We Came All the Way from Cuba So You Could Dress Like This?

by Achy Obejas

  When I go down to the cabin to get some aspirin and refresh my drink—pulpy tomato juice that sticks to my tongue and makes me feel thick—my lover follows. She pushes me flat against the wall so I have to turn my head in order to avoid crushing my nose. She traps me there with her knees pinning the backs of my knees, expertly moving both of her hands under my shirt then down into my shorts, where she presses her thumbs so hard I’m sure she leaves bruises. She moves her left hand down; I’m so wet so quickly she just slides in. Her right hand snakes up under my top, grazing my breasts with her nails, and emerges from my collar. She puts her fingers in my mouth, not delicately but as if she were going to extract a tooth. She makes no sound.

  I stand there with my arms outstretched, one holding the empty juice glass, the other the cold can from which I was going to pour a fresh serving. I feel a river running down my legs.

  Later, my lover decides to charm our hosts by telling them stories about life in poverty. She talks with a mix of pathos and satire, the ends of her sentences like prickly little daggers. I feel them under my skin and watch our hosts fidgeting in their chairs. I’m never sure what to say at these moments. I know my lover wants support and solidarity; she wants me to side with her—whatever that means—against the easy privilege of sailing on Lake Michigan. She wants our hosts, and me, to feel just a little miserable, but I can’t work it up. Instead, I watch them watching her, knowing that they see the chip on her shoulder as well as her luminous white skin and the sharp outline of her clavicles. They look knowingly at each other and laugh, but not at her. They keep enough distance to let her keep her dignity. I’m grateful to all of them. I love her more than ever.

  When we get in bed that night, her body is musty and cold. I run my hands on her belly, her shoulders, her long arms. I listen for the rhythm of her breathing. Then her head falls in the space between my chin and chest, her coarse hair lightly scratching my skin. Suddenly, she kisses me with her eyes wide open, almost desperate. And I know immediately: this will not—cannot—last.

  I go to counseling on Mondays. Sometimes it’s an individual session, sometimes it’s with my ex-lover, a woman I was with for seven years. She’s an actor with a neofuturist group in town, so she’s never at a loss for drama or a brand new perspective. We’re good lesbians: we’ve been painfully breaking up for two years. These days I grovel at our joint sessions, having lost all sense of possibilities. Even the therapist turns away, perhaps embarrassed or disgusted, and tells me to please stop.

  The worst part of this is that I don’t want to go back to my ex-lover. In fact, I don’t grovel for love or attention but for explanation. I need to know why things happened, why they had to fall apart the way they did. Before I can go on, I need to understand. I’m getting desperate because I’m fast running out of time: someone, soon, is going to find out about this miserable existence; someone, soon, is going to understand what a lousy role model I really am.

  Once, back when we were together, my ex-lover and I hosted my parents for dinner. My father, after too many glasses of wine, passed out on the couch. His snoring was deafening. His cheeks puffed up then shrunk as the noise came blowing out of him. We watched, my then lover, my mother, and me, as our dog licked my father’s hand dangling limp off the couch, my father so deadened by the alcohol that he never knew. I thought he was disgusting to have drunk himself into oblivion. But my mother, small and refined, a quiet little bird to his rhinoceros, wouldn’t have any of my contempt. “When I think of myself as an old woman, the only person I can picture rocking next to me on the porch is your father,” she told us.

  My ex-lover and I laughed, in part amused, in part scornful, and in part terrified. We never said so aloud, but we both knew: we never saw ourselves together, wrinkled with age, on a porch or anywhere else.

  In retrospect, I realize we were ashamed because we were caught in the trap of believing in the future—in believing we’d last long enough to have one. This hope, as evidenced by everyone I know, is false. Even my mother, who has visions, sees an imaginary future on that porch, not a real one. The truth is, she and my father are going to wind up living in my brother’s basement, converted into an apartment for their modest use, in a desolated old factory town just south of the city. There won’t be a porch or anything to look out at. The reward of staying together so long will be just that, a shared claustrophobia.

  Personally, I’d prefer to evolve beyond the concept of lovers, of couples, of love. The future is moot then; the future has no choice but to be now. It strikes me as the most revolutionary lesbian-feminist thing to do. Forget hunger, equality, environmentally correct garbage bags; let’s work to eliminate heartbreak instead. Love, coupledom, the right person—they’re as anachronistic and elusive as Puerto Rican independence: everybody’s for it, but no one’s quite sure what it means or how to get it.

  I just got a cat. I named it after myself. Now let’s see who calls and who answers.

  “Miss,” the voice whispers to me on the train. I don’t bother to look up. It could be anybody, and I’m not in any mood for polite conversation with someone who loved my last column, or for equally polite defenses against someone who hated it. I ignore the voice. Faces peer back from the train windows, reflections superimposed over the shadows rushing by.

  I’m in a hurry, on deadline with this week’s column in my backpack. This one’s a real killer: I happened to have overheard an obnoxious AIDS administrator—who’s HIV negative—respond to the shenanigans of a local AIDS activist—who’s HIV positive—by saying, “Why doesn’t he just die already?” I’ve got notes. I’ve got witnesses. Deadlines don’t usually mean anything to me (especially if I know my editor’s going to lap up my column), but I’m in a hurry today because it’s payday at the newspaper. That means it’s imperative that I be on time. If I’m not, I won’t get my check right away. And if I’m not one of the first to dash to the bank with it, there’s always a chance I won’t be able to cash it. I can’t make the train go any faster, so I watch paper cups, scraps of paper and newsprint fly up, like ghosts, as the train thrashes on, its cargo pungent with summer sweat.

  “Miss, miss,” the voice says again. It’s a man. I continue to ignore him, but this time notice that he has a slight accent. Spanish maybe, or Portuguese.

  The train rattles on through the tunnel, tossing the passengers this way then that. The woman sitting next to me on the aisle seat is big and pink. She rolls forward with the train’s movement, then to the side. Sweat runs down her temples and chin, disappearing into a roll of flesh on her neck. Her shoulder bumps up against me, but I don’t move. She has no clue who I am.

  “Miss,” the voice says again. The accent’s more pronounced now, as is its urgency. I stare up at the man who has suddenly appeared above my reflection in the train window. He’s brown-skinned and handsome in an absent-minded sort of way. His nose is straight, almost Roman. I consider that he might be Asian Indian or Pakistani. Maybe an exchange student or a visiting professor needing directions. Then I notice he’s holding out a piece of paper.

  “This is for you,” he says.

  I turn my head, my eyes just catching his before they drop to the paper he holds between perfectly manicured fingers. I’m not actually looking at him, but I know that he’s nodding, encouraging me to take the paper.

  “It is for you,” he says again, and this time the paper seems to drop from his hand into mine.

  The woman sitting next to me stands to leave and gives her seat to a young white man with a tie and a briefcase. When I look up again, the Asian man’s gone. I hold onto the paper and scan the shifting masses, but I can’t find him. The train stops, jostling the passengers. The doors fly open and lines of identically dressed white men with ties and briefcases empty out. The guy next to me stays put, eyes closed. His mouth’s slightly agape, but his neck’s still straight. I’m tempted to wake him, just to rattle him, but instead I unfold the paper in my lap, half expecting an advertisement for a pizza parlor or escort
service.

  Typed in a neat serif face, it reads, “I know you know.”

  “Oh my god, he ate it,” shrieks my twenty-two-year-old girlfriend as she searches the refrigerator. She leans on the door and laughs. “Can you believe it?” Her red hair stands on end, shocking and brilliant.

  “Well, it was a perfectly innocent looking bowl of guacamole,” I say. “Why wouldn’t he eat it if he was hungry?” I’m sitting at the kitchen table, which is sticky from old spilled coffee.

  “Should I tell him? Is there an ethical way to approach this?” she rattles on, amused and nervous. I shrug, peeling off some of the coffee with my neon red fingernail. She lets the refrigerator door close. “What is wrong with you? We just found out my roomie ate a bowl of guacamole seasoned with girl cum, and you’re all gloom. Don’t you think it’s funny?”

  She runs her hand through my hair and down the back of my neck. I want her to stop immediately. I want to have no memory—none whatsoever—of last night, of how we started by saying we’d just have a snack in bed, and then, without thinking about it, started offering each other bits and pieces of soft bread with that delicious guacamole, then just our fingers dripping with the stuff. Then there was that moment when she took my hand and pushed it gently down between her legs, and the guacamole smeared against the mauve of her skin, and I was fascinated by the colors and the mix of smells. I needed no encouragement to lower my head. But all I did was look, and feel, and inhale. I never did enter her with my fingers or tongue. I never did make love to her in any recognizable way. Right now I can’t think of a single reason why we ever put that guacamole back in the refrigerator.

  “I had the weirdest experience on the train today,” I say, pulling the note from the Asian man out of my pocket. “This guy just came up and handed me this.”

  She looks at it. “It’s an advertisement for a Meg Christian album, only he’s about twenty years too late,” she says. She gives me back the note and makes herself busy by clearing the counter of the dirty dishes which have accumulated in the past week.

  “He was really deliberate,” I tell her. “It wasn’t like he was just handing out little pieces of paper to everybody. He came right to me and gave it to me like it was a secret message from a tribal chieftain or something.”

  She lets the hot water run in the sink, pulls the bowl of leftover guacamole from the refrigerator, and drops it on top of the dishes. Steam rises. “This is the city. Weird things happen all the time,” she says. “It’s not like there has to be a logical explanation for any of it. Most of the time, you know, there isn’t.”

  I think, Yes, I know. Look at us.

  I’m on another deadline—but without a check as reward—when I hear somebody calling my name. I’ve been taking a lot of heat lately for the column on the obnoxious AIDS administrator, and I really can’t deal with one more person telling me I shouldn’t be so hard on the guy—he’s done so much for the community, and anybody can slip up once—so I try to blend in with the crowd and pretend I don’t hear anything. This is particularly hard because, besides the tonnage in my backpack, I’m carrying a twenty-pound bag of special diet cat food that I just bought at the specialty pet store. I’m in the Dearborn-to-State train tunnel at rush hour. All the musicians who normally play here are pressed against the white walls by the commuter crunch. They look flat, wet, and exhausted. Everything smells of sweat. I can’t see a thing, can’t focus on a single face or outline. There are just too many people. The tunnel’s suffocating.

  “Hey, soy yo,” I hear behind me and turn to see Miguel Colorado, a tall, robust-looking painter who lives in my neighborhood. His face is as flat and shiny as pie crust, his nostrils like slits for air. He wraps his fingers around my upper arm and pulls me away from the current. “Are you okay?”

  I nod. “Yeah, I’m fine, just a little disoriented. It’s too hot.”

  “You looked pale, like you were going to pass out,” he says. His fingers, damp and calloused, are still around my arm. Standing only inches from him, I can smell his body—an acidic, almost bitter odor. I shift my backpack a little then move the cat food from one hip to the other. Finally, he drops his fingers from around my arm.

  “Look what I bought,” he says, pulling up a yellow plastic bag. From it he yanks a carefully wrapped ceramic hand, its five fingers spread apart against an elaborate backdrop. To either side of each finger, there’s a small icon or deity, all garishly painted in primary colors. I recognize it right away as the siete potencias, the pantheon of gods revered in santeria. But these icons don’t look African; instead, they’re stereotypically Native American, with feathers and tomahawks.

  “That’s so ugly!” I say, laughing.

  He laughs, too, still holding his prize. “Isn’t it, though?” he asks, putting it back in the bag. “I found it at El Talisman, that little place on Lawrence. I wasn’t really looking for anything, you know, but I just about fell over when I saw a siete potencias with Indians. I mean, Indians!”

  “What are you going to do with it? I mean, you’re not actually going to set it somewhere in your house, are you?” I ask, getting some breathing room as the traffic in the tunnel eases. A couple of people nod at me as they go by, like they know me, but I ignore them. I really can’t take anymore feedback on my column.

  “Well, I was thinking of bringing it to my Indian support group, but I don’t know yet,” he says. “I just started going to it, you know, and I don’t really know everybody that well yet. I don’t want them to think I’m making fun of them or anything. I just thought it was funny.”

  “Miguel, what are you doing at an Indian support group? You’re Mexican,” I say, laughing more heartily now.

  He shrugs his shoulders, trying to keep it light, but I can see he’s serious and even embarrassed now. “Well, I’m both, really,” he says. “I mean, I’m too indio to be Mexican, and too Spanish to be Indian. I’m fucked, that’s what I am. I’m completely fucked up.”

  I’m trying to muster some sympathy here. I want to put his hand back on my arm, to tell him he’s brave for admitting his confusion, for taking this journey. I’m juggling my backpack and the giant bag of diet cat food when I look up and see the Asian man, with his perfect Roman nose, standing across the tunnel and staring at us.

  My twenty-two-year-old girlfriend and I are lying on my futon. My cat, who was napping on the bed until we came in, is now perched on the window sill. When my lover and I make love during the day, we usually do it at my house. I’m busy with my column and really can’t afford the forty minutes on the train to get to her house. Besides, the incident with the guacamole has really made us nervous about her roommate. He didn’t say anything, but it just feels weird, that’s all.

  There is a problem, however. We haven’t talked about it, but it’s fairly clear to me that I’m not really interested anymore. It’s not that she doesn’t turn me on—she does—it’s just that I don’t want her to touch me. And I don’t really want to touch her. So now, instead of having sex in the usual way, we just jerk off together.

  Since we’re both right-handed, I try to lie on the right side. That way, by putting my arm around her, I can keep her from going any further than I want. I don’t care if she kisses my breasts or strokes me. But I’m keenly aware that if our positions were reversed, it’d be very obvious I could do without her. I’m sure I wouldn’t kiss her breasts or stroke her, and that would probably force us to talk.

  Not that she’s silent during sex. She’s not. She has this remarkable ability to let go, usually in escalating moans. By the time she reaches orgasm, the moans have become full-blown screams. It really is amazing. In all my years of sexual activity, I’ve never seen anything quite like it.

  I admit I envy that release and exhaustion. Although I can come—and come hard, I might add—the experience is often frustrating. My girlfriend, it seems, can reach a crescendo and explode, but me, I just stay there, coming eternally, one time after another, over and over. I realize it sounds enviab
le, but eventually it just feels suffocating, with my shoulders aching, my fingers splayed and stiff (I sometimes have to use my other hand to unlock them), and this sense that I’ve been skinned alive.

  Recently, as if to bring me out of my coming coma (I know she knows it’s not about her), my girlfriend’s taken to screaming my name. It startled me at first because she never did that when I used to actually make love to her. My cat, who usually just watches from the window sill when there’s sex going on, now comes running, tossing her head, bumping her wet nose against my girlfriend’s burning brow.

  I’ve decided whatever’s going on is between them.

  I am having a problem. In fact, I’m having three problems.

  The first is that my editor’s incensed because I just lost her an ad account. It seems that the obnoxious AIDS administrator whom I wrote about in last week’s column—the one who wanted the street activist dead—is actually part-owner of The Stallion, one of the sleaziest pick-up bars in town and, until now, one of the paper’s steadiest ad clients. Neither my editor nor I knew about this when I brought in the column; it would have made no difference to me, but apparently it would have to her.

  “Do you realize this man pays your salary with his ads?” my editor screams. She’s a bulldagger who drives a Lincoln Continental sporting a license plate which reads, “WMN PWR.” Right now she’s standing over me, waving my check in the air, knowing that as long as it’s flapping up there, I’m going to go along with her like a trained seal.

  The second problem is that my ex-lover is on the phone, telling me she’s reconciled herself to not being able to tell me exactly why things happened and that perhaps I should consider accepting this as a resolution to our eternal codependency. She wants to stop going to couple counseling.