This Is How You Lose Her (3 page)

I raise my eyebrow. I thought they were South American.

We’re speaking mythically here.

Bárbaro points the light down the hole but that doesn’t improve anything.

Would you like to see inside? the Vice-President asks me.

I must have said yes, because Bárbaro gives me the flashlight and the two of them grab me by my ankles and lower me into the hole. All my coins fly out of my pockets. Bendiciones
.
I don’t see much, just some odd colors on the eroded walls, and the Vice-President’s calling down, Isn’t it beautiful?

This is the perfect place for insight, for a person to become somebody better. The Vice-President probably saw his future self hanging in this darkness, bulldozing the poor out of their shanties, and Bárbaro, too—buying a concrete house for his mother, showing her how to work the air-conditioner—but, me, all I can manage is a memory of the first time me and Magda talked. Back at Rutgers. We were waiting for an E bus together on George Street and she was wearing purple. All sorts of purple.

And that’s when I know it’s over. As soon as you start thinking about the beginning, it’s the end.

I cry, and when they pull me up the Vice-President says, indignantly, God, you don’t have to be a pussy about it.

—

T
HAT MUST HAVE
been some serious Island voodoo: the ending I saw in the cave came true. The next day we went back to the United States. Five months later I got a letter from my ex-baby. I was dating someone new, but Magda’s handwriting still blasted every molecule of air out of my lungs.

It turned out she was also going out with somebody else. A very nice guy she’d met. Dominican, like me.
Except he loves me
, she wrote.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I need to finish by showing you what kind of fool I was.

When I returned to the bungalow that night, Magda was waiting up for me. Was packed, looked like she’d been bawling.

I’m going home tomorrow, she said.

I sat down next to her. Took her hand. This can work, I said. All we have to do is try.

N
ILDA WAS MY BROTHER’S GIRLFRIEND.

This is how all these stories begin.

She was Dominican, from here, and had super-long hair, like those Pentecostal girls, and a chest you wouldn’t believe—I’m talking world-class. Rafa would sneak her down into our basement bedroom after our mother went to bed and do her to whatever was on the radio right then. The two of them had to let me stay, because if my mother heard me upstairs on the couch everybody’s ass would have been fried. And since I wasn’t about to spend my night out in the bushes this is how it was.

Rafa didn’t make no noise, just a low something that resembled breathing. Nilda was the one. She seemed to be trying to hold back from crying the whole time. It was crazy hearing her like that. The Nilda I’d grown up with was one of the quietest girls you’d ever meet. She let her hair wall away her face and read
The New Mutants,
and the only time she looked straight at anything was when she looked out a window.

But that was before she’d gotten that chest, before that slash of black hair had gone from something to pull on the bus to something to stroke in the dark. The new Nilda wore stretch pants and Iron Maiden shirts; she had already run away from her mother’s and ended up at a group home; she’d already slept with Toño and Nestor and Little Anthony from Parkwood, older guys. She crashed over at our apartment a lot because she hated her moms, who was the neighborhood borracha. In the morning she slipped out before my mother woke up and found her. Waited for heads at the bus stop, fronted like she’d come from her own place, same clothes as the day before and greasy hair so everybody thought her a skank. Waited for my brother and didn’t talk to anybody and nobody talked to her, because she’d always been one of those quiet, semi-retarded girls who you couldn’t talk to without being dragged into a whirlpool of dumb stories. If Rafa decided that he wasn’t going to school then she’d wait near our apartment until my mother left for work. Sometimes Rafa let her in right away. Sometimes he slept late and she’d wait across the street, building letters out of pebbles until she saw him crossing the living room.

She had big stupid lips and a sad moonface and the driest skin. Always rubbing lotion on it and cursing the moreno father who’d given it to her.

It seemed like she was forever waiting for my brother. Nights she’d knock and I’d let her in and we’d sit on the couch while Rafa was off at his job at the carpet factory or working out at the gym. I’d show her my newest comics and she’d read them real close, but as soon as Rafa showed up she’d throw them in my lap and jump into his arms. I missed you, she’d say in a little-girl voice, and Rafa would laugh. You should have seen him in those days: he had the face bones of a saint. Then Mami’s door would open and Rafa would detach himself and cowboy-saunter over to Mami and say, You got something for me to eat, vieja? Claro que sí, Mami’d say, trying to put her glasses on.

He had us all, the way only a pretty nigger can.

Once when Rafa was late from the job and we were alone in the apartment a long time, I asked Nilda about the group home. It was three weeks before the end of the school year and everybody had entered the do-nothing stage. I was fourteen and reading
Dhalgren
for the second time; I had an IQ that would have broken you in two but I would have traded it in for a halfway decent face in a second.

It was pretty cool up there, she said. She was pulling on the front of her halter top, trying to air her chest out. The food was bad but there were a lot of cute guys in the house with me. They all wanted me.

She started chewing on a nail. Even the guys who worked there were calling me after I left, she said.

—

T
HE ONLY REASON
Rafa went after her was because his last full-time girlfriend had gone back to Guyana—she was this dougla girl with a single eyebrow and skin to die for—and because Nilda had pushed up to him. She’d only been back from the group home a couple of months, but by then she’d already gotten a rep as a cuero. A lot of the Dominican girls in town were on some serious lockdown—we saw them on the bus and at school and maybe at the Pathmark, but since most families knew exactly what kind of tígueres were roaming the neighborhood these girls weren’t allowed to hang out. Nilda was different. She was what we called in those days brown trash. Her moms was a mean-ass drunk and always running around South Amboy with her white boyfriends—which is a way of saying Nilda could hang and, man, did she ever. Always out in the world, always cars rolling up beside her. Before I even knew she was back from the group home she got scooped up by this older nigger from the back apartments. He kept her on his dick for almost four months, and I used to see them driving around in his fucked-up rust-eaten Sunbird while I delivered my papers. Motherfucker was like three hundred years old, but because he had a car and a record collection and foto albums from his Vietnam days and because he bought her clothes to replace the old shit she was wearing, Nilda was all lost on him.

I hated this nigger with a passion, but when it came to guys there was no talking to Nilda. I used to ask her, What’s up with Wrinkle Dick? And she would get so mad she wouldn’t speak to me for days, and then I’d get this note, I want you to respect my man. Whatever, I’d write back. Then the old dude bounced, no one knew where, the usual scenario in my neighborhood, and for a couple of months she got tossed by those cats from Parkwood. On Thursdays, which was comic-book day, she’d drop in to see what I’d picked up and she’d talk to me about how unhappy she was. We’d sit together until it got dark and then her beeper would fire up and she’d peer into its display and say, I have to go. Sometimes I could grab her and pull her back on the couch, and we’d stay there a long time, me waiting for her to fall in love with me, her waiting for whatever, but other times she’d be serious. I have to go see my man, she’d say.

One of those comic-book days what she saw was my brother coming back from his five-mile run. Rafa was still boxing then and he was cut up like crazy, the muscles on his chest and abdomen so striated they looked like something out of a Frazetta drawing. He noticed her because she was wearing these ridiculous shorts and this tank that couldn’t have blocked a sneeze and a thin roll of stomach was poking from between the fabrics and he smiled at her and she got real serious and uncomfortable and he told her to fix him some iced tea and she told him to fix it himself. You a guest here, he said. You should be earning your fucking keep. He went into the shower and as soon as he did she was in the kitchen stirring and I told her to leave it, but she said, I might as well. We drank all of it.

I wanted to warn her, tell her he was a monster, but she was already headed for him at the speed of light.

The next day Rafa’s car turned up broken—what a coincidence—so he took the bus to school and when he was walking past our seat he took her hand and pulled her to her feet and she said, Get off me. Her eyes were pointed straight at the floor. I just want to show you something, he said. She was pulling with her arm but the rest of her was ready to go. Come on, Rafa said, and finally she went. Save my seat, she said over her shoulder, and I was like, Don’t worry about it. Before we even swung onto 516 Nilda was in my brother’s lap and he had his hand so far up her skirt it looked like he was performing a surgical procedure. When we were getting off the bus Rafa pulled me aside and held his hand in front of my nose. Smell this, he said. This is what’s wrong with women.

You couldn’t get anywhere near Nilda for the rest of the day. She had her hair pulled back and was glorious with triumph. Even the whitegirls knew about my overmuscled about-to-be-a-senior brother and were impressed. And while Nilda sat at the end of our lunch table and whispered to some girls, me and my boys ate our crap sandwiches and talked about the X-Men—this was back when the X-Men still made some kind of sense—and even if we didn’t want to admit it the truth was now patent and awful: all the real dope girls were headed up to the high school, like moths to a light, and there was nothing any of us younger cats could do about it. My man José Negrón—aka Joe Black—took Nilda’s defection the hardest, since he’d actually imagined he had a chance with her. Right after she got back from the group home he’d held her hand on the bus, and even though she’d gone off with other guys, he’d never forgotten it.

I was in the basement three nights later when she and Rafa did it. That first time neither of them made a sound.

—

T
HEY WENT OUT
that whole summer. I don’t remember anyone doing anything big. Me and my pathetic little crew hiked over to Morgan Creek and swam around in water stinking of leachate from the landfill; we were just getting serious about the licks that year and Joe Black was stealing bottles out of his father’s stash and we were drinking them down to the corners on the swings behind the apartments. Because of the heat and because of what I felt inside my chest a lot, I often just sat in the crib with my brother and Nilda. Rafa was tired all the time and pale: this had happened in a matter of days. I used to say, Look at you, whiteboy, and he used to say, Look at you, you black ugly nigger. He didn’t feel like doing much, and besides his car had finally broken down for real, so we would all sit in the air-conditioned apartment and watch TV. Rafa had decided he wasn’t going back to school for his senior year, and even though my moms was heartbroken and trying to guilt him into it five times a day, this was all he talked about. School had never been his gig, and after my pops left us for his twenty-five-year-old Rafa didn’t feel he needed to pretend any longer. I’d like to take a long fucking trip, he told us. See California before it slides into the ocean. California, I said. California, he said. A nigger could make a showing out there. I’d like to go there, too, Nilda said, but Rafa didn’t answer her. He had closed his eyes and you could see he was in pain.

We rarely talked about our father. Me, I was just happy not to be getting my ass kicked in anymore but once right at the beginning of the Last Great Absence I asked my brother where he thought he was, and Rafa said, Like I fucking care.

End of conversation. World without end.

On days niggers were really out of their minds with boredom we trooped down to the pool and got in for free because Rafa was boys with one of the lifeguards. I swam, Nilda went on missions around the pool just so she could show off how tight she looked in her bikini, and Rafa sprawled under the awning and took it all in. Sometimes he called me over and we’d sit together for a while and he’d close his eyes and I’d watch the water dry on my ashy legs and then he’d tell me to go back to the pool. When Nilda finished promenading and came back to where Rafa was chilling she kneeled at his side and he would kiss her real long, his hands playing up and down the length of her back. Ain’t nothing like a fifteen-year-old with a banging body, those hands seemed to be saying, at least to me.

Joe Black was always watching them. Man, he muttered, she’s so fine I’d lick her asshole
and
tell you niggers about it.

Maybe I would have thought they were cute if I hadn’t known Rafa. He might have seemed enamorao with Nilda but he also had mad girls in orbit. Like this one piece of white trash from Sayreville, and this morena from Nieuw Amsterdam Village who also slept over and sounded like a freight train when they did it. I don’t remember her name, but I do remember how her perm shone in the glow of our night-light.

In August Rafa quit his job at the carpet factory—I’m too fucking tired, he complained, and some mornings his leg bones hurt so much he couldn’t get out of bed right away. The Romans used to shatter these with iron clubs, I told him while I massaged his shins. The pain would kill you instantly. Great, he said. Cheer me up some more, you fucking bastard. One day Mami took him to the hospital for a checkup and afterward I found them sitting on the couch, both of them dressed up, watching TV like nothing had happened. They were holding hands and Mami appeared tiny next to him.

Well?

Rafa shrugged. The doc thinks I’m anemic.

Anemic ain’t bad.

Yeah, Rafa said, laughing bitterly. God bless Medicaid.

In the light of the TV, he looked terrible.

—

T
HAT WAS THE SUMMER
when everything we would become was hovering just over our heads. Girls were starting to take notice of me; I wasn’t good-looking but I listened and had boxing muscles in my arms. In another universe I probably came out OK, ended up with mad novias and jobs and a sea of love in which to swim, but in this world I had a brother who was dying of cancer and a long dark patch of life like a mile of black ice waiting for me up ahead.

One night, a couple of weeks before school started—they must have thought I was asleep—Nilda started telling Rafa about her plans for the future. I think even she knew what was about to happen. Listening to her imagining herself was about the saddest thing you ever heard. How she wanted to get away from her moms and open up a group home for runaway kids. But this one would be real cool, she said. It would be for normal kids who just got problems. She must have loved him because she went on and on. Plenty of people talk about having a flow, but that night I really heard one, something that was unbroken, that fought itself and worked together all at once. Rafa didn’t say nothing. Maybe he had his hands in her hair or maybe he was just like, Fuck you. When she finished he didn’t even say wow. I wanted to kill myself with embarrassment. About a half hour later she got up and dressed. She couldn’t see me or she would have known that I thought she was beautiful. She stepped into her pants and pulled them up in one motion, sucked in her stomach while she buttoned them. I’ll see you later, she said.

Yeah, he said.

After she walked out he put on the radio and started on the speed bag. I stopped pretending I was asleep; I sat up and watched him.

Did you guys have a fight or something?

No, he said.

Why’d she leave?

He sat down on my bed. His chest was sweating. She had to go.