Everything Begins and Ends at the Kentucky Club (23 page)

“Are you sure?”

I nodded.

They let us see her. She was lying on the bed, a sheet over her face. I uncovered her. They’d closed her eyes. I would never see them again. I found myself yelling,
Goddamn you! Goddamn you! You left me! You fucking left me! You and Mom, you just left me
!

It would be a lie to say that I remembered her funeral. The day we buried her, I went to her apartment. I asked Uncle Hector for the key. I slept in her bed. I could smell her. She had a painting she loved hanging on the wall opposite her bed. She told me that every night before she went to sleep, she looked at the painting. There was a door that was ajar and there was a piece of sky outside that door. The room itself was dark and you could see the traces of what was in the room. But you had to look hard to see what was there. She said she found things in that room. “Strange and awful things,” she said. I wish to God
she had paid attention to the blue sky that was outside that room.

I had a real boyfriend for a while. I started seeing him a few weeks after Carmen died. He was good to me and he made me laugh, and when he made love to me, he was tender and kind and affectionate. He said I cried in my sleep. He tried so hard to love me. For once, it wasn’t just about catching the dragon. In the end, we broke up. He said I was too sad and that some day I wouldn’t be sad anymore—and maybe then I would let someone love me. It was a kind thing to say—but it wasn’t something that I believed would ever happen. Not to me.

I had loved only one person in my life. And that was my sister, the dragon I never caught. Some nights, I wake in the darkness, and I know I’ve been dreaming her. I see her sitting on the floor, her face illuminated by the light of the lamp in the room. She looks like an angel. I see her handing me the needle. I see me taking it. I hear her whispering in my ear.
Conrad, die with me.

Because he died today, I’m drinking. I was never much of a recreational drinker, not before I met him. But right now I feel as if I have to do something, and the only thing that’s entered my head is that I should have a drink. Just because it isn’t an original thought doesn’t make it a bad idea.

I get this phone call, Kathy’s sweet voice telling me he’s dead, no booze in the house, not a drop, drive to the liquor store, buy his favorite bourbon, pour it in a glass over ice, stare at it, hold it up, the ice cubes sparkling in the afternoon light. I drink. Then I drink another. That’s what we did, we drank, me and him, when we were together.

I’m listening to Joni Mitchell and she’s singing
Oh, I could drink a case of you
. Yeah, well, we both drank more than a case of each other. And what of it? I’ve been sitting here all afternoon, and it’s night now. Tom’s dead. And I’m supposed to be feeling something that resembles grief. But that’s not what I’m feeling.

The first time he kissed me, he tasted like the bourbon he’d been drinking. Almost sweet. That’s the first thing I thought when Kathy called me on the phone from his office. “He’s gone,” she said.
How? How
? But I didn’t ask. I
listened to her cry. “Shhh, shhh, baby.” That’s what he would have wanted me to tell her. I thought she’d sob forever. I hate to listen to people cry. All that hurt let loose, unrestrained, vulnerable, prideless, inarticulate, like howling dogs who have a sad sickness stuck inside them. Those howling dogs, they understand that if they are to survive, they have to howl in order to push that hurt out into the darkness of the sky. Howling may very well save dogs, but for people, crying isn’t any good. I stopped crying a long time ago.

When my cell phone rang, it said: Tom Office. TOM1 was his private cell phone. I actually expected to hear his voice. I hadn’t heard from him in over a month. That’s the way it was with us. I wouldn’t hear from him for a week or a month or two months and then I’d get a phone call from him. “Al,” he’d say, “let’s have a drink.” My name is Michael—but he renamed me Al. “Mike-Al,” he said one morning as we lay in bed. And then it just became Al. Half the time he called in the middle of the night. “Let’s have a drink,” he’d say.

And I’d say, “Now? It’s one thirty in the morning.”

“You were asleep?”

“What else would I be doing at one thirty in the morning?”

“I could think of a few things.”

“I’m tired, Tom, it’s late.”

There would be silence on the phone—and I could tell he was a little hurt because when he called that late, I always refused to let him come over. I’d never been anybody’s booty call, nobody’s bitch.

“Okay,” he’d say. “Tomorrow. At the Kentucky Club. Six o’clock?”

“Sure,” I’d say. It was our private joke. He said he’d had a dream about me—and in that dream he walked into the Kentucky Club on Avenida Juárez and there I was at the bar, smiling, waiting for him. “That’s where it began for
us, babe. At the Kentucky Club.”

“It was a dream,” I said.

“You looked like an angel in that dream,” he said. “A fucking angel.”

I laughed. “So,” I said, “the only way for me to arrive at angel status is to appear in your screwed-up dreams.”

“Take it any way you can get it, babe.”

I guess I got a kick out of the Kentucky Club thing. All it meant was that he’d pick me up at my place. Kentucky Club was code for home. Every time he arrived at my doorstep, he was all smiles and charm. He’d kiss me and say, “I missed you, babe.” It annoyed me, all that affection pouring out of him. He made it all look so easy.

We’d laugh, we’d talk, we’d have dinner. He drank a lot. I drank with him. One time I wasn’t in the mood to drink and I ordered a club soda. At the end of the evening, he said, “I feel lonely.”

“Because I didn’t drink with you?”

He nodded. He looked sad. I ordered a drink before we left. He kissed me in the car.

Mostly we’d wind up at my place. Sometimes we’d wind up in a nice hotel because he liked them and could afford them. But we never went to his place, not ever, and I didn’t like that. I didn’t even know where he lived. That put me at a disadvantage. You could tell a lot about a person when you knew where they lived, the neighborhood they chose, the yard they tended or didn’t tend, the paintings they hung on their walls. Tom could study me through all the things I had in my house—and things I didn’t have. He liked looking around my place. He said I had too many books.

“Look,” I said, “I haven’t read half of them.”

It didn’t make him feel any better. “That means you’ve read the other half.”

“Guess so,” I said.

“We got to get you a life,” he said.

“Sometimes reading makes me feel alive.”

“Like I said, we got to get you a life.”

Tom and I, we had certain rules. I never asked about the details of his life. That was
his
rule. And we weren’t ever,
not ever
, to bring up the word
love
. That was
my
rule. I wasn’t going to get near that word. When he disappeared for a month or two, I never asked where he’d been. Sometimes he told me—sometimes he didn’t. He had secrets. I let him keep them. I had my secrets too. So that’s the way we played it.

I never figured out what we had, what I meant to him, what he meant to me. Not that I spent a lot of time thinking about it. I was busy counseling kids, some of them screwed-up as hell, wounded, some of them just wanting advice on where to go to college, some of them just wanting someone to talk to because they were already old and tired from being made invisible by the adults around them. And then there was night school at the university, trying to finish a degree in art. I loved art. It had everything to do with psychology. I was too fucking busy thinking about my last failed painting or my last conversation with a student or my last encounter with a lousy teacher who’d stopped caring or an out-to-lunch parent who had a hundred excuses as to why they didn’t notice that their boy or their girl was doing drugs or having sex or engaging in behavior that was probably going to fuck them up even more. Yeah, I was too busy to analyze what Tom and I had. What we had, why did it have to have a name?

I met him five years ago. I was thirty. He was forty-five. He was handsome, just the other side of perfect. Once, he had been perfect. I sat across from him at a dinner party at a nice restaurant. One of my colleagues was
married to an attorney, and they were celebrating ten years together. I didn’t really understand marriage and ten years of it was either a miracle or hell pretending to be heaven. And there he was, one of the guests, Tom Espinosa, who didn’t appear to have a hint of ethnicity left in his social make-up. A non-Mexican Mexican. He might as well have been a gringo. Hell, I was more Mexican than he was. It helped that my mother had been a Garcia. My father was a Steadman. Steadman genes and Garcia genes, all mixed-up to hell in my psyche. I got my mother’s black eyes, my father’s fair skin. My sense of irony I got from reading books and from some fucked-up relative a few generations back—probably on my father’s side.

I was having a conversation with Susan in Spanish. Tom looked at me from across the table and said: “You one of those gringos who wants to be a Mexican?”

I looked at him and said, “I come by my Spanish honestly.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“My mother was born in Mexico City.”

He smiled. “My mother was born near the dump in Juárez.”

“You win,” I said.

He told me he was a criminal attorney. He was in the middle of a trial. It was a death penalty case and he believed in his client. I found that appealing. “Bad business, the death penalty. This is what passes for civilization.” He dipped his finger in his drink. “You? What do you do?”

“I’m a high-school counselor,” I said.

He smiled. “High-school counselor? Is that interesting?”

“My clients aren’t criminals so maybe not so interesting.”

He smiled again. All that smiling annoyed me. I was beginning to wonder if he didn’t treat everyone as a potential juror. “Criminals aren’t always that
interesting.” He was sipping on a glass of bourbon on the rocks. “You like kids?”

“Yeah. Something about them. I don’t much care for their parents.”

“You have any kids?”

“Nope.”

“Planning on having any?”

I hated these questions. I got them all the time. “Nope, why would I want to become just like one of the parents I don’t much care for?”

I don’t remember what else we talked about. I noticed he drank a lot. But I also noticed he didn’t seem to be getting drunk. Another thing I noticed: he was studying me. I didn’t know what to think about that. He didn’t seem like the kind of guy that would be interested in a guy like me.

At the end of the evening, he gave me his card. “Give me a call,” he said. “We’ll have a drink.” He wrote down his cell number on his card. But just because he was easy on the eyes didn’t mean I liked him enough to call him. There was something about him I didn’t trust. He wore cologne. His hair was a little too combed. His clothes were a little too expensive. He wore a watch that he could pawn to buy a decent used car. He had too much money. I never cared much for people with money. They were a little too proud of themselves, too entitled. They never entertained the possibility that they might just be overpaid.

I never called him. He was the one who called me.

“How’d you get my cell?”

“You sound annoyed.”

“Maybe.”

“Susan gave it to me.”

“Susan, yeah, well, she doesn’t know how to keep other people’s secrets.”

“Your cell number’s a secret?”

“Not anymore,” I said. What I really wanted to say was that if I’d wanted him to have it, I’d have given it to him when we met.

“Wanna grab a drink?”

“Sure,” I said. What the hell, there was nothing to lose. And then I regretted saying
sure
because I knew there was always something to lose.

We met at the bar at Café Central. It was six o’clock. He was talking on his cell, his coat hanging on his chair, his sleeves rolled up. His hair was more than a little uncombed and he looked tired but the whole look worked for him. He had a tattoo of a mermaid on his forearm. I sat down, almost smiled and let him finish his phone call.

He called the waiter over, raised his glass. I took the cue and ordered a glass of chard.

He clicked off his phone. “What are you, a girl? Drinking white wine?”

“If I was a girl,” I said, “you wouldn’t have asked me out for a drink.”

He gave me a crooked smile.

“What makes you think I’m interested in men?”

“I’m not so sure you
are
interested in men. I just know you’re interested in me.”

“You sure about that?”

“You gave me your cell phone number, and when I didn’t call, you came looking for me.”

“And found you,” he said.

“A real private eye.” I stared at his tattoo. “I think better of you for that.”

He stuck his arm out. “You want to touch it?”

“Okay, you just killed the moment.”

“Are you always this hard?”

“I’m not exactly a walking Hallmark card.”

“I thought gay men were supposed to be softer.”