We wake up bright and early for the buffet, get served by cheerful women in Aunt Jemima costumes. I shit you not: these sisters even have to wear hankies on their heads. Magda is scratching out a couple of cards to her family. I want to talk about the day before, but when I bring it up she puts down her pen. Jams on her shades.
I feel like you’re pressuring me.
How am I pressuring you? I ask.
I just want some space to myself every now and then. Every time I’m with you I have this sense that you want something from me.
Time to yourself, I say. What does that mean?
Like maybe once a day, you do one thing, I do another.
Like when? Now?
It doesn’t have to be now. She looks exasperated. Why don’t we just go down to the beach?
As we walk over to the courtesy golf cart, I say, I feel like you rejected my whole country, Magda.
Don’t be ridiculous. She drops one hand in my lap. I just wanted to relax. What’s wrong with that?
The sun is blazing and the blue of the ocean is an overload on the brain. Casa de Campo has got beaches the way the rest of the Island has got problems. These, though, have no merengue, no little kids, nobody trying to sell you chicharrones, and there’s a massive melanin deficit in evidence. Every fifty feet there’s at least one Eurofuck beached out on a towel like some scary pale monster that the sea’s vomited up. They look like philosophy professors, like budget Foucaults, and too many of them are in the company of a dark-assed Dominican girl. I mean it, these girls can’t be no more than sixteen, look puro ingenio to me. You can tell by their inability to communicate that these two didn’t meet back in their Left Bank days.
Magda’s rocking a dope Ochun-colored bikini that her girls helped her pick out so she could torture me, and I’m in these old ruined trunks that say “Sandy Hook Forever!” I’ll admit it, with Magda half naked in public I’m feeling vulnerable and uneasy. I put my hand on her knee. I just wish you’d say you love me.
Yunior, please.
Can you say you like me a lot?
Can you leave me alone? You’re such a pestilence.
I let the sun stake me out to the sand. It’s disheartening, me and Magda together. We don’t look like a couple. When she smiles niggers ask her for her hand in marriage; when I smile folks check their wallets. Magda’s been a star the whole time we’ve been here. You know how it is when you’re on the Island and your girl’s an octoroon. Brothers go apeshit. On buses, the machos were like, Tú sí eres bella, muchacha. Every time I dip into the water for a swim, some Mediterranean Messenger of Love starts rapping to her. Of course, I’m not polite. Why don’t you beat it, pancho? We’re on our honeymoon here. There’s this one squid who’s mad persistent, even sits down near us so he can impress her with the hair around his nipples, and instead of ignoring him she starts a conversation and it turns out he’s Dominican, too, from Quisqueya Heights, an assistant DA who loves his people. Better I’m their prosecutor, he says. At least I understand them. I’m thinking he sounds like the sort of nigger who in the old days used to lead bwana to the rest of us. After three minutes of him, I can’t take it no more, and say, Magda, stop talking to that asshole.
The assistant DA startles. I know you ain’t talking to me, he says.
Actually, I say, I am.
This is unbelievable. Magda gets to her feet and walks stiff-legged toward the water. She’s got a half-moon of sand stuck to her butt. A total fucking heartbreak.
Homeboy’s saying something else to me, but I’m not listening. I already know what she’ll say when she sits back down. Time for you to do your thing and me to do mine.
—
THAT NIGHT I LOITER around the pool and the local bar, Club Cacique, Magda nowhere to be found. I meet a dominicana from West New York. Fly, of course. Trigueña, with the most outrageous perm this side of Dyckman. Lucy is her name. She’s hanging out with three of her teenage girl cousins. When she removes her robe to dive into the pool, I see a spiderweb of scars across her stomach.
I also meet these two rich older dudes drinking cognac at the bar. Introduce themselves as the Vice-President and Bárbaro, his bodyguard. I must have the footprint of fresh disaster on my face. They listen to my troubles like they’re a couple of capos and I’m talking murder. They commiserate. It’s a thousand degrees out and the mosquitoes hum like they’re about to inherit the earth, but both these cats are wearing expensive suits, and Bárbaro is even sporting a purple ascot. Once a soldier tried to saw open his neck and now he covers the scar. I’m a modest man, he says.
I go off to phone the room. No Magda. I check with reception. No messages. I return to the bar and smile.
The Vice-President is a young brother, in his late thirties, and pretty cool for a chupabarrio. He advises me to find another woman. Make her bella and negra. I think, Cassandra.
The Vice-President waves his hand and shots of Barceló appear so fast you’d think it’s science fiction.
Jealousy is the best way to jump-start a relationship, the Vice-President says. I learned that when I was a student at Syracuse. Dance with another woman, dance merengue with her, and see if your jeva’s not roused to action.
You mean roused to violence.
She hit you?
When I first told her. She smacked me right across the chops.
Pero, hermano, why’d you tell her? Bárbaro wants to know. Why didn’t you just deny it?
Compadre, she received a letter. It had evidence.
The Vice-President smiles fantastically and I can see why he’s a vice-president. Later, when I get home, I’ll tell my mother about this whole mess, and she’ll tell me what this brother was the vice-president of.
They only hit you, he says, when they care.
Amen, Bárbaro murmurs. Amen.
—
ALL OF MAGDA’S FRIENDS SAY I cheated because I was Dominican, that all us Dominican men are dogs and can’t be trusted. I doubt that I can speak for all Dominican men but I doubt they can either. From my perspective it wasn’t genetics; there were reasons. Causalities.
The truth is there ain’t no relationship in the world that doesn’t hit turbulence. Mine and Magda’s certainly did.
I was living in Brooklyn and she was with her folks in Jersey. We talked every day on the phone and on weekends we saw each other. Usually I went in. We were real Jersey, too: malls, the parents, movies, a lot of TV. After a year of us together, this was where we were at. Our relationship wasn’t the sun, the moon, and the stars, but it wasn’t bullshit, either. Especially not on Saturday mornings, over at my apartment, when she made us coffee campo-style, straining it through the sock thing. Told her parents the night before she was staying over at Claribel’s; they must have known where she was, but they never said shit. I’d sleep late and she’d read, scratching my back in slow arcs, and when I was ready to get up I would start kissing her until she would say, God, Yunior, you’re making me wet.
I wasn’t unhappy and wasn’t actively pursuing ass like some niggers. Sure, I checked out other females, even danced with them when I went out, but I wasn’t keeping numbers or nothing.