The Appetites of Girls (37 page)

The whiteness of outside must have made my room brighter than usual, and I woke early. I dug out my snow boots and hat from one of the boxes at the back of my closet I’d never unpacked, zipped my parka over my sweater and long johns, and strapped Carlos’s camera around my neck. Still shaking off sleep, I tripped down the three flights of stairs and out into the transformed street—glittering and softened. I photographed as much as I could capture—a few snapshots to keep but most to show Carlos. “Should I tell you to take care of yourself? Not to miss me too desperately?” he had joked just before leaving. “No, not you, Francesca, who is always, always just fine on her own!” At one point I had made plans for Opal to stay with me while Carlos was gone. She would be traveling north to the Boston area for two job interviews, she’d told me. She could
stop through New York on her way so that we could spend a couple of days together. But at the last minute, because of the winter storm, she’d needed to make rearrangements—flying directly to Logan, avoiding the snow.

A blond couple I recognized from one of the buildings across the street was completing a life-sized snowman, smoothing out a lumpy section near its middle, adding a turnip nose, sprigs of parsley for hair. When they’d finished, the woman lifted her face to the man’s and he bent down and kissed the tip of her nose. “Magical out here, isn’t it?” They turned to me before climbing the steps to their building.

“Yes!” I waved. I hoped I hadn’t been too obviously watching them. I had a sudden urge to call Carlos, to try to explain what he was missing. But it wasn’t even eight yet; he was surely still asleep.

I was on my own on the sidewalk now in a stillness that did not belong to the city. Nothing stirred but a few falling flakes. The only sounds were small and far away: the scrape of a snow shovel on some other block; children laughing, their voices seeming to echo from some distance. But this part I would not share with Carlos: how I began to feel a bit lonely after a while, gazing in solitude at the snowdrifts. I ran back inside for more layers, determined to trek through what would keep most others indoors or at least close to home. Maybe I would trudge as far north as Central Park. Then I would tell Carlos about my venture after he returned.

On the six-month anniversary of our moving in together, Carlos bought a bottle of champagne. He lifted his glass in a toast: “To the many ways you have enriched my life. You never cease to astound me, Francesca bonita. You are the most secure woman I know.” He leaned forward somewhat awkwardly, shifting his champagne from one hand to the other as he kissed me, making me suddenly self-conscious and shy. Never having become an official couple, refusing to fall into dependent roles, we usually saved such gestures of affection for the bedroom. In public we eschewed
such displays so that none of our colleagues ever guessed our relationship was anything but the most platonic of friendships.

Carlos and I did not speak of a shared future. I had gathered from a comment he’d once made that he felt this would shatter the spell, mar the beauty of all that was spontaneous and unrestrained between us. So it took me some time to truly understand what I discovered in his room the Saturday following our six-month celebration. I had woken late that morning to find him gone. The previous night, as we had stood undressing beside his bed, Carlos, kicking at the discarded pool of our clothes, had removed my earrings and a silver cuff bracelet from my wrist. “I want nothing but you,” he’d said, and dropped them with a tinkling of metal on the surface of his bureau. Rarely did I enter his room when he was away, and I could not help feeling this was some sort of violation, but after a glance at the dresser’s top, I saw that only one of my earrings remained beside my bracelet. So I began opening various drawers, rummaging through rolled socks and jockey shorts and stacks of magazines, thinking perhaps it had accidentally been swept in.

The small box was midnight blue leather and nestled between two folded T-shirts, a secret place not meant for my eyes. But my whole body seemed to pulse from the pounding of my heart, and the thought of not knowing made me shakier than the possibility of what might be inside. Oh! Oh, it was perfection! Carlos’s sophisticated, elegant taste. A single round diamond, not ostentatious in size but shimmering and brilliant. I dared not touch the stone itself but ran my finger across the crushed velvet of the box’s interior. How sweet Carlos’s words had been to me the night before, but this,
this
I never could have dreamed. And I sank to his bed, unaware I had been crying until I saw the spots of wet on my lap. Always I had claimed this was something I was not sure I would want. But now that it was real, now that
he
was real . . . I closed my eyes and sighed with a happiness fuller than I had ever known.

Over the following days and weeks, Carlos seemed perplexed by my good humor. I caught him frowning when I sang along with the Spanish
ballads I was beginning to learn or gave him unexpected squeezes from behind as he chopped onions and cilantro, rinsed mussels for our supper. To ensure that he would not guess the reason for my exuberance, I should have worked harder to maintain my usual habits, my former disposition. But what a struggle that would have been! I was far too joyful! Even the things that had once made me grind my jaw in anger or frustration seemed less irksome. When Mother called, wanting to send a few slimming items she’d picked up during her latest midtown shopping spree, I did not object. I refrained from argumentative retorts, disparaging comments when she bemoaned the most recent coif given her by her new hairdresser, the wine stains that had ruined a silk dress she’d planned to wear that weekend to a wedding for one of Father’s business associates. Her concern over her appearance seemed suddenly less ridiculous.

•   •   •

I
n early April, a card arrived in my mail with a return address I did not recognize. Inside was a folded news clipping, a page of wedding announcements from a month earlier. At the top right of the page was a photograph of a buxom bride, ringlet curls too tightly coiled around her hairline and at her temples, her hand hooked through the arm of her groom, who grinned down at her proudly. Jesus! My high school friend Sharon. It had obviously been weeks since her ceremony, and she hadn’t even called. Before my return from Paris, she had disappeared to graduate school on the West Coast. Over the past year or two, we’d talked only a handful of times. But she had phoned some months before to say she was engaged and that she and her fiancé, Claude, were planning a very small ceremony—just family—at Claude’s parents’ home in La Jolla.
Hi, Fran! Claude and I tied the knot in March!
she had written in the note attached to the announcement.
We are now living outside of San Diego. Just a plane ride away, so I hope you will come visit soon. I want you and Claude to meet.

I studied every detail of her picture—the tilt of her head, her
bouquet of pastel peonies, the delicate string of pearls about her neck, the sprinkling of beads at her waist. How boringly conventional, how unenlightened, my coworkers and I had deemed posed images like this. But, gazing at Sharon, I saw something different now—a hopefulness in her diffident smile, the knowledge of reciprocated love in her shining eyes—things I now believed I understood. That night, as I leaned into the warmth of Carlos beside me, I thought of Sharon—of the boys we’d known in junior high who’d teased her for her ears and for her constant rash of pimples, and of the many she’d been sick over in the years afterward, telling me not so long ago she’d just about given up on ever finding anyone. And now
this
. One decision, one moment could transform everything.

The next morning, stepping from the shower, I glimpsed my reflection in the wall mirror and loosened the towel wrapping my hair, draping it like a veil. How the staff at
Real
, if they’d known, would have ridiculed me, but I was too elated to care.

•   •   •

I
made no conscious decision to restrict my diet, to hold back from indulging. But the muffins and brownies passed each afternoon at work from desk to desk tempted me less. How bland food suddenly seemed, how mundane compared to the things that now preoccupied me.

At first Carlos did not seem to notice my decreased appetite, but after some days, I saw that during dinners, glancing at the fork and knife at rest on my plate beside my unfinished food, he shifted in his chair as if he could not make his legs comfortable. “Is it overly salted? Too many spices for your taste?” he wanted to know when I shook my head at seconds. For a night or two, I imagined, he assumed I was simply not feeling myself, but after several evenings of this, he drew another conclusion.

“Ai, yi, what is this sudden self-denial? Since when did you want to be so skinny? Skinny like the runway models? This is not the Francesca I know.” The music from the stereo, though soft and melodic, seemed
suddenly to irritate him, and pushing his plate aside with a clattering of silverware, he rose to mute it.

Someday, I thought, with a secretive smile he could not yet understand, I would be able to tease him about his pouting, his sudden flashes of temper. For now I would simply try coaxing him into a better mood. Laughing, I stood and joined him where he leaned, his back to me, his palms flattened against the living room window. I wrapped my arms around his waist and pressed my cheek to the hollow between his shoulder blades. “What if I told you, you make me too happy to eat,” I whispered, feeling him flinch.

For much of the next week, I saw little of Carlos. He had no obligation to tell me where he disappeared to, but after my discovery of the box . . . I suppose I had begun to make presumptions. For four straight days, I met him only passing in the hallway as he rushed to the door. He seemed fretful, only half aware of my presence. He took no notice of the reddish-gold highlights I’d threaded through my hair or of the new jojoba oil perfume I had begun to spray on my throat and wrists. Many men, I’d heard, grew skittish and withdrawn before mustering the courage to ask the most significant of questions. So I wouldn’t push. I would remain patient and approachable.

One evening Carlos arrived home early, having been out for little over an hour. Not expecting him back for some time, I had lathered my forehead and nose with a cleansing scrub, combed a hot oil treatment into my damp hair. I flushed at the thought of my appearance when he called my name, but after a moment, realized that Carlos hardly saw me. He sank into a couch and began scratching at a clump of hair near his temple. He wished to apologize, he said. He had been snappish lately, short with me. He was sorry I had borne the brunt of troubles that did not involve me in the slightest. He hesitated, rapping his knuckles against the tops of his thighs. There was someone—a woman. “I can tell you, yes? Always our relationship has been an honest and open one. For you, too, Francesca, so attractive, so capable, I can only guess there have been others as well.”

For an instant, he paused as if awaiting some confirmation. But I said nothing, only wiped from my face as much of the cleanser as I could with the sleeve of my robe. Even had I wanted to reply, the words would have stuck to the roof of my mouth. My chest, my ribs, my lungs felt suddenly compressed as they had in childhood when, learning to skate, I had fallen forward, smacking the hard ice.

“She’s not like you. She’s so . . .
so
erratic. One day she wants one thing, the next day . . . God! All women should be as rational as you, Francesca. Isn’t that what I have always said?”

From the periphery of my down-turned eyes, I could see that he was attempting to flash me a smile. But I did not raise my head, pretending to be busy with a loose bit of skin along the side of my thumbnail, wishing he would look away from my baggy robe, my hair hanging in limp strings, my face caked with white.

“So if I have been edgy lately . . . It’s just, you know, sometimes she makes me
crazy
.” Carlos stretched out this last word, rolling the
r
, his accent thickening. Then, letting out a soft yet audible stream of air through his teeth, he pressed his fingers between his knees until I could see streaks of white between the veins of his hands. And as he did, I understood what I should have always suspected, that what lay protected in velvet in his bureau drawer had never been meant for me.

•   •   •

I
t took me no more than two weeks to sign a lease for a one-bedroom sublet in a brownstone on the Upper East Side and, through the same friend of my parents who had found me my position at
Real
, to make contact with the editors of another fledgling magazine. The focus of this publication was outdoor recreation, a subject about which I was far less passionate; but, I told myself, I was in no position to be choosy.

Carlos was distraught. As I packed my belongings in cardboard boxes, he pestered me with questions. He hovered at the edge of my desk at work
while I organized papers, emptied folders. “What is it, Francesca? Is it something I’ve done? Is it the things I confessed the other night? Because I thought you and I had agreed. I thought we understood each other.”