Читать книгу A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant's Son - Sergio Troncoso - Страница 10

A LIVING MUSEUM OF LOVE

Before Sarah or anyone else downstairs came up to Stanley’s bathroom, Carlos took the Cialis and jammed it in his pocket. No one would miss one bottle in a cabinet with maybe fifteen different prescriptions sitting beside them. Did Carlos have any clue what they’re for? No. He studied revolutionary movements in Mexico, not pharmaceuticals. Stanley’s daughters—Carlos’s wife Sarah and his sister-in-law Deborah—would soon throw away the lot, and Carlos didn’t care about the cufflinks, watches, and shotguns Deborah’s husband Sam coveted from his dead father-in-law. Okay, here I am, the Mexican stealing from my father-in-law. How crass is that? But Stan won’t need these anymore. Carlos alternately stared in the mirror and then turned to study the pills still left in the bottle he’d just stolen. Would he dare take one to see what would happen? He had already slipped two of the best old Playboys from Stanley’s musty stacks in the attic: Jenny McCarthy, October 1993, and Stephanie Seymour, March 1991.

Three months ago, Stanley had died of a heart attack, and their house on the Merrimack River in Newburyport, Massachusetts would be up for sale in six weeks. Carlos thought about this grand old house, or at least how grand it had once seemed to him as a Harvard undergraduate from El Paso, Texas. Three decades ago. When he still wore more t-shirts and blue jeans than button-down Oxfords and khakis. When Sarah was this wicked-smart Jewish girl from the suburbs of Boston who loved canoeing and spoke Spanish perfectly, one of the many attributes Carlos’s father and mother would come to adore about her. Three decades ago. Before graduate school, their children Jonathan and Ethan, and New York’s Upper Westside. Before the “You-are-not-a-Jew” tomahawk to his chest by his future mother-in-law, Nancy, at the announcement of their betrothal. Nancy, Stanley’s wife from Waban. Nancy, who had too often blurted put-downs from her cushioned throne in her kitchen like a rugelach bursting with nuts and raisins. Nancy who now, with slight dementia, sat helplessly, her face lost in the flow of the river, and smiled distractedly at her daughters and son and even her Mexican-American son-in-law. Carlos even loved his mother-in-law, despite the memory of her old attacks against “the Spaniard” her daughter was marrying. Was it the dementia or simply time and Carlos’s stubbornness that had worn away his mother-in-law’s hatred and pettiness? Was it his good relationship with his father-in-law, the erudite oncologist and once-Conservative Jew from Manhattan, who appreciated that his son-in-law had scored a tenured job at Columbia University, his old alma mater? Who knows what changes the human heart. Who knows if it changes at all. Maybe the objects around it simply change too, so the heart-in-the-world is only an older heart lost in a different world. The question then becomes: Are we the same person as our younger selves, or a collection of different selves in new worlds, or something disquietly suspended between the past and the present?

Carlos remembered the first week he had really met the Mondsheins in Newburyport, when Sarah and he were writing their senior theses, she on the literature of revolution in Latin America—Mariano Azuela, José Vasconcelos, Martín Luis Guzman—and he on the Mexican Revolution itself, a historian-in-the-making. He remembered Nancy’s “Spaniard” comment, which red-faced Sarah corrected in her offhanded way. Carlos also remembered making love to Sarah at the Mondscheins after a day of writing and work. In her old bedroom, while her parents slept downstairs, Sarah encouraging him, “As long as we keep quiet.” She had jammed towels at the bottom of her bedroom door. The college boyfriend, Carlos couldn’t believe her parents had allowed him to stay not just one night, but an entire week, to write their magnum opuses of their undergraduate years. He could only imagine his mother barging in with a cast-iron skillet to smash his head if ever he dared to bring a girl home and close his bedroom door in Ysleta. Or what his father would do, calling the father of the girl, the two joining together, with baseball bats, to teach these sinvergüenzas how to respect a Mexican home. Newburyport was like hitting the Mexican lottery for young Carlos: from the panoramic view of the Merrimack River in their living room with a black Steinway grand piano nobody played, to delicious Sarah every night, kind and sweet Sarah, Sarah whom he would marry years later. And now Newburyport, this house along the river, would be dismantled, sold, the Mondscheins but a memory. The patriarch was dead: Stanley Phillip Mondshein. He had indeed created different selves. Oncologist who had saved many lives and wouldn’t stop lecturing his children about the country’s healthcare problems. Intellectual who read David McCullough, Walter Isaacson, and Playboy. Jewish macho who was a revelation to his son-in-law from the United States-Mexico border. The Cialis jingled in Carlos’s pocket as he walked into Sarah’s old bedroom with its sunflowers-on-lime-green wallpaper and a human-size, stuffed green frog collapsed in one corner.

“Ready to go?” he asked a few minutes later as Sarah entered the room. She wasn’t quite packed yet. They still had a long drive to New York City. Was she about to cry? Carlos jammed the Cialis deeper into a running sneaker. “What’s wrong?”

“My dad…it’s so sad.”

Carlos hugged her. He had always loved her scent, which wasn’t flowery or sweet, not like licorice or cinnamon, just Sarah’s musky smell. He kissed her on the lips, kissed her big blue eyes which he never tired of studying. Oddly, they were her father’s eyes. Sarah also had her mother’s ample hips. In Carlos’s mind, after three decades of being together, Sarah was still perfect, still the one he wanted, even if, if…well, she… said nothing, did nothing. This nothing in between them like a series of black walls nobody wanted to touch. Still love. But now with decades of nothingness to fill up the space in between… only walls he would occasionally make a half-hearted effort to breach…walls separating him from who he had once been on the border, for better or for worse. “Thank you for spending so much time here. You didn’t have to. Just one more weekend, and we’ll be done. Is that okay?”

“Of course. I’ll be here. Where else am I going to be? You have any more boxes that need to go to the Dumpster? Anything else for the Highlander? I think we could get one or two more boxes in the back underneath your mother’s wooden bench. There’s still room.”

“I got a text from Jonathan. He said he was going out with some friends tonight,” she said, wrapping her arms around her husband. For years, Sarah had relished losing herself in him. Carlos missed these impromptu hugs so much.

“On a school night? Doesn’t he have a term paper due this week?” Carlos pulled away, too tense to hold her anymore.

“Please don’t yell at him. Please, Carlos. He’s doing fine.”

“Is that good enough for you? That’s the reason Ethan doesn’t drive, the reason Jonathan will be lucky to get into Fordham in three years. You don’t push them. You cover for them. I was driving at thirteen—”

“’Cause your father needed someone else to haul cinderblocks, I know.”

“Why are you interrupting me? Don’t interrupt me. Am I wrong? Ethan should’ve gone twice to the driving school this weekend. What’s his excuse this time? You let him off the hook. I would’ve forced him to practice with me if we were in New York. Saturday and Sunday. He’s a smart kid, at least he’s got that, but you don’t learn to drive by thinking about it. You gotta get your ass behind the wheel.”

“Carlos, please. Let’s talk about it on the way home, okay. Deborah’s choosing what Oriental rugs she wants, and what’s left will be mine. Maybe one more box after that. Then we can go.”

“Deborah’s choosing ‘her rugs’? I thought you were going to divide them. Even. Please, don’t be a dupe.”

“I got the china I wanted. Dad’s paintings. You want anything else? Just shove it in the car. Please. Mom doesn’t want much at Arbor Gardens. Whatever doesn’t fit, we’ll pick up next week.”

“And your sister got the nicest pieces of furniture. The grandfather clock from Sweden. The Shaker table and chairs. Even the chipper-shredder and your father’s antique motorcycle.” Carlos had often disliked how his sister-in-law smiled to get her way, how she slyly turned conversations to her “brilliant” kids and her cocker spaniel, how she pretended to care about others. Sarah, Deborah, and even Sam were all black-belts in passive aggression. For three decades, Carlos thought himself an amateur taking lessons from pros. In Ysleta, he would’ve simply shoved one of his brothers in the chest if they had crossed him.

“Deborah’s the one who found Arbor Gardens. She’s arranged for all the painting to be done for Mom’s rooms. Getting the furniture she wants moved there. She’s been packing her all morning. We’re almost done.”

“Okay, fine. Deborah’s done a lot. Your mom okay? I mean, all of you are going through her stuff, and she just sits there staring at the river. She doesn’t have a choice, I know. But has she said anything to you? How’s she feeling about all this commotion around her?”

“She’s happy to have a nice place to go. I think she’ll love Arbor Gardens.”

“Your mom, when I talked to her, when I brought her coffee this morning, she apologized to me. She apologized for treating me badly. She told me I was a good husband.” Carlos could see Sarah getting teary-eyed again.

“You see, she’s not evil. She loves you, Carlos. So did my dad. He knew you had started from nothing, just like he did. He always admired that.”

“I know, I know,” Carlos said, his voice breaking just once. He did feel some sort of allegiance to Stanley. From the very first day in Newburyport, Carlos had never felt adequate about who he was, a poor kid from the border. Without support, without encouragement, he dared to choose the life of the mind, instead of becoming a lawyer, which he had thought about, which would have brought immediate recognition from his mother-in-law Nancy, his sister-in-law and her husband, and their friends. Carlos’s father and mother thought their son was crazy: the life of the mind was not for a Chicano from El Paso. “Can you make a living as a historian?” his father had said in Ysleta years ago. “Are you out of your goddamn mind? You’re turning down law school?” Sarah was the one who gave him the space and time to achieve his doctorate, Sarah was the one who had always earned more money than him, even after his tenure as a professor, and Sarah was the one most proud when his first and second books won accolades, despite that she had sacrificed her time with Ethan and Jonathan as children to become a partner in her law firm. For years, they had made their uncommon bond work, but Sarah had never forgiven Carlos for depriving her of the motherhood she had envisioned for herself. Ironically, only his father-in-law had truly understood Carlos. His Jewish ‘other father’ who had always wanted to write a book, but never had. The doctor-intellectual who never tired of arguing history and politics at the Newburyport kitchen table. Stanley Phillip Mondshein. Turn any name in the sun and one will always discover a new refraction of dark and light. “We’ll come back as often as we have to. Make sure your mother’s taken care of. That’s what your father would have wanted.”

“Thank you. It’s not too much driving?”

“Five hundred miles each weekend. But it’s fine. We need to do it. You need to be here with your mother. She didn’t remember, by the way.”

“Who didn’t remember?” Sarah asked, already on her knees, packing her suitcase. Her sneakers, shoes, pants, a few family photographs for their New York apartment. Her head was but a few inches from Carlos’s waist, and he remembered—how could he not?—how a young Sarah used to smile slyly at him for no reason, without warning, and just start to unbuckle his belt, and unzip his khakis… What is wrong with me? What the hell is wrong with me? Carlos thought.

“Your mother,” Carlos said, sitting down on the bed and adjusting his pants. “She didn’t remember what she said when we told her we were engaged. She didn’t remember what she said at our wedding, in the kitchen downstairs. She didn’t remember. But she was sorry.”

“Well, that’s how it is. Her memory comes and goes. I’m glad she said she was sorry. She probably remembers she said something bad. I know she does.”

“I just brought her the coffee and she blurted it out. Even if she doesn’t quite remember why, I’m still glad she said it. It meant a lot to me.” Carlos forced himself not to get choked up. Why does it still matter to me? Why am I still fighting battles decades old?

“I love you,” Sarah said.

After three more trips to the Dumpster in the driveway to dispose of what all of them did not want, their cars full, they were done. Perhaps one more visit to Massachusetts next weekend would finish the job of cleaning out Sarah and her sister’s childhood home.

Carlos and Sarah drove for four hours, from Interstate 495 South to 90 West, the Mass Pike, to I-84, to Route 15, which after New Haven became the Merritt Parkway, to the Hutchinson River Parkway, joining the Cross County Parkway, finally to 9A South and Manhattan’s Upper Westside. Carlos memorized the route like the lines on his face. Sarah never drove anymore. Sometimes he imagined he was a lighter-skinned Morgan Freeman, “Driving Ms. Sarah,” without the hat. Carlos often made life convenient for his wife, dropping her off in front of their apartment, after which he drove three subway-stops away to dump the Highlander in their garage just west of Lincoln Center. She texted him they needed whole milk for tomorrow’s coffee. Carlos walked home, not really wanting to get there quickly, unless he was more exhausted than he was. Tomorrow he would prepare for his classes and finish that research paper on Zapata in the stacks of Butler. At home Sarah would be talking to Jonathan or Ethan, if they were around, and getting dinner ready. He would be just like an invisible father-butler, in the way, trying to find a Yankees game on TV, feeling that distant look in Sarah’s eyes every time she walked into their bedroom. Why are we even together anymore? Why isn’t she more affectionate? Why does she torture me like that? She got everything she wanted. And now she hates me? It’s never enough. But why am I blaming her? Maybe there’s a problem with me.

Carlos hated himself for wasting time with these thoughts as he walked north on Broadway to stretch his legs. It was a gorgeous October day in Manhattan. He had forced her to work, when young Sarah would have been quite happy as a stay-at-home mom. That’s what love did: it warped them into different selves. His schedule was much more flexible than hers, which she had never stopped resenting. For her, weekends became sacrosanct time to be with Jonathan and Ethan. Carlos thought they should already have learned to be on their own and not be depending on their mother to remind them constantly about college applications, term papers, driving lessons. The Mondscheins were like that: always on top of their children, a family trait they had passed from generation to generation. Can anyone ever escape these cycles of history within a family? Carlos never forgot when he asked Sarah a question at the Newburyport kitchen table years ago, and her mother Nancy, without skipping a beat, answered for her daughter, as if Sarah had not been a New York lawyer but still a teenager in Massachusetts. That’s how it often was in that family. His parents from Juárez loved him, but that meant they pushed him out of the house and encouraged him to take fifteen-mile bike-rides on weekends by himself—as a grade-schooler, through traffic, with only a “God be with you!” at his back. After Carlos had announced to his parents (who didn’t speak much English) that he wanted to apply to colleges in Boston, and after he was accepted to a school he had never visited and in a state he knew nothing about, his father handed him three hundred dollars. “The rest is up to you, Carlos.” The first and only time his parents visited him in college was when he graduated. It was brutal, but also clarifying.

“Excuse me,” Carlos said to Sarah as he worked his way around her in the kitchen to put the milk in the refrigerator. He had waved at eighteen-year-old Ethan on the couch, engrossed in his computer. To interrupt him, Carlos walked over and kissed his son on the forehead. Sarah was chopping a tomato and mozzarella in slices. His younger son Jonathan was nowhere in sight. Carlos had overheard their conversation about Ethan’s “personal essay” for college. This past summer Carlos had driven Ethan and Sarah to a dozen colleges, from Maine to Pennsylvania and back.

“Dinner will be ready in about fifteen minutes.”

“Okay, thank you. Ethan. Ethan—” Carlos said, as soon as his son looked up from the screen. “I’m happy to look at the essay too, when you’re ready. I wrote about my abuelita and how much she had meant to me in El Paso. She had shot and—”

“—killed a man who attempted to rape her during the Revolution. I know. Great story. Thanks, Dad. I’m gonna have Mom look at my essay first, if that’s okay.”

“Of course.” Carlos stared at Sarah for a moment. She hadn’t looked up from her cutting board.

“I’ll show it to you by the end of the week, okay?”

“Yes, of course. Whenever you want. I’ll be ready.”

Later that night, in the semi-darkness still made possible by the micro-blinds in their bedroom, when Sarah reached over perfunctorily to kiss him goodnight, Carlos noted the chill on her lips, noticed they only remained on his cheek a second (never an instant longer), noticed she never pressed her body insistently into his anymore to say, “You’re not tired, are you? What if I…you know…get ready? I miss you.” For months, and then a year, he had initiated their lovemaking until it occurred to him that she didn’t want to make love anymore, that she did it because she had slept with him for decades, but not because she wanted to be with him. There was no great argument. No smashing doors closed. No walking out. No drama at all. Just a cold, friendly kiss that burned on his lips for many minutes after he could hear her softly snoring asleep. Wiping that kiss away in the darkness was always what allowed him to get some rest. Does everybody reach a point in life when you’re dying more than you’re living?

The fall was his favorite time in New York, breezy and cool, with that anticipation of the holidays at the end of the year, that excitement at the beginning of every academic year lingering in the air. At Columbia University, the young women still sunbathed next to the statue of Alma Mater on the steps. In front of Butler Library, a young man in a red t-shirt, with a goatee, leaped miraculously through the air and grabbed a Frisbee and slid on the grass, like an outfielder snagging a fly ball in shallow centerfield in a spectacular play for the Yankees. Carlos had never been that carefree as an undergraduate, never that fit or confident, but he liked seeing those young people. He loved teaching them Mexican history. He imagined them as selves of what he could have been, perhaps how his sons would be in college, without the abject poverty of the border like a boulder strapped to the back of their heads, without the fear of the self that does not belong, without that weakness that distrusts and dismisses its own voice. Sarah had helped him through all of that. He would always be loyal to Sarah in his heart because of her patience with him. If they could just break down these walls between them—after the kids left for college?—then maybe they could thrive again together, maybe they could recapture a new version of their relationship. Was it too late for another metamorphosis?

A student in his seminar on “Major Battles of the Mexican Revolution,” had asked him a series of questions, which preoccupied his mind like fireflies flittering around a porch light.

Carlos flashed his ID to the guard at the library entrance. The guard grinned at him, he knew Carlos well, he recognized him, but Carlos could not help but be formal, a mask he donned to keep anyone from bothering him. Intimidation. It worked.

That inquisitive young woman in his seminar reminded him of Christina Sierra, a girl he had a crush on at Ysleta High School in El Paso. Chocolate brown hair. Black coal eyes. Her skin so clear and pallid that it seemed to shimmer.

Like his seminar student, Christina had also owned a slim and pretty figure. But that’s not why Carlos had “loved” Christina, as much as a chubby, geeky high-school senior can pine for a friend without actually doing anything about it. Plenty of girls from Ysleta High were gorgeous, even voluptuous. Christina wasn’t like that necessarily. Yet she was smart, she was eloquent. She gleefully argued with young Carlos, and he never intimidated her. That was her attraction: Christina Sierra was an aggressive, intelligent, pretty Chicana who was his equal. She wasn’t like his mother, who obeyed his father out of instinct and fear. She wasn’t like many of the other girls at Ysleta High who obsessed about hair and makeup and the stupidities of fashion, or flirted with the jocks, or ass-kissed the popular teachers, or pretended to be rich when no one in Ysleta was really rich. Christina was “modern,” that’s how teenage Carlos had phrased it to himself.

That’s why he went away to college, to find more modern women and men, to become one. That’s why he fell in love with Sarah, a confident college student, and why he still loved her. The young woman in his history seminar possessed that same magical mixture Sarah had: nerve, beauty, intelligence, and youth. Always a remarkable whole.

Carlos thought about the exchange in class earlier that day, the past often the present in his mind.

“Professor Garcia, I understand how Villa’s decisions before and during Celaya put him in such a precarious military position that he had to resort to desperate measures. But I have a more philosophical question. I don’t know if we have a few minutes just to talk about it, before we end our class. But…well…why do we study history, really? Why does it matter to study history in general, and why this history in particular? About Villa, for example?”

“Well, Natalie, that’s an important question to end our discussion with. I think the broad answer is that we study history to study how people and societies work, but even more importantly, how they change. History, in a way, is a laboratory of facts, what actually happened to determine our present, and these happenings are complex, with no easy answers, and a lot of missed opportunities. This particular history we are studying in a way explains Mexico and the government formed after 1917. For example, if Villa had appreciated Obregón’s defensive postures at Celaya early, if El General had used his cavalry to outmaneuver Obregón, instead of the frontal attacks that so decimated the División del Norte…if Villa had used reserve forces to counteract Obregón’s maneuvers during the second battle in April of 1915… or if Villa had retreated to engage Obregón at a more favorable spot, where the Constitutionalists would not be so defensively entrenched… the course of the Revolution would have been different. Would Villa have eventually defeated the Constitutionalists if he had avoided the disasters of Celaya? Maybe, maybe not. But if he had avoided Celaya by adapting to and learning from the modern warfare of Obregón, then Mexico could be very different today. Perhaps a country implementing more of the Revolution, rather than paying only lip-service to it.” Carlos was in full lecture mode for a few seconds, as his over-subscribed seminar of twenty-two students listened attentively. He rarely turned away any junior or senior who wanted to take his seminar, and lately even his lecture course on Latin American social movements had been packed. The chairman of his department had just asked him if he wanted to be Director of Undergraduate Studies for the next three years.