by Julie Mars
With her vanished parents and dead grandfather, her classes at the School of Visual Arts leading nowhere except deeper and deeper into the paintings, and her tiny tub-inkitchen apartment in Alphabet City—financed largely by the rental scam she’d set up around Donny’s apartment—Margaret seemed to Harold like a character out of a story, perhaps “The Little Match Girl.” He had known other women artists, of course. How could he not at that time and place, when every other young person billed himself or herself as the next Gustav Klimt, minus the syphilis, or the next Charley Parker, minus that pesky heroin addiction? But to Harold, no one had ever seemed as genuine as Margaret or as beautiful or as talented, or, if the truth be known, as tragic, and he had to fight off the impulse to do such things as lay his expensive coat in a puddle for her to step on. By the time they emerged from the after-hours bar into the rush-hour foot traffic on Canal Street, he was a goner, sucked into love like inept flight deck sailors on aircraft carriers get sucked into jet engines; and by the time it was over, he was, like those sailors, shredded. Shredded by love. And so was Margaret.
The odd part was that, even at the end, neither blamed the other. Each felt totally responsible, as if every problem arose like a black tornado from one psyche only, and trapped them with no hope of escape and no way to save themselves.
But for a while, a few years, they were patched together like a crazy quilt, as if Harold’s privilege and Margaret’s lack were meant to even out for the benefit of both. Without feeling that it diminished her to say yes, she found it possible to accept his many gifts, such as a new winter coat, or sable paintbrushes that retailed for twenty-five dollars each, or a weekend in Montreal at the jazz-fest; while Harold experienced a frenzy of commitment to the artistic life just through exposure to Margaret and her passion for painting. This took precedence over everything, including him. He delighted in being ignored while she spent hours in the tiny airless studio she had kept on the Bowery since she was nineteen, not much more than a large storage closet really, in the back of a restaurant supply warehouse owned by a lifelong friend of Donny’s from the old country. It cost her $250 a month, a sum which was often hard to come up with, but she managed it.
In the corner of her living room on Avenue B, Margaret had a six-inch slab of high-density foam, which served as both a bed and a couch of sorts. When she and Harold were in the apartment together, they rarely left it, as if it were a raft floating in the open sea a thousand miles from the nearest port. It was there that they pushed into each other, farther and farther, past anything healthy after a while, which is when it got dicey.
Harold compared the place they arrived at in their love affair to the molten core of the earth. Buried deep, hidden, burning at ten thousand degrees, it was simply not survivable. It should have been the place where they abandoned themselves, fusing into some other unit, a two-headed chimera that could take on anything, but to do that took courage, a sense of destiny, or a willingness to give up their previous lives. Neither knew how to do it. Margaret’s core was fragile and fearful, certain she would never be safe, petrified, really, of being abandoned yet again by love. When she should have trusted Harold, she withdrew instead, tightened inward to steel herself for the next loss, a defensive move she did not even recognize for what it was. And as she withdrew, Harold stood helplessly by, dying more each day as his muse and his strength retreated. He knew that, without her, he was headed for graduate school—an MBA most likely—and a Wall Street future in his father’s investment firm, where he would always be the son of the boss and never have to make his own way, like Margaret had to. He should have hung on to her, wrapped his arms around her waist and locked his fingers together in front of her heart for life. He should have wailed, screamed like a banshee, or howled like a lonely wolf, but he could not because he was paralyzed with the shame of the privileged.
In the end, each of their dreads came true. Harold disappeared down the stairs of her building on Avenue B. Margaret, her back pressed against the wall, let him go. A moment later, the phone rang. She answered it.
“Margaret, please,” he said, “it’s like you’re all wadded up inside, tangled up in things you don’t need to be afraid of with me. I love you. Can’t you understand that? I don’t want us to end.”
“And yet you just walked out and slammed the door,” she replied icily. She could hear the traffic on the street in stereo—through her window and in the phone. She could feel her breath burning in her throat.
Harold was silent for a few seconds. Then he whispered, “Margaret, please let me help unravel the wad you use to get through life. Please.”
It felt like a knife shoved into her chest. “It’s too late, Harold. Go home to your trust fund,” she said.
She unplugged the phone, curled into the foam mattress, and barely moved for two days and nights. She lost the last of her hope and moved through her life as a woman who could not be reached. And Harold, though Margaret never knew it, developed a drinking problem, one that put him in rehab twice before he even finished his master’s degree and stepped into the executive suite waiting for him just two blocks away from the New York Stock Exchange.
Through all of that, neither had ever resorted to stingrays.
Margaret finished one full rendition of “Greensleeves” before the truck pulled away from the curb, and the music faded in the distance. Memories of Harold lurked in the shadows of the words of the song, but Margaret was adept at keeping them there, in the dark. Besides, she had something more important on her mind: welding. Like a wizard, she raised her arms. “I dissolve all stingrays that want to come between me and my welding lessons,” she said out loud, spreading her fingers wide, as if sparks were shooting from them.
After a little while, she fell into a deep sleep on the futon couch with Magpie on the floor beside her, and she didn’t awaken until a beam of intense western sun enveloped her, nudging her awake with its relentless heat.
1989
THEY FELL into a friendship, Vincent and Thomas.
“I’ll teach you how to jail,” Vincent had said, smiling a bit as he used the new verb. “And you can tell me about the world out there, if it’s still out there.”
“It’s out there, worse than ever,” Thomas replied.
“Not worse than in here,” Vincent responded.
Thomas looked around. His eyes passed over the filth, the men in rags, crowded everywhere, the din and the dust and the relentless nothing, and he said, “That depends on where you are. I’ve seen worse.”
“This is the worst I’ve seen,” replied Vincent, “but I’m used to it.”
“There’s worse,” said Thomas.
Vincent had looked into Thomas’ brown eyes and known that what he had said was true.
Eight months later, he looks into those eyes again, deeply, as he wipes fever-sweat off Thomas’ forehead with a rag that he keeps as clean as possible, given the circumstances. Thomas had sliced his foot open on a sliver of tin, the top of a can that had been buried in the dirt of the yard. It became infected. There was no medicine, no one to help. It went septic.
Thomas asks Vincent to find some paper and a pencil or a pen, and it isn’t easy, but Vincent manages to trade two cigarettes, treasures in the prison, for a blank page ripped out of the back of a book owned by a man—a Brahman it is rumored—and he brings it to Thomas.
Thomas, who is barely able to sit up anymore and has stopped sipping water, takes the pen and draws a map.
NO WORDS had been exchanged between Rico and Rosalita by the time Margaret turned the corner and disappeared from sight. The book on low riders lay open on the desk, and there on its pages was Rico, the man known all over the Southwest as el rey. It was enough to make him laugh or cry; he wasn’t sure which. He moved toward Rosalita, stepped behind the chair where she was sitting, and placed his hands on her shoulders. He began to press his fingers in, as if that could release the tension that had collected in the room. She groaned, a sound not unlike a growl, and then, as if sh
e was embarrassed by it, reached up and put her hands on top of his, a light touch.
“So what’s next, Rico?” she said in her new quiet voice.
Rico had no answer. He had to think hard for about half a minute. “Maybe lunch,” he finally said, and Rosalita laughed.
“Always thinking about your stomach.”
“Not eating lunch never solved anything,” he said.
“Neither did eating lunch,” she responded.
“At least it puts it off, Rosalita.” He had the food she had prepared for him in the mini-fridge, but suddenly he didn’t want to retrieve it, open the bag, unwrap something, and start chewing as he always did. “Let’s go to the Barelas Coffee House,” he said.
Rosalita turned in her chair to face him, a little glint of curiosity in her eyes, and said, “Okay.”
So Rico locked up the shop, took his wife’s hand in his own, and proceeded down the block toward Fourth Street. He hadn’t had lunch outside the garage in years, and it felt somewhat liberating to saunter along with Rosalita, holding hands like a couple of teenagers. From behind his sunglasses, he took her in. They had been together more than half their lives. Anyone who thought about it for three seconds would assume that she was completely familiar to him, and she was. But she also wasn’t. Thinking he knew her, inside and out, would be like mistaking a detailed map for a real place. Naturally, he knew her exterior very well, though even that was changing. Lines were etching themselves outward from the corners of her eyes, and here in the sunlight he could see a few silver threads in her lush, black hair. But the last four years had proven that what went on inside her was a mystery. If he could somehow slip through her skin and ride along her bloodlines into her brain and heart, he thought, there would be a universe inside that would make the solar system as he had been taught it in school seem like a small-scale model of the possibilities of space. Did she feel that way about him, he wondered, or was he just Rico, the same old Rico, who thought going through the motions was the same as really doing something?
“Did you take the rest of the day off?” he asked by way of opening the conversation.
“I finished the lunch prep, and then I said I was sick and they let me go.” She paused a second and added, “I was worried about you, Rico. I had to see you, not to explain anything, because I don’t know what to say. Just see you.”
They had arrived at the door of the restaurant; he opened it and stepped aside so she could move past him. As usual, there was a line. The Barelas Coffee House was a place where deals were struck, even on the level of city government, though Rico was quite sure the politicians parked as close as possible and made a beeline for the front door rather than leisurely strolling down Fourth Street from City Hall, which wasn’t very far. Inside, the closeness of other people and the clatter from the plates made small talk impossible, which suited Rico very well. He had no words stored up for use in the current situation, and he welcomed a time-out.
Soon enough, they were seated at a deuce along the front wall with a view to the street. The table top was yellow Formica with a little crumb-catcher band of aluminum tacked down around the edge. It was set with white paper napkins, where knives and forks rested. “All the comforts of home,” Rico said with a grand gesture across the top of the table, and Rosalita smiled. The waitress appeared instantly, took a coffee order, and somehow transmitted that, if they knew what was good for them, they would be ready to announce their lunch choices by the time she returned. Both focused on the menu for a moment, and then, almost in unison, set them aside and glanced up.
They caught each other’s eyes, silently acknowledging the moment of discomfort at the arrival of the inevitable, which in this case seemed to be conversation. Rico knew they were at a fork in the road: one way led straight into the heart of the issues swirling like smoke around them, and the other led away from them. Neither looked promising to Rico, as he lifted the paper napkin from the table and smoothed it over one thigh.
But Rosalita was ready. “No matter what happens,” she began, “I’m glad about last night.” She said this with urgency, as if she absolutely had to get it on the table before anything else, including their cups of coffee.
Rico knew in his heart that this was the moment he should say, “Me, too.” Those words would cement some new stage of their life together into place, give them a foundation from which to start rebuilding. But he couldn’t say them. The fact of the matter, which he only realized now in retrospect, was that he had not only been expecting, but counting on her to refuse his last attempt to reach her. Her no would be the “get out of jail free” card in a game of Monopoly. True, there had been great relief, enormous, heart-palpitating relief for him in their lovemaking; but it was also true that he had an unconscious back-up plan, one that involved the slow seduction of Margaret Shaw, and it had not been washed away in the wave of renewed closeness with Rosalita.
“I was surprised,” Rico finally admitted. “I pretty much thought that part was over between us.”
“Not quite,” she said with a shy, sexy grin.
The waitress arrived with the coffee, and they both ordered Mexican food, though there were other choices on the menu. Rico watched his wife empty one packet of sugar into her cup and fill it with so much cream that it could barely be called coffee anymore.
“Rosalita,” he said, “things are fucked up with me.”
“Okay. Things are fucked up.”
“I don’t know what I want to do.”
“Take whatever time you need to figure it out, Rico. You have it coming.”
“What if I take four years?” He was beginning to feel like the words “four years” were some kind of chant that was always playing in the back of his mind. Four years, four years, four years. Even in this moment, above the racket in the café, he could hear it bouncing off the inside of his head.
Rosalita said nothing.
“What if I take four years?” he repeated, just slightly louder, as if he thought she hadn’t heard him the first time, which he knew she had.
Rosalita took a long sip of coffee and then patted her lips with her paper napkin. “I have to pick my way carefully here,” she said. “I don’t want to say the wrong thing.”
“I want you to say something,” Rico said, “so just say something.”
“Okay.” She took in a little breath and then focused her eyes on his. “I was not the only person in the four years, Rico.” And then, as if she had to clarify, she added, “You were there, too.”
Rico reached for the underside of his chair and held on. He had seen war movies in which airplane pilots hit a button and their entire seats ejected like rockets out of the top of the plane seconds before it blew up or crashed into a mountainside or the sea; he was suddenly certain that what he was feeling was what they were feeling in that split second before blast off. And then, as if his whole life were about to flash backward before his eyes, starting with last night, he remembered her answer to his question, “Where have you been, Rosalita?” She had said, “Waiting for you to come and get me.”
When he was a young man, just a few months after Fernando died, Rico had crashed his truck into an embankment along I-25. He didn’t remember much about the accident, but one image had remained clear forever after. It was the way, in a fraction of a second, the windshield cracked into a thousand pieces and then shattered. After that, everything in his visual field went black, but he couldn’t forget the way the silver cracks had manifested out of nowhere; that one pristine second before it all fell apart and all the pieces of the windshield scattered like memories that were unlikely to ever reassemble themselves. The truck was totaled, but he’d seen it later in the garage where it was towed, and the whole front seat and floor were covered with bits of glass that shimmered in the sun like diamonds. Staring into them, he had had a strange idea: if he could put them all back together again, would he have been able to avoid the accident in the first place. This thought had come to him like a wild bird.
; Now, years later, gripping his seat in the Barelas Coffee House, Rico had a similar feeling. Every sentence out of Rosalita’s mouth, or his own, was like a bit of glass on the passenger seat with the sun shining through it. She seemed to be saying that he had co-created the four missing years. It was just like a woman to fail to notice how much of himself he had sacrificed in that time, how challenging, and at times overwhelming it had been to hold their life together and wait. And wait and wait and wait. It had been hard, useless work and so consuming, and now she seemed to blame him for not crashing through to her, though he had tried for the better part of a year, until he just couldn’t try again.
He let go of the chair with one hand and held it up to her, a “stop” gesture that she well understood. He would think about this later. He would. But not right now. Right now, he would remain calm. Fortunately, perhaps, the food arrived, slapped onto the table with precision by a waitress with an attitude of efficiency. He had an impulse to pick up the plate, loaded with beans and rice and tortillas, and send it flying, but he successfully fought it off. He didn’t pick up the knife either, until he was sure he wouldn’t throw it across the restaurant, just to see it embed itself in the wall. Because Rico was a man who didn’t want to make a scene in public, or witness one, he ate his lunch in silence, and so did Rosalita. Then they walked back to the garage, where one of Rico’s customers was standing outside the locked door. Rosalita got into her car and took off. Rico went to work, determined to keep his mind on the engine he was tuning and nothing else.
