Dying Unfinished

by Espinosa, Maria

  My brain had learned to shut down.

  “What future is there in dance?” said the shrink. “It’s better that you’re back full-time at college.”

  The shrink, a thoroughly bourgeois European Jew of an older generation, wanted me to fit into his mold. Then he could have affected a “cure.” But this was a Procrustean bed into which I could not fit. Besides, I had no idea how a nice Jewish girl acted in intimate relationships. In what ways she was assertive, in what ways meek?

  At times I wanted to die. I felt sad and empty. The physical discipline of dance no longer buoyed me up. Academic studies, engaging only the intellect, left a huge part of me hungry. Writing papers was extremely difficult. I got straight “C”s. My thoughts still were too swift to create cohesive paragraphs, as if I had drunk far too much caffeine. Then there would be long spaces of blankness.

  “I feel badly dressed,” I said one day.

  “You are,” the psychiatrist said, scrutinizing me. I was in my usual black skirt and tights, but today I had put on a gray sweater with a scooped neck.

  “I feel guilty about spending money on clothes. But then I spend so much on you.”

  “You sound angry.”

  “If I weren’t seeing you, I’d certainly have more to spend on clothes.”

  “Perhaps you’re angry at yourself,” he said, deflecting me

  “I want to stop seeing you.”

  “That would be a big mistake.”

  Scared, I believed him for a while longer.

  Then things changed. I moved into an apartment of my own on East Fourteenth Street. I began going out with men again.

  One night I awakened on the lumpy mattress of a man named Eli, whom I’d met at a party. His good male sweat mixed with cologne and marijuana, which we smoked earlier while we listened to Charlie Parker on the stereo. He lived in a fifth floor walkup a few blocks away. Books overflowed the shelves and lay in heaps on the floor. There was an Olivetti portable on the desk on which he wrote plays. His bedroom was sparsely furnished. There was an Indian print spread on the wall, along with black-and-white photos of nude female parts, with thighs that resembled stretches of sand fringed by hair and breasts that made me think of soft lunar mountain tops.

  “Stay, baby, why don’t you stay the night,” he murmured, as I pulled myself away from the warmth of his body.

  “I’ve got to get back.” When I looked at my watch under the light of the candle, I saw it was midnight. Suppose Dad were to phone early in the morning? What would he have done? Probably nothing. If he questioned my absence, I could have easily invented an alibi—or simply told him the truth. In reality, he never did phone. But I was afraid. His hold was so strong, although invisible and unarticulated, that I couldn’t spend the entire night in a man’s bed without suffering anxiety.

  Driven by an irrational compulsion, I flung off the thin army blanket, gathered my clothes from the floor and began to dress. It was dangerous at this hour on the street.

  “Will you walk me home?”

  “No, baby, I’m half asleep.”

  “Please!”

  “Sleep …,” he mumbled, curling up against the pillow.

  Quickly I finished dressing, put on my shoes, closed the door behind me, and walked down the winding flights of stairs.

  I ran the four blocks home through nearly deserted streets.

  Invisible cords hurled from invisible chakras bind me.

  “Hindus believe in chakras. Energy centers,” I said to the shrink.

  “Do you?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. … Yes, I do.”

  “Hindu mythology consists of fairy tales,” he said in his cultivated voice with its tinge of a Hungarian accent.

  Dad’s mind was a mystery to me, filled with unsavory, strange objects which I picked up on now and then. I would doubt my perceptions because they were so bizarre. I told him about a girl in my building who sold Oriental rugs and who made a commission one day of seven hundred dollars. “That’s more than a call girl earns in a night,” he said. I was shocked. Why did he associate her earnings immediately with illicit sex? Such isolated comments revealed what I believed to be fragments of his hidden nature.

  My reason came up against a wall of fear with regard to him. Dark pits of lions waited, hungry to devour me. His rage, like fire, could transform me into ash. And so I rushed away from Eli’s apartment at midnight, leaving the warmth of his body and his bed, diaphragm inside me, sperm leaking onto my underpants.

  Invisible cords hurled through space from invisible chakras.

  “Perhaps it is your own desire that you are attributing to your father,” the shrink said, relighting his pipe.

  “No,” I replied.” It’s more than that.”

  “Chakras! You’re crazy!” Aaron would have sputtered in rage.

  When I was fifteen, intrigued by Rosicrucian advertisements, I enrolled in a course by mail. When Dad learned of this, he ordered me to take the heap of pamphlets that I had accumulated and throw them all into the trash. That was the only reading material he ever directly censored. Another hint of his true nature, of the fear he felt about phenomena he did not understand.

  But these forces do exist. Invisible cords of desire hurled from invisible chakras. (Why did I obey him?)

  The tension created between my own perceptions, which were like dream images, and the beliefs of everyone else around me, was painful. When my perceptions flashed signals of warning, the world told me those signals didn’t exist, that I was crazy. But, Mother, underneath your mocking words, you too have a sense of this reality.

  CHAPTER 21

  CHANGE, 1963

  I am the merman king that called over the strand

  The voice that called you from husband and kin

  To a watery land.

  Come, come, come to me.

  Break through the wall.

  See, there is no wall. Soft mist dissolves it all.

  — MSC

  The house felt barren to her without the children. Sometimes when the stairs creaked at night or a shadow hovered in the darkness of their bedroom, Eleanor half believed these were signs of intangible presences, those spirits she had sensed when they first moved here.

  The boys were off at college—Howard in Chicago and Jesse on the West Coast. Rosa was living in Paris. “I want to get married,” she had said in a passionate voice before she left on her travels.

  “You’re not ready, my dear.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, you need to work on yourself,” Eleanor said, reluctant to express all her doubts. Rosa had not pursued the discussion.

  She had left for Europe immediately after obtaining her Bachelor’s Degree, despite the warnings of her psychiatrist, whom Eleanor secretly consulted. After traveling through several countries, she settled in Paris. In her letters, she mentioned a Chilean writer. To Aaron’s consternation, she had moved in with him.

  Eleanor and Aaron had both retired from their jobs. Aaron worked long hours in his studio. He had received several large commissions, and now he depended more than ever on her support. She dreamed of completing fragments she had jotted down over the years, but there never seemed to be time. Endless tasks and social life consumed her. She found herself haunting department store sales. A mysterious rash appeared on her skin. Her back ailment flared up. Both conditions required numerous medical appointments. As for Heinrich, he was increasingly moody and difficult.

  “You’re so good at languages,” said Margaret one day when they met for tea at Margaret’s brownstone flat near Gramercy Park. Margaret’s hair, like Eleanor’s, had turned gray, and her face also showed lines of age. “Why don’t you try your hand at translating?”

  So one afternoon Eleanor went to see a publisher who was a cousin of Margaret’s. He gave her a French cookbook to translate, with the promise of more interesting work in the future. For months now the thick volume had lain on her desk. She had translated only a few pages. What an endless task i
t seemed to be. Ah, she lacked discipline! She could hear her mother’s reproachful voice in her mind.

  One September day, just as she was slicing a loaf of fresh, warm Italian bread for lunch, the phone rang. “Mom, I’m pregnant!” Rosa’s voice came faintly through the cackling trans-Atlantic phone cables.

  “You are?”

  “Yes.”

  Eleanor gripped the phone tighter. “When is the baby due?”

  “In two months.”

  “What?” shouted Aaron, who had just come into the kitchen.

  “Sshh, Aaron. It’s Rosa.”

  She looked down at the blue platter with cold cuts that she had arranged with care for their lunch. There were thin slices of Prosciutto, Swiss cheese, coppery lettuce leaves, and Greek olives. The food blurred in front of her.

  “Donnes-moi, petite.”

  A man’s voice came on the line. He spoke loudly with a thick accent. “Bonjour, Madame. I am Antonio. Your daughter and I, we are going to marry, si le bon Dieu veut, so the baby, she will have my name.”

  “She?”

  “I think the baby it is a girl. Already she is powerful. Because of her, we marry. You must come to Paris, Madame.”

  “When are you getting married?”

  “The government must give us the papers. They are slow, you understand, the French bureaucrats. For months we are trying. We will have a civil ceremony because my family is Catholic, but your daughter she is Jewish.”

  “Not really.”

  “You will come to Paris, Madame, yes?”

  “She doesn’t have to,” Rosa hissed.

  “Laisse-moi parler, petite! Je sais ce que je fais!”

  “I will see.”

  “Tell me yes, you will!”

  You must go, said her friends. Of course you must, said Aaron. Only Heinrich thought differently. They met for a late lunch near the Brooklyn gallery where he now worked. He set his wine glass down so forcefully that a few red drops spilled on the white tablecloth. “Don’t go,” he said. “I don’t want to see Rosa hurt.”

  “What do you mean?” She stared at her lamb and rice pilaf.

  “It’s a delicate situation.”

  “They asked me to come.” A mixture of maternal apprehension and desire for adventure stirred in her. She hadn’t visited France since she was a young girl. Furthermore, the emotion in Antonio’s voice gave her a sense of urgency.

  “He’s much older than Rosa. He makes a hand-to-mouth living. He probably thinks that because she’s American, her family is rich. Frankly he sounds like a bit of a gigolo. But Rosa loves him, and he’s the father of her child.”

  “You don’t understand!” A sob rose in her throat. Other women were close to their daughters. When Melanie told about how she and her perfectly blonde girls went shopping or skiing together, she wanted to shut out the words, it was so painful.

  “The last time we were all together,” said Eleanor, “you held her an awfully long time in your arms when you greeted her.”

  “I love her. She’s like a daughter to me. I would never take advantage of her.”

  “I’m glad,” she said stiffly.

  “My God, Ellie, don’t be jealous. She’s your child!”

  “You don’t know how often I’ve wanted to die because of her,” she murmured. “I don’t want to hurt her.” Tears welled up in her eyes.

  “You deny reality,” he said. “That only makes things worse.”

  “My own mother came when my children were born.”

  “This is a different situation. You hadn’t had a breakdown.”

  Drops of sweat glistened on his flushed skin, and his face hardened. He lit a cigarette. “Have you been seeing other men?”

  She flushed. In the past few months there had indeed been others: an artist with a loft in Soho, a friend’s lonely ex, a ruddy-faced Canadian with whom she shared a drink at the Algonquin.

  “Don’t look away. Tell me the truth.”

  “Yes,” she murmured. “It’s a private matter.”

  “It’s not private! It affects me.”

  “I don’t want to hurt anyone. But I don’t want to feel that my body isn’t mine.” Her voice dropped. She couldn’t find the words to express her need for a secret life and how it somehow nurtured her. “I want to be free,” she whispered. “Not in bondage.”

  “Love is a bond,” he said, flicking his cigarette ash into a black ashtray. The meat and gravy on his plate had congealed.

  “What about Aaron and Erica?”

  “You could say they’re part of the bond.”

  He took a drag of his cigarette, swallowed the rest of his wine. “I feel the change in your body. I think that’s why I’ve been impotent at times with you. The truth is I don’t satisfy you any more in bed, do I?”

  She flushed again. Indeed, it had troubled her, although she would never admit it so brazenly. “Potency is not all there is. It’s the closeness between us that counts. Sex isn’t that important to me,” she said in a low voice. “For me, it’s casual. Like shaking hands.”

  “My God, El. Sex is not like shaking hands.”

  “Long ago you said that Aaron—to use your words—plucked creativity from my bones. With great compassion, you said that was why I sought out other lovers. To replenish myself. Perhaps that’s happening with us.”

  “It’s not the same!” he said. “You and I have been honest with each other. If you’re going to conceal things from me, as you do with him, then it’s over between us. Finished. Caput.”

  She placed her hand on his knee. He shook it off. Then she pounced upon him, clinging. Tears streamed down her cheeks. “I love you,” she kept repeating.

  He held her close and smoothed her hair. “Ellie, don’t go.”

  “I must,” she said, flaring with anger “I won’t let you dictate to me the way you do to Erica.”

  “Then you will lose me.” He picked up the check from the table, paid the cashier, and strode out the door without a backward glance. Eleanor wanted to run after him, but her body felt rooted to the chair.

  CHAPTER 22

  ROSA

  Antonio sliced through the cords that bound me so tightly to my father. He was the only one strong enough to do this. When we first met one cold winter afternoon in a café on the Left Bank, I perceived in that first instant the essence of who he was, as I think we often do, before our wishes and fears and habitual responses hide the truth of another person. His eyes made me think of the sea. He said that he was a writer, but I could see he dissipated much of his energy in talk and frenetic activity. While we drank red wine, he talked about Don Quixote as cerebral, while Sancho Panzo, he said was vegetative, and Dulcinea the illusory ideal. These were essential aspects of human nature that any story needed to address, he said. Scribbling his notes on the back of a napkin, he handed it to me as if he knew that it would become a keepsake.

  Later we went back to his apartment in the Quatrième Arrondissement. We entered through a heavy wooden door into a large courtyard. I could imagine horses tethered there in former times, blowing steamy breaths, filling the air with the odor of fresh manure. A group of housewives were gossiping. “Bonjour, Antonio,” one shouted. “Cette fille-là, elle est jolie.”

  “The women here like to flirt with me.” he said. “I’m the janitor. I clean the stairs and the WCs.”

  His apartment had an air of threadbare aristocracy. There were two rooms and an alcove with a stove and sink. The toilet was outside on the landing by the stairs. It consisted of a cement hole in the floor. In Antonio’s main room was a double bed covered with a quilt, a black wooden table with faded gilt trim and curved legs, and three antique chairs upholstered in damask. A corner bookshelf contained volumes with Spanish and French titles. There was a tape player. Gold satin drapes, faded with age. An earthen red tile floor.

  We made love, and although he was vigorous, it wasn’t satisfying. There was a mechanical quality to his lovemaking. His skin was pale, nearly hairless. His body muscu
lar and bony. Afterwards he ran his hands over my body. “How thin you are,” he said. As I was shiveringin the cold, he put a maroon satin robe around my shoulders and made me a cup of Japanese tea. Then he showed me photos of countless girls he’d slept with. Some were clothed, others in various stages of undress. Blondes, brunettes, far more beautiful than me. How could I compete?

  We arranged to meet the next afternoon at five o’clock at my hotel, but I left before the appointed time. For the next few hours I browsed through bookstalls along the Seine. I consulted a fortune teller who warned me against him. She advised me to leave Paris. When I returned to the hotel, he was just arriving!

  “I will marry you,” he said three days later. We were in my room with its pale flowered wall paper, where I’d been burning candles and eucalyptus for protection. He leaned forward in his armchair. “We will have a baby. I will give it my name. Castillo de Olivares is more elegant than Bernstein.”

  “Will we stay together?” I asked, treating it as a joke, although he must have sensed my hunger for intimacy. “Of course not,” he said.

  He tore the bonds that I had tried in vain to break. Months later, after making love I discovered he had torn through my diaphragm. I bought another, but it happened again. By that time our baby was crying out to be born, and I knew it was time.

  I had moved into his apartment, which was gloomy and dark at night. The electric light wasn’t strong enough to read easily. The table quivered on its spindly legs. I was always cold, huddled by the gas heater in my winter coat, and he was constantly late. I always seemed to be waiting for him to come home, trying to read or write while my fingers were numb with cold.

  He was unlike anyone I had ever known.

  “We’re going to dinner with Eduardo, the Chilean consul,” he said a few days after I had moved in. “He’s a friend from my university days. I want him to give me a job.”

  It was an important occasion. I took special care with my makeup, hair, and clothing. That night I wore a black sleeveless sheath, pearls, and fragile high heels. “We’re late,” he said. He had begun drinking wine to quell his nervousness. All my fault, I thought later. If I had only dressed more promptly. Been ready on time.