Vida

by Patricia Engel

  I could see what he meant, so it was up to me to spell it out for my mother, tell her that Paloma would die on our sofa. She needed better medical care in case there was an emergency. Mami relented. A few hours later, an ambulance came to take Paloma to a hospice in the Bronx. Mami and I followed the ambulance in her car. I could see my mother was exhausted. She’d been forsaking her makeup and wearing the same black pants and gray sweater for days. Her hair was pulled into a ponytail and she had a folder full of documents with her: Paloma’s papers indicating her wishes not to be revived or sustained on machines, leaving my mother to make all decisions on her behalf.

  I thought a hospice was a hospital but I learned this is where people come to die. Shriveling bodies in wheelchairs lining the halls, forgotten people waiting for their last breath. As Paloma was set up in her new room, a counselor and a doctor took my mother and me aside to tell us about the different support groups they offer for families of patients.

  Mami wouldn’t ask, so I took over.

  “How long does she have?”

  “I would be surprised if she lasts a week,” the doctor said, and the counselor woman put her hand on my shoulder. I hate when people you don’t know try to offer you comfort. I think she must have sensed this because the hand lasted only a second there before she removed it.

  We went to see Paloma in her room, told her she should get some rest. I offered to put on the TV but she said no, that the sound and light bothered her. Her voice was just a whisper now. It took all her might to make out a few words and then she’d quickly put the oxygen mask back on and close her eyes as she drew in her breath. While we were there, she had the oxygen tank changed three times, saying each one was defective.

  “They’re trying to kill me,” she told my mother with panicked eyes.

  Mami soothed her, tried to read her some psalms but Paloma didn’t want to hear it. She looked at Mami, took the mask off her face, and said, “Go home, Maria. You look terrible.”

  We each kissed Paloma good-bye. She didn’t meet my eyes when I told her I loved her. When I left her room, I spotted a copy of the Post on the counter of the nurses’ station, picked it up, and brought it back to Paloma’s room while my mother continued down the corridor.

  I got as close to Paloma as I could, touched her hand as I held the paper in front of her. “Look, Paloma, I found the paper. You want me to leave it here for you?”

  She shook her head, pulled her hand out of mine, and waved me away. I told her I loved her again but I don’t think she heard me. When I left her, she was fumbling with the oxygen mask again, fighting for each abbreviated breath.

  CIELITO LINDO

  This morning after you left I stayed in bed a long time trying to find the moment when we both knew what was happening. We were on the sofa leaning on each other, watching The Godfather. You ran your fingers all over my arms and I pretended I didn’t feel anything. You pulled my face to yours and tried to kiss me and I shook my head and said, “You’re not my boyfriend anymore.”

  You kissed me anyway and I pulled away. My hand brushed against you and I felt you hard and said, “What are you going to do with that?”

  “You know …”

  And I told you to show me.

  When it was all over, we lay tangled in the darkness of my bedroom. I almost forgot what year it is but then you started to slide out from under me, pushing the sheets off you, stepping into your jeans, and pulling your shirt on over your head. You leaned over the bed, kissing my forehead while I avoided your eyes and stared out the window.

  “Look at me,” you said.

  I gave you a little smile so you would feel absolved. You kissed each of my eyelids the way my mother used to do when I was a child and disappeared out the door.

  The last time we were together like this was eight months ago, Valentine’s Eve. The next day, you were distant and I hated that you looked at me with a guilty face. I saw you were ready to blame me for seducing you, as if it would lessen the charge and you’d only face time for second-degree cheating. I wondered if you ever felt that guilty when it was me you were cheating on, with her.

  My friend Michael took me to a bar on Washington and while he got wrecked with some strangers, I drifted into the back of the place to play pool with some model boys who are too pretty for their own good. Michael said this was the best night of the year to meet someone new because all the couples are in restaurants and only single people are in the bars. He was right. I looked around and saw that everyone in the place had that same lonely, hungry look in their eyes, like stray dogs looking for owners.

  The set just seemed to roll onto the stage and next thing you know I was in this silly boy-meets-girl scene. He asked me to be his partner for the next game. He had his quarters on the pool table for an hour already. I said no, that I just wanted to sit and smoke and I could tell he was a little disgusted watching me light up but he kept grinning at me anyway.

  He was really sporty-looking, Star. The opposite of you. He was wearing neat jeans, not soft with two weeks of dirt on them like yours, a button-down shirt, and he looked like the cleanest guy in the bar, out of place, and definitely older than the rest of us. He was so blond, or maybe he just looked like a ray of sun because I’m so used to your black mane. He has fat lips that are split from surfing accidents, a wide nose with a broken bridge, and his skin is tan and cracked with sun damage. He’s got a swimmer’s body. Huge shoulders, a thin waist. I studied him while I smoked. I sniffed him out the way I sniffed you out. Like the night you and I met at the concert and I knew this was going to be the beginning of something huge in my world. With this guy at the bar on Valentine’s, I hoped I would find a distraction for a while, from you.

  Lucas wants to know if I’m feeling better today.

  “Yeah,” I tell him, confident in my lie. “I took some aspirin and went to bed early.”

  “I called you at least five times last night.”

  “I know. I heard your messages this morning.”

  We’re in his flashy car. A total midlife-crisis car. He’s forty, rich, and single, so he drives a bullet-colored Ferrari. When we stop at red lights, people in the cars next to us always check us out. It’s such a stupid car. It makes me think of people starving in third-world countries. I feel guilty riding in this car, and it has nothing to do with the fact that I don’t love him.

  You never talk about her. I never ask. It’s as if she doesn’t exist. I’m different. I can’t say three sentences without muttering something about “my boyfriend.” I know you don’t like to hear about him; you’ve told me so a hundred times. You don’t like to imagine that I kiss anyone else. But I can’t edit him out like you do so well.

  I’m not going to lie. Sometimes I wonder why I even bother running around with you, letting myself become la otra, doing things I swore I’d never do. I tell myself it’s okay when you do these things for love. And the other part of me, the sinister self I never knew I possessed, is satisfied to know that at the very least, you’re not faithful to her either.

  I broke up with Lucas after two months together.

  I said to him, “I think we should break up before you get too attached to me.”

  He started to laugh, showing me all his teeth.

  “I’m already attached to you,” he said.

  “Well, we’d better break up before you fall in love with me.”

  “I’m already in love with you.”

  It lasted only two days. I made this case about how we’re at different stages in life. He’s divorced and has had like fifteen live-in girlfriends. That’s all he wants, a professional girlfriend to complement his lifestyle.

  He’s always telling me how life is about taking pleasure in the day-to-day stuff like surfing, sports, good restaurants, and vacations in Rio and Gstaad, not having a nuclear family on an already overpopulated planet. We have so little in common it’s scary. The only thing that keeps him interested in me is his taste for my body.

  I can’t wear h
igh heels with him though. He’s shorter than me and he hates if I extend myself another few inches. Not like you, rising almost half a foot over me. I could wear my highest heels and you’d love it. And, back then, you loved it when I took off everything except those high heels and walked around for you before you’d grab me and throw me on the bed.

  Not my boyfriend. In his apartment, you take off your shoes at the door.

  But Lucas is devoted. I’m lucky that his age has allowed him to get any cheater ways he might have had out of his system.

  “Promise you won’t leave me,” he says at the most random moments, like when I’m putting on my makeup to go out for dinner.

  “I promise,” I always answer, because I don’t have the energy for truth anymore.

  You’ve poisoned me, Star, sabotaged me in every way. I was the most faithful girl in the world until I met you, and now we are the same.

  It’s midnight. We’re lying on a blanket on the beach, drunk on red wine and laughing at all the stars in the sky. You lay me on my belly and trace the paths between all the beauty marks on my back, the ones that look like they were made with a Sharpie. You call them my constellations. And the biggest mark, right in the middle of my left shoulder blade, is the brightest star. And the brightest star, I say, is you.

  You go on singing me that old song, “Cielito Lindo,” and I close my eyes while you whisper the lyrics into my ear. “Ese lunar que tienes, cielito lindo, junto a la boca, no se lo des a nadie, cielito lindo, que a mí me toca …”

  It just so happens that your girl and my man are both in New York, where you and I met so many years ago. This is just about the funniest thing we can think of right now and we are laughing so hard I feel like my ribs are going to split like wishbones.

  “You know what would be really funny,” I say, gasping for air, “if we took out my boyfriend’s Ferrari.”

  I can’t remember how we got here. Yet somehow we’re inching into Lucas’s apartment with the key he gave me. You’re surveying the whole monstrous place and his slick minimalist furniture while I go to his bedroom and pull his spare set of car keys from the nightstand drawer. When I turn around, you’re standing close behind me. You hold onto my hips to keep me from tripping over and falling backward onto the bed.

  You’re driving the Ferrari fast down the causeway. We fly past palm trees and the Brickell Avenue mirrored high-rises flickering like razors in the moonlight. You drive like it’s your car, looking over at me sitting next to you every few seconds, running your fingers through my hair, putting your hand on my thigh, leaning over to kiss me at every traffic light. I’m so happy I almost wish we would crash and die like this, together.

  I’ve only given you one side of the story. The fact is that I’m not really that miserable with Lucas. He’s good to me, Star. He calls me all the time and I always know where he is. He’s not a disappearing act like you are. No way would he shut off his cell phone for hours like you used to do. I like the security more than I thought I would. I also like that for once I don’t have to be the relationship tutor. He’s expressive. He never holds back. Not like you. Getting you to say what you feel is like walking out into the desert and asking God for a sign.

  That’s why I never told you I loved you either. Not until we’d spent the night together for the hundredth time as cheaters and I decided to lay it on the line right there in the mess of my bed sheets. Remember?

  I told you, “If I could, I would reach into my chest, rip out my heart, and hand it to you.”

  You just stared back at me with your gypsy eyes.

  Maybe that’s when I let go of the pretty picture I wanted our love to be and accepted the story as it was dealt. Our love isn’t dainty colors and perfect proportions set in a neat frame. Our love is more like the graffiti on the walls downtown that they try to wash away and paint over but it’s always underneath. Even after a fresh coat of paint someone always creeps up in the night and sprays on some more.

  Having an affair isn’t that hard. Once you get used to the lying it’s all pretty simple. All you need is a probable alibi. But today Lucas is looking at me like I’m in trouble. He’s got something serious to say and he won’t spit it out. We’re sitting face-to-face on his bed because this is where we always sit, cross-legged, when we’re about to have a serious conversation.

  “Baby, you know I don’t mind you driving the Ferrari while I’m away,” he begins.

  How does he know? We were so careful. Nobody saw us leave his condo or come back with it. We only added a few miles.

  “You left the seat back and it took me forever to return it to the position I like.”

  He says this like I committed a felony.

  I use your recipe for lying. I meet his gaze. I keep quiet and try to look as childlike as possible, sitting still with my lips soft. Silence implies innocence. Only idiots confess. I learned that from you.

  It was bound to happen. We’re both at the same bar, you with your girl, me with my man. I’m sitting on a sofa along the wall, smoking, while Lucas pretends it doesn’t bother him. I’m out of cigarettes and feeling bold, so I make my way to the ladies’ room to buy a fresh pack from the bathroom attendant, knowing I’ll pass through your line of sight on the way.

  As I slice through the crowd on the way back to Lucas, I feel a hand close around my wrist. I look and see you there beside me.

  I mouth the words, “Let me go,” and you do.

  I feel strange to be so near you in a public place. I’m so used to our stolen privacies. My eyes come into focus and I see that she is next to you. I have never seen her before but I know it’s her by the way her finger hangs on one of the belt loops of your jeans.

  Now it’s a game of eyes.

  I learned from my mother, the retired beauty queen, that how well a woman speaks with her eyes is what separates the amateurs from the pros. I look at your girl and then at you, feeling your eyes anchor on me as I slip into the crowd.

  If she didn’t already know we’re sleeping together, she does now.

  We’re in the Ferrari again. It’s our little routine, stealing Lucas’s car every chance we get. You’re speeding and I know it’s only a matter of time before we’re stopped by the police.

  You pull over on the beach along the bay. We put the seats all the way back and for a second I think that maybe you brought me here to tell me you love me. But then you begin to kiss me, ripping into my lips with urgency, pulling the clothes off both our bodies with a famished fury that makes me think this might be the last time.

  VIDA

  She told me her real name was Davida, that she was named for four men who came before her in her family and that her older brother escaped the tradition because he was a diseased baby who Saint Anthony saved, so his name is Tony. She said she couldn’t remember who started calling her Vida but that it happened here in Miami. In Colombia she was never called anything but her given name, but over here Vida stuck, which she said was okay with her because that plane ride over the Caribbean broke her life in two.

  I met her at my boyfriend’s house, a small pink stucco cube in El Portal. He’s Hungarian and has a cluster of compatriots that get together at his place for weekly barbecues in the backyard. I was one of the newer girlfriends and Vida had been with her guy, Sacha, for at least a year or two. But when she showed up she always had those same skittish eyes, like a stray cat who knows it’s about to be chased off. She hardly spoke to anyone. It was her man who did the talking with a fixed hand on Vida’s waist, and you’d almost think she was his prisoner if it wasn’t for the way she always dipped her mouth into the curve of his neck and marked him with kisses. Sacha never broke away from her except to hover around the grill with the other Hungarians, poke the steaks, and talk in their language about the old days in Veszprém.

  I didn’t mind those barbecues. The boyfriend and I were doing well at the six-month mark, and I had beaten out the other two girls he was sleeping with when I met him: a Mexican and a Nicaraguan. Didn’t ta
ke a genius to see that the boyfriend and his friends had a thing for girls with a tan but I didn’t care. I’d been living in Florida for three years already and only had a few ex-boyfriends to show for it. No female friends, and a community college teaching job that always left me fearing for the future of our youth.

  Vida raised an eyebrow at me the first time she heard I was Colombian. The boyfriend said it when he introduced us, as if that’s all we needed to become like sisters. I had to clarify that I was U.S.–born, it was my parents who were true Colombians, and Vida accepted that, even appreciated that I took the time to authenticate myself to her. She found my Spanish amusing. Said I talked like it was the seventies. That’s the Spanish my parents left with, I told her, the Spanish I learned in our house mixed with the telenovela talk I picked up on Telemundo. The other girlfriends, a Russian girl named Irina and two Hungarian sisters named Valeska and Zora, mostly kept to themselves. That left Vida and me to take refuge in each other during those long afternoons around the picnic table.

  Vida didn’t work officially. I knew she was illegal like my boyfriend, most of his friends, and about half of Miami. She was pretty: lean with high hips, dollar green eyes, and bouncy black hair. I didn’t see why she couldn’t get a job in a restaurant or a store. She told me she cleaned houses sometimes, even offered to clean mine for cheap. She said she did makeup nice, too, and if I had a party to go to I should give her a call. I asked her where she learned and she got a faraway look in her eyes and said, “I used to do pageants.”

  I told her my mom was a beauty queen in her former life. She was a plain Bogotá nerd till some guy pulled her off the street and into a pageant and she ended up a Miss Colombia finalist. The following year, she married my father and moved to Queens and later to New Jersey, where she traded in her tacones altos for driving shoes. Vida seemed to be doing me the favor of listening and when I was through she only asked me where New Jersey was in relation to Florida.