation never became a divorce. After he retired, at age seventy, my father bought a little condo in Florida, where he’d stay in the winter, driving himself back up to Massachusetts in the spring. He had a condo in Walpole, too, but after a few years he sold it and went back to living with my mother in our house in Namoset whenever he came north, on the pretext that my mother couldn’t handle the house on her own—paying the bills, the landscapers, and so on. At eighty-seven, when my father started getting sick and couldn’t do the long drives anymore, he sold the Florida condo, too. Living with my father year-round again, dealing with his illnesses and cantankerous nature, so wore my mother out that within a few years she seemed almost as old and doddering as he. In his youth my father had been an athlete, a high school football and semipro baseball player, but during his last years, while a slow-moving cancer in his intestines was devouring him, he had the wasted skinniness of the decrepit Fidel Castro. In 1999, he choked on vomit in his sleep and spent eight days in a coma, from which he miraculously emerged with a crazy glint in his eyes, skinny limbs electric with dancing-skeleton energy. The coma left him with memory loss and disorientation, though four years later he still did the
Times
crossword puzzle every day and was opinionated about everything. Sometimes he’d say something strange and spookily suggestive, as if his coma had opened a leak from which dream logic seeped unchecked, like when we were on the phone right after 9/11 and he said, Frankie, why aren’t you
out guarding the airports? I had no idea what he meant. Frankie, he persisted, all the young men are out guarding the airports, why aren’t you with them?

About two weeks into September, I went directly from Wadley to see him at the hospice. The room he was in was a cement box and he was hooked up to the familiar IV tree of nutrient and piss bags and monitors. My father spent his last days in that horrible place mostly just lying on his side, staring at the wall. The nurses were rough and bad tempered; my mother told me that she hadn’t met one yet who was nice. When I asked him to tell me what his mother had been like he started to sob. I’d never seen him break down like that, boohooing away. His mother had died years before I was born and I’d never had much curiosity about her. My father was from a Russian immigrant family that had fled the pogroms; he was one of the youngest of eight or nine children, and he came of age in the Depression. He’d worked his whole adult life, until he was seventy, as a chemical engineer for a dental products company in Somerville, leaving for work every morning at six-thirty a.m. His mother, he told me that day in the hospice, was “a foul-mouthed fucking bitch,” always fighting with his father and her children, making everybody’s life miserable. It was close to the opposite of how I’d heard her described years before in what must have been the abridged for-children version. But the way my father wept, as if in helpless rage, as he spoke about his mother surprised me even more. I think he knew that if I was asking about his mother, it could only be because his death was imminent. He probably figured that it must be my novelist’s opportunism: better get this info now before it’s lost forever. He’d had what some might think was a pretty shitty life, but he’d sure loved its few pleasures: his flower and vegetable gardens, betting on horses and football, his spy novels and American history books. At eighty-six, he’d still drive out to Fenway and buy a standing-room ticket to watch Roger Clemens pitch. In most ways he’d done better than I: he’d owned a house in the suburbs, helped put his kids through college, had married a beautiful Central American woman—a bilingual secretary at the plant where he
worked when they met, a future schoolteacher, who never really loved him, just as he probably never really loved her. But not being loved by his wife wasn’t making it any easier for my father to let go of life. I told him I’d be back in another week. He was going to hang in there, I was sure of it, I figured probably even for another year. Pretty soon, Daddy, I said, we’ll be watching the Red Sox in the World Series. We used to joke about how there was no way he was going to leave this life until the Red Sox finally won the World Series. It wasn’t going to be that year, 2003, though it still looked like it might be. I’d already bought my train ticket to Boston for the weekend, when, sitting in my closet-sized office at Wadley College, I got a call on my cell phone from the hospice telling me that he had died. Nobody had been with him, he’d died alone, facing that wall, or so I pictured it.