After class the Brazilian and I would walk out together. He was tall and long-limbed beside me, and my walking close to him, in matched stride with him, made me feel in possession of a prize. One time we made it all the way to a coffee shop, where I asked him whether he’d like to have coffee with me, and he said no.
“Coals to Newcastle and all that,” I said, flustered. “Why would a Brazilian drink coffee in America — don’t know what I was thinking.” I turned to go.
“I’d like a Coke,” he said.
“OK,” I said. “They have Pepsi in there. Is that all right?”
“OK,” he said. He had a smile that made you realize that some skulls contained an entire power plant set up in miniature inside, and the heat and electricity they generated spilled their voltage out through the teeth and eyes.
“Teach me some Portuguese,” I said over coffee and cola at a back table near a table of zines and flyers.
And what he taught me, phrases from little songs—Ahora voy a dormire, bambino, / Porque llevo el pijama: si! no! si! no! — I repeated and rehearsed at home and even taught Mary-Emma. They could have been Etruscan for all I knew. Negro, blanco, / Me gusta naranja! I learned much later it was actually Spanish with some Italian thrown in. Except for the words to “Happy Birthday,” none of it was Portuguese at all.
Thus began my protracted misunderstanding of Romance languages (in high school I had taken German with Frau Zinkraub; on the tops of all my quizzes I drew pictures of Panzer tanks with Hitler on top in a salute; I had tried Latin, but in situ there had been no one to speak it with — and so what was the point? I would do things like imagine ergonomic meant “thereforeish”). Romance languages eluded me both generally and specifically; nothing was as cryptic and ripe for misunderstanding as the physical language of a boy’s love. What was an involuntary grimace I took to be rapture. What was a simple natural masculine compulsion to be in, to tunnel and thrust, I saw as a tender desire to be sweetly engulfed and at least momentarily overpowered by another’s devoted attentions. What was an urgent, automatic back-and-forth of the body I thought of as the eternal romantic return of the lover. Kissing was not animal appetite but the heart flying up to the lips and speaking its unique attraction and deep eternal fondnesses in the only way it could. The juddering of climax, as involuntary as a death rattle, I took to be a statement of hopeless attachment. Why, I don’t know. I didn’t think of myself as sentimental. I thought of myself as spiritually alert.
Uh-oh, as Mary-Emma would say.
“Are you a virgin?” he had asked.
“Yes,” I said. That he couldn’t tell already, that it wasn’t spelled out all over my face and demeanor, thrilled me. To be funny, I rolled my head with a harlot’s abandon and purred, “I am.” I fell back, the way a cooked onion slid apart, in all its layers, when bit.
Later I would come to believe that erotic ties were all a spell, a temporary psychosis, even a kind of violence, or at least they coexisted with these states. I noted that criminals as well as the insane tended to give off a palpable, vibrating allure, a kind of animal magnetism that kept them loved by someone. How else could they survive at all? Someone had to hide them from the authorities! Hence the necessity and prevalence of sex appeal for people who were wild and on the edge.
If only I could have dated someone who was both insane and criminal. If only I could have dated the criminally insane! I could have doubled my fun and entered the purest, highest exhilarating erotic and narcotic trance! and if I’d lived to tell the tale, perhaps come to my senses sooner. I was in a fused condition of ecstasy and retrospective rue almost always, and from the beginning. “I love you,” I would say, and he said nothing at all. But no shame rose in me to rescue or silence me. “I love you,” I said again. And then I added, “Is there an echo in here?”
“There is,” he would say, smiling. His teeth were the color of cream. His gums the pale lox pink of a winter tomato. He wore wrapped around his neck a black-and-white scarf — a print I thought of as Middle Eastern, though it could have been a Navajo tablecloth, for all I knew.
“Yeah, I thought so.” I would tenderly smooth the strands of hair off my own face, myself.
I had told Murph that I had a crush on a South American and while I was out she called from her boyfriend’s one night and sang into the phone machine: “Pedro Pedro bo bedro, banana fanna fo fedro, fee fie mo medro …”
His name was Reynaldo, and as the snow melted, I began to bring Mary-Emma — in her Radio Flyer wagon or in her stroller — on walks to his apartment. To bring him a present — a doughnut or Danish or a hot mocha — I would stop in the market on the way there, in a section of town where there were actual black people shopping (unlike the Wednesday-night rumors of such). Some would look at me, then at Mary-Emma, and then at me again and smile. They seemed to be welcoming me into the community. Some would say hi to Mary-Emma. There were only a few bits of unpleasantness from women. Two black women and one white one scowled at me: I was a tramp. For some black women I clearly had encroached upon their men and produced this baby; besides, what did I know about bringing up an African-American child in this world? (Nothing.) To the white woman I was a whoring girl messing around with anyone. This was all said in looks, so the truth could not be uttered, but I saw again and again what it was simply to walk into a store for a doughnut and have a wordless racial experience.
But mostly black people were smiling and warm to us. Everyone loved a beautiful baby, no matter what.
“Hey, sweetie!” they said. And Mary-Emma would smile or hide her face in her own shoulder.
Once, I thought I saw Sarah’s car following us, but when I turned saw nothing.
When I brought Mary-Emma, Reynaldo and I did not kiss or touch at all in front of her, but often I returned to his place with her after having left his bed for work just that morning, wanting badly to see him again soon and right away. It was neither near nor far — one could get there in twenty-five minutes without much trouble, and when we arrived he was very kind to us both. He loved the doughnuts. He loved that particular mocha coffee. He was taking a photography class and took pictures of us with a new digital camera he had just bought — we said “cheese” in three languages, and then “keys” and then “please,” and when we were not paying attention he would suddenly sneak up and snap our picture from the side. Or freeze us in the frame, I should say. Digital cameras were still new, and seemed magical, as right in the moment he could have you look through the frames and say which picture you wanted. He made me some strong Brazilian morning tea, to last the whole day, and poured juice for Mary-Emma. She poked around and got into things, but he had a real xylophone, which he let her play, with both the soft cotton-dampened mallets and the harder wood ones with their zingier sound, and it all delighted her. She struck hard and with every note turned to look at me with amazement. “Here, let me show you,” Reynaldo would say, and he would take two sticks per hand and bounce them around on what I thought of as a double-decker keyboard. She seemed to love Reynaldo because he was attentive and appreciative, and perhaps because he was brown (the colorblindness of small children was a myth; she noticed difference and sameness, with almost equal interest; there was no “Dilemma of Difference” as my alliteration-loving professors occasionally put it; there was no “Sin of the Same”), but she also loved him because of that xylophone. He played the only American song he knew, a folk one with verse upon verse of wide water and longing and woe, one that ended “… like the summer dew.” And then he was very quiet, saying, “Shouldn’t it be ‘like the summer does’?”