She chose the color polish. A light pink because she said I struck her as an understated sort of girl.
“A natural shade,” she said, “because it’s quiet and honest. Like you.”
And this only made me feel like more of a phony.
The boyfriend slept with another girl. I asked him straight out and he confessed. Said it happened twice and that it was another lady from the gym. Forty. Divorced twice. Panamanian. I know because I asked for details and I was so angry my only response was, “Panama used to be Colombia, asshole.”
Then, my canned defense. Said I hoped it was worth it. You lost me. Lost me. Lost me. Gave him a wall of silence, unreturned phone calls, adjusted to my life without him, the hole in my evenings, and the cold bed. Returned to life before the Hungarian. Sunday without his grill. His friends. Without Vida, the living documentary.
And then I caved in, because I am like everyone else who can’t do anything based on real principles. I thought of my father. How he would shake his head and say I have no character. That he didn’t raise me for this kind of treatment from a man. And when my parents called to check up on me, I closed my eyes and mumbled that everything was fine, while the boyfriend fell asleep with his head in my lap like nothing.
When I saw Vida again, this time for dinner, the four of us at a churrascaria on Seventy-ninth, she and I fell into our Spanish while the boys talked business in their language.
“I didn’t think you would take him back,” she said softly.
“Neither did I.”
Later, the boys suggested we get a bottle of wine and drink it on the beach. Normally, Vida loved the beach, but with Sacha and the boyfriend there she seemed indifferent. As the boys got drunk and did flips in the sand, Vida lit herself cigarette after cigarette. She had an eye on Sacha while he and the boyfriend frolicked like little boys. He blew her a kiss and she stared back under a veil that looked a lot like contempt.
“The owners of the house used to surprise us at night sometimes. Once, they went extra hard on me, punched my eyes so that I couldn’t open them for days. I never was allowed out except two or three times when Sacha let me smoke a cigarette with him behind the house. But after that beating, he put me on his motorcycle and all I felt was the wind because I couldn’t see. I held him as tight as I could but I was in so much pain I thought for sure I would fall off and die on the road. And then I smelled the change in the air. Salty and sweet at once and he carried me into the water. At first it stung but then I opened my eyes and saw the sea in front of me, all around me. We were in our clothes but wet up to our necks. He held me so I could float, didn’t talk so I could listen to only the waves. And when he returned me to the house and put me back into the bedroom where I lived, I thought, It’s not his fault that he is so cruel. We’d all become different creatures.”
Just as I started to think of her and Sacha as some kind of weird fairy tale, Vida turned to me and declared that she was no Eréndira.
She told me other things.
She said there were four girls and they were expected to see clients whenever they showed up, and could only sleep a few hours at a time. One of the girls wore bikinis all the time and would do anything for drugs, and the owner of the house, a guy named Raul, kept her supplied. One girl, Vida told me, hardly ever spoke and once they raped her so badly that she bled for hours in the shower. There was a woman doctor who came to see the girls when Sacha called, but she was pitiless and Vida was pretty sure all the girls were sterilized during one of those brutal examinations. Vida heard of a girl who was there before her, who managed to have a client fall in love with her and buy her debt to the house. Some girls thought she was like a Cinderella but Vida thought the client probably made the girl his personal slave. Vida said the other girls resented that Sacha took a liking to her, that she tried to explain to them that she had a plan for seducing him to get them all free, but that Sacha started encouraging clients to pick other girls so Vida wouldn’t have to work. For this, Vida said, she would never forgive herself.
One of the clients let Vida use his cell phone to call her parents, but when she heard her father’s voice she hung up. She said she lived in her dreams for a long time. Thought of her old boyfriend, Fernando, who moved to Brooklyn to be with his father when they were still in high school. He’d written her a few times but the letters stopped and Vida told herself that when she was finally free, she’d go find him. “And then the beatings,” she said. “Every time the bruises faded, there came another round.”
It never occurred to me to ask Vida where this house of horrors was. I never thought to report it to the police, see if the house was still in operation. Help her expose Fito, maybe help the girls who would follow.
None of that. I just listened.
That New Year’s Eve, the Hungarians had a party in a mansion on Hibiscus Island. The owners were off skiing and one of the boyfriend’s friends was the caretaker, lived in the guesthouse, and had run of the place when the patrons were away. We drank champagne on the boat dock, watched the fireworks over Biscayne Bay. The boyfriend pulled me to his side as we sat on the concrete ledge, our toes skimming the dark canal water. We had our midnight kiss, hugged all the friends. Vida wrapped her skinny arms around my neck and we toasted privately to the future.
On our way home, I asked the boyfriend if he knew that Vida used to be a prostitute and that Sacha was her warden.
He didn’t lift his eyes from the causeway. Just nodded, palms closing tighter around the steering wheel.
“I don’t know how she can stand to be with him.”
The boyfriend looked over at me, a shot of anger in his eyes. “He almost got killed because of her. They hunted him for months.”
“He watched them beat her, rape her, and sell her.”
“She never tried to escape.”
“They shot a girl in the back once for trying to run away.”
He laughed. “They just told the girls that to keep them from trying.”
“How could you have known about it all and done nothing?”
That set him off. The boyfriend pulled over right there on the Venetian Causeway and wrapped his fat knuckles around my shoulder, his rough fingertips carving into my skin.
“It was just a job, Sabina. He had to make a living, too. It’s not his fault they took her there. If it wasn’t for him she’d still be there.”
“Being a witness can make a person just as guilty.”
A solid minute passed. The boyfriend’s eyes drove into mine and I refused to soften. He wasn’t my lover anymore but an accomplice to something terrible and his hands felt like weights on my body. The strange thing is that he was looking at me with a blend of hatred and confusion. We didn’t recognize each other anymore. Or maybe we were seeing each other for the first time.
“Get out of the car, Sabina.”
As soon as he said it, he relented. Pulled me into his chest with that same heavy hand and pushed my hair off my face, kissing my cheeks and forehead with his dry, chapped lips.
I wish I’d gotten out, had a little honor and walked home by foot, each step reminding me how off-track I was in my life. But I didn’t move. Let the boyfriend drive me home and let him sleep in my bed and everything else.
Vida and I both woke up the next day with the same idea. She called me while the boyfriend was still sleeping and Sacha was out for an errand for one of his clients.
She didn’t even have to say it. I already knew.
Later that afternoon she told Sacha she was going to buy cigarettes. I told the boyfriend I was visiting Jessamy. I picked Vida up on the corner of her block and we drove all the way to Orlando before we stopped for a toilet. Didn’t talk the whole way, either. It was only then that we realized we needed a plan.
We drove for something like thirty hours. When we got to the New Jersey line I called my parents and said to expect us. They were nice to my new friend Vida, and didn’t ask why they’d never heard of her, or what we were doing there in New Je
rsey in the dead of January with no luggage and still in our Miami clothes. I dressed her up in one of my high school sweaters, gave her some thick socks and duck boots. Made her look like a real suburbanite.
I slept in my childhood bedroom and she slept next door in the one that belonged to my brother. I went into my parents’ room early the next morning and shut the door behind me. Vida was still sleeping. I tried to explain to them as much as I could but stopped short in several places, every time I saw my mother lift her palm to cover her heart.
I’m a coward. I hid when my parents took Vida into the kitchen, pushed some breakfast her way, and tried to talk some truth out of her while the maid, Luz, pretended to be busy chopping vegetables for the lunch soup.
I listened from the hallway as Vida complimented the coffee and asked for another bagel. My mother told her she could use our phone to call her parents and Vida declined.
“They must be worried about you,” said Papi.
I knew that’s all it would take. The face of a father. Any father.
Vida started to cry and Papi had an in. Offered her a ticket home. Or, he said, she could stay here and they’d figure something else out. But my mother pushed her toward Colombia. Said it’s not a question of dreams anymore. It’s a question of love and she should be with her family.
Seems so easy now. After all those confessions on the beach. Problems solved by a long drive and my dad’s credit card.
The next day, she was home.
On my end, I still hadn’t figured anything out, but I decided to stay with my parents a little while longer. The boyfriend would forget me after a while. Maybe he’d pester me to find out about Vida for Sacha, but he’d replace me with another chica soon enough.
My parents and I took her to Newark Airport together for that insanely early Avianca flight. I insisted to Papi that he book her a direct flight, no layover in Miami. I was afraid the sight of the ocean might blow her off course. It happens to the best of us.
She hugged me. Gave me a new smile. A shy one I’d never seen before. Thanked me for nothing specific, which was fine because I felt like I’d been really stingy in every way. Why did it take me this long to get her here? I’ll never know.
When she landed, she called. Her parents got on the phone and thanked mine for their help. They still didn’t have a clue about Vida’s life here. I wondered if she’d ever tell them.
It’s been a year since all this.
I went back to Miami. After a few failed phone calls the boyfriend forgot me, just as predicted. I only saw him once afterward, at the movies. I was alone and he was with a girl wearing knee-high leather boots in the middle of Florida summer.
Every time I get to thinking of Vida, she is the one to call first. Always that fuzzy connection, her warning me that she’s only got a few minutes left on the calling card and we might get cut off.
“I’m just calling to make sure you’re okay,” she tells me. “I worry about you.”
That always cracks me up.
She says she’s washing hair at a nice salon on La Septima, and they’re going to teach her how to do highlights. Her family is planning a trip to Cartagena. Their first vacation together ever.
She sends her love to my parents. Makes me promise to visit her one of these days.
On the long drive up from Miami, Vida and I went through two or three states without a word between us. She hardly moved her gaze from the stretch of interstate sound barriers beyond her window. Somewhere around Maryland, Vida spoke over the hum of the engine that comforted me through the night: “There is no love. Only people living life together. Tomorrow will be better.”
DÍA
I find him sitting on a plastic lounge chair by the hotel pool. I give a little wave and he stands. We kiss on the cheek. He tells me I’m taller than he remembers.
“Sit down, sit down,” he offers just as thunder rolls in, so we find a spot on an iron bench under a flaking white gazebo.
“It’s been a long time,” he says.
We were never a couple. Still, it felt that way because Día was always mad at me. I tell him that, thinking it’ll go over like a joke, but he just stares at me like he doesn’t remember it like that. He called a few days ago, the first time in five years, to say he was coming to Miami and he heard from Malik and some others that I live here now.
“I tried to say good-bye,” I say. “You never picked up the phone.”
“You were always good about those sorts of things.”
Día looks like life ran him over. Must have dropped twenty pounds, melting into his blue button-down, and his black pants have all kinds of shadow spots on them. The Día I remember had soccer legs and sharp shoulders, but now he looks gelatinous, eyes twitching, mestizo skin yellowed, hair knotted in buds. While he talks about the humidity, how he can’t understand how a civilized person can live here, I look for the rod he used to have in his tongue, a tiny barbell that got in the way every time we kissed.
I don’t see it.
I ask what brings him to town and he’s agitated, looking to the dark clouds for the right words.
“You’re not going to like it,” he says.
“Just tell me.”
I think it can’t be that bad because Día was never one for drugs. He managed a bar for years without drinking, spending the slow afternoons before the happy-hour crew rolled in reading history books on a stool in the corner. That’s how we met. One day I asked what he was reading.
“I’m a professional gambler,” he says.
I can’t help it, my whole forehead lifts like strings are tugging.
Last time I saw Día, he was studying for the Foreign Service exam. Spoke six languages and could talk politics and literature in any of them, always on my back to study, asking what grades I was pulling since I was majoring in screwing around. He’d yell at me on the corner of Fourteenth, tell me a smart girl like me was throwing it all away. Call me an ingrate, a brat, a blind fool for running around with Malik, who Día said spent more time in the bathroom snorting the amputated limbs of my compatriots than being a boyfriend to me.
“Gambling?”
Día explains that he started playing blackjack online and then joined some secret league in the city. His eyes shine when he tells me he realized he has a gift, cashing out every night with thousands, way more than the small wads he earned at the bar.
It’s been too long for me to play the friend, tease him, ask him what happened to Mr. Integrity. I’m just looking at his pallid face, bushy brows wiggling while he tries to explain poker like it’s a peace treaty, full of rehearsed rationale.
He came down to Florida to play the Indian casinos. Was at the one in Seminole till five this morning. He moved out of the Astoria place and has a loft on the Bowery now, though he hardly ever leaves except to play poker in Bay Ridge. He’s got standing matches online a few nights a week against people all over the world; the Koreans are tough to beat, he says, and some guy in Australia is the reigning king. But Día grows taller for a second, tells me he’s ranked fourth in the world.
“It’s a really big deal, gatîna,” he tells me and when I hear his old name for me I notice his voice has changed—used to be deep and lush, like the voice of that guy who sings on Tuesdays at the Carioca place on First. Now it’s hollow, scratchy, creaking as if he’s not used to speaking so much anymore, and even though we’re looking out at the beach, it feels like we’re in an empty apartment.
When he’s through he says, “So what do you think?”
I know my smile is so weak not even Día buys it. He offers me a cigarette but I tell him I quit years ago.
We used to smoke together. Sitting on the radiator of my place on Fourteenth, blowing smoke out the window, watching each other. We were just friends at the time, had dropped the kissing part because I was with Malik now. “I don’t understand what you guys talk about” was Día’s favorite line, and just to piss him off I’d say that was the best part— Malik and I didn’t talk about anyth
ing.
I used to wear these big hoop earrings, my hair down to my hips, supertight jeans, and blouses with embroidery like I was some kind of gitana—a full dimension away from the teacher garb I’m wearing now. I used to take photos, mostly of city people with sad faces, and sometimes Malik would tear off his shirt, lay against a brick wall showing off his wingspan, flexing his back to carve a new landscape for my camera. Malik, with his Egyptian curls and lion tattoo stretching across his shoulder blades, a guy who couldn’t plan past next week. It was Día’s idea to curate my first show right there in the bar. Threw me a party and everything, but when I tried to introduce him to my friends, Día hung back and stayed in his corner.
Día asks me if I ever think about moving back, and before the question is all the way out, I’m shaking my head.
“I wonder if I could stand to live here,” he says, sticking his palm out into the curtain of rain.
I look at my watch.
“Somewhere you need to be?”
I feel bad. Say no, I’ve got time. Let’s finish this thing.
We play catch up, start each sentence with “Remember when.”
Día asks me if Malik and I still talk and I say no.
“Why did you split up anyway?”
“You know.”
He wants to hear me say it even if he heard the story long ago from the people on the block. How Malik hit me in plain sight because I was on his case about the coke. Punched me in the face so hard I landed on a little girl blowing up balloons on her Third Avenue stoop. The little girl cried and by the time I got to my feet, missing two teeth, Malik was around the corner. Some Honduran deli guys saw the whole thing, cleaned me up, wiped my face, told me they’d take me to the station to press charges but I said no. Told the dentist I fell. I went into hiding. Thought maybe Día would come looking for me but he never did. I hated him for that. But I never told him.
Vida Page 9
