The Way Forward Is With a Broken Heart (13 page)

He’d shrugged lamely, feeling like a cad, and said, “I’m sorry. I just knew I couldn’t be what you need.”

“Am I the only woman you’ve slept with since she’s been gone?”

And John answered truthfully, because he hated lying to women, “No.”

“You shit,” she said, scornfully. Her anger at least making John feel somewhat cleansed.

He thought about what he should tell Orelia, if the subject of his affair with Belinda (and her children, he always added under his breath, because he realized the children had been wooing him as earnestly as she: and why not, they needed a father) ever came up. Eventually he remembered her telling him about a visit from an old lover and how she had gone out with him and his wife, and how much she still liked him but also how much, unfortunately, she had liked the wife.

The thought that she was still attracted to an old lover drove John into a fit of jealousy. But Orelia had only laughed.

“Everybody I’ve ever loved, John, I still love.”

“What does that mean?” he’d asked, pouting.

“I think it means, my love, that you will always be safe.”

But he had, in imagination, invented trysts between Orelia and the old lover. He remembered Orelia had said that one of the things she’d loved about him was the fact that he dared to be daring even though he was poor.

“We’d take long trips in his raggedy car, with just enough money for gas. When we came to tollbooths we ignored them. We drove right through. We’d laugh to hear the bells go off.”

John couldn’t believe or imagine it. “Why didn’t the cops ever stop you?” he’d asked.

Orelia frowned as if she’d never wondered this herself, though of course she often had. “I don’t know. They never seemed to be
around. The real reason though,” she smiled, remembering, “is that we were charmed.”

“Charmed.” He wanted her only “charmed” life to be with him.

And one day, in the country, with Orelia puttering happily in her new home, John intercepted a letter to her from Belinda. First he sat Orelia down and told her what he thought was in the letter, then he gave it to her to read.

He was wrong to have been suspicious. Belinda was simply passing along the phone number of someone who wanted Orelia’s services as a designer, but the damage had been done.

“Oops,” said Orelia, as the letter dropped from her hands to the floor, like an egg.

There was a river, and they were sitting beside it. It was the only river Marcella had seen in New Mexico. Actually it looked like a canal, it was so straight, as was the path beside it, as was the wooden bench on which they sat. Wordlessly, as if all three had reached a common realization about straightness and man-made designs, they stood up, walked a few steps to the right of the bench, and sat down carefully in the dry grass, balancing gingerly against the pull of the sloped bank.

“We felt we must talk about things,” said Angel. He was short, pale, and closed in, his mouth tense, as if he anticipated unpleasantness. For a long time now Marcella had felt he lacked radiance. Even now, as she looked at him, she wondered: Did he ever have radiance? Or did I create it for him because his mother named him Angel?

Sally, plump and the luscious darkness of a ripe fig, sat between them, her large eyes filled with pain. She had wept so
much already she thought no more tears would come. Yet, as Angel spoke, she felt them start up behind her eyes. Damn, she thought.

Marcella also felt out of control. Here she was on a riverbank in the middle of nowhere, between her lover and her best friend, compelled, she thought, to choose between them. There was no doubt in her mind that she loved them both, and that to lose either would be devastating.

It had all started because Sally had had a dream in which she’d replaced Marcella in Angel’s arms. Marcella had simply disappeared.

“But where did I go?” Marcella had asked, as Sally told her, laughing, about the dream.

Sally didn’t know where she went. If she did she never told Marcella.

One evening when the three of them were together in Marcella’s house, with its green shutters and wine-colored walls, Sally acted out the dream, flinging herself into Angel’s arms and lying back as she’d seen Marcella do. It had been painful to watch, amazingly so.

Now Marcella struggled to articulate a feeling that seemed ridiculous, even to her.

“When you didn’t know what happened to me, I felt abandoned.”

“But it was only a dream,” said Sally, pleased that her tears had decided not to flow. Partly, she knew, because her emotions had changed. Angel, as usual, having introduced the agenda, left the two of them to pursue it; suddenly he appeared so vacant it was almost as if he were merely a form. A male form without substance, sitting between them. She wanted to smack him, and say something deeply vulgar and cruel.

Angel was in fact wishing he were someplace, anyplace, else. Marcella, whom he knew so well, was clearly suffering. Her eyes were sad and her voice shook. He felt how awkward his position was: a straw man, a hollow man, between two flesh-and-blood women. Why could he not feel himself, as he was at least capable of feeling for them?

“I thought you wanted to hurt me,” said Marcella; bravely, Angel thought, considering how she liked to act as if nothing ever could. “I also thought you …”

There was a pause, as Angel read her mind. The word she chose not to say was “cowardly.”

“I also thought you didn’t want to be responsible for it.”

“For what?” asked Sally, screwing up her face, on which the sun shone brightly, causing tiny purple shadows beneath her ears.

“For hurting me.”

“I don’t understand.”

“We are not responsible for what we dream,” said Marcella. Wearily.

Angel, from a distance, thought along with her. Yes, he mused. If you tell someone, Hey man, I dreamed about you last night and crushed your nuts with a hammer, what can they say? It was your nightmare. And yet.

“It wasn’t so much what happened in the dream, as out of it.”

“Come again,” said Sally.

“That you didn’t care what happened to me in the dream I could understand, but when I asked you what happened to me, in your imagination, while I was cooking food for you in my kitchen later, you couldn’t even invent something. I disappeared. Okay. I accept that. But what happened to me, in your mind, after you were awake?”

Sally sighed. She really hadn’t wanted to tell Marcella, who was, after all, her best friend.

“You were hit by a car,” she said. “A white Peugeot, moving very fast.”

Marcella had cooked Sally’s favorite dinner, Senegalese chicken and new potatoes in peanut sauce, and Sally had done justice to it by eating every bite on her plate. They sat by the fire after dinner listening to a new CD by a singer Marcella had heard recently in London. Just as she’d anticipated, Sally loved it. Sally had brought her seventeen-month-old grandson, and the two women took turns dancing about the room with him and smiling into his bemused, easily distractable face. During one of these dances, as Marcella swooped and swung and dipped the child to the passionate beat of the music, the phone rang.

Angel, his voice very happy and his speech quite fast, announced he was returning the call Marcella had made the night before, when she called to say good night (just because the moon was full and this had reminded her of Angel and how his fangs seemed to grow on such nights) and had gotten his answering machine. He hadn’t answered the phone he said because he’d been “with someone.” He sounded so pleased with himself, and full, Marcella could practically feel his radiance over the phone. It struck a chord in her; she had a feeling of relief.

They talked, easily, over the phone, Angel describing the color of skin of his new lover—beige, like his own—and quality of hair—curly, like his own—to Marcella, and Marcella describing her evening with Sally and little Basho to him. She mentioned the glowing fire, the crisp cold night outside, the brightness of
the moon, the satisfaction she felt sitting and talking and eating with Sally and dancing with the child, who had Sally’s dark and soulful eyes and lustrous dark brown skin. She told Angel how “in himself” he sounded and advised him to do more of whatever it was he was doing. Obviously his one night with the new love had begun to bring him back to himself.

“Don’t forget the years of therapy!” he joked, reminding her that for much of his life he’d felt unlovable. The only time he’d felt loved as a child was when his mother approved of his performance in school. He’d been a brilliant scholar, for her sake; left to himself he felt he would have been happily mediocre. He’d confused love with approval and felt condemned to perform—in every relationship.

“But I let you be an outlaw, in our relationship!” said Marcella, laughing. Recalling the tight jeans and black desperado Stetsons she’d urged him to wear if he felt like it. The shirts open to the navel and his first gold stud earring.

“Because I knew that’s what you wanted.”

“You mean even your outlaw behavior was a performance?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Well, damn,” said Marcella, feeling some of the wind of pride leaking from her sails.

She felt Angel slipping away, and with him a number of years of her life. If someone has performed the entire time they were with you what, indeed, was the quality of your life together? Who was she with? Had she been alone? She’d often felt alone, as if Angel disappeared behind his eyes or withdrew himself from his own arms and fingers. His own face and smile.

The years together were not wasted, though, she thought, hanging up the phone. Her heart had been broken so many times because of his vacantness, his inability to be there, literally,
when she needed him. Eventually, of course, it had taught her to rely on fantasies. Fantasies of other lovers who wouldn’t disappear, who would be there for her. It was at the end of her ability to create more fantasies into which to hide the impoverished nature of their relationship that she discovered how alone and lonely she felt, and woke up. A year or so after she broke up her friendship with Sally, she broke up with Angel.

It was Sally, she felt, who’d helped her. Sally and the white Peugeot. Sally who’d perhaps been able to see, as she could not, that Angel was actually oblivious to Marcella, careening wildly as he constantly was away from reality, away from himself. That he, pale and foreign, emotionally, to Marcella, had run over her, killing something in her, in his flight. And it was this that Marcella had feared about her friend’s dream. That the person in Angel’s arms hardly mattered since he himself was not really there. And that by the time of Sally’s dream, Marcella herself had already left.

After putting little Basho to bed Marcella and Sally smoked a pipe of ganja someone had left her as a gift and reclined in the Jacuzzi. The moon, nearly full but beginning to wane, lit up the valley below them and a fine mist hung in the faraway trees. The two friends marveled that after years of absence they were back in each other’s lives. It was a still, perfect night, with the fresh scent of eucalyptus wafting up from a recently planted grove.