Say Her Name (23 page)

Waiting for the train to Brooklyn, listening, looking down into her face, so full of puppyish excitement and her own particular innocence: What was that innocence? What was Aura innocent of that I wasn’t? Much past experience of failure and disappointment. Was love making me innocent again, wiping that history away? Aura was innocent of the power of her own gifts and that, her innocent promise and humility, sometimes made her seem so fragile to me. At such moments, there on the subway platform, practically dizzy with love for her, I would sense how vulnerable she was—so caught up in her own excitement, not paying attention, so physically slight—to a shove from behind by some fiendish lunatic off his medication, into the path of an oncoming train. This recurring fear of a crazed subway pusher was sometimes so strong that I would almost feel the urge to push her off the platform myself, as if the fiendish lunatic was me and I needed to get the inevitable over with, or as if I just couldn’t endure so much love and happiness one more second, and
simultaneously, in a silent burst of panic, I’d pull her to safety, away from the edge of the platform. My hands around her waist or on her shoulders, I would gently pull her back into the mass of waiting passengers and put my own body between her and the tracks, and give her a relieved kiss on the cheek. I never understood it, this awful urge to push her off the subway platform while simultaneously pulling her to safety, rescuing her from phantom fiends but also from myself.

16

The first time I put on my down jacket in November, heading into my second winter without Aura, I found an empty pink condom wrapper in the zippered pocket on the outside, over the breast, and for an instant I couldn’t remember how it got there. I stared at the words printed on it,
Extra feucht, Zartrosa,
as if they were code I’d once understood but had forgotten. It was from last winter, those few weeks in Berlin. One night I’d gone to a bar with a young woman, just a girl really, a Mexican art student visiting Pancho Morales, a writer I knew from the DF who was in Berlin on a German DAAD grant. She was studying in London but knew Berlin inside out, and we were going on to another bar when she realized that she’d lost her hat, a sort of iconic art object of a hat that she’d made herself—another Mexican girl into her hats—and she wanted to go back to Pancho’s apartment to see if it was there, and it was, hanging on a coat peg in the hallway. There was a Christmas tree in the hallway, too, completely stripped of bark and foliage, its pale branches decorated with what looked like snowflakes and icicles that turned out to be delicately tied strips of medical gauze and shards of broken mirror hung from white threads. What a beautiful Christmas tree, I said to her, because it really was, and it turned out that she’d made it for Pancho and his wife. Your art must be amazing, I said, and she said that I could see some of it on her computer if I wanted. We went into the room where she was staying, took off our shoes, sat down on the futon on the floor, and she opened up her laptop and started showing me her art, and before long I was kissing her neck and, as she leaned forward, her shirt rode up, exposing
the skin of her waist and the small of her back, and I kissed that, too, and then she asked, Do you want to eat me out?—just like that, with disconcerting frankness; all this like an echo of my first night with Aura, when she’d read me her airport story and shown me the drawing of the robot shoes. Aura and I didn’t fuck that first night, but the girl in Berlin and I did, after I’d eaten her out like she’d asked, with a desperate hunger, for a long time. We used a rubber that she had in her bag and it had a pink wrapper.

She was only twenty-five, the same age as Aura when we’d met, but now it was five years later, when Aura would have been, was still, thirty. We slept, then stayed in bed until late afternoon; it was one of those Berlin days without daylight, that pass on silent wings like a soot-colored owl, and the apartment was silent. Pancho was out on one of his famous binges from which he wouldn’t return for three days, and we saw or heard no sign of his wife. We fucked some more, went to a movie at the Sony Center, ate sausages and drank
gluhwein
at a Christmas market, and then at three in the morning I put her and her many suitcases into a taxi to the airport, and I went back to the apartment I was staying in, that belonged to my Guatemalan friend and his German wife. When I woke up later that morning it was as if those one and a half nights of sex and sweet female company hadn’t happened, though of course they had, it just made no difference that they had. I felt the same as I did every morning, the same darkness and sadness, the same memories, images (Aura dead …). Sex and intimacy with a beautiful young woman made no difference, I could fuck all I wanted, or not fuck, and it wouldn’t change anything—later, when I found the pink condom wrapper in my jeans I decided to save it as a reminder of that lesson, and put it back in the pocket of my down jacket. Over the next few weeks while I was in Berlin, and when I got back to Brooklyn, we exchanged a few e-mails, and then I never heard from her again, though now and then I looked at her Facebook page. She was snowboarding in the Alps. She’d decided to go on the wagon and stop using drugs. She was making sculptures from smashed mirrors.

* * *

Valentina, with Jim, was visiting me in my apartment when I asked her for help in setting up my screen saver to rotate different pictures of Aura—without Aura around, I needed outside help for even the simplest computing puzzles—and she noticed that I had at least five hundred photographs of Aura saved in my computer.

Why do you have so many photos of Aura? she asked.

Because I loved her, I said, and could never stop taking pictures of her.

Valentina turned to Jim and asked, Why don’t you have pictures of me in your computer like Frank does of Aura?

Jim’s gentlemanly lack of expression said, So pictures in a computer are a sign of love, but the Gramercy Park town house we live in isn’t?

Some nights I would meet Valentina and some of Aura’s other New York friends, like Wendy, or Juliana, a Chilean who was also at Columbia, in a bar near my apartment or in another neighborhood, sometimes even in Manhattan. They missed Aura, too, and sought connection to her through our conversations and through me, just as I looked for Aura in them, always encouraging, hectoring, begging them to describe every detail they could recall of even the most ordinary moments they’d spent with her. There were complications and dangers in allowing ourselves to get as close as we did during those months, that first winter and spring of Aura’s death, just before I went to Berlin and, especially, after I came back.

Valentina was a norteña, with long slender legs, the upright posture of a lifelong rider of horses, and the brash informality and swagger of a spoiled rancher’s daughter. Except her parents were music teachers who owned a little musical instruments store in a Monterrey shopping plaza, and Valentina had spent way more time in mosh pits than anywhere near a corral. Before Jim, she’d serially dated self-destructive junkie rock musicians and the like. Now she
dressed like a rich emo girl, with fantastic hairdos that always made her look like she’d just come directly from Tokyo’s hippest hair salon. She shared with Aura some of that childlike volubility, and they ignited bouts of goofy hilarity in each other.
Raua
was what Valentina called Aura;
Navilenta,
Aura called Valentina; they liked to talk, to e-mail each other, in a nearly made-up language. They loved each other, but their friendship had sharp edges, and Aura was wary of Valentina’s sometimes stunningly insensitive tongue. Aura used to be intimidated by Valentina, until, as the years passed, she realized that she shouldn’t be. Valentina was smart and fun to talk to, but like a lot of New Yorkers from the art-hipster-money world—her husband was one of those high-finance guys who haunt Chelsea and Williamsburg art galleries and rock and experimental music clubs, dressed like an aged punk rocker though one who drank only very expensive wine—Old Man Sex Pistol, I liked to called him—a lot of that talk was intellectual fashion, which doesn’t mean that it was empty, or not often clever, but it usually adhered, however loosely, to a recognizable script. Valentina wasn’t happy in her marriage. It had been in a long crisis that she was always trying to
work out
. She desperately wanted a baby but Jim, with two grown sons from his first marriage, didn’t. It wasn’t easy for a middle-class Mexicana, into her late thirties now and still struggling to finish her PhD thesis, to even contemplate walking away from a twelve-million-dollar town house on Gramercy Park and all the perks—private masseuse, at-home pilates and yoga instructors. I found myself feeling drawn to Valentina, seeking her out, craving her attention, even. I’d stand as close to her as I could, looking down into her face, trying to ignite in her some of the silly playful banter that she used to share with Aura, and whenever I succeeded I was surprised by the intensity of the longing it aroused, a sugar rush that, when it faded or burned out, plummeted me into a vacant stupor.

But Valentina could also be so callous in what she said that I’d wondered if she suffered from some form of autism. Why can’t you just go back to being the way you were before you met Aura? she said to me during one of those nights when we had met up in
a wine bar. Her tactlessness seemed to suggest other laxities, and I found myself fantasizing and wondering more and more about whether or not I might be able to fuck her. Valentina aroused me in a confusing way. It was as if I preferred to be misunderstood or ignored than to be sympathized with. I’d discovered that I almost never liked it when people tried to be sensitive to me.

It also annoyed me that Valentina thought she knew certain things about Aura and me that were probably not so great—I didn’t know what those things were, but I had some reason for believing that they weren’t necessarily true. I wanted to know, and didn’t want to know, what she thought she knew.

One evening Aura had come home from hanging out with Valentina and, standing penitently before me—penitently but also playing it up, comically theatrical in her distress—she’d pressed her forehead to my chest, remorsefully shaken her head back and forth, and blurted: I said some bad things about our marriage to Valentina that aren’t true but I only said them because she’s so unhappy with Jim and I wanted to make her feel better. I won’t do it again, I promise! Frank, am I horrible?

I thought that must be what lay behind some of Valentina’s occasionally mocking attitude. She liked to remind me that she knew sides of Aura that I didn’t, but also that no one has the right to claim an authoritative knowledge of anybody else anyway—this was a huge theme of Valentina’s—that there was even something fascistic in such presumption. When Aura’s friends and I ended up in conversations about this, ephemeral alliances would form: Wendy glaring coolly at Valentina while she extemporized, and then indulging me in the most old-fashioned of widower-coddling ways, with lamp-eyed affection and
douceur,
stroking my hand while I quietly/exaggeratedly fumed, blinked my eyes, and said, Of course I knew Aura, you can’t tell me I didn’t know Aura. (
la douceur
—the revolutionary nineteenth-century technique of treating the mad with “gentleness,” picked up in my research into
l’histoire de la psychanalyse
for Aura’s novel.)

When I told Valentina what Aura had said about making things up about us just to make her feel better during one of their bad marriage conversations, Valentina left the bar, indignant and humiliated. It was cruel of me to have told her that. Juliana was with us that night and I expected Juliana to hurry after her, but she didn’t, she stayed behind in the bar. She downed her glass of wine in a few gulps and ordered another. A silent nervous melancholy descended on us. We’d never been alone together before. I was drinking bourbon. Oh, Francisco, Valentina misses Aura so much, Juliana blurted with a soft moan. I know nobody misses her as much as you do, she said, but this isn’t a competition, Francisco, we all miss Aura, but Valentina really really misses her. I wasn’t Valentina’s best friend, Aura was, and sometimes I feel that she wants me to be like Aura was, and I just can’t. Juliana had brown fox eyes with long, curling lashes, and dark-reddish hair that fell around her thin pretty face, neck, and shoulders in a viny way that I found incredibly attractive. On the cab ride back across the Brooklyn Bridge, I remembered how Aura used to like to gaze out the window at the bridge and the view, often exclaiming over it. I remembered one night in particular, when she’d twisted herself around in a taxi to look out the window, her leg hooked behind her on the seat, her dress riding up a bit to unveil the supple underside of her dancer’s thigh, her naked heel coming out of her shoe, the lights of the bridge and the skyline illuminating her like lightning, and how all that had made me almost crazy with joyous lust. The next instant, I was kissing Juliana in the backseat of the taxi. We went back to her place in Park Slope and fucked deep into the night, and again in the morning, as if this was going to mean something. The wedding rings on the silver chain around my neck jingled and bounced in her face; I watched her flinching beneath them. She didn’t smell like Aura, her skin, her lips, her saliva; neither had the Berlin girl’s, but with her it had not been a turnoff. I already knew before we got out of bed that morning that we were never going to do this again.
Why did this happen?
Juliana asked just before I left, and I replied, lamely, Because we felt lonely and we both miss Aura.

Later that same day I waited for Valentina in the small West Village park across the street from where I knew she went twice weekly for harp lessons, from three-thirty to five in the afternoon. As soon as she came out, wearing dark glasses, her mid-thigh, orange coat with fur-lined hood, and black leggings and ankle boots, I called out to her. She crossed the street and didn’t seem much surprised. I apologized for what I’d said in the bar. I held her beautifully manicured long fingers that were learning to play the harp and kissed them, one by one, then her lips. We began to say things, as if each of us had been storing it all up, waiting for just this moment. It was crazy. We decided that we’d run off to Mexico to live together, but not yet, in a few months, when a year had passed since Aura’s death, when it wouldn’t look so bad. Yes, when it won’t look so bad. We parted, madly kissing, uttering little exclamations between breaths, is this really happening? She headed west, like a spy after a rendezvous. There was an A train stop just blocks away, and I headed back to Brooklyn, and I kept imagining her lying in her million-dollar bed, her shapely thighs apart, slowly masturbating herself with those painted, pliant harpist’s fingers while I watched. The next day I wrote her an e-mail telling her that, aside from my apology, I hadn’t meant a word of what I’d said. Later we had an argument about whose idea it had been to run off to Mexico, and who had actually first said the words, “after a year is up, when it won’t look so bad.” Why had any of this happened?