Forsaking All Others

by Jimmy Breslin

  “My aunt and my cousins are coming for Christmas Eve,” Lydia said.

  “That’s good,” Teenager said. He was wrapped in a deep blue velour robe that allowed his thick, shaped calves to be displayed.

  “Who are you telling to come?” Lydia said.

  “All my friends.”

  Lydia’s face, which usually had the character of wallpaper in Teenager’s presence, now showed great displeasure. “I don’t like your friends. Somebody nice must come.”

  A conversation such as this at any other time would be terminated with a snarl, a slap perhaps, a spinning around and exiting. Yet the most disoriented of Puerto Rican marriages became as formal as a high court during any holiday season, when relatives arrive to eat and peer and carry back to the family networks the precise estimates of the worth of the relationship they have observed. For the highest principle of all, form on a holiday, Lydia suddenly had her husband, for all his evil, pushed into a corner.

  “Mama is coming too,” Teenager said.

  Lydia rocked her head from side to side in skepticism. “Mama is always somewhere in this house. Is that all we have coming? Mama and these people I don’t like?”

  “Oh, no,” Teenager said. “Maximo and his mother are coming too. I asked them and they said they would be here.”

  Lydia’s head turned quickly enough to show excitement and pleasure. She immediately tempered it with suspicion. “You asked them?” she said.

  “Just the other day.”

  “Which other day?”

  “Two, three days ago. I told them, ‘You’re coming Christmas Eve.’ They both were very happy.”

  “I love Maximo’s mother. I love Maximo,” Lydia said.

  “He is going to be an important man,” Teenager said.

  “Oh, yes. Everybody says that. What time did you tell Maximo and his mother to come?”

  “At eight o’clock.”

  Lydia nodded in satisfaction as her hands resumed stuffing the plantain leaves with yucca.

  Teenager drank grapefruit juice, then dressed and left for Ana’s. A half hour later, as he walked into the bar, Luisa Maria said to him, “I have to go out shopping for some things.”

  “What things?”

  “I have to get coconuts and buy good rum, not this rum you have here. I make coquito for you on Christmas Eve.”

  “Just for me?” Teenager said.

  “Oh, no, I am having my brother and my brother’s wife and all my nephews and my girlfriend. And you and Benny.”

  She looked at him through narrowed eyes. “You are coming to my house on Christmas Eve?”

  “Certainly,” Teenager said.

  “What time will you be there?”

  “Ten o’clock, eleven o’clock,” Teenager said.

  “You will be there,” Luisa Maria said, with the same firmness exhibited by Lydia only a short time before.

  Through the rest of the day, as he drove to collect money, Teenager planned his Christmas Eve. Because he had been in prison, he had not been obliged to do this for some time, but it was the usage of time by a Puerto Rican man on Christmas Eve, and then on New Year’s Eve, that determined the condition of his sexual arrangements for the remainder of the year. On Christmas Eve, Teenager thought, if he could ease out of the big party at his own house, using a pretext that satisfied the wife, he then could rush to the house of Luisa Maria, remaining there just long enough to give her the satisfaction of his presence. He then would return to his own house and somewhere in the early hours of Christmas Day he would measure the situation and decide that he had made a great success of the night, that he had pleased both his wife and his girlfriend.

  Following this, on New Year’s Eve, he would have to be with Luisa Maria at the start of the evening, glancing at the clock as if working in a knitting mill, waiting until he could kiss her, promise to return before the night dissolved, and then whip out of her house and get home with only minutes left, perhaps five, before the most important moment of the year to a Puerto Rican, the moment of twelve, at which point he would have Lydia nestled comfortably in his arms and thus lulled for the year to come; as would, elsewhere, Luisa Maria, who understood that Teenager’s promise to return on this night was a lie, but one that still showed that Teenager cared enough about her to make such a promise. Luisa Maria’s view, Teenager knew, then would be that the man had spent so much of the evening with her as to make the moment of twelve a meaningless one for the stupid lazy sonofabitch who carried the title, Wife.

  In order for him to carry out such exquisite timing, Teenager knew, the presence of Maximo in his house on Christmas Eve was crucial. Maximo was the only legitimate person Teenager knew, and it gave him a feeling of power to be able to say to Maximo, here, ride in the car with me and we will talk; here, meet my wife’s cousin. Why hasn’t Maximo been around for him to do this? Teenager also knew that Maximo’s presence would impress Lydia’s relatives so much that it immediately would reflect on Teenager to such a point that Lydia’s family could overlook their distaste for him for what he did. With Maximo in his house, Teenager in the midst of the night could motion to Lydia and she would place her head to his lips and he would mumble that he had to leave for something important, that it would only take a short time, and Lydia would kiss him and say, you must return quickly or I will lock the door so that you never can get back in. She would say this mildly, however, and Teenager would translate the amount of acquiescence in her voice, as against the measure of hardness, into almost the exact amount of time he could spend with Luisa Maria.

  At five-thirty on Monday night, December 21, Teenager drove up to Maximo’s, went immediately upstairs to look for Maximo’s mother, was annoyed to find that she had not returned from work, pounded down the stairs and drove over to Maximo’s apartment where, again, there was no answer. He rang the doorbell downstairs and a square-faced woman answered.

  “Do you know Maximo upstairs?”

  “The new guy?”

  “That’s right. When you hear him come home, tell him that Teenager wants him. It is very important.”

  “Teenager?” the woman said.

  “Tell him Teenager. He’ll know.”

  “That’s the name?” the woman said.

  “You never heard of him?” Teenager said.

  The woman’s face not only was blank, but indicated lack of interest. Teenager’s face flushed, as if the woman had just slapped him. He looked at her in disdain. Fat stupid Indian.

  “Just tell Maximo Teenager.”

  He left, but was so annoyed by the woman that he had to go immediately to Mi Corazon, which was on Broadway and 138th Street, where the western edge of Harlem becomes Hispanic, and where the barmaid, Lucy, threw up her hands when he walked in and announced: “Here is the strongest man in New York City!” She ran down the bar and kissed him on the cheek. It was after eleven when he remembered that he had to find Maximo. Instead, he drove to Luisa Maria’s apartment, remaining there until seven on Tuesday morning. When he arrived home, he went to bed without speaking.

  When he got up at two that afternoon, he found Lydia in the kitchen chopping coconuts. “Coquito,” she said.

  “I will drink a tub of it,” Teenager said.

  “You spoke to Maximo?” Lydia said.

  “I told you I did that before.”

  “Just making sure.”

  His son came in from playing in the apartment next door and Teenager swung him up to the ceiling. “Santa Claus will bring you a present that will make everybody jealous of you.”

  He was annoyed again that afternoon to walk into the bar and find that there was no word from Maximo or his mother despite his message. He decided to find Maximo by himself, but he did not know the exact name of the place where Maximo worked, and neither did anybody else around him. He then started for Westchester Avenue to look for Luis Jimenez’ office, but on the way there remembered that he had to meet Albertito at four-thirty at the Carolina Social Club on 154th Street.

  At s
ix, with Albertito riding shotgun, he drove to the Soundview Projects, where three men sat in a basement apartment with shotguns and thirty-six thousand dollars in fives, tens and twenties. Teenager and Benny stepped in with drawn guns. Albertito held a kilo of heroin. The exchange was made and Benny and Teenager drove off with their money, then stopped five blocks away at a social club where a barmaid named Rosa sat alone in the early evening and promptly locked the door as she saw that the two wanted to do lines and were including her in. When Rosa got off at nine o’clock, they went to her apartment and spent the night.

  On Wednesday, nervous and drinking and doing lines, Teenager walked around with his pockets filled with money until eight o’clock, when he went to LaRoche Motors, in Yonkers, which specialized in cars for pimps and dope dealers. He bought a Mercedes 220 for $23,000, which the salesman counted out in the locked office, then drove the new car home while Benny followed in his old Mercedes. In the trunk of the old Mercedes Teenager had a moped which he had bought from a junkie for two hundred dollars.

  At five o’clock, with a finger on his lips, he lugged the moped into his bedroom.

  “I am Santa Claus,” he said.

  Lydia looked at him crossly. “He is too young for such a thing.”

  “That’s all right,” Teenager said.

  “What does he do with it?” she said.

  Teenager closed his fist around the keys to the new Mercedes and held the fist in the air. “Inside my hand is your present from Santa Claus.”

  Lydia’s eyes opened quite wide. “What is it?”

  “Tomorrow night I give it to you,” he said.

  She dropped her head back on the pillow. “Tomorrow is today. You better hide it very good, because I will be cleaning the whole house for the company.” Her head came off the pillow again. “Maximo and his mother are coming?”

  “Of course,” Teenager said, taking off his shirt. His hands stopped at the last button as he realized that not even the new car would make up for his loss of face and romance if Maximo was not present.

  At eleven o’clock on Christmas Eve morning, Teenager arrived at Ana’s, holding a hand in the air to prevent Luisa Maria from speaking first.

  “I will be at your house this night,” he said.

  “What time?” she demanded.

  “Nine o’clock, ten o’clock.”

  “And you are staying?”

  “I will party all night with you.”

  Teenager felt his nerves rustling. At any other time, he thought again, he would slap his wife and slap this female. But the meaning of holidays to women had left him tied with a thousand ropes. And the simplest task, getting Maximo, had eluded him.

  Teenager went around to Indio’s apartment, where Francisca stood on the stoop with two other women. The two women held large cans of Spaghetti-Os that had steam coming out of them. Their children, playing on the sidewalk, would run up the stoop, receive a spoonful of the canned spaghetti and, lips orange, return to playing. Francisca stood on the bottom step and mechanically pushed a stroller back and forth in an attempt to rock her sister’s baby, four months old now, to sleep. The baby wore a red snowsuit and sucked on a plastic bottle filled with grape soda. When the baby threw the bottle down, Francisca picked it up, took a tablespoon full of Spaghetti-Os from one of the women, mashed the spaghetti with a finger and wedged the spoon into the baby’s mouth.

  Teenager approached her and said, “Who is upstairs?”

  “Indio. He lets me stay here to take care of my sister’s baby. She is sleeping.”

  “Do you know Maximo?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know where you can find him?”

  She looked down the block. “One of the women went to see him for help at some office someplace. I could ask her.”

  “Find him. And tell him that he must be at my house at eight o’clock tonight. Tell Maximo he must call me on the telephone at the bar and I will tell him about tonight myself.”

  Maximo had spent most of the afternoon at two basement parties held by block associations with whom he worked. Arriving back at his office he found himself in the midst of a wine and rum party that was to close out the day.

  “One woman was here with a baby to see you,” the woman in the next cubicle, Haydee, told him.

  “What did she need?” Maximo asked.

  “I don’t know. From the looks of it, probably welfare trouble. She left her name and a phone number.” On the slip Haydee handed him, Maximo saw the names of Francisca and Teenager and the familiar phone number for Ana’s Bar. “That wasn’t welfare,” he said, more to himself.

  “It wasn’t?” Haydee said.

  “No.”

  He called Nicki at her office, but her detached voice, with the office party noise in the background, told him that she didn’t want to talk.

  “I’ll be leaving soon,” she said.

  “Meet you?”

  “You know I can’t today. I have to get home and help my mother.”

  “What are you up to all weekend?”

  “Family.”

  He said nothing.

  “Family all weekend,” she said.

  When he still said nothing, she said, “Angela got family all weekend too. So what can I tell you? I might like it to be different. I think I really would. But I can’t. Merry Christmas and talk to you Monday.” There was laughter close to her now. “Got to go,” she said.

  After he hung up, Maximo had a few drinks and talked too long in the office and he was the last to leave, walking out into the end of a dark afternoon. It was after four-thirty when Maximo stepped off the subway at 138th Street. The platform was filled with music from the social club that was behind a door a few feet away from the turnstiles.

  Maximo came up the stairs on the other side of the street from Ana’s Bar and started down the hill to Eddie Hernandez’ store. He was going to buy two shirts, or a sweater, for his uncle in Brooklyn, his mother’s favorite brother. He had just enough rum in him to make it casual and enough cash in his pocket to buy himself out of as much pain as possible in this first visit.

  He also had more confidence when he faced Eddie, because he had been able to keep Teenager almost completely out of his life. On Monday night, when Maximo returned from the airport after putting his mother on the plane to San Pedro, the woman downstairs had delivered Maximo the message from Teenager. As the woman and her husband had since gone to Brooklyn for the holidays, Maximo now could take the position that he never received a message. The same would apply to the girl, Francisca, who had shown up at the office: I never was there.

  Maximo’s apprehension rose as he reached Eddie Hernandez’ store. Eddie was busy with two women buying men’s underwear; Weinstein sat on a chair smoking a cigarette and watching the street, his usual activity in the few minutes between the close of his shop and the start of his ride home.

  “This is the first time Eddie’s business has thinned out all day,” Weinstein said proudly.

  “That’s good,” Maximo said.

  Eddie Hernandez looked past the women, saw Maximo and called out, in a voice that was overly familiar, “What can I do for you?”

  “Shirts, when you’re finished there,” Maximo said.

  Eddie nodded and went back to the women. Finishing with them, he gestured for Maximo to come to the counter. Maximo told him who the shirts were for, and the size, and Eddie got up on a stepladder, reached for a box and brought down the shirts.

  “Good enough,” Maximo said, looking at them. Bright plaids. The uncle would wear them proudly.

  “Do you want them gift wrapped?” Eddie said.

  “I don’t know,” Maximo said.

  “When are you going to give them to him?”

  “Tonight. I’m going over to Brooklyn on the subway now.”

  “Then you get them wrapped,” Eddie said. He reached for paper.

  “Maximo.”

  Maximo turned around to Weinstein. “Your fan club,” Weinstein said. In the doorw
ay to the store, Francisca had the stroller tilted to get over the one step up. Weinstein opened the door for her and she walked in behind a wailing baby.

  “Yes?” Maximo said.

  “I need to talk to you,” Francisca said.

  “What about?” Maximo said.

  “Teenager says you and your mother must come to his house tonight.”

  “My mother is in Puerto Rico.”

  “Then I guess he means that you must come.”

  “Tell him I have to go to my uncle’s house in Brooklyn.”

  Francisca frowned. She was not used to people saying they would not obey Teenager. She reached down, put a pacifier in the baby’s mouth and then stood looking steadily at Maximo.

  “Tell him that I thank him very much for his invitation and that I will try my best to be there. I first have to go to my uncle’s house in Brooklyn. Tell him I promised my mother I would do that. But then after my uncle’s house, I will try my best to get to see Teenager at his house.”

  “Does that mean I should tell him you are coming?” Francisca said.

  “It means I will try.”

  “He will be angry,” she said. She looked at the phone on the wall behind Eddie. Eddie shook his head. “Not on this one, darling.”

  “I’ll just go outside,” Francisca said.

  “I’m going now,” Maximo said.

  “Wait until I call Teenager,” she said.

  She left the baby in the store and went outside to the phone booth.