No Matter How Much You Promise

by Edgardo Vega

  When it came time to ask questions, she raised her hand, just as she did in school.

  “Yes,” the man sitting up front said.

  “Suppose a man,” Vidamía asked, “was a fantastic musician, a pianist, and lost a couple of fingers, could he still be as good a pianist if he chanted those words?”

  The man, who looked like he worked for an advertising agency because he was wearing a suit and had blue eyes and sandy hair combed neatly, replied that a person could change his karma by practicing this Buddhism. She found it hard to believe. It sounded like magic. However, she read everything she could on the subject. She tried chanting the words, but after a while lost interest and began reading Dostoyevsky, who Lurleen said was a great Russian master of literature and must be read if one wants to understand the depth of the human spirit, which sounded extremely noble to Vidamía.

  As she thumped on the string of the bass, Vidamía couldn’t remember why the chanting had come to mind, but slowly she recalled the second time she’d gone to the meeting. Someone had spoken of a Buddha that had five sets of eyes. One of those sets of eyes was the capacity to see suffering and be able to remove that suffering from other people. She had prayed fervently, chanting the words over and over, that her father would be able to play the piano again.

  She now saw that whatever had been the matter when Mr. Butterworth looked at her father, something beyond the loss of his fingers had made her father suffer. She watched him sitting on the amp, strumming his guitar, his gaze far away, his eyes brilliant in color but also feverish in their intensity. She wanted desperately to ask him what had happened but didn’t dare. The entire matter frightened and angered her. And then it dawned on her that her father was hiding. Whatever had taken place had made him take cover, and from his hiding place he was looking out, fearful of emerging, ever watchful that an intruder might come along and flush him out. As their rendition of “Sweet Georgia Brown” came to an end, she felt her wallet stuck in a front pocket of her baggy jeans, placed there at the suggestion of Cookie, who had explained the dangers of not taking precautions.

  “Girl, they got pickpockets down in the subway,” she said. “I’ve seen ’em work. They just kinda bump up against you, excuse themselves and the next time you go looking for your chavos … nada. Nacariles del oriente.”

  Cookie talking in Spanish always cracked Vidamía up. If you closed your eyes she sounded like her girlfriends chattering away in both languages. Touching her wallet, within which this year there had developed a plastic safety net, woven finely and connecting her life through her mother to a number of accounts, she decided that she had no choice but to take the next bold step in her plan to help her father come out of whatever place he was hiding. For the first time in her life she saw that the wealth which she was becoming aware of could be put to good use and maybe it wasn’t so crazy when she’d gotten the idea at her birthday party, and then, walking around the East Side with Janet Shapiro, they’d seen a showroom with antique pianos, and she’d thought maybe her father could play again.

  Second Movement

  The Horizon

  18. The Offering

  What transpired on the evening of July 18, 1988, the day Vidamía Farrell became sixteen years of age, created the impetus for a further change in Billy Farrell’s life. Vidamía’s mother, ever on the lookout for ways of displaying her wealth, made such a big production out of this milestone, that her husband, the ever unflappable Barry López-Ferrer, nearly went into cardiac arrest when, a month later, he received a combined bill of more than $30,000. Through her considerable managerial abilities, the onetime Elsa Santiago of the Lower East Side, who on Saturday afternoons years earlier would shop for $12.95 bargain dresses on Orchard Street, but who now had charge cards for every possible department store, including Neiman Marcus in Texas where from time to time she was expected to materialize for conferences on the aberrations of the human mind, shopping not being one of them, concocted an enormous party with an eight-piece rock band for Vidamía’s friends and cousins her age, who numbered in the dozens, some even flown into La Guardia Airport and limousined to Tarrytown, N.Y. as a demonstration of Elsa’s goodwill, and who came from as far away as Sheboygan, Michigan, and Grand Forks, North Dakota, the Santiago clan and their conjugal relatives having dispersed to all corners of the great US of A to drive the good people of the heartland cuckoo with geographical curiosity. Did you say Costa Rican? No, I didn’t think you had.

  For the entertainment of the younger cousins and the sons and daughters of adult friends of the family who had been invited, Elsa hired mimes, a dancing couple on stilts, magicians, face painters, puppeteers, folksingers, and clowns, many of whom performed with great flair, having partaken of large portions of Cannabis sativa and other supposed talent enhancers, substances that eighty-five percent of the adult guests present swore on stacks of pancakes, if not Bibles, that they never used, though nearly ninety percent of them found themselves walking leisurely in the woods behind the Lopez-Ferrer property, where they happened to run into someone who offered them a toke, and one has to be sociable, and political correctness is one thing but good manners is something else altogether and what’s it going to hurt anyhow, the kids are probably already stoned so let’s just relax this one time. Cough, cough.

  The grounds of the Santiago López-Ferrer mini-estate with its manicured lawns, tall hedges, and stately trees, purchased four years prior at the cost of $1.2 million, but valued now at nearly $2.5 million, had been festooned with garlands of colored lights shaped like pineapples, bananas, and papayas. All around the terrace there were burning torches set on poles. The theme was Hawaiian, and everyone had been forced to bow their heads to have their necks encircled by one of the 600 leis, which, whenever shed, Elsa forcibly replaced. Everywhere you looked there were discarded little umbrellas and tiny hula-girl swizzle sticks. The rock band was even forced to do a version of the “Hawaiian War Chant,” which they totally submerged beneath extremely vigorous drumming, whining guitars, and a bass whose owner was convinced that his responsibility was to emulate the surf. It was the most awful music anyone had ever heard, and even the teenagers, generally tolerant of anyone with an electric guitar, were in total agreement that whatever it was they were playing, it sucked big time. Vidamía took full responsibility for her mother’s dubious taste and apologized profusely, instructing the band to ignore her mother for the rest of the evening.

  On the spacious grounds behind the house Elsa had a huge candystriped tent erected and beneath it she had the caterers place tables and chairs where the children and adults, family and friends who came to celebrate this glorious milestone could stuff their faces with broiled shrimp, rib steak cooked on open grills on the spacious back lawn, baked potatoes of nearly epic size, enormous bowls of salad, twelve different dressings, expensive sausages and cured hams, roast pork legs, roasted chickens, ducks, geese, baked turkeys filled with five different varieties of stuffing, including hayabonga stuffing made of maize and venison, the latter, according to Elsa, a Native American delicacy concocted circa 1638, although most likely part of some Upper West Side, P.S. 75 myth, from the short time when Elsa had essayed being a student teacher before deciding that psychotherapy was her true calling.

  For those with a less adventurous palate there was rice with chicken, rice pilaf, rice with pigeon peas, rice with sausage, and pork fried rice, along with no less than a dozen Chinese dishes, including ginger chicken, beef with broccoli, and egg foo yung. There were also militarysize vats of potato salad, macaroni salad, cole slaw, corn on the cob, and, on baking pans and large pots, pastas, or pasti, as Elsa referred to them, choosing to employ the Italian plural, necessary in this case since there was lasagna, linguine with white or red clam sauce, meat or cheese ravioli, baked ziti, spaghetti and meat balls, and rigatoni. Of breads, not counting rolls, pita, bread sticks, crackers of 112 varieties, there was nearly 225 yards. Sherbets and ice creams of more than forty flavors were dispensed from a genuine antique soda
fountain situated in a gazebo at the north end of the front lawn. Additionally, there were fourteen types of cakes numbering fifty in all, and a hundred pies in ten different flavors to complete the repast.

  To liquefy and allow to pass more gently this gastronomic excess through the nearly 500 or so human bodies in attendance, Elsa ordered twenty kegs of beer, one hundred bottles each of red, white, and rose wine, forty cases of assorted sodas, and a bar so vast that the following morning there were no less than twenty people scattered all over the property in different stages of alcoholic stupor. To handle the egress of this culinary and libational extravaganza, a dozen Port-o-Sans, painted in agreeable pastel colors, had been placed strategically several yards into the wooded periphery of the property.

  To add greater drama to an already chaotic situation, a number of children were lost for a time, most serious of all an eight-year-old, one Ralph Maggiore, grandson of a reputed member of the underworld. The boy was later found sleeping comfortably in the den of a neighbor’s house a quarter of a mile away, a bottle of scotch whiskey capped but a good quarter of it consumed by him, one had to assume, given the state of disorientation from which Master Maggiore was suffering upon being discovered by the local authorities in the middle of his slumber.

  As one might expect, sexual indiscretion was rampant, although generally undetected or ignored. Such was not the case involving Diana Sandoval, Elsa’s married cousin from Urbana, Illinois, a runner-up in the Miss Teen Urbana contest a dozen years prior, found panting and in an advanced state of undress with Bobby Renoir, who was the tennis coach at Baldrich Academy, the prestigious prep school in Connecticut. The person who surprised the passionate couple in one of the upstairs bedrooms was none other than Lynn Renoir, who taught history at Baldrich and was Bobby’s wife of six months.

  But by far the most outrageous occurrence of the evening was the one in which thirty-eight-year-old red-haired Kendra Higgins, heiress to the Lindwell fortune and recently divorced from Dick Higgins, the Washington, D.C., lawyer, first stripped to her birthday suit, except for the plastic lei around her neck, and, drunk, and pathetically roly-poly, having failed miserably Jane Fonda’s several attempts to civilize her considerable avoirdupois, got on the three-foot diving board of the swimming pool and began doing one cannonball after another until, exhausted, she lay heaving on the diving board, bending the thing in a dangerously moving arc that made it look as if poor Kendra might at any moment be catapulted skyward over the bathhouse of the López-Ferrer property. Fortunately, the affaire Higgins took place well past midnight, after all the children had been taken home or put to bed in nearby motels or in the house proper, and only a few dozen people remained awake at the party.

  Elsa had called it a coming-of-age party, a turning point in a young woman’s life, stressing this over and over so that Vidamía felt as if perhaps she wasn’t having a birthday but was about to become part of some ancient ritual like she had read about in a book on the Mayans, who sacrificed virgins, which she still was, and was getting tired of being, but wasn’t about to give it up just like that to one of the idiots she went to school with.

  Relatives and friends brought presents and kissed her and invariably every third one said the same idiotic thing, “Sweet sixteen and never been kissed.” Vidamía kindly gave them her most sincere smile and said thank you and felt like running somewhere and hiding, she was so embarrassed. Bobby Kirkland, who was supposed to be her boyfriend, spent the entire night trying to get her to go with him into the greenhouse so he could feel her breasts. God, he was such a pig. One of the cutest boys in school, but his hands were always sweaty, and whenever he came near her he insisted on pushing his thing against her thigh. And when they were alone, he was always taking her hand and pushing it down on his erections. One time when he was driving her home, he stopped, parked the car, and just like that took it out and took her hand to make her touch it. She refused, and he became rough and began wrestling with her. When she punched him with all her might in the chest, he stopped. That was the last time he’d tried anything like that.

  Her birthday had been a nightmare. At one point her mother made an announcement over the loudspeakers, her voice coy and sensual due to her advanced state of inebriation:

  “ATTENTION. ATTENTION. SINGING OF HAPPY BIRTHDAY AND CAKE CUTTING. FIVE MINUTES. SINGING OF HAPPY BIRTHDAY AND CAKE CUTTING. FIVE MINUTES. PLEASE BE READY FOR CAKE CUTTING AND SINGING OF HAPPY” BIRTHDAY.

  Five minutes later, on cue, the hugest cake anyone had ever seen was wheeled out on a Puerto Rican Day Parade float—like structure pulled by a golf cart festooned with more Hawaiian paraphernalia. The cake was in the shape of a volcano, and atop it was a ridiculous-looking Barbie doll—like figure in a corny pink hula skirt, her plastic hips undulating, mechanically or electronically, slightly offbeat, to some sensual Polynesian melody.

  Vidamía, seeing at least eight shades of red, was handed a knife. Wishing to perform ritual Japanese disemboweling of her person rather than go on with the profound humiliation which her mother had chosen to inflict on her, she took a deep breath and raised the knife. With a downward swing worthy of a master samurai, she slashed through each of the three tiers, nearly toppling the comfitured structure and, in the process, spraying her mother and a dozen other people with icing.

  With her mother whipping the crowd into a frenzy, they all insisted that Vidamía open every present. Some of the stuff was hilarious. At least two negligees. One of them was from Victoria’s Secret. She immediately guessed it was from Rita Monteleone, whose mother worked in the boutique. She looked over and Rita just arched her eyebrows, closed her eyes, and pursed her lips, like, who me? She loved Rita, but boy was she wild. She was seventeen, had her own car, and had already had one abortion.

  Vidamía must’ve spent an hour opening presents. Cliff and Cookie had come, and they fit in with the other kids just fine. Cliff was so handsome and tall that the girls wouldn’t leave him alone, even though he was only thirteen. Eventually, toward midnight he had come up to Vidamía and pulled her aside behind the gazebo.

  “Yo, Vee,” he said. “I need a thing, but don’t tell Cookie. She gets all plexed about me being too young and whatnot.”

  “A thing?” Vidamía said. “What thing?”

  “You know,” Cliff said, not batting an eye. “For protection.”

  “Oh, oh. A thing thing.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Use it or lose it.”

  “You’re too much. Who is she?”

  “Secret,” Cliff said, his smile just on one corner of his lips. “I don’t kiss and tell.”

  “Yeah, I bet,” Vidamía said. “Go up to the house, to the third floor. The room next to the bathroom on the left is a guest room. Look in the drawer of the night table.”

  “Thanks, sis,” he said and reached down and pecked her lips.

  Eventually, Vidamía found out that he’d taken Clare Gorman, the older sister of her friend Linda and a sophomore at Sarah Lawrence, into the woods and made it with her. Clare, six years older than Cliff, was so taken with him that, whether truth or hyperbole, she made sure that word got around about what a good lover he was. At least three other girls claimed that they’d had relations with Cliff that night. He denied everything, but when Vidamía and Cookie checked the night table the entire box of Trojans that had been there was missing.

  But if Cliff was the sexual sensation among the teenage crowd, Cookie made an impressive fashion statement. Dressed in baggy khaki pants, pink Reeboks, and a sleeveless Mets shirt with no bra, she was the ultimate East Village homegirl. When she walked in, her blond hair cut short and spiky and wearing three earrings in her left ear, one on her nose, black lipstick, and cutoff gloves with spikes on them, the other kids couldn’t believe it and everyone was whispering how cool she was. When Vidamía introduced Cookie as her sister everybody was overwhelmed and when she crossed her arms over her chest, turned her head to one side, pursed her lips and said things like, “That’s really dope, man, but
I gotta book,” heads nodded in assent and continued to bob as she slid through the crowd like she owned the place.

  After everyone danced and ate and drank punch, which had been spiked by Ronnie Goldstein and which her mother overlooked, winking at her as she tasted it, her mother once again made a big announcement. After a drum roll, she called Vidamía up on the bandstand. In front of everybody, Elsa Santiago López-Ferrer, onetime denizen of the lowest circle of Lower East Side society, that of street vendors, presented her daughter, with all good intentions but with as crass a show of materialist arrogance, a gold credit card with a line of credit of $25,000, as she announced proudly. Her face burning with shame while the admiring upper-middle-class coreligionists cheered madly, Vidamía accepted the gift dutifully and as dutifully kissed her mother and stepfather. When she crossed back over enemy lines and got to safety, Cookie saw her expression and inquired.

  “Oh, it’s this damn card,” she said, slamming it down on a table.

  “Girl, what you worried about?” Cookie said, picking up the card and examining it. “Yo, now you can really party. Damn, if you wanna go off to a concert in Europe, like in Amsterdam or London, you just book and don’t have to be messing around trying to get you a token to get on the subway and whatnot. Understand what I’m saying?”

  “Sure, Cookie,” Vidamía said.

  Not a second elapsed before Vidamía’s chagrin and anger were suddenly replaced by extremely rapid activity within her considerable gray matter. Ever at the ready, these neural cells emitted billions of complex electrical impulses making calculations of a monetary, geographical, and musical nature, and involving such names as Wurlitzer, Baldwin, and Steinway, until extremely quick-moving electrical impulses, traveling from neuron to neuron, produced a perfectly formed mental image of beautifully crafted wood and metal with eighty-eight black and white keys capable of producing entire countries of sound, wars and walls of epic music, choirs of angels, and myriad other magisterial phenomena. In this case, culture, given at times to understatement, has called this invention not a splendid, awesome, breathtaking, gigantic, peachy-keen, magnificent, or monumental but simply a grand piano, which Vidamía saw sitting in the corner of the loft where her father often sat, the sunlight streaming in from the windows, Billy lost in tragic contemplation; so that in response to her sister, she said in perfectly cadenced Rican English: