When Tito Loved Clara (7 page)

“Mmm,” she said. “And wine, too? You hoping to get lucky or something?”

“Hoping,” he said. She had been willing all summer, but now that they had the opportunity, she had become coy.

He walked her through the living room, pointing out the projection television and the oriental rugs. In the second bedroom, he
indicated the sleeping bag and said, “This is our new fourposter bed.”

“Let's try it out,” she said, and sat down. He got down beside her. He was desperate to feel her skin, even a glancing brush of its warmth, but, continuing to tease him, she rose again and went to the window where he had been when she rang. Tito followed like a dog. She had her back to him and he stood behind her, with his hands on her hips. She did not try to move away. He turned her around and reached up to her face, swept his fingers across her cheek and let his hand glide along her throat. He tugged at her earlobe, teasing the nub of flesh between his fingers like a little piece of dough. She was watching him, her mouth slightly open. His other hand reached behind her and curled up into the back of her blouse. She was naked beneath it and he felt the little canal of her spine between the muscles of her back, the way it flattened out just below her waist. He brought his hand away from her ear and pulled her close. Her mouth felt pulpy. They lowered themselves to the sleeping bag and she was still silent, but busy now, her hands on him, in his hair, clutching at his neck.

Tito was on his knees and she was sitting up in front of him. “Take it off me,” she said, pulling at her blouse with a gesture of impatience. Using both hands, he pulled it over her head. He bent forward to kiss her breasts but she stopped him. “These too,” she said, squirming as she unzipped her jeans and hooked her finger through a belt loop. “Take them off me.” Tito grabbed the cuffs and pulled. They came off slowly at first as her hips resisted his tugs and then they slipped quickly down her legs and she was naked on the sleeping bag before him in the broad afternoon light. Nothing about her was coy anymore and, seeing her this way, Tito was seized by a queasy sense of doubt as he realized how little he really knew her, this beautiful girl he had fantasized about for years. In all, they'd spent a dozen afternoons together. The weight of what they were doing frightened him. Suddenly, he wanted to be done
with it, to rush through the act and have it finished, to move on to the next stage of things, but she would not let him. She pushed him onto his back and slowly unbuttoned his shirt, kissing his chest after each button was unfastened.

The buzzer sounded.

“Who's that?” Clara whispered.

“Get under,” he said, ridiculously, and lifted the sheet and the blanket for her. Maybe one of the tenants had tracked him down here. Or maybe his parents had come back early. He ran to the intercom. “
¿Si?
” he said. He was still dressed and had to adjust himself.

“Yolanda?” said the voice through the speaker.

“No.” said Tito.

“Yolanda? Marta?”

“They moved,” said Tito. “They don't live here anymore.”

The buzzer sounded again, but he was already on his way back to the bedroom.

“Who was that, your other girlfriend?” Clara asked.

Tito said nothing. He took his clothes off and got into the make-shift bed with her. As he lifted the blanket and the sheet, he caught sight of her naked body again, but this time it unnerved him less. Instead, he took pleasure in it, the lovely geometry of her limbs and joints arranging themselves, her breasts swaying, gravity-tugged, and her skin puckering in tiny circles of brown gooseflesh. He felt momentarily that he had created her, willed her into being.

Clara turned and looked at him with a direct and open tenderness that he had not seen from her that afternoon. She kissed him softly, long and drawing with the mouth he had wounded in the playground many years before. Tito felt himself becoming erect again. She continued to kiss him. His tongue went into her mouth and searched for the scars on the inside of her lip. The disruption had settled them and stopped their anxious playing. Tito was not afraid now and he felt calm and watched her and saw that there was none of the nervous, flirty behavior of before. She withdrew
under the blankets, kissed him, and turned him so that he lay on his back. Then she straddled him, her body substantial and warm. Tito watched her fingers take hold of him and he felt the firm, bristly pressure as his cock was guided up inside her.

A
FEW DAYS
after the move, he returned to the apartment on Sherman Avenue. Ms. Almonte opened the door. She did not look surprised to see him.

“I've brought the key for your storage unit,” he said. “And, if you don't mind, perhaps you have time to fill out a customer satisfaction survey for me?”

She regarded him for a long moment, a gentle, condescending smile curling one side of her mouth, and then nodded. “Come in,” she said. “But you must be quiet. My mother is sleeping.” It was six-thirty in the evening. She led him into the kitchen. En route, they passed the mother, who was sitting in a recliner with her eyes closed and her mouth slightly agape, a blanket draped across her.

“Would you like something to eat? My mother made
sancocho,
” said Ms. Almonte.

“
Sancocho
? In this heat?” said Tito.

“She's always cold—it doesn't matter what the season. The
sanco-cho
helps her feel warm. It's just about all she eats these days. Would you like some?”

“Sure,” said Tito, sitting at the white, plastic-topped table. Since moving out of his parents' apartment, he'd subsisted on pizza and Chinese takeout. He could smell the
sancocho
as Ms. Almonte ladled it into the bowl. The starchy thickness of it stung his salivary glands to life.

“School opens soon, right?” he asked.

“I'm not teaching this year,” she said, bringing the two bowls to the table and sitting down opposite him.

“Did you retire?”

She laughed. “I'm not
that
old. I'm taking a sabbatical. I need to
look after my mother,” she gestured in the direction of the living room. “It's a full-time job now.”

“Why didn't you move her to Oradell? Is it OK for me to ask that?”

She gave the mildest of shrugs, no more than a wince of her bony shoulder. “My husband refused,” she said.

Tito nodded. He placed the storage key on the table between them. It was tagged with her name and the unit's location in the Cruz Brothers warehouse. Ms. Almonte did not look at the key, maintaining eye contact with him. “I know why you came back,” she said. “So let's not waste time on the survey. My mother will wake up soon and I won't be able to talk to you.”

Tito nodded again. “Are you still in touch with Clara?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “I was going to ask you the same thing.”

“When did you last hear from her?”

“It's been a long time,” she said. “Not since her first year of college. And you?”

“Around the same time,” he said.

She ate a spoonful of the
sancocho
and seemed to consider what he had said. “It's a shame,” she began.

“What?”

“That she didn't go to Cornell.”

“Uhh—yes,” said Tito. He stirred the
sancocho
with his spoon, steering a piece of carrot around the bowl.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “I see that I'm upsetting you. I didn't mean to do that.”

“None of the other Word Club girls know where she is?” asked Tito.

She shook her head. “They weren't as close as you might think. I guess Clara's whereabouts remain a mystery.” She looked at his left hand and he felt himself being assessed anew. “I take it you're not married now?”

“No,” he said.

She raised her eyebrows. “A girlfriend, at least? Surely. You're a handsome fellow, after all.”

“No,” he said, looking up from his bowl. “Not right now.”

She nodded once, a kind of directive. “You should eat your
sancocho,
”
she said. “Before it gets cold.”

A
FTERWARD, TITO GOT
in his car and drove across the bridge. It was rush hour and traffic was heavy. By the time he reached Oradell, it was dark. He parked on the street and climbed the steps, but instead of going in, he went around the side of the house, past the graves of the deceased pets and the shed where he kept the lawn equipment. He stopped at one of the back windows, hoping to spy his wife and children at play—a golden moment of domestic happiness that would affirm everything. But all he could see was a middle-aged man eating dinner alone in a room where the art had recently been removed from the walls.

The envelope must have come in the mail while she was at the airport—big as a kitchen bulletin board, with
DO NOT BEND
stamped in red letters beneath the address. She'd been expecting it, dreading it. Thomas had left it for her on the sideboard in the front hall and it was the first thing she saw as she and Deysei entered the house.

“What's that?” said her niece.

“It's nothing,” said Clara. “Just some medical records. Why don't you go upstairs and unpack? Make yourself at home. I'll call you when dinner's ready.”

“OK, Tía,” said Deysei agreeably, and climbed the steps to the sanctuary of her new room.

Clara was still reeling from her niece's revelation about Raúl, still reeling from seeing Tito Moreno in the airport. She decided she wasn't ready to look at the envelope's contents. She needed a few minutes to compose herself. The television noise coming up through the floorboards told her that Guillermo was safely in his cave; through the dining room window, she could see Thomas at the grill on the patio preparing dinner. She left the envelope and busied herself setting the table, seeking solace in the quotidian on such a non-quotidian day.

Clara took pride in setting an attractive table. One of the first things she'd done after moving out of her mother's apartment was to buy herself a set of new dishes at Fishs Eddy. While Guillermo
was still very much in the age of paper and plastic, she and Thomas regularly unfurled linen napkins into their laps, ate off their wedding china, and drank from Tyrone Crystal tumblers. She saw no point in owning these beautiful things if she wasn't going to use them. Would you buy a new car and not drive it? Would you get a new plasma television and not watch it? She'd eaten from chipped plates with bent-tined forks and pitted spoons all of her youth and she associated those indignities with where she had come from, not with where she wanted to be. Putting out her gilt-rimmed dishes every night and setting a soup spoon and dessert fork for a meal that would feature neither soup nor dessert was a daily affirmation for her. Some people leaned on Bible passages, others their bank balances: Clara had the flatware from her wedding registry.

Once the tablecloth had been changed, the napkins folded, and the places set, she crossed her ams and admired the result, quickly noticing that something was still missing—a centerpiece. In the living room, there was a vase of week-old flowers, a thank-you gift from her firm's Westlaw rep for renewing their contract. A small bouquet could probably be salvaged from them, but when she went into the living room, she discovered that the flowers were gone. Had Thomas thrown them out? Such attentive housekeeping would have been unlike him.

She walked through the kitchen to the back door and out onto the patio, where her husband stood at the grill listening to a ball game on an ancient transistor radio and drinking a bottle of beer. The radio, a shiny chrome-and-plastic tablet with its rapier-like antenna, was a relic from Thomas's adolescence, one of several out-of-date contraptions he self-consciously cherished in a kind of sentimental rebuttal to his digital-age profession. Up in his study, there was an Olympia manual typewriter so ancient that the lowercase
l
had to be used for the number 1. From time to time Thomas rolled a sheet of paper into the thing to write a letter, an actual old-fashioned letter placed in an envelope and sent through the mail to his mother in
D.C. or to one of his college friends, all of whom seemed to have made their careers in technology startups in Boston or Silicon Valley. The cackle of the keys on the platen always sounded to her like the chatter of a diabolical monster, but Thomas took inordinate pride in still using the machine. He was similarly attached to the Raleigh ten-speed that hung from hooks in their garage. Like a marine with his rifle, Thomas could disassemble and reassemble the thing blindfolded. Clara had once floated the idea of buying him a new bike—a Trek or Cannondale—but he'd shot her down. “What's wrong with my old one?” he'd asked. Back when they were dating, she had found his attachment to these objects endearing (she'd received more than a few typewritten letters from Thomas during their library-school courtship), but now that they were married, she had to admit, it bugged her. There was intransigence in it—an unwillingness to move forward, a trait, she believed, that was hampering him from finding another job, almost as if he were rhetorically still asking himself,
What was wrong with my old job?

“Hi,” she said, kissing him. He smelled of charcoal smoke and beer, and his eyes were a little swimmy, either from the smoke or the beer or both.

“Hello,” he said, and smiled a weird smile at her.

“Everything OK?” she asked.

“Sure,” he said.

“What's cooking?”

“Fish,” he said. “Salmon. I figured we'd have something light after going to Church's for lunch.”

“Sounds good,” she nodded. “By any chance did you throw out those flowers I had on the coffee table?”

“No. Guillermo knocked them over,” he said. “He was playing with that squeaky ball when he got home and bam! Down they went.”

“Oh,” she said, wincing. “What about the vase?”

“Broken,” said Thomas, “but I think a little Super Glue will put
Humpty Dumpty back together again.” He gave her that weird smile once more.