My Best Man (24 page)

“And?”

My heart is pounding, pushing against the skin of my chest. I

want to kiss his aubergine lips. “Hot.” “And?” “Humid.” “And?”

“What do you want?” I ask, desperately wanting to undress him.

“More.” ‘

More than a laugh? More than a refill on the champagne? More than a quick reply? I look at him, into his eyes. They’re unbelievably

beautiful, the first pair of dark eyes that I’ve found prettier than blue or green or hazel. His eyes are on the border where brown becomes black. And his luxuriant eyelashes remind me of the pocket combs I carried as a kid, with their thick black prongs emanating from the base of the comb. I used to run my fingers across them. I’d like to gently run my fingers across his lashes.

He bids, “Tell me the poetry of your home. I know it’s inside your heart.”

There is something about him that makes me not want to disappoint. I take a breath. Think. “Kansas … is like a dirt road that runs for infinity, never dipping or rising, never turning.” He nods and closes his eyes, causing his lashes to fall like fans, and waits for me to continue. “And above the road is a sky so large it could hold the wings of every angel. And people say there’s no ocean, but there is. In the early season, when the wheat is green, almost the color of seaweed, it rolls in waves, pushed by the wind, just like the top of the ocean. As summer wears on, the waves turn gold and stiffen slightly as if the tide has turned. Sometimes I’d ride my horse down a country road and stand on the side of a wheat field and pretend I was on a beach watching the waves roll by. I’d watch them carry life along, just like the sea. Then I’d close my eyes, breathe in, and change the scent of the damp earth and ripening grain into salty air. And sometimes when I opened my eyes, a meadowlark or a whippoorwill would land and roll up and down over the waves while deciding where it was headed next. And even though the waves rolled on for infinity, like the road and the sky, most often the meadowlark flew only as far as a neighbor’s front porch because she couldn’t see leaving such perfection behind.”

He opens his eyes, satisfied. “This is your reward for telling me about Kansas,” he says, lifting my hand to his mouth and gently kissing it.

“I can tell you about Missouri and Colorado too,” I offer eagerly.

He laughs. “Just Kansas, hombre.” He lowers my hand from his lips. “And why did you fly farther than your neighbor’s porch?”

“Well … I had no choice, I guess. My family couldn’t offer me the comfort of their precious little nest, so I took off.”

“Then we are alike,” Nicolo says, his beautiful lips forming a melancholy smile. “I’m here because of my family also. Though we were forced to flee our nest together.” what was left of us.” “What do you mean?” I inquire, my erection subsiding.

“I am from Argentina, Harry. Do you know of our recent his tory?”

“Not really. Just that it’s been kind of unstable down there, right?”

“When Peron returned to power eleven years ago, I was thirteen years old. The people of my country thought that we would be delivered to prosperity, that the end of bad times had come, that Peron would restore Argentina to the glory of its past. But my father believed that Argentina had never known glory, that its successes throughout its history were triumphs only of the rich and were short-lived and had always come at the expense of the common people, la gente verdadera, my father called them. He was a journalist for Liberacion del Alma.”

“Liberation of the soul,” I translate.

“You speak Spanish? You want that we speak in pansn. “No,” I answer. “I only know a little.”

He continues. “Liberacion del Alma was a paper that was not aligned with guerrilla factions. And not with the government. It was a neutral publication dedicated to telling truth through all eyes and letting the reader decide who was righteous. An interview with members of a Marxist guerrilla organization like the ERP would be published beside an essay from the Navy School of Mechanics, the evil military organization that my father knew operated clandestine concentration camps, and below that, you might read a passion ate interview with Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, the mothers

of the kidnapped civilians who were accused of being subversives. Though the paper was committed to allowing all thought and debate, my father was employed to offer his opinion on the last page. He wrote political editorials that were most often open-minded. It was when he aligned himself with Las Madres that he got in trouble. He believed they were right to speak out about the disappeared. So the government disappeared him.”

He’s not crying, but he’s inside of himself now, below the equator, I suppose, in the land of his past. “What do you mean?” I ask.

“Los desaparecidos. The disappeared. Thousands of people were kidnapped, tortured, murdered. They simply disappeared. Those who were found were floating in barrels in the River Plata or dropped on top of refuse dumps. It is said there were groups taken to the sky in airplanes and thrown to their deaths. I’ll never know what happened to my father.”

“God,” I whisper, “there are some passengers on my flights I’d like to throw out of the plane, but I’d never do it.” He looks incredulous, confused by my remark. Shit, me and my mouth. “Sorry. I didn’t mean it. Sometimes my timing is off. Why were they kidnapped? What did they do?”

“Nothing,” he answers, shaking his head. “The government called them subversives. But they were ordinary people, like you and me. Their biggest crime was that they had an opinion or belonged to a social group that helped others less fortunate or were lawyers with so-called subversive clients or whatever the excuse. It is hard to explain.”

I put my arm around him and stare at the wall, as he does, and try to imagine what he sees. “Is that why you came to America?”

“No. We came because of my sister. She was an artist who vowed to expose my father’s murderers. She was sure it was the work of the government. She blamed the federal police. But when she confronted them, in print and in her person, they cast the blame rllUU | VUIIVim on the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance, who had written a strong rebuttal to one of my father’ seditorials, which was gladly published in Liberacion del Alma. But everyone knew the Alliance was the federal police, and they were making her walk in a circle, she believed, laughing behind her back. And when she pushed too hard and they weren’t laughing anymore, they disappeared her.”

“Your sister too?” All of a sudden the champagne and reefer is making me dizzy, uncomfortable. “Did you find her?”

He shakes his head no. “But my mother received word from a member of the Navy School, someone who called himself a friend because he was willing to offer the truth that both my father and sister were dead so we should not worry or try to find them. “Go on with your lives,” he told us, ‘but remain quiet.” My mother was devastating.”

“Devastated,” I correct. Then I think, maybe she was devastating, I’ve never seen her.

“Yes, devastated. So she did what only a woman in her shoes could do. She joined Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, the group of women who publicly protested their disappeared family members only she knew something the other mothers did not know: Most of the disappeareds were never coming back.”

“She’s brave.”

“Yes,” he says, lost in a memory, “until they attempted to take me away.”

“You? Who?”

He snaps out of his trance, looks me in the eye. “I don’t know. It was the week of the World Cup games, 1978. Police in plainclothes grabbed my arms and legs while I was walking down the street and tried to force me into an unmarked government car.”

“You got away?”

“Yes, because there were so many turistas in town, and a group of Italians was on the street, and I started to scream to them in Italian. The police agents let me go, because they didn’t want to

make a scene in front of the turistas, in case someone from the international press could be watching. When I got home, I told my mother, and she broke down. She cried, a very broken woman. She made arrangements that week to get my brother and me and herself out of the country. She could suffer no more loss.”

I think about my perky mother and wonder how she would endure such tragedy and loss in her own family. Would she become a Mother of the Plaza by going shopping on the Country Club Plaza in Kansas City? Treat herself to a Smoothie? Would she be devastating? No. I’m too hard on her. She would rise to the occasion, use her Midwestern pluck to live on, reinvent the family as best as she could. That’s my mother.

“So you see, Harry, I enjoy hearing the poetry of people’s homelands. Because mine is stuck inside of my heart and it will be a very long day before it will come out again.”

We’re silent for a few minutes while the candles flicker and the radio plays Eurythmics, “Here Comes the Rain Again.” It feels odd, lying here, holding hands, learning about the sorrowful past of this beautiful man beside me. But when Annie Lennox sings, “Talk to me, like lovers do,” I know that Nicolo is doing just thatqspeaking to me with the honesty of a lover. And the oddity of it falls away, and it feels just right.

Nicolo smiles, sighs. “This happens when I drink too much. I become lonely for my family. I’m sorry, Harry. You probably just wanted to get me in bed and taste the meat that Argentina is famous for. No?”

I smile, grateful that his sense of humor is intact. This time I kiss his hand. “Who’s left in your family?”

“My mother and my brother,” he answers.

He’s right. We are alike. Alike and so different.

He rolls off the bed, walks to the table, and carefully lifts the plate holding the burning candle. He carries it slowly back to bed

and lowers himself next to me until the flame is flickering near my face. “Look into the flame,” he says. “And tell me what you see.”

I look through the dancing fire connected to the wick, and what I see is his handsome, dark-skinned hand, beyond its glow, holding the plate. “I see your hand,” I answer, feeling stupid and literal. Shit, he likes poetry. I should have said something poetic.

“When you look into a flame you are looking into your future,” he explains. Then he smiles sexily and says, “And what you see is me.” He holds the candle in front of our faces, highlighting them with the swaggering flame, then suddenly blows it out, returning us to the middle gray light of the shade-darkened room. He puts the candle on the floor, rolls back to me, and wraps me in his muscular arms. Then he closes his eyes.

It’s nightfall. Nicolo and Thomas are gone. Amity is pooing up for real the whole two-hour show. I’m feeling almost dreamy, as if I’m still wrapped in Nicolo’s arms. I sit on the side of the tub and watch. I don’t know how she’s doing it, but she seems to have this incredible energy, she is fluffing her hair and painting her face and staying very focused and task oriented. “Thomas was unbelievable, Harry. He can go and go and go. You should hear his accent while he makes love. “I’m coming, Amity,” he said, but it sounded like he said, “I’m calming Amity.” European love makes me melt. From the moment he stamped my passport, I was wetter than a canal in Amsterdam!”

I smile. Quietly laugh.

“How was your Latin lover? Tell me about Nicolo, Harry. Did he scramble your huevos?”

I sigh, contented. “We didn’t have sex. We didn’t even take our clothes off. We just talked.”

“What? G’yaw, sounds like true love,” she says flippantly. “You just talked the whole time?”

“No, we talked a little while; then we fell asleep in each other’s arms. We were both kind of knocked over by the champagne.”

“And each other?” Amity asks. She does the Belushi eyebrow, but her smile is slightly tense.

“Kind of,” I say. I’m a little nervous about telling her my true feelings that I think this guy is the sexiest, sweetest, most real person I’ve ever met which is largely the way I felt about her when first we met. The fundamental difference is that Nicolo is a man. A man that I could instantly fall in love with and probably am. Even though my relationship with Amity is wide open, and honest as well, the whole situation seems loaded. How can I love two people at once?

“He doesn’t like me,” she says, putting her mascara on while she opens her mouth wide like a fish.

“How do you know?”

She pauses with the mascara wand. “Harry, don’t bullshit me. You see it too.”

“I think he likes you,” I lie. “He just didn’t like Hunt’ sfriends calling him a faggot, and since you dated Hunt, he finds you guilty.”

“I wish he wouldn’t judge me,” she says, going back to her mascara application.

“He’s a wonderful man. He’ll get over it.”

“Harry, are you in love?”

“Amity, I just met the guy. How could I be in love?” I don’t sound the least bit convincing.

She doesn’t answer, but smiles. It’s a smile I’ve not seen her wear; her lips aren’t raised or lowered, but spread to camouflage whatever her feelings may be. She quickly resumes her mission of readiness, and before I know it, she’s whipped herself back into a fresh and gorgeous woman in a black cocktail dress and pearls. “Libby’s sore,” she whines, slipping into her shoes. “Kim can have a blow job, but he’s not sticking it in.”

“You want me to tell him?” I ask, gallantly.

“You let me take care of that,” Amity says.

Kim comes to the door, and this time she answers it herself.

r,u!

She brings him in, and I’m surprised to see that he’s Chinese or Japanese or something like that. He’ sa short, wired-up guy of about fifty who shakes my hand as if we’ve made a thirty-million-dollar business deal that entitles him to the whole thirty million. His black hair is dirty and unkempt, his face has a five o’clock shadow, but with his sparse whiskers it looks as if he’s operating on daylight saving time. His clothes are jail cell fresh, and his breath smells like rotten sushi. I can’t believe she’s dating this guy. But Amity eagerly throws her Chanel purse over her shoulder, and whoosh, they’re out of the house.

With the house to myself, I revel in the quiet. Falling into the wingback chair, I raise my hand to my nose. I can still smell Nicolo’ s natural scent. It’s a powerful aphrodisiac, and I try to imagine him naked in my arms, kissing me. I’m feeling as if this is a day I’ll never forget, like the day Amity and I had in Mexico. A day when every smell, every piece of clothing, every word will be remembered.