Radio Belly (13 page)

At that, he picked up the watermelon and smashed it against the floor. “But we have food right here!” He slurped the meat rather than cutting into it the regular way. “Fruit should be an experience,” he said, sucking up seeds from his leg hair. I knew he was South American but this was the moment I
believed
it.

It wasn't until the next day that I finally got my chance to slip away to the corner store. Enough with the fruit and foreplay! I needed a moment alone and also some beef jerky. I needed to reconnect with my training.
Every client has a past,
the corporate literature read.
Never let the client run away with the interview.

“Listen,” I said when I got back to our lair. “I need to know about your past, so give me the bad news and give it to me straight. What's your damage?”

I noticed he had lit a whole bunch of candles while I was out, that he'd covered the floor with what looked like tea but was actually dried rose petals. The whole place smelled like singed grass.

“I have no past. I have only the future,” he said, and I'll admit they were words I'd waited all my life to hear.

That's when it happened.

He got down on one knee. “A wise man once said to me, only a fool rushes into love,” he said. “But I just can't help falling in love with you.” He produced a ring from behind his back. “Please give me your hand, but give me your whole life too. I just can't help falling in love with you—”

“You just said that,” I interrupted.

“Please will you marry me?” he said

Something in me went
splat:
the second most romantic moment of my life.

My answer: “Does that mean we can have sex now?”

His answer: “Let's wait until the honeymoon” and “What's a couple of weeks compared to a lifetime?”

“Okay, okay. Yes, yes, yes,” I said, because the eighties had been a long, hard decade and I was staring down a diamond and even a killer can lose her focus when she's face-to-face with the prize. After all, I had cracked the code, found the loophole. I couldn't wait to tell the girls at work. Immigrants for all! Puppy love for everyone!

“UN-FUCKING-BELIEVABLE!” FAITH SAID, fluffing her perm. We were standing in the first-floor bathroom. “You asked him about his past and he
proposed!
”

“He said ‘love,' and you haven't even had
sex!
” said Ginger, hiking up her nylons.

“That is
so
totally romantic!” Tiffany said, hairspraying her bangs.

Then they started in with the questions:

Faith: “Is he gay? Check if his fingernails are manicured.”

Ginger: “Is he an ex-con? Check if his clothes are way out of style.”

Tiffany: “How did he propose? Was it
so
romantic?”

I told them the story. How a wise old man once told Paolo that only a fool would rush into love—

“Wait, aren't those Elvis lyrics?” Faith interrupted. She started humming. They all did. Crooning Paolo's proposal to some tune they all knew.

“‘Only Fools Rush In.' It
is
an Elvis song,” said Ginger. “My parents had their first dance to that song.”

“Wait. That doesn't make it any less romantic, does it?” asked Tiffany. “Maybe he's never heard the song.”

“Maybe he's a whole new type,” Faith said, spraying perfume into the air and ducking under it, “working a whole new angle we've never seen before.”

All four of us looked at each other, inhaled, choked on perfume.

THE NEXT FEW weeks Paolo chased me around the house asking me endless wedding questions. He'd been to the immigration office to get something called a fiancé visa and was a little overexcited. We lived in one of those fifties-style apartments where all the rooms open onto one another. I would come home from work and he'd follow me from the kitchen to the dining room to the living room to the bedroom to the bathroom, calling his questions after me: “Indoor or outdoor?” he wanted to know. “Winter or spring? Tiered cake or slab cake?”

“What's that?” I'd call back. “I can't hear you.”

NEAR THE END of January, Mum called with a whole new lineup. A dentist and a banker. A lawyer and a realtor. One was a widower, which might've been tempting once.

“No can do,” I said.

“What does that mean, sweetie? Speak properly.”

“Means I'm busy, Mum. Like, marathon busy.”

Paolo had finally caught up to me and was leaning in the door frame, listening.

He pointed to the wedding magazine in his hand and mouthed, “Tell her.” Those full-moon eyes, his pouty shoulders.

I broke it to Mum as slowly as possible, in a roundabout way, but it didn't help. “Paul-
who?
” she screeched.

“Pow-low,” I corrected.

“Po-elo,” she said. “Aren't things moving a bit
fast?
Shouldn't we
meet
him first? You
know
your father's not very good with accents.”

“Like this, Mum: Pow-low. And it's not too fast.”

“Paul-oh,” she said. “Oh dear. I just saw a movie about this. He isn't looking for citizenship is he? Is
that
what the rush is all about?” Her questions were ice cubes. They chilled and then stung and then numbed.

“Just call him Paul,” I said. “Paul is fine.”

THAT NIGHT WHILE Paolo called around to different wedding venues, I pulled my old notebooks down from my highest bookshelves. What I found there, in amongst the descriptions of my dream partner, the lists of “Top Ten Most Romantic Gestures” and “Five Best Proposals Ever,” made the skin under my engagement ring itch.
Not afraid to speak of the future. Unconventional, exotic,
I had written.
Paints toes, plays with hair—not just after sex.
There was even a photo of a shirtless Hawaiian man serenading a woman with a ukulele, even an article about a sweet Russian couple who'd saved themselves until marriage. I couldn't believe what I was reading. I had wanted this once. I had dreamed Paolo long ago, down to every last detail and now he had appeared.

THE NEXT MORNING I made Paolo drag his four boxes out from the back of my closet. We were sitting on my bedroom floor—speechless, surrounded by old photos, books, letters and diaries, everything in Spanish and coated in thick South American dust—when the phone started to ring. We sat upright, like squirrels sensing a storm. Our eyes locked onto each other for four whole rings before the machine picked up. Then Mum's voice filled the apartment.

“Listen, honey, this Paul-oh. I just didn't have a good feeling so I called a lawyer. It doesn't look good. Call me back.”

“So you
do
have a past?” I said looking at Paolo's belongings all around us.

My finger had swollen up overnight—red and tight under my ring.
Of course
he had a past.
Every
man has a past: it was the number one rule. I was used to a long line of exes stretching off into the distance, winking and waving like the bitches they are, each having left her mark, the different dents and bruises that made up the man before me—we of the first floor had ways of dealing with exes—but this was something else.

He reached across and squeezed my hand. “More importantly, I have a future,” he said. I wanted to believe him, but my mother was still in the air.

I interrogated him further while he continued to un-pack. He told me about Buenos Aires, a crumbling city with a grand old history. “Disrepair is so much more beautiful than perfection,” he said. The buildings there were organized into impenetrable city blocks locked off from the street but for a single door, he said. On the other side of that door, a long dark hallway led to the very centre of the
manzana,
or apple, as the blocks were called.

I was trying to locate myself in this anecdote. Was he the apple? Was I the worm? I was confused. Were we disrepair or perfection?

The phone was ringing again. Mum: she would call and call until she got an answer.

To a foreigner out on the street, the city might seem abandoned, he said, but at the centre of each
manzana
lay an open square of green, the
pulmón,
or lung. That's where families breathed. Women cooked and children chased dogs and old men stared at the sun, spitting sunflower seeds. He said that from a rooftop you could look out and see all those
pulmónes
as wild bursts of green amidst so much concrete.

I was starting to understand. In every man's past there is that
one,
the girl who divided his life into a before and after, the “Supreme Bitch” we the women of the first floor liked to call her.

“Remember, we are always competing with her,” we reminded each other. As staff of the second-largest hiring firm, we were in a position to run background checks on the Supreme Bitch. We could call her employer and references, or if she lived in the city, we could just stand outside her apartment and see for ourselves. We always knew exactly what we were up against.

But this Supreme Bitch wasn't a woman. She was the motherland and she had broken him long before anyone was keeping track. I was perfection and she was disrepair. I was modern, plain and tall, and she had the slow curves of history. How could I compete?

“These asylum seekers,” Mum said into the answering machine, “they're not
legal,
honey, not until they've passed this test—” there was the shuffling of paper—“this ‘Credible Fear Screening.' They've actually got to have a certain amount of
fear
about going back where they came from. And
sometimes
if there isn't enough fear, they just find someone quick to marry.” She stayed on the line, exhaling.

“So you're saying you want to go back there?” I asked. “It's sexier there? You wish you'd never left? How can it be sexier there if you weren't having sex?”

He was ripping into his last box, Styrofoam peanuts spilling everywhere when he said there was no reason to go back, that his whole family was “disappeared.”

“What do you mean
disappeared?
Just into thin air?”

“Nobody knows. Some say thrown into the river,” he said.

The very idea made me mad. I much preferred closure.

He lifted a huge wooden shield from the box. Styrofoam shrieked all around us. The shield was the size of his torso, the wood so old it looked like it had been coated in tar. He twirled it around to face me. I took one look at the shrunken black head mounted there; Mum hung up and I fainted.

When I came to he was quick with the explanations. “It's not what you think,” he said, and then explained that it was a family heirloom, a sea tortoise from his grandfather's shipping days.

I could see it then—the small beaky nose, the turned-down mouth, those sad lidded eyes. Not human. Not an old man's head shellacked and mounted to a plaque in my hallway, looking like it so badly needed a drink. More like a nailed-down worm.

“Maybe we should get that,” I croaked.

“Get what?”

“The phone.”

But the phone wasn't ringing anymore, only in my head.

He brought me water and then told me a sad story about his uncles being taken in the night, how his family was ejected so quickly from the upper-middle class that his mother had to sell off the family heirlooms one by one, how she finally died of grief. This tortoise head was the one thing she hadn't sold, the last family relic.

My limbs were tingling back to life. “So are you
really
afraid to go back there, or just a little afraid?” I asked. “And where'd you get the ring? Did you buy it before you moved in? Before you even knew me?”

He sputtered, puffing and waving his hands through the air.

In the end, I let him mount the tortoise above the TV. After all he'd been through I wanted him to feel at home. Every time I looked up at it though, I was reminded that his life was divided not just into a before and after, but also a here and there. I was reminded that I was the foreigner out on the empty street, banging on the door, wanting to be let into the
pulmón,
to breathe at the centre of things.

THERE WAS NO MORE avoiding it. It was time to meet my parents.

On our way out of the city we stopped at three different specialty shops looking for the right pot of jam. It had to be apricot, the right colour and consistency, with a smallish label. It had to be American. It couldn't be French or Italian.

Once we were on the road I explained how Dad refused to wear his hearing aid. I told Paolo about the help, not to help the help. I explained that our jam would be placed on a shelf with all the other jams in the summer kitchen, that this was
display
jam, not to be confused with the other
regular
jam.

He started to say, “Where I come from—” but his voice was cancelled out by a big rig passing in the next lane. I can only assume he ended the sentence with something like “Kids line up outside the door just to lick the empty jars.”
Where I come from
was a sentence that never ended well. I turned up the music. If we had a fight now, it would trail us like a bad smell and Mum would detect it as soon as we walked in the door.

For the rest of the ride I heard him rehearsing under his breath. “Tell me, do you have many friends in the country?” and “I hear your roses won third place at the county fair” and “May I ask what's in the soup?”

MY PARENTS BURST out of the dining room in a stampede of poodles. I had forgotten to warn Paolo about the dogs. Mum had him backed into a corner and agreeing to be “just Paul” in no time. It was then I noticed he was wearing that old corduroy jacket from our first interview along with matching pants that were hemmed too short. He looked out of place and time—a used car salesman suddenly beamed into my parents' marble foyer.