Hot Sur (46 page)

From Cleve’s Notebook

I hadn’t known anything else about María Paz since the workshop at Manninpox had ended. But I thought a lot about her, all the time, I should say. I was hooked to her pain, tangled to her hair, dreaming of her eyes, maddeningly wanting to touch her legs. Who knew if I would see her again, and the uncertainty was killing me. When I tried to visit her in prison, they told me she wasn’t there anymore. Her old friends couldn’t tell me anything about her because they had not heard from her. And then one morning, I’m on Facebook and I get a friend request. I always deny them, hating these intrusions from strangers. But this one said, “Juanita wants to be your friend.” I had no idea who this Juanita was, but it was a Latina name and I immediately thought that perhaps it might help if I became friends with her in relation to María Paz. Instinct? Premonition? Neither, really, more like desperate love. How many times had I answered the phone convinced it would be her, and nothing? How many times had I followed some woman down the street thinking it could be her, and nothing? And now another time, this friend request on Facebook, which I immediately thought could be connected to her. And it was. This time it was.

María Paz had been looking for me through her friend, this Juanita getting in touch. So we arranged to meet that afternoon in Central Park, and because I was coming from the Catskills, full of hope and very jittery, I almost killed myself on the way down trying to get there on time. The meet-up was somewhere she had proposed, near the statue of Alice in Wonderland, right in the heart of the park.

I can’t say that there was anything exciting about that first moment, anything romantic. Something wasn’t right, something had broken, and things were different than they had been in Manninpox. I had spent weeks going over in my mind each of those moments of shared complicity, those sudden bursts of excitement, those shocks of illicit attraction between us. But at the park, all that was gone. In the plain light of day, in an area reserved mostly for children, with her as free as I was, no guards watching us, no rules and regulations to follow, the magic had gone. We were a couple of strangers, she without a uniform, all made-up, her hair longer, a flashy pair of earrings. Perhaps prettier than before, I’m not sure, but definitely a lot thinner. And something strange about her, as if the fire of that raw beauty that made me so insanely attracted to her had suddenly gone out. Something missing, that’s how I would put it. She looked dazed, half-asleep. I felt as if I were looking at some creature that had just risen from the dead, some being from some other reality that hadn’t fully made it into ours. I tried to convince myself that the girl of my dreams and this stranger were the same person, but something faltered in me. I went to give her a hug, see if the physical contact would thaw things a bit, but she brusquely cut me off, and I felt horrible, mistaken, ridiculous, out of my element. Later, she told me of the sudden and miraculous turn of events that had led to her freedom, which I supposed had a lot to do with this new mood between us. This woman has just come back from the underworld, I told myself, so it was natural that our world would still be a little strange to her. And what had been her first impression of me? Couldn’t have been much better. I must have seemed just like any other guy, no longer donning the writing teacher mantle, instead wearing a threadbare leather vest and boots, which were white because I had bought them in a thrift store and that was the only color available, but which aside from being white were also bulky, as if they were made for an astronaut to walk on the moon, not to mention the ugly red mark on my forehead because my helmet was one size too small. Some motorcyclists take off their helmets, tidy up their hair, and look great in a matter of minutes. I am not one of them. When I take off my helmet, I look sopped and disoriented, like a plucked chicken. The first thing María Paz asked me was if I had received her manuscript. And I said I had no idea what she was talking about. What manuscript? A very long one, she told me, and it had taken her days and days to write it while she was still in Manninpox. She was horribly disappointed when she realized I didn’t even know about it. It was clear she had put everything she had into writing her story, and that the manuscript had been lost was like a blow to the gut, one more loss among so many others. I felt like an idiot consoling her, assuring her we could find it, could find out what that woman from Staten Island who was supposed to have sent it to me did with it.

“Why did you try to send it through that woman and not your lawyer?” I asked her, and she said that there had been rumors going around that everything was going to be confiscated and she had no choice but to hand it off to the first person who showed up to visit.

Be that as it may, things were tense there in the park. Maybe we had both been expecting too much, and when it came to it, things were just different. Maybe my expectations were just different from hers, but, whatever the cause, it was an anticlimactic scene. It seemed in fact as if the old connection was missing. The conversation was going in reverse, each exchange of words like giving birth, the kind of birth where you have to use forceps, and that was just on my part; I was doing all the heavy breathing and pushing and all the while she remained undaunted: silent and absent. There I was, putting on a show, playing ping-pong against myself. What a difference from those moments after class in the prison, the way we contained ourselves in front of the other inmates, the distress in front of the guards, the indirect communications between her and me, the little word games, disguised seduction, all that spilled energy, the sexual drive under extreme circumstances. All that illicit flirtation, that pseudo fucking right there in that jail, or at least that’s what it seemed to me, but now everything was flat, sadly antiorgasmic. We finally had a chance to tell each other everything we had kept suppressed before, but it was as if there wasn’t anything to say. María Paz was definitely acting strange. She seemed so dejected, so sad. I tried to change the mood with a rigorous interrogation: “When did you leave Manninpox? Have you been found innocent? Are you on some sort of parole? How have you been since then? Have you been able to get in touch with your sister?” Such basic questions seemed to puzzle her, or bore her, or something; in any case, she let them pass without even trying to respond. When I asked about her time in jail after the class was canceled, she responded with a gesture of indifference and said, “I told you about all that already in the manuscript that was lost. Everything was in there.

“Tomorrow is my trial,” she told me suddenly, and then a bulb came on inside my head: the eve of the trial, of course, that is the root of the problem, worst time possible for any kind of romantic connection. I told her that it was no wonder she seemed concerned.

“No, it has nothing to do with the trial,” she retorted.

“So, what is it then?”

“My writing, does that not matter to you? Do you know how many days I spent writing that? How many hours, with shitty pencils the size of a cigarette butt? Even in the dark, I wrote. Come on, Mr. Rose. I dreamed you were going to read all of it one day, kissing ass with the guards, to see if they could slip me any piece of paper, and now that all the shit is lost, all that work for nothing, and you’re telling me I shouldn’t be upset.”

“María Paz, I’m really sorry, me more than anyone, but don’t be like that with me, it’s not my fault.”

“It is your fault, who else’s? You were the one who put all these delusions into my head,” she responded, turning her back to me and pulling some papers out of her bag, which she tore into pieces and threw in a trash can.

“What are you doing?” I shouted to her. “What are you tearing?”

“New chapters that I brought you. So what? Everything is fucked anyway.”

Quite the little scene she was putting on, right in the middle of the park, an unexpected tantrum by a spoiled brat and with the destruction of the manuscript in theatrical gestures à la Moses breaking the Tablets of the Law. If I had not been a writer or aspiring to be, I would have never understood the frustration of someone who had spilled her guts on these pages, and when I say on every page, I mean every paragraph, every line . . . and more so under such harsh conditions as she’d done because of what I had made her believe. So it felt like a violation when she was tearing up the pages, as if she were violating some part of her, and both of us remained still, shivering, and mourning.

It took a couple of minutes to react, but eventually I did. I moved to the garbage, and, like a Red Cross volunteer, I set off to rescue any of the surviving torn pieces of manuscript. Some had been smeared with organic yogurt, others with the remains of Turkish wraps, and the luckiest ones Van Leeuwen ice cream.

“Leave it alone, Mr. Rose,” she told me, “don’t.”

But that wasn’t going to stop me. I continued sifting through the garbage, which I was not disgusted with at all, until I had recovered most of the manuscript, and although all wrinkled and sticky, my girl’s chapters made it out of the sinking boat alive and ready for a little reconstructive surgery. I put the pieces in a plastic bag that I also found in the garbage and tucked the bag safely in a jacket pocket. I had hoped that after my heroic feat there would be some appreciation, or admiration, the kind of moment when Lois Lane finds out the geek Clark Kent is Superman. But that wasn’t the case. María Paz hardly reacted.

“Why would you bother?” was all she said to me, but I suspect that deep down the gesture had moved her.

After a while I asked, “Do you want me to go?” And she asked, “Where?”

“To your trial, María Paz. I want to go with you.” And she accepted, but accepted without much excitement, and so we remained there, acting like strangers. Me from a simple and calm world, she from one shaken by drama; me with a secure future, she with her fate hanging by a hair; me looking at her from between the ears of the White Rabbit, she sitting on the bronze mushroom beside the Mad Hatter; the two of us finding no way to break our deafness, or our muteness, because we had failed to articulate what we had wanted to say from the moment we met. In any case, I felt exhausted, defeated, convinced by that point that I had invented everything, that all that give-and-take at Manninpox had been unilateral, that any give had a corresponding take that was just a figment of my imagination. Standing there, it occurred to me to ask, “Why is a raven like a writing desk?” The riddle posed by the Mad Hatter in Carroll’s book. I guess I asked it because what else was there to say with us just standing there. María Paz knew how to respond: “I give it up. What is the answer?” she said. Exactly what Alice says. She must have read the book at least twice, because she knew exactly what I was talking about and kept to the script perfectly. “I haven’t the slightest idea,” I replied, just as the Mad Hatter did. Bingo! There was the magic, the connection, the key to the door that was closed until that moment.

Then finally we laughed, as if we had suddenly recognized each other. We hugged. Holy shit, what a hug, the great, long hug of two people who become one, using four arms to press in, to amass, until they find that they no longer want to let go. Her face buried in my chest, my face buried in her hair, a long-expected, long-awaited hug from eternity to forever. I mean, it was the hug of a lifetime. Things between us began to proceed as before, or much better than before; arguably, we moved the second stage of a narrative, which graphic novelists call “things go right” and that comes after “conflict begins” and before “things go wrong.” By now, we were starting to float in the bliss of “things go right,” and she told me she wanted to know something about my world because I had shared hers during my days at Manninpox, but she did not know anything about mine except what she had imagined from the few facts that I let seep in.

“We can do that later,” I said. “For now it is important you rest and get ready . . .”

“Perhaps there is no later,” she said. “I want to do it now.”

I asked her if she wanted to visit Dorita, and it upset her because she thought I meant my girlfriend. I explained that Dorita was not my girlfriend but the girlfriend of the suicide poet, and that she and the poet were the protagonists in my series of graphic novels. I suggested we visit the Forbidden Planet on Broadway, which sold manga and anime, retro and modern comics, pop-culture items, Japanese figures, and T-shirts and hoodies, and where both vendors and patrons were fans of my novels. I explained that Forbidden Planet was a heaven for nerds, a nostalgic corner that smelled of lost childhood, where children who were no longer children went to look for toys. It had been one of my places of worship and a great showcase for my
Suicide Poet and His Girlfriend Dorita
. She agreed to go but said she wanted to eat something first.

We went into the first diner on Madison Avenue that we passed and ordered spinach omelets and salad, and she began to recount, from beginning to end, the implausible events that led to her release from Manninpox and the multitude of things that had happened since. All of it was very emotional, and I thought she was going to break down and start weeping, but she didn’t: my girl was beyond tears. Though the trial was to take place the next day, we did not say anything, not a word, not mentioning it as if to not tempt fate. But, finally, the topic had to be addressed; it was unwise to continue avoiding it.

“The only thing that’s important now is the trial,” I said, very aware that it was not the best way to approach the issue. She remained firm and did not answer. Instead, she talked a lot about Sleepy Joe, her brother-in-law, and confessed that she had also been his lover. She harped so much on this guy, it made me feel lousy, because at the time, she seemed interested only in him. And what a story she told, a folksy and spooky version of the drama of Paolo and Francesca, the two kin who become lovers and dwell in Dante’s hell. The difference was those two had been killed by the husband, while in this story the husband was dead. According to the description María Paz offered of her brother-in-law, I saw him as a sexist, an abuser of women, an ultra-Catholic, an uneducated and violent man . . . an ordinary person. And then, I saw him for real. Speaking of the devil or its semblance. At first, I saw it in the eyes of María Paz, the flash of panic. She was facing the entrance to the diner, and I was on the other side of the table, facing the back of the room.