When Tito Loved Clara (31 page)

He had told her that there was an empty apartment in his father's building and that they could use it while his parents were away. The apartment would be empty until the end of the month—Tito was supposed to clean and paint it before his mother and father returned from their second honeymoon. It suddenly seemed urgent to have this final meeting with him, to do the thing they had been building toward all spring and summer. In her heart, she had always known that their relationship would not survive her departure for Cornell. She planned to sever all ties to the neighborhood, and Tito, she knew, would always be tied to the neighborhood.

Clara told her father that there was an all-day orientation at Hunter the following Thursday. Then, during her lunch break, she walked to the phone booth on the corner and called Tito to tell him that Thursday she could come to see him. Now there was something other than the escape to occupy her mind.

The early part of the week went by. During the day, she worked in the store; in the evening, she did her chores at home; late at night, she quietly went through her meager possessions, selecting the few items that she would pack in her school satchel and a plastic shopping bag. Having never gone on vacation, having not flown on a plane since coming to New York, Clara did not own a suitcase.

Thursday came and, at breakfast, she tried to act like it was nothing special. She hadn't dressed for the occasion, choosing jeans and a white blouse. She had a three-ring binder and a couple of pens to make it look official.

“What time will you be coming back?” asked her father.

“I don't know. Like I told you, it's an all-day thing. I'll be back for supper.”

“You be careful on the subway. Don't let anyone squeeze into a seat beside you. If they do that, you stand up.”

“Yes, Papi.”

“Maybe you should cover yourself up. Put on a sweater or something.”

“It's August,” she said.

“I know, I know. The classrooms might be airconditioned at the school, You never know.” He extended his forefingers like two erect nipples.

“Don't worry, Papi. I know how to look after myself.”

She walked to the Dyckman Street station and, instead of taking the train downtown, rode uptown to the last stop, 207th Street. From there, she made her way to Tito's building.

He answered the door looking nervous, which only made her nervous. Immediately, he tried to kiss her, but she moved away.

“So, come on, show me the place,” she said, hoping to buy her-self a little time, to calm herself down. She didn't feel excited at all. She just felt worried, afraid.

Tito smiled and bowed. “Right this way, ma'am.” He showed her a bedroom near the entrance to apartment, telling her it was her study, pointing out the bookcases. “I had your diploma from Cornell framed and put up on the wall.”

“That's very thoughtful of you,” she said. He seemed to understand what was going on, that he needed to make her feel comfortable, that he needed to seduce her all over again. He made a few attempts to take her hand or kiss her cheek, but they were playful. Many men, she thought, would have grabbed her, forced themselves on her. But Tito was his father's son, a gentleman.

There was food in the kitchen and a bottle of wine chilling in the fridge. “You hoping to get lucky, or something?” she asked, which made him laugh.

“Hoping.” He said it in such a way that she knew if nothing happened between them this afternoon, he would wait. He would not force her. The futility of his patience chastened her. She would need to give him something.

They made their way through the rest of his tour, which ended at a second bedroom, where a sleeping bag had been laid on the floor and made up with clean linens like a proper bed.

“Let's try it out,” she said, and lowered herself onto the sleeping bag, slipping off her sandals. Tito sat down next to her, but she got up again and went to the window, still anxious. A moment later, he was there behind her, his hands on her hips, his chest pressing gently against her back. She could smell him, a faint whiff of cologne mixed with fresh sweat. Slowly, he turned her around and reached up and squeezed the flesh of her earlobe. It was something he liked to do, like a cat swatting a ball of yarn. Her earlobe must have been some kind of pressure point, because his squeezing of it always relaxed her, always turned her on. With his other hand, he swept his fingers across her throat in a gesture as soft as a breeze. Whatever he was doing was working. She felt desire, like the tickle of someone's breath between her legs.

The hand that had been at her neck reached behind her, up under her blouse, the fingers pressing against the small of her back. Almost of its own accord, her mouth opened to kiss him.

W
HEN IT WAS
over, she cried, small spasm-like sobs, not much louder than hiccups. She and Tito were mostly naked, mostly uncovered on the sleeping bag, cooling off after the heat of sex.

“What?” Tito asked. “Did I hurt you?”

“No, no,” she said. “I'm sorry.” It had been uncomfortable, at times awkward, but also pleasurable, the first taste of something she wanted more of.

“What is it? Are you OK?”

“I'm fine,” she said.

“Are you hungry? We've got all that food.”

“Yes,” she said. “I am hungry.” She wiped her nose on her wrist. He got up and went into the kitchen, and while he was in there, heating the food in the microwave, popping the cork on the wine, she decided: She wasn't going to tell him. She wasn't going to ruin this by saying goodbye.

E
ARLY IN THE
morning on Sunday, when everyone else in the house was asleep, Clara got out of bed and made her final rounds, her farewell tour. She was still a little sore from the sex three days earlier. It was not an unpleasant feeling, a tenderness, a reminder of Tito she could carry with her into her new life (un-aware as she was of the much more enduring reminder that was already growing and dividing within her).

The dawn came later and later every day. Now, at a quarter to seven, the house was filled with the murky light of hazy late summer. When she had first been brought to New York, Sunday was a church day. Dolores insisted that they all attend Mass, a ritual Clara's father endured for a time because his wife was still undergoing a temporary kindling of religious faith from surviving the accident. It had stopped not long after Efran was born, when sleep became more important than church. Sleep had consumed Sunday mornings ever since.

Clara went down to the basement, to the room where she used to hang the laundry in the years before her father bought the dryer. It was now a kind of storage area and workshop for renovations to the house, renovations that had taken on the status of an elderly relative who would not die. Down there, she found what she had been looking for—her last piece of business before she left, a fare-well gesture for Dolores, which, after a few minutes of labor, she left on the kitchen table.

As she went back upstairs, she heard explosions and gunfire coming from the living room. Efran was awake, watching cartoons,
sneaking them in before their father woke up. She left him alone, went up to her room. Her satchel and a plastic Mandee bag were behind her bed. She looked around at the unadorned space where she had spent the last twelve years. It had been not much better than a cell. She nodded, as if to affirm this thought and then, as softly as she could, she climbed the stairs to the third floor, where she would have a good view of the street in front of the house. She wondered how this was going to work. Were they coming in a car? In a taxi? Would they knock?

The third floor showed a few improvements from the days when she used it as a refuge from Dolores. The holes in the plaster had been repaired. New windows had been installed to cut down drafts and reduce heating costs. But it still needed paint, still needed wiring, still needed the long-promised second bathroom to be installed. Here she was at last. She was not going to fly out of there as she had so often dreamed as a child. She would walk out the door, into daylight.

A black cab came to a stop, double-parked in front of the house, its windows rolled down. Clara could hear the voices of the people in the car discussing something. Then Yunis stepped out of the back, looking up at the house. She waved. Was it really going to be this easy?

Clara went down to her room, rushing now, not caring about waking anyone up. She retrieved her bags and descended to the ground floor. On her way to the front door, she walked into the den. Efran, in pajamas, was lying on the couch watching
Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers.

“I'm leaving,” she said.

“Where are you going?”

“Away from here,” she said.

He sat up, suddenly aware that something out of the ordinary was taking place. “What?”

“Goodbye.”

She did not lock the front door behind her. There, on the street, was Yunis, beckoning her into the cab. Clara ran between the two parked cars and got in. Sitting behind the driver, in the back of the cab, was a middle-aged woman.

“
Hola,
Clarita,” she said.

“
Hola,
Mami.”

They hugged desperately in that backseat, her mother kissing her on the head, as Clara started to weep. Yunis got in the cab and slammed the door.

“
¡Vámonos!
” she said to the driver, and they pulled away.

Still hugging her mother, Clara looked back through the rear window as the cab descended Payson Street and her father's house shrank farther and father away. In the house, Efran would be up-stairs by now, waking her father and Dolores from their Sunday slumbers. They would shake their hangover-heavy heads. They would not understand at first what he was talking about. Her father might even tell Efran to
shut the fuck up.
But Efran would persist and finally they would understand what he was saying and they would come downstairs, her father in his baggy pajamas and his wife-beater, Dolores in a ragged housecoat, like the one she had been wearing the night Clara had first arrived in New York. They would come downstairs and look outside and see nothing and lock the front door. Then they would go into the kitchen, shaking their heads in disbelief, and in the kitchen they would see what Clara had left them as her parting gift: the pieces of Dolores's paint pole sawed into harmless foot-long sections and laid end to end. And on those pieces, they would read the message she had written in permanent marker, one word to each sawed-off piece:
You can't hurt me anymore.

In the Piper's Kilt, the four flat screens were showing two college football games and two baseball games—Rutgers, UConn, the Yankees, and the Mets, a tristate sporting flush. It was the month of transition, when both of Tito's favorite pastimes shared the city and its airwaves: summer to fall, hardball to pigskin; warm to cold, vacation to work. He was still on vacation, still had two weeks before he had to go back to Cruz Brothers. He hoped that in those two weeks he would manage a period of transition for himself, too, that he would somehow be different when he went back to work. This meeting with Clara would have a lot to do with that.

He'd arrived at one o'clock, early enough to watch two innings of the Yankees game while drinking rum and Coke to mellow himself out. The Bombers' late-summer resurgence had faded in the past week and they were behind three runs early in the game against the pesky Devil Rays. Unbelievably, it looked like they would not catch the Red Sox this year. And that, in itself, was another transition. For a decade they had always finished first.

The bar held about two dozen other customers, mostly young men in baseball caps and T-shirts. Had he been there earlier, he would likely have seen the hordes of Columbia alumni who flooded the neighborhood whenever there was a game at Baker Field. Parking was hard to find on these mornings. Tempers were short in the streets near his father's building, which were suddenly lined with a better make of car. The alumni came up from the more desirable
precincts of Manhattan, down from Westchester and Connecticut, plump, successful men decked out in baby blue attire, cheering for a historically bad team. He thought of them as an invasion force like the Mongols or the Apache:
the Alumni.

Outside, it was sunny, another in what seemed to be an endless string of beautiful September days. But inside, it was dim and seasonless—bar time. Every minute or so, Tito's eyes ticked toward the door, looking for Clara. It was ten past two and still she was not there. Was she going to stand him up? He didn't think so. He did not think there was that kind of cruelty in her. She wouldn't have called him just to do that. He took another sip of his drink.

He'd been disappointed when she'd refused his offer to drive her into the city. Having listened to countless confessions and confidences of men he barely knew in the cab of a moving truck, he'd formed the conviction that it was easier to talk about difficult things when you were not looking at the person you were talking to. The car ride would have given them that opportunity. But he understood her reasons for refusing, or thought he did. Clara did not know yet if she could trust him. She might even be a little afraid, he supposed.

Awaiting her arrival, he was reminded of the days in late August after they'd had sex in the empty apartment, the stormy, hazy, oppressive days into which the summers in New York always seemed to dwindle. He had been so self-contented, so inebriated with his love for her that he was, at first, completely unconcerned by his inability to get in touch with her. After all, she'd never been easy to reach. She'd told him that her father was making her work every day in the store and that her stepmother was on her every moment at the house. It was a family life so far removed from his own that it sometimes seemed like a fairy tale, like something Clara had made up. While he waited, Tito let himself get carried away. He imagined going to visit her at Cornell, staying in her dorm room; he pictured the two of them getting together during the Christmas break to go
ice skating and see the tree at Rockefeller Center. (His dream life, even early on, tended toward the conventional.) This was it; they were on their way.