one hot summer

by carolina garcia aguilera

  The restaurant had been around for decades, ever since Castro came to power. It was open almost twenty-four hours a day, closing only for the brief time it took to clean the place. It didn’t matter what time of day it was, the dining room was always packed. It was named, of course, after the Palace of Versailles outside Paris and decorated in a knock-off of the Hall of Mirrors but with a definite Cuban twist. The decor featured an equal measure of Havana in the fifties, with lots of Formica and plastic.

  Versailles had two menus, one in English and one in Spanish, and the waitresses instinctively knew which to hand their customers. I had never seen them err, although it wasn’t so surprising, since the clientele was overwhelmingly Cuban. The few Americans who came there had read about the place in guidebooks and were pretty easy to spot. I always smiled inside when I heard young Cubans—second generation—ordering their meals in accented Spanish, using atrocious grammar and lapsing into Spanglish when they couldn’t come up with the right word. Still, I was proud of them for trying to speak the language of their parents, and for eating at a real Cuban place instead of opting for Olive Garden or TGI Friday’s.

  Versailles had featured prominently in our lives ever since we were teenagers. It was where we went to plot and maneuver our love lives, and it was where we had confessed our secret dreams and humiliating secrets to one another. But maybe the real reason Versailles had always been so important to us was that it was invariably our final stop after a night of carousing, a place to eat a gargantuan meal in a frantic shot at sobering up before returning home. With enough food in our bellies, we figured, we could avoid our families’ wrath and endless lectures about standards of proper comportment for young women.

  Well, that’s not entirely right. The lectures were really about the expectations laid out for young Cuban women of a certain class.

  Vivian calmed down after a couple of sangrias; she always did. She shook her head and bit her lip.

  “God, I freaked out. I hope he didn’t see the way I acted,” she said. “I don’t want him to think he mattered that much to me.”

  “He didn’t see anything,” Anabel said, trying to comfort Vivian. Vivian and I shared a glance. There was no way Anabel had any idea what Luis had seen or not seen.

  “I know it’s hard,” I said. “But it’ll get better. You just have to let time pass. The wounds are too fresh right now.”

  “Margarita’s right,” Anabel added. “That situation just wasn’t going to work out for you.”

  “You said he would never leave his wife,” I added.

  Both Anabel and I seemed to realize at the same time that we should stop offering advice. Since we were both happily married, our words had a hollow ring.

  “You’re right,” Vivian sighed. “He couldn’t handle me, anyway. He was always making little remarks about how strong my personality is. You know what that means. Be a nice little Cuban woman. Listen when I talk. Don’t come on so strong.”

  There was nothing much to say. Vivian was right. Few Cuban men could handle her. Maybe few men could handle her, period, but that was an ugly question that no friend would raise at a time such as this.

  I surprised Ariel by coming home a little earlier than expected. He was in the den watching about ten TV shows simultaneously. He barely looked up when I came in, so I walked down the hall to check on the baby. I loved to watch him sleep. I was still getting used to the idea that I had produced such a creature.

  I had been pretty wild in my youth. Nothing I was terribly ashamed of, but I had done some things I still blush to think about—and which would definitely disqualify me from consideration for a high-government appointment (Okay, so I thought about such things. It wasn’t out of the question). Getting older, I had a vague idea that God might have kept a running score of my conduct in order to hold me accountable. Guilt is like a stone-solid foundation in any Catholic’s view of the world. My sense of guilt and shame is very well developed, and has been finely honed through the years. In my weaker moments I dread the possibility that my family might be affected in some way by my past sins.

  When I was pregnant with Marti I had a morbid fear that something would be wrong with him as God’s way of punishing me. I started going to Mass every week, sometimes more, in a frantic try at atoning for my past. I even went to confession for the first time in years, but the priest told me off when I explained the reasoning behind my sudden rush to piety. He told me in no uncertain terms that God does not punish people in that fashion.

  And that He doesn’t bargain.

  I thought about it and realized that I was taking a lawyer’s approach to the situation. God was not a prosecutor with whom I could plea bargain to obtain a favorable deal for my client—in this case, the baby. It finally hit me that I’d been working too hard, so I concentrated my energy instead on trying to take better care of myself and not being so crazy. That would do more for the baby than cutting deals with God.

  I paused for a second outside Marti’s room. God hadn’t punished me. For reasons I couldn’t fathom he had given me a husband who adored me and a child who was a joy.

  What else could I want?

  Marti was a month shy of his third birthday. We’d named him after the Cuban patriot José Martí, and he was the spitting image of his father both in looks and character. He was built solid, with his father’s dark hair and shining black eyes. Sometimes it was disconcerting to look at him and see a mini-Ariel staring back with the same intensity as his papa. It was like a window in time, a glimpse back to my husband’s childhood.

  I went in on tiptoe and spied on Marti sleeping in his bed. He even looked like his father when he slept—blissful, completely relaxed. I remembered the first time I ever saw Ariel, ten years before, at the University of Miami law library. Ariel had been comfortably ensconced in a study carrel—I soon learned he went there because he could never get peace and quiet at home. Ariel still lived with his family in those days; his mother and three brothers shared the same crowded two-bedroom Miami Beach apartment they had had for years. The father had left the family when Ariel, the youngest, was a baby. He was never heard from again, and money was always tight. From what little I had heard about Ariel’s father, though, they were better off without him. Better no father than a bad father.

  At the time, I was a first-year law student at Duke. I had gone to the UM library because I had to do some research for a legal writing class paper that was due after Thanksgiving. All the carrels were occupied, and I was on a tight schedule. In desperation I began asking each occupant if they were planning on leaving any time soon. Ariel was the fourth person I asked, and the last. We struck up a conversation about what I was working on. It turned out Ariel was ranked first in his class. He helped me out without making it seem like a big deal.

  I had to go back to Durham in two days, so we made open-ended plans to see each other over Christmas vacation. I had just started to date a classmate back at Duke, Luther Simmonds, an American from New York, so I wasn’t particularly eager to get involved with anyone else. It’s funny to think about it now, but I had a feeling that things between Luther and me might work out on a permanent basis.

  Since Ariel was from Miami Beach, he hung out with a completely different crowd than mine growing up. Dade County is really several cities, and people stayed within their orbit, but our never meeting before was more than a fact of geography. We came from different social classes and, to be frank, we wouldn’t have been comfortable with each other and didn’t share much of anything in common. For the older generations, it’s an accepted fact of life that Cuban exiles of different classes don’t interact socially, but for the younger that’s slowly changing. We interacted for business reasons, of course; that was accepted and encouraged. But, for now, it was also pretty much the full extent of class mixing. The fact that we’re all exiles isn’t enough to make us overlook social status. There were strong memories of who was who in Cuba, but as the older generation died out, so did the individuals listed in the Chron
ica de la Vida Social—the Cuban social register.

  I liked Ariel, though, and we saw each other a few times during various vacations when I was back home in Miami. Our friendship developed very slowly, as we really weren’t at ease with each other. We knew about our differences, thus made a conscious effort to overcome them, but at times it almost felt as though we were speaking different languages. We had our studies to fall back on, though, and because Ariel was such a sharp legal mind I enjoyed talking to him without the competitive pressure I felt from my go-getter classmates.

  After he graduated Ariel went to work for a five-person personal-injury firm in northwest Miami; the firm was housed in a one-story ramshackle building owned by one of the partners. Ariel took me there one day when I was home for Christmas vacation my second year at Duke. I remember that I had to hide my shock—I always envisioned lawyers working in glamorous offices, and this was anything but. The building was wedged between a mom-and-pop grocery and a tire store painted the most garish yellow ever imagined. Ariel’s office would have had a terrific view of the Orange Bowl, if it weren’t for the thick iron bars over his window. At the time Ariel was living in a garage apartment a block from the office; I visited there once and actually considered calling the health inspector on the landlord.

  For a couple of years Ariel’s clients were mostly neighborhood types; they’d come in and tell him about getting hurt or incapacitated on the job in falls, burns, electrocutions, car crashes—all sorts of accidents and assorted malice. Ariel helped them with their workmen’s comp cases and took his fee from a percentage of recovery. Since he worked steadily and methodically, his client list grew until he was a trusted presence in the community.

  As the top student in his class, Ariel would have had his pick of white-shoe law firms in Miami. But his instincts had sent him elsewhere, to get experience with the people he knew and who needed him most. A lot of people questioned his judgment and I have to admit I was one of them. But then The Case walked into his office. Ariel was proved right, silencing his critics forever.

  I looked around Marti’s room. It was decorated with Disney characters and the best baby furniture available. Probably none of it would have been there if not for an August day when Señora Matos walked into the firm’s office and described Ariel’s appearance, saying he was the lawyer she wanted. Once Ariel was produced she sat down across from him and explained that she had a personal-injury case involving her son. Ariel’s office was on Señora Matos’s daily route to her job as a seamstress at a dry cleaner; many times she’d walked home late at night and seen Ariel at his desk through the security bars on the window. She figured anyone who worked as hard as Ariel would do a good job for her son. And her instincts could not have been more sound.

  A truck owned by one of the biggest private construction firms in Dade County had jumped a curb on Flagler Street—one of the busiest thoroughfares in Miami—and struck Señora Matos’s son. Alfredo Matos was a married father of five, and the accident had paralyzed him permanently from the neck down. This might have been considered a tragic but unavoidable accident, were it not for the fact that the driver of the truck was legally drunk with three prior offenses on his record. The construction company knew about the driver’s history, but he had kept his job because his brother-in-law was the home office dispatcher. Alfredo Matos was a pillar of his neighborhood, a bookkeeper for his church, and an active volunteer along with his wife, Esmeralda.

  Ariel took the case like a dog takes to a bone, and in the end the jury couldn’t award the Matos family enough money to compensate for their loss. The award was the largest ever granted by a Dade County jury for a personal-injury case. A year later the ruling held up on appeal; Ariel, with his thirty percent of recovery, was set for life. He was twenty-seven years old, and he could have retired then and there.

  The standard recovery for attorney’s fees was forty percent, but Ariel declined to take that much—he thought a lower figure was more fair, and said that the family needed the money more than he did. Imagine that—a lawyer refusing to collect his full fee. That gesture earned Ariel even more publicity than the case itself. After that, Ariel’s phone never stopped ringing. I sometimes wondered what his motivation for that had been, as Ariel had never been particularly altruistic. He had been born and raised poor, and every dollar to him had always been precious. It was not like him to give a poor mother a break, but, whatever his reason, it had helped propel him into the limelight of the Miami legal community. Ariel could be cold and calculating to reach his goals, and he was a master at cost/benefit analysis, characteristics I lacked. But then, I had to acknowledge that I was brought up in a wealthy family, so I had not faced what he had.

  Marti stirred in his bed, sensing my presence. I carefully adjusted his blanket and crept out of the room. I lingered a little in the hallway, looking over the framed photographs that covered almost every inch of wall. I reached out and touched a couple of my favorites.

  The oldest picture was of my parents in Miami, taken early in 1960—the year they left Cuba. They left in a hurry, with no time to pack any photos, so my family’s visual history started here. That void must have affected us pretty strongly, because we had shot pictures with a vengence in the forty years since—thousands and thousands of them. Sometimes I thought we did it because we had no visual evidence that we had, indeed, enjoyed a full and successful life in Cuba. So, damn it, we would prove we had one here in America. My two brothers and I were all avid picture-takers, so we had a thorough pictorial chronicle of the Santos clan. My walls, desks, and dressers were all packed with framed photos. Someday I was going to run out of room to display them.

  I returned to the den to check out how serious Ariel was about his TV viewing. The moment he heard me come in, he switched off the set and stood up.

  “The baby’s okay?” he asked, walking toward me. “I checked on him right before you got back.”

  “Sleeping soundly,” I replied. “Sweet and innocent.”

  Ariel put his arms around me. “I missed you tonight,” he said in his deep voice. “Jacinta fixed me a tray. I had dinner in front of the TV.”

  He kissed me below my ear, one of my most sensitive areas. He knew all my shortcuts.

  “You look sexy dressed all in black like that,” he purred, t

  hen kissed me on the mouth. “Garlic. All in black, coming home from a funeral smelling like garlic. I feel like I have a Sicilian wife. Very sexy.”

  He started working on the other ear. Soon we were in the bedroom. For all our differences, this was one area where we were always in tune with each other. And that was what was important.

  [4]

  “Margarita, mi amor, I know you’ve been avoiding the subject. But I’m here if you need to talk about it.”

  Ariel carefully folded the Miami Herald and put it on the table.

  “Time’s getting short,” he added. “You have to let them know.”

  We were on the terrace behind our house, breakfast behind us, watching the waters of Biscayne Bay. The effects of last night’s lovemaking were still with me, making me relaxed and languorous. But now Ariel was jolting me back to a reality that I didn’t want to confront.

  I fought off the impulse to groan. It was a beautiful morning, why should I deal with any pressure? It was eight in the morning, a perfect temperature, with no trace of humidity and just enough breeze to drive away thoughts of the stifling heat that would set in when the day progressed.

  Ariel was looking good that morning, his hair still damp from the shower, his skin glowing after a close shave. He wasn’t storybook handsome; his features were rough and sort of meshed together. He looked a little tough; in jeans and a T-shirt he could be taken for a street fighter. The toughness was no act—without it, he wouldn’t be where he was. He also had a certain undefined charisma that, I had to admit, surfaced after he won the huge Matos award. It proved that money was indeed an aphrodisiac, and that large amounts of it were orgasmic.

  That
morning he was dressed in a white shirt and dark suit pants, his jacket and tie draped over a free chair at the table. From this point it would take him only a minute or so to get ready to leave for the office. Several months ago I would have also been wearing a suit, prepared to take on the world. This morning, though, I was still wearing my nightgown and a bathrobe.

  From where I was sitting on the terrace, I could watch all the recreational and commercial fishing boats setting off to try their luck on the Atlantic. For some reason I felt jealous of them. I picked up the binoculars off the table and focused on a few sailboats anchored in the calm waters of the cove nearest our house. The people who lived out there on the boats seemed to hardly ever come ashore; at times they disappeared for a few days then reappeared one morning as though they had never left. One of the men who lived out there was a Robinson Crusoe look-alike, with wild sun-bleached hair and beard; he usually wore nothing more than a loincloth, and always had a beer in his hand. On another boat lived two stocky butch women with short spiky hair; these lovers demonstrated their ardent lust for each other in private, if the waves that they generated when they went below were any indication.

  We lived on North Bay Road, a street along Biscayne Bay just north of South Beach. It was a long, winding, tree-lined street favored by the rich and famous; the houses were set back from the road in hopes of affording privacy from prying eyes.

  We bought our seven-thousand-square-foot home the year we were married. The place used to belong to a salsa singer from Puerto Rico who hadn’t had a hit record in five years. It was built in the old colonial Spanish style, with enormous public rooms—the singer used to give wild, memorable parties there, we learned from our neighbors. The house was too big for us at first—a couple with no children—but the terrace in the back had sold us. Who wouldn’t want to have their morning coffee while taking in a sea breeze and watching the sun-kissed waves of the bay?