No Matter How Much You Promise

by Edgardo Vega

  “It’s not a line, Elsa,” he said. “I meant it.”

  “Like that?” she said. “Just like that? You don’t even know me.”

  “It doesn’t matter to me,” he said. “I’m willing to wait for you to get to know me, but I definitely don’t want this to be the last time we see each other.”

  “Oh, I didn’t mean it like that,” she said. “I mean, I’m flattered and everything. You’re really nice and I like you, but I have to think about it.”

  “About seeing me again?”

  “No, about the other.”

  “Marrying me.”

  “Yes, of course. I have a kid, you know. Did Linda tell you?”

  “No, she didn’t.”

  “Are you disappointed?”

  “Not at all. Boy or girl?”

  “Girl.”

  “Great. How old?”

  “Six.”

  “How long were you married?”

  “I wasn’t. I had her when I was sixteen. My mother’s helping me raise her.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Vidamía. My mother gave her the name,” she lied. “Strange, right?”

  “No, not at all. Unusual, but I like it. Anyway, think about it and maybe next weekend we can have dinner and you can get to know me.”

  He parked the car on Essex Street and they walked the rest of the way, this well-dressed couple at two o’clock in the morning on a summer evening, the people in the street not paying much attention to them. It was common to see people who lived in the tenements dressing up and going out, returning home late from dancing in the Latin clubs. When they got to her building, she stopped and told him she’d invite him up but didn’t want to disturb her mother. She reached up and kissed him on the cheek and smiled at him.

  “Thank you,” she said. “It was nice of you to drive me home.”

  “My pleasure. When’s the best time to call you?”

  “I’m always home at night, late,” she said. “I’m working as a counselor at the college and taking courses in the evening. Let me give you my number.”

  He copied down her number and she went inside the door, and she began to let herself into the second door when she suddenly grew fearful that something might happen to him. She ran down the steps, but Barry was already walking away, confidently, at ease in the neighborhood. Back inside the apartment, she knew that something wonderful would happen between her and Barry. As she changed into her nightclothes and then brushed her teeth, she recalled being with her homegirls and, hearing once again the tune, she let it play in her head. Estoy buscando a Barry, Barry, Barry, Barry, estoy buscando a Barry, Barry, Barry, dónde está? As she fell asleep, she imagined herself dressed in a white wedding gown, marching down the aisle.

  And that’s exactly what happened. The following week they’d gone out on Friday and eaten at a quiet, intimate Italian restaurant in the Village. They ambled through the streets, looking into shopwindows and talking about their lives and their dreams and books and movies, laughing and finding many things in common in their experience of growing up Rican in New York. The week after that he picked her up early in the afternoon, met her mother and Vidamía, and then drove over to the Seventy-ninth Street marina. They boarded his boat, a forty-five-foot cabin cruiser named SUERTE, which he eventually renamed ELSA. He maneuvered the boat expertly down the Hudson River, around the Battery, up the East River, through Hell Gate, and past Riker’s Island until they got to City Island, where they docked and went ashore.

  He’d called ahead and they were met by his friend Israel Caraballo, the detective. She had expected someone rough and tough, but he was a mild-mannered, gentle Puerto Rican man, about Barry’s age. He was very introspective and shy, almost professorial. They went to Israel’s home and had a barbecue with his family—Israel’s wife, Maritza, a nurse, and their three children, two boys and a girl, ages three to ten. The girl was about Vidamía’s age.

  The following month they were in Puerto Rico, lying on Esperanza Beach in Vieques. They swam and ate seafood every day and at night lay naked in bed looking at the moon and stars through their mosquito netting after making love. He was a very patient, almost disinterested lover, and in the same way that he drove his car or boat he made love to her, speaking softly about her breasts and lips, describing them with such delicacy that by the end of the week as he was touching her with his fingers she’d had an orgasm. It was the first time in years that she’d felt one so strongly and she clung to him, pushing his hand into herself, and then he was inside her, moving slowly and then more rapidly so that she had another, milder, orgasm, which surprised her because that had never happened with a man inside of her except a few times with Billy Farrell back when she was a crazy little spic. She cried then, recalling Billy Farrell and her supposed cries of ecstasy when he was making desperate love to her and all she could think about was his pain and when it would all be over, her bladder hurting and her breasts tender from his touch.

  “Oh, Barry, Barry,” she whispered, “I love you.”

  Afterward, she lay on the bed and wondered if she was being honest about her love for Barry. What was it supposed to feel like? She knew that he was special to her, but there was no overwhelming passion in her heart for him. They got married six months later. Her uncle gave her away. Vidamía was the flower girl. Barry’s sisters were beautiful women, very poised and quiet, their children very well behaved. She was equally proud of her own family, although the children, by contrast, were all over the place, during the ceremony and later at the reception. Except for Vidamía, who spent most of the time tagging along with the photographer, peppering him with all sorts of questions about his camera.

  They spent that evening at a hotel in Midtown, and the next afternoon they went to the top of the PanAm Building and took a helicopter to Kennedy Airport, where they got an Air Iberia flight to Madrid and changed planes for Sevilla, then rented a car and continued on to the coast. Barry spoke Spanish very slowly and pronounced his R’s like they were L’s, and by the end of the honeymoon her nerves were completely on edge and she was happy to be back in the United States, where they could return to speaking English. After they had been back a month and were living in the huge, beautiful apartment in Riverdale, she was sitting at the kitchen table, absentmindedly opening the mail one Saturday morning when she opened a badly handwritten letter addressed to Elsie Santiago and in it found a card in Spanish with a corny congratulatory verse and twenty dollars. Below it in an unsteady hand were the words “Hapi gwedin, yul fadel, Justino.” The note made her so angry that she banged the table over and over and then ripped up the note and the twenty-dollar bill into little pieces, so that by the time Barry came in from his study she had rendered note, money, and envelope into confetti.

  “What’s the matter?” Barry had asked.

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” she said, sweeping up the scraps of paper and leaving the kitchen.

  She’d gone to the terrace, and, with Barry and Vidamía looking on, she threw the tiny pieces of paper out into the void beyond their twenty-second-story perch. How had her father found out? As she watched the papers fall, she wished, for a moment, to have the courage to follow them. The shock that she could be suicidal sobered her. She returned inside and knew she should have the doctor prescribe something for her nerves. Eventually, she thought, the question of race will come up in their relationship and Barry will know. She had heard Barry make remarks about color. Nothing too revealing, but enough to make her wary.

  14. Research

  Traveling through the inner workings of subterranean Manhattan, they are nearly impossible to see, owing to their shyness, pulsars or distant stars as they fly in the face of reality, but if you stop and listen you can hear their song, which is crazy, but it’s what sixteen-year-old Vidamía Farrell, under the considerable influence of Lurleen Meekins Farrell and her fondness for the universe and its complexities, thought as she banged away at the single string of the washtub bass during The South
ern Constellation’s rendition of “Sweet Georgia Brown,” watching her fourteen-year-old half sister, Hortense McAlpin Farrell, nicked and named “Cookie,” for reasons unknown, by her homegirl Gisele Gutiérrez from the projects around Third Street and First Avenue, unhook and set down her tenor saxophone, run her hand over her spiky blond hair, and, affecting that whiskey-laden, throaty sound which their mother had taught her, belt out the song while their brother Cliff, already a virtuoso at the age of thirteen and, like Cookie, scheduled the following year to attend the Fiorello La Guardia High School of Music and Performing Arts, wailed away on his trombone.

  This was the first time they were out playing this summer. With school now behind her, Vidamía looked forward to time away from her mother’s house. This was the fourth summer that she spent all of July and half of August with her father’s family, returning home for a week of camp followed by a one-week trip to some exotic place with her mother and stepfather. The previous year they had flown to Vancouver, British Columbia, and taken a cruise ship along the Canadian coast until they reached Alaska, the days growing longer and longer as they traveled north until eventually, at midnight, the sun was still out.

  Thumping away on her bass, the string vibrating as her left hand moved the stick of the rustic instrument to vary the pitch, keeping up with the steady beat of Fawn’s cymbal, Vidamía watched as her father, sitting on the amp, his beard thick and his baby blues far away under his Farmer Jones straw hat, strummed his Gibson, his heartbreaking crab hand crawling sideways across the strings, the rest of him somewhere back in the 1970s, wondering what had gone wrong with his life. Because it had gone wrong, no doubt about it. It began weighing on her mind last Christmas, when she arrived, as she had for the past three years, loaded down with presents for the family, and he’d sat in his rocker throughout the entire celebration, as he did that first Christmas, accepting a cup of eggnog, sipping from it periodically, but, on the whole, merely staring out into the night. Although she had seen this behavior before, her concern expressed itself in a mounting curiosity, but more particularly in a desire to reverse the situation.

  She knew that his war experiences had been unimaginably horrible but couldn’t fathom exactly what it was that made him so distant. She’d made an effort to read about Vietnam and watched every available cable program on the subject, but she needed to know why his mind seemed to unhinge from reality and hang limply in time, suspended like a psychic rag doll. She asked her mother, and Elsa replied that it was likely her father was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, from which soldiers who’ve been under particularly difficult situations on the battlefield sometimes suffered. She’d asked her mother if she could read something about the ailment and was surprised when she returned one weekend from staying at Fran Nearny’s house in Rye and found on her desk a stapled Xerox copy of an article. Paper-clipped to the first sheet was a smaller piece of yellow paper with a note addressed to “Sweetheart,” which explained that the material was from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

  Her mother had underlined certain phrases like war veterans and military combat. She had bracketed parts of the long description and highlighted the following part in orange: In more severe forms, particularly in cases in which the survivor has actually committed acts of violence (as in war veterans), the fear is conscious and pervasive, and the reduced capacity for modulation may express itself in unpredictable explosions of aggressive behavior or an inability to express angry feelings.

  309.89 Post-traumatic Stress Disorder.

  The essential feature of this disorder is the development of characteristic symptoms following a psychologically distressing event that is outside the range of usual human experience (i.e., outside the range of such common experiences as simple bereavement, chronic illness, business losses, and marital conflict). The stressor producing this syndrome would be markedly distressing to almost anyone, and is usually experienced with intense fear, terror, and helplessness. The characteristic symptoms involve reexperiencing the traumatic event, avoidance of stimuli associated with the event or numbing of general responsiveness, and increased arousal.

  The most common traumata involve either a serious threat to one’s life or physical integrity; a serious threat or harm to one’s children, spouse, or other close relatives and friends; sudden destruction of one’s home or community; or seeing another person who has recently been, or is being, seriously injured or killed as a result of an accident or physical violence.

  In more severe forms, particularly in cases in which the survivor has actually committed acts of violence (as in war veterans), the fear is conscious and pervasive, and the reduced capacity for modulation may express itself in unpredictable explosions of aggressive behavior or an inability to express angry feelings.

  Thinking about her uncle Joey, whom she never met, Vidamía bracketed and underlined the next sentence and went on reading.

  [In the case of a life-threatening trauma shared with others, survivors often describe painful guilt feelings about surviving when others did not. or about the things they had to do in order to survive. ]

  Vidamía read everything twice and tried to form a profile of a person suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder so she could better understand her father. The most important symptom was that the person reexperienced the horror of the event pretty often. This meant that her father thought about what had happened a lot. His sitting by himself quietly explained the numbness and not moving in order not to think about things. Several items disturbed her:

  (4) markedly diminished interest in significant activities

  (5) feelings of detachment or estrangement from others

  (6) restricted range of affect, e.g., unable to have loving feelings

  In another section she found that if at least two of the items persisted, then it was obvious that Billy had to be suffering from what she now called PTSD. She wrote the items down to see if she could detect any of the following “as indicated by at least two of the following”: (1) difficulty falling or staying asleep, (2) irritability or outbursts of anger, (3) difficulty concentrating, (4) hypervigilance (which she had to look up in the dictionary), and (5) exaggerated startle response (which she had Elsa explain to her).

  She eventually typed the criteria for diagnosing Post-traumatic Stress Disorder into her computer—she was one of the few students in her school, in 1988, who had a computer, courtesy of Barry and his firm. She then printed the information, in the smallest possible size with her dotmatrix printer, trimmed the sheet with scissors, and folded it into her wallet. She could now refer to the salient points of the diagnosis when she needed to. She returned to the dictionary to look up “lability” and “psychogenic,” but other than that, after she read the definition a couple of times she understood most of it. From all surface appearances, her father clearly seemed to be suffering from the disorder, except that he was kind and always smiled sadly at you when you addressed him. It was true that he never got angry at anything, even when people yelled at him—like the time the whole troop of them had gone into a diner to get out of the rain and the man said they couldn’t stay and called her father a bum and Cookie damn near went after the man with her saxophone case. Lurleen had to hold her back, but her father just smiled and told the man he was very sorry, and they went back out into the rain and stood under a McDonald’s awning, Lurleen telling him that it was okay to go in the place, but her father shook his head and stood there stoically, the wind and rain blowing all around and Caitlin sniffling and shivering even with a blanket that Lurleen had put around her. As far as being a threat to the family, there was none of that. Whenever there was anything having to do with war or combat, whether a news item or a film, he always got up and walked away, sometimes leaving the loft completely.

  Whenever she asked Cookie, her sister just shrugged her shoulders and said, “That’s just the way he is,” which Vidamía finally understood, because as long as the children could remember, their fathe
r was there but not truly; coming in and out of their consciousness like an image that fades in and out of focus, or like a person observed walking in a partial fog, so that parts of the body appear in startling disassociation from the rest of the human form. So, in truth, Cookie couldn’t be blamed for having such a vague notion of her father.

  “Does he ever get angry?” she asked, recalling the symptoms, the repressed anger.

  “If he does, I’ve never seen him,” Cookie said. “But I bet you one thing. If anybody messed with us, he’d be there to protect us.”

  “Sure, I believe it.”

  “No, really,” she said, and added that their father really would. “He’s not scared of anything. When we were little he’d pick us up at school and drug dealers would just get out of his way. Everybody respects him. He’s not gonna hurt us. You scared?”

  “Of course not,” Vidamía said, not sure that she wasn’t. “Does Daddy have a gun?”

  “He could if he wanted to. Mama doesn’t believe in guns,” Cookie said, casually. “Vietnam made him a little weird. That’s all. Anyway, he wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

  “Not even himself?” Vidamía said.

  “Hurt himself?” Cookie said and gave her a look like she couldn’t believe what she’d just heard. “Are you crazy? No way.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that.”

  “He’s just a little strange, that’s all. The war, Mama says.”

  “Yeah …” Vidamía replied.

  Asking her father about his ailment didn’t do any good because when he came out of wherever he went, he just smiled and tousled her hair and told her how beautiful she was. He’d tell her that, whatever happened, don’t let them get you down, whoever those damn “them” were—the sons of bitches, like her Grandma Maud said.