Troika (18 page)

I
’m home alone with Norma, and Julian is out for a late dinner with his friends: Roger and the Russians. After Julian made his first of many fortunes, he turned his attention to expatriating Petrov and Volokh from their dreary lives in Siberia. His two friends had remained tight after their expulsion from the orphanage at the age of sixteen, and their lives since then were defined by grueling manual labor, poverty and petty crime. It took Julian five years, several trips to Moscow and Washington, and countless millions to get them, their wives and children to the States. And now he’s got them right here in the city, and they are about the closest group I’ve ever seen. Thick as thieves. And with this group, there might be a bit of truth to the idiom.

Since Julian amassed great wealth, his interactions with others have changed in such a way that his insularity has been reinforced, for no longer are people genuine in his presence. In the orphanage,
when he had nothing, they were real—either kind or brutal or indifferent, but always real. But with his wealth now extraordinary and well known in this gossipy town, he no longer enjoys truly honest interactions with strangers.

His friends in the inner core, however, have managed to express their reverence and unwavering loyalty and have coupled that with playful ridicule. It is the ridicule, good-natured, that Julian misses most—the therapeutic effect of being forced not to think too highly of oneself, not to buy into the myth that wealth, the
creation
of wealth, assigns to that person a wisdom, a morality or a competence that exceeds those who are less successful financially. The great American myth, Julian calls it.

I’m right in the middle of this group, cozy and safe under its protective cloak. There are others who dance along the perimeter, people who for any number of reasons are not fully embraced by Julian; it could be a shameless self-promotion or the hint of pathological narcissism or a nauseating deference that will cause Julian to keep someone at a safe distance. And I guess that Perla is somewhere near the periphery now, a tiny, curvy figure in the distance. But I can feel her moving closer to us. And I wonder, if she makes it here, will she be additive or displacing?

After Norma works her magic to get me properly positioned, I sit in a fluffy chair in the living room. I am as comfortable as my condition will permit, and I can’t decide if I want to read yet another rock-and-roll memoir, a genre that I’ve been loving lately, or if I should close my eyes for a few minutes. While I am considering my next move, Norma stands in front of the window and looks out to the park.

“Pretty night,” she says. “The museum’s all lit up and a nice moon. A
crescent
moon.”

I lean forward and to the right to get a better view of the sky. “I
can’t see,” I say, frustrated by my inability to view the moon from this perspective. “What does it look like?”

Norma studies the moon. “It’s thin, real thin, just a little bit of light on the side. It’s got color, which you don’t see much. Orange, maybe even some red, with streaks going across it.” Norma looks at me and understands that her description, while lovely, leaves me ungratified. “You want me to get you back in the chair?” she asks, nodding in the direction of the wheelchair—a weird vehicle that sickens me with its simplicity, not much more than two engorged bicycle wheels bolted to a beach chair. “What do you think, Mum? Get you close to the window?”

I eye my wheelchair in the corner of the room. I think about the snugness that I feel in this wingback, the effort that will be required for me to transfer, and I decide that, sadly, my aversion to inconvenience exceeds my desire to witness beauty.

“No, thanks,” I say. And as I’m thinking about yet another joyous thing that gives me no joy, an intrusive thought emerges without warning or context; I think about Julian making love to another woman, to Perla—his commitment to her orgasm, his strength, his surrender upon release. There’s a surge of jealousy, searing and unexpected, that floods my bloodstream with stress hormones. “Open the window, please,” I say, my body temperature rising. “I’d like some air in here, some
fall
air.” With only the slightest flick of the wrist, Norma guides the perfectly crafted window upward.

The wind pours in from the west. It’s cool and crisp and there’s a hint of something sweet that surprises me. It’s not the autumnal sweetness of apple cider or pumpkin pie or a rural leaf burn. No, it’s something vague and alluring. “You smell that, Norma?” I ask.

As if she is a curious terrier, Norma makes a sniffing motion with her nose. “Smell what?”

“Something sweet,” I say, reaching to the side table for a brilliant
memoir by a poet and musician, a memoir about her love affair with a photographer and their life in New York. By mistake, I knock the book to the carpeted floor. “You don’t smell it?”

Norma sniffs again, this time with an exaggerated motion that contorts her entire face. “No, Mum, there’s nothing but the air.”

I reach for the book on the floor, but it is well beyond the tips of my fingers. Norma notices my struggle and crosses the room to pick it up. I close my eyes. I inhale. And there it is—that sweetness, an eclectic sweetness, paradoxical, like clove gum or a charred fig.

T
he last time I was in New York was with my father when I was nine years old and it’s one of the few childhood memories that’s just like I remembered, but now they print the calories on the menus, which seems odd, and there’s no smoking in the bars and the taxi driver told me that you can’t even have a cigarette in Times Square or Central Park.
Outdoors!
Which is something that just cannot be true, can it? In Florida, the government pretty much stays out of your hair, which is something that means a lot to us Cubans, ’cause God knows we had enough people telling us how to live our lives, and down in Florida you can do just about anything you want, carry a gun and strip fully nude and have a big fatty milkshake and probably smoke in the middle of a library if you really want. Cubans, we don’t like having one man with all the money and all the answers making up laws that’s supposed to be in our best interest. My dad used to call that
paternalismo
. And he used to say Perla,
you already have one father, and you don’t need another one telling you what to do.

I’m standing on Fifth Avenue and Seventy-sixth Street, and there’s a gorgeous old building on the corner. I look at the address on the envelope and sure enough this is where Julian lives, with his paralyzed wife, I guess, and maybe some other people that I don’t even know about yet. I cross the street so I can get a good peek into the lobby. There’s a guy in a uniform standing in front of the door and he looks like a soldier, an officer from one of those World War II movies—not one of the smart officers, but one of the goofy German guys everyone’s always fooling even though he thinks he’s in charge.

I look again at the envelope to see if there’s an apartment number or a floor, but there’s only the address. I look up at the building and count the stories. It looks like there’s fourteen, maybe fifteen, and I wonder if these people are so rich that they have more than one floor. I start to shake a little and I’m thinking that maybe I’m not too comfortable being away from Florida. Maybe I should just go over to the Doll House, ’cause I know a couple of girls from Miami who work there and I can crash at their place for the night. But I hear they’re getting in trouble lately, dabbling in drugs—meth and X, which is a really strange combination I think—and they’ve always got sketchy boyfriends, tough guys from places like Albania and Serbia who scare the crap out of me.

On the tenth floor, there’s an open window and it’s the only open window in the building. I can see an arm hanging out, a woman’s arm, dark-skinned and thick. That must be somebody’s maid, I think. But then I get real angry at myself for thinking so racist, ’cause I’m a Cuban girl and I know what it’s like when fools make assumptions about you based on nothing. And why
can
’
t
a black girl own a fancy place like that? It’s a possibility, right? I’m watching her arm and it’s so still that I wonder if it’s real or a mannequin. But
then her head pops out of the window. She’s wearing a uniform, sort of like a nurse, and I guess that means she works there, ’cause no way a nurse can afford a place like this. Or maybe she just happens to be a really rich black nurse. Or maybe she does live there and her husband’s got a nurse fetish, likes to have his temperature taken from behind.

My mind’s racing now and coming up with so many crazy ideas, each one canceling out the last, that I’m getting anxious and afraid I’m gonna have one of those dissociating moments again. I think about my comfort zone now and how I’m already so far out of it and so uncomfortable that I don’t think I can take much more. I figure I’ll walk over to the next avenue, which turns out to be Madison, and get a snack and settle myself down.

Turns out there’s not much going on at night on Madison, but I find a deli a couple blocks down and get a little bite to eat. And when the guy behind the counter tells me how much a soda, an apple and a bag of chips costs, I’m thinking that people up here are totally nuts. ’Cause if an apple, chips and a soda cost almost as much as a lap dance, you got a serious problem on your hands. A serious problem with
society
. I pay the money, but give the cashier a mean look just to let him know I don’t approve, not that he seems to care one damn bit.

I walk back toward Julian’s building and stand across the street. I look up again for that open window, but all the windows are closed now and I don’t remember which one it was. The doorman stands in front of the building and he’s leaning against the brass pole under the awning and he’s smoking a cigarette in a way that says he doesn’t want anyone to see that he’s smoking a cigarette. He’s holding it in his cupped hand behind his back, and I laugh ’cause I’ve seen
that
move before. He looks across the street in my direction, and I try to look away before he sees me, but too late. He nods to me. I just stand
there all still, nervous and feeling silly. He squints at me like he’s trying to get a good look at my face. And then he holds up his cigarette, above his head, and yells out
want a smoke?

I’m not a smoker, but I shrug my shoulders and walk across the street toward the man. I walk right up to him all confident, even though I’m not. He says
evening
, nothing sketchy or sleazy, but real sweet like he’s bored and so happy to have contact with someone that he doesn’t see every day of his life, someone he doesn’t work for. Good evening, I say, and he pulls out a pack of cigarettes and offers them to me. Smoke? he asks. No, thanks. And we both stand there by the side of the awning with the brass poles, just like the ones at the club, but these are shinier and they must get polished all the time. I take a look at him and I’m guessing he’s mid-fifties—a little puffy with a gray moustache and the funny uniform that’s got to make a man feel like he’s being dressed up like a clown for someone else’s amusement.

He bends back a bit at the waist, hands on hips, then points to the sky and says cool moon, huh? I look up and there it is, crescent and hanging low to the right. It’s got a reddish look to it, orange, which is something that I’d figure you see in a desert or in the Caribbean, but not right here in the middle of New York City. It
is
a cool moon, I say. And he smiles a bit and I can tell that he’s happy a young girl is talking to him and seeing the same beauty he sees and that I don’t think he’s just some nostalgic old man. We stand there for a few seconds, just looking up at that funny-colored moon, and I say does Julian live here? Julian Pravdin?

The doorman stares at me. He takes another drag of his cigarette and flicks it with his middle finger and thumb into the street, a perfect shot so it lands right in the center of a puddle and fizzles into nothing. You Perla? he asks, all matter-of-fact.

Well, I’m not sure I’ve ever been so shocked in my life, but I try to act real cool and nod yes. He opens the front door for me and tells me come on in, we’ve been expecting you. I enter the lobby, and he points to an elevator at the end of the hall and says tenth floor, Perla, I’ll send you up.

I
get a bit of a chill and ask Norma to close the window. Again, with the tiniest flick of the wrist, she slides the window downward. She approaches me and looks at her watch.

“Let me take a look at your bag,” she says. She leans over and unties the sash around my silk robe. She opens the robe and looks at my midsection. “Almost full,” she says, removing two rubber gloves from her pocket.

“How’s the color?” I ask.

“All good.”

Norma twists the clasp and removes the bag. One drop of urine, warm and slick, lands on the band above my waist—and I enjoy the sensation. Norma wipes it from my skin and then disappears into the bathroom. She returns five minutes later with a clean, empty bag that she attaches to the tube. Then she lifts the memoir off the
armrest and takes a look at the cover, at the black-and-white photo of the author and her lover.

“I know him,” she says. “
Knew
him.”

“You did?”

Norma pulls the book closer to her face and examines the photograph. “He took a photo of my cousin, you know, in the eighties. He’s passed. Mikey.” She crosses herself. “The same thing that got most of those boys back then, damn shame. They had no idea, no one did. All so innocent, every one of ’em. My aunt still has that photo, black-and-white just like this one.”

After six years together, Norma continues to reveal herself to me episodically. I guess that I do the same with her. “Really . . . I’d like to see that photo one day.”

“One day, Mum.”

“I’m tired,” I say. “Let’s get ready for bed.”

Norma places the book on the side table, then leans down and places her wrists under my arms. She spreads her strong legs shoulder width apart and prepares to lift me off the wingback and into the wheelchair.

“A one . . . and a two . . . and a . . .”

Norma pauses before she gets to three—not a long pause, but an almost undetectable hesitation, as if she’s got a tickle in the back of her throat. And in that hesitation, that briefest moment of suspension, there is a knock at the door.