Almost a Woman : A Memoir (9780306821110) (50 page)

Ulvi surprised me one day. He took me to dinner at an expensive restaurant because he wanted to celebrate meeting some people interested in his film. They had shot a couple of low-budget films in Italy and were interested in Ulvi as a director for another film they wanted to produce. Ulvi said they were impressed by his reputation as an art film director, an image they sought to promote for themselves.

“It is a good possibility,” Ulvi said, and as he downplayed it, I knew he was relieved. The burden of financing every aspect of
Dry Summer
was lifted just when he ran out of money. “I only have enough for one month,” he told me, and I wondered what might have happened if the partners hadn't come along.

When we returned to his apartment, Ulvi took my hand, kissed it. He asked me to close my eyes and clicked a cuff bracelet on my wrist. It was heavy gold mesh, about one and a half inches wide, with gold braid along the edges. I was speechless, embarrassed by the extravagance of such a gift.

“What's this for?” I stammered

“You have been good girl,” he murmured.

“But you can't afford it.”

“Don't worry,” he said.

Later, naked save for the bracelet, I turned my wrist this way and that to catch the shimmer of the gold against my skin. I wondered what the bracelet was worth, whether hundreds or thousands of dollars.

“I feel funny taking this when I know you need money,” I offered.

“I said don't worry,” he snapped.

On the way home that night, I pulled the sleeve of my coat over the bracelet so that no one on the train could see it and mug me. Because I knew Mami would notice it, I concocted a story about a friend who wanted to sell it. Was the bracelet worth the $25 she asked? Mami thought the price was more than fair.

I wore the bracelet everywhere, with casual or dressy clothes, because it pleased Ulvi to see it on me. When I showed it to Iris at work, she said it reminded her of shackles. “For that slave-girl look,” she added.

Over the next few weeks, Ulvi gave me other expensive gifts. An Hermes leather agenda book, a sterling silver key ring from Tiffany's in the shape of a heart. He also took an interest in how I dressed. He insisted that when we were together, I not wear makeup. “I don't like painted woman,” he said. He accompanied me shopping for clothes. Before making films, he had worked as a textile engineer in Germany and was particular about what went next to his skin. When I chose a garment, he rubbed it between his fingers, weighed it on the palm of his hand, turned it inside out to see if the pattern was stamped or woven in, and to check the finish on the seams. He eliminated most of my choices. “This
is for cheap girl,” he sneered, then picked something else. “This one better for you.”

“Cheap girl” was his biggest insult, the exact opposite of “elegant girl,” who dressed well and behaved appropriately according to a complicated system of etiquette and demeanor that Ulvi swore I needed to master. “If you are going to be with me, you must learn.”

I wanted to be with him, so I attended to his lessons. When we were out, I was to mirror his movements, so as not to embarrass myself. I was to eat if he ate, with the utensil he used, to speak less and listen more, to withhold my opinions. He made me aware of my limitations, promised to help me overcome them. “You are poor girl with small mind,” he said once and repeated often. When he noticed I was offended, he explained that he meant not that I was stupid but that I was unsophisticated, because I'd been too well protected.

“It is what I love about you, Chiquita,” he told me. “I can teach you everything.” He wanted to be Pygmalion, and I became the stone upon which he sculpted Galatea. Whenever it felt as if he controlled too much of my life, I complained, but he shushed me with caresses and a promise. “You will be by my side, but you must do as I tell you.” To be with him, I had to discard who I was and evolve into the woman he wanted to be with. “I have thousand girlfriends,” he boasted, “but only you I care.” It was the closest he could come to saying he loved me, but for me it was close enough.

Gradually, he introduced me to people in his life. Each encounter was a test I had to pass to move on to the next level. First I met Hans, Johan, and Fritz and comported myself well in the stuffy editing room. Then he introduced me to Bruce, the writer who helped him with the subtitles, and to his delicate wife, Diana. Peter, the Iranian cameraman who filmed the sex scenes, and his wife, Barbara, were next. When he introduced me to the man he called his best friend, Tarik, I knew he trusted me. Each little piece of his life I was allowed to share felt like a victory, because I'd earned the right to be with him, by his side.

Manos finished most of the score and planned to record it
with a Juilliard-trained group of musicians who performed under the name
The New York Rock
and
Roll Ensemble.
I came to the recording studio and met Manos for the first time. He was enormous, with an engaging grin; small hands with short, fat fingers; merry ebony eyes.

After the first couple of sessions in the recording studio, Ulvi told me not to come anymore. The musicians and their girlfriends smoked pot constantly, and Ulvi worried that they were into other drugs. “I don't want you around that,” he said, and I was grateful for his concern.

The day he admitted how old he was, I understood why he had kept it a secret for so long. He was thirty-seven, the same age as Mami, seventeen years older than me. I'd studied psychology at Manhattan Community College, was aware that Ulvi was the classic father substitute, but it didn't matter. He took care of me in a way no one else did. In his arms I felt safe and protected. Wrapped in his embrace, I had no responsibilities except to do as he said. “Don't worry,” he assured me, “I take care everything.” He was clear about what he expected from me. Unlike the other adults in my life, he didn't say one thing and do another. If he didn't want me to drink alcohol, it was because he didn't drink. If he frowned on smoking, he didn't smoke. He didn't want children, so he took care I didn't get pregnant.

He needed a disciple; I needed to be led. I felt myself submerge into his need like a pebble into a pond, with no resistance, no trace I'd ever been anywhere or anyone without him. With Ulvi I wasn't Negi, daughter of an absent father, oldest of eleven children, role model for ten siblings, translator for my mother. I was not Esmeralda, failed actress/dancer/secretary. My head against Ulvi's chest, my arms around his neck, I was what I stopped being the day I climbed into a propeller plane in Isla Verde, to emerge into the rainy night of Brooklyn. After seven years in the United States, I had become what I stopped being the day I left Puerto Rico. I had become Chiquita—small, little one. Little girl.

In April Ulvi and I took long walks in Central Park along paths that he seemed to know intimately. “I jog here,” he said, which surprised me because he'd never told me he was a runner. From time to time he liked to leave the paths and walk on the grass, his eyes scanning the green for four-leaf clovers. It impressed me that he always found one, plucked it, pressed it between the folds of a dollar bill. Later, in his apartment, he taped it flat, carefully cut around it. He sent them to friends, he said, and once gave one to me. “It will bring you good luck,” he claimed. I kept it in my wallet as he instructed but noticed no difference in my fortunes.

“Maybe I'm immune to good luck,” I joked, but he didn't get it.

Our walks in the park usually ended at the zoo, where we visited the sad, caged creatures who paced back and forth with the same tenacity they'd display if they were going somewhere. We stopped to watch the seals slither in and out of murky water, their coats a-shimmer. A crowd gathered around the pond when they were fed, but I found their silly antics for a dead fish pitiful.

Shanti had taken numerous pictures of me in the zoo, by the monkey cages or on a bench surrounded by pigeons, which an old lady fed from a plastic bucket at her side. Every time I passed those spots, I remembered Shanti's Crayola brown eyes, the way he tilted his head to let me know how I should place mine.

When Ulvi and I walked around the Lake, I remembered
Jurgen's content look as he lifted the oars, dipped them in the water, pulled them toward his chest to propel us across. Ulvi liked to sit in the lobbies of fancy hotels like the Plaza, the St. Regis, the Waldorf. I didn't tell him about the dinners Shoshana and I had had in the restaurants of those hotels, about the lonesome men eager to spend their money and their time on a couple of girls hungry for male attention.

The restaurant in Rockefeller Center where Jurgen and I had first talked still served expensive meals under bright umbrellas, but I didn't tell Ulvi I had once sat in their shade to cry on the shoulder of a stranger because Avery Lee had asked me to be his mistress. Ulvi, who talked as if I'd never remember a word he said, didn't ask about me. The less interest he had in my life, the more ashamed of it I became, ashamed of a life before him, without him.

A few weeks short of my twenty-first birthday, we were walking in the park when Ulvi doubled over. I helped him to a nearby bench, and he sat for a while, refusing my offer to accompany him to an emergency room. “It's nothing, Chiquita. I get this before,” he said, and I didn't press him but insisted we take a cab back to his apartment. He lay down for a few minutes, which he said made him feel better. Before I left, he promised to see a doctor.

“I need operation,” he told me a few days later.

The only people close to me to have needed operations were Raymond, whose injured foot and subsequent surgeries were the reason for our one-way trip to Brooklyn, and Francisco, Mami's love, my brother Franky's father. Raymond's operations had saved his foot. Francisco had suffered through numerous procedures that couldn't save him. Instinctively, I ignored the successes and focused on the failures of medicine. Like Francisco, Ulvi would go for surgery, and I wouldn't see him again. I wasn't strong like Mami, couldn't survive the months of black despair.

“Don't be so scare, Chiquita,” Ulvi took me in his arms, pressed me close while I sobbed into his chest. “It is only hernia operation. Nothing to worry.”

But he couldn't convince me. My head filled with images of Ulvi, dead. Ulvi, a ghost to haunt me forever, as Francisco had haunted Mami. It took me a long time to calm down, and then Ulvi told me the rest. It was minor surgery, he wouldn't be in the hospital more than a couple of days; but he didn't have insurance, and his savings had run out. The distributors who wanted to release
Dry Summer
arranged for a hospital and a doctor to perform the surgery at no charge, in Fort Lauderdale.

“Why so far?” I whined.

“It is the way it must be.” He waited for me to argue, and when I didn't, he continued. Even though he was in pain, he wanted to finish the film before he left New York. The new subtitles had to go in, the film had to be remixed to incorporate Manos's music and new sound effects. He needed a couple of weeks, and then he'd fly to Fort Lauderdale to have his surgery. He didn't know when, or if, he'd come back to New York. He spoke matter-of-factly in his simple, declarative English, each word carefully chosen. I sat with legs folded under me, my hands pressed between my thighs. For some time, I'd dreaded a conversation like this, had known that one day Ulvi would leave my life as swiftly as he had entered it. I was glad he wasn't going to die; he was just going to Florida. As he spoke, I made myself withdraw, until we were not at opposite ends of his black leather sofa but in different continents.

Once he laid out the plans, Ulvi leaned further into his corner of the couch, pressed his hands together, his fingers to his lips, and spoke so softly I had to strain to hear him. “You can come with me.”

I'd waited, hoped for those words, certain I'd never hear them, relieved when he said them. I surprised myself, then, when my response was that my mother would never let me go.

“You must leave her, then,” Ulvi declared.

There was no way to explain to Ulvi, who didn't know Mami, why the thought of leaving my mother so that I could go to Fort Lauderdale with my lover terrified me. He hadn't been there when
she showed up on Long Island in the middle of a snowstorm to rescue me from sex with Otto. He hadn't heard the pain in her voice when she mourned her unfinished education, young, unmarried motherhood, men who betrayed her. He hadn't been with her at the welfare office, had not stood solemn and scared as she humbled herself before people who would conquer her pride because they couldn't vanquish her spirit. He'd never placed his head on her lap, had never listened as she revealed her dreams for her children, who would, she hoped, be smarter about life than she had been. He hadn't seen Mami's face light up at the thought of me, her eldest daughter, dressed in a white wedding gown en route to a cathedral.