Читать книгу The Amado Women - Désirée Zamorano - Страница 8

It was the end of a bright sparkling March day. Celeste sat at her favorite Italian restaurant in San Jose having a glass of wine with Victor Resnick. “Thank you, Victor, once again, for the referrals. It’s been a very lucrative year.”

Victor waved his hand and sipped at his wine. “It embarrasses me that you feel you need to bring me here and thank me. You do both me and your clients a service. Who else am I going to send them to?”

He said that with his familiar lopsided grin. When most men his age seemed to be losing their hair, his kept sprouting out into impossibly militant curls. How many times had Celeste thought her life would be so much simpler if only she could conjure the necessary erotic feelings for this man?

The waiter set a platter of antipasti down between them. Victor raised his eyebrows, then helped himself to half of the mozzarella and a slice of the salami. “The clients I have that are the hardest to work with are the ones who don’t call you. Half way through the settlement proceedings, they’re kicking and screaming at me.” He ate the cheese in one bite and shook his head. “These women. You know as well as I do that most of the time they’ve dug their own grave. What’s that phrase? The suspension of disbelief. They sure as hell got that down.”

Celeste smiled and said, “Is that wife number two or number three that you’re talking about?”

“Ms. Amado, you offend me deeply. Wives number two and three signed solid prenups. There were no negotiations, and, if they had read what they had signed, there would have been no surprises.”

Celeste smiled at Victor again and shook her head. What a pragmatist. Ah, the pinot bianco was so cool and crisp, Celeste didn’t realize she had finished her glass. Victor filled hers, then his.

“What about you?” Victor said, with less dissatisfaction on his face and a hint of keen curiosity. “You and Keith still—.”

Celeste shook her head. “You know that I gave him his pink slip. A while back.”

Victor finished the last drop of wine, set his glass down with fervor, sat back and waved a finger at her. “This isn’t right, Celeste. I see now this meal is founded on false pretenses. You’re plotting my seduction.”

Celeste laughed. “You are one of the most insightful men I’ve ever known.”

“Hmm. I suppose I was hoping you wouldn’t have found that quite so funny.”

The waiter deftly removed their empty plates and changed the glassware. He returned with a bottle of red.

As Victor inspected, sipped and savored, Celeste glanced around the restaurant. She recognized a couple in the corner. She’d have to say hello before they left. She turned to Victor and saw him frowning.

“Something wrong with the wine?”

He shook his head. “I don’t understand why you’re not with someone,” he said.

“Why aren’t you with someone?”

“Me? Everyone knows I’m merely between wives. You, Celeste, you of all people, should know you’re between husbands. But you have to know that in order to realize that.”

“Victor, you’re very sweet to care.”

Victor stared at Celeste. “I mean it,” he said, “you’re too beautiful and too smart to squander this life, Celeste. You and I both know the world’s not just about money.”

She said, “I have two little nieces who remind me of that every time I see them. Miriam, I swear, she’s so grown up for eight years old. So smart. And Becky, I think she’s like my mother and my sister combined.” The same silky skin and bony body of Nataly. That same mischievous smile.

Victor shook his head. The sides of his face shook ever so slightly with him. “You see, that’s what I mean. You need a man, and you need a kid.”

“Jesus, Vic, look, I thought the unwritten agreement here was you speak about your love life, and I talk about business.” Celeste watched Victor set his fork down. There was a rupture going on inside of her.

“But come on—”

“Could we change the subject, Vic? Let’s not spoil this wonderful meal by talking about me? Really, who the hell cares?” She was not going to trot out that story of Michael. Display Skye, turn her into a wound that time still had yet to heal. She sipped her wine. Maybe that would quell what was going on inside.

“I do, Celeste,” Victor said, picking up his fork and looking down at his plate.

“Once again you’re the better man, because I don’t.”

The next morning—what a morning! Celeste had already had two clients. Both of them made her so angry she wanted to shake them.

Client #1: For the past fifteen years, she had been receiving statements from two different brokers and not opened a single envelope. She brought all of the (unopened) statements to Celeste.

Client #2: A young woman named Andrea Paz, clearly anxious, very attractive, very demure. She had a court settlement worth $100,000. Ms. Paz didn’t go into the details of the settlement, but for some reason Celeste thought it was related to sexual harassment.

“I’d like to be able to invest $50,000 for my children, for their college,” Ms. Paz had said. That had quite literally filled Celeste’s day with sunshine, and her business woman’s heart with joy. Halfway through the necessary questions, Celeste asked her what she was doing with the other half of the settlement.

“My husband invested it in his brother’s boss’ business.”

Celeste nodded, very slowly. “Did you happen to bring a copy of the paperwork?”

“What paperwork?” Andrea Paz asked, her large innocent eyes making her look fifteen, not twenty-seven. Celeste gritted her teeth and inwardly promised herself to make this money grow for Andrea’s sons.

Client #1’s statements revealed that one brokerage firm had kept her funds in a money market fund for the past fifteen years, where it had shrunk a bit because of the management fees. That was far better, however, than the other brokerage firm, which had simply churned and churned the money until they had the temerity to be billing her!

What was it about women that made them refuse to look? Okay, maybe once they looked they couldn’t see, couldn’t recognize the problem or the indicators, couldn’t decipher the financial statement. But they had to look first, in order to realize it.

What made them think that the money would take care of itself or that the money, their money, would be better thrust blindly into the hands of a stranger?

Celeste got so angry with these women—these women whose anxieties, neuroses and prayers were layered on to their funds. Money was neutral! Money can’t spend or invest itself, she wanted to yell at Client #1.

What the hell does your husband’s brother’s boss know about investing? she wanted to yell at Client #2. But she couldn’t. She knew they had both used all of their emotional reserve to just enter her office. No use scolding a person for that. She knew how to treat women like this, coddle them more gently than she would her two young nieces. Otherwise they would bolt, and who knew what kind of swindler would find them next?

What were these women so terrified of? To Celeste, the unknown was more terrifying.

Celeste sipped her coffee. She knew her own sin had been pride. She was once Celeste Amado, eighteen years old, National Merit Scholar, perfect 1600 on her SATs, invitations to attend nearly every Ivy League School back East and a hundred private colleges throughout the country. Celeste Amado, something bright and shiny, even to herself, an eighteen-year-old Celeste who had left midway through an insipid church service, choking on her tears. She wished she were far away. She wished it was next year.

“Whatever it is,” her mother said, following her, putting her cool hand on Celeste’s hot cheek, “it’s not the end of the world.”

That’s exactly what it was, the end of the world. The end of her world, at any rate, and of the way she had planned on living it. So many plans, they had made her dizzy with possibility. Dizzy with being eighteen, standing on the very edge of the world and the things that are the most important, the most meaningful.

“We love you,” her mother said. This was her mother, with the golden brown eyes and gentle touch Celeste had known all her life. This was the mother who had tied her shoes as Celeste read, who still dabbed a tissue at her face as she headed out the door, who continued to tuck all three daughters in at night. This was her mother—peace, consolation, solace all wrapped into one person.

Her mother stroked her face. “Everything seems impossible when we look at it for the first time. I know you, it will work out, it will be all right.”

Celeste felt her mother’s cool hand on her face, and the tears stopped. Her mother knew her and loved her. Michael loved her. Her mother was right, it would work out. Somehow. “Mom, I’m pregnant.”

At which point her mother, Mercy Amado, began to cry.

There were women who refused to look at the truth. Celeste had borne it, faced the implications of her pregnancy head on. Celeste thought of her sister Sylvia and stilled her interior rant. As she had told Sylvia, she could only find transfers and withdrawals of funds. Legally, those funds were all Jack’s, and he could do with them as he pleased because that inheritance had been bequeathed specifically to him. Although—and this is what Celeste did not say—what kind of marriage is it where the husband hoards it all for himself?

Celeste already had a sense about what kind of marriage it was. Early in their marriage Jack had pinned her in a closet, then apologized for thinking she was Sylvia. Sylvia had laughed when Celeste told her —what else could she do? Jack was just a little drunk, a little toasted, Sylvia said.

Since their chat at the bar in Laguna back in February, Sylvia hadn’t told Celeste if she had found out or done anything further about the money. Here was another woman, her Sylvia, she was going to have to shake some sense into, very very gently.

Sylvia had graduated from the University of California at Irvine with honors in Comparative Literature. That literature had included Russian, French and ancient Greek. Raised Protestant, she joked to her Catholic friends that she had given up Spanish for Lent—and had forgotten it completely.

Her degree had prepared her for a wide variety of jobs, all of which were unpaid internships. Sylvia knew there were adults in this world whose parents would subsidize their self-actualization for any number of years, but she was not one of those. Without drama or self-pity, she went out to find a job to cover her student loans.

She worked briefly for her father as a hostess in the restaurant he managed. She went home nightly cursing the fact that her parents had never taught her Spanish. With the intensity she had reserved for Anton Chekhov and Stéphane Mallarmé, she pored over vocabulary books and 1001 Spanish verbs. After a few months, even the dishwashers understood her.

But the commute inland was gritty, the pay absurdly low. At this rate she’d still be living with her parents when she retired. And it was getting very odd at home, the phone rang and rang and when Sylvia picked up no one answered—then it was tense between her parents, Nataly was in Pasadena racking up mountains of debt at CalArts. So she shifted gears and followed her mother’s example: she applied as a substitute teacher and was quickly hired as a full-time teacher on an emergency credential and placed in a structured English immersion classroom in Anaheim.

This Lincoln Elementary looked a little like the elementary school in Compton Sylvia had attended before her family moved to the city of Orange. The classrooms were filled with blacks, Mexicans—although she was supposed to call them Hispanics—Filipinos, Asians, mixed-race kids, white kids.

She began her teaching career in January in a third-grade classroom that had had five previous substitutes.

If the mysteries of a cash register had perplexed her, its technical complexities were silly putty compared to a class of thirty-five third-graders and their exponential demands.

Sylvia would arrive at seven in the morning and leave at five-thirty in the afternoon. At home, she read wretched compositions filled with illiterate spellings and painfully formed printing. Her red pen flew across pages and pages of worksheets.

Sylvia realized a few things:

She didn’t know how to teach spelling.

She didn’t know how to teach writing.

She didn’t know how to teach math.

She threw away her red pencils. Apparently teaching was a lot more difficult than it looked.

While the students—oh my God, the beautiful students, they all looked like they could be her or her sisters or her uncles or her cousins—chased each other in the classroom, Sylvia pored over her teacher’s manual, looking for the correct phrasing.

“Maestra, maestra,” the students would say, the parents would say, with their admiring eyes, their needy eyes.

Sylvia knew she was an imposter. An imposter! And what was the point of Victor Hugo or Dostoyevsky or Anna Akhmatova or de Maupassant if she couldn’t help a classroom of eight and nine-year-olds, for God’s sake?

For the unit on Columbus, she asked her students to tell her about the longest trip they had ever taken. When she was in third grade, the longest trip her family had ever taken was an hour drive to see relatives.

She called on Robert, a slim dark boy with lightly muscled arms who had earlier demonstrated his terror of spiders.

“Two years,” he said.

“Two years, Robert? Where were you going?”

“When we walked here from El Salvador.”

Pause. Well, Columbus’ three month cruise was going to have a hard time following that. Sylvia shared the story in the staff lounge.

“You didn’t believe him, did you?” a stridently gray-haired teacher scoffed, dipping her herbal teabag into a mug. “El Salvador’s an island, for heaven’s sake, he couldn’t have walked.” Perhaps Sylvia wasn’t as underqualified and incompetent as she had feared

Carrot, stick. Carrot, stick. Carrot, stick. Carrot—stickers, praise, candy. Stick—missed recess, detention, standards, late to lunch. But still the children spilled out of their chairs, tripped each other, ran wild through the hallways and onto the playground.

“All right,” she said one Wednesday in March. “If we can get through the next two days with you following my directions, we can have a class party.”

If they had spilled out of their desks before, now they were bouncing on the table tops. Sylvia raised her voice, “And if we have a party, you can bring treats, music—”

Lena, a little girl Sylvia had seated in the front row, a little girl who never finished her work but who betrayed such powerful neglect that Sylvia rewarded her with candy anyway, said, “Ms. Amado? Ms. Amado? Music? We can bring music?”

“You betcha,” Sylvia said.

Lena’s eyes became slits as she glowered at Sylvia. Now what had she done?

She found out Thursday afternoon when the principal asked Sylvia to come to a meeting after school. Lena sat outside the principal’s office, accompanied by a woman so huge she appeared inflated.

The little girl sucked on a piece of candy Sylvia had given her just as school had ended. The principal, Ms. Marroquin—a Latina Sylvia found incredibly beautiful and incredibly intimidating—smiled at the parent, asked her into her office, then looked at Sylvia. “Come in here,” she commanded Sylvia.

Sylvia felt two sets of eyes glaring at her.

“Now,” the principal said. “Would you please explain to Lena’s mother, Mrs. Wilkinson, why you called her daughter a bitch?”

After the meeting Ms. Marroquin said, “You are warned.”

In April her toughest kid, Saul, the eleven-year-old in a class of eight and nine-year-olds, listened, rapt, as she read The Little Match Girl.

“That’s a true story, ain’t it, Ms. Amado?” he said, as Sylvia finished.

Sylvia stammered. How did Malamud put it in The Assistant? How could she translate that here? It IS the truth, it IS the truth.

“It could be,” she said. But in elementary school, you taught them that nonfiction is truth and fiction is pretend. It’s pretend.

“It’s nonfiction, ain’t it, Ms. Amado.”

“It’s fiction, Saul.”

The light in Saul’s eyes clicked off.

Days later, weeks later, Malamud’s line ran through her head: “I lie to tell the truth.” Teaching was the hardest thing she had ever done, and she was terrible at it. This was all confirmed one morning in May. She was leaning over Lena’s desk to work on her daily oral language when she heard something so strange and unfamiliar. Thuds, then grunts, then the commotion of kids.

She jolted upright, scanned around, and saw Saul sitting on top of Robert, whacking Robert’s face with all his force.

“You monster!” Sylvia shouted. “You monster!” She bumped into children and knocked over desks before yanking Saul off of Robert, dragging him by the arm and leading him to the office. “Line up outside,” she told her class, and, to her shock, they did. Two orderly lines, filled with eyes, watching her drag Saul up to Ms. Marroquin’s office. “You filthy monster,” Sylvia said, over and over again.

The next day Ms. Marroquin, petite and brittle as a bird, tough as industrial cleaner, asked her into her office a second time. She said, “Saul was beating up Robert.”

Sylvia nodded.

“You were upset.”

“Very.”

“You hit Saul.”

Sylvia froze. She wasn’t even asking her. She was telling her.

“You hit Saul.”

“No.”

“You were upset. We would all have been upset. Now I have to talk to Saul’s parents. And I need the truth. He was being violent, you needed to stop him, you hit him.”

“No, I did not. Ask the kids. Thirty kids in there could tell you I didn’t.”

“Sylvia, stop making this difficult. We have a witness.”

“Who? Lena again? Even you must have known she was lying. That whole meeting was a way of getting attention—”

Sylvia was stopped by the look on Ms. Marroquin’s face.

“I’m not stupid, Sylvia. Four children who are not Lena saw you hit Saul.”

“Oh, Christ,” Sylvia said. Her insides flipped over, and she concentrated on holding in the tears that were on the verge of bursting out.

There was to be no last day of school for Sylvia Amado. While her mother was annually showered with plastic flowers, pen and pencil sets, jewelry boxes, perfume, candy, cards and coffee, Sylvia left that day with nothing.

She was mortified. She didn’t tell anyone and pretended that she still had a job. She left for work and returned just like before. During the day, she hid in libraries and coffee shops, hoping not to run into anyone. It was a very uncomfortable month. For the very first time in her life, she couldn’t escape from the feeling of being an idiot in a classroom.

She had met Jack on the deck of a friend’s home in Laguna, overlooking the beach. They watched the waves crash, the sun set, and by the time she’d been fired, had been dating for a year. He was Jewish, God’s chosen people, her grandmother insisted. He was clever, entertaining, and she did love him, the attention he gave her and the possibilities he represented. So it was very easy to say yes when Jack asked her to marry him. Yes, she would convert to Judaism. Yes, they could live in Pasadena. Yes, yes, yes.

Tonight Sylvia cleared the table, poured herself another glass of water and sent the girls upstairs to play in their rooms. That day she had gone to buy summer clothes for the girls, and two of her credit cards were declined. Before dinner she had opened a bill from her daughters’ school, a kind, gentle letter, telling them that they were far behind in tuition payments, and if there was a significant change in the household income, to set up an appointment to talk to their financial aid office.

When Jack came home, Sylvia said, “Hey, honey, I got this letter today. Is there something I should know?”

He read the letter, crumpled it up. “It’s been handled.”

“Great,” she said. “Is there some way I could help?”

He stared at her. “I am so sick of this,” he said. The dining room lighting emphasized the highlights of his hair and made his skin look sallow. He needs more time outdoors, Sylvia thought. It had been a warm winter and he still looked as gray as a European. “Look, you think your father’s a loser, you have ‘issues’ with men, and I have to deal with the fall out. And you think what? What’s in that simple brain of yours?”

“I’m asking you if I can help,” she said, trailing him as he picked up his dinner plate, stalked grimly into the kitchen, set it down on the countertop that had set them back six thousand dollars—six thousand dollars Sylvia had argued over—how could a piece of marble be worth that? Jack made his way to the office off of the kitchen.

“I’m not going to sit here and listen to this. I have work to do,” he said. “Somebody’s got to pay the bills.”

She couldn’t help herself and followed him into the office. “Then how was that bill not paid?”

“Go the fuck away.” He didn’t even turn to face her. God, she hated that contemptuous tone of voice as if he knew everything, and she knew nothing. I know something! she wanted to shriek. Something’s not right here!

And it was eating away at her, eating at her morning and night. She tried to put on the right face for her daughters. They needed her face constant and caring and moral and right, and she needed that face for them, but she was furious with Jack.

“Fuck you, Jack,” she said.

He swiveled around and turned to look at her. Now she was afraid. “What did you say?”

“Fuck. You.”

“All right.” He pulled his belt through the pant loops. He unzipped the pants that had cost $215 at Nordstrom’s.

“You win,” Sylvia said and walked toward the office door. Don’t show fear, she thought. Shit shit shit, you fucking did it again. Can you never fucking learn? Jack was at the door before her, shutting it tight.

“I am so sick of your whiny shit,” he said. “What do you want? Huh? You want me to ask you for permission every time I take a piss? Every time I go to lunch? Or maybe you want to pay the quarterlies? Is that want you want? Take your blouse off.”

“Don’t,” was all Sylvia could say. Jack blocked the office door. On the other side of it was her kitchen, with the floor she had mopped that afternoon. Don’t make me do this, Jack, there’s no going back after this, don’t kill the little that’s left Oh, Christ, the girls, the girls. She took her blouse off. She wasn’t wearing a bra underneath.

“Turn around,” he said. She turned.

He was quick behind her, his hands all over her, strong and unyielding. “Don’t fucking ask me about my business again. It’s my business, and you don’t have the fucking brains for it, do you understand?”

He had grabbed her from behind, he was hard against her, his voice was thick. With one hand he cupped her breast. With the other he pulled down her sweatpants, pulled down her underwear.

“Don’t,” Sylvia said, in almost a whisper. What if the girls saw this? Oh, Christ, she had pushed him over the edge, Christ, just like last time. “Jack, Jack, Jack, don’t do this.”

“I’m going to fuck you,” he said. “Like you fucking deserve.”

Sylvia twisted around. “Jack, Jack, Jack, don’t do this! For God’s sake!” There were tears in her eyes and voice. Jack looked back at her, those green eyes of his cold and empty. Something flickered behind those dead eyes. He stopped.

“Get dressed,” he said, his voice still thick, his hands tucking himself back into his pants. “And don’t ask me about my business again.”

Sylvia stepped out of the office and into her kitchen, closing the door behind her. The fixtures had cost four thousand dollars. Jack had picked them out.

She threw up into the copper kitchen sink.

She ran the garbage disposal, wiped down the sink, rinsed her mouth. Her hands were shaking as she placed the dinner dishes into the dishwasher and washed the pots and pans.

She wiped the counters, swept the kitchen, then mopped the floor again.

She had made an agreement with Tamara. Tomorrow was an appointment and a promise she would keep. Why, why, why had she thought married life would be a refuge?