by Amy Lapwing
“Look at you!” he said. “You’re so pretty.” He smiled with lowered brows, as though puzzling something out.
“Miguel—” What did she want to say? “It is good to see you.”
“Come on,” he said, “let’s not stay in here, it’s such a beautiful day.”
He led her back out to the white buildings and the trees. Walking amongst the other people she felt herself calming and she told him what she was doing there.
“And Derek found this little college and he was intrigued by it. And it has such a good music program, so here we are.”
“He didn’t like it at Emory?”
“It was all right, but he wanted a change,” said Teresa. “How long have you been here, Miguel?”
Since you left me. “I arrived in 1976. From New York. You remember I was there?”
“Yes.” Did he want to talk about that week? Now? She looked at him and he took her hand. He squeezed it and let it go.
“Do you live in Boston?” he asked.
“That’s where my office is. I live here, in Kennemac.”
“You’ll like it here, I think. In some ways, it’s like the countryside around Heredia.”
“Yes, I’ve noticed that.”
As they walked, Michael was aware that he wanted to talk all afternoon with her. But that was not why he had asked her to see him. He was supposed to offer to help her. What might she need help with?
“So, do you like it here?” he asked.
“Yes, I do. I’m glad I didn’t move to Boston. Besides, this way, Derek lives at home. He keeps me company and we save a little money.” Would he think she needed money? “I bought a house on Thomas Road, perhaps you’ve seen it? It’s an old red colonial.”
“Thomas Road,” he said, thinking. “Oh yes, I know where that is.”
“Where do you live?” she asked.
“We have a house on Longmeadow Road. It’s an old colonial, too. Not red, though. Justina says it’s the color of dead grass. Not dried grass, she says, that’s different. I think she wants to change the color.”
“Her name is Justina?”
“Yes. Justina Trimble.” Why did he feel like he shouldn’t be talking about his wife?
“You’re married, though?”
“Yes. She keeps her name.”
“Mm,” nodded Teresa. “I should go back to mine, I suppose.”
“Where is your husband?”
“He’s still back in Texas. We divorced a long time ago, when Derek was six.”
“That’s too bad. For Derek, at least.” He took a breath through his teeth— too personal.
“Not truly,” she said. “He was cruel to Derek.” To his look of surprise she said, “He was a cruel man.”
“He hurt him?”
“He hurt us. I don’t think he could help it. I’m sorry it happened to Derek, but I don’t think it went on for more than a year, for him.”
“Teresa!” His heart pushed into his throat and he stopped walking. “Oh, Teresa! You should have told me, I could have helped you!”
“It wasn’t your problem, Miguel.”
“Yes, it was!”
Surprised by his vehemence she said quietly, “Miguel, I said no and I left the country. You were quit of me then.”
“No.”
He was breathing through his mouth, she could see his chest rising and falling, his gaze improperly sunk into hers.
“Teresa, you know I loved you.”
“Yes.”
“I didn’t stop loving you, just because you said no. If I had known what was happening to you, I would’ve done something to stop it. You should have told me.”
“Miguel, it was my problem. I took care of it. Everything’s fine now.”
He looked at the weeds on the edge of the walkway. He let out a deep breath but he could not dispel the regret.
“Let’s not talk about it anymore,” she said. “I want to invite you to my house for dinner sometime. So you can get to know Derek a little better. He admires you very much, he has told me he is learning so much in your class.”
“That would be nice, I would like that.”
“How would Sunday be?”
“This Sunday? Yes, we have this Sunday free. I think. I’d better check with Justina.”
“I would love to meet her.”
“She would like to meet you, too,” he lied. He had only said to Justina that an old friend from his Universidad de Costa Rica days had moved to the area and he was offering to help her get her bearings. He had thought of adding, oh, by the way, she’s the first woman I ever loved and I was going to marry her but it didn’t work out. But he had not said that. Why I keep it a secret?
He could ignore the wheedling call no longer. After supper that night, he left Justina on the couch with her student essays— “assays,” she called them, experiments in writing, looking for the presence of that rarest of components, logic, many of them failing— and went up into the attic. He found the box of UCR-era things that his mother had sent him years ago when she was clearing out the closets. He sat on an old chair and pulled out the notebooks of class notes: ‘Historia,’ Inglés, ‘Geometría.’ He flipped through some photos of his school chums and stopped on a snapshot of himself with his arm around a young woman who barely came up to his armpit. They smiled to the camera as though a fortune-teller had just predicted that they would be both be rich and famous someday, they had only to be good and do what their hearts told them. He turned the photo over and read the date. “jul 67.” The year he had proposed to her. He turned the picture back over and his thumb passed over the young woman’s face. She had rejected him for a man that beat her. Why? What was wrong with me?
A moth beat about his head. He waved it away and rummaged around in the box. No letters. They had not written love letters, they had never been separated long enough, not until she left him. She had not contacted him; he had not known how to contact her. He gathered up the notebooks and put them back in, and felt a small box at the bottom of the carton. He opened it and found the polished stone heart, a salmon color with gold veins, that she had given him. His brain showed him her breasts, cupped in his hands, the round tops. That was what he had said when she presented it to him, that he would always think of his beautiful Teresa when he looked at it. He had meant her breasts. He ran his finger along the edge of the heart and turned it over. “Por siempre a ti,” the engraving read. ‘Yours forever.’ He felt sad, as though he had argued with someone and they had died before he could apologize. And tell them he loved them. Her.
The moth came back and brought a few hardy mosquitoes. He put the old things back in their box, sandwiching the photo between the others, tucking the stone heart in its cardboard bed. He pushed the box back under the eaves and went down the stairs.
“She was a girlfriend!” crows Justina. “I knew it! ‘Oh, she’s just someone I knew at university.’ And she looks you up thirty years later? Yeah, right!”
Justina smiles at me, catching me in a not-quite-the-whole-truth.
“Just come,” I plead. “We’ll leave early.”
“I feel crummy, and I’ll spray microbes all over them.”
“Then I’ll stay home too,” I say, a little relieved.
“No, you should go. Come on, Michael, it’s really to get to know Derek, right? So, I’m just a useless appendage in that case.” She grips my arm and staggers on bent legs, her tongue lolling. I laugh. “I’ll meet her some other time,” she says. She stands back up and I swing her to me. “But here’s the deal,” she says. “No kissing, except on the cheek, maybe, if it’s absolutely necessary. And no touching body parts, and definitely, positively, no dancing.”
“What if she starts it?” I say, petulant as a ten-year-old bully.
“Then you stop it, Mister. Got me?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She plays with my hair. “I bet she thinks you’re a lot cuter than she expected.”
“I doubt it. You should have seen me then
, I was very, very cute.”
“Smart ass.” She kisses me and then she says, “Anyway, I got you for the really cute years.”
“I already said I’ll help you paint the house.”
“Oh, gah! Are we really going to do that?”
“Aren’t we?”
“Next spring. I’ll have time then.”
“Why is it you always have time in May and never in September?”
“I don’t know.”
“Come with me,” I plead again.
“What are you afraid of? You’ve already seen her once, right?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I want to show you off. You’re so pretty and smart.”
“She doesn’t want somebody else pretty and smart, that’s her department.”
I take in a deep breath and let it out with, “Justina!”
“What?”
“Are you trying to throw us together?”
“All right. Here’s the way I see it. She’s a little lonely, she remembers you fondly, she’d like to see you, see how you’ve turned out. So, she contacts you. Turns out you’re curious about her too. So you meet, you find you have all kinds of things to talk about, so you make a date to get together again. You’ll talk and talk and then you’ll just be two people. You’ll either be friends, or you won’t. You have a capacity for having woman friends, Michael, I’ve seen that. Maybe you’ll be friends with her, maybe you won’t. But you both want to find out. Don’t you?”
I look at her as though she is an elegant geometry proof: a few short lines and Q.E.D. Simple. “We used to be lovers. Doesn’t that bother you?”
“It was a long time ago. I used to smoke pot. Does that bother you?”
“You did?”
“What? You didn’t?”
“No!” I say, for I am affronted.
“Really?”
“Yes!”
“You’re a man who has woman friends and you never smoked a joint. That’s amazing.”
But the conversation was not how Michael imagined it. Justina simply said she was feeling lousy and he should go without her, that she would meet her some other time. And so he fixed her a sandwich and warmed a can of lentil soup and left at six on Sunday evening and drove alone to Teresa’s house. Justina sat at home with the honey-gold afghan upon her legs and tried to read. She moved up to the bed when she realized she was so tired from this cold. Of course she had not wanted Michael to go. But not because she could not go with him. She did not want him renewing any sort of acquaintance with an old lover. And Justina knew that was what Teresa was, though he had simply called her a ‘girlfriend.’ That word could mean anything from the mouth of a non-native speaker. Justina could have told him she did not want him to meet her, but she was afraid she would seem jealous. She was not jealous, just apprehensive. Michael did have woman friends, perhaps she was wrong to worry. So she told him to go. She hoped she would never meet her. She wanted her to go away. She put all her hopes into believing they would, at the end of a lot of talk, realize they were no longer interesting to each other, and there would be no further meetings. She wondered what Pascale would do. She picked up the phone.
She made herself chat with Denis for a moment, to seem normal. He was going with Pascale in the morning to take Nicolas in for his two-week check-up, then he would be starting back at work. They were worried the baby had not put on enough weight. “He seems heftier to me,” obsessed Denis, “his thighs are filling out, and his ankles. But I don’t know. Guess we’ll see.” Justina said something reassuring— “If he’s eating every two hours, gah, Denis! He’s got to be putting it somewhere!—” and he put Pascale on.
“Teresa?” Pascale repeated the name. “No, he never mentioned a Teresa to me. When is he seeing her?”
“Today, right now.”
“You let him go alone?” Justina saw her friend’s big eyes in the ‘oh’ of ‘alone.’
“Like, I’m sure I’m going to sit there and make happy talk with my husband’s old lover, come on!”
“Why’d you let him go at all?”
“‘I forbid you to go, Michael.’ That what you mean?”
“You could have said you didn’t want him to see her. That’s true, isn’t it?”
“But isn’t that being selfish?”
“Why? What good thing does it keep him from? Nothing. Nothing good, Justina.”
Justina sighed into the mouthpiece.
“Look, why don’t you give them an hour and then call to say you feel much worse, could he come home?”
“I couldn’t do that. Don’t you think she’d know what I was doing?”
“What’s it matter what she thinks? She’s nothing to you.”
“I’d feel foolish, lying.”
“Then I’ll call. I’ll call and say you called me because you think you have a fever and I think Michael should go home.”
“Same thing.”
“Well, then, try not to worry.”
“I hate this. Why did this have to happen? Especially now. I really don’t need the stress.”
“It’s your tenure year. It’s always something.”
“So you wouldn’t have let him go?”
“Probably not. I don’t know.”
“Thanks, Pascale.”
“Don’t worry, chère. She’s probably old and fat. Old, for sure, if he knew her at university. Wrinkled and flabby, and boring, with fixed notions, all that ruin that comes when you get old.”
“Michael’s not like that.”
“He’s an exception. Odds are, she’s not an exception. Very ordinary, most likely. Just think, that woman at the library that checks your bag when you go out. She’s probably exactly like that.”
Justina hung up and tried to sleep. She was still awake in the dark bedroom when he got home at eight twenty-three.
Chapter Six
I Got You, Babe
“Come in, Miguel,” said Teresa, smiling up a little timidly at him. The odor of onions and cilantro whipped about his head. She took his jacket and hung it on the wall on a peg already covered with her puffy black sweater while he checked her out. She wore a long straight skirt in a print dominated by red and black and yellow, and a maize knit short-sleeved top, tucked in at the waist, which she encircled with a dark brown belt. She looked very lithe, he imagined her heart beating to break out of the neat cage of her ribs; like a quick, darting bird, she seemed to him. She showed him into the living room. Derek had just turned off the television set and was standing in front of the couch trying to look neutral. “You already know my son, Derek.”
Michael stepped forward and shook Derek’s hand over the back of the sofa.
“Señor,” said Derek.
“Miguel,” said Michael. Derek flexed his lips in an embarrassed smile.
“Derek, why don’t you get the gallitos?” She said to Michael, “Dinner’s almost ready. Why don’t you sit in here while I finish in the kitchen.”
He sat in a chair upholstered in lime green cotton, and looked about at Teresa’s things. The furniture looked new. The couch was in a dark blue fabric, there was a wing chair in a green and coral geometric fabric. The tables were of washed oak, the coffee table had a glass top. The furnishings reminded him of the condos at Hilton Head he and Justina had stayed at. Modern, color-coordinated, graceful. He wondered if Teresa was in debt. His eye was caught by a collection of colored crystal fruits arranged on the coffee table: a pineapple, a pear, a mango, grapes, a banana. No apple. Derek came in with a platter of little wrapped tortillas.
“So, you two met when you were at university?” said Derek, offering Michael a gallito. Up till now Michael and Derek had dealt with each other in English. But they were in the home now, they spoke the language of their homeland.
“Yes, we must have been the same age you are now.”
“That was a long time ago, then,” said Derek, smiling at the kitchen.
“Hey!” called Teresa. “Don’t insult our guest!”
“I wasn’t
insulting our guest,” said Derek.
They exchanged half-smiles.
“And you haven’t seen each other till now?” asked Derek.
Michael glanced at the kitchen. She said nothing. “We saw each other once, since then.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“I was working in New York, and your mother was in town on business—”
“So she looked you up? When was that?”
“A long time ago,” called Teresa.
Michael’s eye was drawn to a print on the wall above Derek’s head. It showed a stem of fuchsia orchids, the top one probed by the beak of a luminous green hummingbird, its cheek blushing cobalt blue. “In 1975,” Michael specified.
Derek narrowed his eyes at Michael’s obviously better memory. “That was when we were living in Austin, wasn’t it, Mom?” he called.
“You weren’t born then, Derek.”
“Well, you and Dad, then—”
Teresa appeared in the doorway. “Dinner’s ready! Derek, will you show Miguel into the dining room.
She was married then? thought Michael. She didn’t tell me that then, did she? He followed Derek and sat where he indicated, at the head of the pretty cherry table. Teresa brought in a chicken roasted in Costa Rican spices, with bowls of rice and greens, and placed them around a miniature ceramic tipico adobe house centerpiece. While Derek talked about his classes, Michael did the arithmetic and realized that Derek must have been born the same year he last saw Teresa, and so she must have been married then. She had cheated on her husband, with him, repeatedly, for a week. He was filled with remorse, adding to the confused tangle of pain and joy he felt whenever he remembered that brief time. How happy he had been when she appeared that Sunday, out of nowhere; and relieved that she had not chosen the year before, when he was living with Delaphine, his complaisant companion; and devastated when he had come home from work the following Sunday and she was gone, without a note or indication of any kind as to where she had gone or why.
These thoughts poked through during the conversation. He realized he was probably neglecting his duty to his hostess. He asked Derek what he hoped to do when he graduated.
