Vida (3 page)

I don’t know why Lou, of all people, came for me. The whole long walk up to his place on Riverside Drive—trains were paralyzed—I kept thinking how I wished Nico had been at the door instead. Last I heard, he was in L.A. doing his musician thing. Probably not doing so well, because, I can say this now, Nico’s not really that talented. Didn’t change the way I loved him, though—like he was some kind of genius— and maybe that’s why he started to act like I was lucky to be with him. It made him hard to be around sometimes. But those lashes. They could split your will into shards.

I’m at Lou’s house, which is really the house his wife inherited from her deceased first husband. When he brought me here, he introduced me to her and the kids as his favorite student. The wife, Olive, is striking: equal parts Snow White and Nancy Wilson. A cocktail of a woman small enough to fit in Lou’s jacket pocket. She looks at me like I’m a sick person, pitying and fearful of catching what I’ve got. She has still, glossy Valium eyes and floats around the house like a spirit while the toddler twin boys roll Tonka trucks on the shag carpet, Lou makes burgers, and I sit on the sofa with Sierra, the thirteen-year-old daughter leftover from the first
marriage. She’s fat-faced but thin of body, greasy-haired with a nest of chin pimples covered in drugstore foundation, the kind I used to stuff up my sleeves along with nail polish and lipsticks with my junior-high friend Alina. We never got caught, but somehow I’ve always felt guilty, and when I go to drugstores now I want to walk up to the cashier and say, Look, I didn’t steal anything.

I’m not good with young people, or any people, really, so I ask Sierra what she wants to be when she grows up.

“A stripper, because they make a lot of money.”

I ask if her parents know and she looks at me like I’m an idiot. Asks me what I do for a living, and I think, I’m only twenty-two. I don’t do anything for a living except smoke cigarettes and throw my heart around. What I’ve got is a job, not a living.

“I’m a receptionist at an investment bank.”

Her eyes lower, mockingly. “Is that your dream come true?”

I could say investment banks happen to pay very well, but instead I try to sound adult and unaffected. “Actually, I’m looking to make a career change.”

I can’t help focusing on her clothes. Tight low jeans. A ratty blue tank with
BABYGIRL
painted in shiny stones across her cupcake-size boobies.

She wants to know about my love life.

“Do you have a boyfriend, Sabrina?”

I tell her it’s Sabina, not Sabrina, and I’m single, which sounds corny, like I’m on a dating show, and I wonder why Sierra is talking like she’s my social worker.

“Were you a virgin when you were thirteen?”

I’m trying not to embarrass us both, so I answer her as if I get asked that question at least once a day.

“I was. Yes.”

“I’m not. I’ve had sex with four guys already.”

She goes on about how the guys were older, like eighteen. I’ve got one eye on the tots on the rug, wondering if they’ll register any part of this conversation.

Another dumb question: I ask if she was in love with any of the guys, as if love is the reason everyone does the things they do.

“No. I kind of love this guy who lives on the third floor, but he’s married. Besides, I think he likes my mom, because he hangs around here a lot when Lou is in the studio. Or at your house.”

Nico thought it was strange that Lou would come over for lessons after midnight and that the one-hour lesson would extend to two or three. I explained that Lou had a packed recording schedule and his only available slots were late at
night, which suited me fine since I was a recent insomniac. Nico didn’t like that I was learning to play. I’d asked him to teach me himself a hundred times, but he always refused, so I had no choice but to find myself a teacher, and it happened that the guy who cuts my hair knew of Luscious Lou because his own wife took lessons from him.

“You just don’t want me to learn,” I said.

Nico shook his head. “You’re the one they say is unteachable.”

This was a personal jab—Nico’s area of expertise— because I’d confided in him that as a kid, I had shit skills for music. The same teacher who deemed my brother a musical prodigy said I was hopeless, which I thought meant homeless, and then my mother had to explain the difference to me. In elementary school, I couldn’t string together three notes on the recorder. In sixth grade, I was told to quit the clarinet, and when I tried out for the school choir, I was told to leave it to the girls with smooth, far-reaching voices.

By the time I linked up with Lou, Nico and I were already headed for trouble. But there were nights when I was in bed with Nico and I’d get up to answer the door and strum chords with Lou for hours while my man slept. I’d written lyrics for Nico to set to music, but he wouldn’t even look at them, so I gave them to Lou. One night, I had wet lashes, not unusual, because Nico kept me in a state of panic. Lou
looked at my sheets of paper and said, “Lets turn those wet eyes into music,” and we spent the whole night drawing melodies over chords until it sounded like a real song.

It always seemed like Lou didn’t want to go home and I never asked why, because people have their own reasons and God knows that for most of my life, home is the last place I wanted to be. Yet our lessons always felt like stolen time. When Lou left, I’d get back into bed with Nico. He’d feel me slip under the covers, reach for me, bend his head into my chest, curl into my torso for the length of the night. But in the morning his eyes would shift to derision and he’d say, “This is all wrong.
We
are all wrong.” And one day, he was gone.

After dinner, Lou reads the boys a story and stays with them until they fall asleep in their little twin beds with Snoopy sheets and padded side rails. I used to have rails like that as a kid, but I still fell out of bed all the time, landing on the rug with a thud, and sometimes I waited a long time to see if either of my parents would come running to make sure I was okay but they rarely did. Sometimes my brother would appear, because his room was just next to mine and our shared wall was as thin as tissue, even my sneezes would wake him, and Cris was very protective of his sleep. I’d be on the floor, wrapped in my blanket and looking like a
runny enchilada with the bed bumper on top of me, but he wouldn’t do anything to help me.

Lou and the wife keep talking about how lucky I am that I called in sick or I might be dead right now. Lou, who has become very religious since he turned fifty, says I should say a prayer of thanks and go light some candles at St. Patrick’s or something. He used to play with Bowie, Dylan, the Stones, all the greats. He told me he’s slept with a million women, done every drug under the sun, and it was all for nothing; at the end of the day that shit has nothing to do with music. Now Lou mostly records studio tracks for these young bands from Brooklyn, but he says they don’t have the heart needed to live music. It’s all about the heart, says Lou. The bloodier the heart, the better the music.

We’ve been watching the news since the kids went to sleep. Those images of people covered in dust. The repeated loop of the towers collapsing like a deflated carnival castle. I think of all my coworkers, people I never really took the trouble to know. Shalonie, the Jamaican mommy of two who worked the reception desk with me. All the horny banker guys would say, “Shalonie is so pretty. It’s too bad she’s all crooked,” just because one of her legs is shorter than the other and half of her drags when she walks. I hope she made it down the stairs okay.

And Wanda Rios, the HR lady who looked out for me when the executive assistants got together to complain that I
should be fired because I take one-hour lunches—more than my allotted twenty minutes—and read fashion magazines on the job. The Polish girl before me was way more serious and responsible, but she got promoted to accounting. Wanda likes me because we have the same last name though we are no relation—she’s Puerto Rican and I’m Colombian stock— and she says us Latinos have to stick together although she doesn’t speak Spanish.

These are people who had it in them to be faithful servants of the bank, hoping for holiday bonuses, a little recognition, and eventually a promotion, while I spent my days trying to get fired. Their survival is certainly worth more than mine. It’s hard to feel grateful knowing I should have been with them today. And that I cheated.

I can’t help thinking of Nico. I picture him sweaty and tan, every bit the rocker, sitting in some Silverlake bar watching the news over a beer, telling the people around him how he used to live right there, that his girl worked right there in the towers. I wonder if he’s worried about me and if, under that, there’s a trace of something more.

The last time I used the word
terrorist
in normal conversation was when I called Nico an emotional terrorist for missing my college graduation because he took his ex to
get an abortion and told me to stop being so selfish. Never mind that the news byte came from her, not him. The baby was his—the result of what he called an
isolated incident
. He managed to convince me not to give up on him, on us, even if for a while we weren’t rapturous lovers but more like two slabs of beef in a meat locker.

Does it really matter how we met? Why is that always the first question people ask? I was at a crosswalk on Lower Broadway when Nico flew by on his bike and his handlebar caught my purse strap, pulling me down into a puddle. He stopped to check if I was injured, but I received him with a blazing “Are you trying to kill me?” He balanced on his bike while some strangers helped me up, apologizing while I yelled that he was a hazard to society. Somehow we ended up kissing on the same street corner an hour later, after he’d bought me some deli roses and chocolates from Dean & Deluca.

My girlfriends considered Nico a big deal because he had gigs all over town, which might be one reason I stuck with him so long. Spaghetti-limbed, wet-lipped, and moody, broke but with the good looks and arrogance of a young hustler, as if his pockets were packed with bills. Nico, all bravado, even had my parents in the thrall of his rising star.

He didn’t smoke, but I did, and when I’d put a stem to my lips, he’d rip it from my mouth and toss it to the curb as if we were performing theater—two people playing the part of a
lovelorn couple. For my birthday Nico had my name tattooed on his neck, which was a beautiful gesture that became tiresome because he’d throw it in my face whenever we fought, pointing to his jugular, screaming, “This is how much I love you!”

I couldn’t tell any of this stuff to my family and friends or they’d think Nico and I were a pair of maniacs. But Lou listened to my stories without judging while he taught me how to fingerpick “Europa” and the song slowly came to life. When I was through he’d say, “You really love that son of a gun, don’tcha, Bean.”

I thought I was lucky to live such a palpable love. A love you could spread out on a table or, in our case, take out with the garbage. Lou says Nico reminds him of himself when he was young and stupid and that he just needs a near-death experience to teach him what’s what.

After hearing so much about us, Lou told me about him and Olive. How when he met her, he couldn’t handle her because she was everything he ever wanted in a lady: smart, fucked-up, and beautiful. They slept together and then he ditched her and went on the road with some band. She got pregnant by another guy and married him. That was Sierra’s daddy. Years later, Lou and Olive ran into each other at a wedding in Montauk. He convinced her to leave her man, but the guy died in a wreck before the divorce was final anyway. That’s how she got the apartment. “Some love
stories are just meant to be,” said Lou. “You just have to let time do its thing.”

He also told me the darker stuff. The antidepressants she often refused to take; pills meant to regulate her chemistry, keep her from hurting herself and her children. Sometimes she’d lock herself in her room for days and not even let Lou in. After an all-nighter at the studio, he sometimes found the boys in dirty clothes the next day—unbathed, unfed, crying, while Sierra did her best to keep them calm. Once or twice, she filled the house with gas from the stove, and the family survived by sheer luck and timing, which is why Lou says he’s become so religious at this juncture in his life. The suicide attempts have mostly stopped. Now the tendency is toward epic silences and occasional flashes of homicidal rage during which she might chuck a butcher knife at Lou, leaving a hole in the wall that he’ll eventually have to spackle.

Lou says Olive used to want to be an actress and people sometimes get loopy when their dreams don’t pan out. Her first husband was on some old TV show that I’ve never heard of and did several pilots, but he was mostly unemployed at the end. Sometimes Lou suspects that Olive still loves him. “It’s not her fault,” he tells me. “The guy is dead. And death is a huge aphrodisiac.”

A few hours in someone’s home and you can smell the beast within. Lou, pulling his body around under the low roof, cleaning what the wife didn’t clean, cooking what the wife didn’t cook, while she watches, smoking cigarettes at the kitchen table.

“How long are we going to go on like this?” she says low enough to believe I can’t hear from the next room.

He says he doesn’t know what she means. They’re a family. Families go through hard times. That’s what they’re designed for.

Then, just plates being washed. The rearranging of objects on the kitchen counter. I picture her rubbing out a cigarette in the clay ashtray one of the kids made her, ready to light another. His footsteps move closer to her. I feel them beside each other—see him put his hand on her shoulder. Hear him tell her, “She’ll leave tomorrow.”

Lou set me up on the sofa. Sheets, a pillow, a quilt with loose threads like dancing spiders. I won’t sleep tonight even though his building is a monastery compared to my place down in the valley of nightclubs and fire stations. I haven’t slept well in months. Ever since Nico started pulling unexplained absences. I’d ask, Where you been? And he’d say his family didn’t flee Cuba so he could be oppressed by another regime, meaning me. I’m no beggar for love, despite what you might think, so I’d kick him out and he’d howl through
the door how cruel I am, that I never loved him, that I don’t know how to love because I’m a loveless, heartless panther who’d eat her own cubs, and I’d wonder who was this girl that he was talking about, because I knew she wasn’t me.