Tell Me Something True (27 page)

Angel crushes the cigarette and lies down with his head against the pillow, pulling her toward him.

“At first, he just licked his lips, and my father just sat there—we all waited—everybody was really quiet. All you could hear
was the television. It was funny. They were showing
Law & Order
in Spanish.

“When the guy started convulsing, my father stood up and walked away. I tried to go toward the guy, and then I tried to turn
away, because it was horrible, Gabriella. It was horrible. Even though he wasn’t screaming or struggling. But he was like
a different person. Like he had already left himself.

“And my dad came and stood behind me and held my head and forced me to watch, I don’t know for how long. Maybe it was a few
minutes, maybe it was an hour. I lost track of time. Finally, Julio went and took this guy’s pulse, to make sure he was dead,
and then we left.”

In the silence of the room, Gabriella hears the soft thudding of Angel’s heart. She is horrified, and she knows she’s meant
to be horrified. She wonders who she can tell a story like this.

“In the car, my father gave me a plastic bag so I could throw up.” Angel grunts ruefully. “He even planned that.

“And then he told me that’s what happened to junkies, and that if he ever heard I was one, I was on my own. He said, ‘It’s
a business, not a lifestyle. And it’s my business.’ That’s what he said. It’s
my
business, not yours. And that was it. He sent me away to school, and he told me to think about what I was going to study
after I graduated and what I was going to do with myself, because this wasn’t going to be it.”

Neither of them says anything for a long time. Gabriella, hazy still from alcohol and traces of cocaine, feels as though she’s
stepped into a looking glass, a place that’s hers but not hers. She wants to take him out of here, once and for all, but the
task suddenly feels gargantuan.

“Is this a shocking story for you, princesa?” he asks her, his voice even and in control again.

This time Gabriella lifts her head up, lifts her whole body up and kneels on the bed, looking into his eyes rather than up
at him.

“Yes,” she says, not knowing what else she wants to say.

“Does it change what you feel for me?” he prods her, gently, and in his eyes she sees not concern, but the dark veil that
he wears when he wants to be inscrutable; the veil he probably learned to borrow from his father after all these years.

Impulsively, Gabriella leans forward and runs her hands across his eyes.

“What are you doing?” he asks, laughing, and when he laughs, the veil lifts and she sees flecks of light underneath the crystal
green of his eyes.

“No, it doesn’t change what I feel for you,” she says, not offering any explanation.

And now, his eyes are limpid and grateful and warm, and she holds his face between her hands and kisses them gently, then
kisses his mouth, and he brings her close to him and lays her down over him so she covers him like the sheets they can’t seem
to find, and in these times, at least, she feels he is completely hers, like no one really has ever been hers.

They make love quietly and urgently, as if there were parents listening in the rooms next door, private lovemaking although
they’ve never known the boundaries of supervision.

Afterward, in the shower, he cleans her gently, shampooing the grit from the ride out of her hair, rubbing soap down her back,
behind her ears, in the crevices behind her knees and between her toes and her fingers, careful not to touch the welts left
behind when he pulled the reins from her hands.

He manipulates her body almost with clinical industriousness, enjoying the smooth feel of her soapy skin, the indentation
of the muscles on her back—a strong back for a girl—the product of a lifetime of windsurfing and swimming. There are freckles
on her shoulders and a gentle half-moon of a scar on her lower belly, the remnant of appendicitis; otherwise, her surfaces
are clean and unspoiled.

In an hour, he will be working, supervising the hangar he rents for the Christmas season only, a broad space with high ceilings
that’s allowed to fit seven thousand people. He permits nine thousand inside because no one dares tell him not to and because
he makes more money and because he thinks it’s right, and that really is what dictates everything he does.

Tomorrow he will have Daddy Yankee and Oscar D’León and Grupo Niche there, and by the time 5 a.m. rolls around and the crowd
starts to trickle out, his hair and his clothes and his being will be impregnated with foreign sweat and cigarette smoke and
spilled aguardiente and purchased laughter and his hand will have been shaken by hundreds of strangers. They’re all eager
to curry favor with him, to receive a tiny crumb of the money they say he has, money that—according to local lore—at one point
Luis Silva kept stashed in suitcases under his bed, because he was so afraid of stepping inside a bank.

Angel was taught to be anonymous, a frank contrast with his father’s penchant for ostentation. Luis Silva learned too late
that while Colombia’s ruling classes were willing to look the other way as long as he shared his bounty, flaunting it so brazenly
was a no-no.

The day he was denied admission into Club Colombia, he pondered his miscalculation long and hard. Much to his surprise, some
things truly could not be bought.

“My son,” he told his wife the next day, “will be a classy guy.”

Angel would be educated in Europe. What did he care that the United States wouldn’t give him a visa? Weren’t England and France
and Switzerland better? Weren’t they old money? He would run a legitimate business. He would date nice girls, girls who went
to the country club and had apartments in Miami. He would never be turned away because his last name wasn’t right.

And it all could have worked nicely, too. Angel Silva was sent to a private boarding school in Switzerland and to college
near Paris. He was young, handsome, smart, and rich. Abroad, where all foreigners are judged by the cash they carry, their
educational pedigree, and the color of their skin, the name, unknown across the Atlantic, was inconsequential.

Here, however, it placed him on ambivalent ground. He looked and sounded like the upper crust, but almost perversely, he allowed
his father’s tarnish to touch upon so many things he did.

He touches her now, and sees an unsullied slate, a chance to get it right. Impulsively, he grabs her shoulders tightly and
presses his open mouth against the nape of her neck, hard.

“What?” she says softly.

“Nothing.” He shakes his wet head against her. “I want to make you happy. That’s all.”

“Take me to dinner,” she says suddenly.

“Take you to dinner?” he repeats stupidly.

“Yes. Take me to dinner. That will make me happy.”

“I don’t know,” he says, laughing. “Wouldn’t a Hermès bag or something like that make you happier?”

Gabriella shakes her head emphatically, delighted at the break in his intensity. “A Hermès bag will make me happy. But a dinner
date with you—a date where we can sit, just the two of us, in a beautiful restaurant and wear beautiful clothes and be served
beautiful food by beautiful people—that will make me happier than anything else.”

Inside the shower, the steam and flow of the water make her words hazy, almost unreal. The simplicity of the request touches
him, but the simple things have eluded him for a long time.

“I want to do all the things I do, but with you,” she says with a touch of wonderment, because she’s not sure when she shed
her apprehension at being seen with him; perhaps it was today, just hours ago, when he kissed her while she was on her horse
with the proprietary air of a man who is proud of what he owns, and she reveled in it.

“I don’t want to hide,” she continues urgently, because she needs to say this now, with her back to him, with his hands against
her shoulders, and now against the small of her back and on her breasts and down to her stomach as her only gauge of a reaction,
and the words pour out of her, the words she thought today, when a sea of people watched them but still didn’t see his hand
on her thigh, grazing her with his thumb as he pulled her against him from his horse.

“I want people to see us and know that we’re together and know, from the way you put your hand around my waist, that we make
love three times a day, and I can’t get enough of you and you can’t get enough of me. I want them to be jealous. To wonder
what it is we do together. I want those stupid girls you’ve gone to bed with before me to look at us and know that I’m better
than them. That I do things to you that they never dreamed of.”

She stops abruptly, shocked at herself because she’s never said things like this, much less done them. But he is hard behind
her, and now his hands go up her neck and cup her face and turn her toward him and he pushes her against the shower wall and
presses against her and whispers hoarsely into her ear: “I’ll take you anywhere you want go.”

H
e was cold and tense the night before.

Everything about her sudden trip is askew, he said. As askew as I’ve been for the past five months. He knows he’s misplaced
a piece of me, but no matter how hard he looks, he can’t find it. I’m shut down. I haven’t even called my parents since I
returned, even though I used to phone them religiously, every two days at the very least. Marcus could call my mother, of
course, have a chat with her, ask her what it is that happened to change me like this. But he’s much too proud to resort to
that. He’ll never admit to anyone there’s something wrong between us.

I’m sure it’s crossed his mind that I’m sleeping with someone else, although he has never come out and asked me outright.
I certainly have been careful to obliterate any trace of deceit—not a phone call or a gift or a slip of the tongue or even
resistance in bed.

But I can’t help myself. Everything he does is reproachable to me. Things that I found endearing before upset me now. He doesn’t
dress properly. He looks sloppy in flip-flops and shorts. That hat he wears in the garden—what guy wears a hat to go gardening?
Most important of all, he doesn’t appreciate who I am or what I do or where I come from.

“You wouldn’t understand,” I dismissed him disparagingly, when he asked why I needed to physically go and revise the book.

“What is it that you need to do that you can’t achieve by FedExing the proofs back to them?” he insisted.

“It’s all about personal relationships, Marcus,” I said curtly, appalled that he still didn’t get this, even though I knew
it was just a fake reason I was giving to go back. “It’s not like here, where you can simply pick up the phone and send things
back and forth. It’s about knowing who you deal with and talking to them and asking how their families are. If you ever took
the trouble to go there, you would get it,” I added, convincing myself of the importance of my mission in the process.

Marcus always stays quiet when I say things like that, I think, because he knows that at some level, my anger is justified.

But tonight, I feel the sadness of his reproach, and a surge of tenderness for him suddenly overpowers me.

“Helena,” he whispered, as if sensing my sudden change of heart. “Just go do what you need to do. I’ll pick you up on Saturday,”
he says, not waiting for my acknowledgment. He knows me so well, he can always tell if I’m awake. “I’ll pick you up, and we’ll
go out and celebrate your book. Okay?”

I don’t say anything for a few seconds. I think of so many nights on this bed, of lying here with Gabriella between us, both
of us embracing over her tiny figure. My throat tightens up, and if I speak, I know I’ll burst into tears. But I gulp it down,
and in the darkness, I let my hand search for his under the covers. “That sounds like a plan,” I countered quietly and turned
around and put my other hand against his cheek and kissed him very, very lightly on the lips, then turned back again, and
after a few minutes, I fell asleep.

H
er mother’s best friend’s name is Elisa. She lives in a downtown building that was once grand, but has now fallen into that
state of sad disrepair associated with older buildings that simply can’t muster the energy to compete with their newer, more
dazzling counterparts.