by Jon Michaud
Dearest Tito,
I'm sorry I did not write sooner. You are probably wondering what happened to me. I want you to know that I am safe and happy. Don't worry about me and please don't try to find me. I'm sorry I did not have a chance to say goodbye.
Clara
He folded the note and returned it to the envelope, put the envelope into the Ziploc bag, and dropped the bag back into the box. Then he went into the kitchen and poured himself a drink.
MS. ALMONTE CALLED him a few days later and accepted his offer but only if she could move that Saturday, a week sooner than she'd told him. Tito, who had not worked a move since being promoted into the sales force, would have to drive the truck himself. He scrambled to put together a crew. On such short notice, he had to scrounge around to find a couple of warm bodies. One of them, Hector, had been working for Cruz Brothers since Tito was a crew chief on the trucks, and Tito was grateful to have him. Hector was an older guy from El Salvador who was shaped like a fire hydrant, didn't speak any English, and could carry objects twice his size. He was religious and, even in Spanish, kept his thoughts mostly to himself. Tito felt less fortunate with his other grunt, a young Dominican named Raúl who had muscles on his muscles but also a reputation for surliness and inappropriate behavior—including hitting on young female clients during moves. There was no one else available, though, so Tito was obliged to go with the team he had. He signed the truck out of the garage and picked up Hector and Raúl in the yard on Tenth.
“So, where we going? Jersey?” asked Raúl, as they drove down Broadway to the bridge, the cab bouncing in response to the potholes.
“Jersey,” said Tito. “Yes.”
Raúl looked like he'd sooner go to hell. “Jersey ain't nothing but a big landfill.”
“That's Staten Island,” said Tito.
“Same damn difference,” said Raúl. On the far side of the cab, Hector sat with his arms crossed, napping. Tito remembered this about him: He could sleep anywhere, seemingly at will.
Ms. Almonte was ready for them. She'd gone through the house tagging everything that was to be taken with Postit notes, sometimes even writing out explicit directions about how an item should be packed. Normally this would have pissed Tito off, but he knew to expect nothing else from her. How could she fail to be a difficult customer? They got to work. He sent Raúl and Hector to do the kitchen, hoping that Hector's example would keep Raúl out of trouble. Once he saw that they were filling boxes with pots and cutlery, he started on the books in the den. Tito wanted to work alone. He had the vague, hopeful idea that he might find something. He kept looking over his shoulder as he worked, waiting for Ms. Almonte to appear to make sure he was packing the right things or to complain about the mess his boys were making in the kitchen, but once she'd let them into the house, she left them alone, and this made Tito even more nervous. After an hour, he poked his head into the kitchen and saw that Raúl was not there. “Where did he go?” he asked Hector.
Hector mimed a man urinating. Then there was the flush of the toilet. Raúl came back into the kitchen, buckling his belt. “What?” he said.
“Nothing,” said Tito. “Get back to work.”
“Man can't even drain his lizard,” said Raúl, shaking his head.
Tito returned to the books. (There were a lot of books.) He heard her footfalls upstairs and wondered where the husband was. From the wedding photo in the living room, he looked to Tito like an uptight businessman—the sort of guy who didn't own a pair of jeans or sneakers. Shouldn't he be here, making sure his wife wasn't absconding with his ancestral china? Maybe it wasn't a divorce, Tito thought. Maybe it was just a separation. Or maybe the husband had run off with his secretary and didn't care about the ancestral china anymore. This is what he loved about his job—the voyeurism, the constant opportunity to speculate about other people's private lives and imagine, if only briefly, that he lived like them. Tito spun out his thoughts as he put the short stacks of books into boxes, filling the crevices and cracks with paper, sealing the boxes tightly with tape. He'd forgotten how this kind of activity with the hands could free the mind. He was so busy daydreaming that he almost failed to notice the edge of the photograph poking out from the book in his hands. The book was a hardcover edition of Julia Alvarez's How the García Girls Lost Their Accents and the photograph was of the members of the Word Club all seated in Ms. Almonte's room, only it didn't look like her room because there were pillows on the floor and teacups and a plate with some kind of pastry on it. There were seven girls sitting in a semicircle around Ms. Almonte. He knew all of their names, as if they had been the heroines of his favorite television show: Yesenia, Milly, María José, Victoria, Julia, Eva, and Clara. None of them lived in the neighborhood anymore (he'd checked, as best he could, in the phone book, he'd asked around). Occasionally he heard stories about one or another of them, though never about Clara. Many had married white men; one was living in Paris. Another was a surgeon. Standing in Ms. Almonte's den, doing a job he had been doing since he was in school with them, he took a long, inspecting look at their faces. They were just girls. He got that now. They didn't have super powers or anything. Some of them weren't even so good-looking, he was stunned to realize. They were trying too hard, wearing clothes that were too mature for them, arranging their hair in styles that now looked ridiculous. Even so, seeing Clara again stirred something in him that he could not explain away so easily. This is what he had been looking for. He slipped the photograph into his pocket and kept packing.
They were done by noon. Her possessions half-filled the truck. None of the appliances were going and only a little of the furniture. It was the small stuff—the books, the bric-a-brac, a few carefully packed pieces of art, and a lot of elegant clothing: five full wardrobe boxes. Tito probably didn't need a two-man crew, but he wanted the whole thing to look official. Raúl and Hector were still securing the cargo in the back of the truck when Ms. Almonte got in her sedan and backed down the driveway, honking as she passed them. Tito started the truck's engine and waited for his boys to close up the back. Then they drove down Route 4, the Washington Heights Highway, to the bridge.
“Damn, she's the whitest Dominican I ever saw,” said Raúl. “Didn't have even one can of beans in her kitchen. I looked. Probably allergic to beans.”
“She's just as Dominican as you or me,” said Tito. “I bet she grew up in the Heights just like us.”
Raúl sucked his teeth. “I didn't grow up in the Heights,” he said. “I'm from Bushwick. There ain't no Dominicans like her in Bushwick, I tell you what.”
FROM THE OUTSIDE, the building she was moving into looked like a significant step down in life, a sooty, once glorious Art Deco structure five stories high. Tito stood on the pavement peering at the names in the little glass windows beside the buzzers, a habit of his. Still a lot of Spanish there. In addition to ALMONTE, he saw a PéREZ, a MARTíNEZ, and a BLANCO. A couple of Irish names appeared, from the faintness of their type, to be the oldest tenants: DEVINE and McINTYRE. Mixed in with these were two Asians, a ZHOU and a YAO; a Jew, GOLDBERG; and a scattering of others who could only be younger white newcomers, NIELSON, BARRE, RUSSO, the sorts of names you never used to see in Inwood buildings. He pressed the black button next to ALMONTE and waited. When the buzzer sounded, he secured the doors with bungee cords and signaled to Raúl and Hector to open the back of the truck.
It was a ground-floor apartment, the door unlocked. He knocked and entered a long, darkened hall. Ms. Almonte was making the journey from the house of Tito's dreams to the kind of dwelling where he had grown up. It was not a step down in life as he had first thought, but a step back. Just inside, he was not surprised to see, stood a glass vase for the water of the saints. Above it, a small portrait of the Virgin Altagracia. He nodded at the Virgin like an old friend. The hallway was clean and otherwise bare. At the end of it was the living room, where Ms. Almonte was sitting with an old woman on a white leather couch wrapped in a clear plastic cover. Something about the room l
ooked wrong, as if the furniture had been shifted around by someone who didn't live there. The television was on, showing El Gordo y la Flaca.
Ms. Almonte introduced him to the old woman, her mother. She looked up at him with incomprehension and, seeing his clipboard, said, “Census?”
“No,” said Tito. “Mudancero.”
“Ah!” she said, and took a drink from her glass. She looked at her daughter and asked her who was moving in.
Ms. Almonte appeared embarrassed by the exchange—or by Tito witnessing the exchange. She stood and led him to an adjoining room, which was empty save for a twin bed with a gaudy floral coverlet. It was a large five-sided room with one window and a doorway that led to another room, which, it seemed, was the mother's bedroom. Ms. Almonte was wearing a dress today, loose black linen, which gently shifted around her skinny frame. “I want everything in here,” she said. “Everything that's not going into storage.” It would look strange, Tito thought, all that modern, highbrow stuff in these immigrant surroundings.
They emptied the truck of everything except the storage items in less than an hour. Carrying in the last of the boxes, he stopped to watch Ms. Almonte trying to feed her mother a lunch of soup and bread.
“You have to eat something, Mami. You're wasting away.”
“No tengo hambre,” said the mother.
“Please, eat.”
“¡No tengo hambre!” said the mother, again.
At this point, Ms. Almonte turned and caught Tito looking. “Yes?”
He raised his hands in apology. “We're almost finished. I just need you to sign.”
“All right,” she said. “Un momentito, Mami.”
Out of the classroom, and out of her house, she had lost her aura. Tito no longer felt cowed by her and he was saddened by this realization. Many of the things that had impressed him the most when he was younger—the subway, Christmas, television—seemed perfectly humdrum now and he wished it weren't so, wished he could still be awed. Was it simply because he wasn't young anymore, or was it something worse: an aptitude for disappointment?
Ms. Almonte signed with an ornate, illegible signature, tipped them generously, and showed them the door.
TITO DIVIDED THE tip evenly, thanked Hector and Raúl, and drove them back to the yard. He signed in the truck, filed his paperwork, and went home. Sitting on his couch and sipping from a bottle of Corona, he took out the photograph and stared at it again. It wasn't enough. He had thought it would be sufficient to pilfer this memento of the great mystery of his teenage years, of his first broken heart, but the more he looked at Clara's face and the more he dwelled on the memories and questions she provoked, the more he came to see that the photograph was just like a first kiss—all it did was make you greedy for more. What he really wanted was the impossible—to go back and do something that would prevent Clara from vanishing. She'd gone off to college and, aside from the one cryptic note, he'd never seen or heard from her again. Tito thought he had made his peace with it, but as he grew older and his losses accumulated, this first one loomed ever larger. The events of that summer assumed the form of a puzzle, which, decoded, would somehow explain why things in his life had not turned out as he had once hoped.
ON A WINDY afternoon in the spring of his senior year in high school, Tito was kept late by a teacher who was “concerned” about his “academic performance.” There was a lineup of boys waiting outside the teacher's room. One by one they were summoned into the room to receive versions of the same pep talk. Upon hearing what the talk was about, a number of those who were waiting left before their names could be called. By the time Tito got in there, he wished he'd left, too. “You've got some brains in your head, Moreno,” the teacher said to him. He was one of those clean-cut young black dudes fresh out of teachers' college who was going to change the world one kid at a time. He'd raised himself up from a slum somewhere and wanted his students to do the same. Tito waited for him to start in about accepting Jesus as his personal savior, but it never came to that. “Your grades aren't that bad. Maybe you could do something with your life if you applied yourself,” the teacher said, getting close enough to him that Tito could smell the man's Pep-O-Mint breath. Tito had already started applying him-self for Cruz Brothers on the weekends, making good money. He didn't see what the teacher's point was and the meeting came to an unsatisfactory end for both of them.
He headed home. As he made his way down 230th Street past the U-Haul lot, he was thrilled to see a familiar figure up ahead, dressed in a long coat. She tottered as she walked, like someone inside a tube. Then the tube crumpled and down she went. Books were cast across the sidewalk. A three-ring binder sprang open, releasing its pages to the wind like a flock of doves. Tito ran after the papers, snatching them out of the air, lunging and thrusting for them as they circled and danced. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw that Clara had gotten up and was doing the same thing, as best she could in that bulky coat. In the end, they captured every page but one, which was carried away from them on an updraft, gliding and flipping over on itself, rising toward the elevated tracks of the 1 and 9.
“I hope that one didn't have all the answers on it,” he said.
She was jumping in vain, beckoning to the departing page, close to tears. Her coat was like a giant roll of shearling. Tito looked at the papers in his hands. The top sheet had a geometry problem, his footprint, and a big red A minus on it. So, she was good at math.
“You all right?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes I am.” She was calming herself. “It's these shoes,” she said, lifting up her coat to show him a pair of ankle boots with silver buckles and leather soles. “No grip.”
“I'll walk you home,” he offered as casually as he could manage. “You still live in that house on Payson?”
That made her look at him properly for the first time. “Hey, you're Don Felix's kid. My dad says your father is a lying sack of shit.”
“Yeah, well, my pops says your old man is a tightwad cock-sucker.”
They both laughed.
“I've still got the scar from when you kicked me,” she said. She pulled down her lower lip and showed him the pair of short white lines her teeth had made, like a double dash in the bumpy red pulp of her mouth. “I'll never forget how much it hurt to eat,” she said. “And brushing my teeth was a nightmare.”
“Yeah, well, I had to have my toe amputated, just so you know. I still walk with a limp from it.”
“Glad you're not holding it against me,” she said.
With her papers gathered and returned to their binder, they headed south along Broadway. “So, were you at the Word Club this afternoon?” he asked.
“Maybe,” she said.
“What do you guys do in that club?”
“You mean after we're finished with the sex toys?”
He blushed. “Yeah, when you put the dildos away.”
She drew an invisible zipper across her lips. “I took a blood oath. They'll kill me if I tell you. Then they'll kill you, too.”
“Thanks for looking out for me,” he said. They walked along for a moment without saying anything. He'd daydreamed about talking to her many times, and now here he was—talking to her.
“So, where you going to college?” he asked. There was no question of if.
“Cornell,” she said.
The name meant nothing to him. “What? Not Yale?” he asked, pronouncing it with a Spanish accent: Jail.
“I no smart enough for Jail,” she said, copying his accent. “Besides, Jail no giving me no moneys.”
“What about the other muchachas?” he asked.
“Oh, jes,” she said. “They going to some good schools: Pre enstone, Wasser, Breen Marr, En Why Joo. ¿Y tu, Señor?”
He shook his head and dropped the accent. “I've got a job lined up.”
“A legal job?”
“Yup.”
“That's good,” she said. “Better than most of the fools around here.” And he was grateful that she
spared him the same lecture he'd just gotten from the teacher. Tito liked to read—comic books, thrillers, pornography—but the thought of studying, of taking tests and answering questions in a classroom for four more years, made him queasy. Clara's proficiency at academics now rendered her all the more remarkable to him. It was the same admiration he felt for acrobats and chess masters, people who excelled at things he had no interest in.
Crossing the Broadway Bridge, they discussed the best way to get to her house. The feud between their fathers was dormant but still acknowledged in the neighborhood, and it would be best for both of them if they were not seen together. Tito was cheered by the underlying assumption that they would walk all the way together, that she wasn't going to ditch him. Any lingering animosity seemed to have been forgotten. He said he didn't want to go down Seaman in case his father was sweeping in front of the building. Clara didn't want to walk on Broadway, in case one of her father's cronies was eating in El Malecon. In the end, they went up through Park Terrace and Isham Park, hurrying across Seaman well south of his father's building and walking through the forested part of Inwood Hill Park to a path that led down and out of the trees at Payson Street.
“You better stay here where my mother won't see you,” she said when they were walking down the path, the trees thinning as they neared the street. “She's already going to kill me for being late.”
“Wait,” he said. “Maybe you want to come out with me on Saturday?”
“I can't. I work in my father's store.”
“What about Sunday?”
She shook her head.
“Oh,” he said, downcast.
She smiled. “But you can walk me home next Friday,” she said.
“Friday?”
“Yes. And one more thing. You can't tell anyone about me going to Cornell.”
“It's a secret?”
“Yes. Everyone thinks I'm going to Hunter. Even the parents.”
“I won't say anything,” he promised, enjoying the privilege of her secret.
