by Zack Love
Two days after the Fernando story, Carlos finished showing a potential buyer an apartment downtown, and then walked over to Spring Street to meet Carolina for a Sunday SoHo stroll. Carlos greeted her with a kiss and immediately frowned upon realizing that her breath was nine parts mouthwash, one part ashtray. “I told myself that I would never date a smoker,” Carlos began, noticeably irritated. “I thought you were going to quit.”
“Carlos, I’ve been smoking since I was twelve. It’s going to take time. And it’s not like I’ve been smoking in your presence.”
“Not yet. But in another month or two, I’m sure that’ll be next. I mean, our first month together I couldn’t tell that you even smoke. But by the second month, I could tell that you’re a smoker with a great mouthwash. So what does the third month hold?”
“Why are you being so harsh on me? Don’t you realize how hard it is to quit?”
“Don’t you realize what a big turn off it is for me?”
“Turn off? And what if I asked you to get over your mysophobia in just a few months?”
Carolina’s tone had just enough punch and sting to make her rejoinder feel painfully personal.
They began their eastbound stroll in an awkward silence.
Early in their relationship, Carlos had explained to Carolina all about his mild anxiety disorder involving an abnormal and irrational fear of contamination or defilement – particularly from publicly handled objects. Initially, she humored his bizarre quirk, but over time found it strange – especially when he would put gloves on before boarding any public transportation or opening the doors of public establishments. In the late summer, shortly after their dating honeymoon had expired, the two were returning from a business lunch in midtown when Carolina mischievously tried to loosen him up on the issue while also indulging the sudden impulse to kiss him. As she held his right hand with her left hand, she pretended to notice something strange in the phone booth to her right, making Carlos lean towards it for a better view, and then she playfully pulled him off balance into the booth with her. She laughed hysterically at how silly Carlos looked trying (unsuccessfully) to avoid hand contact with any part of the phone booth. To indulge her romantic impulse, she then tried to kiss him in the booth, but he was clearly too uncomfortable there and just wanted to find some water with which to clean himself. Later, when he remained sour over the incident, she began to question their compatibility a little.
Carlos’s mysophobia also affected his sensuality. There was always a moment of hesitation before he would make his lips or body accessible to Carolina, who had always been accustomed to fending off oversexed men (other than Fernando). Carlos’s tentative physicality usually had the effect of teasing Carolina and making her even more aroused, but she sometimes wished that he could be the first to make a move. She knew from their searching talks, his fervidly held views, and his emotionally profound reaction to art and poetry that he was a man with tremendous passion and soul. She knew that – while Carlos had little sexual experience – he had all of the potential to be the best lover she had ever had, after some training and the elimination of his paranoia about germs. But she also knew that it would take time. On one occasion, she even suggested that he go to therapy to resolve the issue more quickly, but he grew angrily defensive at the idea.
With Carolina’s simple question (“What if I asked you to get over your mysophobia in just a few months?”), all of these issues were instantly conjured in a way that alienated Carlos and suddenly made him feel insecure. He finally broke their strained silence.
“That’s not a fair comparison. My mysophobia doesn’t affect your health like your smoking affects mine. It doesn’t taste bad in your mouth. It doesn’t expose you to impurities…On the contrary, it encourages you to avoid them.”
“Carlos, your mysophobia does affect my health. I feel freer – more alive, more vivacious and, ironically enough, healthier – if I’m not constantly made to worry about germs and unhealthy choices. Whether it’s for a moment of spontaneous kissing in a phone booth or eating an occasional hamburger…Obsessing about your health doesn’t actually make you healthier. The fact of the matter is, Carlos, our bodies are decaying at every moment, regardless of what we do. Living is bad for your health.”
“It doesn’t have to be.”
“Maybe if you live in an antiseptic bubble specially designed by the CDC it doesn’t. But in a place like New York City, you’re fighting a pointless battle. You can either embrace the dirt and the germs as part of the risky joy of living in an exciting, overpopulated metropolis, or you can spend lots of mental real estate obsessing over whether you touched a few extra microbes when you got on the subway.”
They walked in silence for a few more minutes. The powerful logic behind Carolina’s arguments only aggravated the mix of embarrassment and insecurity that he felt. These emotions were in addition to the very jealousy that spawned the whole exchange. Now that Carlos felt self-conscious about his mysophobia and theoretically replaceable by someone like Fernando, it became all the more crucial to assert his dominance in the relationship. He had to test her devotion to him. And he had to prove that he was above all of these issues – that he could just walk away from the whole thing if she wasn’t willing to accede to his demands, no matter how unreasonable they were.
Carlos finally broke their silent walk, after mustering the courage to state his ultimatum. “I can’t date a smoker, Carolina.”
“What are you trying to say, Carlos?”
“I…I…It’s…It’s really important to me…”
“This is because of Fernando isn’t it?”
“No! It has nothing to do with that!” Carlos angrily denied. “Before I ever met you, before I ever knew about your trysts with the church, I always knew that I would never be with a smoker. Period. Don’t try to complicate this….Because….Because it’s really simple….It’s me or the cigarettes.”
“You’re not saying what I think you’re saying.”
“Carolina, I’ll give you a month to quit…But that’s it.”
She stopped walking. He stopped after her.
She looked him in the eye. “Are you serious?”
“As serious as lung cancer,” he replied.
Carolina’s brow became crinkled in a torrent of confused emotions.
“Well in that case I don’t need a month,” she began. “I’ll quit right now.” A tear rolled down one of her cheeks and she turned around and ran.
For a few minutes, Carlos’s wounded pride prevented him from running after her, and he just continued walking stubbornly in the same direction at the same pace, watching Carolina get farther away by the minute.
Suddenly, his memory of the tear on her face jolted him into an apologetic sprint.
By the time he got within earshot of her, her fluttering summer dress was rapidly descending the entrance stairs of the Spring Street subway station. As he ran towards the stairs, he pulled out his anti-germ gloves and put them on just before he reached the handrail. As luck would have it, when Carlos bolted down to the bottom of the stairs, the train was already there and Carolina was boarding it. His only hope of getting on and catching her was to accelerate and jump over the turnstile rather than stop long enough to get his metro card out and swipe it through one of the potentially uncooperative turnstiles.
Praying that there were no police around, he opted for the risky route and flew over the turnstile, with all of the grace of a cheetah on the hunt.
“Get away from me!” she cried in tears, as the subway train’s slamming doors barely missed Carlos’s back. As he approached her, out of breath, she began walking from train to train, figuring that the germ-filled passage between cars and the dirty tunnel air would surely deter Carlos from following her.
But Carlos was too focused on her to think any more about germs and dirt.
“I’m sorry, Carolina,” he said, following behind her, still catching his breath. “I was wrong.”
The passengers turned
their attention to the unfolding drama of a lover’s quarrel.
“Go away!” she replied, crying even more and dodging some passengers, until she got to the door and moved to the next train.
This chase continued until Carolina had exhausted all of the train cars and was in the first car of the uptown six train. By now, Carlos had caught his breath and was about ten steps from cornering Carolina.
“Leave me alone!” she said, still crying. “Go look for your fucking non-smoking, perfect girl somewhere else.”
“I’m sorry, Carolina. Really, I am…I’m so sorry,” he said, getting within just a few steps of her. “It was about Fernando. I got really jealous. In a totally idiotic and irrational kind of way. Please forgive me.”
And with that, Carolina gushed a fresh set of tears, and Carlos went up to her and cradled her in his arms. “I’m so sorry, mi amor.”
He sat her down on the subway seat, and she cried some more on his large, built chest, with his strong, tan arms around her graceful, feminine figure. When she finally looked up at Carlos, she could tell from the embarrassed look on his face that they had an audience.
Eager to add some levity to the situation, Carlos addressed everyone looking at him with heartfelt, sappy smiles. “Go ahead. I know you want to clap. You might as well,” he said as the passengers around them erupted into self-conscious laughter.
“Let’s just turn this into that cheesy, tear-jerking, Hollywood mush scene that it already looks like,” he added.
By now, Carolina was laughing too. “Come on. Put your hands together. I’ll help you out.”
Carlos began clapping, and soon everyone – including Carolina – was clapping with him.
When the clapping finally stopped, a seventy-year-old man sitting next to his wife across from the reconciled lovers launched his directorial debut of the Hollywood sap scene. “Sunny, that was great, but you’ve got to kiss her now. You know, Casablanca style.”
“You’re absolutely right,” Carlos said, as he and Carolina shared another laugh and then kissed to some more applause.
*****
The distress of nearly losing Carolina made their reconciliation almost more blissful than their initial honeymoon. Carlos and Carolina remained lip-locked for the next six subway stations, by which point they had an entirely new audience on the train with them.
After the sixth station, none of the people riding the train with them had witnessed any of the drama leading up to the passionate kissing that Carlos and Carolina were still indulging. So when the two finally came up for air, they became acutely aware of the many people in the world who are enviously, sadly, or bitterly not in love. They suddenly felt enveloped by some warm and mystical energy that protected them from the cold faces of the alienated passengers surrounding them. Yet they were still aware of these passengers who seemed to resent a couple that was so happily together in the presence of individuals so miserably alone.
As if in deference to the ever-present possibility that they too, at some point, might end up like the unhappy people standing around them, Carolina asked Carlos, in an irresistibly childlike way, “Do you think we’ll always be in love, Carlos?”
“Yes,” he replied, with the resounding certainty of scientific fact.
“But…But what about the cigarettes?” she asked, smiling at how absurd the whole issue now seemed.
“We’ll work it out,” he replied, with the same self-conscious smile. “In fact, I figured out a whole compromise while running after you.”
“You did?”
“We’ll go on a two year plan.”
“What do you mean?”
“In two years, you won’t be smoking cigarettes and I won’t have mysophobia.”
“Really?” she asked, her face full of wonder and hope.
“Yeah. I’ll see a therapist. I can beat this thing if you can quit smoking.”
“You can?”
And with that, Carlos smiled at Carolina, and gave her another kiss. He then removed the anti-germ glove from his right hand, inserted his index finger into his mouth just enough to wet the tip. Carolina watched in awe as Carlos turned around and drew a small heart shape on the dirty, dusty subway train window behind them, and then, in the middle, wrote “C+C.”
She smiled dreamily, and the two kissed again as Carlos discreetly wiped his finger against his pants, trying to remove the dirt.
Chapter 8
Evan’s Bad Trip to the Hospital
From the moment Evan passed out to the moment he regained consciousness, his mind drifted like a lifesaver bobbing about on a stormy sea of surreal hallucinations. His strange and oneiric thoughts shifted about in this twilight zone of illusion with the same rhythm as the occasional bumps of the ambulance conveying him to the hospital.
First, he saw his parents sitting next to him in the ambulance. They looked very disappointed.
“Victoria, I told you we should have had another child. Just in case this one turned out to be a letdown.”
“Oh stop it, Frank. He’s a good boy…Aren’t you, Evan? If you would have just listened to us. We told you never to bring girls to the house. This is isn’t a playground. This is a respectable Upper West Side apartment, and we can’t have our neighbors getting the wrong idea about our family.”
“Victoria, that’s not the point. He shouldn’t be starting with girls in the first place. Not before college anyway. Evan, high school is the time to focus on getting into college. Girls are a waste of time right now. Just like all of that creative writing you do. You have to focus your energies on more practical things. Focus on finding yourself a solid career path. Like accounting or law or medicine.”
“Evan, you’re father’s right. Now look what’s happened to you.”
The ambulance slowed down as the cars in front of its whiny siren gradually cleared out.
“Frank, we have to get out of here because I’ve got some spaghetti on the stove.”
Evan’s parents moved to the back of the ambulance and his father opened the rear door for Evan’s mother. She stepped out and his father followed with these parting words: “Sorry to leave you like this, son. But dinner will get cold. We’ll come visit you in the hospital. Victoria, make sure you save some spaghetti for Evan. We’ll bring it to him in the Tupperware.”
As the ambulance began to move again, Evan saw himself surrounded in the back of the vehicle by all of the major characters of that disastrous night: Tina, Sayvyer, Alexandra, her giant Samoan boyfriend, and Brandy and Bonnie.
“Now do you see why I played you like that?” Tina said to him. She turned to the others and continued. “I have to screen guys carefully so that I don’t take home anyone like this.”
“Why didn’t you just write down my phone number, Evan?” Sayvyer asked. “We could have been happily dating by now, instead of sharing this ambulance ride.”
“Don’t be so hard on him, guys. I’m really the one responsible for this mess,” Alexandra began. “None of this would have happened to him, had I not dumped him…I’m so sorry for all of this, Evan. You’re really a great guy, but I just wasn’t feeling it…I needed a change…”
“You should have quit while you were ahead, Evan,” her Samoan boyfriend added. “She said no more charity fucks. That means go home and jerk off. And if you call her again, what happened to you tonight will feel like a bubble bath massage.”
“You shudda just paid fo’ yo’ blowjob, Sexy Evan,” Brandy said. “It wudda been so much better fo’ both of us…You think I liked bitin’ down on that shit?…I kept tryin’ tell you that you get what you pay fo’, but you wouldn’t listen…”
“Forget it, Brandy,” Bonnie said, flipping through Evan’s wallet. “In the end, we got paid with some fat-ass interest. Come on. Let’s get back to the car. I see a payin’ customer waiting for us.”
Bonnie led the way, followed by Brandy. The others filed out of the back of the ambulance, until everyone but Alexandra had exited from the back of the vehicle. She gave
him one last word of advice.
“Evan, you really should make up with your buddy Narc. You let a good friendship end over something stupid. And if he had been with you tonight, none of this would have happened.”
She blew Evan a kiss goodbye and then left.
The vehicle remained empty for a few moments, until Delilah Nakova appeared, all alone, in front of Evan, with a bright halo around her.
Delilah Nakova was universally adored as a charming, intelligent, and stunning starlet. Born in Prague to a Czech father and an African-American mother, the exotic, green-eyed, mocha-skinned, five-foot-six actress was discovered at the age of thirteen in the luggage pick-up area of JFK airport, when the Nakova family had arrived in New York City for the first time that Delilah would call it home.
Given Delilah Nakova’s fame, much of her biography was common knowledge. But after randomly running into her at a party about a year and a half earlier, Evan fell obsessively in love with the celebrity and researched virtually every publicly available fact about her.
In the ambulance, floating in front of Delilah Nakova’s angelic face, a hologram-like film of her remarkable life story played for a few moments. Evan witnessed the moment when the female forty-something talent scout first found the teen actress while walking next to the Nakova family at JFK airport. The agent marveled at how charismatically and convincingly the little girl was imitating some of the rude airport personnel, and how easily Delilah slipped from Czech into perfect English. She followed Delilah and her parents to the taxi area, and then persuaded them to let her share their cab and pay for it. During the cab ride, she convinced Delilah’s parents to entrust their daughter to her professional management and to enroll the young girl in acting classes.
