The Other Side (6 page)

The Man I Live With puts our two plates on a little table by the window in the living room of his apartment: tonight it's
pescado a la Veracruzana
. He plugs a
CD
into the player and we sit down to eat; the kitten jumps onto the table, attracted by the smell of the fish. He is asking about my day, about what I have been reading in my literature class, about what goes through my head while I'm cutting lenses at the Vision Center. I start to answer but then he is telling me about the flaws of capitalism, about how I will quit my job, how I will let him cover our expenses, about seeing Bob Marley in concert in Denmark, one of the last he ever performed. He tells me about the Danish political system and the anarchist camp in the center of Copenhagen.
I'll take you there
, he says. A song comes on, one of his favorites. He puts down his fork, stands up, takes my hand, pulls me up and out of my seat. He holds my hand in his
against his chest, his jaw against my forehead, the words in his throat sung so softly. We shuffle in circles from one side of the room to the other, back and forth, over and over, the kitten scarfing down the fish getting cold on our plates. His hand on my back so softly.

He asks if I will love him forever.

We leave for Mexico during the first week of summer vacation, stopping first in the southern part of the state to visit one of his half brothers, a former air force officer who works now for the Department of Justice. I sit mostly quietly on a lawn chair near the picnic table in the backyard, sipping an iced tea under the shade of a swaying oak tree, while The Man I Live With stands near the grill, his legs spread wide apart. He tells stories to entertain his nephews. He gestures wildly. His voice, his performance, fills the neighborhood.

The next day we drive and drive, stopping only at the Continental Divide. In the photo, I'm squinting into the sun, one hand shading my eyes, the other hanging limply at my side. We descend from the mountains, through the pine trees and spruce trees and juniper trees, into a desert spotted with sagebrush and manzanita, past signs warning drivers not to enter dense smoke, straight to his mother's apartment, where we stop to pick her up and take her out
to dinner.
A Spanish place
, he tells me in advance.
Order the fish
, he says, as we scootch into a booth. They speak in Spanish to one another the whole time. I don't need to understand every word to know she doesn't approve. She asks about his children, his ex-wife. Her eyes plead with him from behind her glasses. We stay only one night at her apartment, where we sleep and fuck on her living room floor.
She'll hear us
, I protest.
I need you
, he insists. Or maybe we stay two nights. Or four. Long enough for her to wash our laundry and tell me in her thick accent that my clothes look like tiny children's clothes.

Maybe at that time, when she is holding my shorts an arm's length from her body, The Man I Live With has already told me that his mother was unmarried when she got pregnant with him. A young girl away at school in Caracas, knocked up by a Finnish oilman. She came to the United States to give birth, making her son an American citizen. She gave him the last name of his father and took him back to Venezuela to be raised by his grandmother and aunts. Or maybe I don't know this yet. Maybe The Man I Live With tells me this story as we cross the border into Mexico, or while traveling south along the coast. I'm certain he's already told me when we attend a bullfight in the resort town, and when he parades me through the town
mercado
like a prize,
because all the next day while we drive down the coastal highway, he keeps bragging about what a good lover he is.
It's in my blood. A birthright
, he says. He says he's seduced women on almost every continent: women in tents and upper bunk beds in hostels. This is how he left Venezuela, he tells me as we approach the resort town, by
hitchhiking in a woman's sleeping bag
. He hitchhiked across Europe this way, across Asia, and back to the States. We check in at the hotel, drop off our luggage, fuck in the shower, and dress for dinner. Before I order he starts telling me how another woman should come live with us.
Would we share her?
I ask, feeling vaguely curious. He explains that she would not be our girlfriend, only his.
You are just not enough
. We'd all be friends eventually, of course.
That's the only way it would work
. By the time he's turning the key to our hotel room, I'm fuming. This isn't part of our deal.
Actually, you're not that great in bed
, I say, emboldened by all the margaritas.
Actually, maybe you should work a bit harder at satisfying me. I've been faking it for months
.

The Man I Live With yells and slams lamps and luggage and furniture around the room. He opens the door and throws my suitcase into the sand. He rips my clothes off and throws them into the hallway. He grabs a fistful of my hair and slams my skull against the bed, holding me there while he spits in my face.
He calls me
Puta! Chingada!
He shakes and shakes and shakes me until I am limp and then he storms out the door.

The next morning, he's calmer. He says he'll put me on a plane and send me back home, where I can go on being a stupid fucking hillbilly.

But I have no life back home to return to. I've quit my job at the Vision Center, like he asked.
Focus on your studies
, he said.
I'll cover the expenses
. I can't ask my parents for help. They've said I'm on my own. My Older Sister stopped taking my calls when she learned I never slept a single night in that cheap studio apartment in the student slum between campus and downtown.
You lied to me
, she said before she slammed down the phone. I don't talk to the other students in my classes. I have no money, no belongings, no place to live.

I say I'll do anything to stay with him.

The Man I Live With tells a good story. In the evenings, after we return from Mexico, he plays bridge and backgammon on his computer and wins nearly every time. Or he plays tennis on the courts at the recreation center and beats men half his age. I love to watch him play: his arms crossing back and forth across his body, his body crossing back and forth across the court, sweat running down his face and chest and back. On the weekends he watches Argentinian films and when I ask who Perón is he explains to me about the Dirty War. He makes beautiful dinners with names I can't pronounce while
my cat curls on my lap. We have discovered, after leaving the cat at the university animal hospital all summer during our trip to Mexico, that it has feline leukemia. I consider returning to my job at the Vision Center to pay for a blood transfusion, but The Man I Live With wants me to concentrate on getting good grades in school. He's still sulking about what I said in Mexico, and I believe that if I do what he wants he will forgive me, and then things will go back to the way they were before, when I first moved in, when we would dance around the living room. Instead of skipping class, or showing up late, or a little drunk or a little high or low on drugs, I am the first to arrive in class, coffee in hand, and always have my best work done.

On the weekends, we drive downtown, where the bartender at our favorite dive talks to us from behind the bar and mixes us drinks. Sometimes the bartender's girlfriend is there, too, a veterinarian at the university animal hospital, and she explains to us that, even with the blood transfusions, my cat cannot possibly live much longer with feline leukemia. The band starts playing and we stumble out to the dance floor, standing close together, my head on his shoulder, his chin on my forehead, swaying back and forth very slowly in no relation to the music. He calls me
skat
, a Danish word meaning
pet, darling, treasure
. He asks if I will love him forever.

One night, while we're watching television at home, a Hair Club for Men commercial comes on, and the announcer asks:
Do you have a problem with thinning hair?
And The
Man I Live With says
No
, as if he and the announcer are having a conversation, and we both laugh very hard for a long time, because his hair is absurdly thick and long and curly and not remotely thinning, and his laughter perpetuates my laughter, and my laughter perpetuates his laughter, and when we finally stop laughing, I snuggle into the space between his arm and his chest and we continue watching television.

When the cat finally gets very very sick, we take it to the hospital and it is put to sleep. We wrap its body in a tiny blanket I have knit from fluffy blue yarn and bury it in the yard behind our apartment. The Man I Live With makes a beautiful dinner while I am crying in the bed and when I come out of the room and sit down at the little table by the window in the living room we plan the trip we will take next summer to Europe.

Even what the mind forgets, the body remembers
. I remember the dead cat. The knitted blue blanket. The yard behind our apartment. I remember the sun on my shoulders, the warm black dirt in my hands. I remember crying in the bed. I remember coming out of the room and sitting at the little table by the window in the living room.

I remember sitting, years later, with My Good Friend in her living room, drinking a glass of wine, when her cat draws the warm length of its body under my hand.

Another memory comes back.

I lie in the dark bedroom crying about the cat that has become very ill, about the trip to Europe we will have to cancel because of the cat's terrible illness, about the blood that I have found seeping out of its nose and ears and anus, when I hear from the kitchen a terrible thud, and then another, and another. The thud becomes a crack, a breaking of something that is not fragile. I stop crying and instead listen to the silence that follows, trying to understand what I have heard.

The front door opens and closes.