No Matter How Much You Promise

by Edgardo Vega

  She guessed she was one of those people, like Lurleen, who couldn’t escape her responsibilities and had chosen to carry the burdens of the world on her shoulders. She had no choice. There was no other place in the universe where she could go. The Earth was it, and she couldn’t hide from the horrors it produced. But why did it have to be so ugly? Why couldn’t it let up? So much unhappiness, so much suffering, so much hate. She recalled walking with Wyn in the late evening the day before the funeral. It was nearly midnight when they’d gotten back to the loft. Lurleen was sitting in Billy’s rocking chair. Caitlin, unable to sleep, was curled up on her lap, her long plaid nightgown on. When she saw Vidamía she climbed down from her mother’s lap, came over, and took Vidamía’s hand.

  “Don’t be sad,” Caitlin had said.

  “I’m all right, honey,” Vidamía replied. “Really, I am,” she assured her, lifting Caitlin up and kissing her.

  “Daddy’s not coming back,” Caitlin said.

  “I know.”

  “You know why?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “He’s gone far away,” Caitlin said. “To a happier planet.”

  “I guess he has,” Vidamía said. “Would you like me to read you a story?”

  “Okay.”

  Vidamía kissed Wyndell and Lurleen and took Caitlin off to bed with her. She had read aloud from The Hobbit until Caitlin fell asleep. A happier planet, she thought, and for the first time she accepted that Billy was gone and would never come back. No matter how much anyone promised to cook or pay the rent, they had all blown it and Bill Bailey was never coming home again. Her father was gone, and accepting his death forced her to recall happier times with him. Her mind began to collect those memories like photographs in an album and to paste them securely in place.

  67. The Gig

  A voice came over the sound system.

  “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the historic Village Gate. Tonight we have a very special musical presentation—the debut of four up-and-coming and very promising musicians on the New York jazz scene. Please put your hands together and help me welcome the Wyndell Ross Quintet, featuring Buster Williams on bass. The Wyndell Ross Quintet, ladies and gentlemen.”

  The crowd clapped politely and then Wyndell Ross counted off the time and on the downbeat Rebecca Feliciano came in and right behind her everyone was blowing in a tremendous explosion of beautiful music, sounding better than Vidamía had heard them in rehearsal on Monk’s “Straight No Chaser.” She watched Cliff, dressed totally in black: a black suit with a red carnation on his lapel, and a black shirt, unbuttoned to the middle of his chest. He seemed taller and more handsome than ever, so stoic that it hurt to look at him. He looked exactly like their father, Billy Farrell, in photographs at the same age, except that Cliff looked invincible and their father had always looked so fragile.

  Cliff stood listening to the music and nodding to the rhythm. When his turn to solo came, he gave himself totally to the music, playing like he was J. J. Johnson, Frank Rossolino, Kai Winding, Bob Brookmeyer, and Curtis Fuller all rolled up into one, or so someone behind Vidamía said, marveling at the tone and richness of his sound, amazed by his virtuosity and technique.

  What a mystery her little brother was, Vidamía thought, as she watched him begin another chorus. Cliff had always seemed older than his years, much as if he had understood early his father’s vulnerability and knew that he’d be called upon to take on adult responsibilities while he was a boy. He had impeccable manners, never grew flustered, and was always ready to help someone in need. Around the neighborhood he was known as a fearless white boy, friends with everyone, and so tough that all he needed to do was stick out his hand to black, white, Latino, or Asian and as if by magic everything was suddenly cool. She couldn’t figure out what it was about him, but perhaps it was a quality that made you decide that you’d rather have him on your side than against you.

  Although he was almost a physical replica of their father, Cliff had never, to Vidamía’s knowledge, experienced any major disappointment in his life up until now. If his father’s death was a serious blow to him, he certainly was masking the impact with remarkable grace. A couple of weeks after the funeral, Cliff had helped Vidamía close the store while Cookie was in rehearsal for the play at the Medicine Show. After they’d counted out the receipts and made out the deposit slip, they had called Tito Delgado, paid him, and ten minutes later, after pulling the gate down in front of the store and locking it, they were in Tito’s car on their way to the bank. With Tito standing guard they had placed the receipts in the night deposit slot at the bank. When they were done they waved at Tito and continued walking. She asked Cliff if he felt like getting something to eat. He had nodded and they’d gone over to the Levee on First Avenue and First Street and had gumbo and corn bread and drank sodas.

  Cliff was a little over six feet tall, blue eyes set deep in his head and dark blond hair that he combed back severely and parted in the middle. He was naturally muscled and incredibly sure of himself. When they entered the restaurant, every woman in the place devoured him with her eyes, going from his face to the front of his pants and his rear as he walked past them. Vidamía’s older friends all said the same thing of him: gorgeous, sensual, irresistible. “He’s one of those men you just have to have,” Kathy Ward’s sister, Nell, had said. Nell Ward was twenty-four and had just returned from getting a master’s degree in literature at Oxford University.

  “He’s only fifteen, Nell,” Kathy had said.

  “Really?” Nell said, momentarily embarrassed, and then, after recuperating, “I don’t care. He’s lovely and I’d kill to have him.”

  He wasn’t at all like their father, Vidamía thought. Just the looks. The person he seemed the most like was Buck Sanderson, except that wasn’t true either. Perhaps in sexual allure, but he was just somebody very special, very perfect, someone women fell in love with and men wanted for a friend. Halfway through the meal Vidamía asked him how he was doing.

  “Okay,” Cliff said, smiling easily at her. “You?”

  “Still hurting, I guess,” she’d said honestly.

  “Me too,” he’d said. “I was pissed off lately at Dad, so my feelings about it are kinda confused.”

  “Are you still angry?”

  “I just feel bad that he’s dead. Mama was telling me how messed up his life was. I guess none of us ever knew how rough things were for him.”

  “Yeah, his whole life was full of violence. His father got shot, and then the war and everything. He was coming out of it with the music.”

  “Yeah, that’s the part I’m gonna miss the most,” he said, his face suddenly solemn. “He was so fucking good. Man, he could play piano.”

  “Cliff?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What are you gonna do?”

  “What do you mean? I’m gonna stay in school and then maybe go to Juilliard, or up to Boston, and learn more. You know, and keep gigging. Why?”

  “I worry about you sometimes,” Vidamía had said.

  “I’ll be okay, Vee,” he said, smiling again at her.

  “You sure? It’s like sometimes I look at you and you remind me so much of Daddy that I think one of these days you’re just gonna explode with anger like he did.”

  “Me?” he said, surprised. “I don’t think so. I get angry, sure. But it’s no big thing. I don’t believe in violence just for the hell of it. It’s a fucked-up way of solving things between people. I’m not saying that Daddy was wrong. Sometimes I think maybe if he was gonna do something he should’ve done it right away. I mean, I wanted to.”

  “Did you tell him?”

  “Sure, I told him. When I saw Fawn going into the building with that boy, I came home and told him we should get her. But he said we should wait for the police.”

  “You think he was wrong.”

  Cliff nodded, his eyes still blazing with the cold anger she had always known was there.

  “Sometimes I blame
myself because I suggested it and maybe if I hadn’t been along he would’ve thought of it himself. But I think he was trying to teach me to have respect for the law or some bullshit thing like that.”

  “And you don’t? I mean, have respect for the law?”

  “Oh, sure, but sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do and take your chances.”

  “You don’t have a gun, do you?”

  Cliff laughed, but he didn’t answer her question.

  “It was all really weird,” he said, going back to the original topic of their father. “I feel sad about Fawn. Daddy, too, but mostly Fawn. She was real scared most of the time. But I woulda done what he did. Those kids were scumbags. Sometimes I feel like I don’t wanna hear about guns and shootings. Other times I think that there’s no other way. I don’t want much, you know? I just wanna play music, maybe travel and meet people, and have a good time. But I definitely don’t want people fucking with me. That’s all.”

  “And if there’s a war?” Vidamía said.

  “Fuck war. Who fights wars? Kids. I ain’t going. They’ll have to put me in jail.”

  “And if somebody came in here right now and tried to hurt us?”

  “I don’t know,” he’d said. “I don’t think that way. I don’t go around thinking shit’s gonna happen. If it happens you deal with it.”

  “But suppose someone did. Suppose they came in and tried to hurt us.”

  “Well, they’d be one sorry bunch of mothafuckas,” he said, seriously, and looking no different from the homeboys in the neighborhood, except with Cliff you could tell that he wasn’t just playing a role.

  “You have a gun, don’t you?”

  He laughed again.

  “What you don’t know can’t hurt you,” he said.

  “You have one, don’t you?” she said, suddenly frightened and at the same time exhilarated by his protectiveness. “Are you ever scared?”

  “Yeah, sure, sometimes.”

  “You seem so cool and sure of yourself all the time.”

  “I’m trying to impress girls,” he said, laughing easily.

  As she listened to Rebecca Feliciano’s solo, she still couldn’t figure what Cliff was about. She thought—and immediately hated herself for thinking—of Cliff in terms of color, but she guessed he was like millions of other boys all over the United States, no matter their color, unsure of what they were going to do with their lives. She tried to imagine him at the different stages of life, but could not. This bothered her until she realized that she couldn’t imagine anything about him because her little brother possessed enormous power and he and nobody else would decide what his life was to be.

  “Straight No Chaser” came to a close and the audience exploded in applause. She sat in the middle of the din, moved by the outpouring of affection from strangers for people she loved. She watched the bandstand as Wyndell, without introducing the next number, snapped his fingers to count off the time. Her heart once again expanded to take in everything she loved about him. When he first came onstage ten minutes before, he had looked like the Wyn she knew, but he now looked monumental, his person filling the entire stage as the thick sound of his tenor caressed each note of “My Funny Valentine.” As aggressive as her playing could be, Rebecca Feliciano handled the chord structure of the tune with subdued delicacy, her body leaning over the piano, her derby and black hair making a shadow of incredible beauty against the gleaming surface of the keys. In the background, David Weinstein’s brushes seemed to still the audience against the fragility of the music. Cliff, as usual, produced an unusually melancholy sound as he punctuated the lyricism of Wyndell’s interpretation of the tune with the rich tones of his trombone, while Buster Williams’s bass gave each musical phrase a deep, dark shading to the ballad.

  Tears once more came to Vidamía’s eyes. Unashamedly, she allowed her heart to expand further, thankful that she could spend this time with the people she loved. In a few months she’d be away from New York and her family and the daily intimacy of her life with Wyndell. She didn’t know whether she’d be able to handle it and had already worked out a schedule allowing for nearly weekly trips back to New York. She even suggested to Wyndell that he move to Boston, using Rebecca’s recent success there as a possible incentive. Feeling already saddened by the prospect of the eventual separation when she went to school, she watched his discomfort as he told her that he’d have to think about it.

  As she listened to the music she thought of the previous weekend. They had walked uptown through Washington Square Park, strolling with the early-Sunday-afternoon crowd up Fifth Avenue to America’s for brunch. They sat at a table for two on the parapet along the left wall of the restaurant, watching the other people—couples in love like themselves, families, large groups of friends at the tables for ten or twelve—the coffee cups enormous and the menu so varied that it sometimes made her dizzy trying to decide what to order. When she did it was always too much food for her and she had to leave nearly half of it.

  Wyn had no problem with his portions. A huge platter of Spanish omelette, Mexican corn cakes, and sausage with large pieces of bread and butter disappeared miraculously. She marveled at his appetite because the amount of food he took in didn’t match the delicacy with which he consumed what the waiters placed in front of him, and she was invariably charmed by his Continental table manners, which he’d acquired during his time with Davina in Europe, the fork always in his left hand, the knife in his right hand, cutting and herding the food onto the fork.

  There was no question that she loved Wyn. Sitting in the huge restaurant, she savored the moment, watching as he brought his Bloody Mary to his lips, and she basked in the magnificence and the boyish appeal that made him appear so accessible to women. If he took care of his health he’d be playing for the next fifty years—growing handsomer each year. They would be like his parents—his mother in the arts and his father a physician. Except with them the roles would be reversed and she would be the doctor. She promised herself again that she would stay with him through thick and thin.

  They had finished eating, and, their arms around each other’s waist, returned to the apartment. As soon as they were past the double doors of the entrance to the building and inside the door of his apartment, Wyndell placed his hand on her back and then slid it slowly inside the waistband of the loose silk skirt she was wearing, until his fingers were kneading her buttocks and she could feel him erect against her belly. They hadn’t made love since her father’s death, nearly a month before, and the sensation of his closeness made her eager for him. He kissed the corners of her lips, and then her closed eyes, and she was instantly aroused. Unlike other times, she didn’t want to wait to be made love to but wanted him inside of her immediately, needing for him to be driving against her. She reached up with her mouth and sought out his tongue and with her right hand opened the zipper of his pants, searching violently for him, grasping the erect organ in her hand so that she felt him grow even more passionate.

  Once naked on the bed with him on top of her, refusing his offer to kiss her clitoris slowly as he did until she was ready to climax, but feeling herself searching for him with her own sex, not letting him guide himself in or taking the heavy organ with her own hand, but seeking him out with her cunt until she found him and he slid in and she began moving slowly, grasping him in her and he moaning, calling God and her name, and her hips going, not being fucked by him but fucking him for the first time as if the threat of the upcoming separation were helping her establish a greater claim to his body and his being; no contraceptives or anything, knowing she was safe, the HIV test tucked away in his files, trusting him that he hadn’t been with anyone since they’d met, feeling an almost blinding power of ownership; and now fucking him, lost in him, her hips moving violently as she thrust against him until the cry issued from deep within her and everything in the middle of her was ebbing away with pleasure, coming and going and coming, one wave after the other, her mouth open against his skin; feeling him then t
hrust against her, the head of his organ pounding against her cervix so that within the small area of pain there was also pleasure and then he was coming, going up into her so that her own pleasure began again and she stiffened out and hooked her legs around his ankles and rocked slowly and felt his chest expand, the wind from his nostrils coming in large spurts of sweet breath. And then she was crying inconsolably, the pain of her loss and of loving Wyndell magnified by the intense sexual release of her love, but also the knowledge that their time together might be over soon, overwhelming in its impact; knowing that she couldn’t let him go so soon after losing her father. That had been painful enough and she didn’t know how she would manage without Wyndell there every day.

  Three days earlier she had flown up to Boston, where a car met her and took her to Cambridge. There, at Harvard, she spoke to an admissions counselor and explained why she couldn’t begin in the fall semester of 1990. The counselor expressed her condolences and said that if Vidamía needed to take a year off she could enter the university the following fall. “No,” she’d said, “just six months.” If she could start at the beginning of the year and make up the work during a few summers, she’d be okay. She’d like to graduate with the Class of ’94, if that was okay. The university agreed. She flew back to New York that evening and returned to the loft to help Lurleen out.

  They finished playing “My Funny Valentine” and during the applause the quintet immediately went into “How High the Moon,” the tempo breakneck, Rebecca brilliant as she played chorus after chorus in her intense, percussive style, the piano shaking and her face so determined that she reminded Vidamía of the seriousness of a matador she had seen in a bullring in Sevilla with Elsa and Barry. She had been fifteen and had sat awed by the courage of the bullfighter as he faced the animal. As Wyn, Cliff, and Rebecca traded fours, Vidamía once again reflected on her relationship with her mother. In her attempt to improve the situation, Vidamía had asked Elsa and Barry if they’d like to come and see Wyndell perform one day during the engagement. She went up to Tarrytown one Saturday afternoon expressly to invite them. Neither Barry nor Elsa was home when she arrived, so she went upstairs, changed into more comfortable clothes, and helped Mrs. Alvarez with dinner. When she was done, she showered and changed again, putting on a dress, nylons, and heels. She made up and wore the earrings and bracelet Elsa had given her for her seventeenth birthday. In the meantime, Barry and Elsa had arrived and they sat down together to eat.