When I came back from Mexico that first time, six weeks after Aura’s death, Valentina, who studied with Aura at Columbia, and their friend Adele Ramírez, who was visiting from Mexico and staying with Valentina, came to pick me up at Newark Airport in Valentina’s investment-banker husband’s BMW station wagon. I had five suitcases: two of my own and three filled with Aura’s things, not just her clothes—I’d refused to throw or give away almost anything of hers—but also some of her books and photos, and a short lifetime’s worth of her diaries, notebooks, and loose papers. I’m sure that if that day some of my guy friends had come for me at the airport instead, and we’d walked into our apartment, it would have been much different, probably we would have taken a disbelieving look around and said, Let’s go to a bar. But I’d hardly finished bringing in the suitcases before Valentina and Adele went to work building the altar. They dashed around the apartment as if they knew where everything was better than I did, choosing and carrying treasures back, occasionally asking for my opinion or suggestion. Adele, a visual artist, crouched over the marble shelf at the foot of the mirror, arranging: the denim hat with a cloth flower stitched onto it that Aura bought during our trip to Hong Kong; the green canvas satchel she brought to the beach that last day, with everything inside it just as she’d left it, her wallet, her sunglasses, and the two slender books she was reading (Bruno Schulz and Silvina Ocampo); her hairbrush, long strands of black hair snagged in the bristles; the cardboard tube of Chinese pick-up sticks she bought in the mall near our apartment in Mexico City and took into the T.G.I. Fridays there, where we sat drinking tequila and playing pick-up sticks two weeks before she died; a copy of the Boston Review, where her last published essay in English had appeared early that last summer; her favorite (and only) pair of Marc Jacobs shoes; her little turquoise drinking flask; a few other trinkets, souvenirs, adornments; photographs; candles; and standing empty on the floor at the foot of the altar, her shiny mod black-and-white-striped rubber rain boots with the hot pink soles. Valentina, standing before the towering mirror, announced: I know! Where’s Aura’s wedding dress? I went and got the wedding dress out of the closet, and the stepladder.
It was just the kind of thing Aura and I made fun of: a folkloric Mexican altar in a grad student’s apartment as a manifestation of corny identity politics. But it felt like the right thing to do now, and throughout that first year of Aura’s death and after, the wedding dress remained. I regularly bought flowers to put in the vase on the floor, and lit candles, and bought new candles to replace the burned-out ones.
The wedding dress was made for Aura by a Mexican fashion designer who owned a boutique on Smith Street. We’d become friendly with the owner, Zoila, who was originally from Mexicali. In her store we’d talk about the authentic taco stand we were going to open someday to make money off the drunk, hungry, young people pouring out of the Smith Street bars at night, all three of us pretending that we were really serious about joining in this promising business venture. Then Aura discovered that Zoila’s custom-tailored bridal dresses were recommended on the Web site Daily Candy as a thrifty alternative to the likes of Vera Wang. Aura went to Zoila’s studio, in a loft in downtown Brooklyn, for three or four fittings, and she came home from each feeling more anxious than before. She was, at first, after she went to pick up the finished dress, disappointed in it, finding it more simple than she’d imagined it was going to be, and not much different from some of the ordinary dresses Zoila sold in her store for a quarter of the price. It was an almost minimalist version of a Mexican country girl’s dress, made of fine white cotton, with simple embellishments of silk and lace embroidery, and it widened into ruffles at the bottom.
But in the end, Aura decided that she liked the dress. Maybe it just needed to be in its rightful habitat, the near-desert setting of the Catholic shrine village of Atotonilco, amid an old mission church and cactus and scrub and the green oasis grounds of the restored hacienda that we’d rented for the wedding, beneath the vivid blue and then yellow-gray immensity of the Mexican sky and the turbulent cloud herds coming and going across it. Maybe that was the genius of Zoila’s design for Aura’s dress. A sort of freeze-dried dress, seemingly plain as tissue paper, that shimmered to life in the charged thin air of the high plains of central Mexico. A perfect dress for a Mexican country wedding in August, a girlhood dream of a wedding dress after all. Now the dress was slightly yellowed, the shoulder straps darkened by salty perspiration, and one of the bands of lace running around the dress lower down, above where it widened out, was partly ripped from the fabric, a tear like a bullet hole, and the hem was discolored and torn from having been dragged through mud and danced on and stepped on during the long night into dawn of our wedding party, when Aura had taken off her wedding shoes and slipped into the dancing shoes we’d bought at a bridal shop in Mexico City, which were like a cross between white nurse shoes and seventies disco platform sneakers. A delicate relic, that wedding dress. At night, backed by the mirror’s illusion of depth and the reflected glow of candles and lamps, the baroque frame like a golden corona around it, the dress looks like it’s floating.
* * *
Despite the altar, or maybe partly because of it, our cleaning lady quit. Flor, from Oaxaca, now raising three children in Spanish Harlem, who came to clean once every two weeks, said it made her too sad to be in our apartment. The one time Flor did come, I watched her kneel to pray at the altar, watched her pick up photographs of Aura and press them to her lips, smudging them with her emphatic kisses and tears. She imitated Aura’s reliable words of praise for her work, the happy pitch of her voice: Oh Flor, it’s as if you work miracles! Ay, señor, said Flor. She was always so happy, so full of life, so young, so good, she always asked after my children. How could she do her job now, in that way that had always so pleased Aura, Flor pleadingly asked me, if she couldn’t stop crying? Then she’d taken her sadness and tears home with her, home to her children, she explained later when she phoned, and that wasn’t right, no señor, she couldn’t do it anymore, she was sorry but she had to quit. I didn’t bother to look for a new cleaning lady. I suppose I thought she would feel sorry for me and come back. I tried phoning, finally, to beg her to come back, and got a recorded message that the number was no longer in service. Then, months after she’d quit, incredibly, she repented and did phone and leave her new telephone number—apparently, she’d moved—on the answering machine. But when I phoned back, it was the wrong number. Probably I’d written it down wrong, I’m a touch dyslexic anyway.
Now, fifteen months after Aura’s death, coming home without her again—no one to meet me at the airport this time—I found the apartment exactly as I’d left it in July. The bed was unmade. The first thing I did was open all the windows, letting in the cool, damp October air.
Aura’s MacBook was still there, on her desk. I’d be able to pick up where I’d left off, working on, organizing, trying to piece together her stories, essays, poems, her just begun novel, and her unfinished writings, the thousands of fragments, really, that she left in her computer, in her labyrinthine and scattered manner of storing files and documents. I thought I felt ready to immerse myself in that task.
In the bedroom there were old dead rose petals, darker than blood, on the floor around the vase in front of the altar, but the vase was empty. In the kitchen, Aura’s plants, despite not having been watered in three months, were still alive. I stuck my finger in the soil of one pot and found it moist.
Then I remembered that I’d left a key with the upstairs neighbors, asking them to water Aura’s plants while I was away. I’d only intended to go to Mexico for the first anniversary and stay a month, but I’d stayed three, and they’d kept it up all that time. They’d thrown out the dead roses, which must have begun to rot and smell. And they’d collected my mail in a shopping bag that they had put next to the couch, just inside the apartment door.
On the beach we—I and some of the swimmers who saw or heard my cries for help—pulled Aura out of the w
ater and set her down in the almost ditchlike incline gouged by the waves, and then we picked her up again and carried her to where it was level and laid her on the hot sand. As she fought for air, closing and opening her mouth, whispering only the word “aire” when she needed me to press my lips to hers again, Aura said something that I don’t actually remember hearing, just as I remember so little of what happened, but her cousin Fabiola, before she took off looking for an ambulance, heard it and later told me. What Aura said, one of the last things she ever said to me, was:
Quiéreme mucho, mi amor.
Love me a lot, my love.
No quiero morir. I don’t want to die. That may have been the last full sentence she ever spoke, maybe her very last words.
Did that sound self-exculpating? Is this the kind of statement I should prohibit myself from making? Sure, Aura’s plea and invocation of love would play well on any jury’s emotions and sympathies, but I’m not in a courtroom. I need to stand nakedly before the facts; there’s no way to fool this jury that I am facing. It all matters, and it’s all evidence.
2
Is this really happening, mi amor? Am I really back in Brooklyn again without you? Throughout your first year of death and now, out on the streets at night, pounding the pavement, up one side of the block, down the other, lingering at steamy windows looking at menus that I know by heart, what take-out food should I choose, what cheap restaurant should I eat in tonight, what bar will I stop into for a drink or two or three or five where I won’t feel so jarringly alone—but where don’t I feel jarringly alone?
The five or so years before I met Aura were the loneliest I’d ever known. The year plus months since her death were much lonelier. But what about the four years in between? Was I a different man than I was before those four years, an improved man, because of the love and happiness that I experienced? Because of what Aura gave to me? Or was I just the same old me who, for four years, was inexplicably lucky? Four years—are those too few years to hold such significance in a grown man’s life? Or can four years mean so much that they will forever outweigh all the others put together?
After she died, for the first month or so, I didn’t dream about Aura, though in Mexico City I felt her presence everywhere. Then, in the fall, when she should have been starting her classes, I had my first dream, one in which it was urgent that I buy a cell phone. In the middle of a lush green field with a silvery stream running through it, I found a wooden hut that was a cell phone store, and I went inside. I was desperate to phone Wendy, another classmate and friend of Aura’s. I wanted to ask Wendy if Aura missed me. I wanted to ask Wendy, in these exact words, Does she miss our domestic routines? I carried the new cell phone, silvery with sapphire keys, out of the hut, into the field, toward the stream, but I couldn’t get it to work. Frustrated, I hurled the phone away.
Do you miss our domestic routines, mi amor?
Can this really be happening to us?
Degraw Street, where we lived, supposedly marks the border between Carroll Gardens and Cobble Hill. Our apartment was on the Carroll Gardens side of the street, Cobble Hill on the other side. When I first moved there, about four years before I met Aura, Carroll Gardens still seemed like the classic Brooklyn Italian neighborhood, old-fashioned Italian restaurants where mobsters and politicians used to eat, lawn statues of the Virgin, old men playing bocce ball in the playground; especially on summer nights, with so many loud tough-guy types milling around, I’d always feel a little menaced walking through there. Cobble Hill was where Winston Churchill’s mother was born and still looked the part, with its landmark Episcopalian church that had a Tiffany interior, quaint carriage house mews, and park. Both neighborhoods had pretty much blended together now, overtaken mostly by prosperous young white people. 9/11 had accelerated the process—nice and quiet, family-seeming neighborhood across the Brooklyn Bridge. Now, by day, you wove through long crooked trains of baby carriages on the Court Street sidewalks, and ate lunch or went for coffee in places filled with young moms, au pairs, and an embarrassing number of writers. The Italian men’s social clubs had become hipster cocktail bars. On every street brownstones converted into apartments years ago were being renovated back into single-family homes. A few blocks away, just across the BQE is Red Hook, the harbor and port; at night you can hear ships’ foghorns, Aura loved that; with a swimmer’s little wriggle she’d nestle closer in bed and hold still, as if the long mournful blasts were about to float past us like manta rays in the dark.
This was Aura’s yoga studio; here’s the spa she’d go to for a massage when she was stressed; here was her favorite clothing boutique, and there, her second favorite; our fish store; this is where she bought those cool eyeglasses with yellow-tinted lenses; our late-night burger and drinks place; our brunch place; “the-restaurant-we-always-fight-in”—that’s what walking these streets had become now, a silent chanting of the stations. The neighborhood has an abundance of Italian pizza parlors and brick-oven places, and a single small antiseptic Domino’s Pizza on the corner of Smith and Bergen, by the subway exit, its customers mostly residents of the Hoyt Street housing projects and black and Latino teenagers from a nearby high school. One night we were coming home late from drinking with friends when, without saying anything, Aura darted through the Domino’s glass doors and stood at the counter no more than a minute, I swear, before she came back out with a giant pizza box in her hands and a look-what-I-just-won grin. All the upscale pizza places were closed by that hour, but I bet at that moment none could have satisfied Aura’s hungry impulse like Domino’s. Where she grew up in Mexico City, amid the residential complexes of the city’s south, every evening an army of helmeted delivery boys on motorbikes, thousands upon thousands, buzzed and zoomed like bees through the clogged expressways and streets, speeding fast food pizza to the apartments and families of working and single mothers like Aura’s. Now I never walk past that Domino’s without seeing her coming out the door with the pizza and that smile.
The long-defunct mud-hued Catholic church across the street from our apartment was being converted into a condo building (the developers, Orthodox Jews, and the work crew, Mexican); Aura would have been happy about the new Trader Joe’s down at Atlantic and Court; on Smith Street, the taco place we were going to open with Zoila opened but Zoila’s boutique closed last year and I still don’t know where she’s gone to. Around the corner is the grungy but popular Wi-Fi café that Aura often liked to study and work in when she wasn’t up at Columbia. She found it easier to concentrate there than at home. No me bugging her for attention or sex or noisily typing away in the next room, no mother phoning from Mexico. I’d come in and see her sitting at one of the tables against the brick wall, half-eaten bagel atop its wax-paper bag, mug of coffee, hair pushed back by a barrette or a red band or tied back to keep it out of her face as she leaned over her laptop, headphones on, that determined, locked-in look, lightly biting her lower lip, and I’d stand and watch her or pretend I’d never seen her before and wait for her to lift her eyes and see me. I used to come to this café to work, too. She didn’t mind. We’d share a table, have lunch or split a bagel or a cookie. Now I only come in for morning take-out coffee. Waiting in the inevitable line, I stare at the row of tables, the long blue bench against the wall, strangers sitting there with their computers.
I hadn’t thrown away or moved out any of Aura’s clothes, they were still in her chest of drawers and in the walk-in closet. Her cold weather coats and jackets, including the down one, hung from a peg by the front door. At least once a day I’d open a drawer and hold a pile of her clothes to my nose, frustrated that they smelled more of the drawer’s wood than of Aura, and sometimes I emptied out a drawer on the bed and lay facedown in her clothes. I knew that eventually I should give these things away—her clothes, at least—that there was somebody out there who could not afford a down coat and whose life would be made more bearable by it, maybe even saved. I pictured an illegal immigrant woman or girl in some brutally cold place, a meatp
acking plant town in Wisconsin, a Chicago tenement without heat. But I wasn’t ready to let go of anything. It wasn’t even an argument I had with myself—though I did discuss it with some of Aura’s friends. At first they had seemed fixated on the idea that, for my own good, I needed to get rid of some of her things. Nobody suggested I had to get rid of everything. Why couldn’t I do it a little at a time, donate some of her coats to the city’s winter coat drive, for starters? In the end, of course, I should keep a few special things, such as her wedding dress, “to remember her by.” During those first months, I drifted away from most of my male friends and shut myself off from my family—my mother and siblings—and only wanted to be around women: Aura’s friends but also a few women I’d been close to since long before Aura.
With the exception of the table that I wrote at in the corner of the middle room—the one between the kitchen and the parlor room where we slept—and some of the old bookshelves, Aura and I had slowly gotten rid of and replaced all the furniture from my slovenly bachelor years. It frustrated Aura that we hadn’t moved into a new apartment, free of traces and reminders of my past without her, a place she could make wholly ours, though she did completely transform the apartment we had. Sometimes I’d come home and find her pushing even the heaviest furniture around, changing the crowded layout in a way that had never occurred to me or even seemed possible, as if the apartment were some kind of complicated puzzle that could only be solved by pushing furniture around and that she’d become obsessed with, or else maybe it could never be solved, but she always made the place look better.
Say Her Name Page 2
