Say Her Name (4 page)

One morning I found myself standing in the kitchen looking through the window at the chair on the fire escape as if I’d never seen it before. That’s when I thought to name it Aura’s Journey Chair. I imagined her descending slowly down a long shaft of yellow-pink translucent light, in a sitting position, holding a book open in her hands, landing softly in the chair, returned from her long, mysterious journey. She glances up from her book, notices me watching through the kitchen window, and says, like always, in her cheerful, hoarse-sounding voice, Hola, mi amor.

Hola, mi amor. But where did you go? Why were you away so long? I know you didn’t get married just to go off by yourself like that and leave me alone here!

The weekend before we left for Mexico at the end of June, Valen-tina and Jim had invited us to their country house again. We were headed back to the city late on Sunday afternoon when Aura and Valentina said that they wanted to stop at a shop in town that we’d visited the day before. Jim and I and their smelly dog, Daisy, waited in the car and minutes later I saw Aura coming out of the shop with a new purchase clasped in her arms, a Joseph’s multicolored dream coat of a quilt, in a clear plastic casing, that she told me had cost
only $150. A good price, I agreed, for such a beautiful quilt, and brand-new, too, no musty grandma relic. An affixed brochure told about the American artist who’d spent years traveling through foreign lands studying textiles and who now designed these quilts that were then hand stitched by seamstresses at her workshop in India.

A few days later, as we were packing, Aura came out from the closet carrying the folded quilt in both arms and laid it into the open suitcase on the floor. So she wanted to bring the quilt to the apartment in Mexico. And then she wanted to bring it back to Brooklyn in the fall? Así es, mi querido Francisco, she answered, with that lightly sarcastic formality that indicated she’d anticipated my skepticism. I rarely opposed Aura’s wishes, with the exception, I admit, of her wanting to move to a bigger apartment, or one with a garden where we could have a dog, because we really couldn’t afford to do that just yet. But this time I did oppose her. It doesn’t make sense, I said, to bring the quilt to Mexico and back with us in September. Look, it takes up almost the whole suitcase by itself. And don’t we already have a nice duvet on the bed in Mexico? But the quilt is so beautiful, Aura insisted. And we just bought it. Why should the subletter get to enjoy it before we do? Maybe we should just keep the quilt in Mexico, she said; at least we
own
that apartment. (It was her mother’s, actually; she’d bought it for Aura before Aura had even met me, though we’d taken over the mortgage payments.) We don’t have to leave the quilt out for the subletter, I argued. You can just put it away in the closet, and we can inaugurate it in the fall when we get back. Imagine how much we’ll miss the quilt this winter if we leave it behind in Mexico.

Without another word, Aura pulled the quilt out of the suitcase and carried it into the closet. She came back into the bedroom and resumed her packing in stony silence. For the next few minutes, she hated me. I was her worst enemy ever. I had to bite the inside of my cheek to keep from laughing.

After Aura’s death, Valentina told me that the quilt hadn’t really cost $150; it had cost $600. Aura had been afraid to tell me.

But it wasn’t just the money, I knew. It was that she didn’t
want me to think of her as the
kind of woman
who would drop so much money on a quilt—even though I knew she was—in the same way that she’d get upset whenever I noticed that she was perusing celebrity gossip or fashion Web sites on her laptop while we read or worked in bed before going to sleep at night. She’d sit with the computer balanced on her knees, the screen turned away from me, emitting staccato spurts of typing, jumping from window to window. It didn’t bother me that she liked celebrity and fashion Web sites. Though that is exactly what would have bugged her, catching this glimpse of herself through my eyes, me supposedly loving it that my brainy superliterary grad student young wife could have the same enjoyments as any frivolous housewifey girl who never read anything deeper than
People
. That
I
could love that, that I presumably found that cute and sexy, that she could satisfy that
cursi
macho voyeurism—how embarrassing! At the end of a long day, she liked losing herself in those Web sites; ¿y qué? It had no significance. Even my noticing it at all was already a distortion or an exaggeration of who she
really
was. Why couldn’t I just keep my eyes on my own book or laptop? My defense was that I was entranced by almost everything she did and could hardly ever take my eyes off her. Really, I was just waiting for her to put the computer away and tumble into my arms under the covers. She knew that, too.

When I came back to Brooklyn alone from Mexico that first time after Aura’s death it was mid-September, hot and steamy. It seemed, that fall of 2007, as if summer refused to end, hanging over the city like a punishment. I ran the air conditioner night and day. But finally, with the first dip in temperature, I went to the closet and, just like I’d promised Aura, took the quilt out of its plastic case and laid it over the bed. The quilt was made up of thin horizontal strips of miscellaneous fabrics—every conceivable hue of bright color seemed represented, reds slightly predominating—arranged in parallel rows running lengthwise. It really did seem to vibrate before my eyes. The quilt added to the strikingly feminine aspect of what was now my widower’s bedroom. Stuffed animals and toy robots; a miniature ruby slipper dangling from a lamp shade; a big
chocolate heart from Valentine’s Day a few years before, still in its cellophane wrapper and ribbon. Plush love seat in a corner, piled with big colorful cushions, next to the television. Wedding dress over the mirror. The carved, painted winged angel from Taxco with its scarlet-lipped white face of a lewd adolescent cherub, hanging from the pronged lamp over the bed, very slowly and perpetually spinning at the end of its nylon cord, fixing its wooden stare on me alone in bed just as it used to stare at Aura and I together, and slowly turning away.

Often in the mornings, when Aura had just woken up, she would turn to me in bed and say, Ay, mi amor, que feo eres. ¿Por qué me casé contigo?, her voice sweet and impish. Oh my love, how ugly you are. Why did I marry you?

¿Soy feo? I would ask sadly. This was one of our routines.

Sí, mi amor, she’d say, eres feo, pobrecito. And she’d kiss me, and we’d laugh. A laugh, I can say for myself, that began deep in my belly and rumbled up through me, spreading that giddy smile on my face that you see in photographs of me from those years, that goofy grin that didn’t leave my face even when I was reciting my wedding vows—Aura’s expression, meanwhile, appropriately emotional and solemn, if a little stunned—which made our wedding pictures kind of embarrassing to look at.

Aura put her quilt away in the closet and came back into the bedroom and finished packing for her death, three weeks and one day away.

3

That first day back in the apartment with Valentina and Adele Ramírez, it was like stepping into an absolute emptiness, outside of time—after I’d brought the suitcases in and we’d hung the wedding dress and built the altar, I said, I wonder where Aura kept her engagement ring? (Or did I say, I wonder where she keeps her engagement ring?) She hadn’t brought the ring to Mexico, not wanting to risk having it stolen. She’d never worn it regularly, anyway. It was too ostentatious to wear to school, she’d decided. She worried about giving the other grad students the impression that she was a bourgeois rich girl from the Mexican upper class, hypocritically playing at the austere life of a grad student of literature so that she could return home someday wearing her Ivy League doctorate as just another expensive bauble. Aura believed, or rather had painfully discovered, that she often gave people, American academics especially, that totally false impression.

I used to worry that Aura had lost her engagement ring and was afraid to tell me. She lost things all the time—so did I—and I’d already settled with myself that if she’d lost it, I wasn’t going to let it bother me. Why should it bother me? Whenever I decided that she really had lost the ring, because I hadn’t seen it on her finger in such a long while, I’d also decide to not even mention it, to let its disappearance pass in silence as if there’d never been a ring in the first place. It was silly, probably even wrong, to have spent so much on a tidbit of a diamond, one that had maybe been mined in Africa in some unethical and even murderous way but that even I could see, when compared to its rivals for purchase on the diamond dealer’s tray, seemed to be waving minuscule twinkle hands in the air to call attention to its own happy radiance. It’s not like
diamond engagement rings are the only enduring rite or institution on the planet with a possible connection to conveniently overlooked criminal and bloody doings. Once the momentous, life-changing invitation had been made and accepted, wasn’t the money well and joyously spent? Once I’d slipped the ring on Aura’s finger and she’d said yes and we’d kissed—I proposed in Puerto Escondido—maybe the most satisfying act would have been to throw the ring away into the ocean right after, cleaving our moment and our memories of it from this expensive trifle you always had to worry about losing. Or maybe she could have taken the ring back to Mexico City, shown it off to her mother, to her tío Leopoldo, and to her friends, and then we could have thrown it off some highway overpass, where some street kid might eventually find it, altering his life for the better or the terrible. That way I never would have wasted a second wondering whether she’d lost the ring and was keeping it a secret.

Then we’d be out for dinner at her favorite restaurant for her birthday, or our wedding anniversary or Valentine’s Day, or for whatever occasion we’d decided merited an expensive New York City night out, and there it would be, sparkling away on her finger. That diamond came and went like a wandering star in the night sky, visible from earth only two or three times a year.

But I knew how much she cared about the ring because of the one time she did almost lose it, when we were in Austin, Texas, for a book fair. Aura had studied at the University of Texas during the two years that a student strike shut down the National Autonomous University of Mexico, where she was majoring in English literature. Her mother, Juanita, an administrator at the university, wasn’t going to let her daughter just languish at home or waste her days roaming the vast, nearly abandoned, apocalyptic city that was the UNAM campus during the strike years, lying around with her friends in the grass, smoking pot in
el aeropuerto—
as students called the tree-shaded stretch of lawn where they met to get high—or hanging out with rock-star strikers in the graffiti-coated, barricaded buildings. Bored with being out of school, Aura had totally turned against both strike and strikers anyway. Juanita and two of Aura’s professors,
who were also her godparents, pulled some strings with some old Mexican colleagues who were now professors at the University of Texas to get her admitted there on a foreign student scholarship.

In Austin at UT, Aura lived in a dorm at first, and then shared the floor of a house with three other foreign students: two Panamanian girls and Irina, from Romania via Israel, a long-limbed, waifish beauty, a local kickboxing champ and a drummer in a rock band as well as a poetry-writing literature student. Smart young women with strong accents who learned to look after themselves and each other, and who didn’t care that the gringa college and sorority girls never included them in anything from day one. Harder to deal with were the predatory preconceptions of white boys who believed all brown females must be just like the ones selling dirty sex so cheaply across the border, or that it was practically obligatory, a sort of reversed chivalry, to treat them that way. But this was my way of talking, not Aura’s—she didn’t use words like “white boys,” and thought it pretty ridiculous whenever I did. She would refer to gringos or los blancos, never sneeringly, though sometimes indignantly. Here’s a poem Aura wrote in one of her notebooks during her Austin days:

Me vuelvo sucio
Y leo Bukowski aunque lo odie
Parece quisiera ser hombre
Para quitar a las mujeres del camino
Que nadie se escandalice
Esto es privado
Esto es mentira
La poesía es ficticia y no salva a nadie
¹

Nevertheless, those were wild times. There’s hardly a photograph of Aura and her housemates where they aren’t holding
beers, or looking totally stoned, or like they’ve been up all night: muss-haired, girl grimy, and pretty delicious. But Aura studied hard, wrote a paper in English on Raymond Carver that her professor read out to the class, and worked relentlessly on what she would submit as her baccalaureate thesis at the UNAM when the strike was over, on W. H. Auden. And for all the supposed craziness, she had only one boyfriend there, a Jewish kid originally from Houston, a musician in the Austin country-rock-hippy mode. One of the Panamanian girls, green-eyed Belinda who was three or four years younger than the other three, told me it was Aura who kept her out of trouble in Austin, guiding her through several crises; she said that Aura was like a surrogate mother to her. But Aura had a surrogate mother of her own in Texas, Irina. Though actually Irina was more like an antimother. She used to encourage and even intoxicate Aura with the idea that she should defy her mother’s expectations that she pursue an academic career, which Aura would at least seem to go on dutifully fulfilling for nearly the rest of her life. But some of Irina’s style and daring rubbed off on Aura, at least as a kind of ideal. In New York, Aura took kickboxing lessons for a few months at a gym near Penn Station, traveling the subways between Columbia and Brooklyn with scarlet boxing gloves dangling from her backpack. Later, Irina would be one of Aura’s three bridesmaids at our wedding, along with Valentina and Fabiola, who came to the beach with us that last summer. The book fair in Austin, where I gave the usual sparsely attended reading, was a reunion weekend for Irina and Aura, a chance for them to girl talk for hours like old times and catch up on everything, including the surprise news of our engagement.