Rust (12 page)

S
OMETHING
HAPPENS
to time in here, Vincent muses. It loses its meaning. Next week, last week, next year, five years ago, ten years from now. They all melt together.

Here you are, surrounded by a thousand guys, all in limbo.

You disappear.

You don’t even remember who you were.

Years go by.

Years and years and years.

Go by.

R
ICO
AND
Wilfredo rode Negrita a few miles along the river, past where the footpath was overgrown and, for a few hundred yards, became difficult to make headway. They pressed farther, knowing that it opened up again into a wonderland of sunflowers growing every which way. This was perhaps the most magical place in the world, Rico thought. Because of the lay of the land and the bend in the river, there was no sign of humans nor their habitat anywhere—just the river, the golden sunflowers, the blue sky, and the tops of the Manzano Mountains to the south, way off in the distance. Quiet and peaceful were words that should have described it, but they had lost their ability to capture this kind of beauty. Better to bring Margaret here than try to describe it to her.

Rico had a temptation, passing but acute, to mention to Wilfredo that he had made a new friend himself—not a
novia
by any means, but a female through and through. He stopped himself because it seemed—and was—pitiful to confide in an eleven-year-old boy. He had never been the type of man to tell his secrets. What he did was nobody’s business, and how he felt, overall and moment-to-moment, was not for public consumption either. But suddenly he just wanted to have a reason to say her name out loud.

When he arrived home just before dark, the whole house was deserted. Elena, Rosalita, Lucy, and Jessica were out having their pictures taken at some charity event sponsored by Elena’s church called, “Mothers Through the Generations”; Ana was taking a night class that didn’t release her until after nine; Maribel had a job at PetSmart and, though she got off work at seven, she rarely made it home before eleven. To be in the house all alone was a rare event, and Rico found himself wandering around, actually opening doors and peeking inside as if he had no idea who lived behind each one. They had a nice home here. They had furniture they had selected rather than inherited or collected out of junkshops as they did in the early days. The house was orderly, at least to the extent that it could be given the presence of a two year old. There were finishing touches, like a vase of fresh flowers on the kitchen table, collected from the garden outside, and seven little pots with cactuses growing in them on the window ledge. Photographs of the girls in various stages of development were framed and rested on several of the horizontal surfaces.

He sat down on the couch. It was silent, with the radio off for once and no chatter, no TV blaring, no baby screeching for whatever reason. He folded his hands in his lap. What next, he thought. Twiddle his thumbs? Rustle up something to eat? Take a long, hot shower? Take a cold one? He unlaced his work boots and took them off, and then he stretched out on the couch, adjusting one throw pillow under his neck and another one under his knees. He could hear the ticking of the kitchen clock, the hum of the cool air coming through the swamp cooler vent in the ceiling, and the motor on the fridge turning on and off at intervals. It was almost like a musical concert, he thought—a buzz here, a tick tock there, a crescendo of noise rising and falling. Dogs were barking off in the distance too—which happened one hundred percent of the time in the South Valley—and cars whose mufflers needed replacement passed by on the street. He felt a sudden urge to listen even more closely, as if once he quieted down in a quiet place—which was unusual in itself—he couldn’t stop. He even became aware of the sound of his breathing, the way it whistled a little as it formed airstreams out of his nostrils.

He listened even harder, feeling suddenly convinced that he was heading toward a place he’d never really had the chance to visit before. He closed his eyes, and it felt like a thick curtain had fallen from the top of the window frame, blocking out the details of the trumpet vines that practically cascaded in thick vines into his living room. He felt completely alert, just lying there like a lump on the sofa, as if his senses had just awakened after a long, long nap. It seemed to Rico that a space had cleared in his head; he was moving through it with no particular goal in mind, but with the same kind of curiosity that might make him pick up a stone in the yard and turn it over in his hand for no reason.

It was somewhere in this silence that he heard a message, though it didn’t come in the form of words and there was no voice attached to it. It came in the form of a certainty, a direction, a knowing that he could not escape or ignore, not if he wanted to have any respect for himself as a man and a husband. It had to do with Rosalita, with trying one more time to penetrate the shell she lived in. Because now Rico was wondering if she had somehow found for herself a place like the one he was in at this very moment. If she was so absorbed in some internal process, some way of being that had so little connection to the outer world that she had all but disappeared from it. If that was why she seemed like a ghost or a shadow.

His determination to talk to her coalesced into action, so when she went into the bedroom that night to slip into her nightie and climb into bed, he followed her, closing the door behind him. She turned from him as she quickly undid her blouse, removed her bra, and pulled the nightgown on over her head. Then she lifted it to undo her slacks and slide them down over her hips.

“Are you coming to bed already, Rico? It’s so early for you,” she said. He could tell by the way she moved like a cat toward her side of the bed that she knew he was up to something, though she had elected to play it as if it were normal for him to come in and close the door. This had not been normal for four years now.

“Rosalita, I need to talk to you,” he said.

“It’s not a good time, Rico. I’m tired. I have to be up early for work.”

“It is a good time,” he countered. “It’s the perfect time.”

Rosalita snapped back the summer bedspread and got into the bed. She propped the pillows up against the headboard and leaned against them. “Okay,” she said. “What is it that’s so important?”

Her tone, which was full of annoyance, seemed like a high wall to scale, but Rico moved to the bed and sat down next to her. “I want to talk to you,” he said.

“We’ve established that. So go ahead. I’m listening. Start.”

It seemed almost impossible to begin, given the feeling of resistance in the room. “Rosalita,” he said, “I have to tell you that . . .” Here he stopped. There were so many ways to go from here, so many emotional strands to follow, but each one was so entangled that they all felt dangerous to him. He reached for her hand, and she let him have it. He had touched her hand, even held it occasionally, countless numbers of times, even after she disconnected from him. But now he turned it over and rubbed her palm with his thumb. He looked at the lines there, her whole past, present, and future story to a gypsy fortune-teller, but a mystery to him, except that the skin still felt so soft, like a young girl’s.

“What is it, Rico,” she asked, and this time her voice was just as soft as her skin.

He looked up and saw a fluttering in her eyes that reminded him of the woman she was before she entered the deep freeze state. He felt tears, hot as molten metal, fill his eyes, though, thank God, they didn’t spill over. They glistened there, though, a source of extra tension for Rico, who had probably not cried in front of Rosalita more than five times in all their years together.

“Rosalita,” he began, and then he added, “
mi alma, mi vida, mi corazón
,” just because he had used those words so constantly in the old days, “I have to tell you that I can’t go on the way we are anymore. I can’t.”

She looked as if she was holding her breath. She said nothing, but her fingers in his hand suddenly felt cooler.

“I don’t know what happened to us—to you, Rosalita. But it has to change because I’m going crazy.” He wanted to tell her how mystified he was, how hurt if he had to be truthful about it, how his patience had finally come to an end, how their marriage had become a kind of mockery of the love that united them in the first place. How he was perilously close to thinking of himself as a man stripped of his balls, and, if he had the courage, he wanted to say how angry he was and how disappointed—things that he knew she would perceive as fighting words when all the rest were feeling words. But instead of all this, he said, “I think about sex all the time, Rosalita. Too much. I’m having fantasies, weird fantasies, the kind that make me wonder if I’m normal anymore. I’m getting a hard-on every time I turn around, and, Rosalita, I can’t hold out any more. This is it,
mujer
. Either you get over whatever-it-is you’re in and we start up again or . . .”

He had no idea how to finish the sentence. He was not a man who had a plan in mind when he brought up a subject. He had a bad enough time just putting the words together in a coherent sentence when he was under stress like this. Her summer nightgown had fallen a little low on one shoulder, and her hair, already brushed out, looked like an intense shadow designed to match her eyes.

“Is there something you want to do to me, Rico?” she asked, and her voice sounded genuine, as if she were posing a real question, maybe one with a little humor it in, too.

“Yes,” he said. “Everything.”

“Then go ahead,” she said. Just like that.

“Take that nightgown off,” he whispered, and she obediently lifted it over her head and dropped it onto the floor next to the bed. He hadn’t seen her bare breasts, except by accident, in years, and his hands moved to them. Then he fell across the bed toward her, gathering her in his arms, burying his face in her neck, breathing her in, lifting her hair, and then whispering into her ear, “Where have you been, Rosalita? Where have you been?”

M
ARGARET
HAD
been in the same position on the couch for three hours, poring over the library books on the nature of metal, before she noticed that the pillow she’d wedged in behind her back against the wooden arm of the futon couch had slipped. The arm was digging into her back right across the place where the lower ribs attach, and she finally, with a little groan, pushed herself forward for relief. She had purchased this couch at the St. Vincent de Paul used furniture store for thirty dollars. The workers there, all of whom looked like recovering alcoholics, had tied it to the roof of her Dodge Colt Vista, and back at home she had dragged it inside by herself. It was comfortable and it looked clean, the latest, and perhaps the best, in a long parade of futon couches that had come and gone from Margaret’s apartments over the years.

When Donny died, Margaret had continued to live in their place on Forty-Eighth Street, the only home she’d known for fourteen years. It had all the essentials necessary to make her feel comfortable—a coffeemaker, a queen-size bed that had been his, a color TV and radio, plates and pots, drawers full of clothing and painting supplies—but it didn’t have Donny, and just being at home there made her ache inside, an ache so deep she once caught herself reaching into the knife drawer with the idea of cutting it out. Her high school friend Christina, who was in her first year of college at the University of Pennsylvania, spent most of her spring break at Margaret’s, packing up Donny’s clothes and shoes, and lugging the boxes down the four flights of stairs to the street, where they hailed a taxi and took them to the Salvation Army drop-off point. Afterward, they had sobbed in each other’s arms as they scrubbed the apartment, top to bottom, which was Christina’s idea. She referred to it as a ritual cleansing, which Margaret thought was funny, though she didn’t say so.

At night, they would break into Donny’s private scotch stash, twelve-year-old Glenlivit, even though neither of them liked the taste. In any case, it wasn’t the taste they were after—it was the place it took them, very efficiently. “The quickest way out of New York,” they called it, though, truthfully, Margaret had no desire to leave and Christina missed the city so much she was thinking of transferring to NYU at the end of the year. But they needed and wanted to get to the place where they could cry even harder at the kitchen table, tell each other Donny stories, because both had loved them—told in that brogue of his that made them all seem funnier—and both had loved him.

“Remember the one about his grandfather?” Margaret would say. Donny’s grandfather had been shot by a neighbor in a drunken party brawl. When he recovered he had to appear as a witness in court, where the judge had asked, “Is it true that you were shot in the fracas?”

“I think it was a little above the fracas,” Christina would reply, imitating Donny’s brogue, and they would both laugh and cry and pour another drink.

“Remember the leprechauns?” Christina would counter. One time when they were high school sophomores, they had come back to Margaret’s apartment to find Donny and his Irish friend Pat Connelly parked at the kitchen table having an intense conversation about leprechauns. The girls had found that hilarious, and Margaret had said, “I can’t believe I come home and find two grown men in a serious discussion about the wee little people in the green suits.”