I Loved You More (11 page)

“My sis was just sixteen,” Hank said, “when she ran off to Ohio with this twenty-two-year-old cat named Darcy. On the phone, my mother was so fucking ballistic I couldn't make any sense out of what she was saying. When I finally got her calmed down, I told her I'd take care of it.

“I took care of it all right,” Hank said.

Hank's black eyes were closer than they'd ever been. Right then I promised myself
never
to fuck with Hank Christian. To never be the reason those black eyes got so scary. Promises, man. So much for promises.

“My dad left before my sis ever knew him,” Hank said. “I was her only father.”

“And my stepdad – shit!” Hank said.

Hank grabbed the bar rag so hard he nearly pulled me over the table.

“My journalism years paid off,” Hank said. “It took me no time at all to track this Darcy guy down. He was living in the burbs outside Cleveland. I packed up my car in the middle of the night and drove straight through. I was at their front door before the sun was up.”

“Darcy opened the door in his shorts,” Hank said. “Tall skinny guy. Didn't know what hit him. Peg came running out of the bedroom screaming at me to stop hitting him, but I didn't stop. All the while Peg was begging me,
Please Hank, I love him, Hank. Please leave us alone. Stop hitting him Hank, I love him. I love him
.”

“I took Peg
by the hair
– didn't let her get her stuff – Christ, all she had on was her jeans and a T-shirt – she was
barefoot
, and I dragged her to my van and threw her in and took her back to my mom's in Massachusetts.”

“Two years later,” Hank said, “when she was eighteen, Peg married the guy. He works in a record store and has his own DJ
show on a local station. They have a son, my nephew, Johnny, a beautiful young man I'll never meet. Peg hasn't spoken to me since. And she never will. She won't even be in the same house with me.”

Hank's knuckles pushed against mine. The bar rag only an excuse. Hank couldn't make his mouth move right. His chin started to go and it was no use.

“Gruney,” Hank said, “the thing that's hardest to say was all the blood. The blood on Peg's jeans and on my shirt. On my hands. Hell, there was blood all over that van.”

Big sobs, old broken things that scraped hard against Hank's heart as they came up out of him.

“I believed all that macho dominant-male kick-ass bullshit and look where it's got me,” Hank said. “My sister. I've lost her. The only family I had besides my mother.”

“My dirty little secret,” Hank said, “– hell, it hasn't even been a secret. You have to think about it for it to be a secret.”

Hank's dark eyes were two deep black holes in the world.

“Gruney,” Hank said, “you're the first person I've ever told.”

WHAT HANK SAID
next, it took my ears a while to hear what he was saying. Strange when that part in you is touched how quickly you can fall apart. It's as if the words that are being said go to the deepest place, the place in you that's become the way you've become so you can keep on going. The helmet you put on when you were a kid that grew into your head and now someone is saying you have a helmet on your head.

“That first time I heard you read at Ursula Crohn's,” Hank said, “it was as if the skies opened, or my soul opened, whatever, shit just opened. Your broken voice saying it is I who am broken, and it is human to be broken, and we are all broken, and it changed my life. I've never heard anything so beautiful.”

“It was you who taught me, Gruney,” Hank said, “to be authentic.”

“It's you who taught me to be a real man.”

      
5.

The women

THEN THERE WAS THE NIGHT HANK AND OLGA AND I GOT
thrown out of Seville.

That's where we were going to meet that night, at Seville – a Spanish restaurant on Perry in the West Village. Hank said Olga said it was the best
Mariscada de Salsa Verde
in town. I didn't even know what
Mariscada de Salsa Verde
was, other than it was green. But I didn't care. It could've been fried green goat brains and I'd have gone. In the year I'd known Hank, besides Mythrixis, of all the girlfriends Hank had only mentioned now and then, Olga Rivas was different. She was from Nicaragua. Into Santeria. Her long thick curly black hair. Her eyes, her eyes, Hank couldn't stop talking about her eyes. Her English. The way she adorned herself with jewelry. And that night, I was finally going to meet her.

It was summer again and hot like only Manhattan can get. Humid hot with nothing green around to suck it up. Heat waves bouncing off concrete. I started out from East Fifth Street an hour early. Those days, my vacations were walking. My favorite route was to cut across Cooper Union Square to Broadway, then window shop Eighth Street with its cheap chic, shoes, and
salons de belleza eres
. To Fifth Avenue. My favorite corner. There was always a guy drawing with chalk on the wide sidewalks, wonderful drawings that looked like da Vinci or van Gogh. I always watched where I stepped so I'd never step on his drawing. And
something else I loved to look at. One Fifth Avenue. That building was what my eyes always went to.

More often than not, that corner was my destination. There was a Hebrew National on Eighth, my favorite dinner out. Two hot dogs with sauerkraut and a Coke. I'd take my dinner to across from One Fifth, sit on the curb, eat my hot dogs, drink the Coke, stare up at the building. The Spanish terra cotta tiles, the mullion windows. The little round windows at ground level that looked like windows on big ships.

There I was, Ben Grunewald, so close I could reach out and touch it.

It. What George Plimpton had, what it takes to be Truman Capote. The penthouse apartment with the arched tall corner windows. The crystal chandelier you could see in there at night. Sometimes the curtains, like clouds those curtains. Vacations on Lake Como.
The Paris Review. The New York Review of Books
. Miles Davis. Sailboats. Those blue plates people hang on their kitchen walls. Pressed starched linen. Chablis Grand Cru. Truffles. Café de Flor. Museo de Chocote. Havana, Cuba. People to love you like Hemingway.

The myth of van Gogh coursing through my veins. One painting. He'd only sold one painting. So happy with my Kosher wieners and my Coke. Sitting there my ass on the curb, my feet in the gutter, next to me the guy chalking out
Starry Night
.

I'm looking up, always looking up.

I knew it was far away. That world. But no fucking idea how far.

If I had it to do over again, I wouldn't. I'd find someplace sunny. Always have tanned feet. Drink clear clean water from a thick green glass bottle. Find a big Catalpa tree to love. Eat dirt.

AT SEVILLE, THERE'S
a line, and even though Olga has made reservations we have to wait. We're standing in the shadows the leaves make. A Mimosa tree I think. Soft lacy shade. Hank does the introductions. I don't look too closely at Olga at first.
Something makes me not look right at her. When she takes my hand I can feel the bones in her hand. How she holds my hand a moment too long. The lacy shade on her arms and face. Her famous long black curly hair, her beautiful brown skin. Black eyes that make Hank's look brown. Small boned, like her body has been reduced down twenty percent. Makes me feel oversized, clumsy. Her light see-through blouse is red. No bra. Pockets on the blouse so you can't really see her nipples. Gold bracelets on her wrists, lots of gold bracelets, a gold ring on each hand. How gold sounds rubbing against itself. Bright yellow shorts. Gold sandals with fake jewels on them. Toenails like her fingernails, so clear and shiny they didn't seem real. The way she says
Mariscada de salsa verde
.

The maître d'hôtel, a tall guy with slick black hair and a Don Ameche mustache, offers us a free cocktail. Olga orders a margarita –
maargaareeta
– margarita for me too. Then Hank orders a margarita. I look over at Hank real close when he says
margarita
. I'd never seen Hank drink hard liquor.

My eyes can't stay on Hank for long, though. They move with Hank's eyes to where he's staring. The way he looks at her. His eyes beholding her. As if she is something newly formed, precious, and as we stand, his breath is breathing life into her. And if he stops looking, if he skips a breath, if he looks away, Olga Rivas, this dark angel of a woman he has conjured up will disappear.

I don't like her at all.

Don't trust her. Women or men – doesn't matter. When they're beautiful the way Olga is beautiful, they know they can get away with anything.

There's a simple test you can try on beautiful people. You know how they look as if they know they're always being looked at? Well, try catching them off guard. And if you can't ever catch them without that looked-at look on their faces, if you can't ever catch them picking their nose, slumped over when they sit, belching, sneezing, yawning too wide, God forbid a fart – then you
know you're in trouble. Stay away from these people like the plague because they're really not human – not until their beauty fades. And when it does, their beauty a blossom that has burst, when they realize they're no longer always being looked at, stand away because there's going to be a meltdown.

Believe me, I am watching Olga. She is ten, twelve years tops away from being human.

THERE IS A
moment at the table. We are in one of the booths in the back, sitting in a half circle of red leather. Darkness and points of soft light hanging in the air around us. In the center of the round table, a votive candle in a red glass. Above us on the wall, a kitsch painting of a peasant woman with large breasts balancing a jar of wine on her shoulder. Olga in the middle, under the painting, facing out, Hank and I on the ends. We're somewhere between our second and the third margaritas, high enough that the regular world has shifted just enough to let the shine come through. The all-important shine. Light – it feels like light – creeps into your body and things get clear and you know shit, important shit, and you speak easily because you're shining with what you know.

That's what I'm doing, shining, speaking easily. Who knows what I'm saying. Something important. Something about me. Going on and on and on. Pretty soon I get this feeling and I stop. I come back into my body back from out there wherever it is I was. Hank's staring at me. Olga's staring at me.

Olga reaches over and takes my hand. Her hand, a way that only a woman can touch. A touch that says she knows she'll never know you but still she's curious. From the other side, her touch, female. Tender even. The way an oncologist touches a cancerous tumor, or maybe in the zoo the way you see on TV a baby tiger playing with a monkey. The candlelight on the smooth brown skin of her arms, her gold bracelets. The sound of gold against gold.

“My buddy Gruney's really something,” Hank says, “isn't he?”

Olga's right hand grasps my hand solid. Across the table, Olga's left hand is solid in Hank's too.

“I'd love to read your cards sometime,” Olga says. “I don't know how to describe. You're like a feral.

“
Feral?
” Olga says. “Is that English?”

“Latinate,” Hank says.

“Is okay?” Olga says.

“Says it perfect,” Hank says.

“A feral child,” Olga says, “who nobody ever listened to.”

IT'S A GOOD
thing I've had two
maargaareetas
. It's a good thing a third was coming. All that attention would have made the normal ordinary Ben Grunewald go tilt. Made my toes curl up in my shoes, made my balls pull up, poked up my shoulders.
Showing off again! Making a spectacle of yourself!

Hank takes hold of my right hand. His hand, only a way a man can touch. A touch that says he knows that men haven't really got a clue. It's only an attitude. But fuck it, we can play and not get caught the way women can. The red votive light on his thick wrist, his smooth forearm.

That moment is one of the big moments of my life. When everything comes together. I feel a way I've only dreamed of. Too high really to ever remember it well. Only a trace, a thin drunk thread of memory going back over the years to find that guy, me, who was sitting there at that table, who let himself be seen. The three of us, on the red leather, darkness and points of soft light hanging in the air around us, the votive candle in the center of the white round table, the red glow of glass, between our second and the third
maargaareetas
, Hank's hand in Olga's, Olga's hand in mine, my hand in Hank's.

I'm about to make a joke, say something, anything, that will make the precious moment stop. I know I can do it. Move my
shoulders, tilt my chin, laugh a little laugh. And I'm just starting, just past the shoulders, and in the middle of the chin tilt, when:

“Don't deprecate,” Olga says.

“Deprecate?” I say.

“Latinate,” Hank says.

“Yourself,” Olga says.

“You must be careful,” Olga says, “of what you say in front of yourself.”

SOMETHING INSIDE ME,
something ancient and infant, that hasn't looked out of me in a long time, looks out and over across the table at Olga. She is so perfectly doing that beautiful people looked-at look. Part of me wants to punch her, wants this all to stop, a big baby torpor, where is the fucking waiter with the tray of
maargaareetas
.