Rocky’s father lit a cigarette and handed it to Maria.
“Thank you,” she said, and she looked up, faults and all, to see he was smiling at her.
When Charlie started his second cigarette, Maria hadn’t yet finished her first. He watched her inhale. The paper had burned down to the double gold lines that mark the start of the foamy white filter, but Maria still hadn’t thrown it to the ground. They were sitting at the far edge of the pool in two separate cloth-draped seats.
“It’s nice here.”
“Oh, yeah. It’s nice.”
He grinned. He liked how her comments were void of pretensions—she didn’t know to overuse words like gorgeous and beautiful. Nice was good enough for her. Maybe if she knew the costs associated with their hotel rooms, she would start to sound like the women who had sat at the table next to him at dinner and told the sommelier that the wine was superb. Imagining Maria interact with a sommelier—he could see it now—a Somalia what?—made him want to draw her close to him, and he rested his hand, which had lifted slightly, back on the bend of his knee.
She reminded him of a girlfriend he had just after college, the frizzy-haired daughter of an Evangelical Southern pastor. One time, early in dating, they went to a restaurant for her birthday, an overpriced Italian place on Third Avenue that Charlie had suggested. When the waiter brought out a bottle of white wine as per her request, he held it in front of her to observe the label before pouring, and she, flustered by the gesture, reached out to grab it from him. He stepped back, a little unnerved, and she giggled uneasily. Yeah, yeah, that’s fine, she said, and then, after hastily swallowing her first sip, flashed him a thumbs-up. When he was gone, she looked bashfully at Charlie. What a weirdo, right? Just pour it! It’s what I ordered! Charlie shrugged. Neither he nor anyone else at the table seemed to have the heart or knowledge to tell her it was just protocol.
Her name was Rebecca. They’d both studied English literature in college. He fell in love with her and paid for everyone’s dinner that night.
But they argued often and he sometimes was mean. Whenever he saw the vials of painkillers she tucked inside her drawers, he made vicious comments about futures in Appalachian trailer parks. And because they hit so close to home, because she knew that she was only one step above the seedy image he painted, only one or two generations away from it and a paycheck or two from returning, she’d cry to herself in their bedroom, and ask him how he could say that he loved her when it felt so little like it so often. He’d inevitably soften and apologize, and tell her he’d never want anyone but her, until soon he was crying, too, the tears gathering in wet splotches around his eyes. Eventually, he’d cry even louder than she did, until she had the vague sense that there was something in him that needed more comforting than she did. She’d sit up to rub her hands through his hair until he stopped shaking, and only when she heard the breathing even out would she know he had fallen asleep. Then she would stretch her legs under the comforter, and taking care to not make a sound, face her body away from him.
Charlie didn’t quite remember why they broke up, but her leaving was a fairly quick process, and within a week, all the traces of Rebecca (her G-strings, her socks, the empty vials, the wet footprints and long strands of blond hair all over the bathroom) were gone. Not a whole lot changed in his routine—he still went to the bars after work—and it didn’t take long to realize how much Rebecca had tolerated. Rebecca had loved him even through the nights he’d pissed in the bed. She hand-washed the sheets so that the laundry woman, with whom Charlie was on a birthday-wishing basis, would never know. Would anyone ever love him as much? But by then he had deleted Rebecca from his phone book, and those tethers of hope—the threads of intimacy that may have incited him to ask but what if?—eventually became so frayed that Charlie merely looked into his whiskey glass and kissed whatever new woman was in his bed on the chance that he’d be able to convince her that he had been sober enough to remember it later.
It continued a while like that. And then, two years before his thirtieth birthday, he met Veronica. They were introduced on a night that Charlie had gone up to Westchester for a private art show hosted by a high school friend. Charlie noticed her standing near the cheese spread, one elbow folded over the other, a wrist dangling just by the edge of the table, clenching a tiny wooden spear. Every so often, without uncrossing her arms, she would stab a cube of cheese and bring it up to her mouth, clenching it between her teeth in such a way that suggested a savage sensuality. She seemed to like the speckled Roquefort best, which fascinated Charlie even more, this woman who, rather than make small talk, was clandestinely sneaking nibbles of tangy blue mold, baring her teeth as she ate. He had no idea who she was, which was why it was so shocking when the host of the party pulled them aside, and the first thing that Veronica told Charlie was that she remembered him being pudgier before. Apparently, they’d grown up together and took the same school bus to school.
At the time, most of their friends were already married, and within five months, Charlie and Veronica were engaged. Things moved rapidly, too rapidly, which was how Veronica explained wanting to leave him later. But even before that, there had been signs, like when she would correct Charlie’s telling of the way they had met—she wasn’t a savagely sexual being, she was only trying not to smear her lipstick while she ate, and it hadn’t been blue cheese at all, but a basic Vermont cheddar, and she knew this because she had gone to buy the food that afternoon. At the party hosted by a documentary maker, which had mostly taken place in a backyard adorned with string lights, there was nothing regal and nothing extravagant—only olives, homemade pigs in a blanket, and bright orange blocks of Cabot Creamery.
Charlie wasn’t to blame for assigning a mystique to Veronica that in reality did not exist—if Maria had seen a picture of her from her school days, the brown-haired girl with perpetually ripped cuticles and full boxes of Samoas to peddle off to obliged family friends, she would have never recognized her either. As a woman, Veronica’s beauty, paired with her no-nonsense demeanor, suggested an effortless sophistication that she wasn’t entirely aware of. Marrying Charlie had only accentuated her elegance, because now she was a woman with wealth, and she became something like a haunting apparition, like a spirit that floated through space, leaving nothing but signatures on slivers of paper as the only traces of wherever she went. She was the soft-spoken woman who had accepted her husband’s yearly trips to Vegas, who likely knew, in all her discretion, that he’d cheated on her before. But she was also the judicious woman who brought the rest of the family along, who had reserved separate presidential suites for them to sleep in, on opposite sides of the hotel. When Veronica saw Charlie these days, she smiled curtly and then returned instantly to whatever he interrupted—her reading, her niçoise salad, her favorite TV show—a gesture so polite and fleeting he couldn’t reasonably get annoyed. This was the woman he vowed to love forever so many nights ago.
It was Veronica who Charlie really was thinking of when he kissed Maria on the lips for the first time. It was Veronica who he still wanted, who would make his life complete. But that night at the pool, by the fourth and fifth time, he knew this wasn’t something he needed to tell himself anymore. By then, he long knew it was a lie.
Maria, even though she said nothing, understood he was lying.
It wasn’t for not knowing the value of money that she used the word nice instead of beautiful. It was just that, in Maria’s world, there were very few things that merited the use of such a powerful word. She certainly did not include herself in the list of things that qualified as such. She hadn’t forgotten Emerson’s words, how beauty existed outside of the body, how humans could only briefly reflect it by looking outside of the me.
When he called her beautiful, which had now happened more than once, she looked at him with unblinking eyes and remembered the distinction: not me. Beautiful were sunsets and oceans and skies with banks of clouds like fishes, but beautiful was also what Emerson said reached
its height in women. To Maria that meant the women in the Victoria’s Secret catalogs, the busty frames with straight, golden hair. That meant the Bell Seminary girls, leggy and tall and rosy. Maria could accept cute. Pretty. Even sexy.
But beautiful?
Whoosh—a red flag went up and waved. What had the uncles told her about men, about boys, about all of them? The loudspeakers blared in her ears. What would they say if they knew about Charlie? He’s lying, they’d say. He’s trying to trick you.
But Maria didn’t care about all of that—at least not right now, as she kissed Charlie back with both lips. They’d wanted to make her paranoid, to make her question and condemn everything she did, but why should Maria do that? Here she was with this strange older man, but he was making her float. Every time he looked at her, Maria felt herself reach a little higher than where she was before. So what if they wouldn’t get married? Did any of that really matter? Rocky was right to care so little so often. Most marriages end in divorce.
The next time Charlie called her beautiful that night, told her that he wanted to see the depths of her dreams, Maria knew for sure what he meant, that beauty isn’t possessed, isn’t handled, that it’s not in the form, but the mind.
Beautiful. Me. Finally, she had found her mirror. Maria had been seen.
CHAPTER 13
Maria lifted the weight of her body onto the balls of her feet. Rocky would be asleep, she hoped, or at least she would be too engrossed in soft porn to care that Maria had been gone. She guessed that she had only been gone for twenty or thirty minutes. It wouldn’t matter how long she’d been gone, anyway, if Rocky had found something good on pay-per-view. Maria approached the door without having yet crafted the lie she would tell to her friend.
With the key card that Rocky had given her, Maria opened the door. Rocky was standing on the opposite side. Their eyes locked. Rocky’s face was as easy to read as an analog clock, and Maria knew that she’d been mistaken. It had been over an hour since she had left. Hastily, she began to construct the walls of the place that she could have wandered off to.
“We were looking for you.”
Quickly, the excuse. To get a drink? To get a snack? But she didn’t bring her money, and with so many free items in the minifridge, free for Maria at least, it wouldn’t hold up. Everyone knew Maria was broke. After Rocky spoke—she had said the word we—Maria saw that Rocky’s mother was standing beside her. Her hair was wet and made tiny, jagged points that made Maria think of the spikes on the underpass by her house. So that pigeons can’t fill the street with caca, her mother had explained.
“I left my phone charging.”
“Yeah, I know that.” Rocky’s eyebrows came down in a V on her nose. “I called Nick and he didn’t pick up either. I had to go almost kick in his door before he finally opened it. I expected you to be there, but he told me you’d left as soon as you’d dropped him off.”
Rocky’s mother hadn’t budged from where she stood. Whether the expression on her face matched Rocky’s expression of anger, Maria did not know. She didn’t dare look.
“I—How long was I gone?” Maria needed more time to think. It was so unnaturally bright in the room for being so late in the evening. Maria could see everything in plain sight as if it were noon. A half-drunk cup of sparkling water on the countertop, shopping bags at the foot of the chaise longue, the upholstered set of chairs huddled around the table near the grand double windows that looked out onto the Strip. The floor was carpeted—she hadn’t noticed before—a spotless creamy-skinned beige. She had felt so secure by the swimming pool, an infinite distance away from her mother and father, and whole floors of billiards tables away from Rocky—but now Rocky was staring at her with that awful V on her face, and with everything incandescent in the bedroom, Maria strained to recall how dark the pool had been, and if perhaps it’d been better lit than she’d thought.
“I went downstairs to look at the shops,” Maria said. “There’s a chocolate fountain down there.” The chocolate fountain was in one of the windows she had passed earlier that day with Rocky. She had wanted to point it out, but Nick and Rocky had been arguing about what time they were going to get lunch. Nick insisted that Rocky didn’t need more clothing. She began shrieking. As if Daddy doesn’t buy you every stupid toy you ask for! Maria turned her attention to the swirling rivers of hot fudge in the window, all eight feet of which went unnoticed by the bickering children beside her.
In the suite, Rocky held her face perfectly still. But when she spoke again, her left eye became the slightest bit smaller, as if straining to see something infinitesimally small on Maria’s face. “That’s what you were doing for an hour and a half? Looking at a chocolate fountain?”
Maria nodded. “Yeah, and just walking. I just walked around.” She had to clear her throat before finishing speaking. Had the cigarette made her hoarse? Could Rocky smell it on her? She was digging her index finger into her thumb cuticle, and her stomach and legs had gone hard in fear. She couldn’t move or speak without fumbling. And Rocky saw it, knew she was lying. Why else would she be looking at her with that face? She resisted the urge to bring her hand to her mouth, despite how badly she wanted to rip her lips off.
“We were just about to put our shoes on and look for you.”
“I’m sorry,” Maria said.
There was something in Rocky’s stance, the slightest lowering of the shoulders, that made Maria realize: she doesn’t know. A tiny dam inside of her broke. She fought to keep the joy from flooding.
“I’m really sorry,” Maria continued, with so much control that it hurt. “I didn’t know you were worried.”
She looked at Rocky’s mother. With her bare feet and her makeup rubbed off, the skin flushed and pink around the edges of her eyes, she didn’t appear to be the same woman Maria had seen that morning in the Vegas lobby. Earlier, she had seemed so powerful, a perfect picture of the kind of woman Maria strove to be. She looked like a woman of means. Now, when she looked at her, she could only think of Charlie. She’s a housewife, too, Maria heard herself thinking. Just like Ma. Just like anyone.
“I’m happy we didn’t have to call your mom,” Rocky’s mother said. Rocky got her eyes from her mother—a deep, brick-building brown.
“I’m sorry,” Maria said, and this time, her voice was a little quieter, the adrenaline inside coming to a blockage, like water in a clogged sink. They stood there, the three of them, like animals braced for attack, until finally Rocky’s mother moved.
“I’m going to bed, Rocky.” She looked over her shoulder at her daughter. Maria noticed the green veins that popped from under her eyes.
“Good night,” Maria said and watched as the woman went in silence, the sound of her feet absorbed by the carpet’s lushness. She and Rocky walked back to their room, and Maria carefully stepped out of her shoes.
Later, as time congealed in the darkness, Maria was startled awake to the sound of her name.
“Maria,” Rocky whispered, the voice ripping Maria out of where she’d been dozing in space-time. “Tell me where you really went.”
Maria glanced at the TV, where the time blinked in red across the room. Back to Pacific daylight, it was 2:03 in the morning. Rocky knew about Charlie, Maria was sure, but it wouldn’t matter. Maria was prepared to fight.
“I told you where I was,” Maria finally said, sitting upright in bed. “Why don’t you believe me?”
“You know Nick has a crush on you, right?”
For the second time that night, Maria was stunned with relief. It was so delicious, she smacked her lips and laughed out loud, and then, she couldn’t stop. She laughed until Rocky smiled, too, but Maria couldn’t see it with the lights off.
“Maria, stop! I’m serious!”
“You think, wait, you think I was with Nick?” Maria was sputtering the words, a jangled mess of letters, a stuttering, giggling alphabet soup. Maria with Nick! Rocky’s baby brother with hollandaise sauce smeared all over his face!
“No,
I mean. Well, yeah, I thought—maybe.”
“But you went to his room? And you saw I wasn’t there?”
“I know.” Finally, Rocky laughed. “Can you imagine?”
“No,” Maria said. “I can’t. At all. That’d be like kissing my nephew!”
“What if he were older? Would you still find it gross if he were older?”
“I mean.” Maria’s voice went somber. “He’s still your brother.”
“I guess.”
Maria waited. “You wouldn’t find it weird?”
“If he were older, I think it’d be okay. Two consenting adults? Whatever.”
Maria considered this in the darkness.
“Oh,” Rocky added, “and Karen texted you. I saw it when I saw that you’d left your phone.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. She said one thing.”
“What?”
“‘Yo.’”
“Did you reply?”
“Of course not. How do you respond to something so dumb, anyway?”
“Yeah,” Maria said. “She’s probably just bored.”
Maria knew Rocky didn’t like Karen and never really had. She suspected it was because Maria and Karen shared an uncommon alliance, being two of the few girls in the school from outside Manhattan and the only girls in their grade who took the same train home. Unlike Rocky, Karen had been to Maria’s house countless times, because Maria knew that she wouldn’t have to explain why the hot water in the bathroom always turned cold or why they didn’t have cable TV. Whenever Rocky asked if she could come over to Maria’s house, which had happened several times now, Maria made up a lie. It wasn’t intimacy that Maria was denying her. It was simply the need to have to explain.
Maria wasn’t going to pick a fight over Karen. She had already cut it close enough. For minutes after the girls said good night, Maria ached to get up to go to her phone. She remembered how earlier she had decided against texting Karen about the wink from Rocky’s father. Even though she had been smart enough to hold out on the urge, lodged only a few scrolls back in her phone’s history were traces of conversations about him. They used code names for almost every other boy they knew; why hadn’t Maria thought of one for Charlie? And with Karen’s insistence on calling him “Rocky’s dad,” it was all the more ridiculous that they’d never come up with a name. Maria set an internal clock in her head to make sure she’d wake up before Rocky. The first thing she would do when she got out of bed in the morning would be to erase the text message history from her phone, starting with her text log with Karen.
They Could Have Named Her Anything Page 16
