Everything Begins and Ends at the Kentucky Club (19 page)

Carmen laughed. “I knew you were going to say something like that.”

“I’m right. Dad’s all smiles in the photograph. Looks aside, he didn’t have anything inside him except anger and an insatiable sex drive. And Mom? She was Mom. She was exactly how she appears in the picture.”

“Maybe you’re right.”

“Maybe?”

“Okay, so you’re right. But being right about things doesn’t mean a damn thing in this world.”

She laughed and said, “Have you fallen in love yet?”

“I think I have,” I said.

“Boy or girl?”

“Girl.”

“Girl, really? I thought you’d settle for boys in the end.”

“Well, I have time. And it’s not as if I have to choose.”

She smiled. “No. No, you don’t, Conrad. So. Have you had sex?”

“Not yet,” I said.

I wonder if she knew that I was lying to her.

“You know what I think? I think you’re going to fall in love with sex. But I don’t think you’ll ever fall in love with a woman. With a man either. Sex. That’s going to be your great love.”

We both laughed. Carmen was five years older than I was, and we had more or less raised each other. She’d protected me all my life, held me when I was sad, told me the hard truths about whatever was happening in our strange
and truth-evading family. Our parents never thought of us as children—and they certainly didn’t treat us like children. They treated us like adults, spoke to us like adults. And they pretty much left us alone. I sometimes wonder if we didn’t potty train ourselves. My father wasn’t interested in being a father. And my mother wasn’t interested in playing the role of nurturer.

I looked at Carmen sitting across from me. Beautiful Carmen. “And you?” I asked.

“Me? What?”

“Love. Any of that in your life?”

“Yes. I’m in love,” she said.

“Really? When are you going to introduce me to him?”

“Tonight,” she said.

I wondered why it mattered to me where that picture of my father and mother was taken. I think I wanted to know something factual about my parents. Most of what I knew about them was a lie—and even my own memories seemed unreliable to me. My mother suffered from depression and killed herself when I was ten. I didn’t know what method she chose. I wasn’t told the truth about the details of her death, but somehow the truth seeped into the air I breathed like a poison. My father killed a man with his bare fists in a drunken rage a couple of years later. He was killed while he was in prison. I’m certain he contributed to his own death with a rage he could never control.

Because my favorite hobby was listening to my uncles and aunts argue about nothing that really mattered, I brought up the competing versions of where that picture of my parents had been taken as often as I could. Once, during a boring Thanksgiving dinner, I simply said, “I was looking at the photograph. Uncle Hector says it was definitely taken at Martino’s in 1980. I
think I agree with him.”

That got the conversation going. My aunt Lucille shook her head. “Oh, you and your photograph. I should never have given it to you.”

My uncle Louie nodded, “Martino’s or not, it
was
1980.”

“Perhaps,” my aunt said.

My aunt Lucille wasn’t Mexican. She was a woman from a humble background with pretentions—and she had a penchant for the word
perhaps
.

It annoyed my uncle who sometimes whispered to me that if I ever had any inclination to marry a gringa, I should go see a good therapist. “
Te hacen sufrir porque así son
. And don’t ever believe anything your uncle Hector says about anything. He couldn’t find his ass to take a dump.”

I think I loved my two uncles and my aunts—I count Lucille here, an aunt by marriage only and a pain in the ass—because they provided comic relief. The fact that they didn’t provide that service to me on purpose did nothing to diminish my gratitude. They could always make me smile and I had a great affection for them in my own superior way. They were a strange lot. They had a loyalty toward each other that was truly remarkable—especially when you took into account the fact that they didn’t like each other very much. And even though they’d spent their lives on the border, they didn’t behave like Mexicans. For reasons I didn’t understand, they had abandoned their ethnic identities. There had been some money in the family, though I didn’t know anything about that. In the part of the world that we lived in, they were an island unto themselves. They were disconnected from the culture around them. Their lives seemed something of a comedy to me—a sort of counterpoint to the tragic lives my parents had led.

I really didn’t remember all that much about my mother and father.
There were scenes of them that were stuck in my head but it didn’t add up to a story. I remember my mother in a green satin dress and high heels as she was getting ready to go out one night. I must have been five. I remember her reaching down and placing her manicured fingers under my chin and whispering. “You’ll be better looking than your father.” She didn’t say
I love you
. She didn’t call me
amor
. She didn’t tell me to be a good boy. She didn’t tell me not to stay up too late. She didn’t say
don’t fight with your sister
. She didn’t offer any words of love or advice. She didn’t tell me what to do or not to do. She wasn’t affectionate. She wasn’t mean either—at least she wasn’t mean to me. And she wasn’t mean to Carmen either. She saved her meanness for my father. My mother handled us with a kindly and astounding indifference. I felt that she sometimes examined us with her eyes as if we were strange and foreign and even astonishing creatures. Most of the time, she lived in a dark, unreachable place, and even when she smiled or laughed, it always seemed to me that she didn’t have it in her to be happy. Carmen once told me that our mother was a statue. “She could have been carved by Michelangelo.” My sister hated my mother.

“She’s not a statue,” I said.

“I don’t see why you defend her,” she said. “She doesn’t love you. She doesn’t love anyone.”

I didn’t say anything. I knew she was right but I didn’t want her to be right. I wanted my mother to love me.

I remember she didn’t speak for weeks before she killed herself. I touched her and tried to make her see me. But she just stared blankly out into the room as if she was trying to find something that wasn’t there. I took her hand. “Where does it hurt?” But it was as if I didn’t exist and I knew she didn’t hear my question.

My sister pulled me away. “It hurts everywhere,” she said. “Can’t you see
that?”

I looked at Carmen and whispered, “I told you she wasn’t a statue.”

We weren’t taken to my mother’s funeral. My father descended into a permanent state of drunkenness. I don’t remember how long it was after my mother died that my father took me in his arms and breathed me in. He kept smelling my neck. As I think back, I have the strangest idea that he was trying to find traces of my mother’s smell somewhere in me. He held me and wept and I didn’t know how to help him. My aunt Lucille gently pulled me away from him. My uncle Louie and my uncle Hector took me and Carmen to a movie. They always took us to movies. My uncle Louie said that even a bad movie could put you in a good mood.

To this day, I hate movies. They remind of me of my parents who disappeared. No movie has ever been made that could heal the wound of a boy who was born to parents who never loved him. It wasn’t personal. My parents didn’t love me because they couldn’t. I didn’t grow up feeling sorry for myself. I also didn’t grow up lying to myself. I wasn’t like anybody in my family. I never pretended I was someone I wasn’t. I had no romantic versions of who and what I was. I saved that for Carmen. I think I also saved all my love for her without even knowing why. Maybe I
did
know something of the why. I loved her honesty and I loved her kindness. She raised me without pretending to be my mother. And she never resented my presence.

She would read entire books to me, one chapter at a time. They weren’t literary books. They were books like
Valley of the Dolls
—Jacqueline Susann and Harold Robbins schlock. I loved her voice when she read to me and I got lost in the world of cheesy novels where the characters behaved more or less like my parents had behaved.

When Carmen turned eighteen, she told my uncle Louie and my aunt
Lucille—who raised her after my mother killed herself—that she was leaving.

“But where will you go?”

“I have a job,” she said. “And I’m going to school.”

“You’ll starve out there,” my uncle Louie said. “What’s wrong with you?”

Carmen kissed my uncle on the cheek, looked straight into my aunt Lucille’s eyes, then looked back at my uncle Louie. “You really should leave her, you know.” She smiled and walked out the door.

Lucille was rendered speechless. After Carmen left, she looked at my uncle and said, “I’ll never let her back into this house.”

My uncle shrugged. “You really think she’ll ever want to come back?”

My aunt Lucille, wearing her customary frigid expression, shook her head and said, “She’s just like her mother.”

My aunt, who was wrong about most things, wasn’t wrong about that one thing. At least she wasn’t all wrong. I realized by then that my mother had been mentally ill. And I had a feeling that Carmen was moving in the same direction. But while my mother had been distant and sad, Carmen was kindhearted and affectionate. I think her mental illness was far worse than my mother’s.

That night, when I was seventeen and after we’d eaten dinner at Martino’s, Carmen
did
introduce me to the man she was in love with. Only it wasn’t a man. It wasn’t a woman either. Marijuana. It was the first time I got high.

She lived in an old apartment building near downtown. My uncle Hector owned it. He didn’t charge her rent. My uncle Louie and my aunt Lucille didn’t know anything about their arrangement. They had broken all ties with Carmen, not that Carmen cared. Uncle Hector had given her some of my mother’s furniture that he’d kept in a storage unit. They were antiques. And at least Uncle Hector wasn’t a slum lord. He was obsessed with history and
part of that obsession was restoring old buildings.

Entering Carmen’s apartment, with its high ceilings and wood floors, was like entering another era. She’d even acquired an old Victrola and liked to play Billie Holiday records—my mother’s favorite singer. She had black and white photographs on the walls. It might have been 1940.

When we got to her apartment that night, she poured me a glass of wine and took out her stash. She rolled a joint and taught me how to roll one too. I was a quick study. I loved the high. I’d never been that relaxed in my life and it seemed that the possibility of happiness actually existed. We laughed. We talked.

I confessed to her that I’d already had sex. “Sorry I lied,” I said.

“I knew you were lying.”

“How? I’m a pretty good liar.”

“You are. It runs in the family. But you can’t lie to me. You just can’t.” She smiled, then laughed.

I laughed too. “Carmen, maybe it’s because I don’t
want
to lie to you. It’s nice, to tell the truth.”

She leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. “Don’t ever leave me,” she said.

“Not ever,” I said.

“So tell me about the girl you slept with.”

“She’s in college.”

“How’d you meet?”

“Starbucks. Her name is Serena.”

“Serena? That’s sweet. How was the sex?”

I pointed my joint in her direction. “It was fucking great. Much better than this shit.”

“So, are you in love?”

“I might be.”

“You’re seventeen.”

“Seventeen? Shit. Seventeen in our family? That means I’m at least thirty.”

Carmen just looked at me and shrugged.

“We were taught to speak like adults who’d been to college when we were six. Kids used to make fun of me in middle school because I talked like a fucking English teacher. Fucking seventeen, Carmen? We’re old. We were never young, not ever.” My voice was cracking. I was crying. I’d been happy with that first hit, and now I was crying.

“Don’t cry, Conrad. Don’t look back.” She smiled. “Take another hit.”

I did. And I leaned back and looked up at the ceiling. “I like this stuff,” I said.

“Me too.” She just smiled at me. “You know what I think? I think you’re in love with the sex.”

“Is that so bad?”

“I don’t know.” I loved her smile. I knew she wasn’t a happy person, but when she smiled I almost believed she’d have a good life. “You know, Conrad, maybe it’s better to love sex without having to love the person you’re having sex with. It’s less complicated.”

“I’m not sure what to think about that,” I said.

“My problem, Conrad, is that I fall in love. I always wind up falling in love. It hurts. I’ve decided against it.”

“Is it something you can decide?”

“There’s a lot of things you can decide. Me, I’ve decided to try every drug in the universe.”

That scared me. That really scared me. I knew she meant it. “Why?”

“I’m sad, Conrad.”

“I know.”

“I get depressed.”