a cocksucker
a punk motherfucker
a fake-ass Dominican.
She claims:
you have a little penis
no penis
and worst of all that you like curried pussy.
(which really is unfair, you try to say, since Laxmi is from Guyana, but Alma isn’t listening.)
Instead of lowering your head and copping to it like a man, you pick up the journal as one might hold a baby’s beshatted diaper, as one might pinch a recently benutted condom. You glance at the offending passages. Then you look at her and smile a smile your dissembling face will remember until the day you die. Baby, you say, baby, this is part of my novel.
This is how you lose her.
Otravida, Otravez
HE SITS ON THE MATTRESS, the fat spread of his ass popping my fitted sheets from their corners. His clothes are stiff from the cold, and the splatter of dried paint on his pants has frozen into rivets. He smells of bread. He’s been talking about the house he wants to buy, how hard it is to find one when you’re Latino. When I ask him to stand up so I can fix the bed, he walks over to the window. So much snow, he says. I nod and wish he would be quiet. Ana Iris is trying to sleep on the other side of the room. She has spent half the night praying for her children back in Samaná, and I know that in the morning she has to work at the fábrica. She moves uneasily, buried beneath comforters, her head beneath a pillow. Even here in the States she drapes mosquito netting over her bed.
There’s a truck trying to turn the corner, he tells me. I wouldn’t want to be that chamaco.
It’s a busy street, I say, and it is. Mornings I find the salt and cut rock that the trucks spill onto the front lawn, little piles of treasure in the snow. Lie down, I tell him, and he comes to me, slipping under the covers. His clothes are rough and I wait until it is warm enough under the sheets before I release the buckle to his pants. We shiver together and he does not touch me until we stop.
Yasmin, he says. His mustache is against my ear, sawing at me. We had a man die today at the bread factory. He doesn’t speak for a moment, as if the silence is the elastic that will bring his next words forward. Este tipo fell from the rafters. Héctor found him between the conveyors.
Was he a friend?
This one. I recruited him at a bar. Told him he wouldn’t get cheated.
That’s too bad, I say. I hope he doesn’t have a family.
Probably does.
Did you see him?
What do you mean?
Did you see him dead?
No. I called the manager and he told me not to let anyone near. He crosses his arms. I do that roof work all the time.
You’re a lucky man, Ramón.
Yes, but what if it had been me?
That’s a stupid question.
What would you have done?
I set my face against him; he has known the wrong women if he expects more. I want to say, Exactly what your wife’s doing in Santo Domingo. Ana Iris mutters in the corner loudly, but she’s just pretending. Bailing me out of trouble. He goes quiet because he doesn’t want to wake her. After a while he gets up and sits by the window. The snow has started falling again. Radio WADO says this winter will be worse than the last four, maybe the worst in ten years. I watch him: he’s smoking, his fingers tracing the thin bones around his eyes, the slack of skin around his mouth. I wonder who he’s thinking about. His wife, Virta, or maybe his child. He has a house in Villa Juana; I’ve seen the fotos Virta sent. She looks thin and sad, the dead son at her side. He keeps the pictures in a jar under his bed, very tightly sealed.
We fall asleep without kissing. Later I wake up and so does he. I ask him if he’s going back to his place and he says no. The next time I wake up he doesn’t. In the cold and darkness of this room he could almost be anybody. I lift his meaty hand. It is heavy and has flour under each nail. Sometimes at night I kiss his knuckles, crinkled as prunes. His hands have tasted of crackers and bread the whole three years we’ve been together.
—
HE DOES NOT TALK to me or Ana Iris as he dresses. In his top jacket pocket he carries a blue disposable razor that has begun to show rust on its sharp lip. He soaps his cheeks and chin, the water cold from the pipes, and then scrapes his face clean, trading stubble for scabs. I watch, my naked chest covered with goose bumps. He stomps downstairs and out of the house, a bit of toothpaste on his teeth. As soon as he leaves, I can hear my housemates complaining about him. Doesn’t he have his own place to sleep, they’ll ask me when I go into the kitchen. And I’ll say yes, and smile. From the frosted window I watch him pull up his hood and hitch the triple layer of shirt, sweater, and coat onto his shoulders.
Ana Iris kicks back her covers. What are you doing? she asks me.
Nothing, I say. She watches me dress from under the craziness of her hair.
You have to learn to trust your men, she says.
I trust.
She kisses my nose, heads downstairs. I comb out my hair, sweep the crumbs and pubic hairs from my covers. Ana Iris doesn’t think he’ll leave me; she thinks he’s too settled here, that we’ve been together too long. He’s the sort of man who’ll go to the airport but won’t be able to get on board, she says. Ana Iris left her own children back on the Island, hasn’t seen her three boys in nearly seven years. She understands what has to be sacrificed on a voyage.
In the bathroom I stare into my own eyes. His stubble quivers in beads of water, compass needles.
I work two blocks away, at St. Peter’s Hospital. Never late. Never leave the laundry room. Never leave the heat. I load washers, I load dryers, peel the lint skin from the traps, measure out heaping scoops of crystal detergent. I’m in charge of four other workers, I make an American wage, but it’s a donkey job. I sort through piles of sheets with gloved hands. The dirties are brought down by orderlies, morenas mostly. I never see the sick; they visit me through the stains and marks they leave on the sheets, the alphabet of the sick and dying. A lot of the time the stains are too deep and I have to throw these linens in the special hamper. One of the girls from Baitoa tells me she’s heard that everything in the hamper gets incinerated. Because of the sida, she whispers. Sometimes the stains are rusty and old and sometimes the blood smells sharp as rain. You’d think, given the blood we see, that there’s a great war going on out in the world. Just the one inside of bodies, the new girl says.
My girls are not exactly reliable, but I enjoy working with them. They play music, they feud, they tell me funny stories. And because I don’t yell or bully them they like me. They’re young, sent to the States by their parents. The same age I was when I arrived; they see me now, twenty-eight, five years here, as a veteran, a rock, but back then, in those first days, I was so alone that every day was like eating my own heart.
A few of the girls have boyfriends and they’re the ones I’m careful about depending on. They show up late or miss weeks at a time; they move to Nueva York or Union City without warning. When that happens I have to go to the manager’s office. He’s a little man, a thin man, a bird-looking man; has no hair on his face, but a thatch grows on his chest and up his neck. I tell him what happened and he pulls the girl’s application and rips it in half, the cleanest of sounds. In less than an hour one of the other girls has sent a friend to me for an application.
The newest girl’s called Samantha and she’s a problem. She’s dark and heavy-browed and has a mouth like unswept glass — when you least expect it she cuts you. Walked onto the job after one of the other girls ran off to Delaware. She’s been in the States only six weeks and can’t believe the cold. Twice she’s tipped over the detergent barrels and she has a bad habit of working without gloves and then rubbing her eyes. She tells me that she’s been sick, that she’s had to move twice, that her housemates have stolen her money. She has the scared, hunted look of the unlucky. Work is work, I tell her, but I loan her enough for her lunches, let her do personal laundry in our machines. I expect her to thank me, but instead she says that I talk like a man.