“No sé if my back feels comfy against the floor,” Juanito said, “but it feels nice. It feels—safe.”
Daniel moved to lean on his right elbow so that he could face Juanito. He glided his left fingers against Juanito’s cheek and leaned in for a little besito.
Their clothes came off quickly, but nothing felt too rushed. Daniel didn’t say any words. Neither did Juanito. Daniel just gazed into Juanito’s eyes with each big movement as if to ask, Is this okay? And Juanito held his gaze, as if to say, Yes.
It was their first time together, but it wasn’t as earth-shattering, soul-spinning, ground-shaking as people said it would be. There were no candles. No música. The only sound was the water gently boiling on the stove and the clapping sounds of their bodies in motion with, and against, each other.
When Daniel was on top of Juanito—Juanito’s legs rested on Daniel’s shoulders—Daniel looked down. His palms were sweaty and he was trying to lay enough force against the floor so that he wouldn’t slip. He looked down at Juanito’s face, but his eyes were squeezed shut and his head was to the side. Daniel stopped.
“You okay, papo?” Daniel asked. “Am I hurting you?”
Juanito rolled his head so that his face was looking up, but his eyes were still closed and he bit his lower labio. “Sí, I’m fine,” Juanito said, “I’ll get used to the pain.”
“Am I hurting you?” he asked again.
“But the pain is what makes it,” Juanito said, “—makes it feel intense.”
Daniel didn’t know if intense was good or bad. He didn’t know if he should stop or go, so he went. He kept at it. He tried to focus on himself, not because he was being selfish, but because he figured that if he focused on the pleasure, he’d cum faster and the pain would stop for Juanito. His movements were slow, but deep, and right before he came, he leaned down so his mouth was close to Juanito’s ear. Juanito’s eyes were still closed and Daniel bit his earlobe and announced that he would cum, and then he did.
Daniel pulled out slowly and focused on Juanito’s face. Juanito was wincing. Once Daniel was out, Juanito opened his eyes and sighed. When their gaze met, Juanito giggled.
“¿Qué?” Daniel said. “What’s giving you the giggles?”
“Nothin’,” Juanito said. “It’s just that you drip-dropped a lot of sweat on me.”
Daniel apologized and offered to get a towel.
“No, no,” Juanito said. “It’s okay. I like it. Makes me feel closer to you.”
* * *
The difference between two types of fabric was lost on Daniel, who couldn’t say if silk chiffon or georgette or ivory damask—words that Juanito said so often, he could recite them in his sleep—were stronger, prettier, or however else fabrics were judged against each other. Así, Daniel just laughed at himself when Juanito ran his fingers up and down the fabric that was on the table and said, “¿Esto? This is just cotton.”
Daniel was in his undies now, sitting on the sofa with his legs bent so that he could hug his knees close to his chest. Juanito stood in front of the table, still naked, pretending to do a presenter’s voice. “Ladies and gentlemen,” Juanito said, two octaves lower than usual. “Tonight, Magician Juanito will do the trick of the century.”
“The trick of the century, century, century,” Daniel echoed from the sala, where he had a direct view of Juanito.
Juanito cupped his hands around his mouth and blew into them, then rubbed them together slowly and dramatically. “These magical fingers will remove—yes, remove!—this cotton fabric, from this table.”
“Ay, Dios mío,” Daniel cried, placing the back of his hand to his forehead like a vieja about to faint.
And then whoosh. The table cloth was whipped off in one swoop. He held the cloth in his hands like a bullfighter enticing a toro. He bowed for his audience and Daniel clapped, then moved into a standing ovation before they laughed so hard, it brought them to their knees and they were leaning on each other for support.
Then Juanito stopped laughing and Daniel asked him what was wrong. Juanito reached out and grabbed something that was on the floor near the leg of the table. “Didn’t see this before,” Juanito said.
“What is it?” Daniel asked. He looked at the piece of newspaper in his hand. “Gotta be a scrap of garbage, verdad?”
“No,” Juanito said. “No, I don’t think so—”
Juanito handed it to him and Daniel saw for himself: it was an announcement for a model search at Bloomingdale’s.
“You think it belongs to Venus?” Daniel asked.
“Probably,” Juanito said. He shrugged. “She never said a word. Not a peep.”
“Nobody says a peep around here,” Daniel said. “This shit is starting to feel like a house of damn secrets and I don’t understand why.”
“Secrets, secrets,” Juanito said. “You keeping anything from me?”
Daniel tugged on the cotton that Juanito was holding still so that he could cover his toes with the end of it. “No,” Daniel said.
Juanito stared at him and Daniel saw his left eyebrow twitch ever so daintily.
“You shouldn’t play poker ever,” Daniel said. “That face of yours can’t hide a thing.”
“What do you think I’m hiding?” Juanito said. “I asked you.”
“You don’t believe me when I said no,” Daniel said. “And that’s cause you’re right. I do got a tiny secret that I got from you.”
Maybe Daniel had misread the eyebrow twitch though. Juanito’s eyes got big and Daniel thought he was going to cry. He got up quick to get his backpack and gave Juanito the box with the watch inside. “Open it up,” he told Juanito. Juanito had some trouble with the tape on the side that kept it shut. “Just rip it open, no pasa nada. The box isn’t the important part. It’s what’s inside that is.”
When Juanito took it out and put it on his wrist, Daniel told him about all the ideas he had about it. How they could wear them every night—hell, every day even—but specially when they weren’t together, like at the piers, and they could pick a time to look up at the sky and think of each other. “Like connected,” Daniel said. “Or I dunno, maybe it’s just corny and shit. Like Del Monte–level corny—”
“Shh,” Juanito said and put his finger up to Daniel’s mouth. Juanito held his finger there for a hot second and leaned in to kiss on top of it. “It’s not corny,” he told Daniel. “I like it a lot.”
“I just don’t want there to be any secrets,” Daniel said, “between us. Let’s play a game where we tell each other secrets, back and forth. To let them out in the open.”
“Okay, I got one,” Juanito said. “One time, cuando era joven, I stole a Charleston Chew. Didn’t even have the sense to steal a better candy bar, like, the fuck did I choose a Charleston Chew for?” He laughed.
“Last week, I walked down the street and this homeless guy was asking for change,” Daniel said. They both lay down together and bunched up the cotton fabric to use as a head rest. They were talking to each other, but looking at and directing their words to the ceiling, as if words had the same properties as air—heat rising above the rest. “—and he was jangling his cup and I walked past even though I had some change in my pocket.”
“That’s okay, papo,” Juanito said. “Don’t beat yourself up over it.”
“I knew he was hungry, but I kept going.”
“Everybody’s hungry, Dani,” Juanito said.
“Your turn,” Daniel said. He kept looking up at the ceiling as he waited for Juanito’s words. But nothing came.
“My papi—” Juanito said, “when I was a little boy, my papi—”
Daniel knew better than to turn around to face Juanito in that moment. The apartment was so still, Daniel feared that one movement would affect it all like a tiny pebble in a pool of water. The silence made Daniel feel on edge, so he said, “It’s okay, I’ll go again if you don’t want to.”
“Por favor,” Juanito said.
Daniel could feel Juanito nod slowly agains
t his shoulder. “When I was in middle school, like maybe twelve or eleven, or maybe it was ten—not the point, the point is that some little macho in training thought it would be cute to punch me in the face in the locker room.”
The story wasn’t true. He was shocked that he had just told such a flaming lie. He wanted to fill the silence and make Juanito feel more comfortable before he told his story about his father—whatever that story was. But Daniel could have picked a better story, one that wasn’t a lie.
Juanito turned his face into Daniel’s shoulder-armpit area and sobbed. “Sorry,” he kept repeating, “I’m sorry. I’m getting mocos all up on your T-shirt.”
“No digas sorry,” Daniel said. He didn’t know what else to say to comfort Juanito. He didn’t need Juanito’s apologies. He could wash the mocos off his shirt at the landromat.
“I don’t want to play this game anymore.”
“Maybe we should go take a nap,” Daniel said. Juanito nodded so Daniel unclasped the watch on his wrist, then did the same to the watch on Juanito’s wrist, and let them both rest on the table next to each other. Then he picked up Juanito, who was clutching the cotton fabric. “No more secrets then,” Daniel said. “We shouldn’t have made it a game in the first place.”
JUANITO
When he was seven, he already had a routine down pat. When he came home from school, he’d watch Sesame Street on the television for a little bit. Then he’d go to his room and take the Barbie doll from her secret hiding spot—in the drawer where his sweatpants were, in the very back corner—and play with her.
“Guess what, guess what,” he told Barbie one night. “When it’s summertime, I’m gonna go see my father in Puerto Rico, can you believe it?”
He fashioned a comb out of five paper clips that he bent into a new shape. It didn’t really look like a comb, but it had the prongs and kind of worked. As long as her hair looked fabulous, he was perfectly content.
He felt like Barbie was the only one who could listen to him. And she always had that pearly white sonrisa, even if he told her the sad stuff. He felt like his mother was always out of the house, working at the Jacobs’ apartment on Park Avenue, too busy being a mommy to those two blonde girls who were so pretty. So much prettier than Juanito thought he could ever be. When he went to visit his mother one afternoon at work, and the two girls told him he couldn’t play with their Barbies because he was a boy, he thought, Oh yeah? I’ll show you. And he stole one of the Barbies just to spite them.
One day at school, a boy named Steven came up to Juanito and said he heard that Juanito was gonna go meet his papi on the island, and was it true? Juanito nodded his head yes. Steven shrugged and said he was hoping to see his primos on the island too. Then he told Juanito to go up to Catalina and push her into the wall when they were walking down the hallway. Their school had red tape on the ground in a line, and the teachers always told them to stay on that red line or things would get combobulated. Juanito kept his head down and stared at the line as they walked back from gym class to Mrs. Caruso’s second grade room. Mrs. Caruso was not simpática, ever since she called Marisela a monster because she ate a crayon. And Marisela cried quietly for the rest of the day, too scared to show Mrs. Caruso her tears.
As they walked down the hallways, Catalina was in front of him and Steven was behind him. Juanito could hear Steven making throat noises. He even felt Steven nudging his shoulder at one point when they marched past the bathrooms. Juanito looked down at the red line, looked over at Catalina’s black Mary Janes. “You better do it, Juan,” Steven said. “Or else.”
Juanito wanted to scream, What for? Why do I gotta do this? Why does it need to be done in the first place? He wanted to scream, You’re being a bully, Steven, and leave me alone.
The perfect moment came when they were lined up outside Mrs. Caruso’s door, waiting to go in. Catalina leaned against the wall and Juanito had the perfect chance to push her. But he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t hurt her. He didn’t see the point.
So later that day, Juanito came home with a fresh bruise at the back of his head and he told Barbie all about it. “He pushed me,” he said to Barbie, guiding the paper-clip comb through her hair. “And my head hit the wall and everyone laughed at me. Even Catalina laughed at me.”
There was Barbie’s happy face, with her flowing blond pelo, the little white studded earrings. “He called me a pansy wimp,” he told her. “I don’t understand why they don’t like me, Barbie.”
A week later, Steven took a pair of scissors from the arts and crafts box. When they were taking a spelling test, Steven grabbed a small chunk of Juanito’s hair and chopped it off. Mrs. Caruso was angry and sent Steven to the principal and brought Juanito out to the hallway to talk to him.
“He’s a little beast,” she told Juanito in the hallway. “Don’t worry, Juan. Your hair will grow back.”
Juanito sniffled a little, and then blew his nose when Mrs. Caruso gave him a tissue from the tissue box.
When he got home that afternoon, as he was telling Barbie about his missing piece of hair, he could smell the lentil-and-potato soup that his mother was making for dinner. It was his favorite kind of soup, and the air was always thick with it on the nights that she made it. He liked to close his eyes and imagine he was swimming in a sea of lentils and friendly sharks made of potato chunks.
He grabbed his pair of safety scissors from his pencil box, and pinched Barbie’s hair between his index and middle fingers. He cut. He snipped. Until Barbie’s blond pelos were scattered on the floor. “Don’t worry, Barbie,” he told her. “I’m not a monster. I just want us to match more. When my hair grows back, so will yours.”
It only took a week for the little patch of hair to grow back on the back of Juanito’s head. And then another week passed, and he would talk to Barbie and cry about the boys at school. How now it wasn’t just Steven, but more of them. Then another week passed and he talked to Barbie and realized that her beautiful blond hair wasn’t going to grow back. Not that week, not ever. What had he done, he thought, I’m a monster.
* * *
A month after Steven had snipped off a chunk of his hair, Juanito walked into the cocina and saw Mr. Jacobs standing in front of the nevera, talking to his mother. “Say hi to Mr. Jacobs, Juanito,” his mother told him. He could tell by her tone that she wasn’t happy.
He said hi to Mr. Jacobs and Mr. Jacobs said hi back. It was Juanito’s worst nightmare. Surely Mr. Jacobs was there because the girls realized that Juanito had stolen their Barbie doll and had come to demand that Juanito give her back. But that couldn’t happen, Juanito thought. The girls wouldn’t want a half-bald Barbie doll, and then Juanito would be in trouble. Unless, of course, the girls could be tricked into believing that her hair had always been that way. Pero that was a risk. He didn’t know how much the girls knew about hair. Besides, it didn’t even matter because he was going to go to PR and his hair would grow back and it’s not like things like that mattered in PR. Papi would be so cool, it wouldn’t matter.
Juanito turned back and started walking toward his bedroom. “Where are you going so fast?” Mr. Jacobs asked him. He was smiling. “Where are you running to, Mr. Juanito?”
Juanito lied and said he forgot a cup in his bedroom. He went back into his room, shut the door, and locked it. He grabbed Barbie by the waist and shoved her back into the sweatpants drawer. There, he thought. Even if Mr. Jacobs came for her, he wouldn’t know where to look.
When he walked back into the cocina, Juanito heard his mother say, “I can’t believe you didn’t have the decency to come while he was at school?”
“What do you want from me, Marisol?” Mr. Jacobs said. “Why does everything have to be hidden?”
His mother gestured at Juanito with her chin. Mr. Jacobs turned around.
“I wasn’t hiding anything,” Juanito said, “I just didn’t have a cup in there. But I thought I did.”
“Here, baby,” his mother said. “Why don’t you get Mommy a scratc
h lotto ticket from the bodega?” She glanced back at Mr. Jacobs.
“Yes, Juan,” Mr. Jacobs said. “Here’s five dollars. Get two tickets and a candy bar for yourself.”
“Don’t go into the bedroom,” Juanito said. “You can only go into my bedroom when I’m home, okay?”
“That sounds fair to me,” Mr. Jacobs said.
He didn’t know how long it took him, probably about the length of one cartoon program and a half, but when Juanito came back home, Mr. Jacobs was gone and his mother was in the shower. He came back with two scratchy tickets and a Kit Kat and stood at the door of the bathroom with the candy in one hand and the tickets en la otra. The water stopped a minute later and he could hear his mother’s feet stepping out of the tub. As the door opened, a nube of steam burst out into the hallway. His mother had one towel wrapped around her body, another wrapped around her pelo, balanced on top of her head.
At first, she didn’t see him. She stood in the door and leaned against the side. She sniffled and wiped her eyes.
“Ma,” Juanito said and she jumped. “Here are the tickets. What will we do with five whole thousand dollars?”
“Jesus, Juanito,” she screamed. “Don’t sneak around. I mean, don’t sneak up on me. I didn’t see you there.”
She walked into her bedroom and shut the door before he could follow her. Before he could knock, she opened the door again. “Where did this come from?” she asked. “Did you put that there?”
“I’m sorry,” he sobbed, “I thought it would grow back.”
“¿Qué dices, m’ijo?” she said. “Grow what back? I just want to know where did that money come from?” She was pointing at the fifty-dollar bill that was on top of her bright red drawer.
Juanito shook his head and held out the lotto tickets in his hand. “Did we already win some money from the tickets?”
“I can’t fucking believe that man,” she said. “Does he think I’m some kind of whore?”
“A what?”
“Nothing, papi,” she said, picking up the bill and giving it to Juanito. “Hold on to this while mommy gets dressed. We’re going to the diner to get some eggs and hash browns.”
The House of Impossible Beauties Page 21
