Almost a Woman : A Memoir (9780306821110) (41 page)

Shanti called to arrange more sessions, but I couldn't do it. He'd quit the school of photography to take a job in a lab, enlarging other people's pictures. “I can develop color now,” he said proudly.

We performed
Babu
a few more times, and then everyone bade a teary goodbye for the summer and dispersed to other repertory or stock companies away from New York. Bill and Vera promised us work in the fall, a tour in the Washington, D.C., area. A new production was to be added to the program, a Japanese fable this time, with a part for an ingenue.

I planned a summer devoted to work and college, so that I could take the fall semester off to perform in
Babu
and, hopefully, in the new production. One of the courses I signed up for, Survey of Art History, required weekly visits to museums. Sometimes I dragged one of my sisters with me, usually Edna, and we spent Saturday or Sunday afternoons staring at paintings neither of us understood. At home, I wrote a paper about the art work assigned that week. My weekends became stressful, because although I appreciated the art, I couldn't explain it. From time to time, Tata or Mami knocked on the door of my room because they heard moans. I was frustrated by the challenge of paintings to which I had an emotional reaction but about which I could find nothing to say.

“If the artist wanted to say other than what's in the picture,” I argued with my teacher, “he should have been a writer, not a painter.” She insisted that painting was filled with vital clues and subtleties that rendered meaning but that each detail had to be studied individually.

“If you stand in front of a painting long enough,” Miss Prince assured me, “its meaning will become clear.”

One Sunday afternoon, as I stared at Seurat's dots, a woman
approached me. “I'm sorry to disturb you,” she smiled sweetly, “but do you have any idea how to get to the restaurant from here?” She had blonde hair teased into a bouffant made famous by Jacqueline Kennedy eight years earlier.

I dug out the brochure with a map of the museum galleries out of my purse and traced the route she should take to the first floor. As we were bent over the map, a man approached. “Hi,” he grinned. He was obviously related to her, with the same alert eyes, sandy hair, cheery smile, and mellifluous southern accent. She introduced him as her brother Avery Lee, herself as Patsy. “You've been so kahhnd,” she said, stretching the word until it seemed endless. “Would you join us for coffee?”

We walked downstairs, and she told me she lived in El Paso. “But I just love coming to New York,” she said, “the museums, the wonderful restaurants . . . Do you live here?”

By the time we arrived on the first floor, Patsy had extracted from me that I lived in Brooklyn, was single, a college student, a dancer and actress. “Oh, my goodness,” she gushed, “you sure do have an interesting life.” As we joined the cafeteria line, she remembered she had to call her husband. I directed her to the telephones and was alone with Avery Lee, who'd followed us in attentive silence the whole time Patsy elicited my history.

“Shouldn't we get something for her?” I offered, but Avery Lee said he didn't know what she liked. The next few minutes were awkward as I waited for Patsy to return.

“I have to be honest with you,” Avery Lee confided. “She's not coming back.”

“Why not?”

“Because we planned it this way.”

Had we not been in as public a place as the Met's cafeteria, I would have panicked. “What do you mean?”

“You were by that painting a long time,” he said. “I stood next to you, but you just stared and stared.”

“I was doing my homework,” I admitted.

“I didn't want to scare you, so I asked Patsy to see what she could do.”

“Are you related to each other?” I asked.

“Of course. She's my sister.” Despite his ploy, there was about Avery Lee an openness that I liked, and his accent, so slow and easy, was reminiscent of the adorable Mr. Grunwald. Avery Lee looked nothing like the math teacher, however. Physically, he was more like Otto—big and muscular, with thin, determined lips and a square jaw.

“You probably know the shows to see in New York,” he guessed, “because you're an actress.” He was also under the impression that I could recommend the best restaurants. I had to admit that the cultural life of the city was something I read about but didn't participate in because of its cost.

“Then you can be our guide,” he suggested. “You know where to go, and we're here to have a good time.” When I hesitated, he insisted. “Come on. Patsy has her husband, and I'm here by myself. You can be my date,” he grinned.

I told Mami that I had a job as a guide to Texan tourists. The next morning, I appeared at the apartment building where Avery Lee and Patsy were staying with friends. The doorman called up my name, and in a while Avery Lee came down alone. When I asked after Patsy, he said she had a migraine.

We hopped in and out of taxis, visited the Empire State Building, the Museum of Modern Art, Lincoln Center. We had lunch at the Waldorf Astoria. He wanted to have dinner at the Plaza, but I wasn't dressed up enough. So we went to Bloomingdale's.

“Avery Lee, I'm not comfortable with you buying me clothes,” I protested. “I'll go home and change.” But he wouldn't hear of it.

I chose a simple dress on sale, but then we had to get shoes and a purse to match. I was torn between the pleasure of buying what I could never afford with my own money and worry about its real cost.

“I know what you're thinking,” he read my mind, “but believe me, I love doing this for you. I love to see you smile.”

So I smiled my way through the junior department, where
Avery Lee bought me an outfit for the next day too, when we'd see
Man of La Mancha
, and a bikini and coverup I was to wear to the beach the day after.

It felt strange to check two shopping bags at a fancy restaurant, but that's what we did. The candlelight, the wine he ordered for dinner, the slow drawl of his speech were all intoxicating. I had to excuse myself several times and go to the ladies' room, where I leaned my face against the cool wall until my head didn't spin any more and I could speak without slurring my words. After dinner, we walked hand in hand around the fountain in front of the hotel. The last man I'd kissed had been Otto, a year and a half earlier. Avery Lee was an equally passionate kisser whose hands strayed, the way Otto's had.

“I'll get us a room,” Avery Lee offered, and headed toward the Plaza.

I sobered up right quick. “No. I better go home.”

He squinted, as if the colored lights of the fountain weren't bright enough to see me. He turned his back, stuck his hands in his pockets, took a few steps away from me, and I fully expected him to kick the ground, hang his head, and say “Aw, shucks.”

“Home?” he asked instead, as if the word were newly minted.

I sputtered that the subways were dangerous if I waited much longer. My shopping bags were still at the hotel, but I was reluctant to go back there with him, afraid to weaken and agree to follow him upstairs. I waited outside while he retrieved them. In the back of my mind I heard Shoshana's voice, “You idiot! He's a Texas millionaire!” Losing my virginity at the Plaza would have been the perfect end to the perfect day, but I couldn't bring myself to do it. As Avery Lee walked me to the train station, gloomy and silent, I felt the need to explain.

“You should know that I haven't come this close to giving in with anyone before,” I confessed.

He grinned, kissed my forehead, handed me my shopping bags. “See you tomorrow,” he said.

For the next three days we met, ate, saw plays, walked in Central Park, kissed at every opportunity. It rained the day we were
supposed to go to Jones Beach, so we went to the movies instead. “This is what they call petting, right?” I whispered, after a particularly breathtaking session of kisses and caresses.

“Yeah,” he huffed.

“What's the difference between necking and petting?” I asked, and he demonstrated. Each evening he tried to get me to come to a hotel with him, and each time I resisted. One night he accompanied me all the way to Brooklyn. We kissed, we talked, kissed some more.

“Come with me to Texas,” he offered, as the subway rumbled near my station. “I'll get you an apartment, a car, whatever you need.”

“Are you asking me to be your mistress?” I asked coyly, because I thought he was kidding.

“Yeah!” He grinned, but this time I wasn't charmed.

“If you're going to all that trouble, why not marry me?”

“Because it wouldn't look right,” he confessed, “for me to have a Spanish wife.”

I was so stunned I almost missed my stop. The doors rattled open, were about to clang shut when I jumped out, too fast for Avery Lee to lumber after me. The train pulled away and left him still sitting on the plastic bench, astonished at my agility.

I must have misunderstood. He couldn't have meant what he said. Not once in the past few days had I sensed Avery Lee's impression of me to be tainted by the stereotype of the hot-tomato Latina. I was the virginal Maria of
West Side Story,
but he envisioned me as the promiscuous Anita.

I walked home through the dark Brooklyn streets to our house, let myself in the door, changed into my pajamas, and lay face up, staring into the dark. It was wrong to have accepted the clothes he bought me, the dinners, the theater, the romantic ride in the horse-drawn carriage through Central Park. Necking and petting, I learned from Shoshana, were okay so long as I wasn't just teasing him. But I was ashamed of how close I had come to tangling with him on a bed.

Early the next morning, he called, begged me to meet him.
“I have to explain,” he said, and I agreed to meet him at a coffee shop near my job.

“It didn't sound right,” he stammered as soon as we sat down, “the way I said what I did.”

“Can you make it sound better?” I was determined to make him squirm, as I had all night long, remembering his kisses, feeling dirty and used.

“Hell!” he exclaimed, blushing when patrons at the coffee shop turned to look at us. He leaned toward me. “My daddy has had a Mexican for twenty years,” he confided. “He loves her more than life,” he added.

“A Mexican what?” I bit out.

“I'm being honest with you,” Avery Lee sulked.

My eyes itched, and I was having trouble breathing. Under the table, my hands shook with the desire to strangle him. But he was impervious to my emotions. He gently turned my face toward his. In a murmur, he told me that he had political ambitions, that he had to marry a “good ole Texas gal” from a prominent family. Someone who could help him get elected. “Hell,” he sat back and exclaimed again, “LBJ himself did it that way. The marriage means nothing.”

I stood up, gathered my things. “I don't want to be your mistress,” I hissed. “Right now, I don't even want to be in the same room with you.”

“Sit down,” Avery Lee ordered. “Everyone's starin'.”

I sat down, defeated. It was too late to make a dramatic exit, to act self-righteous. Avery Lee wrote a phone number on his business card. “This is mah private lahhn.” Oh, those long vowels! “Call me when you change your mahhnd.” I stared at the paper, at his hopeful, foolish face. I wanted to spit into it. He stood up, helped me out of my chair, walked me to the Advertising Checking Bureau half a block away. At the elevator, he tried to kiss me, but I backed away. When the doors opened, I gulped some air, pushed my shoulders back, swallowed the hurt that tightened my throat, tickled my eyes. As the elevator rose, I absorbed Avery Lee's
insult as thoroughly as newsprint absorbs ink. Maybe I was too proud and ambitious. Maybe the years at Performing Arts, the exotic dance training, the movie work, the Broadway show had caused me to develop a higher opinion of myself than I deserved. Maybe Avery Lee saw the real me, a “Spanish” girl, good enough to sleep with but not good enough to marry.

That night I pulled out Shanti's photographs and studied them. In one, I sat on the grass, my body toward the camera, my face in haughty profile, gaze on a distant horizon. A scarf was tied around my forehead—Cleopatra's diadem. When Shanti took the picture, he made me hold the pose a long time. “Be still,” he murmured over and over, until I had to stop breathing to satisfy him.

In another photograph, I leaned against the granite wall at the top of the Empire State Building. Behind me, Brooklyn floated in a soupy gray cloud like the suggestion of a city, nothing but pale rectangles and bruised smudges. Between me and Brooklyn, the East River was a flat, icy sheet. That photograph was taken on a cold, blustery morning just as the sun cut through the clouds, so that half of me was overexposed, the other half obscure. My expression was desolate, as if I'd just heard bad news.

As I leafed through the portfolio of my stillborn modeling career, I didn't see myself. I saw Avery Lee's Spanish girl, earnest but sad, eyes wary, and in each picture, alone, the edges of the photographs a box encasing loneliness.