It seemed incredible to Joe that his life had come to this. “A goddamned daisy-chain of clichés,” he muttered.
As quick as the revulsion hit him, it disappeared. His strength was the ability to face things head-on, make fast decisions, and follow through. He was going to turn this around, not tomorrow, not next week, but right now. He had known all along he would have to do it and how it would have to be done. He had to put distance between himself and them—permanent distance. No more phone calls. No more stupid visitation games.
“Walk away,” he told himself. “Just fucking walk away.”
He could do it. Hell, he had walked away from Celia when he was more or less in love with her. He doubted he had ever loved Vera, although God knows he’d been hot for her. Every inch of her Barbie-doll body, from shiny hair to aerobics-perfected buttocks, had turned him on, and he had gone after her as if she were the best deal in town.
She had hardly been that. But give himself credit; once he’d had it with her insatiable appetite for shopping combined with an all too satiable appetite for sex, and no appetite for it at all unless she’d been pre-sweetened with a gift or promises of extravagances to follow, he had shut her off. And she, of course, had shut him off. He had let her file for divorce, let her think it was all her idea. But he had done his homework. The game plan was perfected in his head before the lawyers were called in: assets tucked away where she couldn’t get at them, generous child support, and a generous lump sum for her in exchange for an ironclad agreement to not ask for more, ever. If he hadn’t got that she would have had him in court every other month just to maintain an element of control over him. He had outsmarted her and now she was using the last thing she had—the kids.
He had a mental replay of Keri raising her tiny hand to wave and the wistful way she’d looked back over her shoulder as Vera pulled her away from the window. His gut twisted. Sure, they were little dolls, but the reality was that they were not his dolls, they were Vera’s, had been from birth. She was the one who chose their clothes, chose their toys, chose their friends. Hell, she even chose their language.
“No Spanish,” she had decided when he agreed to pop for a full-time maid. “Miami is a divided city and it is not in the girls’ best interest to be taken for Latinas.”
So they had got a Haitian housekeeper. Given their fair skin, they certainly would never be taken for Haitians. Half their blood might be Cuban but it didn’t show and never would. Vera would see to that.
“American kids,” he muttered as he fumbled through his CD selection. He imagined the girls ten years from now, phoning him the way his friends’ kids phoned them, to ask for use of the car, or their own car, or money: price tags for affection that would become larger as they grew older.
He dropped Buena Vista Social Club into the CD player and cranked the volume up as high as it would go. On impulse, he hit a button and all the car windows slid open. Cuban music blasted across the lawn and crashed against the side of his all-American ex-dream house like a fist.
FOUR
CELIA stepped out of the shower and moved into her bedroom, leaving a trail of wet footprints across the worn tile floor. She stood towelling herself dry, considering the choices offered by her minimalist wardrobe while telling herself that she did not care enough about José Lago’s return to dress in any particular way.
She had to go to work later, so could wear the white slacks and smock in which she felt most comfortable. But would that not seem as if she was advertising the fact that she was a doctor? On the other hand, not a dress, definitely not. Since her teens she had not been able to wear a skirt without attracting the admiring glances of men who felt compelled to let her know they thought she had nice legs. She cringed at the thought of José telling her she had a nice anything, especially in front of Luis.
She absently wrapped the towel around herself, wandered into the kitchen, and poured a cup of coffee. Then, remembering that she was on evening shift and would be sipping coffee all night, poured it back into the dented aluminium pot. Celia did not particularly like being alone. She missed her niece during the weeks when she was away at school and more so during a home week like this when Liliana chose to join friends at a beach campismo.
Still wearing only a towel, Celia went out onto the balcony. She sat down in one plastic chair and put her feet up on the other one. The sun, combined with a breeze off the ocean, felt wonderful on bare skin. She looked through the railing at the expanse of wind-ruffled water and listened to the rhythm of wavelets washing ashore across the street and four stories below.
She chose not to think about José, whom she would soon see. Instead, she forced herself to recall the previous weekend with Luis. She had enjoyed being with him, both at the restaurant and later. He was so upset about José’s visit that she had gone out of her way to make the rest of the evening pleasant. Because predictability soothed Luis, she had tried to make their lovemaking just that, and knew as his body relaxed that she had succeeded. She had feigned tranquility too, but it had been hard to keep her mind off the hallucination—if a hallucination is what it was, and what other name could there be for an experience so clearly recalled that had no basis in reality? Only later, alone in the privacy of her own bedroom, had she gingerly reviewed the vision.
It resembled one she had had a year earlier, in that it had not lasted more than a second or two. Perhaps the only reason she had retained both was because for those few seconds she had felt so sure of herself, so strong! Was her psyche reaching back into Cuba’s glorious revolutionary history in an attempt to claim some of its participants’ courage for herself? If so, she thought ruefully, it hadn’t been particularly successful, since the feeling had vanished along with the visions.
She noticed that the towel had slid down, exposing her breasts to the sun, and hiked it up to cover skin that had already turned pink. Here on the small balcony of her apartment she saw how her mind had been playing tricks on her. Those things had not happened to her and may not have even happened to Sánchez—at least, not the way she had visioned them. The incidents were hallucinations, dreams, fantasies, or…
“Whatever they are they are not me,” Celia said aloud, and mentally began to list all the reasons why not. She had never been into mysticism. She did not even care for the magic realism of such fine Latin American writers as Isabelle Allende and Gabriel García Marquéz. By temperament and training, she was a rational, scientific-minded person.
Like the good doctor she knew herself to be, Celia prescribed what reason and intuition told her was the best regimen. She must not dwell on sensations that momentarily made her feel as if she had become Celia Sánchez or Celia Sánchez had become her or whatever was going on there. Yet she should try to remember, perhaps write down, the details of each episode. They were, after all, symptoms of something. Meanwhile, she should examine other aspects of her life that might be causing the mental aberrations. Was she under some stress that she was choosing to ignore?
José’s imminent arrival popped into her head, but she waved it away as one might a mosquito. Even the most recent hallucination had occurred before Luis broke the news that his brother was returning. Naturally she had grieved when José walked out on her, and had it not been for Franci’s support she might well have failed her final medical school exams. But hers was not a profession nor was Cuba a culture that encouraged emotional self-indulgence. In recent years she could honestly say that she had rarely given her former fiancé a thought.