“You think this is it?” he asked. “Am I gonna die now? I’m gonna die now, right?”
“Stop being wack,” she said. He leaned against the sink and she leaned with him. “You’re not gonna die from a bug bite.”
“Oh, come on, Angel,” he said. He squeezed his T-shirt tighter as he held it up above his head. “We can cut the shit. I know you know what this is. Everyone knows what this is.”
She did know what it was. Or at least what it might’ve been. It was the bruise, the mark that everyone talked about and dreaded. What else could it be? She asked him if he had been to a clinic.
“What for?” he said.
“What do you mean, what for?” she said. “To find out. Don’t they have some pill you can take?”
“Where have you been?” he said to her. “What magic pill are you talking about? There’s nothing, not a thing. The results come back in another week.”
“Okay, so we have another week—”
“What do you mean we? You’ve got all the time in the world,” he said. “I got a week.”
“—and then we can talk to Dorian,” she said. “I bet he knows how to handle this and where we can get you the minerals and stuff. Protein powders, vitamins, whatever.”
“And with what money?” he said. “I don’t even got a pot to piss in, you know that.”
“I’ll give you some money.”
He closed his eyes and leaned his head back and opened his mouth as if to scream. She imagined that this was what deafness would feel like—watching someone in open-mouthed agony, hearing nothing. The pipes made a loud churning and Hector opened his eyes to look back at her.
“It’s not going to be enough,” he said. “We don’t have enough money for that. For this.”
* * *
Two days later, on Thanksgiving morning, Angel climbed out of Hector’s bed and up the fire escape to the top of the roof in order to watch the sun rise. The streets below were empty, except for a couple who were bickering over something. Angel was too far away to hear what they were arguing about. The woman was waving with her hands and the man was pointing at himself. Angel exhaled a strong cloud of smoke and looked at the fading advertisement for a soup company that was on the side of an eight-story building on the corner of the block.
She wasn’t wearing a jacket because she didn’t think it was going to be as chilly as it was. As soon as she was up there, she regreted that decision. She tried to rush through her cigarette so that the air wouldn’t wear her body down. The last thing she needed right now was to get sick.
She was worried about Hector’s test result. The anxiety flashed in her mind at least once an hour, but she wanted to get out on the roof to smoke and not have to sit with all that worry. November was her favorite month. It was the month that the trees dropped their leaves, and sweaters came out, and the sales associates at Saks and Bergdorf did up their Christmas windows real good. The tree in Rockefeller Center would soon be lit up bright and the streets of New York would be packed tight with people buying gifts. November in Manhattan felt like the entire city was huddled together under a soft cotton blanket that was fresh out the secadora.
Every November, she fantasized about coming out of the Plaza Hotel dressed in silk, stepping onto a carriage led by a horse into the orange-and-yellow swirl of leaves. She liked to imagine that the trees were reaching up to grab a piece of the sky, then they would curl themselves into a ball and sleep through the winter on a bed of four-hundred-thread-count Egyptian cotton, until spring, when they would doll up for the season’s next ball.
Snow had been forecasted that morning, but as she finished up her cig on the roof, no flakes were falling yet. She climbed down the fire escape and back into Hector’s apartment. He was still in his pj’s and brought her a cup of coffee just as she liked it: lots of half-and-half and sugar. He liked to joke with her that she put so much half-and-half, she should just call it full-and-full. She thought that was mad corny, but she always laughed at it.
Later that morning, Angel watched the Macy’s parade on the TV with Hector. She had to focus on the dancers, the singers, the marching bands in order to not think about the test results. Santa and Mrs. Claus paraded down the street in their sled, and Angel said, “How many more days until the test results come back?”
“I told you already,” Hector said. “A couple more days.”
“Right, right,” Angel said. “I knew that.”
“If you keep bringing it up, you’re gonna make me go stir-crazy también,” Hector said. “Please. Everything’s gonna work out fine.”
Now that Hector was singing a different tune and pretending to be calm about it, she felt guilty. It was like they had done a role reversal. She felt like her questions were pestering him and stressing him out. She was worried that Hector was pretending to be the calm one because they couldn’t afford to have two people melting down in their apartment at the same time.
The TV cut close to a shot of Mrs. Claus waving to the little white kids in the audience. The Christmas season had officially arrived, the announcer said.
“You think they get a different Santa every year?” Angel said. “Or do you think they stick with the same guy?”
* * *
By the time they stood outside Mami’s building in the Bronx, the sky had a twinkle of orange in the gray clouds. Angel hoped that the earlier promise of snow would come for real. Before they walked into the building to face Mami, Hector squeezed her hand and told her not to worry.
“I ain’t worried,” she said, but it was a lie.
When she led him into the apartment, she could hear Miguel belting out tunes from the shower. She kissed her mother on the cheek and took over the tasks—checked on the pernil in the oven, sprinkled garlic powder and salt over the tostones, piled the lumps of maduros onto a plate with sliced tomatoes. It took Hector negative-two-minutes to chat it up with Mami. That man, Angel thought, could charm the pants off a tree. Angel peeked out from behind the cocina wall—Mami was only drinking a coconut soda. For the better, Angel thought.
During dinner, Hector dominated the conversation as Angel took care of the food situation and brought the dirty plates to the sink. As Angel sprinkled the cinnamon over the tembleque and served it with dessert spoons, Hector was in the middle of his El Yunque story. The rain forest was wet with magic, he said, when he and his abuelo had walked a random path until they came to a water hole.
“Ay, Dios,” Mami screamed like a church lady, “I love a good watering hole.”
“I couldn’t believe it myself,” Hector said. Angel sat and spooned her tembleque and wondered if she were in a special edition of The Twilight Zone. She tried to make eyes with Miguel, but he was also enraptured by Hector’s suave-ass storytelling abilities.
“I took off everything ’cept my calzoncillos and swam under the waterfall,” Hector continued. “And I was begging my abuelo to come in with me.”
“I always say,” Mami said, waving her dessert spoon in the air, “whenever the shoe fits—you gotta swim.”
“What?” Angel said, but no one responded.
“Did he swim with ya?” Miguel asked.
“Naw,” Hector said. “He just watched and gave me one of those gummy smiles because he forgot his denture-teeth at home.” Hector curled up his lips over his teeth and did his best jibarito-abuelo impression, eating the last syllables of all the words. His sense of stage presence always amazed Angel. It was as if the man could just turn it on for anyone he wanted to dazzle. Angel watched as Hector told story after story. He spoke with his hands. He placed an arm on Mami’s shoulder. He threw his head back to laugh. She watched his charm unfold just the way it had when she first fell for him.
After dessert, Miguel started talking to Hector about his homeys at school, smoking reefer and listening to Pink Floyd.
“You know they say you can watch The Wizard of Oz backward and listen to it,” Miguel said. “Or maybe it’s the other way ’round, like you listen to it backward
and watch it forward. I dunno, it’s one of those.”
“Who’s they?” Hector said. “They say, they do. I just wanna know who they is, my man.”
“Pues, no sé,” Miguel said. “Just people.”
* * *
When dinner was over and Hector had gone downstairs to bring out the trash, Mami was folding the floral tablecloth and the plastic cover that went over it. She asked if Angel and Hector were fucking.
“Madre mía,” Angel said. “Por favor, could we not go there. Can we not have that moment right now.”
Miguel was blasting music from his bedroom, loud enough that the neighbors would be banging on their door in no time. The smell of reefer flowed up from under his door and it smelled like freshly dead skunk.
“He’s gonna give you that virus,” Mami said. “I seen it on the NBC Nightly News. I thought you were bringing a friend over—not some fucking maricón, Angel.”
“Where’s this coming from?” Angel said. “I thought you liked him. Just a half hour ago, this apartment was like the fucking Puerto Rican rendition of Leave It to Beaver.”
Miguel’s music was all bass, just a thump-thump verberating the walls and floor.
“Mira, it’s hard enough for me to deal with you coming into my house dressed the way you do,” Mami said. “But you’re gonna get ese virus—that gay cancer shit. Don’t do that to me, Angel. Coño, what’re the neighbors gonna say?”
“You were laughing at his stories,” Angel said.
Mami put the two table-protecting cloths over each other and shoved them into the lowest drawer in the plate cabinet. She told Angel she was going to call the santera lady from the botánica to set up an in-home appointment.
“You’re not calling no santera,” Angel said. “I don’t need no espíritu bullshit.”
“Only a spell to help protect you,” Mami said.
“I don’t need some fucking hoodoo magic,” Angel said. “He doesn’t have the virus. Not all maricones got the damn virus. We’re not all walking time bombs, for fuck’s sake.”
Later that night, she lay on the floor of the sala, staring up at the ceiling while smoking a cigarette. The nieve was falling down so light, it looked like white dust floating in the sky. As the smoke swirled up toward the white ceiling, she wondered if maybe Mami was right. Maybe she did need all the protection she could find. But that gave Angel the terrors.
What terrified her were the ways in which the world, with or without magic, was capable of doing anything, and there was no way to see or say what kind of jodienda was going to come next. What terrified her was that even without magic, anything could happen. Anything at all.
HECTOR
Dear Alvin Ailey,
My name is Hector Valle. I live in New York. My counselor said it might help if I keep a journal. Maybe write some letters too. She said I don’t need to send the letters if I don’t want to. The important part is just getting the feelings out there. So forgive me, Mr. Ailey, because I probably won’t ever send this letter to you. It’s just that I’m going through a difficult time. I hope you understand.
I wanted to say that I’m a huge fan. I watched a video of Revelations and I was so moved. The dancers glided like they was moving through water. When I was young, my abuela managed to save enough money for me to take one dance class a year. My ballet teacher was an old Cuban woman who trained in Paris. She used to tell us that a proper dancer stands up straight, so we should imagine that our spines are hanging down from the ceiling like a string of pearls. Whenever we fucked up, she slammed down her walking stick and screamed, “Pedestrian!” at us. (The goal, I guess, was not to be pedestrian.) And I thought of that when I watched Revelations. Your dancers was moving like they was dangling from the ceiling off a pearl necklace. They definitely wasn’t pedestrian. It made me so happy and so sad, but I mean that in a good way. That’s how I feel whenever I see something really beautiful. That’s how I know it’s beautiful.
In Revelations, I remember there was a group of dancers on the stage that used a giant tree branch to sweep the earth. And there was a white cloth to cleanse the sky. That made me happy-sad too. And the couple getting baptized! With yards and yards of billowing silk stretched across the stage. Was it silk? I always thought, wouldn’t it be nice if the sky was made of silk, and whenever we walked and the wind blew, the sky would billow also. I think that would just make me happy. Not happy-sad, just happy.
But it’s the last part that really kills me. I watched it and rewatched, the part when the man does the “I Wanna Be Ready” solo. Just him alone on the stage with the one light shining down on him. Everything else black. He’s just there, can’t even get up off the ground almost. Ever since I saw that, I go up to my roof and lay down a couple of flattened cardboard boxes and do that dance. Every morning. Because I wanna be ready too, Mr. Ailey.
I always wanted to be part of your dance group. What a dream that would have been. But then someone told me that you can’t join if you’re not black. I thought, Well, gee, I’m not black—but I certainly ain’t white. Especially if I’m talking Spanish, all the white people in Manhattan look at me like I might as well be black. But that’s okay, I understand why all your dancers are black. And I like that. I like what you do. But most of all, Mr. Ailey, I love your range. You can do ballet and jazz and hip-hop and gospel. It feels like something real special.
I’m trying to teach my girl, Angel, how to dance. She’s alright. Sometimes I think she overthinks it. You know how you have to get past that stage of thinking and let your body take over. Like the world is made of water and it only has to flow into you and out of your arms and legs. I’m going to keep teaching her though, and then maybe one day, her and I can dance on the roof without music, letting our bodies tell each other everything we think and see and feel.
With love,
H.
VENUS
Fluorescent lights were pure hell and she would never understand their purpose, but there it was, flickering in the bathroom as she stared at her reflection in the mirror to do her makeup. Mirror was a generous word—it was the kind of mirror that used to hang in the bathrooms at Our Lady of the Flowers, where she would look at herself and see a lost boy, and the mirrors in the disgusting bathrooms at Port Authority, where she would refuse to look at herself as she sponge-washed her armpits. She could barely make out her face, but it would have to do—whatever it could reflect back to her. She closed her eyes and arched her eyebrows up so that the skin on her eyelids was flat. She dabbed on the cover-up, which felt damp against her skin. She smoothed it in, creating a base layer for the color that would come next—a brand new blue that she had just mopped from Duane Reade. She heard the door open and close.
She opened her eyes and saw Sugar Cookie standing in front of the door frame. She apologized and said she’d be out in just a sec. She was just doing her face right. She only had to finish up her eyes and put lip liner on, then the bathroom could be all his.
“Nah,” he said. “We got something to conversate about.”
She heard the light buzz as it flicked on and off quickly. “If it’s about La Loca, don’t worry, Sugar. We’re close now.”
“It’s not,” he said. He turned the door’s metal lock, and Venus heard it click as she put down her brush.
He started walking toward her and she put down her compact. “What do you want? Why’d you lock me in?”
He took a step toward her and she backed up against the bathroom’s side wall. She could feel the cold pink tiles against her back. She could even feel the groove where an old tile had popped out and crashed to the floor. Now there was nothing left there except a small hole in the wall in the shape of the square that used to fill it. It was cold enough to feel through the sheer fabric of her tank, a fabric she had picked because it showed a little skin without being trampy. She had wanted to suggest, not reveal. He pressed his body against hers so that her face was pushed in his chest. He told her to just make it easy for the both of them—he want
ed her to suck his dick.
“And what is this hairspray you are using today?” he said, taking a deep inhale breath.
“Stop, Sugar.”
“It smells sweet. All tropical scented.”
“Stop it,” she said. “Why are you bugging?”
“Why stop,” he said, but she could tell that it wasn’t a question. “You know you like it. I see you, wearing that sexy tank top. I see you, just getting close to Loca so that you can have me.”
She could feel him getting hard as he pressed his legs against her waist. He reached his hands into the side of her tank and grabbed her nipple. His pinch sent a sharp pang through her body. She tried to wiggle her way out, but he had her pinned.
“You don’t have to pretend to make it all difficult for me,” he said. “But if you’re at it, just don’t make a fucking sound.” His left fingers pinched harder and she held back a scream because she was scared that he would cover her mouth and fuck her up real bad. She scrunched her face because of the pain, and when she heard a click, she saw the switchblade in his hand. “If you’re not gonna give in,” he said, holding the blade to her neck, “then we’re gonna have to do it my way.”
He told her to get to her knees. He unzipped his pants and, once she was down there on all fours, he backstepped to the sink counter. With his hands rooted in her hair, he pulled her closer to the sink so that he could lean against the ledge.
His cock was thick and curved and he was unforgiving as she gagged on it. He was so thick that the hinges of her jaw hurt as she tried to keep her mouth locked open, fearing that her teeth would scratch him and he’d slice her neck open. She couldn’t bear to swallow, so the spit leaked out of her mouth as he facefucked her. She thought she was gonna throw up, and she hoped she would so that the acid from her stomach could burn him.
When he was done with her, the back of her throat felt warm and sticky. She used the sink counter to prop herself back up, and she didn’t know where to look because she didn’t want to see herself in the mirror and she didn’t want to see him. She sat back down on the floor and reached for a wad of toilet paper to blow her nose. She wiped the side of her mouth. She could only imagine what her mascara looked like.
The House of Impossible Beauties Page 10
