The Long Night of White Chickens

by Francisco Goldman

  That had to be accepted, you repeated it so forcefully, in a tone of voice much more shrill and adamant than I’d ever heard you use with my mother before. There was no echo now of the strangely innocent artificiality of your words in front of F. A. O. Schwarz. You were publicly forgiven, you even received some sympathy. My father, recuperating, in his bathrobe, his belly still stitched up, hugged you to him like a true daughter.

  Even though you’d been exposed as a liar in another, though I guess perfectly mundane and adolescent way: for months you’d been telling my parents that it was finally over between you and Tony, who my father had unapologetically been deriding as a “cannibal”—“What does that guy think he is, a cannibal? Oh Flor!”—ever since the last time he’d turned up at our house with his hair grown slightly longish and wearing an imitation tiger-claw earring and a necklace of shark teeth. I’d asked Tony that time if it meant he’d become a hippie, and he’d grinned rakishly and said that he was only pretending to be one, because “those white hippie girls, they really put out, man . . .” And you’d instantly shrieked his name and charged at him with pummeling fists until he grabbed your wrists laughing and said he was justjodiendo while you, trying to writhe free, seethed, “Oh sure! Fucker! Go back to your little hippie girls and their hairy armpits full of lice!”

  That was the last time I’d seen Tony, but only I knew that you hadn’t broken up once and for all. I spent much less time in the basement now, but I knew that you often spoke to him on the phone in the afternoons, though you always, always seemed to be fighting. I could tell whenever you, downstairs, had heard me come into the kitchen by the way your voice would drop to a harsh, tireless whisper. Later your eyes would often be red or angry or both, and you’d attack either your homework or housework in a high-strung way I knew to keep out of the way of.

  You’d said we were only going to stop in at Tony’s for a minute, and then we’d walked over from Back Bay Station without phoning to warn him. Maybe you were hoping to catch him with someone else or desperately hoping not to. But he was alone when we got there, in his pot-reeking, sparely furnished, though fastidiously neat apartment. Tony wasn’t wearing any of his cannibal regalia, but his hair was still on the long side, falling around his collar, and the pierce in his earlobe looked like a tiny piece of lint stuck there. He wore a purple shirt with black polka dots, tight black jeans. Even though Tony rarely seemed as outwardly ebullient as he had that night when he’d first captivated you in our basement, he still had his quiet good manners and grace and his gray eyes still seemed to look at the world with a casual good humor that was contradicted by the obvious facts of his life and, often, by his moods.

  He wasn’t particularly surprised to see us, though my presence, which he seemed determined to ignore, made the visit unprecedented. Your explanation was brief: my father in the hospital, you were very upset and needed to see him. But the looks that passed between you! Yours suspense-fully contrite, then worried and determined, Tony’s grimly skeptical no matter what. It was almost as if our fraught weekend had been nothing but a brief interruption in an argument that had already been raging. Together you went right into Tony’s bedroom and shut the door and soon I heard his voice rising sharply and yours defensively, both speaking at once in rapid Spanish. I had to just sit there on the couch watching television throughout the rest of that afternoon and into the evening, while, in the bedroom with the door locked, you and Tony alternately shouted and made speeches in passionate whispers so that I wouldn’t hear, soothed, even wept I think, laughed or giggled sometimes, and eventually got around to basically fucking up as quiet a storm as you could before starting up the argument all over again. And often Tony forgot to whisper. Once I heard him referring to my parents in a muffled but sarcastic tone and felt unbelievably relieved when you angrily rebuked and shushed him. But nothing was more astounding than the way you suddenly and furiously began berating him just when the most recent silence had started to sound like peace at last, a tirade that only became comprehensible to me when your voice shifted into the chesty bleating of your most affronted anger: “—You think reading books and having dreams is an escape from reality? Hah-hah! Too bad books cannot be rolled up like marijuana and smoked, then you would like books, verdad, Tony? You think that being intelligent and courageous makes a snob. Well she is twice the man you are! When Miss Cavanaugh was your age she went all the way to Chile by motorcycle and had romances with presidents along the way and wrote a book about it, but you don’t even own a car! That’s what American men do, isn’t it, Tony? It’s a matter of pride, it doesn’t have to be a new one or at all expensive! They find some kind of car and take good care of it and then they can make wonderful romantic surprises! You could come by my house and say, Flor, I’m taking you skiing in Vermont! Eh? Just like that, Tony!” and you stopped yourself. And then Tony, in English, shouted, “Flor, a car? Coño! I can’t afford a car!” Moments later you said, “Oh Tony, I think I am going crazy.” And then Tony moaning, “No, I am a fuck up, OK? So what am I going to say? You are right. But mierda, Florcita, I’m trying to get it together, I am . . .” He sounded exasperated and deflated, totally wrung out; in the ensuing silence I pictured him spread facedown over his bed as if he’d just been squeezed like paste from a tube . . . “I just want you to realize you could be so much more. It’s your choice, Tony. Amorcito? Only yours. You say you have put Cuba behind you, but you haven’t put anything in front of you.” And then more silence, and then other sounds. That’s the way it went, until it had been dark outside for a while.

  Now and then you came out of the room with your essential clothes back on, red eyed, gravely distracted or worried looking, and one time even looking as if you were trying not to laugh out loud over some delightful thought you were having. You’d hug and kiss me then and tell me we were going home any minute and that we’d only come here first because you’d been so worried about my father, and Tony, after all, was like your best and oldest friend not counting Delmi Ramírez (whom we never saw anymore anyway), and you made me promise that this would stay our secret, because I understood, didn’t I, how worried you’d been about Ira? Well, see how much better you felt now? And then back into the bedroom, and soon that limited but unforgettable repertoire of sounds would start over.

  That night Tony finally came out and made hot ham, salami, and cheese sandwiches at the kitchen counter by pressing down on them with a clothing iron, wiping up the crumbs and grease right after. Holding the refrigerator door open, you smiled at me and said, “See? A giant lives here,” because it was loaded with giant loaves of ham, salamis, cheese, bread, and whole cases of canned soda. Tony said he saved money buying his food at wholesale prices from his friend who was a produce distributor to delicatessens. He said it like this was a big-shot connection that only a very cool guy could have. Tony didn’t work as an apprentice jeweler anymore. I didn’t know what he did now, though he always seemed to have a job doing one thing or another, driving a taxi, or working as a salesclerk at Filene’s during the Christmas season.

  The three of us sat on the couch in front of the television eating our sandwiches and saying hardly a word, and when Tony lit up a joint I wasn’t at all surprised, though I’d never yet smoked marijuana. You frowned at him, but this seemed just for show. He exhaled, waved the joint around a bit as if cooling it off, pinched it with his fingers, and dropped it into his shirt pocket, and then you asked if I was ready to go home. You went to the telephone and told us to stay quiet, though we hadn’t exactly been conversing, and phoned my mother at the Chilean’s house. I could tell it was a servant who’d answered, a Spanish-speaking one, from the way you said, “Ah, bueno,” and then went on in carefully enunciated English. Tony, from the couch, snorted, “Pretenciosa,” and you shot him a withering look and then switched to Spanish with the servant, leaving a carefully worded message. That is, you didn’t say that we were at home, and didn’t say that we weren’t. You simply said you were very relieved to hear that my mother ha
d gone out to dinner with the MacKenzies because that must mean my father was feeling better, and you sent love and good nights from both of us, and said we’d phone again after school.

  Then you and Tony went back into the bedroom, where I could hear you arguing in whispers, and then both of you came out, all smiles, carrying sheets and blankets to make me a bed on the couch and to say good night.

  Well, you were nineteen, after all, and even in the sixth grade there was a girl who was rumored not to be a virgin anymore. But I lay awake for hours, distressed and silently raging. It wasn’t as if I was confronting that you fucked Tony for the first time in my life. It had been three years since I’d last watched you change out of your school clothes in the basement, since we had last played Tunnel of Love, like the carnival ride, the one we’d seen in a Hayley Mills Disney movie, closing our eyes and pressing our lips together, pretending we were in that movie, you running your hands through my hair and telling me I was Paul McCartney. It was just an orphans’ game. Or it was the way the angels played. Well, you were only fifteen or so, a confused girl in a confusing body, stuck in a Namoset elementary school no less, so no wonder! Only twice had it progressed to a stage of touch these, touch this, aren’t they like little rabbit noses, look . . . so that after you’d blushingly had to warn me that what we’d done was naughty though you promised not to tell. When other kids at school talked about sex, it sometimes amazed me to remember that I had once actually touched and kissed the rabbit noses on your small slippery breasts and that I could still remember it as if it had happened yesterday, though I told nobody. Sometimes it didn’t seem to have anything to do with what everybody else meant by sex, or even with reality. Then, suddenly, it would, like when I listened to the faint rustlings of you fucking Tony on the other side of that wall. In a healthy light, of course, such memories should hold plenty of innocent sweetness. Tunnel of Love was no more wicked, no more unusual, than a nineteen-year-old’s going to rather ludicrous and reckless ends to contrive a way of spending a night in bed with her boyfriend, was it?

  I finally fell asleep there on Tony’s couch, and in the morning I woke before you did and walked all the way to Boston Common and then across it to my uncle Judge Herbert’s office in the courthouse, which is how my mother found out about it in the end. She’d phoned Judge Herbert only half an hour before I walked in, frantic with worry over where we were, because she’d phoned the house in Namoset, of course, meaning to catch us before we’d left for school.

  All this is what I later found myself trying to get at with Moya in the Omni. Except what I’d always thought was going to be absolutely the most important thing for me to face just wasn’t. Maybe you can’t focus on one thing and say, This is it, the deep difficult truth that I’ve been evading. But there’s this notion that speaking it out loud finally frees you, it all dissipates and you’re changed, you climb out through a trapdoor in the ceiling into a new life. But it didn’t, my confession just plummeted harmlessly to the floor like the paper cup full of ant poison balanced at the edge of a plank in my old “Flor trap” contraption in the basement.

  That’s what it was like when I told Moya in the autohotel, the Omni, in that red-velvet-and-satin room created for nothing else but adulteries and dalliances with whores, when I was telling him all this that I’ve been telling.

  It just came out, I told Moya about the what never happened that came to seem as if it had—that had come to seem as if it had especially after what the girl with the pink-streaked hair said, the one who was at your funeral and who came into the Regina Bar & Grill one night seven months after while I was bartending (though her hair wasn’t pinked anymore, it was dyed a lustrous auburn with black tips now). In the Omni, my words just plummeted to the floor and lay there, no big deal, daunting me with the revelation that the truth, if there was one, lay elsewhere after all, or at least not only there, lay closer to that ping . . .

  So there I was, sitting on one curve of the round, red satin—covered bed beneath the mirrored ceiling in our room in the Omni, Moya sitting on the other curve, trying to keep his mind off the terror of knowing that there were people out there who earlier that very day had tried to kill him—

  “. . . at Wellesley Flor used to tell the girls in her dorm that she and I, well, that we’d fucked all our lives practically, from the time I was twelve or so anyway. In the basement when no one was home. Like the incestuous enfants terribles of suburbia or something. But it never happened!”

  “No, vos.”

  “Sí! . . . So she didn’t tell you that story anyway.”

  “No. Perhaps she outgrew this particular myth.” And then he laughed, softly, but—Well, he’d had a nerve-shattering day, but still, I couldn’t believe he’d laughed.

  “. . . Uh-huh,” I said. “Anyway, that’s what the girl with the pink hair said when she came into my bar one night. She was all coked up or something. That little story had really impressed her, it had stayed with her all right, back from when she was in college with Flor. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing, though, I threw her out of the bar. I mean, not even a year after the funeral, imagine?”

  “Flor could be very crazy, and muy necia, no?” he said, with no particular emphasis. Necia: pesky, naughty, mischievous . . . Necia?

  “It never happened.”

  “Ajá.”

  “But imagine its effect on me, Moya. I mean, I started to live in it like it had! Like it had happened, OK? Not even like I wished it had happened, but like it had. Because the thing is, it probably could have happened at least once, if I’d been different the one time, really just the one afternoon, when I think she gave me the chance to, except we never mentioned it again. Until that girl walked into the bar and said what she said, I don’t think I’d ever really believed that maybe she had given me that chance, I thought it was more like my imagination, you know?”

  “But what chance, vos?”

  “It was when she was home that first summer after college. I came in from the yard through the basement and then into her room without knocking on the door except she’d just taken a bath, she had a towel on but she looked at me, and I said, Oops! Should’ve knocked, and Flor said, with just that look, You don’t have to knock when you come into my room, Roger.”

  “. . . Entonces?”

  “Nothing. I ran up the stairs.”

  “It never happened?”

  “No. I thought she couldn’t have meant that. Maybe she didn’t—”

  “Because of course you would have wanted it to. It’s natural, pues. She wasn’t your sister, not even your cousin. She was young y todo. If you had been in Guatemala it undoubtedly would have happened, vos, and you would have felt yourself scandalously in love for a little while, and then it would be just a nice memory of youth.”

  “. . . She never said anything?”

  “Oh no. Of course she loved you very much, in that same way you always say you loved her. Like brother and sister, pues.”

  “. . . In my head, it started to seem like it had happened, Moya. That was the worst part of all that time after. I got secretly obsessed with it, trying to imagine this whole other life starting with that afternoon when it almost did, I think.”

  “Yes, I see, a missed opportunity. Qué lástima, vos.”

  “A missed opportunity.” This time even I had to laugh. “Is that all you think it is?”

  “Pues sí,” he said. “Or—what else?”

  Or what else . . . ?

  “But she told the girls in her dorm at Wellesley that we had! But I mean, what an invention! Why? Well, to scandalize them, obviously, to make herself seem”—I shrugged—“the most interesting. She’d waited a long time to get to college.”

  “Yes, to scandalize them.” Moya was silent for a moment. A moment later he said, “And then telling all these stories, she came home for summer, and thought one day, Well, why not? And you missed your opportunity.”

  “I wasn’t even sure . . .”

  “Maybe neither was s
he. That’s what she was like sometimes, getting an idea in her head and then another one. You can see in her notebook that she considered marrying el negro ése, the football player. Maybe if he had asked her at the right moment, no, vos?”

  “So what, is what you’re saying. So what if I found myself in this really horrible head, thinking I was in—had been in love with her. So were you. Except, I don’t know, it’s more than that. It’s been like my whole life.”

  “. . . Yes, that is true,” he said gloomily. “I didn’t have a Flor in my whole life. So yes, claro . . . But the true question, Rogerio, is the same as always. Who was Flor? Truly, who was she? It was not so easy for her as for you to become ‘just a Namoset kid,’ eh?”

  It was almost like he was saying, Who cares about you—about me, I mean. Especially since I’d never even let him tell me all about him and you, Flor. Though we did finally kind of get to that too, and to everything else, there in the Omni.