The Accidental Native (28 page)

We arrived late, and the party was in full swing. Marisol and I made the rounds congratulating the seniors and honor students,
saying our hellos to colleagues and attacking the buffet that had been catered. We sat down to eat, sometimes waving to a student or colleague coming in, chatting with Juan Cedeño and his wife and trying to get more than a grunt from Stiegler, all of whom sat on folding chairs near us. I looked up and saw Pedro Roque walk in with Carmela López, who surely had convinced him to come. Roque had been out of mind since his announced leave, staying in the shadows, where he belonged. But he had taught some of these students, shepherded them through their four or five years of studies, so who was I to expect his continued absence. Seeing him, though, upset me, filled me with anger and disgust. Marisol looked at me and whispered if I wanted to leave. He and Carmela made their rounds, skipping our table, and stood to watch the activity. Occasionally, a student approached and greeted him.

“Definitely, in a few minutes,” I responded, “but let me go to the little boys' room.” I needed to take a leak, throw some water on my face and then leave.

Granted, I didn't knock but the door wasn't locked. I opened the door and bumped into the Green-Eyed Girl brushing up her lip gloss. She was bending toward a little round mirror, her butt sticking out. She stayed in that position and smiled as I walked in. I should have walked out. But that terrific smile of hers and those big sparkling emerald eyes froze me, not to mention the awkwardness of the encounter. She continued applying lip gloss, slowly, running her index finger across her shiny lips. I scoped her curving body, her firm butt snug in tight jeans.

“Hi, professor,” she said, again smiling, this time with glittering lips. Her eyes glassy, she had the silly look of someone entertaining a comfortable buzz on a warm tropical day.

“You need to use the bathroom?”

The question was immaterial because her flashing eyes fixed on mine. We stood there just staring at each other for a few seconds.

“Why do you run away from me?” she asked. She took my hands and like an idiot I let her, and she placed them on her breasts.

“Don't you like me?” she asked, as I stood there dumbfounded, flat-footed, looking into those eyes, my hands palming her generous breasts.

I stared in wonder, studying her face in its earnest desire. She tiptoed to kiss me and her newly glossed lips, fruity and waxy, found mine and broke me from the trance. I pushed her and her breasts away.

“No, please, this isn't appropriate,” I said, turning my now flushed face away.

The slight shove shook her into embarrassment and reality.

She grinned and whispered, “I'm sorry,” and burst out of the bathroom.

I threw myself on the toilet seat, shaking my head, knowing that I was aroused, wondering what had happened.

After throwing cold water on my face, I went out ready to leave. The party was becoming livelier. The entire department, except for Foley, was in attendance. Freddie Rivas was cackling along with Iglesias for some reason. Cedeño and his wife talked. Rosas cleaned up some of the piling garbage. Micco kept asking if there was any rum in the house. The new Department Chair, I noticed, avoided looking in Roque's direction. Roque had taken a seat and sat regally and immovable as ever. The Green-Eyed Girl spotted me and turned to her friend, one of the English majors, who probably had invited her.

“Let's roll,” I whispered to Marisol.

We tossed our goodbyes to colleagues and students alike, most of them not acknowledging or noticing our departure.

I wanted to tell Marisol that same day, but couldn't. The sex thing wasn't going well for us. And I couldn't figure out how it got to the point it did. Was I to blame? Did I encourage her? Was I so in dire need of getting laid that my penis took over my better judgment? I felt terrible, and after a few days I sat down with Marisol and confessed.

“What took you so long to take your hands off her tits?”

I looked flustered, because honestly I did not know. Then Mari roughly grabbed my face in her hands.

“Honey, you did the right thing. A little slow,” she laughed, rolling her eyes, “but you did. It's obvious she has a crush on you, and she's sexy.”

“Nowhere as sexy as you,” I said, nuzzling her neck.

She slapped my thigh. “Not now, Romeo, I have papers to grade. And so do you.”

And so it went until the end of the semester. Cold turkey. We both knew we had to do something. Having submitted grades and waiting for summer classes to start, we decided it was a good time to take up Julia's offer to borrow the Luquillo condo for a weekend.

We walked the beach during sunset, had a fantastic seafood meal, shared some animated, lighthearted conversation and a bottle of wine nudged us into the mood. We felt giddy, carefree and sexy. We groped and kissed as we bounced around the elevator. I slammed open the door to the condo and carried her to the bedroom in the dark, her legs wrapped around my waist.

Outside the waves slapped the beach, the bright moonlight spread through the window and shrouded our nude bodies. Mari's perfume filled my nostrils with every deep breath I took. The food and wine lingered on our tongues and lips as we kissed.

Naked, exposed to each other, our bodies had not touched like this in months. It was electric, like our skin would pop with sparks at any moment. My hand ran up Mari's curving thighs, her back, as I kissed her navel, lost inside her skin.

The tactile journey ended as my fingertips alighted on her left breast and the lump. She shot up as soon as I stopped, pulling up the bed sheet to cover herself.

“It's nothing,” she said.

I sprung from the bed, stumbling, and turned on the table lamp to see her better. “Let me feel it again.”

“You just want to cop another feel,” she joked.

I looked at her, angry now. “Fuck, Mari. This is no joke.”

“What do you know about it?”

I looked at her, my arms crossed now. “Have you had that checked by a doctor?”

“Not yet.”

“Holy fuckin' shit,” I yelled, looking at her open-mouth and wide-eyed.

“Don't get hysterical on me, okay?”

I slid myself by her side on the bed. “How long have you known this?”

The pause infuriated me.

“Tell me!”

She started crying. “A few weeks. Oh, Rennie, I'm so scared.”

I hugged her, kissed her head, her brow.

“I didn't want you to worry,” she said in between sobs. “You've had so much on your mind.”

We held each other, rocking ourselves for a long time. Her sobs ended, and we continued embracing in silence.

“Tomorrow we'll go see a specialist.”

She nodded her wet face into my naked chest.

Looking back, the routine comforted me. From Monday to Friday, every week, for seven weeks, I drove Marisol to the Hospital Oncológico in Río Piedras for radiation therapy. Fighting a disease that causes such chaos in the body, following a regiment of procedures that, although necessary, seemed brutal and torture-like. The complete havoc it creates on the lives of patients and those they love; what it does to a person's spirit and psyche—all this was overwhelming for Marisol, of course. But also for me as I tried, as well as I could, to stand with her through that rough period.

I had inspected every inch of that waiting room, so many times. Having absorbed the purposeful sterility of it, having made symbolic acknowledgement of the burning round cell-like ceiling lamps, I felt the loneliness of sitting in interlocking chairs set against white walls, gaining only an occasional sad smile from another person waiting for a loved one to receive the fifteen to thirty minutes of high energy rays to kill rebel cells out to destroy them.

On the last session of her treatment, there were two other visitors in the waiting room. An older woman waiting for her husband who had prostate cancer and someone new, an older gentleman. When these other people got to talking, after seeing them again for a couple of weeks, they wondered why someone as young as I could be there. They were saddened to hear about Marisol, so relatively young, getting breast cancer, about our budding romance being interrupted by the disease. They were short polite conversations—no one wanted to talk much—and anyway, you weren't there for long.

Toward the end of therapy, I had read everything strewn on the coffee and end tables, so I indulged in the comfort of having the routine run its course. I tried to grade exercises I'd brought, but instead concentrated on the photos of beautiful and serene landscapes carefully placed throughout the room. That last day, I remember focusing on the beach scene, which could have been anywhere on the island: eye-popping turquoise water, oatmeal-colored sand, a barefoot, healthy, tanned couple walking arm in arm.

Marisol was worried about wearing a bathing suit after the surgery. She loved the beach so much and couldn't stand the idea of not being able to go. She said this although she had only had a lumpectomy, and the cancer had not spread to lymph nodes. But in her mind it was as if the entire breast had been forever damaged. Wearing a swimsuit was foreign, impossible now. She refused to let me see the scar. I tried to talk to her, tried to make her see the bigger picture: she was alive and her prognosis was good. But, no, she had seen the statistics, she said, and they told her that there was a 12% chance of not surviving.

In early June, the biopsy had come back positive; the tumor was malignant. Mari was devastated. The doctors told her it was stage II, a treatable cancer. But the reality was that a knife would cut inside her breast in pursuit of something potentially lethal.

At first she would not accept it. We went to another oncologist who could not believe we were seeking a second opinion on what she termed clear evidence of cancer. She told us to act quickly, now that the tumor was relatively small and the cancer highly treatable. I had to shake Mari out of her stupor. She wanted to put it off, and I kept pushing her. We had a big fight.

“I've had enough loss in my life,” I told her. “Please don't add to it.”

That kind of shook her a bit, and she relented. After surgery, she lost interest in everything. She was so depressed, she gave up her summer class, the money that went with it, along with the vacation she had planned with me to the Dominican Republic.

“You'll be the first on the list next year,” I told her.

“If I'm still alive,” she snapped back.

Julia's frequent calls during this period kept me balanced, sane. She had the uncanny ability to call when I was approaching a meltdown. At night, after one of Marisol's bad days, or struggling with doctors and appointments, or medical bills, she was there to listen to me vent. Her soothing voice told me how proud she was of me, offered help with bills, gave me advice whenever I asked. My mother gave me the boost to get up the next morning and face another day.

And those days living with Marisol were not fun. She would go off on tangents about her contaminated breasts and wondered how she could breastfeed if we ever had children. Out loud, she asked me if I would be disgusted or repulsed at her breast scar.

“I'm in love with you, not your breast.”

“That's what you say now,” she huffed. “Men are all alike.”

It was July and I was busy teaching the remedial class, which had turned out to be more difficult and challenging than Basic English. Micco had assigned me the late afternoon section, so I could drive Mari to her morning radiation therapy. When I returned from teaching the class, I'd find her with tissues crying in front of a novela. I would turn off the television and suggest running the Jacuzzi, or that I would cook up a favorite dish, without much success. During weekends, she slept late, spent mornings lying around in pajamas. In a way, I was glad that the radiation therapy had begun because it got us out of the house every day. After a therapy session, I planned outings to distract her and make the day pleasurable. She resisted, she just wanted to go home, she would say. The radiation made her tired, and she complained about the skin irritation. She became even more depressed and lost weight.

“Why couldn't the weight come off my thighs and butt?” she asked, as if I'd be stupid enough to answer that.

Even her family could not shake her moods. Marisol's parents—Don Martín and Doña Caridad—and her siblings, Nicki and Carlos, volunteered to drive Mari to the radiation sessions, but it didn't make sense. I lived with her in Baná, and they lived in San Juan. Why should they drive back and forth? They visited her when we stayed weekends in Marisol's condo, or at home in Baná, always
bringing food and gifts. That cheered her up a bit, but their leaving then made her sad and despondent. Doña Caridad cried at the end of every visit; to make it worse, Don Martín would reprimand her. Nicki ushered them into the car, rolling her eyes or shaking her head, apologizing for them. You could hear them arguing in the car as they drove away.

Puerto Rican families argued out of love and caring, but it was always loud and animated. Even the most banal discussion required wild hand motions, bodily gesticulations and rising decibels. In my own family it was the norm, and I grew up wanting to retreat somewhere all the time. I grew up avoiding confrontation, avoiding issues, skirting them, not wanting to be bothered. Being an only child helped me create a cocoon, a bubble from which I never needed to answer to other siblings as I isolated myself from my parents.

But I could not run away now. I kept my ground because life without her would be empty. Selfishly, I fought to retain that which made me feel good, and sound, and whole. There was no cocoon to run to, nowhere I could escape without the feeling of abandonment gnawing at my mind and heart. She needed me, and I had to be there for her. I was not going to lose her. But it was tough. Mari was not the best of patients. The door was tempting, such a natural and easy escape. Sometimes she pushed me toward it, when in her worst moments she claimed, always in Spanish, that I was wasting my time with a “vieja ajada, acabada,” an old decrepit woman.