When Tito Loved Clara

by Jon Michaud

  Her other option, she knew, was to stay home with Efran, who would spend the evening playing practical jokes on her. Efran hated these grownup fiestas, and so it might be worth accepting just to spite him.

  “Come,” said her father. “A little food. A little dancing. Some laughing. It's good for you, I think. And I can keep an eye on who you're talking to.”

  MARTI HAD BEEN in the accident with Dolores the year before Clara had come to New York. The livery cab they were in was rearended by a bus. Later it turned out that the cab driver had been drunk. So everyone was to blame except the passengers. Dolores and Marti ended up in the hospital together. The accident and the settlement made them like sorority sisters or something. It also made them—by their standards—rich.

  Marti had suffered more serious injuries than Dolores—she'd lost the hearing in one ear (Clara could never remember which one, since it seemed that Marti was just plain deaf) and had a scar that ran from her knee to her ankle. Marti liked to tell everyone how the doctors had almost amputated. “Marti la pirata,” she liked to say. She had an eye patch that she liked to bring out when she'd had a few drinks. There were rumors of other scars in places only Marti's husband ever saw, and her lack of children and occasionally weird behavior seemed to lend credence to these rumors. With the money, she'd bought a house in the Dominican Republic to which she would retire when she reached sixty-two. She also must have kept some kind of party slush fund, because two or three times a year, she threw a massive fiesta. People came from New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Once, a relative had flown in from Santo Domingo and flown back the next day.

  Marti's building was in the 230s, west of Broadway. There was a low-ceilinged, wood-paneled function room in the basement, which she rented for these affairs. A row of folding tables would be set up along one wall, and on them would be a series of entries in the Best Dominican Food contest: pernil, moro, pastelitos, tostones, arroz con pollo. On either end of the row of tables, like sentries, stood garbage barrels lined with black GLAD bags and filled with ice. The long necks of Coronas and Presidentes protruded like bottles stuffed with messages floating on a frozen sea. Another table nearby served as a landing spot for guests to drop off their contributions to the event: Hennessy, Johnnie Walker, and Absolut, along with mixers and cordials. In the back, an aspiring DJ from down the block set up his turntable and two steamer-trunk-sized speakers. The music was loud enough that even Marti could identify the songs. Around the room were odds and ends of furniture, busted up couches, dented metal chairs, and paint-stained stools. There was never enough furniture for the number of people who came, barely enough space in the room to contain everyone. If you stayed long enough, you could rub yourself up against everyone there. Aware of this, a couple of postadolescent boys (too old to be friendly with Efran and too young to know Clara), were pressing the flesh, pressing the cotton, the rayon, the silk, and the polyester. One of them, squeezing past Clara, brought his hand up toward her breasts. “Touch me and die, chulo,” she barked with such vehemence that the kid said, “Coño,” and backed away from her, spilling several drinks in his retreat.

  Out of the tectonic shifts of bodies came Gustavo. He was dark—darker even than she was. His nappy hair was like a ski cap with springs glued to it. He had eyes set very far apart—a salamander's eyes, she thought—and a weirdly thin nose, maybe the genetic remnant of some Nordic sailor who'd passed through the Caribbean generations ago.

  “Negra,” he called to her. This was a term of endearment he used whenever her father was not in earshot. Mi Negra. Mi Negrita. She steadfastly called him Gustavo, now and then referring to him as Señor Benítez, which he hated.

  “How are you, mi corazón?” he asked, handing her a red plastic cup.

  “What's this?” she asked.

  “Cognac, baby. Only the best for you. Cognac and ginger ale. On the rocks.”

  She accepted it against her better judgment—it was hot—and took a sip, looking around to make sure her father couldn't see her, wondering if there was any chance Tito might show up.

  “Marti always throws a good party, don't she?” said Gustavo.

  “I don't know. I haven't been to one in a while.”

  “I know. You don't get out too much, do you?”

  “No.”

  “What you say we got to Club Mirage next Saturday—me and you. I already asked your pops.”

  “My father said I could go to Club Mirage with you?”

  “Sí, Negra. But only if you go with me.”

  “I don't think so.”

  “Come on, Clarita. I show you a good time. I treat you like a queen.”

  “Since I'm not a queen, I think I'll pass.”

  Gustavo took a sip of his drink. “That's too bad, because . . . I found out who your little homeboy is. The one you been going to the park with on Friday afternoons.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Yeah, I bet your pops wouldn't be too happy to hear you been hanging with Tito Moreno.”

  “Who?”

  “Ha! You know who I'm talking about. Your father still hates Tito's dad, you know. Still calls him a traitor to the Dominican race. Look. Here's your papi now. Let's tell him.”

  Clara turned and saw her father forcing himself through the crowd, pushing people aside and drawing cries of “¡Tranquilo!” and “¡Calma te!” as he moved through the room.

  Gustavo started to say something but her father cut him off. “Come, Clara. We're leaving.”

  “What? We just got here.” But her father had taken her by the biceps and was pulling her away from Gustavo—not a bad thing, altogether. Then she noticed that Dolores and Efran were already waiting by the door.

  What was going on? She looked around. Off to the side, deep in the crowd at the back of the room, not far from where the DJ had set up, Clara saw another disturbance, another parting of bodies, and in between the limbs and the hair and the bottles of beer, she saw—could it be?

  Her father was pulling her even more stridently behind him, like a lifeguard saving her from drowning.

  “Wait, wait,” she protested.

  “No,” said her father.

  “We are leaving now.”

  “Wait!” she shouted, but to no avail.

  He dragged her out of that basement and all but carried her down to Broadway, with Dolores and Efran following. Clara struggled against him, but he had her in both arms, pinned against his chest, exhaling his rummy breath into her face. Efran was asking Dolores what was happening, why they were leaving so soon. Dolores didn't respond, preoccupied as she was by waving her arms at the passing traffic. A cab came, separating from the flow under the elevated tracks and stopping in front of them. The four of them got in—Clara's father pushing her into the backseat so that she was trapped between him and Dolores, Efran riding in the front. As the driver guided them into the stream of traffic, Clara looked out the window past her father and saw two women coming down the street—one older and one younger, the younger one either obese or pregnant, she couldn't tell which. In the darkness and the shadows of the elevated, Clara couldn't make out their faces. The signal changed and the cab was sucked south in the rush of cars and buses, across the Broadway Bridge, back into Manhattan.

  “What was that witch doing at Marti's?” asked Dolores.

  “I don't know,” said her father. “But I'm glad I saw her when I did.”

  “We shouldn't have brought her,” said Dolores, glancing at Clara.

  “I can't believe it,” said her father. “All these years I've never seen her once. Not once. And there she was. Like a ghost.”

  Clara was silent. She felt an exultation run though her body, the giddiness of her childhood wish finally being fulfilled. Her mother was real, not an abstraction. Her mother had found her, just as Clara had always hoped. It was happening. One way or another, her days in her father's house were numbered.

  IT TOOK LONGER than she expected. Having been seen by her mother, Clara expected contact rig
ht away, but the days went by with no word—no phone call, no knock on the door. School came to an end and the summer began and she wondered if the night at Marti's party had been nothing more than her overactive imagination combined with a longing for her absent parent. She asked her father about it. “That was my mother you saw at Marti's, wasn't it?”

  “I don't know what you're talking about.”

  “That's why you hauled me out of there like that.”

  “It was getting late, that's all,” her father said.

  That last summer in Inwood, Clara saw a lot more of her father than she had in some time, and the more she saw of him, the happier she was that she would soon be away from him. She worked every day at Lugo Hardware. This was partly so that he could keep an eye on her and partly because he wanted her cheap labor. At the end of the week, he would hand her a twenty-dollar bill with a wink and a sly “Gracias.” Before Marti's party, Clara's only free time came late on Friday afternoons, when business was slow and her father hosted his weekly card game with some of his best customers: local contractors and handymen. It was an important part of the business and also an end-of-the-week stress release, the lapse in vigilance necessary to blow off steam. Her father and Gustavo set up a table in the back of the store, brought in a case of beer and some arroz con pollo from El Malecon, turned up the music, and laughed loud enough to be heard by people across four lanes of Dyckman Street traffic. Gustavo minded the store with one eye while also acting as dealer and cashier. Clara was released, forgotten about. They didn't want a woman on the premises. Friday afternoons were also when Dolores went to the salon to get her hair done—an ordeal that took six or seven hours, the female equivalent of her father's card game. Gossip exchanged, alcohol consumed, the week laid to rest. This was how Clara managed to continue to see Tito once the school year came to an end. Those Friday afternoons were also when she had her occasional meetings with Alicia Almonte, who was the conduit for her correspondence from Cornell. Clara and Ms. Almonte would get together in the Riverdale Diner to go over the university's paperwork and discuss possible courses for the fall. Alicia had helped Clara fill out the numerous forms Cornell required and had written a letter to the university alerting them to the fact that Clara would be unsupported by her family and asking Cornell to consider her for supplementary financial aid, which was granted.

  “Are you willing to risk everything for this?” Ms. Almonte had asked earlier in the school year when she offered to handle all of Clara's college correspondence. “Are you prepared for your father's anger when he discovers that your Hunter application was just a ruse? Are you prepared for him never to speak to you again? I have not met him, but from everything you have told me, he won't be happy in the least when he discovers your deception.”

  “Yes,” said Clara. “I'm ready. I know what this is. I am running away from home. I know I'm not going back.”

  “If you are prepared for that, then I will do anything I can to help you. But be warned, Clara, it's going to be hard on you. Where will you go at Thanksgiving? At Christmas? You can call me if you ever need a place to stay. I think you are very brave to do this.”

  “I'm not brave,” she said. “Just desperate.”

  That was her plan. Even if her mother did not reappear, she was going to abduct herself.

  • • •

  MARTI'S PARTY HAD made everything harder. Clara was forced to stay in the store even on Friday afternoons, leafing through copies of Hoy and the Post until the card game was over and her father locked up and they walked home together, her father's mood dependent entirely on how he had done in the game. If he had come out ahead, they would stop at the Carvel on Broadway for an ice cream cone. If he had lost, he would curse the other players and console himself with the thought that the money would eventually come back to him in exchange for spackle, pipe, and drywall. As far as Clara could tell, Gustavo had not told her father about Tito—perhaps in the belief that he still had a chance to convince her to go to Club Mirage with him, a belief she kept from flatlining by occasionally speaking to him.

  A month after Marti's party, on a quiet afternoon in late July, with the fans blowing in the front, and the guffaws booming from the back, a pregnant girl came into the store. She was young and pretty, with good hair—long and thick and curly—and something about her seemed familiar to Clara, as if she'd seen her face in an ad for BMCC or ITT Tech. Gustavo, who was leaning on the storeroom doorway, keeping tabs on the game, saw her, too. Clara watched him watching the girl. Normally Gustavo would have leapt to assist such an attractive female customer, but Clara saw the fact of the girl's pregnancy register, saw Gustavo's attention turn away from the girl and back to the card players in the storerom. With a flick of his hand, he indicated that Clara should attend to her customer.

  Clara walked out from behind the counter and approached the girl. “¿Necesitas ayuda?”

  “Sí,” said the young girl, smiling at her. She reached into her purse and pulled out a scrap of stained brown paper, which looked like it had been torn off someone's lunch sack. “My mami is redoing her kitchen. Do you have this?” She handed the paper to Clara.

  Clara looked at the scrap. On it were two lines of scrawl in Spanish:

  Write your address and we will come for you. Tell us when.

  Tu Mama.

  Clara looked at the girl. “¿Es verdad?”

  “Sí,” whispered the girl. “I'm Yunis. I am your sister.”

  So, here it was, the message from her mother that she had been waiting for. It had come in human form, in the form of a sister she did not know she had.

  “That one's on order,” said Clara, stagily. “Maybe next week. Let me give you the phone number here and you can call.” Taking a pen out of her pocket, she wrote the address of her father's house, the date for the following Sunday, and eight a.m. She gave the paper back to the girl—to her sister.

  “Gracias,” said Yunis, loudly. Then, under her breath. “Pack a bag. Be ready. You hear me?” And with that, she walked out of the store.

  CLARA WAS ELATED and terrified. But what was there to be terrified of? Shouldn't she be just elated? She was eighteen years old—legally an adult—and she had been planning to leave her father's house anyway. Why was she scared? All this meant was that now she had help in abducting herself. But she could not deny it. She was afraid. That night, as she lay in bed unable to sleep, she regretted telling Yunis to come back in a week. The week seemed like a year. Anything could happen. Her mother could lose interest. Change her mind. Clara should have asked her to come back the next day. Or—the idea came to her with an Oh my God, I'm so stupid! thwack to the forehead—she should have simply walked out of the store with Yunis earlier that afternoon. Why hadn't she thought of that? No bag. No goodbyes. Just the clothes on her back—the same way her father had taken her from the Dominican Republic. Wouldn't that have been right? Wouldn't that have been poetic? Her father emerging from his card game, drunk, asking Gustavo where the hell his daughter was. Gustavo not having an answer for him, stammering and embarrassed. But in that moment in the store, with the scrap of paper in her hand, Clara was still hemmed in by her old life. She wasn't thinking like a fugitive anymore. She was thinking like someone about to assume possession of herself. Besides, there were things she needed to take care of before she left. The most important of these was Tito.

  He had told her that there was an empty apartment in his father's building and that they could use it while his parents were away. The apartment would be empty until the end of the month—Tito was supposed to clean and paint it before his mother and father returned from their second honeymoon. It suddenly seemed urgent to have this final meeting with him, to do the thing they had been building toward all spring and summer. In her heart, she had always known that their relationship would not survive her departure for Cornell. She planned to sever all ties to the neighborhood, and Tito, she knew, would always be tied to the neighborhood.

  Clara told her father that there was a
n all-day orientation at Hunter the following Thursday. Then, during her lunch break, she walked to the phone booth on the corner and called Tito to tell him that Thursday she could come to see him. Now there was something other than the escape to occupy her mind.

  The early part of the week went by. During the day, she worked in the store; in the evening, she did her chores at home; late at night, she quietly went through her meager possessions, selecting the few items that she would pack in her school satchel and a plastic shopping bag. Having never gone on vacation, having not flown on a plane since coming to New York, Clara did not own a suitcase.

  Thursday came and, at breakfast, she tried to act like it was nothing special. She hadn't dressed for the occasion, choosing jeans and a white blouse. She had a three-ring binder and a couple of pens to make it look official.

  “What time will you be coming back?” asked her father.

  “I don't know. Like I told you, it's an all-day thing. I'll be back for supper.”

  “You be careful on the subway. Don't let anyone squeeze into a seat beside you. If they do that, you stand up.”

  “Yes, Papi.”

  “Maybe you should cover yourself up. Put on a sweater or something.”

  “It's August,” she said.

  “I know, I know. The classrooms might be airconditioned at the school, You never know.” He extended his forefingers like two erect nipples.

  “Don't worry, Papi. I know how to look after myself.”

  She walked to the Dyckman Street station and, instead of taking the train downtown, rode uptown to the last stop, 207th Street. From there, she made her way to Tito's building.

  He answered the door looking nervous, which only made her nervous. Immediately, he tried to kiss her, but she moved away.

  “So, come on, show me the place,” she said, hoping to buy her-self a little time, to calm herself down. She didn't feel excited at all. She just felt worried, afraid.