by Tara Conklin
“I was waiting for you,” Joe says. “Were you with Anna?”
“No, just some people from work.” They’ve been busy recently with resort wear, or was that last month? It’s hard for Joe to keep track—Sandrine doesn’t talk about it much.
The TV plays an ER rerun, a doctor is breaking down on-screen, there are tears from a young woman in green scrubs.
“I can’t do this anymore, you know, Joe,” says Sandrine. She speaks in one great breath, staring at the screen. Her eyes are unblinking, and she folds her hands across her stomach like she is ill or trying to hold something inside. She has such small hands, such delicate fingers, Joe thinks. Sandrine’s collarbone juts out sharply from the neck of her blouse, and Joe wants to kiss it, kiss this hard, angular part of her.
“Joe, I just don’t want to do this!” and Sandrine’s voice is suddenly raised, as though he has said something to dispute her, convince her. “I don’t want to have your children. I don’t want to go on vacation with you. I don’t want to have dinner with you. I don’t want to watch you brush your teeth. I don’t want us to get all old and stupid and jiggly together.” She raises her arms now and shakes them, and the small fillet of flesh on the back of each arm shakes.
Joe remains in his chair in front of the television. He does not say a word. He cannot think of a single thing to say.
“I don’t think you’re a bad guy, it’s not that.” She is definitely slurring her words now, Joe notes mechanically. “I think you’re sad, and I think you’re boring,” and she drags out the word: booooooring. “Look at you—watching the Knicks, drinking beer. This is not what I signed up for.” She pauses. There is a large shuddering intake of breath. “I’ve had it, Joe, really, this is it. You’re not who I thought you were. I’m sorry, but it’s true.” Sandrine looks out the window where the sound of the early-morning garbagemen can be heard, the drag of metal cans across pavement. “I deserve someone more . . . more . . . more . . .” Joe is waiting for her to finish her sentence—what more does he need to be?—but she turns away from him, walks to their bedroom, and slams the door.
Joe can hear her pushing something—is it the dresser? the TV table?—in front of the door and then the flinging of various things against the wall, the run of water in the sink, then the shower, and again more banging and flinging, drawers opening and closing, their closet door slamming repeatedly. Joe remains seated and stares at the TV screen: the ER bustles now with some medical emergency; electric paddles are placed on a man’s hairy chest, and his body lurches with the jolt.
Joe sleeps that night on the couch, and the next morning he leaves the apartment early. He goes to the gym, where he lifts weights and runs on a treadmill until he is light-headed and drenched in sweat. His muscles shaking, breath on fire. He showers at the gym and returns to find Sandrine gone, her clothes and shoes, knickknacks and DVDs cleared out, the apartment as empty and clean as a sand-polished shell washed up with the tide.
“So that was it,” Joe said, looking at Luna across the table. “Sandrine wanted more. More what? I didn’t know there was a scorecard. Like a point system or something.”
“Fifteen for flowers,” said Luna. “Fifty at least for jewelry.” She was on her third margarita, the salt heavy along the rim. This woman Sandrine seemed to Luna an exotic animal, one rarely sighted in the wild but the subject of much study and anxious calculation. The last man Luna slept with had been married, with two young children at home, and he liked to drip hot wax onto her back. He’d seen it in a movie, he told her, and the small, bright burn on her skin transformed almost immediately to warmth.
“I’ll give you twenty points for dinner tonight. Another ten if we go dancing after,” Luna said.
Joe smiled. “Deal.”
The waitress brought their meals. They were at a Mexican restaurant, and the smell of warming corn tortillas made Luna momentarily ill. When she was a child in Nicaragua, her mother had made tortillas—grinding the corn, rolling the dough into disks, frying them over the open fire in the yard. It took all day, the tortilla making, and by the end of it her mother’s shoulders would curl forward, her back nearly parallel to the floor.
Luna sliced through the fancy dish and chewed without tasting. She hadn’t seen her mother in five years, her sister Mariana in five and a half. Now Luna bought her tortillas from the Cuban grocer on the corner where they wrapped them in plastic and charged by the pound.
After dinner Joe took Luna dancing. They drank Moët and slipped small pills the color of sky into their mouths and felt a universe of sensation expand with each driving bass note and shudder of strobe.
“Fifty points!” Luna called above the music. “One hundred,” she whispered into his ear.
At dawn Joe checked them into a suite at the Betsy Hotel, a quiet, cool space larger than Luna’s apartment. They left the lights on, but the solid raft of Joe’s back and his long-reaching arms surrounded her in darkness, and afterward she closed her eyes and slept as though she were at the bottom of the sea.
* * *
Joe told Luna everything. It was mundane and it was tragic. He’d fallen in love with Sandrine completely. After all the women, all the girlfriends, all the dates and hookups and one-night stands and never thinking it was enough. The more, more, more of it, skin, tongue, breast, pussy, my God, so many women, how could he choose just one? But everything about Sandrine was enough. Enough because hadn’t it become exhausting? It came down to the smells, the multitude of smells, all of them on him, bodies and perfume, the way a woman had one smell at her neck, another under her arms, another between her legs. And each woman was different! How could he keep up? He worried that he was losing it, his sense of smell, that soon every woman would register as the same, which seemed the worst kind of fate. With Sandrine he focused on each specific part of her: he knew what to expect on the inside of her wrist, her hair when they were going out. He found comfort in knowing with certainty who was beside him. In knowing what she wanted and what she could do. The knowing became more important than the surprise. He understood at last—at last!—what was enough.
But he had been wrong.
* * *
One night Donny followed Luna to the parking lot after her shift ended. It was 4:00 a.m., and a slight chill moved off the water. The restaurant’s dumpsters pulsed with stink. Usually Dima or Jorge walked her to her car, but tonight she’d been slow to clean up, slow to count her tips, and so Rodrigo left her the keys to lock up. Had Donny been watching the bar? How had he known?
“Luna,” he said. “It’s nice to see you.”
“Donny. It’s late. I’m going home. I’m tired.” She kept her voice steady. Donny’s gaze held a clear purpose that scared her, a sharpness that cut her into tiny, separable pieces. Behind her back Luna slid her hand into her purse and felt for her keys. Donny was roughly ten feet away, a distance covered in seconds if you moved fast. Luna remembered him as someone who worked out every day, and he still looked it: biceps that popped, thighs that pulled his jeans tight.
“You should get home, too,” Luna said. “Don’t you have work tomorrow? I’m sure you do.” Her hand closed around the keys, and she began to step backward to the car, a dented Subaru she’d bought last year. Two hundred twenty thousand miles, and still it ran like a dream.
“Nope,” Donny said, his voice friendly. “No work tomorrow. I’m partying all night. Come with me, Luna. Remember? Our parties?”
“Sure. I remember.” The key slid into the lock, Luna turned it and eased the door open a crack, then turned quickly and slid inside. He did, he ran, but she was faster. She slammed the door shut and pushed the lock, and all Donny could do was throw up his hands and say, “Come on Luna, come on.”
She waved at him through the window glass. He didn’t wave back but kept his hands raised, palms up, shaking his head. The bat on his wrist rose and fell. Luna’s hands were trembling so violently she had trouble putting the car into drive, but the gear dropped into place and the car jumped awa
y.
* * *
Joe and Luna are asleep. They do not go to Joe’s condo on South Beach, which he is embarrassed to show her because of the mess and the unpacked boxes, but again to the Betsy, to a suite that Joe cannot afford yet books nonetheless because it is the biggest and the best. Once he could have afforded it, and his habits have not changed. The bed is king-size, a raft of white cotton and silk duvet, down pillows that sink slowly beneath the weight of their heads. They sleep without trouble, dreamless, Joe’s right hand clasped loosely around Luna’s right wrist. She twitches and turns, and Joe turns with her.
* * *
On their tenth date, Luna told Joe this story about her mother and her sister:
Mariana has been gone for three weeks when Luna’s mother first talks about going back to Matapalo.
“Back?” Luna asks. She’s eighteen years old and a senior in high school.
“I miss home,” Luna’s mother says. “Maybe Mariana did, too. Maybe she went there.”
Luna is getting ready for work, pulling her hair into a ponytail, slipping into the loose black trousers she wears in the kitchen. “She would never go back,” Luna says. “Never.” She knows what happens to women and girls there. Mariana is younger; she doesn’t remember as much, but she remembers enough.
Her mother has just come home from her job cleaning rooms at the Betsy Hotel and is standing by the door, still in her uniform with the frilly white skirt. She sighs extravagantly and kicks off her shoes, then sits on the couch and stretches her legs long, spreading her bare feet with their thick yellow nails and calluses.
“Mami, put your feet away,” Luna says, and her mother slides them off the couch.
“But maybe for the jobs,” her mother says. “Tourism—everything is changing now. Rosa keeps telling me. Or maybe for Papi. She loved him, it didn’t seem to matter what he did. And she had that friend Sofía, remember her? They were like sisters.”
“I’m her sister,” Luna says, but her mother seems not to hear.
“I don’t know, it’s harder there, but it’s easier, too. Do you understand?”
Easier in that you had no choices, that your future was the same as your mother’s, and her mother’s, on and on. They call you bruja if you try for something different. Say that you have no respect or love for your family or your friends, say that you deserve all the bad luck God will deliver upon you. Go back to that?
“No, I don’t understand,” Luna replies, but she does in a small, secret way. There is a smell she remembers from Matapalo, a dry burning, tortillas cooking, gas from the stoves, a collection of different odors that together form one, and it is not immediately attractive, but it is specific. It is home.
The last time Luna saw Mariana, the bruises on the girl’s face had shaded already to yellow. Mariana spent a week on the couch, watching cartoons and sipping milk shakes through a straw. Her boyfriend, Davie, claimed she fell out of the car, not that he’d pushed her, and who could say? Mariana herself had been so high she barely remembered the night, only the flashing lights and the handsome ER doctor who handed her pamphlets on drug addiction and alcohol abuse. They pumped her stomach, took her blood, and told her all the things they’d found there. Mariana was fifteen years old.
“I don’t think Mariana wants to go back,” Luna tells her mother. “She wants . . .” Luna doesn’t finish the sentence, because she doesn’t know what Mariana wants, only that it is something she doesn’t yet have.
“Did the police call today?” her mother asks.
“They’ll only call if they have something new to tell us. Remember?”
“Oh,” says her mother. “Yes.”
“There’s nothing new,” says Luna, and she is suddenly angry at her mother, for her job and her feet and the way she lets the TV blare all day and all night. Luna picks up her bag, heavy with her American-history book. This quarter they are studying the American Revolution, George Washington crossing the Delaware, no taxation without representation, liberté, égalité. Without saying good-bye, Luna leaves for her 6:00 p.m.–to–2:00 a.m. kitchen shift at Revel.
One month later Luna’s mother asks for the savings-account passbook. “I need to go back home,” she says. “I don’t know what else to do. I can’t just sit here. If she comes back, you’ll see her. If she goes back to Matapalo, I’ll see her. It’s better to spread out.” Her mother’s face, since Mariana disappeared, has fallen into itself, like her cheeks are the roof of a house that has lost its beams.
Luna sees many flaws in her mother’s logic, but she does not describe them. She merely nods. Spread out. Like they have lost a dog in the greening sesame fields of Matapalo. Spread out, call her name, promise her treats and kisses. Luna has been saving for college, but she hands over the passbook. The college money never felt real anyhow. Luna has watched the number grow over the years to a figure that seems impossible. And it is. An impossibility. Luna has a 3.95 GPA, plays varsity softball, and works nights in the kitchen at Revel Bar + Restaurant. Her school counselor, Ms. Jasmine, tells her she has a shot at a good school, maybe UVA or UFlorida. Stay southern, only state schools with lower tuition. Study for your SATs, don’t get into the drug scene. Go straight home after work at night. Ms. Jasmine knows Mariana, knows the kinds of things she was doing before she disappeared.
“Okay then, go back,” Luna says. “I’ll stay here. I’ll keep looking.”
On the morning of her mother’s departure, Luna helps her pack. “Where will you stay?” Luna asks, sliding small plastic bottles of shampoo into a larger plastic bag.
“With Auntie Rosario at first. Then I’ll find a place.”
“Will you see Papi?”
Her mother shakes her head. “Not if I can help it.”
“I’ll send money,” Luna says. Her mother nods, as if this is expected, as if this is nothing.
Luna folds up a thin towel, Miami Sexy Baby! printed in curling pink script across the fabric, and places it in the suitcase.
“I’ve paid up rent here until May, and then you’ll have to move,” her mother says. Luna watches her click the suitcase closed. “You’ll be okay, Luna,” her mother says, and kisses her forehead. “You are always okay. I know.”
Joe listened to Luna’s story without comment, only a few nods, head shakes. This was rare, Luna speaking this way about her family. He did not want her to stop.
At the end he took her hands. “Your mother sounds very wise,” he said. “She knows you. You are okay.”
Luna shrugged. “Actually she’s a fool. Mariana never went back there, and I can’t find her here.” She paused. “My mother had two daughters. Two. And now she has none.”
* * *
Joe thought often about his sisters. He missed them. He knew he had fucked up, but he couldn’t identify the how or why of it. He kept telling himself he would visit them, he would apologize for everything, that whatever it was they wanted him to say, he would say it. He would throw himself at the feet of his family. But he wasn’t ready, not yet. Before you can lie down, you first must stand up. Didn’t someone say that once?
Maybe Miami had been a mistake. All the partying, the job about which he felt only ambivalence. He was alone, with no one’s expectations bearing down on him or assumptions buoying him up. He could do anything, and no one would care. He could fall, and no one would pick him up. This was terrifying, but clean in a way. Honest. Every morning he woke in a dark room, the alarm rattling, and wondered what would happen. Would he drink today? Would he call Felix? Would he call Renee? Would he find his strength? Joe considered these questions with a detached, clinical curiosity, and then he pushed himself out of bed and into the day.
Before Miami, Sandrine had formed part of the picture in his head of what his life should be. Within a gold, ornate frame, she stood beside him, beautiful, blond, with a neat, clean smile and fingernails painted pink. But that picture had disappeared completely: there was no Sandrine, there was no gold frame, there was no life as he’d previously imagined
it. There was only Joe alone surrounded by sea and sky.
And into this space came Luna. Joe held no picture in his head of their life together. Every day Luna became something different, something altogether unexpected. She didn’t care what he’d done, the good or bad of it; she knew him only now, in this moment of drift. She was drifting, too, he could see it, and yet when he stood beside her, he felt anchored, secure. Even on the days they were at their worst, the days he saw them both as weak, he felt there was more to them than the weakness. Luna made him feel a potential. Hope was too sentimental a word for it. Faith was too sanctimonious. But it was something like that. Something grand.
He wanted to explain all of this to Fiona. Of his three sisters, he always felt the most comfortable with her. But she was writing a sex blog now, not poetry, and sleeping with dozens of men, describing their weaknesses and flaws, all the things they’d done wrong. How was that empowering? he wondered. How was that art? It tore people down. It was Caroline who sent him the link, no comment, just the word Fiona. He’d felt a jolt of happy surprise to hear from his sister, swiftly undercut by the contents of the blog. The Last Romantic.
And so, two days after the e-mail arrived from Caroline, Joe picked up the phone and called Fiona. She was surprised to hear from him, she said, but glad he had called. For a spell he considered telling Fiona about Luna, but no. He wasn’t ready to share her. His sisters had judged Sandrine so harshly; he didn’t want to subject Luna to their scrutiny, not yet.
Joe had always liked the lilt of Fiona’s voice, the way she told a story, and so he listened for a bit to updates on her job, her revolving cast of housemates. Then he asked:
“Fiona, have you heard of The Last Romantic?”
“Sure. I’ve heard of it. New feminism. I read it every week.” Fiona’s voice had shifted. Now she was carefully casual, on guard, and immediately Joe knew it was true.
“Who do you think writes it?” he asked.
“It’s anonymous. Who knows? It could be anyone.”
