When Tito Loved Clara (6 page)

“You all right?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes I am.” She was calming herself. “It's these shoes,” she said, lifting up her coat to show him a pair of ankle boots with silver buckles and leather soles. “No grip.”

“I'll walk you home,” he offered as casually as he could manage. “You still live in that house on Payson?”

That made her look at him properly for the first time. “Hey, you're Don Felix's kid. My dad says your father is a lying sack of shit.”

“Yeah, well, my pops says your old man is a tightwad cock-sucker.”

They both laughed.

“I've still got the scar from when you kicked me,” she said. She pulled down her lower lip and showed him the pair of short white lines her teeth had made, like a double dash in the bumpy red pulp of her mouth. “I'll never forget how much it hurt to eat,” she said. “And brushing my teeth was a nightmare.”

“Yeah, well, I had to have my toe amputated, just so you know. I still walk with a limp from it.”

“Glad you're not holding it against me,” she said.

With her papers gathered and returned to their binder, they headed south along Broadway. “So, were you at the Word Club this afternoon?” he asked.

“Maybe,” she said.

“What do you guys do in that club?”

“You mean after we're finished with the sex toys?”

He blushed. “Yeah, when you put the dildos away.”

She drew an invisible zipper across her lips. “I took a blood oath. They'll kill me if I tell you. Then they'll kill you, too.”

“Thanks for looking out for me,” he said. They walked along for a moment without saying anything. He'd daydreamed about talking to her many times, and now here he was—talking to her.

“So, where you going to college?” he asked. There was no question of
if.

“Cornell,” she said.

The name meant nothing to him. “What? Not Yale?” he asked, pronouncing it with a Spanish accent:
Jail.

“I no smart enough for Jail,” she said, copying his accent. “Besides, Jail no giving me no moneys.”

“What about the other
muchachas
?” he asked.

“Oh, jes,” she said. “They going to some good schools: Pre enstone, Wasser, Breen Marr, En Why Joo.
¿Y tu, Señor?
”

He shook his head and dropped the accent. “I've got a job lined up.”

“A
legal
job?”

“Yup.”

“That's good,” she said. “Better than most of the fools around here.” And he was grateful that she spared him the same lecture he'd just gotten from the teacher. Tito liked to read—comic books, thrillers, pornography—but the thought of studying, of taking tests and answering questions in a classroom for four more years, made him queasy. Clara's proficiency at academics now rendered her all the more remarkable to him. It was the same admiration he felt for acrobats and chess masters, people who excelled at things he had no interest in.

Crossing the Broadway Bridge, they discussed the best way to
get to her house. The feud between their fathers was dormant but still acknowledged in the neighborhood, and it would be best for both of them if they were not seen together. Tito was cheered by the underlying assumption that they would walk all the way together, that she wasn't going to ditch him. Any lingering animosity seemed to have been forgotten. He said he didn't want to go down Seaman in case his father was sweeping in front of the building. Clara didn't want to walk on Broadway, in case one of
her
father's cronies was eating in El Malecon. In the end, they went up through Park Terrace and Isham Park, hurrying across Seaman well south of his father's building and walking through the forested part of Inwood Hill Park to a path that led down and out of the trees at Payson Street.

“You better stay here where my mother won't see you,” she said when they were walking down the path, the trees thinning as they neared the street. “She's already going to kill me for being late.”

“Wait,” he said. “Maybe you want to come out with me on Saturday?”

“I can't. I work in my father's store.”

“What about Sunday?”

She shook her head.

“Oh,” he said, downcast.

She smiled. “But you can walk me home next Friday,” she said.

“Friday?”

“Yes. And one more thing. You can't tell anyone about me going to Cornell.”

“It's a secret?”

“Yes. Everyone thinks I'm going to Hunter. Even the parents.”

“I won't say anything,” he promised, enjoying the privilege of her secret.

“Thank you,” she said, and turned away to walk down the path and out of the park.

The Lugos owned one of the single-family homes that were
scattered among the crumbling Art Deco apartment buildings of Inwood. It was a three-story brick wreck with boards in the windows of the upper floor and planks on breeze blocks for a stoop. A Dumpster had occupied the short driveway for as long as Tito could remember. If progress was being made on restoring the house, it was all happening on the inside, because the outside was as derelict as it had been when their fathers were friends. In Tito's imagination, the house had, over the years, anthropomorphized into a giant, decapitated head, its chin on the sidewalk, the garage an open mouth, the windows above them like a pair of eyes, and the boarded orifices on the top floor some kind of pagan headdress. As Tito watched Clara walk across the street, it seemed like the house was going to swallow her alive.

W
ITHOUT HAVING TO
be told, Tito understood that the Friday afternoon walks home with Clara would be a secret—not just from their parents, but also from their schoolmates, from his friends. He could tell no one. The romantic lives of the Almonte girls spurred endless speculation among the boys (and, he guessed, the girls) of John F. Kennedy High School. The speculation filled a void. There were rumors of the Word Club girls going on dates with Columbia students and New York Presbyterian doctors, of limousines and downtown nightclubs, of trips to resorts in the Poconos or long skiing weekends in Vermont, but these were merely rumors, never substantiated. The only certainty was that they did not date boys from Kennedy. If Tito had claimed that he was Clara's boyfriend, no one would have believed him; he would have succeed only in attracting ridicule or, perhaps, pity. During the school week he could presume no change in Clara's attitude toward him. In short, he could not expect her to acknowledge his existence beyond sharing her amusement with her friends about the boy who sometimes followed her in the halls. He was fine with this. It was a small price to pay.

The next Friday was Good Friday—something Clara may or may not have realized when she issued her invitation the week before. It was a half day. He waited for her by the U-Haul lot, figuring she wouldn't want to be seen near the school grounds with him. He positioned himself there immediately after the final bell rang and was still there well after the time when he had run into her the week before. Rain threatened and he sensed the disapproval of the people passing by: He must be up to no good. Still she did not appear. Maybe she'd gone to church or something? It was then that he realized there would be no school the following week because of the Easter break and that he would not see her for at least ten more days.

Those ten days passed slowly. He worked a move on the Saturday, a family relocating from a shitty apartment on Nagle Avenue to a slightly less shitty apartment on Fordham Road. Sunday he went to an early season Yankees game with his cousin Hershel. Hershel attended George Washington High, but Tito refrained from telling him about Clara, just in case the rumor leaked back to Kennedy. During the week off he helped his father. He repainted a vacant one-bedroom apartment by himself; he hauled the mounds of trash out to the curb for the weekly collection; he unclogged a drain for Mrs. Canby on the fourth floor. When his father sent him out to buy a new faucet for the Hernández family in 2G, he momentarily thought of going down to Dyckman and buying it from Clara's father, just on the off chance that she was working. But his own father would never forgive him.

On the Monday after the Easter break, Tito saw her in the hallway, walking by herself between classes, and was relieved to learn that she still existed. She appeared to take no notice of him until she was almost past and then, at the last moment, she winked at him. It was so quick that anyone seeing them might have thought she got something caught in her eye. But it was enough.

That Friday—it was mid-April already—he waited for her closer
to the school, standing outside a bodega in the weak spring sunshine, pretending to read a newspaper. About an hour after the final bell, she walked by with one of the other Word Club girls, Yesenia Matos, and he followed them, keeping his distance. At Broadway, Yesenia climbed the stairs to the subway while Clara turned and walked south toward the bridge. He followed, catching up with her on the span as a train made its cacophonous passage over them on the elevated track.

“I was beginning to think you didn't like me, Tito,” she said.

They walked home together by the same evasive route they'd taken before, talking and joshing each other about the mix-up on Good Friday. Clara's mother, in one of her fits of piety, had made them go to Mass. That afternoon in the park Tito kissed her for the first time. It was on the path in the woods as they descended toward her house. He was motivated by a sense of desperation, a sense that she might contrive ways of avoiding him on Fridays the rest of his life. If nothing else, he would at least have this one kiss. How modest that aspiration seemed to him later, but how immense it seemed to him at the time. He took her by the hand and pulled her close, fully expecting to be struck across the face. She gave no resistance, opening her mouth to his. Tito tasted icing sugar on her lips—a dissolving sweetness—along with traces of lip balm. He felt her warm breath against his cheek. When he finally pulled away, she smiled at him. “See you next week,” she said.

F
OR THE REMAINDER
of the spring, Tito did not have any trouble finding Clara on Friday afternoons. Even after school ended in late June, they maintained their schedule. He worked both weekend days so that his Fridays would be free for her. He moved furniture, hung out with his boys, ate meals with his parents, listened to music, read his comic books, exchanged bullshit with Nelson, did his daily pushups and sit-ups, watched the Yankees on TV, went to a couple of lame parties, but all of it was just a means of
distraction until Friday afternoon came around again. To minimize their chances of being seen together, they took to arriving separately in the forested part of the park. These dates, as Tito liked to think of them, soon turned into extended sessions of kissing and reaching into each other's clothes. The warm weather conspired to make things easier for them—thickening the greenery of the wilder sections of the park, inviting Clara to go barelegged in skirts and short dresses, the inciting sight of her brown skin on display. They explored each other as much as possible under the cover of the park's flora, but the lack of privacy kept them from going as far as Tito would have liked. There remained always something elusive about Clara. He was increasingly aware of her imminent departure for Cornell. He had tried to talk about it with her, saying that he would visit her at college, promising to do whatever it took to carry their relationship forward, always seeking signs of assurance from her. But Clara inevitably stopped these entreaties by kissing him or taking his hand and placing it over her heart. As much as he loved those gestures, they did not allay his fears—if anything they heightened them. Tito became convinced that the only way to ensure that they would stay together beyond September was to sleep with her. They were both virgins and he believed that sex would somehow create an unbreakable bond between them.

In August, an opportunity finally presented itself. His mother and father were going to celebrate their twentieth wedding anniversary with a week at a resort in Punta Cana. Tito took the time off work to be available for the building's tenants. There was an empty apartment on the third floor. He'd repainted it earlier in the month and helped his father install a new refrigerator. In the refrigerator now was a bottle of wine and some of the food his mother had left for him. The apartment's layout was unconventional, with a bedroom right by the entrance then a long living room opening to an alcove kitchen and leading to the second bedroom. The previous tenants had lived in filth and disorder, with clothes and garbage
on the floor, but the place was clean now. All of the rooms had windows that opened into the airshaft—and therefore were visible to people in other apartments—except for the second bedroom, which had a view of the ballfields of Inwood Hill Park. On the hardwood of that second bedroom, Tito had laid out his old sleeping bag, along with a sheet, a blanket, and two pillows. He brought up a vase of flowers. He brought up toilet paper. When the buzzer rang, he was in the bedroom looking out the window at a Little League game.

Clara was wearing nothing special—jeans, sandals, and a lacy short-sleeved blouse—but she looked astounding to him. He tried to kiss her as she entered the apartment, but she danced away, laughing. He could tell that she was in a strange mood. “So, come on, show me around our new place,” she said.

He walked her from room to room, describing the apartment as if they lived there together. In the first bedroom, he said, “This is your study. Notice the bookcases over there, and the desk with the nice new computer. See that, I had your diploma from Cornell framed and put up on the wall.”

“That's very thoughtful of you.”

Every time they went to another room, he tried to take her hand or kiss her cheek, but she moved away. “This is the kitchen,” he said, prepared to leave it at that, but she said, “So, who's the cook in the house? You?”

“Of course,” he said. “Look what I made earlier today.” He opened the fridge and showed her the roasted chicken and the rice and beans his mother had left for him.