Tell Me Something True (16 page)

“Ay, mamita,” says Nini finally, shaking her head with sad disdain. “It was nothing. It wasn’t important.”

“That’s not what she wrote, Nini,” says Gabriella quickly, wanting to give details but profoundly ashamed of repeating the
intimacy of her mother’s words.

Nini pauses and sighs heavily.

“I am telling you, Gabriella,” she says finally, recovering a sense of decorum. “That it was not important. That it might
have seemed important to her at the time—and that was a shame—but it wasn’t. And the last thing I would have done was to tell
your father about it,” she says, looking Gabriella in the eye, the warning tacit between them.

“You don’t ruin good marriages over a little”—Nini will not use the word “affair,” so she goes for a mild alternative—“flirtation.
And you don’t spread rumors, either. Gossip is the worst enemy of relationships.”

No one says anything for a few moments, not even Juan Carlos, who’s found himself in deeply uncharted territory.

Gabriella wants to leave but doesn’t dare make the move now.

Nini is afraid to ask, but she feels compelled. Helena was part of her, too. “Can I read it?” she says, and there is pleading
in her voice.

“Nini,” says Gabriella, uncomfortable. “I… I can’t. She wrote it to me. I can’t dishonor that.”

The air in the breezy room is suddenly heavy. No one speaks. No one moves. The ticking of an antique clock is all that can
be heard.

“She was infatuated, not in love,” Nini says after a long silence. “Just like you are now with this Angel. And I think that
if she hadn’t died, she would have ripped those pages out. If she hadn’t died, she would have written a very different book.”

Juan Carlos is in the room, but she is speaking only to Gabriella now, all her energy zeroed in on her, on making her see
what she sees, what she would like to be true.

But now Gabriella shakes her head no.

No.

“No, Nini,” she says, and there’s a sad bitterness in her voice. “I think she would have written the same book. I think,”
she continues, looking straight at Nini, because she feels that somehow she can reach her, “I think she had a chance. And
she took it. And now I have my chance. And I’m going to write my own book. And you have to let me, Nini. I think you owe me
that.”

I
could tell him not to place the palm of his hand flat against my back when we dance, not to close his eyes and bring me close,
so close to him, his mouth periodically brushes against my hair where my head rests beneath his chin. I could ask him not
to allow his hand to linger at my waist longer than a few seconds when he escorts me into a room. I could ask him not to be
my date for every art function, pretending instead to run into him, as if he were a casual acquaintance, but not so obviously
my lover.

At dinner with his friends last night, he leaned into me to say something softly, his hand underneath the tablecloth sitting
high on my thigh, and I couldn’t help but lean into him in turn, pressing my other thigh into his hand, shivering in quick
anticipation before I glanced up to see the frank stares of curiosity from the other side of the table.

I felt myself blush as I tried not to look guilty and casually put distance between us, as if the closeness had been nothing
more than just an errant moment, not the constant state of affairs.

“So how old is your daughter now, Helena?” asked Lilian. She is Juan José’s cousin and her question is deliberate, a reminder
to the table of who I am and what I’m doing.

“She’s four,” I answer with my brightest smile.

“Wow, that’s young! And you left her alone for… what’s it been, over a month?”

It’s more an accusation than a question, and I feel the warmth reach my cheeks all over again.

“Well, she’s not alone,” I say, far less pleasantly. “She’s with her father and she’s having a ball. I don’t think children
need to be attached to their mothers every second of the day, unless, of course, their mothers have nothing else to do,” I
add pointedly, because there are several nonworking mothers here.

“It must be nice to have a husband who doesn’t mind staying alone for a month, much less with the children in tow,” rejoins
Lilian, all pretense of niceties apparently forgotten. “That is, if you’re married. You
are
still married, right?”

I seriously consider hurling my glass of wine at her.

Everybody has affairs, don’t they? I want to shout. Why then are you trying to make me feel like the town harlot?

But Juan José intercedes smoothly.

“Lily, you’re such a little snoop,” he says with a laugh, draping his arm around my shoulder. “I always told Lilian she should
become a journalist,” he says to the table at large. “You would not believe the things this girl used to ask us when we were
kids!”

We laugh, but now the shrimp appetizer feels like lead in my mouth.

Later, as I head back to the table from the bathroom, I pass a half-open bedroom door and the words buffet me once again.

“That was harsh, Lily,” I overhear one of her friends say.

“Someone has to say it,” I hear Lilian answer impatiently. “She’s married; she has a kid, for Christ’s sake. She has a little
girl! And she’s here happily screwing around with my cousin. What kind of mother would do that? Not to mention poor JJ.”

“Come on, Lily. I don’t hear Juan José complaining,” her friend answers with a laugh.

“Maybe not, but it isn’t fair to him, either,” says Lilian, sounding angry. “I think he’s falling in love with her. He’s smitten.
Really. And it’s just a game to her. She thinks her husband is an idiot and she thinks my cousin is an idiot.”

“Lily, Juan José is right. You overthink things. He’s a guy, she’s pretty, he’s just having a good time. And God knows what
her husband is like. He probably doesn’t even care what she does.”

I hear their footsteps coming toward the door and I quickly move to the other room. From where I stand, I see Juan José sitting
on the terrace, a glass of whiskey in one hand, a cigarette in the other, talking animatedly, then bursting out in loud laughter.

Marcus would be nursing a Groth cabernet, he would never smoke a cigarette, and his voice would never carry across the room.

But he would care. He would care a lot.

A
s much as she hates to admit it, the conversation with Nini has rattled her.

That night, while Angel works, while her grandmother sleeps, she lies awake in the dark, her thoughts punctuated by bursts
of music or an occasional trail of laughter left behind by a car as it speeds by on the street below.

She can still stop it, she reasons. She could call him tomorrow and put an end to it, and continue her life as if nothing
had happened. In a few days, the world—her very small world that cares about this—would have forgotten it, rendering the moment
nothing more than a small parentheses in her life.

“But why?” she asks out loud softly, overwhelmed by the blatant unfairness of her predicament. There is nothing sinister about
him or what he does. So he travels with a small army. That is hardly unusual in a country fraught with kidnappings and uncertainty.
His father is in jail. She admits to herself that it is hardly the ideal situation, and yet, she parries in her mind, it’s
not uncommon, either, what with the wave of white-collar prosecutions.

But a father who’s a drug dealer, a major drug dealer, a drug dealer so powerful his net worth is estimated at nearly that
of the country’s gross national product?

Gabriella presses the palms of her hands against her eyes, rubbing them until she sees stars. But he is not his father, Gabriella
tells herself. I don’t care what anyone says. He is not his father.

She’d slept with two men before him. One was her high school boyfriend, a football player who was gloriously tall and well
built, a boy she couldn’t quite believe had fallen for her. He had discovered her in her senior year, when she went from gawky
to beautiful, when her legs seemed to grow and she joined the track team, her quickening speed seemingly leaving her shyness
behind. She ran around and around the track while he practiced tackling in the field, distracted by her legs and her unwavering
gray eyes. It took him a month to get her into bed with him—a rushed and totally unsatisfying affair, for her, at least, that
took place on a sagging couch in his basement. The sex never improved and that was all they ever did together.

She surprised all her friends by dumping him first. But he surprised her by taking it in stride; a gracious loser who never
quite got over her and who left the door open for her to continue basking in the glow of his popularity in her last months
of high school. She never stopped feeling grateful to him for that, and even now, when they meet at an odd party or restaurant,
their hugs linger.

“My backup romance,” she would say, not unkindly, when she talked about him.

She poured her affections far more generously on her second lover, a tortured film student named Seth Girard, who had a brilliant
mind and an unshakable sense of self-importance.

Her father disapproved. He knew the type. And he could tell she was simply infatuated with the idea of the man rather than
in love with the man himself.

But she liked the intellectual challenge and charged on, convinced she could somehow teach him an iota of consideration.

For a long time, she couldn’t figure out why their lovemaking didn’t work, when their minds were so finely in tune. But he
never quite understood the rhythm of her body, the kind of touching she needed him to do. For a while, she actually thought
it would always be like that: relentless foreplay that led her nowhere. If she moaned hard enough, she thought, she could
will herself to feel something more. For a while, she thought good sex was a myth. But when Seth broke up with her, he blamed
what he called her “repressive persona” and recommended she see a sex therapist.

Her friends put him in his place.

“Bad sex is always the guy’s fault,” they said categorically.

And then, she met Angel and realized they were right.

She just hadn’t known.

Except that with Angel it isn’t just the sex.

Gabriella closes her eyes and sees him. Sees the genuine spark of pleasure that reaches the clear depths of his green eyes
when he makes her laugh, like he did yesterday in the dance hall. With him, she has nothing to prove, and she feels the ease
of the time spent together roll over her in waves, like a sailboat that finally catches just the right amount of wind to reach
the perfect speed. When they’re together in his car, he steers with his left hand, and with his right, he seeks her out, touching
her hair, her arm, her hand, which he holds as he drives, sometimes releasing it for just seconds at a time to shift gears,
then firmly claiming it again, never taking his eyes off the road but periodically running his thumb over her wrist, joining
her pulse to his.

And yet, the next morning, when he calls and invites her to work out at his sports club, she caves just a little to her grandmother’s
wishes.

“I’ll meet you there,” she tells him over the phone, rebuffing his offer to send a driver over, her mind made up to go with
Edgar, forgo the showiness of the bodyguards and draw the least attention possible on herself and her family.

The short silence on the other end registers his surprise.

“I’ll pick you up if you want,” he says resolutely, and she feels a surge of guilt, because she knows it’s dangerous for him
to drive around unnecessarily, and yet, he’s willing to do that for her.

“No, you know you shouldn’t,” she responds, saying the right thing, but almost choking on her duplicity, angry now at having
allowed herself to entertain any doubts.

And yet, as Edgar drives her, each passing mile reassures her that this indeed makes sense; that she can be with him, but
still stand apart if she wishes.

“Luis Silva’s son? That’s pretty big leagues, Miss Gabriella.” Edgar interrupts her thoughts with the bluntness earned by
years of service that make him more a family member than an employee.