one hot summer (3 page)

“I know a back door out of here,” Anabel told us. “Let’s go.”

Vivian and I followed her down a hallway until we reached an unmarked door. Anabel stood there blinking.

“Here it is,” she said. “This leads out to the parking lot.”

We opened the door and stepped into pitch darkness. “Anabel, are you sure about this?” I asked. I wrapped my pashmina tight around my shoulders, feeling a sudden chill.

“I’m sure. I recognize the way.” Anabel spoke with such total certainty that I knew we were in trouble.

“Mierda!”
Vivian cried out. “I stubbed my toe! Where are the damned lights in here?”

“Anabel, are you sure this is the way out?” I asked.

“Thank God,” Vivian said from somewhere ahead of me. “I found a light switch.”

“
Fuck,
Anabel,” I said when the lights came on. “You must not have been wearing your glasses the last time you went out the back way
. Because this sure isn’t the way to the parking lot.”

We were standing in an icy-cold room filled with bodies lying on gurneys. One look around, and facing Luis and the missus didn’t seem so bad. I’ll take a married ex-lover over a dead body any day.

“I know you’re a liberated woman and everything, Margarita, but you’re a traditionalist at heart, right?” Ariel, my husband, gently teased me as he stroked my hair. We were lying in bed with only the moonlight illuminating our bedroom, enjoying the quiet peace after making love.

“Mmm,” I murmured.

“We can try all these different ways, but you really like the old-fashioned way best, right,
mi amor
?” he whispered in my ear.

Since that had been an observation rather than a question, I burrowed my face deeper into his chest instead of answering. I could never tire of the smell of him. It was late, and I knew we should go to sleep because our mornings started early. But I was reluctant to end the day without analyzing everything that had gone on. It was a lifelong habit. I lay there in our king-size bed listening to Ariel’s breathing become deeper and more regular as he drifted off to sleep.

After our unexpected encounter with the temporary—and rather frigid—guests at Caballero’s, Vivian, Anabel, and I had gone to dinner. We opted for Versailles, the Little Havana restaurant that was the epicenter of all things Cuban in Miami. Vivian’s painful experience definitely called for comfort food, and lots of it. We had thought about going to a fancy Italian place in Coral Gables, but it wasn’t the kind of atmosphere where we could discuss the situation. When in crisis mode, Cuban exiles turn to Versailles.

We overate and drank a little too much sangria, which is what you do at Versailles. Even visiting the morgue at Caballero’s had failed to dampen our appetites. It takes more than a room full of corpses to make a Cuban pass on a meal, especially the bounty of hot, tasty, cheap food at Versailles.

The place was packed, as always, so we had to park in the lot across the street. Knowing parking would be at a premium, we had all gone together in Vivian’s Lexus. We crossed the road and went in through the main door on Eighth Street. Within seconds the maître d’ led us to one of the tables set for four against the long mirrored wall in the main dining room.

Following my friends, I caught sight of us in the mirror. We were dressed in black from head to toe, and it brought back vivid memories of recent wounds suffered by the exile community that had yet to heal. If this had been a couple of years earlier, during the Elian situation, we would have been taken for women from Mothers Against Repression, an organization of Cuban women who dressed exclusively in mourning black.

God, what a tumultuous five months, from Thanksgiving to Good Friday. The child’s fate had fluctuated wildly, and those dedicated women could be seen daily at Versailles sitting quietly, taking a break from their round-the-clock demonstrations in front of the family home in Little Havana just a few blocks away. They were a constant presence, unwavering, always standing in a circle praying unceasingly for Elian. Versailles was at the center of the controversy. The news crews—local, national, international—took up residence outside Versailles, where they interviewed patrons and tried to gauge the exiles’ reaction to whatever had happened that day. Anytime a Cuban crisis erupted—which seemed to happen about every five minutes these days—you could count on turning on the TV and seeing Versailles featured in an exterior shot.

The restaurant had been around for decades, ever since Castro came to power. It was open almost twenty-four hours a day, closing only for the brief time it took to clean the place. It didn’t matter what time of day it was, the dining room was always packed. It was named, of course, after the Palace of Versailles outside Paris and decorated in a knock-off of the Hall of Mirrors but with a definite Cuban twist. The decor featured an equal measure of Havana in the fifties, with lots of Formica and plastic.

Versailles had two menus, one in English and one in Spanish, and the waitresses instinctively knew which to hand their customers. I had never seen them err, although it wasn’t so surprising, since the clientele was overwhelmingly Cuban. The few Americans who came there had read about the place in guidebooks and were pretty easy to spot. I always smiled inside when I heard young Cubans—second generation—ordering their meals in accented Spanish, using atrocious grammar and lapsing into Spanglish when they couldn’t come up with the right word. Still, I was proud of them for trying to speak the language of their parents, and for eating at a real Cuban place instead of opting for Olive Garden or TGI Friday’s.

Versailles had featured prominently in our lives ever since we were teenagers. It was where we went to plot and maneuver our love lives, and it was where we had confessed our secret dreams and humiliating secrets to one another. But maybe the real reason Versailles had always been so important to us was that it was invariably our final stop after a night of carousing, a place to eat a gargantuan meal in a frantic shot at sobering up before returning home. With enough food in our bellies, we figured, we could avoid our families’ wrath and endless lectures about standards of proper comportment for young women.

Well, that’s not entirely right. The lectures were really about the expectations laid out for young
Cuban
women of a
certain class
.

Vivian calmed down after a couple of sangrias; she always did. She shook her head and bit her lip.

“God, I freaked out. I hope he didn’t see the way I acted,” she said. “I don’t want him to think he mattered that much to me.”

“He didn’t see anything,” Anabel said, trying to comfort Vivian. Vivian and I shared a glance. There was no way Anabel had any idea what Luis had seen or not seen.

“I know it’s hard,” I said. “But it’ll get better. You just have to let time pass. The wounds are too fresh right now.”

“Margarita’s right,” Anabel added. “That situation just wasn’t going to work out for you.”

“You said he would never leave his wife,” I added.

Both Anabel and I seemed to realize at the same time that we should stop offering advice. Since we were both happily married, our words had a hollow ring.

“You’re right,” Vivian sighed. “He couldn’t handle me, anyway. He was always making little remarks about how
strong
my personality is. You know what that means. Be a nice little Cuban woman. Listen when I talk. Don’t come on so strong.”

There was nothing much to say. Vivian was right. Few Cuban men could handle her. Maybe few men could handle her, period, but that was an ugly question that no friend would raise at a time such as this.

I surprised Ariel by coming home a little earlier than expected. He was in the den watching about ten TV shows simultaneously. He barely looked up when I came in, so I walked down the hall to check on the baby. I loved to watch him sleep. I was still getting used to the idea that I had produced such a creature.

I had been pretty wild in my youth. Nothing I was terribly ashamed of, but I had done some things I still blush to think about—and which would definitely disqualify me from consideration for a high-government appointment (Okay, so I thought about such things. It wasn’t out of the question). Getting older, I had a vague idea that God might have kept a running score of my conduct in order to hold me accountable. Guilt is like a stone-solid foundation in any Catholic’s view of the world. My sense of guilt and shame is very well developed, and has been finely honed through the years. In my weaker moments I dread the possibility that my family might be affected in some way by my past sins.

When I was pregnant with Marti I had a morbid fear that something would be wrong with him as God’s way of punishing me. I started going to Mass every week, sometimes more, in a frantic try at atoning for my past. I even went to confession for the first time in years, but the priest told me off when I explained the reasoning behind my sudden rush to piety. He told me in no uncertain terms that God does not punish people in that fashion.

And that He doesn’t bargain.

I thought about it and realized that I was taking a lawyer’s approach to the situation. God was not a prosecutor with whom I could plea bargain to obtain a favorable deal for my client—in this case, the baby. It finally hit me that I’d been working too hard, so I concentrated my energy instead on trying to take better care of myself and not being so crazy. That would do more for the baby than cutting deals with God.

I paused for a second outside Marti’s room. God hadn’t punished me. For reasons I couldn’t fathom he had given me a husband who adored me and a child who was a joy.

What else could I want?

Marti was a month shy of his third birthday. We’d named him after the Cuban patriot José Martí, and he was the spitting image of his father both in looks and character. He was built solid, with his father’s dark hair and shining black eyes. Sometimes it was disconcerting to look at him and see a mini-Ariel staring back with the same intensity as his papa. It was like a window in time, a glimpse back to my husband’s childhood.

I went in on tiptoe and spied on Marti sleeping in his bed. He even looked like his father when he slept—blissful, completely relaxed. I remembered the first time I ever saw Ariel, ten years before, at the University of Miami law library. Ariel had been comfortably ensconced in a study carrel—I soon learned he went there because he could never get peace and quiet at home. Ariel still lived with his family in those days; his mother and three brothers shared the same crowded two-bedroom Miami Beach apartment they had had for years. The father had left the family when Ariel, the youngest, was a baby. He was never heard from again, and money was always tight. From what little I had heard about Ariel’s father, though, they were better off without him. Better no father than a bad father.

At the time, I was a first-year law student at Duke. I had gone to the UM library because I had to do some research for a legal writing class paper that was due after Thanksgiving. All the carrels were occupied, and I was on a tight schedule. In desperation I began asking each occupant if they were planning on leaving any time soon. Ariel was the fourth person I asked, and the last. We struck up a conversation about what I was working on. It turned out Ariel was ranked first in his class. He helped me out without making it seem like a big deal.

I had to go back to Durham in two days, so we made open-ended plans to see each other over Christmas vacation. I had just started to date a classmate back at Duke, Luther Simmonds, an American from New York, so I wasn’t particularly eager to get involved with anyone else. It’s funny to think about it now, but I had a feeling that things between Luther and me might work out on a permanent basis.

Since Ariel was from Miami Beach, he hung out with a completely different crowd than mine growing up. Dade County is really several cities, and people stayed within their orbit, but our never meeting before was more than a fact of geography. We came from different social classes and, to be frank, we wouldn’t have been comfortable with each other and didn’t share much of anything in common. For the older generations, it’s an accepted fact of life that Cuban exiles of different classes don’t interact socially, but for the younger that’s slowly changing. We interacted for business reasons, of course; that was accepted and encouraged. But, for now, it was also pretty much the full extent of class mixing. The fact that we’re all exiles isn’t enough to make us overlook social status. There were strong memories of who was who in Cuba, but as the older generation died out, so did the individuals listed in the
Chronica de la Vida Social
—the Cuban social register.

I liked Ariel, though, and we saw each other a few times during various vacations when I was back home in Miami. Our friendship developed very slowly, as we really weren’t at ease with each other. We knew about our differences, thus made a conscious effort to overcome them, but at times it almost felt as though we were speaking different languages. We had our studies to fall back on, though, and because Ariel was such a sharp legal mind I enjoyed talking to him without the competitive pressure I felt from my go-getter classmates.

After he graduated Ariel went to work for a five-person personal-injury firm in northwest Miami; the firm was housed in a one-story ramshackle building owned by one of the partners. Ariel took me there one day when I was home for Christmas vacation my second year at Duke. I remember that I had to hide my shock—I always envisioned lawyers working in glamorous offices, and this was anything but. The building was wedged between a mom-and-pop grocery and a tire store painted the most garish yellow ever imagined. Ariel’s office would have had a terrific view of the Orange Bowl, if it weren’t for the thick iron bars over his window. At the time Ariel was living in a garage apartment a block from the office; I visited there once and actually considered calling the health inspector on the landlord.

For a couple of years Ariel’s clients were mostly neighborhood types; they’d come in and tell him about getting hurt or incapacitated on the job in falls, burns, electrocutions, car crashes—all sorts of accidents and assorted malice. Ariel helped them with their workmen’s comp cases and took his fee from a percentage of recovery. Since he worked steadily and methodically, his client list grew until he was a trusted presence in the community.

As the top student in his class, Ariel would have had his pick of white-shoe law firms in Miami. But his instincts had sent him elsewhere, to get experience with the people he knew and who needed him most. A lot of people questioned his judgment and I have to admit I was one of them. But then The Case walked into his office. Ariel was proved right, silencing his critics forever.

I looked around Marti’s room. It was decorated with Disney characters and the best baby furniture available. Probably none of it would have been there if not for an August day when Señora Matos walked into the firm’s office and described Ariel’s appearance, saying he was the lawyer she wanted. Once Ariel was produced she sat down across from him and explained that she had a personal-injury case involving her son. Ariel’s office was on Señora Matos’s daily route to her job as a seamstress at a dry cleaner; many times she’d walked home late at night and seen Ariel at his desk through the security bars on the window. She figured anyone who worked as hard as Ariel would do a good job for her son. And her instincts could not have been more sound.