My Best Man (25 page)

Later in the evening, I run out to Butch’s Diner for dinner food. Recently, I’ve started eating all the fattening food I can and drinking protein shakes, because working out at the gym has made me hungrier. My body has been changing, and now that I’ve met Nicolo, I have more incentive to garner results. After I eat my takeout calories, I fall asleep in my room.

Later that night, I’m stirred slightly awake by sounds coming out of Amity’s bedroom. “Oh, Kim, you drive me wild!” she squeals. There’s something a little sick about it. She was just saying the same thing to Thomas this morning, and it makes me wonder which guy really drives her wild. And while the answer may be both, I have a feeling it could just as well be neither. I roll over and pull my feather pillow over my head and fall back into a deep sleep.

t’s morning. Kim is smoking a cigarette, and Amity (topless) and he are sitting on the floor of my room, lotus style, in their underwear. Kim’s underpants have yellow stains in the crotch, and the stains are these weird shapes that provoke me to analyze them as if I’m taking a Rorschach test. I swear I see a raccoon and a garden rake.

Amity tells him to sit still because she’s going to pluck a gray hair from his head. I’m sure this is going to send his mid life crisis into a further tailspin, but he doesn’t flinch. Possibly because he’s so coked out of his mind at ten o’clock in the morning that his life is nothing but a big fat cabaret.

“Harry, read Kim some of your poetry,” Amity commands. There’s powder on her nose, and it isn’t the kind she gets at Max well’s cosmetics department.

“He doesn’t want to hear a poem,” I say, annoyed. There’s something unseemly about being around a wired-up middle-aged guy who has pee-pee stains shaped like animals on his underwear at ten o’clock in the morning. I’m losing respect for Amity too it’s difficult to watch her coke-induced gushiness for this mutt before I’ve even had my morning cup of coffee.

“Come on!” she pleads.

I want to give him a flea bath, put him in a crate, and take him to the pound. And insist they neuter him before adopting him out. Oh hell, if I can improvise anew for Nicolo, I can certainly recite something old for Kim. I choose a poem I wrote when I was sixteen about a young boy who rides on a cloud looking for his lost horse. I decide on this poem because it is the one I will always know by heart meaning I don’t have to join the underwear party by getting out of bed to rustle through my file box.

He rode above the plains below

Upon a castle of ice and snow

O’er wheat fields and farms and creek beds stony In search of his friend, his cinnamon pony.

Amity tries to look interested while bending down with a rolled up hundred dollar bill in her hand to snort a line of coke. She holds her hair back, but it falls into the powder and obliterates the line. “Damn!” she says, pulling back, grabbing the razor to reconvene the little nasal convention into a straight line.

They’d joined as friends when he was nine

This Kansas boy and his pony fine

And grew together, from boy and colt

To handsome steed and young adult.

Kim holds her hair back so she can stick the bill down and suck up the cocaine with her perfectly shaped nose and send herself flying into the atmosphere. After Amity’s done, he pulls on her hair to guide her down to his Rorschach crotch. “Kim!” she says, mock horrified. He laughs while she looks at me disgusted and rolls her eyes. “Naughty boy,” she sniffs, pinching her nose. He starts

chopping more powder with the razor while Amity stares down into the glass of the mirror. “Go on, Harry,” she says. “It’s beautiful.”

She hasn’t heard a word, and this poem is more precious to me than others. Why in the fuck am I reciting it to them?

Along the way they learned to fly

O’er fences and gullies, to touch the sky.

No love had he, not yours nor mine,

Could touch the love of his pony fine.

Kim snorts up a huge line of blow, then reels back, eyes wide, and says something that I guess translates to “Killer shit, man!”

Amity giggles. “Don’t you love Korean? It sounds so … Korean!”

He pulls his head back, breathes in, holds out his hands. He’s going to sneeze. Amity screams and grabs the little mirror holding all the powder, lifts it away from him, and holds it over her shoulder just in time for him to explode with a sneeze that sounds as if he’s getting his head chopped off—four times. When he’s through, there’s a big green, phlegmy loogie hanging on his lips and chin.

“Nose floss!” Amity screams, holding her hand in front of her face so she doesn’t blow the coke off her mirror while laughing.

Kim wipes the loogie off with the back of his hand and reaches for another cigarette.

I’m baring my soul for this guy?

“Go on, babe,” Amity urges.

“I just finished,” I tell her, lying.

“You did?”

“Sure. Didn’t you listen?”

She nods as if she’s been hanging on every word. “Yes, it was great!” Grite!

Kim blows a cloud of smoke into my face. “Very good.” Velly Goo.

zuz nuy

Four days later, after working a trip to Atlanta, I’m back in Dallas cruising in a black Jaguar sedan. The interior is incredibly fine leather, and the dash is mahogany, and the sound system beats the shit out of anything. There’s a pack of cigarettes on the dash. I don’t smoke, not usually, but I light one up, and add to my mystique a twenty-three year old cruising the campus streets around DCU in a black Jag. I’ve never driven a Jaguar before because my parents were the Cadillac types, and I admit the power and design are intoxicating. I roll the electric window down and rest my arm as I drive. People look at me. On the street, in the next lane, at the stoplight. I pretend I don’t see them, but I do. Fuck, I’m acting like Winston. Isn’t it enough that I have my own dentedin BMW with a burned hole in the upholstery? What the hell is the matter with me?

Eventually, I park the Jaguar at Caldwell and Family, makers of fine clothing for the prep dogs at DCU, and I reach into my pocket and feel the five one hundred dollar bills. I hear Amity saying, minutes before, “Kim, you can’t expect Harry to stay around while we’re together at our house. We need our privacy and Harry needs his. I think you better send him shopping.” And so Kim peeled off five bills and handed me the keys to his car. Amity walked me to the door and suggested I go to Caldwell and Family and get myself something nice, and when Kim wasn’t looking, she pinched me on the ass and stuck her tongue in my ear. I walked to the car with a wet ear and a belief that I deserved the spree as a reward for putting up with Kim.

So here I am, in Caldwell and Family. The salesman is friendly, helpful. He probably saw me drive up in the black Jaguar, because he’s not shoveling out the usual Dallas attitude thrown upon young Yankee lads. I’m fitted for a nice pair of khaki slacks and two button-down dress shirts. I see a khaki cotton jacket with red plaid lining, and though it’s not quite the season yet, I take it.

I leave the shop and survey the surroundings, noticing a jewelry store. I stop in and decide to buy something for Amity since I’m really shopping with her hard-earned money. But as I wade through the necklaces, rings, and pendants and arrive at the fine writing instruments, I think of Nicolo and how he wants to be a journalist. If I buy him a pen, he can use it to take notes while investigating a story or while interviewing someone. After all, I’ve already bought Amity a car . sort of. I mean, she drives it as much as I do. So surely I can use the money to buy Nicolo a simple ink pen. I find a shiny sterling silver pen that is beautifully designed in the slightest curvature of the letter S. It fits perfectly in my hand, and it looks very elegant while I’m writing with it, testing it out. I tell the shop owner I’ll take it if I can get it engraved right away. He says, “Of course.” What shall I say? “With Love, Harry?” Too much, too fast. “With Love, From Your Hero?” Gag. I’m choking on my ego. I think I better go with inscribing his name on it. “Nicolo.”

I drive toward the restaurant where Nicolo works. When I get there, I find he isn’t working, but Thomas is. Thomas freely gives me Nicolo’s address and directions to get there.

I pull up to the duplex and try to breathe my heart into a normal rhythm, but it doesn’t work. I give up, grab the little gift-wrapped box, and head up to the door. Ring the bell twice.

A woman appears. His mother? She’s about the right age, but she doesn’t look anything like Evita. Come to think of it, I’ve never really seen Evita, just Patty Lupone pretending she’s Evita on a poster. “Yes?” she asks from behind the screen door, her accent noticeable in just one word. Her black hair is pulled back from her face.

“Is Nicolo here?”

“He is at school,” she says carefully.

I think about his stories, realize she’s probably distrusting of strangers. “Can I leave something for him?” Oh, God, she probably thinks it’s a bomb. “It’s a gift.”

“What is your name?”

Behind the screen I see her smile. “Of course,” she says, opening the door. “Come in.”

“You know who I am?” I ask, stepping into the apartment. “Nicolo speaks of you. You please him. He says you are funny.” I want to jump up and down and yelp with delight, “Nicolo told his mother about me! Nicolo told his mother about me!” But

I calmly tell her, “Nicolo’s cool. He pleases me too.” “And now you have bought him a gift.” “Yes.”

“Would you like to drink coffee?” “Sure.” ‘

She motions for me to sit, and as she turns and walks into the kitchen, I realize that her hair isn’t pulled into a bun, but is hanging in a ponytail, which makes her seem less severe, less frightened. She’s wearing a sleeveless dress that looks very seventies. The apartment is conservatively decorated, and the color scheme is mostly gold and deep blue. The wooden chair I’m sitting in probably came with them, as it distinctly feels like a foreign chair. The coffee must have been already brewed, as she returns directly with two cups.

I take the cup and saucer from her. “Thanks.” She nods a welcome. I take a sip and only guess that I’m now drinking Argentinean coffee because the brew is mega strong and heavily sugared stronger than a baby’s fart and sweeter than his momma’s milk, Amity would say.

“You met Nicolo at the restaurant?” his mother asks.

“Yes. I was there with my … friend. Nicolo waited on us.” “Do you like the food?”

I nod. “Oh, yes. It was great. I liked the service too.”

“He is a terrible waiter,” she laughs. “He comes home with food on his pants. But he is a very attentive, very kind boy. He is a beautiful singer. Someday if you are lucky he will sing for you.”

“That would be nice,” I say. As she lifts her coffee to her lips,

I notice that her hands free of jewelry except for her wedding ring are beautifully aged, full of life. There is elegance in their lines, veins, and creases, and I see that she’s comfortable in using her hands, unlike my own mother. I want to make small talk, but I’m not quite sure what to say. Knowing her past has made me cautious. “How long have you lived here?”

“Five years,” she answers.

I meant the apartment, not the US. I’m not sure if she understands. “Do you like it?”

“Very much. But I miss Argentina, to be truthful. It is my home. I had to leave. Did Nicolo tell you?”

“Yes,” I answer, ashamed. I’m not sure why I feel this way. Maybe it’s because I don’t have any concept of difficulty or hardship. I certainly don’t experience torture at the hands of my government other than the suffering and agony I go through whenever Nancy Reagan appears on TV in one of her little red Adolfo dresses and insists that her ballet-dancing son is all man. “I’m sorry that you lost your husband and your daughter. I really am.”

“You are sweet, like Nicolo says. Many people are awkward and unable to speak of it, but it is comforting for us to speak of our loved ones. Would you like to see pictures?”

“Sure.”

She sets her coffee down and rises from her chair. “Come,” she says, and I follow her across the room to the photographs she’s lovingly hung in various, beautiful, handmade frames. “Here is my precious Graciela,” she sighs, taking a photo from the wall. “She was the strength of all women.”

The girl in the photo is small, but her energy nearly bursts the frame. She is smiling broadly and carrying a bag on her shoulder. The beret on her head makes her look as if she’s in some kind of army. The Army of Dynamism maybe. In her hands is a small painting, but I can’t tell of what. I smile and tell her, “I can feel her strength.”

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“I too,” she answers, nodding her head. “And this is Gianni, my husband,” she says, unhooking another picture from the wall. The man in the photograph is wearing an argyle sweater and dark pants. He’s holding a rolled-up newspaper in one hand and a cigar in the other. His face is square, handsome, full of knowledge. His eyes are Nicolo’s almost black. At his feet is a little dog, a mutt of some kind.

“He’s very good-looking,” I say. “Nicolo looks like him.” “Yes,” she smiles.

“Gianni, Graciela, and Nicolo. Italian names?”

“There are many Italians in Argentina,” she explains. “Gianni’s great-great grandfather came from Italy in 1857 to farm the land in the Santa Fe province. He gained title to his land and integrated his family culture with Argentina’s.”

“But your husband was a journalist, right? Or was he a farmer?” “Gianni farm?” she asks, laughing at the question. “Crops need water, not words. His brother declined to farm also. To the salvation of their father, they have a sister, Angelica, who stayed and worked the land. She is handsome, manly, and lives with another woman on the farmland. I love her.”

God, how wonderful to hear someone of my parents’ generation be gentle and accepting of a gay person. “And where is Gianni’s brother?”

She turns, hangs the picture back on the wall. “He is in Argen tina,” she answers, her back to me. “We owe him our lives. He helped us escape.”

When she turns around to face me again, I see that her face is unsettled; there is a disturbance in her eyes. I swallow the last gulp of coffee. “Well, thanks for the coffee,” I tell her, not wanting to push it and wondering if Amity has pushed Kim out of the house yet. “I better go. It was a pleasure meeting you.”