This Is How You Lose Her (16 page)

He’s not yours, you tell Elvis.

What are you talking about?

The boy is not yours.

Don’t be a jerk. That kid looks just like me.

Elvis. You put your hand on his arm. You look straight into the center of his eyes. Cut the crap.

A long silence. But he looks like me.

Bro, he so doesn’t look like you.

The next day you two load up the boy and drive back into the city, back into Gazcue. You literally have to beat the family off to keep them from coming with you. Before you go one of the uncles pulls you aside. You really should bring these people a refrigerator. Then the brother pulls you aside. And a TV. And then the mother pulls you aside. A hot comb too.

Traffic back into the center is Gaza Strip crazy and there seems to be a crash every five hundred meters and Elvis keeps threatening to turn around. You ignore him. You stare at the slurry of broken concrete, the sellers with all the crap of the earth slung over their shoulders, the dust-covered palms. The boy holds on to you tightly. There is no significance in this, you tell yourself. It’s a Moro-type reflex, nothing more.

Don’t make me do this, Yunior, Elvis pleads.

You insist. You have to, E. You know you can’t live a lie. It won’t be good for the boy, it won’t be good for you. Don’t you think it’s better to know?

But I always wanted a boy, he says. My whole life that’s all I wanted. When I got in that shit in Iraq I kept thinking, Please God let me live just long enough to have a son, please, and then you can kill me dead right after. And look, He gave him to me, didn’t He? He gave him to me.

The clinic is in one of those houses they built in the International Style during the time of Trujillo. The two of you stand at the front desk. You are holding the boy’s hand. The boy is staring at you with lapidary intensity. The mud is waiting. The mosquito bites are waiting. The Nada is waiting.

Go on, you tell Elvis.

In all honesty you figure he won’t do it, that this is where it will end. He’ll take the boy and turn around and go back to the jípeta. But he carries the little guy into a room where they swab both their mouths and it’s done.

You ask: How long will it take for the results?

Four weeks, the technician tells you.

That long?

She shrugs. Welcome to Santo Domingo.

Year 5

You figure that’s the last you’ll hear about it, that no matter what, the results will change nothing. But four weeks after the trip, Elvis informs you that the test is negative. Fuck, he says bitterly, fuck fuck fuck. And then he cuts off all contact with the kid and the mother. Changes his cell phone number and e-mail account. I told the bitch not to call me again. There is some shit that can’t be forgiven.

Of course you feel terrible. You think about the way the boy looked at you. Let me have her number at least, you say. You figure you can throw her a little cash every month but he won’t have it. Fuck that lying bitch.

You reckon he must have known, somewhere inside, maybe even wanted you to blow it all up, but you let it be, don’t explore it. He’s going to yoga five times a week now, is in the best shape of his life, while you on the other hand have to buy bigger jeans again. When you walk into Elvis’s now, his daughter rushes you, calls you Tío Junji. It’s your Korean name, Elvis teases.

With him it’s like nothing happened. You wish you could be as phlegmatic.

Do you ever think about them?

He shakes his head. Never will either.

The numbness in the arms and legs increases. You return to your doctors and they ship you over to a neurologist who sends you out for an MRI. Looks like you have stenosis all down your spine, the doctor reports, impressed.

Is it bad?

It isn’t great. Did you used to do a lot of heavy manual labor?

Besides delivering pool tables, you mean?

That would do it. The doctor squints at the MRI. Let’s try some physical therapy. If that doesn’t work we’ll talk about other options.

Like?

He steeples his fingers contemplatively. Surgery.

From there what little life you got goes south. A student complains to the school that you curse too much. You have to have a sit-down with the dean, who more or less tells you to watch your shit. You get pulled over by the cops three weekends in a row. One time they sit you out on the curb and you watch as all the other whips sail past, passengers ogling you as they go. On the T you swear you peep her in the rush-hour mix and for a second your knees buckle but it turns out to be just another Latina mujerón in a tailored suit.

Of course you dream about her. You are in New Zealand or in Santo Domingo or improbably back in college, in the dorms. You want her to say your name, to touch you, but she doesn’t. She just shakes her head.

Ya
.

—

Y
OU WANT TO MOVE ON,
to exorcise shit, so you find a new apartment on the other side of the square that has a view of Harvard skyline. All those amazing steeples, including your favorite, the gray dagger of the Old Cambridge Baptist Church. In the first days of your tenancy an eagle lands in the dead tree right outside your fifth-story window. Looks you in the eye. This seems to you like a good sign.

A month later the law student sends you an invitation to her wedding in Kenya. There’s a foto and the two of them are dressed in what you assume is traditional Kenyan jumpoffs. She looks very thin, and she’s wearing a lot of makeup. You expect a note, some mention of what you did for her, but there is nothing. Even the address was typed on a computer.

Maybe it’s a mistake, you say.

It wasn’t a mistake, Arlenny assures you.

Elvis tears the invite up, throws it out the truck window. Fuck that bitch. Fuck all bitches.

You manage to save a tiny piece of the foto. It’s of her hand.

You work harder than you’ve ever worked at everything—the teaching, your physical therapy, your regular therapy, your reading, your walking. You keep waiting for the heaviness to leave you. You keep waiting for the moment you never think about the ex again. It doesn’t come.

You ask everybody you know: How long does it usually take to get over it?

There are many formulas. One year for every year you dated. Two years for every year you dated. It’s just a matter of willpower: The day you decide it’s over, it’s over. You never get over it.

One night that winter you go out with all the boys to a ghetto-ass Latin club in Mattapan Square. Murder-fucking-pan. Outside it’s close to zero, but inside it’s so hot that everybody’s stripped down to their T-shirts and the funk is as thick as a fro. There’s a girl who keeps bumping into you. You say to her Pero mi amor, ya. And she says: Ya yourself. She’s Dominican and lithe and super tall. I could never date anyone as short as you, she informs you very early on in your conversations. But she gives you her number at the end of the night. All evening, Elvis sits at the bar quietly, drinking shot after shot of Rémy. The week before, he took a quick solo trip to the DR, a ghost recon. Didn’t tell you about it until after. He tried looking for the mom and Elvis Jr. but they had moved and no one knew where they were. None of the numbers he had for her worked. I hope they turn up, he says.

I hope so, too.

You take the longest walks. Every ten minutes you drop and do squats or push-ups. It’s not running, but it raises your heart rate, better than nothing. Afterward you are in so much nerve pain that you can barely move.

Some nights you have
Neuromancer
dreams where you see the ex and the boy and another figure, familiar, waving at you in the distance.
Somewhere, very close, the laugh that wasn’t laughter.

And finally, when you feel like you can do so without blowing into burning atoms, you open a folder you have kept hidden under your bed. The Doomsday Book. Copies of all the e-mails and fotos from the cheating days, the ones the ex found and compiled and mailed to you a month after she ended it.
Dear Yunior, for your next book.
Probably the last time she wrote your name.

You read the whole thing cover to cover (yes, she put covers on it). You are surprised at what a fucking chickenshit coward you are. It kills you to admit it but it’s true. You are astounded by the depths of your mendacity. When you finish the Book a second time you say the truth: You did the right thing, negra. You did the right thing.

She’s right; this would make a killer book, Elvis says. The two of you have been pulled over by a cop and are waiting for Officer Dickhead to finish running your license. Elvis holds up one of the fotos.

She’s Colombian, you say.

He whistles. Que viva Colombia. Hands you back the Book. You really should write the cheater’s guide to love.

You think?

I do.

It takes a while. You see the tall girl. You go to more doctors. You celebrate Arlenny’s Ph.D. defense. And then one June night you scribble the ex’s name and:
The half-life of love is forever
.

You bust out a couple more things. Then you put your head down.

The next day you look at the new pages. For once you don’t want to burn them or give up writing forever.

It’s a start, you say to the room.

That’s about it. In the months that follow you bend to the work, because it feels like hope, like grace—and because you know in your lying cheater’s heart that sometimes a start is all we ever get.